Madeleine Gagnon | Biography

Madeleine Gagnon was born in 1938 to Jean-Baptiste and Jeanne Beaulieu Gagnon at Amqui, Quebec. One of ten children, she grew up in the countryside of the Gaspé region of Quebec. She received her B.A. in literature from the Université Saint-Joseph du Nouveau-Brunswick, her M.A. in philosophy from the Université de Montréal, and her doctorate in literature from the Université de Nice in France. Married early in her life, Gagnon divorced after her first book, which she signed with her married name, Madeleine Gagnon-Mahoney. She currently lives in Montreal with her two children, Charles and Christophe, and teaches literature at the Université de Québec à Montréal.

Although Gagnon is recognized chiefly for her poetry, she has successfully explored a number of different genres, beginning with the publication of her first work, Les Morts-vivants (1969), a collection of short stories, through her political articles in Chroniques, to her recent volume of poetry, Les Fleurs du Catalpa (1986). The variety of her writing styles reflects in part the political turmoil of the period in which she began to have her works published. During the 1970s, she was an active member of the Union des Ecrivains Québécois and a member of the editorial collective for Chroniques (1974-1976). Her more "militant" texts, such as Retailles (1977) or Pour les femmes et tous les autres (1974), and her articles in Chroniques (1974, 1975) bear witness to her engagement in many of the struggles for political liberation then current: the burgeoning trade-union movement, the emergence of radical feminism, the struggle for linguistic freedom in Quebec.

This "quiet revolution" was not, however, the sole motivation for the multiplicity of her writing styles. Gagnon's texts outline a concerted effort to explode the boundaries of genre, to recognize the textual conjunctions of theory and fiction, of prose and poetry, of autobiography and history. Her best-known work, the "archaeological" novel Lueur (1979), is a blend of theory and autobiography written in language that floats between prose and poetry. It tells of a feminine exploration that searches for an origin, the origin of language, and of personal history. Similarly, in the collaborative work La Venue à l'écriture (1977), she describes the discovery of her own voice, as well as the discovery by women in the 1970s of their own expressive possibilities. In two of her latest volumes, Les Fleurs du Catalpa and L'Infante immémoriale. Poesie (1986), a blending of haiku prose poems, intimate journal entries, and theoretical reflections elaborates this same textual approach.

Her work, although intensely personal and intimate for the most part, nonetheless recognizes in a number of ways the influences of writers around her. Many of her works have been written in collaboration with other writers: Portraits du voyage (1974), with Quebecois writers Jean-Marc Piotte and Patrick Straram le Bison ravi, La Venue à l'écriture (1977), with French authors Annie Leclerc and Hélène Cixous, and Retailles, with Quebecois playwright Denise Boucher.

In books like Retailles (1977) or Pour les femmes et tous les autres (1974), her use of collage acknowledges debts to the voices and texts from which she draws inspiration. She mixes her own reflections with citations from other authors. In addition to well-known international figures such as Marguerite Duras, Paul Claudel, Maurice Blanchot, and Gabriel García Márquez, she is fond of integrating the work of writers from the Quebecois community (Philippe Haeck, Claude Gauvreau) to signpost her textual affiliation.

As did many Quebecois writers during the 1970s, Gagnon used the Montreal dialect joual in her work, but her everyday Quebecois voices are, for the most part, those of women. Gagnon juxtaposes reflections on politics or prose poems on the act of reading with these voices of everyday life to create a textual counterpoint. In some instances, she has used ad copy from popular magazines to orchestrate harmony, and sometimes dissonance, in her pieces. The fragmentation and ambiguity of pronoun reference in her work also adds to the impression of a polyvocal text and develops poetically Gagnon's continuing theoretical focus on the dissolution of the modern subject.

Early in the 1980s, Gagnon took pains to put distance between her present writing projects and her earlier, more militant texts. In an interview which appeared in Voix et Images in 1982, she describes how, like Pasolini, she had to find courage to leave behind those writings which she felt had been co-opted by a discourse of power. Her later writing no longer takes part in a "feminist realism," but rather searches for the traces of an unwritten female language. Increasingly in her later texts, such as Antre (1978) or Lueur (1979), Gagnon turns to a psychoanalytic approach in literature, drawing out her relationships to such French feminists as Cixous, Annie Leclerc, Michèle Montrelay, and Luce Irigaray. Gagnon finds that the inscription of hysteria and history on the female body becomes the source of a feminine language heretofore marginalized. In what might be called a psychoanalytical version of "the personal is political," Gagnon works with corporal symptoms of hysteria that constitute a sign system exploitable in texts.

Her interest here accounts for the thematic and linguistic fascination in her writing with the relationship between mother and daughter and her concerted efforts to imagine a world outside of the Oedipal relation. The prominence of metaphors of fluidity, of fissures and gaps, and of sewing and quilting, harken to this preoccupation with an "écriture féminine," as in Antre: "Un pré de blé. En plein milieu de la forêt touffue, un pré de blé. Elle est allongée de tout son long, dedans, une femme, comme endormie, la tête sur une ardoise plate ou c'est écrit, hiéroglyphes. Des letters sont gravées dont elle ne comprend ni la disposition ni le sens. De son index, elle balaie la poussière de blé sur hiéroglyphes. Elle souffle sur l'ardoise. Emergent des mots signifiants jamais appris nulle part. Ce sont des mots de tous les jours" (A field of wheat. Right in the middle of the thick forest, a field of wheat. Stretched out full-length, within, a woman, as if asleep, her head on a flat slate on which are written hieroglyphs. Letters are engraved of which she understands neither the order nor the meaning. With her index finger she sweeps away the wheat dust on the hieroglyphs. She blows on the slate. Meaningful words emerge never learned anywhere. Everyday words).

Although her most recent publications have been volumes of poetry, the appearance in Vidéo-Presse of several short stories indicates a return to the genre with which she had begun her published fiction. Gagnon, whose Autographie 1 was published in 1982, is presently working on the second and third volumes in this series of retrospective collections of her writing from 1970-1980. Her writing, as well as her teaching, lectures, and writing workshops continue to multiply her many critical and literary contributions to the vibrant life of Quebec letters.