Language and Literary Form in French Caribbean Writing by Celia Britton (review)
- Language and Literary Form in French Caribbean Writing by Celia Britton
This book unites a series of essays published over a span of some twenty years by this distinguished scholar of French and francophone literary studies. The volume is divided into three parts and eleven chapters. Part One addresses the formal themes of literary genre, intertextuality, and discourse. The first three chapters investigate the vicissitudes of exoticism, initially from the perspective of the colonized (in the journal Tropiques and on the part of the writers René Ménil, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant), and then, turning to the problem of reception, from that of the Metropole. Here, Celia [End Page 292] Britton deftly overviews the shifting attribution of metaphors of ‘consumption’, both as marketing device and as literary trope internalized and refashioned by Antillean authors themselves. Other chapters go on examine canonical writers of the field including Gisèle Pineau, Simone and André Schwarz-Bart, Maryse Condé, and Daniel Maximin. Britton’s abiding concern throughout remains the practice of close readings that attend to the formal and textual literariness of Caribbean fiction. Key among countless moments of insight for this reader include Britton’s unsparing dissection of Césaire’s ‘patronising’ (p. 19), primitivist understanding of African American writers in terms perfectly symmetrical to the primitivist disparagement of French observers of Tropiques such as Benjamin Péret, and the author’s critical and salutary attention to the commodification of Antillean literature that underscores the trope of ‘edibility’ figured as metropolitan ‘consumption’ and postcolonial counter-consumption (a striking complement to Valérie Loichot’s recent study The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)). Part Two treats in sustained fashion the literature of the writer Britton knows as well as any critic of our time: Édouard Glissant. It is here that these perceptive and keen analyses truly shine, sounding the enormous complexities of Glissant’s œuvre in reference to the key problematics that fascinated him: history, time and memory, subjectivity, community, language and voice, identity, and the aesthetic. The analysis of Le Quatrième Siècle is exceptionally fine-grained, dissecting the many narrative complexities of one of Glissant’s finest works, to reveal its co-construction of a memorialized history and a vocalized memory that gradually builds the basis of a postcolonial Martiniquan communal identity. Theoretically, Britton draws on a familiar pantheon of postcolonial and continental literary theory, while continuing to explore the complexities of Glissant’s many discoveries. Although one might wish for more sustained development of an original theoretical methodology or apparatus from such a seasoned literary critic, readers will find no more perceptive and revealing discussion of Glissant’s novels of his middle period — from Malemort and La Case du commandeur through Mahagony — than in these pages. This publication, though consisting of previously published material, in its cumulative effect and sustained attention across the field as a whole, demonstrates the incisive originality and intelligence of this outstanding reader of French Caribbean literature.
