Marginalité et identité dans l'oeuvre romanesque d'Antonine Maillet et de David Adams Richards : esquisse du sociogramme du protagoniste marginal

Antonine Maillet and David Adams Richards, originally from neighbouring counties in the province of New Brunswick, share similarities of characterization and topoi that occur through serendipity rather than design. Throughout their novels, the sociogram of the marginalized protagonist changes, comes to a halt, and varies in the figurative journey carried by a member of a minority culture as that culture evolves through history in the advent of modernity to establish an identity. The referential axes of space and time in the works of both authors offer several anchor points to the sociogram. The sacred temporality of Acadia for Maillet or the profane time of the Miramichi for Richards serve as basic predicates to identity. The reflexive movement of the conflicting antinomies centre/margin, past/future, tradition/rupture, ignorance/knowledge, all sources of tension and opposition around identity, outline the scope of the marginalized protagonist's sociogram. In both bodies of work, the sociogrammatical activity revolves around several conceptual polarities such as: the territory and the fragment, memory and cultural amnesia, the community and the individual, subjectivity and American-ness, and finally confrontation and accommodation. Maillet's marginality is wilful, a conscious decision involving a community commitment to 'le vivre ensemble' (living together); Richards' marginality is that of the inexorable loss of identity, the internal exile in the absence of a community, an "us". The protagonist in Maillet resolves the enigma of her relationship to her community. Language, rather than Catholicism becomes the medium through which one discovers a viable self. The loss of cultural identity for the protagonist in Richards is a function of his dispossession from the Catholic Church. All the while, a sense of community dissolves as the American presence grows to be one of domination. In the case of both authors, the marginalized protagonist's sociogram is displaced according to linguistic circumstances. With each succeeding novel, Maillet's protagonists become increasingly confident in expressing themselves in French, the language of her identity, whereas Richards' protagonists manage to speak up and out using the dominant language, English. The Maillet protagonist, who in 1958 could not express herself in the vernacular language, celebrates in 1996 the recovery of her language of origin, written in literary space, granted; however, this space in turn becomes the locus of identity. The Richards protagonist of 1974 was a prisoner of silence; by 1996, however, the role of speaking out in fiction is the measure of the comprehension of a life lived. The sociogrammatical activity revolving around identity in order to add new meaning to it sheds light on the search for identity in Maillet's novels and on the loss of identity in Richard's novels. Through the figurative protagonists, both authors examine the individual and collective futures of their respective cultural minorities, both of which must face the challenges posed by modernity. To meet this challenge, Maillet 're'-tells History in fiction thereby ensuring an Acadian continuity in social discourse. The absence of a collective memory and all this implies in the novels of Richards produces a counter-effect vis-à-vis social discourse. Both authors, each in unique fashion, provoke a movement of sociogram of the protagonist who is marginalized; and this movement, from novel to novel, contradicts, displaces, and transforms the hegemonic 'doxa'.