The French Heritage: From Utopia to Eden - Literature and Painting in Quebec: From Imagery to Identity - page 12

sources and modes of this heritage, what were the French mental struc-
tures prevalent at the time of Cartier and Champlain?
While most historians readily characterize the European Renaissance
(extending from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century) as
an era of discovery - intellectual, artistic, scientific, and geographic -
the geographer Luc Bureau argues that, in addition, there was a central
ideological value (or mental structure): 'S'il existe une aspiration qui
caractérise le monde intellectuel de la Renaissance, c'est bien la recher-
che de l'unité.' (107; If there exists a single aspiration that characterizes
the intellectual world of the Renaissance, it is truly the quest for unity.)
Bureau calls this trait 'utopian,' describes it as a geometric vision im-
posed on geographic space, identifies it as a primary motive in the
colonization of the Americas, and contends that its traces still persist in
the landscape:
La foi commune en la raison humaine capable de commander la nature,
l'idée qu'une loi unique organise tous les phénomènes de l'univers, la
possibilité offerte à l'homme d'ordonner le monde selon un plan pré-
existant, se fusionnèrent alors pour faire de l'espace un simple prétexte à
l'exercice d'un pouvoir aux ambitions universelles. Au particularisme des
aménagements spatiaux précolombiens devait donc succéder une straté-
gie d'uniformisation déconcertante dont sont toujours témoins les pay-
sages américains contemporains.' [108; The common faith in a human rea-
son capable of commanding nature, the idea that a single law governs all
the universe's phenomena, the possibility offered to man to order the world
according to a pre-existent plan, all fused together to make of space no
more than a pretext for the exercise of a power with universal pretensions.
The particularities of pre-Columbian spatial organization thus had to yield
to a disconcerting strategy of uniformization to which contemporary
American landscapes still bear witness.]
In the terms of our study, the Renaissance vision of space involves the
domination of nature ('commander la nature') by culture ('la raison hu-
maine'), 2 and indeed, Bureau bases the overall organization of his fasci-
nating book, Entre l'éden et l'utopie: Les fondements imaginaires de l'espace
québécois , on precisely this distinction: the myth of Eden is based on
nature - 'L'Éden est le pays de la nature originelle, des forces insou-
mises, des forêts excessives et indisciplinées' (12; Eden is the land of
original nature, of untamed forces, of vast, uncontrolled forests) - the
myth of Utopia is founded on culture: 'L'Utopie est le domaine de la