Notre plaine et les leurs... : images du Manitoba et de la France chez Gabrielle Roy

Between the Canadian plains (“Manitoba”), where fresh water simultaneously nourishes abundant crops and charming mirages, and the saline land’s ends of Bretagne (“Sainte-Anne-la-Palud”) and of Camargue (“The Camargue”), plains soaked with “unwholesome water,” Fragiles lumières de la terre evokes not only the physical distance between two continents but also the distance between the child’s paradise revisited, nestled at the “axis of the world,” and two brackish spaces, which are at land’s end, both marked by war and representative of the worst aspects of modernity. Our analysis of the internal modes of organization of the descriptions in these three articles will focus on three operations studied by theoreticians: anchoring, reformulation and assimilation. The study of anchoring, especially the one of the legend-word which accompanies the title-theme, allows for the designation of a positional function for the descriptions, which ties them to a specific genre: the idyll for “Manitoba,” and the elegy for “Sainte-Anne-la-Palud” and “The Camargue”. But the initial genre labelling of the three articles is called into question by the operation of reformulation. The idyllic description of Manitoba ends with a brackish conclusion, thus rejoining the spirit of the other two, which in turn move from elegy towards a polemic tone. The latter term takes on its full meaning in the study of the operations of assimilation, where similes and metaphors take the form of war and peace allegories. The manipulation of these three descriptive operations in the texts evokes Camus’ metaphor of exile and the kingdom. At first glance, the plains of Manitoba appears as the kingdom, while those of Bretagne’s Finistère and the Camargue represent exile. But this kingdom that is Manitoba is not free of bitterness. One realizes that no longer can a kingdom, even a child’s paradise, be separated from exile. 40 CAHIERS FRANCO-CANADIENS DE L'OUEST, 2003