Antonine Maillet's Don I' Orignal
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The Tale of a Narrative: Antonine Maillet's Don I' Orignal by Barbara Thompson Godard "Le monologue est la forme la plus eighteenth-century and contemporary ancienne et la plus nouvelle du thea• works that question the origins and tre quebecois. II se situe a la function of narrative. Don 1'Orignal fois en marge (au cabaret, dans les celebrates unbookishness: its self- boites) et au coeur de notre thea• conscious analysis of narrative focus- tre, " (1) writes Laurent Mailhot. This ses on the question of an "Acadian mode of representation has its roots literature" where moribund conventions in an especially rich oral narrative of the European literary tradition tradition that is also the source of would be regenerated by the living tales by Ferron, Theriault, Carrier and, vitality of a native folk tradition now we may add, by Maillet. Paraphras• based on oral narrative. This folk ing Mailhot, the tale is the most tradition provides a rhetoric and venerable and the newest form of fiction vocabulary of comedy, a cast of char• in French-speaking Canada, a paradox I acters and the element of the marvel• should like to explore in Antonine lous that engenders romance. In jux• Maillet's Don 1'Orignal. taposing classical form and vital language, Maillet insists that dis• covering an ancestral community should This novel shares its sophisticated liberate rather than enslave a present reflexive form with prominent generation. In 1971, Maillet published a thesis on tive plot reveal the modernist ethos, Rabelais et les traditions populaires though their origins lie in the oral en Acadie(2)wherein she showed how the tale. Modernism, whether of the mediaeval traditions on which Rabelais "early symbolist variety" or a more drew for his celebrated works were recent, historically based "post• alive and flourishing in the folklore modernism," attacks mimesis. Para• of Acadia. As if to demonstrate the doxical though it may seem, one of the reality of the Phoenix, Maillet pub• characteristics of the modernist move• lished in the same year La SagouineQ) ment in Canada, whether in Laurence's (a monologue or a recit? asks The Diviners, Aquin's Prochain episode Mailhot)(4)and a year later Don or Don 1'Orignal is the search for new 1'Orignal, narratives heavily dependent narrative forms in an ancient oral on her folklore research. Maillet's tradition. These works juxtapose the attempts to develop an artistic lan• artifice of verisimilitude to the guage out of the real landscape in chaotic vitality of history, thus which she lives lead her to the folk• questioning the ability of literature tale, whose very art is "the art of to give form to reality. Its arti• playing with the masks of words."(5) fices are accentuated through the In company with her contemporaries, presence of a highly visible and un• Maillet's major task becomes the ex• reliable narrator and the abandonment ploration of language for the purpose of realism's linear plot. In Don of freeing the imagination from repre• 1'Orignal folk traditions have the sentational strictures and affirming appearance of history and history gains the compatibility of spiritual and the heightened grandeur of legend. The political goals. The continual ex• fact that both history and folk tra• ploration of the French language in dition are possible explanations of all its vital aspects and Acadian facts deters us from dismissing either specificity is a constant of Maillet's one. Maillet's characteristic struc• style. Her linguistic sense seeks out tural device of multiple choices leads the most vital form of language. Her us to a wider world of multivalent words, expressions, inflexions are de• narrative larger than the partial rived from speech, not books. Yet truths of either the marvellous or the paradoxically, her writing is an at• world of fact offered therein. tempt to give them form. Like Jacques Ferron, Maillet says: "I am the last Fundamental to the modernist movement of an oral tradition and the first of are its linguistic preoccupations. its written transposition."(6) Disjuncted from feeling, language in Modernism took over its own space, In Maillet's novel the multivalent formed an opaque substance dwelling narrative perspective and accumula• outside the characters who ostensibly mouth it to become itself the subject tensive use of pastiche and puns would in a plot. With its emphasis on indicate an attempt at "de-composition." transmission, the tale does not create Readers are invited to reflect more heroes but limits itself to propagating deeply on the conventions of literary the art of speaking and telling.(7) language. Most common here is a style of "writ• ten speech" which, according to Roland This dual movement has particular Barthes,(8)is one of the more extreme relevance in Canada where both English examples of modernist "zero degree and French writers have been aware of writing," writing which is the nega• "translated" language—standard British tion of itself, silence, absence. or American, international French- dominating literature. Dennis Lee has Classical language reflected a stable described the problem of language for world; however, beginning with Flau• a minority whose public space is bert, language became narcissistic, threatened. self-reflexive. Mallarme with his But if we live in space which is phrase "to speak has no connection radically in question for us, that with the reality of things," "murdered" makes our barest speaking a problem language. Later Wittgenstein des• to itself. For voice does issue in cribed the nature of linguistic truth part from civil space. And alien• as tautological ("that which mirrors ation in that space will enter and itself in language, language cannot undercut our writing, make it re• represent"), and the only subject left coil upon itself, become a problem for writers was that of their diffi• to itself. cult relationship with their medium, language. One facet of this crisis The act of writing "becomes a prob• of language has been a turning to lem to itself" when it raises a symbolism, music or foreign languages vicious circle, when to write to carry the burden of meaning when necessarily involves something that English or French is no longer suf• seems to make writing impossible. ficient. Maillet's use of Acadian Contradictions in our civil space dialect in Don 1'Orignal is evidence are one thing that makes this hap• of her dissatisfaction with literary pen, and I am struck by the subtle language. Through her use of the cur• connections people here have drawn rent coin of language, the commonplaces between words and their own prob• of speech and popular art forms, she lematic public space.(9) has injected new material into litera• Significantly Lee first made this state• ture. There are some indications that ment to a group of Quebec writers only Maillet has experienced the crisis of too acutely aware of the linguistic language in yet another way. Her ex• alienation of a doubly colonized people. From the early sixties, a debate on Maillet has learned from Carrier's language has animated the Quebec example: she uses swearing as a means literary world. Its focus has been on of individualizing the characters and "joual," speech that signals linguistic showing their inventive powers. These alienation. Those who use it in fic• are also revealed in their creative tion make thus an implicit comment on malapropisms and unwitting puns on literary conventions and show one way literary classics. Writing from to renew them—"Parole" versus "langue." Acadia as a spokesman for its national aspirations,(11)Maillet is Roch Carrier, who has chosen to seek even more aware of the colonizing im• out the vital speech of the past to plications of conventional language. form a new literary language, describes Like Carrier she is embarked on the the process in a comment on the origins perilous enterprise of creating a of La guerre, yes sir. vital imaginary country in order for En ecrivant ce livre, je me suis that country to come into existence. apercu que notre litterature demeurait generalement superficielle Her Acadian nationality is the first dans ses themes et son ton, comme element in Maillet's mistrust of la litterature d'une communaute language, but there is a second ele• tenue a l'ecart, alors meme que des ment nourishing it, namely her sex. recits comme ceux de Cartier, de Though she has made no feminist pro• Champlain, du P. Biard, de Marie nouncement, in all her fiction—Don de 1'Incarnation regorgent d'une l'Orignal, La Sagouine, Mariaagelas richesse spontanee qui n'a pratique- and Cordes-de-Bois—Maillet has ment jamais ete exploitee. Pour developed strong female characters who ecrire mon roman, j'ai du me are the effective heads of their so• depouiller de tout ce qu'on m'avait cieties. Don l'Orignal may be the appris pour revenir a la source de titular head of Flea Island, but it is personnages d'instinct, de coleres, La Sagouine who fulfills all the of• de sentiments profonds. Le sacre, fices she is entitled to in a battle par exemple, dont personnellement which sets her against the redoubtable je 'use pas, que je n'ai jamais en- Mayoress from the mainland. Epic tendu dans ma famille, j'en fais battles in this fiction, as in grand usage dans le livre, parce Cordes-de-bois, pit women against each qu'il m'apparait comme la premiere other in an inversion of the tra• affirmation d'une conscience in- ditional epic, an implied destruction dividuelle. La structure syntaxi- of masculine conventions. que du blaspheme raconte bien notre histoire, le flou de notre Contemporary Quebec women's writing expression, le pietinement de la also centres the revolt against conven• pensee et de la vie.