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3 Creole Storytelling and the Art of the Novel Chamoiseau and Ina Césaire In a passage from SOLEIL DE LA CONSCIENCE, the narrator speaks from a crowded Parisian café, the ultimate environment for talking and discussing, and one of the places in the modern city dominated by the spoken word, la parole. The narrator expresses a sense of belonging because here, in the café, he is among friends, voices: “Everybody engages in the exchange, but it is true that everyone reserves an oasis for himself, behind the words. One lives in secret in the arena of a discussion . There are no more individuals, but one single body stretched towards its destiny. On this level, I am not insular at all, I do not represent ; I am, in this café, a voice that is added to the others” (71). Here, collectivity and individuality are contained in the voice: there are countless numbers of voices, each one of them individual. In addition, these voices can be reduced neither to the speaker nor to the referent. The simple act of exchanging voices, of creating a polyphonic chorus in a specific place is essential; what they sing or what they want to express is of secondary importance. Without mentioning the storyteller or the tale, Glissant relocates the spoken word—a central theme in Martinican literature intimately linked to ethnography since the days of Tropiques—and places it at the heart of the European metropolis. The Glissantian narrator questions his authority to represent, exploring the position in space of the speaker and the role of writing in giving a voice to others. The art of speaking is understood in relation to others and the surroundings. Considering that Creole is mainly an oral language, the spoken word has, together with dance and music, been a major vector for popular cultural expressions in Martinique. But until the publication of Glissant’s 101 Creole Storytelling and the Art of the Novel Malemort in 1975 the form and poetics of storytelling were often neglected in favor of the content of the tale. From then on the issue of orality becomes increasingly central in Martinican literature. Just the fact that this particular cultural expression now has a proper name, orality, shows that the aim of simply making tales visible, as seen in Tropiques, has changed. There is a new theoretical and ethical awareness which raises questions that are crucial to texts dealing with orality, questions that are directly tied to ethnographic poetics: What is a voice? What is the role of exchange? Orality is, in this understanding, fundamentally relational. In the 1980s, Patrick Chamoiseau and Ina Césaire link these phenomena to an exploration of the tale and the storyteller. Both Chamoiseau and Césaire work with this relation-based concept of orality to which Glissant’s quote alludes, and they further develop polyphony by including several narrators and stories within the framework of the novel. Using the different personas of the author in his first three novels , Chamoiseau seeks a literary technique to be able to follow the storyteller . He is interested in the very performance of storytelling and finds in the storyteller a model for the role of literature in Martinican culture. Ina Césaire, on the other hand, is a trained ethnographer, specializing in the field of Caribbean tales. Her work contains a number of transcriptions of Creole tales into French. Even though she pays less attention to performance and puts more emphasis on the tales themselves, she does let the tales influence her own plays. In Zonzon Tête Carrée, published in 1994, she builds an entire novel around the idea and structure of the Creole folktale. These two authors’ narrative explorations of storytelling are directly linked to the ethnographic poetics of Tropiques. Here more than in Ménil’s and the Césaires’ journal, the interest in the art of storytelling is tied to a feeling (and fear) of disappearance, especially in Chamoiseau ’s texts. Ina Césaire seems to agree with Chamoiseau that, in Martinique , traditional storytelling, like many other Creole cultural expressions , is fading away, but she does not join his lamentation of “entropy and loss,” to paraphrase once again Clifford’s characterization of LéviStrauss (Predicament 14). Her fictional reworkings of the story suggest that the art of storytelling has not disappeared; instead, it has changed in response to the reality of modern Martinique. Because Chamoiseau and Ina Césaire have different ideas about what has happened to the tale...

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