Excerpt of The Cultural Fatigue of French Canada by Hubert Aquin: Difference between revisions

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[...] Another way of derealising French Canada is to only accept its administrative translation as a province. "Quebec is a province like the others", which amounts to accepting the reality of the French-Canadian culture only according to the legalist terms of the Confederation which regionalizes and provincializes this culture. This reasoning is the inversion of the other according to the size of the confrontation pole but the same reasoning, structurally, in that it retracts the French-Canada English-Canada axis which, historically and politically, is constitutive, which does not exclude the multidimensional relations of French Canada with the world and history.
[...] Another way of derealising French Canada is to only accept its administrative translation as a province. "Quebec is a province like the others", which amounts to accepting the reality of the French-Canadian culture only according to the legalist terms of the Confederation which regionalizes and provincializes this culture. This reasoning is the inversion of the other according to the size of the confrontation pole but the same reasoning, structurally, in that it retracts the French-Canada English-Canada axis which, historically and politically, is constitutive, which does not exclude the multidimensional relations of French Canada with the world and history.


Somme toute, nos penseurs ont à maintes reprises refusé la dialectique historique qui nous définit et ont fait appel à une autre dialectique qui, en élargissant la confrontation ou en la rapetissant à outrance, signifiait un refus de considérer le Canada français comme une culture globale. Ce refus a constitué la base idéologique de plusieurs systèmes de pensée au Canada.
Altogether, our thinkers on several occasions refused the historical dialectic which defines us and called upon another dialectic which, by widening the confrontation or by reducing it excessively, meant a refusal to look at French Canada as a global culture. This refusal has constituted the ideological basis to several systems of thought in Canada.


Nos penseurs ont déployé un grand appareil logique pour sortir de la dialectique canadienne-française qui demeure, encore aujourd’hui, épuisante, déprimante, infériorisante pour le Canadien français. Le « comment en sortir ? » a été le problème fondamental de nos penseurs et leurs fuites dialectiques ne font qu’exprimer tragiquement ce goût morbide pour l’exil dont nos lettres, depuis Crémazie, ne font que retentir.
Our thinkers deployed a big logical apparatus to exit out of the French-Canadian dialectic which remains, still today, exhausting, depressing, inferiorizing for the French Canadian. The "how to get out of it?" was the fundamental problem of our thinkers and their dialectic runaways do nothing but tragically express this morbid taste for exile which our letters, since Crémazie, do nothing but resound.


Ce qu’ils ont fui, dans le gaspillage idéologique ou les voyages, c’est une situation intenable de subordination, de mépris de soi et des siens, d’amertume, de fatigue ininterrompue et de désir réaffirmé de ne plus rien entreprendre.
What they have fled, in ideological wasting or travels, it is an untenable condition of subordination, of contempt for oneself and one's own, of bitterness, of uninterrupted tiredness and a reaffirmed desire to no longer undertake anything.


Le Canadien français se présente souvent, dans ses plus hauts porte-parole, comme un peuple blasé qui ne croit ni en lui ni en rien. L’auto-dévaluation a fait son œuvre, depuis le temps, et s’il fallait n’en citer qu’une preuve, je mentionnerais la surévaluation délirante dans laquelle donne maintenant le Canadien français séparatiste. Il se bat les flancs, mais il faut dire, à sa décharge, que s’il ne le fait pas, il risque bien, conditionné comme il l’est à l’affaissement et à la défaite, de se prendre pour le dernier des idiots et que son propre milieu ne manque jamais de lui faire savoir.
The French Canadian often presents himself, through his highest spokesmen, as a blasé people which believes neither in himself nor in anything. The self-devaluation accomplished its evil, after so long, and if it were necessary to quote but one proof of it, I would mention the delirious over-evaluation in which now gives the French Canadian separatist. He fights his own sides, but it should be said, to excuse him, that if he does not do it, he very well risks, conditioned as he is to depression and to the defeat, to think of himself as the last of idiots and his own milieu never fails to let him know.


"Cet extrait est tiré du livre Mélanges littéraires II Comprendre dangereusement, édition critique établie par Jacinthe Martel avec la collaboration de Claude Lamy, Leméac éditeur (Bibliothèque québécoise), 1995.
"Cet extrait est tiré du livre Mélanges littéraires II Comprendre dangereusement, édition critique établie par Jacinthe Martel avec la collaboration de Claude Lamy, Leméac éditeur (Bibliothèque québécoise), 1995.


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