Surprendre les voix: Essais by André Belleau, and: Liberté by André Belleau (review)

HUMANITIES 173 With the exception of interviewers of Munro, he seldom refers to other Munro critics. As space and method preclude in-depth analysis, this text is perhaps more appropriate to the studentthan the scholar, but all Munro scholars will find the bibliography of her fiction, including uncollected stories and the original publication of collected stories, a useful tool. (LORRAINE MCMULLEN) Andre Belleau. Surprendre les voix: Essais Boreal 1986. 233. $16·95 ,) Liberte (fevrier 1987): 'Andre Belleau.' 169. $5.00 The two publications under review came out within a few months of each other following the death in the fall of 1986 of Andre Belleau, a prizewinning teacher at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, researcher, brilliant critic, and writer. Although his books were few in number (an earlier version of the present essay collection, Ya-t-il un intellectuel dans la salle?, 1984, and his very perceptive Le Romancier fictif: Essai sur la representation de l'ecrivain dans Ie roman quebecois, 1980), he left a sure mark on Quebec's intellectual environment. As the editors of Liberte point out in their 'Presentation' of the special issue dedicated to him, 'Au total quantativement restreinte, cette oeuvre atteint toutefois une densite et une pertinence qui expliquent l'influence de son auteur sur nombre d'entre nous, amis, universitaires, etudiants et lecteurs ....' (Belleau did leave behind an unfinished manuscript on Rabelais, and had planned a book of memoirs, a collection of fantastic tales, and the fruits of his recent research on F.-X. Garneau and Romantic historiography.) Yet Robert Melam;on, a colleague on the editonal board of Liberte, of which Belleau was one of the founders in 1958, did not hesitate to speak of Belleau's oeuvre as June des plus importantes de sa generation,' and called his essay collection, which he grouped together with works by Paul-Marie Lapointe , Hubert Aquin, Gaston Miron, and Marie-Claire Blais, 'un des meilleurs livres quebecois des vingt dernieres annees.' And this view has much to be said for it, as one discovers in reading Surprendre les voix, which the author was able to prepare for publication before his death. The book is divided into five parts: 'Paysages,' 'Voix,' 'Debats,' 'Codes,' and 'Epilogue.' It consists of some thirty articles published mostly in Liberteoverseveral decades, and also in La Nouvelle Barredu jour, Strategie, Etudes fran~ises, Critere, and L'Esprit createur. Belleau's style is marked by concision, a high degree of intelligence and sensitivity, evidence of a vast a.nd variegated panoply of readings, a reflexive quality, and witty and sometimes highly imaged expression. 174 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 In the first section there are excellent 'landscapes' of Montreal, Guadeloupe, and Morocco, in which the author's contention that one should be a 'voyageur' and not a 'touriste' is amply demonstrated. In addition, there is a foretaste of Belleau's deep interest in language and levels of speech, which he develops more fully in later sections. In a formulation of which one finds variants elsewhere, he writes: 'Et pourquoi parler de patois? Une langue, c'est un patois qui s'est fait aider par plusieurs divisions de cavalerie.' In 'Voix,' he takes a critical look at Quebec's 'chansonnier' phenomenon , probes the salient characteristics of the novel genre, moves on to distinguishbetween that form and the short story, and examines fantastic writing and the complex relationships between literature and politics. (In. the latter area, as elsewhere, Belleau injects a healthy dose of selfcriticism .) The section 'Debats,' as its name implies, is perhaps the most polemical. Here he treats the pre- and post-Referendum atmosphere in Quebec, giving us rare insights, even after the considerable output of social scientists, into the Cite libre ideologists (P.E. Trudeau and Gerard Pelletier, in particular) and the persistence of a conflictual'dialogism' in the discourse of the independence movement. He points to a glaring contradiction between Trudeau's association of Quebec's neo-national- . ism with fascist tendencies, in a major 1962 article, and the future prime minister's authoritarian acts during the October 1970 crisis. (Belleau's labelling him 'Ie general Trudeauchet' after the Chilean dictator Pinochet is, however, inappropriate; in my view the fascist label should...