From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Culture And Identity In French Canada/Mary Elisabeth AubÉ
During the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s a new orientation in cultural identity was manifested with the adoption of the adjective québécois to replace “French-Canadian,” which was seen as denoting a double colonization. This period witnessed the creation of provincial ministries of education and culture that were of paramount importance in the transfer of authority over these two domains from the religious to the public sector. Publicly funded schools made secondary and university education, previously available only in religious schools and to a small number of students, available to the entire population. The curriculum in the humanities was overhauled, and courses on Québécois literature came to occupy an important place at all levels, from the elementary school to the doctoral program. The Ministry of Culture established state authority in the arts through the funding process.
Québécois literature was in a state of great ferment in the 1960s. The socio-political turmoil that the province was undergoing was expressed in literature as a renewed search for collective identity. The marriage of social themes with formal innovation meant that the question of identity was present in the structure of literary works as well as in their content. For example, the narrative “I” became problematic in works such as Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel (1965), by Marie-Claire Blais, which turned on its head the novel of the land. The multiplication of narrative perspectives was synonymous with a search for individual and social identity in Hubert Aquin’s Prochain épisode (1965). Réjean Ducharme also experimented with narrative form in his novels, which parodied the myths of Quebec. In the wake of the 1980 referendum, Jacques Godbout, in Les têtes à Papineau (1981), created a bicephalous character as a metaphor for the cultural dilemma facing the Québécois.
Poetry expressed a reorientation in the discourse of identity from a collective to an individual one, yet the major poetic current of this period presented the individual as a socially and historically rooted individual, thus expressing the dilemma of the Québécois: colonized, searching for self and self-expression. Michèle Lalonde took up the question of language in Défense et illustration de la langue québécoise (1979) and Speak White (presented 1967; published 1974). Adopting in the latter title the expression used by American Blacks to reflect their alienation, she compared the Québécois situation to that of other persecuted groups around the world and expressed solidarity with them. Gaston Miron wrote of the colonized collective consciousness of Quebec society. Novelist and playwright Hubert Aquin took a similar view. He spoke of “the cultural fatigue of the French Canadian,” and he echoed Lord Durham’s report of more than a hundred years earlier when the protagonist in his novel Prochain épisode described himself as the national leader of an unpublished people. Theatre expressing the search for identity was created by Jacques Ferron, who took up the theme of decolonization in Les grands soleils (1958). The plot of his Tête du roi (1963) revolves around the politically symbolic gesture of decapitating a monument. Robert Gauthier tackled the existential questions involved in political terrorism in Ballade pour un révolutionnaire (1965). Robert Gurik had great success with his political parody Hamlet, prince du Québec (1968), while the sacred French-Canadian institution of the family was the focus of Jean-Claude Germain’s Diguidi, diguidi, ha! ha! ha! (1972). The most widely known Quebec playwright made his debut in 1968 with the public reading of his Belles-soeurs. Michel Tremblay’s play was produced with overwhelming success the following year. He broke new ground through his now-legendary use of joual, the language of his Montreal working-class characters, whose very speech embodies their political and economic dispossession. Tremblay also made his mark with a highly imaginative use of dramatic structures.
During the 1970s there was a renewal of interest in traditional popular culture in Quebec. Old buildings and furniture were restored, and new ones built on the model of the old. At the same time, traditional songs and myths were incorporated into the repertoires of many singers of popular music. Their songs thus became the site of an important interaction between culture and ethnic identity. Félix Leclerc was the first of the chansonniers to appear on the scene. Though not overtly political, his music nonetheless became associated with the cause of sovereignty both because his lyrics expressed everyday Quebec reality and because he was active in the movement. The group Beau Dommage sold a record-breaking 350,000 copies of its first album in 1974. The public identified with its style, which recalled traditional melodies and included lyrics in the popular language of Montreal. Two years later the group headed the Saint-Jean-Baptiste day celebration on Mount Royal, an occasion that attracted some 300,000 spectators. This was one of the earliest of the mass cultural events that reflected and encouraged the mounting nationalism leading to the 1980 referendum. Another manifestation of the interaction of culture and ethnicity in music at this time was the adoption of Gilles Vigneault’s song “Gens du Pays” to replace the translation of “Happy Birthday” that had been used before. Pauline Julien also made her mark by combining popular music and nationalist themes.
Several currents within Quebec since the Quiet Revolution have caused the concept of collective identity embodied in the term “Québécois” to be re-posed in different ways. These include critiques of the notion of nationalism, feminist writing, the creation of native texts in French, and immigrant writing. The last two phenomena have been discussed earlier. All these currents have benefited from the context of post-modernism with its valorization of the fragment, the mixed, and the heterogenous, and its critique of hegemony. Claude Bertrand and Michel Morin, in Le Territoire imaginaire de la culture (1979), criticized the call for independence as a regression to homogeneity after the éclatement (bursting open) that characterized the Quiet Revolution. In the notion of “imaginary territory” they referred to the earliest manifestation of a French-Canadian identity in the figure of the nomad, who circulated in a vast, undefined area. Another critique of nationalism came from François Charron, who in Peinture automatiste (1979) took aim at the notion of a homogenous identity found in the nationalist discourse. More recently, Marc Angenot has added his voice to the discussion in his Les idéologies du ressentiment (1996).
Feminist writing calls into question theréférent d’homme, a play on the word référendum, by questioning not only the male-centred conception of collective identity but also, and more profoundly, the notion of national identity based in homogeneity. The work of feminist authors has argued for the heterogenous as the basis for identity by seeing it as a process, a constant flux, a relationship. Among the most influential writers are Nicole Brossard, Jovette Marchessault, Louky Bersianik, and France Théoret. Théoret critiques the very word “identity,” both with respect to relations between the sexes and as it concerns nationhood. She finds the term ideologically charged because of its association with the nationalist 1970s, yet she uses it because for her it is also linked to the word “fiction,” which is a creative otherness, an alternative to the real. For Théoret, then, identity is necessarily both other and multiple.
