Tanya d'Anger, U of Toronto
Damnation and Redemption: the Cripple Metaphor and the Search for Identity in the Le chien, Eddy, and Lucky Lady by Jean Marc Dalpé
 
This paper discusses Jean Marc Dalpé’s exploration of identity and nationality through an analysis of the cripple metaphor in his earliest solo works: Le chien (1987), Eddy and Lucky Lady (1994). Taken together, they read as a loose trilogy that documents the struggle of the archetypal Franco-Ontarian "hero" to overcome the legacies of geographical displacement, unemployment, and domestic violence. Dalpé’s protagonists exhibit the qualities of classical Greek heroes: initially doomed and fated in Le chien, yet ultimately stumbling toward redemption in Eddy and Lucky Lady through the acceptance of moral responsibility and self-determinism, in line with the classical precept of self-knowledge. As essential parts of this self-knowledge, nationality and identity are presented as complementary, conceptual notions, independent of cultural, geographical or hereditary associations. The struggle of Franco-Ontarian culture to survive amidst the anglophone majority of both Ontario and North America is therefore equated, on an existential level, with the need to overcome the sense of existential helplessness inherent in the mortal condition. This sense of helplessness is mirrored by the constant tension between illusion and reality, self-gratification and nurturing in the plays, identified by Dalpé with the ambiguous American Dream: the appeal of an idealised individualism that straddles the classical precept of self-knowledge and the modern pitfalls of egotism.