RELATIONAL NARRATIVES: CONSTRUCTING MEANING IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURES IN FRENCH by Rebecca Loescher A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland March, 2017 Abstract The act of narrating permeates daily life: from the tales we tell about our identities to published works of fiction, narratives fundamentally shape human perception. With this in mind, Relational Narratives: Constructing Meaning in Contemporary Literatures in French explores narrative mode as a means for structuring innovative thought-models. Marrying close readings with socio-cultural analyses, it examines relational narrative modes in six works of prose published since the turn of the 1980s: François Bon’s Sortie d’usine (1982), Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia (1985), Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove (1989), Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco (1992), Koffi Kwahulé’s Babyface (2006), and Annie Ernaux’s Les Années (2008). Part One, on narrative voice and temporality, argues that relational narratives bring temporally divergent voices into a single space of resonance. Part Two turns to the portrayal of narrative truths, whether collective, individual, historical, or purely fabricated, as well as to the mixing of genres, which include autobiography, historical realism, testimony, ethnography, and the marvelous. I contend that truth in relational narratives is multiple and shifting, and requires that the reader actively construct meaning. Finally, Part Three examines the political implications of relational narration. First, I show that relational narratives remain fully grounded in specific socio-cultural contexts — or their lieu, the space from which Édouard Glissant contends relation becomes possible. Second, I discuss each work as a life-script that exceeds the exclusionary logic of self-other thought-constructs. Reading through opacity, I demonstrate how relational narratives circumvent the identity politics ii and linguistic conundrums associated with postcolonial literatures and provide models for constructing knowledge in a relational way. Investigating works of prose as performative acts, where each text provides a particular historical view on gendered and collective becoming, my research dialogues with historiography, sociology, and gender studies, while my focus on Caribbean, Northern-, and Sub-Saharan African narratives also contributes to area studies. Highlighting narrative mode allows me to bridge the gap between “metropolitan French” and “Francophone” literary production. The thesis brings the diversity of literatures in French into a mutually informative space without falling into the traps of universalism: neither the generalizations of world literature, nor the particularity of francophone studies, but something between or beyond these two terms. Primary advisor: Derek Schilling Second reader: Jacques Neefs iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Introduction 1 Part I: Narrating Relation Chapter One: Negotiating Polyvocality 17 1.1 Polyvocal Narrators 19 1.2 Entanglements of Speech and Discourse 26 1.3 Unidentified Voices 39 1.4 The Author’s Voice? 49 Chapter Two: Navigating Temporality 58 2.1 Synchronic Narratives 59 2.2 Decomposing/Recomposing Linearity 64 2.3 Cryptic Temporality 71 2.4 Linking Voices in Time 81 Part II: Relational Truths and Genres Chapter Three: Competing Narratives, Multiple Truths 95 3.1 Individual and Group Narratives 97 3.2 Subjective and Historical Truths 116 3.3 The Truth Isn’t Out There 126 Chapter Four: Relations in Genre 139 4.1 Realism Redirected 140 4.2 Fiction and Historiography 149 4.3 Autobiographical Horizons 161 Part III: From Cultural Site to Relational Script Chapter Five: Form and the Specificity of the lieu 176 5.1 “Tous les bruits parlent” 178 iv 5.2 “La forme qui fait voir les choses autrement” 180 5.3 “Tellement de tracées pour faire notre seul chemin” 184 5.4 “On ne traverse pas la mangrove” 188 5.5 “Je suis le cri” ` 192 5.6 “Raconter ça” 198 Chapter Six: Scripts of Relation 207 6.1 To Orchestrate the Text 208 6.2 The Writing of Multilingualism 217 6.3 Relational Life-Scripts 228 Conclusions 238 Appendix 1 242 Appendix 2 243 Appendix 3 245 Bibliography 246 Curriculum Vitae 270 v Introduction L’écrivain est un renifleur d’existence.1 – Jean Bernabé et al. If the collective reflections in Je est un autre: pour une identité-monde (Le Bris et al. 2010) are any indication of the literary zeitgeist of the new millennium, contemporary French-language writers feel widespread disillusionment toward the thought-constructs that lie at their disposal. In relating experiences of socio-cultural and linguistic hybridity, these authors reject rigid conceptions of identity in favor of more fluid ones that better correspond to their lived historical experiences as human beings in general, and as writers of French in particular. In highlighting this deficiency, the contributors to Je est un autre ask a much larger question — namely: what is it possible to think and articulate in the new millennium? As Michel Foucault writes in his treatise on genealogical method Archéologie du savoir, “on ne peut pas parler à n’importe quelle époque de n’importe quoi” (65); in Foucault’s parlance, then, we may ask what knowledge the contemporary épistémè allows writers to express?2 If we take heed of Je est un autre, it would seem that our imaginary constructs have outgrown the available discourses through which to articulate them. In keeping with the notion that we “represent and structure the world in narrative form” (Mitchells, “Forward” viii), works of literature provide a privileged point of access onto the épistémè out of which they arise; they are necessarily to some extent 1 Éloge de la Créolité, 39. 2 “Par épistémè,” Foucault writes, “on entend […] l’ensemble des relations pouvant unir, à une époque donnée, les pratiques discursives qui donnent lieu à des figures épistémologiques, à des sciences, éventuellement à des systèmes formalisés” (Archéologie du savoir 259). 1 symptomatic of their time. However, because literature inhabits the imaginary realm, it can equally act as a catalyst for fashioning innovative models of “worldmaking,” to borrow the title of Nelson Goodman’s study. Contemporary narrative theory, in effect, has turned away from the concepts of narrative as purely representational or bound up with the faculty of imitation, and towards a vision in which human subjects partake as creative agents.3 “The premise,” Sewell writes, “is that narrative […] is not only a means of representing life, used self-consciously by historians, novelists, and storytellers, but a fundamental cultural constituent of the lives represented. All people develop a sense of themselves as subjects in part by thinking of themselves as protagonists in stories” (482- 483). Beyond “making worlds,” narratives act as what cultural critic Kwame Anthony Appiah terms “life-scripts,” which people actively assimilate and deploy in order to stake out positions and to articulate individual and group identities. Echoing Sewell, Appiah contends that “our personal histories […] are constructed, like novels and movies, short stories and folktales, within narrative conventions” (22); “one of the things popular narratives do,” Appiah adds, “is provide models for telling our lives” (22). Insofar as works of literature actively participate in the writing of these scripts, they harbor the creative potential to reshape the very thought-constructs of the era from which they originate. At the turn of the 1980s, French-language literatures would be marked by a sharp return to the real. Contrary to their modernist predecessors, who rebuffed notions of identity and history in favor of distinctly subjective encounters with the world, contemporary authors reinvest in the socio-historic subject matter characteristic of 3 Though Goodman’s treatise embraces the multiplicity of worldviews and relativism between them, Ways of Worldmaking nonetheless remains within the aegis of representation, or what he describes as “systems of description” (2). 2 nineteenth-century realism. But if, as Dominique Viart and Bruno Vercier assert in their survey, “la littérature contemporaine redonne des objets à l’écriture qui s’en était privée,” it is knowingly so, “[s]ans ignorer les critiques des décennies précédentes” (14). As a symptom of their times, these post-1980 texts participate in the writing of group-specific narratives that counter the all-encompassing nature and unitary vision of what has been theorized by cultural critics such as Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson under the term “Master Narrative,” the decline of which modernist literary works arguably register. Contemporary literatures return to, and thoroughly revisit, notions of identity, memory, and group history the better to fill in the gaps glossed over by those same narratives that the modernists challenged. Akin to nineteenth-century literary depictions of the social world exemplified in Hugo’s Les Misérables (1864) and Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, they too tell the forgotten tales from the underside of History, recounting the travails of marginalized people groups or simply taking note of the intimate details of the everyday.4 Authors hailing from the French Metropole, such as François Bon and Annie Ernaux, consistently engage with subjects of marginality; both write “au-dessous de la littérature,” as Ernaux formulates her specific project in Une femme (560). Bon’s works of fiction often center on what