Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau

Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau (Montreal, June 13, 1912 - Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier, October 24, 1943) was a Canadian poet, writer, letter writer, and essayist, who "was posthumously hailed as a herald of the Quebec literary renaissance of the 1950s".

He spent his early years at his family's ancestral manor (which his mother had purchased) in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault (now Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier), Quebec, where his cousin Anne Hébert was born in 1916.

Garneau moved to Montréal with his parents in 1923.

There, he studied the classics at three Jesuit colleges: Sainte-Marie, Jean de Brebeuf and Loyola.

In 1925, Garneau studied painting at Montreal's Collège des beaux-arts with Paul-Emile Borduas, Jean Palardy, Marjorie Smith and Jean-Paul Lemieux.

He won a bronze medal and second prize for a work of art.

In 1934, he exhibited some paintings at the Galerie des Arts in Montréal and, in 1937, he presented his painting "Sky Fall" at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Still in his youth, he founded the monthly journal La relève with his friends Paul Beaulieu, Robert Charbonneau, Robert Élie and Jean Le Moyne.

In 1934, Garneau developed a rheumatic heart problem and discontinued his studies.

He then devoted his time to writing poems, painting and music.

He is mainly recognized for his literary work - in particular, for the only book published during his lifetime, entitled Regards et Jeux dans l'espace, published in 1937 - but he was also a painter.

Almost all of his writings are published, without cuts (around 2600 pages), between 1970 and 2020.

Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau was the grandson of the poet Alfred Garneau and great-grandson of the historian Francois-Xavier Garneau.

In 1937, Regards et jeux dans l'espace, his collection of poems, was published.

Garneau wrote poetry prolifically between 1934 and 1937; on one day alone (October 22, 1937), he reportedly wrote 13 poems.

In his lifetime, though, he published only one slim volume, the 28-poem Regards et jeux dans l'espace.

"Radical in its form, with its unrhymed lines of various lengths, its lack of punctuation and its broken syntax.".

Regards et Jeux dans l'espace was published in March 1937 and received a rather cold reception from critics, which (we like to believe,) would have deeply shaken the author.

However "contrary to what has been said, Garneau is in no way discouraged by the critical reception: What is to be feared here is the silence he wrote. Also, a month after the publication, "he even undertook, which is completely surprising on his part, an advertising 'campaign' to publicize his book and even then, Garneau did not foresee any particular difficulty in terms of critical reception".

De Saint-Denys Garneau constructed the book according to a very meticulous plan: the layout of the titles and sections in no way determines the layout of the poems.

Moreover, one must constantly leave the text and its comprehension and jump to the table of contents to know the titles, the numbers or the order of the poems, since in the text some are titled, others not.

These choices are not arbitrary, the table of contents of the original edition having been meticulously prepared by de Saint-Denys Garneau.

Looks and Plays in space is composed of twenty-eight poems and divided into seven sections, unified, when we add "Accompaniment", unnumbered, at the end of the seventh section, entitled "Untitled".

As Romain Légaré underlines: “the book is supported, like a vital necessity, by an indestructible law, that of the unity of opposites”.

For a long time, the “I” of the different speakers (living things, objects and “others”) in this book has been confused with the more erased one of the poet himself.

The poems, however, are mystery enough.

On the original form of this poetry, François Hébert writes:

"'In a very stripped-down speech, the simplest on the surface, but with extremely varied registers, as long as you listen to it, Garneau inlaid a thousand and one surprises [...]: rhymes or assonances and unexpected references ('chaise', double phonetic and semantic contraction of a 'malaise' and a 'chose'), jarring syntax ('living and art'), phonetic gambols (of 'je' to 'jeu', from 'moi' to 'joie' via 'pas'), semantic breaks and leaps (from 'body' to 'soul', from 'self' to 'world'). [...] The verse is mostly odd. And irregular, whimsical even, [...] with its gaps, its variations, its arabesques. [...] Bizarrely laid out on the page (as a staircase, irregularly spaced), the verses abound in unforeseen rhymes, in clever alliterations, placed as if by chance [...]'"

Alain Grandbois sums it up: “Garneau's poetry [...] seems to me to provide the most perfect expression of the most astonishing freedom.

it unties the chains, escapes and rejoins total emancipation.

". Even if de Saint-Denys Garneau himself would have been disappointed with its reception, Regards et Jeux dans l'espace is today considered one of the most important books of Quebec poetry.

The recent declassification of many unpublished letters by Garneau calls for a rereading of all of his correspondence, which can no longer simply be considered as a sideline to the work, as it links all the pieces of it.

The letters form the most massive part of his work (920 pages, "well packed").

Garneau likes to write long letters, until physical exhaustion.

He discusses his readings, compares such and such a composer, comments on an exhibition of paintings, tells an anecdote, paints a portrait, describes a landscape, etc: each time, he 'walks around what he is among what there is.

', reconstituting with precision “every moment of what he presents as a game in which he is both the witness and the actor”.

His story unfolds “before our eyes like a comic strip using simple lines, barely sketches.

[...] he died in 1943 of a heart attack, after canoeing alone."

Garneau first achieved some notice as a poet as a boy of 13, when his poem "Le dinosaure" took first prize in a province-wide essay competition.

Two years later, he was awarded a prize by the Canadian Authors' Association for his poem "L'automne".