Curative Illnesses: Medico-National Allegory in Québécois Fiction by Julie Robert (review)

The opening sentence of Julie Robert's study quickly focuses the reader's attention on the conspicuous presence of illness in Québécois literature in the latter half of the twentieth century. Robert argues that the persistence of illness narratives warrants greater critical consideration than it has previously received and problematizes explanations that have been proposed for this persistence. In laying out her argument for an allegorical reading of these illness narratives, she makes a significant and genuinely interesting contribution to Québécois literature and to the field of literary nationalism in general. Prior familiarity with Quebec's history and literature is helpful in reading this study, but it is not essential.

The first chapter lays out the background for the common understanding of the nation as a body via such images as the body politic and connects this to the common reading of the diseased body as a natural consequence of Quebec's abnormal status as a nation. The theoretical and historical research grounding Robert's argument is quite wide-ranging, but we can note the importance of Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities" for her understanding of nation and nationalism. She draws upon the work of Michel Foucault, among others, for her understanding of the figure of the physician as an authority and the role of medical language. In this chapter, Robert argues skilfully that the equivalence of a sick character to a sick nation is problematic, and, therefore, a new reading of these illness narratives is called for.

The chapters that follow are organized thematically and chronologically; the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and the referendum era of the 1980s and early 1990s are the twin anchors of the historical divisions. Chapter two looks at two works by Gabrielle Roy, Bonheur d'occasion (1945) and Alexandre Chenevert (1954), as well as André Langevin's Poussière sur la ville (1953), published during the period following World War II. This chapter focuses on the act of diagnosis by which the medical professional transforms a collection of symptoms into a named disease. In demonstrating how diagnosis fails as an authoritative act in these narratives, Robert argues that the reading of the nation as diseased is thereby undermined. The third chapter, which focuses on texts from the 1960s, continues the discussion of Langevin's Poussière sur la ville and also examines Aller-Retour (1962) by Denis Lord and Anne Bernard's Cancer (1967), which all feature doctors who are ill. Robert notes that the sick doctor narratives complicate the role of the physician as an authority figure by blurring the line between doctor and patient. However, once again undermining the temptation to read illness narratives as positing Quebec as a nation that is morbidly ill, Robert highlights the fact that the doctors in question are cured of their ailments. These novels are ultimately texts that describe recovery. Chapter four introduces texts following the Quiet Revolution up to and immediately following the 1980 referendum on sovereignty association. These three texts by Hubert Aquin (Trou de mémoire, 1968), Jacques Godbout (Les têtes à Papineau, 1981), and Pierre Billon (L'enfant du cinquième nord, 1982) are the most clearly political of the works examined in this study. All of these texts present aggressive approaches to treat the sick characters that have equally dramatic unintended consequences. The failure of the prescribed treatment to result in a favourable outcome is shown once again to problematize any reading that would propose a similar cure for the nation's ills.

The fifth chapter focuses on illness writing in general and the act of writing about illness in particular. The act of writing is addressed in the preceding chapters, but it is brought to the forefront in the discussion of more contemporary works: Sylvain Trudel's Du mercure sous la langue (2001), Gil Courtemanche's Une belle mort (2005) and Je ne veux pas mourir seul (2010), and Mère...