19 - The French-Canadian Short Story

Summary

THROUGHOUT THE NINETEENTH CENTURY and at least until the 1940s, the development of the French-Canadian short story, both thematically and formally, paralleled that of the novel. The generic boundaries of the novel and the different forms of short prose cannot always be clearly determined, and scholars and the authors themselves are often vague in their distinction between nouvelle, conte, histoire, récit, légende, chronique, and mémoire. Thus, Patrice Lacombe's La terre paternelle (1846) has been categorized both as a novel and as a nouvelle, Albert Laberge's La Scouine (1918) has occasionally been regarded as a short-story collection, and Jacques Ferron's novels as “grands contes.”

In the first decades of the twentieth century, authors such as Adjutor Rivard, Lionel Groulx, Frère Marie-Victorin, Damase Potvin, Clément Marchand, and Blanche Lamontagne-Beauregard produced short prose that was ideologically indebted to agriculturalism and focused on French-Canadian country life being threatened by rural exodus, technology, and Americanization. In these works, the francophone population represents both the values inherited from France and those of Catholicism. Literary adaptations of historical events and picturesque depictions of country life — all claiming to be anthropologically authentic — resulted in an idealizing realism. The authors of the 1920s such as Frère Marie-Victorin (1885–1944) particularly emphasized the “vieilles choses, vieilles gens,” which were folkloristically overdrawn and enjoyed great popularity. Only a few writers managed to break away from the agriculturalist and moralizing discourse dominating the majority of short stories, most of them published in periodicals.