Authorising a tradition: Theory,criticism and (self-)canonisation in French Caribbean writing

Absent ancestors, contemporary authorities, and ‘everything to be made’

Literature came late to the vast majority of French Antilleans. Illiteracy was the lot of most people until departmentalisation in 1946, and in comparison even with other ex-plantation societies in, say, the US and the British Caribbean, ³ the absence of slave narratives from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has meant that we are dealing with an especially belated tradition. While some writers have cited this belatedness as a source of anxiety, ⁴ I have argued elsewhere that the apparent lack of a historically binding tradition or of a long-established canon could have contributed to the exuberance of Antillean literature (McCusker, 2004: 358–9). The Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott describes the ‘explosion of utterance’ in the Caribbean, an explosion directly linked, Walcott suggests, to the exhilarating absence of tradition: ‘if there was nothing, there was everything to be made. With this prodigious ambition one began’ (Walcott, 1998: 4). The exceptional volume of literature produced by Antillean writers in a relatively short space of time means that one might talk of absence more than of lack; the non-existence of a sanctified local canon might be read as a source of liberation rather than limitation, motivating what Glissant has called the ‘irruption dans la modernité’ (Glissant, 1981: 192). In contrast to the melancholic self-scrutiny identified with the anglophone postcolonial field in the opening paragraphs, these writer/critic/theorists could be said to be engaged in a process of self-authorisation and self-inscription which is (self-)confident and often defiant.

‘Authentic’ Antillean literature is generally considered to have begun only in the early to mid twentieth century, with the work of Aimé Césaire. ⁵ The sense that one has of an intensive and very compressed literary flourishing has both a temporal and a spatial dimension, then. First, the contemporary literary scene in the French Antilles is played out on small islands, among often interrelated populations, even when writers live elsewhere. Local critics and writers are often strategically aligned with one school of thought or another so that, for example, Maryse Condé’s and Tony Delsham’s disdain for créolité, or the créolité writers’ criticisms of Daniel Maximin and Aimé Césaire, can be as much a matter of journalistic and even anecdotal status, belonging to the ‘more nebulous sphere of gossip and rumour’ (Moran, 2000: 1), as of academic record. Secondly, until very recently, the recognised elders of francophone Caribbean writing were still alive, serving at once as precursors and contemporaries to younger writers. These ‘contemporary precursors’, charismatic author-figures in Bourdieu’s terms (Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant), continued, over five or six decades, to write, and to shape reactions to their and others’ work. The recent deaths of both Glissant (2011) and Césaire (2008), as well as of other father figures (René Ménil, 2004; Zobel, 2006) will in time no doubt lead to a reappraisal of the legacies of these elders. But it remains one of the determining features of Antillean literature that canonisation (according to one usage, an honour bestowed on the dead) was so fully achieved by these founding figures at a relatively early age, and would be consolidated throughout prolonged literary and/or political careers.

Theory, criticism and the academy

The prodigious ambition described by Walcott above is manifest in cultural production generally, but is perhaps most pronounced in the theoretical and essayistic work to have emerged from the Antilles. If the anglophone Caribbean has produced a number of important author-theorists (Wilson Harris, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott), the French Antilles (and notably the island of Martinique) have been particularly prolific in this regard. Many Antillean writers have published substantial volumes of literary and cultural criticism; it is not insignificant, for example, that both Condé and Confiant have authored monographs on Césaire. In parallel, theoretical and essayistic writing has been an integral part of this tradition, and the speculative, the discursive, the critical and the creative have been so intimately intertwined as to be at times indistinguishable. Writers’ affiliations with academic institutions, moreover, shape the context in which their own works, and the works of their peers, are received and judged (in the classroom, in the first instance), ⁶ while fostering a body of theoretical and critical work which supplements, and often provides a reading map or an interpretative model for, the creative. ⁷ Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant for many years held senior academic positions in the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, Martinique, Daniel Maximin lectured in anthropology in the Institut d’Études Sociales in Paris, while Maryse Condé and Édouard Glissant held professorships in a number of prestigious US universities. If, as John Guillory has argued, ‘canonicity is not a property of the work itself but of its transmission’ (Guillory, 1993: 494), the institutional clout wielded by these writers ensured and inflected their transmission, while their theoretical and critical writing provided an enlightening – if potentially circular or incestuous – meta-discursive map with which to read the writing in question. So it is hardly surprising that the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane has produced a huge number of MA and PhD theses on the Creole language and créolité, while in the US there has been something of a ‘boom’ in studies of Condé and Glissant, often in comparison with other black diasporic writers.

Theory brings with it institutional legitimacy and symbolic power – the power to name, to diagnose and even to prescribe – and hence a measure of self-authorisation and authority. Moreover, as Pierre Bourdieu argues, the school or literary group is an ‘instrument d’accumulation et de concentration du capital symbolique (avec l’adoption d’un nom, l’élaboration de manifestes et de programmes, et l’instauration de rites d’agrégation …’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 441)). Such symbolic capital bolsters ‘brand recognition’ for certain authors on the islands. As Mary Gallagher noted in 2001, for many readers ‘contemporary French Caribbean writing begins and ends with the work of three or four writers, all of whom are identified with (or against) certain cultural movements, programmes or manifestos’ (Gallagher, 2001: 9). If anything, this sense of constriction has only increased. Writing almost a decade later, Kaiama L. Glover laments ‘the disturbingly fixed roster of writer-intellectuals who have thus far interested theorists of postcolonial (francophone) literature’ (Glover, 2010: xii). That Césaire, Glissant, Chamoiseau (and to a lesser extent Confiant and Bernabé), and their associated theoretical toolboxes (négritude, antillanité, relation, créolité), have become standard reference points in canon-forming readers and guides is of course a reason for celebration, and testifies to the quality and dynamism of this literature. Yet both Gallagher and Glover here avert to the potentially stifling consequences of too strong a stranglehold being wielded by too small a group of writers, and to the more negative potential consequences of what Glover (2010: 10) calls ‘locally cannibalizing auto-canonization’ – a point to which I shall return in my conclusion.

In the elaboration and refinement of these successive theoretical and identitarian movements, and particularly in the discourse of the créolité writers, a strong coterie-building instinct has emerged. This has been accompanied by a polemical, and often vitriolic, tone, based around an implicit notion of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, or of friends and enemies, to use Chris Bongie’s term (2008), such that the critical field in the Antilles could be said to veer from the iconoclastic to the celebratory. Cilas Kemedjio explains this privileging of ‘contestation’ and ‘rupture’ in generational terms. He distinguishes what he calls ‘le discours-ancêtre’ (négritude, indigénisme and the Harlem Renaissance), all of which attempted to negotiate ethnic interests from within the structures of domination, from ‘le discours-héritier’, which sees such theories as fatally compromised because they implicitly accept the principle of oppression. The second generation of black writers were thus motivated by ‘le rejet spectaculaire des modèles de l’idéologie dominante’ and by ‘la volonté d’écart maximal’ which one finds, he argues, in Glissant, Mongo Beti and the créolité writers (Kemedjio, 1999: 10). Kemedjio’s notion of the ‘volonté d’écart maximal’ is exemplified in Confiant’s much-criticised Aimé Césaire: une traversée paradoxale du siècle (1993) and its bitter attack on ‘Papa Césaire’, but can also be seen in Chamoiseau and Confiant’s Lettres créoles (1991), a literary history of the Antilles which constructed a selective and highly partial canon of Antillean writing. In the decade or so following publication of the Éloge (1989) and Lettres créoles, the group was to be heavily criticised in the Antilles and beyond for intemperance, prescriptiveness and dogmatism, as well as for dubious ethnic and gender politics.

Maryse Condé: essaying/denying theory

As the above discussion might suggest, Antillean theory has been considered an overwhelmingly male pursuit, which most women authors have eschewed. A. James Arnold, in something of a back-handed compliment, describes women’s writing as ‘more recently emerged, less theoretically articulated’ (Arnold, 1995: 21), and states categorically, if somewhat problematically, that ‘the women have a clear aversion to theorizing their project’ (1995: 36). ⁸ Maryse Condé, the most prominent and successful woman writer from the Antilles (and co-editor of the collection in which Arnold’s essay appeared), has tended to make a virtue of her own repudiation of theory in favour, ostensibly, of more open-ended and inclusive narratives of Antillean identity. In turn, as Celia Britton has argued, the titles of studies of Condé’s work testify to her rebellious or unclubbable image (Britton, 2004: 35). ⁹ Rather than being read according to, or even against the grain of, her own theoretical pronouncements, as has been the case for many of her male peers, Condé has often instead been read through the prism of her own biography, a biography which is frequently understood through comments made by Condé herself in interviews. ¹⁰ While for Césaire, Glissant and the créolité writers (all enthusiastic interviewees) the interview tends to be a supplement to or an extension of theory-building, for Condé it frequently acts as a space of autobiographical exploration. Thus critics of Condé often ground the act of reading in an appeal to the author’s life, the coordinates of which (notably her move from Paris to Africa to the US, and then her short-lived return to live in Guadeloupe) have provided a neat mise en abyme of successive identitarian theories coming out of the islands. Françoise Pfaff’s collection of interviews with Condé exemplifies this approach. Declaring in her preface that she would focus on ‘son cheminement biographique (Antilles, Europe, Afrique, États Unis) et littéraire, sa personnalité, sa pensée et les correspondances pouvant exister entre sa vie et son œuvre’ (Pfaff, 1993: 7), Pfaff (and Condé) unabashedly foreground the personal, intimiste dimensions of the work. ¹¹

However, Condé’s apparently defiant scepticism towards male theorising, and her seemingly more confessional authorial presence, should itself be read as a strongly theoretical position. Condé may not have developed an identifiable ‘theory’; but the term ‘theory’, when applied to Antillean writing, tends in any case to describe a fairly heterogeneous blend of essay, polemic, lecture, journalism and interview, straddling literary criticism, sociology and anthropology, and exemplified by Glissant’s Le Discours antillais (1981). Condé’s work moves within and between such modes. Of particular interest here is a cluster of essays published between 1992 and 1996 in high-profile journals and edited collections. Most of these originated, and in many respects had most critical impact, in the United States, where their resonance was undoubtedly connected to the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s ‘discovery’. But this period also, not coincidentally, marked the high point of the créolité movement (Chamoiseau’s Texaco received the Prix Goncourt in 1992), and in these essays Condé was to position herself as the movement’s key critic. Bolstered by her position as professor in a number of prestigious US colleges (Berkeley, Maryland, CUNY), Condé’s outspoken interventions expressed, to return to Kemedjio’s term, a ‘volonté d’écart maximal’ from other movements in a manner very similar to her male colleagues, while her more subtle editorial inclusions and exclusions allowed her to condition and shape her readers’ horizons of interpretation. In one of her more directly polemical pieces, for example, an essay in Yale French Studies (1993), ¹² Condé attributes the ‘malaise’ in Antillean writing not to the fact that West Indian literature does not yet exist (a direct criticism of Glissant and the créolité writers – see note 4), but rather to the ‘very commands enumerated throughout the history of West Indian writing by the various generations of [male] writers’. Asking whether ‘we are condemned to explore to saturation the resources of our narrow islands’ (1993: 130), Condé upholds women writers such as Myriam Warner-Vieyra (and herself) as offering a fresh perspective. A similar agenda is pursued in three major collections edited by Condé (L’Héritage de Caliban (1992a), a special issue of the US journal of black writing Callaloo, on Guadeloupe and Martinique (1992b) and Penser la créolité (Condé and Cottenet-Hage, 1995)), both through the editor’s own contributions and in the selection of critics sympathetic to her viewpoint. These highly self-referential volumes would arguably construct a counter-coterie to that of the créolité writers, both authorial (privileging the work of Schwarz-Bart, Warner-Vieyra and Césaire) and critical (contributors featuring in more than one of the three volumes include A. James Arnold, Thomas Spear, Kathleen Balutansky, Christophe Lamiot, Lydie Moudileno, Delphine Perret and Françoise Lionnet). The collections would, moreover, establish some of the principal lines of theoretical engagement for readers of contemporary Antillean writing.

Condé’s 1984 novel Ségou had explored the bankruptcy of négritude as a solution to the Antillean identity quest. And yet both L’Héritage de Caliban and Callaloo, appearing in the wake of harsh criticism of Césaire in the Éloge and elsewhere, (re-)consecrate him as the father of Antillean writing. Both collections claim that they might have been entitled ‘Césaire’s Legacy’; L’Héritage states that contemporary movements (unnamed, but créolité is the clear target) attempt to define themselves against the movement that Césaire had established a half-century before, a movement ‘dont l’écho ainsi que l’éclat perdurent’ (Condé, 1992a: 11). ¹³ The verb ‘perdurer’ underscores Césaire’s (and négritude’s) endurance, and their unquestionable place in the Caribbean pantheon, hinting perhaps that the trajectory of recent ‘stars’ will be more ephemeral. While the Éloge, the text of a seminar first delivered in Saint-Denis, Paris, had been criticised for the exteriority of its vision and for privileging an external audience, Condé, acknowledging the North American bias of her contributors, notes unapologetically that she ‘takes an outside approach to works in the francophone Caribbean’ in her preface to Callaloo (Condé, 1992b: 1). In L’Héritage, similarly dominated by US-based scholars, she stresses the virtues of this exteriority, stating that it will attenuate the polemic and bias that characterises more ‘local’ criticism:

Donc pas de procès ni de recours en grâce. Nul souci de polémique. Point de parti pris. Le regard de l’Autre restitue au texte le mouvement qui lui semble propre tandis qu’il confère au créateur une liberté et une innocence qui lui sont souvent contestées. (1992a: 11)

Yet no such canon-fixing collection can be innocent of parti-pris nor disinterested in terms of self-presentation. Of the 19 essays in L’Héritage, five deal sympathetically with Condé herself, while the others are a fairly mixed bag in terms of coverage and quality. ¹⁴ Callaloo, too, in addition to a number of articles espousing a feminist approach, or championing lesser-known women writers, devotes a cluster of three articles to Condé’s then recent novel Traversée de la mangrove, read by all as a critique of créolité – the novel includes a sideswipe at ‘le talentueux Martiniquais Patrick Chamoiseau [qui a] déconstruit le français-français’, but who, it is implied, is more appreciated on the Left Bank than at home (Condé, 1989: 228) – a text which is now consecrated as the Condé novel par excellence. Meanwhile Confiant, Chamoiseau, and even Glissant warranted only one article apiece in the journal. ¹⁵

The most influential of the three volumes, however, was undoubtedly Penser la créolité (1995), which Condé co-edited with Madeleine Cottenet-Hage. The volume again privileged US-based critics, emerging as it did from a conference held at the University of Maryland. It has recently been described by Lydie Moudileno (2010: 60) as a ‘contre-manifeste’ to the Éloge, and indeed in the semantic echo from one title to the other, and in the substitution of the rather antiquated noun ‘éloge’, for the verb ‘penser’ (to think through or to problematise), the collection positions itself more explicitly than either L’Héritage or Callaloo as a reply and as a corrective to the 1989 manifesto. Although the collection does include one article in praise of créolité, ¹⁶ it is generally highly critical of the movement, and the tone of the collection is every bit as polemical as the manifesto it criticises. Critics have noted the prominence of a gendered critique in essays by A. James Arnold, Thomas Spear and Francoise Vergès (see, for example, Milne, 2001), and the collection, like the two analysed above, gives considerable and welcome space to women writers and critics. ¹⁷ And in its explicit engagement with créolité it seeks to repair other omissions too. First, while it features essays by several contemporary Guadeloupean novelists (Condé herself, Gisèle Pineau and Ernest Pépin), Martinican writers are notable by their absence. Secondly, it affords considerable space to Haiti (Émile Ollivier authored a chapter, and the volume includes articles on Ollivier and Jean Métellus, as well as Leah D. Hewitt’s chapter, ‘La Créolité, Haitian Style’). Thirdly, the volume includes a ‘Critique afrocentrique de la créolité’ (Ama Mazama), a direct riposte to the controversial side-lining of African culture in the Éloge. Fourthly, and perhaps most significantly given Condé’s frustration with the localism of the créolité agenda, it features a piece on the Guatemalan testimonio writer Rigoberta Menchú. And of course Condé herself is again presented as a refreshing alternative to the stifling edicts of créolité, most obviously in an article by Kathleen Balutansky (1995) which reads Condé (favourably) against the créolité agenda. As in the other two volumes, more chapters are devoted to Condé’s work than to that of any other writer, reflected in the fact that her index entry is the longest in the volume (outstripping that of both Césaire and Glissant). In her closing chapter, whose title, ‘Chercher nos vérités’ is a quotation from the Éloge (and which is, not unfairly, taken as evidence of the prescriptive and nationalistic approach of the movement), Condé begins ‘Je n’ai aucune envie de parler de moi-même’ (Condé, 1995: 305). Yet her critique of others is, inevitably, a self-referential one, and the chapter reiterates, in highly self-conscious terms, some of the by now very familiar criticisms of créolité. Condé makes common cause with the international community of Creoles, and cites writers as diverse as Max Rippon, Derek Walcott, Axel Roehmer and Gloria Anzaldúa. The essay thus reinscribes many of the by-now familiar self-images of Condé as cosmopolitan intellectual and citizen of the world.

It should be stressed that Condé’s criticisms of créolité, and notably her commitment to women writers and critics and to Haitian authors, are valuable and necessary correctives to an often intemperate and unquestionably masculinist discourse, and to a Martinique-centric perspective. My argument is not that such interventions are in any way illegitimate or invalid, but rather that they undermine the claim, by Condé herself and by other critics, that she takes an atheoretical approach, or an ‘innocent’ position (as L’Héritage de Caliban explicitly announces), or that she is somehow outside the whale in terms of local polemics and coteries. These publications, in their self-promotion and self-exemption, can be considered a sustained act of self-canonisation, which seek to influence ‘patterns of taste’ (Brouillette) in an even more explicit way than the manifestos that she so heavily criticises. Moreover the inclusion of a number of articles which sought to position Traversée as a riposte (despite its earlier publication date) to créolité explains at least in part why this Condé novel has attracted more attention than any other.

And yet, of course, the critical ink spilt on créolité served in turn only to bolster that movement’s cultural capital, such that these acts of self-construction would serve, paradoxically, to reinforce the importance of créolité. Pierre Bourdieu, in his foundational essay ‘Champ intellectuel et projet créateur’, illustrates this mutually energising dynamic with a quotation from Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe: ‘Les théories et les écoles, comme les microbes et les globules, s’entre-dévorent et assurent par leur lutte la continuité de la vie’ (Bourdieu, 1966: 865). Self-validating gestures, like outright criticisms of others, are in the end often mutually reinforcing positions. Writing specifically of the nouveaux romanciers, Bourdieu argues that, as this disparate group came to be recognised as a school, readers were encouraged to ‘rechercher les signes de ce qui unit les membres de l’école et qui les sépare d’autres écoles, à distinguer ce qui pourrait être rapproché et à rapprocher ce qui pourrait être séparé’ (1966: 883–4). ¹⁸ In building up a self-image as an (the?) oppositional voice to the highly marketable créolité movement, Condé was to become an obligatory point of reference in the debate. In turn the créolité writers’ often hostile engagement with her ensured in many ways the ‘continuity of life’ to which Bourdieu refers. In other words, as Bourdieu explains (with specific reference to Verlaine and Mallarmé, but his words have a clear resonance here too), ‘l’effet d’opposition entre les deux écoles, qui va se renforçant à mesure qu’avance le processus d’institutionnalisation nécessaire pour constituer un véritable groupe littéraire … tend à redoubler, en les consacrant, les différences premières’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 441). Chamoiseau’s notorious reading of Traversée (Chamoiseau, 1991 – a reading tellingly commissioned by Condé herself) is only one example of a very direct ‘reading in pairs’ that animated and sustained the critical field, and which would help to consecrate the differences between the two. ¹⁹

In recent years, the virulence of the debate around créolité has subsided, and indeed the coterie seems to have disintegrated. Confiant’s reputation was compromised, if not fatally damaged, by his support for the racist comedian Dieudonné, and while he claimed in a 2008 interview (Vété-Congolo, 2008) that a follow-up to the manifesto is in progress, it has yet to appear. Meanwhile Chamoiseau was to become more and more closely affiliated with Glissant in the decade preceding the latter’s death. The works co-authored with Glissant (a polemical treatise on Sarkozy’s Ministry for Immigration, 2007; an open letter to Barack Obama, 2008) could be described as œuvres de circonstance, and appear to embrace a more worldly perspective. Yet Chamoiseau’s fiction remains, despite the criticisms described above, largely trained on the native land (see McCusker, 2011).

A recent novel, Un dimanche au cachot, demonstrates Chamoiseau’s awareness of his reception in a global marketplace. While other novels foreground the writing process through an array of meta-fictional devices, this text explores reception and critical perception. In the first of two self-referential passages, which I will quote at length, the narrator/author refers to his awareness of his own position as a fetishised commodity which can be pressed into the service of various interest groups.

J’assume du mieux possible cette espèce d’ « écrivain » que l’on a fait de moi. Tel lecteur me sacre gardien de nos mémoires. Telle lectrice s’agenouille (sans me voir) devant le dieu Goncourt qui m’aurait sanctifié et gommé ma personne. Telle autre m’intronise nostalgique de nos belles traditions. Un club du troisième âge me nomme sergent d’honneur des vieilles oralités. Une triade militante me décrète fantassin des langues créoles. Dans deux ou trois salons, je suis ou bien l’ayatollah ou bien le pape d’un coffre-fort identitaire où chacun entrepose ses problèmes … Bien entendu, en délicieuse lâcheté, je confirme volontiers ce fatras et m’enfuis d’un pas mal assuré dessous la charge nouvelle. (2007: 22)

Here Chamoiseau humorously references, through the apparent praise of others, many of the criticisms of the créolité movement: co-option by the French publishing industry; nostalgia; parochialness; the over-privileging of orality. (Interestingly, however, criticisms of gender are not addressed.) In the process the reader is reminded of the author’s consecrated, canonical status. Note the use, albeit it in ironic mode, of verbs such as ‘introniser’, ‘sacrer’ and ‘sanctifier’, the reference to the Prix Goncourt, and, more generally, the portrayal of a celebrity author much in demand. And yet the cluster of militaristic terms (‘sergent’, ‘fantassin’) registers an awareness of critiques of the overly strident, even violent rhetoric of créolité. From this perspective, the double meaning of ‘triade’ is particularly revealing. The ‘triade militante’ who applaud Chamoiseau’s promotion of Creole could of course be a humorous double of the créolité triumvirate. But ‘triade’ has a more sinister referent, designating the Chinese mafia-like gangs known for their brutality. Indeed juxtaposed with the terms ‘pape’ and ‘ayatollah’, and with the forbidding ‘coffre-fort identitaire’, such a reading is not implausible, suggesting perhaps that Chamoiseau is well aware of the possibility (and even the reality) of prescriptive versions of identity being co-opted by authoritarian movements – precisely the kinds of criticisms levelled by Condé and others. Yet any sense of a straightforward self-critique is in turn undercut by the fact that all of the identities named in the quotation (even – perhaps especially – écrivain) are presented as projections by the reader and the critic, rather than identities assumed by the author – the butt of the joke, then, is the over-enthusiastic or categorical reader, seeking to impose rigid interpretations or to align the author too readily (and despite pronouncements by the author to support such readings) with any given cause.

Several pages later, in a footnote detailing the messages received on his mobile phone, the narrator reflects further on the pressures of being a celebrity author:

Ma sœur la Baronne m’avait appelé pour exiger un conte sur Noël aux Antilles à destination d’une enseignante d’Alsace en délire exotique. Puis ce fut Antoine Gallimard soucieux de ce roman promis depuis dix ans. Puis une traductrice italienne inquiète de la signification « koker » en français. Puis Édouard Glissant qui s’était vu en songe en train de se noyer au rocher Diamant. Puis un ami indépendantiste qui me convoquait au secours d’une rivière menacée. Puis Raphaël Confiant qui n’avait pas trouvé assez de mots créoles dans mon dernier dialogue de film. Puis un membre du Comité économique et social qui m’engageait dans un colloque fondamental sur « insularité et mondialisation ». Puis la Baronne encore qui me rappelait l’heure d’aller nettoyer la tombe de Man Ninotte, notre pauvre manman. Puis mon pêcheur de Taupinière, au Diamant, qui mettait à l’encan deux-trois kilos d’oursins et des œufs de daurade. Puis … (Chamoiseau, 2007: 35–6)

It may seem churlish to interpret such playful prose on anything but its own terms; the over-earnest reader, already parodied several pages earlier, should of course be on her guard against distortion, projection or over-rigid conclusions. And yet, if gender was sidestepped in the previous passage, here it infiltrates the footnote in a questionable way. With the exception of the fisherman and the conference organiser – the latter’s gender is unspecified – the male characters stake out the high ground of literary activity (Antoine Gallimard, hustling for another novel for his elite publishing house; Glissant, epitomising the ‘high brow’ of local writing but also an intimate friend; Confiant, gently mocked for his continued fetishising of Creole) and political and environmental activism (the ‘ami indépendantiste’). His sister, however, nags about familial duties, while the other women mentioned are shown to be either ‘en délire exotique’ (the Alsatian teacher who requested a Christmas tale) or, in the case of the Italian translator, ill at ease with, or even ignorant of, the lexicon of Creole. Cultural production remains the preserve of males, a criticism made over a decade earlier (Arnold, 1995), while women occupy secondary roles – teaching or translating literature, for example, rather than writing or commissioning it. The fact, moreover, that the translator is having difficulty with the translation of the verb koker, Creole for ‘to fuck’, is of course a provocative and knowing nod to the criticisms of créolité as a phallocentric discourse. It is also a defiant assertion, within the space of the fictional text, of non-engagement with a key and enduring criticism of Chamoiseau’s work, as so often articulated by Condé and by contributors to volumes such as Penser la créolité.

Self-referentiality, it would seem, does not necessary entail self-doubt or even self-critique. It is therefore telling that Chamoiseau singles North American critics out for attack in terms of their analysis of gender in his work (McCusker, 2000: 730), while Condé posits the US critic, if not as an ideal reader, at least as one whose gaze is ‘moins exotique que celui du [critique] français’ (Pfaff, 1993: 154). For both writers, a detailed awareness of the reception of their fiction can, in a somewhat circular process, provide in turn the subject matter of that highly self-referential, and at times highly defensive, fiction. At once subject and object of their own discourse, Chamoiseau and Condé are typical of the modern author described by Meizoz, a writer ‘qui sait mieux qu’en tout autre temps qu’il entre en littérature sous le regard d’autrui’ (Meizoz, 2007: 187).

Conclusion

It is now a critical commonplace to assert the rebirth of the author. Indeed it might be argued that the author’s death was in any case the prerogative of cultures of longue durée, while postcolonial authors, intent on forging a new voice and with, as Walcott argued, ‘everything to be made’, had never been so cavalierly dispensed with. In any case, the Antilles offer an extreme example of the hyper-presence of the author figure, to the extent that, as Kemedjio suggests, we could talk of ‘une saturation du champ littéraire par l’auteur’ (Kemedjio, 1999: 16). This saturation occurs, at the textual level, in meta-fictional novels and, perhaps most forcibly, in the vogue for autobiography that characterised the Antilles in the 1990s and 2000s. But Antillean authors also inhabit the fields of criticism, theory, interviews, political and academic roles, and even cyberspace. Their gestures of triumphant or at least very confident self-authorisation seek to impose overt and self-conscious control over the reading and criticism of their own and others’ writing. And it is precisely (and, occasionally, paradoxically) through such pronouncements and polemics that a readership is created and guaranteed.

What this saturation risks, however, is failing to make space for a new generation of writers. The discourse of the créolité writers was described as ‘Oedipal’ in its attempts to kill off the symbolic father figure, Césaire; the movement also claimed (and yet struggled) to take distance from Glissant. However, both Césaire and Glissant are now dead, the Éloge de la créolité is 25 years old, and the writers most associated with (both sides) of the polemic surrounding it are in late middle or old age: Condé is in her seventies, Confiant, Pépin and Maximin are in their sixties, Chamoiseau and Pineau in their fifties. Whether one describes the dynamics in play here as being those of ‘contestation et rupture’ (Kemedjio, 1999), a classic dispute between ancients and moderns, or whether they should be described more negatively as a form of ‘locally cannibalising auto-canonisation’ (Glover, 2010), it is clear that Caribbean writers have historically defined themselves as much by reference to peers and predecessors as they have in terms of their own preoccupations and aesthetic choices. And yet one of the most striking things about the contemporary literary scene is the apparent lack of a new generation of writers and intellectuals. While individual authors have undoubtedly emerged, writers such as Fabienne Kanor and Mireille Jean-Gilles, perhaps because they are not identified with a particular identitarian movement, have had a relatively limited impact on the literary scene to date. This article opened with a quotation from Lilian S. Robinson, reminding us of the necessarily finite space of the curriculum, as opposed to the more abstract, hence more capacious, pantheon. Antillean writers, with ‘everything to be made’, noisily fought their way onto course syllabi, prize lists and the public consciousness throughout the twentieth century. It would be a shame if new voices, with different preoccupations, agendas and theoretical perspectives (or indeed those with no particular theoretical agenda at all), were not to find room in this crowded literary field.