[BRIEF NOTE] Who is Ringuet?

[rfmcdonald]

Yesdterday, satyadasa asked me why, on my interests page, I listed "ringuet" as an interest. Even now, two years and eight months after I first listed him as an interest of mine, I'm still the only person on Livejournal interested in this subject. What is he? satyadasa asked.

Ringuet is neither an object nor a person. Rather, my Ringuet is the authorial persona of Philippe Panneton. See this French-language biography of Ringuet, hosted by a Laval library named after him, for a more detailed biography than that provided in English here, at Athabasca University. A Canadian diplomat and winner in 1959 of the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal, Ringuet was the subject of the second chapter of my Honours English thesis.

In my thesis, I examined his famous 1938 book Trente arpents (translated into English in the 1940s by Antoine Sirois and available from McClelland and Stewart) and its subversive representation of French Canadian culture. As Réginald Hamel noted in issue 69.1 of the University of Toronto Quarterly, Ringuet was rather critical of the conservative norms prevailing in his Québec.

http://www.geocities.com/pauline_emilienne/terroirauteur3.html

Trente arpents, publié en 1938, a marqué un sommet, tant pour Ringuet que pour la littérature canadienne-française. L'ouvrage est la forme la plus achevée du «roman de la terre», genre inauguré en 1846 avec La Terre paternelle. Le roman dépeint un cultivateur profondément enraciné, qui défend les valeurs et les traditions et s'oppose aux valeurs nouvelles, issues de la civilisation urbaine, car elles viennent troubler son espace. Il illustre aussi les conflits des générations qui s'opposent pour s'approprier la terre. Contrairement à ses prédécesseurs, Ringuet abandonne l'approche idéaliste pour observer la réalité de façon objective, et il révolutionne ainsi le roman québécois.

Thirty Acres, published in 1930, represented a peak as much for Ringuet as for French Canadian literature. The work is the highest form of the "romance of the land," a genre inaugurated in 1846 with The Paternal Land. This novel depicts a farmer profoundly rooted in the soil, who defends his traditions and his values against the new values imported by the urban civilization that encroaches upon his territory. It also illustrates the conflicts between different generations which fight for control of the land. Unlike his predecessors, Ringuet abandons the idealist approach in order to objectively observe reality, in so doing revolutionizing the Québécois novel.

In my thesis, I use Thirty Acres to demonstrate the way in which Québécois novelists recognized that the whole package of traditional French Canadian nationalism--a strong attachment to rural life and agriculture, to the Roman Catholic Church, to the maintenance of the patriarchal family and to ethnic homogeneity--was fundamentally flawed and doomed to failure. At best, things could work well when the outside world allowed. More frequently, as Euchariste Moisan found to his sorrow, the ancestors of today's Québécois (and of today's Franco-Americans) embraced a secular and urbanized mass-consumption modernity as quickly as they could.

I like Ringuet and Thirty Acres (and Trente arpents, which I do own and have read in its original language). I think it a pity that more people don't appreciate him.