Dictionary of Literary Biography on Albert Laberge
Albert Laberge was a pioneer of naturalism and realism in French-Canadian fiction, modes that developed late in Quebec because of the powerful conservative influences of clerical and lay ideologues. Together with his friend Rodolphe Girard's Marie Calumet (1904), Laberge's novel, La Scouine, published privately in an edition of sixty copies in 1918 (translated as Bitter Bread, 1977), launched a short-lived foray against the idealized roman de la fidélité which presented the Quebec countryside as a haven of tranquillity and spiritual Catholic values. With a few notable exceptions (especially Ringuet's Trente Arpents, 1938), the Quebec novel eschewed realism until World War II, and it was not until the late 1950s and the 1960s that a neonaturalist trend reappeared, some four decades after La Scouine, in works by Gérard Bessette, Marie-Claire Blais, and Roch Carrier.
Laberge was born to farmers, Pierre and Joséphine Boursier Laberge, in Beauharnois, south of Montreal, one of nine children. His primary and secondary schooling took place in the area of his birthplace. In 1888 he began his cours classique at the well-known Jesuit institution, the Collège Sainte-Marie in Montreal, from which he was expelled four years later for having been caught reading "dangerous" fiction.
Thanks to a doctor uncle, Laberge began to read French romantic and symbolist poets and then Balzac and Zola. In 1891 he became familiar with the works of Guy de Maupassant, who had a strong effect on him. The next year he became linked to leading figures of the Ecole de Montréal, a modernist literary group, which he would leave soon afterward, probably for personal reasons. Laberge began to publish short stories in Montreal periodicals in 1895. By the end of his life he had published fourteen volumes (all at his own expense in small private editions), of which nine were short-story collections. The rest were sketches and biographies of Quebec journalists, writers, and artists. These had their source in his career as a journalist with the Montreal daily La Presse, where for twenty-three years he was art critic and for thirty-six years, sports editor.
Laberge wrote his major work, the novel La Scouine, over a period of twenty-two years, from 1895 to 1917. He reestablished ties with the Ecole de Montréal paradoxically during that group's regionalist phase. In 1909 he read before the Ecole an excerpt from La Scouine, chapters of which began to appear in various Montreal periodicals. That same year his twentieth chapter, which describes a sexual encounter between Charlot Deschamps, a member of the novel's central family, and a drunk and mud-stained Irishwoman, appeared in La Semaine. The archbishop of Montreal, Msgr Paul Bruchési, condemned this text as "[de] l'ignoble pornographie" and added: "Il faut couper le mal dans sa racine" (One must nip evil in the bud). For seven years Laberge remained silent, before again offering excerpts from La Scouine to a number of journals. He took even greater care in publishing several chapters from a novel he would never complete, "Lamento," by using the pen name Adrien Clamer. This work was centered on a sexually obsessed female character.
La Scouine finally appeared in its entirety in 1918. Its dedication, seemingly ironic, given Laberge's anticlericalism and his novel's demythification of traditional rural values, reads: "A mon cher frère Alfred qui, près des grands peupliers verts, pointus comme des clochers d'église, laboure et ensemence de ses mains le champ paternel, je dédie ces pages..." (To my dear brother Alfred who, near the great green poplars, pointed like church belfreys, labors and sows with his hands our father's field, I dedicate these pages...).
The novel has been described as a series of tableaux of rural life in the Beauharnois area, from 1853 until about the end of the century, loosely tied together by the tribulations of the Deschamps family, and the evolution of the life of one of the two twin daughters, Paulima, nicknamed La Scouine because of her malodorous bedwetting into adolescence. The story can be divided into four parts: from Paulima's birth to her sixteenth birthday; from her sister Caroline's marriage until the fateful fall of brother Charlot from the roof of a house he was building for a bride he would never have; the gradual breakdown of the Deschamps family through greed and violence; and the death of the father, Urgèle, and the mother Mâço's move, with Paulima and Charlot, to a house next to the cemetery in her native village. The entire work is syncopated by an unvaried refrain, symbolizing the bitter bread of the Deschampses' evening meal and entire existence: "le pain du souper ... lourd comme du sable, au goût sur et amer" (the supper bread ... heavy like sand, with the sour and bitter taste) and which will be marked with a knife, ironically, in the sign of the cross. Gilles Dorion, in his essay La Scouine for the Dictionnaire des ouvres littéraires du Québec (volume 2, 1980), has summed up generally well the novel's basic pessimism and fatalism and shabby portrait of human behavior: "Selon ce roman, aucun amour, aucune tendresse n'existe entre les êtres. Les rapports humains baignent dans l'égoïsme le plus asséchant.... La misère et la mort sont le lot commun" (According to this novel, no love, no tenderness exists among the characters. Human relations are steeped in the most draining egoism.... Misery and death are the common lot). One could add that a key naturalist trait of the work is its general assimilation of humans and animals, with stress on man's lower, purely biological behavior.
Critics Gérard Bessette, Jacques Brunet, Paul Wyczynski, and others have gone even further, interpreting Laberge's novel as one that is totally impassive, clinical, bereft of any ideological insights or explanations. This view can be contested by pointing to the sharper focus put on the class divisions in the countryside than was the case before La Scouine; to Laberge's wail about "les éternels exploités de la glèbe" (the eternal exploited ones of the land); to his admiration of some of the minor characters, especially the female teachers and other women and the old beggar; to his clear sympathy for the francophones who are prevented from voting and beaten and humiliated by anglophone Tories, and for those cheated by the merchant Linche, whose name seems to be a veiled version of the Irish Lynch. All of these touches, however, do not take away from the somber, crushing tonality of the novel. And Gabrielle Pascal is convincing when she states in Le Défi d'Albert Laberge (1976) that the anticlerical, antitraditionalist Laberge seems to come full circle and join his adversaries (no doubt unwittingly) by his profound pessimism about earthly life and his puritanical, guilt-ridden treatment of sexuality.
Critical evaluation of the novel's style and structure ranges from near-total deprecation to exaggerated praise for an alleged total fusion of form and content. Most critics have questioned the choice of the title, since other characters are equal in importance to Paulima. One could argue, though, that her misanthropy, cruelty, perversity, and arrested infantilism are symbolic of the harsh universe created by Laberge.
In any case Albert Laberge is an important writer who was neglected by official literary history in Quebec until the 1960s. During the Quiet Revolution, in a period when traditional ideologies were sharply questioned, his work was republished and given its rightful place, in spite of its inadequacies and rough-hewn character. Gérard Bessette's Anthologie d'Albert Laberge appeared in 1963, followed by a facsimile edition of La Scouine in 1968 (Réédition-Quebec) and another published by L'Actuelle in 1972. The first critical edition, edited by Paul Wyczynski and including his long introduction and copious notes, appeared in 1986. A ballet entitled La Scouine was created in Montreal by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in 1977, choreographed by Fernard Nault.
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