MEDICO-NATIONAL ALLEGORY in QUÉBEC, 1940-1970 by Julie L. Robert a Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfill

A NATION’S ILLS: MEDICO-NATIONAL ALLEGORY IN QUÉBEC, 1940-1970 by Julie L. Robert A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Romance Languages and Literatures French) in The University of Michigan 2009 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Jarrod L. Hayes, Chair Professor Martin S. Pernick Associate Professor Frieda Ekotto Assistant Professor Katherine M. Ibbett © Julie L. Robert 2009 Preface Throughout the work the follows, I will endeavor to define key terms and figures in context as they arise. Certain terms are nevertheless so central to the argument that a brief a priori definition may stave off confusion and more clearly situate the points I am making. With this potential complication in mind, I wish to explain my use of the term nation—particularly as it applies to Québec—which is influenced by both European ideas of nationhood and postcolonial thought. The European underpinnings of the question of nationhood in Québec surface in relation to who constitutes the nation: those who share traits or experiences, or those who agree to collectively constitute a distinct national entity. These two concepts of nationhood, the essentialist and the contractual, issue from nineteenth-century debates about national belonging, but have been in constant tension in Québec because of the English (Canadian) presence. This presence adds a third dimension to debates about the nature of the nation and the English in Québec, for it introduces elements of nationhood linked to postcolonial identity. Specifically, this aspect of nationhood centers on the colonized majority’s negotiation of national identity in relation to a colonizing minority’s vision of this same nation. The term nation consequently signals both an entity that derives its cohesion from inherent commonalities and also an entity that has collectively embraced and perpetuated a way of being that emphasizes internal cohesion among French Canadians in opposition to a perceived national Other. The enactment of nationhood in this way operates by, among other mechanisms, the elaboration of national narratives such as a national literature. ii Table of Contents Preface ii Chapter I. Sick Readings/Reading Sickness 1 The Nation as Body The National Paradigm Embodied National Paradigms: A Case for Allegory National Health, National Illness: The Québécois Case Diagnosis II. Diagnostic Allegories 59 Loaded Diagnoses, Empty Diagnoses Diagnostic Possibilities, Diagnosis As Impossibility Refusing to Diagnose and Denying Allegory III. Sick Doctors: An Allegory of Illness Or An Allegory of Cure? 127 Doctorly Exceptionalism The Talking Cure Cure as Disease, Disease as Cure Curative Patienthood The Patient’s Voice IV. Reinventing the Illness Narrative 190 Illness Narratives: Social Realism or Social Causes? Charting The National Illness Narrative in Cité Libre Epilogue 240 Appendix 245 Works Cited 247 iii Chapter I Sick Readings/Reading Sickness Novels in Québec got sick between 1940 and 1970. The number of fictional narratives about illness exploded at a time of uncertainty over collective identity and unprecedented social transformation. The sudden appearance of this alarming literary symptom has divided critics as to the appropriate diagnosis. Some, indeed most, critics view the subject of (physical) sickness in Québécois literature as not requiring explanation.1 The growing number of sick characters is dismissed as an expected result of the realist trend in literature that took hold starting in the late 1930s but which revolutionized Québec’s literature when urban life found its way onto the page. As such, the novels are thought to merely reflect the unsanitary, disease-ridden existence that has historically accompanied the influx of poor rural populations into urban centers. Ben- Zion Shek, for example, notes the signs of disease, such as fingernails whose markings belie malnutrition, but categorizes them as mere “cinematic” details that enrich the realist novel (French Canadian 36). Others, like François Ricard, generally ignore sick characters, which suggests that disease is an unremarkable part of the narrative. So while the individual narratives of cancer, tuberculosis, heart failure, fevers, and disabilities may 1 There is, despite the silence with regard to physical illness, a considerable body of criticism on mental illness and madness in Québécois literature. See Jane Moss, “Les folles du Québec: The Theme of Madness in Quebec Women’s Theater”; Jennifer Waelti-Walters, “Beauty and Madness in M.-C. Blais’ La Belle bête”; Marvin N. Richards, “Poet, Hero, Icon: Can We Still Read Nelligan?”; Claudine Fisher “Féminitude et folie dans Les Fous de Basan d’Anne Hébert”; and Alain-Michel Rocheleau “La folie de Marcel: Étude d’un personnage de Michel Tremblay.” 1 elicit some comment in relation to the larger narratives or the realist movement, they are but rarely perceived as textual epidemics or indications of a sickening national literature in their own right. For those critics who do, nevertheless, discern a pattern of meaning within the body of the narratives, they default to a reading that correlates a sick textual body with an enfeebled nation. Maurice Arguin, for instance, interprets illness among characters as part of larger social and individual problems which can be collected under the heading “défaut de vie,” designating a collective fatal flaw (79). Jane Moss, like Arguin, invests the sick character with metaphorical significance, and reasons that the text can thus be read as commentary on the nation: “This emphasis on physical, psychological, and sexual debilities suggests that these authors consciously or unconsciously see Québec society as unhealthy” (153). Consequently, the sick character’s body becomes a figure for the sick nation. While equating the sick character with the sick nation opens the door to a number of rich metaphors, it nevertheless proves problematic. First, the excessive morbidity rate among Québec’s literary characters makes the nation not only sick, but also a terminal case. Second, the critical tendency (at least among those who acknowledge the sick characters as significant in their own right) to read illness narratives as commentary on the nation presupposes that the nation (at least prior to the 1960s) is separate from the illness narratives. Simply, these critics take the nation to be an outside element that must be “read into” the text. Illness narratives, bolstered by medicine’s pretensions to empiricism, are accordingly held up as metaphorized evaluations or assessments of a nation that can be viewed disinterestedly and objectively. Although such readings do 2 reveal a great deal about the nation, they generally fail to account for the ways in which the nation is both informed and shaped by literary representations of itself. When it comes to stories of sickness and disease, the imposed disjunction between text as commentary upon the nation and text as generative of the nation is even more acute, because critics tend to overlook the repercussions of reading and writing the nation as sick. Third, metaphorical approaches centered on the sick character as a locus for national meaning in Québec presuppose a problematic equivalence between the character’s body and the nation. While metaphors necessarily imply relations of both difference and sameness between their constitutive elements (without difference there would be no point to the trope, yet without some commonality, there would be no basis for comparison), the tendency in Québec has been to overemphasize the continuities and to overlook the differences that strain the trope. Yet to move beyond the earlier readings of illness narratives by taking into account the problems with the medical and the national entails reevaluating the premise that the nation is afflicted with the ailments of its literary characters. The propensity to read a character’s venereal disease as an indication of national decadence and corruption or tuberculosis as a sign of a nation slowing wasting away and consuming itself has effectively produced, both in Québec and elsewhere, a series of national diagnoses based on literary symptoms. When certain literary diseases abound, as cancer and alcoholism do in Québec, these national diagnoses are issued and confirmed so often that they effectively become part of the national literary tradition, and thus the nation itself. If, however, the model of the sick character as literary shorthand for a sick nation is to be overcome and a broader, less formulaically morbid, perspective introduced into 3 reading French Canadian medical narratives, readers and critics will have to look beyond the sick body.2 The key to such an exercise rests not in rejecting the medical trope altogether, but rather in expanding the scope of what is considered medico-nationally relevant. By considering more than just the presence or absence of disease in a text as the measure of the nation’s health it becomes possible to read the story of illness, the medico- national allegory, in its entirety. To take the entire narrative of sickness into account allows for a reading that exposes the often unusual, and at times contradictory, ways in which the nation-sickening disease functions in the text. Consequently, the texts’ allegorical diagnoses of the nation are put into question as readers become diagnosticians not of the nation, but of a national literary tradition that has normalized medico-national allegories to the point that textual disease

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