‘Survivors of the Night’: The Language and Politics of Epic in Antonine Maillet's Pélagie-la-charrette

university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 3, summer 2002 JANET GILTROW and DAVID STOUCK >Survivors of the Night=: The Language and Politics of Epic in Antonine Maillet=s Pélagie-la-charrette For several reasons, epic seems to be a thing of the past. Well-known prototypes of epic B the Iliad, the Aeneid, Beowulf B are very old. And, as Bakhtin points out, epic tends to seize the past as template for all time, inspiring reverence for long-ago figures. Moreover, the ideologies of current literary-critical studies shun the grand, unitary themes of epic conclusiveness, preferring instead notions of inconclusiveness and polyvalency. Practitioners of these critical trends mistrust so-called >master narratives,= in which they see the now discredited hand of patriarchy, and the rule of the fathers. We argue in this essay, however, that epic persists in our day as a relevant literary mode. We conduct this argument by first suggesting that epic has been defined too narrowly B within the domain of genre rather than mode. Once we understand epic not as genre but as mode B as enduring motivation rather than contingent convention B we can see that epic expression still abounds in the modern world. Second, we develop insights from recent reasoning about epic to suggest that epic motivation is best understood as occurring along two lines: the traditionally observed story of conquest, hegemony and empire, on the one hand, and, on the other, the story not of winning but of losing, the story of peoples dominated, dispossessed, dispersed in national struggles. For the winners, the past and its triumphal record are definitive. The defeated, however, look not principally to the past but to the present and its promise for the future B for survival and regrouping, even rebirth. A conceptualization of epic that includes the stories of loss and defeat offers new interpretations of time and the past B ones more in keeping with current critical attitudes towards literary expression. The losers= epic shifts narrative power from the centre to the margins, and to the stories of minorities, of women, of the disenfranchised. To demonstrate this understanding of epic, we examine Pélagie-lacharrette , Antonine Maillet=s novel, which won France=s prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1979. Pélagie is a history of the Acadian people who returned after deportation and exile to their homeland in Canada B a story of >the 736 janet giltrow and david stouck university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 3, summer 2002 cripples, the aged, the whiners, the loud mouths, the hunted, and the abandoned= (47), >survivors of the night= (57). We show first that Pélagie adopts some epic conventions, but we then go on to show that Pélagie is also stylistically innovative in its intelligence of the oral tradition, which is often associated with epic but here newly imagined for its political meaning. Linguistic pragmatic analysis of the narrative reveals, first, that it is marked with the circumstances of the spoken word, and, second, that these circumstances are represented in such a way as to emphasize the reception of the word. Style in Pélagie is motivated by a vision of the community as auditors reassembled, reconvened after defeat. In configuring audience, Pélagie depicts the Acadian community as surviving the past B outliving it and continuing. But pragmatic analysis also shows that the rule of time is even more radically contradicted in this narrative. Explicitly resisting the sovereignty of literate culture, Pélagie stylistically defies time=s erasing power over the spoken word: the telling of the story (its narrative clauses) is audible not just to a descendant audience but to the ancestors themselves. The language of Pélagie exposes the authority of the narrative clause to rejoinder and interlocution. Re-examination of epic and its scope suggests that it can embrace those emergent political actualities that absorb current critical attention B the experience of the oppressed, the marginalized, the disappeared B in language that is neither patriarchal nor masterful, but collective and outspoken. EPIC AS MODE For students of literature and culture in the twenty-first century, the concept of epic may well founder on Bakhtin=s essay >Epic and the...