SOURCE: "Narrative, Carnival, and Parody: Intertextuality in Antonine Maillet's Pélagte-la-Charrette," in Canadian Literature, No. 118, Spring, 1988, pp. 43-56.

In the following essay, Lacombe examines the references to Longfellow and Rabelais in Maillet's novel.

According to Linda Hutcheon, the intertext is generated by a reader who recognizes, responds to, and activates the textual referents brought into alignment by the author in a contract with the reader. As with any self-reflexive text, Antonine Maillet's epic novel Pélagie-la-Charrette (1979) is brought into being, in the reader's mind or experience, by the interplay of three factors: text (in this case the unique combination of story and narrative that is signalled by the hyphenated title); context (historical referents, here specifically pertaining to the survival of the Acadians); and intertext (the sum total of allusions, influences, parallels, and comparisons, both implicit and explicit, with other texts). The foregoing quotations from the novel suggest that...