Romancing the Epic: Forward to the Past with Antonine Maillet

Hans R. Runte

Dalhousie University

In the final analysis, these reflections will be about the power of literature, about its power not so much to reflect and (thereby) shape peoples and a people’s life, but its even more fundamental power to call communities into being and to ground them in existence. In order to demonstrate this power, there will be needed, and indeed will be evoked, a non-people awaiting to be called into time and space, and the people of medieval France will be used as a control group.

Penultimately, and much more pragmatically, the following pages will try to show by means of which narrative tools and tricks practitioners of literature lay the foundations of nationhood, and a contemporary research specimen will serve to suggest how this may (have) be(en) done.

The physical and human map of France in the ninth, tenth or eleventh century presents, in the concise formu-lation of Marie-Louise Ollier, “une communauté frag-mentée en micro-sociétés,” scattered over the territory by geography, politics, and “la disparate de ses dialectes” (Ollier 208). This community has not one but many names: Champagne, Burgundy, Anjou, Normandy, etc.; it has not one but many languages: wallon, picard, lorrain, champenois, bourguignon, normand, angevin, etc.; its allegiance is not to one nation indivisible, but to a duchy, county, village or clan in a patchwork of regional or local “appartenances.”

Similarly, the French-speaking people of Eastern Canada may live in what has been called Acadia ever since Samuel de Champlain explored the Atlantic coast at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but this name ceased to signify anything concrete as long ago as 1713, when England acquired the land for the last and final time. For two centuries and a half, and especially since the expulsion in 1755 poeticized by Longfellow, the descen-dants and successors of Champlain’s colonists have lived in a fragmented community whose names are New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, whose seventeenth-century language has evolved into a variety of ways of speaking as divergent as the pockets of Acadian habitation are far-flung, and whose identity is indeterminable:

We live in America, but we ain’t Americans. Nope, Americans, they . . . ’re rich . . . ’n we ain’t. Us, we live in Canada; so we figure we mus’ be Canadians. Well, that ain’t true either, cause the Dysarts, ‘n the Carrolls, ‘n the Jones, they just ain’t like us, and they also live in Canada. If the’re Canadians, we sure can’t be the same. Cause the’re English, ‘n us, we’re French. Nope, we ain’t completely French, can’t say that: the French folks is the folks fr’m France . . . ’n fer that matter, we’re even less Français de France than we’re Americans. We’re more like French Canadians, [the census takers] told us. Well, that ain’t true either. French Canadians are those that live in Québec. They call’em . . . Québécois. But how can we be Québécois if we ain’t living in Québec? Fer the love of Christ, where do we live? In Acadie, we was told, ‘n we’re supposed to be Acadjens. . . . Well, them censors didn’ wanna write that word on their list. The way they sees it, seems l’Acadie ain’t a country, ‘n Acadjen ain’t a nationality, cause of the fact it ain’t written in Joe Graphy’s books. Well, after that we didn’ know what else to say, ‘n we told’em to give us the nationality they wanned. So, I think they put us down with the Injuns. (Maillet, La Sagouine 165-66; see Appendix 2)

Yet there comes a time in medieval France when the assemblage of isolated micro-societies “éprouve le besoin et trouve l’élan vital pour l’assouvir, de se projeter . . . dans une image” in and through which the scattered groups can apprehend themselves as a community. This “éclatante affirmation d’une communauté qui se saisit comme telle,” this “prise de conscience collective, c’est l’épopée qui les véhicule” (Ollier 208). The epic, litera-ture, unites a dispersed people under one hero, one myth, one nation and, eventually, one language; that is its function and its power as any nation’s “premier mot—forme première dans l’ensemble des formes où s’articule la société” (Paquette 11). But how is such literary nation-building achieved in practice?

The medieval epics we know and study offer but imperfect and partial answers to this question. The textual evidence they present is unclear. Are they copies of perfor-mance records (dictations or transcriptions), or copies of individual authors’ final drafts? Who was first, the bard or the writer? Do epic formulas attest to the process of reiterative oral (re)creation, or to the formulaic character of all humanoid discourse? Do jongleresque interventions in these texts reflect the hic et nunc of an epic in the (re)making, or an author’s attempt at artificially aging his work? Is the remarkably discordant manuscript tradition of many an epic an indication of oral mouvance, or of interventions by remanieurs and scribes? In brief, did the “prise de conscience collective” begin orally, or was it from the outset the sole product of art and artifice?

As sentimentally tempting as the Romantics’ credo of spontaneous oral improvisation may have been, it eventually lost out, in the epicists’ Homeric struggle, to principles of “rifacimento littéraire” and “refinement of narrative structure” and “psychological or ideological complexity” (Calin, “L’Epopée dite vivante” 73, Carton 3-19). Yet the champions of Literary Composition won over the defen-ders of Oral Composition by default only, for medieval orality, by definition, cannot be documented, has at best left merely residual traces in the epic record. We know virtually nothing about the circumstances and mechanics of epic processes; we do not know how heroic events spawned memorable tales, how these tales passed from the anecdotal to the heroic, how they were transmitted and, through transmission and performance, shaped and forever inscribed in the collective consciousness. Even analogies with other oral cultures, from Central Asia’s Kirghiz to Ghana’s Gonjas or Cameroon’s Boulous (Spraycar 63-74; Zumthor 109, 120), have not answered our questions, for in the scientific search for the great Formulaic Recipe of oral creation, carried out, for example, among the guslari of former Yugoslavia, punctilious analysis of hemistiches, decasyllables, percentage thresholds, length and concordant or discordant pairs (Duggan, “Le Mode de composition” 286-316) has largely missed the fundamentally human and societal dimension of epic myth-making.

Perhaps literary science has reached a limit here, a limit beyond which only a “romancing” imagination can roam. Perhaps we should seek out, in a land not dissimilar from medieval France in its historical, cultural and linguistic situation, a bard who in and through the telling of her tales is living, and is making us live with her, the birth of the genre and of a country. We may find such a bard in Antonine Maillet (see Appendix 1), that necessary creator of an initial image into which Acadia can for the first time project herself as a nation.

Antonine Maillet’s publisher calls her books “romans” and even “romans québécois,” yet they are nothing of the sort. They are epics, by their narrative scope (Pélagie-la-Charrette [Prix Goncourt 1979] recounts the Acadians’ return from exile), by their irrepressible orality (Cordes-de-Bois [1977], Crache à Pic [1984]), and especially by their function as conveyors of the identity-giving “prise de conscience collective” (Cent ans dans les bois [1981]). Cent ans dans les bois, moreover, is an epic of the epic, a meta-geste telling of the heroic life and times of the genre and the people it reflects. Antonine Maillet herself is well aware of her epicity, evoking expressly the “matière d’Acadie . . . la geste acadienne . . . cette vaste matière des côtes [de l’Atlantique], parallèle à cette matière de France . . . qu’on avait apportée . . . dans ses bagages” (Cordes 227-28) and which is being commemorated by “douze chevaliers accroupis sur [la] galerie” (Cent ans 55).

Antonine Maillet’s cycle of Acadian epics demonstrates what goes into the making and working of epics. “In principio erat . . .” “la maçoune . . . que certains appellent l’âtre” (Pélagie 10), the essential place and space in which, as in the pilgrims’ hostels, market places and castle halls of the Middle Ages, epics are created, and around which assembles “toute la maisonnée . . . gonflée de la parenté et des voisins qui sort[ent] de chaque logis” (Cent ans 83). For epic creation is above all a collective act, a communal sifting of life’s myriad events and their distillation into meaningful essences, a slow and pon-derous process engaged in by the village pipe-slurpers (“le cercle des gicleux,” Pélagie 10, Cent ans 62) “assis en demilune autour du feu . . . [et] giclant dans la maçoune” (Pélagie 10, 83-84; Cent ans 24). In their midst is the bard, the menteux or conteux de contes or jongleux (“jongler” still means today “ruminer,” “muser” in Acadia), with whom the audience will spar, comparing his tales with theirs, confirming a detail here, contesting another one there, and revising their own versions according to what they hear. For example: “Dâvit à Gabriel venait à son insu de donner à Jérôme un nouvel argument . . . le conteur . . . s’arrêta pour respirer et laisser le temps à ses compères radoteux de protester” (Cent ans 41 and 31) or to yawn (“Louis-le-Drôle arrache à ses mâchoires un bâillement qui fait bâiller à la ronde le cercle des conteurs,” [Cent ans 42]) or to approve (“Ils sont tous debout, gesticulant et crachant dans l’âtre, se tapant les cuisses, se frottant les mains,” [Cent ans 48]).

What is being told and retold during these “veillées” are remembrances of things past and, in their light, interpre-tations of things present, “les derniers développements de la chronique” and “de nouveaux dits et gestes” (Cent ans 315) out of which will be woven the fabric of Acadianness, as out of the heroic legends about Charlemagne or Roland or Guillaume was created the notion and feeling of French nationhood. Until epics are written down, oral mouvance ensures that the fabric of tales remains a living one, for each bard, each participant has his/her own way to “transmettre les mots des autres, en les agaçant, juxtaposant, les triturant pour en extraire tout le jus” (Cent ans 14), each one chooses as s/he sees fit “les péripéties à taire ou à dévoiler . . . les coins à recourber, les tranches à fourbir, les brouillards à éclaircir, les conclusions à tirer” (Cent ans 24), and each one has the right to “tordre et retourner chacun des éléments . . . de la matière qu’il a . . . sous les yeux, ou sent . . . sous ses pieds, ou palp[e] dans ses mains . . . [pour] augmenter le pathos des événements tragiques” (Cent ans 315-16), to “embellir, et . . . inventer, en la gonflant d’ajouts et de péripéties de son cru, la belle histoire qui lui trotte entre les ouïes et la luette” (Cent ans 326), and to “échafauder sa splendide imagerie intérieure” (Cent ans 300).

Orality also accounts for many of the stylistic characteristics of the epic, and these Antonine Maillet explains best, and better than anyone, by simply using them in her cycle. She, like the tellers of/in her tales, has in her “besace” or bag of narrative tricks a rich collection of semiotic codes, rhetorical figures and structural devices such as “les mises en garde, les étapes, les péripéties, les clins d’œil, les digressions, [et] les commentaires de son cru” (Cent ans 27-28). “La redondance . . . [est] l’une des formes stylistiques les plus chères aux gens . . ., avec la litote et l’hyperbole, et . . . les vrais amateurs . . . [vont] jusqu’à combiner les trois figures dans une seule phrase, si la circonstance en . . .[vaut] l’effort” (Cent ans 190). Gestures and silences, integral parts of the oral performance, become important epic signifiers:

Avant de s’aventurer dans [son conte] . . ., il fallait aiguiser ses outils, sa curiosité, ses appétits. Et Jérôme [le Menteux, le “jongleux” dans Cent ans dans les bois] . . . laissait [les gicleux] prendre tout leur temps, cédant de la corde un pouce à la fois, sans les perdre jamais de vue. Mais voilà qu’on était prêt. . . . Jérôme . . . prend le temps d’ajuster sa casquette, de rallumer sa pipe . . . et d’approcher son banc. . . . Silence. Personne ne bouge. . . . À lui maintenant . . . de saluer bien bas la compagnie, de huiler sa langue de salive, et d’amener petit à petit son monde à le suivre. (46-47 and 27)

Antonine Maillet, like her counterparts in her epics, even has some of the epic formulas so eagerly researched by epicists: in Cent ans dans les bois, Jérôme le Menteux adorns “chacun de ses récits de ‘comme disait mon père,’ ‘au dire du vieux Mathias,’ ‘je le tiens de la défunte Agnès,’ ou ‘je m’en vas [sic] vous raconter un conte que m’a conté un conteur mort y a passé cent ans’” (14). Yet the oral artist cannot entirely forsake orality’s basic spontaneity, which may cause him/her to

bégay[er] et s’embrouill[er], enfilant les verbes les uns aux autres sans sujets ni nominatifs . . . mélange[r] les circonstanciels de temps et de lieu, pren[dre] une causale pour une finale, et accroch[er] des propositions relatives à des complétives à des subordonnées, en parsemant son discours d’imparfaits du subjonctif. (Cent ans 198)

We may take in Antonine Maillet’s epic mode of creation a purely theoretical interest, hoping to glean from her cycle a few insights into the world which lies forever hidden behind the epic texts we know, then dismissing her work as yet another historical recreation. But Antonine Maillet is no Jeanne Bourin; she does not recreate, she creates. Her epics found her country, ground it in its fundamental orality, and presents of it for the first time an image in which all Acadians, despite their diversity, dispersedness and isolation, can recognize themselves and the distinct society they form. And her creative act must be epic, for it is in Acadia the “premier mot,” the “forme première dans l’ensemble des formes où s’articule” a community which heretofore had been unexpressible and unexpressed, and which can now at long last begin to shape its present and future. Antonine Maillet’s twentieth-century epics are no more a phenomenon than was the Chanson de Roland nine hundred years earlier, and the time it took the Roncesvals legend to become text is only slightly longer than the period separating, for example, the expulsion of the Acadians from Pélagie-la-Charrette. Antonine Maillet’s emergence as the founding writer of her country is consistent with literary history and with the history of Acadia which reaches with her the last link in the long chain of heroic Acadian tales “qu’on se passait comme du tabac dans la parenté, de père en fils en rejeton” (1981:19; see also 31, 150-51, 302). She begins Pélagie-la-Charrette thus: “Au dire du vieux Louis à Bélonie . . . mon cousin . . . qui . . . tient [l’histoire] de son père Bélonie à Louis, qui la tenait de son grand-père Bélonie . . . qui l’avait reçue de père en fils de . . . Bélonie, fils de Thaddée, fils de Bélonie premier . . .” (9, 12).

Yet while Antonine Maillet is by temperament but one in a long line of Acadian bards, she is also, by something resembling historical necessity, that Turoldesque bard who must put the national epic in writing. She may literally, like her characters, “cogner . . . [aux] portes, extirpant de chaque gorge un mot à la fois” (Cent ans 13-14) in order to gather together the uncounted strands of oral traditions, and the processes she describes in her meta-geste may well drive her narratives proper, but her creations must nevertheless be, in our reading culture, written texts instead of oral performances. And when the world of Cent ans dans les bois is threatened by the introduction of writing, she comments:

Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple qui sait conter et réciter a besoin de savoir lire! . . . Les Acadiens qui avaient trois siècles d’oralité dans la mémoire collective . . . n’auraient pas su, même en apprenant à lire, écrire en colère, écrire souriant, écrire surpris, écrire fort, écrire hébété, écrire moqueur, écrire tendre, écrire tout bas. (150, 234)

What is, in other words, the relationship between oral epic performances and written epics?

It is no doubt a coincidence, albeit a potentially significant one, that the same year Cent ans dans les bois appeared, and two years after the publication of Pélagie-la-Charrette, Joseph Duggan proposed to reduce the long-standing controversy pitching the defenders of all that is oral in epic texts against the supporters of epics as pure literary constructs, to a measured debate about the varying distances separating orality from given specimens of epic literature (“La Théorie” 249). The case of Antonine Maillet fits this inspired compromise position exceedingly well; indeed, it offers a unique and spectacular example of works in which the distance between orality and literature, between bard and writer has been reduced to close to zero. Not only does Antonine Maillet demonstrate, in theory and practice, how epics (have) come about and how they (have) work(ed), but her epics, in which, behind the formulas and figures of speech, behind the commentaries, digressions and interruptions we nevertheless find “struc-ture, composition, unité, cohérence, et . . . authenticité psychologique et idéologique” (Calin, “Littérature médiévale” 282), are also living and compelling proof of the kind of close, and in this case optimal, collaboration envisioned more than thirty years ago by Maurice Delbouille who spoke of an

étroite collaboration . . . [entre,] chacun faisant son métier, un clerc-trouvère (parfois jongleur de surcroît) qui écrit la chanson (ou la remanie) en ne cessant de penser . . . à la destination pratique et essentielle de son texte, et . . . un jongleur (parfois clerc de formation et peut-être rimeur au besoin) spécialisé . . . dans l’art du chant. (335)

In Acadia and in Antonine Maillet, “la tradition ‘scriptuaire’ et . . . [la tradition] orale se croisent sans cesse et vivent de réciproques échanges” (Siciliano 197), and I venture to deduce from this example that the process was not much different in medieval France.

Nor have Acadia and her literature, once initiated by the epic, evolved differently from the development of medieval French society and literature. In Acadia as in France or indeed anywhere, the epic is condemned to die once it has fulfilled its function of uniting all that was scattered under one myth. A nation that has been made fully aware of itself also becomes aware of the fact that epic discourse is basically redundant, repeats forever the same predictable model, that it was the very perpetuity of the unchanging model which initially gave timeless and immutable meaning to the collective consciousness (Ollier 209). Épopées tardives are still agonizing long after the epic has been replaced by romance, and Antonine Maillet’s Crache à Pic of 1984 is already a late Acadian epic in this sense, as is the cycle by Laurier Melanson. Conscious of herself, Acadia has begun to realize that the stuff of literature is no longer a more or less heroic past but the contradictory present and an uncertain future, and that the public is no longer a collectivity of listeners but an amalgam of individual readers whose horizon of expectation traditional, linear and repetitive epics can often no longer fill (Ollier 213). And time does not stand still, as epics would have it, but is and brings change, for the mastering of which the twelfth century “invented” what was to become the novel.

Acadia, too, must progress from the epic, which identifies the community, to the novel, which, by featuring individual characters rather than types, satisfies the need for personal identification. No one would dream of identifying with a predictable, predetermined epic hero often lacking conflictual complexity. A novel’s character, on the other hand, may undergo many a change on the narrative trajectory that society has marked out for her/him with obstacles and props (Ollier 213), the “adventures” of romance, and the reader who recognizes herself/himself in such a character penetrates all the more easily into the literary work and into the world. The impenetrable and limited epic must yield to the open novel which organizes its units of structure and meaning freely and “makes sense” autonomously (Ollier 214), from within rather than ex cathedra epica. As a diversified system of multiple signs, the novel secretes its own “conjointure” and takes the narrative out of the timelessness of myth to install it in its own time.

This is the future for Acadian literature, a future as ineluctable as her epic past. It is not, however, the future for Antonine Maillet who has always held that only “les chroniqueurs, les composeux de complaintes, les défricheteux de parenté, les conteux de contes et de légendes . . . sav[ent] vraiment rebâtir le monde. . . . Les romanciers s’y perdraient” (Major 23). No more prepared to write a novel than Turold would have been to write Yvain ou le chevalier au lion, she has left that task to others, who, however, lie neither outside epic nor outside romance time, but outside the limits of these pages.

References

Calin, William. “L’Epopée dite vivante: réflexions sur le prétendu caractère oral des chansons de geste.” VIII Congreso de la Société Rencesvalls, ed. Institución Príncipe de Viana. Pamplona: Disputación Foral de Navarra, 1981.

___. “Littérature médiévale et hypothèse orale: une divergence de méthode et de philosophie.” Olifant 8.3 (Spring) 1981.

Carton, Jean-Paul. “Oral-Traditional Style in the Chanson de Roland: ‘Elaborate Style’ and Mode of Composition.” Olifant 9.1-2 (Autumn/Winter) 1981.

Delbouille, Maurice. “Les Chansons de geste et le livre.” La Technique littéraire des chansons de geste: actes du colloque de Liège (septembre 1957). Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège, 150. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1959.

Duggan, Joseph J. “Le Mode de composition des chansons de geste: analyse statistique, jugement esthétique, modèles de transmission.” Olifant 8.3 (Spring) 1981.

___. “La Théorie de la composition orale des chansons de geste: les faits et les interprétations.” Olifant 8.3 (Spring) 1981.

Maillet, Antonine. Les Cordes-de-Bois. Roman québécois, 23. Montreal: Leméac, 1977.

___. Pélagie-la-Charrette. Roman québécois, 30. Montreal: Leméac, 1979.

___. La Sagouine. Trans. Luis de Céspedes. Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1979 [1971].

___. Cent ans dans les bois. Roman québécois, 55. Montreal: Leméac, 1981.

___. Pélagie: The Return to a Homeland. Trans. Philip Stratford. Garden City & Toronto: Doubleday, 1982.

___. Pélagie. Trans. Philip Stratford. New Press Canadian Classics. Toronto: General Publishing Company, 1983.

___. Crache à Pic. Roman québécois, 76. Montreal: Leméac, 1984.

___. The Devil is Loose! Trans. Philip Stratford. International Fiction List, 32. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1986.

___. The Devil is Loose! Trans. Philip Stratford. Totem Books. Toronto: Collins Publishers, 1987.

Major, André. “Entretien avec Antonine Maillet.” Écrits du Canada français 36 1973.

Melanson, Laurier. Zélika à Cochon Vert. Montreal: Leméac, 1981.

___. Otto de la veuve Hortense. Montreal: Leméac, 1982.

___. Aglaé. Montreal: Leméac, 1983.

Ollier, Marie-Louise. “Demande sociale et constitution d’un ‘genre’: la situation dans la France du XII^e siècle.” Mosaic 8.4 1975.

Paquette, Jean-Marcel. “Épopée et roman: continuité ou discontinuité?” Études littéraires 1 1971.

Siciliano, Italo. Les Chansons de geste et l’épopée. Biblioteca di Studi Francesi, 3. Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1968.

Spraycar, Rudy S. “La Chanson de Roland: An Oral Poem?” Olifant 4.1 (October) 1976.

Zumthor, Paul. Introduction à la poésie orale. Paris: Seuil, 1983.

APPENDIX 1

Antonine Maillet (*1919)

Narrative Works (and English translations)

(first editions only)

1958 Pointe-aux-Coques (Montreal: Fides)

1962 On a mangé la dune (Montreal: Beauchemin)

1972 Don l’Orignal (Montreal: Leméac)

1972 Par derrière chez mon père (Montreal: Leméac)

1973 Mariaagélas (Montreal: Leméac)

1977 Les Cordes-de-Bois (Montreal: Leméac)

1978 The Tale of Don l’Orignal, trans. Barbara Godard (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company)

1979 Pélagie-la-Charrette (Montreal: Leméac)

1981 Cent ans dans les bois (Montreal: Leméac)

1982 La Gribouille [=Cent ans dans les bois] (Paris: Bernard Grasset)

1982 Pélagie: The Return to a Homeland, trans. Philip Stratford (Garden City & Toronto: Doubleday)

1984 Crache à Pic (Montreal: Leméac)

1986 The Devil is Loose!, trans. Philip Stratford (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys)

1986 Mariaagélas: Maria, daughter of Gélas, trans. Ben-Z. Shek (Toronto: Simon & Pierre)

1986 Le huitième jour (Montreal: Leméac)

1989 On the Eighth Day, trans. Wayne Grady (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys)

1990 L’Oursiade (Montreal: Leméac)

APPENDIX 2

Quote from:

La Sagouine: pièce pour une femme seule (1971)

Je vivons en Amarique, ben je sons pas des Amaricains. Non, les Amaricains, ils . . . sont riches . . . j’en sons point. Nous autres je vivons au Canada; ça fait que je devons putôt être des Canadjens, ça me r’semble. Ben ça se peut pas non plus, parce que les Dysart, pis les Carroll, pis les Jones, c’est pas des genses de notre race, ça, pis ça vit au Canada itou. Si i’ sont des Canadjens, je pouvons pas en être, nous autres. Par rapport qu’ils sont des Anglais, pis nous autres, je sons des Français. Non, je sons pas tout à fait des Français, je pouvons pas dire ça: les Français, c’est les Français de France. Ah! pour ça, je sons encore moins des Français de France que des Amaricains. Je sons putôt des Canadjens français, qu[e les censeurs] nous avont dit. Ça se peut pas non plus, ça. Les Canadjens français, c’est du monde qui vit à Québec. Ils les appelont . . . des Québécois. Ben coument c’est que je pouvons être des Québécois si je vivons point à Québec? Pour l’amour de Djeu, où c’est que je vivons, nous autres? En Acadie, qu’ils nous avont dit, et je sons des Acadjens. . . . Ben ils avont point voulu écrire ce mot-là dans leu liste, les encenseux. Parce qu’ils avont eu pour leu dire que l’Acadie, c’est point un pays, ça, pis un Acadjen c’est point une natiounalité, par rapport que c’est pas écrit dans les livres de Jos Graphie. Eh! ben, après ça, je savions pus quoi trouver, et je leur avon[s] dit de nous bailler la natiounalité qu’i’ voudriont. Ça fait que je crois qu’ils nous avont placés parmi les Sauvages. (Quoted from the 1973 edition, pp. 134-35)