On the occasion of his 60e anniversary, the Department of French-language Literature at the Université de Montréal highlighted the immense work of Marie-Claire Blais during an evening on September 9, held at the Faculty of Music. The author, who was awarded a doctorate by the University Honorary in 2012, came to the mountain campus to meet students on multiple occasions with the same generosity each time.
The evening began with an interview with Francis Gingras, professor at the Department of French-language literature, with the author Hélène Dorion about the writing of the opera libretto. Yourcenar: an island of passions, co-written with Marie-Claire Blais. This was followed by a moving recital by mezzo-soprano Stéphanie Pothier, a graduate of the Faculty of Music, accompanied on the piano by Francis Perron, professor at the faculty. Finally, a round table on the work of Marie-Claire Blais led by Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge brought together Jean Bernier, Lise Gauvin, Kevin Lambert and Catherine Mavrikakis.
The prodigious presence of Marie-Claire Blais highlighted
Lise Gauvin, honorary professor in the Department of French-Language Literature, remembered Marie-Claire Blais with emotion: “She has always been for me the prodigious friend whose presence has never ceased to accompany me. What I remember from her is her presence. Presence to her friends, but also presence to her characters as well as to the vast world, which she translates by a choral writing that we find both in A season in the life of Emmanuel than in his other books.
She also remembered her listening. “Marie-Claire Blais offered each of her interlocutors an exceptional quality of listening. And in his books, there is a distribution of voices between several characters as if it were a game with multiple echoes. Even more, she knew how to detect in each other the singularities that determine them. In her novels, she lets the others speak, that is to say her characters, leading them into a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions,” she said.
The publisher of the writer who died in 2021, Jean Bernier, spoke of “this tiny woman with this fragile voice who places herself in dialogue with the whole world”.
Give a place to the excluded, to the marginalized
In a very contemporary way, Marie-Claire Blais gives a voice in her novels to the excluded, to those we never talk about and she reveals the depth of each one. “All the characters, no matter their origin or their social backgrounds, are entitled to great thoughts on the human condition, on the fate of existence, on inequalities, on the beauty of art, on poetry”, said Kevin Lambert, a graduate of the Department of French Language Literature.
Marie-Claire Blais had, according to Jean Bernier, “this desire to make literature an instrument for the inclusion of different groups. There is a desire to affirm the rights of these people in his books to give them more space in life, so that this translates into a change in morals, a change in laws”.
Innovative writing
“I had the rare feeling of coming into contact with someone who invented a form when I started reading thirstsin 1995”, mentioned Kevin Lambert about this writer who plays on temporalities and skilfully mixes potential and reality.
The art of the incise in Marie-Claire Blais is also noteworthy. We thus pass from one subjectivity to another without realizing it, as in the incipit ofA season in the life of Emmanuel:
“Grandmother Antoinette’s feet dominated the room. There they were, calm and sly like two beasts lying down, barely quivering in their black boots, always ready to get up: they were feet bruised by long years of work in the fields (he who opened his eyes for the first time in the dust of the morning did not see them yet, he did not yet know the secret wound in the leg, under the woolen stocking, the swollen ankle under the prison of laces and leather…), noble and pious feet (n didn’t they go to church every morning in the winter?) […]»
An opera written by Marie-Claire Blais and Hélène Dorion
Hélène Dorion wrote with Marie-Claire Blais Yourcenar: an island of passions, an opera on the life and work of Marguerite Yourcenar. Rare fact: they wrote the libretto before the music was composed. The work was then set to music by Éric Champagne and performed for the first time in 2021 at the Quebec Opera Festival and the Opéra de Montréal. Stéphanie Pothier, a graduate of the Faculty of Music at UdeM, played the main role of Marguerite.