[Shek provides an overview of Maillet's work, praising her style and use of language.]

Late in November, 1979, the Académie Goncourt announced that its prestigious annual prize for literature had been awarded to Antonine Maillet, the prominent Acadian novelist, playwright and short-story writer. This was the first time that the coveted honor, created in 1874 by the will of Edmond de Goncourt, (who, with his brother Jules, was a pioneer of the naturalist novel) was offered to a writer living outside France. Antonine Maillet won it for her novel Pélagie-la-charrette published in Montreal by Leméac and in Paris by Grasset.

Before having affixed to her name the label "Prix Goncourt", Antonine Maillet was best known as the author of the brilliant, moving and expressive series of dramatic monologues, La Sagouine, written in the rhythmic and colorful Acadian dialect of the Bouctouche region of New Brunswick, where she was born. This ancient speech (only slightly sprinkled with anglicisms and names of commercial products by La Sagouine), nearly extinct today, was brought to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries by the colons of Poitou and Touraine. Its peculiar morphology, phonetic system and lexicon were rendered inimitable by the outstanding interpretation of actress Viola Léger.

Maillet's writing career began more than 20 years ago. Her first book was Pointe-aux-Coques, a novel, published in 1958, and was followed by five other novels: On a mangé la dune (1968), Don l'Orignal (winner of the Governor General's Award, 1972), Mariaagélas, (1973), Emmanuel à Joseph à Dâvit (1975) and Les Cordes-de-bois (1977). Besides La Sagouine (1971), she has published six other plays, the short-story collection Par derrière chez mon père (1972), and her doctoral dissertation, Rabelais et les traditions populaires en Acadie (1971).

Antonine Maillet is both a product of, and a catalyst for, the cultural renewal among New Brunswick francophones. Her creative activity grew out of the burgeoning cultural and political awakening of the 1960's during which time the Université de Moncton was created, there took place the struggles of that city's one-third French-speaking population against the bigoted Mayor Leonard Jones, and, eventually, the Parti acadien was formed. Her books were published in parallel with the release of Pierre Perrault's film, L'Acadie, L'Acadie (1971), the records of Edith Butler, Calixte Duguay and Angèle Arsenault (who is from P.E.I.) and those of the musical group, "1755". Some feel that these movements of cross-fertilization have come too late to stem the tide of assimilation in New Brunswick, which has had a history of turbulent struggles to maintain the "French fact". Yet Antonine Maillet and the other creative forces of the Acadian renewal are determined to carry on. It should, however, be noted that they depend a great deal on material support from the institutions and public of Quebec, which certainly acts as the foyer of French-language culture in Canada, and whose own cultural flowering and growing self-confidence have been fundamental supports for the Acadian revival.

Maillet's novel, Pélagie-la-charrette, is in fact linked to a capital moment of her people's history, namely the expulsion in 1755 of the Acadians, mainly grouped then in Nova Scotia, by the British forces, and their scattering throughout the southern colonies of the Atlantic seaboard. This traumatic reference point is variably (and sometimes, euphemistically) called in the novel, La Déportation, le Grand Dérangement, l'Evénement, La Grande Echouerie, La Dispersion.

The novel is indelibly marked by the rhythm of continuity, which is its lifeblood and heart-beat. The dedication by the author is to her mother, Virginie Cormier, an identically named ancestor of whom is one of the characters, and the book ends with the inscription, "Bouctouche, le 23 juin, 1979, en cette année du 375e anniversaire d'Acadie". The very title, named after the heroine who will lead a ragamuffin band of remnants of her people back to Acadia during a 10-year-long trek on foot and in carts of all sizes and shapes, also underlines the dominant theme of continuity: "C'était coutume en Acadie d'apporter en dot une charrette à son homme, la charrette, signe de pérénnité."

The narrative structure, based on a lineage of chroniclers retelling the saga at a distance of 100 years (at the end of the 19th century and today, at the end of the 20th) is, too, one of continuity. The unobtrusive primary narrator in the present (who says symbolically "moi, qui fourbis [nettoie] chaque matin mes seize quartiers de charrette", relates most of the events of the epic return of the Acadians between 1770 and 1780 as they are told to her by her cousin, "le vieux Louis à Bélonie, dit le jeune", who himself had them passed down from his grandfather, Bélonie, a story-teller of the late 19th century, who used to argue about the fine points of the heroic feat with Pélagie-la-Gribouille,both of the latter descendants, respectively, of the nonaganerian Bélonie and the original Pélagie, who actually lived the saga of the arduous homecoming. Continuity is also syncopated by the recurrence of names of typically Acadian families, such as Bastarache, Le Blanc, Landry, Gaudet, Doucet, Maillet and others, and by the Acadian fashion of designating the lineage of male characters through their male line: e.g. "Pierre à Pierre à Pierrot."

Pélagie-la-charrette has other important rhythmic devices that give cohesion and unity to the novel, and fuse its form and content into a whole. One of the most vital of these is the dédoublement between the oxen-led charrette of Pélagie, that of life, of hope, of optimism, and the ghostly charrette de la mort, that of destruction, despair and fatalism, with its six black horses constantly evoked and perceived by the wizened Bélonie, as travelling alongside, and sometimes in the very ruts of, Pélagie's vehicle. The two charrettes "compete" mercilessly throughout the narrative. Old man Bélonie, too, is the source of other elements of fantasy, as he recounts tales of visions of Black Beard, of flaming pirate ships, of the White Whale, and the hallucinatory ringing of the church-bells of Grand-Pré, the village razed to the ground by the British, during sea storms.

The story is structured, too, by the refrain of the traditional Acadian folk-song, "Le Grain de Mil" ("Et j'ai du grain de mil, et j'ai du grain de paille, et j'ai de l'oranger, et j'ai du tri, et j'ai du tricoli …") which is sung on the relatively few happy occasions that broke the suffering of the exiles. Another refrain is that of the expletive, "et merde au roi d'Angleterre", evoked when the burning of the church at Grand-Pré or other tribulations at the hands of British commanders Lawrence, Winslow and Monckton are recalled. Also, there is frequent repetition, with variation, of the phrase, "N'éveille pas l'ours qui dort …" This reference to the Loyalist majority of New Brunswick is evoked at the very outset of the novel, in the prologue: "… surtout pas l'ours qui dort sur le marche-pied de ton logis. C'est pourquoi l'Acadie qui s'arrachait à l'exil, à la fin du XVIII^e siècle, est sortie de ses langes tout bas … Elle est rentrée au pays par la porte arrière et sur la pointe des pieds." It echoes at the end of the novel, too: "Surtout, n'éveillez pas l'ours qui dort. Rentrez chacun à votre chacunière sur la pointe des pieds et attendez le temps qu'il faut." In her commentaries on La Sagouine, Maillet had already explained her views on the passive resistance of the Acadians to discrimination and inequality and the importance of patience and subterfuge in their struggles to redress ancient ills.

While the British troops of the 1755 events and their aftermath are often the butt of Maillet's irony and bitterness, she creates a counter-movement by linking to the Acadian exiles a host of episodic characters belonging to other wronged peoples: Micmac Indians, a Scottish woman miracle-healer, a freed Black slave (sometimes treated a touch paternalistically), the witches of Salem, and, finally, the American rebels of 1776. Yet the rancour of the past gives way to forgiveness, in the hope of starting life anew on Acadian soil: "… le printemps qu'on lui avait volé, à la Pélagie, vingt-cinq ans auparavant, l'attendait sur les rives de la baie Française. Plus rien que ces cent lieues et elle oublierait, et elle pardonnerait, et elle bâtirait son logis incendié."

The language of Pélagie-la-charrette is largely that of the spoken word. Antonine Maillet has given it a more stylized form than she did in La Sagouine, to which she appended a glossary, still keeping its essential flavour while making her text more accessible to the average reader. The oral flavour is present in the "huhau" shouted to the oxen, in the stories within the story recounted mainly by old man Bélonie, in the songs and refrains, and in the constant interpellations to the reader-listener.

The texture of the language is also richly poetic in many instances. Most of the images grow out of the maritime topography of Acadia, e.g.: "Une belle île, celle-là … aux abords déchirés par des anses et des baies, comme si les baleines depuis des temps reculés avaient mordu dans les côtes à belles dents." The poetry inundates the prose towards the end of the novel, in the springtime of the return to Acadia in 1780, and the end of "le plus long hiver de leur vie … un hiver d'un quart d'un siécle", and especially during Pélagie's pilgrimage to the desolate Grand-Pré of her childhood and youth. Poetic, too, and effectively so, is the personification throughout the work of inanimate objects, especially la charrette, and abstract concepts, especially l'Acadie, which are infused with life, joy, sobs, murmurs, cries.

The language is often humorous, as laughter interrupts the tears of the exile and painful return. The humor is earthy, Rabelaisian, démesuré, and is found especially in the tales within the tale recounted by old man Bélonie. Sometimes it is ironic, as in the scenes of the slave auction in Charleston, North Carolina; often it is outrageously hyperbolic as in the tale told by Beausoleil of his crew's having their speech frozen in the Polar region until a hail storm showered them with their own words some six months later, thus giving them back their speech; or that told by another Acadian storyteller a century later, of urine turned into instant icicles at 55 below zero!

Maillet's Pélagie-la-charrette is not without weaknesses, sometimes suffering from rembourrage as in her other works, occasionally turning melodramatic, or presenting historical episodes without sufficient aestheticization. Nevertheless, together with La Sagouine, Pélagie has helped build a corpus which has already left its vital mark on the francophone literature of Canada and beyond.

In an interview with Le Devoir on December 1, 1979, Antonine Maillet stressed the following significance of her Goncourt prize:

Il y a plus important encore: le Goncourt est une reconnaissance universelle. Et c'est un statut qu'on donne à notre langue. C'est important, pour tous les écrivains d'ici qui se sont battus et pour ceux qui nous suivent, de savoir que la langue qu'ils parlent, les idées qu'ils émettent, les personnages qu'ils créent, le monde qu'ils font, sont universels. Depuis le temps qu'on nous disait: 'Vous parlez patois … ou le dialect acadien … ou le dialect québécois …' Il me semble qu'on ne peut plus maintenant entendre ces phrases! Le jour où une académie donne un prix de cette envergure à une oeuvre, c'est qu'elle reconnaît le statut de cette langue aussi.

(There is much one could say on this aspect of the rehabilitation of one of the major dialects of Canadian French, but space does not permit it.) Another key point made by Antonine Maillet in the same interview is that she sees herself as a sujet transindividuel, or sujet collectif, in the terms of the late French critic and sociologist, Lucien Goldmann:

L'écriture, c'est grand. De toute façon, La Sagouine est plus grande que moi, Pélagie est plus grande que moi. Elles valent mieux que moi. Elles sont les produits de tout un peuple qui me les a passées. Et moi, je ne fais que les rendre aux autres. Mais je suis plus petite que mes personnages: ils ont été fait par 375 ans d'histoire. J'ai été tributaire de ces personnages que j'ai rendus au monde. Mais d'autres Jes ont faits avec moi.

In her typically modest fashion, Antonine Maillet nevertheless thus describes a profound truth: the intersection of a people and a creative spirit.