Acadia's woman of words
Published Saturday November 7th, 2009
It is 30 years since Antonine Maillet received the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary award. The recognition catapulted the Acadian experience into the international spotlight and established Acadian as an official French literary language. The anniversary will be celebrated in Moncton Nov. 18 with the premiere of the NFB documentary 'Antonine Maillet: Les possibles sont infinis.'
Authors make things up. Imagined scenes, dialogue and characters are their stock in trade. After a half-century of writing, though, Antonine Maillet realized characters don't reside exclusively on the page, and they aren't strictly the creation of authors.
"After so many years of writing and public life, you discover that you became yourself a personnage as you write about personnages all the time," Maillet says. "And beyond me, in spite of me, I gathered that I had become some kind of a figure, and I'm not sure I like that. But it's that way."
A new film peels back the celebrated Acadian author's public persona, offering an intimate look at the 80-year-old woman who is credited with giving Acadia its voice.
Antonine Maillet: Les possibles sont infinis premieres Nov. 18 at the Capitol Theatre in Moncton. The launch of the French film (it is being translated into English) is timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Maillet receiving the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary award, for Pélagie-la-Charette, her novel about the return to Acadia in the late 1700s following the deportation. On Nov. 19, 1979, she became the first non-European to take the prestigious award.
The idea for the 52-minute film, the first full-length documentary about Maillet, grew from a short meeting of just a few hours.
It was October 2005, and Marie-Linda Lord, research chair in the department of Acadian studies at the Université de Moncton, had met Maillet in Bouctouche to take her photo for the Acadian literary atlas Lord was working on, which will be published next month.
Lord had encountered Maillet before in various capacities, first as a journalist (she still has a tape of a 1988 interview she conducted with the author) and later as a conference organizer and academic.
But it wasn't until she spent the afternoon with Maillet in her native Bouctouche that Lord realized how little is known about one of Acadia's greatest living artists.
During their time together, Maillet spoke candidly of her childhood, family and writing.
"At the end of the afternoon, I couldn't believe all the things I had heard during those three hours," Lord says, including the stress Maillet felt after winning Le Prix Goncourt.
"We know about her books, we know she's from Bouctouche, she now lives in Montreal, but about the rest of her life, we don't know a thing."
And while certain of Maillet's honours and accomplishments are well-known - she has published more than 50 books in as many years, is a Companion of the Order of Canada, recipient the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal, is an Officier des Arts et des Lettres de France, and a member of the Order of New Brunswick and the Queen's Privy Council for Canada - Lord was shocked to hear of others, such as Maillet's membership in the literary council of la Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco.
"I thought, 'My God, what a woman!' I couldn't believe my ears."
The next month, over lunch, Lord enthused to Moncton filmmaker Ginette Pellerin about her meeting with Maillet.
"Spontanément I said, 'Maybe we should try to do a documentary on her,'" Pellerin says.
Maillet had been the subject of hundreds of media interviews and a number of short films, but never a full-length documentary.
"We wanted to make something more substantial about her, that would go more in-depth about her and her life and work," Pellerin says.
In July 2006, over dinner in a Montreal restaurant, Lord told Maillet about the documentary she and Pellerin wanted to make.
"We don't want the public figure, we want the writer and we want the woman you are," Lord told her.
"In the beginning, I was a little hesitant because I was wondering, what I am I going to say?" Maillet says, speaking from her Montreal home on Avenue Antonine Maillet, named in her honour after she won the Goncourt. "I don't want to say everything, and yet if you're open for that kind of film you have to say everything, because the questions come and you just can't make a blank. You have to answer."
Lord recalls that Maillet was quiet for a moment, considering the request. "You want me to sign le pacte du diable," Maillet said - a deal with the devil.
"Yes," Lord replied.
"And finally she said, "D'accord. I'll do it,'" Lord says. "And she did it."
Lord says there are many revelations in the film.
"She went where she had never gone before, about her life, about her relationships, about her family, about what happened when she left Acadie."
When Pellerin first approached the National Film Board with the idea for the film, she fought to convey the timeless, universal elements of Maillet's work.
"At first they said, 'Oh, there's been lots of stuff on Antonine Maillet. Why do you want to do that? What will be different?'"
"I was trying to convince them," she says. "The thing that came back a lot was that she was folkloriste, passiste, (that) her writing was from the past and folkloric.
"Each time, I was trying to tell them, 'No, no, she's very modern. Even in writing La Sagouine, all the subjects, all the topics that La Sagouine explores, it's very anchored in modernisme. And she treats a lot of social subjects ... That's why it came through the ages."
Pellerin calls the film an Impressionist portrait of Maillet, who turned 80 in May.
"Because her work is so big, her personality is so big, I couldn't go in depth in every aspect of her life, her work. So it's by little touches."
The film weaves interviews with Maillet with those with publishers, professors, journalists, actors and writers, including former New Brunswick Lt.-Gov. Herménégilde Chiasson and Noah Richler.
Pellerin and her crew visited places that have been important in Maillet's life, including the auditorium of the Collège Notre-Dame d'Acadie, where she taught and made her debut as a writer; the Radio-Canada studio in Moncton where she read the early monologues of La Sagouine on-air; the stage of the Théâtre du Rideau-Vert in Montreal, where a play based on the novel was first performed in 1972; the sand dunes of Bouctouche; Le Pays de la Sagouine, the Bouctouche tourist centre inspired by her work; and the attic of her Montreal home, where she writes for four or five hours a day, six days a week.
"She said, 'Each time I go up in my attic and I sit there and I write, all my characters are surrounding me. I see them everywhere, on the chair, on the bookshelf,'" Pellerin says. "So I did that."
She filmed some of the actors from Le Pays de la Sagouine in front of a blue screen, later inserting them into the scene.
Even though she was initially reluctant to discuss some issues, Maillet says there was a certain relief in talking openly about things she hadn't disclosed before.
"More and more I say everything," she says. With age, she says, comes freedom - not to be mistaken with wisdom.
"I think wisdom is closer to humour than real sagesse. (With) humour, you can see life with a distance ...and also, it gives you some kind of freedom to say things because you have nothing to lose anymore.
"When I write a book now I'm not thinking of the critics or the reception of the book or the prizes. I've got them all. I don't care about that anymore, so I am free to write what I like to write, to say what I need to say."
Pellerin says the film shows vulnerabilities that belie the popular image of Maillet as indomitable.
"Lots of people think she's sort of a superwoman, that she is ahead of everything and she's in control of everything," Pellerin says, "but she sort of proposed to us various fragile aspects of her personality and also of her work."
One of the greatest revelations was the aftermath of winning the Prix Goncourt. Many of the winners never write again.
"It's too big. It's too much," Lord says. "The expectations are too big after that, so the only thing you can do is come down. You got the biggest, the highest."
Although the pressure was intense, Maillet calls the idea of not writing again nonsense.
"I thought that if the price you had to pay for it is to stop writing, it was so ridiculous, I would have said no. I was not the type to stop writing because I had a prize.
"The biggest prize I ever had was to write and to have the public read me."
She published again two years later, in 1981, but concedes in the film the writing was not up to her standard.
"So it's a big confession to say, 'That book is not very good,'" Lord says. "She's very honest."
Maillet says the best part, personally, of winning the Goncourt was being freed from the worry of having to make a living from her writing, "and that's quite a freedom, quite a liberté," she says.
On a larger scale, the Goncourt marked the acceptance of Acadian as an official French literary language.
"That was the prize for me ... after the Prix Goncourt, we never had to question ourselves anymore on the importance of our culture and our history and our value," Maillet says.
She won't take full credit, though.
"When people say, 'You're the writer of Acadia,' I don't think so. I am, and I am not. I'm less and more. I say less, because others are just as much as me ... and on the other hand, I am more because it expands, it goes beyond. I'm a writer of life, not just Acadia, you see."
In the film, Maillet answers to some tough questions, including explaining her decision to live in Montreal, which has been criticized by some Acadian authors in New Brunswick.
Lord says there are a couple of reasons a full-length documentary on Maillet had not been done before.
"In Acadie, some people say that she's the tree hiding the forest," she says. "And the other thing is that there are so many things to do and there are only a few of us, so we can't do all that needs to be done."
Lord's last priority was the international symposium she organized last summer to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Maillet's first book, Pointe-aux-Coques.
Her next priority is a Maillet biography, which will draw on much of the research she did for the film.
Lord had unprecedented access to the author. Maillet would even leave Lord a key to her Montreal home while she was in Bouctouche.
"I could go and look at everything I wanted," Lord says.
She figures she has at least two more years of research, interviewing and writing before the biography will be done.
Her subject is in no hurry.
Fit and active at 80, Maillet speaks of "the many years I still have" and the writing she wants to accomplish.
"I think life is just beginning for me."
While her short-term memory is shorter than it used to be - "I don't know where I put my pen yesterday," she says - her "ancient memory" is more acute than ever, she says.
She is exploring the role of memory in a new book she is working on about writing.
"I'm discovering that I'm going much deeper than I think, that I'm not just a memory, I'm a whole being, more unconscious than conscious," she says. "I want to write what I don't know I know. And to do that, you have to close all the little doors of your cerveau, your brain, and go down beyond your heart, beyond your memory, to the memory of the past you still have but you forgot." She compares herself to an entonnoir, a funnel.
"The entonnoir gets bigger and bigger as you go deeper and deeper. The larger your knowledge, the larger your ignorance of what is left to be known."
Her memory goes so far, she says she can remember things even from before her own life.
Even from her mother's womb, her memory was developing, she says.
"What she felt, she made me feel it; what she learned, she brought it to me. She taught me how to laugh when she was laughing. And she got a lot more from her mother, which she passed on to me," Maillet says.
But it goes even deeper than her own conception, into a kind of collective cultural memory.
"I'm sure that I have a memory of things I have never done, of words I have never said."
She has improvised a word in her writing before, only to later encounter it.
"It had existed before me, but I had forgotten that I knew it."
Those deep memories make for rich creative soil.
"I have more vision now than ever, and I know I'm lacking the time to put them all into books," she says.
"Every character opens me to many more characters. Ever story is an open house to all the stories I've never written."
Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph-Journal and is a frequent contributor to Salon.
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