Background

Réjean Ducharme was born on August 12, 1941, in a small town near Lac Saint-Pierre, Quebec in Canada, to Omer Ducharme and Nina Lavallée who had about five children. His mother found Réjean sad. During his childhood, he was always reading and writing at night.

Education

After a prestigious beginning in a private high school in Joliette with the Clerics of Saint-Viateur and then a foray into Montreal’s acclaimed Ecole Polytechnique (now Polytechnique Montréal), Ducharme dropped out of college after only a single semester and started working at various jobs.

Career

After a period of unemployment and odd jobs, including office clerk, shoe salesman and theatre usher, Ducharme joined the Canadian Air Force and flew to the Arctic in 1962.

In the years that followed, Réjean Ducharme hitchhiked across Canada, the United States, Mexico, and devoted them to the writing of his first novel, L'Avalée des sweets, which will be published in 1966 by Gallimard. The publication of the first work of a writer of this calibre by a French publisher is controversial in those years when Quebec nationalism knows an excitement rarely equalled.

In 1967 and 1968 were published Le Nez qui voque and L'Océantume, two novels which manuscripts had been submitted to Gallimard at the same time as the Swallowed Swallow.

In June 1968 of the same year, his first play, Le Cid Maghané, an unbridled parody of Cid de Corneille, was created in Sainte-Agathe under the direction of Yvan Canuel. It was one of the first pieces to make use of joual (popular Québécois speak) on stage.

Also in the summer of 1968, Yvan Canuel staged Ducharme's second play, Ines Pérée and Inat Tendu. In 1969, Ducharme publishes The Daughter of Christopher Columbus.

The following year, his third piece, The Lost Marquis, was premiered at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde under the direction of André Brassard, the same one who had directed the Belles-seurs.

After L'hiver de force (1973), and Les Enfantômes (1976), Ducharme stopped writing novels for 14 years until the publication in 1990 of Dévadé, followed by Va Savoir (1994) and his last novel Gros Mots (1999). But he does not give up writing. He returned to the theatre in 1978 with HA ha! ... , a rather dark work set up in 1978 at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde by Jean-Pierre Ronfard.

At the dawn of the ​1980 Québec Referendum, having become adept at portraying Québec society and its pain, Ducharme watched Francis Mankiewicz’s film Le temps d’une chasse (1972). He then decided to entrust a script he wrote to the director, and, with the help of Michel Brault’s magnificent cinematography, the film Les bons débarras (1979) was released, becoming a critical favourite and is still considered a masterpiece of both Québécois and Canadian cinema. The sequel, Les beaux souvenirs (1981), which was also Ducharme's work received mixed reviews.

In 1985, under the pseudonym Roch Plante, Ducharme also mounted a show of fifty-three artworks made from objects found during his daily walks around Montreal. He called the collection “Trophoux des annees 80,” a play on words meaning trophies (trophee) and too crazy (trop fou).

During his career, Réjean Ducharme was also a lyricist. He has written some important songs from the repertoire of Robert Charlebois, such as My Country (it's not a country it's a job), Happy in love, The Violent alone (tanned chu) and I want to love. He also composed some for Pauline Julien.

Ducharme was also a sculptor. His works, which he called trophoux, were signed by the name Roch Plante. He composed them from the garbage and debris that he picked up during his walks in the streets of Montreal.

In his latter days, Ducharme lived and worked as a freelance writer in Montreal. In 2017, he died of natural cause at age 76.

Achievements

• Réjean Ducharme was a noted Quebec writer, playwright, screenwriter, lyricist and sculptor. He was a seminal figure in the development of modern French-Canadian literature. He has been known since the debut of his novel L’Avalee des values (The Swallower Swallowed) in 1966 for sophisticated works that display a virtuosic use of the French language and are fraught with pessimism. Among other major works, one can name novels, The Nez voque (1967), The Océantume (1968), The Daughter of Christopher Columbus (1969), Devoured (1990), Big Words (1999), and his plays, The magical Cid (1968), The Lost Marquis (1969), and Ha ha!... (1978).
  
  In the cinema, Ducharme collaborated on the screenplays of two films by Francis Mankiewicz: Les Bons Débarras (1980) and Les Beaux Souvenirs (1981).
  
  Réjean Ducharme also anonymously wrote the lyrics to several of Robert Charlebois’s songs at the height of the singer’s career, including J’veux d’l’amour, J’t’haïs and Mon pays. He also composed some for Pauline Julien.
  
  Ducharme was also a sculptor. His works, which he called trophoux, were signed by the name Roch Plante. He composed them from the garbage and debris that he picked up during his walks in the streets of Montreal.
  
  In 1992, Jean-Claude Lauzon directed Léolo, a film inspired by the spirit of Réjean Ducharme's novel and in which the main character read L'Avalée des sweets. In 2005, Time magazine listed Léolo on its list of "100 best movies of all time."
  
  The singer-songwriter Patrice Michaud quotes Réjean Ducharme with his permission in the song Kamikaze: "Because love is not something, it's somewhere". He discovered this quote in the foreword of the novel Golden Square Mile (Editions L'Oie de Cravan, 2015), by Maxime Catellier.
  
  An unprecedented posthumous work by Rejean Ducharme from 1966 was also published in 2017. The book is a collection of 198 drawings and legends "that gives us to see and read the witty finesse of Rejean Ducharme," according to the publishing house.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Go Figure

    (Go Figure is the hauntingly beautiful tale of a Montreal ...)

    2016
  • Nez Qui Voque

    ((English and French Editions))

    1967
  • Oceantume

    ((English and French Edition))

    1968
  • Ha ha!...

    ((French Edition))

    1982
  • L'avalée Des Avalés 1966
  • Miss Take 2012
  • L'Hiver de force 1973
  • Les Enfantomes 1976
  • La Fille de Christophe Colomb 1969
  • Wild to Mild 1980
  • The Swallower Swallowed 1968

Views

Childhood and the rejection of the adult world are themes that recur frequently in the work of Ducharme as if the author wanted to stop the march of time, "so that remains the golden age that is childhood."

In his work, Réjean Ducharme is distinguished by the frequent use of word games, neologisms and inventions of language, which makes his style particularly alive and unique. Unlike many of his contemporaries of the 1960s and 1970s, he does not write in joual, although local expressions or Quebec swear words sometimes appear in his work.

Quotations: "I was born only once. This was done in Saint-Félix-de-Valois, in the province of Quebec. The next time I die, it will be the first time. I want to die vertically, upside down and feet up."

"At school, I was always the first to leave. I did not go there often and stayed there as little as possible. I completed my high school in Joliette, with the Clercs of Saint-Viateur. I suffered six months at the École Polytechnique de Montréal. Finally delivered, I mistook myself for an office clerk and still take me today for such. But those who hire office clerks do not want to take me for an office clerk. I do not always work and do not always work as an office clerk. Every other month, I am unemployed."

"I did not get married once again. Women do not want to marry me. If they had wanted, I would have married every day and today I would have about 5,768 children. "

"If there were no children on Earth, there would be nothing beautiful."

"I find my only true joy in solitude. My loneliness is my palace. This is where I have my chair, my table, my bed, my wind and my sun. When I am in exile, I sit in a deceitful country."

"We are not born when we are born. We are born a few years later, when we become aware of being."

"There is no way to be positive when you think about it: the future life is beautiful until proven otherwise, the past life is over and the present does not exist."

"The ungrateful struggle that must be fought to exalt the boredom of the love of the Cossidian is also Cossidian."

"I take pleasure in reading. I put myself in all the books that fall to my hand and only pull out when the curtain falls. A book is a world, a world made, a world with a beginning and an end. Every page of a book is a city. Each line is a street. Every word is a home. My eyes roam the street, opening every door, entering every home."

Personality

Réjean Ducharme has always refused any request for an interview and made no public appearance. Hardly two photos of him exist, and only a few extremely rare letters to the dailies were published early in his career. He lived in Montreal. Just as the American writer Thomas Pynchon, he lived in anonymity.

Ducharme had been friends of the couple formed by Gérald Godin and Pauline Julien, counted among his close friends, besides Charlebois and Francis Mankiewicz, the Lorraine Pintal theatre-woman who was going to edit her plays at the TNM, the novelist Micheline Lachance, the future Governor General Michaëlle Jean and his spouse, the essayist Jean-Daniel Lafond, a time his neighbors, but he always returned in his bubble, which has just burst with so many secrets with him.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Ducharme's work touches deeply because each reader has the impression that at least one sentence has been written just for him." - Tristan Malavoy
  
  "The legacy of Réjean Ducharme is immense! At the theatre, I had the chance to play his characters twice, in HA ha! ... and L'hiver de force. His characters are excessive, absolute, and playing them is extremely enjoyable for an interpreter." - Anne-Marie Cadieux
  
  "When we put Rejean Ducharme's work on the TNM (Théâtre du Nouveau Monde), the room is always full. Ducharme and the TNM is a happy marriage." - Lorraine Pintal
  
  "I have always considered Rejean Ducharme as one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. It has a relation to words that fascinates me. He had such a great command of the language, it's as if he had played all the instruments of an orchestra all by himself." - Larry Tremblay

Interests

• Reading, writing, collecting garbage for scuptures

Connections

Réjean Ducharme was married to Claire Richard but had no children. His wife acted as his agent, handling his affairs and shielding him from public life. Ducharme was said to have lived in west central Montréal. His address was published, but journalists and fellow writers seemed to agree to preserve his anonymity.

Wife:

Claire Richard Ducharme