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Modernity and the Novel in the Expanded Caribbean Wilson Harris, Patrick Chamoiseau and Carlos Fuentes by Kerstin Dagmar Oloff A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and Comparative Literary Studies Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick October 2007 1 Contents Acknowledgments............. ................ ... ........................................................................ 3 Declaratio ns........................................ •••••••.•••..••••.••.••....•••••.••....................•........•.....•• 4 Abstract............................................. •••..•..••••..••••..•••••.....•..••••.••..•.....•........•.....•..•••••. 5 Introduction Reading Regionally ...................................................................... 6 Chapter 1 Violence, Imperialism and Culture .................................................. 27 "Block Functions" and the Legacy of Colonialism in Carnival ... ................................... 30 The "imperialism of the universal", Language and Racism in Chemin d'Ecole and Texaco ..... 40 Mexican Labour, Stereotypes and Cultural Imperialism in La fro ntera de cristal ......... .. .... 50 Chapter 2 Towards interior vision: Nation, Culture and Hybridity ........................ 62 National Fragmentation and the Quest for Spiritual Community in The Guyana Quartet ........ 66 The Death of the National Project?: Nation, class and race in La muerte de Artemio Cruz ...... 80 The Politics of Martinican Identity: History, Class and Popular Culture in Texaco ............... 99 Myth, History and Resistance ............................................................................ 112 Chapter 3 Testimonial Voices: Genre, Representation and the IndividuaL ............. 115 Representing the Subaltern: the Narrative Strategies of Cuzcatlcin .................................. 119 A Testimonial Detective story: Genre and Displacement in Solibo Magnifique ................... 138 Writing the Real, Combating Tradition: Wordscratcher or Warrior of the Imaginary? .............. 154 Chapter 4 The Archetypal Imagination: History, Community and Character ............ 161 "Trapped in the venom of history"?: Archetypes, Stereotypes and the 'Atrocity Tale' ........... 164 "Una vida no basta": Revolution, Community and the Modern Subject in Terra Nostra ... ..... 186 Chapter 5 Towards a global vision: Peripheral modernism, Ex-centricity and Genre.. 208 Terra Nostra, the World Paradigm and the 'Primitive' ................................................ 212 "One throne makes another footstool visible": The World System and the "tilted" Vision ...... 229 Underdevelopment and the Counter-Narrative of Liberation in Biblique des dernieres gestes .. 239 Mapping Regional Culture: the Geographies of Postmodernism, Marvellous Realism and the Baroque ........................................... , .......................................................... 256 Conclusion Regional Literary Studies and (Global) Comparativism ........................ 259 2 Acknowledgements I wish to express my gratitude to my supervisors Professor Neil Lazarus and Professor John King for their invaluable and formative support, intellectual stimulation and encouragement throughout the course of my PhD. I would also like to thank Professor Michael Bell for his support, advice and feedback throughout my time at Warwick from undergraduate to postgraduate level. I must also thank the national Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my research, as well as the Warwick-based Humanities Research Council and the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies for small grants. The English department at Warwick - and, in particular, the postcolonial studies group - has provided an exciting intellectual environment. Many members of staff have been very generous with their time, especially Professor Benita Parry, Professor Jackie Labbe and Dr. Rashmi Varma. The Department of Comparative American Studies has provided a supportive environment in which to teach - especially thanks to Dr Rebecca Earle and Professor John King. I also want to acknowledge the intellectual formation offererd by the activities and talks organized by the Centre for Caribbean Studies; thanks must go in particular to Professor David Dabydeen. Thanks to the members of Poco-Net, whose friendship as well as scholarship I greatly value: Mike Niblett, Sharae Deckard, Jane Poyner, Jim Graham and Pathik Pathak. Among my great friends from university I also count Becca Hayes, Rina Kim, Claudia Lozada-Can, Dimitar Angelov, Katsura Sako, Nicola Wilson, Nadya Yakovchuk, Teresa Bailach, Rochelle Sibley and Red Chan. Lastly, I would also like to thank the team of resident tutors at Tocil, of which I am happy to have formed part. Finally, I wish to express my infinite gratitude to those closest to me for their unwavering support: my parents, Horst and Barbara; my sisters, Ingrid and Anne; Nestor E. Rodriguez, Mario and Leon. 3 Declarations I hereby declare that this thesis represents my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree at the University of Warwick or any other educational institution. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at the University of Warwick or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged. This thesis may be photocopied. 4 Abstract My thesis examines how the form of the novel is transformed in the postcoloniaVneo-imperial context of the 20th century Expanded Caribbean. I focus on works written in Spanish, English and French and thus privilege a regional approach over a linguistic one. While the fragmentation of the region has been furthered historically through the educational system, neo-imperialism, economics and global politics, the region is united by the common experience of colonialism, of plantation slavery and/or the encomienda system, and of anti-imperial resistance. By focusing on the form of the novel that has originated in Europe, I set out to examine the impact of geo-politics and economics on aesthetics. Furthermore, Carlos Fuentes, Wilson Harris and Patrick Chamoiseau can arguably be seen as representative for the academic fields of Latin Americanism, Postcolonial Studies and Francophone Literature respectively, given their canonical status within them. One of the aims of this thesis is to examine how the novels from the Expanded Caribbean speak back to certain developments within the 'central' academies over the last few decades and what the canonization of certain writers to the exclusion of others, and the promotion of certain ways of reading texts, tell us about the latter. For this reason, most of the novels examined in this thesis have been published during the last quarter of the century that, on the political, economic and social level, has witnessed dramatic global changes that have had a devastating impact on the achievements of the 'boom' period of the sixties. 5 - Introduction - Reading Regionally El Caribe ha sido mar de encuentros y su literatura una corriente del espiritu que fluye del Mississippi al Orinoco, y en la cual nadan peces de todos colores y todas las lenguas, desde William Faulkner en Nueva Orleans hasta Gabriel. Garcia Marquez en Cartagena de Indias, pasando por Alejo CarpentIer en la Habana, Jean Rhys en Dominica, Luis Rafael Sanchez en San Juan de Puerto Rico, Arturo Uslar Pietri en Caracas, Jacques Roumain en Puerto Principe, y los ya mencionados Naipaul y Walcott, Cesaire, Glissant y Depestre. Carlos Fuentes, Geografia (220) [the school teacher] taught Masters the geography of Europe, particularly of Great Britain; nothing at all of the Americas but his silence here was sometimes deafening. Wilson Harris, Carnival (72) The proposition to read literature of the Americas regionally is not new and has been promoted by engaged local literary journals and intellectual groups throughout the twentieth century. 1 Its distant roots lie in the Cuban Jose Marti's plea in 1891 that "the European university must give way to the American university" to replace those Eurocentric spectacles through which the region is viewed with ones that would be anchored in a regional outlook ("Our America" 297). Yet despite political, social and cultural efforts at integration, the region continues to be fragmented into different zones - politically, socially, economically and linguistically- a fact that still has a tangible impact on the formation of regional bodies of knowledge. As Raphael Confiant - one of Patrick Chamoiseau's fellow Creolistes in Martinique - remarks: "Nous Antillais, nous sommes completement isoles par rapport ala litterature des pays qui nous entourent. Nous sommes completement tournes vers l'Europe [ ... J Nous n'avons meme pas de contacts directs ITo list a few examples, we might mention the Guyanese literary journal Kyk-over-al founded in 1945 and West Indian