Forfending the conformisions and all forms of exclusion in its romantic cycles, the writer, to the demanding language and sometimes confusing, had received the Medici Award in 1966. She died on November 30, at the age of 82 years old.
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Major Voice of Worldly Recognized Francophone Literature, the Quebec novelist Marie-Claire Blais died on November 30 in Key West, Florida, at the age of 82 years.
Born on October 5, 1939 in Quebec City, within a working-class family of Limoilou, Marie-Claire Blais is the eldest of five children and so doomed to work early. If, at age 15, she has to leave school – a Catholic religious establishment – to work in a biscuitorie, she sees from 1957 her first poems welcomed in the journal emourage that with other Gilles Vigneult just launched.
In parallel with his work, she follows evening classes at Laval University, where she meets two people whose support is decisive for the one who already lives for writing: Jeanne Lapointe (1915-2006), Literary criticism and first literature professor in this department who becomes his mentor, and Georges-Henri Lévesque (1903-2000), Dominican and Sociologist. Both support this little sister of Françoise Sagan when she published her first novel at 20 years. The beautiful beast (1959) is doubly noticed by its literary dress and by violence and a cruditality that resolutely decide on Quebec production. Rejected Amoral, the savagery of the plot that opposes a disgraced sister to his beautiful brother but simplet amazement, especially assumed by such a young woman.
“Choral literature”
Despite or because of the scandal, the text wins the game, immediately translated and disseminated in Europe. Released at Flammarion, he is crowned with the French language award by the French Academy, usually more cold, imposing the young writer as a free woman with homosexuality assumed. Among his most fervent admirers, American critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), who rents the “poetic and passionate force” of the first novels – followed white head (1960) and the day is black (1962) -, supports his Application for a Guggenheim Foundation Scholarship.
This is Marie-Claire Blais at 23 years old in the United States, in the Massachusetts, free to scan the libraries where she elects her models, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, in Cambridge, then in Wellfleet. There, she saw some time with the couple for the feminist activist Barbara Deming (1917-1984) and the artist Mary Meigs (1917-2002), that Wilson presented her. This is where Marie-Claire Blais writes a season in the life of Emmanuel, which appears in 1965.
Crossing the types of writing – narrative, poetry, correspondence, intimate newspaper -, the writer undermines the traditional novel of terroir, disturbing the order of families. The vanguard disturbs, and the novel wipes five refusals before the editions of the day accept it. Again, the scandal succeeds in Marie-Claire Blais: the work, revealing the temptation of a “choir literature” which soon becomes his signature – she will try to pierce the mystery of these interior voices who say a world often inaudible -, is crowned by the France-Quebec Award. Accommodated at Grasset, she won the Medici Award in 1966.
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