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Modernism/Modernity 8.4 (2001) 703-705



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Book Review

Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture: The Game of Slipknot


Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture: The Game of Slipknot. Keith L. Walker. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. Pp. x + 300. $54.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

The term "francophone" might appear to the uninitiated simply to mean French-speaking, but in general its uses and connotations are more coded. The notion of francophonie is associated with the promotion of the French language, a cultural impulse linked to the post-Revolutionary promulgation of French within France, to colonialism and its mission civilisatrice, and to the advancement of French culture and interests in the postcolonial era. The phrase "francophone literature" generally designates writers of French (from) outside France, but only those who remain marginal to "French" literature; authors such as Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and even Albert Camus have generally been taught in French departments without much attention being paid to their non-French origins.

As a category, then, francophone literature is both too broad and not broad enough, insofar as it assigns certain writers to a non-French ethnic or cultural group that serves as the ground of their texts' particularity and the horizon of the limited interpretative field into which those texts [End Page 703] are placed. On one level, the label connotes variations in critical practice vis-à-vis canonical and "other" texts, and, on another, it is suggestive of imperialism's continuing legacy. Critics may therefore find themselves tugged in different directions, aiming to afford the texts the degree of artistic autonomy and the particular sort of serious attention associated with immanent analysis of canonical works, while also striving to give due weight to broader forms of cultural, historical, and political specificity.

Disarmingly, Keith L. Walker comments early in his book that

[s]ome scholars proceed by accepting and rejecting the work of others, inevitably making value judgments and thereby establishing their intellectual position, territory, or, worst of all, their turf. To my mind, this procedure is neither very sophisticated nor helpful in establishing a collaborative community of scholars. [4]

In practice, members of the community in question do not always have that much in common: different francophone specialists tend to have read different, often little-known, texts, and to have considered them in highly varied contexts. They have French in common, of course, as well as a certain amount of the history that scattered that language across the globe. For good reasons, however, scepticism about how significant (and indeed how positive) that shared "heritage" is--and about the value of any concept as vague as the "francophone condition"--characterizes the field (29).

To suggest in such a field, as Walker does, that any separation of North African from Black African literature is artificial, and is driven by notions of "race," seems odd (1). There have been notable instances of collaboration, it is true, and patterns of mutual influence across the diverse francophone literary cultures on which he draws; indeed, some of his discussions of francophone literature's relationship to modernism fit into a framework that is (geographically) wider still. Perhaps the most suggestive passage in the book comes when he writes that

the feelings of fragmentation and isolation, and the immobility of one's treadmill existence in a society of speed, technology, rapid communication, and unprecedented mobility; the disconnectedness from one's past and traditions, the solitude amid the urban crowd . . . --these are not merely modernist commonplaces but rather constitute the poetry of powerlessness. [54]

This raises intriguing questions that might pertinently be addressed in a broad literary-cultural context, in terms of literature in French in general, or of literature in various languages in the era of high modernism, and through a theoretically nuanced account of the relationship of such literatures to historical dynamics in which imperialism played a vital role.

Too frequently, Walker opts instead to make implausibly general claims about francophone literature in the narrow, tendentious sense, repeatedly asserting that "it" is "countermodernist" or remarking, for instance, that "[f]rancophone literature is replete with insurrection...

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