Beautiful, excessive and rich with lyrical flights, Robert Lalonde’s eighth novel is the story of Aubert, a poet of the woods on a quest to find his lost paradise. His journey takes him from a Mattawin lumber camp to the City of Light and back to his home country, where, hit by an epiphany, he realizes that paradise isn’t what happened in the past; it’s what might happen in the future. And that the poet’s mission is to call forth that paradise—like the witchdoctor prays for the sun or rain. Winner of the 1994 Governor General’s Award for French Fiction and the 1995 France-Québec/Jean-Hamelin Prize, Little Eagle with a White Head is a monumental novel, a philosophical essay and a poem praised by critics far and wide.

An actor, playwright and translator, Robert Lalonde is one of Quebec’s leading novelists. Seven Lakes Further North was a finalist for the 1993 Governor General’s Award for French fiction. His previous novels published in translation by Ekstasis Editions include The Ogre of Grand Remous, The Devil Incarnate, One Beautiful Day To Come and The Whole Wide World.

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The Igniter of Souls

by Delrufus

It took Robert Lalonde three years to create Aubert, the character in his novel Little Eagle with a White Head—his experimental ego, as Kundera used to say. You could even mistake Aubert for the author because he’s like him in so many ways. Just like the Little Eagle, Lalonde writes frantically, because he’s afflicted and torn by an unknowable wound that will only disappear when he dies. Like the poet, whose story he writes so well, Robert Lalonde is sworn enemy to violence and death. Like him, he caresses madness with the hand that’s not holding the pencil, works against progress and tries to shake up the world. Like him, he accepts the tragedy of existence and even feels metaphysical shame over it. Life also appears as a fable, the world as a great theatre, and the universe as a dream.
Like Aubert, he struggles against forgetting. For a modern writer, struggling against forgetting is a battle against the prevailing mood and the invasiveness of comedy. It’s about meeting reporters who are in a hurry—sometimes even friends—who zap, quibble, digress, get on their high horses, in short, people who talk about everything except the content of his most recent novel, Little Eagle with a White Head (Seuil).
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How do you get cured from forgetting? How do you escape from it? Lalonde makes this the central theme of this very powerful and pamphleteering book about the life of Aubert, the Little Eagle with a white head, a poet who travels through the 20th century armed with his Fruits of the Earth—his essential pagan bible—flanked by his aunts Alma, Fatima and Claire, the sugar bush fairies—with his brother Vianney, his juniorate friends, his accomplices from the logging camp, where he’ll be a luminous animal, and his companions in amnesia and those from the asylum.
“No one wants to hear about this vocation for forgetting, about this habit we have of walking beside ourselves, of wanting something and not wanting it. Of walking forward and backward at the same time. Of wanting to be immobile at any price. I see the result of this when I’m on tour these days: a country of shopping centres and scattered stores. A country poets tried to fight against,” he says, getting carried away, and even more intoxicated with dismay than Aubert, whom he created so brilliantly.
And since names are necessary, still more names, let’s say that Aubert is a hybrid conceived in-vivo from an anthology of Quebec poets that fate placed before Robert Lalonde’s very busy eyes. First and foremost, Aubert is François Hertel, the forgotten man of letters whose words and writings have fallen into disuse, and who, like Aubert, only got a nearly posthumous recognition from feverish academics. Fiercely anti-clerical, rebellious and liberal, Hertel was very much like the Little Eagle. Or is it the opposite? Aubert is also Jean-Jules Richard, Alain Grandbois and Saint-Denys Garneau all in one. And Nelligan, of course.
Little Eagle with a White Head is a vibrant homage to those poets who’ve disappeared from our collective memory, a superb entreaty written to shake up a country haunted by forgetting. This is no doubt the reason behind the lyrical, passionate, tight and intricate writing. Which yields very beautiful pages that rattle the reader who lingers over them and ignite the soul of the one who surrenders to them.
Like all exiles from paradise, Aubert will smoulder, celebrate his desires, live intensely, experience the dizziness of animal instinct, because “human nature has remained bestial, despite the perverse philanthropies of progress.” In Little Eagle with a White Head, friendship doesn’t happen without violence or desire. Aubert will find tender love with his brother, Vianney, with Rémi, the pianist, and with Pauline, his gentle muse.
“Aubert lived at a time when names weren’t given to things. People entered secretly into relationships that defied all definitions, and became precious as a result,” he explains.
“We hide that part of desire in friendship, just as we hide everything from ourselves. We’ve emerged from a very long silence and we’ve had to give names to things. But instead of poets, the moralists have done this, the Janette Bertrands of this world. We must give a name to personal experience. As Gaston Miron said recently to a group of young people: “Your personal experience doesn’t interest me, if you don’t do anything with it, if it isn’t creative.”
What Aubert and Robert Lalonde are saying is simple. “We must accept the tragedy of existence. To live, feel pain, love and feel loved.” But today, their appeal falls on deaf ears like a shout in the wilderness, like a bottle tossed into the ocean. Because the herd wants to laugh. The herd has no use for tormented souls. Humourists take up the whole stage. And Robert Lalonde is complaining about it.
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It’s often been said that nature is a recurring theme in Lalonde’s work, including this latest novel. Just like presence of the father figure. Besides, he’s written Le Fou du père (The Father’s Madman), a story where he dismisses the psychological aspect of the issue. In Little Eagle with a White Head, the father’s voice asserts itself more than ever. His sayings abound and they’re little jewels of wildlife philosophy. Much to our enjoyment. “Even when a bird walks, you can feel it has wings,” his father will say to explain that a smart man never becomes stupid, even when fate hits him.

Tears well up in Lalonde’s eyes when he remembers his father. “He was a very fatalistic man, who was implacably wise nonetheless. He left me a considerable legacy, one that is very rich and fertile,” he says. And he hasn’t forgotten it. Proof that we can, in fact, escape from forgetting.

Excerpts from “The Igniter of Souls,” by Pierre Cayouette, Le Devoir, Saturday, September 17, 1994. Translated by Jean-Paul Murray, trad. a.