PARTISAN
REVIEW
277
theatrical performance. This is a fiction about a fiction, specifically a
novel about a television drama. "We had our manifesto read on tele–
vision after all," says Jacques Lanctot at the end: "It was a revolu–
tionary act, wasn't it?" The underlying question is not the Quebec
problem, but the role of television and the media in a divided urban
society. The struggle is between the "children of Canada's first TV
generation," who
try
to use the media as an instrument of war against
their oppressive world, and the "master of television," Trudeau, who
uses it as an instrument of control. It is this that gives the events in
Quebec their repeatable significance: the effects of the media on the
nature of communication (mainly making "act" a precondition of
"talk") and their role in the distribution of power.
The Revolution
Script
is tenaciously about this, and about the private lives of those
who enter this "theater of fright." In this too it is very different from
In Cold Blood:
the Kansas murders are the product of remoteness;
Moore presents us with an intensified proximity.
On
the face of it, Moore's attitude to his theme seems to be
clear: his position is that of the liberal committed to the values of a
printed culture who recognizes the terrible gulfs in the society he
portrays and
is
at the same time appalled by the way in which the
media enable those gulfs to be traversed not by communication but
by communique, ultimata, "statement" - all the paraphernalia of
confrontation. Trudeau can never know the way Marc Carbonneau,
the traditional working-class Marxist, feels, because he has never lived
his life, and because he is concerned primarily with his television
impact ("Just watch me" is his final comment at the end of the chapter
which has narrated his whole point of view). Equally, the FLQ are
prevented by their Marxist language from understanding the complexi–
ties of the pressures on Trudeau and the Canadian government. Their
manifesto
is
composed of a "sour Mao dough" beneath which there is
a "leaven" of truth (which it takes, probably, a book to be able to
identify). The "reasonable men" of the book are, characteristically, the
lawyers, Demers and Mergler, who
negotiate
in order to minimize
bloodshed. The story ends with a much heavier sense of the price paid
than of anything gained, with Carbonneau phoning his abandoned
family before leaving Canada for good, with Suzanne Lanctot seven
months pregnant silently brooding on her Cuban future, with James
Cross faltering as he recalls the death of Pierre Laporte. Nevertheless
there were major gains - Trudeau exposed, Levesque acknowledging
that the program of the Parti Quebe.yois would have to be radicalized,
the world aware as never before of the plight and feeling of the French
