Neptune Redux

The (First) Nation(s) Enacted in Alexis Martin's Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France

Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France (Invention of Central Heating in New France) is the first of a trio of plays penned by Alexis Martin as part of his project entitled Histoire révélée du Canada français 1608–1998 (A Revealed History of French Canada 1608–1998). A prolific and beloved actor, director, and playwright, Alexis Martin has been a central figure of Québec's theater scene since the early 1990s. While he works regularly in film and television, he is closely associated with Montréal's Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental (NTE) and with its founders Jean-Pierre Ronfard and Robert Gravel. Martin has been the artistic codirector of the company since 1999, a role he now shares with his close collaborator Daniel Brière (the two were at the helm of the Histoire révélée trilogy produced by the NTE between 2012 and 2014). As a playwright, Martin often investigates the centrality of language in Québec, creating existential encounters between colorful characters from various socioeconomic, linguistic, and even temporal strata. His eclectic theatrical world is thus composed of past productions in which Mafiosi and intellectuals, Hitler and God, priests and waitresses uncomfortably and often hilariously rub elbows. Unsurprisingly, Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France features encounters between Samuel de Champlain, Jesuits, an Innu spiritual leader, and a group of aficionados of historical "cosplay" (costume play as a hobby).

In a 2012 interview, Martin mused on what he perceived as the relative absence of historical dramas in Québec's theatrical canon. Noting the scarcity of texts dramatizing the early days of Nouvelle-France, the defeat of the French forces on the Abraham Plains, or the lives of historical figures such as Marc Lescarbot or the Comte de Frontenac, for example, Martin asked whether this silence, this form of cultural forgetting, was "the lot of the defeated." The title of Martin's ambitious trilogy — A Revealed History of French Canada 1608–1998 — clearly positions the plays as a corrective gesture to Québec's so-called cultural and historical forgetting and announces the author's desire to illuminate what he sees as Québec's obscured past. If Martin is quick to point out that he is not a historian and that his plays do not pretend to show the truth about the past, the trilogy's website and Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France's program nevertheless feature an exhaustive bibliography of the scholarly and historical texts Martin consulted to pen his plays, giving the whole project the seal of legitimacy that comes with archival research.

As its title suggests, Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France (hereafter Invention) explores history through the theme of cold and positions frigid temperatures and harsh weather conditions as central driving forces in the formation of Québécitude (which I use here to denote the French Québécois de souche identity). Explaining this dramaturgical choice, Martin notes in an interview published in the major newspaper Le Devoir: "Cold has really forged our identity. And it still does. From the beginning, cold, for example, has made us create alliances with Aboriginal people, if only so that we could survive the first winters." In each of Invention's interwoven storylines Québécitude thus emerges from the thermal shock of winter, from unlikely alliances devised in times of need, and from the ingenuity required to survive the long winters' extreme cold. The action of the play jumps from the winter of 1606, which led to the formation of L'Ordre de Bon Temps (the Order of Good Cheer) in the colonial outpost of Port Royal, to the "Storm of the Century" in 1971 during which more than eighteen inches of snow fell on Montréal in less than twenty-four hours, burying the city under a thick white blanket. Bookending the play is the ice storm that paralyzed the southern part of the province (including Montréal) in 1998, leaving thousands without heat for weeks in the dead of winter.

According to Martin, the structure of the play and of the trilogy as a whole emulates the geometrical structure of a snowflake:

The play comports 6 branches that each constitutes a condensed scenario, the temporality of which is reversible. This dramatic structure is diachronic-hexagonal and evokes the shape of a snowflake. Thus, 6 sequences of events (or scenes) converge to a center, which is the temporal space that structures the trilogy as a whole. This center, always the year 1998, is the neutral space that allows the transit from one era to the next, from one theme to the next.

The notion of reversible temporality is important here, since it allows Martin to jump back and forth in time and to revisit and establish resonance between disparate historical and fictive events. Through these episodes of extreme winter weather, Martin imagines, often with poetic humor, a genealogy for the French Québécois de souche in which survival and adaptation, colonial alienation and a desire for liberation, and ultimately nationhood produce a narrative of resilient presence on a harsh landscape.

In conversation with Martin's Invention and its articulation of Québécitude, this chapter first meditates on theater's intimate role in shaping national memory and a community's sense of self. As Alan Filewod argues, "theatre models the society in the process of enactment ... transform[ing] experience into a community narrative and ... materially construct[ing] in the audience the community it addresses in its texts." The nation and theater produce and legitimize each other in "the elation of spectacle." Through the process of bringing people together to witness storytelling, theater (the space and the performance) solidifies a community's sense of self in a process that simultaneously erases that (bodies, events, etc.) which threatens its narrative's coherence. In this sense, theater participates in what Ernest Renan qualified as a form of necessary forgetting in this oft-cited passage of Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?

Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things. ... All French citizens must forget the Saint-Barthélemy, the massacres in the South of France during the XIIIth century.

Renan, who...