SOURCE: "Five Short Plays by Tremblay," in Essays on Canadian Writing, Summer, 1978, pp. 248-59.

[In the essay below, Serafin discusses how Tremblay's use of language affects the theatricality, characterization, humor, and dialogue of the five plays comprising La Duchesse de Langeais, and Other Plays.]

In her story "Copenhagen Season" Isak Dinesen tells of an artist who was "feted in society, but feared as well, because he would at times sit without saying a word, taking in the face and figure of a lady until she felt that she had no clothes on, and at other times, when once set upon a theme, would go on talking forever." Nothing could be more appropriate than the fact that Dinesen places this figure in an aristocratic milieu. After all, in what other milieu could one find individuals given to the fastidious and absorbed contemplation that this artist bestows not only on the women who catch his eye but also on the topic to which he later turns his attention? The ruminative genius has always found a refuge in the aristocracy, if not a home. And this has been so right into recent times. Proust, for example, presented a perfect copy of the type that Dinesen ironically summons up in her story. As one critic notes, Proust "alarmed his friends, who dreaded and longed for the moment when the writer would suddenly appear in their drawing rooms long after midnight—brisé de fatigue and for just five minutes, as he said—only to stay till the grey of dawn, too tired to get out of his chair or interrupt his conversation." That this behaviour was reflected in his writing is well known. Again and again, one comes across in Proust sentences that go on for interminable, exhausting lengths, so reluctant is the author to let his topic go until it blesses him. It is clear, however, that language which seeks to impulsively touch its listeners cannot afford to cling to its theme in this way. Rather, it must be playful, constantly changing, giving itself up to the most ephemeral subject. That this is so is demonstrated in the work which opens Tremblay's collection.

While La Duchesse de Langeais is a monologue, it is not a contemplative voice that we hear, but an ecstatic one. La Duchesse possesses the ecstacy of the creature; she almost literally vibrates with her awareness of herself. Talonbooks has supplied a picture of Claude Gai in the role: the jewelry, voracious mouth and brilliant eyes of this Duchesse bring to mind those habitués of Vancouver's Davie Street bars whose tight white blouses often reveal a startlingly hairy inch of belly and whose Roman-cut hair and shrill voices seem so in accord with their archly mobile faces that one can without effort imagine them as the subject of a Daumier sketch. Like these homosexuals, la Duchesse is garrulous to an extreme, talking as though she had never spent more than three minutes without companions. Her monologue has no inward quality; instead, it is stuccoed with impulsive phrases, as if at every moment she wanted to lean over and pinch an arm or kiss somebody on the lips. To be sure, this language, like a flapping coat, occasionally reveals a bright lining of pain. Nevertheless, these glimpses are far from having a sobering effect. In fact, considering the flushed and uncontrolled nature of her speech, it is surprising that it should be the delicacy which this creature brings to her reminiscences that makes them so vivid. Suffused with delight, la Duchesse harks back to an old lover:

… He used to play at being the poor suffering poet and while la Vaillancourt would tear your ticket, he'd tear your heart out! Hah! All he needed was a pair of big ears and he'd have made a perfect Gérard Philippe … Oh, what was his name?… Don't dig too deeply, hein, you'll get me all excited …

She laughs.

At your age! Tsk, tsk, tsk! You're so pretentious!

A wink, a little squeal and a wiggle of the hips.

I called him, "my lover with the brazen shaft." I don't know why. Guess I thought it sounded nice. God knows, that's the only thing about him that was the least bit hard … And I was stuck with the little pisspot for two whole months … He couldn't do a thing! Nothing! Had to show him everything! Toute!

From beginning to end! Mon Dieu, the crazy things I've done in my life. No one in Montréal has had more "aventures stupides" than me. I could tell you about them for weeks, my darlings …

Perhaps a backdrop of cherubs could do justice to this—certainly such a backdrop would be in line with la Duchesse's intoxicated, defenceless vulgarity. This vulgarity is an attribute of the purely spoken word that differentiates it from speech which has been profoundly touched by the reading of books, and since the introspective person is usually a bookworm as well, this includes all speech which ignores its audience for the sake of those interminable, enchanting sentences we mentioned before. What distinguishes it from the speech of la Duchesse is therefore easy to recognize, and why there can be no confusing the two: for those whose involvement with language begins and ends with the sentence the whole area of language that expresses the ecstacy of the creature must remain more or less inaccessible.

Actually, it is in this connection that Tremblay's use of the vernacular becomes most attractive. For that which in language is the receptacle of warmth, ecstacy, bliss—the colloquial utterance, the exclamation, the cry of creaturely abandon that completes itself not with a period but with a slap, a nudge, a kiss—is the very thing that his audience is to a perhaps predominant extent barred from expressing even while being drawn to its presence in others as if to the presence of genius. And it is indeed the genius of language which lives only to ensure communion between individuals that Tremblay has made his own in La Duchesse de Langeais. Many of the play's features—the abundant use of question marks and exclamation points, the short, utterly colloquial outbursts—flow from this fact.

There is no denying the jubilantly theatrical context in which this vernacular places itself. Not only is this the context in which la Duchesse's speech may be most fruitfully discussed, but it appears in nearly all the other of Tremblay's works as well, including the others in this collection. The innumerable uncorseted minutes in the lives of Tremblay's characters, the impulsive—one might also say, the improvised—nature of their lives and the concomitant emotional reversals and changes of fortune which again and again overcome them all go hand in hand with a tendency towards unabashed display, theatricality for the sake of theatricality. Tremblay reveals the heaven of his figures to be a theatre in which every moment can be turned into an opportunity to display oneself. And precisely this is reflected in the vernacular as in a mirror. To plan, to think ahead, to discipline oneself—essentially, this means to hold something in reserve, the very reserve whose excluding, distancing power on the social level finds its linguistic counterpart in the dignity of the completed sentence. Pure display of the self, on the other hand, is instantaneous. It gives itself without reservation to the moment, lives in the moment, and vanishes once the moment has vanished. Like the language that lends it voice, it is in its very essence lyrical. It must be admitted, however, that the creaturely attractiveness mat accompanies this lyricism and which is overwhelmingly apparent in such Tremblay figures as la Duchesse is shot through with an element of helplessness. One is reminded of the charm which the wild young men who fill the jails display in the eyes of the social workers who deal with them. "It cannot be guilt that makes them attractive," Kafka once wrote of figures who are distant cousins to those that appear in Tremblay's works, "nor can it be the just punishment that makes them attractive in anticipation … so it must be the mere charges brought against them that somehow show on them."

This attractiveness is usually represented by Tremblay in a figure who is charged with a version of the very theatricality discussed above and in whose appeal helplessness and defiance are intertwined. Hosanna and En piéces détachées provide striking examples of such a figure, and in this collection, too, Tremblay turns his attention to this prototype. Berthe details the struggles of a nightclub cashier to free herself of me swamp of daydreams in which she wallows. It is no accident that this woman sits in her box "reading a movie magazine" and wearing glasses "made of blue plastic and shaped like cat's eyes"; they are the attributes one might expect of the kind of dreamy bungler whose home is oblivion. This is Berthe's home, and the fact that this is so is perhaps most appropriately seen as a judgement on her. This judgement marks her unmistakably. The bungled, the useless, the lost—they are the most removed from the times in which they find themselves, and the smaller and more inconspicuous they are, the more they bear, in a concentrated form, as it were, the marks of judgement that the times deal out to whomever has lost touch with them.

To perceive these marks of judgement, to perceive the peculiar beauty which oblivion bestows on individuals, is one of Tremblay's gifts, and explains his sensitivity to the eccentric and grandiose features of his characters. The fact that he presents these features in a humourous light should not obscure the recognition that he does so with a full awareness that they are symptomatic features, just as the garish dress of an isolated individual in a big city is symptomatic of the anxiety his situation causes him to feel. Hosanna's involvement with Elizabeth Taylor is an example of this symptomatic element, as is Berthe's image of herself as a Hollywood star. "I'm the greatest actress in the world, and I get a million bucks per movie!" Berthe says. "I'm not locked up in this box!" Nevertheless, there is precisely the admission of failure which one might expect from a prisoner:

I know it's too late. I know there's nothing I can do. Everyone's been telling me for years. But let them say what they want. I'm not that crazy! "You're nothing but a bloody dreamer," they tell me. "All you're good for is making up crazy stories that don't make any sense! We never know if your telling the truth or if you're dreaming out loud. If you keep going like that, you're going to find yourself without any friends, Berthe. One of these days you're going to wind up all alone. All by yourself!" Do something, Berthe. Do something!

A long silence

But I never did anything.

A long silence.

I don't ask for much now … Just let me have my dreams. Leave me in peace and let me dream! That's all I've got left. 'Cause I do know how to dream. Ha! Do I ever! Maybe I'm dumb, but that doesn't keep me from making up stories. I know I don't look it, but I can make up, all for myself, the real life of a real Hollywood star. I'm not too smart, but I know how to make myself think I am. So what if I look stupid sitting here. I could have done something with my life if I'd wanted to.

She pauses.

But I never did anything. I just sat here in my box.

It does not take much effort to discern the bewilderment which this creature feels when it comes to reflecting on herself. Actually, there is a dialectics of bewilderment, an oscillation between despondency and rage which Berthe sums up in words that might serve as a motto for her monologue. "If I can't dream, I'm gonna suffocate," she more than once says, and quite palpably, dreaming here takes the place of the real understanding of the situation which is denied her.

In an interview in one of those weekly magazines that appear in the newspapers, Tremblay fervently denounced the addiction to daydreaming that characterizes his subjects, and it is clear that this attitude has played a part in his representation of this figure. Yet it is this very ability to daydream with an almost rhapsodic intensity which is one of the most attractive features of Tremblay's characters. If one thinks back to the passage from La Duchesse de Langeais, it is easy to see that one of the most significant components of this monologue lies in the brilliant excessiveness of the reminiscences. Stories flow from Berthe as well. But here it is the other side of the lyricism that makes la Duchesse such a charming figure which is revealed—the utter inadequacy of this lyricism when it comes to productive, cold-blooded reflection on existence. For Berthe, happiness lies in the blissful glamour which communion with friends spreads over life; isolated in her box, she is at times frantically restless. Indeed, one might go even further and say that it is nothing but pure and simple homesickness which Berthe experiences. For the vernacular is like those tropical birds which lose their brilliant colour when they are taken out of their natural environment; it languishes and wilts in isolation. Unlike la Duchesse, who is drunk enough to surround herself with imaginary companions, Berthe must suffer her loneliness. Her garrulity, one might say, is a short rope against which she continually pits herself in an attempt to take hold of her experience, only to be continually jerked back. And the silences which stud her monologue are loud with the perplexed and painful panting of this creature.

Berthe is in some respects an exhausted older version of those female figures in Tremblay's works whose chief characteristic might be described as an irritated voluptuousness. They are women who eat, smoke cigarettes and talk at the same time, who brush out their hair in front of mirrors as if they hated it and often make abrupt and unarguable statements, as though seeking to unsettle the boring world that has so little time for their dreams. If one were vindictive, one would call them ham actors. Certainly they love to display that "dancer's calf" that Roland Barthes speaks of. The glasses Berthe wears are an example of this, as are the theatrically straight back and sensual kick of the foot which one associates with Hélène in En pièces détachées, for instance. Usually one cannot fail to notice the sexuality of these women. They have the flushed, slightly hysterical expressiveness of von Jawlensky's Spanish Girl. In this case, however, all that is left of their high, flaunty, nervous colour is a loud, somewhat self-conscious polemicism. The acutely alien isolation in which Berthe finds herself forces her monologue to take on the barren nature of prattle. She is like the sinners in hell who irritate and bore their tormentors because their agony forbids them an adequate language with which to express it. When one considers the extent to which it is her frustrated theatricality that lies at the root of her problems, it stands to reason that it should be the actual theatre which is presented as the way out of the everyday hell in which she finds herself. And this is indeed the case.

In the companion pieces to Berthe—Gloria Star and Johnny Mangano and His Astonishing Dogs—Tremblay gives us an image of the theatre both as a family setting and as a scene of redemption. These works are, so to speak, detailed and revealing doodles in the margins of his longer plays. What they present that is most their own is not so much what is explicit in them as it is a buried image—that of the illuminated body, made sumptuous and expressive by the fact that the least of its movements is staged and lit by spotlights. The presence of this image explains the characteristic light in which the backstage argument of the Manganos is bathed, a light which combines the depressive hues of a kitchen sink drama with the pastels of those Cocteau scenes in which little girls dressed in pink tights with round red spots on their cheeks and artificially arched and blackened eyebrows hiss and snarl at each other. In the same way Johnny and Carlotta retain an actor's gaiety even as they quarrel, and just as the above mentioned scenes are usually set in what appear to be attic rooms in which cats, bird cages and old, heavy silk dresses abound, so here, too, the couple argue in a milieu of tights, spangles, make-up and pink poodles.

As is often the case with Tremblay, it is the very perversity of this milieu which both causes their argument and enlivens, lights up its play. For in the realm of acting no less than in the realm of the family which we shall discuss presently, perversion and redemption are so closely contiguous as to be inseparable from each other. Thus, while it is nothing but the actor's bitterness over his "difference" that Carlotta expresses in this play, she reveals her calling by the fact that her flourishes of rhetoric are really a form of self-intoxication that allows her to consume her fate in one swallow, as it were, so as to encounter in its dregs the experience which awaits her onstage. Perhaps it is this experience that Tremblay has attempted to present in the figure of Gloria Star. "I offer you the greatest innovation of the twentieth century!" says Gloria Star's producer—known in the play as "the woman"—to a stage manager busy with his lights.

The greatest dancers, the greatest strippers have been in my hands and they have known what Gloria Star knows today. Glory! And it's thanks to their bodies. The human body is the masterpiece of creation…. Look at the Greeks. I've spent my life showing masterpieces to the public…. But … young man, women also want to be provoked and transported…. I see a large open space…. The orchestra playing some savage piece…. Yes, we'll work it out so that you won't have too much trouble taking off your clothes…. You'll appear dressed as an Arab … in the midst of your women, slaves and animals. Superb women, thinly veiled, shiny black slaves and … camels! And slowly you begin to undress…. You take off your burnous, your caftan, you unlace your sandals before an audience of delirious women!

The manager laughs. "But don't stop," he says, "I'm listening with one ear."

The role which marginal figures like the stage manager play in Tremblay's works is worth examining. Unmistakably, they are outsiders, individuals who are only incidentally connected to the circle of figures we have heretofore discussed. And like sons who have developed reserved and orderly lives and are no longer capable of the display of feeling that a deep family tie makes possible, they demonstrate by their shadowy existence how ready is the milieu that draws Tremblay's attention to consign to the attic everyone who has escaped into the larger world. (It is worth noting that only the theatrical successes who have the intensely domestic quality of fairytale figures are exempt from such a consignment.) In the above scene, the woman is clearly tempting the manager to step inside this realm. Abbreviating drastically, one may say that what he hears in her speil is the siren song of Tremblay's families. It tempts him to detach himself from the crowd whose members are all strangers to each other by promising him the piercing pleasure of a difference which is not merely exposed but flaunted, just as the "wink perverse" of la Duchesse flaunts the difference which she turns to such ecstatically theatrical account. The fact that Tremblay appears to equate the unabashed intimacy of his families with the theatricality of those who, like la Duchesse, are stigmatized by their difference determines one of the most illuminating features of his work. Berthe, Hosanna, la Duchesse, the bunglers and perverted ones, crowd together, comfort and protect each other. This is why their silliness is so valuable, and why even the element of depravity that inheres in them is suffused with the image of redemption. Tremblay expresses this in the concluding scenes of Gloria Star, the only place where the dancer makes her appearance:

Suddenly, out of the darkness there appears an extraordinarily beautiful dancer. Striptease music begins. The dancer starts her act. The stage manager seems hypnotized. Little by little, the dancer's act becomes a kind of ritual combining dance steps with slow, disquieting gestures.

The woman begins to laugh loudly. The dancer goes toward Carlotta and with a flick of her hand makes her disappear. The same with Berthe. The dancer turns toward the stage manager, gesturing for him to follow her. He goes toward her dancing.

The woman laughs more and more loudly.

As the stage manager breaks into dance, he enters a world apart—the seductive world in which Tremblay's most fully realized creatures are at home. His sister is Hélène, who curses her neighbours and drunkenly challenges her seedy, broken-down husband to an arm wrestle. "Do you wanna have an arm wrestle with me, Henri? Do you wanna have an arm wrestle? Eh? Do you …??" The voluptuous hysteria which Hélène gives voice to here finds an echo in the woman's laughter which is the most significant of the ritual elements that accompany the manager's transformation. This laughter, incidentally, recalls those places in Tremblay's longer works where the women join together in "chorus lines" whose function is not so much to provide a commentary on events as it is to produce a state of enchantment through what might be described as the mortification of events, the abrupt stiffening of what occurs on stage into ritualistic, significant patterns. The fact that this ritual delimiting of meaning here proceeds by way of hysterical laughter seems especially appropriate when one considers the affinity of such laughter to the sensual possibilities inherent in the various forms of display. For the ritual joke which explodes into convulsive laughter is not the least of the ways by which these possibilities are realized.

Tremblay is never very far away from such laughter. In a recent radio interview, he admitted to being raised "in front of cartoons and theatre," and anyone who is familiar with the large, lower-class households of French Canada will know what is meant by this juxtaposition of terms and what the connection is to that magnificent humour which runs through all of Tremblay's works. As a child, Tremblay may not only have jumped off an armchair with a towel tied around his neck like Superman, but also mimicked the laughing, screaming, lamenting housewives who have again and again claimed his attention. The creaturely display beloved by these women feeds on the gasping laughter and crude jokes in which Tremblay still partakes, and one can imagine that the hiding places from which the little boy looked out on their playacting were not so very different from the front row seats that he coveted at a later age. For the intoxicating memorability of such scenes is as dependent on physical presence as is the language which animates them; indeed, it would be difficult to imagine Tremblay's mimetic gifts developing apart from prolonged immersion in the physical reality he writes of. Incidentally, this may help explain his reluctance to write for television. When asked about this reluctance in the above mentioned radio interview, Tremblay replied, "I have a great deal of lyricism in me," adding by way of elucidation that "an opera is boring on television." This last statement is especially interesting. Far from insisting on the reproductive accuracy which tends to be associated with the mimetic effort exemplified by his work, Tremblay implicitly compares his figures to those of opera. Nor is it hard to see why. In both cases, the presence of living persons on the stage is a major source of the intoxication felt by the audience. We say of a person that he has presence. What is operatic about Tremblay's work is in fact the heightened presence of its figures. The grace notes and trills of the coloratura have an obvious analogue in the colloquial flourishes of Tremblay's characters; both amplify the aura of the figures involved by allowing them to display themselves with a greater intensity. For many readers, the word "aura" will bring Walter Benjamin to mind. His insights regarding the contemporary decline of the aura, in which "photography is decisively implicated," illuminate Tremblay's resistance to television, as well as his need to enhance the presence of his figures in the ways that have been described.

"If, while resting on a summer afternoon," Benjamin says,

you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction…. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose 'sense of the universal equality of things' has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.

Since television is the medium which enables one to experience the loss of the aura at its sharpest, it may seem surprising that in the last play in this collection, Surprise, Surprise, Tremblay should present us with a slapstick situation of the kind which is the stock-in-trade of television comedies—the very place where the uniqueness and authority of the living person shrivels into nothing. To understand this, it is worth-while to take a closer look at these comedies. What characterizes the situation comedy on television is its continual delineation of a joke which is continually fed by the performance of the actors. Every movement presented by the camera ideally either anticipates the joke or underlies it—in other words, makes it as obvious and effective as possible. This deeply affects the nature of the characters who are shown on the screen. Popular figures, such as Archie Bunker and his wife, are really a bundle of unchanging idiosyncracies which provide immediate visual and dramatic gratification when presented by the camera. The wife's shrill, enthusiastic entrances, and Archie's expressive way of looking at someone who displeases him are examples of these idiosyncracies; their well-nigh inevitable appearance on each show demonstrates that the ambiguous, constantly changing presence of an actual living person would be out of place in a situation in which the joke is to be continually fed.

The nature of the dialogue is affected as well. At no point in these comedies can the characters speak eloquently or at length. This is because language plays a decisive role in establishing the aura of the human creature and in a very literal sense would impede the joke's effectiveness if it were allowed free play. As a result, one finds dialogue formulated down to the least intonation and presented in short bursts which pace the action in such a way as to allow the camera to continually move in for close-ups—either to anticipate the joke, as when Archie looks with disgust at his son-in-law, or to emphasize it, as when Archie's face visually embroiders the sarcasm he unleashes on this same son-in-law. The camera's reproduction of the situation resembles that which his binoculars permit the opera-goer; both turn the actor's living person into material feeding an obsessive outside interest.

To a certain extent, Tremblay also injects an idiosyncratic element into his characters; indeed, his popular appeal is probably due to his willingness to accommodate the television experience which has become part and parcel of the experience of the community which is the real source of his creativity. However, to the delight found in the delineation of the pure joke, Tremblay adds the intoxication inherent in creaturely ecstasy pushed to its limits. Hence the overwhelming presence of his figures, the degree of which casts into relief the limitations of television, and at the same time renders these figures unsuitable for representation by that medium. "I can see it now," says one of the characters in Surprise, Surprise:

I can see it now … I come into the restaurant. They're all there, having their party for that stinking corpse, Madeleine Simard! I hide behind a flower pot like a panther. I leap out at their table so fast they don't know what hit them. "Surprise!" And then … Down we go, Madeleine's head right in the cake! Her ugly puss all covered with cream! Then I pull off her wig, whack her across the face with it two or three times and smear it around in the other's plates! What else could I do to her? What? I'll slap her face! That's it, some nice big slaps across her face! POW! POW! POW! Maybe I'll take some Javex and wash out her mouth … Or a shotgun! Or maybe a butcher knife! That's it, a butcher knife, and I'll mix her blood around in buckets full of Bar B-Q sauce!…

If, to paraphrase Benjamin, we designate as aura the poetic associations which tend to cluster around the object of a perception, then its analogue here is the linguistic experience that makes palpable the creaturely ecstasy of this figure. The camera simply cannot do justice to an experience so essentially tied to a unique, individual presence. One need only think of the reaction of an animated family gathering to someone who wishes to take their picture: the uneasiness, even hostility which greets the camera demonstrates how completely it forces one to abandon the display of the self which alone permits communion with others and which is analogous to the above-mentioned experience in order to face up to the test that the camera proposes.

It is precisely this communion with others which is central to the mimic, and nothing illuminates Tremblay's creativity more than the realization that his highly developed sense of community is what gave rise to his mimetic gifts. For what distinguishes mimicry is the fact that it takes for granted the existence of a community. Only when it can draw on a shared linguistic and gestural repertoire can such an impulsive, creaturely art be successful. It is hardly an accident that a large part of Tremblay's appeal lies in the fact that his characters express not only themselves, but also the linguistic genius of their community—that they are, in other words, "operatic" from the start. One senses the mimic's affection and enthusiasm in the heightened expressiveness of even the least of these creatures. Perhaps this is why the soliloquy is unknown to Tremblay. Even where he deals with a disturbed creature like Hosanna or Berthe, the solitude of such a figure has nothing in common with the isolation that characterizes Hamlet's contemplation of suicide, for example. In Shakespeare's great soliloquies the thought wears the language which gives it expression as if it were a rich but frightening mask. This makes it easy to see what differentiates these soliloquies from the speech of a figure like Hosanna. While the former are discourses which may occasionally take their audience bodily, and, as it were, gasping, straight into the chilly forecourts of language, the latter is lyrical and ecstatic conversation, and thus lends itself to mimicry, which by its very nature must communicate the experience of a figure in the most natural and immediate way that comes to hand.

This kind of representation is and will always be opposed to that of the camera. For it bears in its substance traces of the very community which made possible the experience it offers, just as a Navajo rug bears in its crudities and imperfections the stamp of the community which permitted its creation. And the perception of these traces—the experience offered by Tremblay' s works—is none other than that of the aura which disappears in technical reproduction, whether it be as a mass-produced rug, or as a figure represented by technical, mechanical means. The lyricism that gives Tremblay's works their beauty and authenticity is the result of a creativity that refuses to sever its ties with the community in the name of an apprehension of others, however precise, in which the collective experience of the community plays no part. And it is precisely because they do justice to this experience that Tremblay's works occupy a special place in Quebec literature.