Mending the Acadian Diaspora: Strategies of Remediation in Nicolas Dickner’s Nikolski (2005)

Abstract

Dickner’s brilliant, witty first novel finds inspiration in the parody and paradox of the OULIPO writers, Jorge Luís Borges, and Michel Tournier – particularly the latter’s ingenious exploitation of the archetype of inversion. Nikolski’s thematic deep structure, however, derives from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and from the stories of Jonah (Jonas, in French) and Noah in the Book of Genesis. Through the mediation of these intertexts, Dickner reflects on the tragic diaspora of the Acadians starting with their violent deportation from the Maritime Provinces in 1755. Three contemporary Acadian protagonists (one may be descended from Caribbean pirates, one is half Native American, and one half Québécois) separately attempt to reconstitute their lost culture. They transcend their initial failures, forsaking paralyzing nostalgia to join new, multiethnic communities of marginalized peoples. Thus Dickner updates the reparative efforts of Longfellow’s Evangeline and Antonine Maillet’s folk epic Pélagie la charrette, with his thoroughly urban, postmodern sensibility.