Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (review)

Using a wide range of both Western and non-Western literary theory, Valérie Loichot’s engaging study on postplantation literature advances interdisciplinary studies by forging an intertexual dialogue between writers from two linguistic blocs: the United States and the Francophone Caribbean. Particularly intriguing is the way Loichot seamlessly bridges the work of descendents of slave owners—William Faulkner and Saint-John Perse—with that of Édouard Glissant and Toni Morrison, the descendents of slaves. In that sense Orphan Narratives builds on the seminal anthology Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (1990) and more explicitly George Handley’s Postslavery Literatures in the Americas (2000), a study also edited by A. James Arnold that aims to construct relationships throughout the various regions of the Americas. In fact, Loichot’s major drawback is that she does not expand her study to include other linguistic blocs of the Plantation Americas, namely the Spanish and Dutch Caribbean. Examining novels and authors from these regions that dialogue with the aforementioned authors would only serve to enrich her interdisciplinary research and widen her scope as well as further her project of de-authorizing the author in order to show the intertexuality and common themes across linguistic regions. Loichot’s study offers new insight into New World studies in the sense that she is not looking at a common history of suffering. On the other hand, including authors like Faulkner and Saint-John Perse in conjunction with Morrison and Glissant proposes a reconstructive strategy that is parallel across the four writers with respect to history and genealogy as they are linked via an “inheritance of economic, sexual, and epistemic violence” (Loichot 15). Commonalities abound through a subversion of linearity, a lack of desire for a traceable origin or patriarchal importance that is evident in both the author (all of these authors use pseudonyms) and their texts where characters and histories are orphaned, hence the book’s title.

Together with the introduction, the first chapter of Orphan Narratives, “A Plantation Family Portrait,” presents the theoretical framework that Loichot employs throughout the study. Of principle relevance to the author’s main arguments are Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “The Talking Book,” found in The Signifying Monkey (1988) and Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990). Loichot utilizes “The Talking Book” to analyze the texts horizontally to see how they “talk” to each other without adhering to linear notions of chronology and precedence. Glissant’s theoretical text provides Loichot with the framework to shift her focus from family to a collective and plural community, thereby weakening plantation binaries associated with filiation and affirming in their place “variance, transversality, and tangle” (Loichot 31). Indeed, Loichot’s main point of reference is community: all four of the texts analyzed produce new community models, in varying stages of development from atavistic, a term she uses to discuss communities pertaining to a monolithic genealogy, whether it is black or white, to composite, or pluralistic societies. Through subversions of genealogy and linear time, the failure of father/master figures, the futile desire for origin, dysfunctional families, and modes of self-birthing, Loichot argues that a composite community is the “only constructive escape from narrow family, plantation, and national units” (195).

The second chapter analyzes Glissant’s La case du commandeur (1981) and, in less detail, La quatrième siècle (1964) and Tout-Monde (1993) through a feminist framework informed by Hortense Spiller and Hélène Cixous. Steadfast in recognizing that Glissant is not a feminist writer, Loichot thoroughly demonstrates that his challenge to “fatherly, linear, and hierarchical authority” (39) allows for a “reassignment of authority to the multiple sites of a complex, injured, collective subject” (39), and therefore, can be read using Spiller and Cixous’s theoretical approaches. Loichot acknowledges Glissant’s tendency to relegate female characters to the periphery, but she suggests that it is precisely by means of his decentralization of power that the woman...