British Journal of Canadian Studies

Satiric lament for a city: Mordecai Richler's Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!, Bill 101 and Montreal

British Journal of Canadian Studies (2011), 24, (1), 49–67.

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3828/bjcs.2011.5
Language
English
Pages
19

Abstract

In the last decade of his life, Mordecai Richler found some of his favourite satirical targets – cultural nationalism, special pleading, injustice and anti-Semitism – fused in the province of Quebec's aspiration for nationhood, especially as that ambition was expressed in 1977's Bill 101, the Charter of the French Language, and its many refinements. This law drastically restricted the use of English in Quebec, violating in outrageous fashion, in Richler's view, the democratic right to free expression of Quebec's non-Francophone minorities. Richler first gained notoriety among the Québécois when he published his criticisms in an article for the New Yorker (1991), which became the book Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country (1992). The present article first contextualises Richler's satire in the history of Canadian satire, then briefly in Richler's relation to Montreal, and finally in Quebec history with particular reference to language. It proceeds to offer an explication and analysis of Richler's satirical criticisms of Quebec's nationalism and language laws, and, in closing, shows more extensively that embedded in Richler's satirical analysis is a hitherto overlooked prose elegy for his beloved native city of Montreal.

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Author details

Lynch, Gerald