SOURCE; "Poet's Dilemma," in Canadian Literature, Vol. 135, Winter, 1992, pp. 130-31.

[In the review below, Mezei faults Tremblay's "clicked and tainted" libretto for NELLIGAN, finding that his "lines do not rise to his usual exuberant eloquence."]

There is no doubt that Emile Nelligan, Québec's "national poet," has not loosened his hold on the Québec imagination. As I write this review, a major commemorative conference, "Colloque Nelligan: 50 ans après sa mort" is taking place in Ottawa. It will culminate in the launching of "l'édition critique de l'oeuvre nelliganienne."

Nelligan's poems, which are unquestionably evocative and moving, echo the Symbolists he admired, and with a few, striking exceptions are set in an oneiric rather than a localized world. His renowned sonnet, "Le vaisseau d'or," which sinks "dans l'abîme du rêve" has been set to music, choreographed, and used as the name of a restaurant operated by former Montreal mayor, Jean Drapeau. As Jean Larose's astute study, Le mythe de Nelligan, pointed out, Nelligan, handsome, tortured, perfectly symbolized a national schizophrenia—French patrimonie versus anglophone North American context. His was the sad story of a young man devoted to poetry, who wrote fervently from age 16 to 19 (1896 to 1899), at which point he was incarcerated in mental institutions for 42 years and thereby forever silenced. He prefigured many Quebec literary heroes who dreamed heroically, but failed, sinking dismally, like Nelligan's ship of gold, like his own youthful spirit. Think of Hubert Aquin's protagonists.

It was therefore a splendid idea to create an opera about Nelligan, and most appropriate that Michel Tremblay, by now another Quebec "mythe," produce the libretto. The well known Quebec composer, André Gagnon, wrote the score and collaborated with Tremblay. The debut of this opera was eagerly anticipated and surrounded by lavish publicity. Performed by the Opera of Montreal, it opened first in Quebec City in February 1990, and then in March in Montreal. Always interested in the twists and turns of "le mythe de Nelligan" I had wanted to hear the Opera. Luckily fate brought me to Montreal at the right moment.

As a spectacle, NELLIGAN was an inspired performance—rich costumes, a simple but powerfully choreographed set, an impressive cast including Louise Forestier (Emilie, Nelligan's mother) and Renée Claude (Françoise). But although the performers were impassioned in their delivery, the opera was a disappointment. Quite simply, Gagnon's music, Tremblay's libretto and presentation of the story were cliched and tainted by a superficial and unconvincing nineteenth-century veneer. A stronger sense of Nelligan's milieu, and indeed of his troubled personality could have been developed (what comes through are merely childish petulance and adolescent alcoholism). Instead, we were presented only with the banal threads of a tragic story, which is still not fully understood, since by Quebec law psychiatric records are not open to the public.

Tremblay's libretto opens, effectively enough, with a professor come to visit the elderly Nelligan just before his death in the hôpital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu. Nelligan then obligingly and pathetically attempts to recite "Le vaisseau d'or," but falters, misremembering his own lines. (Tremblay draws his material from Paul Wycznynski's detailed biography, Nelligan, 1879–1941, and from Bernard Courteau's more idiosyncratic Nelligan n'était pas fou). Then while the elderly Nelligan watches, the last few months before the young Nelligan's incarceration are enacted. These unfortunately are stylized, predictable set pieces, redeemed only by the pathos of the older Nelligan observing events roll to their ineluctable end, and trying vainly to intervene. A series of scenes involve his mother, Emilie, a Quebecoise with whom Nelligan has a particularly close relationship (though she was much troubled by the direction of his poems and may have destroyed some), his father, David, who speaks mainly in English (he was played by a former American, Jim Corcoran), his two sisters, his bohemian friends, Charles Gill and Arthur de Bussières, the priest, Eugène Seers (later Louis Dantin, who posthumously published Nelligan's poems), and Françoise, a journalist and kindred spirit.

Tremblay's lines do not rise to his usual exuberant eloquence, they remain pedestrian, hobbled by flat end rhymes: for example, listen to Emilie: "Pourquoi nommez-vous folie / ce qui n'est que mélocolie / d'un poète." These lines reflect banal notions of a tormented poetic soul. Most disturbing, however, is the tremendous importance of the French-English/mother-father conflict in Nelligan's unhappy life. Tremblay carries Philip Larkin's "they fuck you up, your mum and dad" to simplistic, annoying extremes. David Nelligan is forced to sing idiotic lines like "I don't want this son of mine to destroy everything. I worked hard all my life! A poet! For God's sake! Why not a murderer! Why not Jack the Ripper!" The young Nelligan responds later, equally inanely, with "La seule chose que vous me dites en français, c'est que je suis fou…." While obviously librettos are constrained by the need for repetition, often exacerbated by hackneyed end rhymes, surely Tremblay with his wonderful ear for the cadence of speech, could have been more inventive. This opera was produced in the midst of Quebec's language war, but to present Nelligan's sad fate as a consequence of the conflict with his English-speaking (and pugnaciously philistine) father, and of the quarrel between French (mother) and English (father) seems to me by now a battered platitude. This disappointing interpretation is all the more puzzling since there seems to be an autobiographical element in Tremblay's portrayal of Nelligan. He obviously identifies with the poet's dilemma—the absent father who works in English, the mother to whom he is warmly attached, and the defiant embracing of a career as writer. Nelligan's psychosis and his undiminished significance to the people of Quebec deserved better. Alas.