The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction (review)

Celia Britton's latest book is a finely-crafted piece of writing that deserves a readership far beyond the relatively narrow community of French Caribbean scholars for whom one might assume it was intended. 'Assumptions about communities' could indeed count as one of the many myths which this book seeks to scrutinise and deconstruct, thereby foregrounding our attention on the broader issue of how literature(s) operate to replicate and explicate the 'being-in-common' which, according to French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, has come to replace more traditional notions of 'community'. Britton's book can itself be seen as staging a type of comparution ('co-appearance') through which her selected corpus is examined 'in the presence of' Nancy's elaborate conceptual universe. As is entirely fitting when dealing with a philosophy where the whole emphasis is on singularity, there is no attempt on Britton's part to use Nancy as a key to understanding Caribbean literature: no overarching theory, no totalising framework, no reading-to-a-purpose. The intention is simply to show how aspects of Nancy's thought can illuminate discussion of the selected novels and this task Britton performs with a masterly deftness of touch and an understated erudition. The introduction provides a succinct presentation of the key issues and concepts in Nancy's writings. Thereafter, the seven chapters that make up the remainder of her book examine in turn works of canonical status by major exponents of the French Caribbean novel (with the sole exception of Vincent Placoly's less well-known text, L'Eau-de-mort guildive). The blending of Britton's textual analysis with the theoretical concepts expounded in Nancy's writing is seamless. Each illuminates and speaks to the other. In some instances, the spotlight projected by Nancy's thought allows Britton to free a text such as Roumain's Gouverneurs de la Rosée from its traditional ideological moorings and propose a radically fresh interpretation of its significance as a text that designates 'the ultimate impossibility of common being' (p. 34). Elsewhere, as for example in her re-reading of Chamoiseau's Texaco, Nancy's particular conceptualisation of myth empowers Britton to focus on the underlying unity that subtends the celebration of créole diversity, which is the feature of the novel on which the vast majority of critics have concentrated their attentions. Minor shifts in perspective are effected therefore, but they are shifts which allow Britton to jettison the accumulated baggage of received interpretations and make truly fresh readings possible. A similar case can be made for her readings of novels by Glissant, Schwarz-Bart, Maximin and Condé. At a time when francophone postcolonial studies appears to be seeking a second wind, this book by Professor Britton (and indeed the Liverpool University Press collection within which it figures) would seem to be offering an exemplary pathway out of the current impasse. This is a book that demonstrates how a serious engagement with theory from another discipline can enrich and re-vitalize the field of postcolonial literary study.