Anne Hebert

Poet, novelist, short story writer, dramatist, and screenwriter, Anne Hébert, who has been living in Paris since 1967, is one of the major and best-known Québec writers in Canada and throughout the world.

Her works, which have been translated into several languages, have been the subject of many articles, books, and theses. Kamouraska (1970) and Les Fous de Bassan (1982) have been adapted for the screen. In fact, these two novels, as well as her short story collection, Le Torrent (1950), her collection of poems entitled Poèmes (1960) and, to a lesser extent perhaps, Les Enfants du sabbat (1975), are all now widely recognized as classics of modern Québec literature and, as such, are part of the curriculum in many schools and universities in Canada and abroad. Not surprisingly, Anne Hébert, who was awarded several grants from the Canada Council and the Province of Québec, has been honoured with numerous prizes including the Prix David in 1952 and 1978; both the Prix France-Québec and the Prix Duvernay in 1958 for Les Chambres de bois (1958); the Prix littéraire de la province de Québec in 1959, 1961, 1967, and 1971; the Governor General’s Award in 1960 for Poèmes, in 1976 for Les Enfants du sabbat, and in 1992 for L’Enfant chargé de songes; the Prix Molson in 1967; the Prix de L’Académie royale de Belgique in 1971; the Prix Prince Pierre de Monaco and the Prix de L’Académie française in 1976; and the Prix Fémina in 1982 for Les Fous de Bassan. Elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1960, she has been a recipient of honorary degrees from the University of Toronto in 1969, the Universite du Québec à Montréal in 1979, McGill University in 1980, and Laval University in 1983.

Anne Hébert - poet, playwright, and novelist - has lived in Paris for most of the past 40 years. Perhaps her novel Kamouraska (1970) best demonstrates her literary virtuosity. By winning the prestigious Prix des Libraires de France, it earned her an international reputation. Kamouraska was also made into a successful film by the notable film maker, Claude Jutra. During Canada's 1967 Centennial, Hébert patriotically exhorted that Québec "is a country within a country" with "Québec the original heart. The hardest and deepest kernel. The core of the first time. All around, nine other provinces form the flesh of this still-bitter fruit called Canada." [Photo, courtesy General & Stoddart Co. Ltd.]

It was as the author of Les Songes en équilibre (1942) that Anne Hébert was first noticed and praised by the critics. Initially published in periodicals, the poems of that collection introduced some of Anne Hébert’s major themes and recurrent metaphors and symbols. Ill at ease in a restrictive milieu that was quick to recognize the odours of sin in earthy pleasures and whose values proved difficult to accommodate, the poet endeavoured to descend into herself and to explore her inner world where she took refuge. Poetry was the instrument of her liberation. In Le Tombeau des rois (1953) and Mystère de la parole (1960), she came to terms with her secret anguish. Struggling against her religious upbringing, she succeeded in toning down, if not in silencing forever, the insistent voices of the suffocating past.

“Au bord du torrent,” a short story published in Amérique française in October 1947, was reprinted three years later in the book entitled Le Torrent, not without difficulty, however, for the subject was giving cautious publishers cause for concern: revolt was already brewing. “I was a child born dispossessed of the world,” the assertive narrator begins before revealing the deep roots of his latent rebellion against a domineering mother anxious to sacrifice him to God in order to cleanse her soul of a persistent feeling of guilt for a sin committed a long time ago.

In Anne Hébert’s first novel, Les Chambres de bois (1958), translated as The Silent Rooms in 1974, revolt is an irresistible motive of action; the heroine finally escapes from the darkness of those closed and silent rooms where she had been kept imprisoned by an impotent husband unable to cope with the reality of the present to welcome the sunshine of a new life with someone she loves. That passage from a state of stagnation to life, it has been advanced, is not without similarities with that of a Québec society on the eve of the Quiet Revolution. Published in 1970, Kamouraska, arguably Anne Hébert’s best novel, presents a heroine willing not only to face scandal to repudiate her past but even to encourage her husband’s assassination in order to satisfy her passion. She is unable to find happiness, however, and finally falls into line.

Different by the remarkable diversity of their structures and narrative techniques, Anne Hébert’s novels have many themes in common, such as the rejection of life, the rebellion against one’s situation, the desire to live one’s own life at all costs and to love passionately, and the need to escape from one’s inner solitude and alienation. Her protagonists in constant motion between their haunting memories of a bygone childhood and the realities of their present situation, oscillate between the angel and the beast and are often attracted by the occult forces of sorcery and victims of their devouring passion. Nevertheless, they remain in quest of their own liberation.

Anne Hébert masters her craft and, staying aloof from politics and literary fashions, has created works of art of lasting significance which assure her a place with the greatest Canadian writers.