What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
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,

This week I’m sending you the French and English language versions of the same novel, Bonheur d’occasion, by Gabrielle Roy, in English The Tin Flute, published in 1945. I imagine you’ll want to read it in English primarily, but the novel is so rooted in its language that it would be a pity if you didn’t delve from time to time into the original version. If you are at all inclined to do so, I’d suggest you have a look at sections of dialogue in French. Gabrielle Roy, like Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God, which I sent you a while ago, uses two levels of language. When the author is speaking as the omniscient narrator, the French is formal, grammatically and syntactically correct, intemporal and universal. But when it’s her characters who are speaking, then a very particular language, place and time are evoked, the vernacular French of Saint Henri, a poor neighbourhood of Montreal, in 1940. It’s a French that exists nowhere else and it would be a pity if you didn’t get at least a taste of it.

The title in French literally means second-hand or used happiness. The title in English expresses the same idea, but using a tiny element of the novel: Daniel, one of the Lacasse children, is sickly and always clamours for a little tin flute. It would make him so happy, to be able to toot away on one. But he never gets one because the Lacasse are too beset by poverty. With both titles and in whatever language you read it, the message of the novel, the picture it draws, is the same: one of blighted lives, of happiness denied, of unremitting misery. Quebec has changed profoundly since 1945. A younger francophone Québécois generation might even react with disbelief that such a province as Roy portrays ever existed. The Quebec of Bonheur d’occasion is one deeply divided between the English and the French, a gulf that Hugh MacLennan captured with the title of his novel that came out the same year as Roy’s, Two Solitudes. The English were the elite, generally wealthy and powerful, living in exclusive neighbourhoods like Westmount, while the French were the masses, generally poor and powerless and living in inclusive neighbourhoods like Saint Henri. In the novel, English Quebeckers are hardly seen or heard. At most their large houses are eyed with envy and astonishment by poor Québécois who wander up the mountain into parts of the city to which they do not—and feel they never will—belong. Even the English language is barely heard, only here and there in little phrases. Otherwise, the Québécois live in total linguistic and social isolation. Their isolation extends beyond the linguistic. Though unstated in the novel, the Lacasse family are who they are and where they are in part because of their religion. They are Catholics and Catholics at that time, especially the poorer ones, had enormous families. La revanche des berceaux, it was called, the revenge of the cradle. The English might be richer, more powerful, but we will beat them with our numbers—that was the idea. And so the families with eleven, fifteen, nineteen children. Those numbers have insured that the Québécois have prevailed and beat back the forces of assimilation, but it also meant a degree of impoverishment, as large families struggled to feed so many mouths and clothe so many bodies.

The novel revolves around various members of the large Lacasse family, principally Florentine, the eldest daughter, Rose-Anna, her loving mother who always tries her best, and Azarius, her well-meaning but hapless husband. Only Florentine brings in a steady revenue from her job as a waitress. But it’s not much and the family is forever moving from one slum dwelling to a worse but cheaper one. Their lives are squalid and wretched. They are clothed in tatters and malnourished. They are the unhappy slaves of an economic system that doesn’t need them. All they have to keep them going is their dreams. Florentine seeks refuge in love, Azarius in lofty dreams of a better future that he’s incapable of bringing about, while little Yvonne hides in religion. All of them are utterly powerless and warped by their ravaging poverty. Their suffering does not make them angels; it merely confirms their humanity. Their lot is so bad that their ultimate friend turns out to be war. The opportunity to join the army and gain the pittance that an enlisted man earns is finally their only way of making a living, no matter if it means that they might be killed or have to kill.

There is one character in the novel who is absent: a priest. The trappings of religion, in the form of kitsch reproductions of sacred figures, adorn the walls of the Lacasse’s living room and the family’s exclamations and profanities are religious in nature, but an actual servant of the Lord never appears in the novel. That puzzles me. Blame for much of the misery in the novel, certainly the spiritual misery, can be assigned to the Catholic Church. Its message of accepting suffering in this world because of future rewards in a next world had the effect of engendering profound passivity in its followers. Furthermore, the Church’s rigid moral code meant that an unmarried woman who fell pregnant was doomed to have her reputation ruined and a child that would likely be deemed an orphan, shunned by society, despite having both a father and a mother. The Church then, as now in many ways, was anti-feminist and anti-modern, obscurantist and backward-looking. It fed its followers in Quebec rancid spiritual placebos while they rotted in material misery and stagnated intellectually. I wonder why Gabrielle Roy refrained from criticizing such an institution.

The quibble is minor. Bonheur d’occasion is fiction, but one solidly rooted in reality. It’s a masterly example of the novel as memory, as document. As a Québécois myself, I read it with a mixture of shame that conditions could have been so bad for my people just a few generations ago and consequent anger at the agents responsible for those conditions. You read this novel and right away you understand the forces behind that great leap into modernity that was la révolution tranquille, which transformed Quebec from Canada’s most backward province into its most progressive.

I will end this letter abruptly. My partner Alice’s waters have just broken and our first child, a boy, Theo, is on his way. A child is the best novel, with a great plot and endless character development. I must attend to it.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. And two more replies. Tony Clement, the Minister of Industry, sent me a complete answer to my querry about SSHRC’s funding [see Reply section of Book Number 51: Julius Caesar], while P. Monteith in your office thanked me in a much briefer way for the next book I sent you [see Reply section of Book Number 52: Burning Ice].

P.P.S. Please excuse the somewhat tattered condition of the French version of Bonheur d’occasion. I read it while I was in the Peruvian Amazon recently and the humidity got  to it.

encl: two inscribed paperback books

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