SOURCE: "Jacques Ferron," in Profiles in Canadian Literature, Volume 5, edited by Jeffrey M. Heath, Dundurn, 1986, pp. 121-28.

[In the essay below, Bednarski surveys Ferron's works, focusing on such themes as Quebec-English relations, death, insanity, and alienation.]

There is one title which more than any other sums up the literary universe of Jacques Ferron. It is Contes du pays incertain (Tales from the Uncertain Country), that of the Québec doctor's first book of short stories, which won the Governor General's Prize for 1962 and gained him his first true recognition as a writer. [In an endnote, the critic explains that "[Tales from the Uncertain Country] was the English title of a collection published in 1972 by Anansi, but of the eighteen stories translated, only ten were from Contes du pays incertain. The French collection is translated for the first time in its entirely in Selected Tales of Jacques Ferron."] This title evokes, first of all, the social, political and ideological uncertainty of a Québec caught in the painful transition from rural to urban life and grappling with the ambiguities inherent in its status within the Canadian confederation. It also suggests the equivocal atmosphere of a literary landscape where nothing is clearcut, where the seemingly contradictory elements of pathos and humour, polemics, and pure fun, blunt down-to-earthness and unrestrained fantasy combine to disconcert and to delight. And it evokes the tale, heir to the folktale, that fabulous genre of the magical and the commonplace, privileged in Ferron's work as it has been in the culture of Québec.

An author of rare compassion, one of the subtlest, most original minds Canada has ever known, Ferron reflected on the human condition from his own distinctly Québécois vantage-point. He embarked on his career in the last dark years of the Duplessis era and matured as a writer during the Quiet Revolution, at a time when poets, novelists and playwrights were seeking to give expression to Québec's new national consciousness. For Ferron, as for writers like Hubert Aquin or Gaston Miron, literature would never be truly universal unless it first reflected the concerns of its particular time and place. Nor could it be a wholly private undertaking: there could be no self-expression, no individual soul-searching, which was not at the same time the exploration of collective truths. Ferron himself attempted to retell a collective experience, or, as he put it, a pays (or country) that had hitherto been mal dit (that is, badly or inadequately told), translating it into terms that were adequate and acceptable. His work has been an example and an inspiration to a whole generation of young writers, who see him as the great chronicler of Québec's recent and not-so-recent past, as a kind of prophet, too, and a builder of the future. For his writing not only reflects a people's doubts and perplexities; it seeks at the same time to redefine an identity, providing Qaébécois readers with a new image of themselves, firing their imaginations with the elements of a new mythology.

In his best known play, The Flowering Suns, Ferron recreates some of the events of the 1837 rebellion and reinstates a national hero, the patriote Dr. Jean-Olivier Chénier, in his eyes far more worthy of veneration than many of the fake figures promoted by the Catholic Church. In the novel, The Saint Elias, he elaborates myths of rebirth and renewal symbolized by a nineteenth century Québécois sailing ship, the pride of the Batiscanais ship-builders, which sails out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to make contact with the wide world. The Penniless Redeemer, Ferron's only lengthy novel, is a veritable Bible of the beginnings of contemporary Québec. In it he gathers together an astonishing array of characters from Québec's recent past—poet Saint-Denys Garneau, painter Paul-Emile Borduas, cleric and literary critic Camille Roy, and many, many more—according them myth-like status and postulating the existence of a Québec Heaven (Le ciel de Québec) for the dead of that uncertain land.

Though there are many characters in Ferron's books who, through their recurring intervention, contribute to the redefining of Québec reality, English readers will be quick to note the continued presence of the Anglais, who has in this enterprise a special role to play. English Canadians are not new to Québec literature. But no writer has portrayed the Québécois' complex relations with this group with such insistence or with such obvious hope for understanding and reconciliation as Jacques Ferron.

It is at the expense of the English that Ferron achieves much of his most memorable humour. In the contes, or tales, the Anglais makes brief, comic appearances. Sometimes British, like the Reverend and Mrs. Andicotte and their three red-headed daughters in "Chronicle of Anse Saint-Roch", sometimes Upper Canadian, like the frustrated Ulysses of "Ulysses" and "The Sirens", and sometimes not clearly one or the other, like the kilt-clad, hairylegged Sergeant-Major in "The Buddhist", he is a foreign being and somewhat quaint, viewed with surprise and a kind of amused respect. Ferron gently mocks these lanky rousseaux. He pokes fun, tickles, deflates, absorbing them lovingly but cheekily, into a Québécois reality of which they are only a part. The English are acknowledged, but rendered merely amusing and therefore harmless, their real power momentarily deactivated by the humour.

This same good-humoured fun is had at the expense of the English in Ferron's novels and plays. But it is impossible to ignore that there is something far more serious going on here. In these longer works, the broader context of Québécois self-affirmation is relentlessly explored, and little of significance can be achieved without reference to the English "other". For Ferron, the notion of "two solitudes" had, by the 1960s, become hopelessly out of date, and some more dynamic rendering of French-English relations was necessary. Like the nationalist prosecutor in his play La tête du roi, who has one anglophile and one anglophobe son to embody his own warring tendencies, Ferron himself is ambivalent. His is the kind of ambivalence one can feel towards an authority figure, or even towards one's own self.

It is the English of Québec whom Ferron most assiduously harries and courts. Throughout his work can be found examples of worthy English residents "Québeckized" or aspiring to be "Québeckized", many of them active on behalf of French Québec. Among the most notable is Elizabeth Smith of The Flowering Suns, seen as a potential Joan of Arc inciting patriotic fervour in the hearts of Québécois men. Equally active and far more complex is the function performed by a certain Frank (Frank Archibald Campbell, alias Frank Anacharsis Scot) whose "real life" counterpart was the late Montréal poet and legal reformer F.R. Scott. Frank appears in several novels as an alter ego with whom a Québécois narrator must come to terms. In La nuit (an early novel, later reworked in the light of the October Crisis and renamed Quince Jam) he dies, poisoned, enabling the narrator, François, to recover his soul—his own and, by implication, Québec's. In The Cart, he returns as the devil's henchman, this time summoning the narrator to his death and presiding over the Faustian rituals of a Montréal night. It is in The Penniless Redeemer that Frank receives his most sympathetic treatment. He takes part in the momentous events leading up to the birth of the Redeemer who is to bring about the salvation of the Québec people, and is himself redeemed, after a fashion, becoming at last indisputably, if somewhat unceremoniously "Québeckized". And by the end of the book he has even achieved the status of first-person narrator. Later, after the events of October 1970, an embittered Ferron would have him just as unceremoniously "sacked". "I was sorry La nuit was only fiction", he wrote in his "Appendix to Quince Jam" (subtitled "The Sacking of Frank Archibald Campbell"). "It will remain fiction, but I am changing the title to stress the poison" (contained, of course, in the jar of quince jam)….

Frank, having achieved the highest status possible in a fictional universe (for what greater authority can a novelist confer on a character than that of first-person narrator?), would thus be banished from Ferron's work, never to return. This banishment reveals how deep and bitter was Ferron's disillusionment at the imposition of the War Measures Act, just as Frank's prior attainment in The Penniless Redeemer (1969) indicates how great had been the trust placed by the author in English Canadians like F.R. Scott. By relating events that have to do with the coming of Québec's saviour, Frank Anacharsis Scot becomes implicated in these events in a manner at once acquiescent and powerful. Some might see in this handing over of the narration to Scot a mark of Québécois alienation. It is true that the first person je to which most Québec narrative tends in the 1960s and 1970s is an authentically Québecois je. But before Frank can achieve a discourse of his own (and it must not be forgotten that this discourse is in French), he must go through the somewhat undignified but no less serious ritual of "Québeckization". He has to have his Québec "night" just as François, in search of his soul in La nuit (and Quince Jam), had to have his. When we marvel at the authority vested in him, we must remember that it can come only after he has been symbolically assimilated and, so to speak, taken possession of by Québec.

No English voice would ever again achieve this authority in Ferron's universe. Frank having fallen from favour, his successor, Ann Higgit, the young English-speaking Maritimer of Wild Roses, is not permitted to narrate. But she, in her own way, is active too. She is a most perceptive observer, a reader of literature, and through literature, of life. She interprets and reads, as no one else can, the destiny of the Québécois, Baron. Once again Québécois reality is being sympathetically translated by an English outside mind, and it is this characteristic projection of one's own reality into the mind of another that constitutes the most interesting aspect of Ferron's attitude to the English. To truly exist, and ultimately, to be truly saved, Québec, it would seem, has to be perceived and have substance, individually and collectively, in the English mind.

Ferron's attempt to come to terms with the English is not the only significant element in his portrayal of his uncertain country, although, since it will be of special interest to English readers, I have chosen to stress it here. Much could be said about his attitude to politicians and to the immensely influential Catholic Church, to what he perceives as a rigid and moribund rural world and to the urban sprawl of North American "petroleum civilization" and the reign of the money-god, Papa Boss. This one illustration will have helped to show, I hope, that Ferron's work does not give simply a reflection of an existing situation, nor even a reaction to it, it is essentially an acting on and a reworking of reality, an attempt to shape and order, and its prime motivation is the need to improve.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, in a doctor's work, another of the most persistent themes is death. In many of the tales, Ferron deals with the subject in a tone that is familiar, joking, almost cynical. There is little sense of awe or mystery. And in the longer texts, although he is occasionally quite lyrical, he seems to delight, as in his first novel, Dr. Cotnoir, in mocking the solemnity surrounding the event. But he is at the same time seeking in death seriousness of another kind. Death is associated with notions of salvation and redemption. In Dr. Cotnoir, a doctor dies, but his simple-minded charge is "saved". So, too, is Rose-Aimée of Wild Roses, when her father, Baron, commits suicide. In The Cart, Ferron explores the death of a first-person narrator, which necessitates a sudden change in grammatical person, the first person "I", once dead, giving way to the third person "he". Ferron wrote The Cart after the death of his younger sister, Thérèse, at a time when memories of his mother's premature passing were particularly vivid and when he himself had narrowly escaped death from a first heart attack. The first-person method allows him to explore more intimately and, for all the macabre sense of fun, more seriously, this theme of death, which was to haunt him more and more.

By the early 1970s, overworked and disillusioned, Ferron had begun to experience the weariness and depression that would characterize his last decade. Not surprisingly, the death he contemplated now seemed almost exclusively to be his own, for even other deaths—like those of poets Claude Gauvreau and Yves Sauvageau—awakened in him a painful awareness of his own unworthiness to live. "Who should commit suicide, Sauvageau or yourself?" he asks himself in "Purple Loosestrife." As his own death came to haunt him more and more, so, too, did a vision of his country's imminent demise, of the fading away of a whole people into nothingness. Québec's disappearance would signify the loss of all that could give meaning and substance to his own brief life, dignity to his death and lasting value to his literary work. And that loss, imagined in adulthood, is contemplated with a lyrical intensity equalled only in the evocations of the childhood loss of his mother, found in La Nuit and Quince Jam (especially in its "Appendix" and "Credit Due") and in The Cart.

Like death, insanity is a theme that haunts Ferron's work. He returns again and again to the subject of mental illness, which he views from his own highly personal standpoint, drawing on his experiences as a family doctor and on his work, with patients in psychiatric hospitals. The barely fictionalized case histories we find in Rosaire and "A Love Letter" (a text appended to Wild Roses) reveal his impatience and dissatisfaction with professional terminology and his desire to account for the failing of individual minds in terms other than those of medical orthodoxy. Here, as elsewhere, he stresses the importance of the wider social fabric of which any individual is a part and insists that no mind should be diagnosed without reference to this context. Rosaire teeters in the first place on the brink of insanity because he is trained in a trade which modern technology has made obsolete. Aline Dupire of "A Love Letter" has been uprooted from her close-knit family unit.

Because of the vital relationship that binds an individual to his group, Ferron is also concerned about the confinement and isolation of patients. The theme of the doctor as "jailer" returns constantly, as does that of callous families willingly imprisoning undesirable "loved ones" behind institution walls. In the tales, treatment is generally light (though who could fail to be haunted by the underground journey of discovery, the devastating descente aux enfers made by the "Jailer's Son"?) and at times veers towards the grotesque (as in "The Parrot", the story of the prim little old lady who follows the obscene example of a parrot and exposes herself to passersby). But in the novels (Dr. Cotnoir, The Juneberry Tree, Wild Roses) and essays like "Claude Gauvreau" or "Purple Loosestrife" or the medical Escarmouches, it is dealt with in a profoundly serious vein. Ferron's polemics against the medical profession in general and psychiatrists in particular are as fierce at times an any of his celebrated attacks in the realm of politics. [In a endnote, the critic adds: "Ferron's political jibes, delivered mainly in letters to newspapers and historiettes, gained him much notoriety. His targets were occasionally English Canadians, but more often Québec provincial politicians and, predictably, federalists like Trudeau."]

Though Ferron himself does not make the connection explicitly, the subject of insanity is not unrelated to the theme of country and collective well-being. His conclusions on the subject of an individual's sense of identity and belonging and the vital guarantees of language, place, and name, lead inevitably to the discovery of the roots of collective alienation. And there is another connection he makes often and quite explicitly—that between the writing process and the natural reactions of a beleaguered mind.

There is, Ferron seems to be saying, something extraordinary going on inside the mind of a writer, which is in some way related to certain kinds of creative delusion apparent in the insane. Rose-Aimée of Wild Roses reads her mad father's letters: "She found them beautiful, well-written, almost literary. And it occurred to her that literature might well be madness that has been transcended and seeks its own cure." Of Aline Dupire in "A Love Letter", Ferron writes: "If [she] has kept her sense of fun and gives the impression of being happy, it is because in her confinement she has discovered the power of words, and with the grade five she never completed they have taught her the art of self-enchantment." And in the "Appendix to 'Quince Jam'", written around the same time as Wild Roses and "A Love Letter", he makes a startling connection between the first person narrator of La Nuit and Quince Jam, with whom he clearly identifies, and this woman patient who has fascinated him so: "Who then is this François Ménard …? Perhaps he's a metamorphosis of Aline Dupire who went mad at Sorel, far from the indispensable company of her own people."

As time went on, Ferron would explore what he saw as the split in his own mind, creating doubles for himself, doubles who converse, collaborate, vie with each other and, finally, conflict. "The Execution of Maski", his last published text, is autobiography transposed, the highly fantastic account of a failed suicide. Notary, the scribe or writer in Ferron, conspires to rid himself of Maski, the doctor, an intrusive other self, whose life has until now provided him with his inspiration, but whose continued presence has become a burden and an embarrassment to him. However, once Maski is gone, the scribe is powerless, and attempts in turn to destroy himself: "Maski's execution announced my own."

Jacques Ferron's work is rich in observations and insights on writing—the origin and the nature of the process, the writer's role in society, the relationship of the writing self to other selves, and the subtle interactions between fiction and life. Ferron does not, like so many Québécois writers of his generation, present us with a narrative which is, totally or in part, an account of or comment on a text being written. Yet his work, while not genuinely self-reflexive, is still self-conscious in every sense of the word, and writing is itself a major theme.

There is, for example, the doctor-writer in The Saint Elias who remakes his country according to his own desires. There is the vagabond conteur in the story "Martine", whose tales (the oral predecessors of Ferron's own written ones) give style and substance to his land, and who, each time he takes leave of his audience, is content in the knowledge that his art has made the world a better place. The picture of the writer that emerges from Ferron's work is first and foremost that of an individual obsessed with correcting and improving, whose function is to recreate the world, presenting to his readers, individually and as a group, a picture not only of what they were and are, but of what they one day might be. And through writing comes, always, a kind of salvation. In The Juneberry Tree, Tinamer is confused and adrift and writes to save herself. In Wild Roses, Louis Hémon, celebrated author of Maria Chapdelaine, is seen as having brought about, through his writing, the salvation of his tiny daughter, and this salvation is mirrored and confirmed by the saving of Baron's child, Rose-Aimée. Mme. Cotnoir, the doctor's wife, in Dr. Cotnoir, saves everyone she writes about in her diary, which becomes a kind of ark, and this is reaffirmed in the saving of the simpleminded Emmanuel. There is, then, in Ferron's work, a whole system of affirmations and assumptions about the nature of writing, and from most of what he wrote there emanates a kind of faith. But there are, undeniably, toward the end, questionings and doubts. The writer's experience belies his earlier belief that he would leave the world more beautiful than he had found it. The "prototype" writer, the vagabond of "Martine", is interrupted in his activities when something in the outside world (social and technological change) disturbs his function. One could say that it is the writer who succeeds, him, but ultimately the writer, too, is vulnerable—vulnerable to his disillusionment with society and the intractability of the world, vulnerable to his own weariness as a man.

In Ferron's work, just as all themes, however personal, are linked to the all-embracing theme of le pays, so too this lifelong preoccupation with a country's destiny translates into a theory of literature and significant elements of form and style. For Ferron's concept of writing grows out of a deep attachment to language—language as it is shared by a community—language made up of "words used by everybody", which gives to an individual his first sense of belonging. It was the precariousness of that language in Québec which first brought Ferron to political consciousness. Moving to Montréal in the late 1940s, he soon diagnosed his country's uncertainty, observing the contamination of the language of the masses with the concern of a physician and the vested interest of a writer already embarked on his career and disconcerted to find his medium perverted and his readership threatened with extinction.

Ferron recognized that responsibility for linguistic health rested squarely with provincial governments, who until the 1960s had refused consistently to act in the interests of "public hygiene". But he himself sought in his own way to consolidate his people's language, writing in a style of great elegance, whose structures recalled those of the classical writers of seventeenth and eighteenth-century France. He felt no need to integrate into his texts elements of urban popular speech and avoided the political protestcum-linguistic regionalism of the joual movement. The only reflection of the country' linguistic situation to be found in his work is his treatment of isolated English words for which he invents highly imaginative and, to the French eye, extremely humorous gallicized spellings, taking possession of them for Québec with a sly wink (for example, "cuique lounche", "ouiquène", "brecquefeste", "ouhonnedeurfoule-dé"). He thus attempts to assimilate the English language in playful vengeance, much as he does the mind and person of Frank Anacharsis Scot, in The Penniless Redeemer.

Nor could he follow the example of writers like Claude Gauvreau, whose work and suicide were nevertheless to haunt him. Gauvreau, a poet and playwright associated with painter Paul-Emile Borduas' Refus global, explored language in Automatiste terms, risking the coherence of the common tongue in the name of a private liberation.

Ferron saw Gauvreau as a writer for whom language had become independent of dictionaries, whereas he himself once admitted feeling an urgent need for the reassurances and discipline they and grammars could provide. For not only was Québec French undermined by English; it was itself particularly vulnerable, having survived as part of a primarily oral culture, without the reinforcement a long written tradition can give. To young writers of Québec's avant-garde who chastised him in 1967 for not being more innovative, he replied: "At the point I'm at, in rang des Ambroises in Saint-Léon de Maskinongé, how do you expect me to shake the bridle? I've never known that bridle and, if anything I'm anxious for discipline, for glossaries and for dictionaries. I'm the last of an oral tradition and first of the written transposition" [Escarmouches, Volume 2].

Here Ferron is referring not only to his language but also to his transformation of the folktale, a form he became familiar with in his childhood in Maskinongé County and during his years as a doctor in the Gaspé. He had profound admiration for the oral storytellers of rural Québec, and even went so far as to affirm in 1970 in an interview with Jean Marcel: "The most interesting literature here [in Québec] is still the oral literature" [Jacques Ferron malgré lui]. Indeed, one of the most striking characteristics of this style is his wedding of this oral tradition, from which he borrows freely, and his own inventive and highly sophisticated written art.

Ferron has published some thirty books, covering almost every conceivable genre, from the political broadside to the most precious one-act play, with a preference, always, for those shorter forms which best accommodated the limitations imposed upon him by medical practice. But the tale is the form that he has made most clearly his own, and the most significant element of the tale, apart from its relative brevity, is its association with a strong cultural heritage, its remembered link with an important past. For Ferron's is a style that consciously remembers. Memory constitutes for him one of the most fundamental moral, psychological, and aesthetic necessities. And along with memory, fantasy. In 1948, at a time when he was embarking on his first stories, and in particular "Martine", he wrote to his friend and fellow writer, Pierre Baillargeon: "I've made a discovery: The Thousand and One Nights, or the salvation of the world through fantasy. It's match for the other Bible any day" [Escarmouches, Volume 1]. This deep-seated faith in what Bettelheim would call "the uses of enchantment", this commitment to fantasy, so evident in the tales, also extends to many of Ferron's longer, equally fabulous works, and it is for that reason—that and the fact that the long works are often composed of smaller, detachable units—that many critics have seen in these other writings just so many variations on the form of the tale. The tale is a form that also happily accommodates irony and the strong didactic strain present throughout Ferron's work. A piece like "The Dead Cow in the Canyon" draws heavily on the tradition of the Voltairian conte philosophique.

Ferron saw literature as a means of bringing his troubled and uncertain country to some kind of certainty. He felt obliged to expose and to denounce, and his work is at times highly political, highly polemical. However much he may have longed to be free of that obligation and "to write in peace, without thought for [Québec], as writers can in normal countries" [Jacques Ferron malgré lui], he was unable to dissociate himself from the collective plight. By the end of his life he had come to see himself as an unfulfilled writer, his finest ambitions unrealized and the destiny of his literary work bound up inevitably with the destiny of his "unfinished" country. Yet Ferron transcends the immediately political. He achieves in his finest pages a fusion of the personal and the collective, which is intensely lyrical and profoundly moving. Defiant, precarious, at times despairing, like his Québec, his work bears poignant witness to a country's struggle to be. It points, too, beyond Québec, beyond Canada even, to the precariousness of a whole civilization and, ultimately, to ambiguities inherent in every individual mind.