What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
This play to defeat silence,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

It’s about time I sent you the work of a writer from English Canada’s twin solitude. It’s a play again, the second in a row, the third in all. And for the second time—Le Petit Prince was the first—I am sending you a book in French. Mind you, the French of Larry Tremblay’s The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi is a bit peculiar. Not that it’s joual, or any other variation of Quebec French; that wouldn’t be peculiar, it would be expected from a Québécois play. Rather, if you glance at the text, you will think it’s just English, plain and simple. Well, it’s not. Tremblay’s play is a play written in French—that is, thought, felt, ordered, and expressed by a French mind—only using English words.

What’s the point of that? Is this a bit of stand-up comedy, some party trick drawn out into a play? It’s not. The cover of the book will tell you as much. Do you recognize the man on it? It’s Jean-Louis Millette, the great actor who died just a few years ago, far too soon. His arms are raised, his face expresses anguish, the background is black: this play is no joke, says the cover. The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi is indeed a serious work of art, premiered and reprised by a master.

Is the point of writing a play that is French in its nature but English in its appearance political? The answer to that question might be yes, but a tenuous yes, in that any work of art can be taken to have political implications. In this case, to read the play politically I think diminishes its scope. Larry Tremblay’s play is both far too personal—it’s the monologue of a man opening up his heart about a private matter—and far too universal to be reduced to a political tract about the survival of the French language in Quebec.

I think Tremblay means to signal the political neutrality of his play when Gaston Talbot, the man who is opening up his heart, says of himself:

once upon a time a boy named Gaston Talbot
born in Chicoutimi
in the beautiful province of Quebec
in the great country of Canada
had a dream…

In describing both entities, and with adjectives of equal banality—if not cliché in the case of Quebec, officially “La Belle Province”—my guess is that Tremblay sought to place his play’s linguistic dualism beyond a merely political interpretation. The dream mentioned, by the way, is not a political dream, but a dream about Gaston Talbot’s mother, whose love he seeks.

So what has Gaston Talbot from Chicoutimi got to say, and why is he saying it in French rendered in English?

I would suggest that The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi is a play about suffering and redemption, about what we have to do to get back to ourselves. Gaston Talbot is an adult French-speaking man struck with aphasia who, when we meet him, suddenly begins to speak again, only in English rather than in his native tongue. And what he recounts is how, long ago, he was a sixteen-year-old boy in love with a twelve-year-old boy by the name of Pierre Gagnon-Connally and how the two went by the river bank to play and Pierre asked Gaston to be his horse and Pierre

…catches me
with an invisible lasso
inserts in my mouth an invisible bit
and jumps on my back
he rides me guiding me with his hands on my hair
after a while he gets down from my back
looks at me as he never did before
then he starts to give me orders in English

I don’t know English
but on that hot sunny day of July
every word which comes
from the mouth of Pierre Gagnon-Connally
is clearly understandable

Get rid of your clothes
Yes sir
Faster faster

And then something happened, it’s not clear what, an accident, an inexplicable burst of violence, and Pierre Gagnon-Connally dies and Gaston Talbot falls into silence.

The play is a web of self-confessed lies and inventions. The first thing Gaston Talbot says is “I travel a lot.” Later, he admits that he hasn’t travelled anywhere. In recounting a dream, he first says that he had one face, a “Picasso face”, then admits that it was another face. Gaston Talbot holds these lies up like a shield, and with them he edges forward towards the truth. English words are thus just one more of these truth-revealing lies that allow him to address what pushed him into the worst abyss of all: silence.

As I did for the fourth book I sent you, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart, I would suggest that you read The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi aloud. Even better: that you read it silently a first time, as if you were Gaston Talbot before the start of the play, and then read it a second time aloud, as if you were Gaston Talbot gasping for expression.

The play of course raises the question of language and identity, of what it means to speak in one language rather than another. Languages obviously have cultural reference points, but these can change. Witness English, spoken, taken on fully, by so many people around the world who are not of English culture. But the play puts the question on a more personal level. Gaston Talbot manages to reach back into his painful past and say what he has to say thanks to a bilingual subterfuge. That is the startling and moving conclusion of the play: the sight of truth found through a mask.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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