Dictionary of Literary Biography on Michel Garneau
Poet, composer, singer, and playwright, Michel Garneau derives his originality from two features rarely found among the contemporary avant-garde: his thoroughly affirmative outlook on life and the highly poetic quality of his drama. Conventional in theme, his plays are experimental in language, structure, and technique. He has developed a personal stage idiom based on the spoken word and using all the freedom of the nouvelle écriture; his dramatic structures, like those of Michel Tremblay, are free-flowing, based on the principles of musical composition; and his style ranges from oneiric realism to the grotesque. Several of his works are "poèmes à jouer," poems for the stage, rather than plays in the usual sense of the word.
Michel Garneau, son of Antonio Garneau, a judge, and Germaine d'Amour Garneau, was born in Montreal. After schooling at several Jesuit institutions (collèges Jean-de-Brébeuf, Sainte-Marie, and Saint-Denis), he abandoned formal studies at the age of sixteen in favor of a more bohemian lifestyle. He worked as a radio announcer in Trois-Rivières and Montreal, took theater courses at a school run by Montreal's Théâtre du Nouveau Monde--and he wrote. In 1962 his first commercially published volume of poetry was enthusiastically received by the critics. He has produced prolifically since then: volumes of poetry, plays, and record albums.
Hired as an announcer and scriptwriter by CBC television in 1960, he produced over a hundred programs between 1961 and 1968, especially for the series Images en tête. He was also a professional singer at the time with a group called Les Cailloux, and later, in 1975, he composed and performed the music for Allô Toulmônd. He worked as a free-lance broadcaster in Paris in 1967 and 1968 (primarily for Radio-Canada), and when he returned to Montreal, where he still resides, he continued to work as a singer, playwright, and dramaturge for the National Theatre School and for Collège Lionel-Groulx in Quebec City. Several of Garneau's plays remain unpublished.
Thematically, his dramatic output can be divided roughly into three (somewhat overlapping) categories: plays dealing with liberation, those exploring the human condition in general, and drama about sex and love. In treating the theme of liberation, Garneau follows the mainstream of Quebec drama. Examples of works in this category are Quatre à quatre, which deals with personal liberation, and Strauss et Pesant (et Rosa), about liberation from authority. Garneau's most universal plays are the poèmes à jouer, which investigate the human condition. Each play in this category combines powerful stage images with a text that has been conceived as a score, rather than as dialogue, and borrows heavily from the techniques of stereophonic radio drama. Les Voyagements, Rien que la mémoire, and Adidou, Adidoucebelong in this category. In the plays about sex and love--Sur le matelas; La Chanson d'amour de cul; Abriés, désabriées --the progression has clearly been from sensuality to "lucid tenderness." Quatre à quatre, Strauss et Pesant (et Rosa), Les Voyagements, and Les Célébrations are probably his most important and representative plays to date.
Quatre à quatre , first performed in 1973, played at the Théâtre d'Aubervilliers, France, in the fall of 1975; its success was such that it was taken to Paris and to the festivals of Bordeaux and Avignon. It is a poetic monodrama about a young woman's struggle to free herself from the emotional conditioning received from her female ancestors. The setting, described as "un espace mental," is in the mind of the young woman, Anouk. Since the play is set in "psychological, real, and mythical" time, the ages of the other characters, her mother, Céline, her grandmother, Pauline, and her great-grandmother, Anne, shift from "twenty to eighty or even a thousand years." As the play unfolds, the parallels in the lives of the four women become clear. In her sorrow each woman cries out--in vain--to her own mother. Anouk eventually realizes the need to break away. She rebels against each of the older women in turn and finally performs a kind of exorcism ritual upon herself, which climaxes in a triumphant rejection of the past and a finding of self, expressed in a parody of the Hail Mary. Highly poetic in language, the play depends for its effects upon careful rendition of the rhythmic patterns. Quatre à quatre was published in 1974 and translated into English as Four to Four in 1979.
Totally different in tone, Strauss et Pesant (et Rosa) (produced in Montreal and published in 1974) belongs to the contemporary mode of grotesque drama exemplified by the work of Friedrich Dürrenmatt. It makes use of symbolism, allegory, and the archetype of the reappearing corpse to convey its multiple meanings. André Pagé, who directed the first production, expressed the wish that the play be performed throughout Quebec, "afinque que nous nous libérions de tous les Strauss et Pesant qui grouillent en nous et à l'extérieur de nous." The play also deals with the illusions of life (and death) and life's unfulfillment, symbolized by Rosa's twenty-seven miscarriages.
The love triangle of this two-act play is made up of Joseph-Albert Strauss, seventy, a retired police captain; Monsignor Emilien Pesant, also seventy, a bishop; and Strauss's wife, Rosa, sixty-eight. Act one opens on the Strauss couple returning from Joseph's retirement party. He is full of liquor and fun, but Rosa feels unwell, disappears into the bathroom, and dies. In a grotesque mourning scene, Joseph drags his dead wife from the bathroom onto the bed and falls asleep over her dead body. Act two shows Joseph weak, aged, and unable to cope. He is visited by his childhood friend Emilien, the bishop, who has loved Rosa all along. The departed makes numerous appearances during the scene; and she is on her knees washing the floor and singing happily as the men eventually administer absolution to each other--and die.
Les Voyagements (first produced in 1975 and published in 1977), in contrast to Strauss et Pesant (et Rosa), has neither characters nor a story line. A symbolic poem for the stage, Les Voyagements , or journeyings, represents man's way from birth to death through a series of stage metaphors. There is no set. The four actors, two men, two women, are on exercycles, a highly evocative image. They each wear four transparent masks, which they remove one by one as their journey progresses. Verbal techniques are as important as visual images: words are used for sound as well as meaning; one sentence is often composed of fragments spoken by two or more characters, underlining the abstract quality of the work; several synonyms are used within the same sentence; spelling and syntax are treated with the utmost freedom. Garneau touches upon several main themes of universal concern: the quest for happiness; the search for identity; problems of communication; waiting for death. The structure is cyclical: the play ends with a symbolic birth ("j'arrive") as the actors make their exit, thus linking birth and death, beginning and end.
In Les Célébrations (first produced in 1976 and published in 1977) Michel Garneau voices his basic optimism about life and love through a poetic, if mundane, dialogue between two lovers, Paul-Emile, a philosopher, and Margo, a child psychologist. The play is developed in eight short scenes, with lines both spoken and sung. Each scene deals with an ordinary event of everyday life; each ends in a passionate declaration of love. The language is both popular and poetic, and the play has charm and gentle humor. It ends with the lovers' resolve never, never even to consider marriage. Les Célébrations earned Garneau a Governor General's Award, which the author declined.
Michel Garneau successfully combines the techniques of the dramatic avant-garde with the experimentation of contemporary poetry. His use of an idiosyncratic québécois carries political/nationalist overtones, but his dramatic idiom is close to that of the international postmodern movement in its emphasis on the musical aspects of language. His poèmes à jouer remind one especially of the Sprechstueck as practiced by Peter Handke or the mises-en-scène of Vitez.
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