SOURCE: "Pélagie-la-Carrette and Antonine Maillet's Epic Voices," in Explorations: Essays in Comparative Literature, edited by Makoto Ueda, University Press of America, 1986, pp. 211-226.

[In the following essay Arésu traces the development of Maillet's artistic voice and vision.]

In 1979, Antonine Maillet, the Canadian novelist, playwright and critic, received the French establishment's most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt. This award was the capstone of a series of widely acclaimed and brilliantly crafted works that had preceded her last book, Pélagie-la-Charrette. It may first be appropriate to remark that her first novel was not, as the ethnocentric publisher of Pélagie may lead the unsuspecting reader to believe, Mariaagélas, actually her ninth volume. As of 1973, the date of Mariaagélas' first edition, Mrs. Maillet had indeed already three other novels in print, as well as a collection of short stories, two plays, a humoristic presentation of the history and civilization of Acadia in the form of a very unconventional tourist guide, not to mention her published doctoral dissertation on Rabelais and the oral traditions of Acadia. Between Mariaagélas and Pélagie-la-Charrette, the author published another three plays, one of which the now famous La Sagouine, and three novels. One of the latter, Les Cordes-de-Bois narrowly missed, in 1978 the Prix Goncourt which Mrs. Maillet was awarded the following year.

Published on both sides of the Atlantic, the Canadian writer has thus been recognized as a major voice in world literature and contributed much needed rejuvenation to a contemporary French fiction perhaps too often mired in the type of formal solipsism generated by the New Novel. Mrs. Maillet's works also attest to the most significant development in post-1950 French literature, that of francophonic writings and their relevance not only to academic study but in the very terms of their universal implications and concerns. Hers is thus a complex and rich production which gained the recognition it deserves only belatedly and perhaps for sadly well-known reasons: too many francophonic works still have to take the inevitable detour of French publishing houses, the sole guarantee of prestigious exposure; it is significant that Antonine Maillet's fame spread only after the publication of four of her works by Grasset. Moreover, the traditional focus, in studies on francophonic Canadian literature, on "Québécoise" production, often fails to take into consideration such brilliant creations as those Maillet has woven around the history, civilization and legends of Acadia.

Over such two richly productive decades of literary endeavors, a thematic evolution seems to emerge, from the early novels of individual quest to the epic narrations of the more recent works. Between the opposite poles of this creative trajectory, moreover, another two phases clearly stand out: Mrs. Maillet's masterful adaptation, on the one hand, of the infinite resources of the folk-tale in such novels as Don l'Orignal and in the short stories of Par Derrière chez mon pére, and, on the other hand, a series of plays, among which the internationally acclaimed La Sagouine and the lesser-known but equally important Evangeline Deusse represent prominent landmarks. A rapid survey of these various productive stages helps delineate the unique kind of epic and mythic aura Mrs. Maillet's last novel exudes.

In Pointe-aux-Coques (1958) and On a mangé la dune (1962), the author set out to explore the sociological, thematic, and, above all, linguistic parameters within which her subsequent works would develop. Very much like the Pélagie-la-Charrette of seventeen years later, Pointe-aux-Coques deals with the theme of self-discovery and the symbolic journey of returning. The heroine of the novel, a young American school-teacher of Acadian ancestry, discovers in a small Canadian village the rich and complex fabric of a society in transition. Love, death, cultural identity, the conflict between tradition and modernism, especially in the inexorably changing area of social realities, the lucid and quietly humorous analysis of human foibles, the gripping dramas of everyday life, all coalesce into a fictional tableau already foreshadowing many of the preoccupations of works to come. The novel's stylistic hesitancy, however, stems from the author's too uniform a reliance on an academic language frequently at odds with the reality of the milieu depicted.

The lyrical and poetic tone at work in the first novel will nevertheless and again permeate the prose of On a mangé la dune, a nostalgic and appollonian evocation of childhood and adolescence. Focusing as it does on the passage from adolescence into adulthood, the novel does not only concern itself with the problem of spiritual integrity and maturation, with metaphysical realities apprehended through the initiatory experience of growing, but also represents a step toward artistic development, the strengthening of inspiration and form within an ever sturdier framework of fictional creativity to which the fictional mode of the dionysian tale will bring full blossoming.

In her Rabelais et les traditionals populaires en Acadie (1971), Antonine Maillet had conducted an ethnological analysis of the oral structures of Acadian popular traditions. The concurrent integration of the "parlure acadienne" in her creative works constituted an important turning point: the author was now fully apprehending the fictional and linguistic appropriateness of oral traditions to her subject matter as well as to her own artistic temperament. Par Derrière chez mon père and Don l'Orignal, both published for the first time in 1972, best exemplify the coming of age of her narrative mode. The short pieces of Par Derrière chez mon père, which sketch out in concisely self-contained fashion many of the plots and characters of subsequent works, now unfold with solid serenity within the timeless creative mode of ancestral tales. But nowhere as in Don l'Orignal, a story of socio-economic rivalry set in the microcosmic universe of a tiny island, and inspired by both Rabelais and Voltaire, does the art of the tale reach such consummate perfections: comedy, literary parody, humor, farce, social and moral satire intermingle in thirty-five short chapters seething with the enlightening effervescence of philosophical laughter. The book constitutes what can easily be considered Mrs. Maillet's first masterpiece, a novel that also established the epic mold in which many subsequent works will be cast.

It was inevitable that the narrative vivaciousness of Rabelaisian prose would find an even more spontaneous outlet in the dynamic universe of the stage. Les Crasseux, first published in 1968, adapted with considerable dramatic strength the plot of Don l'Orignal. In the absence of the novel's pervasive satirical point of view, the play ludically focuses on the dynamics of confrontation between two rival groups whose characterization makes for unforgettable social comedy. But more significantly, the author's artistic endeavors now point to novel preoccupations. Quasi "engagés," her writings have become strategically conscious of their audience. And the stage's dionysian outbursts underscore more and more the socio-philosophical meaning of laughter. While steering clear of the ponderous strictures of political moralizing, Mrs. Maillet's dramas display, indeed, persistent shades of Brechtian determinism.

By the time Mariaagélas was published, in 1973, the seeds of Mrs. Maillet's best creations were blossoming into superb prose epics. This richest phase of her creative evolution yielded four novels in which her affinities with Rabelais, her epic and ritualistic apprehension of human destiny and her masterly characterization of female protagonists won her international recognition and the courtship of Canada's and France's most prestigious publishing houses.

Mariaagélas represented her first full-fledged novelistic portraiture of the heroine as rebel, a grown-up and pugnacious avatar of Radi, the adolescent protagonist of On a mangé la dune. The book merits critical attention not only for its magnificent fresco of ancestral traditions, but also for the brilliant mordancy of its social satire, its humanistic ideology and comico-dramatic characterization of a fiercely independent woman during the rum-running days of Prohibition.

Emmanuel à Joseph à Dâvit (1975), tonally autonomous from the novels of this period, harks back to the quiet inspiration of Par Derrière chez mon père, but symbolically juxtaposes, in the North-South axis of two neighboring villages, the quietly traditional life of the land and that of the sea, the latter suddenly threatened by the relentless encroachments of modern industrial interests. Peacefully counter-pointing this conflict, a nativity story unfolds, ostensibly patterned on the Biblical model, but whose mythical undertones throw a new light on Mrs. Maillet's use of religious themes, and significantly counterbalances her abrasive satire, in other works, of unbending and dotardy religion.

Les Cordes-de-Bois centers on the truculent and sympathetically caricatural portraiture of a matriarcal bevy (the Mercenaire family,) and chronicles its hilariously eventful démêlés with the religious clan of contentiously prude Ma-Tante-la-Veuve. The gay satire and exhilarating lustfulness of the novel gave way, two years later, to Pélagie-la-Charrette (1979) and its dramatic account of the journey of dispersal and return of a group of Acadian exiles during the momentous years of 1755–1780. Immersed anew in the ancestral and historical traditions of her people, the narrator retraces, with phenomenal immediacy and Steinbeckian vigor their joys and sorrows, commingling history, legend, popular tales and age-old beliefs in a breathtaking succession of seventeen episodes. But in the last resort, the most impressive achievement of Pélagie-la-Charrette may be its mythic vision, its ritualization of historical awareness and its figurative appropriation of primitive legends.

In dwelling on the dispersal of the Acadian people and the epic diaspora of a group of exiles, the novel's wider historical perspective thus subsumes and amplifies many of the key themes of previous works. More successfully than any of these works, though, Pélagie-la-Charrette exemplifies brilliant formal unity and linguistic autonomy, a triumphal "aboutissement" in light of the author's earlier inner struggle with the problem of language and cultural identity. Antonine Maillet once confided in an interview: "(Mon) premier (roman), Pointe-aux-Coques, est un petit roman que j'ai écrit en faisant tous les efforts pour ne pas écrire à l'acadienne, presque pour éteindre la personalité que chacun pouvait avoir … je m'efforçais d'écrire 'en francais'." It is precisely the opposite attitude, the pervasive reliance on the "parlure acadienne" and its spontaneous amalgamation into the historical but above all legendary and mythical strata of the novel that gives Maillet's narration such powerful impact.

Told from the point of view of oral tradition, the narrative of Pélagie-la-Charrette covers twenty-five years of exile of a group of Acadians, from 1755, the date of their systematic deportation and dispersal, to 1780, the date of their stealthy but victorious return. While one of Antonine Maillet's concerns is obviously to set the historical record straight, she does not choose to do so through the medium of purely politico-historical narration but through that of the popular epic chronicle, retracing historical events through the joys and tribulations and the collective consciousness of a whole people. While 1755 signalled the beginning of the dispersal, a central thematic motif referred to as "l'exil", "la Déportation", "le Grand Djéangement", or the euphemisitc "l'événement", the novel's narrative structure revolves around the homecoming journey to the promised land of the ancestors, la Grand' Prée, a journey of grief and sorrow as well as joy and self-discovery, above all an eventful experience of coming together and of recreation of group identity: "les gens, au départ, sont une famille, à l'arrivée, un peuple" Maillet recently remarked.

Two voices harmoniously blend in the narration of this oral chronicle, intermingling everyday occurrences, historical events, popular legends, dialogues and interpersonal conflicts into the flow of a strikingly dynamic epic. The ageless, earthily dialectal voice of an Acadian narrator-participant in the journey, in turn Pélagie herself, in turn a "conteux et défricheteux" without whom "l'histoire aurait trépassé à chaque tournant de siècle", pervades the whole novel. To this voice periodically responds the omniscient voice of a modern narrator, a voice nonetheless tonally and thematically in keeping with the storyteller's voice of popular tradition. Pélagie-la-Charrette owes its structural unity precisely to the narrative equilibrium that such a dual, complementary perspective provides. Moreover, the expressive dovetailing of two stylistic registers, actualizing as it does past experience, projects it into the realm of modern collective consciousness and opens the gate to the type of universalizing myth-making that successfully transcends the immediate socio-historical framework of reference.

By the time Pélagie was completed, Antonine Maillet's position on the validity of French Acadian as an artistic medium had radically changed. Of this coastal language, separate from the "joual" and distinct from the French-English "chiac" of the Moncton area, she avers: "Premierement je dis que c'est une langue. Je ne crois pas que l'acadien soit un patois. C'est une langue ancienne, désuète. On n'a rien inventé chez nous: tous les mots que j'emploie dans Pélagie-la-Charrette, à 99.5″, sont des mots français, mais des mots d'ancien francais; Si je dis callouetter, si je dis aveindre, si je dis cobbi, si je dis chacunière, allez tout verifier ça, c'est dans Rabelais, dans Villon, dans Marguerite de Navarre, et même dans Molière". Of La Sagouine and the lesser known play Les Crasseux, she had already indicated: "Je n'ai pas choisi la langue de La Sagouine ou des Crasseux, j'ai choisi la Sagouine et les crasseux. Ceux-là n'avaient pas le choix: ils devaient parler leur langue. Tout au plus en ai-je fait une transposition littéraire; comme est transposition toute langue écrite".

This notion of literary transposition perhaps best explains the kind of epic immediacy Maillet so successfully achieves in the novel. Early in the book, when admonishing her troops at the beginning of the journey of return, Pélagie's ostensibly unfelicitous choice of words elicits a tellingly vigorous vindication on the narrator's part, and one wonders to what extent such textual intrusions (for they are numerous in the novel) do not aim at the strategic pre-emption of the inflexible censorship of traditional stylistic propriety: "Elle avait mal choisi son image, Pélagie, et aurait mieux fait de parler de tabac ou de coton. Mais Pélagie ne choisissait pas ses images, elle les traînait avec elle depuis le pays. Un pays de mâts et de haubans, encadré de baies, balafré de fleuves, et tout emmuré d'aboiteaux. Les aboiteaux! Ce seul mot la mil en rut, Pélagie-la Charrette, et elle fouetta les boeufs".

Elsewhere Maillet states: "Trois-quartsdes Acadiens sont nés les pieds dans l'eau," later adding: "vous me permettrez quand-même de vous donner en deux mots les raisons historiques qui ont fait se peupler les abords des rivières. Premièrement, les Acadiens ne disposaient que de bateaux pour tout moyen de transport; deuxièmement, ils vivaient de la pêche; troisièmement, ils devaient pouvoir se déplacer rapidement à l'approche des Anglais qui leur ont fait la chasse pendant plusieurs décennies après l'exil. A l'époque, les rivières étaient les grand' routes qui reliaient la forêt à la mer".

Summing up the historical condition of Maillet's characters, the narration of the endless journey from forest to sea and from sea to forest shows compulsive delving into the treasures of natural and animal tropes, as well as authorial predilection for symbolic evocations of a cosmic nature. Frequent assimilation of the characters' experience with animal or forest life pervade the novel, as in the characterization of the orphaned and lonesome Catoune: "la Catoune me pouvait s'égarer dans les bois, les bois qui avaient abrité et nourri sa prime enfance. Elle avait dans la peau le nord absolu, Catoune, comme d'autres le diapason. Et si l'on en croit Bélonie, elle aurait été la seule, ce jour-là, avec la boussole dans l'oeil." The frequent recurrence of "humer" and "flairer," likewise, graphically depicts the protagonists' ever so cautious progress throughout the forests of exile, and suggestively evokes the animalistic determination moving Pélagie's companions: "Mais pendant les joyeuses funérailles de cette Acadie du Nord, auxquelles trinquaient si joyeusement Lawrence, Winslow, Monckton, et le roi George dans toute sa joyeuse majesté, des lambeaux d'Acadie du Sud remontaient, tête entre les jambes, piaffant, suant et soufflant des deux narines, une Amérique qui n'entendit même pas grincer les essieux de la charrette."

While the "grincement" of poverty and suffering effectively points out, throughout the novel, the jarring note of quiet upheaval and stubborn progress of the protagonists, the animal metaphor of the ox simultaneously conveys not only humorous self-mockery but a concurrent sense of dogged resolution and robust obstinancy. The novel's long march of joys and sorrows, likewise, remains closely associated with meteorological phases and natural cataclysms, as if cosmic moods were made to echo and dramatically underscore the whims of historical adversity. But perhaps most telling is the metaphorical designation of "défricheteux" or "defricheteux-de-parenté", ubiquitous under Maillet's pen and playing a central role in the vast fresco of her writings. For the expression, which designates those of the elders who keep track of the complex genealogical ramifications of various clans, figuratively and earthily comingles the function of oral tradition and that of attachment to the land, sine qua non conditions of Acadian survival.

In On a mangé la dune and in the tales of Par derrière chez mon père, Maillet had already revealed significant glimpses of the rich framework of inspiration that the reality and legends of Acadian coastal life were to represent in her fiction. Significantly, in the 1979 epic, the return to the land of the ancestors originates on an island, the Isle of Hope in northern Georgia, and the focus of the narration frequently shifts to the fate of Captain Beausoleil, to his sea adventures along the eastern coast during the American revolution: "Pendant qu'elle (Pélagie) dressait, barreau par barreau, les ridelles d'une charrette qui la ramèenait avec les siens au pays, làbas en mer, une goéleete chargeait les restes d'un peuple, des côtes de la Nouvelle-Angleterreaux rives de la Nouvelle-France." The continuous superimposition of such realities reinforces that sense of idiolectal allegiance Maillet had once emphasized: "Il existe aussi (in Acadian French) des termes marins adaptés au language terrien: on va 'amarrer' ses souliers, on 'grée' une mariée, on 'frête' une voiture." "Et pour tout bâtiment Pélagie gréa une charrette" says the narrator in the first chapter of the novel (our emphasis); Pélagie herself will later announce "Demain au petit jour, je mettons le cap sur l'Acadie du Nord", and again later we are told that: "Après toutes ces années le coeur au sec, Pélagie laissa la brise du large lui minatter les joues et la peau de l'âme", in metaphorical constructs firmly anchoring human experience in the symbolic fabric of cosmic awareness.

The journey northward thus becomes both a historical occurrence and an experience of self-discovery, an assertion of cultural identity through the dialectical code of the group. On this subject, Maillet had already warned her reader, with delightfully incisive humor: "Ne vous méprenez pas (l'Acadien) parle francais; mais le sien. C'est une question de nuance." This archaic French of the late Middle Ages and of Rabelais symbolizes, in a sense, a striking phenomenon of cultural resistance, fighting as it does, unlike the joual and chiac dialects, against the encroachments of the language of the conquerors. To the modern reader, it provides not only a rich insight into the cultural and historical development of an ethnic group but, above all, the narrative expressiveness of numberless stylistic surprises, such as the phonetic evocativeness of "hucher" for "crier", "pigouiller" for "chatouiller", "sourlinguer" for "secouer", "tétines de souris" to designate an indigenous plant. Such stylistic particularities make for countless humorous episodes in the novel, and, more importantly, reinforce one of Mrs. Maillet's most fundamental creative impulses, the use of language as play, of words as ludic or agonistic structures textually reenacting or mirroring individuals or collective trials and experience.

The following observations concerning two young men's brash but unsuccessful advances to the beautiful Catoune crisply illustrate, in the light vein, the author's superb manipulation of language to such ludic ends: "Les deux rescapés des Sauvages, durant ce temps-là, flairaient et humanient les cotillons, lançaient des phrases équivoques et pigouillaient à tort et à travers. A travers surtout. Et le jour où le beau Maxime, qui avait cru avec la disparition de son rival Jean retrouver le champ libre autour de Catoune, voulut traverser l'étoffe épaisse d'un corsage qui gardait le fruit défendu, il comprit qu'il venait de pigouiller à tort."

Beside such sonorous notations as "des huchements de Pélagie à ses commères d'exil," which evokes to this reader the jarring cacophony of a screeching flock of exotic birds, Maillet's prose teems with crisp and vivid comments, brisk observations amounting to unforgettable one shot portraits. "Et le vieux radoteux de Bélonie reprit son récit là même où le pied bot de Celina avait planté son point d'orgue," for instance, instantaneously and hilariously captures the perennial conflict between the incorrigibly garrulous characters of Bélonie the patriarch and Celina the limping midwife. The abrupt failure of Bourgeois' demands before Pélagie's fierceful determination are likewise expressed in a beautifully caricatural combination of onomatopeia, halting rhythm, and equine metaphor: "—Et je veux plus en entendre parler. Le Bourgeois se cabra, fit heu! puis se tut." Most memorable, however, is the phrasing of old Bélonie's patriarchal but rather rusty and mechanic progression toward Pélagie in the twelfth chapter of the novel, where "il fit jouer sur leurs gonds ses os quasi centenaires, et se dirigea vers Pélagie."

Typographically isolated as autonomous paragraphs, such statements naturally take on incisive theatrical expressiveness. Insofar as they display the dynamism and graphicness of Maillet's prose, its quickness to seize upon the humorous and the caricatural, the question of Rabelais's influence poses itself. While it is not within the scope of this paper to analyze Maillet's indebtedness to the sixteenth-century writer, some salient formal and thematic affinities deserve mention: the didactic role and causticity of laughter, the compulsive use of the burlesque, the grotesque and the scatological, the inclusion of the structures of the chronicle and of folk tale, the parodic nature of encyclopedic accumulations (of which we have numerous examples in Pélagie), and above all the fictional reliance on folkloric and legendary material, as shown in gigantean characterization. All of these constitute not only the hallmark of Maillet's felicitous resurrection of a hallowed literary tradition, but also of effective incorporation of a larger framework of imagination, that of myth.

If, in its modern sense, myth symbolically projects a people's collective values and attempts to articulate its reality, Maillet's reliance on the rich legendary traditions of Acadia and her revival of ancient folk traditions attest to her imaginative propensity to mythically transcend historical reality and to strike roots in the rich humus of a pre-industrial consciousness made of "bribes d'images restées dans toutes les mémoires." The tale of the white whale and the golden ring, for instance, both scatological and initiatory, intertwines legendary and historical experience, that of intestinal engulfment and of entrapment in the dark, mazelike corridors of a Charleston prison. In turn, myth sacralizes historical experience, as does the Acadian "empremier," a term that effectively associates memories of early Acadian history and, from an etymological point of view, ab origine times. "Je m'inspire beaucoup de la tradition orale, mais dans la mesure où elle est vivante. La littérature orale a transmis des mythes, des croyances, des gestes, des drames, des héros populaires: tout cela est la plus riche matière litéraire" significantly remarked the writer.

At a higher degree of symbolization, her last novel ritualizes historical experience into mythical visions of unusual lyrical quality. Primordial creation, rebirth and salvation from water and from fire, the mythical dance of Life and Death are central preoccupations that deserve indeed full critical recognition. As mythical a figure as Brecht's Pelagea Vlassova or Steinbeck's Ma Joad, with whom she shares so many features, Pélagie enacts, throughout her clan's initiatory and reconstructive journey, many of the ritual gestures of an archetypal mother. In the end, the nocturnal symbol of her metonymic wagon, "logis primitif" and "signe de perénnité," triumphs over the most dramatic of all trials, the nyctomorphous threat of ruthless marshes, of "cette boue mouvante qui cherche à l'aspirer comme un gouffre béant."

The luxuriance of Antonine Maillet's literary imagination and of her textual strategies is indeed stupendous. As this survey suggests, incorporation of oral traditions, ludic didacticism, socio-historical awareness, linguistic revivalism and universal myth-making constitute some of the more salient foundations of her works, and because of a rich career extending now over twenty-three years, it is easier to appreciate the eminence of her contribution to the world of letters, what a critic has recently termed an "imposing presence." Very similar to that of other illustrious regionalists" (Faulkner's, Gionos's and Steinbeck's especially come to mind,) her vision is able to transcend the immediate sphere of native sources and, through the optimistic medium of self-derisive laughter, the catharsis of insane comedy and the overriding power of humanistic concerns, to explode in the type of pan-human statements of which only true art can partake.