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

Reviews 215 “La question du mariage et le corps du poète”(marriage, self-portraiture). The clarity of this systemization makes sense of it all as poetry. Her insight is that Deschamps is part of the wider later medieval movement to make high culture more accessible, delivering it from the self-interested clutches of specialists: medical, scientific, legal, academic, administrative, ecclesiastical, etc. His preferred instrument for bypassing these professionals was the short lyric poem, in particular the ballade. Short lyric poems, performed, perhaps even with actions, and not simply read, were basic to the entertainments of the period, including those at royal or ducal courts. If Deschamps wished to get past the specialists, he needed to begin there, where, as an officer in the royal service, he had something close to a captive audience. In and outside those courts, he was not only an entertainer but also an educator. Is he, however, able to stand comparison with the greatest later medieval French poets? Becker addresses this question from the beginning in her subtitle:“entre poésie et pragmatisme.” The use of the most prestigious fixed forms of the lyric to elevate prosaic themes to higher levels has been, at least for modern readers over the last fifty years, Deschamps’s greatest claim to fame. Becker’s contribution is to point out that, just as the law, for example, on which civilization depends for its existence, requires rules and the formalization of the written and spoken word, so do all the other domains included in his work. This, she argues, is nowhere made clearer than in his L’Art de dictier et de fere chancons, balades, virelais et rondeaulx. For Becker, the crux of the matter is the importance attached in that work to‘fourme’and‘regle.’ In Ballade 1364, with which she concludes her work, Deschamps goes even further, comparing the work of a poet with that of architects, painters, and royal administrators, arguing that the political order itself would collapse without them: “On ne puet bien sanz regle ouvrer” (223–24). Anyone with an interest in later medieval poetry should read this excellent book. Flinders University of South Australia Ian S. Laurie Berg,William J. Literature and Painting in Quebec: From Imagery to Identity. Toronto: UP of Toronto, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4426-4398-7. Pp. xii + 382. $75 Can. The literary texts written in the wake of the Quiet Revolution of the early 1960s rejected the nostalgic focus of the roman du terroir and opened themselves to innovative techniques, creating the groundwork for a new, largely urban littérature québécoise.It is therefore a somewhat daring move—or perhaps a sign of a less polemical approach to the always vexing question of Quebec national identity in recent years— for Berg to assert in this well-documented and well-written interdisciplinary study, juxtaposing literary and pictorial representations of the Quebec countryside, that“this arduous and ardent quest for identity is often, even primarily, staged within the landscape”(11). Berg, whose career has been largely devoted to the intersection of the visual and the novel, as in his previous book-length studies of the topic in Zola and nineteenth-century French literature in general, argues for a synchronicity in the evolution of prose fiction (with a brief excursus into poetry) and pictorial arts. He traces ideas of landscape from the early explorers who saw nature as a place on which Europeans could impose their ways of life to a nostalgia present as early as the first half of the nineteenth century for lieux de mémoire, that is, for landscape as a means to hold onto the essential constituents of national identity, including closeness to nature, resistance to oppression, and capacity for sacrifice. Berg sees this attachment to the landscape beginning with Chauveau’s Charles Guérin, which has explicit metaphors relating to painting and photography, and continuing until the early twentieth-century split between the régionalistes and the exotiques, when landscape is not merely observed, but is transformed by the observer in the act of seeing, a move visible also in that most iconic French-Canadian novel, Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine. Interspersed within analysis of...