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of the collective aspirations of the group. The frontier and the village are
permitted, even necessary. They are the here and the there , the necessity
and the possibility of the survival, continuity, and prosperity of the
French-Canadian nation' (188). And, in establishing these boundaries,
the novel not only delineates its space, but itself becomes a place, a site
of memory, indeed a magical one emitting its own voices and messages.
If, in the following, short chapter that ends the novel, Maria tells
Eutrope that she will marry him the following spring and thus remain
in her present rural setting, it is not because she has rejected the city or
the wilderness: she has simply recognized them as unrealizable alter-
natives for her. In particular, the paradise represented by François may
be lost, but it is hardly forgotten, and the wilderness remains a persis-
tent component of the French-Canadian identity, slated as it is to em-
brace contradiction.
It is this very openness to different spatial locations, configurations,
and connotations that causes Luc Bureau to question the traditional des-
ignation of Maria Chapdelaine as a 'roman de la terre' or a 'roman du
territoire.' By focusing on the novel's fifty-seven toponyms, recurring
234 times, Bureau notes that while 29 per cent allude to the 'centre' of the
territory and 26 per cent to its periphery, a full 23 per cent designate
faraway places, another 14 per cent foreign places, and 8 per cent refer
to space in general. Since none is privileged to the exclusion or detri-
ment of others, Bureau finds them complementary, not contradictory,
and from their combination formulates an expanded vision of the notion
of space and spatial experience, worth quoting extensively as we begin
to move into 'modern Quebec' and on to, dare we say, globalization:
Aucun espace ne peut être réduit à un espace. La fiction, le rêve, les sens,
le mouvement, le passé, le futur travaillent directement sur les lieux et les
font éclater en des myriades de scènes, de tableaux et de points de vue …
'L'espace vécu' pourrait-il être aussi ailleurs? À moins que la pensée, la
parole, le rêve soient des phénomènes totalement étrangers à l'espèce hu-
maine, irrémédiablement exclus de son champ d'expérience, l'on doit re-
connaître que 'l'espace vécu' des Chapdelaine est aussi les États-Unis, la
rivière Mistassini et Saint-André-de-l'Épouvante. L'expérience spatiale ne
procède pas par soustraction ou par exclusion; chaque lieu s'additionne à
l'autre et le complète … Lue dans cette optique, l'œuvre de Louis Hémon
devient un 'roman de la Terre ' plutôt qu'un soi-disant 'roman de la terre .'
[176-7; No space can be reduced to a single space. Fiction, dreams, the
senses, movement, the past, the future, work directly on these places and
 
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