VI. French-Canadian Letters

J:§tters In Canada: I950 PART II VI. FRENCH-CANADIAN LETTERS W. E. COLLIN The novelty this year in French-Canadian letters is the impact of new thought, existenialism in particular, on orthodox thought, and its consequences. It was Newman who first applied the idea of development to the history of dogma. The Abbe L.-E. Otis, in La Doctrine de f evolution, "reconciles undeniable facts with sincere beliefs" by showing that "the fact of evolution does not prevent God from being the author of every thing." Father Louis Lachance, a Dominican scholar and author of I.'Etre et ses propri.tes, regrets that conditions at the time of writing prevented him from mastering contemporary thinkers whose minds have been occupied with the problems of human existence, but one advantage he has gained from contact with existentialist thought is a deepened consciousness of the "ever-renewed actuality" of metaphysics. In La Beaute de Dieu by Father Arcade Monette, another Dominican scholar, impressions of density, austerity, the tenseness of intellectual analyses become attenuated by the presence of something new: the appeal to thinkers of our time, Kierkegaard, Berdyaev, Bergson, Gabriel Marcel, and the poetic figurations of divine perfections and the poetic suggestion of man's participation in them. This, no doubt, is because Father Monette has a poetic sensibility and an intuition of the intimate relation between art, especially poetry, and metaphysics. If he cared to probe further 'into nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature he would find Platonic symbolism due to no other cause than the association of the idea of sin and the idea of the flesh and the anguish of that association . II Some, not all, of our dramatists are prepared to deal with the anguish of existence. If an artist wishes to ' dramatize the tension between true love and the ethical law, he instinctively hits upon the illegitimate child. This is what M. Gratien Gelinas does in Tit-Coq, But this popular dramatist, while providing a good deal of fun, allowed love to be pushed around and dismissed the real problem, the great loneliness of the central character. Irony, smothered in Tit-Coq, is aggressive and potent in Eloi de Grandmont's Un Fils Ii tuer. This 388 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, vol. XX, no. 4, July, 1951 LETTERS IN CANADA: 1950 389 little play, classical in its Racinian simplicity and intensity, presents the clash of two uncompromising forces: tradition and new life. The situation in this home in New France is obviously intended to represent the "killing" atmosphere of conformism. The father is the traditional French-Canadian parent created by the "national" historians ; his rule is work, duty, authority, mission; the law of the children, as he understands it, is ohedience, "honour thy father and thy mother in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." Jean is vital youth; moved by an obscure urge to sail away on one of the French boats in the river and see what life is, he spurns the traditional values. He does not want his way chosen for him, he wants to be responsible for himself; he mocks the authority which cannot make him stay where he does not want to stay. He picks up his bundle and leaves. His father, who calls him "deserter," the traditional stigma put upon a French Canadian who turns his back on the "sacred soil," takes a fowling-piece, follows the boy and kills him. When the body has been laid on the table, the mother (who has understood his strong desire to go ) turns to her husband and cries "Assassin." In another drama, L'Ogre, by Jacques Ferron, the author's imagination plays with the idea that "before marriage some monkeybusiness sent by the devil slips in between lovers." The play is a sort of Cocteau ballet arrangement of a fairy-story theme; the characters are symbolic puppets; they are Pierrots who look at life from the stage. The monkey idea suggested the settings: a castle in a forest and an oasis in a desert. The monkey, addressed as Monseigneur, squats in the centre of the stage on which there is a palm-tree and a telescope. The ogre of the fairy...