RÉJEAN DUCHARME
Literary giant mourned
Réjean Ducharme, the “invisible” author who helped shape Quebec literature and theatre in the 1960s, died on Monday, French book publisher Éditions Gallimard announced. He was 76.
The author found success at 25 with the publication of his first novel, L’avalée des avalés, in France by the prestigious Éditions Gallimard, the third publishing house he had approached. It was later translated into English under the title The Swallower Swallowed.
Ducharme, who was also a dramaturge, playwright and lyricist, was born in St-Félix-de-Valois in the Lanaudière region on Aug. 12, 1941. His father was a taxi driver and his mother was a housewife. In a 1966 interview with RadioCanada, he said his parents never read his books.
That same year, Ducharme won the Governor General’s Award for L’avalée des avalés and was nominated for the Goncourt prize in France.
He earned a second Governor General’s Award in 1982 for a play titled Ha ha! about four people sharing an apartment. His other plays, Le Marquis qui perdit (1970) and Prenez-nous et aimez-nous (1968), were republished under the title Ines Pérée et Inat Tendu in 1979.
Ducharme shunned publicity and treasured his privacy after the publication of his first novel in 1966. He lived in the Pointe-St-Charles neighbourhood of Montreal with his partner, Claire Richard, who acted as the link between the public and the writer. While the location of his residence was known to other artists, his privacy was respected.
Throughout his career, only a few photos of the author were circulated.
Ducharme wrote the screenplays for the films Les bons débarras (1979) and Les beaux souvenirs (1981). He also anonymously wrote the lyrics for multiple songs by Robert Charlebois and Pauline Julien. His last novels, Dévadé, Va savoir and Gros mots, were published in 1990, 1994 and 1999, respectively.
During his youth, Ducharme studied at the Clerics of St-Viateur and École Polytechnique de Montréal, which he left after a year.
“I suffered six months at the École Polytechnique de Montréal,” he later wrote.
“At school, I was always the first to leave. I did not go there often and stayed there for as short a time as possible.”
His flagship work, L’avalée des avalés, presents the inner monologue of the young Berenice who, rejecting the world of adults and traditional values, invents the “berenicien,” an asocial and incomprehensible language. Ducharme would often place fiercely individualistic adolescents, seeking knowledge and love in a world they consider restrictive and hypocritical, at the forefront of his works.
Le Nez qui voque (1967) is the diary of a teenager who formed a suicide pact with his girlfriend in order to avoid the compromises of adult life. In his 1968 L’Océantume, two young girls turn away from the adult world to travel together to the sea. La Fille de Christophe Colomb (1969) is an epic parody of rhythmic quatrains, while the heroes are older but equally intransigent in L’Hiver de force (1973) and Les Enfantômes (1976).
His plays, like his novels, call upon a particular form of language, populated by play-on-words and metaphors.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Ducharme did not write in joual, although local expressions or oaths sometimes appeared in his work.
To earn his living, Ducharme was a taxi driver like his father, a proofreader and a sculptor. He composed his sculptures from the rubbish and debris he collected during walks in the streets of Montreal, signing them Roch Plante.
Prior to publishing, he travelled to the Arctic with the Canadian Air Force in 1962. He also travelled Canada, the United States and Mexico hitchhiking in 1965. His only comment: “It’s tiring. “
His favourite subjects and the secrecy surrounding the intimate life of the author have exacerbated several comparisons between Réjean Ducharme and the American writer J.D. Salinger. The latter, however, lived in total confinement and did not publish anything for decades, unlike Ducharme.
He collected several prizes as a ghost writer, including the Quebec-Paris, the Gilles-Corbeil Prize and the Athanase-David Prize — prizes he never collected for himself.
Director Jean-Philippe Duval had drawn a portrait of the author in a documentary titled La Vie a du charme in 1992, inspired mainly by the writings of Ducharme.
In 2000, Ducharme was appointed an officer of the Ordre national du Québec.
Upon its 50th anniversary in 2016, the publication of L’avalée des avalés was designated a “historic event” by the government of Quebec, under the Cultural Heritage Act, joining a list of significant events in the history of Quebec, such as the arrival of the Filles du roi in New France, the signing of the Treaty of Paris and the Second World War.
“The next time I die, it will be the first time. I want to die vertically, head down and feet up,” he wrote.
Ducharme’s partner, Claire Richard, died last summer