[In the following essay, Bednarski comments on the relationship between life and literature in Ferron's works.]

When Jacques Ferron died this spring, I began immediately rereading books of his, some of which had remained unopened on my shelf for several years. It must be a natural reaction to seek to re-establish contact in this way and to re-affirm a bond with a writer who has died. Especially if we have known and loved the man. For me Jacques Ferron the writer had always been inseparable from the man. And I no doubt brought to this most recent reading the particular intensity of my loss and, in spite of long held critical convictions and academic habits of mind, the desire, unconscious, perhaps, but no less intense, to rediscover in the texts a life which was no more, and which, in some compelling way, had touched and engaged my own. I also brought a recent and quite conscious preoccupation with the nature of the reading/writing process and curiosity about the subtle interplay between literature and life.

And so I read, following no particular order, heeding I know not what unconscious promptings, letting each book itself call forth the next. The Jacques Ferron I rediscovered was himself a reader, a voracious reader of other writers, great and small—writers as different as Lewis Carroll and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Hémon and Claude Gauvreau, Samuel Butler and Paul Valéry—as if reading were a precondition of writing, a complement and accompaniment to that act. And not only did Ferron interpret and gloss the work of others, commenting, quoting, even stealing unabashedly, as if all literature were his to absorb, to draw on, to recycle and rework, but he read his own works too, and what is more, in texts that were to become increasingly and, in the end, almost exclusively, autobiographical, his own life. Not only did he offer a view of literature where boundaries of time and culture and individual oeuvres became indistinct and insignificant, but a view of reality in which boundaries between life and fiction also blurred, and where not only books but lives could be read.

I found Ferron the reader in the appendix to Quince Jam, elaborating on his own novel, linking the two protagonists of his fiction—the Québecois, Francois Ménard, and the English Canadian, Frank Archibald Campbell—to their counterparts in real life—Ferron himself for Francois ("You don't have to be very clever to guess that it's me behind this character whose humility and principle of humility I admire."), and for Frank, Montrealer, F.R. Scott ("politiciser from McGill, son of a bishop or archdeacon, self-deluding idealist who thought he was a reformer, ahead of his time, when in fact he could only be, as a member of a dominant minority, a well-intentioned Rhodesian, more pernicious than anything."). I found him moving back and forth with ease and grace between fiction and life, weaving together memory, fantasy, supposition and fact, creating a text of uncommon richness and density. And in the novel itself I found two fictional lives so closely bound together as to seem almost to form one. Frank not only embodies for Francois all that is admirable and despicable in the English Canadian, he is an alter ego, not an enemy—or not just an enemy—but a veritable other self. At once the same and different, hated and loved, the English "other" is a vital point of reference in Francois' search for himself. Frank is a medium and an obstacle. To come to terms with him, to deal with him, is absolutely essential if the Québécois narrator is to recover his soul—his own and, by implication, Québec's. I knew that for close to a decade little of consequence, and certainly neither death nor redemption, could come about in Ferron's fictional universe without reference to this same Frank, identified clearly in Quince Jam's appendix, recognizable always, in his various guises, as the one and only F.R. Scott. In Quince Jam (a second version of La Nuit, an earlier novel), Francois and Frank meet in the Montreal morgue, and Francois is instrumental in bringing about the only slightly ambiguous poisoning of Frank. In The Cart it is Frank who summons the Québécois narrator and doctor to his death, and who, as the Devil's henchman, the Blarneyman—Bailiff of the Night, presides over the nocturnal rituals surrounding the demise. Finally, in the Penniless Redeemer, he even achieves the status of first person narrator. 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 indisputably, if somewhat unceremoniously, Quebeckized. Later, after the events of the October Crisis, he would be just as unceremoniously "sacked" … ("I was sorry that La Nuit was only fiction. It will remain fiction, but I am changing the title to stress the poison.")

I knew that Ferron and Scott had known each other, that they had had the C.C.F. and literature in common and had disagreed over the question of independence for Québec, but it seemed that they had not been associated in any regular or lasting way. The fictional association, however, was so long, and so intense, that I found it not at all surprising, indeed strangely logical, that Ferron's death should have followed so closely after Scott's, in spite of the more than twenty years of age that separated the two men. Already, to the reader-observer I was at the time, the first death (Scott's) had seemed to call up the second and to make it imminent, necessary. Now, in the light of my rereading, I had no trouble accepting that the close connection between two inhabitants of a fictional universe should be reflected, after the fiction, so to speak, in real life. Not only was life in this case as strange as fiction, fiction almost seemed to exert an influence on life, or at least to extend its logic beyond the confines of the printed page. It seemed impossible to speak of accident or coincidence. The closeness of the two deaths signified in some vaster sense the inextricable nature of the lives. In the logic of a total universe every detail was meaningful.

There were, I discovered, other circumstances of Ferron's death that were so like those described in this books as to make the latter appear almost prophetic. And it even seemed to me, as I reread them, that he had over the years written primarily of this, his own death, now facing it front on, now obliquely, jokingly, predicting even the time of day, the time of year. Could one, I wondered, write a life to bring it into line with fiction? Indisputable master of his fictional world, had Ferron managed, in some comparable way, to order, to author life? Or was he merely reading, seeing with heightened vision, the shape and sense of things to come?

There was no question in my mind that my comportment as Ferron's reader was governed, at least in part, by my relationship with the man, and by the fact that he had been as real to me as his books. With Ferron I would be drawn, as with no other writer, to abandon my normal critical stance and to re-integrate fiction and life. But I was equally sure that the work itself authorized, indeed invited, readings such as mine.

Not only does Ferron provide us with a fascinating example of author-reader, but there are in his books fictional readers, too, characters whose most significant activity is to read and interpret books. One of them caught my attention for the particular quality of her insights. She was Ann Higgit, the young English-speaking Maritimer of Wild Roses. Ann studies the works of French writer Louis Hémon, the author of Maria Chapdelaine, and discovers in them hidden messages, ciphers almost, cries for help directed to his sister who has stayed in France, while he, Hémon, has travelled to England and Canada. And the pleas remind her of those, unspoken, of her Québécois friend, Baron, with whom she has spent a few days in Moncton. Baron's wife, like Hémon's has gone mad, leaving him alone with a little daughter, who, like Hémon's child before her, must now be saved. Ann Higgit has read Hémon's fiction and made the connection between his life and work. She has interpreted his messages just as his sister did, and what is more, through this reading she has found new meaning in the life of Baron. But that is not all. Ann is well-read. In the course of her studies she has acquired some notion of mythology and a sense of tragic destiny. When she learns more about the biography of Louis Hémon and the circumstances of his tragic death, she fears for Baron and sees Hémon's fate as a kind of foreshadowing of Baron's end. She sees and understands, but she can do nothing to help Baron and knows she must abandon him to his cruel fate. In this case, strange though it may seem, conclusions are being drawn, on the basis of one man's life, about another's. Here, clearly, life itself is being read, with the same interpretive skills that are normally applied to literature. All this happens so easily and so naturally that Ferron seems to be inviting us, through the intervention of Ann Higgit, to make the same kind of connection between his life and work, and, what is more, to apply directly to life, to his, to our own, the processes we have refined for the reading of literature.

I realized in retrospect that this was in fact what I had always done. Attentive to the laws of Ferron's universe, I had always read his books in conjunction with his life, finding in both signs, patterns, messages and a coherence I liked to call meaning. It was not surprising that ultimately I had come to read his death. If Ann Higgit was so important to me it was because she authorized and confirmed conclusions that, intuitively, I had reached, and because, as a reader, she resembled me.

Ann knew Hémon, the writer, and Baron, the man—two separate lives, which, in the perspective of the book, mirror each other and finally merge. Ferron himself identifies as surely with Baron as he does with Hémon, for each represents different possibilities of the same self. (Interestingly enough, while Baron/Hémon can be seen as a composite, the theme of the writer as split self is explored fully in the moving Execution of Maski, Ferron's most recent work, where the writer, Notary, conspires to be rid of Maski, the intrusive man.) Like Ann, I am a special kind of reader, because I knew both the writer and the man. But what does such a reader do with her insights? Can her reading be of significance to anyone but her? Ann Higgit taught literature. One can teach, though there are insights that would seem to have little place in the lecture room. One can teach … and one can also write.

In the appendix to Quince Jam, Ferron says of writing, "I consider it a right more than a profession, and I've often tried to convince others to do the same." And he adds jokingly that if his uncle, already a fine storyteller, were to take up writing, perhaps he himself might feel free to divert some of his own creative energies elsewhere ("Maybe if you'd write, then I'd feel more free to go chasing skirts.")… implying, albeit frivolously (the uncle in question was a devoted womanizer), that by exercising his right, the writer is at the same time performing a kind of duty, a function vital to the well-being of those around him. Writing is an activity that goes on in the name of all.

I found in Dr. Cotnoir, Ferron's first novel, where there is also, incidentally, an uncanny description of a doctor's April death, a passage on the power of writing, which summed up for me the writer's role as I had experienced it in my life. And I mean by that not just any writer's role (like mostly anyone, I have dozens of writers who are important to me), but that of the one great writer it was my privilege to know as a man.

In this novel there is a character who writes, not books, but a humble diary. She is the doctor's wife, and in the eyes of her husband she is creating an ark in which all whom she describes find salvation, for she elevates them, through the act of writing, to a kind of blessed state. The doctor has never looked inside the diary, and he wonders if he will recognize himself when he finally comes to read what she has written over the years. Transformed he will most likely be, but saved in some miraculous sense, too, he is sure. This doctor talks to his wife at the end of each day, offering up his experiences to her, and he tells us, "I've gotten a good many people aboard that ark and all the animals I've met in my twenty years in the suburb." Ferron himself has left us with a formidable ark, some forty years in the making, upwards of thirty volumes, a monument to his unbounded curiosity, his tolerance and his humanity. Inside, a multitude of individuals, an astonishing assortment of lives, extraordinary in their diversity, moving in their contradictions. And on them all he has bestowed dignity and the miracle of meaning. Like Cotnoir, some of us who knew Ferron must have sensed what he was building, for we would often bring to him treasures for safekeeping—people, thoughts, insights, disconnected fragments of our incoherent lives—convinced that to present them to him, to entrust him with them, was to somehow ensure their significance and their integration into a larger and coherent whole. And for this they did not need to find their way, transformed or otherwise, onto the printed page of an actual book. It was enough, we felt, to share them with him and so expose them to the meaning-seeking process we are all involved in, but in which writers overtly and systematically engage. It is writers who provide us with the strongest assurances that meaning can be found in life, or, if it is not already there, that it can at least be made to exist. Writers are, by their very existence, living models for a double activity which is fundamental to us all.

We are all readers and writers. I am Ferron's reader, and beyond that I am the reader of my own life, of which he is forever a part. But I am also, by natural extension, the virtual writer of that life. We are all of us virtual writers, carrying our texts around inside us, like the picture Jeremiah, the simple-minded "landscape painter" of Ferron's short story, saw, but never produced. ("No one recognized it. The artist had forgotten to sign.") We all tell, shape and order, just as we record the patterns, signs and meanings we have perceived. But very few of us ever become actual writers, giving to our texts a tangible and reasonant form. Ferron's uncle the storyteller came very close. Ferron himself, in spite of his achievements, recognized inside him a virtual creation, which remained as real and compelling as any of his finished books—those débris—to quote his beloved Paul Valéry—those mere fragments of a vaster, more glorious whole. And, sensing the virtual all around him, he could encourage others to write. As for me, the only words I ever wrote that were of lasting significance to me were addressed to Jacques Ferron. And I see my letters to him, not as true writing, but as humble jottings, notes de lecture, notes written by a reader in the margins of her life …

As reader/writer of my life, I cherish my association with Jacques Ferron, the writer and the man. I consider myself enriched by him, immeasurably, more than I could possibly put into words. As a reader of literature, I have gained insights I am still unsure how to share. Ann Higgit did talk to her students of Hémon (Baron), but when she spoke they noticed there were tears in her eyes.