DISCOURSE ON THE GREAT WAR. A REQUEST FOR HISTORY

MICHELINE C.AMBRON LE DISCOURS SUR LA GRANDE GUERRE. DEMANDE D'HISTOIRE (DISCOURSE ON THE GREAT WAR. A REQUEST FOR HISTORY) Depictions of war, and particularly the Great War, are relatively rare in Quebec literature, even though Quebec volunteers and conscripts experienced battle, mud-filled trenches and gas attacks. It seems that memories of this experience have not made their way into the collective memory as if war, as an event, belonged to the private sphere. Our hypothesis here is that in Quebec's discourse, war events are presented less as part of collective narratives than as elements bearing witness to an individual memory deprived of a general horizon. We examine texts of various kinds (stories and eyewitness accounts from newspapers, poems, novels, narratives) published at two specific moments in the construction of memory: contemporaneously, during the war itself, when the discursive raw materials without which memory is impossible were being accumulated; and during the aftermath of the war, when a few texts bear witness to a realization of memory that is actually erasement. The nature of the Great War and the specific characteristics of the media in which accounts were conveyed seem to lead to social actors' being "dispossessed of their original power to tell their story themselves" (Ricceur), which would partly explain how the stories were collectively forgotten or became unspoken.