1949
Leacock Medal
Truthfully
Yours by Angéline Hango
Interview
with humour scholar
Dr. Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard
For Audio of Podcast Return to Home Page
Truthfully
Yours by Angéline Hango is a memoir, and in
it, the author describes her childhood embarrassments and instability, her
father's alcoholism and abuse, and her mother's struggles to cope in rural
Quebec. The “truthfully” in the book's title refers to Hango’s pledge to break
from a lifelong habit of what she called fibbing about her family and stretching
the truth to fit in. With this content,
readers might wonder why the book was considered humourous and warranted the
Leacock Medal.
For some
answers. I interviewed Dr. Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard, a comparative literature
scholar, an author, and an expert on humour and women's literature in both
French and English. She is a member of Quebec’s very active humour studies
community, as embraced by the network known as l’Observatoire de l’Humour. Dr.
Mathieu-Lessard has conducted research on humour writing under the network's
founder, Professor Lucie Joubert.
In this
interview, we talked about Freud, humour as catharsis, a paper by Concordia
Professor Bina Freiwald, and how Angéline Hango’s work compares to that of a
famous American contemporary.
DBD
First of all, let
me say it's wonderful that somebody with your background and experience in the scholarly
study of comparative literature, particularly in areas of direct relevance to
the humour genre, would be impressed by Truthfully Yours. I guess a first
question would be to ask how you viewed the book. Did you enjoy it?
Dr.
Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard (JML)
Yes, I did. I
thought it was generally well written; it was playing with extreme contrasts.
And I imagine we'll discuss this later. But within this playfulness are very,
very harsh moments and the depiction of difficult or pathetic moments in the
life of the narrator.
And the
construction of the book was also really interesting in that it was mostly
chronological. I mean we start with her first years, and we end with her very
probably getting married. But it's also grouped around themes. And it's playing
with this double way of organizing the structure of the book. And she also as a
narrator reflects upon the construction of her own narrative when she compares
it with, for example, the way her own son deals with building blocks.
And she's very
conscious of the different ways she's been using to build a narrative. So, I
found all that very interesting. I couldn't compare it directly with other
books that would be similar in French in the same period although the article
by (Concordia Professor) Bina Freiwald compared her with a later narrative in
Quebec, the autobiography of Claire Martin. But one comparison did come to my
mind with an American author Betty Bard MacDonald, who wrote many humourous
autobiographical narratives in the late 40s and the 50s: narratives that were
bestsellers that were adapted into movies later, and I found a lot of
similarities in terms of style.
Although I would
say MacDonald is intentionally trying to be comical and is a lot more comical
than Hango is. But still, I found many, many commonalities between those two.
DBD
That was Betty
MacDonald?
JML
Yes. She's
called Betty MacDonald. Sometimes Betty Bard MacDonald. She's mostly known for
our first book called The Egg and I and she also wrote children's
fiction. The Egg and I tells the story of when she lived on the chicken
farm with her first husband. And she at some point is keeps the chicken farm
with her two daughters. And she talks about the hardships of her life after
that. And it's really about the quite difficult, actually difficult situation
of being really isolated in a setting that she doesn't know anything about and
making humour out of it. And that's why this comparison came to my mind: because it was really about discussing
difficult moments in her life at thst moment on the farm. And in another
narrative, she talked about when she had tuberculosis and had to stay in bed
for almost a complete year without our daughters in a sanitarium. And she
writes a comical narrative out of it.
So, it seems
similar to me in that kind of playing or cathartic use of humour to discuss
hardship.
DBD
This was during
roughly the same time period ?
JML
Exactly. MacDonald
published her first book The Egg and I in ‘45. The other one about the
sanitarium, it's called The Plague and I, the plague referring to
tuberculosis, and it's in 48. And she writes mainly in the late 40s and the
50s. And she writes also about having to find jobs in Depression-era America,
and they're almost to my knowledge all memoirs.
They are all playing
playfully with her life. And there are similarities between the two authors,
and it's also the same time. So, I couldn't think of a comparable example, at
the same time in French Canada or English Canada. But I think this this example
in America could maybe, I don't know, be a point of comparison that can be
could be of interest.
DBD
You've already
highlighted or indicated a difference though between the two authors, and that
is that Hango only wrote one book.
JML
Yes
DBD
And if she did
employ these techniques – of having different themes, following the chronology but also mapping
different themes on top of it, it must have been something that would have come
to her naturally as a function of her desire to tell her story.
JML
Yes, it does
seem like there's something that is flowing out of the narrative and that she
will later adjust. And that might be why the structure is a bit, going back and
forth with sometimes going in circles a bit before she, she moves to a new
subject. And that's when about - at a third of the narrative, if I'm not mistaken,
she starts reflecting on what she'd been doing so far with a narrative and that
it is going in many directions and that she could decide at some point - will she be mostly talking about her past in a
certain way, mostly talking about her ancestry or moving on with her own
narrative?
And so there
seems to be something natural, which would go along with what you know, she
seems to express about this in a way to review your past and to maybe make
amends and to reveal about her life and to have that cathartic experience with
writing.
DBD
So that
resonates with what she is has said publicly, I think, in different interviews,
that she didn't think she was writing a humorous book when she wrote it, she
was doing it, presumably, and this is not her words, but as you say, a
cathartic exercise to confront, shake off those demons from her childhood and putting
her father's alcoholism in perspective.
I guess we all
try and mollify things from our past that bother us in one way or another,
maybe with forgiveness, or, in this case, humour. So, I think I hear you saying
that that perception of Angéline Hango’s project in this one book makes sense
to you from your reading?
JML
Yes, it does, it
does. And also to shed light on it, maybe I can bring up the Freudian theory of
humour because I feel it helps to explain some things that might be happening,
and especially the fact that it was not intentional, because actually humour,
creating humour and having a cathartic experience are not at all mutually
exclusive.
And there's some
things that are extremely unconscious about our creation of humour, and humour
can be extremely spontaneous like this, Freud distinguishes between jokes, the
comic and humour that that he understands in a very - not limited, but very
specific way. And I really think that the humour that comes out of Hango's book
is specific to this notion of humour.
If I can explain
it very briefly, the difference would be that jokes in the comic are very
social, they need at least two people to work. Whereas humour in the moment it is
created often takes place within yourself, that takes place alone. And it often
arises when you try to escape difficult feelings. And so in trying to deal with
your own difficult feelings, you would gain pleasure by creating humour.
And you often
create humour by distancing yourself from yourself. And so having a kind of
moment where you split yourself and you look at yourself, and I really see that
at play in Hango’s narrative. First of all, because of the temporal distance,
there's the narrator, the adult who's reflecting about her past. And so there's
this temporal separation. And there's also the play all the time between
reality and what she calls the fibbing that is her way of lying about reality
to embellish it. There's always this double movement and this isolation, and I
feel Hango’s humour is both a cathartic way to express herself in a way to be free
to reveal moments in our life that have been sometimes hidden to herself. And
of course, she also revealed publicly because it is a public act, the act of
publishing,
DBD
That’s something
I never really focused on, as intently as maybe I should that interplay between
her real and imagined worlds - she presents the imagined is fibbing. My
favorite book is Don Quixote, which exemplifies that mode of the
interplay between the real and the imagined. I'll have to go back and look at Angéline
Hango’s book through that lens.
Certainly, this
is a delight for me to talk to somebody who's thought about things relative to humour
writing in such a profound way. And I'd welcome any comment you make in this
context. But if you read my comments on the book, one of the things I wondered
about, and it was partly prompted by the jacket of the book. Did the book you
got a hold of did it still have its jacket cover?
JML
No, it's a
library book. And so it's the hardcover kind put on top of the book. But it did
have the illustrations. So, it is a 1948 Oxford University Press edition. And I
was fascinated by what you were saying about that.
DBD
Yeah, there was
a lot of commentary at the time that the book warranted the humour medal because
it was a celebration of quirky, French Canadian life and rural life in French
Canada. And all these funny things are going on - her amorous affairs, and that and I thought it
was actually a distortion of what was in the text. But it's not only that that
was done by outside critics, but also Oxford University Press promoted it that
way. And, and I wonder if it at the root of that, and potentially, the awarding
of the Leacock Medal was a sort of prejudice toward French Canada in the 1940s.
It might have been perceived in Anglo circles as quirky and, and maybe backward.
As someone from the French culture, do you think that there's any merit to that
perspective on my part?
JML
Yeah, I thought that was a really interesting point you made in your presentation
of the book, because when I read it, it did not come across to me as trying to
make humour out of something that was typical. I found that the ethnographical
moments, if we can call them like this, were not necessarily the most funny. To
me, the humour really arose when there was that clash between what we discussed
earlier her fantasies or imagined life in her reality and the clash between the
two, and I did feel like there were some characters with comic potential she exploits
that in her father - father can be perceived both as really tragic at times and
really comic. And there, the
illustrations only emphasize the comic side, but I do think it's very slippery
to put emphasis only on what she depicts in the French Canadian life because
reading Freiwald’s article really highlights how there are multiple (forms of) what
she calls grids of exclusion, the narrator's subject position, and of course,
her national and ethnic identity is one of those her positioning is different
to anglophone readers because of that. But she also highlights are differences
class and her difference in being in a dysfunctional family and or difference
in being a female competing with other females for resources because she is
poor. And I found that the reading you were highlighting that people were
mostly seeing that as humour arising from cultural differences was kind of
downplaying the other parts, and especially the class difference that was
there. And I found that was one of the main sources of work.
DBD
If I am understanding
your point correctly, would you call the ethnographic elements, perhaps when
they're talking about their celebrations around Réveillon, or the French
Canadian culture weren't actually the points of greatest humour, it was more on
the human personal interplay between her parents and the outside world where
the humour arose. So yeah, that would be consistent with my take that there was
a bit of a distortion when they said that the book was all about funny French
Canadian rural life.
JML
Exactly. Yes, I
agree with that. Because I do find that the funniest moments are not about
that. And there's also this assertion about it being pictured as more funny
than it is. I didn't mention that at first. But there is that fact that because
of the illustrations, because of the way it was commercialized, I mean, humour
sells. And I find like, that's that kind of expectation of the readership might
have colored what was actually written in the narrative. So, I really agree
with you about that. And also about the fact that the depiction of French Canadian
life is not the most funny element to me. It's mainly about the clash between
her own fantasies and her reality and how she deals with that.
But I also
wanted to add, like you mentioned, that she first presented the book under a
pseudonym. That was Angéline Bleuets which is literally Angéline Blueberries to signal herself probably as coming from Lac
Saint Jean because that’s what we call people from the region where she grew up
because the blueberry is very commonly cultivated there. And I wondered if this
way of first presenting yourself to a publisher might have come across as an
attempt at humour to me sounds like a comic persona. It sounds extremely funny.
It doesn't sound like a real name at all.
DBD
So that's
interesting because I took it, just the fact that she'd used a pseudonym, to be
sort of consistent with it being a cathartic exercise, not intending, you know,
to promote yourself as a writer. In fact, if you didn't consider yourself a
professional writer. But yeah, I can see that even people that did not know the
background to the term bleuets would automatically see it as like, a humourous
kind of name. The one thing you've convinced me of is, I want to work on my
French so I can read more of you and your colleagues’ papers. I wonder if just
a closing, if you wanted to talk a bit about your own work and the circle that
you work in just to describe it for people, I found it really quite impressive.
And I think it would be really interesting to people in the Leacock Medal
circles because they are, of course, students of humour as well.
JML
Yes, certainly.
And I do think this could be the start of an interesting partnership to maybe
organize events, together a bilingual event, many of our members are bilingual,
and could take part in it all because as people translate and exchange and go
back and forth, I know what I'd be really, really interested in that. But I can
maybe describe briefly what is the Observatoire de l’Humour. So Quebec has created the first, to my
knowledge worldwide, the first school of humour - professional school of humour that gives
diplomas that are recognized by the Ministry of Education for humour be it for stage
performance or writing in L’Êcole National de L’Humour was created decades ago.
And still, to my knowledge, is the first of the kind and a bit more than 10
years ago, in partnership with the L’Êcole Nationale de L’Humour that forms
professionals that trains professionals - a group of researchers and
practitioners of humour have created the Observatoire de l’Humour. And it is a very
interdisciplinary group of people who both research and practice humour in
discussing the role of humour in society, in many forms of art - be it on stage
in literature, be it the political role of humour. And so far, the Observatoire
has generated multiple events like a conference and publications on important Quebecois
forms of humour such as humour groups, Les Cyniques and Rock et Belles
Oreilles, the two first publications
were on those two main groups. And as we are currently preparing more
publications, one of which is the anthology of women's humour, which we found
was really lacking in French. And if I have time, I might just like, briefly
present the anthology, because I think that Angéline Hango’s case made me
reflect, first of all, because the anthology is trying to map out progression,
the scope and the breadth and the richness of women's humour in Quebec. And
although women have had a lot more visibility in humour in the past decade,
they still have less visibility than the humour performed by men in Quebec.
That is still the case.
DBD
That is still
the case to a certain degree elsewhere as well.
JML
Yes.
DBD
Certainly, in
the past, it was dominated by men. And when you were talking, I was thinking
mostly of stand-up comedy, which has been brutally male-dominated. It's
changing, though. I'm really humbled by the scholarly nature of your study as
somebody who's been interested, studied it unofficially, for a long time.
JML
Thank you. I'm
really glad we can talk about that passion about humour. And yeah, I think
like, like you were saying, stand up has been dominated by men. And I'm really
interested to see what you're saying about the statistics for the Leacock prize,
which I think is really representative. We found the same thing in French, we
found that people don't know about women's literary humour in particular, and
there are a lot of forgotten women comedians, and so our anthology wants to
share text from all literary genres. So, we start with chronicles, we have
songs, obviously, parts of novels, short stories, monologues, stand-up. So,
we'll be covering multiple genres from the beginning of the 20th century until
now, and what we found is that we have quite a few chronicles and songs in the
first decades. But there is very, very little in the 40s and 50s. And I was
really interested to see Hango published during this period because we have
barely one or two titles in those decades. Whereas after in the 60s, there is a
great boom, first in literature and then in television and on the stage too,
which starts mostly with literary irony; irony is a lot more present in the 60s
in the 70s. And then we have humour and more breadth in the genres of humour
from the 90s onwards. But I think it is important for us to show the breadth of
women's humour, and we will put alongside very, very well known pieces in also
texts that have been forgotten and that we want to share for the quality of
their humour
DBD
I do not want to put you in an awkward position, but if it is not too late maybe
you can squeeze in a footnote on Angéline Hango
JML
Yes, actually.
So, our project was mostly to publish texts that are in French. So it's going
to be on Quebec and Canadian francophones. So, our criteria is that it is in
French.
But we will have
introductions to each of the texts as well as the introduction of the book. And
I really intend to mention Hango, especially because we can see connections
with other authors. So we are including Claire Martin, for example. And as Freiwald
has shown in her article, there are many parallels that we can draw on - Hango
is actually writing before Martin.
And so I think
it would be a good moment when we talk about Martin’s book that we also discuss
Hango and to show that there are connections between what is written in French
and English - so yeah, no, I'm really, really glad - it's not too late. We are
still working on the project.
So this was good timing.
