Liminal Space of the Aboiteaux: Pilgrimage in Maillet's Pelagie

Antonine Maillet's novel, Pelagiela-Charette, which won the Prix Goncourt 1979, is rife with tall tales, fantastic fables, and lessons of History, all of which have come through an opening as small as a clapper the aboiteaux: the mouth of a storyteller (7). The aboiteaux--clever one-way valves a dike that once characterized the shores of Acadie--function as metaphor for a trickle of people surviving deportation (in 1755), exile and return (in 1764), and a century of silence before being recognized as a people at le premier congres 1881 (Le Blanc 27) such that there are now over 300,000 Acadians Canada. The gap at the centre of each aboiteaux constitutes the space where change occurs: fresh water becomes salty, a weak trickle becomes the strength of the tide. These gaps represent liminal space, the 'in-between space' which cultural change may occur, and this exile and pilgrimage represents a time of ambiguity and change (Ashcroft et al., Post-Colonial 130). But survival of a people is not simply the survival of its stories. Maillet's novel lets readers experience, by taking them to the feet of an accomplished storyteller, that sometimes survival is a releasing of the storyteller's hold on the details of an story so that it may flow with the present times. And the clever storyteller can mark changes, enabling her listeners to remember the version, the new version, and the event for which the change occurred. In the novel, a good deal of argument occurs regarding what's authentically old (Maillet, Pelagie 68), and such argument invites readers to examine the terms of authenticity as well as the distinctions between fiction and History (3), which is capitalized the novel as if she were a character who needs the life breathed into her by a storyteller. Studied here the English translation of Philip Stratford, the novel is a noisy celebration of generations of Acadian storytellers. To understand just who is talking, and from which century, requires active listening, as readers imagine themselves, by turns, on the pilgrimage the eighteenth century and at the feet of the storyteller the twentieth. The novel's several narratives comprise an 'invention' of a collective for a people whose sacred centre, its identity, has had to become storytelling itself (Pache 64). Graeme Wynn offers a fragment written by a French visitor to Port Royal 1699 that chronicles the complex system of the Acadian aboiteaux, saying, five or six rows of large logs are driven whole into the ground at the points where the tide enters the Marsh, & between each row, other logs are laid, one on top of the other, and all the spaces between them are so carefully filled with well-pounded day, that the water can no longer get through. In the centre of this construction, a Sluice is contrived such a manner that the water on the Marshes flows out of its own accord, while that of the Sea is prevented from coming in (qtd. Wynn 47). While open, the clappers of the aboiteaux create a gap--a liminal space between farmland and sea--in which fresh water is transformed to sea water, flowing waters to tidal waters. But for Maillet, the aboiteaux offer the complex metaphor of transition and pilgrimage that her narrators require: just as water trickles back to the sea, altered from fresh to salt water along the way, so people trickle back to their lands after The Expulsion, their identities detached from the lands they knew, and their stories altered the process. The image is also gap, space, state of ambiguity, and transition, and, as anthropologist Victor Turner puts it, the 'no place' of a society (qtd. Tucker 97). In identifying a space as liminal, Turner refers to the midpoint of transition a status-sequence between two positions (237), saying that one's transition through it is characterized by three stages: separation (232) or detachment from the group; a state of ambiguity betwixt and between all fixed points, where the subject passes through a symbolic domain that has few or none of the attributes of his past or coming state; and a re-entering of the social structure. …

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