Michel Tremblay by Renate Usmiani (review)

Book Reviews RENATE USMlANI. Michel Tremblay. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre 1982. pp. 177. $5.95 (PB). Professor Usmiani has written a highly readable, perceptive and quite well-organized critical analysis ofnot only the plays but also the short stories and novelsofthe avowedly Quebecois author Michel Trem~lay. ]n her introductory chapter, she places the subject in a historical context by tracing the gradual development of theatre in French-speaking Canada through three important phases. She argues that 1606 marks the origins of French theatre in the New World with the staging of Marc Lescarbot's Theatre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France; that 1948 marks the advent of French-Canadian theatre with the staging of Gratien Gelinas's Tit-Coq; and that 1968 marks the arrival, at long last, ofQuebecois theatre with the staging ofMichel Tremblay's LesBe!les-Soeurs. The QueMcois mode of theatre has been aggressively political in its subject-matter. attitudes, and stylistic features. In seeking to bring about a difficult yet liberating "cure d'identification" (p. 5) for Quebec, the theatre has been joined by a number ofdisparate people and events, including the Quiet Revolution, the activities of the FLQ. and, most importantly, the assumption of power by the Parti Quebecois in 1976. It is nonetheless the case that, for many people in English-speaking Canada (and elsewhere), Michel Tremblay selVes as a symbolical leader of this large-scale political-cultural movement. In the second chapter, ProfessorUsmiani sketches in the general thematic and stylistic characteristics ofTremblay'S writings. Like many colonial autho~s, Tremblay wrote his fIrst plays in the language of his mother culture of France and instinctively turned his back upon indigenous themes and subjects. Not unexpectedly, a numberoftransvestites turn up regularly in Tremblay'S gallery of characters, for as he himself has explained: "We are a peoplewho have disguised ourselves for years to resemble another people. It's no joke! We have been transvestites for 300 years" (quoted on p. 22). However, during his gradual political awakening, he came to recognize that his own city of Montreal (particularly the Rue Fabre and the Main or Blvd. St-Laurent) could serve as the Book Reviews 355 legitimate locale of his work, as the microcosm by which the macrocosm of Quebec society could be understood. He also came to recognize that he must allow his characters to speak in their own language of joual so as to create an authentic rendering of their historical experience. However, Professor Usmiani rightJy argues that despite his professed desire to act as spokesman and liberator for his"disguised" people, Tremblay should not be viewed as an exclusively ideological writer. Rather, he is concerned to dramatize the existential trauma of a whole range of character types: whatever their political orientations or social classes, they are all searching for aquasi-mystical state of absolute being in which they know their true identities without equivocation. Their transcendent epiphanies are not unlike those experienced by the traditional martyrs of the Catholic Church. In the remaining six chapters, Professor Usmiani examines what it means for a Tremblay character to be a martyr-like figure in search of identity. The search usually conforms to a threefold pattern: ignorance and despair lead to a protracted struggle for liberation; and this liberation in tum leads to either lasting freedom (a secular fonn of heaven) or further entrapment (a secular form of hell). In Les Belles-Soeurs, Germaine Lauzon and her sisters-in-law are exploited and alienated, like Quebec itself, The family of Atoi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou provides a constant source oftonnenting gUilt. To cope, Manon escapes into the numbing rituals ofCatholicism, whereas Cannen escapes inw the glittering world of the Main, where. as a night-club singer and prostitute, she achieves some small measure offreedom. The transvestite Claude/Hosanna in Hosanna dresses up as Elizabeth Taylor dressed up as Cleopatra. He must gradually relinquish these disguises to come to tenns with his real identity. In Sainte Carmen de La Main, CanneD's quest for freedom from the prison ofher family leads to her murder. but in this way she at least "achieves the full status of tragic heroine, saint and martyr" (p, 109), However...