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"www" Notes |
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http://www.bookrags.com/biography/claire-martin-dlb/ |
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669x570,, MONTREUIL, Claire
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Dictionary of
Literary Biography on Claire Martin |
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Claire Martin's pseudonym itself
proclaims two elements central to her work and its place in the history
of French-Canadian literature. Asserting the continuity of the Female
line through her use of her mother's maiden name Martin, she also
signals her commitment to the exploration of the varieties of women's
experience within a male-dominated culture. As she writes in her 1966
volume of memoirs, La Joue droite , her interest is in the
possibilities of women's lives beyond the traditional rhythm of
"yearly maternities, sleepless nights and dreary days, nursing
children, washing, cooking, finished off with eclampsia or puerperal
fever." She has made a significant contribution to French-Canadian
literature through her willingness to move beyond the conservative
stereotypes of Catholic Quebec in order to investigate the meaning of
love, whether in terms of familial bondage or of erotic and emotional
involvement. |
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On 18 April 1914 Claire Martin was born
in Quebec to Ovila Montreuil, a civil engineer, and his wife, Alice
Martin Montreuil. Martin studied with the Ursulines in Quebec and with
the Soeurs de la Congregation de Notre-Dame in Beauport. She worked as
a radio announcer first with station CKCV in Quebec and later with
Radio-Canada in Montreal. On 13 August 1945 she married Roland Faucher,
a chemist, and they lived in Ottawa until 1972. Her first book, Avec ou
sans amour, was published in 1958, and in the course of the next two
decades she won a number of awards including the Prix du Cercle du
Livre de France (1958), for Avec ou sans amour; the Prix de la Province
de Québec (1965), and the Prix France-Québec (1965), both
for Dans un gant de fer ; and a Governor General's Award (1967), for La
Joue droite. From 1963 to 1965 she was president of the
Société des Ecrivains Canadiens-français and in
1970-1971 Martin served as president of the jury for the Governor
General's awards. After her husband's retirement, Martin moved with him
to France and lived in Cabris in the Maritime Alps from 1972 to 1982
when they returned to Canada and took up residence in Quebec City,
where her husband died on 30 November 1986. In 1973 she spent a term as
writer in residence at the University of Ottawa and also devoted
herself to the translation of English versions of Inuit narratives as
well as of fiction by Robertson Davies and Margaret Laurence, among
others. |
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Martin's first book, the collection of
short stories entitled Avec ou sans amour, is a series of experiments
with tightly controlled form and style. For the most part brief and
ironic, these stories reveal Martin's insight into the predicaments of
love from a woman's point of view. Those who demand "realism"
have been dissatisfied not only with Martin's short stories but also
with her novels. As Maurice Blain has summed up these objections in his
essay "Comment fille inconstante devient femme fidèle"
collected in Gilles Marcotte's Présence de la critique (1966),
"Roman immoral, diront les moralistes, qui va de l'inconstance un
peu cynique a la fidélité un peu durable. Roman
invraisemblable, diront les psychologues"; however, as Blain
himself concludes, a novel like Martin's Quand j'aurai payé ton
visage (1962) is a "Roman de l'intelligence du coeur." |
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Martin is a moralist who is less
concerned with plot and character development than with the elucidation
of a situation, a moment, a problem which becomes representative of a
life. This metonymic mode is obvious in Martin's second book, Doux-amer
(1960), in which her use of lyrical first-person narration focuses the
novel on ten years in the life of the narrator, an editor, and on his
relationship with Gabrielle Lubin whose first book he has edited. A
retrospective and frequently elegiac view of Lubin's relationship with
the narrator's rival, Michel Bullard, her marriage to Bullard, and the
return to the editor in the end, Doux-amer is structured in terms of
two narratives set within the frame of the editor's story itself.
Doux-amer was translated into English as Best Man in 1983. |
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Taken a step further in her next novel,
Quand j'aurai payé ton visage (1962), this technique of
narrative doubling produces two narrators, Catherine Lange and Robert
Ferny, and two parallel narratives of ten chapters each. These
narratives are, in turn, separated by the narrative of Robert's mother,
Jeanne Ferny, which is set between them. A retrospective narrative like
Doux-amer, this novel presents three monologues on essentially the same
event: the marriage of Catherine and Bruno Ferny, Catherine's love for
her husband's brother, Robert, and her leaving of Bruno to live with
Robert. Martin's working title for the first draft of the novel
summarized these relationships: "Triangles pour un quatuor."
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Equally difficult relationships form the
subject of Martin's two volumes of memoirs, Dans un gant de fer (1965)
and La Joue droite. Both volumes of this autobiography were published
in English translation in one volume under the title In an Iron Glove
(1968); separately published translations appeared in 1975. Essentially
the record of Martin's survival in the house of a tyrannical father,
these memoirs powerfully evoke the Jansenist-Catholic ethos of Quebec
before the social transformation heralded by the Quiet Revolution. In
her presentation of her mother's tragic life, Martin clearly
demonstrates the extent to which both physical and emotional violence
were directed particularly against women and from which individuals
seldom-and only at great cost to themselves-managed to escape. The
depth of female bonding which also emerges at times under such
conditions is shown by Martin in her depiction of her maternal
grandmother to whom she was devoted and to whom she attributes her love
of the French language. |
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Like Anne Hébert, her great
contemporary, Martin has resisted the political pressure toward
incorporation of joual (colloquial Quebecois French) and toward an
Americanized French into her work. Her syntax remains traditional and
her lexicon that of the French Academy, choices which made her work
suspect during the 1970s and which have distanced her from the climate
of vigorous stylistic experimentation characteristic of contemporary
Quebecois writing. Her 1970 novel, Les Morts, and its stage adaptation,
"Moi, je n'étais qu'espoir," produced at Montreal's
Théâtre du Rideau Vert and published in 1972, aroused a
good deal of opposition from those committed to the view that the
primary function of a writer in Quebec is to explore the circumstances
of contemporary Quebecois life using the language of the majority.
Martin has, however, resolutely refused to participate in this
transformation, seeing the movement away from the language and
intellectual traditions of the mother country as cultural folly. |
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Regarded by many as her finest novel, Les
Morts has been classified by Martin as a "roman-essai," an
intricately structured analysis of love which may be seen as the
counterpart to her memoirs. Another retrospective narrative in the
first person, this novel presents its narrator as a writer in search of
the meaning of past loves and of love itself, struggling in elegantly
taut prose to disentangle the erotic from the conventionally romantic,
the body of the other from her own longing, the experience of love from
the saying of words which nourish-perhaps invent-love. |
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With the exception of La Petite Fille lit
(1973), a brief narrative composed as a literary exercise in
fulfillment of her term as writer in residence at the University of
Ottawa in 1972, Martin has not written a work of fiction since Les
Morts. Alienated from the stylistic experimentation and commitment to
feminist theorizing about writing which characterizes the work of such
contemporary Quebecois novelists as Nicole Brossard and Louky
Bersianik, Martin's work is now set firmly in the middle distance by
contemporary Quebecois critics. It is ironic that, perhaps in part
because her work has not been well served by English translators, being
blunted and deprived of much of its feminist anger in the process, her
writing has not yet found the place of honor in English Canada which it
may yet achieve. |
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