Theatre and Politics in Modern Québec by Elaine F. Nardocchio, and: French-Canadian Theater by Jonathan M. Weiss (review)

186 LETTERS IN CANADA 1986 essai est donc I'occasion de vider leurs querelles communes. Ce qui nous vaut des pages souvent savoureuses contre les linguistes, les structuralistes , !'institution litteraire quebecoise (en particulier les patoisants), les nouveaux professeurs, l'abandon des etudes classiques, tous ceux qui suivent la mode, tous ceux qui massacrent la langue fran<;aise, tous ceux qui ne savent pas ecrire, tous ceux qui meconnaissent Ie talent tous ceux, Quebecois ou Fran<;ais, qui consacrent les ecrivains qui ecrivent mal (v.g. aussi bien Anne Hebert et Gaston Miron que Michel Tremblay). Cela fait beaucoup de monde, dira-t-on. En effet. Ne restent, dans Ie pantheon de la poesie quebecoise, que Nelligan, Grandbois, Paul Morin, et ... Hertel, evidemment (pp 303-6); et dans celui de la philosophie d'Amerique fran<;aise, personne, sauf lui, car Hertel est seul parmi les plus grands (Aristote, saint Thomas, Descartes, Spinoza, Bergson) dont il se distingue , toutefois, car it est de la lignee des Montaigne et des Nietzsche (p 306- 13). Ces pretentions en feront sourire plus d'un. '<;a se saurait: retorque Ie sens commun. La meconnaissance du genie de Hertel, que ses amis (et lui-meme!) expliquaient autrefois par la malveillance, la conspiration, la conjoncture defavorable, qu'on explique maintenant par l'ignorance du public ou les aleas de la mode, ne convainc personne. Les premieres critiques de son ceuvre (que Tetreau a Ie merite de rapporter), celles de Berthelot Brunet ('un chanoine Groulx badin: p 96), de Victor Barbeau ('pensee nebuleuse: p 130), de Samuel Baillargeon ('desinvolture, eparpillement ... manque de profondeur: p 225), sont Ie plus souvent celles que reprendrait ason compte un lecteur nouveau, abordant l'ceuvre sans preventions. La cote de l'ecrivain risque donc peu d'etre modifiee par cet essai. Ressortent mieux, toutefois, la personne, chaleureuse, accueillante, genereuse, angoissee sous son optimisme volontaire; Ie personnage, savoureux, haut en couleurs, rabelaisien malgre sa maigreur; l'homme de lettres, d'un engagement exemplaire. Tetreau a Ie grand merite de les rappeler a notre attention dans cet essai tout entier issu de sa piele filiale. (ROBERT MAJOR) Elaine F. Nardocchio. Theatre and Politics in Modern QU/!bec University of Alberta Press. xii, 157. $21.00, $12.95 paper Jonathan M. Weiss. French-Canadian Theater Twayne Publishers. 179. us $18.95 In 1986, for the first time in memory, two monographs in English on modern QUfibecois drama and theatre were published, one by an American , one by a Canadian scholar. Comparison between these studies is inevitable - and, inevitably, invidious, for they are sadly unequal. HUMANITIES JH7 Elaine F. Nardocchio's catchy title, Theatre and Politics in Modern Quebec, is seriously misleading. Student and general reader will find a synthesis of useful information on the better-known dramatists of the past thirty years, but the subtle interrelationships between politics and the stage are left largely unexplored. An introductory chapter, 'Politics, Religion and Early Theatre: From New France to Early Canada' (pp 1-17) makes one's ears burn with a mixture of embarrassment and exasperation, its tone set in the first two paragraphs, devoted to Marc Lescarbot's Theatre deNeptune (1606). Nardocchio has real Indians taking part in the performance, with verses written 'some in standard French, some in Indian dialects, and others in broken French.' She has obviously not read the play, or at least not recently. Anyone who has will recall: there is only one departure from 'standard French: and that is the 12-line stanza spokenin what the author describes as 'gascon: but which modern scholarship has proven to be occitan; there are exactly four Amerindian words used in the text, each identified by Lescarbot with asterisk and marginal explanation; there is no 'broken French' and, of course, the 'Indians' were Frenchmen dressed as such ... This same mismanagement of easily accessible facts prevails in the rest of the chapter. We learn with amazement that after Neptune 'the plays performed during the next sixty years or so were sponsored mainly by the students of Quebec's Catholic Seminaries'; that Moliere's Tartuffe, pretext for the famous confrontation between Frontenac and Saint-Vallier in 1693- 4, 'had been banned in France just a few years previously' (it had in fact been suppressed thirty years before). Misinformation on Quesnel and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century playwrights abounds. We are assured, for example, that 'the first known comedy written by a French-speaking Canadian [Pierre Petitclair] was performed by an amateur group in Quebec City in 1848.' Whatever happened to the same author's Griphon, published in 1837? And would the average undergraduate not be able easily to discover, in any university library in Canada, that even the play she is talking about (La Donation) was first performed in 1842 and published the same year? One is further bewildered a few lines later (p 13) by the author's reference to the perceived similarity in theme between Petitclair's Une partie de campagne (1857) and Quesnel's Anglomanie . 'Needless to say: she observes, 'there were no copyright laws at the time, and even prominent writers were not above "borrowing" from the works of others.' Does she not know that I'Anglomanieremained unpublished until 1932? It would be otiose to multiply such examples. One is, frankiy, distressed to see such serious misinformation passed off in such selfconfident tones. The literary and political dimensions of her topic before 1960 seem simply to escape the author's grasp. Happily, as she approaches the contemporary period her research appears more solid and her insights more useful. Indeed, her last chapter, 'Theatre in Mod- 1M LETTERS IN CANADA 191)0 ern Quebec: Permanence and Change' (pp 77-111), is a useful summary of theatrical activity in the 1970S (although the political dimension of that activity remains underplayed). But summaries just as useful, and less skeletal, are easily accessible in the generic essays available in the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literatureand the Canadian Encyclopedia, to mention only the most recent. The book is capped by a two-and-a-half-page Conclusion which reiterates many of the disconcerting misunderstandings that characterize Nardocchio's perception of the evolution of theatre ('for well over three hundred years, Quebec theatre was dominated by Church and State: p 115, my emphasis; 'most of the school productions of the 1700S were religious plays'; 'from World War I to the late 1930S the stage was dominated by patriotic and moralistic pieces,' etc). A Selected Bibliography purports to list 'the most important works of theatrical and socio-historical research published before 1981: but includes , surprisingly, books published as recently as 1985, the careful consultation of which would immeasurably have improved the author's understanding of her topiC. It is apparent that her reading for this text ended about 1980. Poor preliminary reading on the author's part is compounded by confused syntax (what exactly is meant, in reference to the Ligue Nationale d'Improvisation on p 89, by her statement that 'the winning team would receive an extra small sum of money'?), intensified by poor proofreading and an alarming insouciance in transcribing French titles. The University of Alberta Press is not to be complimented on the appearance of this volume. By contrast, but not only by contrast, French-Canadian Theater by Jonathan M. Weiss represents an important contribution to our appreciation of modern theatre history. Let us make clear what the title does not: five-sixths of this book is concerned with the Quebec stage since 1968. Weiss, a professor at Colby College in Maine, is highly sensitive to the social and political context from which contemporary playwrights and plays derive. This, in fact, is the text which would better wear Nardocchio 's title. In a brief introductory chapter entitled 'Birth of a Theater: the author paints, in broad and often imprecise fashion, a history ofdrama inQuebec to 1