Literature and Painting in Quebec: From Imagery to Identity by William J. Berg (review)

Until the middle of the twentieth century most francophone citizens of Quebec based their collective sense of identity on their language and religion, their unique natural landscape, and their rural way of life. Dominant practices in painting and literature reflected what was taken to be spatial and socio-cultural reality. While studies have been made of individual works, and overall historical studies have been done separately of painting and literature in Quebec, only in the past few decades have scholars and critics become interested in the creative cross-fertilization in representational practices between painting and writing. Offering new perspectives on the transformation of notions of landscape and national identity since the arrival of Jacques Cartier, William J. Berg provides in Literature and Painting in Quebec a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of many works by Quebec visual and verbal artists where landscape has “the role of triggering, anchoring and guiding memory.”

In addition to a substantial introduction and conclusion, the study contains ten chronologically ordered chapters, twenty-four well-chosen black-and-white illustrations, sixteen colour plates, extensive expository notes, and a list of works cited. The book “traces the evolution of landscape representation in Quebec,” pairing “major literary works” with “prominent paintings” of the same period. At the heart of evolving representational styles lie various conflicting forces, all of which form tensions between nature and culture, space and place. The unifying topic throughout the investigation is “a struggle for national identity depicted through landscape.”

The two examples of Berg’s analytic approach in the introduction, one from painting and one from literature, demonstrate the sensitivity, precision, careful reading, astute use of critical opinion, and awareness of history that Berg maintains throughout the ten chapters. He develops his central argument around the dynamic tension he finds between nature and culture, a tension that, until the twentieth century, was frequently represented by a modest habitation, a place of religious significance, or a memorial site in the presence of vast and looming natural space. Berg balances his exposition of ways of seeing between a discussion of outside influences, particularly from France (from the Renaissance to impressionism and surrealism), and the lived experiences of those in this place.

The first four chapters follow the course of representations of space, place, and tensions between nature and culture in painting and fiction through the nineteenth century, as they reflect early exploration, rural expansion, political troubles, growing anglophone economic domination, and the rise of cities. Chapters 5 to 10 examine the transformation of tensions between nature and culture and space and place in the technologically changed world of the twentieth century, never allowing us to forget the central argument that ways of seeing and the representational practices of artists, with all their conflicting drives between nature and culture, are a reflection of the search for identity that has always been a particularly powerful urge in Quebec. Berg places particular stress on the radical social changes that occurred through the first half of the twentieth century and on the split in Quebec into progressive and conservative elements, which began at the end of the nineteenth century and reached crisis proportions by the mid-twentieth century with the publication of Paul-Émile Borduas’s Refus global and the outbreak of the Quiet Revolution. In the final chapters, Berg highlights the apparent replacement in the collective psyche of the coureur de bois by the artist (painter or writer) as torchbearer in the quest for identity, the conflation of the search for national identity with the search for personal identity, and the modification of what is meant by landscape to include cityscape.

The quality of Berg’s analysis of particular works of painting and literature is impeccable. However, despite the significant interest of this study, one is left to ponder the validity of the conclusion regarding “a nearly constant openness of vision in Quebec’s great works.” Also, while the impression is created that the study...