Refus global et ses environs by André-G. Bourassa and Gilles Lapointe (review)

234 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 of granting agencies or of journal review, a more egalitarian arrangement should prevail and that blind peer review should be even more widespread than it is. If, however, Savan's suggestions are universally embraced, there is one fear I cannot fail to confess: namely, that if inspection, review, and granting procedures become any more complicated than they are at present the whole enterprise will be close to strangulation by its own bureaucracy. Then the siege under which science has been held will have been completely successful and we shallhave to announce that I science is dead' to a world no longer so much interested in science as obsessed with the foibles and follies of humanity, among which science will be numbered as but one. If Savan's book has the success it deserves and many books like it follow, then perhaps scholarship like her own will cease to be marginal and the great era of the interrogation of humanity will be upon us, replacing the era of the interrogation of nature as surely as that replaced the interrogation of God. Then the humanities will leave their marginal, backwater, and science-aping activities and be potentially under siege themselves. (IAN WINCHESTER) Andre-G. Bourassa and Gilles Lapointe. Refus global et ses environs Editions de l'Hexagone and Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec. 184. $15.95 This catalogue documents an exhibition which the Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec mounted last summer upon the twentieth anniversary of the library'S founding and more significantly, the fortieth anniversary of the publication by Paul-Emile Borduas and his Automatiste group of their famous manifesto, Refus global. The exhibition also coincided with a large-scale Borduas retrospective at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. While the museum's retrospective triumphantly reaffirmed Borduas's position as the greatest modernist painter Canada has produced, the BNQ exhibition and catalogue, in dealing with the library's very solid collection of texts by and about the Automatistes, emphasized the 'rapport privilegie' this group had with books, 'ceux qu'ils ont ecrits, ceux qu'ils ont Ius, ceux qu'ils ont illustres et ceux qu'on a ecrits sur eux.' Bourassa and Lapointe's overall perspective, however, is not a literary one, any more than it is art historical, although these two are coeditors with Jean Fisette of the definitive scholarly edition of Borduas's writings (Ecrits I was published in 1987bythe Presses de l'Universite de Montreal). Throughout the catalogue, and even through the structural divisions of .their text, they stress the fact that the Automatistes' activities included. such fields as photography, sculpture, choreography, dance, theatre, stage design, decoration, and music, as well as writing and painting. HUMANITIES 235 Refus global itself had reflected this by including three short dramatic works and an essay on dance in its pages. In 1959 in the journal Situations, 1:2, Fernande St-Martin also declared that Refus global's real importance was in signifying the appearance of a community of artists who worked beyond the limits of their disciplines towards 'une nouvelle definition de l'homme dans la synthese de toutes ses possibilites.' Over the years the Automatistes have come to be thought of most often in terms of painting, as the authors point out, largely because of Borduas's importance as a painter. This catalogue is particularly useful in stressing that Automatism as defined by this Montreal group meant far more than painting; to them it was a powerful unifying principle that could influence all human activity and even transform a repressed society in desperate need of change. Bourassa and Lapointe also emphasize the group'$ highly self-conscious use of language and their commitment to its power. Most notably, in a section called 'Le pouvoir des mots,' the authors discuss a series of terms the Automatistes defined with extreme care, partly to distinguish themselves from the French Surrealists, their moral and cultural parents. The catalogue suggests that the Automatistes' very close linking of art and discourse set a precedent for today's artists, in spite of the fact that until recently, apart from Refus global, most of their texts were only very sparsely diffused through the culture. Though interesting...