[In the following essay, Bednarski remarks on the central place of the tale in Ferron's work.]

Jacques Ferron, winner of the Governor-General's Prize for literature, the Prix France-Québec, the Prix Duvernay and the Prix David, has long been recognized as one of Quebec's foremost writers. Novelist, essayist, playwright, polemicist and, above all, master storyteller, he has begun in recent years to achieve the recognition he deserves outside Quebec, in France and in the rest of Canada.

In spite of his literary fame, many people in Quebec still know Ferron only as a doctor. He completed his medical training in 1945 at Laval University and shortly afterwards went to work as a country doctor in a remote fishing village in the Gaspé. Since 1948 he has lived and practised in Longueuil (formerly Ville Jacques-Cartier), which lies opposite Montreal on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River. In White Niggers of America Pierre Vallières has paid tribute to Ferron's contribution to the lives of his working class patients there, and the doctor has shown a similar commitment to the mentally ill, working first with disturbed children at Montreal's Mont Providence and later with women patients at Saint-Jean-de-Dieu Psychiatric Hospital. To many others, Ferron is a political figure, whose name has been associated for some time with the struggle for an independent Quebec. In 1966 he ran as a candidate for the separatist R.I.N. During the 1970 October Crisis he was chosen as a mediator between the government and the Laporte kidnappers. And he is famous above all as founder of the Rhinoceros Party, which came into being in 1963 as a kind of political practical joke aimed at pointing out the futility of federal elections. In that party's pranks and antics can be seen the fantasy, the humour and the sense of the absurd so apparent in the work of Jacques Ferron, the writer.

Even though the writer concerns us most, it is difficult to separate him from the doctor and the political figure. From his contact with the poor rural classes in the Gaspé and with his patients in Ville Jacques Cartier and Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, Ferron has gained insight into the lives of ordinary people and deep sympathy for the quirks and foibles of humankind. Death and insanity have become familiar to him, and are themes which haunt his work. As for his political involvement, it springs first and foremost from a desire to write in a land no longer uncertain. Ferron believes, and his work reflects this belief, that a writer must above all else be true to himself and to his origins, that a work must explore to the full the particular before it can lay claim to any universality. In his writing, the doubt and ambiguity surrounding the lives of his fellow Québécois find expression, yet are at the same time transcended. For Ferron believes too that art, in its way, can change the world, taking reality as its point of departure, then transforming it. His works, while depicting real situations, bathe them in a fresh new light, sharpening their significance and establishing a new order, a new reality.

Many critics are tempted to talk of Ferron's realism. There is in his work a down-to-earth quality, a gallic impudence, which is realism of a kind. There is realism too in the blunt frankness with which he faces death, and, above all, there is that exactness of setting in which he often seems to delight, noting, with care and a kind of loving insistence, names and place names, and names of streets, mountains, rivers. And having identified the setting, he goes on to examine many of the perplexities of modern Quebec: those of a society caught in the painful transition from rural to urban life; those of sons exiled from home, forced off the land and into "foreign" surroundings—outside of Quebec or within its cities; those of a search for identity which often ends in tragic failure, as in the case of the wretched Cadieu, who renounces his ancestral name and ends up not only without a past, but also with no hope of progeny, no future. Yet despite the semblance of realism, Ferron transports us to another world—a world of fantasy, where archangels walk the streets, where hens and dogs converse with people and even trees are capable of thought—the fabulous world of the tale.

The tale is an art we have tended to forget, relegating it as often as not to the nursery. But it has been kept alive for centuries in Quebec, where, in the guise of the folktale, its earliest and perhaps most vital form, it has been handed down by word of mouth, independent of the printed page, from father to son, from one generation of conteurs (storytellers) to another. These folktales fulfilled a salutary social function in the emptiness of the New World, bringing people together and providing, with the folksong and the dance, the surest rampart against the rigours and uncertainties of life in a hostile land. They were at the same time the vehicle of popular wisdom and the perfect expression of human aspirations in that rural society. For through them the inaccessible was brought near, the impossible became possible, as, momentarily, in the atmosphere of complicity generated by the tale, the conteur and his listeners transferred their allegiance to another world. More recently the move to the cities has resulted in a weakening of the structures of traditional rural society. In Quebec, as in the rest of Canada, the society which has taken its place is a society in transition, confused and uncertain, a society in search of itself. The folktale ritual has all but disappeared.

Ferron picks up where the folktale left off. He transforms it from a spoken into a written art and broadens its relevance and its appeal. His are tales for the present, providing at the same time continuity with the past. Fantasy spreads from the country into the urban environment. The subject matter is resolutely up to date, though Ferron occasionally offers a bizarre blend of old and new, as in "Ulysses" or "Little Red Riding Hood," where he juxtaposes time-honoured traditional and legendary sequences and elements both inventive and modern, or "Mélie and the Bull" which, in spite of its contemporary setting, draws its inspiration from a folktale of international renown. For the most part his material is anecdotal, often relating personal experiences; but in his treatment of it he remains true to the spirit and atmosphere of the tale. He retains many of the formal features of the oral tale: the often enigmatic opening sentence, the stereotype endings, and above all, the recurring lines, the almost ballad-like refrains, which give rhythm to the text and remind us that this is an art still close to its spoken source. However, it is no naive art; it is a highly sophisticated one, often precious, and even, at times, obscure. Ferron delights in the nuance of the written word and explores its every subtle possibility, taking us far beyond the simplicity of the popular tradition. He is conscious of his debt to the folktale, examples of which he heard as a child and during those years he spent in the Gaspé; but he shows great independence in his handling of it. It is a vital part of his cultural heritage and as such he has assimilated it and made it quite his own. I know of no other Quebec writer who has achieved such masterful autonomy in this form, while remaining at the same time in such close harmony with its origins. He is a conteur in his own right—the last, as he says, of an oral tradition, the first of the written one.

Ferron has published two collections of tales—the first, Contes du pays incertain, which won him the Governor-General's Prize in 1962, the second, Contes anglais et autres, which dates from 1964. These were grouped together in 1968, along with several hitherto unpublished stories (Contes inédits), under the general title Contes. Tales from the Uncertain Country, published by Anansi in 1972, was the first selection of Ferron's stories to be translated into English, and while it took its title from the first French collection, it contained stories drawn from both. The present selection includes all of the eighteen translations in the original Anansi volume as well as nineteen new ones. Contes du pays incertain is translated here in its entirety for the first time. To it is added an array of the most memorable Contes anglais and the haunting "Chronicle of Anse Saint-Roch" from the Contes inédits. Thus, with more than twice the material included in the 1972 volume, Selected Tales of Jacques Ferron gives the English reader access to a wider range of stories than has ever been available before and a fine base from which to review Ferron's other, longer works, more and more of which are appearing in translation.

Dr. Cotnoir, The Saint Elias, The Juneberry Tree, Wild Roses, Quince Jam, The Cart—all of these long works contain themes and motifs already clearly visible in the tales. The tales themselves often point the way to novels. A story like "The Bridge" marks the earliest notation, the first attempt at fusion of elements later to come together so movingly in The Cart. In the tales narrative voices abound: there are those that speak with the humour, the fantasy and the timeless authority of the traditional conteur, those that adopt the urgency of the polemicist, and those, especially in the first person stories with a contemporary setting, that announce the more personal narrator, disabused yet compassionate, who asserts himself in many of the novel-length texts. Characters, too, first come to life in the tales—doctors and derelicts, clergymen and countryfolk, men and women of the urban sprawl, the simpleminded and the mentally disturbed, and the much-loved, much-railed-at Englishman. Indeed, everything is present in the tales. All Ferron is there. They form a veritable microcosm of his work.

It has often been suggested that Ferron's works spring from the same source, that they conform to the laws of a single genre. And the significance of the tales stems above all from the importance of this genre. Critics maintain, for example, that the longer texts, the so-called novels, are in fact simply longer and more complex contes. The conte is clearly Ferron's most personal form of expression, privileged in his work as it has been in the culture of Quebec. And, what is more, rich and moving though the longer works may be, there is in the smaller units—the tales here present—a sustained magic, a perfection seldom achieved elsewhere. It is fitting that the first book to reach the English speaking public should have been a selection of these tales. In the new, expanded edition the reader will once again discover Ferron at his finest. The stories that follow contain the very essence of his art.