An “Improbable” Book: Mendeleev’s Periodic Table and the Idea of Artistic Completion in France Daigle’s Petit crayon pour faire mine

Petit crayon pour faire mine is the first book by France Daigle to appear since the Acadian author came out as transmasculine. Conceived as a “fable-book” (“livre-fable”), Petit crayon is a hybrid, fragmentary text that resists easy classification. The fable’s conventional moral eludes the narrator. Consequently, they create a complex formal infrastructure around transidentity which serves as both a literary theme and a creative principle. Owing in part to the arrival onto the scene of the “fable-muse”, embodied as a woman, the narrator constructs a literary language with which to give form and expression to their transidentity. In a typically Daiglian gesture, Petit crayon tells the story of its own creation. In an unconventional twist, however, Petit crayon also envisions its own ending. One of the most striking features of Petitcrayon’s densely self-referential narration is the way in which it recruits the chemical elements of Mendeleev’s periodic table to serve as symbols of transidentity. Individual elements, such as hydrogen, carbon, and boron, come variously to embody shape-shifting and composite behaviours. Daigle pries apart individual chemical elements to analyze their atomic structures. In doing so, they treat the chemical elements in ways that echo their characteristically nuanced treatment of literary language, together with the specificity of Acadian existence, in previous novels. To recall Raoul Boudreau’s influential terms, “[Daigle] se ser[t] de la langue pour gonfler la matière acadienne d’ambiguïté, d’implicite et d’ironie”. In the process of deconstructing the fable’s conventional archetypal infrastructure, the narrative imbues the chemical elements with dialectical behaviours that cause them to oscillate between the two thematic poles of creation and destruction. From one fragment to the next, and by means of iteration, Petit crayon endows transidentity with the performative force needed to imagine the simultaneous origin and end to Daigle’s literary universe. In Petit crayon pour faire mine, Daigle’s œuvre comes full circle. The book is as much a narrative of origins as it is a dénouement to Daigle’s forty-year authorial career. If Petit crayon can be said to contain Daigle’s œuvre within it, then it may also be seen to reflect the critical frameworks that have been brought to bear on Daigle’s fiction over the last few decades. The following section lays the foundation for the ensuing examination of Petit crayon. It does so by exploring the critical vocabularies that have arisen from the analysis of dialectical narration and tropes of creation in Daigle’s body of novels. The following section also traces Petit crayon’s formal roots to the postmodern fable whose scholarly reception helps to measure the tenor and thrust of Daigle’s experimentation with this genre. Prior to engaging with this body of criticism, however, I would like to conclude the introduction with a brief note on methodology. In the following analysis of Petit crayon, I approach Mendeleev’s periodic table in terms of a literary topos. By literary topos, I have in mind both a narrative attribute and a critical method. Its roots may lie in classical rhetoric, where it signifies “ [a] « consideration », [or an] « argument »”. But, as Jean-Pierre Dubost reminds us, the literary topos can also be viewed as a recurrent narrative sequence and as an integral part of a text’s spatiotemporal fabric : “si le topos […] est définissable comme configuration narrative [itérative], celle-ci est toujours en même temps une configuration spatio-temporelle”. When a literary topos is extracted from its narrative context for purposes of analysis, it effectively contains the larger whole within it. My approach to the topos combines both the classical and the literary approaches. That is, I view the …