ABSTRACT
Isaac Jogues was one of eight Jesuit missionaries, beatified in 1925 and canonized in 1930, who lost their lives during the Iroquois-Huron wars of 1642—49. Accounts of their execution, along with their biographies, are related in print for the first time in Jesuit Relations, published for the most part by Octave Cramoisy, from 1632 to 1673. 1 Each death, beginning with Rene Goupil’s, is narrated by the Jesuit in charge of the mission in Huronia or Quebec, in the Relation that covers the year in which it occurs. Yet the account of Isaac Jogues’ capture, torture, hiding, release, and escape to France, followed by his return to Quebec lV 2 years later, and finally his capture and assassination by the Iroquois in October 1646, is the most interesting by far, from the point of view of its composition, and its relation to the rest of the narrative enfolding it. Jogues’ narrative, a founding text, is the most intricate and fascinating of all, since it is constructed in several stages, and it spans several Relations. 2 It is also dialogical to the extreme, as it has a number of different narrators as well as narratees, who cite and constantly refer to one another, and it incorporates and integrates numerous sources, both written and oral, in constructing the persona of Jogues. Indeed, even before Jogues says “I” in his own narrative, he emerges as the complex intersection of the directly and indirectly reported and transcribed voices of all the speaking and writing subjects of New France (both Christian and non-Christian) and the mother country inscribed in his narrative. Polyglotic, the subject “I” speaks and says by and through the polyphonic “we.”
