“What sense of disquiet?” Novelization, creolization, world literature

Abstract

This article aims to locate the antecedents of Glissant’s poésie du Tout-Monde, outlined in La Terre, le feu, l’eau et les vents (2010), in his delineation of the “poetics of creolization” in Caribbean Discourse (1989 [1981]). The concept of creolization contains the seeds of a critical version of world literature, one that is averse to mondialisation and envisages mondialité, a concept Glissant develops in his later writings. Despite clear differences in their approach, Glissant’s conception of world literature shares with Moretti’s notion of a world literary system an emphasis on the inequality of the globe. This is not to claim Glissant for a materialist perspective proper. But to read him as underwriting a triumphalist discourse of globalization would be unfair. In Glissant’s sense, literature is world literature to the extent that it registers oppression and unevenness.

Keywords:

• Bakhtin
• creolization
• novelization
• Tout-Monde
• mondialité
• tremblement

Acknowledgements

This essay draws on and develops my reading of Glissant’s creolization of the novel with a focus on world literature (Saskia Schabio, “‘At the edge of writing and speech’: Shifting Genre, Relocating the Aesthetic”, Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres, ed. Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio, New York: Routledge, 2013, 44–57). I wish to thank the editors and my friend Sarah for their invaluable comments and excellent suggestions. Thanks are also due to E. Hartel, J. Hoeffel, H. Fau, F. Jolie, C. Lemke, A. Mohr and H. Wollbold for discussion of translations from the French.

Notes

1. For a methodological elaboration in terms of a “globalized postcolonial comparativism”, see Deckard (92). Cf. Schabio, “Shifting Genre”: Glissant’s discussion of “forced poetics” and orality (49) challenges Bakhtin’s conception of generic evolution (cf. “The Problem of Speech Genres”). Novelization seems to affirm, rather than question, western temporality and modernity (47ff.). This may also be seen as a considered reply to Mannoni and his notion of the “dependency-complex” (52, 54).

2. For a summary of the deployment of the novel in postcolonial studies, see Edwards, and Hitchcock; and with reference to Glissant, see Schabio (“Shifting Genre” 44–46, 52). In the following I draw on and develop my earlier discussion of his approach to the novel in “Shifting Genre”.

3. On the utopian dimension of his poetics which also informs his remarks on “The Novel of the Americas” and the “new man”, see Niblett and Oloff (15).

4. As suggested above, I see Glissant’s comparative perspective and “poésie du Tout-Monde” emerge from his notion of utopian thinking and insight into the politics of desire in Caribbean Discourse (cf. Schabio, “Peripheral Cosmopolitans”). On his idea of “newness” and “social desire”, see in particular 316ff. and Glissant, Poetics 160.

5. Cf. Glissant et al., “High Necessity”: “The prosaic cannot be defeated or transcended from within the cave of the prosaic” (par. 19). See Holland’s exploration of the tension between Bloch and Deleuze & Guattari (par. 1, par. 19).