L'âge de l'irréalité: solitude et empaysagement au Canada français 1860–1930 by Vincent Lambert

Abstract

Reviewed by: L'âge de l'irréalité: solitude et empaysagement au Canada français 1860–1930 by Vincent Lambert Douglas L. Boudreau Lambert, Vincent. L'âge de l'irréalité: solitude et empaysagement au Canada français 1860–1930. Nota Bene, 2018. ISBN 978-2-89518-585-7. Pp. 444. Québécois literature produced between 1860 and 1930, the province's so-called Dark Age, has acquired a reputation of being both unrealistic and passéiste, too obsessed with patriotic and religious idealism and far too literary to depict life in Canada in a realistic manner. Describing his work as an exercice de lecture, Lambert proposes a re-reading of the writing of this period, suggesting that this reputation may be due largely to what writers of the 1960s needed from their literary heritage. Lambert presents in detail criticism of the period regarding its failure to capture real life, attributing it variously to idealisms that demanded portraits that were beautiful and wholesome, or the inability of European forms of expression to capture American [End Page 214] phenomena, or to an intellectualism that led to seeing the natural world through the filter of literature against the evidence of one's own eyes. In his reconsideration of this literature, Lambert provides a detailed portrait of the literary forms and movements that dominated the era, along with an extensive discussion of the interplay between nature writing and painting, paying particular attention to the nature poems called esquisses. His study focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on the works of five authors, Alfred Garneau (1836–1904), Eudore Évanturel (1852–1919), Albert Lozeau (1878–1924), Jean-Aubert Loranger (1896–1942), and Alfred DesRochers (1901–1978). Supported by correspondence and other writing from the period, Lambert reveals a profound preoccupation with representing the real. He argues that the label irréaliste applies, but not in the sense intended by later detractors. In the works under consideration, nature appears even more real by being revealed in unusual ways. A couple of examples should serve as illustration. In the case of Lozeau, whose physical infirmities kept him from close contact with the outside world, Lambert demonstrates that the window of the room in which he wrote was simultaneously a barrier separating him from the world and his connection to it. The chapter on DesRochers highlights the poet's rejection of idealism, crafting portraits of habitant life that are more heroic for their attention to the anti-heroic details of the daily grind. The conclusion focuses on parallels to the writing of Hector de Saint-Deny Garneau, suggesting that the gap between this "dark age" and the modern era may not be so very large. Lambert's writing style is agreeable to read, and his arguments are supported throughout with evidence from critical readings both contemporary to the authors under discussion and more recent. He argues convincingly that the literature of this period merits new reading. Readers who are less familiar with Québécois writing of the period will probably want a cheat sheet next to them as there are a lot of names to keep track of, a consequence of Lambert's objective to ground his re-reading in the literature's historical context. Scholars who study the connection between francophone literatures of North America and Europe, those who study Québécois literature in its American context, ecocritics, and others will find much here that is of interest. Douglas L. Boudreau Mercyhurst University (PA) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French