Antonine Maillet's dual careers, as novelist and playwright, have been developing in parallel for some twenty years now. She began as a novelist with Pointe-aux-Coques in 1958, and also achieved her greatest success with a novel, Pélagie-la-Charrette, which won the Goncourt Prize in 1979. However, her most memorable character, La Sagouine, was created for the stage, and around her a mythical universe has developed. The stage has also provided the medium which enabled Maillet to articulate most coherently a complex Weltanschauung. For the stage she has created a concert of voices and characters (as Godin has shown to be the case in Évangéline Deusse), as well as a succession of monologues in which the narrator/performer explores her memories and her perceptions just as one sight-reads a score—rehearses them, redefines and modulates them. She has also developed a dual intertextual network: the external, explicitly referred to by the author writing as critic; and the internal, reaching from one play to another, with echoes and allusions, or reworking the same "score" in successive versions.

Maillet's dramatic corpus is actually broader and more ambitious than her oeuvre as a novelist. Thus in 1978, with Le Bourgeois Gentleman, "a comedy inspired by Molière," she introduces settings, characters, and problems entirely different from the Acadian background of her other works. Here she devotes her attention primarily to external intertextuality and transposes ideological concerns from relations between classes to relations between national groups in a colonial context (Albert Memmi's Portrait du colonisé may well have served as a source text). But while this latest undertaking is of considerable interest (though not altogether successful), I shall here consider only her Acadian dramatic works (not including three early, unpublished attempts from 1957, 1958 and 1960): that is, the five plays which have been performed and published. Three of these—Les Crasseux (1968/1972), La Sagouine (1971/1974), Gapi et Sullivan, with its expanded version, Gapi (1973/1976)—have been considerably reworked. I shall not consider this aspect of intertextuality here, and shall use the final versions, as well as the other two Acadian plays: Évangéline Deusse (even though it takes place in Montréal, the chief character is Acadian, a demystified successor to Longfellow's archetypal heroine), and La Veuve enragée, published in 1977.

In order to attempt a definition of drama as a specific mode of writing or textual production, I shall, however, make use of the novels, since, by and large, their fables or narrative lines, their sets of characters, and even their locales are similar to what we find in the plays. One can, for instance, draw obvious parallels between Les Crasseux and Don l'Orignal, La Veuve enragée and Mariaagélas as well as Les Cordes-de-bois. The presentation of time and space in the novels thus refers to the same setting as that of the plays, but does not take into account the contingencies of stage production which appear as a significant variable in the comparison.

At one further remove, I shall also consider Maillet's non-fiction writing; i.e., her guide to Acadia and her critical essays (excluding, however, her thesis on Rabelais, which contributes to the external intertextuality); such non-fiction writings indeed make us aware of what I should like to call a referential galaxy, which includes objective systems, ideological complexes, constellations of myths, and whose elements may or may not be consciously developed. These texts involve Maillet only as écrivant, to use Barthes's terminology, or as "transitive writer," whereas the novels and the plays are the work of an écrivain, transmuting into a poetic universe not only the message, but also its spatial and temporal co-ordinates. The referential galaxy claims to represent a world; the poetic universe is a creation in words manifest through the "casting" of "distributed" discourse, and through the relay of speech articulated by the playwright but forever "to be proffered." "The haunting concern with time and space in the Acadian works of Antonine Maillet" was pointed out a few years ago by Hans Runte, who also suggested some of its political and ideological implications.

My aim is to study how the specifically dramatic expression of this concern has developed, not only with the growth of Maillet's corpus (in a syntagmatic extension, so to speak), but also by the reinforcement of a number of paradigmatic connections, through additions or corrections, and by a focussing or adjustment that define a specific style of writing for the stage. However, rewarding though it would be, for lack of space—and of competence—I shall not attempt a study of the "second production," the actual staging leading to and including the performance, and shall limit my remarks to what is inscribed in Maillet's text as part of the "first production." I shall simply note that Maillet, who seems little concerned with the definition of the "performance space" in her early works, and provides but few stage directions and virtually no comments on the pragmatic conditions of performance, becomes more precise and more explicit as she becomes experienced and familiar with the actual conditions of the "second production." This development, I believe, gives a measure of her humility, flexibility, and good sense. On the other hand, what Anne Ubersfeld describes as "hors-scène" (that is, all the events that can be assumed to take place off-stage), growing by metonymy out of what can actually be represented on stage, and "extra-scène" (what may be evoked—through allusion or metaphorical expansion—in the text that is spoken on stage), have all along been extremely important in Maillet's dramatic texts. One may indeed consider that her works are a projection of what Souriau describes as a "sphere"—an expression of the mental universe assigned to the characters—rather than an attempt to meet the contingencies of the "cube" provided by the actual playing area; or, to use another one of Souriau's distinctions, it is clear that in her plays, dramatic time and space are paramount, while scenic reductions, streamlining "the complex interplay between the senses of time" (to use Ubersfeld's description), and, of course, simplifying the presentation of space, are left to the initiative of future directors and producers.

Thus, I have not discovered in the Acadian plays any case where "the performance reinvests in the text its own contingencies." Maillet pioneers the development of a "national" repertoire in a country with very limited resources for staging that repertoire: she conceived the character of the Sagouine for radio, and later had her plays produced in Montréal by the Rideau Vert—a company which, in spite of its flair for discovering new material, is not noted for its propensity to experiment with staging. One should therefore not be surprised if the codes of the stage production are less important for Maillet than the "symbolization of socio-cultural perceptions of space," and if the definition of markers to indicate the passage of time means less than the transposition of a "true story" into an exemplary development. The text, and what it says, is therefore paramount. (It tends to be, at any rate, when it comes to conveying the sense of time, except in the rare cases when a stage device cleverly emphasizes the passing of time [for instance, the tree "covered with leaves" in the second act of Godot] or the arbitrary release from the passing of time [for instance, the clock that strikes twenty-odd times at the beginning of The Bald Soprano].)

All the same, Maillet makes use of a few fairly simple stage conventions, and sometimes defines space and time with the setting or with the props. Thus in Les Crasseux, the railway tracks define an area and relegate the characters to a "wrong side" with powerful sociological connotations, whereas in Don l'Orignal, its novelistic counterpart, the "hay island" is a floating, Utopian territory that is not anchored to any objective geographic co-ordinates nor connected to any specific historical situation. In La Sagouine, the scrubbing pail (le seau à "forbir"), which, while collecting the grime left by others, is a vessel where the protagonist's hands are "purified" and her wrinkled face mirrored, offers a clever visual symbol of the ambiguous status of the character: she is a socially dispossessed and physically broken type, and yet she has soft, white hands, and possesses a magic mirror with which she can engage in dialogue, like the powerful queen of a fairy-tale. In Évangéline Deusse, the stop-sign carried by the guard at the crosswalk and the young, tender fir-tree the heroine wishes to transplant not only offer a contrast between (present) urban space and a (past, nostalgic) rural scene, or a jerky, choppy perception of time (the stop/ go of traffic) and a continuous sense of growth that transcends seasons (the evergreen), but also act as powerful reminders of the exile of all the characters, and of their pathetic efforts to grow new roots.

What is more, in all the plays the set or the props can offer a starting-point, a kind of cue to the dialogue, which in turn makes their suggestions explicit. For instance, at the beginning of La Veuve enragée, Old Patience sits in front of her shack in "Cordwood Town": she thus asserts both her own position in the play and the central issue that will be dealt with in the play's action; she plays on her own (magic) name and recites an incantation. The place that she occupies physically, her powerful "all-pervasive laughter" (which she nevertheless keeps under strict control), the performative value of her words, all contribute to the creation, from the outset, of a carnival atmosphere that will modify the normal perception of space and time (as Bakhtin has pointed out) and of a number of symbolic relationships that will define the conditions of the action (in the way, for instance, that the opening of the gates in the prologue of Claudel's The Tidings Brought to Mary or the scrubbing of the doorsteps by the maids in Pelléas et Mélisande suggest a ritualistic process of initiation). Here is the opening of La Veuve enragée:

A huge burst of laughter from Patience, which begins as the curtain rises, and is kept up until the audience join in … if possible. Then a sharp cutoff.

     PATIENCE You jest set and the time bide
     On the stoop in front of your dwelling
     Then you'll see them by the bye
 
     The corpse of your foe carrying

She returns to carding her wool and sings

My Father had a house built….

In Gapi, the insults the character hurls at the gulls ("just shut up you goddam tarnation of little picked chickens!") evoke a space wholly devoid of human presence—at the moment—but capable of being defined through ecological sharing: "—There's room for all of us fishin' folk right here." The lighthouse in the setting thus provides a focus and a boundary, and by sweeping this territory with its beam of light, creates another human rhythm, establishes another language, engages in dialogue with the old fisherman. But the effect of the settings and the props is maximal at the beginnings of the plays. In the body of the drama, the hors-scène and extra-scène evoked through the dialogue are indeed by far the most significant modes of presentation of space and time.

Unfortunately, we lack suitable methods to analyse such modes. Ubersfeld, adapting some of Yuri Lotman's ideas, suggests an inventory of the conflictive effects and the binary opposition systems which determine space patterns. This can be done effectively for plays like Les Crasseux or La Veuve, strongly polarized characters defining their own space, but the patterns of relationships between characters are not always of an emotive/conative nature. In La Sagouine, the confrontation between the narrator and her community on the one hand (first person je/I, nous/we), and the third persons bourgeois on the other (eux/they), is only reported or alluded to; moreover, it is often mediated by an appeal to the second person (vons/you). Recourse to the phatic function, a notable feature of plays with a single character on stage (La Sagouine can be compared in this respect with Beckett's Not I, or Cocteau's Le Bel indifférent or The Human Voice), postulates a constant shift in the spatio-temporal framework. In Gapi, the opposition between the protagonist and Sullivan, his one-time drinking pal and secret rival, appears only in the second part of the play. The entire beginning is made up of the dreamy speculations (the jonglerie) of a lonely man who transcends the constraints of his increasingly narrow present space by flights into the realm of memory. Whatever conflict there is takes place only within the succession of figures of the protagonist, past and present, as with Vauthier's Le Personnage combattant (The Struggling Protagonist), or Beckett's Krapp (Krapp's Last Tape) and Winnie (Happy Days).

One might of course use Lotman's suggestion and restore a paradigm of oppositions between the living and the dead, and consider that the first part of the play deals with the lasting love—alive but not truly valued—of Gapi for the late Sagouine, while the second part, after Sullivan's arrival and the revelation of his love for the same woman, presents an actual conflict in which La Sagouine's value is enhanced ("A treasure, Gapi, is not always buried in a sea-chest"), but her husband's comforting memories of her are shattered. Such an interpretation would make the temporal model congruent with the spatial opposition Gapi/Sullivan: he who remains/he who travels, the keeper of the lighthouse/the sailor who visits exotic lands. However, the "dramatic" conflict remains virtual and undeveloped ("the two men eye each other and clench their fists"). There is no "crossing of the frontier," and the "movement from one space to another," which according to Ubersfeld is a significant feature of dramatic conflict, is not actualized. Should one then return to Lotman's hypothesis concerning the exclusivity of each character's space and time, and the inherent lack of mutual penetration? Alternatively, should a large portion of the Maillet corpus be considered not in terms of dramatic interaction, but only as a variety of modulated narrative? I do not believe that either such exclusivity or such an exclusion is warranted.

What constitutes the dramatic tension may well take place not between different characters, but within a given character: this occurs whenever the system of actantial functions is not actualized into explicit roles developed on stage. For instance, in Krapp's Last Tape or Happy Days, there is very little physical (on-stage) indication of movement; yet the text, the words assigned to the character, evoke off-stage (hors-scène) conflicts and provide genuine clues not only to the passage of time but to a change in the kind of space considered. This evocation takes place also in those of Maillet's plays which assume the form of a soliloquy or tend towards that form. Indeed, Maillet's repertoire offers an important clue to the workings of the kind of soliloquy which does not take stock of a situation; that is, which does not follow the pattern one finds most commonly in dramatists who make the soliloquy ancillary to the presentation of conflicts on stage. The opposition to be found then is not between spaces of a similar nature which could be actualized in actions within the cube, to use Souriau's description, but between the heterogeneous spaces that develop within the cube and within the sphere. In fact, this opposition—which may or may not be entirely coterminal between that of the "world" and the "universe" of a protagonist—is probably an important feature of the world's most deservedly famous soliloquies, in Corneille, Calderón, or Shakespeare.

In Maillet's plays, this opposition takes the form of what Québécois or Acadian French describes, in a very felicitous phrase, as "jonglerie." This is not a mere "juggling" with thoughts, but a complex interplay of fantasies, memories, and dreams; it involves a move to a "somewhere else," a transposition of conflicts within a realm of myths, an escape from the grid of "positive" categories. What takes place then is not a conative action (of the kind analysed by Ubersfeld), but the development of a poetic relationship to time and space conveyed through a phatic implication of the public who then must, through the exercise of imagination, substitute for the absent partner(s) of the character engaged in jonglerie. This jonglerie is never entirely absent from Maillet's dramatic works. Often, along with the action, in the time and space of the cube, which develops in syntagmatic fashion, it presents a series of reactions (one might even venture the psychoanalytic term of abreactions) and of phantasmal interactions.

In Les Crasseux, for instance, in spite of the injunction of his father, the old "realistic" chief Don l'Orignal ("Listen to your father, Noume, don't act crazy […] listen to your granddad and all your line of ancestors who spent their lives in this spot and had […] very little time for fool-juggling [pour jongler]"), young Noume persists in his jonglerie. But in this way Noume (Nomen est numen: he is a paradigm of the "houme," the man of the shabby settlers on the wrong side of the tracks, who by the act of "nommer," of naming, turns them into thinking subjects and potential heroes) "kind of figures a plan" to provide a new space for the evicted squatters. He will "overturn the tables of the law" (and set them right side up!) and volunteer to clear the dump as a project for improving the environment so as to receive a clear deed to the site. His "thinking crazy" is a prelude to a "crazy act" which turns out to be the extreme of wisdom, and establishes a space and a historical "base time" for a renewed community. While his father equates jonglerie with madness, Noume turns it into the mode of actualization of an idea that can change the world for him and for his society. While Don l'Orignal is concerned mostly with "making ends meet"—a pathetic spatial image of mere survival in the cube—and "not dying before your last hour has come"—its translation in time, the young hero draws from his dream sphere the vision that can unite myth (the founding of a "city") and reality. He can then reinvest the tension of the sphere/cube contest in a properly scenic situation: the decision to occupy the dump site leads to a clearly dramatic confrontation of the squatters with the solid burghers who wanted to cheat and exclude them from the time and space of the city.

In La Veuve enragée, the "juggling" (in this case made visible by step-dancing) of the marginal women of Cordes-debois takes place inside the time and space of the carnival, which belong to the order of the sphere ("Mardi Gras does it again!" exclaims la Piroune at the end of the play, to affirm the victory of her laughing cohorts over the solemn widow champion of the sober establishment). The merry wenches, the jolly witches and their ally the Irish sailor, Tom Thumb—leprechaun and circus performer, teller of tall tales, spinner of dream epics—will also at the end translate their poetic time and space into a conative action, and take renewed possession of the ancestral hillock where they have been squatters. This renewal is made very clear in the text:

ZELICA Here it is, our home and native land. It ain't ready to die yet, the hilltop our old ancestor has cleared (la butte qu'a défrichetée l'ancêtre Mercenaire).

It is also represented by the action on the stage:

       La Piroune leads her people in a merry round. The
       widow is driven from the stage
       and runs away screaming.
 
       The End

In the less "scenic" plays, jonglerie alone must evoke conflicts and tensions, and define the dramatic style. In order to study those plays, the procedure suggested by Ubersfeld to analyze the treatment of the time and space needs to be somewhat adapted. Of course, the study of spatial paradigms, the definition of semic and scenic categories, and the distribution of characters and objects into polarized classes remain necessary tasks. But in this case, stage directions (or didascalies) offer little help: in La Sagouine, they have to be deduced from the character's words: in Gapi and Évangéline Deusse, they are often, if not redundant, at least subordinated to the text:

ÉVANGÉLINE You should not need to tell them who try and shoot roots in foreign soil when they're getting on in years … how raucous the shriek of sea-gulls can be …

One hears faintly at first, then gradually louder the call of sea birds. (Évangéline, final scene)

GAPI … There's no one left … no one …

Shrieks of the sea-gulls, all agitated.

No, not a one! Now you just shut up, you up there! I want to be left alone.

Spatial and temporal models are dependent less upon the (conative) representation of actions and conflicts than upon the (poetic) evocation of conflicts in the tales or the recitatives of the protagonists. Binary patterns that could be used to define sets of characters or objects are constantly modified as the speakers proceed with their jonglerie. For instance, in La Sagouine, the group of us is sometimes split up, and we have an opposition between I and you; within the I, one may even at times distinguish between an individual I (or somatic self) and a representative I, who speaks on behalf of the community and is apt to use a mixed singular/plural form (j'avons). The opposition of the first-person character(s) to the third person is fairly constant. But some they—who are incapable of speech, within expression, the "poor slaves"—are occasionally subsumed by us. In addition, there are beyond expression, a group of they that I have called tiers abstraits (the abstract third parties) who have no existential correlative. Their voice is that of non-people and is heard through the media (the "gazettes" or newspapers); it takes the form of officialese ("newspeak"), or of clericalese ("oldspeak"), and expresses the "machinofichier" (the power of machines and files). That tiers abstrait which uses what Gobard would call a "referentiary language" is the cold arch-enemy of the vernacular; it even distorts and dehumanises the vehicular. In order to escape it, one must travel through the looking-glass of the theater and reach the realm of the living imagination where comforting old myths still hold sway, where one is free to create personal mythologies and even to tinker with an individual, idiosyncratic expression, with idiolects and "idiomytholects."

This multiplicity of levels and the constant creative interplay among them are to be found not only in the distribution of voices, characters and objects, but also as major characteristics of the treatment of time and place by Maillet. The author of La Sagouine is clearly of the same generation as Armand Gatti, the generation that has become aware of the necessity to accommodate scientific relativity into its experience of life. She does not establish the kinds of precise relationships among four-dimensional systems that can be found in Thirteen Suns (Les Treize Soleils) or The Stork (La Cigogne). But beyond the chronicle of familiar events which provides the framework of the narrator's discourse in La Sagouine—the seasons and feast-days of Christmas (Nouël), Happy New Year (La Bonne Ânnée), Springtime (Le Printemps); the recurring activities that establish the cycles of human existence, such as one's life-work (le métier), youth (la jeunesse), death (la mart)—she also establishes the presence of historical events: war, the census. These events proceed according to mysterious laws, and their comprehensible order often appears in the guise of arbitrariness. Nevertheless, the heroine connects them with realities she has experienced; she reads some sense into their absurdities and naïvely reveals ironies without necessarily perceiving them in herself. The economic crash becomes crache écumunique (ecumenical spit), a description which invests it with religious dignity—Christ suffering insult, the efforts to unify churches—enhancing its world-wide character; the fates that are "in the cards" are connected to existential patterns. Moreover, beyond such human contingencies, the heroine is aware of cosmic horizons: the moon can be brought within reach, in the same way as heaven, and La Sagouine believes in space travel, by an act of faith which Gapi, ever critical, refuses to accomplish.

It would therefore be rewarding to develop the study of the jonglerie plays not only as poetic explorations, but also as mythical constructs. A systematic mythocritique ought to detect in them the workings of imagination, be it collective or individual. In spite of the cultural starvation imposed on the characters by their poverty and their comparative isolation, an active interplay of memories and speculations, a resourceful weaving together of vernacular and mythical languages (in Gobard's terminology), as well as the occasional bold leap into the hors-dit (that postulated treasure which dramatizes the non-dit and complements the hors-scène) make such plays extremely rich. I am unfortunately not in a position to present a developed proposal for such a mythocritique, both because of the limitations of this paper, and because of the methodological problems I still have to work out (including the techniques for dealing with the heterogeneous, in spite of Bataille's seminal suggestions; or the relationship between mental categories and verbal equipment, although Benveniste's observations on "categories of language and categories of thought" may well provide a starting-point). But I would like to submit here a few samples, the result of a rapid and somewhat subjective survey rather than of a systematic and thorough investigation, and to venture a few hypotheses and suggestions for future research.

Among the most obvious problems raised by Antonine Maillet's corpus are those of the relationships between her plays and her stories which could often be analysed in parallel from the point of view of the plot lines, the characters, the techniques of actualization and the mediations of the emotive function. The plays' originality could be assessed also by a study of the strong sociological and heterological polarization of their spatial features. One could also draw attention to the tendency of Maillet the dramatist towards a deconstruction of history and the redistribution of its elements. These elements are manifested as day-to-day history (petite histoire), emphasizing anecdotes and extending them in the direction of parable and/or exempla; in other words, transposing time sequences into a symbolic construct and offering a commentary based on folk wisdom and doxa, thus offering thumb-nail sketches of morality plays. But time sequences may also be reorganized in cyclical patterns or in epic or pseudo-epic narratives—again with commentary—thus providing a different proto-Brechtian kind of epic theater whose protagonists are again held to be in the oral tradition since most of them are functionally illiterate. Finally one could consider, as the starting-point for a definition of Maillet's theatricality, her use of paradigmatic disjunctions, the valorization of certain terms and their dual role as syntactic shifters and as semantic terms of reference.

I have briefly discussed the relation between the plays and the stories, as well as the spatial polarizations and the temporal deconstructions, and shall return to them in other studies now in progress. But the fourth problem seems particularly relevant to our overall project here, and indeed is considered to be crucial by several theoreticians, whether they deal with drama (Ubersfeld) or with other projections of the imaginative faculties (Gobard). I shall therefore concentrate on it as best I can with the limited theoretical equipment now available.

The obligatory focus, which establishes contact at the present time of the actual performance (re-presentation), at the point of emission of the spoken work (whether or not it is perceived as a transposition, a final term in a succession of relays, a speech act grounded in experience, with referential and / or metalingual co-ordinates), is the here and now vehicular: ici et maintenant with their variants in vernacular: "icitte," "là où je suis" (where I am), "où je sons" (combining singular speaker and collective awareness), etc. This base point must always be considered in its poetic function in the text of the play but, whenever enunciated, it also involves all participants in the dramatic experience, be they internal to the play or external, identified or removed (verfremdet). From this base point radiate revolving semantic beams which reveal for a brief moment a particular experience and make it possible to share it.

The lighthouse in the set for Gapi, firmly established in a given point in space, offers a metaphor and an analogue of the here and now in Maillet. It constitutes a landmark, but at the same time emits signals which reveal other areas (and reveal it as far as the eye can see) and which must be interpreted in relation to a rhythmic, temporal pattern superimposed upon natural rhythms such as those of the tide or the phases of the moon. The place of and the part played by this emitter of signals offer a visible correlative of the way the text and its dramatic production are associated. The here and the now are not, however, any more punctual than the speaking I of a character, which can, as we have noted, be considered at any moment under a variety of guises, and which of course evolves as the play progresses. But they can serve as anchoring points for paradigmatic series arranged according to modes or aspects, and include terms which are more or less strongly marked. For instance, starting from now, one finds the vehicular tomorrow and yesterday, soon, shortly (à l'instant), still (aspect of duration), again (iteration), but also the vernacular still and all (toujours ben), as of tomorrow (dès demain), which often convey a charge of emotion and imply an existential urgency.

The mythical horizon is conveyed by expressions even more idiosyncratic and with a faintly archaic flavor to evoke the time of origins—once upon early days (sus l'empremier)—or the eschatological horizon—some fine day (un beau jour). These two later terms recur in all of Maillet's plays and might establish a kind of teleology of jonglerie. But Maillet (or her characters) seems to shy away from the absolute: the Creation and the Last Judgement are dealt with by the very human, very Acadian agents. God Himself is very much in the image of a neighborly, jolly old fellow (La Sagouine would feel happy in Heaven if "… God the Father could come over to call the square dances 'pon a Saturday night …") Eternity is conceived of as a development of experience: "a real Spring, that won't stop, but that will last, and then that will last, and then … why, that will be Heaven, and on that there day (c'te jour-là) I do believe I shall be dead and right inside Paradise."

On the other hand, if the absolute is made relative, the relative is durable: provisional and precarious conditions provide the basis for lasting ideologies and for a world-view based on the desire to "hang on tight." The important characters in Maillet's plays (with the notable exception of Citrouille and the Merchant's daughter in Les Crasseux, humble modern counterparts of Romeo and Juliet, even though social conflicts are more important in their tragedy than feudal pride) refuse to die. When they are taken from life, it is after a tough battle against hardship (La Sagouine), or even when they have weathered the worst storms and are within sight of a safe harbor (the old Breton of Évangéline). Their ability to "surge up again" (ressoudre), their physical and moral resourcefulness, is indeed their most remarkable feature: each individual takes up the collective fight of the Acadian nation and, without illusion, refuses to give in to time and its grim ally, death:

you must not come and tell old folks what's what, it's no use coddling them, it's definitely no use trying to pull the wool over their eyes … Old folks and those who have been deported … That's on account of their being the only ones (par rapport qu 'i' sont les seuls) I have ever met who know all about life, since they are the only ones who have started over several times, and who have kept going to the very end … to the very end …

as Évangéline puts it before the curtain falls.

Among those poor and thrifty people who are used to mending nets and patching old clothes, the effort to negate the wear and tear of time leads to a patient reconstruction of sequences. While history has been unkind, with its succession of spoliations and uprootings, a complementary counter-history must be wrought from the little shreds that have been treasured by individuals. In that respect, the work of the défricheteuses de parenté—the careful genealogists who at the same time, in a complex metaphor, untangle confusing skeins, clear areas which are overgrown with weeds, and restore the continuity of "lines" in the vegetation of family trees, in the weaving of family "tapestries"—is exemplary. In fact, the work of restoring the chronicle may well mean more than the reconstructed chronicle itself. The Acadian descent, although it is patrilineal according to the common Western pattern, often takes its virtue from the tracing up (through the work of women) of a lineage from the individual ("he is Thomas, born of Jos, born of Samuel") rather than from proceeding in the Biblical style down from the (male) ancestor ("Samuel begat Jos, who begat Thomas") who established a root or "stirps." The family is ascent, not descent, and an effort to evolve. Thus, a tension against time is created, and that too is a factor of dramatization.

The tension against space is quite as notable, and what is more, in its most crucial form, the inherited fight against displacement (which in Évangéline Deusse actualizes the deportation into a personal experience of collective deportation), is part of the same struggle, of the same agon. Generally speaking, the Acadian characters stay in their places but will not be pushed around: should anyone attempt such an abuse, he would arouse a popular movement, such as that which takes place at the end of Les Crasseux at the instigation of Noume, the juggler-hero. Any individual who breaks ranks and tries to move apart (or believes he/she can move up) is punished by ridicule (La Sainte, in the episode of the church pews in La Sagouine) or visited with some more obscure retribution from within or without the group. But this tenacity cannot be equated with immobilism: the characters are active and mobile inside the space which they define.

These all too brief remarks in no way exhaust even one aspect of a complex set of issues. I hope, nevertheless, that they provide some clues to the originality of a remarkable corpus. Maillet's dramas are very specific: they offer the defense and illustration of a national theater for a nation that is still as much in limbo as Poland was in Jarry's Ubu. They are the representative voice of a social group that is still not heard publicly, of a sex that is still often relegated to the status of "other." But at the same time, this Acadian repertoire, whose major protagonists are old, poor women, is universal in its topoi and its structures: it constitutes in many respects a paradigm for the study of general ideology, of cultural patterns, of the layering of language. It would therefore be rewarding to use it as a basis for further research, dealing for instance with mythopoetic jonglerie and other extensions of the dramatic into the hors-scène. But such extensions are most often reinvested in the scenic cube, even if this return, this new surging up, carries with it the strange atmosphere of myth or carnival, of a different truth, a different time, a different space. Perhaps this is an example of the theater of the oppressed at work. Perhaps it is the expression of a general rule of any theater which establishes reality against reality by a process of denial.