La Scouine by Albert Laberge, and: Un homme et son péché by Claude-Henri Grignon (review)

HUMANITIES 185 l'alliage d'une langue et du patrimoine culturel qu'elle vehicule. (LOUIS B. MIGNAULT) Albert Laberge. La Scouine. Edition critique par Paul Wyczynski Collection Bibliotheque du Nouveau Monde. Presses de l'Universite de Montreal 1986. 299· $38.00 Claude-Henri Grignon. Un homme et son peche. Edition critique par Antoine Sirois et Yvette Francoli Collection Bibliotheque du Nouveau Monde. Presses de l'Universite de Montreal 1986. 257. $34.00 Launched in 1986, the Bibliotheque du Nouveau Monde has published, in addition to the two important novels of the land being reviewed here, Jacques Cartier's Relations and Arthur Buies's Chroniques I. Projected for this series of attractive leather-bound volumes, in the lineage of the Bibliotheque de laPleiade, and with the aim of grouping 'les textes fondamentaux de la litterature quebecoise,' are works by Paul-Emile Borduas, Alfred Desrochers, Louis Frechette, Alain Grandbois, and Germaine Guevremont, among others. Based on the sample under study, the research that has been invested in these critical editions on sources, genesis, variations, vocabulary, and language levels, etc, is most impressive. They will be of great usefulness for teachers of Quebec literature and bibliophiles alike. Albert Laberge and Claude-Henri Grignon are two novelists, shortstory writers, and literary commentators whose lives and creative activity intersect at numerous points, and would lend themselves to a fruitful comparative study. Both were rural-born, mostly self-taught, and had an early dream ofbeing writers'au vrai sens du mot,' as Laberge put it. Both were linked to the Ecole Litteraire de Montreal, and commented on the literature of their time mainly in newspapers and journals outside the consecrated cultural periodicals. The two also broke with the idealized image of the Quebec peasant (Laberge much more radically than Grignon), and pioneered in the use of French-Canadian popular speech, with its phonetic, syntactic, and morphological peculiarities, both in dialogue and narrative passages. Both were denounced as 'pornographers ' because of their treatment of sexuality, although close study of their treatment of this theme (Gabrielle Pascal has done so for Laberge) would ratherlead one to conclude thatthey were prudish and quite in line with the ambient dualism of their nmes. Both were victimsof censorship, Laberge unwillingly, and Grignon (allegedlybecause of pressing material need) reluctantly, agreeing to a bowdlerized edition ofhis novel for use as school prizes in 1935. (It is also true that Laberge wrote the preface and 186 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 edited the 1945 expurgated edition of his friend Rodolphe Girard's Marie Calumet for reasons as yet not fully clear.) Grignon admitted to being influenced by the early realists, Balzac and Flaubert, while the older Laberge acknowledged Zola and especially Maupassant as his mentors in naturalism. Grignon specifically mentioned Laberge and Damase Potvin as writers he admired during the gestation period of Un homme et son pecke, while Laberge spoke positively about Grignon in his Peintres· et ecrivilins d'hier et d'aujourd'hui. There are, however, some important differences between the two. While both treat peasant avarice, for Laberge it was a generalized phenomenon, whereas Grignon concentrated it and dramatized it in a central character, a 'type.' Also, the standing of the two writers in the literary institution is quite distinct, and is no doubt a reflection of the ideological impact of their respective novels. Grignon's went through edition after edition, with ever-rising sales, reaching 125,000 copies in the mid-1980s,· and he was honoured by the Prix David in 1935 and membership in the Royal Society of Canada in 1962 (not to speak of the lengthy runs of his radio and television adaptations of his work and the two feature films based on it); Laberge's novel remained virtually unknown to the reading public until after his deathin 1960. La Scouine and all of his other works were published by Laberge himself in small private editions, and his main claims to 'fame' during his lifetime were the condemnation of his writing by Mgr Bruchesi, the Bishop of Montreal, and the publication of two of his short stories in LeJournal de Pekin in 1927' Grignon, on the other hand, while getting the odd rebuke for his 'charnalite' from a clerical...