Context North America: Canadian-U.S. Literary Relations

Victor-L

Victor-Levy Beaulieu and the Quebeckization of American Literature RAY ELLENWOOD This essay is in memory of RaymondY.Chamberlain,a native of the United States, longtime resident of Montreal and major translator of Quebecliterature , including four titles by Victor-Levy Beaulieu, one of them Monsieur Melville. Beaulieu's most Kerouackian novel, Satan Belhumeur, was dedicated to Chamberlain, "in order to clear American Madness through customs, the madness of Savanagh, Georgia as well as that of Morial-Mort, Quebec." "Clearing madness through customs" may be as good an image as any of Canadian/U.S. literaryrelations. FOR THE SAKE of those who may not know his work, I should explain that Victor-LevyBeaulieu has published about thirty books in the past twentyyears, including novels, stage plays, scripts for radio and television, and long literary essays such as the two that will be the main focus of this paper: Jack Kerouac (1973) and the three-volume Monsieur Melville (1978). Beaulieu is certainly one of the most prolific writers in Quebec. What's more, as one commentator has pointed out (Melangon 8), he has succeeded in creating a public persona of such magnitude as to be easily recognized even when reduced to a set of initials: VLB, a sobriquet widely used in Quebec, is so much easier to sayand write than "Victor-Levy Beaulieu" that I intend to use it here. In 1983, VLBwas the subject of a special issue of Etudesfrancaises, to which an American scholar,Jonathan Weiss,contributed an article entitled "Victor-Levy Beaulieu: ecrivain americain." Mr.Weiss began by denying any attempt to appropriate VLB for the United States, as happened to Margaret Atwood, according to Weiss,when her nationalist message got swallowed up 90 in the U.S. by her feminist one. And yet, going on to discuss VLB'swork, Weiss imposed an American model on it by concentrating on evidence of what the Freudian critic Leslie Fiedler had found in some of the greatest literature of the United States: infantile sexuality,violence and homoeroticism . However valid Weiss' study may be, it too avoids the issue of nationalism , which is an important part of all of Beaulieu's writing, and perhaps especially important in his essays on Kerouac and Melville. Beaulieu's Quebec nationalism is precisely what I want to emphasize. In doing so, however, I would retain one comment from Weiss, that VLBis, "in spite of his great admiration for [the literature of the United States], not so much a stranger looking at us, as a writer looking at himself through us" (41). We will see how this is not only a consistent authorial strategy for VLB,but also a broadly political strategy of the Quebeckization he admiringly traces back to another important writer and nationalist,Jacques Ferron. VLB's works on Kerouac and Melville must be seen as parts of a series beginning with Pour Saluer Victor Hugo, in 1970, and ending with his most recent publication, Docteur Ferron. These texts are difficult to place, generically, because they have at once the qualities of documentary, literary biography, autobiography, and novel. Even though VLBwrites, in Jack Kerouac, "I don't care too much for biography, chronology, bibliography —I don't like tourists" (46),the literary essays in question may all be seen as quite traditional critical biographies in some ways. They give us a chronological account of an author's life and work, complete with relevant quotations and photographic documentation. They are also very thorough and thoughtful readings, at times almost academic in tone. On the other hand, they are intensely personal because, for Beaulieu as reader and author, "writingis always profoundly autobiographical" (Melville 2:119). Thus, his salute to Victor Hugo gives us all kinds of information on the great French writer,including an "arbitrary anthology" of readings, but we also get a running account of VLB's apprenticeship as a writer, of how Hugo was a model for this young would-be novelist from Quebec who was in the process of developing a myth for himself and who eventually arrived at an enormous sense of the writer's duty, of the need to be a great writer with a strong feeling for nation and history. While situating Hugo in the context of literary Quebec, showing how he was despised by the church and admired bypeople like Louis Frechette, VLBwrites these words, which I quote at length because they are crucial to an understanding of what he does later with Kerouac and Melville: And I understood that...