Le Québec: La révolution silencieuse

Abstract

The important symbolic and discursive role that the North plays in the Canadian imagination has often been noted. The present essay proposes to consider resonances between the inscriptions of an imagined North in Hubert Aquin’s 1974 novel Neige noire and those in Nicole Brossard’s 2007 novel La capture du sombre. Brossard’s narrative ventures into an Arctic landscape that readers of Aquin’s novel immediately recognize. This quintessentially narrative voyage poses the question of what it may mean to step out of a familiar landscape into a landscape of erasure. The final passages of the two novels have a parabolic density that provokes and resists interpretation. Yet the penultimate scenes seem to suggest a momentary glimmer, a readable trace of that passage through the North.