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Postcolonial Literatures Beyond Representation HOW TO OCCUPY THE REAL: POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES BEYOND REPRESENTATION A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Alex Lenoble (Marie-Edith Lenoble) May 2019 © 2019 Alex/Marie-Edith Lenoble HOW TO OCCUPY THE REAL: POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES BEYOND REPRESENTATION Alex Lenoble, Ph. D. (Marie-Edith Lenoble) Cornell University 2019 This dissertation addresses the ways in which postcolonial authors from the Caribbean and the Maghreb, anglophone and Francophone such as Frankétienne, Edouard Glissant, Abdelkebir Khatibi M. NourbeSe Philip and Dany Laferrière respond to a historical exclusion from the symbolic; an exclusion that affected and continues to affect colonial and postcolonial subjectivities. How is it possible, from the perspective of the colonized (non)subject, to express a (post)colonial experience? Is bearing witness to past colonial events possible when the constitution of the modern paradigm itself necessitated the erasure of such events? How does one project a voice that bears the possibility to be heard when the structural stability of language and communication—in other words, the “symbolic”—is secured by deafness to these voices? To examine these questions, I look at works of fiction (poetry, novels, spiral) that do not fit easily into a specific genre precisely because they experiment with literary forms of representation. Deploying strategies ordinarily viewed as negative, such as schizophrenia, disidentification and opacity, the authors of my corpus push language to its limits in order to express postcolonial traumatic experiences. Drawing on Lacan’s concept of the real, trauma studies, postcolonial theory and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, I demonstrate that they successfully “occupy the real:” their dismantling of traditional literary forms–and sometimes of language itself–questions western forms of representation and opens up an ethics of reading that demands the reader takes responsibility for the object of his or her gaze. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Alex Lenoble was born in Paris, France. He did his Maitrise at Paris X Nanterre and after spending a year teaching in Guadeloupe did his M.A. at Paris IV-Sorbonne. Before coming to Ithaca, NY, for his Ph.D., he published translations of the South- African poet Dennis Brutus and articles on the literary work of the Haitian author Frankétienne. During his time at Cornell he taught French, Literature and Culture in the Romance and Africana Studies Departments. He was a member of Diacritic’s editorial board and an active contributor to the Intergroup Dialogue Project. He also taught French language courses at Ithaca College. He will soon start his new job as an Assistant Professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I want to thank the members of my dissertation committee; I am honored to have been guided by such wonderful, brilliant, and generous people. I am grateful for the freedom they have given me to explore my ideas, sometimes even in unconventional ways. Their insightful comments helped me delve deeper into my arguments. A special thank you to Gerard Aching for his continual support and his unshakable faith in my project. He has been the best dissertation advisor I could have ever dreamt of: always making himself available (despite his incredibly busy schedule), whether it was to read a draft, discuss new ideas or take me out for a drink when I was feeling down and overwhelmed. I consider him not only a great advisor but also a role model of the human being I want to be in my future academic career. I want to thank Natalie Melas, Cathy Caruth, and Jonathan Monroe for the precious advice they provided me throughout this long journey. The conversations I had with Natalie Melas at key moments in the writing process have been extremely valuable. Each time we met, she motivated me to keep going and helped reignite my passion for Caribbean and Postcolonial literatures. Cathy Caruth’s teaching and work inspired me tremendously and gave a new direction to my research; I believe that including trauma theory in my analyses made this work more meaningful while also allowing me to understand the deep connections between my family history and my research interests. I want to express here my immense gratitude to Frankétienne. When I contacted him in the first stages of researching a topic for my dissertation, he immediately sent me a box full of books, rare volumes self-published and printed in Haiti, that would vii have otherwise been inaccessible to me. Without his help and his recommendation, I probably would not have been able to start this project at Cornell. Though I am the only signatory of this thesis, it is my conviction that writing is not and should not be a solitary act. English is not my native language, and I would never have gained the confidence I have today without my readers and editors who are also dear friends. I owe a great deal to Valeria Dani, to her critical eye and her generous comments. During our nightly epic writing sessions, she rescued me many times from the Mallarmean syndrome of “blank page anxiety.” I thank the friends who took the time to read and edit parts of this thesis: Lisa Avron, Mostafa Minawi, Suzanne LeMen, Gustavo Llarull and Nick Bujalski. Informal discussions with friends have been immensely profitable to my work: thank you to Ben Tam whose passion for writing deeply inspired me, to Yael Wender whose sharp thinking skills I always admired, to David Fieni who shares with me a deep interest in postcolonial studies. My deepest gratitude to all the members of the Caribbean Reading Group, especially to Kavita Singh, Michael Reyes, Neal Allar, Jan Steyn, and Elise Finielz. At conferences, I met amazing scholars who became my friends; they gave me invaluable feedback and helped me negotiate the intricacies of starting an academic career. Thank you to Alessandra Benedicty, Kaiama Glover, and Natalie Léger, among many others. Last but not least, I want to thank my Africana Studies’ students: teaching and learning from them kept my work meaningful at times when it was very difficult to be hopeful for the future. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS HOW TO OCCUPY THE REAL: POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES BEYOND REPRESENTATION i BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ix INTRODUCTION 11 Chapter 1 US Occupation and Frankétienne’s Schizophrenic Writing 18 Colonization, Occupation, Humanitarian Intervention 23 A Reconfiguration of the Symbolic Order 27 The Spiralists 32 Schizophrenic Writing 35 Writing the Traumas of History 43 CHAPTER 2 DETERRITORIALIZING THE MIND: TOWARD DISIDENTIFICATION 57 Identification and Its Discontents: Provincializing Identification, Deterritorializing Psychoanalysis 60 Disidentification Strategies 73 Becoming Nègre, Becoming Algerian. 78 Existential Paradoxes of the Francophone Writer 89 Lost in Translation: Occupying In-betweeness 100 Who am I? 101 Movement, Disorientation and Vertigo 107 Aimance 113 Japanese Deterritorialization 115 Literary Outer Space 124 Writing Desire 134 Desire instead of identification, a New Relation to the Other 141 Chapter 3 A Throw in Circumstance: Zong!, the (Post)colonial Event and the Poetic Real. 143 What Marks the Spot of a Subaquatic Death? 146 Mallarmé, Badiou and the Event of Modernity 150 Mallarmé’s Pure Symbolic 157 ix “Or,” the Erasure of History, and a “Linguistic Theory of Currency.” 164 The Mallarmean Event: The Consecration of the Signifier 168 The (post)colonial event: a trauma event 170 Os: Exposing the Bones 175 The Right Words 176 A Symbolic Sacrifice 179 Conclusion: Occupying Trauma, the Tidal Movement of the Real 182 Chapter 4 Opacity, Literature and the Real 184 Specters of Descartes 193 From an Epistemology of Clarity to an Aesthetics of Clarity 202 Descartes’ Linguistic Event 204 What is Opaque is not French: Colonialism and the Dark Side of Language Purity 212 Modernity and Clarity 214 Innocent Writing and Colonial Violence 216 Works Cited 227 x INTRODUCTION How is it possible, from the perspective of the colonized (non)subject, to express a (post)colonial experience? How can they bear witness to past colonial events when the constitution of the modern paradigm has itself necessitated the erasure of such events? How to project a voice that might be heard when the stability of the structures of language and communication–in other words, the symbolic–is precisely secured by deafness to these voices? There is not one single answer. In She Tried Her Tongue, M. NourbeSe Philip declares: “For me the imperative was to move beyond representation.” What does it mean to move beyond representation? Why is moving beyond representation an imperative? What kind of literature accomplishes this challenge? And for what purpose? These are some of the questions that were on my mind during the journey of which this dissertation is a result. For Philip, moving beyond representation was the only ethical way to approach the experience of those who were enslaved, murdered and irretrievably silenced in the events of modern/colonial history. She refused to work within the “order of logic, rationality and predictability” because it would be a betrayal: it would exert a second violence, this time “to the memory of this already violent experience.” This experience, as far as it radically exceeds rationality and order, cannot be told in a language whose grammar expresses rationality and is inscribed in linearity. And yet, it is a story that “must be told.” The authors I convoke in this thesis as poets and writers whose unique tool is language–a language they inherited from the colonizer–are all caught in a similar deadlock: I interpret this move beyond representation as a refusal to partake in the western “symbolic” order. One of my goals is to investigate the possibility for these authors to occupy the “real,” a domain at once excluded from and constitutive of the symbolic.
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