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

The intersection between literature and painting is an ever-growing field of scholarly inquiry. William J. Berg's study offers a history of crossovers between the two, with particular focus on the ideas of landscape (and the related concepts of nature, culture, place, and space) in Quebec. From Jacques Cartier to Monique Proulx, Berg traces a long trajectory that convincingly demonstrates multiple ways in which Quebec culture has constructed an identity through its representations of landscape. Berg's analyses are detailed and his structure is clear, and he makes interesting use of a wide variety of primary sources: journals, diaries, novels, short stories, songs, maps, and paintings. The book is also well illustrated, with forty images supporting the close readings Berg proposes of his selected pictorial and literary works. These strategies and approaches allow him to underline the extent to which painting and literature are rich in cultural significance. The book draws its strength from Berg's varied examples and from the original connections he makes between works that are not usually analysed together. However, even taking into consideration the fact that no study can be exhaustive, there seem to be two striking absences. First, in examining the question of identity in Quebec (especially within a broad framework that extends from the sixteenth century to the 1990s), it would be relevant to take into consideration the treatment of landscape and identity by First Nations authors and/or painters. It is surprising that, while Berg does examine some literary and pictorial examples created by white francophone authors or painters that address the multiple associations between identity, landscape, and Canada's First Nations, he does not include any words or images by Aboriginals. Furthermore, the study does not really investigate the highly problematic colonial relationship between early settlers and First Nations, or between contemporary francophone Quebec and First Nations. Such a matter surely has a bearing on how French Canadians and First Nations have represented nature, how they experienced and changed the natural world around them (and continue to do so). The second omission is that of immigrant voices in contemporary Quebec literature. As Quebec tries to come to terms with what it means to be a Quebecker in the twenty-first century, it grapples with the roles and influences of its immigrant population. Berg looks at the representation of ethnic diversity in Proulx's Les Aurores montréales, but a discussion of the numerous celebrated authors from other countries who have meaningful insights to offer on the question of landscape and identity in Quebec is not included in the book. Such pluralistic visions would offer not only an interesting dimension to this study, but also a more complete account of issues of nature, culture, and identity in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Quebec. These reservations aside, the book's range, solid documentation, perceptive conclusions, and novel juxtapositions of the works studied make it of interest to students and scholars of Quebec's rich literary and artistic history.