I have been accumulating Élisabeth Vonarburg books since 2012, when I got a copy of La maison d’oubli, the first book in her La Reine de mémoire series, at the university bookstore at Université Laval, where it was one of only a handful of non-translated books in their already small fantasy and science fiction section. I got about a third of the way through but lost steam because it was so long; now I’m excited to get back to it, because I’ve finally finished another of her books, Les voyageurs malgré eux, a science fiction novel published in 1994. (it was also translated into English as Reluctant Voyagers in 1995, in which form it was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award; the original French won the Prix Aurora.) I have some reservations about it, but I was nonetheless really impressed and would definitely recommend the book.
Les voyageurs malgré eux is built around a classic and much-maligned technique of fictional information management, the infodump, in particularly in its most obvious forms: characters discussing something that everyone in their world would already know, or else characters reading in-world documents that provide them with a bunch of information that’s obviously for the reader’s benefit. Vonarburg makes the infodump the basis of the novel’s plot: Catherine Rhymer, a French woman who moved to Montreal in the ’70s to teach literature, discovers that her memory has gaps. some of these are small, but most of them are glaring: her father’s death, the basic structure of Christianity (here organized around twin messiahs, Jesus and his sister Lilith, a concept Vonarburg takes up again in La Reine de mémoire), the political divisions of the alternate Canada she lives in, the fact that it is a normal if not everyday occurrence for people to have visions of...somewhere else. another world.
these gaps mean that when Catherine listens to a conversation about politics and finds her memories of repressive anti-francophone policies in Canada (here comprising only “Canada East” — southern Quebec — and “Canada West”, British Columbia) rushing belatedly back to her, she can only wonder: why don’t I remember this already? what else have I forgotten about basic aspects of my world? crucially, Vonarburg also refuses the narrative authority that infodumps typically claim: as the novel progresses, Catherine begins to notice more and more gaps in the world-building that surrounds her, until finally everything she thought she knew — and everything she didn’t realize she didn’t know — comes crashing down.
as the parenthetical in the last paragraph indicates, Catherine’s world is very different from ours. aside from the history of Christianity (which takes a back seat to the religion(s) of the “Royaume Indépendent du Nord”, the secretive Indigenous and francophone polity that split off from Canada in the 19th century), the earliest identifiable point of divergence is that the Louisiana Purchase never happened. as a result, North America is divided into two main polities. on the one hand, there is the “American Union”, a confederation comprising the thirteen colonies under a unified government; a large francophone Louisiana; a “Fédération amérindienne” spanning what for us are the Canadian Prairies and possibly parts of the US mountain West; and a “Fédération hispanique”, which I take to be big Mexico (in the absence of Mexican-American War). on the other hand, there is Canada, which lost much of its territory in the late nineteenth century, first in the “Twenty Years’ War” with the American Union, during which the Canadian government — fearing francophone collaboration with Louisiana — forced all the francophones in Canada East to either switch to English or move to the nominally independent “Enclave” of (part of) Montreal, and then in the splitting-off of the North, where francophones fleeing repression in the south fled, collaborating with the Indigenous population to create an independent polity. also, much of the Northern Hemisphere is in effectively an ice age and has been since the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
this is, of course, very ’90s: one of the things the novel is doing is reflecting on the construction of “Quebec” and of “Québécois” identity on the eve of the second independence referendum. this aspect of the novel is definitely romanticized, though I also think Vonarburg hits on some interesting elements of the ways Québécois identity has been constituted. the kind of violent anti-francophone policies and repression Vonarburg portrays feel like a holdover from the October Crisis, perhaps mixed with a bit of Belfast in the ’90s. I don’t think this imaginary entirely justifies itself, although the developments towards the end of the novel mitigate some of this precisely because the world-building begins to fall apart: this is, in the end, a self-consciously artificial construct.
strikingly absent from this are Indigenous people — but not entirely absent. one of the major supporting characters is Joanne Nasiwi, a mixed-race not-not-agent of the North. Vonarburg describes her consistently as “métisse”, which points in part to a misunderstanding of Métis identity but also to the imagination of the North as a place of racial mixing. (as an aside, I think this is in turn related to the construction of Québécois identity, both the semi-racialization of French-Canadians in the 19th century, which I think comes from a perceived proximity to Indigenous people, and the later construction of the “pure laine” Québécois, an obvious claim to “pure” whiteness.) nonetheless, while we’re told that the francophone refugees were dependent on and partly absorbed into Indigenous communities, there is, for example, no Cree or Innu-aimun spoken in the novel. again this is explicable based on later world-building developments, but given how soon after Oka the novel was published it nonetheless strikes me as a notable gap. where are the Mohawk of Kahnawà:ke and Kanehsatà:ke in all of this? Vonarburg is attempting to imagine a world where Quebec nationalism and Indigenous sovereignty would not be in conflict, but it turns out to be a world where Indigenous people basically all speak French (plus a few English; no Cree, no Innu-aimun, no Nunavimmiutitut) and where people are still thinking in terms of blood quantum — one of the elected Councillors in the North, Kiwoe Tchitogama, is apparently one of the “few” “pure-blooded” Indigenous people left in the North. I think the things Vonarburg does within this setting are worth engaging with, but this is a large and central lacuna in her imagination of this not-Canada.
the book is very ’90s-liberal in other ways, as well, particularly in its portrayal of Catherine’s friend group in Quebec City, mainly comprised of her former students: there are Christine and Dominique, a lesbian couple, and Charles-Henri and Antoine, a gay couple. Charles-Henri is also Black, and I both cringed at and appreciated the portrayal of his first meeting with Catherine in person — cringed because she does a double-take, realizes she’s made a set of racist assumptions, and is initially awkward; appreciated because rather than retreating from this realization and from Charles-Henri she acknowledges this and consciously confronts her own biases, and ultimately the two become close friends; Charles-Henri is a major supporting character in the second half of the book.
the status of sexuality in this alternate Quebec is markedly different from our primary world, though as it’s not the focus of the novel Vonarburg doesn’t go into detail — we just know that Christine and Dominique are already married in the late ’80s and that Dominique is an ordained Catholic priest. there’s also an implication that Joanne Nasiwi and Simon-Pierre, a friend-acquaintance of Joanne’s that Catherine meets in the second half of the book, may be — consciously or otherwise — competing for Catherine’s affections, though this is complicated by later developments. Catherine seems nonplussed by the possibility of Joanne’s interest, but less because Joanne is a woman than because of personal considerations unrelated to gender/sexuality.
I often find French prose stylistically grating (particularly prose by European French authors), but I really enjoyed Vonarburg’s writing and the way she moves between registers and styles: conversational dialogue, the surreality (in the sense of more-than-real) of Catherine’s vivid dreams and visions, the conventional third-person narration, and regular passages of free indirect discourse as Catherine — just like the reader! — tries to make speculative sense of the world she’s confronted with. the movement between a more “objective” third-person perspective, a perspective closely following Catherine’s thoughts, the first-person diary accounts of some of Catherine’s dreams, and the third-person but present-tense accounts of other dreams and visions complements the sense of disorientation and epistemological uncertainty that the novel is exploring: Catherine is a reliable narrator, but a reliable narrator surrounded by a profoundly unreliable world. even during the revelations at the climax, despite the fact that I had put some of the pieces together more quickly than Catherine, I genuinely was no more sure than she was what was happening. until we finally got the whole story.
the end of the novel, as Catherine confronts the unreliability of the world and finally arrives at the heart of all the inconsistencies she has been grappling with, is a vertiginous opening-up of possibilities: of other worlds, of other — profoundly inhuman — ways of being in the world, and of change, at long last, in the world Catherine has found herself in, an escape from the both literally and figuratively frozen present into an uncertain but newly open future, or rather many futures, some hopeful, some resigned, all previously impossible. not to Mark Fisher post on main but the vibe is very much “From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again”, and I do love it.
would this book work as well in English? I don’t know. but in spite or perhaps, in some ways, because of the limits of its political imaginary I found it an engaging and enjoyable read in French and would recommend it.
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