SOURCE: "Jacques Ferron: The Marvellous Folly of Writing," in Voices of Deliverance: Interviews with Quebec & Acadian Writers, translated by Larry Shouldice, Anansi, 1986, pp. 83-103.

[In the following essay, based on correspondence and an interview, Ferron discusses his British literary influences, symbolism, character, and the place of Quebec history and legend in his works.]

Interviewing Jacques Ferron seemed at first to be something of a Mission Impossible. I had been told several times that Ferron almost never granted interviews and that, although he was not a complete recluse like Réjean Ducharme, the good doctor was not very fond of talking about his writing. However, I was not about to let myself become discouraged. I had just spent five years working on a doctoral dissertation dealing with Ferron, and my head was teeming with his work: 16 plays, 12 novels, two collections of short stories, two books of fictionalized biography, two volumes of polemical writings and a book of historical tales. So I sat down with a blank piece of paper and wrote as follows:

Cher Monsieur Ferron,

I am not Scott Ewen in your play La tête du roi, a paternalistic Englishman if ever there was one; nor am I that enemy of the Québécois, Frank Archibald Campbell, whom you poison in La nuit. And I'm certainly not one of those Englishmen from Ontario in Les contes anglais, fanatics for the Red Ensign and that belligerent anthem "The Maple Leaf Forever." On the other hand, I must admit to being rather kindly disposed towards Frank-Anacharcis Scot in your novel Le ciel de Québec. [In an endnote, the critic adds: "'The name Anacharcis comes from one of my patients who was called that because his father spoke Greek.' '(note from Jacques Ferron)."] Frank, a poor Scot who sold his soul to the imperialist English, finally came to his senses and turned into François Sicotte. This is what you refer to as Jaxonization, in memory of Henry Jackson, Louis Riel's secretary from Toronto, who quite naturally spoke French when he took up the cause of the Métis. All that to say I'd be delighted if you would grant me an interview.

A few weeks later, Monsieur Ferron replied:

Your request for a meeting has been lying here in front of me for several weeks now, and I haven't been able to reply. I found you terribly naive. I had nothing to say to you. I could only disappoint you and I had no wish to do that, being incapable of acting like Msgr Savard in your interview with him. And also, I liked what you had to say about La tête du roi in your article in Études françaises. It's a play I wrote with affection and I still have a soft spot for it; it's my "Riel," my reality, at least indirectly … It seems to me I could manage to see you.

Before going off to meet Monsieur Ferron, I mentioned in a letter what a unique and unforgettable pleasure it had been for me to read Le ciel de Québec. I said in particular that I'd been fascinated by the Frenchman, Monseigneur Turquetil, a character based on Arsène Turquetil, a former Superior of the Oblate missions in the Hudson Bay area, an imperious miracle-worker on the great ice-floes of the North, author of one of the first grammar books of the Eskimo language and a friend of the canonical visitor to the missions in the north of Saskatchewan, Gabriel Breynat, who was known as the flying bishop, the bishop of wind (he travelled by plane, since skidoos didn't exist at the time) and occasionally the lousy bishop (an appellation the reader can interpret as he/she wishes). Obviously Jacques Ferron is not the historian of the Oblate Fathers, but he does have a gift for satire, changing his "Borgia prelates" into strutting pigeons, into "turtle-preachers" with three wisps of hair on their skulls. In any case, it is thanks to Jacques Ferron that, in my mind, an Oblate is no longer an Oblate. I wanted Monsieur Ferron to know just how powerfully evocative his words are, and also to thank him for creating all those images that keep constantly recurring in my mind. The best way to do this, it seemed to me, was to describe the Ferronesque scene that lay before me that day as I looked through my living-room window. After all, it was Jacques Ferron who had taught me about the metaphorical possibilities inherent in our surroundings. Thus I wrote as follows:

Your Turquetil from the Land of Aurélie reminds me of the Mennonite neighbours of my sister June who, far from your amélanchiers/Juneberry trees, lives in typical Ontario—or in other words Mennonite territory. Everything there is tinged with black: the carhearses, the buggies, the clothes, even the bread. June, who happens to be an excellent painter although in no way similar to your overly theoretical Borduas, does marvellous sketches of the Ontario landscape.

As for me, although my ancestors came from the Far-Ouest where they were familiar with the amélanchier/saskatoon berry, I myself live on Nelson Street in Ottawa. Often when I close my eyes I imagine I live on the same street as your famous patriot, Wolfred Nelson, but that must be an illusion, since this is quite clearly Bytown, where Viscount Horatio Nelson lives on.

Also, just across from my place, at 305 Nelson, there are 168 air conditioners sticking out from the windows of the Oblate Monastery; 168 black suits—I haven't actually counted them—eat, sleep and distribute their pamphlet about the beatification of their founder, Monsignor de Mazenod, a friend of the second bishop of Montreal, Ignace Bourget. At 307 Nelson there are 17 white-robed Sisters of the Holy Family who cook in the cafeteria. The black suits are always crossing through the tunnel that connects 305 to 307. The trap-door opens and closes. The scandal-mongers say that the mouse-trap is getting emptier and emptier.

What fascinates me the most about this scene, however, is the majestic, black, skeletal oak tree on which someone has written in large white letters: PQ. The tree is located on the left side of 305 and is thus at the half-way point between the middle of the Oblate Monastery and the entranceway of the white nuns.

There's nothing literary about this description. I see the same scene every day and I'm only a simple spectator. You, however, living in the Land of Longueuil, must be able to contemplate scenes of equal significance at the Nunnery of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary.

Several days later Monsieur Ferron sent me the following reply:

One of my distant Oblate cousins, who is a supply teacher and thus always travelling, came to see me one day and spoke about the Mennonites with some envy and a great deal of respect. At the end of his career, it was almost as if he'd found a new vocation.

On the other hand, I know a fellow named Schneider who was banished from the Mennonite community because he wanted to get an education. The first time I saw him he was hoping to get back into the good graces of his father. The last time, he was sad and a lot less sure.

Those Mennonites are one of our fascinating minorities in the West. The French spoken outside Quebec reminds me of the Flemish dialect that the Belgian missionaries wanted to impose on the Congo.

I though to myself ahead of time that Jacques Ferron, whose letters are written as metaphorically as his books, would certainly not enjoy playing the traditional analytic game of interviewer-interviewee. And so it occurred to me that I would probably end up having to reconstruct a good part of the interview and fill in the gaps between certain sentences myself.

Jacques Ferron is a medical doctor; however, he's not the sort of doctor for whom a portuna (as a doctor's bag is called in the Gaspé) and an office are a sign of prestige, a barrier that sets him apart from the rest of society. Ferron is a "misbeliever," in the sense that he does not possess the ordinary "faith" in medicine, writing or the Quebec nation. And although he does not follow the beaten paths, he has beaten some very strange ones of his own in his creative writing. The path of medicine, for example, leads him to asylums, those lugubrious prisons for the insane, where Coco the Misunderstood in L'amélanchier waits blindly for death and where the doctors, locked into their individual worlds, avoid any thought of social considerations and hold fast to the established rules—which Ferron suggests is the cause of most illnesses. As for the various pathways the nation has taken or will take, Ferron claims that these get dangerously muddled and lost in the "Labyrinth of Progress," whereas the nation's people, suffering all too often from a lack of hereditary memory, perish in the wastelands of unconsciousness and anonymity. The literary language Ferron uses is like a living tree that grows in every little corner of the land of Quebec. According to Ferron, the reader learns in his own "Bible" that "The space that surrounds us plays a good joke on time by constantly replanting itself like wheat." As a writer, his references constantly move in the direction of local reality, whether that be Longueuil, Trois-Rivières, Louisville, the Gaspé, Quebec City or Montreal. Ferron interiorizes the landscapes of his country so that by recreating them, he can foster a deeper sense of belonging.

Jacques Ferron had little use for what he called the "parasites of literary criticism"—critics with their graphs in hand, ready to tear works of literature apart and deform their meaning. I wondered whether he'd see me as yet another academic, a discipline of Bachelard and Freud or member of some literary "coterie."

Before setting off to meet him, I finally decided that I would take Jacques Ferron for what he is: a doctor who cares for the working-class people in Longueuil, a man who clearly sets out his own positions in life, and above all a writer with a tremendous gift for storytelling. I was prepared to react to what he said, since I suspected he would talk more or less as he wrote, using images as anecdotes. This was certainly the case; blessed with an extraordinarily fine memory, Ferron sometimes unconsciously repeated complete sentences from his published work.

I finally got into the taxi which was to take me to Dr. Ferron's office. "1285 Chambly Road, please," I said to the driver; "1285, oh yeah, that's close to the shopping centre," he replied, flicking on the metre. Deep in Ferron's home territory, which had become almost mythological in my mind, I discovered that the phrase "shopping centre" recalled for me the marvellous passages Ferron had written about Longueuil—especially about Old Longueuil, when there were still animals and fields and swamps. And I realized that Old Longueuil had definitely been taken over by what Ferron in his novels calls the "terrible sameness of urban, suburban, gas-station, American banality." We drove by an immense and appropriately filthy grain elevator, which paradoxically looked like a gigantic castle. A few minutes later Ferron would refer to the elevator as an "urban castle," and at that point I realized the same elevator must be the source, in La nuit, of the malevolent castle of Montreal. After almost running into a young man who was no doubt suffering from a hangover and whose car was stopped in the middle of the road, the taxi driver yelled out "maudit flo!" ("damned kid"), and there I was again, right back in the middle of Ferron's work, since it was in his Contes du pays incertain that I had first discovered the Quebec word flo—apparently derived in the Gaspé region from the English "fellow." I got out of the taxi and found myself in front of an ordinary little redbrick house, which reminded me of Papa Boss and the "nice red-brick row houses, the achievement of a lifetime" for low-income workers and the unemployed. I entered the house. Monsieur Ferron, wearing a dark-blue suit and powder-blue turtleneck, greeted me warmly in an office filled with a curious mixture of books, paintings and bottles of medicine. We chatted for a few minutes about flos and grain elevators and gradually our conversation turned into an interview.

My first question dealt with the act of writing. Some writers build up a collection of filing cards and construct their books brick by brick, letting themselves go only occasionally, when inspiration strikes. If Ferron had worked in this way, I could have asked him precise questions about such and such a theme or the development of a particular symbol. However, this is how he explained the way he writes:

Sometimes after seeing something that has caught my attention, I put it into a book without even being aware of it. That's what happened with the nighthawks, those poor insect-eating birds that have trouble walking and that hovered over Montreal. They symbolize the City, but they've disappeared since then, I think, since the City doesn't even tolerate insects any more.

In the act of writing, images simply emerge. You don't actually know what you're doing. Just inventing things gives you pleasure. It's an accomplishment. You reveal yourself. When I have my historical character Chénier drink rubbing alcohol in Les grands soleils, for example, I added an unexpected dimension to the character, turning him into a beggar for a moment or two. This was a surprise. Writing makes time stand still. The hours go by and you're not even aware of it.

I did my apprenticeship as a writer with my plays. I learned how to create places, how to provide a setting. It appears that Jean-Marie Lemieux is going to produce Les grands soleils this fall, which will be sort of like taking up nationalism where Louis Fréchette left off in the 19th century with his La légende d'un peuple, I wanted to write a play entitled Riel but I wasn't able to do it. The situation around the character was utterly crazy! There was nothing crazy about Riel himself, proudly declaring that the Métis nation existed: "Here we are, established as a nation!" He was brilliant in both his words and his intelligence.

In La nuit, Ferron states that "reality is hidden behind reality." The critic Jean Marcel has previously underlined the importance of this phrase. Ferron, however, tells me that it is simply the "phrase of a madman," and since I know that madness in his work is often a sign of profundity, fantasy and illumination, I conclude that literary madness and the symbolic dimension hidden behind external reality are equivalents. From this perspective a nighthawk is not a nighthawk, but the macabre bird of Ferron's urban castle. In a similar way the magnificent canvas "Le bout du monde" ("The World's End"), painted by Ferron's mother, Adrienne Caron, is not simply a landscape of Maskinongé County; through the reality of a sinuous, black river and leafless trees in an autumnal evocation of the end of the world, it expresses a certain anguish caused by the dying natural world. Hung directly opposite Dr Ferron's desk, "Le bout du monde," because of its sinister atmosphere, seems to have strange connections to the novels and short stories—and to the sad, dull suburbs "flattened out so they spread wider, and spreading wider so they can drink more oil, the new blood of Christ and the milk of the new civilization" (La nuit).

I've always been fascinated by rivers in Ferron's work. I remember a passage from La nuit:

My own childhood was a river, and all along this river there was a succession of little compartmentalized countries marked off from one another by the bends in the river. After each bend comes another, and in this way my childhood reaches back into the past—at least a century or two, and perhaps more. My childhood includes a beginning of the world and an end of the world. It is my Genesis.

I had imagined Ferron's river of childhood to be sunny and surrounded by vegetation. I was mistaken, at least as far as the maternal river of "Le bout du monde" is concerned.

If a river isn't a river in Ferron's novel, then an animal is rarely an animal, but rather the incarnation of an individual or group of human beings. Cows, horses, pigs and wild boars, dogs, nighthawks and martins—all these are used as images through which Ferron speaks to us. When he was a young child in Louiseville, he told me, he often used to go to look at the cows that belonged to a neighbouring farmer, and "every cow had its own name."

Jacques Ferron has published almost nothing recently and this silence troubles him a great deal:

I wanted to do a book about madness, based on my experiences as a doctor, but I botched it … I had writer's block. Not being able to write any more has taken away my power.

Madness interests me. The insane are often more serene than the rest of us. All this goes back to my childhood. In Louiseville people talked about the ones who had escaped from the asylum in Beauport. They also used to say someone "was ready for Mastaï," for the Saint-Michel Archange Hospital named after Pius IX, Cardinal of Mastaï. Mastaï was a "very classy" place to be locked away, like Shakespeare's "Bedlam," a corruption of Bethlehem. Speaking of Shakespeare, British novels are among my favourite books. I really liked Dickens' Hard Times, and The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner by George Eliot. The British countryside resembles our own more than France does. The French countryside is foreign to me.

Jacques Ferron's "English readings" seem to me rather significant. Dickens' Oliver Twist, with its elements of the traditional British "tale" and a sense of fantasy both lighthearted and nightmarish, is not unlike Ferron's own stories or tales. Like Ferron's young character Tinamer, Oliver Twist struggles against social injustice, "hard times," corrupt police officers and the evil personified in Fagin, who in turn is not unlike Ferron's Bélial, a gripette or devil in Quebec French. Furthermore, in L'amélanchier, the marvellous story of Hubert Robson of Tingwick in Arthabaska County is reminiscent of Mr Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers, although this would appear to be simply a coincidence since Ferron took the episode almost word-for-word from Les bois-francs by Abbé Mailhot. In any case Mr Pickwick shares Ferron's revolt against the inhumanity of our institutions. With regard to George Eliot, it was through her realistic nineteenth-century novels that Ferron first made acquaintance with the English countryside. Also, in Eliot's Silas Marner as in the works of Ferron, childhood serves as a "humanitarian orientation." As far as the reference to Shakespeare's Bedlam is concerned, the insane asylum Saint Mary of Bethlehem, founded in 1247 by a group of nuns in London and infamous for its "Bedlam Beggars," is in much the same league as Ferron's "madmen's prisons"; his Mont-Thabor, Mont-Providence and Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, all sanctioned by the Church, are described as mediaeval "institutions of torture." [In an endnote, the critic adds: "Regarding his readings in Quebec literature, Ferron confesses to being particularly fond of the writings of Hubert Aquin."]

Jacques Ferron attaches a great deal of importance to Quebec's history. He demythifies almost the entire group of Quebec heroes glorified in the schoolbooks published by the Christian Brothers and the Clercs de Saint-Viateur. Jacques Cartier, for example, is transformed into an apostle of free enterprise, coming to America in the name of "extraction" and "plunder." The "handsome but good-for-nothing Dollard de Zoro" (Dollard des Ormeaux) becomes the "bandit of the Long Sault" and not the pious hero depicted by the Church. For Jacques Ferron, however, the historiette (historical tale) is a good deal more than simply a collection of anecdotes. Here is what the author has to say on the subject:

The historiette is true history without any window-dressing or prettifying. Too many of our historians have glorified men who were in fact bandits. Those who falsified our national history had to be silenced.

The title historiette occurred to me because of the Historiettes written by Tallemant des Réaux. In his work, as in the witty memoirs of Hamilton, history becomes a series of picturesque and racy military escapades. One of my Polish friends said that the historiette is a "madman's paper."

The expression "a madman's paper" strikes me as being a very appropriate description of the way Ferron approaches history. He sets out to dispel certain myths and it is only in that sense that he sees himself as an historian. Moving from history to the historical tale, he "disenhaloes" events or characters that have been falsely acclaimed in the past and then moves on to the "picturesque," the colourful and the comic (satire, irony, puns and off-colour jokes). Emile Nelligan is a case in point. Ferron does not agree with the nebulous fame of the poet described by some literary critics as condemned, insane, castrated, mother-repressed, father-repressed or even martyred:

Nelligan couldn't do any better than he did. He wrote some remarkable poems in a very short period of time, but then he started pounding his head against the wall and he was declared insane, which was normal at Saint-Jean-de-Dieu. That was it for Nelligan. I met his nephew recently. He told me that Nelligan's father, an Irishman who repudiated his country of origin in the name of the civil service, was earning $8,000 a year, which was a considerable amount for the time.

In the case of the poet Saint-Denys Garneau, Dr Ferron diagnoses a "swelling of celebrity" and he assigns this first of Quebec's modern poets, changed into Orpheus for the occasion, to the hell of those Québécois who can't make up their minds. Orpheus, the aristocratic "little brownhaired boy" in Le ciel de Québec is condemned for having disavowed his patriotic ancestor, François-Xavier Garneau, and for having written "intimist poetry" based on a rejection of the space, colour and games of his native land. According to Ferron, the critic Jean Lemoyne also lacks a "collective memory" and an "internal river." Lonesome for the "track of Confederation" and carrying a C.N. lantern, Ferron's "Pope" of the magazine La reléve, a veritable choir-boy "hung up" on the Jesuits, accompanies Orpheus to hell.

Monsieur de La Barre is another example of an actual historical figure viewed through the deforming lens of the historical tale. After being sent out to Ville-Marie by Anne of Austria, La Barre took command of a group of 60 men fighting the "wicked Iroquois." In Ferron's view La Barre is another of those historical bandits who need to be given a "picturesque" and "racy" metamorphosis in the historical tale. Thus Ferron's version has Monsieur de La Barre, an extremely devout man with a crucifix hanging from his belt, being discovered by Maisonneuve stretched out in the underbrush beside a pregnant Indian woman. Ferron's achievement is to be able to take various historical realities and blend them into an original concoction of fact and fiction.

Ferron talked to me about the Mémoires du Comte de Gramont by Anthony Hamilton, an Irishman who wrote in French. Hamilton too was a writer of historical tales who always managed to find just the right combination of "picturesque" images and significant abbreviations to describe the vices and virtues of England at the time of the Restoration. The "francization" of Hamilton reminds me of all the Irishmen in Ferron's work, including his novel Le salut de l'Irlande (literally The Salvation of Ireland), who are "in the process of Quebecification" and thus contributing to the "Salvation of Quebec" in French-speaking North America. In Ferron's writings there are a certain number of English-speaking characters who break free of their minority/majority attitudes. Such was the case, in Le ciel de Québec, with Frank-Anacharsis Scot, who Ferron assured me "may one day become François-Anacharsis Sicotte, nicknamed Pit." In Le salut de l'Irlande, Connie Haffigan sets out on the same rocky road to "Quebecification" when he sympathizes with certain aspirations of the F.L.Q. As Ferron put it:

English people who have been assimilated make the best Québécois. At the beginning some of them were only here for industry. But there are always a few who come to understand that money is less important than identity. They start seeing themselves as an oppressive minority, they're ashamed of it, and they become nationalized. In Louiseville (the village Ferron grew up in) I had my first contacts with assimilated English people, Hamiltons and Lindsays. Later, in the Gaspé, I knew a British woman who became as Gaspesian as you can get.

In Ferron's writings names and nicknames are extremely significant. The author, like country people generally, is a "nominalist" (the term is defined in the Appendice aux confitures de coings ou le congédiement de Frank Archibald Campbell). He likes the way names sound, the senses and images they evoke. The character Papa Boss, who represents the "bonus value" and net profit of the American Way of Life, as the Commanding General of all the G.I. Joes, the new Eternal Father and the principal director of "Asshold Finance," was, Ferron explained, originally based on the Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier. The "nominalist" power of the key words in Ferron's work is so great and so fascinating that, for me, one night in Montreal, Papa Boss took on the altogether different nominal form of a unilingual English-speaking waitress in a restaurant called Papa Joe's. That night Papa Boss or Papa Joe became my own "reality behind reality."

The same family names frequently recur in a variety of forms in Ferron's writings, often in connection with Quebec history. These historical references are not always easily identifiable, however, and the reader may take a great deal of pleasure in discovering their origins. Perhaps the most flagrant example is that of "Frank Scott." Ferron's Frank Scot (not to mention George Scott, who goes hunting for Acadians in Les roses sauvages, the paternalistic Scott Ewen character in La tete du roi, and the Métis Henry Scott, who becomes Henri Sicotte) points the reader towards a whole family of Canadian and Quebec Scotts, some of whom, Ferron pointed out, were not terribly sympathetic to the Quebec cause. There is, to be sure, the English-Canadian poet Frank Scott, translator of Anne Hébert and son of an Anglican Bishop of Quebec City. That particular Frank is a social-democrat, a staunch federalist and a champion of bilingualism—in short, as "Hughma-clennenesque as they come," in Ferron's opinion. A rapid glance through the country's history, however, reveals a number of other important Scotts who have become part of Ferron's mythology: Thomas Scott, a young Ontario Orangeman who was executed by the Riel tribunal in 1870; Alfred H. Scott, representative of the English settlers in the official Métis delegation sent to Ottawa in 1870 to negotiate Manitoba's entry into Confederation, whom Ferron depicts quite positively; William Henry Scott, the patriot elected in Deux-Montagnes, a friend of Chénier and Girod and a supporter of Papineau, although he was in league with the Curé Paquin and thus opposed to the use of arms; and William Henry Scott's brother, the merchant Neil Scott from Sainte-Thérèse, who was also a peace-seeking patriot. Ferron's Scotts and Scots oscillate between the Quebecified Sicottes and the Scots along the line of the Anglican Bishop of Quebec City, who stands admiring the monument to Wolfe. It might be noted that even the name Sicotte is taken from Quebec history, since a farmer from Mascouche named Toussaint Sicotte was a minister in the Union government and a patriot charged with high treason in 1837. Jacques Ferron has an obsession with names. The same name or nickname may pop up in a number of different works, with or without changes in spelling. And in the course of our conversation that Sunday morning in the month of March, he spontaneously referred to a number of names that appear in his writings. At first these names may seem somewhat random, but it gradually emerges that they inevitably refer to four major thematic thrusts in Ferron's work: political, social, medical or religious betrayals and injustices. In L'amélanchier, Mr Northrop, for example, is an Englishman by birth and by choice, his compass firmly pointed in the direction of London. In this case the reference is obviously to the English-Canadian critic Northrop Frye, ironically described to me by Ferron as "a former Quebecker who prefers the anatomy of criticism and of the University of Toronto to the anatomy of Quebec." This is followed by one of Ferron's wry little smiles, an endearing gesture that manages to be almost childlike and at the same time reminiscent of the fox in Le salut de l'Irlande.

Ferron then goes on to explain that his character Rédempteur Fauché, the son of Papa Boss and a Québécoise virgin in Papa Boss, is somewhat closer to the criminal of the same name, who settled his accounts by setting fire to a house (although he got the wrong house by mistake), than to any real Redeemer (Rédempteur). "With my Rédempteur," Ferron continues, "I intended to make some annunciations. That wasn't what happened. Young Rédempteur, the little bum, became a sacrilege." Sacrilege does not seem too strong an expression, in fact, since in the world of Rédempteur Fauché, the Almighty Dollar replaces the sacristy, soldiers replace the Messiah, and "Asshold Finance" replaces church collections and tithes. "I use names to conquer, to nationalize," says Ferron. I ask him if Abbé Surprenant in Le ciel de Québec, a pleasant local ethnologist, a "pilgrim" who is more interested in the unemployed than in holy places, who admires the communists, actually existed. "Not at all," laughs Ferron, happy at having led me down the garden path. The Abbé is a fictional character who is surprenant (surprising) in comparison to the prestigious, plutocratic clergy of the establishment in the novel. He is at the bottom end of the Catholic hierarchy, close to the people. Ferron himself was once a communist, but he left the movement because he found it too theoretical, full of contradictions and corrupted by "that strange talent so many reformed communists have for property speculation," (La charrette). Still, in Le ciel de Québec Abbé Surprenant can claim, like Ferron, that communism

takes account of historical reality and gives people in distress something that will save them quicker than bread and board—I mean an understanding of their situation … In [the Church's] abstract philosophy, we've bet our money on the absolute; in the concrete world we offer nothing but cheap escape, such as pilgrimages to fight unemployment; bowls of soup to people starved for justice.

(trans. Ray Ellenwood, The Penniless Redeemer)

For anyone who plunges into the nominalist world of Jacques Ferron, it is clearly interesting and perhaps even useful to know whether such-and-such character actually existed, but it is not essential. I had understood the significance of Abbé Surprenant, and that's what really matters. Nominalist that he is, however, and whatever the degree of consciousness or unconsciousness involved, Ferron's Surprenant reminded me of the Lorenzo Surprenant in Maria Chapdelaine, a character who was much more a man than his eunuch-like rival, Gagnon. Jacques Ferron is fascinated by the religious history of nineteenth-century Quebec:

The most baroque and flamboyant manner of preaching was taught to us by Msgr Forbin-Janson, the Bishop-Prince of Nancy. His two-week retreat, as reported in Les mélanges religieux, was very useful for me in Le ciel de Québec; I only had to arrange his sermons and put them into the mouth of Msgr Cyrille Gagnon. I don't believe Msgr Bourget was one of our great religious tenors, who like Chiniquy were all students of Forbin-Janson; nor was Msgr Lartigue, who must have preached in the serious, sober style of the Sulpicians.

The Sulpicians of Montreal, in close collaboration with their counterparts in Paris, sent the first Bishop of Montreal, Msgr Lartique, into retirement in Longueuil. In actual fact the first Bishop was the second, Msgr Bourget, who came from Quebec City. Without going so far into the past, I can quote from my own experience: in Louiseville, my first teachers, the Frères de l'Instruction chrétienne, were Canadians at the bottom of the ladder, Bretons in the hierarchy. But an even stranger thing was that in the kindergarten in Trois-Rivières, the Filles de Jèsus, who were referred to as the French Nuns, were under the authority of two British ladies, who were in fact remarkable creatures.

Forbin-Janson had been an Ultra and it was after the Revolution in 1830 that he went into exile in America.

Brother Marie-Victorin is another religious "tenor" in whom Ferron shows an interest. Marie-Victorin is famous for identifying the plant-life of the Laurentian shield, and in his own way Jacques Ferron has identified the places and families of Quebec. The "family history" of Quebec, Ferron affirms, has its roots in the legend of the three brothers (which is told in L'amélanchier and in an article published in La revue de l'Universite de Moncton, vol. 8, no 2, May 1975).

My father used to talk about the three brothers. People with other family names have also told me the same story. At the very beginning, there were three brothers. There's always one who turns out badly, a famous rascal named, in my case, Jean Ferron. When I went to Shippigan in New Brunswick, the Acadian Ferrons were amazed to learn there were Ferrons in Quebec.

In Acadian mythology it's the women who dominate: they dream of Evangeline, they know about Ave Maris Stella, they have their great Saint Anne. For us, the woman is an element of reunion and confidence who comes after the three brothers. The Acadians and the Québécois have different archetypes.

Popular legends are scattered throughout Ferron's writings. Their authenticity is less important than their unifying effect and their amusing, liberating qualities. Léon de Portanqueu in L'amélanchier claims that every family should "make itself into the stuff of tales so as to give new vitality to an old heritage and revive the tales and songs that are part of life's necessities." The cart, which Ferron uses as a symbol of capitalist corruption, human stupidity and the hard labour of the working people, has its origins in the legendary past of the Ferron family:

"La charrette" ("The Cart") was my father's favourite song. It's a song about a peasant farmer who runs into trouble with the middlemen. The Devil picks up the whole lot of them, except him. At the end he's a free man.

Jacques Ferron has a reputation for being deeply involved in nationalist causes. He tells me that he hasn't always been a nationalist and that when he was at classical college, even Pierre Laporte, who wore the little green beret of the Action francaise, was more nationalistic than he. "The situation was pretty well reversed in October, 1970," he remarks thoughtfully, perhaps recalling his role as intermediary between the police and the F.L.Q. after Laporte had been kidnapped and killed. It was well before the Quiet Revolution that Ferron first began to regard himself as Québécois and not French Canadian. This is already apparent in La barbe de Francois Hertel, written in 1947. The nationalist orientation began to take hold when Ferron thought back to his childhood, especially to that distant night the village church burned down (Ferron assures one that the fire Léon de Portanqueu talks about really did take place); this revealed to Ferron that, even without a church, the village could still exist. Quite independently from his father, who was somewhat infatuated with his own success as a lawyer, and his mother, an artistic woman who had a nationalistic streak but who died of tuberculosis, Ferron started thinking on his own about the problems of existence and the splendours and miseries of Quebec. From that time on he became his own saviour and considered any other messiah as "worthless."

Jacques Ferron's earliest memory of his childhood in Louiseville contains, in capsule form, the basic structure of his future work as a writer:

In Louiseville the overall structure was completely Manichean: lower and upper, good and evil, the big village of the important people, and the little village of the proletariat. Don't forget that today's Lachine used to be the little village of Montreal. The "little villages," no doubt of Indian origin, only had paths for streets. I saw the same thing in 1946 in the Micmac village in New Brunswick—an Indian reservation where there were Chinese men and Black women working. Micmac and Fredericton: little village and big village. Sydney and Montreal: little village and big village. The Black women in Sydney and the French Canadians: two little villages.

This obsession with villages should in no way be construed to mean, as the critic Gilles Marcotte has claimed, that Ferron, true to the old "agriculturalist" complex of French Canadians, is advocating a return to the land. The little village compared to the big village is simply one way of representing the small versus the large, Quebec versus the United States and Canada, the working man versus the boss. Ferron is, of course, fascinated by the parish structure, but this is how he explains it:

What more did the French settlers do than set up parishes? That's where the meaning of those little communities comes from—little communities in a larger community. That's why the main subject of Le ciel de Québec is the founding of a parish. In the old days they used to put a curse on the grasshoppers to drive them into other parishes, which were considered "foreign."

In an article entitled "Jacques Ferron et l'histoire de la formation sociale québécoise" (Etudes francaises, 12/3-4), Robert Mignier takes issue with Ferron, who sees the beginnings of Quebec's national history as emerging about 1837. Mignier claims that Ferron confuses history with nationalism, and that after the conquest, the French-Canadian people, contrary to what the author of the Historiettes states, did have a sense of patriotism, which came mainly from the fact that they were populating the country. Ferron objects to this, as follows:

There were barely 60,000 French Canadians after the Conquest. There weren't enough people to develop any real national awareness until the 1830's. A nation's history has a starting point. It's important to establish when it was.

In the writings of Jacques Ferron, the leading figures in the emergence of a national spirit are Papineau, the patriots Chénier and Bonaventure "le Beau" Viger, and the historian Francois-Xavier Garneau. The author confides to me that the episode in Les grands soleils, where Chénier collapses in a cemetery, was taken from a tale called "Petite scène d'un grand drame" by Pamphile Le May. In the case of Viger, a number of historians have told the story of the patriots' first encounter with the British soldiers on Chambly Road at the corner of Coteau-Rouge. Ferron was able to point out the exact spot to me: three blocks from his office, where a traffic light flashes anonymously at a busy highway intersection. The beautiful fields of Longueuil are gone forever.

They were there on November 17, 1837, however, when Bonaventure Viger, a farmer from Longueuil and captain of the militia, captured the colours from Colborne, Dr Davignon and the notary Demaray. I point out to Ferron that the man nicknamed "le beau Viger" was not Bonaventure, but rather Louis-Michel Viger, a lawyer, first cousin to Papineau, and founder of the People's Bank, a sort of precurser to today's Caisses populaires. I add, however, that in my opinion an "error" of this sort is not really an error, since Ferron's "beau Viger" and the historical "beau Viger" do not necessarily have to be the same person. For Ferron the expression "le beau Viger" acts as a leitmotif. And through a marvellous "coincidence," "le beau Viger" who is missing part of his thumb is related to the good-for-nothing brother in the legend of the three brothers: a strange beggar who also lost the end of his thumb, in this case in a battle against the English at Fort Maskinongé. In Ferron's world the history of the nation and the history of the family are never entirely distinct.

It was already the noon-hour and Monsieur Ferron and I had been chatting back and forth for three hours. Not wanting to impose upon him, I glanced at my watch and Monsieur Ferron offered to drive me to the Métro station. Since we were driving in a yellow Renault, I remarked that Dr Ferron, unlike some of the more pretentious characters in his work, didn't drive the black "hearse" favoured by his doctors, prelates and incompetent honourable ministers. We drove past the house that formerly belonged to the Ferron family. "It was a lot more shaded by trees when we sold it two years ago," Ferron sighed. Behind the house I was amazed to see how far the woods extended; here was the origin of the "airy, chattering and enchanted" second-growth forest where the Ferrons' little girl, named Tinamer in L'amélanchier, used to spend her afternoons. There was no Minotaur stalking down Bellerive Street, as in Ferron's supernatural tale, but the street was as subdivided and asphalt-covered as I had imagined. The June-berry tree (l'amélanchier) that young Tinamer refers to as "rakish and mocking, in league with the birds," is enormous for a shrub of that species. "It's the size of a small tree," Ferron remarks, "but it doesn't flower every spring." What does matter, I thought, is that it flowers and acquires new meaning in the minds of Ferron's readers.

The Renault drove past a shopping centre. I looked out at the huge parking lot with horror and heard Ferron remark:

I once saw Marie-Victorin give a lecture at the College in Longueuil. Did you know that in one of his tales ("Ne vends pas la terre") he tells the story of a proud and admirable farmer who refused to sell his land to the speculators swarming over here after the Jacques-Cartier Bridge was built? He sold it a few years ago, for a higher price.

Does the lust for money always win out in the end? How is it possible to resist the "urban sprawl" that Ferron depicts so effectively in his writings? These were the questions I was asking myself, and I couldn't help thinking of Le salut de l'Irlande and Major Bellow, a former land speculator in Quebec now living in Victoria, a city Ferron amusingly transforms into "a plastic English place" of retired "golden-agers" and American tourists from Seattle. If the Major "bellows," it must be out of contentment, although "sneer" might be a more appropriate expression, considering how he exploited the people of Quebec. As for the shopping centre, the only thing left grazing there is the Steinberg supermarket. I left Monsieur Ferron with a firm handshake and thanked him for the images he had awakened in me. A few minutes later the Métro was whisking me under the St. Lawrence, under what Tinamer refers to so marvellously and so "anachronistically"—after all, writing does make time stand still—as the "majestic St. Lawrence, filled with greasy dishwater," the most impressive "of all the sewers of Upper and Lower Canada."