A New World Assemblage: William Carlos Williams and the Québécois Avant-Garde

In the spring of 1929, Marcel Dugas’ Littérature canadienne. Aperçus (Canadian Literature. Insights) was published in Paris. Though the title would seem to encompass all of Canadian literature, both Anglophone and Francophone, the book functioned primarily as a means to introduce the new Québécois literature of the teens and ‘20s to a French readership. As a central figure in the Québécois avant-garde, Dugas had a keen comprehension of the French-Canadian scene. Moreover, having lived in Paris from 1910 to 1914 and again since 1920, he was acutely aware of the potential for Québécois literature to be dismissed as provincial by metropolitan readers. Thus, he prefaced Littérature canadienne with some cautionary words: “Le lecteur français serait déçu s’il s’attendait à une poésie farouche, sauvage, une poésie de défricheurs, d’ouvriers de la terre, de peauxrouges, ou bien à une sorte de géorgiques québecquoises [sic]. La poésie de maintenant ressemble à celle de la France.” (“The French reader will be disappointed if he expects a wild, savage poetry, a poetry of pioneers, of workers of the land, of redskins, or indeed a sort of Québécois georgics. The poetry of today resembles that of France”; Littérature 6).¹

In disavowing a rural poetry rooted in colonial themes and imagery, Dugas was not simply anticipating the preconceptions of his Parisian readership; he was also responding to a regionalist, nationalistic mode that had come to dominate Québécois letters. For Dugas, as for the other poets associated with the Québécois art and literature journal Le Nigog, the widespread influence of the regionalist “terroiristes” stifled the development of Canadian modernism by restricting potential themes and subject matter:

. . . [L]a littérature en général au Canada, s’enferma dans des limites très définies. L’histoire de la domination française dans l’Amérique du Nord, le récit des prouesses des ancêtres français, les destinées du catholicisme, le culte de la France, voilà des thèmes choisis entre tous, dès la première minute où ce peuple prend conscience de lui-même, et que poètes, écrivains, orateurs, journalistes, exploitent avec plus ou moins de réussite. Toute autre inspiration semble bannie.

(Dugas, Littérature 3)

Literature in general in Canada, encloses itself in very defined limits. The history of French domination in North America, the account of the prowess of French ancestors, the destiny of Catholicism, the cult of France, these are the themes chosen among us, from the first minute that this people became conscious of itself, and that poets, writers, orators, journalists exploit with more or less success. Any other inspiration seems banished.

Dugas’ use of the adjective “bannie” (“banished”) is worth noting here, since it describes both his poetry and his life as an expatriate. For Dugas, escaping the influence of regionalism meant escaping Québec itself. Yet not all North American poets of the Lost Generation found the regionalist impulse to be a limit upon artistic freedom. William Carlos Williams, born the same year as Dugas (1883), inherited a similar cultural debt to Europe, but his response to this cultural deficit differed from the reactions of contemporaries like Dugas, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, or T. S. Eliot, all of whom left the New World for the Old. As Christopher Schedler points out, many of Williams’s artistic compatriots decided to emigrate from America “either because it did not possess a ‘culture’ (conceived of as a tradition, a usable past) as Europe did, or because the culture it did possess was dominated by materialism and mechanization (both anathema to the modernist artist)” (34). Williams, however, found a lifelong source of inspiration in the New World heritage that, for Dugas, represented nostalgia for a provincial past and a knee-jerk rejection of literary experimentation. It is not that Williams was indifferent to the European avant-garde or to European literary history. He was well aware of trans-Atlantic Dadaist rumblings, and...