| <=== Index ===>
|
|
|
| |
"www" Notes |
| |
http://www.bookrags.com/biography/claire-martin-dlb/ |
| |
|
| |
Dictionary of Literary
Biography on Claire Martin |
| = |
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. |
| |
|
| = |
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. |
| |
|
| = |
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." |
| |
|
| = |
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. |
| |
|
| = |
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." |
| |
|
| = |
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. |
| |
|
| = |
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. |
| |
|
| = |
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.
|
| |
|
| = |
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. |
|
| <=== Index ===> |
|
