Le rêve de Phonsine: Poétique/psychocritique du Cycle du Survenant de Germaine Guèvremont

Abstract

adaptations forged in the trade and embodied in music and sound, sometimes means that the other consequences of those fur trade encounters are noted briefly or otherwise left aside. Laxer’s chapter on the introduction of arms and ammunition, for instance, shows how new soundways emerged from the adaptation of Indigenous and European customs. The incorporation of firearm salutes (or feu de joie) into ceremonial relations and traveling rituals and the reliance on gun blasts for communication and signaling harnessed the sound-making capabilities of these arms. As Laxer shows, the guns exchanged as part of the trade no doubt “transformed the soundscape” (32) of North America’s interior, but those guns also remade the human landscape, as did the microbes and other goods that traveled along the well-worn fur trade routes. It may well be that the demographic collapse caused by epidemic disease, and the resulting “displacement of violence” (to use Ned Blackhawk’s phrase) that accompanied the trade left fewer auditory traces. As a result, the ancillary effects of the spread of market relations across the northern reaches of the continent are left to the margins of the story that Laxer tells here. By listening carefully to the records left by the fur trade, Laxer nonetheless shows how the songs, dances, diplomatic protocols, and other practices that emerged from the fur trade bore the unmistakable imprint of the institutional imperatives of that trade and its diverse participants. This work illustrates, moreover, the possibilities for re-reading a fur trade archive. Laxer shows how the scattered but recurring references to these ephemeral sounds and practices can offer important insights into the nature of the human relations engendered by the trade.