Michel Tremblay: Des nouvelles d'Édouard (1984)

Des nouvelles d'Édouard is the fourth volume of Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal by the gay Québéquois writer Michel Tremblay, and for me it was a surprisingly fascinating, often hilarious, read. I say surprising because the initial pages about the ageing Édouard, a shoe saleman-cum-drag queen and the world of the drag queens weren't too interesting for me, until Édouard meets his death by a knife blade in a Montréal street. That's when both he and the book come alive.

Because we go back to 1947, when Édouard came into a little inheritance and went to Paris for the first and only time, when he wrote a diary about his journey and his findings, but intended it to be read after his death, a diary from the dead to be read by his sister-in-law the 'Grosse Femme'.

This is a tale of lies, masquerades, outsiders (whoever they are: aren't we all in some way outsiders?), and culture conflict. A common language links Québec and France, or maybe divides it: after all, French Canadian talk is different, often difficult to understand, laced with English therefore bastardised, but then so are all forms of speech, and who's to say which is better than another?

On the voyage across he meets Antoinette Beauregard – the name of course is an indication of the pedigree, or at least the pretension towards the pedigree – but in any case don't we all pretend to be someone we aren't, as for instance Édouard was pretending to be the Duchesse de Langeais when a drag queen? Why shouldn't Édouard lie and pretend to have read all of the books by (the incidentally gay and sort of mid-way between American and French) Julien Green, the author she's reading? Or pretending to read? And then along comes the Princess Clavet-Daudun, by which time Édouard's had just a gram of bullshit too many, and confesses – in broad French Canadian dialect, really laying it on thick – that he's really just a shoe seller and she may well not be a member of the aristocracy, etc. But she doesn't realise that he's speaking the truth, she just sees him as a brilliant actor. It's a bit like an Eliza Dolittle 'Luvaduck me beads!' moment, but Édouard really doesn't give a shit.

Until, that is, he has to have one in the (unmentioned by the same name) chiottes à la Turque in France, has no toilet paper and is forced to use his underpants. See what I mean about culture shock? That is before more dirt greets him in Paris, before he discovers the minuterie and has to scrabble in the dark, before he discovers there's a rez-de-chaussée before he reaches the first floor, and oh the smells, the lack of en suite accommodation, the crap food.

The Deux Magots café near the Café Flore isn't specifically mentioned, but that's where Édouard ends up late at night with a street map spread out before him, pretty pissed, very pissed off, but a certain Simone (who's with a certain Jean-Paul) is very obliging and tells him which métro to take home. But home is Montréal, not Paris, so after a ten-day journey and a mere thirty-six hours in Paris he's off home. And so a final lie is discovered posthumously: Édouard didn't spend all that time in Paris that he said he did.

A book to read before you die.

Michel Tremblay in Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, Québec

A notice under the mural states:

'2013 and 2014 marked the 45th anniversary of the first showing of Les Belles-soeurs (1968) and the 30th of Albertine, en cinq temps (1984); the 40th anniversary of C'ta ton tour Laura Cadieux, Hosanna and La duchesse de Langeais ([all in] 1973); and above all, the 35th anniversary of the beginning of Les Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal with the publication of La Grosse Dame d'à côté est enceinte in 1978. So it's impossible to let this occasion go by without paying homage to Michel Tremblay in one of the series of murals produced by MU* which pay homage to the cultural builders of Montréal.

Directly inspired by the author's body of work, Rafael Sottolichio's mural at once celebrates Michel Tremblay's invaluable contribution to the literature of Québec and the typical world of Montréal on which he sheds light: the inescapable Plateau.'  (My translation.)

*A non–profit-making organisation whose aim is to promote and support public art within the metropolitan area of Montréal.

Michel Tremblay: À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou (1971)

Set in Montréal, À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou is Québécois Michel Tremblay's most famous play, and it strongly impressed me with its Beckettian overtones.

The language is perhaps the first thing that impresses, with its use of elision, idiosyncratic spelling and Québec-specific words: 'yeule' ('gueule'), 'marde' ('merde'), 'toé' and 'moé' ('toi and moi'), 'chus' ('je suis'), 'astheur' ('à cette heure'), and 'ciboire' and 'câlice' (two oaths of religious derivation): for me, it's as though the ground is being set for a different experience, and this play certainly is different. Like Beckett's plays, it's also disturbing.

I'm unfamiliar with any of Tremblay's other work, so the quite lengthy Introduction by Michel Bélair is of great use. He subtitles it 'ou quand Michel Tremblay se permet d'espérer', or 'or when Michel Tremblay allows hope in'. Perhaps, but then I can only imagine how bleak his earlier stuff must have been if that's the case.

The main point here is that the play almost throughout is set in two different periods of time in which the dialogue alternates between two pairs of characters – Léopold and his wife Marie-Louise (who are speaking ten years before their deaths), and their daughters Carmen and Manon (who are – almost entirely – speaking ten years after the death of their parents).

Like his wife, Léopold is in his forties. His manual work brings him little pay and he grumbles about spending money on Marie-Louise's peanut butter, although all he does is drink beer when not working; he goes to the bar but has no friends there so drinks alone. He also criticises his wife for her complete lack of interest in sex.

Marie-Lou spends her time watching television while knitting, and one of her survival mechanisms is to verbally attack her husband. Her mother taught her to steel herself against sex by lying rigid and bearing the onslaught until it passed: sex is merely 'good for animals'. In addition to Carmen and Manon they have the very young Roger, but the audience learns later in the play that she is pregnant, and although Léopold doesn't have the money to feed a new mouth, and there isn't enough space in the home, Marie-Lou refuses to have an abortion: religion is another survival mechanism, although in this instance it is obviously self-defeating.

Manon, 25, has no existence apart from through her dead mother, and stays in the house worshipping God. Her slightly older sister, 26, returns to try to convince her that there is life outside, that she has escaped the familial impasse by embracing life, and embracing the many lovers she has at the 'Rodéo', where she sings 'cowboy songs' on stage. It is because of the existence of Carmen and her positive choice the Bélair calls the play more hopeful than Tremblay's others. But, trapped in her imitated religious behaviour and the memories that she refuses to shrug off, Manon merely calls Manon a 'Boulevard St-Laurent prostitute'.

At the end of the play, Léopold asks Marie-Lou to join him that evening in a suicide car crash, and although she says nothing, the obvious implication is that his wife agrees. The final word – in the stage directions – is 'noir', and that (for all the hope it may contain) is my impression of the play: noir, but deliciously so. I loved Tremblay's power to convey the despair and the (self-)alienation, the holes that people carve themselves into and from which they can't escape. Remarkable stuff.

I read Marie-Claire Blais's very odd Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1968) a few months ago and more recently Suzanne Jacob's in some ways even odder L'Obéissance (1991) and I'm left really interested in learning how much French Canadian literature is like this, but that's for me to discover and not strictly relevant to this post.