Content area
Full Text
In such a place every vista is an avenue of tradition and wonder, and every corner an antechamber of thrilling memory and stirring surprise.
(H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, Jan. 26, 1924)
Or il nous connaissait, nous du Québec.
(Thus, he knew us, we Québécois.)
(Esther Rochon, "La Ville lovecraftienne")
Although h. p. Lovecraft's three brief trips to Quebec add up to just over a week when combined, his writing about the province reveals a genuine understanding of its sites of memory. Reciprocally, many Québécois developed a deep-seated appreciation of Lovecraft (HPL), seen not only in obvious venues like special issues of genre magazines but also in the fiction of sf and fantasy writers like Daniel Sernine or Yves Meynard. This transcultural fertilization extends even to the province's best-known mainstream writer, Michel Tremblay. Lovecraft's "cosmic horror" (Weinstock vii) has offered thousands of Québécois a vehicle to travel through time and space, but the author whose work most patently bears the stamp of his influence is Esther Rochon. In her works which focus explicitly on HPL-five essays, a short story, and a novel-Rochon nonetheless proposes a revisionist critique of his horror. As his readers know, Lovecraft stages brilliant scenes of the Self horrified by the abjection of the Other usually depicted as a hybrid monster, an abortion of cosmic miscegenation, or an amorphous body dissolving before the protagonist's very eyes. In contrast, Rochon's fiction redeems the abject by privileging an openness to alterity and by embracing the ambiguity that comes from crossed boundaries; her work achieves acceptance where HPL's only rejects. This essay first briefly traces HPL's path to Quebec and then surveys his influence on four Québécois writers. Finally, it demonstrates how the last of these, Esther Rochon, revises the subject's reaction to the abjection of the Other found in Lovecraftian horror.
Quebec for Lovecraft
Perhaps the brevity of his time in Quebec justifies scholars' lack of interest in this aspect of Lovecraft's work, and while not entirely absent, French-Canadian themes and characters are rare in his fiction (e.g., "Ibid"; "The Call of Cthulhu" 89). And yet, those few days on foreign soil, accumulated during rail excursions made in early September of 1930, 1932, and 1933, left an indelible impression on the writer....