The Imagined Communities of Quebec's science fiction and fantasy: Esther Rochon's Cycle de Vrenalik

West Virginia University Philological Papers, Fall, 2006 by Amy J. Ransom

In Imagined Communities (1983, 1991) Benedict Anderson argues that national identity represents the product of a collective imagination rather than a real phenomenon. The evolving image of the "nation" of Quebec clearly illustrates this concept. From the arrival of the first French explorers, colonial officials, patriots, politicians, clerics, essayists, and historians have all worked to shape what this territory would be--a North American New France, a subject British colony, a leader in the creation of Canada's confederation, a semi-autonomous province, or a sovereign state. Also participating in the ongoing debate over the questions "What is Quebec and is it a nation?" have been many writers of fiction and poetry. One group of writers, however, because of the very nature of the genre in which they work, has been most effective in imagining both literal and allegorical Quebecs: its writers of science fiction and fantasy. One of the province's most respected writers of genre literature, Esther Rochon clearly demonstrates this point of view in the novels of her Cycle de Vrenalik, which have been described by Michel Lord as "une vaste metaphore de l'histoire du Quebec" (37).

Science fiction and fantasy begin from the premise that the things and places they depict are imagined and that almost anything is possible. This freedom allows them to speculate on the future shape of the nation and its identity or to criticize its present government or society in a way that few other genres can. I argue that the Francophone genre writers of Quebec (and elsewhere in Canada) participate creatively in the debate over Quebec and its status as a nation on a wide range of levels, ranging from the most literal depictions of their (often cautionary) visions of near-future Quebec to the creation of what appear to be completely independent worlds, distant in time and/or space from the French-speaking province of Canada. Even the latter, however, often have something to say about what "Quebec" means. After a very brief examination of some of the literal and figurative representations of Quebec's future or alternate past, I will turn to an indepth analysis of one particular imagined community, the Asven people of Rochon's Vrenalik Archipelago.

Literal representations of Quebec by the French-speaking province's writers of science-fiction and fantasy (or, SFFQ, for short) have ranged from the erasure of the entire Canadian nation in Jean-Pierre April's story "Canadian Dream" (1982) to the creation of an independent, authoritarian state depicted in Jean-Michel Wyl's novel Quebec Banana State (1978). Jean Dion imagines Canada as the Orwellian totalitarian regime and Quebec as a subject Enclave in his story "Base de negociation" (1992). Denis Cote's uchronia "1534" (1985) also pays homage to 1984 and imagines a land called "Nu-Franz," locked eternally in the title date of Cartier's discovery of the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. These and numerous other narratives literally reimagine the geographical and socio-political boundaries of the real-life province of Quebec, each one expressing a slightly different political opinion about the questions of sovereignty and the status of Canada's Francophone population. (1)

In addition to these literal visions of alternative or future Quebecs, its science fiction and fantasy writers have created numerous imaginary worlds, many of which--consciously or unconsciously--resonate with the historical and contemporary situations of francophone Canada. Spanning the development of SFFQ during the late 1960s to today, writers have created imagined communities that forefront the problems of defining the nation and developing a national identity. The literal microcosm of Michel Tremblay's La Cite dans l'oeuf (1969) is a fantastic city in a glass egg visited by the protagonist. As Michel Lord has observed, it represents contemporary Montreal as much as the "realist" elements of the narrative set in Quebec's largest city. Maurice Gagnon's seminal urban dystopia of Les Tours de Babylone (1972), addresses contemporary fears over the role of technocrats in post-Quiet Revolution Quebec. Its depiction of the imaginary capital for a world Society, Babylon in 2380, foregrounds the motif of the duplicity of the State in its efforts to control the individual by limiting knowledge and the rejection of that control leading a protagonist to a liberating quest for knowledge, as Helene Colas-Charpentier has argued. The struggles of the individual versus the state--central to debates in the French-speaking province as its government accumulated authority in the interest, it was argued, of preserving and promoting a "national" Frenchspeaking culture--recur through the 1970s as seen in Monique Corriveau's Compagnon du soleil trilogy (1975).

Although debates over sovereignty appear to have died down after the failure of a second referendum for sovereignty-association in 1995, works of contemporary SFFQ continue to depict worlds that in many ways figure Quebec. Esther Rochon's vision of hell in the Chroniques d'enfer (1995-2000) depicts a damned woman from modern-day Montreal undergoing a series of redemptive adventures in an underworld that, at time, could be read as a mirror world for Quebec. In Francine Pelletier's Sable et l'acier (1997-1999) trilogy the imagined territories of Vilveq and Franchelande in Pelletier's respectively reflect a post-apocalyptic Quebec and an off-world France. Her more recent novel, Les Jours de l'ombre (2004) explores the issues of racial purity and cultural belonging central to traditional nationalist debates in the French-speaking province. The struggles of the Terran colonists in Elisabeth Vonarburg's epic pentalogy Tyranael (1996-1997) reflect many of the concerns of French-speakers in Canada. A figurative exploration of Franco- and Anglo-Canadian conflicts also appears in Sylvie Berard's novel Terre des Autres (2004) and its depiction of the relationship between Terran colonists and the indigenous lizard race on the planet Sielxth. (2) A beautiful example of how one particular author of Quebecois science fiction and fantasy uses the genre to explore the concepts of nation and state so pertinent to how contemporary Quebec imagines itself as a community appears in Esther Rochon's Cycle de Vrenalik (1974-2002). These novels trace the evolution of a people, the Asven, from their foundation as a nation on the Archipelago of Vrenalik through prosperity, disaster, decline, renaissance and, finally, mass migration to a new homeland on another continent. Through the imagined community of Vrenalik, Rochon explores such concepts as the nation, the State, and what it means to be a people.