A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  In 1944, Césaire made an extended and significant visit to Haiti. It would take almost twenty years, however, for the fruits of his reflection on Haitian history to bear literary fruit, yielding his essay and his play on the respective tragedies of the captured revolutionary, Toussaint Louverture, and the postrevolutionary monarch, King Henry Christophe. It is hardly surprising that Césaire’s imagination was engaged by the world’s first black republic and by the Haitian revolution in particular. How could any anticolonial thinker from one of the—still—French Caribbean islands not need to understand Haiti’s descent after 1792 into a hellish postindependence cycle of recidivist dictatorship (monarchic, imperial, or pseudodemocratic), of sectarianism, and eventually of economic and social stagnation and chronic debt? Césaire’s historical essay (1960) on the Haitian revolutionary general who perished as an exiled captive in the Fort de Joux of the Jura Mountains is titled Toussaint Louverture: La révolution française et le problème colonial (The French Revolution and the Colonial Problem). This is the “homme seul emprisonné de blanc” (solitary man imprisoned in white) named in the Cahier. The other figure of fascination is Henri Christophe, the erstwhile revolutionary who had fought under Toussaint. Upon the death of the dictator Dessalines, who was the first leader of independent Haiti, this former slave and cook turned military leader had himself crowned King Henry Christophe of the newly liberated first black republic. This figure also inspired a play by Derek Walcott.

  Incisive as Césaire’s historical essay is, the capacity of propositional, monological writing to explore the complexity and density of the (post)revolutionary problematic cannot be compared with that of a fully dialogical poetics. La tragédie du roi Christophe was first staged in 1964 in Austria and subsequently and more controversially in Paris in 1965, and it is still part of the repertoire of the French national theater, the Comédie-Française. Although this polyphonic treatment of postrevolutionary dynamics is a tragedy, there are overtones of Molièresque comedy as the king ennobles his supporters, giving them ridiculous titles, such as the Duc de Marmelade or the Duc de Limonade (Dukes of Marmalade or Lemonade), titles that reference real Haitian place-names. However, the atmosphere of farce is most uneasy, holding up, as it does, a mirror to colonialist posturing; it is, moreover, entirely absent from the second half of the play, as the king fails to coerce his subjects into the realization of his vision of a flourishing, self-confident state, and especially as he begins to execute those who have become encumbrances. He is eventually betrayed by his less loyal followers, loses his reason to disillusionment and despair, and ultimately kills himself. The play focuses therefore not on the struggle for power but rather on the struggle to govern, vividly problematizing the exercise of power and authority, charting the temptations of absolutism and self-delusion, the risks of betrayal and corruption, the fragility of genuine democracy. It also, of course, exposes the nefarious after-effects of the recklessly divisive racial engineering of colonialism.

  In the anglicization of the king’s name (from Henri to Henry), we can register the Shakespearean rather than the Corneillean or Racinian timbre that Césaire espoused in all of his plays apart from the T. S. Eliot–flavored oratorio style of the first. The anticlassicist stylistic capaciousness, the swings from earthiness and ribaldry to extremes of pathos and drama, all speak to a very different imaginative and literary register than the one characterizing French theatrical heroics. Césaire’s next play also explores the political mines lying in wait for republican values and democratic ideals on the still-smoking battleground of decolonized states. In Une saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo), a play translated into English by the venerated postcolonial critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the action is situated in central Africa a full century and a half following Haitian emancipation. The play exposes the depth of the internecine divisions bequeathed by the impervious arrogance of the colonial plunder machine. But, unlike the Haitian Tragédie, which deals with a period prior to the accumulation of Haiti’s astronomic national debt, the Saison explicitly indicts the absolute cynicism of the forces of capitalism that, far from having been swept away by independence, are represented by rapacious (world-) bankers. Of course, it also charts the other reversals and betrayals of postindependence politics, the rising power of the military, the betrayal of Dag Hammarskjöld, and the biting reality of political corruption with, at the center of the action, an antiheroic, flawed, but well-intentioned Patrice Lumumba. The language ranges from that of the ponderous, pompous statesman to the realpolitik of the military man to the weasel words of the so-called neutral men (hommes neutres)—and from the scatological release of unsustainable tension to lyrical outpourings, as Césaire has the idealistic secretary general of the United Nations quote to an uninspired Patrice Lumumba an unattributed string of grandiose versets from Saint-John Perse’s epic poetry.

  It is perhaps easiest to identify Césaire’s work as “postcolonial” in relation to the well-worn trope of the Empire writing back to the Imperial Power, subverting the language and the forms of empire in order to critique the latter, turning its very own (cultural) firepower against it. Césaire’s most obviously postcolonial rewriting is Une tempête (1969), the last of his plays, first staged in Tunisia and in Paris in 1969 and two years later in Martinique. In this version of The Tempest, written from a point of view sympathetic above all to Caliban, the shift from the definite to the indefinite article registers the post-colonial tenor of the play, as Césaire writes back to empire, certainly, but from an oblique angle. This play is, in the author’s words, adapted “pour un théâtre nègre,” but what Césaire is really doing is underlining the emancipation or decolonization of his writing, set free from all “French” resonance and explicitly identifying as his model the much wilder, untamed English model of Shakespearian verve. Power, loyalty and betrayal, governance and corruption are, once more, the dominant themes, Again, the role of Caliban has little or no purchase on the central plot lines, and at the end, while the ever-opportunistic Europeans are able to forget past perfidy, cut their losses, and move on to the next promising deal, the marginalized colonial master/slave duo, Prospero and Caliban, both turn out to be utterly enslaved to their dynamic and to their domain, quite unable to let go or leave it behind them, with Caliban determined to destroy both himself and Prospero along with the whole island.

  Literature and theory involve very different positionings in relation to thought. The former is far more dialogical, leaving more room not just for the imagination but also for the input of the reader. Since its meaning is not clearly stated, but remains open, plural, even contradictory, its relation to knowledge and (or as) power is entirely different from that of propositional discourse: the writer of a literary text eschews a position of dominance in relation to meaning. As the foregoing anemic abstracts of Césaire’s works demonstrate, the meaning of a literary text is in radical excess of any “message” that can be abstracted from its verbal texture.

  Césaire’s openness to multiple voices, languages, registers, contexts, or cultures can be seen not just in his choice of three different writing genres (essay, poetry, and theater) but also in the choice of the theatrical genre itself: more specifically, in the range of dramatic situations embraced by the four different plays as well as in the range of voices and idioms within each play. The poetic oeuvre is also distinguished by its variety. First of all, each of the collections has a distinctive timbre and poetics; and second, many poems written and published by Césaire are either not included in any of the various collections, or they have been excluded from subsequent editions of collections in which they were previously included. Crucially, this lack of a unifying perspective in Césaire’s oeuvre as a whole means that the meaning of each individual work is particularly open to interpretation.

  Clearly Césaire felt no need to supply his work with the underpinning of a program or a manifesto. As already noted, he is far more inclined to question the slogan of negritude than to defend it—much less than to impos
e it either on himself or on others as a cultural or aesthetic orthodoxy. Instead he was often at pains to open it out as a pragmatic, historically situated response to oppression of any kind, rather than narrowing or limiting it as a specification. In other words, in Césaire’s writing there is none of the dogmatism, none of the programmatic assertiveness or restrictiveness of the literary label, none of the imprisoning sectarianism, fundamentalism, or authoritarianism of identitarianism or essentialism. In contrast to the stamp of Creoleness, for example, which rarely surprises in terms of either form or content, Césaire’s writing is stylistically multifarious.

  As a corollary of this eclecticism, however, it must be recognized that some of his critical essays possess no particular poetic pitch, a fact that distinguishes them from the essays of Edouard Glissant, the sustained poetic tenor of which never drops. Césaire’s choices of genres and styles is highly significant. For many politically engaged Caribbean writers, the novel is the chosen genre. Theater, being such a preeminently dialogical form, permits, pace Bakhtin, a very different engagement with politics than does narrative. It (re)presents thought and meaning as being entirely subject to the pragmatic, communicational constraints of relational dynamics and role playing. Furthermore, the author’s text leaves space for the actors to interpret the various characters in different ways, just as it also makes room for directors and actors to stage the play according to their reading and values. Césaire’s ability to cede control over the interpretation of his words in this way, his willingness to collaborate with other writers, thinkers, and artists (such as actors and stage directors), is reinforced and emphasized by his (aforementioned) predilection for (self-)revision.

  Césaire’s choice of poetry and drama underlines his commitment above all to direct address and to the spoken word. Perhaps the most constant feature of his writing, more fundamental even than his extraordinary linguistic and stylistic range, is his fidelity to the verbal act per se, to the quintessentially human act of speech, the proffered word. His avoidance of narrative orchestration and of theoretical pronouncements in favor of the vulnerability and openness of the I/ you relation of direct speech, can be seen both in imagined and in real discourse: in the drama and in poetry, in the voice of an imagined other, whether a “real” historical character such as Lumumba or a (re) imagined one like Caliban, or in his own voice as in the poems of Moi, laminaire …, in the Discourse on Colonialism, or in the valedictory conversations with Françoise Vergès. He thus eschews the monological writing style of manifestoes, which seem to stand and speak for the many but that, essentially, make proclamations in one voice, a voice represented as resounding beyond the constraints and rebounds of the relation between one person and another and as vibrating in denial of the provisional, dependent, dialogical, and only incompletely controllable reverberation of all verbal engagement.

  One of the most striking aspects of Césaire’s work, compared with that of almost all his fellow-Caribbean authors in French, is the diversity of language (vocabulary, register, idiom, and tone) of his writings. This reflects his ability to imagine such a variety of distinct worlds and worldviews, from the vast inwardness of the poet to the focus of the campaign-hardened military general; from the unlikely scatological remarks of the monarch, to the Ghanaian foot soldier who speaks a French/English translanguage, to the parody of rarefied courtliness in the French “maître des cérémonies” sent to refine Henry’s court. This eclecticism reflects not just the flexibility of Césaire’s writing across the boundaries separating different genres but is also reflected in the range of styles characterizing the different poetry collections—from the epic élan and breadth of the Cahier to the surrealist shards and flashes of Les armes miraculeuses; from the theatrical oratorio of Et les chiens se taisaient to the controlled fury of Soleil cou coupé; from the distilled distress of Ferrements to the more resolved introspection of Moi, laminaire. … Even though the speaker of that latter collection also has a big lump in his throat, the lump formed by “ce passé en boule non mâché” (the unchewed ball of the past), the speech act is sovereign and a statement in itself. Its constancy confirms Césaire’s hallmark perspective on humans as essentially verbal beings, preeminently discursive, living within language, not as a metaphysics, but rather as the sole medium of a necessarily nontranscendent relation and engagement with the world, with history, with each other, and with themselves: as the speaker of the Cahier puts it: “Et si je ne sais que parler, c’est pour vous que je parlerai” (And if all I can do is speak, it is for you that I will speak). Indeed, Césaire would never, in the rest of his work, cease to speak for others, both collective and individual others, and this act of speaking for others involves both speaking to them and on their behalf, giving voice to them either directly or indirectly.

  Césaire’s writing occupies a central, seminal, and pioneering position in the history of literature in French. In fact, his was one of the most significant bodies of writing that eventually pried open the notion of French literature, making it impossible to confine it to a hexagonal shape, including only the work of writers from metropolitan France. He was, indeed, one of the very first authors of literature from France’s overseas colonies—francophone literature as it came to be labeled for better or (mostly) for worse—to be assigned a place of honor at the high table of literature in French. In the mère patrie, the newness and the sharpness of his work was recognized as early as 1941 by André Breton and thereby by the surrealists in general. Breton’s imprimatur, but also that of Jean-Paul Sartre, were of significant value in this respect. Important as it may have been locally, therefore, his role in representational politics pales into near insignificance in relation to his position as a writer and author, a role that propelled him onto the national, international, and even the global stage. More than any other author writing in French either before and possibly after him, Césaire put the French-speaking Caribbean or Americas on the cultural map of the world. Furthermore, he was, along with (though with greater credibility than) the Senegalese poet and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor and prior to Frantz Fanon, one of the very first black authors to express an absolutely anticolonialist consciousness in French and to point to a radical reevaluation of the effects of racism and colonialism on the understanding of African or African-originating culture.

  Beyond the field of French or francophone literary criticism, the work of Césaire has, of course, traveled widely. Thus, for example, when James Clifford was conceptualizing what he calls the “predicament of culture” in the closing decades of the twentieth century, it was to the Caribbean, and more specifically to the work of Césaire, that he looked for inspiration. It is surely significant that it was not to the novels, poetry, or essays of V. S. Naipaul or of Derek Walcott, Caribbean writers in English (both of them subsequently Nobel laureates), but rather to the effervescent poetics of a poet/dramatist working in French that Clifford turned to find a benchmark for the dying millennium’s cultural ferment, which was to a very large extent the result of the crossings and interpenetration of European imperialism. Clifford’s choice is perhaps not unrelated to the fact that, within the Caribbean crucible, it was in the French-speaking Caribbean specifically that the cultural magic of creolization produced not only a self-conceptualizing, exponentially impacted cultural mix, but also a viable new language, Creole. Paradoxically, however, some of the champions of Creole culture in Martinique have, as already noted, lambasted the absence of the Creole language and of Creole oral culture in Césaire’s writing. And there is indeed, in that respect at least, something quixotic or even wrongheaded in the attempt by Clifford and many others to recuperate Césaire’s poetics for either Caribbean or Creole cultural specificity, that is, for a culturalism that the author of the Cahier at no time and in none of his works sought either to defend or to represent.

  In reality, Césaire’s creative verve has nothing to do with the so-called politics (all too often an anti-politics) of culturalism (or cultural identitarianism). This is not t
o say that Césaire is not interested in culture. On the contrary, he is devoted to it, and to its even more problematic near-synonym, civilization, but as a unifying, humanizing imperative, however historically situated it might be, rather than as a separatist force of hierarchical distraction and division.

  Finally, Césaire’s enduringly bifocal defense both of human inwardness and of human community is particularly pertinent for an age grappling not just with the drowning of interiority in the wash of mediatization, but also with an unprecedented global attack on democracy and on the political realm per se. For our apparently postpolitical, posthistorical age, Césaire’s refusal to prioritize programs of cultural or political identity over the ceaseless verbal (re)articulation of self and other(s), of introspection and extraversion, and of lived and imagined realities, is of the utmost importance, as is his mobilization of literature to galvanize and reinforce that refusal.

  NOTE

  1. This phrase is taken from the “Discours sur la négritude” first published in 2004 in Paris by Présence Africaine as a coda to the reissue of the 1955 Discours sur le colonialisme.

  WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING

  Note: All translations of passages quoted in this chapter are my own.

  Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. Eloge de la créolité. Paris: Gallimard, 1989.

  Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

  Confiant, Raphaël. Aimé Césaire: Une traversée paradoxale du siècle. Paris: Stock, 1993.