Fuzzy left

No doubt this uneasiness of mine has its roots in a culture which has built itself on a collective will to survive past the trauma of Conquest - always that, yet again - a culture stamped with a reassuring sense of belonging to a predictable catholic territory - well, I’m not too sure really, and I certainly don’t want to lose myself in over-speculating on our history, with its already paradoxical character of a presumably liberating prison. But it is certainly not new that Québec artists, playwrights, singers or poets who do speak publicly about politics - and with Quebec sovereignty, the anti-capitalist discourse seems like a necessary corollary - do so in a strange quasi-unanimity, something which I think can justify anyone’s uneasiness.

Now if this particular instance at the Soirée des Masques was somehat more troubling in itself, it is because it reflects how far this quasi-unanimity goes, way beyond the traditional ultra-nationalist political subcultures. Marc Béland is the textbook case of the discipline of rebellion that true art requires, in order to pull our humanity beyond its limitations, so as to push these further ahead at the same time. And the question of this modern and tormented actor-dancer who wants to reveal humanity’s depth through his art, reminded me all at once of how solitary was playwright René-Daniel Dubois‘ questioning the value of our received ideas, how efficiently the Michel Tremblay and Robert Lepage were ordered back to orthodoxy, how severely Gilles Vigneault could judge all these other quebecers who were just too afraid to lose their little oranges to do the bold move to sovereignty…

Yet my uneasiness isn’t really about the moralizing or the closed-knitted nationalism itself. This can be easily explained, with the market for cultural products being itself pretty sympathetic to this kind of thinking - one wouldn’t bite the hand that feeds him - and with this basic victimization ethos that is such a fertile ground for lamenting the unattainable nation, the absent dad, the busy mom, and for being watchful of any gesture interpretable as a form of treason. I don’t care much about that, in fact, but rather about the other side of the coin, since these explanations, like all explanations, have limitations (thank god). The thing is, how can the artist-as-artist, assuming this refers to something which at least lies somewhere in our collective consciousness, how can this true artist feel at all comfortable with such conformity? Isn’t this in absolute contradiction with the artistic intention itself?

Obviously, I’m not judging of the legitimacy of anyone’s individual opinion here. Democracy can’t tolerate any other censorship than that which protects freedom of speech. It’s also quite healthy for any society that its cultural figures take part in political debates, and we shouldn’t be surprised to find them more often on the side of change, idealism, a bit more to the left than to the right, greener and more open. But what troubles me most is precisely the relative absence of voices singing other tunes than what this apparently unchallenged sovereigntist quasi-unanimity reveals. La Presse editorialist André Pratte expressed something similar a few months ago, but he was mostly concerned about the lack of federalist discourse per se. What bothers me is different: it is the completely unbalanced way with which the reality of Quebec political ethos is represented in the artistic community, not only by taking somewhat more progressive stances than the average citizen, which again is to be expected, but by literally censoring, in our collective imagination, any notion of how we can live together which could break away from the traditional statist-nationalist mold.

My own political position, for sure, makes me more sensitive to this phenomenon, but I think the problem would be just as bad if it was the other way around. When a people is split in half over its future, there is a richness of subject matter there, for deeper recognition of who we are, for a recognition of the value and meaning of our collective inner conflicts, there is material for classic tragedy with the associated beauties of human virtue and uncertainty. Then why should we always, all the way now it seems to the avant-garde of our performers, writers and thinkers, reduce, over-simplify, caricature this reality, and picture a presumed way out of this dilemma as so obviously desirable that only pity and scorn seem appropriate as responses to differing views? Again, isn’t there a huge contradiction between the liberating character of the artistic stance on the one hand, with the values we lump with it, open-mindedness, receptivity for what’s hard to understand, hard to say or to accept, and on the other hand, wholesale rejection of a real dilemma between problematic loyalties, in the name of some new revealed truth or ideological puritanism?

At a time when we start asking our own modern anti-clerical selves about our relation to religion, in particular through the way we are ready to accomodate other beliefs or traditions, how come so few people here seem to wonder about this soft-chauvinism crowding our Québécois national conscience all the way to our cultural avant-garde? And let not my Trudeauite english-speaking readers think for a moment that I may be talking about some white catholic francophone chauvinism here, which is completely irrelevant to the whole debate, but with ideological chauvinism, the kind which distinguishes dogmatically between the good, the bad and the ugly Québécois along completely different lines than shared language and culture. The question is why, then, can our own cultural elites be so dismissive of what we really are as a people, of our own complexity? Yet again, isn’t it a huge cultural failure, when a society gets comfortable with such ideological conformism?