Hubert Aquin - Next Episode

No interpretation excludes all others, but I have difficulty understanding how this novel could be read otherwise than as a modern fable of Romantic despair. Unless, of course, its meaning is presumed to follow from the purported revolutionary intentions of the author.

Everything in Next Episode is set in counterpoint and inverted images. The narrator imagines dashing figures of revolution and counter-revolution in vivid contrast to his own desperate situation. Yet the characters he creates are strangely ineffective and constantly shackled by doubt and ambiguity; they flounder about, without a clear purpose, in a world that is painfully beautiful and where nothing is truly what it seems.

“I am the fragmented symbol of Quebec’s revolution, its fractured reflection and its suicidal incarnation,” writes the narrator of Next Episode . The inescapable paradox of the novel, however, arises from the fact that collective identity is a source of depression and, ultimately, of defeat and despair, rather than the foundation for revolutionary action. Because it is dictated by the collective disability, the novel itself becomes a form of suicide: “I give in to the vertiginous act of writing my memoirs and I start writing up the precise and meticulous proceedings of an unending suicide.” Thus, the writing of the novel, however accomplished, does not generate a form of liberation; rather, it is a measure of defeat.

The true test, however, is not whether the meaning of the novel is to be found in its traditional ending or in its reference to the “next episode,” or whether one interpretation is more convincing than the other. The true test remains the reading of the novel as a unique combination of style and structure, beyond whatever images of its author’s circumstances.

Correspondence of G. Sand and Alfred de Musset (Brussels: E. Deman, 1904), p. 40.