Making Women Pay: Revolution, Violence, Decolonizing Quebec in Hubert Aquin's Trou de Memoire‪.‬

It seems that at some point in her career, the feminist critic of Quebec literature is compelled to study Hubert Aquin, and in particular, his controversial and often violent rapport with all things female. It is not an altogether pleasant moment, but it is definitely a fascinating and necessary step to a better understanding of 1960s Quebec revolutionary literature. Born in Montreal in 1929, Aquin is best known for his four complex modernist novels, Prochain episode (1965), Trou de memoire (1968), L'antiphonaire (1973), and Neige noire (1974), although he also influenced contemporary Quebec culture as a political activist, filmmaker, and editor. A brilliant and deeply tormented figure--he committed suicide in 1977--Aquin was perhaps the most important intellectual of his generation. He was without a doubt the Quebec writer to have experienced most intensely the French-Canadian male dilemma of the 1960s: that is to be both an "homme international," influenced by European aesthetic and political currents, and an "homme local," deeply committed to Quebec independance and to the promotion of Quebec culture. The treatment of women in Aquin's second novel Trou de memoire, published in 1968, continues thirty years on to fascinate, provoke, disturb, and disrupt a gendered reading of his work. The novel's main character, a revolutionary pharmacist-writer, Pierre X. Magnant, murders his English-Canadian lover and then writes in a vain attempt to fill with words the absence created by her death, an absence that becomes a metaphor for Quebec's erasure from history and its ambivalent relationship with English Canada. As Patricia Smart first stated in 1988, the entire novelistic universe of Hubert Aquin is "tendue vers la fusion mystique avec une femme-archetype qui s'identifie au pays, a la revolution et a la mort" (238). For Smart, "faire la revolution en litterature, etait un projet de fils eleve contre la mere, c'etait une `virilite' a assumer contre et au depens de la femme ... une naissance concue comme rejet, refus et rempart contre la mere trop enveloppante" (239-40). Another leading feminist critic, Lori Saint-Martin, has analyzed this same desire for female annihilation in several important men's novels of the 1960s and 70s, including Trou de memoire, in order to expose their inherent pornographic structure in which women are reduced to sex objects who in fact desire the treatment--read rape--that they receive (95, 100-04).