Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot

Canada forms the cultural and linguistic-poetological backdrop to the constellation analyzed in this review of Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot's "Godpèle" (2025). At its center is the character la Floune, who, after an existential escape into the wintry wilderness, writes a diary, gradually revealing the repressed trauma of her community—cannibalism during a catastrophic winter. The interpretation highlights that this narrative is inextricably linked to the text's bilingual structure: the juxtaposition of phonetically notated Joual and standardized French serves as a means of reflecting on language loss, cultural normalization, and the violence of linguistic smoothing. By seemingly clarifying spoken language, the standardized version simultaneously reproduces the silence surrounding the trauma. From this, the review develops the thesis that "Godpèle" stages language itself as a site of truth and repression: only in the transition from communicatively regulated speech to individual writing does the hidden become articulable. This guiding principle informs the analysis through figures, spatial arrangement, and metaphor, interpreting writing as an ambivalent practice poised between knowledge and limitation. The argument leads to the insight that only the spoken word—the breaking of collective silence—opens up the possibility of an ethically oriented future.