Abstract
This chapter focuses on the problems of intentionality, authorial control, and reception that emerge when one attempts to outline an ethical or political function for literature. In tracing concepts of intent, this chapter gives special attention to self-writing in French Caribbean work, which serves as a privileged site where debates about agency, writing, and public intellectualism play out. Focusing on multiple forms of irony in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Ecrire en pays dominé, Maryse Condé’s La vie sans fards and Gisèle Pineau’s Folie, aller simple, this chapter examines self-representational practices with an eye for the hungers or desires that motivate and flow from this writing.
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Notes
- 1.
Condé and Philcox, “Intimate Enemies,” 92. (Condé and Philcox 2013)
- 2.
Nancy K. Miller, “Representing Others, 19. (Miller 1994)
- 3.
J. Hillis Miller, Reading Narrative, 178. (Miller 1998)
- 4.
On self-writing in the French Caribbean context, see Larrier, Autofiction and Advocacy. (Larrier 2006)
- 5.
McCusker, Patrick Chamoiseau, 47 (McCusker 2007). See McCusker’s Chapter 2, “‘Une tracée de survie’: Autobiographical Memory,” for a sensitive analysis of Chamoiseau’s autobiographical triptych, Antan d’enfance (1990), Chemin d’école (1994), and À bout d’enfance (2005), which focuses on his childhood. As McCusker argues, these three works, along with Écrire en pays dominé,
can be seen to have initiated and sustained something of a “boom within a boom” in the French Caribbean: in this same period, most of the major writers from the region (Raphaël Confiant, Gisèle Pineau, Maryse Condé, Daniel Maximin, Ernest Pépin, Emile Ollivier) would produce autobiographies which concentrate on childhood. But in this contemporary burgeoning, Chamoiseau is at once the earliest of practitioners (chronologically, and in terms of age), and the most prolific. It is he who has been most insistently drawn to the genre, and in his work the role and mechanisms of private, intimate, “living” memory are explored on a uniquely extensive scale. (47)
- 6.
Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 299 (Chamoiseau 1997). All translations from this text are my own. Henceforth, references to this work will be cited parenthetically.
- 7.
Condé, La vie sans fards, 14 (Condé 2012). All translations from this text are my own. Henceforth, references to this work will be cited parenthetically.
- 8.
Pineau, Folie, aller simple, 38 (Pineau 2010). All translations from this text are my own. Henceforth, references to this work will be cited parenthetically.
- 9.
Paul Allen Miller, “Placing the Self in the Field of Truth,” 323. (Miller 2015)
- 10.
Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, x. (Dalleo 2011)
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Moore-Gilbert, “A Concern Peculiar to Western Man,” 93 (Moore-Gilbert 2011). Following Jameson, Moore-Gilbert designates as protopolitical various aesthetic acts that “galvanize readers to reimagine the world as a preliminary to changing it” (92).
- 13.
Ibid., 105.
- 14.
Coe, When the Grass Was Taller. (Coe 1984)
- 15.
Quoted in Bart Moore-Gilbert, “A Concern Peculiar to Western Man?,” 105. (Moore-Gilbert 2011)
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
As Nancy K. Miller has shown, building on work by Françoise Lionnet and others, Western literary criticism of autobiography often overlooks the relational and contingent dimensions of subjectivity highlighted in its most famous exemplars (such as Augustine’s Confessions), reading into these texts instead a story of the (male) subject’s sovereignty and self-mastery through reflexive examination. The “biography of gender” through which critics approach autobiography strongly shapes what readers find there; this gendered (and, we might add, racialized) analytical framework “lays down a grid against which the autobiographer necessarily strains.” Miller, “Representing Others,” 17. (Miller 1994)
- 19.
Olaoluwa, “The Author Never Dies.” (Olaoluwa 2007)
- 20.
Condé, “A Conversation at Princeton,” 21. (Condé 2006a)
- 21.
Ibid., 24, 21.
- 22.
Maragnès, “Contre la mort lente,” 56. My translation. (Maragnès 1981)
- 23.
In addition to his novels and interviews, see in particular Confiant’s numerous essays and cultural analyses in the Potomitan dossier, “Raphaël Confiant: Écrivain martiniquais.” http://www.potomitan.info/confiant/. Accessed June 30, 2016. (Potomitan, n.d.).
- 24.
- 25.
Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 59, 2. (Glissant 1989)
- 26.
Brossat, “Fin de l’histoire,” 10, 17. My translation. (Brossat 1981)
- 27.
Treyens and Machecler, “Un taux de chômage de 19.4 %.” (Treyens and Machecler 2015) Guadeloupe’s unemployment figures for 2014 were even higher, at 23.7 % overall, and a rate of 56.3 % for those under 25 (Treyens and Machecler, “Un taux de chômage de 23.7 %,” [Treyens and Machecler 2015]). These rates far exceed the 9.9 % unemployment rate Institut national de la statistique et des études économique (INSEE) recorded for metropolitan France during the same period. See also INSEE’s comparative 2010 study of the cost of living in the Antilles and the metropole, carried out in the wake of the widespread 2009 protests against exploitative pricing (Berthier, Lhéritier, and Petit, “Comparaison des prix” [Berthier et al. 2010]).
- 28.
Citizens in Martinique and Guadeloupe (as in French Guiana and Réunion) are full French citizens accorded the same legal rights as all other French citizens. In addition to the legacies of slavery and racial violence marking social interactions, political debates today focus largely on the administrative structure of the overseas departments and regions (and more specifically, the degree of local autonomy and state control built into these structures); taxation and funding of local institutions; and the structure of the local economy itself, which is heavily skewed towards the service sector and reliant on metropolitan subsidies and imports.
- 29.
Lionnet and Shih, The Creolization of Theory, 2. (Lionnet and Shih 2011)
- 30.
Ibid., 26.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Henry, Caliban’s Reason, 275. (Henry 2000)
- 33.
I am inspired here by Jean-François Lyotard’s understanding of rusing as a means for breaking with everydayness and creating openings for new interpretations. See Lyotard’s Au Juste, translated into English as Just Gaming. (Lyotard 1985)
- 34.
Gallagher, “Postcolonial Poetics,” 257. (Gallagher 2010)
- 35.
Ibid., 251. Gallagher distinguishes poetics, which constitutes the bulk of francophone postcolonial thought, from other modes prominent in the anglophone academy, such as the theoretical discourses of Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies, and Globalization Studies that accompany literary production.
- 36.
Henry, Caliban’s Reason, 16 (Henry 2000). By contrast, the historicist approach, in Henry’s view, “has emphasized popular and state-led transformations of colonial/plantation institutions with a view toward creating national and egalitarian communities and corresponding changes in consciousness” (16). The poeticist/historicist distinction captures different emphases and approaches to cause and effect, but does not map directly onto an idealist/materialist opposition. Moreover, Henry’s goal is to unearth the “hidden unity” of these two directions, in order to provide new sources of renewal and reform for Caribbean thought (17).
- 37.
- 38.
Gallagher, “Postcolonial Poetics,” 258. (Gallagher 2010)
- 39.
Henry, Caliban’s Reason, 276. (Henry 2002)
- 40.
Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, 109. (Dalleo 2011)
- 41.
Ibid., 125.
- 42.
As Dalleo argues, “in de-privileging literature as unpopular and at the same time turning to some of the most commodified forms like popular music, [Caribbean Cultural Studies] can tend to reinforce the crisis of the literary and the valuing of consumable products.” Despite this complicity with consumerism, as well as a tendency to rely on the fantasy of a more pure, authentic public, this turn to other forms of popular cultural production also produced creative engagements with the global market realities with which intellectual positions are inevitably entangled today. Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, 204. (Dalleo 2011)
- 43.
Chamoiseau makes use of the second person as well in this text, alternating between “je” and “tu” in ways that reinforce, Samia Kassab-Charfi has argued, the role of polemicist and advocate that he adopts, harnessing the rhetorical conventions of judicial discourse to enhance the pathos and persuasive force of his arguments (Patrick Chamoiseau, 42–45 [Kassab-Charfi 2012]).
- 44.
Watts, “The ‘Wounds of Locality,’” 114. (Watts 2003)
- 45.
Chamoiseau uses neologism in qualifying these grammatically singular “I’s” neologistically by plural adjective forms in the French—Moi-amérindians, Moi-africains, and so on—until the end of the second part, when this “I” becomes Creole (Moi-Créole), a consolidated self but one that “contains an open part of Others” while maintaining “quivering contact with the impenetrable part of Others” (221).
- 46.
Knepper, Patrick Chamoiseau, 179 (Knepper 2012). Knepper draws out well the importance Chamoiseau accords to stone and sediment, here and in other works, as figures for creolization and the alchemical processes through which the world (imagined as a philosopher’s stone) changes shape (175). As she observes, Chamoiseau reads
the accumulation of migratory groups to Martinique as the sedimentary layers of himself…describing how these fluid layers are transformed into a sedimentary, solid yet fluid, rock-like identity.…Creolization is envisioned as a diagentic process where each identity traverses the other, producing a composite yet distinctive self. (179)
- 47.
Kullberg, The Poetics of Ethnography, 81. (Kullberg 2013)
- 48.
Ibid., 88.
- 49.
Watts, “The ‘Wounds of Locality,’” 118. (Watts 2003)
- 50.
Taylor, “Créolité Bites,” 151. (Taylor 1998)
- 51.
Watts, 113. (Watts 2003)
- 52.
“Vivre ou écrire: il faut choisir.” The original in Sartre’s La Nausée reads as follows: “Il faut choisir: vivre ou raconter” (48).
- 53.
Des Rosiers, “Le livre du devoir.” My translation. (Des Rosiers 2012)
- 54.
Condé’s arrest and brief imprisonment in Ghana following the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah is retold here, for example, as a frightening but absurd outcome of her decision years before to seek a Guinean passport (a decision made, she writes, not out of political conviction or support for Sékou Touré, but merely out of a personal desire to be free of her past and to reconstruct her identity as African [69]).
- 55.
I don’t believe that a fetus is a separate person from the moment of conception; how could it be? It is interconnected, flesh-and-blood-bonded, completely a part of a woman’s body. Why try to carve one from another?…I’m not sure I believe that a child who has left the womb is really a separate person until sometime after the age of two. The entire life force is a social one, a process of grafting onto our surroundings and then growing apart and then grafting again, all in our own time and in all kinds of ways that defy biological timetables alone. (But I have been called extreme in this, and by my own mother, from whom I have not even yet moved fully apart.) Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, 184. (Williams 1991)
- 56.
Scarry, “The Body in Pain,” 206. (Scarry 1985)
- 57.
Morrison, Afterword, 210–211. (Morrison 1993)
- 58.
Paul Allen Miller, “Placing the Self in the Field of Truth,” 320–321. (Miller 2015)
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Simek, N. (2016). Ironic Intent. In: Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean . New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55882-4_3
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