A Nation's Ills: Medico-National Allegory In Quebec, 1940-1970.

Abstract

When literary and political discourses in mid-twentieth century Québec suddenly turned to tropes of illness and disease, nationalist critics deemed the nation that these illness narratives posited to be sick. Public health reports nevertheless attest to the rapidly improving health situation at this same time. Although the medical tropes created a paradox in which the nation is perceived as sicker than it actually is, Québec’s novels and political writings nonetheless expose the ways in which the relation of the medicalized body to the nation is challenged and disrupted.

Working from the idea that nations and diseases come into being via parallel discursive processes, textual illnesses are revealed to not only be incomplete national allegories, but also allegories that are themselves “sick” in their inability to posit a nation. Gabrielle Roy’s urban novels, Bonheur d’occasion and Alexandre Chenevert, along with André Langevin’s Poussière sur la ville, expose the ways in which diagnosing disease is not analogous to pronouncing the nation sick. Denis Lord’s Aller-retour and Anne Bernard’s Cancer use the figure of the sick doctor to question the nationalist historiographic tendency to read the Quiet Revolution as the end to the problematic rule of Québec’s traditional socio-cultural elites. Even, the political journal Cité Libre reveals how medical rhetoric in Québec has transformed itself over time from expressing notions of sickness to those of cure.

In rhetorically shifting sickness away from the nation and onto national allegories themselves, illness narratives are reframed as therapeutic spaces of resistance and cure, which destigmatize Québec’s national literature, and render the nation itself healthier. By acknowledging that it is the illness-driven process of positing the nation that creates the dire prognosis, it in turn becomes possible to move beyond the sick or victim-oriented idea of the nation popular in certain nationalist circles.