Quebec Nationalism from an Anglophone Perspective

By Ron Burnett
*(From Refus Global — quoted by Hubert Aquin in his essay entitled, Literature and Alienation)

It was an overcast day in 1977 when the great writer and Quebec nationalist, Hubert Aquin, committed suicide. I felt the pain of Aquin's death very deeply having followed his career and his writing for many years. While there was a profoundly personal side to Aquin's death, it was also a metaphoric and symbolic gesture. As he once said: “I am the broken symbol of revolution in Quebec, a reflection of its chaos and its suicidal tendencies? (Gordon Sheppard and André Yanacopoulo, Signé Hubert Aquin: Enquête sur le suicide d'un écrivain, Montréal: Boréal Express, 1985 p.15)

On the 19th of October, 1976, a few weeks before the Parti Québecois election victory, Andrée Yanacopoulo, Aquin's wife, wrote him a letter in which she implored him to change his mind about suicide.

She went on to say that his suicide would reenforce defeatist attitudes in Quebec which he himself had openly critiqued. She did not want to bring up their son in a country which wasn't capable of instilling national pride in its citizens. She equated his projected suicide (about which they had argued for many years) with the destruction of a collective identity still in formation.

There is an attractive romanticism to Yanacopoulo's equation of Aquin and Quebec. It is also a potentially dangerous juxtaposition, for while it might be desirable to conceive of revolution through the eyes of one individual, it is a rather different thing to transform a community of six million people. At the level of myth, however, transformations can be imagined, even thought of as real without having a direct impact on daily life.

Aquin wanted a total ‘national revolution’. He wanted to rebuild Quebec society from the bottom up. He wanted to start anew and this led him to analyse both the strengths and weaknesses of his own culture. He saw himself as a representative of the collective will of his people with all of the contradictions which that entails.

This is an attractive formulation, a somewhat religious one in fact. It may explain the dark paradox of Aquin's suicide. He offered himself to the Quebec people as myth and this is inevitably the site of a death. No one individual can ever be the nation just as the nation can never be understood or experienced through one person, although we have witnessed many efforts to create and sustain the power of that myth (from Lenin and Stalin through to Mao, Thatcher, Reagan, and so forth). In death all of these ambiguities are frozen. In life they undergo neverending change which alters the myth, perhaps fundamentally and even leads to its unmasking. (TO BE CONTINUED.......)