Anne Hébert's story, Le Torrent, and its relation to the rest of French-Canadian literature takes on the same significance as does the relation between an ancient House and its coat of arms. It can be argued that the story is a zenith point within the tradition to which it belongs. (p. 9)

Le Torrent is most accessible through its superficial meaning, through its theme of conflict. It has been stated above that the story is emblematic; as such, it represents the duality that has always characterized French-Canadian literature: the division of being. The same is manifested by the use and opposition of particular symbols. Water opposed to dryness invites life; the closed room or house opposed to the open land or water invites death. This opposition reflects the archetypal conflict between the flesh and the spirit. The lesson to be learned here is that the traditional life of the spirit is really the death of the flesh, not its mere suppression but its death: a paradox indicating the seriousness of the division of being. The persona will try to escape this division through a destruction of the traditional notion of life and an assertion of life by the physical senses, to reinstate the natural equilibrium of existence.

At once the struggle between instinct and reason becomes apparent…. The result is dédoublement, the splitting of the personality by two equally strong forces. The same opposition and splitting characterizes the early poetry of Anne Hébert. Her late poetry is an affirmation of freedom and new life. The dramatic action of the poetry is conveyed through uniform symbols found also in her fiction. The images and symbols can be reduced to a basic concept expressed in the author's total work; that is, to the concept of time and space and its particular relation to the poetic persona.

From her earliest poems, we observe the author's nascent vision of life and existence as a closed space containing no time but the past. Naturally, such a view leads from happy contemplation to disrupting alienation…. There follows a progressive, almost systematic, delineation of images and symbols conveying the sterile condition of a static existence: faded flowers, past memories, lost happiness, sombre dwellings, closed rooms and houses, impenetrable windows and doors, dusty furniture, ashes, mirrors, hydrophobia, claustrophobia, claustrophilia, and finally, the ultimate irreducible dark space of the coffin and tomb. The whole impact of such imagery will be vividly presented in a key poem, "Le tombeau des rois". Here, a descent into the grave of a dead past provides the only means of exiting into a present time which will turn naturally into future. (pp. 9-10)

In Le Torrent, meaning can be intensified by a more profound analysis. The central conflict in the story does not merely reflect an opposition between the Conscious and the Subconscious, the former represented by Claudine the mother, the latter by François the son and narrator, and by the action of the Torrent of water on him. The Mother image in French-Canadian literature embodies more than a symbol for the individual Conscious. In Le Torrent the Mother represents a collectivity and an established order of life. Because of the importance of this figure in the literary history of French Canada …, the Mother cannot perforce be a limited symbol. Indeed, if she is archetypal in Québec, all the ambiguities of such a portent must be taken into account. Claudine, therefore, is not solely François' external world but also a disruptive part of his inner world. She is part of the Self, conscious and unconscious…. (pp. 10-11)

The narration in Le Torrent divides into two identifiable parts with rising and falling intensity. The action intensified by the extreme repression suffered by François, repression by his mother's will, and his own repression of the pull towards the instinctual life of the Torrent also resembles the contraction of the insect. This reaction climaxes in François' sudden deafness, the result of being struck by the mother, and in the sudden importance of the dominating Torrent…. Once the narrator is drawn into the world of nature, he experiences a whirlpool of sensations and feelings. Though the Torrent represents a physical symbol of repressed existence, it also becomes the image of the narrator's actual condition: turbulency, loss of direction, loss of power, absence of will, full domination by external natural forces. Furthermore, the narrator's inability to control his new condition, constitutes a falling action. He recognizes his condition but cannot direct it away from what seems to be a fatal course. Like the horse, Perceval, unable to be broken by the mother, François desires escape from her cruel attempts to break his ego. Because of his deafness, and because of the Torrent's hold over him, François begins truly to experience the duality of his existence and the conflict between life in nature and death by reason; whereas in the first half of the narrative all he knew was the absolute control of his mother's will, now he suddenly finds himself open to himself, unprotected and exposed to a more intense struggle.

In the collection of poems, Le Tombeau Des Rois, there is a progression of images that perfectly describes the poetic journey undertaken by the persona and the dark journey undertaken by François. It proceeds from water and fluid images to more solid imagery, from these through the familiar images of closed rooms and houses to the final tomb image…. Each step of the way to the end has its appropriate victim. In the first poem the victim is a sleepy persona who is ignorant of the water's dangerous enchantment. (pp. 11-12)

Then follow the closed and wooden rooms that imprison the body as well as the spirit. The rooms represent the historical past and the reaches of sterility. Their wood is ancient, permeated with fatal odours. These images of imprisonment and suffocation are enlarged and given a more explicit meaning. Existence in the ancestral manor is characterized by its qualities of absence of objects and people that would make it livable otherwise. Only the persona inhabits this place, a hall of mirrors. The split of the Self is symbolized by reflection in the polished glass. The Original and its Double contemplate each other, narcissistically, in the glass waters. The Double retains his traditional idiosyncrasies, he is Death announcing death. He resides under the quicksilver of the mirror. Being an exact copy of the Original, he sticks to his victim; like seaweed, says the poet. Together, they simulate an act of love, a perversion of love.

The result of division by conflicting forces is alienation of the Self. In the story, before the horse's escape and the mother's death, François had only experienced denial and absence; denial of love, childhood and any physical life; absence of other humans. His completely isolated and guarded existence is symbolized by the confines of a daily routine of chores and prayers, by maternal decree, and by the figurative significance of the house. He is thoroughly dispossessed. At the seminary where he is sent to learn self-denial and holiness, he learns only loneliness and fear. He keeps away from his fellow students because he cannot know them. They are the outside, the temptations of evil, of life beyond the eternal vigilance of the self. Thus, his isolation is final.

Alienation, therefore, is the movement inwards away from exterior existence into the very narrow keep of repression. Extreme denial of anything connected with real life produces a condition that must lead to actual death, for the grave or coffin is its ultimate symbol. The splitting of the personality on the surface takes the form of loneliness or solitude. Underneath this isolation, the Self undergoes successive change induced by the storm and stress of surface conditions, causing the persona to experience desperate need for contact of any kind with any other human…. Finally, the desperation of such an irreparable state produces complete confusion, total exposure to the dividing forces, final collapse of rational existence. The extent of this alienation begins to unwind in the second part of Le Torrent, at the narrator's fascination with the horse, Perceval, ending with the last paragraph of the story. The attempt to escape such existence, which constitutes the action of the second half, is the first made in the work of Anne Hébert.

The mother dead, he is left to himself. Gradually, as he perceives the static condition of his sterile life, he feels the effects of utter solitude and isolation, and then of alienation…. It is too late to recapture life. The moment this is perceived is a moment of revelation, for the narrator knows then that he must follow events to their end…. The events he must follow are a surge of activity that bring François to experience a nightmarish recognition of his utter desolation. He must endure a series of irreversible experiences. He becomes tormented by desire for woman, and goes out to find her. Each impulse to act, to counter passivity, is met by a painful reminder of his split existence, something which in itself prevents positive action. In order to find a woman, he must confront and admit to his solitude. Doing so, he bears witness to his alienation.

The girl he brings home, Amica, in many ways resembles the horse Perceval: in spirit, in mystery, and in appearance, with blue-black hair like the blue-black skin and mane of his stallion. She is the unknown, the purity of physical and instinctual life. But François can only suffer from his encounter with her:

    I observe the alien couple during its wedding night.
    I am the wedding guest.

This splitting into actor and spectator, not only forms the premise for the narration; it also occurred as such at the exact moment when François is struck deaf by Claudine. The splitting results from an ever-present conflict, for the mother prolongs her domination over the narrator right up to the end. Being dead, she truly becomes the symbol of the devastation wreaked by the order she symbolizes. Such destruction pushes François to the very limits of his existence. The necessity voiced by the Torrent in his pounding temples invites him to a final and complete discovery of the unknown. (pp. 13-15)

To escape the pain of his conscious existence, François must push away its constricting effects, must attempt the final "adventure" of life…. The story ends with an attempt to reclaim life in its fully ambivalent state. It is also escape into the unknown, the last potential means of becoming one with the rush of the Torrent and all it represents.

In the poem, "Le tombeau des rois", a similar journey or adventure can be observed, a similar escape into an unknown future. The descent into the tomb is a Thesian voyage through the labyrinth of the mind, or of the soul and body. The reduction of the closed spaces of the persona's existence is contained in the image of the grave. The grave as the dimension of death is absolute. It is both breathless and fathomless, like the gulf or the abyss; it is an unescapable enclosure. This image is used to project the conditions of living-death. The nature of actual death can only be induced or imagined…. Anne Hébert's persona induces the nature of actual death from the particulars of her experience throughout the progression of poems in Les Songes en Equilibre … and Le Tombeau des Rois…. In this title poem of the second collection, actual death becomes identified with dead kings, and the experience of it is recreated in the rape of the persona, seven times by seven tall Pharaohs. After a symbolic real death, the persona is freed from its living-death and moves towards the dawn at the end of the long tunnel of the tomb. (pp. 15-16)

Liberation of the Self depends on confrontation with death. To be initiated into life, one must die, literally or symbolically, in order to be reanimated. François' end allows him to experience the unknown, and therefore his new adventure could possibly be a new beginning. The persona of the poem is released into the light once more, and her affirmation of life unfolds in Mystère de la Parole where every word, act or gesture is a fiat. The title poem vividly asserts that the word can be made flesh. The word-maker lives by naming things. The poetic consecration of life is thus a creative process…. All the closed spaces of the Self are opened up by the destruction of the symbols of isolation and solitude…. Symbols and images previously given a negative and morbid function now metamorphose into positive and vivid meanings. Snow, birds, water, landscape no longer convey a perverse condition of alienation; they are shorn of their previous uniformity. Instead of a blanket of death, snow becomes a natural element complete with all its ambivalent characteristics. It is negative when it tempts one into a prison of dreams and sterile purity, positive when it is made a natural compliment to existence. Birds fly free. Water flows as blood flows. Landscape is divested of any static qualities. Time is freed and allowed to fill the immensities of space.

The idea and image of the Torrent form the symbolic foundation of François' narration, just as the idea and image of the tomb form the symbolic foundation of the collection and its title poem, "Le Tombeau des Rois". In both cases, the fundamental component has a distinctly ambivalent quality; it evinces negative and positive characteristics at the same time. Ambivalence constitutes the necessary element in the drama of Anne Hébert's total work…. The Torrent is an aggregate of opposites, destructive and creative. The Tomb as an aggregate symbol represents the logical end of a progression marked by opposition. All the images and metaphors of preceding poems are resolved by the final descent underground. The light of day at the end of the descent into the tomb provides an indication of a non-destructive resolution. It leads literally into the mysteries of creation. We can conclude that the duality of existence cannot be resolved, but that the persona can accept its dialectic and use it creatively. The Self will then cease to be split by physical and metaphysical forces. What takes place in Anne Hébert's last poems is the exploration of the mystery of new life, and the wonderment and affirmation of anything and everything. (pp. 16-17)

In Anne Hébert's [Le Torrent], the characters and events are the parts of a collective consciousness: Claudine is la femme canadienne, an enduring but perverted Maria Chapdelaine; François represents the effected offspring of the former, the depersonalized male, empty ownership, the disjointed Self, the disinherited heir seeking reintegration with his surroundings; Perceval and Amica are personifications of the land, of natural life. Together, these characters and symbols form the dramatic opposition that constitutes the central activity of the French-Canadian, and indeed the Canadian, literary tradition. (pp. 17-18)