A Certain Difficulty of Being: Essays on the Quebec Novel

Ronald Conrad is a professor of English at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute in Toronto.

Not so long ago much of Canadian literary criticism was naively unaware
of its own critical assumptions and methodology. Studies such as
Margaret Atwood’s Survival (1972) reduced their subjects to theme,
often leaving unaddressed the larger artistic or political agendas of
critic and writer. English-Canadian writings on Quebec literature,
especially, indulged in reductionism and even stereotyping.

In A Certain Difficulty of Being, Anthony Purdy has produced a
thoughtful, fully conscious study of several texts central to the canon
of Quebec fiction. A professor of French at the University of Alberta,
Purdy came to this country in 1973 after having studied foreign
languages in search of what J.P. Stern called the “alien
experience.” In this book he deftly crosses the line between the two
Canadas: his analyses are varied in method and focus, but always awake
to the cultural and literary realities of Quebec.

Purdy begins by showing how, in the very act of denouncing the morally
suspect “code” of the French novel, prefaces to nineteenth-century
Quebec novels enticed the public to read on. He then goes on to explore
the tension between epic and novel in Félix-Antoine Savard’s Menaud,
maоtre-draveur, the “political economy of everyday life” in
Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion, narrative ambiguity in André
Langevin’s Poussiиre sur la ville, narrative as history in Hubert
Aquin’s Prochain épisode, and narrative as archaeology of the self in
Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska. The last two essays are particularly good.

Although Purdy claims not to take a unified critical stance, much of
his analysis bows deeply to the poststructuralists. The casual reader
may be slowed down here and there by the ensuing critical terminology,
the many references (Purdy’s bibliography is 12 pages long), and the
presentation of quotations in the original French. But the student of
Quebec literature will find in this book honest, incisive, and elegant
keys to several of Quebec’s most evocative and important novels.