Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze: Literature Between Postcolonialism and Post-Continental Philosophy 9781441116437, 9781472542359, 9781441117465

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Introduction: How Newness Enters the World
Chapter 1. Surrealism and the Caribbean: A Curious Line of Resemblance
Chapter 2. Writing Back to the Colonial Event: Derek Walcott and Wilson Harris
Chapter 3. Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of the Chaosmos
Chapter 4. Postcolonial Literature as Health: Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze

Also available from Continuum: Magical Realism and Deleuze, Eva Aldea Postcolonialism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Pramod K. Nayar The South Pacific Narratives of Robert Louis Stevenson, Lawrence Phillips

Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze Literature Between Postcolonialism and Post-Continental Philosophy Lorna Burns

Continuum Literary Studies

Continuum International Publishing Group A Bloomsbury company 50 Bedford Square 80 Maiden Lane London Suite 704 WC1B 3DP New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Lorna Burns 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. The Author has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-4411-1746-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burns, Lorna. Contemporary Caribbean writing and Deleuze : literature between postcolonialism and post-continental philosophy / Lorna Burns. p.  cm. -- (Continuum literary studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-1643-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-1746-5 (ebook pdf : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-5621-1 (ebook epub : alk. paper) 1.  Caribbean literature--20th century--History and criticism. 2. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. 3. Postcolonialism in literature. 4. Continental philosophy. I. Title. PN849.C3B87 2012 809'.89729--dc23                2012005176 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents

Acknowledgements vi Introduction: How Newness Enters the World

1

Chapter 1. Surrealism and the Caribbean: A Curious Line of Resemblance 27 Chapter 2. Writing Back to the Colonial Event: Derek Walcott and Wilson Harris

68

Chapter 3. Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of the Chaosmos

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Chapter 4. Postcolonial Literature as Health: Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson

148

Notes 189 Bibliography 200 Index 211

Acknowledgements

In fitting Deleuzian style, this book grew from the ‘middle’ of another: my doctoral thesis completed in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow in 2007. While little may remain of that original work, I hope that all those who supported me in my doctoral research will find continuities in what follows. I wish to thank the Department of English Literature at Glasgow for giving me the opportunity to continue to pursue this research in my postdoctoral years: without this support, this book would not have been possible. I am also grateful to the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, which awarded me a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in 2010–11. I would like to thank Susan Manning and Pauline Phemister for creating such a wonderful research environment at IASH, and for giving me the opportunity to develop this project. Many thanks are also due to Nick Nesbitt who has enthusiastically supported this book throughout its development, and who first suggested that I might find it interesting to read Deleuze; to Birgit Kaiser who read and offered suggestions for my Introduction, and with whom I have had many productive discussions about the relationship between Deleuze and postcolonialism; to Wendy Knepper, who commented on Chapter Three; and to David Avital and the editorial team at Continuum for their support throughout the process. Finally, I wish to sincerely thank the University of Lincoln for affording me the time to bring this research project to a conclusion. Many people have read and reviewed my work and I would like to thank all for their input. Although no single article has been fully reproduced in this study, I have used sections of varying length from the following publications: in Chapter Three, ‘Becoming-postcolonial, becoming-Caribbean: Édouard Glissant and the Poetics of Creolization’ printed in Textual Practice 23. 1, 2009; in Chapter Two, ‘Becoming-Bertha: Virtual Difference and Repetition in Postcolonial “Writing Back”, a Deleuzian Reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’ printed in Deleuze Studies 4. 1, 2010; and in Chapter One, ‘Uncovering the Marvellous: Surrealism and the Writings of Wilson Harris’ printed in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47. 1, 2011. I have drawn

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from and extended extracts from my contribution to the ‘Introduction’ (co-authored with Birgit Kaiser) and essay ‘Beyond the Colonizer and the Colonized: Caribbean Writing as Postcolonial “Health”’ in Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures edited by Lorna Burns and Birgit Kaiser (Palgrave, 2012). I gratefully acknowledge permissions to reprint from these sources.

Introduction

How Newness Enters the World

There are, Gilles Deleuze tells us, two types of islands: Continental islands and Oceanic islands. While this statement may come of little surprise to geographers, why this should be ‘valuable information for the imagination’ (Deleuze 2004a, p. 9) is of great interest to the postcolonial literary critic. Breaking away from the land mass, ‘Continental islands are accidental, derived islands’, ‘born of disarticulation, erosion, fracture’ (p. 9); whereas Oceanic islands erupt from the earth’s crust or form from coral reefs and, as such, are ‘originary, essential islands’ (p. 9). The two features displayed by the two island types – a derivative status and a condition of genuine newness – are concepts that lie at the heart of Deleuze’s philosophy. Understanding both creativity and separation, difference and repetition, are crucial concerns in his work; ones that this study takes up in order to explore the multiple connections between Deleuze and the postcolonial thought and literature of contemporary Caribbean writers. However, Deleuze has more to tell us about islands: Dreaming of islands [. . .] is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone – or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew. Some islands drifted away from the continent, but the island is also that toward which one drifts; other islands originated in the ocean, but the island is also the origin, radical and absolute. Certainly, separating and creating are not mutually exclusive: one has to hold one’s own when one is separated, and had better be separate to create anew; nevertheless, one of the two tendencies always predominates. In this way, the movement of the imagination of islands takes up the movement of their production. (2004a, p. 10) It is a well-observed feature of Deleuze’s oeuvre that creativity takes on an increasing significance in his work, and by What is Philosophy? (1991),

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Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze

co-authored with Félix Guattari, philosophy itself is defined as the creation of concepts. In the passage above, the imagination of islands is characterized as displaying two tendencies: one a movement towards isolation and separateness, and the other a radically creative force. That these are not mutually exclusive is an important point, for to create anew the imagination cannot separate itself entirely from the world; to create anew one must perform a double movement that both separates and grounds. For this reason, Deleuze argues that the concept of the island is not one of ‘creation but re-creation, not the beginning but a re-beginning that takes place. The deserted island is the origin, but a second origin. From it everything begins anew’ (2004a, p. 13).1 Deleuze’s refinement of creation as a re-creation that is, nevertheless, the production of something genuinely new resonates with the poetics and philosophies of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean writers. One recalls the closing moments of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1939) where he envisions a moment of clearing, of ‘revolvolution’ (Césaire 1995, p. 135). The neologism with which the poem ends, ‘verrition’, translated in the Rosello edition as ‘revolvolution’, speaks, Michael Dash has argued, of ‘Césaire’s poetics of erasure and pure origins [. . .]. His poem ends, therefore, with the fiery tongue of the night spurting out of the reanimated volcano, destroying the past and creating the ground for a new world space’ (2003, p. 293). Césaire rearticulates this vision in Discourse on Colonialism (1955) when he writes that the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism. Nor is it the present colonial society that we wish to prolong [. . .]. It is a new society that we must create. (1972, p. 31) Once again the imagination of the islands is pulled between the twin movements of separation – going ‘beyond’ the past – and creativity – ‘a new society that we must create’. In the Anglophone context, the Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott confirms Césaire’s conviction that above all else it is the movement towards creativity that must be embraced by the Caribbean imagination. Drawing on the trope of the deserted island, Walcott establishes a comparison between Robinson Crusoe and Adam as allegorical figures of the New World poet: ‘On his island [Crusoe] doesn’t know the names of the plants that he is living among. He doesn’t know the names of the natives that he may find

Introduction

3

there. So he renames them, probably from what he already knows [. . .] by associating what he is looking at with another image from the old world’ (Walcott cited in Handley 2005, p. 134). Adam, on the other hand, ‘really has to begin from the immediate surroundings that are there’ (p. 134). For Walcott, both perspectives are common to the poet as what has to be undertaken is a vocabulary that may be the same word, or same noun, but in the context of this idea of discovery, and immediacy, and freshness, and exploration, then that noun has to acquire its own identity in the poem. I don’t think that’s very different from, say, the naming of either the explorer or the naming that is already there in the mind of the native. (p. 134) Walcott does, of course, recognize the ideological perspective with which Crusoe is aligned: a discrepancy that draws him closer to Adam as the archetypal figure of the New World poet.2 What is clear at this point in Walcott’s career (Handley’s interview was conducted in 2001) is that by reverting to Adam and celebrating newness, he is not diminishing the importance of historical legacy, for, as he argues, ‘the idea of Adam contains original sin. I am talking about someone looking at a morning that is unspoiled, not devastated by any means, and the feeling that one can rechristen things, rename things’ (p. 133). Here, as with Césaire, we find evidence of the poet’s desire both to ‘go beyond’ the colonial past and to embrace a new society, a new ‘vocabulary’. Faced with the historical legacies of colonialism and slavery, revolutions and resistance, many Caribbean writers have echoed Césaire’s demand to move beyond the colonial past in the articulation of a new, undetermined postcolonial identity. However, this, as I shall argue throughout this study, makes a very particular claim on postcoloniality: calling for an understanding of the postcolonial moment as a specific relation to the colonial past which both preserves historical memory and moves beyond it. This dual positioning is clearly evident in Walcott’s description of Adam/Crusoe, who, while faced with the challenge of starting anew, is nevertheless not wholly separate (to recall Deleuze) from his past; he carries with him ‘original sin’. Like Deleuze’s account of Robinson Crusoe in ‘Desert Islands’, although the castaway does experience some degree of separation (one of the two movements of the imagination of the islands), it is not a total separation and, correspondingly, the act of creation that may occur is not absolute but a ‘re-creation, not the beginning but a re-beginning’ (Deleuze 2004a, p. 13). Each instance of creation, of beginning anew, carries with it the trace of the

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past: an originary moment that bears the marks of ‘original sin’, of history. In turn, Walcott argues, the demand made of the New World poet is not to create ‘new names for old things, or old names for old things, but [to have] the faith of using the old names anew’ (Walcott 1998, p. 9). From a critical standpoint, Walcott’s celebration of the New World poet as a creative and commemorative force may risk accusations of essentializing the Caribbean. Just as Alejo Carpentier’s claim that the ‘marvellous’ and ‘marvellous realism’ are the preserve of the Americas was seen to uphold the binary division of Old and New World (Echevarría 1977, p. 128; Richardson 1996, p. 13), Walcott’s dichotomization of Europe and the Caribbean, privileging the latter as a site of regeneration and creation, suggests that it is a particular quality of the New World itself that inspires the poet. However, what Deleuze’s account of the imagination of the islands reminds us is that it is not a matter of essential qualities but of processes. The imagination may be ‘separate’ or ‘creative’ only to the degree that it follows the movements of separation or creativity. This may seem like a minor distinction, but it is key to understanding the relevance of Deleuzian thought to postcolonial studies. Where the Caribbean theorists Édouard Glissant (Martinique) and Wilson Harris (Guyana) critique states of being, they nevertheless celebrate the processes by which identities and expressions emerge. For these writers it is creolization not creoleness that best captures the promise of the postcolonial Caribbean: creolization ‘is only exemplified by its processes and certainly not by the “contents” on which these operate. This is where we depart from the concept of creoleness [. . .]. We propose neither humanity’s Being nor its models. We are not prompted solely by the defining of our identities but by their relation to everything possible’ (Glissant 1997, p. 89).3 Later chapters of this study will explore in detail the projects of both Glissant and Harris, but for the moment it is important to highlight that by employing terms such as creolization and Relation as a means to conceptualize the postcolonial Caribbean, both writers reject essentialized, fixed identities in favour of a creolizing process by which identities are continually created and re-created. Indeed this is true of one of the Hispanic Caribbean’s major theorists, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, for whom ‘none of our cultural manifestations is creolized, but rather in a state of creolization’ (2002, p. 202). The interactive movements of creolization and Relation for these writers are significant features of Caribbean postcolonial theory, offering a fluid, non-essentialist account of being. Still more than this, both terms signal the value that Benítez-Rojo, Harris and Glissant place on creativity and the production of the new within their postcolonial

Introduction

5

‘philosoph[ies] of regeneration’ (Harris 2006, p. 19). For Benítez-Rojo this transformative condition is one that ultimately resists even the notion of process where that term is taken to signal a progressive evolution: creolization, he argues, ‘is not a process – a word that implies forward movement – but a broken series of recurrences, of happenings, whose only law is change’ (2002, p. 202). This disjunctive transformation could not generate ‘a predictable state of creolization’ (p. 202) but rather an unstable state, and it is this association of creolization and the unpredictable or unforeseeable that marks the common ground Benítez-Rojo shares with Harris and Glissant. As Glissant argues, when ‘we speak about creolization, we do not mean only “métissage”, cross-breeding, because creolization adds something new to the components that participate in it’ (1995, p. 269). In this statement, Glissant makes a crucial distinction between creolization and notions of synthesis or crossbreeding that evoke Robert Young’s analysis of hybridity (Young 1995, pp. 4–9). Again, Glissant is unequivocal: ‘Creolization is unpredictable, whereas the immediate results of crossbreeding are more or less predictable. [. . .] Creolization opens on a radically new dimension of reality [. . . it] does not produce direct synthesis, but “résultantes”, results: something else, another way’ (Glissant 1995, p. 270; cf 1989a, p. 561). Glissant’s faith in newness, like Walcott’s, does not lead to the erasure of historical memory and it indicates something of the tension that has persisted within the field of postcolonial studies in general that the desire Césaire expressed in 1950 to move beyond the colonial past remains difficult to reconcile with the impulse towards commemoration. As I have suggested, understanding the particular relation to the past enacted in postcolonial writing and theory is crucial for the development of a meaningful sense of postcoloniality. The risk remains, as Césaire warns, that too strong a commitment to preserving the persistent legacies of colonialism within the ‘postcolonial’ present will produce a discourse over-determined by historical memory, locked in an uninterrupted line of continuity between past and present. In other words, the colonial past conceived of within a linear temporal evolution from past to present and projected into the future, not only insistently preserves the historical memory of colonization within the present, but deals in a future which emerges as always already marked by the colonial encounter. This much contemporary Caribbean writers such as Walcott, Glissant and Harris recognize in their celebration of creativity and newness as key strategies of the postcolonial imagination. But it is also a theoretical move that aligns the field of Caribbean postcolonial writing with the philosophy of Deleuze.

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Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze

Such a connection is not incidental and speaks a great deal to the philosophical assumptions made by certain writers. The work of Glissant is of particular relevance to understanding this connection insofar as he, in many respects, led the way in demonstrating the significance of Deleuzian thought to postcolonial theory. As the opening pages of Poetics of Relation (1990) make clear, the work of Deleuze and Guattari is of fundamental importance: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari criticized notions of the root and, even perhaps, notions of being rooted. The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it. In opposition to this they propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a network [. . .] with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently [. . .]. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other. (Glissant 1997, p. 11) Although this shifting, non-hierarchical, inter-connected network that Glissant designates ‘Relation’ does indeed offer an important tool for postcolonial thought, it must also be recognized that, for Glissant, Relation should not be simplified as a Levinasian ethical relationship with the Other, nor does it imply a Hegelian negative differentiation by which the self gains determination through its opposition to an other.4 Rather, as I shall discuss in more detail in Chapter Three, his focus is on ‘the mutual mutations generated by this interplay of relations’ (p. 89). As previously suggested, it is the processes by which newness enters the world that are important to Glissant and, while creolization and Relation suggest the movement by which identities interact and change, it is the sense of creativity associated with this process that persists throughout his work up to and including his final publication, Philosophie de la Relation (2009), in which he once again affirms the importance of the Deleuzian rhizome to his own philosophy. The nomadic ‘errantry’ or wandering that is presented in Poetics of Relation as the rhizomatic production of (an always-changing) identity, is recalled once again in Philosophie de la Relation where it provides a fundamental metaphor for the movement of Relation. Consistent with Poetics, Philosophie de la Relation maintains the value of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome as a model of relational or creolizing identities, but further confirms it as the ‘principle behind’ a philosophy of Relation; a philosophy not fixed and absolute, but like an écho-monde, constantly changing: ‘If errantry is constitutive of Relation, it has to do

Introduction

7

with philosophy, the philosophy of Relation, which is not only the art of errantry but, to the letter, an errant philosophy, the limits and intersections of which constantly change’ (Glissant 2009, p. 62).5 Chapter Three of this study will explore in greater detail the points of exchange between Deleuze, Guattari and Glissant, and will comment in particular on the ways in which a philosophical concept of immanence can help us to better understand Glissant’s philosophy of Relation. However, with Deleuze’s Continental and Oceanic islands in mind it is interesting to observe Glissant’s own distinction between continental and archipelagic thought in Philosophie de la Relation. As he argues, continental thought fixes, deals in absolutes and systems; it offers a cursory, general and ‘academic’ knowledge as opposed to the more material archipelagic thought. In the image of the Caribbean, archipelagic thought enacts Relation and errantry: connecting disparate and rhizomatic points, creating unforeseeable lines of relation or becoming.6 Glissant would, however, object to a straightforward correlation between archipelagic and Oceanic thought since ‘a sea may be a continent’ (Glissant 2009, p. 52) when it imposes unity not diversity, fixed systems of thought not creolization. Nevertheless, when Oceanic thought is understood as Deleuze defines it as a revisionary, (re-)creative process, an emergence or becoming, then the strong parallels between Oceanic and archipelagic thought can be better appreciated: both concepts emphasize lines of creativity, becoming and deterritorialization as the dominant (but not exclusive) features of the imagination. In Glissant’s work, like Deleuze’s, creation and creativity occupy central roles whether that be in his concept of creolization, Relation or archipelagic thought. However, the concern to incorporate creativity or the production of the new into his postcolonial philosophy of Relation takes on further significance when viewed as an element of Glissant’s theoretical appraisal of the impact of history on postcolonial subjectivities. Glissant, like his contemporary Wilson Harris, envisions the postcolonial project as an engagement with the traumatic history of colonialism that, nevertheless, creates a new, unpredictable future: a ‘prophetic vision of the past’ (Glissant 1989b, p. 64). While this might imply a certain degree of utopianism in Caribbean postcolonialism, both Glissant and Harris, like Walcott, resist the notion of a blank slate or pure state: the future while new nevertheless retains the trace of past traumas. This particular relationality between past, present, and future, as Chapter Two will argue, is precisely what Deleuze’s thought offers: enabling a theoretically informed appraisal of postcolonial literature’s capacity to generate unforeseeable futures while redressing the legacies of colonial pasts.

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Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze

By elaborating a transformative vision of a future that maintains the ability to become something wholly new, the writers explored throughout this study – René Ménil, Glissant, Harris, Walcott, Pauline Melville, Robert Antoni, and Nalo Hopkinson – implicitly and explicitly engage with Deleuzian thought on a fundamental level. Following their lead, this study makes the case for the reconceptualization of postcoloniality as a differential actualization of the (virtual) past, which, as Deleuze argues, enables the emergence of a genuinely original present/future in which the colonial past coexists as a disjunctive factor mediated by a caesura or break. In light of the philosophical demand made by this formulation, the problem posed by Rushdie – ‘How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?’ (Rushdie 2006, p. 8) – turns out to be the quintessential question facing postcolonial literature and theory: a question that Deleuze’s philosophy helps us to better address.

Deleuze and Postcolonialism In the wake of Robert Young’s seminal rereading of the epistemic and physical violence of colonialism as a desiring-machine’s production, coding and re/deterritorialization of colonial desire, drawing on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari to ‘think through’ postcoloniality (Young 1995, p. 173), few critics followed his lead and ventured into the difficult domain of Deleuze and the postcolonial. Despite its controversies, Christopher Miller’s application of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad and rhizome as conceptual tools for theorizing the post-identity politics of postcolonialism has perhaps come closest to developing the contours of a Deleuzian postcolonial analysis: today both nomadology and rhizomatic thought continue to find resonance with the work of postcolonial theorists and critics.7 While Caribbean writers such as Glissant do demonstrate the value of such terms, this study argues for a more fundamental alignment of the fields of Deleuzian thought and postcolonialism. In doing so, it follows on from Simone Bignall and Paul Patton’s Deleuze and the Postcolonial (2010), the first collection focused on the multiple points of connection between the two fields. Echoing Young’s analysis, Bignall and Patton illustrate the ways in which Deleuzian thought can be made to ‘speak’ to postcolonial theory, even if Deleuze himself did not directly ‘speak with’ or for formerly colonized peoples (p. 1). This is an important point, for it begins to suggest something of the resistance to Deleuzian philosophy within the field

Introduction

9

of postcolonialism. As Bignall and Patton discuss in their introduction, Deleuze’s failure to offer models of counter- or postcolonial resistance, the absence of sustained political commentary and anti-colonial critique, and his appropriation of ostensibly primitive or nativist paradigms such as the nomad in his work have raised concerns of a certain Eurocentrism (pp. 1–2; cf Kaplan 1996). Indeed, this suspicion is echoed by Gayatri Spivak whose Althussarian critique of both Deleuze and Michel Foucault argues that while both theorists expose complex networks of power and desire, they nevertheless both ‘systematically and surprisingly ignore the question of ideology and their own implication in intellectual and economic history’ (Spivak 1999, p. 249). Both Deleuze and Foucault fail, in other words, to recognize the ideological biases inherent in their own privileged position as Western intellectuals while arguing for the deconstruction of ideologically inflected subjectivities such as the Other. In the first essay of Deleuze and the Postcolonial Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey do much to clear a way beyond Spivak’s critique, arguing that Deleuze and, indeed, Deleuze and Guattari, in works such as Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), base their analyses on a philosophy of difference and repetition discrepant to Spivak’s Lacanian reading of the subaltern.8 As Robinson and Tormey argue, Spivak’s critique turns upon a misreading of the Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of desire, subjectivization and representation. While Spivak does usefully draw attention to the problems of a postcolonial discourse that speaks for or about the subaltern within a register that risks reinscribing the dominance of hegemonic (Western) structures of thought, her assertion that Deleuze works within a Western conceptualization of oppression – ‘deploy[ing] an essentialized subject of oppression’, a ‘universal subject of oppression’ (Robinson and Tormey 2010, p. 22) – crucially ignores the important distinctions between a Deleuzian philosophy of difference-in-itself and Spivak’s own Lacanian/Freudian understanding of difference based on an ontological lack. As a result, Spivak’s attempt to locate a ‘subject of power and desire’ in Deleuze (Spivak 1988, p. 280) fails to recognize that, for Deleuze, desire is never simply the desire of a particular subject, nor is it the sole ground upon which a subject is constructed. Rather, as Robinson and Tormey point out, desire is ‘a matter of flows and becomings which traverse the entire social, and indeed material or ecological field’ (2010, p. 22). What Deleuze and Guattari term ‘desiring-production’, therefore, reaches far beyond the limits of the sovereign subject and, crucially, while certain majoritarian (not a numerical determination but signifying a state of standardization, domination, or continuity) flows of desire can produce

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Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze

determinate subjects or identities, there is always also, in opposition, a flow of desire characterized as minoritarian (again, not a marginal subjectivity but a singularity, a process of becoming rather than fixity). It is this polarization of the majoritarian subject and minoritarian process of becoming that is crucial for understanding how Deleuze and Guattari, particularly in A Thousand Plateaus, conceive of the position of both the subaltern and the intellectual (the focus of Spivak’s critique). Since the figure of resistance must be identified as minoritarian, the so-called subject of desire must be one that follows minor lines of becoming, employs rhizomatic strategies of thought and operates within ‘smooth’ spaces that escape the ‘striations’ of power. ‘Hence’, Robinson and Tormey argue, ‘the agency of the oppressed, the voice of the subaltern, is not characterized by true representation or self-presence. Rather, it concerns original production, an expression of the primacy of desiring-production over social production’ (2010, p. 24). The significance of identifying ‘original production’ as the result of a minoritarian process of becoming is, as this Introduction has indicated, key to understanding the value of the literary imagination to postcolonial studies. However, what Robinson and Tormey also draw attention to is the way in which the association of the figure of resistance with a creative, minoritarian process of becoming – escaping the standardized, determinate and dominant codes of majoritarian desire – is linked to the position of the intellectual in Deleuze’s work. As Spivak argues, Deleuze does indeed reject representation and the intellectual who purports to represent others (speaking for or about). However, in place of ‘speaking for’ or discovering the true voice of the other, Deleuze’s intellectual creates rhizomatic connections: It is a work of building, of bricolage, a ‘scouring’ or ‘curettage’ of the unconscious to clear out Oedipus and its correlates, untying the knots of the representations and territorialisations of a subject so that transversal connections and molecular flows become possible [. . .]. And between the two ‘subjects’ as Spivak calls them, between active and reactive forces, the theorist is not mere analyst, but in the act of creation becomes-minoritarian, becomes part of the construction of agency of the ‘oppressed’ (the minoritarian). In fact we are dealing not with two subjects but with two structures of desire, active versus reactive, and for Deleuze, the radical philosopher’s desire is active and constructive. (Robinson and Tormey 2010, p. 26) By focusing on the intellectual’s (in)ability to give voice to an authentic subaltern subject, Spivak’s critique of Deleuze fails to recognize that what

Introduction

11

is at issue in his philosophy is not a question of representation, but of connections, creativity and a notion of difference and desire freed from subjectivity. In this moment, we are once again exposed to something of the difficulty of marrying Deleuze and the postcolonial since, while counter-colonial and postcolonial analyses continue to privilege the deconstruction of (mis-) representations of the colonial ‘other’, Deleuze’s philosophy rejects representationalist thinking on the grounds that it limits his privileged notion of difference. For Deleuze, the tendency of representationalist thought to subordinate ‘difference to identity or to the Same, to the Similar, to the Opposed’ has produced an inadequate notion of difference (offering ‘a conceptual difference, but not a concept of difference’) by submitting it immediately to pre-existing images and, thereby, privileging stratification and identity over movement and difference (Deleuze 2004b, p. xiii). Difference submitted to ‘pre-existing images’ is, according to Deleuze, majoritarian; radical difference, insofar as it designates the emergence of the genuinely new, is always a becoming-minor. It is the potential inherent in minoritarian flows of desire to effect a creative process by which dominant, standardized majoritarian identities are challenged that signals the value in opening up a dialogue between Deleuzian thought and postcolonial literatures, particularly in light of the demand for newness expressed by various Caribbean writers. While some postcolonial authors, most vocally Ngugi wa Thiong’o, have (like Spivak) argued that the continued use of the language of the colonizer perpetuates an imperial hegemony, a far greater number have defended their use of the colonizers’ language. From Yeats to Achebe and, as illustrated, Walcott, it is the deterritorializing and creative potential of language that signals the ability of postcolonial literature to disrupt the dominant forms of colonial discourse. Although the essay referred to at the beginning of this Introduction, Deleuze’s ‘Desert Islands’, establishes a direct relation between philosophy and creation, it is the particular relationship between postcolonial literature, literary theory and creativity that is the dominant concern of this study. As such, I suggest that, despite the criticisms that have followed the field since the mid-1990s, it is through the philosophy of Deleuze that the revisionary force of postcolonial literature for both society and the imagination, politics and aesthetics, may be reconceived anew. By drawing attention to the connections between Deleuze and contemporary Caribbean writing, this study inevitably recalls one of the most significant but, perhaps, least understood studies of postcolonial literature of recent years, Peter Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the

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Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze

Singular and the Specific (2001). Hallward’s study is in many respects typical of the politically inflected criticism that has been directed against postcolonial theory since the mid-1990s. Where the first-wave of postcolonial studies (associated predominately with the work of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak) exposed the reductive and essentialist discourse of colonialism and cemented literary modes of analysis as the key tools of postcolonial critique, in recent years a new post-Marxist critical turn has emerged through the works of Aijaz Ahmad, Neil Lazarus, Robert Young and Benita Parry.9 The latter direct their critique against the fixation of existing postcolonial theory on cultural and literary analysis, and encourage a move ‘toward a renewed engagement with the “properly political”’ (Bongie 2008, p. 1). It is in this light that critics such as Chris Bongie (2008) and David Huddart (2008) have viewed Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial: reading his dismissal of postcolonialism as a deterritorializing, singular discourse as a sign of the movement’s failure to provide meaningful political resistance or social commentary. By this view, postcolonial texts emerge as singular rather than representative; they are said to eschew the confrontational logic of the ‘properly political’ discourse of anti-colonialism (Bongie 2008, p. 12), and tend to associate with a brand of critical theory that privileges cultural and psychological concerns over collective principles, politics and justice. Bongie’s work is a strong example of the way in which the political critique of postcolonialism has taken renewed focus in the wake of Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial. This present study, however, is firmly grounded in the deterritorializing and minoritarian potential of literature as literature, not as social commentary or political rhetoric. To this degree, the arguments set forth here follow Graham Huggan’s recent defence of a literary postcolonialism wherein, echoing Appadurai and Quayson, he argues that ‘in the continuing struggle to create new possibilities of thinking, as well as living, for previously exploited and dispossessed peoples, literature plays a formative role’ (2008, p. 13). In turn, this study maintains that it is literature’s potential for imagining ‘new possibilities of thinking’ that is key to understanding its particular value for postcolonialism. This is not to suggest that literature has no bearing on politics, but rather it is to move towards an understanding of the productive (not reflective or derivative) force of literature in itself: to recognize its role in providing the conditions for becomings and newness. And, as Deleuze demonstrates, the production of the new is always a political act, a radical step beyond the limits of our present conditions. In common with this study, Absolutely Postcolonial presents postcolonial theory in general as fundamentally aligned with Deleuze’s thought

Introduction

13

but, more than this, Hallward suggests that it is this commitment to a Deleuzian-inspired model of creativity and newness that marks the radical de-specification or de-politicization of postcoloniality. In the face of such arguments, Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke in their analysis of Deleuze and the production of the new are moved to argue that there is nothing escapist or romantic about this ‘event-horizon’ of the new, and it does not simply lead ‘out of this world’, as Peter Hallward has recently suggested [. . .]. The new is an outside that exists within this world, and as such it must be constructed. Indeed, [. . .] it is only through a practical engagement with this world [. . .] that we can create something new. (2008, p. 2) While Hallward’s critique of postcolonial literature is of great interest, what has been overlooked by critics who utilize the arguments of Absolutely Postcolonial, such as Bongie and Huddart, has been well observed by Deleuzians: that Hallward bases his reading of Deleuze and postcolonialism on a skewed understanding of the Deleuzian concepts of singularity and the virtual. With regard to the virtual, O’Sullivan and Zepke’s defence of Deleuze is indicative of Hallward’s approach. As Deleuze contends in Difference and Repetition (1968), there are two sides to the single, immanent reality that underpins his thinking and these are termed the actual and the virtual. Yet, while these two sides are distinct and irreducible, the virtual can become actualized while the actual may return to the virtual (counter-actualization). In this Deleuze clearly signals his philosophical influences, most notably the writings of Benedict de Spinoza. Where Spinoza recast the Cartesian separation of thought and extension as an immanentist philosophy in which the single-substance universe (God or Nature) is conceived under two attributes termed natura naturans and natura naturata, a (virtual) self-creating aspect and the structure of (actual) created things respectively, Deleuze adopts Spinoza’s dual sense of actual created world and virtual creative force as the two ‘unequal odd halves’ of reality (Deleuze 2004b, p. 261). As late as What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari reiterate: Immanence does not refer back to the Spinozist substance and modes but, on the contrary, the Spinozist concepts of substance and modes refer back to the plane of immanence as their presupposition. This plane presents two sides to us, extension and thought, or rather its two powers, power of being and power of thinking. (1994, p. 48)

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Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze

Like Spinoza, then, Deleuze argues that reality must be considered as both the actual world and, at the same time, as a virtual plane. Crucially, while the Cartesian split ensured that thought and extension persisted as non-relational, distinct spheres, Spinoza’s single-substance ontology offers a relational structure that is reflected in the way in which Deleuze presents the actual and the virtual as caught up in a ceaseless movement from one to the other: where elements of the virtual become realized within the actual, experienced as sensations, events, or identities. It is because of this philosophical basis to Deleuze’s work that, while the actual/virtual pairing may suggest a divided structure, what is actually at issue is a question of immanence: ‘In Spinoza, immanence is not immanence to substance; rather, substance and modes are in immanence’ (Deleuze 2005, p. 26). ‘Immanence is not related to Some Thing as a unity superior to all things or to a Subject as an act that brings about a synthesis of things: it is only when immanence is no longer immanence to anything other than itself that we can speak of a plane of immanence’ (p. 27). So, as with Spinoza, immanence is not a characteristic of substance, rather substance, expressed through its attributes, the actual and the virtual, is in immanence: there is no outside, only this world, this ‘life’. Crucially, it is the virtual’s status as the absolutely-other, as that which cannot be represented since by definition it is that which is not actual, that ensures its role in maintaining the renewed potential for newness. As Daniel Smith explains, because ‘the virtual is constituted through and through by difference [. . .] when it is actualized, it therefore differs from itself, such that every process of actualization is, by its very nature, the production of the new’ (2007, p. 6). For Deleuze, the production of the new is the result of the actualization of the virtual: ‘actualization is creation’ (Deleuze 1991, p. 98). This concept follows from Deleuze’s Spinozist logic of immanence and the positioning of two ‘sides’, one actual and one virtual, within an immanent reality. Since the virtual designates a radical otherness, when it is actualized it differs from itself and it is ‘[i]n this sense [that] actualisation [. . .] is always a genuine creation. It does not result from any limitation of a pre-existing possibility’ (Deleuze 2004b, p. 264). Crucially, then, the virtual cannot be equated with the possible nor can its actualization correspond to any pre-existing image, hence Deleuze’s insistence on the production of a radical, genuine newness. As Deleuze points out, the issue here is not equivalent to that of the difference between the real and the possible, since the only difference between the possible and the real is the fact that the real has existence or reality added to it, which is translated by saying that, from the point of view of the concept, there is no difference between

Introduction

15

the possible and the real [. . .]. The virtual, on the other hand, does not have to be realized, but rather actualized; and the rules of actualization are not those of resemblance and limitation, but those of difference or divergence and of creation. (Deleuze 1991, p. 97) Thus actualization is the radical production of a difference that is not reducible to any pre-existing image; a movement beyond the status quo towards a creative becoming that, nevertheless, as O’Sullivan and Zepke insist, ‘exists within this world’, always as a ‘critical engagement with our present’ (2008, p. 2). There is an important concept at work in Deleuze’s distinction between the real/possible pairing and the actual/virtual one. In order that there may be a conceptual difference between the virtual and the actual, we must abandon the idea that they are defined and limited by their difference from one another as this would introduce a false transcendentalism to a philosophy of immanence: it would conceive of an actual and a virtual that were dependent on an external cause as the principle feature of their distinct realities. This is why the movement of creation which takes place from virtual to actual must be understood in the first instance as an immanent differentiation of the virtual: ‘in order to be actualized, the virtual cannot proceed by elimination or limitation, but must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts. [. . . It] is forced to differentiate itself, to create its lines of differentiation in order to be actualized’ (Deleuze 1991, p. 97).10 The virtual ‘differs with itself first, immediately’ (Deleuze cited in Hardt 1993, p. 7), an immanent and positive differentiation. This is an important qualification to Deleuze’s philosophy and part of his attempt to wrestle difference away from the Hegelian negative dialectic, as well as his development of a Spinozist single-substance philosophy in which immanence is not a quality belonging to the virtual but rather the virtual is in immanence: an absolute immanence, the attributes of which are both a virtual creative force and the structure of actual created things. It is in this sense that the lines of different/ciation do not lead out to some other, transcendent world but remain within this ceaselessly creative one. The positive production of difference means that the creative process that takes place between virtual and actual – actualization as the production of the new – is in the first instance an internal differentiation of the virtual. However, if actualization can be identified as a production of a difference that has its roots in the self-actualization of the virtual, then we must also acknowledge that what is actualized is not the virtual, but the new. Once again the focus on movement rather than product is useful here because

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Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze

it is important to view the production of the new as a process – actualization – and as such a constantly shifting horizon and not primarily a product. As I shall discuss in Chapter Three, Deleuze develops this idea further in works such as Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense (1969) and Bergsonism (1966) where he sets out his philosophy of time: providing an account of how things exist in the present (the first synthesis of time); how each present passes into a past that is ontologically the same (the second synthesis of time); and how each present retains the ability to become something radically new (the third synthesis of time). In Difference and Repetition, both the first and third syntheses draw on the movement of actualization and the eternal return of difference in order to explain how the future retains the ability to become new and carry forth the whole, virtual past. The account given here of the self-differentiation of the virtual as a creative force agrees, to a certain extent, with Hallward’s reading of Deleuze. However, it is what Hallward does with this philosophy that is problematic. In Absolutely Postcolonial and his later study of Deleuze, Out of this World (2006), Hallward conflates the virtual with the immanent substance of Spinozism (what he terms the ‘singular’). By Hallward’s reading, the virtual takes on the characteristics of a substance insofar as it is self-differing, creating the lines of its own actualization. As a result, the actual takes on a derivative, secondary status: ‘What is real’, for Deleuze, ‘is a vitalist, self-differing force of Creativity in its purest form – an absolute intensity or virtuality in constant metamorphosis’ (Hallward 2001, p. 11). As a result, Hallward continues, ‘[a]ll existent individuals, then, are simply the immediately produced, direct actualisations of one and the same Creative force [. . .], the virtual’ (p. 12). We have seen how the self-differing force of the virtual is identified by Deleuze as a creative movement; however, for Hallward, this focus on the virtual offers a philosophy that ‘lead[s] out of the world’ (2006, p. 3) since it is a production that ‘does not in itself depend on mediation through the categories of representation, objectivity, history or the world’ (p. 5): it is the self-diversification of the virtual. Furthermore, it is this problematic Deleuzian logic of the virtual that underpins much contemporary postcolonial literature and theory. While colonial and counter-colonial discourse may be criticized for their overspecification of the subject, in Hallward’s view, the postcolonial has moved in precisely the opposite direction, towards a reality he calls singular and which ‘will operate without criteria external to its operation’; thus replacing ‘the interpretation or representation of reality with an immanent participation in its production or creation: in the end, at the limit of “absolute

Introduction

17

postcoloniality”, there will be nothing left, nothing outside itself, to which it could be specific’ (2001, p. xii). Implicit in Hallward’s argument is the view that postcolonialism tends to follow the logic of a single-substance philosophy. As such, everything exists as a particular element within the single substance that one might term the universe (or what Hallward would term the virtual), and is nothing other than a particular configuration of that single substance. Accordingly, for Hallward, the postcolonial will tend towards the elimination of specific histories, locations or cultures as independent, contextualizing forces and, as a result, postcolonial discourse can be regarded as ‘more or less enthusiastically committed to an explicitly deterritorialising discourse in something close to the Deleuzian sense – a discourse so fragmented, so hybrid, as to deny its constituent elements any sustainable specificity at all’ (p. 22). While Hallward’s work does represent a significant and distinct intervention in the field of postcolonial studies, the core logic behind his critique should sound familiar since it echoes precisely the criticism that Hegel levelled against Spinoza’s notion of substance. To recall Hegel’s indictment of Spinoza in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy: ‘the cause of his [Spinoza’s] death was consumption, from which he had long been a sufferer; this was in harmony with his system of philosophy, according to which all particularity and individuality pass away in the one substance’ (Hegel 1968, p. 257). For Hegel, as for Hallward, the Spinozist conception of substance and positive (or immanent) differentiation cannot provide a basis for particularity or the specific since it lacks the core feature of determination: dialectical negation. As Michael Hardt argues, ‘[a]ccording to Hegel, the unique and absolute being of Spinozism cannot provide a basis for determination or difference because it involves no other or limitation’ (1993, p. 67). Within a Hegelian ontology, determinate or specific being emerges through the negation of its opposite, nothingness, and it is this opposition between being and nothingness that ‘defines the foundation of real differences and qualities’ (p. 3). In other words, difference is always produced through a negative movement and each thing exists in its particularity and difference through the reactive negation of something else. Importantly, this view of difference is echoed in Absolutely Postcolonial in which Hallward highlights what he considers to be effective acts of postcolonial resistance, such as the fiction of V. S. Naipaul, in which difference emerges when ‘Naipaul puts himself and his characters in a position of judgement, as alternatively judge and judged’ (Hallward 2001, p. 332). As a result, Naipaul’s work ‘is simply specific rather than singular, inflected through the experience of a positioned narrator or character and

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Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze

maintained as a network of [. . .] relationships’ (p. 332). So, for Hallward, difference and specificity are produced negatively through one’s situated opposition to an other. Hallward’s claim that the lack of situated opposition or determination in postcolonial literature results in a discourse that, given the absence of negation, cannot sustain real difference and will inevitably dissolve into an undifferentiated nothingness, must be recognized for what it is: a contemporary elaboration of Hegel’s critique of Spinoza’s positive ontology. As such, Hallward’s argument faces strong criticism from the philosopher he holds responsible for the singularizing nature of postcolonialism: Deleuze. Hardt has shown in detail how throughout his career Deleuze drew on Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson in order to demonstrate that negative determination not only presents a false notion of difference but also, controversially from Hallward’s point of view, ‘fails to grasp the concreteness and specificity of real being’ (Hardt 1993, p. 4). Put simply, Deleuze elaborates Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza to argue that Hegel’s concept of negative or dialectical differentiation cannot provide an adequate foundation for being since it depends on external causes, thus introducing contingency and causality into being: to quote Deleuze, ‘in Bergson [. . .] the thing differs with itself first, immediately. According to Hegel, the thing differs with itself because it differs first with all that it is not’ (cited in Hardt 1993, p. 7). Hallward’s reluctance to acknowledge fully the Hegelian logic behind Absolutely Postcolonial results in an argument against postcoloniality and Deleuzian philosophy that fails to address Deleuze’s own ready-made answer to the charge of ‘singularity’. As a consequence, Hallward’s reading rests upon a critique of differentiation at odds with Deleuze’s commitment to an immanentist philosophy that is concerned to re-evaluate the differentiation of identities and to reject the negative movement of the dialectic. The role of the virtual in the creation of concepts and singularities is clearly a crucial but contested point, as the heated exchange between Eugene Holland and Christopher Miller, for example, demonstrates (Holland 2003a, 2003b; Miller 2003). Despite what Holland sees as its drawbacks, Miller’s Nationalists and Nomads (1998) ‘raises an important question: what are the relative merits of binary opposition and multiplicity or complexity as modes of thought for addressing colonialism and postcoloniality?’ (Holland 2003a, p. 160). And, indeed, this is an important question for this present study. Hallward’s Hegelian critique leads to the former position of the binary since, by his account, postcolonial difference can only emerge negatively from its opposition to colonialism. The same is true of the alternative that Hallward poses to a singularizing postcoloniality:

Introduction

19

a specific postcolonialism in which one adopts strategic but oppositional positions of critique and resistance. However, for many Caribbeanists, Hallward’s citation of Naipaul as the exemplary postcolonialist in this respect would no doubt raise an eyebrow since it is precisely the judgemental positioning of the author in works such as The Mimic Men (1967) and An Area of Darkness (1964) that has made him such a controversial figure. The question that the critical response to Naipaul’s work generates is this: if it is necessary to take a position, to make a stand, how can one ensure that this does not reify into a binary opposition? How can we resist a majoritarian political engagement? By stressing the need for becoming, opacity and creolizing identities, the writers explored in this study offer a postcolonialism that is clearly minoritarian. A minoritarian discourse does not offer alternative sites of opposition: it is, rather, a creative engagement with the present and a reformulation of difference expressed not in opposition to a polarized other, but (as Glissant and surrealists such as Wifredo Lam show us) as a differentiated relationality to the whole. Looking to the other side of this debate, Miller, following Hallward, reads in Deleuze and Guattari’s work a desire to leave the world behind even while they draw their practical philosophy from it: for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘[p]hilosophy is the very means by which the virtual is created and the real, the actual, and the referential are left behind’ (Miller 2003, p. 132; cf Wuthno 2002). This leaves us with the legacy of an inherently paradoxical philosophy such that even ‘Deleuzians sometimes contradict their own claim of complete detachment from the real and the actual’ (p. 132). Leaving aside the conflation of the real and the actual, which Deleuze so insistently argues against, the question raised by these comments is two fold. First, how can we conceive of an immanent production of difference that involves in the first instance no other or limitation? For Deleuze, to polarize postcoloniality and colonialism is to reduce not define the contours of their difference. Rather than limiting itself to, or being trapped by, to evoke Soyinka (1976, p. 129), the established terms of colonialism, the difference of postcolonialism is not defined through opposition (and indeed this is effectively Hallward’s claim albeit one he critiques). This however, leads to a second question: how, then, can we conceive of a relationship between these two seeming substances, one actual and one virtual? It is in this second moment that both Miller and Hallward attempt to resolve the paradox of Deleuzian thought by privileging the virtual as the one, non-relational substance, taking us from substance and modes in immanence to an immanence that is immanence to substance (cf Deleuze 2005, p. 26). As should be clear from this reversal of Deleuze’s

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Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze

comments on Spinoza, this is to misunderstand the philosophical tradition in which Deleuze may be placed and to disregard the way in which his work preserves the paradoxical parallelism of two irreconcilable yet correlative sides of a single reality. Real differences according to the Spinozist model are immanently produced and, as I shall discuss in Chapter One in my exploration of Caribbean surrealism, this is of great significance to postcolonial writers seeking a model of difference that both preserves specific and individual differences, and provides an alternative to the dialectical opposition that served to underpin imperialist discourse. A more pertinent question, then, is not can a single-substance philosophy support any real and material differences whatsoever, but rather how can we conceive of the specific (but minoritarian) relation between individuals and the whole? And further, given the pairing of actual and virtual, how does Deleuze deal with representation? What strategies of connection and construction can be employed in order to make value judgements without recourse to a transcendental perspective or a negative binarism? The task, which in part is that undertaken by this study, is to explore the concepts Deleuze plays off one another: surface and depth, virtual and actual, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, smooth and striated, minoritarian and majoritarian. It is only by understanding play of these pairings within immanence, not by reducing one to the other, that we can fully appreciate the value of Deleuzian thought both to critical theory and the postcolonial writers who implicitly and explicitly draw from it.

Between Postcolonial and Post-Continental The relevance of Deleuze’s thought to prophetic visions of the past and postcolonial practice as the creation of the new has been defended in this Introduction and, indeed, will continue to inform the discussion throughout this study. Far from subscribing to Hallward’s glossing of singularity as, philosophically speaking, the product of the virtual-as-substance, my own use of singularity as a descriptor of postcolonial literatures falls far closer to the sense of the word employed by Derek Attridge (2004): newness or originality. By better understanding how, according to Deleuze, newness enters the world through actualization, we have seen how this necessitates a philosophy of immanence as well as that of creativity. Further, it is this commitment to immanence that places Deleuze’s thought within the emerging field of ‘post-continental’ philosophy. Defined by John Mullarkey

Introduction

21

as ‘a real change in the intellectual current’, ‘post-continental’ philosophy represents the ‘embrace of absolute immanence over transcendence, the tendency of previous Franco-German thought being to make immanence supervene on transcendence’ (2006, p. 1). Associated, Mullarkey notes, with the writings of Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry and François Laruelle, the rise of post-continental philosophy has refocused critical attention on immanence as the basis of philosophical thought.11 In turn, it is my contention that contemporary postcolonial Caribbean theory (notably that of two of the region’s most influential writers, Glissant and Harris) mirrors the post-continental philosophy of Deleuze in its own embrace of immanence as the basis for Relational thought and a ‘universality re-visioned’ (Harris 1997, p. 19). Spinoza’s reformulation of the Cartesian split as a two-sided single substance termed God or Nature, as we have seen, strongly influenced Deleuze’s own philosophy of the virtual and actual. However, while this immanent dualism is essential for understanding the production of singularity or newness, Deleuze is certainly not the only philosopher to characterize the production of the new in this way. Foucault’s archive as an always-changing threshold between the known and the absolutely other witnesses newness as it ‘bursts open the other, and the outside’ (Foucault 2002, p. 147).12 Similarly, Badiou’s evental site guarantees ‘genuine “novelty in being”’ (Hallward 2003, p. 114) as a threshold point between the known world and ungraspable void. However, as Mullarkey notes, what distinguishes Deleuze’s philosophy is his combination of a post-continental philosophy of immanence with the dual-faced reality he terms actual and virtual. The development of these philosophical concepts can be traced in Deleuze’s own studies of such philosophers as Spinoza in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970) and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968), Nietzsche in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), as well as Bergson, notably in Bergsonism (1966). Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence stems from his readings of these philosophers, and through them he offers not only an understanding of how newness enters the world, but a model of time that accounts for both the persistence of historical memory and the generation of a radically new future specific to but not specified by that past; a model of difference freed from the hierarchical, binaristic differentiation of Hegelianism; and a concept of identity always as a ‘becoming’, not fixed or essentialized. This claim for identities in continual evolution or becoming holds clear significance for postcolonial studies and it is a concept that owes much to Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence and difference. Much of this Introduction and indeed the following book is concerned with the implications of a philosophical concept of immanence for

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Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze

postcolonial studies. While the development of this idea can be explicitly traced from Spinoza to Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze, and from Deleuze to Glissant and Benítez-Rojo, its articulation within the Caribbean takes on new significance when viewed in relation to the influence of surrealism. And so the question that this study seeks to address is not only in what ways can Deleuze’s immanentist philosophy help us to think through postcolonialism, but also what is the relationship between two parallel lines of thought? On the one hand, Spinoza – Nietzsche – Bergson – Deleuze, filtering into Glissant’s work, exploring the significance of a dual-attributed substance; and, on the other, French surrealism’s influence on Caribbean writers such as René Ménil and Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, who then develop a distinct Caribbean surrealism which feeds into the later writings of Antoni, Glissant, Harris and Walcott to name only a few. Chapter One explores this parallel evolution and, in doing so, suggests not merely that the roots of postcolonialism lie in surrealism’s anti-imperialist sympathies (Brennan 2002), but that prominent Caribbean writers and theorists display in their works a commitment to notions of universality, cross-culturality and Relation that are grounded in a philosophical concept of immanence that they share both with Deleuze and surrealism. If surrealism witnessed the moment at which the artistic and philosophical expression of immanence shifted from Europe to the Caribbean, then it plays an important part in explaining the immanent basis of contemporary Caribbean postcolonial theory and its significance to the literary imagination of the region’s writers. Chapter Two turns to the work of two prominent figures in the Anglophone Caribbean canon, Derek Walcott and Wilson Harris, in order to trace the further evolution of this intellectual history: suggesting that what was characterized in the surrealist movement as a dialogue between consciousness and the unconscious is reframed in the writing of Harris and Walcott as a creative relation with the Caribbean’s colonial past. Drawing, in particular, on Deleuze’s philosophy of time and the event in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, this chapter proposes a new theoretical approach to writing back premised on literature’s capacity to incorporate the virtual event of colonization as the potential for a future with the ability to become-new. In turn, Chapter Three explores one of the Francophone Caribbean’s most significant writers, Édouard Glissant, in order to explore the connections between Deleuze, Glissant and his contemporaries, Walcott and Harris. If, as Glissant has argued, creolization is ‘one of the ways of forming a complex mix’ (1997, p. 89), a process not merely of synthesis but an opening ‘on a radically new dimension of reality’

Introduction

23

(1995, p. 270), the process of literary criticism ought also to be seen as an act of creolization. Thus in Chapter Three it is not my concern merely to identify the ways in which Glissant actually draws on the philosophy of Deleuze, but to continue this creolization of ideas by asking how we might better understand the processes described in Glissant’s work if we read them through the lens of Deleuze’s philosophy. By further exploring the implicit and explicit dialogue between these two philosophers, Chapter Three does not intend to produce a more ‘correct’ reading of Glissant, but to enact a process of creolization in order to discover something new about the processes of becoming-postcolonial, becoming-Caribbean in light of the post-continental turn to immanence and positive differentiation. Literature remains the focus of this study and throughout I seek to interrogate the particular role that literature as literature can play in a postcolonial context. While Deleuze displayed a keen interest in literature throughout his career, it is in his late Essays Critical and Clinical (1993) that he clearly sets out his vision for the work of literature: to diagnose the ‘health’ of the world. Set against the context of Roberto González Echevarría’s Myth and Archive (1990) in which he details the twin figures of the archive and the archivist as central tropes in Latin American writing, I suggest that through the work of Robert Antoni (Divina Trace [1991]) and Nalo Hopkinson (The Salt Roads [2003]), the full significance of the Deleuzian writer as physician comes into focus. As I shall argue in Chapter Four, the turn from history to health in contemporary Caribbean writing not only brings the conversation between postcolonialism and postcontinental philosophy into the twenty-first century and speaks to current debates surrounding the politics of postcoloniality, but offers an approach to literature that meets Walcott’s demand for a Caribbean criticism that is ‘not just social and historical’ but ‘imaginative’ (2003, pp. 44–5).

The Repeating Island I began this Introduction by referring to Deleuze’s Continental and Oceanic islands as the two distinct but interrelated models of the imagination; I will end it, however, by looking towards another island metaphor, that of the repeating island. Cuban theorist Antonio Benítez-Rojo draws on an unashamedly Deleuzian paradigm in The Repeating Island (1992) and claims that the Caribbean is a ‘meta-archipelago’ that constantly codes and recodes within a chaotic diversification of the world system. The DeleuzoGuattarian machine metaphor is intentional as Benítez-Rojo rereads the

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history of the New World from discovery to colonization, plantation society and decolonization in terms of the emergence of a series of progressively complex and effective ‘machines’: I think I ought to clarify at this point that when I speak of a machine I am starting from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept. I am talking about the machine of machines, the machine, machine, machine, machine; which is to say that every machine is a conjunction of machines coupled together, and each one of these interrupts the flow of the previous one; it will be said rightly that one can picture any machine alternatively in terms of flow and interruption. Such a notion [. . .] is fundamental to our re-reading of the Caribbean. (Benítez-Rojo 1996, p. 6) Thus Columbus’s machine interrupted the flow of ‘Nature’ in 1492 and by 1565 ‘Columbus’s small and rudimentary machine had evolved into the Grandest Machine on Earth’ (p. 6): the imperial machine: It was a machine made up of a naval machine, a military machine, a bureaucratic machine, a commercial machine, an extractive machine, a political machine, a legal machine, a religious machine, that is, an entire huge assemblage of machines which there is no point continuing to name. The only thing that matters here is that it was a Caribbean machine; a machine installed in the Caribbean Sea and coupled to the Atlantic and the Pacific. (p. 7) This machine not only ensured the prosperity of Europe past and present, but it established the Caribbean as a crucial figure in any debate about colonization and postcolonialism since what followed it, the plantation machine, ‘exists today, that is, it repeats itself continuously’ (p. 8). Echoing Glissant’s assertion that although ‘the plantation has vanished, creolization is still at work in our megalopolises, from Mexico City to Miami, from Los Angeles to Caracas [. . .] where the inferno of cement slums is merely an extension of the inferno of the sugarcane or cotton fields’ (Glissant 1995, p. 274), here Benítez-Rojo suggests that while certain prototypes existed in Cape Verde, the Canaries, and on the Moroccan coast, the Caribbean machine defines the modern world; facilitating not only the transportation of ‘no fewer than ten million African slaves’ (1996, p. 9), but producing mercantile capitalism, industrial capitalism, African underdevelopment, imperialism, colonial blocs, wars, rebellions, repression, naval and air bases, and revolutions. Thus, the Caribbean emerges as a crucial

Introduction

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‘historico-economic sea and, further, a cultural meta-archipelago without centre and without limits, a chaos within which there is an island that proliferates endlessly, each copy a different one’ (p. 9). The repeating island then fulfils an important function in the conceptualization of the persistence of empire and exploitation: providing a process-based paradigm that rereads imperialism in terms of a coding and recoding that connects and interrupts previous flows. Without essentializing Caribbean space or culture as representative of the post/colonial condition, the way in which colonial desire has been coded and recoded, connected and interrupted in the Caribbean presents us with a certain kind of machine which reveals a common dynamic as it repeats itself across the globe. In the same way, the Caribbean machine as the production of postcolonial ‘desire’ establishes a pattern that is repeated ‘in a more or less regular way within the chaos and then, gradually, begin assimilating into African, European, Indoamerican, and Asian contexts up to the vanishing point’ (p. 24). Thus, what begins as a singular repetition of a ‘certain way’ (p. 4) of coding and recoding colonial desire ends up as a context-specific confluence of dynamics. However, to posit the postcolonial machine or repeating island as the immediate successor to the colonial machine, problematically recalls the trappings of counter-colonialism and negritude. Thus, the repeating island does not merely interrupt and recode colonial desire in an oppositional fashion, but rather, as a properly postcolonial machine it ‘flows and interrupts at the same time’ (p. 28). Caught between the ‘singular’ or virtual plane that Benítez-Rojo designates chaos and the actual context of emergence or local coding, the creolizing Caribbean machine enacts a simultaneous yet incommensurable movement that both resonates with and recodes the world in response to a particular socio-historic experience of colonization and decolonization (this particular island) and deterritorializes in a move towards a centreless field of absolute difference (a repeating island). To deal only in the former is characteristic of the imperialist machine, the flow or ‘rhythm’ of which ‘articulate[s]’ itself ‘in a binary fashion’ (p. 26): a territorializing, majoritarian movement. The creolizing machine, on the other hand, moves in the opposite direction. But they are the two sides of the same coin, not ‘fixed poles that always face each other as enemies’ (p. 28). The Deleuzo-Guattarian desiring-machine allows Benítez-Rojo to characterize the ongoing coding and recoding of colonial desire in the Caribbean as a double movement that both grounds and decentres, but, more than this, it provides a means of conceptualizing certain processes that do not depend on essential qualities or fixed identities to effect the connection/interruption of flows of desire. Rather, the machine is movement, repetition and rhythm. As such, the syncretic objects, opaque texts

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and creolized languages that are the (incomplete) products of the Caribbean machine offer a certain way of recoding colonial desire that remains open. In other words, the Caribbean machine is the postcolonial machine not because there is some essential quality of the Caribbean that sets it above other postcolonial regions, but because it performs the dual movement necessary to both recode and remain open to the repeated return of difference: not a system of relative machines that either connect or interrupt, but a meta-machine of both flow and interruption at the same time. In this last statement Benítez-Rojo moves beyond the Deleuzo-Guttarian model of Anti-Oedipus in which a machine forms part of a series of connections and interruptions – ‘there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts [. . . and] in turn [is] connected to another’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a, pp. 5–6). However, what I want to emphasize is the way in which Benítez-Rojo sets up the Caribbean machine as a particular relation to the world that provides a framework that may be repeated (always with a difference, always in relation to its context) in such a way that allows us to identify common dynamics that one may characterize as postcolonial. In the same way, by focusing on the particular moves made in contemporary Caribbean literature and theory this study does not intend to suggest that there is some essential quality of Caribbean postcoloniality that makes it the archetype for postcolonial studies. Rather, by looking to the Caribbean I hope to uncover the processes by which postcoloniality emerges in local contexts but which may be repeated elsewhere. For Benítez-Rojo, what marks the Caribbean machine is its capacity to both recode the world and resist coding: ‘the spectrum of Caribbean codes is so varied and dense that it holds the region suspended in a soup of signs’ (1996, p. 2). And indeed it is this dual movement – a moment of grounding and moving beyond – that is evident in the ways in which Caribbean writers embrace newness as a radical step beyond the status quo. By exploring the works of Antoni, Glissant, Harris, Hopkinson, Melville, Ménil and Walcott in relation to the philosophy of Deleuze, the ways in which newness enters the world turn out to be not only a concern for writers caught between the desire to commemorate the colonial past and the need to move beyond its limitations, it also signals the dual movement of postcolonial writing as it both grounds and decentres. Indeed, in the final analysis, and despite his critical standpoint, the field is precisely as Hallward characterized it – writing between the singular and the specific. How this paradoxical movement can be achieved by both postcolonial Caribbean writers and Deleuze without succumbing to the pitfalls Hallward identified in Absolutely Postcolonial is the subject of what follows.

Chapter 1

Surrealism and the Caribbean: A Curious Line of Resemblance

In what would be the final theoretical treatises of the Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation, the author draws attention to a persistent but often overlooked legacy within twentiethcentury Caribbean writing: surrealism. Highlighting the time that Aimé Césaire spent in Paris as a student in the 1930s, Glissant argues that the period witnessed a significant intellectual emigration from the colonies to the colonial metropolis. It was an exchange that forged relationships between writers such as Aimé Césaire, Etienne Léro, René Ménil, Jules-Marcel Monnerot, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Pierre Yoyotte, and produced important journals including L’Étudiant noir and Légitime défense that drew from the Marxist intellectual tradition and emerging surrealist movement in 1930s Paris.1 Yet this intellectual emigration did not merely consist of individuals travelling from the colonies to study at the Sorbonne. More than this, the moment witnessed an exchange of ideas: the point at which Caribbean writers, artists and intellectuals exposed the colonial centre to the politics of (what would later become) negritude, questioned society’s racial prejudices, and at the same time encountered a French literary and artistic avant-garde committed to overthrowing the hegemonic dominance of white Europe. This chapter argues the importance of this surrealist exchange platform to understanding the parallel emergence of both postcolonialism and postcontinental philosophy within the context of contemporary Caribbean writing. While often overlooked in criticism, surrealism raises important questions about difference, the self, the other and the power of the imagination that remain of great significance to postcolonialism. While in the Caribbean context there has been scant attention paid to this period of interaction, I argue that the legacies of surrealism are fundamental to understanding the historical development of Caribbean literature and thought. Michael Richardson’s anthology Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism

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and the Caribbean (1996) is an important but little-appreciated text in this respect: bringing together key essays from both Caribbean (Ménil, Léro, Monnerot, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, René Depestre and Paul Laraque) and French (André Breton, André Masson, Michel Leiris and Pierre Mabille) surrealists. Reassessing the value of the works collected in this anthology, this chapter stresses the philosophical value of surrealism, both French and Caribbean. From this perspective, surrealism’s immanent world-view, evident, notably, in the writings of Breton, Mabille, Ménil, and Suzanne Césaire, the paintings of Wifredo Lam, and in key terms employed such as the marvellous, alchemy and the unconscious, reveal the full extent of the movement’s continued influence on contemporary aesthetics. At stake is not only a better understanding of the relationship between postcolonialism and surrealism, but a clearer appreciation of postcolonialism’s relation to contemporary thought. Where post-continental philosophy has refocused critical attention on immanence as the foundation of philosophical thought, I argue that contemporary postcolonial Caribbean theory mirrors post-continental philosophy (particularly that of Deleuze) in its own embrace of immanence as the basis for Relational thought and a universality re-visioned. Exploring the resonance that Deleuze’s characterization of creation as actualization finds with surrealist practice, this chapter exposes two parallel lines of thought: one leading out from the legacies of the Radical Enlightenment and the philosophy of Spinoza into the contemporary thought of Deleuze (via Nietzsche and Bergson), exploring the creative potential of a single, dual-faced reality; the other, an aesthetic attempt to liberate the imagination through the search for the ‘certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions’ (Breton 1972, p. 123). Surrealism’s embrace of a fundamentally unified, single, immanent reality expressed through the relation of apparent opposites – real and imagined, consciousness and the unconscious – not only continues to influence the contemporary writings of Édouard Glissant and Wilson Harris, who I shall discuss in subsequent chapters, but resonates with Deleuze’s philosophical account of difference, becoming and newness. As a result, this chapter, indeed this study, does not merely argue that Deleuze’s post-continental thought can be seen to influence Caribbean postcolonialism. More than this, by looking to surrealism and its impact on Caribbean aesthetics since the 1930s one may find what Wilson Harris might well term a curious ‘resemblance of line’ (2006, p. 25) that reveals a parallel evolution of



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thought common to both post-continental philosophy and contemporary postcolonialism. As in my Introduction, this is a story that begins with the radical appraisal of Cartesianism established by Spinoza and his continued influence on contemporary post-continental philosophy. And it is with this in mind that I begin this chapter with the tale of a South American parrot with phobias of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest and the father of rationalism, René Descartes.

Fearing Descartes In her short story ‘The Parrot and Descartes’, published in The Migration of Ghosts (1998), the Guyanese-born writer Pauline Melville presents a historically situated, humorous tale of a parrot captured by Sir Thomas Roe during his visit to Guyana and the Orinoco region in 1610–11. While this tale recounts a remarkable history that takes us from the discovery of the New World to Europe during the Age of Enlightenment, it simultaneously poses important questions about the philosophy of postcoloniality and, as such, offers a salient point of departure for this chapter’s analysis of the moments of convergence between surrealism, Deleuze and Caribbean writing. The allegorical nature of the tale sets it up as an exemplary interrogation of postcolonial themes. From the outset, for example, the mythology of El Dorado is evoked by Roe’s voyage to the New World: at first ‘Fat Thom thought that sunlight was falling on the bird’s head, then he saw that it had a golden beak. In other words the creature was a traditional plain and not particularly fancy South American parrot’ (Melville 1999, p. 101). Evoking both the search for the riches of the New World and imperial exploitation, Melville’s allegory serves to expose the relationship between Europe and the New World in the period immediately preceding the Age of Enlightenment. However, rather than focusing solely on imperial expansion the text turns its attention to what it identifies as a fundamental shift in European thought. The unfortunate parrot of the tale is captured by Roe and taken to England as a wedding present for the marriage of James I’s daughter, Elizabeth Stuart, to Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine. As the royal pet, the parrot, who lives far beyond a normal lifespan, is witness to significant moments in European history. In particular, there are two episodes that impact appreciably on the parrot’s consciousness, being, as he is, a creature who recalls and repeats (mimics): a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest performed at the royal wedding and, later, his encounter with the father of rationalism, René Descartes:

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Having survived a rough journey and upset by the climate, to his horror, the parrot was forced to sit on a lady-in-waiting’s shoulder and watch one of the worst productions of The Tempest the world has ever seen. The parrot’s genetic construction, however much he willed it to the contrary, ensured that every word sank ineradicably into his memory. Sensibly, he refrained from ever repeating any of it – including the sotto voce ‘Oh no’ from the bard himself, as Ariel slipped on a piece of orange peel and skidded across the apron stage into the wedding party. How the scions of literature would have torn that bird wing from wing had they known that Shakespeare’s own voice was faithfully transcribed on his inch-long brain. He kept his counsel and tied to look dumb. The parrot naturally developed a phobia about The Tempest. Why he should also have developed an irrational loathing of the philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes, is something I shall address later. (p. 102) Melville constructs her story around a remarkable family history: Frederick did commission for his wife an ‘English-wing’ and gardens at their court in Heidelberg, gardens designed by Salomon de Caus and influenced by his hermetic, mystical Rosicrucian background; Frederick and Elizabeth were crowned king and queen of Bohemia in 1619, only to be overthrown at the Battle of the White Mountain – a battle during which Descartes fought on the side of the attacking Hapsburgs and later established a well-known acquaintance with Frederick and Elizabeth’s daughter Princess Elizabeth. But more than this, what Melville emphasizes is that this historical period was witness to a fundamental shift in European thought: the point at which ‘the unity of magic and science’ (p. 109) was destroyed; the birth of the modern world, triumph of rationalism and the separation of art and science, imagination and technology.2 ‘The Parrot and Descartes’ returns to this moment in order to evaluate its impact. With The Tempest, the mastery of Prospero over Ariel as well as the savage figure of Caliban have become well-worn symbols for postcolonial writers and theorists seeking to reclaim the stereotypes of colonial discourse. However, the polarization of magic and science raises a theoretical concern that implies a far-reaching critique of the Enlightenment, one that is of great significance to Caribbean writers who, as Alejo Carpentier (1995) argues, are faced every day with examples of the marvellous, the unexpected and the magical. In Melville’s story the parrot experiences with some pleasure the hermetically inspired gardens at Heidelberg and sits in on the secret meetings of the Rosicrucian Order as they plan to perform a version of The Chemical Wedding of Christian



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Rosencreutz, a symbolic text revealing the alchemical and esoteric beliefs of the Brotherhood. It is, however, when the family reach Prague that the parrot gains his most rewarding experience of Europe; a Prague, the narrator notes, with religious liberty guaranteed by the law set down by Rudolf II in 1609 (that is until the defeat of Frederick V at the Battle of the White Mountain and the establishment of the Catholic Hapsburg dynasty). This Prague is most clearly identified as Europe’s golden-age: ‘before the Hapsburg attack, the wondrous city of Prague was host to every sort of cabbalist, alchemist and astronomer and housed the most up-to-date artistic and scientific collections’ (Melville 1999, p. 105); so it came about that Descartes, innocent symbol of reason, skulking in the back rows of the soldiery, watched and participated as little as possible as the Battle of the White Mountain was fought outside Prague. The battle put to flight the newly ensconced King and Queen, smashed the spirit of Bohemia and destroyed the unity of magic and science which had developed as one under the liberal auspices of Rudolfo and his successors. Magic and technology were, from then on, to go their separate ways. (p. 109) Descartes, ‘the man who contributed to the rout of a certain sort of imagination’ (p. 110), becomes (irrationally, the text tells us) an anathema to the parrot, both in terms of his association with the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but also for the accompanying triumph of the written word over the oral: the point at which the ‘parrot, a natural representative of the oral tradition, began to sob’ (p. 112). Escaping a Europe that no longer has any place for the irrational, the mystical or the oral, the parrot returns to the New World in 1652, only to find ‘that ideas from Europe were gaining ground in his own territory’ (p. 114), notably the ideas of Descartes, which two Jesuit priests, overheard by the parrot, plan to introduce as part of their college lectures. By the end of the story we see not only the growth of Western culture within the New World in the form of US tourism and the company of actors who capture the parrot and force him to be part of their touring production of The Tempest, but in particular the spread of Enlightenment ideas. One of the final images of the parrot at the end of his tour in 1801 notes that with ‘wings clipped and wearing an ornamental chain on one leg, [he] set off wearily for a new life in North America’ (p. 115). With his freedom of flight denied and shackled by chains the parrot evokes another image of postcolonial critique: transatlantic slavery. But more than this, the date of his journey to the US marks a further

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stage in the triumph of rationalism: the parrot arrives in 1801 in time to witness the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, yet another flag-bearer for the Enlightenment and, echoing Descartes’s division of magic and science, a strong advocate of the separation of church and state. If Melville’s story draws attention to the colonial encounter, appraising a particular strand of Enlightenment thought and a ‘certain sort of imagination’, it nevertheless remains a critique that offers little sense of any way beyond this impasse. ‘European thought’ is vastly simplified in the tale as the Enlightenment is reduced to the work of Descartes and the division of art and science. But perhaps this too serves as an allegory of postcolonialism: the Enlightenment essentialized as a discourse of a distorted universality that served to underpin colonization and imperial expansion. Recently, however, critics such as Nick Nesbitt have explored the legacies of the radical Enlightenment, particularly the philosophy of that great opponent of Descartes, Spinoza, and have considered the example of the Haitian Revolution as an instance in which the ideals of the Age of Revolution were taken up and adapted (not mimicked or parroted) to the ends of the revolutionary movement (Nesbitt 2008).3 As suggested in my Introduction, Spinoza is an important figure for the ideas explored in this study and while Melville points to the particular division between magic and science, it is another Cartesian separation, that of thought and extension, that is crucial in the debate between Spinoza and Descartes. Spinoza himself had a role to play in the family history introduced by Melville’s tale: in 1673, and against a background of hostility towards Spinoza as an excommunicated Dutch Jew of Spanish descent with liberal ties and political sympathies that lay with Jan de Witt’s republican party, not to mention ‘the stupid Cartesians’ who were ‘abusing everywhere my opinions and writings’ (Spinoza cited in Deleuze 1988b, p. 5), Charles I Louis, Elector Palatine (son of Frederick and Elizabeth) offered Spinoza a professorship in philosophy at Heidelberg. Although Spinoza refused the offer, claiming that it was never his desire to teach in public, it nevertheless hints at the emergence of a minor line of thought in opposition to the dominant Cartesianism.4 Echoing, for us, the sentiments of Melville’s parrot, Deleuze reflects on his philosophical training at the Sorbonne during the 1940s under Ferdinand Alquié (a stammerer who harnessed his voice ‘to the service of Cartesian dualisms’) and Jean Hyppolite (a man with ‘a powerful face’ who ‘beat out Hegelian triads with his fist’) (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, p. 9): ‘I could not see any way of extracting myself. I could not stand Descartes, the dualisms and the Cogito, or Hegel, the triad and the operation of



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the negative. But I liked writers who seemed to be part of the history of philosophy, but who escaped from it in one respect, or altogether: Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson’ (p. 11). In both Dialogues II (1977) with Claire Parnet and Negotiations (1990), Deleuze draws attention to a minor tradition in European philosophy set apart from the dominant Cartesian and Hegelian modes of thought and which ‘proceed[s] only through positive and affirmative force’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, p. 12). It is this total critique of transcendent, dualistic and dialectical philosophies, then, that lies behind Deleuze’s post-continental turn to immanence and a positivist conception of difference. In doing so, Melville’s arguments against the Enlightenment’s rationalism – the formation of a dominant and majoritarian image of thought that privileged reason, science and progress over magic and art – take on further resonance: pointing the way towards the minor philosophical tradition that this study sees as feeding into contemporary postcolonial thought as well as Deleuze’s post-continental one. This gains greater significance in light of the 1940s Caribbean surrealist movement where the shift towards immanence, creativity and a positive sense of difference is given expression within the surrealists’ philosophy, literature and art. However, bearing Melville’s Enlightenment critique in mind, I want to turn to how Deleuze’s thought draws from this minor philosophical tradition (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson) in order to move beyond the transcendent Cogito and, adding a further dimension to this debate, Hegelian dialectics. The Cartesian dualism of thought and extension, which resonates with the magic/real split that Melville’s text draws attention to, is reformulated in Spinoza’s classic concept of God or Nature as a single substance characterized by the two attributes natura naturans and natura naturata (an intensive creative force and the created structure of physical things). In this formulation there is a strong echo of Deleuze’s later account of the actual and the virtual as the two asymmetrical sides of the real, but more than this it anticipates the concept of immanence upon which John Mullarkey’s definition of post-continental philosophy depends. For Deleuze, it is the unfortunate legacy of Platonism that transcendence has supervened on immanence: where Plato introduced ‘a new type of transcendence’, ‘a transcendence that can be exercised and situated within the field of immanence itself’, modern philosophy has simply followed suit and erected ‘a transcendence at the heart of immanence as such’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 137). So, for example, the Platonic Idea takes on a transcendent function since it stands as the pre-existing determination of the thing. In other words, the quality of the thing is differentiated not internally or immediately, but by

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its relation to the Idea which it realizes to varying degrees of accuracy. This of course recalls Deleuze’s comparison of Hegel and Bergson: ‘in Bergson [. . .] the thing differs with itself first, immediately. According to Hegel, the thing differs with itself because it differs first with all that it is not’ (cited in Hardt 1993, p. 7). Accordingly, we can argue along with Deleuze that the move which is common to Plato, Descartes and Hegel is one which posits a transcendent ground as the a priori first or final cause of being: the cogito as the knowing subject who then experiences the world, or the ideal unity which is the endgame of dialectical transformation. Philosophies of pure immanence, such as those of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, on the other hand, offer no external foundation such as Truth, God or the Subject as the basis for being. Rather, for these philosophers there is only the flow of life: ‘there are no such things as universals, there’s nothing transcendent, no Unity, subject (or object), Reason; there are only processes, sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but just processes all the same’ (Deleuze 1995, p. 145). By arguing that there is only the flow or process of life Deleuze does not mean to suggest that there is no such thing as the subject or reason, but rather that it is erroneous to view these concepts as the predetermined, fixed, and transcendent causes of being rather than as themselves created within the process of life and therefore, crucially, always open to reinterpretation and experimentation. It is this constructivism that makes Deleuze’s philosophy, as he himself described it, a transcendental empiricism, but one that, as Claire Colebrook has argued, should not be mistaken for a return to transcendence (2002, p. 71). Rather, transcendental empiricism offers a focus on experience, analyzing various states of being and exploring how states of affairs come to be what they are (becoming not Being). In other words, rather than starting with ‘abstractions such as the One, the Whole, the Subject’ and then searching for ‘the process by which they are embodied in a world which they make conform to their requirements’, Deleuze explores ‘the states of things, in such a way that non-preexistent concepts can be extracted from them’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, p. vi). In turn, we might say that by returning the reader to the Age of Enlightenment and the precise moment of the Battle of the White Mountain, Melville’s text reimagines the process of rationalization by which a certain majoritarian way of thinking (Reason) was established that privileged scientific and empirical forms of knowledge over irrational and hermetic practices, creating a so-called universal image of mankind as white, male and European, and made the world conform to it. What this approach reveals therefore is not merely the constructed nature of concepts that are taken as transcendent



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givens, but by returning us to the processes of becoming, illustrating how a particular image of thought is produced at the expense of others, Melville evokes the always-present potential for alternative minoritarian becomings and newness. If the transcendent categories of being such as Unity or the Subject represent for Deleuze fixed abstractions that cannot account for the creative and material experience of life, part of our understanding of the work of post-continental philosophy follows Deleuzian empiricism, the aim of which ‘is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness)’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, p. vi). Such a concern shares much with postcolonialism, as I argued in my Introduction, but it also reveals the extent to which Deleuzian newness and different/ciation marks a radical shift in contemporary post-continental philosophy away from both transcendent causes and dialectics. While Deleuze’s critique of Hegel has been well documented by writers such as Michael Hardt (1993), Simone Bignall’s recent Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism (2010) takes Deleuze’s project a stage further as she argues for a close understanding of the ways in which Deleuze’s overhaul of dialectical philosophy and Hegel’s negative conception of difference can be made productive specifically for postcolonialism. Without pre-existing abstractions such as the One or the Truth as the transcendent categories which determine in advance the form that the world assumes, Deleuzian philosophy offers us a very different concept of difference from that provided by the oppositional logic of the dialectic. While Hegelian philosophy stresses becoming over being, it is nevertheless a becoming that represents an evolution towards a final synthesis or realization of the One or Unity. As a result, what drives this becoming is lack, or what Bignall terms ‘the generative force of negativity’ (2010, p. 30). Moreover, the projected movement of becoming by this account offers a concept of being and transformation fixed in a relation with that to which it is opposed (thesis meets antithesis): ‘reality is not “created” but “realised” in this process, in the sense that everything that comes to be always already exists, or is pre-given, and is simply “made real”’ (p. 34). Deleuze’s comments on the distinction between his actual and virtual, on the one hand, and the real and the possible, on the other, stress the incompatibility of this account with his own philosophy: ‘actualisation [. . .] is always a genuine creation. It does not result from any limitation of a pre-existing possibility’ (Deleuze 2004b, p. 264); ‘the rules of actualization are not those of resemblance and limitation, but those of difference or

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divergence and of creation’ (Deleuze 1991, p. 97). While we might reflect on the way in which Hegel privileges a form of becoming that is driven by an immanent force and rejects the Cartesian Cogito as first cause of being (Bignall 2010, p. 55), he nevertheless falls into the trap of Platonism insofar as he places transcendence at the heart of immanence: a final unity. In turn, the dialectical production of difference is always a negative moment, determined (judged even) by its difference with respect to the Ideal. Deleuze’s philosophy, by contrast, is one that seeks ‘to have done with judgement’ through an affirmative ontology (cf Deleuze 1997). However, in doing so, Bignall argues, Deleuze can be seen to be at odds with the mainstay of contemporary postcolonial theory. Dividing the field of postcolonial studies into the two major schools that have increasingly come to polarize critics – Marxist and poststructuralist – Bignall demonstrates that both sides are united in their common emphasis on the critical power of the negative. In Marxist postcolonialism, this negativity is rendered in the dialectical play of opposition; in poststructuralist, deconstructivist and psychoanalytical postcolonialism, critical negativity inheres in the crucial lack or absence at the ontological heart of the subject. (p. 76) More problematically, by continuing to construct difference negatively either by opposition or through ontological lack, postcolonial theory does not merely preserve Hegelian dialectics as the dominant mode of contemporary thought, but remains bound to an emphatically imperialist world-view. Since the endgame of dialectical transformation is the assimilation of difference, Bignall argues, postcolonial theory ‘proposes solutions to colonialism that are unable to break free from a fundamentally imperial outlook and attitude, because it assumes an underlying concept of agency that remains grounded in negativity’ (p. 20), and as such, is ‘aimed at the management of difference’ (p. 18). In order for a truly postcolonial practice to emerge and challenge imperialist, majoritarian modes of being, a new understanding of difference and agency must be constructed in such a way as to avoid the oppositional logic of colonial and counter-colonial discourse. Deleuzian becoming, therefore, emerges as a very different process from the one described above. In place of ontological lack or dialectical opposition, Deleuze posits the actual and the virtual. Such a move resists the dualisms offered by Cartesian thought since the actual and the virtual



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are presented as the two sides of a single reality. Rather, the virtual operates as ‘an impersonal and pre-individual transcendental field, which does not resemble the corresponding empirical fields, and which nevertheless is not confused with an undifferentiated depth’ (Deleuze 2004c, p. 118). Where Deleuze’s empiricism signalled a philosophical investigation into experience, but not the experience of a subject, in The Logic of Sense we find that the ‘transcendental’ aspect of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism is revealed as the immanent condition for the creation of actual entities. The asymmetrical relation of actual and virtual, the empirical field of experience and the pre-individual field of singularities, ensures both the always-renewed potential for creativity and becoming-new, and the redundancy of any notion of unity or final cause. As the immanent cause of different/ciation, the virtual operates as the transcendental condition for the production of all actual forms.5 The dualism of Cartesianism is rejected through the Spinozist sense of immanence (the created world and the creative force of life as the two attributes of Nature), as is the knowing subject of the Cogito. In other words, Deleuzian thought does not work backward from the position of a universal subject as the external foundation of being, nor does it project forward towards a final unity. Both positions enforce a limit on the plane of immanence: judging the flow of life or becoming as a measure of lack relative to either the pre-given subject or final unity. Deleuze, rather, begins with the pre-individual field of the virtual, the plane of immanence or chaosmos and then moves towards difference. From this chaotic ground (not to be confused with ‘undifferentiated depth’), bodies and assemblages emerge: a process of individuation that does not depend on any external ground as the cause of its becoming. As Bignall argues, since actual being is different/ciated from this virtual plane, the virtual is always already present in each actual thing as the condition of its determination: More precisely, the becoming of being is a process of actualisation in which an original, uniformly chaotic ground both ‘differentiates’ to select and determine the content defining a virtual and problematic Idea, and then creatively ‘differenciates’ to express individuated actual bodies as forms of solution that exist as responses to the particular problem given by that virtual Idea. (Bignall 2010, pp. 103–4) There are two moments described by Deleuze: the first (differentiation) designates a primary form of organization which emerges from the chaotic milieu and which determines the ‘plane of composition’ from

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which the second process (differenciation) proceeds as the actualization of the thing: the determination of the form, content and expression of a particular thing as an assemblage of parts that coalesced on the primary plane of composition. Such a process of different/ciation ‘cannot proceed by elimination or limitation, but must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts [. . .], to create its lines of differentiation in order to be actualized’ (Deleuze 1991, p. 97), since there is neither a final unity that exists as the endgame of becoming (the elimination of difference), nor a transcendent limitation on becoming and being (virtual and actual) insofar as both are fully real. What distinguishes the actual and the virtual is not their opposition to one another (one real, the other not) or lack from the point of view of a predetermined unity, but a quality of relation between their constituent parts: ‘Actual being is a point of fixture or arrest, when mobile and flexible relations of force between parts acting upon each other become consolidated into definite and rigid relations that define the form of the emergent body’ (Bignall 2010, p. 104); whereas the virtual is described by Deleuze as a plane of consistency precisely because the infinite speed of relation between its parts creates a smooth space in which relations are characterized by their immediacy. In terms of postcolonial thinking, as Bignall argues, dialectical philosophy fails on two accounts: first, by maintaining the oppositional structure of conflict upon which imperial ideologies operated (thesis meets antithesis); and second, by approaching difference as an object to be overcome (final synthesis). Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, on the other hand, offers a positive conception of difference as the immanent different/ciation of the virtual: a concept of difference in itself and not just specific differences between actual things. Understanding the way in which actual things come to be differenciated from the virtual plane of composition provides us with ‘a true difference in kind as a body changes qualitatively from one kind of assemblage to another when its constitutive elements shift and combine in alternative ways’ (p. 110). Both Bergson and Nietzsche can be read in the account of different/ciation offered here: the Nietzschean relation of forces that either stratify as actual bodies or retain their infinite speed within the smooth space of the virtual; and the Bergsonian elaboration of difference-in-kind as a qualitative, not quantitative difference. Such is an affirmation of the productive forces of life: the endlessly creative becoming-actual of the virtual plane of immanence. In turn, where we seek to understand the different/ciation of actual things, exploring how they came to be what they actually are, counter-actualizing being by retracing its becoming, we return to the virtual plane of immanence in such a way as



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to pose alternative lines of actualization (differenciation) or to construct a new plane of composition (differentiation). Rejecting the colonialist logic of binary opposition, lack and final cause, the central task of postcolonial critique, then, becomes ‘the disruption and “counter-actualisation” of the problematic post-colonial present that remains tied to the virtual conditions of the emergence of colonisation, and the subsequent reconstruction of an alternative postcolonial present’ (p. 114). Postcolonialism, according to this Deleuzian model, becomes a question of the new and the eternal return of (not recuperation of) difference understood as an affirmation of life’s productive forces. Via Bignall’s exploration of Deleuze’s philosophical value for postcolonialism, we find a model of difference that is constructed, positivist and affirmative: difference produced not from the opposition of self and other, or driven by lack, but itself created by nothing other than the flows of life or desire (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of the term). While the current modes of postcolonial analysis critiqued by Bignall at one level appear to celebrate difference, the constant recourse to dialectical process means that the ‘action remains structured as objectification, corresponding with the expanding adequacy of the subject as it develops better self-understanding about the difference it internally carries, accommodates and represses. The force motivating action remains the desire for mastery over difference’ (p. 94). While I do not refute the importance that Deleuzian thought, understood as offering a positivist sense of difference, holds for postcolonialism, Bignall’s presentation of her analysis as a clearing beyond the downfalls of postcolonial studies as it currently stands ignores the ways in which certain postcolonial writers, particularly those from the Caribbean, have foregrounded this critical move. Of course, Bignall’s focus is not literature and indeed literature is barely mentioned in her analysis, nevertheless the development of postcolonialism in both its Marxist and poststructuralist expression has been closely bound to literary studies, and, as a result, such perspectives should not be ignored. Hallward, Huddart, Parry, Said, Spivak, Bhabha and so on, regardless of which side they fall on – Marxist or poststructuralist – are all, among other things, literary critics. My argument here is not simplistically that as a postcolonial critic one must always return to the question of literature, but rather that in the theorization of postcolonial agency, the role of literature should not be overlooked, nor should the contributions of certain writers and their works. The critique of negritude outlined, in different ways, by Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott and Édouard Glissant is a case in point. By confronting the oppositional

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logic of counter-colonialism these writers clearly reject what Deleuze (via Nietzsche) would characterize as the reactive forces of the will to dominate in favour of an affirmative will to power. In other words, while I support the critique of the generative force of the negative offered by Bignall as well as the positivist alternative she offers via Deleuze, when viewed from the perspective of postcolonial literatures, I argue, it is a less radical shift. Indeed, just as Deleuze’s own positivist philosophy can be seen to be drawn from a minor tradition within the history of philosophy, it is the aim of this study to demonstrate that a similarly positivist account of difference, creativity and becoming can be traced within the history of postcolonial literatures, and in particular those from the Caribbean.

Deleuze and Surrealism Surrealism plays an important role in the minor intellectual and literary tradition that this study sets out to explore. Yet to raise the legacies of surrealism in this way is not without its difficulties given Deleuze’s own reservations about the project of surrealism, particularly as André Breton enforced it. Deleuze along with Parnet, for example, is expressly critical of aspects of surrealism’s dogma insofar as any literary or artistic movement represents an ‘arborescent’ image of thought: ‘a school is already terrible: there is always a pope, manifestos, representatives, declarations of avant-gardeism, tribunals, excommunications’, they crush ‘all that happened before or at the same time [. . .] as Surrealism crushed the international Dadaist movement’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, p. 20). Surrealism viewed from this perspective acquires a majoritarian positioning and adopts a reactive will to dominate. Once again evoking the minor, affirmative philosophical tradition which includes Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze develops a critique of the oppositional logic of judgement premised on the pre-existent criteria of higher values and instead argues for a new mode of existence created through the combat-between forces. One such example of the distinction between this latter mode of existence and judgement, Deleuze argues, is illustrated by contrasting states of intoxication or sleep with the dream. The dream falls on the side of the will to dominate and judgement: Apollo is both the god of judgement and the god of dreams: it is Apollo who judges, who imposes limits and emprisons [sic] us in an organic form, it is the dream that emprisons life within these forms in whose name life is judged. The dream erects walls, it feeds on death and



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creates shadows, shadows of all things and of the world, shadows of ourselves [. . .]. Whenever we turn away from judgement toward justice, we enter into a dreamless sleep. What the four authors [Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud] denounce in the dream is a state that is still too immobile, and too directed, too governed. Groups that are deeply interested in dreams, like psychoanalysts or surrealists, are also quick to form tribunals that judge and punish in reality [. . .]. In his reservations concerning surrealism, Artaud insists that it is not thought that collides with the kernel of a dream, but rather dreams that bounce off a kernel of thought that escapes them. (Deleuze 1997, pp. 129–30) By this account, dreams too often fall into the trap of Cartesian dualisms, are mistaken for the shadows of the waking world. In turn, dream interpretation subjects the content of the dream to conscious thought: the ‘kernel’ of the dream is read as the repressed ‘truth’ of the subject’s psychic reality. Implicitly contrasting Breton and Artuad, Deleuze affirms that the dream is not reducible to reality, but is rather a minoritarian line of flight that escapes the image of thought. Where the pre-individual basis of Deleuzian philosophy produced an account of individuation based upon the immanent different/ciation of the virtual and the actual as a qualitative difference in speed and in relation, so Deleuze’s distinction between consciousness and the unconscious in The Logic of Sense follows his constructivist approach to being. The ‘impersonal and pre-individual field’ which offers the virtual ground of different/ciation cannot be determined as that of a consciousness. Despite Sartre’s attempt, we cannot retain consciousness as a milieu while at the same time we object to the form of the person and the point of view of individuation. A consciousness is nothing without a synthesis of unification, but there is no synthesis of unification of consciousness without the form of the I, or the point of view of the Self. What is neither individual nor personal are, on the contrary, emissions of singularities insofar as they occur on an unconscious surface and possess a mobile, immanent principle of auto-unification through a nomadic distribution. (Deleuze 2004c, p. 118) Consciousness operates as the consciousness of a subject and therefore it cannot function as the ground from which actualization emanates. In other words, consciousness takes on the role of yet another abstraction which must be ‘embodied in a world which’ it makes ‘conform to [its] requirements’

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(Deleuze and Parnet 2006, p. vi). Deleuze’s approach, as we have seen, returns to states of things in order to create new concepts by retracing the lines of differenciation that produced them. Therefore, while there may be a process of consciousness formation akin to the subjectifying processes that constitute a subject, consciousness should not be mistaken as the a priori ground or cause of itself. Rather, the different/ciation of singularities, the organization of a plane of composition as well as the actualization of the thing, occur on an ‘unconscious surface’. This implies a different definition of the unconscious from that which views it as the ‘shadowy’ opposition to the real. Rather, what is properly speaking unconscious for Deleuze is that which is pre-individual and virtual: the immanent condition for the emergence of actual consciousness. It is in this sense that the virtual or unconscious remains a ‘part’, however hidden, of each conscious subject as both the condition of its existence and its potentiality to become or change over time. The error of psychoanalysts and ‘dreamers’ is to view the unconscious as determined and limited by consciousness. The logic in this case is that of a dialectical transformation since the unconscious or dream is situated in opposition to consciousness or everyday reality. In turn, the process of dream interpretation seeks to attain a higher form of consciousness by finding in the dream a kernel of truth about the subject’s common-day reality. As with Hegelian dialectics, the ultimate movement of this process is always towards the resolution of the unconscious within a final truth. The Deleuzian unconscious, by contrast, is aligned with the virtual, and as such the movement is always towards the creative different/ciation of new forms of consciousness in relation to the virtual singularities which constitute its plane of composition.6 By suggesting that the distinction between consciousness and the unconscious in Deleuze resonates with the fundamental pairing of the actual and the virtual as the two asymmetrical sides of a single reality, I am seeking to foreground both the way in which the different/ciation of the unconscious, pre-individual surface of the virtual or plane of immanence constitutes an essentially creative emanation of ways of being, points of view or consciousness, and the potential of surrealism to be recuperated within this affirmative philosophy. While Bretonian surrealism is on one level quite obviously concerned with manifestos, declarations and excommunications, it is my contention that on a philosophical level, surrealism as it was expressed within the context of the twentieth-century Caribbean extends the positivist tradition that Deleuze finds in Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson and, in turn, offers a bridge between the post-continental philosophy of Deleuze (understood as a contemporary elaboration of this positivist tradition) and postcolonial thought. In doing so, this chapter



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not only argues for an understanding of surrealism as an expression of the creative potential of the unconscious freed from dialectics or dream interpretation, but moreover, as an important moment in the development of postcolonialism as a positivist critique of difference and becoming. While the impact of surrealism has been explored by postcolonial critics such as Timothy Brenann (2002) who argues that the genesis of postcolonialism can be traced to surrealism’s anti-imperialist struggle and refashioning of exoticism, it is my contention that surrealism’s celebration of a univocal ontology understood as at once consciousness, the unconscious and the creative relation between the two reveals a commitment to a philosophical concept of immanence which the movement shares not only with Deleuze but with contemporary Caribbean writers. From Melville’s critique of the Cartesian split and implicit confirmation of the unity of a relational totality, to the continued prominence of marvellous realism as an exemplary postcolonial literary genre, Édouard Glissant’s rhizomatic vision of Relation, and Wilson Harris’s engagement with notions of universality, cross-cultural wholeness and creoleness, the legacies of surrealism are of fundamental importance to understanding the development of Caribbean literature.7 Critically, surrealism’s monistic world-view, evident in the works of André Breton, Pierre Mabille, René Ménil, Suzanne Césaire, Aimé Césaire and Wifredo Lam, reveals the full extent of the movement’s continued influence on contemporary aesthetics. What such an analysis hopes to achieve is not only a better understanding of the relationship between postcolonialism and surrealism, but a clearer appreciation of postcolonialism’s relation to contemporary thought.

Surrealism and the Francophone Caribbean: Revisiting Tropiques Despite Milan Kundera’s suggestion that prominent features of contemporary Caribbean literature are rooted in surrealism – the development of a ‘creole’ text endowed with the rhythms of speech, the sense of the marvellous in everyday objects, and the centrality of a literary imagination that ‘swings from the plausible to the implausible and back again’ (Kundera 1991, p. 50) – the impact of surrealist practices on Caribbean literature and thought has received scant critical attention. Although clearly signalled as an important stage in, for example, the development of Martinican literature by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant in Éloge de la créolité, surrealism remains a marginalized movement within

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the evolution of postcolonial studies. As J. Michael Dash has argued, ‘one would be hard put to find, even in French, a thoroughgoing examination of this period of interaction between a French literary avant-garde and Caribbean writers’ (2007, p. 84). While Dash, A. James Arnold, Michael Richardson and Celia Britton have led the way in exposing the significance of surrealism to the Francophone Caribbean, the influence of surrealist values on the wider Caribbean and, in particular, Anglophone canon suffers from a more pronounced critical silence. This chapter goes some way towards correcting this imbalance by exploring the role surrealism played in providing a philosophical, aesthetic and political framework for conceptualizing the postcolonial Caribbean. Kundera’s commentary offers an expansive view of Caribbean literature’s surrealist tendencies, incorporating both the literary use of creole and marvellous realism as surrealist-inspired features of contemporary Caribbean writing. However, it is my specific intention in this chapter to explore how surrealism, or what Kundera described as the shift ‘from the plausible to the implausible and back again’ in the works of contemporary Caribbean writers (Kundera 1991, p. 50) marks the persistence of a philosophical notion of immanence and creativity on the Spinozist-Deleuzian model within Caribbean literature and thought. As a result, this chapter not only traces a direct line from Breton to Césaire, Glissant and contemporary writers such as Chamoiseau (a well-documented lineage), but looks to the pan-Caribbean legacies of surrealist ideas and practice. While the contemporary influence of surrealism (understood in the broad sense of the term employed by Kundera) is extensive and includes a vast array of writers who draw on creole speech patterns and marvellous realism, the philosophical legacies of surrealism are of greatest interest to this study.8 This is not to reject the aesthetic, poetic or political value of the movement since these concerns are prominent from the earliest expressions of Caribbean surrealism, notably in the politically motivated journal Légitime défense which was published in 1932 by a group of Martinican students in Paris. The journal, which ran only to one issue before it was effectively banned by the French authorities, brought together a collection of essays and poems that explored colonial oppression from a Marxist perspective and called for the liberation of black peoples. As a result, the journal is recognized as an important influence in the development of the negritude movement, despite discrepancies between the group’s political commitment and the cultural ambitions of negritude.9 Légitime défense demonstrates the ways in which surrealism and Marxism combined to produce new ways of thinking about colonial oppression and exploitation.



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For the contributors, surrealism’s break with European tradition offered a platform from which they could challenge the hegemonic superiority of white, European culture. As Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant argue in Éloge, ‘Surrealism blew to pieces ethnocentrist cocoons, and was in its very foundations the first reevaluation of Africa by Western consciousness’ (1993, p. 81). By celebrating the impact of surrealism on Western consciousness and ethnography the authors of Éloge echo James Clifford who views the surrealists’ fascination with Africa as distinct from the earlier exociticism of the nineteenth century, which maintained the legitimacy of the existing cultural order while seeking in the exoticized other ‘a temporary frisson, a circumscribed experience of the bizarre’ (Clifford 1981, p. 542). Rather, surrealism interrogated the legitimacy of that order and moved towards modern cultural relativism. While Clifford’s work has done much to demonstrate the lasting legacies of surrealism on contemporary ethnography, in a postcolonial framework, Brennan (2002) has linked the expression of anti-imperialist sympathies within the context of the Russian Revolution to the surrealists’ Marxist-inspired colonial critique, evident, for example, in the 1931 counter-exhibition ‘The Truth About the Colonies’ which was staged in opposition to the Colonial Exhibition in Paris.10 Both Clifford and Brennan offer readings of the movement that resonate with the particular engagement with surrealism that has played out in the Caribbean context from Légitime défense’s Marxist critique of colonial France to the cultural relativism of creolization theory in the works of Édouard Glissant and Wilson Harris. However, the articulation of surrealism’s theoretical dimension was not exclusive to the West and, by the same token, by arguing that with ‘Césaire and Negritude we were steeped in Surrealism’ (Bernabé et al 1993, p. 81) the authors of Éloge do not necessarily refer the development of Francophone Caribbean literature back to the colonial centre. While Légitime défense expressed the political aspirations of a group of Martinican students from within the French metropolis, another journal, Tropiques (1941–5), edited by Aimé Césaire, his wife Suzanne Césaire and René Ménil (who had been involved with Légitime défense), provided an international forum for surrealism and focus for the anti-Vichy struggle within Martinique itself. Like Légitime défense before it, the journal was strongly influenced by André Breton and French surrealism. However, while, as Richardson notes, Breton’s advice to the authors of the Parisbased Légitime défense ‘encouraged them to concentrate their discussion on the links between politics, aesthetics and anti-colonialism [. . .] without

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emphasizing the Caribbean context’ (Richardson 1996, p. 30), the editors of Tropiques made clear the Caribbean dimension of their surrealism. In ‘For a Critical Reading of Tropiques’, which was published as the introduction to the 1978 reissue of Tropiques, René Ménil argues that to ‘picture the appropriation of what are called “surrealist processes” or the “surrealist image” as coins slipped from one hand (French) to another (Caribbean) is really and truly an admission of analytical incomprehension and impotence’, and accordingly, one must take into account ‘the extent to which the poetic texts in Tropiques distort French surrealist form in order to establish another form in a new literary structure imposed by Caribbean socio-historical circumstance at a particular date’ (1996g, p. 71). The surrealist vision offered in Tropiques operated within the bounds of the editors’ environment and in response to the specificities of Martinican life, and in the same essay Ménil highlights, for example, the particular pressures of publishing a surrealist/Marxist journal during Vichy rule which effectively censored the journal until May 1943. It is apparent from the Tropiques essays that Richardson gathers in Refusal of the Shadow that for all three editor-contributors the notion of an independent Caribbean surrealism rooted in a Caribbean specificity (its folk traditions, landscape, languages, syncretic religions) is an important point. This is not to say that the influence of Breton and the French surrealists was rejected (perhaps an act of equal ‘analytical incomprehension’). As Suzanne Césaire argues in ‘1943: Surrealism and Us’, despite or, perhaps, even because of ‘Breton’s Saint-Just aspect’ (his absolutism, ‘demand for liberty’, loyalty and ‘need for complete purity’), the surrealist cause as he defined it represented the most urgent task for mankind (1996a, p. 124). Resonating with the arguments set out in Breton’s two manifestoes, Césaire defines Caribbean surrealism as ‘an activity whose aim is to explore and express systematically the forbidden zones of the human mind in order to neutralize them’ and to liberate the mind from the shackles of absurd logic and so-called reason (p. 124). However, while this is consistent with Breton’s definition of surrealist activity, liberating consciousness takes on additional significance within Césaire’s contemporary context: ‘in 1943, when liberty itself is threatened throughout the world, surrealism (which has not ceased for a moment to remain resolutely in the service of the greatest emancipation of mankind) can be summed up with a single magic word: liberty’ (p. 124). Crucially, for Césaire not only is surrealism an evolving, living concept, universal in its relevance to mankind, but it is always also a concrete assertion of liberty within this world (for Césaire, a world over-determined by the fascist Vichy regime) and not purely an



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abstraction. To this end she cites Breton: ‘liberty must incarnate itself and to do so needs to reflect and recreate itself ceaselessly in the word’ (p. 124). Surrealist activity in the broad terms that Breton employs to describe it (as the attempt to express an extraordinary reality apart from the regulatory force of reason) is revolutionary because it seeks to disrupt the status quo and hegemony by accessing hitherto unacknowledged elements within our reality, such as the unconscious. This activity, whether it happens in Martinique or Paris, is by its very nature revolutionary since it represents the disruption of the same through a relation with the absolutely other. Moreover, while this represents a process in general, when it is enacted within a particular context, that of Martinique in 1943, for example, it can be seen to represent a call for freedom and liberty in the face of Vichy domination, the legacies of transatlantic slavery, and colonial oppression. Characterizing surrealist activity or the actualization of the unconscious as a revolutionary move beyond the current status quo recalls Deleuze’s presentation of the eternal return of difference as different/ciation. This chapter will examine in more detail the correlatives between Deleuzian philosophy and surrealism; however, it is important to note at this stage that what makes Tropiques and the essays gathered there of particular interest to this study is its development of a properly philosophical approach to surrealism in parallel with an explicit interrogation of the role of art, poetry and literature within society, and an implicit political critique of Vichy. Scant though the analysis of surrealism and the Caribbean has been, Arnold’s Modernism and Negritude (1981) remains one of the most important considerations of Tropiques’ legacies. The links that Arnold foregrounds between Aimé Césaire, who is the focus of his study, Nietzsche and Bergson form an important background to my arguments here. Nevertheless, the philosophical references that Arnold draws on in his reading of Césaire’s essays ultimately seem patchwork: not just Nietzsche and Bergson, but Freud, Jung, Marx and Hegel, suggesting both that the dialectical model produced a contradictory politics of negritude based on ‘the negation of a negation’ (Arnold 1981, p. 70) and that Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land remains a powerful critique of colonization when read in dialectical terms (pp. 155–68). The overt focus on Césaire, moreover, radically undervalues the contributions of Suzanne Césaire and René Ménil: Arnold goes as far as to suggest that as editor-in-chief, Césaire was the ‘guiding spirit’ of the journal (p. 75), while at times Ménil is ‘frighteningly naïve’ in his theorization of the unconscious and society (p. 89). Given the strong distinction drawn in this chapter between negative, dialectical philosophy and an affirmative tradition associated with Spinoza,

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Nietzsche and Bergson, Césaire’s multiple allegiances seem to confirm Richardson’s comment that for Césaire surrealism ‘was essentially a poetic tool’, as opposed to a critical one (1996, p. 7), and that ‘[g]reat poet that he is, Césaire […] did not fully grasp the philosophical underpinnings of surrealism’ (p. 8). Arnold’s analysis strongly argues for the philosophical validity of Césaire’s work; however, it is my intention to recuperate the writings of René Ménil in particular for their ability to reframe our understanding of the philosophical dimension of the 1940s Caribbean surrealist movement in such a way as to highlight its role in moving Caribbean thought away from the negative movement of Hegelian dialectics towards a positive sense of creativity, difference and the unconscious. Ménil, who lectured in philosophy at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-deFrance, states in his introduction to the 1978 reissue of the journal that ‘philosophies of élan vital, sensitive intuition and instinctive forces’ are ‘predominate’ in the works collected here, ‘references that were tacit in the case of Bergson or explicit in the cases of Novalis, Nietzsche, Freud, etcetera’ (Ménil 1996g, p. 75). It would be difficult to understate the significance of this comment to our understanding of the philosophy of Caribbean surrealism. In a short essay published in La Révolution Surréaliste (No. 5, 1925), Breton identifies a lineage of philosophers, writers and artists whose work stands in opposition to the ‘whole disgusting cycle’ of Western civilization and its dominance: ‘Spinoza, Kant, Blake, Hegel, Schelling, Proudhon, Marx, Stirner, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Nietzsche – this list alone is the beginning of your downfall’ (Breton 1978, p. 319). Here the rejection of European capitalist hegemony in favour of a ‘freedom based on our deepest spiritual needs’ (p. 319) begins, for Breton, with Spinoza, although it too is a rather mixed bag. In one respect, the surrealists’ rejection of rationalism foreshadows the conflict that Melville detailed in ‘The Parrot and Descartes’. And, significantly, the single reality that Breton and other French surrealists such as Pierre Mabille characterized as both consciousness and the unconscious strongly resonates with the immanent God/Nature and two attributes of Spinozism. However, if for Breton the story of contemporary thought begins with Spinoza and not Descartes, Bergson is notably absent from the lineage he details, and in 1930 a catalogue of surrealist publications featured a table of authors and philosophers under the headings lisez and ne lisez pas. In this account, Bergson joined Schiller, Schopenhauer, Durkheim, Claudel, Lévy-Brühl, Proust and Gandhi among many others under the category ‘do not read’; while Berkeley, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Engles are cited as philosophers to read (Breton 1978, p. 46). After the First World



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War, Breton argued, it was impossible to return to the same ideological concerns and political questions about European sovereignty, the nation and the ‘conflict of interests sharpened on eternal grudges and neighbours’ quarrels’ (p. 238). Where post-war surrealism sought to attack the assumed predominance of European culture through radical literature, philosophy and art, many other intellects failed: ‘let themselves be dragged backwards to a bellicose outbidding which rang false and for which the combatants did not forgive them. In France this was the case with Bergson, Barrès, Claudel’ (pp. 238–9). The unpopularity of Bergson in the post-war era, particularly when compared with his contemporary Freud, is notable. While Freud’s theory of the unconscious was a major influence on the development of surrealism, the Bergsonian model of the unconscious as primarily a site of memory and duration failed to impact on the intellectual environment after the Second World War and, as Christian Kerslake has argued, was overtaken by existentialist theories of time: ‘In a landscape of ruins and an atmosphere of shock, the urgent desire to completely renew society, from its foundations upward, perhaps made the Bergsonian emphasis on the continual accumulation of the past in the present unwelcome’ (Kerslake 2007, p. 6). This commentary makes Ménil’s reference to the implicit influence of Bergson on Tropiques all the more remarkable, and it speaks to the strength of conviction in Caribbean thought that the past, no matter how traumatic, must be recognized as part of the recovery process in the present and be carried forth into the unforeseeable future. While Breton is dismissive of Bergson, La Révolution Surréaliste nevertheless establishes an important line of thought that begins with Spinoza and leads to Hegel, Marx and Engles. From this list of philosophers, however, it is the work of Hegel that is most consistently invoked in Breton’s writings. As he argued in a lecture in 1935: ‘I cannot repeat too often that Hegel, in his Esthetics, attacked all the problems that on the plane of poetry and art may today be considered to be the most difficult, and that with unparalleled lucidity he solved them for the most part’ (Breton 1972, p. 258). Strong praise indeed; however, the predominance of Hegelian thought in Breton’s work is a little misleading. To be sure, the surrealists found much to value in Hegel’s concept of the dialectic. Breton’s definition of surrealist activity, which all three editors of Tropiques reference in their own work (as does, as we shall see, the contemporary Guyanese writer, Wilson Harris), as the search for the ‘certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions’ (p. 123) is inspired

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by Hegel’s concepts of dialectical process and total synthesis.11 In Hegelian terms the transcendence of opposition and contradiction is achieved by a process of dialectical synthesis, a movement towards the point at which the oppositions of ‘life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future’ and so on are resolved within a higher unity. However, as Bruce Baugh has argued, while drawing on this relational movement, surrealism nevertheless resisted any notion of final synthesis, without which, according to Hegel, there is no dialectic, only ‘anti-thetics, the play of opposed terms that negate and pass into each other without ever coinciding in a meaningful whole’ (Baugh 2003, p. 5).12 Crucially, then, surrealism cannot be said to be truly dialectical in the Hegelian sense. Breton’s resistance to totality means that the negation of contraries envisioned as surrealist activity ‘is what Hegel calls “a spurious infinite”: not the internal and genuine infinity of the interrelations of the various moments subsumed under the concept, but a series of negations and surpassing that extends ad infinitum’ (Baugh 2003, p. 56). Rather, for the surrealists, dialectics stood for ‘a becomingother of the object without limits, guided by the imagination, which is itself propelled by the unconscious’ (p. 56). A Hegelian critique of surrealism takes on a familiar characteristic for the Deleuzian scholar since it is the absence of a limit (totality) that makes the process of becoming for Hegel one that is endlessly repeated and groundless. This much Sartre recognized when he rephrased Breton’s definition and claimed that surrealist practice represented the search for ‘the imaginary point where the dream and waking, the real and the fictional, the objective and the subjective blend together’; producing ‘a mixture, an ebb and flow, but no synthetic unity’ given ‘the regrettable absence of any mediation’ (cited in Baugh 2003, pp. 61–2). One can hear the genesis of Hallward’s critique of both postcolonialism and Deleuze in Sartre’s final lament regarding the absence of mediation. However, at issue once again is the question of positive verses negative differentiation since Hegel’s critique of Spinoza foregrounds the objections made to surrealism above. To recall the argument, for Hegel Spinozism tends towards a groundless and undifferentiated nothingness because it involves no other or limitation. Yet, to turn this on its head, it is precisely the question of an a priori limit as first cause that fuels Deleuze’s critique of Hegelianism: ‘in Bergson [. . .] the thing differs with itself first, immediately. According to Hegel, the thing differs with itself because it differs first with all that it is not’ (cited in Hardt 1993, p. 7). Since the dialectic depends on the presence of a limit, from a Deleuzian perspective, Hegel introduces contingency and causality into being insofar as the difference of any particular



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thing is determined first by an external cause or limit. The positivist model of differentiation that Deleuze draws from Spinoza facilitates an understanding of difference and change without transcendence into some final totality. By rejecting totality and final synthesis while maintaining the validity of a relational and interconnected reality, surrealism emerges as much closer to Spinoza and philosophies of immanence than Hegelianism. In turn, the surrealist conceptualization of the paradoxical coexistence of two contradictory states within a single moment where the essential movement is not directed towards a higher unity but captured within the ‘ebb and flow’, is best understood within a Spinozist/Deleuzian ontology of immanent becoming and differentiation where it is no longer a question of difference driven by opposition and lack, but by a creative élan vital. This is to move well beyond Breton’s arguments since, while he rejects final unity, there is little development in his writings of the concept of a positive movement from unity to difference. It is in this respect that Ménil’s writings come to occupy an important place in this argument, specifically his discussion of the particular relevance of philosophies of élan vital rather than dialectical progression in his introduction to Tropiques. The acceptance of an immanently creative, self-diversifying reality is signalled in his essay ‘Introduction to the Marvellous’ (1941) in which he draws on Breton’s definition of surrealist practice to define the ‘land of the marvellous’ as the place where contraries can intimately rub shoulders or, more accurately, are able to communicate, to be mutually compelling [. . .]. Life and death, the communicable and the incommunicable, past and future, the possible and the impossible, are interdependent and cease to be perceived as contradictory. At last man is no longer forced to choose. (Ménil 1996c, p. 92) The difference between this description and Breton’s statement is significant for in Ménil there is no sense of transcendence or dialectical synthesis: he does not claim that the marvellous represents the point at which oppositions are resolved.13 Rather, he envisions the coexistence and interaction of states of affairs which are no longer perceived as contraries within a relational model that foreshadows the contemporary postcolonial theories of Glissant and Harris. This view is echoed by Suzanne Césaire’s ‘Leo Frobenius and the Problem of Civilizations’ (1941), in which Frobenius’s concept of the Paideuma demonstrates that humanity ‘does not possess a will to perfection [. . .], it does not create civilization and then try to take it ever higher. On the contrary, it develops in multiple

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directions transformed by the inner Paideuma’ (1996b, p. 85). Here dialectical synthesis as advancement towards a higher unity is wholly rejected and the movement of human life is characterized not as a progression towards a perfect end-state, but as an immanently inspired transformative process that occurs across multiple lines of becoming. As with the later writings of Glissant, Deleuze and Guattari, here Suzanne Césaire opposes a hegemonic, linear evolution towards a progressively perfected state with a rhizomatic model of becoming.14 What Sartre characterized as a creative practice that produced ebb and flow, not synthetic unity, emerges in Tropiques as a model of becoming that anticipates contemporary theories of creolization, notably those of Glissant and Harris for whom the concept designates not the relation of two parts to produce a syncretic third term, but an always-changing state of being. Ménil agrees with Breton and Césaire and similarly resists synthesis in his work. Arguing that his surrealist philosophy is opposed to the utilitarian and ‘mathematical chattering of Cartesian psychologists’ (Ménil 1996d, p. 154), Ménil maintains the importance of the imagination as the site where apparent oppositions may coexist in relation. Rather than following the Hegelian model of the dialectic, both Ménil and Suzanne Césaire present an immanent conceptualization of reality in which the movement detailed marks the emergence of multiplicities and not a higher unity. As a result, the persistence of relative parts is not a failure of dialectical synthesis (a failure to produce the highest form), but rather a sign of a philosophy concerned with relation, speeds and lines of becoming. Together, ‘lines and measurable speeds’ constitute ‘an assemblage’, ‘a multiplicity’ composed of ‘lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, p. 4). Viewed from this perspective, Ménil’s insistence on the relation of parts within the realm of the imagination gains additional resonance. Indeed, where Deleuze and Guattari later argue that the processes of, for example, deterritorialization and reterritorialization may be measured as comparative rates of flow (p. 4), Ménil argues that the emergence of determinate form is relative to speed: ‘One can escape contradiction, in other words the principle of identity, by means of the speed of the mind. (The irreducible images of a film are blended together by being thrown into motion)’ (Ménil 1996b, p. 149). Here, as for Deleuze and Guattari, degrees of reterritorialization and deterritorialization, ‘the principle of identity’ and pure becoming, are understood as relative expressions of speed not a priori form. Indeed this also recalls the distinction between actual and virtual noted above, wherein



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the actual (identity) is characterized as a moment of arrest and the virtual an infinite speed. Contradiction and opposition, Ménil suggests, are the result of a philosophy premised on the judgement of a fixed identity. In its place, he posits a play of relative forces, some of which subjectify while others offer a flight from consciousness towards the unconscious ground of pre-individual singularities characterized by their infinite speed: ‘Far and away in the distance where we had been concerning “life”, at lightning speed and with a light flowing from its speed, the fire-spirit illuminates faces, countries and things springing up from broken habits’ (p. 147). Ménil’s ‘Evidence Concerning the Mind and Its Speed’ (1945) draws on surrealist dogma in its reference to the unknown mystery of the world ‘hidden in our unconscious’ (p. 147). Nonetheless, Ménil stresses the extent to which the unconscious represents a radical beyond that cannot be captured by language or thought. His rejection of metaphor as a weak marker of difference – ‘Every metaphor affirms a relation of resemblance and, ultimately, of identity between two heterogeneous objects’ (p. 148) – resonates with Deleuze’s own comments on the paucity of metaphor as a deterritorializing language effect (cf Lecercle 2010, pp. 124–5). Furthermore, he stresses that his is an affirmational philosophy that begins from a position of unity and of univocity: From the point of view of life, the affirmation of such relations [between states of affairs mistaken for contradictions] is no surprise [. . .]. From the point of view of life, everything is contained within the whole, everything is related, there is a complementarity of everything, everything resembles everything else – in an organic way. (1996b, p. 148) We recall Deleuze’s claim that ‘the essential in univocity is not that Being is said in a single and same sense, but that it is said, in a single and same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities. Being is the same for all these modalities, but these modalities are not the same’ (Deleuze 2004b, p. 45), and recognize in Ménil’s work an affirmational philosophy that seeks to explore the relative forces of speed and rest that enable escape from fixed identities, contradiction and opposition. To different degrees both Ménil and Suzanne Césaire present an immanent ontology within Tropiques. In turn, the surrealists’ exploration of the interior world of the self and the dialogue between conscious and unconscious is always much more than an instance of an individual’s psychic liberation; it concerns mankind’s liberation. Ménil, notably, makes the case for the view that the expression of the part is necessarily that of the whole

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in ‘Birth of Our Art’ (1941), where he argues that the ‘expression of the whole is indivisibly attached to the expression of the self’ (Ménil 1996a, p. 107). This is strongly Spinozist in its logic and depends on a philosophical notion of substance and univocity. Since for Spinoza there can only be one infinite substance (God or Nature), all finite things are produced immanently within that substance.15 Moreover, what any particular finite thing actually is can be nothing other than a particular configuration of that substance. In other words, where for Hegel the limitation required to produce the difference of a particular thing was an external limitation (thesis meets antithesis); for Spinoza ‘the finite is clearly limited and determined; limited in its nature by something else of the same nature’ (Deleuze 1988b, p. 95, emphasis added). This is expressly argued in part two of The Ethics where God/Nature is identified as the cause of each ‘idea of each body, or of each singular thing which actually exists’: ‘insofar as [God/ Nature] is considered under the attribute of which the things are modes, their ideas must involve the concept of their attribute’ (Spinoza 1994, p. 144). This is where Ménil can be seen to draw on Spinoza’s parallelism. The single substance God/Nature is the basis of all reality, but what is characteristic of this reality is its two attributes, thought and extension (revising the Cartesian split of thought and extension as two substances). The two attributes are not independent of substance or each other, but are the interconnected, universal property of all things. As Stuart Hampshire explains, because ‘reality is a single, self-generating system natura naturans, thought and extension are just two aspects of the same order of things and are necessarily coextensive. Therefore, for every individual physical object there exists an idea or representation of that thing’ (2005, p. xxxvi). It follows that there is no change in thought without a corresponding change in extension. On one level then, when an individual experiences a dream this event is realized in both the mind and the physical world (activity in the brain, changes in breathing patterns, fluctuations in body temperature and so on), and the surrealists’ attempt to unlock the potential of the dream-state is, accordingly, always an engagement with both the internal, psychic world and the external, physical one. Ménil’s claim that the ‘expression of the whole is indivisibly attached to the expression of the self’ is framed within a broader discussion about the nature of literature and, in particular, poetry, as is much of his work in Tropiques. This can be read as part of his attempt to reveal the ways in which any creative act is both an individual effort of the mind and a reaching out towards the world: ‘man is merely the world in the sphere of self-consciousness’ and, like the tree that ‘has access to the world not



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through the external but through its inner being: through its roots’ so in man ‘the communication paths to the world also necessarily pass through the internal: through the human body, the only bridge linking him to the world’ (Ménil 1996a, p. 107). Here the body encapsulates the two attributes: at once both thought/mind and extension/physical being. In turn, Ménil’s philosophy resounds with both Spinoza and French surrealists such as Breton, yet his development of parallelism and immanence do not necessarily lead to Sartre’s conclusion that surrealism is marred by the absence of mediation. Indeed, as Ménil cautions: ‘Take care not to call something formless simply because you are unable to find a fixed form you are seeking’ (1996f, p. 129). Ménil, like Spinoza, is clear that man’s existence is finite and therefore always limited by the laws that govern all living things. Accordingly, surrealist activity is not about the discovery of the point at which life and death, real and imagined, ceased to be seen as contradictory (the resolution of the dialectic in a final unity), but more properly the search for that point: a process not a state of being. Two essays in particular, ‘Birth of Our Art’ (1941) and ‘Orientation of Poetry’ (1941), make the case for this approach. A full vision of reality is, Ménil argues, beyond the reach of man as a finite thing: ‘The point at which reality might seem pure to us, without needing recourse to illusion merely in order to exist, is, when all is said and done, just theoretical: it cannot be humanly experienced’ (1996e, p. 112); ‘all living thought dynamically conceals the infinite zone of gymnastic possibilities and limitless hopes within itself, and this is the price it pays for life’ (p. 113). In other words, the price paid for life, to be able to exist within this actual world, is what makes pure psychic automatism impossible. Mediation, by language, imagery or ‘illusion’ is essential: To create, it is necessary to engage not with the haze of conceptual life, but with the course of the real life of the individual and the collectivity. You must play your hand and take risks in the actual course of events: this is the condition upon which nature operates within us and which gives the work its substance. When man creates, it is nature that is creating through him. (1996a, p. 109) Ménil repeatedly makes the case for a view of creation as an engagement with this world, not, to evoke Hallward, a transcendence out of it: ‘Our ideas emerge from this world, which is the only one’ (p. 111). The role of the imagination, then, is one of both grounding – ‘maintain[ing] a toehold in daily reality (the poet lives, don’t forget)’ (Ménil 1996e, p. 116) – and a

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counter-actualization, ‘an attempt to attain a limitless vision of the universe’ (p. 114). As a result, the opposition of real and imaginary for Ménil is not equivalent to that of being and nothingness, but rather of being and becoming. As the site of becoming, poetic activity repeats the creative process of different/ciation (in the Deleuzian sense) immanently within this world and in response to its actual conditions. His development of the ‘marvellous’ as a conceptual tool representing the function of the imagination is a case in point. Acknowledging the influence of the French ethnographer and surrealist Pierre Mabille and his work Mirror of the Marvellous, Ménil follows Mabille’s characterization of the marvellous as an element within our reality but one beyond commonplace perception. As such, like the unconscious, it is a realm of pure possibility, unrestricted becoming and the unmediated flow of desire: a ‘land’ where ‘everything is possible’, where man ‘can transgress his spatial boundaries’, transform into ‘a tree, an animal, a peaceful lake’, and ‘overcomes space by instantly crossing infinite distances’ (Ménil 1996c, p. 91). However, man is always barred from actually living out of such a state and it is only via the imagination that one can access the marvellous. Thus, the imagination is identified as the site (not cause) of actualization. In turn, what is actualized is not the pure marvellous which is virtual or unconscious, but what Ménil calls the ‘lived marvellous, a moment that is unique and cannot be detached from an inspiring becoming. In the final analysis, the production of marvels is one with pure duration and the pure activity of the mind’ (p. 93). Here Ménil draws further on Bergson’s philosophy in his reference to duration, but he is also in line with the later Deleuze since the lived marvellous is presented as essentially an instance of differenciation, the actualization of the virtual as the production of the new (‘a moment that is unique’). Betraying his philosophical influences once again, Ménil argues further for a parallelism by which the lived marvellous is experienced at once in the mind and body: the marvellous ‘lives in the mind with the full force of its emotion and which is consequently inseparable from the human body which actualizes it in time and space’ (pp. 93–4). Here actualization is characterized as the process that enables man to experience some form of the marvellous: not the pure marvellous which is virtual and inaccessible, but a lived marvellous understood as ‘an inspired becoming’. Furthermore, it is in this moment of actualization that the marvellous becomes specific to the individual who experiences it. The marvellous for Ménil is founded on an immanent conception of a reality that is at once actual, virtual and the relation between the two (becoming). If the imagination is the site of actualization, it is only because



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the marvellous is always already contained within the mind: ‘marvels which, in the indivisible unity of nature, are found no more within us than outside us’ (p. 92). This fundamental sense of immanence is an essential feature of Bergsonian philosophies of élan vital and in this respect Ménil’s essays not only gesture towards Breton’s lineage of philosophers that lead out from Spinoza, but they crucially reclaim Bergson’s legacy in the wake of Breton’s critique and anticipate Deleuzian post-continental philosophy. While Spinozism provides Deleuze with an immanent conception of reality as both a virtual self-creating aspect (natura naturans) and the structure of actual created things (natura naturata), it is Bergson who explores the profound creativity within this movement from virtual to actual. Élan vital, in other words, does not merely implicate a philosophy of immanence but also one of the production of the new and of creativity. This is why Deleuze defines élan vital as ‘a virtuality in the process of being actualized’ (1991, p. 94); ‘Evolution takes place from the virtual to actuals. Evolution is actualization, actualization is creation’ (p. 98). While for Ménil the marvellous is associated primarily with actualization, in ‘The Situation of Poetry in the Caribbean’ (1944) he makes it clear that what is properly speaking involved in this becoming is the production of the new as an immanent actualization of the virtual: ‘It is within the new thing itself that, in a virtual state, the form of the newness lies’ (1996f, p. 128, emphasis added). This statement elaborates Ménil’s distinction between form (the actuality of the thing) and substance (not philosophical substance per se, but rather akin to the virtual – a singularity).16 This does not mean that substance mirrors the form that it will become. Just as for Deleuze the virtual is not to be misunderstood as the possible and thus limited to become in a predetermined way, for Ménil the form that newness assumes is always a radical step beyond current possibilities. Citing the French author André Gide, he contends that ‘no new thinking enters into the temple of art in borrowed robes’, and further claims that ‘the idea of pouring new content into an old form arises from a “false dialectical appearance”, which makes the two notions of substance and form independent metaphysical entities. Yet for anything that has concrete reality, substance and form are inseparable’ (Ménil 1996f, p. 128). As Walcott argued in a different context, it is not a question of giving new names to old things (Walcott 1998, p. 9); newness is a more radical event than that. But for Ménil the reason that the new can be defined in this way is more profound and rooted in his philosophy of immanence and élan vital. Form and substance are, Ménil argues, essentially one and the same thing: one does not simply add form to substance in order to

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give it a concrete reality. Such a distinction holds for Deleuze insofar as the difference between the actual and the virtual is not equivalent to that of reality and non-reality, both are fully real. In turn, the idea that new content may be added to old forms attributes to ‘form’ a false transcendentalism and independence from substance. Rather, newness is always already present in the old form as ‘substance’, as the virtual. To refer back to Walcott, the point is neither to give ‘new names for old things, or old names for old things, but [to have] the faith of using the old names anew’ (p. 9). In other words, old things always carry within themselves the potential to become-new, one just has to have the ‘faith’ to actualize it. Ménil’s particular glossing of the marvellous in terms that evoke a philosophy of élan vital is an important move that links immanence, actualization and the new within a philosophical framework that anticipates Deleuzian thought. While there have been few analyses of the theoretical dimension of Caribbean surrealism, Celia Britton’s Race and the Unconscious (2002) stands out in its exploration of Freudian theories of the unconscious in Tropiques. While Britton’s study usefully explores how Caribbean surrealism introduced the question of race to Breton’s psychic automatism, her characterization of Ménil’s contributions, in particular, as evoking a sense of an essentialized Caribbeanness that offers a privileged relation to the unconscious, the irrational and the marvellous recalls Alejo Carpentier’s often-critiqued concept. Suggesting, like Carpentier, that the marvellous is more readily accessible or exists in a purer state in the New World problematically adopts ‘a spurious European perspective, since it is only from the other side that alterity and difference may be discovered’ (Echevarría 1977, p. 128). A close analysis of the philosophical arguments made by Ménil in Tropiques reveals a much more sophisticated philosopher than previously recognized. His definition of the marvellous is close to that of Mabille, as Britton observes; however, the line that she draws between the two is problematic: ‘whereas Mabille’s version [of the collective unconscious] is “general”, Ménil reformulates it as the unconscious of a particular people’; he ‘distinguishes between an individual “merveilleux” expressed in poetry and a collective one expressed in the “contes” [folktales], which are specific to a particular culture’ (Britton 2002, p. 12). However, Ménil clearly distinguishes between the specific forms that the marvellous assumes and its substance which is properly speaking always virtual or unconscious.17 As a result, his work stands in opposition to Richardson’s assertion that ‘while recognizing the importance of cultural specificity and diversity, surrealism none the less fundamentally asserts that this belongs to the realm of appearance and that the universal is the only



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essence’ (1996, p. 12). Following Spinoza and anticipating contemporary discussions about the philosophy of Deleuze, Ménil is careful to underscore the necessity of the universal and the specific, substance and form, to the processes of becoming-new and actualization encapsulated in the surrealist concept of the marvellous. Ménil’s surrealist philosophy of immanence and élan vital is remarkable in its depth and the extent to which it moves beyond the ambivalent Hegelianism of Breton’s manifestos.18 His presentation of the immanent production of newness foreshadows that of Deleuze and both thinkers share a common influence in the philosophy of Bergson. We are once again aware of the presence of Bergsonism in ‘The Situation of Poetry in the Caribbean’ as Ménil moves on from his discussion of the unity of form and substance as two interdependent ideas (attributes would be just as fitting) to claim: The actuality of a being is its present, but this present is that very being marked by the extreme temporal sign of its duration. For a living being, there is thus no irreconcilable contradiction between its present and its past except in the minds of those who like splitting hairs. (1996f, p. 130) Later chapters of this study will comment in more detail on how Bergson’s sense of the virtual as a ‘gigantic memory’ (Deleuze 1991, p. 100) ensures that the creative process Deleuze terms different/ciation is always also a temporal evolution. Chapter Two, in particular, explores Deleuze’s own philosophy of time as the coexistence of past and present. At this stage, however, it is important to highlight how Ménil’s own Bergsonian philosophy pre-empts Deleuzian thought by arguing for a notion of duration and coexistent times. The curious resemblance between these thinkers, apparent here and in their philosophies of immanence, élan vital and creativity, exposes the evolution of a parallel line of thought that feeds into the development of twentieth-century Caribbean philosophy and the emergence of a European, post-continental one. Despite Ménil’s claim that the ‘reader should not too hastily deplore the impossibility of reducing the multiplicity of philosophies in Tropiques to one alone’ (1996g, p. 76), this chapter has explored the development of a single line of thought, one identified by Ménil as prominent in the journal’s response to surrealism: philosophies of élan vital. This is not to say that other philosophical perspectives cannot be gleaned from the journal and employed in a study of Caribbean writing. However, it is clear that while for Ménil the Caribbean surrealists’ philosophical commitment

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to élan vital was key to understanding the theories of creativity and the univocity of being expressed in the journal, there has been scant consideration of its legacies within postcolonialism or Caribbean thought in current criticism. As a result, what may have appeared to be an obvious philosophical claim of Caribbean surrealism to Ménil has gone unnoticed in the few studies that consider the impact of surrealism on Caribbean literature or postcolonial studies in general.

Surrealism from the Other Side Tropiques, and in particular Ménil’s essays, played an important role in the development of Caribbean surrealism, especially from a philosophical perspective. At the same time, this period marked an important dialogue with French surrealists, many of whom spent time in Martinique and Haiti during the 1940s. Exile from Vichy France brought André Breton, Michel Leiris, André Masson and Pierre Mabille to the Caribbean and it is a particular strength of Richardson’s Refusal of the Shadow that the collection showcases essays from Légitme défense and Tropiques in English translation, but also includes reflective accounts, discussions and short essays about the Caribbean by the established figures of the French surrealist group. While the philosophical dimension of surrealism is often overshadowed by its literary and artistic output, Breton’s essays and manifestos reveal something of the intellectual impact of the movement. Yet from the perspective of Caribbean surrealism and its engagement with philosophies of élan vital, the work of Pierre Mabille stands out as being of particular relevance. An anthropologist, doctor and psychologist, in 1940 Mabille was employed as the head surgeon of the general hospital in Port-au-Prince and in 1945 was appointed the French cultural attaché to Haiti. In this capacity Mabille became well acquainted with a number of prominent Caribbean artists and writers of the time (including Wifredo Lam, Alejo Carpentier, Jacques Roumain and the editors of Tropiques) and, significantly, documented his interest in the Haitian people and their culture through his own ethnographic writings. Engendering a new form of ethnography distinct from the exoticizing gaze and ‘primitivist stereotypes’ that, Dash argues, can be found in Breton’s writings on Haiti, works such as Mabille’s ‘The Haitian Panorama’ (1945) show us ‘the tireless feet of black peasant women [. . .]. In contrast to Breton’s “charmeuses” [enchantresses], Mabille’s images evoke the historical suffering of the Haitian peasantry’ (Dash 2007, p. 88). Echoing this departure from exoticist images of the enchanting,



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mysterious native, Mabille’s ‘Memories of Haiti’ (1981) depicts an ethnographer’s quest to witness at first hand a voodoo ceremony. Recounting his journey into the depths of the forest, Mabille’s text offers signposts towards the modern cultural relativism that Clifford (1981; 1988) locates in ethnographic surrealism by refusing to exoticize or assimilate his subject, maintaining instead a clear sense of the author’s own otherness. Reflecting on the failure of the mission Mabille writes that ‘it was we who had compromised everything. The unexpected arrival in the area of an officer accompanied by foreigners on the previous day had provoked a deep disquiet which had quickly spread’ (1996c, p. 253). Mabille’s ethnographic writings on Haiti recount cross-cultural engagement and not the assimilation of another culture: a celebration of the irreducible otherness of the other person as the direct precursor to Glissant’s Relation of opacities.19 Mabille’s ‘Memories of Haiti’, however, offers a further signpost to contemporary Caribbean theory. In the descriptions of the Haitian jungle, Mabille writes: When I think of the forest, I mean the sum total of the contradictory, confused sensations it leaves in tangible memory and which the popular language expresses. Don’t we speak of ‘plunging into the forest’, don’t we talk about its depths, as we would about the depths of a mine or an ocean, and yet it has neither a surface nor a skin, but an edge, a border. Language, confusing the part with the whole, often evokes the heart of the forest [. . .], of a centre. But the point is that the forest does not have a centre; it is everywhere and nowhere. (1996c, pp. 243–4) It is this decentred, rhizomatic vision of the forest that Mabille encounters again in the work of the Cuban surrealist painter Wifredo Lam and, in particular, his masterpiece The Jungle (1943), which Mabille discusses in an essay of the same name. Importantly, in the profuse, tangled nature of Lam’s jungle Mabille finds a new model of perspective: The Jungle, Mabille notes, is organized according to a different set of principles from that found in European artworks which tend to structure their composition around a single focal point. This ‘European’ perspective ‘expresses the general idea of the organization of the world emanating from a single God, of social organization emanating from a supreme leader. A series of laws or relations strictly determines the position of the peripheral parts in terms of the centre’ (Mabille 1996b, p. 209). By contrast, Lam’s New World sensibility is

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totally opposed to that with which the European is familiar [. . .]. Here it is no longer a question of an empire with an all-powerful monarch at its head, of a structure dependent on a single centre, but of a vast space, without gaps, all of whose parts act at the same time, all equally free and equally dependent on the totality, unaware of any external hierarchy and oriented towards their own destiny: a living whole, knowing no other laws than those of the rhythm. (p. 211) The distinction that Mabille draws between a strict hierarchy organized around a single source and a living whole in which all parts coexist equally recalls Suzanne Césaire’s discussion of humanity’s rhizomatic and immanently differentiating Paideuma (1996b, pp. 82–5), but also foregrounds the rhizomatic totalities that both Glissant and Harris evoke in their later writings. Crucially, however, it demonstrates what is at stake in a philosophical return to immanence for postcolonial studies. Rejecting transcendental concepts of the Ego or ‘Other’ as pre-constituted primary units (a view from the ‘outside’ or the ‘external hierarchy’ to which Mabille refers), immanence is a philosophy of being in the world, of processes. Just as a musical analysis concentrates on variations in tone, speed and intensity rather than isolated notes abstracted from the composition, so a philosophy of immanence focuses on the complex relations and interactions between living things in a world that is constantly changing. Importantly, this relational world-view rejects essentialist notions of Being and focuses on multiplicities: as Giorgio Agamben writes, ‘there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize’, there is only the ‘fact of one’s own existence’ (1993, p. 43). Where imperialism sought to realize the pre-ordained racial destiny of white Europeans, constructing a fixed hierarchy of ‘universal’ values from the transcendental view of Europe, immanence promotes a new discourse of universality based on lived experience and relationality: a universality that is taken up by Harris and Glissant in their notions of wholeness, totality and Relation. Furthermore, the rejection of transcendence in favour of a philosophy with no ‘outside’ not only refocuses philosophical thinking on this world rather than the ‘inconsequential heavens of transcendence’ (Mullarkey 2006, p. 3), but provides a model of difference that functions without recourse to negative oppositions such as self and other, colonizer and colonized. Rather, all are ‘equally free and equally dependent on the totality’. Each ‘part’ gains determination not from a hierarchical or negative differentiation, but from its always-changing relation to the whole: the patterns of movement in Relation (Glissant 1997, pp. 92–3); or for



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Harris, ‘the mystery of cross-cultural wholeness steeped in the freedom of diversity’ (1999, p. 240). Lam’s painting usefully illustrates something of the value of immanence: offering a non-dialectical production of difference and specificity. Mabille is an important figure in this narrative as he was a member of Breton’s surrealist group and also established a strong presence in the Caribbean during his time spent in Haiti. However, as Ménil argued, it is misleading to view the development of surrealism in the Caribbean as ‘coins slipped from one hand (French) to another (Caribbean)’ (1996g, p. 71), and part of what this chapter has aimed to show is the ways in which surrealism took on a new relevance in the Caribbean context. Ménil’s Tropiques essays play a prominent role in developing the philosophical scope of Caribbean surrealism: exposing not only its close relationship to French surrealism as defined by Breton, but demonstrating their common influences (Spinoza, Hegel, Marx and Engles) while exceeding Breton’s vision by recuperating aspects of Bergsonian thought and philosophies of élan vital, and anticipating the contemporary post-continental philosophy of Deleuze. The poetics and philosophy of Tropiques established surrealism as an important influence on Caribbean literature, as the writings of Glissant, Bernabé, Chamoiseau, Confiant and Daniel Maximin highlight.20 However, surrealism’s impact was wider than the Francophone Caribbean. Pre-empting prominent terms in contemporary postcolonial literary studies, Michel Leiris’s ‘L’ethnographie devant le colonialisme’ (1950) outlines the need for colonized cultures to ‘write back’ as an act of resistance to the dominance of the colonial centre (Tythacott 2003, p. 214). Key surrealist tropes such as the reconciliation of opposites, alchemy, the search for wholeness, cultural relativism, and cross-cultural dialogue, as well as the aesthetic practice of juxtaposition, collage, and pastiche clearly resonate with the contemporary writings of Wilson Harris, as James Clifford notes (1988, p. 173), and anticipate postcolonial concepts such as hybridity and creolization. While critics such as Tythacott and Clifford have made some headway in exploring the points of convergence between surrealism and postcolonialism, in the Caribbean context there has been little analysis of the movement beyond Tropiques and its legacy within the French Caribbean. Crucially, however, the prominent Guyanese author Wilson Harris has written specifically on both surrealism and Tropiques, notably in his review of Richardson’s Refusal of the Shadow published in the journal Wasafiri. In this important document, Harris not only points out the continuing relevance of surrealism to contemporary aesthetics, but highlights the surrealists’

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exploration of ‘cross-culturalities’, ‘the life of the imagination’, and their development of a universality ‘re-visioned as rooted in synchronicities that bring into play a range of partial systems within a dynamic of space and time’ (1997, p. 96). It is this particular commitment to revision and crosscultural dialogue that, Harris claims, sets surrealism apart from negritude which reified the colonial hierarchy of self and other. Rather, surrealism takes the Caribbean writer ‘beyond negritude’ towards a creative dialogue with the past: ‘the rubbing together which we may visualize between endemic malaise and surreal vessels of the imagination provides a residue in depth which becomes I think the potential seed and branch and tree of a black creativity beyond negritude to deepen resources of memory and imagination in a plagued humanity’ (p. 97). Harris’s review crucially evidences his familiarity with the 1940s Caribbean surrealist movement headed by René Ménil, Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Césaire, as well as the ‘Caribbean’ writings of Breton, Mabille and Leiris that Richardson documents. While critical of Tropiques’ ‘mimicry of Marxist ideology’ and wary of the ‘hasty dogmatism’ of Bretonian surrealism, Harris celebrates the ‘daring, sincerity and importance of the [surrealists’] programme’ for ‘endangered minorities’ (p. 97). It is, in particular, surrealism’s re-visioning of universality as an unlimited play of ‘partial systems’, addressed, Harris notes, in the writings of Césaire, Breton, Mabille and Leiris, that emerges forcefully in his own writings: anticipating his demand for a creative relationship between contraries – art and science, imagination and reality – as an expression of the fundamental unity of the totality. In this way, Harris engages with surrealism at both artistic and theoretical levels while exploring the application of surrealist values within a postcolonial context. In doing so, Harris may be placed alongside such Caribbean writers as Glissant who contribute to the development of a postcolonialism drawn not only from the surrealists’ anti-imperialist sympathies, but from their recasting of universality as an immanent expression of cross-cultural dialogue. If Lam’s painting The Jungle offers a concise image of immanence, it is in Mabille’s writings that a clear sense of surrealism’s commitment to a reality composed of both conscious and unconscious elements becomes apparent. This immanent, non-hierarchical unity of the whole-world (what Glissant would term tout-monde) emerges in other works such as Mabille’s Mirror of the Marvellous in his presentation of a reality that is at once both the real world and an unknowable creative source. However, in terms of the broader influence of French surrealism on Caribbean writing, the importance attributed to Mabille’s sense of the marvellous by Caribbean



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writers such as Ménil is significant. Marvellous realism remains a dominant genre in postcolonial and Caribbean writing in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Carpentier and Marquez to Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, Patrick Chamoiseau and Robert Antoni, postcolonial authors access magical, marvellous and extraordinary realities to highlight a world that is always much more than this actual one.21 Yet, this does not make the expression of marvellous realism one of a temporary frisson with another reality, to recall Clifford’s critique of exociticism (1981, p. 542). Rather, the marvellous is always contained immanently within this world, which is in turn inseparable from the individuals who populate it: ‘man is merely the world in the sphere of self-consciousness’ (Ménil 1996a, p. 107). It is in this sense that Harris can claim that ‘the concept of “marvellous realism” constitutes for me an alchemical pilgrimage [. . .] a ceaseless adventure within the self and without the self’ (cited in Linguanti 1999, p. 245). Here the surrealist roots of Harrisian marvellous realism are clear not only in his reference to alchemy, which offered Breton a metaphor for the functioning of the imagination, but in the essential sense of immanence evoked by his claim that the ‘ceaseless’ search for what Ménil called the pure marvellous is always both an internal and an external process since they are both (in the Spinozist sense) of the same nature. Harris’s approach to marvellous realism, like that of other Caribbean writers such as Glissant, Melville, Antoni and Chamoiseau, is in line with the surrealist account of the marvellous offered by Ménil and Mabille. In particular, Mabille’s definition of the marvellous as a latent creativity both directly influences Ménil’s glossing of the term in Tropiques and resounds with the contemporary writings of Harris and Glissant and the ‘vast space’ of Lam’s paintings. As Mabille writes: the marvellous is everywhere. In things, it appears as soon as one succeeds in penetrating any object whatever. The most humble of them, just by itself, raises every issue. Its form, which reveals its individual structure, is the result of transformations which have been going on since the world began. And it contains the germs of countless possibilities that will be realized in the future. (1998, p. 14) Corresponding to Carpentier’s claim that ‘everything that eludes established norms is marvellous’ (1995, p. 101), for Mabille the marvellous is both an element in our reality and an otherness that lies outside comprehension, suggested in moments of discovery, dreams, nature and folklore as a sign of the collective unconscious. The marvellous is at the heart of

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Mabille’s surrealist activity, representing access to the unconscious while affirming the fundamental unity of existence, and importantly it sets his approach to the marvellous apart from the specific vision of the Haitian collective consciousness that Jacques Stephen Alexis articulates: ‘what, then, is the Marvellous, except the imagery in which a people wraps its experience, reflects its conceptions of the world?’ (Alexis 1995, p. 196). Alexis’s marvellous realism constitutes a ‘clear consciousness of specific and concrete current problems’ (p. 198), and as a result diverges from the unknowable creativity that Mabille designates the marvellous: a distinction that resonates throughout the later writings of Harris, who emphatically embraces Mabille’s sense of the marvellous as the borderline between reality and dream, consciousness and the unconscious. Ménil perhaps occupies an important middle ground between Alexis and Mabille since his conceptualization of the marvellous maintains, as I have argued, both the specific and singular sense of the term: a lived marvellous. Crucially, while at first glance Ménil appears to place man at the centre of his vision, with the imagination as the creative force that seemingly wills the actualization of the virtual, the underlying principle of immanence in his thought ensures that the imagination is only ever the site where one encounters the marvellous, not the cause of its emergence. As the site of its actualization, man (mind and body) gives shape, form and colour to a particular experience of the marvellous: ‘the very fact of the marvellous appearing is crucial to the being to whom it appears, in other words to whom it is specific and, consequently, to whom only it has a value as a sign’; ‘it is always historically situated’ (Ménil 1996c, p. 94). To look ahead to Hallward’s critique of postcolonialism, Ménil’s marvellous is emphatically both specific to but not specified by the context of its articulation. As Marie-Sophie, the narrator of Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, notes of her Haitian writer-friend Ti-Cirique: He fell in ecstasy before Lewis Carroll who (just like that Don Quixote and that dear Kafka [. . .]) taught us all the extent to which the stretching of the real was pregnant with knowledge [. . .], and how rubbing the real with the magical (as practiced in Haiti since the moon was born) has added to the ways of apprehending human truths. (1998, pp. 324–5) Surrealism’s interrogation of the real via the marvellous is always located within a particular context and as a means of attaining a deeper understanding of human truths. The surrealist techniques that Kundera (1991) finds within Texaco cannot be understood apart from the human struggle



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that Chamoiseau depicts within the specific context of Martinique from plantation society to present day. Furthermore, while surrealism’s marvellous is necessarily experienced as a ‘lived marvellous’, specific to the person and context in which it is actualized, it is the coexisting pure or singular marvellous that ensures that this event is not the privilege of a particular people (Carpentier’s fallacy), but is available to all. This much Chamoiseau suggests by highlighting the parallels between Carroll’s ability to stretch the real in order to expose the magical and Haitian cultural-religious practices such as voodoo, which were of great interest to French surrealist ethnographers.22 Like Melville’s ‘The Parrot and Descartes’ which draws attention to the hermetic tradition of pre-Enlightenment Europe, Texaco exposes a line of continuity in thought and creative practice that links the concerns of Caribbean surrealism to the ideas of French surrealists such as Breton and Mabille: a ‘curious resemblance that tells us of distances we have travelled in one shape or another’ (Harris 2006, p. 25). Although often recognized as a result of the growing interest in literary theory and the continental philosophies of Heidegger and Derrida in the 1980s (Brennan 2002, p. 186), postcolonial studies may be significantly revalued alongside post-continental philosophy: reconceiving postcolonialism’s principles of difference, cross-culturalism and local specificity anew. The close connections between these two fields of contemporary thought are the subject of this book. What this chapter has sought to argue is that prominent aspects of Caribbean surrealist writings and Deleuze’s philosophy, such as their questioning of the presence of the past, creativity, newness, and the essential quality of immanence that underlies their worldview, reveals an important line of resemblance. If the historical evolution of Deleuzian post-continental philosophy can be easily traced to the philosophers about whom he himself wrote – Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza among others – then a similar evolution can be traced in Caribbean literature and thought. While writers like Ménil clearly draw from a wideranging philosophical tradition, the 1940s Caribbean surrealist movement established a direct line of influence and engagement that led from Breton and the lineage of philosophers he highlighted (Spinoza, Kant, Blake, Hegel, Schelling, Proudhon, Marx, Stirner, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Nietzsche) to Tropiques and the editors’ reframing of immanence and élan vital within a Caribbean context. In light of these concrete lines of influence and interaction, the emergence of both postcolonialism and post-continental philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century may be reassessed in recognition of their common commitment to an immanently creative world.

Chapter 2

Writing Back to the Colonial Event: Derek Walcott and Wilson Harris

Within the postcolonial critic’s lexicon, terms such as hybridity, writing back, and creolization have come to be associated with a fundamental ambivalence that lies at the heart of the postcolonial project. Indeed, Homi Bhabha’s characterization of the ‘location’ of the postcolonial moment as a transitory site, ‘neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past’ (1994, p. 1), confirmed radical ambivalence and in-betweenness as the archetypal features of postcolonial resistance: the hybridized subject or creolized text works to undermine colonial authority precisely because it is not reducible to the colonizer’s self-assured world-view. In the same way, where postcolonial authors such as Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, J. M. Coetzee and Aimé Césaire appropriate and rewrite canonical texts, writing back to the imperial canon as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin have argued (2002, p. 96), it is the production of a text that both does and does not resemble the original work that marks its ambivalent status as a hybrid or creolized text. Yet, what has remained understated in contemporary postcolonial criticism is the extent to which both hybridity and creolization do witness the birth of ‘a new horizon’. Rather than locating the revisionary potential of postcolonial aesthetics within an ambivalent hybridity, I contend that it is the overlooked ability to effect the new that distinguishes postcolonial discourse and, crucially, marks its compatibility with the philosophical writings of Deleuze. While my analysis of surrealism in the Caribbean centred on questions of creativity and different/ciation read through a Spinozist conception of immanence, this present chapter follows Deleuze’s elaboration of another philosophical influence, that of Henri Bergson, in his development of a multi-faceted theory of time and the event in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. What was characterized in Chapter One as different/ciation, the process of individuation by which newness enters the world, is reframed in this chapter in terms that interrogate the particular relationship between the colonial past and the



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postcolonial present/future enacted in contemporary Caribbean writing. To this end, I explore the next stage of the Caribbean’s intellectual and literary history through two Caribbean writers who came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and who continue to exert a notable influence on the field of contemporary Anglophone Caribbean writing: Derek Walcott and Wilson Harris.1 At issue in this chapter is not simply the question of whether a text such as Walcott’s Omeros, or any example of postcolonial writing back, is a new work of literature, but rather, at a more fundamental level, a question of the particular relationship between the postcolonial present and the colonial past enacted in writing back. Indeed, this question is evident in Bhabha’s own formulation of the postcolonial moment as neither a ‘new horizon’ nor the abandonment of historical memory. Despite this suggestion, The Location of Culture does not oppose the idea of the postcolonial as the production of the new: Bhabha later defines cultural translation as ‘an encounter with “newness” that is not part of the continuum of past and present’ (1994, p. 7), and argues that the hybrid object be recognized as ‘new, neither one nor the other’ (p. 25). However, it is the concern to define postcolonialism as both the liberation of the subject from the traumatic legacies of colonialism and the care that the past be not forgotten that leads Bhabha ostensibly to reject the horizon of the new. In turn, what is needed to address this concern is an understanding of postcolonialism as a historical relation that gives rise to a newness ‘that is not part of the continuum of past and present’, but which is, nevertheless, derived from a particular (colonial) history. It is this paradoxical relation in which the engagement with history both generates a future with the potential to become something wholly new and revises our understanding of all that led up to it (a new continuum that leads from past to present and into the future), that Deleuze establishes in both his third synthesis of time and, in The Logic of Sense, his concept of the event: articulating a theory of becoming that accounts for the production of the new from a re-dress of the past and, I argue, when applied to writing back, reveals the revisionary force of postcolonial writing. It is this aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy that resonates with Caribbean writers such as Édouard Glissant and Wilson Harris. Notably, both Glissant and Harris envision the postcolonial project as an engagement with the traumatic history of colonialism that, nevertheless, creates a new, unpredictable future: a ‘prophetic vision of the past’ for Glissant (1989b, p. 64), or in Harris’s characteristically opaque prose, ‘continuities running out of the mystery of the past into the unknown future yield proportions of

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originality, proportions of the “genuinely new”’ (1996, p. 6). The particular engagement with history that both Harris and Glissant propose in their writings represents a shift from what Walcott designated a literature of ‘recrimination and despair’ (1998, p. 37) which endlessly repeats the biases of colonialism, towards a revisionary postcolonial literature. Wole Soyinka’s denunciation of the negritude movement as that which trapped itself ‘in what was primarily a defensive role’ (1976, p. 129) and ‘stayed within a pre-set system of Eurocentric intellectual analysis both of man and society and tried to re-define the African and his society in those externalized terms’ (p. 136), highlights the point of contention: countercolonial discourse is wholly specified by the colonial context in which it exists, it adheres to the ‘pre-set system’ in which the black man is cast as the racial other. The postcolonial, on the other hand, while drawn from a particular socio-historic milieu (one marked by the traces of the colonial era), is distinguished by its ability to move beyond the ‘defensive role’ of counter-colonialism. It is a discourse that exceeds the already established, ‘pre-set’ value systems that Europe imposed on its colonial others. In other words, postcoloniality denotes a synthesis of the past that does not repeat predetermined attitudes, but creates something new: an original future not determined at the outset by pre-existing socio-historic subject positions or cultural hierarchies, but, nevertheless, specific to those legacies.

Omeros and the Muse of History The distinction between counter-/colonial opposition and a properly postcolonial aesthetics elaborated above comes to the fore in the uncompromising reaction against the literary canon’s assimilatory and regulatory function within the colonialist state apparatus evident, for example, in the writings of George Lamming or Jamaica Kincaid. As Lamming suggests in The Pleasures of Exile (1960), in the Caribbean ‘education was imported in much the same way that flour and butter are imported from Canada’, and as a result, ‘the examinations, which would determine that Trinidadian’s future in the Civil Service, imposed Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, and Jane Austen and George Eliot and the whole tabernacle of dead names, now come alive again at the world’s greatest summit of literary expression’ (1992, p. 27).2 Here the canon of English literature exerts an assimilatory pressure on the colonial child, one that teaches them to value the work of British writers above that of any local literary production: effectively what Glissant would term a form of diversion that finds the source of (literary)



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culture elsewhere (1989b, pp. 19–26). The end-result of diversion, for Glissant, is the production of either a literature of reverence to the primary (external) source of cultural authority or one of counter-colonial defiance. Lamming’s sense of resentment against ‘the whole tabernacle of dead names’ suggests the latter course, as does Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy (1990), in which the eponymous protagonist reacts angrily to her first encounter with daffodils: I remembered an old poem I had been made to memorize when I was ten years old and a pupil at Queen Victoria Girls’ School [. . .]. I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside false, inside true. (1991, pp. 17–18) For Lucy, Wordsworth’s poetry functions as a signifier of acculturation and, in turn, her determination to erase from her memory ‘line by line, every word of that poem’ (p. 18) represents the explicit rejection of Western hegemony. The division that Lucy feels as a result of her colonial education resonates with Fanonian psychoanalytical theory: ‘The black schoolboy in the Antilles, who in his lessons is forever talking about “our ancestors, the Gauls”, identifies himself with the explorer, the bringer of civilization [. . .] – that is, the young Negro subjectively adopts a white man’s attitude’ (Fanon 1986, p. 147). The psychological trauma wreaked by imperialism, then, is a result of a process of self-identification that, to recall Soyinka, proceeds entirely through externalized terms. While this may go unnoticed in the Caribbean context, when the individual travels to Europe, society’s identification of them as black – the child who points and says ‘Mama, see the Negro’ (p. 112) – precipitates a devaluation of the self and creates an exteriority whereby the individual’s actions are orientated towards the other: ‘for The Other alone can give him worth’ (p. 154). Kincaid’s Lucy travels to the US and not Europe, but she experiences a similar reaction in her outrage against her childhood self who, from this later perspective, participated in the legitimization of European culture by memorizing and repeating Wordsworth’s poem. Lucy’s assertion that ‘outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside false, inside true’, however, presents a problem for a Deleuzian approach to postcolonialism. Spivak’s misreading of Deleuze illustrates something of the issue. While Spivak usefully draws attention to the problems of a postcolonial discourse that speaks for or about the subaltern within a register that risks reinscribing the dominance of hegemonic

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(Western) structures of thought, her assertion that Deleuze works within a Western conceptualization of oppression, offering an essentialized and ‘universal subject of oppression’ (Robinson and Tormey 2010, p. 22) ignores the pre-individual basis of Deleuze’s philosophy of difference and desire. In other words, Spivak’s attempt to locate a ‘subject of power and desire’ in Deleuze (1988, p. 280) fails to recognize that for Deleuze desire is never simply the desire of a particular subject. Rather, as Robinson and Tormey point out, desire is ‘a matter of flows and becomings which traverse the entire social, and indeed material or ecological field’ (2010, p. 22). What Deleuze and Guattari term ‘desiring-production’ reaches far beyond the limits of the sovereign subject and, crucially, while certain majoritarian (not a numerical determination, but signifying a state of standardization, domination or continuity) flows of desire can produce determinate subjects or identities, there is always also, by contrast, a flow of desire characterized as minoritarian (again, not a marginal subjectivity, but a singularity, a process of becoming rather than fixity). In turn, Lucy’s conflict, from a Deleuzian perspective, is not between a true and a false self since the measure of veracity required to judge the truth of one perspective relative to another would implicate a transcendental measure as the basis of Lucy’s sense of self. Rather, at issue is the expression of different lines of becoming specific to but not specified by the context in which they emerge: as a child Lucy conforms to a specified, majoritarian identity as she maintains the colonial hegemony by repeating Wordsworth’s poem; as an adult, the narrative traces her becoming-minoritarian as she rejects the standardized self. As I have argued elsewhere, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, an often-cited example of writing back, offers one example of how a Deleuzian reading of identity as an immanent becoming and not a transcendent fixed form might proceed.3 Throughout the novel the reader witnesses a series of becomings or masks in relation to the character of Antoinette, some of which are validated, some of which are not, and it is in the rejection of certain masks, forcing Antoinette to become-Bertha (a majoritarian ‘becoming’), that the greatest violence lies. It is in this sense that Antoinette’s fate emerges not as a violence against an original identity, but as an original construction, an expression of becomings and difference. Where Kincaid’s Lucy reacts angrily against her adolescent complicity with majoritarian codes, Rhys’s novel highlights the persistent sense of possibility within every becoming. Therefore, even while Antoinette becomes like the canonical and majoritarian Bertha, Wide Sargasso Sea draws attention to the myriad ways in which she could possibly become something else and in doing so hints at



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the possibility of a postcolonial subjectivity freed from the predetermined framework that posits self against other, colonizer against colonized.4 This sense of potentiality and becoming is crucial for understanding the revisionary potential of postcolonial literatures. While drawing attention to the problems of colonial mimicry, Kincaid’s protagonist, nevertheless, falls into the defensive role that Soyinka associates with negritude. In this sense, Walcott’s dismissal of the African revivalists who produce a ‘literature of recrimination and despair’ (1998, p. 37) applies equally to Kincaid’s protagonist, as both articulate a counter-colonial stance that preserves (albeit in a reverse configuration) the conflictual structure of imperialism. While Lamming laments the Caribbean’s cultural dependency on the former imperial motherland, and Kincaid’s Lucy rejects outright the imposed supremacy of English literature, Walcott takes a very different approach that brings us closer to the understanding of postcoloniality sketched out above. Indeed, part of his aim in the essay from which the previous quotation was taken, ‘The Muse of History’, is to deconstruct both positions (mimicry and rejection). The latter is subject to forceful critique on Walcott’s part, associating it as he does with negritude and the oppositional politics of the 1960s and 70s Black Power movement.5 The ‘truly tough aesthetic of the New World’ must reject history, refuse ‘to recognize it as a creative or culpable force’ (p. 37). This statement forms part of Walcott’s vision of the New World poet as an Adamic figure liberated from the weight of the past and free to create anew. From a philosophical position, however, it appears to offer a strongly existentialist vision of the poet, one fundamentally opposed to the Bergsonian reading of the past that Deleuze draws on. As Christian Kerslake argues with respect to the post-war turn to existentialism, Bergson’s sense of the present as a moment pregnant with the whole, accumulated past was deeply uncomfortable for modernist thinkers (Kerslake 2007, p. 6), and, in turn, Walcott’s New World Adam would seem to support the existentialist’s desire to rupture the relationship between past and present. However, Walcott’s approach to the past is more nuanced than an outright rejection of its legacies. Adam, he reminds us, contains original sin and his refusal to view history as a creative force does not rule out the past as a source of poetic inspiration (cf Handley 2005). In his poetry, from Another Life (1973) to White Egrets (2010), the present is a moment that bears witness to the trace presence of the past, whether that be in his ‘Sicilian Suite’, a poem that reflects on the historical parallels of colonization and empire in both his St Lucia and the Italian birthplace of its patron saint – ‘the name Ortigia that rings like crystal/in its fragile balance [. . .] The sea was the same/except for its

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history’ (Walcott 2010, p. 17) – or in Another Life as the poet describes the historical parallels between classical figures and the inhabitants of Castries (Walcott 2009, pp. 16–18). If Kincaid’s protagonist rejects her colonial education outright, Walcott remains open to the creative potential of the past as it is carried forth in each present moment. More than this, however, he specifically draws attention to literature as both the past’s material presence and its potential to be transformed. Lucy’s specific rejection of literary legacies signalled by her determination to erase from her memory ‘line by line, every word of that poem’ (Kincaid 1991, p. 18), is, for Walcott, a sign of a reactionary literature that absolutely refuses a creative relation with the past and, therefore, offers no way forward. As he argues in ‘The Muse of History’: I knew, from childhood, that I wanted to become a poet, and like any colonial child I was taught English literature as my natural inheritance. Forget the snow and the daffodils. They were real, more real than the heat and the oleander, perhaps, because they lived on the page, in imagination, and therefore in memory. There is a memory of imagination in literature which has nothing to do with actual experience, which is, in fact, another life, and that experience of the imagination will continue to make actual the quest of a medieval knight or the bulk of a white whale, because of the power of a shared imagination. (1998, p. 62, emphasis added) Here Walcott’s sense of the imagination as the ground of actualization is not articulated as a philosophical argument, as it is in the work of René Ménil for example, but important continuities between their respective positions are clear. The phrase ‘another life’ takes on additional significance as Walcott fundamentally rejects the idea that a colonial education in English literature constituted an epistemic violence, since he understands literature to be much more than a mere reflection of the immediate world in which one lives. Memory and imagination are privileged over experience and history as creative forces (recalling Ménil’s ‘land of the marvellous’ as both imagination and pure duration) and as a result Walcott envisions an approach to literature closer to the surrealists’ sense of the marvellous and creative actualization than Lamming’s or Kincaid’s view of the canon as a source of alienation. By arguing that literature constitutes ‘another life’, Walcott highlights the need for a new model of writing back grounded not on the principles of mimicry and ambivalence, which imply the secondary nature of



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Caribbean writers’ engagement with the canon, but, rather, as in Wide Sargasso Sea, on the novel creation of different lines of actualization or becoming in the Deleuzian sense. Walcott’s Omeros, for example, evokes the Greek pronunciation of Homer in its title and throughout the text. It repeats the word, however, in such a way as to evoke the Caribbean landscape: ‘and O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was/both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,/os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes’ (Walcott 1990, p. 14). Here ‘Omeros’ is ‘made actual’ in a way that derives its particular form from the poet’s landscape. In other words, what Walcott repeats is not identity or the same (Greek Homer), but difference (Caribbean Omeros, a percept of the shoreline, Deleuze might say), and, accordingly, in writing back to the historical canon of Western literature, Walcott captures a sense of literature as becoming not as representation. This is where Deleuzian thought becomes productive for conceptualizing postcolonial writing back, providing a framework for understanding the potential of the imagination through the concepts of minor literature, becoming and the new. In short, because Walcott’s definition of the imagination envisions a process of actualization and in his work he demonstrates the creative potential of this process as a becoming, his constitutes a minor literature. Kincaid’s Lucy may seek to reject her colonialist (majoritarian) identity as a colonial subject, however one becomes postcolonial or minor not by simply rejecting the standardized expression of the self in favour of an oppositional and, therefore, equally majoritarian version (specified by), but by repeating the lines of actualization that constitute it as a becoming that challenges the status quo (specific to). This is what Walcott achieves in Omeros by repeating not the actual text of The Iliad, say (or by naming ‘Homer’), but the becomings that constitute it. Commenting on the writing of Omeros, Walcott specifically rejects the commonly held notion that his poem is a rewriting or transposition of The Odyssey and The Iliad, for to do so implies that ‘the Caribbean is secondary to the Aegean’ (Walcott 1997c, p. 232).6 Rather, he argues, Omeros is an attempt to ‘register exact parallels, proportionally speaking, between the Caribbean experience and that of Homer’s Greece’ (p. 230). As above, here the ‘memory of imagination’, expressed in literature and ‘which has nothing to do with actual experience’ (1998, p. 62), is not bound to an oppositional framework that pits Walcott’s Caribbean against Homer’s ‘original’ Aegean. The ‘exact parallels’ and repetitions are rather, as for Deleuze, better understood apart from the representational logic that either reduces difference to identity (the same) or ‘which make[s] them pass through the negative’ (Deleuze 2004b, p. xviii). The

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drive behind Difference and Repetition is, Deleuze claims, the search for ‘a concept of difference without negation’ (p. xviii). Such a concept for us, following Simone Bignall’s lead, offers an understanding of difference and different/ciation without reinscribing an imperialist framework ‘aimed at the management of difference’ (Bignall 2010, p. 18) and orientated by an essential negativity. Difference, for Deleuze, must not be reduced to a difference between two opposed objects, since the very act of comparison brings both terms into a representationalist framework and reduces them to identity, to the same. In Walcott’s case, the Caribbean is secondary to the Aegean only when viewed from the perspective of identity/History (the Deleuzian time of Chronos) not difference/becoming (Aion).7 In the same way, while characters such as Major Plunkett and the poet ‘register exact parallels’ and ‘Homeric repetition’ (Walcott 1990, p. 96) between the St Lucian islanders and the cast of The Odyssey and The Iliad, the ultimate task undertaken by the poem is one that seeks to inspire moments of difference and creation from the trace presences of the past: ‘the mirror of History/has melted and beneath it, a patient hybrid organism/grows in his cruciform shadow’ (p. 297). Or, as Deleuze argues, ‘[r]epetition is never a historical fact, but rather the historical condition under which something new is effectively produced’ (2004b, p. 113). ‘All that Greek manure under the green bananas’ (Walcott 1990, p. 271), then, denotes for Walcott a past that is repeated as a becoming, an act of creation in which ‘something new is effectively produced’. This ‘something new’ is for Walcott, as it is (as we shall see in Chapter Three) for Glissant, the creation of a properly postcolonial Caribbean people undetermined by the colonial past (not specified by) and grounded in their own landscape, not an idealized elsewhere (specific to). Omeros entices the poet towards a creative becoming and in doing so he asks not only ‘when would I not hear the Trojan War/in two fishermen cursing in Ma Kilman’s shop?’ but moreover, ‘when would I enter that light beyond metaphor?’ (p. 271). In other words, the recasting of historical repetition as the eternal return of difference is at the same time a move beyond the representationalist framework – or ‘imperialism’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a, p. 234) – of the signifier that threatens to reduce difference to identity. Of course, such a move is never absolute: the poem remains a work of literature, constructed in language and through metaphor. However, as the poet tells us, ‘Like Philoctete’s wound, this language carries its cure’ (Walcott 1990, p. 323), and like Deleuze, Walcott is drawn to those aspects of language and literature ‘that resists coding: flows, revolutionary active lines of flight, lines of absolute decoding rather



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than any intellectual culture’ (Deleuze 1995, p. 22). Such minoritarian lines of flight or becomings, I shall argue in more detail in Chapter Four, are precisely the cure that Walcott seeks for a Caribbean culture overdetermined by colonial legacies and neo-colonial dependency. However, this turn towards becoming and that which escapes standardization not only signals a re-evaluation of the role of history in shaping the contemporary Caribbean, but, recalls the surrealists’ experiments with different/ciation. Indeed, while surrealism, as I argued in Chapter One, approached creation as actualization, it is in the later work of writers such as Walcott, Édouard Glissant and Wilson Harris that this creative different/ciation is expressly linked to a philosophy of time in which the past itself becomes the creative source of a radically new future. These examples of writing back foreground the core argument of this chapter by demonstrating the particular importance of theories of newness and becoming to an understanding of how postcolonial writers respond to the historical legacies (literary or otherwise) of colonization. Walcott’s work in particular suggests something of the special role that literature plays in the process of different/ciation: providing the framework within which actualization may proceed. I will return to this point later in this chapter, specifically in reference to the writings of Wilson Harris, to argue that both Harris and Walcott provide examples of what Deleuze suggests is literature’s primary function: to embody the event. Throughout, however, it is my concern to think through the ways in which Caribbean writers draw on the colonial past in the creation of a new, no longer oppositional, postcolonial identity. Walcott pre-empts this debate by situating the drive towards newness and originality at the forefront of a New World aesthetics; however, it is the concern of this chapter to bring to the fore the theoretical implications of Walcott’s definition of literature and the imagination as a creative actualization, and in doing so to underscore the role that Deleuze’s philosophy of time can play in enabling us to better understand postcolonial newness and writing back.

Prophetic Visions of the (Virtual) Past The distinction that I am arguing for between a historical relation that repeats already-established biases and fixed subject-positions and a postcolonial re-dress of history that engenders the absolutely new is clarified by Deleuze’s account of the three syntheses of time. As Deleuze presents it in Difference and Repetition, the first synthesis of time is a theoretical paradigm

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that accounts for the continuation of the same and the general. Crucially in terms of the particular relationship to the canon that is enacted in writing back, or what Edward Said designates ‘contrapuntal’ reading (1993, p. 59), for Deleuze the first synthesis is the creation of expectancy through repetition, exposing the way in which, in the present, we come to anticipate future events because of their past occurrence. For example, the repetition in the series AB, AB, AB, A . . ., Deleuze argues, ‘changes nothing in the object or state of affairs AB. On the other hand, a change is produced in the mind which contemplates: a difference, something new in the mind. Whenever A appears, I expect the appearance of B’ (2004b, p. 90). In this ‘contraction’ of specific instances of ‘A’ and ‘B’ into ‘AB’, the first synthesis of time produces a movement from the specific to the general (p. 91). Furthermore, the effect of this contraction is to create a sense of expectancy: in this case, the recurring experience of A followed by B is contracted in the present into the projected expectancy that AB will recur in the future. It is this sense of expectancy that underlies postcolonial authors’ problematic relationship with the canon and historical legacies. Following Ashcroft et al, the relationship envisioned here is not between individual authors or works since the ‘canon is not a body of texts per se, but rather a set of reading practices (the enactment of innumerable individual and community assumptions, for example about genre, about literature, and even about writing)’ (2002, p. 186). In writing back, postcolonial authors seek to expose not only specific prejudices, expressed in particular cases, but the continuing influence of these views. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, for example, the reader encounters particular references to the colonies and racial others, expressed in a particular way. One might then read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and register a repetition in the way in which both authors depict the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, a repetition that is echoed as one then reads Austen, Dickens and so forth. It is the repetition of these specific ways of characterizing the relationship between centre and periphery that is contracted into what might be termed, in general, as a colonial attitude. Importantly, as Deleuze’s account of the first synthesis emphasizes, it is not a change in the texts themselves or in that which is repeated, but it is a change in the mind of the reader who registers the repetition. This is why the canon evokes reading practices: the repetition of themes, attitudes or genres in specific texts is synthesized in the mind to create a general expectancy, a general set of reading practices that will, accordingly, shape future reading experiences. As the process which engenders this expectancy, the first synthesis



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is that which makes of the canon a set of reading practices that condition one’s response to a text. It is, in particular, the issue of canonical expectancy, created by the texts of the past in the mind of the reader and projected into the future as a set of regulatory reading practices, that underlies the postcolonial tradition of writing back. In enacting a contrapuntal rewriting, authors expose the ideological biases that lie behind certain generalized expectations: highlighting the syntheses that occurred in order to produce particular stereotypes or reading practices, while at the same time revealing what was excluded by such generalizations. In other words, by returning the general to the specific. Writing back, therefore, works by confronting expectancy, and what we might term a contrapuntal rereading/rewriting, in line with Deleuze’s first synthesis of time, directs its attention to the contraction of the specific past into a generalized framework for determining the future. In turn, this is exemplary of the distinction between counter-colonial discourse and the postcolonial previously delineated: by writing against the expectancy created by the first synthesis of time, Caribbean writers do not envision the continuation of a fixed relationship between centre and periphery, but engender an unpredictable future specific to but not limited by the contracted past. In other words, postcolonial texts must reject the determination of the Deleuzian first synthesis as a contraction of the past that conditions the generalized colonial relationship and propose a new continuum. This latter process Deleuze calls the third synthesis of time: a different/ciation of the past as a virtual presence in the production of an unpredictable future. Different/ciation provides a model by which newness enters the world as a repeated becoming. Crucially, it is this movement from virtual to actual that Bergson captures in his notion of élan vital, understood as ‘a virtuality in the process of being actualized’ (Deleuze 1991, p. 94). With this concept, a full sense of the relation between actual and virtual comes into focus and, moreover, offers a philosophical paradigm for change and novelty in time. Since each actualization of the virtual designates the emergence of the new, both élan vital and different/ciation describe the creative evolution of the immanent totality: ‘evolution takes place from the virtual to actuals. Evolution is actualization, actualization is creation’ (p. 98). However, more than this, for Deleuze, Bergson’s sense of the virtual as a ‘gigantic memory’ (p. 100) ensures that this creative process is also a temporal evolution. The past for both Deleuze and Bergson is a virtual field available for different/ciation within the present as recollection. At issue here is not history since the past as virtual has ‘no psychological existence’

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(p. 55), it is ‘not the particular past of a particular present but [. . .] is like an ontological element, a past that is eternal and for all time, the condition of the “passage” of every particular present. It is the past in general that makes possible all pasts’ (pp. 56–7). By constituting that which enables each present to pass and ‘preserve itself in itself’ (p. 58) the pure or general past (the second synthesis of time) represents what James Williams describes as a virtual ‘archive’ (2003, p. 93) in which ‘all events, including those that have sunk without trace, are stored and remembered as their passing away, independent of human activity and the limitations of physical records’ (p. 94).8 Clearly, the premise of a pure past independent of physical records or active recollection is of great significance to Caribbean writers and theorists faced with a historical inheritance of ‘amnesia’ (Walcott 1998, pp. 39–40). As Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant write in their manifesto of créolité, ‘our history (or our histories) is not totally accessible to historians. Their methodology restricts them to the sole colonial chronicle. Our chronicle is behind the dates, behind the known’ (1993, p. 99). Precisely by accessing that which lies ‘behind the known’, a postcolonial synthesis of the past draws from the Bergsonian pure or virtual past. Further, what emerges from this process as a different/ciation of the virtual past is new, a wholly novel postcolonial ‘chronicle’. Deleuze’s account of the movement between the actual and the virtual as a temporal, creative evolution in Bergsonism echoes his elaboration of the three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition. While the past as virtual implies that any different/ciation of the past will result in the production of the new, the first synthesis gives consistency to the present by relating it to a distinct series (AB, AB . . .) of the pure past and then subjecting it to the processes of contraction and generalization. In this way, the newness that is created via different/ciation is assimilated by habit and generalized as anticipated behaviour towards the future. The first synthesis alone cannot account for the radical sense of the future as an infinite potentiality that is evident in the writings of Harris and Glissant. As a result, the demand to account for a future with the ability to become-new leads us beyond the first and second syntheses of time ‘in the direction of a third’ (Deleuze 2004b, p. 111). With the third synthesis of time Deleuze explores how newness enters the world. Where the first synthesis demonstrates the way in which actual things gain consistency in the present and the second synthesis details a pure past into which each present falls, the third synthesis accounts for the prevailing sense that the future maintains the potential to become something wholly new.9 Further, as a different/ciation of the pure or virtual past, Deleuze’s third synthesis may be used to elaborate Said’s claim



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that contrapuntal reading uncovers that which was excluded from the colonial text. In other words, when Said argues that we should re-examine Jane Eyre to discover the latent prejudices within the text, he is asking us to different/ciate Brontë’s work, exposing the unspoken assumptions and unacknowledged exploitations that are taken for granted within the economy of the nineteenth-century novel. In turn, what this contrapuntal reading engenders, according to the Deleuzian model, is new. By actualizing the virtual (here the virtual ‘side’ of the canonical text), the repetition on which the third synthesis is based is not, as in the first, grounded on recurring instances of the contracted past, but on the repetition of the virtual past’s becoming-actual, of different/ciation as the production of the new (what Deleuze designates the eternal return of difference-in-itself). In turn, writing back produces an original work of literature not because it repeats the actual text or canon that has generated certain generalized expectations and reading practices, but because in actualizing the virtual aspect of the canon it repeats only the processes of different/ciation necessarily as a becoming-new.

Wilson Harris: The Re-Visionary Imagination It is in the work of the Guyanese writer and philosopher Wilson Harris that the full, vitalist sense of creative evolution within Deleuze’s philosophy of time finds its most consistent Caribbean counterpart.10 In his work of literary criticism The Womb of Space, for example, Harris analyses Rhys’s rewriting of Jane Eyre in order to expose the novelist’s attempt to re-dress absolutes (such as the colonizer and colonized) and ‘the paradox of resources of variables of the imagination through which the past speaks to the present and to the future [. . .], its inner capacity for re-dressed bodies and imageries’ (1983, p. 61). What Harris envisions, in other words, is a return to the memory or mythology of past conflicts in order to uncover unconscious (virtual) dimensions which may be synthesized in such a way as to allow the past to ‘speak’ to the present and future in a new way. Indeed, Deleuze envisions this too: the third synthesis, he tells us, marks a break or ‘caesura’ in the contemporary ordering of time and witnesses the birth of a new order of ‘the before and the after’ (2004b, p. 112). It is in this sense that the third synthesis is never a rejection of the past and, although it incites a future that is radically different from what has come before, it is a future that remains linked to the past; generating to evoke Bhabha, a new continuum that leads from past to present and future.

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The ‘intuitive clue[s]’ that one may uncover in mythologies and works of literature inspire the creative actualization of the past and, as for Walcott and the surrealists, this is one of the privileged roles of the imagination for Harris – indeed, he refers to his work as a whole as a ‘philosophy of the Imagination’ (1999, p. 231). Or, as he spells out, ‘the visible text of the play [in this case Antigone] runs in concert with an invisible text that secretes a corridor into the future, a future where the burden of classical blindness – as in the instance of Sophocles’s Antigone – needs to be taken up and treated differently’ (p. 249). The text carries forth a virtual excess that may be actualized in a future moment. For Harris, this process of actualization is often characterized in terms of Jungian archetypes of the collective unconscious, since not only are archetypes presented by Jung as ‘forms without content’ (Jung 1969, p. 48; cf Mackey 1993, p. 176) and therefore beyond specifying representation – ‘those psychic contents which have not yet been submitted to conscious elaboration’ (p. 5) – but the process by which the archetype is actualized denotes a creative transformation. As Jung argues, ‘[t]he archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear’ (p. 5). In other words, as the archetype moves from the unconscious into consciousness, its content is altered in relation to the specific context in which it is realized. In this way, Harris pursues a reading of Jung very different from that offered by Wole Soyinka, for example. Drawing a distinction between African mythical thinking and Jung’s ontology, Soyinka writes that the inner world is not static, but is ‘constantly enriched by the moral and historic experience of man. Jung, by contrast declares that “the archetype does not proceed from physical facts”’ (Soyinka 1976, p. 35). Soyinka’s desire to read the archetype as ‘autogenous’ (p. 35), then, would appear to foreshadow the Hallwardian critique of Deleuze and postcoloniality explored in this study: the self-positing archetype as virtual content bears no relation to the actual world of conflict and action. However, just because the archetype is not a priori determined by actual conditions does not mean that it cannot be actualized in context-specific ways, taking its ‘colour’ from the individual circumstances in which it emerges. In this sense, ‘“intuition” is not a turning away from concrete situations. It is, in fact, a revelation of other capacities at the heart of a concentration within and upon given situations’ (Harris 1999, p. 124): a ‘revelation’ that is apparent in what Harris promotes as the capacity of the ‘visible’ or actual archetype to retain an ‘invisible’, virtual side and, as such, secrete ‘a corridor into the future’



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(p. 249). In turn, writing back can be seen to draw on the invisible side of the visible text, contrapuntally actualizing that which could not have been recognized in a previous era. Thus Wide Sargasso Sea, for Harris, can draw attention to certain historical biases, such as the association of creole identity with madness, which remained latent in Jane Eyre. In doing so, Rhys does not repeat Brontë’s actual text, but rather the virtual, ‘invisible’ one: tracing a line of becoming, such as Antoinette’s becoming-Bertha, that repeats her difference. In this there is much shared ground between Harris and Deleuze. Where they ostensibly disagree is in Harris’s claim that Rhys’s re-dress of historical antagonisms in Wide Sargasso Sea works through the identification of what he calls a ‘core of likeness’ (1983, p. 56). Harris finds in Rhys’s ‘re-dress of Charlotte Brontë’s polarizations’ a trajectory in which ‘a crosscultural web and likeness are revealed [. . .] through points that unravel apparently incompatible appearances’ (p. 56). It is in the exposure of ‘likeness[es]’ in apparent polarizations that Harris locates the potential for historical re-dress, a move that seems to set him in opposition to Deleuze’s celebration of difference and becoming. However, Harris’s evocation of likeness is not to be misunderstood as signifying the same: the same is the foundation of the ‘narrow basis of realism [. . . which] tends inevitably to polarize cultures or to reinforce eclipses of otherness within legacies of conquest that rule the world’ (p. 55). Realism is a reflection of the same and, accordingly, creates the polarizations that Harris (and postcolonialism) seeks to overcome. Likeness, therefore, is not equivalent to the same. As Harris argues: the politics of culture assume that like to like signifies a monolithic cradle or monolithic origin. Whereas in creative subtlety or re-dress [. . .] monoliths are extremes/extremities that become fissures of emotion in claustrophobic and historical or cultural space, when imbued with asymmetric spirit or intangible, untameable life. Those fissures are parallels, extensions [. . .] in and into bodies of experience whose mental point or core of likeness turns into the spark or passion of science and art. (p. 56) What Harris refers to as a ‘core of likeness’ is not the identification of the same, but what he senses in the cross-cultural web: a single, collective unconscious that, to recall his protagonist in The Ghost of Memory, ‘tells us of distances we have travelled in one shape or another to reach where we are’ (2006, p. 25). It is a universal cross-cultural web that links all peoples and

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ties all cultures to a common creative ‘spark’: the virtual ‘side’ of reality that gives all the ability to become in unforeseen ways. Put another way, what Harris finds revolutionary is the virtual presence of the past as an undifferentiated (virtual) whole and as that which gives all the ability to become in unforeseen ways. Harris’s presentation of the past as a virtual archive into which each present passes is fundamentally aligned with the Deleuzian/Bergsonian sense of creative evolution and memory. Indeed, although Jung is his major point of reference, Harris at points moves closer to the Bergsonian model by suggesting that his evocation of archetypes and the collective unconscious must be understood less in the Jungian sense as a psychic function and more as an individual’s ‘peculiar dialogue with the past’, ‘the collective or universal unconscious extending into voices that echo within the roots of nature as from the ancestral dead’ (Harris 1999, p. 201). In other words, the valued attributes of archetypes, their virtuality, their ability to becomenew, are not a feature of their psychic function, but are characteristic of their status as virtual content of the pure past. The invisible text that Harris associates with the archetype, therefore, is nothing other than the virtual past awaiting different/ciation in the creation of a new future/present. In turn, although Harris identifies a ‘core of likeness’ at the heart of historical re-dress, it is fundamentally an issue of what Deleuze terms difference: a repetition of the virtual past’s becoming-actual as that which engenders a new ordering of history. In particular, Harris anticipates a Deleuzian concept of difference-in-itself rather than the Hegelian dialectic by arguing for the recognition of ‘ceaseless parallel animations or subtle likeness through contrasting densities or opposite and varied appearances’ (1983, p. 56). Accordingly, what is taken for granted as a difference achieved through opposition is, in fact, a difference of degrees of becoming, of ‘densities’ or ‘appearances’. That Harris employs the term ‘likeness’ rather than Deleuzian differencein-itself is a sign of the emphasis that Harris places on the immanent creativity of the virtual as that from which differences are actualized or become actual. To the extent that all identities are particular configurations or expressions of different/ciated becomings emerging from the infinite virtual side of a single, immanent reality, all apparent adversaries are to some degree ‘like’ one another in that they all actualize the virtual, albeit in different ways. Thus, Harris notes, despite their polarization in Jane Eyre, ‘Bertha and Rochester possess in themselves, within the genius of Charlotte Brontë, the seeds of such re-dress’ (p. 61). Brontë’s characters always had the potential to overcome historical antagonisms, the ability to



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become in unforeseen ways. If the ‘seminal force of the fiction as a whole’ (p. 61) – Brontë’s commitment to the structuring influence of tradition and ideology – meant that this potential remained virtual in Jane Eyre, in Rhys’s novel the repetition of becoming rather than the actual aspects of Brontë’s text, realizes the potential for re-dress in the production of a new work of (minor) literature. Harris’s own fictional and theoretical writings are strongly orientated by his philosophy of the imagination which incorporates both a vitalistic sense of creation as actualization and an understanding of the past as a productive force. Like Walcott and, as we shall see in Chapter Three, Glissant, Harris remains suspicious of a linear ordering of the past (the first synthesis of time), which may be associated with conquest (Harris 1981, p. 69; cf Glissant 1989b, p. 73) and instead searches for a ‘timeless’ point which ‘break[s] fixed linear ruling patterns into non-linear simultaneous movement of such patterns forwards and backwards [. . . which] helps the past to be re-creatively present’ (Harris 2008, p. 26). This distinction between a linear and ‘timeless’ sense of time, I suggest, foregrounds a further dualism in Deleuzian thought: Aion and Chronos.

The Time of the Event The pairing of the two irreducible temporalities Aion and Chronos, particularly in The Logic of Sense, is closely linked to Deleuze’s theorization of ‘the event’: ‘Chronos is the present which alone exists. It makes of the past and future its two oriented directions, so that one goes always from the past to the future [. . .]. Aion is the past-future’ (Deleuze 2004c, p. 89), ‘the becoming which divides itself infinitely in past and future and always eludes the present’ (p. 8). The familiar echo of the virtual/actual dualism resonates in the above, and, as Jack Reynolds observes, although Aion and Chronos are not strictly synonymous with the virtual and the actual (since the concepts specifically address the question of temporality), they nevertheless point towards a common ‘function that maps on to the overarching distinction between virtual and actual [. . .] that which is creative, productive and transformative [. . . versus] that which is created, produced and of the realm of identities, sameness, and all that currently is’ (2007, p. 146).11 What Deleuze refers to as the event operates within both temporalities: as both a historical event occurring within a chronological sequence of time and as a virtual or pure event.12 It is therefore both that which is actualized within a state of affairs and a virtual excess which persists. Or, as Deleuze

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and Guattari write in What is Philosophy?: ‘What History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self-positing as concept, escapes History’ (1994, p. 110). Although Harris specifically draws on the Jungian concepts of the archetype and collective unconscious in order to explain his sense of historical narrative as a visible text ‘in concert with an invisible text that secretes a corridor into the future’ (1999, p. 249), his theorization of the past (and the past as it is preserved in literature) draws close to that of the Deleuzian event. Indeed, while the Jungian concepts are, Harris acknowledges, primarily intended to address the human psyche (p. 201), here in Deleuze we find a concept specifically dealing in time, and, as a result, I would argue, better placed to fully account for Harris’s intuitive clues (p. 249), asymmetric futures (p. 106), simultaneities that break ‘a purely linear progression [. . .] between the past and the present’ (p. 206), timelessness (2008, p. 26), as well as his claim that ‘[o]nly a dialogue with the past can produce originality’ (cited in Peterson and Rutherford 1995, p. 185, emphasis added). In The Logic of Sense the paradoxical simultaneity, in Lewis Carroll’s work, of Alice’s becoming ‘larger than she was’ and, at the same time, ‘smaller than she is now’ (Deleuze 2004c, p. 3) reveals the insufficiency of historical time (Chronos) alone: Certainly, she is not bigger and smaller at the same time. She is larger now; she was smaller before. But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than one was and smaller than one becomes. This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. (p. 3)13 Deleuze draws on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in order to demonstrate the impossibility of locating the event of Alice’s becoming larger/smaller. If we could isolate a moment on the sliding scale of Alice’s progressive becoming-larger, we could say that at one point she is larger than she was when compared to a previous stage and yet smaller than she will become when compared to a projected future moment. But because these two points of comparison, past and future, are infinitely divisible, it becomes impossible to capture the present moment where the two series meet, to pause the sliding scale of Alice’s becoming. Paul Patton’s Deleuzian Concepts (2010) not only offers a clear account of the complex nature of the Deleuzian event, but also crucially demonstrates



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the way in which it can influence how we understand an event such as colonization.14 What Alice’s becoming demonstrates is both the elusive nature of the event in the present and its dependency on a situated act of interpretation. As Patton notes, ‘[c]onsidered from the point of view of her smaller self engaged in growing, Alice becomes larger. Considered from the point of view of her larger self, Alice continues to become smaller than she is, although progressively less so’: in other words, Alice’s point of view depends upon ‘the temporal direction from which [she] view[s] the becoming’ (Patton 2010, p.  104). This paradox, Patton continues, can explain differential perspectives on oppression and colonization, for example (p.  105). Thus, in Chinua Achebe’s seminal Things Fall Apart (1958), from the point of view of the District Commissioner the tribal village of Umuofia passes from a state of lawlessness into one governed by the rule of English law. When considered from Okonkwo’s perspective, however, the functioning laws of the tribe based on merit and title give way to what he sees as a lawless state insofar as the rules of the colonial government do not conform to his idea of justice and order. The event of colonization, then, cannot be reduced to a single narrative, but nor can it be pinpointed as a single historical moment. Indeed, as Patton asks, when could we say that colonization occurred: in Cook’s voyages, in Columbus’s discovery of the Americas? In such a moment ‘it is too soon to say that colonization has taken place. At any moment thereafter it can be said that colonization has already taken place’ (Patton 2010, p. 107). Taken together, both features of the event of colonization suggest a virtual excess that remains unactualized. Different readings or explanations of the event may be articulated, but no single perspective can capture it entirely. Similarly, one can say that something actually happened within a certain time frame (within the historical time of actual events, Chronos), but it remains difficult to absolutely isolate that moment as part of that event belongs to the time of Aion: an event is always ‘something that has just happened and something that is going to happen, always flying in both directions at once’ (Deleuze 2004c, p. 74). Importantly, then, events are signs that lead us to ask not only ‘What has happened?’, but also ‘What is going to happen?’ (Patton 2010, p. 91). This two-directional question enables us to elaborate further what Glissant terms a ‘prophetic vision of the past’ (1989b, p. 64). As discussed previously, both Harris and Glissant share a sense of the past as a potential source of a future with the capacity to become-new. More specifically then, it is the event that captures this dual sense of being addressed both to the past and the future. To the extent that one explores the question ‘What has happened?’, grasping the effect of

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the event ‘in states of affairs or in lived experience’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 110), one is in the position of the historian and the time of Chronos. To the extent that one moves ‘back up in the opposite direction, from states of affairs to the virtual’ (p. 156), then one is properly speaking in the position of the philosopher (cf Patton 2010, p. 95). The latter is both ‘prophetic’ (future orientated) and productive of the genuinely new because, as with any act of counter-actualization, the line [back to the virtual] is not the same because it is not the same virtual [. . .]. The virtual is no longer the chaotic virtual but rather virtuality that has become consistent, that has become an entity formed on a plane of immanence that sections chaos. This is what we call the Event, or the part that eludes its own actualization in everything that happens. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 156) The pure or virtual event persists on the plane of consistency and is created through a process of differentiation; the actual event occurs on the plane of organization, and is differenciated. ‘The event’, then, ‘is not the state of affairs. It is actualized in a state of affairs, in a body, in a lived, but it has a shadowy and secret part that is continually subtracted from or added to its actualization’ (p. 156). It is the shadowy, virtual aspect of the event that means that every actual, historical event retains the potential to become in unforeseeable ways. Patton provides a salient example of this within the context of a 1992 ruling by the Australian High Court in the case of Mabo versus Queensland, which led to legal recognition of native title: A decision by the High Court reactivated an event that had never entirely passed away but continued to hover over the history of relations between indigenous and nonindigenous Australians [. . .]. This historical moment in which this decision took place involved a return to earlier events of colonization, collapsing elements of the colonial past into the present and making these parts of the ongoing elaboration of the future. At such moments, we glimpse the possibility of an altogether different relationship between indigenous and settler communities [. . .]. In Deleuzian terms, the philosophical challenge is to extract a new concept from the colonial encounter and its aftermath, to counter-actualize the event in a manner that might open up the possibility of a genuinely postcolonial society. (2010, p. 111)



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In this example, the productive capacity of the event turns not merely upon a counter-actualization, returning to the plane of composition, but also on the subsequent differenciation as the eternal return of difference. In the former process we are in the moment of the second synthesis of time, delineating, as Ronald Bogue observes, ‘virtual memories from their actual representations and thereby extract[ing] the aspects of the past that have not been actualised’ (2010, pp. 45–6). However, in the second stage, differenciation, we find the Deleuzian third synthesis of time: the eruption of the new. Deleuze’s historical method, then, is properly speaking a philosophical one since his aim is ‘not to provide historical explanations, genealogical or otherwise, or even to characterize particular historical events but rather to delineate the internal dynamisms of events and the manner in which these unfold in reality’ (Patton 2010, p. 99). By counter-/actualizing events, a new, prophetic vision of the past represents the potential for a ‘genuinely postcolonial society’ to emerge from the persistent, virtual event of colonization. Writing back as a properly postcolonial genre, then, offers one way of conceiving the revisionary potential of the event. Returning to the historical moment of the source text, writers such as Rhys and Walcott identify an event that has failed to wholly pass away, and they create in their work a repetition not of the actual historical moment itself but the processes of becoming that constituted it: repeating the event’s actualization as the return of difference. The challenge for the postcolonial writer, therefore, is not to find a way to perpetually preserve (actual) memories of the colonial past, but as Walcott, Harris and Glissant observe, to discover a way to live creatively out of them. In Omeros, Philoctete’s wound, like any other wound for Deleuze, signals the paradoxical, shadowy presence of the pure event that cannot be precisely located as an actual occurrence (Chronos). The wound as event is always both something that has already happened and something yet to come: it must be grasped through both orders of time not merely as an actual, empirical occurrence.15 Indeed, in Omeros, Philoctete’s wound is not merely the result of an injury involving a rusted anchor but is characterized as the haunting presence of the past (a sign of slavery: ‘He believed the swelling came from the chained ankles/of his grandfathers’ [Walcott 1990, p. 19]), and future pain. Although at the outset of the poem, the wound is no longer an open sore but a scar that he displays to the tourists, the scar, Deleuze argues, is only the actualization of the wounding event (Deleuze 2004c, p. 10; cf Reynolds 2007, p. 147). Thus the pure event of wounding persists ‘behind’ the scar, and may be actualized once more in the future. Accordingly, at the carnival which concludes

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Omeros and follows the healing of his wound, Philoctete dances and lands heavily on his leg: All the pain re-entered Philoctete, of the hacked yams, the hold closing over their heads, the bolt-closing iron, over eyes that never saw the light of this world, their memory still there although all the pain was gone. (Walcott 1990, p. 277) The wounding event of the Middle Passage and slavery persists as a virtual, hidden presence behind the sign of Philoctete’s scar. There is no way to erase the wounding event of slavery and colonization; however, this is not the aim of Deleuze’s philosophy of time. Rather, the task, Deleuze and Guattari add in What is Philosophy?, is to find in the wounding event a line of flight or creativity and thus to be ‘equal to the event’ or to become ‘the offspring of one’s own events’ (1994, p. 159). This is the meaning of Joe Bousquet’s claim that ‘“my wound existed before me; I was born to embody it”. I was born to embody it as event because I was able to disembody it as state of affairs’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 159). In other words, by counter-actualizing the event, returning to the plane of consistency, one may become (be ‘born’) anew. As Nesbitt explains, for Deleuze, ‘[t]o be worthy of what happens to us, of our inheritance of the past failure that is our wound, is to redeem that failure as the actualisation of our fullest potential’ (2010, p. 109). Omeros embodies the creative, revolutionary potential of writing back because it returns to the wounding event in order to create something new: a prophetic vision of the past. Or, as Reynolds argues with respect to Deleuze, ‘despising any particular wounding-event is a form of ressentiment [. . .]. On the other hand, embracing the event and the transformations it induces – not its brute actuality – is amor fati’ (2007, p. 153). Philoctete, as I shall argue in more detail in Chapter Four, is healed by the move from a position of ressentiment (full of shame and seeking solitude in the ‘leoparding light’ [Walcott 1990, p. 10]) to an acceptance of the creative potential of becoming. Omeros is a vision of the wounding event of colonization orientated by both the persisting pure past and a future with the always-renewed ability to become-new in wholly unforeseeable ways. It is precisely the transformative capacity to live out of one’s wounds that underpins the novels and essays of Wilson Harris. In Jonestown, for



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example, a novel which relives the death of over nine hundred members of the Peoples Temple cult in Guyana on the 18th of November 1978, Harris points towards the paradoxical creativity of the wounding event. Presented as the first-hand account of Francisco Bone, the sole survivor of the tragedy and the fictional author of the text, the novel returns to the violence of the historic event in order to trace a new trajectory that leads away from ressentiment. As Bone claims: Jonestown had left me stunned but I needed to revisit the scene and the entire environment – not only interior but coastal – in which it had occurred to learn of the foundations of doomed colonies, cities, villages, settlements, ancient and modern, by retracing my steps, by accepting my wounds and lameness and the speed of light with which one travels back into the past from bleak futures. (Harris 1996, p. 170, emphasis added) Not only is this prophetic vision of the past framed in terms of ‘accepting my wounds’, learning to live creatively or to be born with one’s wounds, but it approaches the actual historical moment as a pure event. For Harris and Bone the Jonestown tragedy is not merely a unique occurrence in the history of Guyana, but a sign of the tyranny of absolute authority that has echoes in colonial oppression, the French Revolution, the Second World War, and contemporary conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda and Ethiopia. In other words, each cited example represents the different/ciation of the same pure event which incorporates and exceeds each and every actualization. As a result, one cannot overcome the legacies of historical trauma by framing that moment in the past and explaining the particular circumstances of its happening as if it were no longer active. Or, as Bone writes in his letter to W.H. in the novel’s opening, ‘[k]eys to the Void of civilization are realized not by escapism from dire inheritances [. . .] but by immersion in the terrifying legacies of the past and the wholly unexpected insights into shared fates and freedoms such legacies may offer’ (p. 8). That Bone describes himself as belonging to ‘peoples of the Void’ (p. 7) is a sign of the persistent presence of the pure, virtual event: ‘“peopling of the Void” implies a form virtually beyond comprehension, a form shorn of violence in its intercourse with reality, but [. . .] it comes to us in its brokenness to activate [. . .] a reach of the Imagination beyond all cults, or closures, or frames’ (p. 8). Psychoanalytical readings of the Jonestown event, such as that offered by Paget Henry in Caliban’s Reason, interpret the Void as a reaction of the consciousness, a voiding of the ego that effects ‘a deintentionalized state’ in which the ego is unable to exist (2000,

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p.  99). However, such an approach puts emphasis on the centrality of the Cartesian ego, a move that Harris has clearly rejected (1999, p. 185). Although Bone narrates the novel and is presented as the sole survivor of the tragedy, the ‘I’ is fractured and multiple – ‘one is a multitude’ (Harris 1996, p.  5) – disrupting the primacy of the ego. The Void in Jonestown is not the void of the protagonist’s consciousness, but an immanent ‘form virtually beyond comprehension’, which plays an essential role in activating the imagination and moving beyond majoritarian ‘frames’ or ‘cults’. What Harris refers to as ‘memory theatre’ (1996, p. 7) is the variable synthesis of the pure past in the creation of genuinely original futures: ‘It is essential to create a jigsaw in which “pasts” and “presents” and likely or unlikely “futures” are the pieces that multitudes in the self employ in order to bridge chasms in historical memory’ (p. 5); ‘[w]hat lies behind us is linked incalculably to what lies ahead of us in that the future is a sliding scale backwards into the unfathomable past’ (p. 5). In other words, like Deleuze and Guattari, Harris is drawn to the lines of flight and deterritorialization that break majoritarian cults or frames, and which offer a means to live creatively from, to be born anew with, the wounding event. As such, Harris, like Walcott and the Caribbean surrealists before him, privileges different/ ciation as the immanent condition for change and newness within this actual world.

Immanence and Difference: Beyond the Dialectic Creativity and becoming are at the heart of Harris’s poetic and philosophical vision. Regeneration in the face of traumatic historical legacies is achieved neither by forgetting nor obsessively repeating the biases of conflict. Rather, one must ‘create a living, vital, non-complacent future within the burdens that history has placed on us in every corner of the globe’ (Harris 1999, p. 209). In this respect, Harris reads history not only as a chronology of actual events, but as a virtual field that retains the potential to re-emerge in unforeseeable ways. The task for the postcolonial writer is to uncover the lines of flight and deterritorialization that break the status quo: to repeat not History but its becoming. On this level, Harris’s work resonates with Deleuze who, as Patton notes, explores a ‘realm of pure eventness or becoming’ which is ‘immanent to the social field, its history, and its public forms of individuation’ as ‘the condition of movement or change within the world’ (2010, p. 99). More significantly, however, Harris’s philosophical vision may be further aligned with Deleuzian thought to



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the extent that he may be seen to challenge both Cartesian and Hegelian legacies. Various critics have attempted to classify Harris’s philosophical approach: C. L. R. James argues that works such as Palace of the Peacock approximate the progression towards a Heideggerian authentic existence (1980, pp. 157–72); Gregory Shaw rejects James’s position, citing Hegel as a more significant influence (1989, pp. 141–51); and Paget Henry accepts that while both James and Shaw present valid arguments, Harris’s philosophy exceeds the Heideggerian or Hegelian frame (2000, pp. 90–114). It is my contention, however, that what Harris’s particular philosophy of the imagination reveals is a commitment to a philosophical concept of immanence that he shares not only with contemporary postcolonial writers such as Pauline Melville and Édouard Glissant and the surrealists before him, but with the post-continental thought of Deleuze. Like surrealists such as Pierre Mabille in Mirror of the Marvellous, Harris’s poetics consistently evoke notions of wholeness and unity, and this has led critics such as Mark Williams and Alan Riach to argue that ‘Harris requires us to embrace, or at least entertain, a kind of Humanism [. . .] that reaches back behind the Renaissance and which sees the various branches of human knowledge as connected to a single, central source’ (1991, p. 52). Characterizing Harris’s poetics as Williams and Riach do as ‘a kind of Humanism’ that reaches back ‘to a single, central source’, however, problematically recalls what Mabille characterized as a ‘European’ perspective: the composition of an artwork around a central focal point in relation to which all other objects gain their determination (Mabille 1996b, p. 209). The problem with this style of composition, Mabille notes, is that it evokes notions of a centre-periphery dyad in which a single God, monarch, or culture imposes its superiority over all others. Unsurprisingly, this is not what Harris has in mind when he evokes Humanism, and we should recognize that what Williams and Riach identify as ‘a kind of Humanism’ should, in fact, be understood as a poetics of immanence, for what Harris offers is a sense of the way in which all parts of the whole coexist and interrelate in the ‘unfinished genesis of the imagination’ (Harris 1999, pp. 248–60). In this way, although Harris suggests an underlying unity behind all things, this should not be misunderstood as a single, transcendent source, but rather as an immanent creative force on the Spinozist model: God/Nature as the substance that links all aspects of the totality both actual and virtual. The processes of different/ciation and the creative potential that Harris finds in the pure past, then, is linked to his sense of wholeness and immanence, an association that finds expression in more directly surrealist

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terms in Harris’s discussion of the three stages of alchemy.16 Foreshadowing Melville’s ‘The Parrot and Descartes’ in which the parrot celebrates the hermetic and alchemical traditions of pre-Enlightenment Europe, Harris’s description of the three stages of alchemy depicts a practice that not only serves to emphasize the immanent unity of the whole, but provides a metaphor for creativity and the imagination. He writes: first of all, nigredo or blackness – sometimes called massa confusa or unknown territory [. . .], second albedo or whiteness ([. . .] an inner perspective or illumination, the dawn of a new consciousness), third cauda pavonis or the colours of the peacock, which may be equated with all the variable possibilities or colours of fulfilment we can never totally realise. (Harris 1999, p. 169) Encompassing all colours and their possible variations, the colours of the peacock can be read as an expression of unity and wholeness that is never fully realized or static. Importantly, as for Breton and the surrealists, alchemy provides Harris with a metaphor for the functioning of the imagination.17 As Breton notes, there is a ‘remarkable analogy, insofar as their goals are concerned, between the Surrealist efforts and those of the alchemists: the philosopher’s stone is nothing more or less than that which was to enable man’s imagination’ (1972, p. 174). Linking alchemical symbolism to the liberation of the imagination evokes a dynamic process in which wholeness is the result of exploring the unconscious, or in Harris’s words, a ‘dialogue with otherness’ that ‘has its “immeasurable point” in the acceptance of the mystery of grace ceaselessly within yet ceaselessly without human and natural endeavours’ (1983, p. 72). In other words, just as Deleuze’s notion of different/ciation captures the movement from virtual to actual, here alchemy signifies the creative dialogue between virtual/ unconscious and actual/consciousness as the two sides of a single reality.18 Crucially, as with the surrealists, we will misunderstand Harris if we read his vitalist vision of a creative evolution in terms of a dialectical process. Jeremy Poynting, for example, is critical in particular of Sylvia Wynter and Michael Gilkes, who focus on the interiority of Harris’s alchemical vision. Indeed, Poynting moves close to Soyinka’s comments on the Jungian archetype by suggesting that Harris’s alchemical method evokes a process of transformation entirely apart from the material conditions of the actual world, and instead compels readers to recognize ‘the radical dialectic’ at work in his novels (Poynting 1989, p. 104; cf Soyinka 1976, p. 35). However, Harris’s ‘imaginative and dialectical vision of the capacity of people to fulfil



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their human potential’ is only attainable, Poynting suggests, if we leave aside those aspects of his work that ‘lead away from both the problems and the potentialities of material social life’ (p. 104). While I believe that the Deleuzian frame through which I have read Harris’s account of different/ciation does not lead thought out of this world, to use a now-familiar phrase, it is unsatisfactory simply to label Harris’s vitalism as, at worst, antithetical to his materialist vision or, at best, of secondary importance to it. Hena Maes-Jelinek, Poynting suggests, is a more productive critic in that she maintains that ‘the material and the spiritual exist in mutual inter-penetration’ (p. 104) in Harris. Implicit in this comment, however, is a view that maintains the primacy of material, dialectical transformation as the only response adequate to the realities of place. Actualization is always context specific, and Harris’s idiosyncratic use of the archetype offers one clear example of how he envisions a creative, vitalist process as a response to actual conditions. However, more problematically, dialectical method maintains an oppositional structure in which transformation is aimed, ultimately, at the reduction of difference. As I argued in Chapter One, since the endgame of dialectical transformation is the assimilation of difference, as Simone Bignall has demonstrated, such a process is ‘unable to break free from a fundamentally imperial outlook and attitude, because it assumes an underlying concept of agency that remains grounded in negativity’ (2010, p.  20). Like his contemporary Glissant, Harris rejects the oppositional structuring inherent in dialectics. ‘Nihilism is rooted in the absolute sway of dualities’ (Harris 1999, p. 213), because, as for Walcott’s Philoctete, the oppositional logic of colonialism and countercolonialism cannot facilitate a future with the ability to become new or postcolonial. Rather, it leads only to ‘the stasis of conquest within which the victorious side apparently succeeds in pressing the face or faces of the vanquished into the dust of uniform conviction’ (Harris 1981, p. 50). The creative transformation at the heart of Harris’s work cannot be attained through an oppositional dualism, but by an asymmetrical block of becoming: what Harris refers to as an asymmetric relationship between all things (1988, p. 263), or ‘a ceaseless creative and re-creative rapport between old monuments and new windows upon the cosmos’ (1981, p. 51). Against a fixed, static concept of identity and ‘the structuralization of feud or incorrigible bias at the heart of existence’, Harris seeks the ‘creative disruption’ of the solipsistic self through an ‘unstructured mediation’ between parties in relation (p. 132). In other words, a minoritarian (unstructured) becoming emerges in-between bodies and serves to deterritorialize one through the other.

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Such an effect is achieved in what Harris refers to as the ‘[c]onsciousness of self in others’ (1999, p. 44), a concept clearly presented in his first novel Palace of the Peacock in a moment when Donne’s crew who are travelling upstream into the Guyanese interior, towards the source of the river, look overboard: The unceasing reflection of themselves in each other made them see themselves everywhere save where they thought they had always stood. After awhile this horrifying exchange of soul and this identification of themselves with each other brought them a partial return and renewal of confidence [. . .]. It was a partial rehabilitation of themselves. (Harris 1985, p. 80) In this we gain a sense of the twin movement of deterritorialization and reterritorialization as the self is initially destructured in relation to others, challenging the crew members’ sense of identity and coherence as they enter into a new assemblage with each other before a tentative ‘return and renewal’ of the self. This ‘horrifying exchange’, the absolute deterritorialization of the self, is avoided and in its place each character experiences a renewal through the actualization of a new, relational, communal identity. Throughout Palace of the Peacock dualities are evoked and undermined. The crew in name and appearance ‘matched the names of a famous dead crew that had sunk in the rapids’ (p.  26); and the protagonist, the Dreamer, expresses a duality he feels with his twin, Donne – ‘he was myself standing outside of me while I stood inside of him’ (p.  26). Far from offering a structured opposition and basis for dialectical transformation, such dualities signify a becoming. Harris is unequivocal on this point: ‘I do not believe in the alter egos that critics and publishers speak of. I believe in cross-culturalities’ (cited by Camboni and Fazzini 2004, p. 57). ‘It is not a question of alter ego; it is a positive relationship that helps us to see that the animals, what I call “creatures of genius”, bear on ourselves, telling us about ourselves’ (p. 59). This positive relationality cannot function dialectically since that would entail the structuralization of the opposition between self and other: The animal state seems absolute in its own right. The divine state seems absolute in its own right. When absolute frontiers, enshrined into absolute separation of animal being and divine being are broken, a re-visionary momentum is set up [. . .]. When we perceive an animal ingredient in the divine, we find ourselves steeped in plural masks that



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break an addiction to power, that break a hubris or proclivity to enslave others whom we deem inferior creatures. (Harris 1999, p. 189) The becoming-animal of the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl or of Butterfly in Harris’s Resurrection at Sorrow Hill (1993), in agreement with the process outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, is a line of flight that escapes majoritarian structures of identity and power. Here, as in Bignall’s critique of postcolonialism, the negative and oppositional structure of the dialectic is aligned with the absolutism of imperialist ideology. On the other hand, plural masks, which ‘are not the same as Cartesian dualisms’, ‘imply a living cosmos in all its grain and particularity’ (Harris 1999, p. 185). Harris’s sense of different/ciation and becoming turns upon a vitalist cosmos that is at once pluralism and unity: ‘Unity then is paradox, the core of paradox’ (p. 185). Or, as Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘pluralism = monism’ (2004b, p. 23).

Vitalism and Palace of the Peacock The journey undertaken by the crew of the El Doradonne in Palace of the Peacock resonates with conquistadorial explorations of the interior lands of Guyana. Indeed, the very name of the vessel conflates El Dorado and Donne, reinforcing the image of Donne as the obstinate and callous colonizer: ‘I’m the last landlord. I tell you I fight everything in nature’ (Harris 1985, p. 22). Under the direction of Donne, the crew journey upstream towards the uncharted source of the river in a seven-stage quest to reach the palace of the peacock. In this sense, like Carpentier’s The Lost Steps before it, the novel is a re-visioning of the creation myth: as Riach points out, ‘the narrative works backwards through the seven days of creation in Christian mythology. We arrive at the very end of the novel at the point of genesis’ (1995, p. 41). The significance of Christian mythology, however, should not be read as the recuperation of majoritarian ideologies within the framework of the novel, but, rather, as part of Harris’s challenge to dogmatic and absolute convictions. Jean-Pierre Durix illustrates this issue by pointing towards a moment in the closing section of Palace of the Peacock. Donne is climbing a cliff-face and is confronted by a number of windows which variously reveal a carpenter’s room and ‘a crib in a stall that might have been an animal’s trough’ (Harris 1985, p. 106). Identifying the biblical parallels evident here, Durix emphasizes the fact that, despite his efforts, Donne ‘obtains no response’ from these scenes, and argues that,

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for Harris, ‘this lack of communication’ illustrates that ‘[u]nless characters can relate to these scenes in such a way as to abandon their biases, these visions of origin will remain like frozen objects with no relevance to the present’ (Durix 2002, p. 97). Again, Harris returns to mythologies in order to stress that it is the invisible or virtual text behind the actual image that represents the potential for newness, creativity and a minor becoming that breaks entrenched biases and absolutism. The palace itself takes on a vitalistic function in the novel: the journey upstream becomes a line of flight or deterritorialization back towards the virtual plane of immanence which is the condition of creation and newness in the world. For Donne, for example, we are told that as he moves towards the palace a ‘longing swept him like the wind of the muse to understand and transform his beginnings: to see the indestructible nucleus and redemption of creation, the remote and the abstract image and correspondence, in which all things and events gained their substance and universal meaning’ (Harris 1985, p. 101). This is an attempt to capture a moment of absolute immanence, the pure plane from which all things are different/ciated and gain their actual substance and virtual content. Although each member of the crew must die in order to reach the palace, this is not an absolute moment of transcendence into another realm (cf Maes-Jelinek 2006, p. 15): Donne’s desire is to ‘transform his beginnings’ not escape his previous life. Furthermore, the enlightenment gained by Donne and his crew on reaching the palace is not associated with an absolute, transcendent creator/God, but is characterized as the awareness of the inscrutable, immanent otherness which lies beyond ‘normal’ comprehension: ‘He saw nothing, he saw the unselfness of night, the invisible otherness around [. . .]. He saw something but he had not grasped it. It was his blindness that made him see his own nothingness and imagination constructed beyond his reach’ (Harris 1985, p. 108). Here Donne enacts the impossible confrontation with the virtual: a moment of absolute deterritorialization and difference that escapes representation and identity, but which is hinted at, in particular, by the music which fills the palace. This music the Dreamer encounters upon reaching the palace is in the guise of a sound that seems to be issuing from Carroll’s lips, but which, he claims, ‘came from a far source within’ (p. 116): Carroll was whistling. A solemn and beautiful cry – unlike a whistle I reflected – deeper and mature. Nevertheless his lips were framed to whistle and I could only explain the difference by assuming the sound



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from his lips was changed when it struck the window and issued into the world. It was an organ cry almost and yet quite different I reflected again. It seemed to break and mend itself [. . .]. It was the cry of the peacock and yet I reflected far different. I stared at the whistling lips and wondered if the change was in me or in them. (p. 113) This privileged moment at the novel’s climax witnesses an unceasing becoming through sound, a scene that attempts to capture the unquantifiable force that drives creation and which is immanent to all. The sound that fills the palace here is unidentifiable because it is not reducible to the actual world. As Harris makes clear: ‘when I speak of music, I am not thinking simply of a man-made music. I am thinking of the music that exists prior to human discourse. It exists in the cosmos, it exists, you could say, in the rivers and in the land’ (cited by Camboni and Fazzini 2004, p. 54). It signifies a virtual caught in the moment of differenciation, the becoming-actual of the virtual, always in unforeseen ways within the genesis of the imagination. As the music travels from the unknown plane of immanence – ‘it came from a far source within’ – to reach the Dreamer, it passes through the window and issues into the world. It passes from the virtual into a (partially) comprehended, actual sound: a process of differenciation or becoming-actual. The sound, like the event, is not absolute because it retains a virtual excess that is renewed each time it is articulated. In other words, with each actualization (differenciation) of the sound, a pure event subsists as a virtual or invisible text that is its future potential to become in unforeseen ways. As such, with each repeated moment of actualization the received sound changes and, as in the previous extract, the music is creatively reimagined as whistle, organ or peacock’s cry. The transfer through the window, then, represents the repeated process of different/ciation: an actualization of the virtual that carries forth, always, a virtual excess as its ability to become-new once again: ‘it seemed to me that Carroll’s music changed [. . .]. The change and variation I thought I detected in the harmony were outward and unreal and illusory: they were induced by the limits and apprehensions in the listening mind of men’ (Harris 1985, p. 114). More precisely, then, the creativity that is witnessed in this moment occurs in the relation between consciousness and the unconscious: the moment of differenciation on the threshold of the virtual and the actual (‘the listening minds of men’). This is an essential qualification, for although Harris’s language evokes notions of a single source behind the created world (a ‘European’ perspective Mabille would argue),

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his metaphysics maintains an essentially immanent, rhizomatic quality in which there is no absolute centre from which creation emanates. In Palace of the Peacock, Carroll does not embody The Creator or creative nucleus, rather the sound issuing from his lips comes ‘from a far source within’ (p. 116): creativity is immanent to all created things and all created things are accordingly creative. Thus the metaphysical elements of Harris’s texts recall the twin aspects of the Deleuzian event: actual and virtual. Indeed, what Harris refers to as wholeness or the unfinished genesis of the imagination encompasses both actual events and bodies, and their virtual or pure counterparts as the potential for future becomings and newness. If on reaching the palace the crew attain a degree of enlightenment, that achievement is the ability to live creatively out of their wounds. The character of Schomburgh, for example, in an earlier moment, is drawn to relive a past memory on hearing ‘[a] long bar of secret music’ (p. 66). This is a ‘universal’ moment that reconciles apparent opposites – ‘beyond life and death, past and present’ (p. 66). However this equilibrium is soon broken: ‘He had heard clearer than ever before the distant music of the heart’s wish and desire. But even now he tried to resist and rebuke himself for being merely another nasty sentimental old man’ (p. 67). Yet, by the time he has reached the palace, Schomburgh has let go of his resentment: ‘He listened too, like me. I saw he was free to listen and to hear at last without fearing a hoax. He stood at his window and I stood at mine, transported beyond the memory of words’ (p. 113). Breaking free from the representationalist framework that posits self against other, life against death, past against present, Palace of the Peacock envisions a moment in which its characters are ‘transported beyond the memory of words’, an absolute deterritorialization and return to the plane of immanence from which they can become anew.

Literature and the Event If, as Patton suggests, responses to the Deleuzian event may be characterized as either that of the historian who recounts the evolution and genesis of the actual event in sequential time (Chronos), or that of the philosopher who ‘give[s] expression to the pure event [. . .] creat[ing] concepts that take us inside the event’ (2010, p. 96), what might the literary response entail? Certainly Deleuze draws on literary examples such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in order to discuss his concept of the event, but that in itself does not address the particular relationship between literature and the



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event. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as the creation of concepts, of which the event forms the concept’s ‘consistency’ (1994, p. 156), the differentiation of its virtual content. Working backwards from a particular state of affairs to the virtual plane of immanence from which it was actualized, philosophy isolates an assemblage or consistency within the virtual. Thus, while history narrates actual events, philosophy is experimentation, an exploration of the processes of counter-actualization (returning to the plane of immanence) and actualization (the differenciation of the new) (p. 111). The work of literature is similarly creative; however, it is directed not at the creation of concepts but of affects and percepts, which assume a comparable pre-individual basis and designate a form of individuation that remains on the virtual plane (differentiation): ‘Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them’ (p. 164). As such, the work of philosophy and literature is distinct: Art and philosophy crosscut the chaos and confront it, but it is not the same sectional plane; it is not populated the same way. In one there is the constellation of a universe or affects and percepts; and in the other, constitutions of immanence or concepts. Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts. (p. 66) Where the virtual individuation of a concept occurs on the plane of immanence, art extracts a universe of affects and percepts on a virtual plane of composition. Percepts and affects, then, are not to be ‘confused with perceptions or feelings’ (p. 24), both of which pertain to actual experience. Rather, the affect and percept go ‘beyond’ (p. 173) affections and perceptions: ‘The affect is not the passage from one lived state to another but man’s nonhuman becoming [. . .]. It is a zone of indetermination, of indiscernibility, as if things, beasts, and persons [. . .] endlessly reach that point that immediately precedes their natural differentiation’ (p. 173). Art and literature, then, exist in ‘the moment that the material passes into sensation’ (p. 173), which is not the sensation of a character, author, or reader, but the virtual ground of their becoming: Painting needs more than the skill of the draftsman who notes resemblances between human and animal forms and gets us to witness their transformation […], it needs the power of a ground that can dissolve

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forms and impose the existence of a zone in which we no longer know which is animal and which human, because something like the triumph or monument of their nondistinction rises up. (p. 173) Art and literature, then, challenge majoritarian identities through a process of counter-actualization ‘that can dissolve forms’ and initiate new lines of becoming because they are composed of blocs of sensation that are in themselves and not reducible to actual experience: ‘Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects’ (p. 164). In this, art captures an excess beyond the actual experience (perceptions or affections) of a particular subject. Where philosophical method extracts the concept from the pure event rather than recounting the actual historical occurrence, so the writer should ‘write not with childhood memories but through blocs of childhood that are the becoming-child of the present’ (p. 168). In other words, the artist does not seek to represent in words or paint their actual memories of childhood, but to create ‘a compound of percepts and affects’ that represents the potential becoming-child of the present: providing in literature or art the conditions for minor becomings. The revisionary potential of art and literature, therefore, lies not in the creation of concepts: ‘A great novelist is above all an artist who invents unknown or unrecognized affects and brings them to light as the becoming of his characters’ (p. 174). Claude Simon offers one such example of the great novelist for Deleuze and Guattari: When Claude Simon describes the incredible passive love of the earthwoman, he sculpts an affect of clay. He may say, ‘this is my mother’, and we believe him since he says it, but it is a mother who has passed into sensation and to whom he erects a monument so original that she no longer has an ascribable relationship with her real son, but more distantly, with another created character, Faulkner’s Eula. It is in this way that, from one writer to another, great creative affects can link up or diverge, within compounds of sensations that transform themselves, vibrate, couple, or split apart. (p. 175) Simon’s fictional mother appears to us as an affect because in becomingearth-woman she pursues a line of deterritorialization, a nonhuman becoming. In this passage Deleuze and Guattari suggest that while Simon’s



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actual remembered mother may be the source of the artist’s intent, his artistry is such that as she is rendered in words she passes into affect. As such, the mother affect that Simon fashions may be counter-actualized, returning to the plane of composition (which is populated not by actual characters and resemblances, but by affects, percepts and pure difference) in which ‘she’ can link up with other affects in the creation of a new assemblage. And this, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, is what allows works of art and literature to relate, interconnect, even speak to one another. It is just such a vision of art that Harris outlines in his own novel The Mask of the Beggar: a novel concerned with the source of art and originality, and which explores such themes through the relational and creative potential of the affect. In a passage that, for us, strongly resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s comments on Simon, Harris imagines a conversation between a mother, who has died in 1952, and her son, the novel’s protagonist and the artist who has sculpted her in the present. In the course of their dialogue, the protagonist addresses the following sequence of thoughts to his mother/sculpture: ‘Think of yourself’, he said at last, ‘arriving as a piece of sculpture in this planetary or solar system. Do you really appreciate how novel you are? It’s an original occasion, is it not? You have never been here before in your present attire and shape and innovative being. You are new life in apparently old flesh and wood. You represent my mother but you are different in the flesh you now wear, the life in the flesh [. . .]. You are an innovation. I may call you Mother but you are a new work of art. Where do you come from to attain such newness? You hint, let us say, at a timeless space beyond yourself, beyond me who has made you. A paradox [. . .]. I have made you, yes, but you are touched by an unfathomable Creator on the other side of Time [. . .]. The life of the narrative unfolds within yet beyond flesh-and-blood [. . .]’. (Harris 2003, pp. 76–7) The fictionalized artist in this passage demonstrates a rare awareness of his artwork as an affect. ‘You represent my mother but you are different’, ‘[y]ou are an innovation’: while the artist’s intent may seek to recreate in material form the memories of his actual, now deceased, mother, as a work of art she passes into affect. Once again, Harris insists upon a vitalistic force as the source of newness and innovation. The mother attains newness in the artist’s present because she has been differenciated from the virtual plane of composition, ‘a timeless space beyond’ and condition of the eternal return of difference. Furthermore, as Deleuze and Guattari found in the example

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of Simon, it is precisely because the work of art is composed of affects and percepts on a shared plane of composition that disparate characters and artworks intersect and ‘speak’ to one another. Or as Harris writes: A painting speaks to a painting. They speak by crossing chasms. Their frames confine them and make them unnaturally silent. Chasms exist outside each frame, in spaces, in seas, in lands, miniaturized and virtually unseen but with immense and living potential. They fly backwards to one another across each chasm. (p. 10) The frame that surrounds a work of art does not place an absolute, transcendental limit on it, delineating the Inside and the Outside. Rather, like the Deleuzian fold, it creates a provisional inside and outside within immanence.19 The so-called ‘outside’, then, is akin to the Void referred to in Jonestown or creative nucleus in Palace of the Peacock: ‘a timeless space’, an unrepresentable, unknowable virtuality endowed ‘with immense and living potential’: a vitalistic force that is the Deleuzian virtual by another name. Paintings ‘fly backwards’, deterritorializing towards a shared plane of composition in which they ‘speak’ to one another, resonate, connect, form a new assemblage, and return as difference. Art and literature for Harris are closely linked to what he calls the unfinished genesis of the imagination (a creative response to the wounding event), but also, more precisely, to the philosophical concepts of the affect and immanence. In the novel The Ghost of Memory, which follows The Mask of the Beggar, and a work that he claims will be his last, Harris again returns to questions of art and originality through a character who, after being shot in the back as a suspected terrorist, deterritorializes onto the plane of composition in which he can explore and connect with a series of paintings that hang on the wall of an unidentified art gallery.20 This novel is orientated by Harris’s non-dialectical vision of creative transformation, stressing, in a move that strongly resonates with surrealist practice, that this work is ‘about life and death or rather – to put it somewhat differently – about the close, almost indefinable cross-culturalities between moments of life and death’ (Harris 2006, p. vii).21 As with Deleuze and, indeed, surrealists such as René Ménil and Pierre Mabille, Harris is not following the Cartesian dualism. Rather, to cite Deleuze, both the actual and the virtual (consciousness and the unconscious) together form the ‘unequal odd halves’ of reality (2004b, p. 261). It is in this sense that, for Harris, the ‘psyche is within the body’ (Harris 2006, p. 15), ‘an immanent body, an unconscious/conscious body’



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(p. 9). Or as the protagonist, the Ghost of Memory, observes of himself as he enters the landscape of a painting within the gallery: a ‘stem or a broken leaf became a finger on my hand. It pointed to traces of infinity within itself, within other leaves on a tree. This withinness was a puzzle’ (p. 1). The sense of immanence that the Ghost of Memory experiences is akin to that of the mother in The Mask of the Beggar: he is no longer an actual character, but an affect on the plane of composition that is populated by other affects and percepts which, in turn, compose other artworks. In the quotation above, he does not have a perception of the landscape, but rather seems to become with the landscape: ‘a broken leaf became a finger on my hand’. Just as Cezanne creates a ‘landscape before man, in the absence of man [. . .]. “Man absent from but entirely within the landscape”’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 169), Harris’s protagonist becomes indiscernible from the landscape in the novel’s expression of a percept. Similarly, the Ghost’s deterritorialization makes of him an affect, understood as the nonhuman becoming of man (p. 169): ‘This man is not to be taken literally. He is a dream-animal who dies and lives in the dreams of Mankind at the edges of consciousness and unconsciousness’ (Harris 2006, p. vii). The protagonist’s becoming-animal, becoming-spectral mark him as an affect and, as such, represent his transformative capacity to break the majoritarian and absolutist perspectives that threaten in the novel. The character of Christopher Columbus, who is primarily associated with a Cartesian, Enlightenment-derived conviction in reason and science, and an absolute sense of good and evil, represents just such a majoritarian perspective. Viewing Giacometti’s sculpture, Standing Woman, the narrator sees in it figures that recall the artworks of ancient Arawak communities: ‘I felt that there was a resemblance of line. That is all. A curious resemblance that tells us of distances we have travelled in one shape or another to reach where we are. Those distances are there in a twentieth-century sculptor who is sensitive to material form as never absolute’ (p. 25). That Columbus outright rejects any suggestion that ‘the important work of a twentieth-century sculptor’ (p. 25) could be associated with primitive relics, is a sign of a world-view that reads the artwork in the same way that the historian reads history: within the chronological simplicity of Chronos. The creative method that Harris seeks, on the other hand, breaks from the majoritarian perspective that seeks identity and representation, and instead explores the nonhuman becomings (affects) and nonhuman landscapes (percepts) of art and literature. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in relation to the surrealist sculptor Giacometti, ‘[i]t is always a question of freeing life wherever it is imprisoned’ (1994, p. 171): freeing the singular

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power of an impersonal life to become in unforeseen ways, not imprisoning it in the same, in identity. ‘What I am getting at is the genius of Art through and beyond all fixtures with which we would stop universal life in its tracks and claim we have an absolute solution to the ills of humankind’ (Harris 2006, p. 28, emphasis added). In The Ghost of Memory, the wounded protagonist, shot as a terrorist, is not a sign of mankind’s incapacity to live in peace with one another. Rather, he lives creatively out of the wounding event by deterritorializing, returning to the plane of composition in which he forms a new assemblage with other affects and percepts that compose other works of art, and then follows a minor line of becoming (becominganimal, becoming-spectral). And it is this capacity to live creatively out of one’s wounds, to repeat the event’s difference rather than its actuality, that, Harris suggests, represents the redemptive quality of art for all: I said I saw the Beggar in a new way. I mean the man who was shot and who fell into the painting. By ‘new way’ I mean he cannot be captured or seized. That’s part of what I mean. He has to be reinvented every century, every generation. His essence is beyond us. That’s what the painting is saying. One may see, rarely perhaps, an imprint that compels us to create, to reinterpret. That imprint is available to all. (p. 71) The work of art or literature creates affects and percepts as the condition for newness. That Deleuze draws on literary examples to explore his concept of the event, however, does not mean that the work of literature and philosophy is strictly speaking equivalent. Rather, art and literature create a ‘monument [that] does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 176). An event such as the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by London Metropolitan police in 2005, Harris might argue, actualizes the violent imperial encounter of self and other, and, at the same time, persists in a virtual, or pure form ready to be actualized in the future in unforeseeable contexts. Philosophy might extract from this event a concept of power or imperialism, but art and literature serve a different function: capturing the pure, virtual, and therefore ‘persistent sensations that embody the event’. In The Ghost of Memory, the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is only obliquely referenced in Harris’s portrayal of the protagonist who is shot as a terrorist: the actual circumstances of the event are diminished and instead Harris attempts to capture in words something of the pure event, constructing his character out of affects and percepts, as argued above. Moreover, it is



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precisely because Harris’s novel embodies the virtual not actual wounding event that his work attains a future orientation, an ability to become-new out of the traumatic legacies of the past. Read in this way, Harris’s work demonstrates the specific relationship between literature and event. Both literature and philosophy are creative and follow lines of deterritorialization and becoming, but, as Deleuze and Guattari argue: It is not the same becoming. Sensory becoming is the action by which something or someone is ceaselessly becoming-other (while continuing to be what they are) [. . .], whereas conceptual becoming is the action by which the common event itself eludes what is. Conceptual becoming is heterogeneity grasped in an absolute form; sensory becoming is otherness caught in a matter of expression. The monument [the artwork] does not actualize the virtual event but incorporates or embodies it: it gives it a body, a life, a universe [. . .]. These universes are neither virtual nor actual; they are possibles [. . .] whereas events are the reality of the virtual, forms of a thought-Nature that survey every possible universe. (1994, pp. 177–8) Now we are in the position to better understand the relationship between postcolonial literature and the pure event. It is not literature that ‘make[s] actual the quest of a medieval knight or the bulk of a white whale’ (Walcott 1998, p. 62), but more precisely, as Walcott and Harris observe, the imagination by surveying these possible worlds. Literature ‘incorporates or embodies’ the pure, virtual event. It creates characters in sensation (affects and percepts) as a becoming-other within the context of their expressed identity: to use both Walcott’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s example, in Moby-Dick, Ahab becomes-whale (a nonhuman becoming of man) while remaining Ahab (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 177). What matters is not, as in bad novels, the opinions held by characters in accordance with their social type and characteristics but rather the relations of counterpoint into which they enter and the compounds of sensations that these characters either themselves experience or make felt in their becomings and their visions [. . .]. And this entails a vast plane of composition that is not abstractly preconceived but constructed as the work progresses. (p. 188) In the literary examples of writing back referred to in this chapter, it is the way in which characters such as Antoinette or Philoctete embody a

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becoming rather than repeating identity or the same (Bertha or Homeric Philoctete) that is of greatest importance. As such, they interconnect with other works (Jane Eyre or The Iliad) on a virtual plane of composition, not through the chronological hierarchy of the canon and its assimilatory function within the context of colonial education. Works such as Wide Sargasso Sea, Omeros and the novels of Wilson Harris stress becoming and sensation rather than sameness and identity, and in doing so follow the Deleuzian reading pursued in this chapter. However, by this account, such works neither commemorate the colonial past nor actualize the event of colonization anew. Rather, they embody the colonial event, creating a universe in which it may ‘live’ and which is one possible world among many others. As such, it is the philosophical work of the imagination, as both Harris and Walcott specifically argue, to bring forth the event embodied by a work of literature or art (cf Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 199). In other words, the philosophical and ‘imaginative’ task of literary criticism (Walcott 2003, pp. 44–5) is to explore the possible worlds created in works of literature as the virtual potential of this actual world to become in unforeseen ways. Finally, then, by imagining a world in which the virtual event of colonization or imperial exploitation is the condition of each character’s becoming, their capacity to live creatively out of their wounds, both Walcott and Harris present works of poetry and literature that embody the virtual, not the actual or historical, event of colonization as a possible postcolonial world without ressentiment.

Chapter 3

Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of the Chaosmos

The work of the Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant has been a frequent point of reference throughout this study, and it remains of fundamental importance to the analysis of the complex and perhaps even rhizomatic connections between contemporary Caribbean writing and Deleuze. In this chapter I focus directly on Glissant’s writings in order to develop the contours of a Deleuzian approach to postcolonialism: exploring the explicit and implicit ways in which Glissant’s theoretical works draw on Deleuze and Guattari, and posing new ways of connecting them. In this chapter it is not my concern merely to identify the ways in which Glissant actually draws on the philosophy of Deleuze (such as his well-observed use of the rhizome), but to continue the creolization of ideas by considering how we might reconfigure the processes described in Glissant’s work if we read them through the lens of Deleuze’s concepts of immanence, difference and the virtual. By further exploring the dialogue between these two philosophers it is not my intention, then, to produce a more ‘accurate’ reading of Glissant, but to discover something new about the movement of Relation in light of the post-continental turn to immanence and positive different/ciation. What emerges is a creolized and, I suggest, more radical Glissant, exceeding, perhaps, even the author’s own intentions. It is a reading that moves beyond the ‘actual’ substance of Poetic Intention, Caribbean Discourse or Poetics of Relation, following what Wilson Harris might term the ‘invisible’ text and intuitive clues (1999, p. 249) that run in-between Deleuze, Guattari, and Glissant, in order to extract new concepts of Relation, creolization, échos-monde and opacity. The place of Glissant’s philosophy within a predominately Anglophone field of postcolonial theory has been subject to an increasing number of studies over the past decade or so. Celia Britton’s Édouard Glissant (1999), in particular, set out to establish the common ground that Glissant shared with the canonical works of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, while challenging the often-overlooked role that Francophone theory has

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played in the development of postcolonial theory. In recent years, Britton (2002), Nick Nesbitt (2003), Peter Hallward (2001), Natalie Melas (2007) and John Drabinski (2011) have forged new philosophical directions in Glissantian critique, drawing on Freud, Hegel, Deleuze, Nancy and Levinas to reread various aspects of Glissant’s postcolonial project. It is, however, the influence of Deleuze (both with and without Guattari) that remains, perhaps, the most contentious issue, especially in the wake of Hallward’s reading of Glissant. Nevertheless, it is an influence that, when contextualized within contemporary debates concerning difference and identity, leads to a greater understanding of Glissant’s poetics as a whole, its place within the evolution of Caribbean thought, and its role in expressing a new mode of postcolonial thought grounded, like post-continental philosophy, on a critical return to immanence. In contrast to Nick Nesbitt’s claim that Glissant’s ‘concern for immanence, immediacy, and the decentering of subjectivities, is in some sense superficial and in any case not [his] most interesting theoretical dimension’ (2003, p. 171), I argue that it is precisely the Deleuzian aspect of Glissant’s work that is key to unlocking the role that his thought plays within the formulation of a new postcolonialism beyond the reactive confrontation of the colonized and the colonizer. By uncovering the pervasive and multifaceted ways in which Glissant draws on the work of Deleuze (and Deleuze and Guattari), this chapter explores the immanent basis of Glissant’s philosophical concepts and theorizes the critical implications of this dialogue between European postcontinental philosophy and postcolonial thought. Understood as a rejection of transcendent, a priori first or final causes of being, post-continental philosophy returns to Spinoza’s sense of a single, infinite plane of immanence that incorporates the structure of actual created things and the virtual creative force. By interrogating the points of intersection between the two, I suggest that Glissant’s theories of creolization and what he terms Relation should not merely be understood as compatible with the already-established discourse of Spivak, Bhabha and Said, but rather as elaborating the theoretical terrain of postcolonial studies. Critics such as Chris Bongie and Shireen Lewis have previously acknowledged the impact of the Deleuzian concepts of the rhizome and nomad on Glissant’s thought.1 However, while I do not deny the significance of rhizomatic thought to Caribbean and Glissantian studies, it is my contention that both Glissant and postcolonial theory intersect with Deleuzian thought on a much more fundamental level: evidencing a shared commitment to a Spinozist immanent or single-substance ontology.2 In the wake of Peter Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial, in which the work of Glissant alongside Charles Johnson, Mohammed Dib and Severo Sarduy



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was critiqued according to the degree of its ‘singularity’, Glissantian criticism has tended to follow the trajectory established in Hallward’s study. The recent work of Nick Nesbitt and Chris Bongie, for example, has reinforced Hallward’s claim that Glissant’s work may be divided into two distinct phases: an early period that encompasses La Soleil de la Conscience (1956), Poetic Intention (1969) and Caribbean Discourse (1981), as well as novels such as The Ripening (1958) and The Fourth Century (1964), in which one sees a commitment to the nation and national specificity; and a late, postpolitical Glissant that comes to prominence from Poetics of Relation (1990) onward, and is distinguished by his abandonment of the national project and movement towards Deleuzian concepts of immanence and rhizomatic thought (Hallward 2001, pp. 66–70).3 This post-political Glissant, Bongie confirms, offers no grounds for the development of strategies of resistance, postcolonial or otherwise, to existing power relations (Bongie 2008, p. 339; see also Nesbitt 2010, and 2003, p. 171). While this split in Glissant’s work may not be absolute (Hallward suggests that even early Glissant betrays signs of the singular logic that will become the dominant force in his work [2001, p. 69]), it is crucial to recognize that within the terms of this debate, both Hallward and Bongie view the distinction in Hegelian terms. Bongie, for example, is explicit in maintaining an oppositional logic as the sole grounds for political action: Glissant’s late work ‘is characterized by the concerted attempt to “desuture” that poetics from any and all oppositional politics’ (Bongie 2008, p. 330). As such, he casts doubts upon the readings of ‘advocates of the “oppositional” Glissant’ as well as on the work of critics, such as Shalini Puri, who maintain that ‘a poetics of Relation could leave behind the adversarial politics of the Discours without ceasing to be political’ (Bongie 2008, p. 340). While Puri may well downplay the significance of post-1990 Glissant in order to confirm the relevance of his work to an understanding of the political arguments of postcolonial studies, what persists in Bongie’s reading is an unquestioning commitment to a Hegelian ontology. Indeed, as Hallward affirms: ‘Glissant’s work, we might say, flows with the dialectical energy of Le Discours antillais toward the singular and ultimately non-dialectical energy of Poétique de la Relation’ (2001, p. 87). Yet, if, following Simone Bignall’s Deleuzian analysis, we acknowledge that maintaining a negative, reactive structure of resistance leaves us with a poorly defined and self-contradictory concept of postcolonialism, the insistence on locating structures of opposition in Glissant fails to account for his value as a properly postcolonial writer and philosopher. As outlined in Chapter One, Bignall argues that what unites both the Marxist and poststructuralist

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contingents of postcolonial studies is a shared ground of negative determination as the basis of critique: ‘In Marxist postcolonialism, this negativity is rendered in the dialectical play of opposition; in poststructuralist, deconstructivist and psychoanalytical postcolonialism, critical negativity inheres in the crucial lack or absence at the ontological heart of the subject’ (Bignall 2010, p. 76). As such, both are ultimately invested in the assimilation or management of difference, which is to say that both extend an emphatically imperialist way of being (p. 20; p. 18). Glissant’s own critique of counter-poetics and the Creole language in Caribbean Discourse highlights the incompatibility of a negative and oppositional politics with his own postcolonial poetics. Creole languages emerged within the context of the Caribbean’s plantation societies, representing a ‘strategy of trickery’ (Glissant 1989b, p. 21) on the part of the enslaved population as they attempted to obscure meaning from the white plantocracy: ‘a language that, in its structures and its dynamics, would have fundamentally incorporated the derisive nature of its formation’ (p. 20). Counter-poetics, like (some forms of) Creole, fail to transcend the colonial condition when they are unable ‘to liberate [themselves] totally’ (p. 128) from a defensive position. In this, Glissant echoes Wole Soyinka’s infamous critique of negritude which similarly focuses on the movement’s tendency to trap ‘itself in what was primarily a defensive role’ (1976, p. 129) and which ‘stayed within a pre-set system of Eurocentric intellectual analysis both of man and society and tried to re-define the African and his society in those externalized terms’ (p. 136).4 What has been overlooked in readings of Glissant’s early works, particularly Caribbean Discourse, is the extent to which ‘the generative forces of negativity’ (Bignall 2010, p. 30) conceived of as the primary drive of dialectics are, in fact, challenged by Glissant. And in its place, as with the philosophy of Deleuze and Caribbean surrealists such as René Ménil, we find an affirmative philosophy that provides the basis for his later elaboration of concepts such as creolization and Relation.

Beyond the Colonized and the Colonizer The related concepts of reversion and diversion in Caribbean Discourse offer a point of entry into this debate. Reversion characterizes the ‘first impulse of a transplanted population’ and is expressed as ‘the obsession with a single origin: one must not alter the absolute state of being’ (Glissant 1989b, p. 16). It is to refuse the creative potential of cross-cultural contact, an emphatically majoritarian way of being that attempts to fix national



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identity. However, Glissant continues, ‘populations transplanted by the slave trade were not capable of maintaining for any length of time the impulse to revert’ (p. 18). The overriding need to ‘come to terms with the new land’ (p. 18) and the erasure of ancestral memory do not offer the conditions for reversion, but rather for diversion, which develops around the trickster strategies of the Creole language, for example. Assimilating the ‘derisive nature of its formation’ (p. 20), Creole is identified by Glissant ‘as a linguistic reaction [. . .] in the presence of whites: lisping, slurring, jibberish. Camouflage’ (p. 21). However, in some contexts, for example Haiti, ‘Creole quickly evolved beyond the trickster strategy [. . . and] became very early the productive and responsible language of the Haitian people’ (p. 21). Crucially, Glissant makes a distinction between a diversion that leads to the point where it becomes the productive expression of a people, and a mode of diversion that remains derivative and derisory: ‘Diversion leads nowhere when the original trickster strategy does not encounter any real potential for development’ (p. 23). It is important to acknowledge that within the two movements of diversion Glissant echoes an important moment in Deleuze’s own philosophy, one of particular relevance to a mode of postcolonial thought that takes seriously Bignall’s comments regarding the pitfalls of the negative and the dialectic. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze develops his total critique of the dialectic by turning to the affirmative and relational philosophy of Nietzsche to illustrate the reactive negativity of Hegelianism. Opposed to the dialectic of self and other in which ‘everything depends on the role of the negative’, Nietzsche shows us that ‘it is important to see that forces enter into relations with other forces. Life struggles with another kind of life’ (Deleuze 2006b, p. 8). Far from the non-relational account of singular substances offered by Hallward, through Nietzsche, Deleuzian philosophy is both constructivist and relational: a relation conceived not as that of or to a transcendental subject or pre-determined absolute, but simply as life relating to another life of the same nature. Difference in this model is the difference of reactive and active forces, the extent to which one or the other determines the body or state of affairs. On the side of dialectical thinking are the reactive forces as the lowest power of life: it is ‘an exhausted force which does not have the strength to affirm its difference, a force which no longer acts but rather reacts to the forces which dominate it’; ‘the speculation of the pleb, [...] the way of thinking of the slave’ (p. 9). In his reinterpretation of the master-slave relationship, Nietzsche turns Hegel’s thought on its head to argue that, for Hegel, power is conceived ‘not as the will to power but as the representation of power [...]. What

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the wills in Hegel want is to have their power recognised’ (p. 9). Thus in Hegel, both the master and the slave fall under the reactionary forces that characterize ressentiment, bad conscience and the ‘slave’. This goes beyond the Fanonian moment in which the self recognizes itself as other, since the operative distinction does not depend on the negative opposition of parties (self and other, colonizer and colonized), but rather draws a line between forces that simply are in themselves (active forces) and those which depend on external recognition (reactive forces). Hence, ‘the Nietzschean notion of the slave does not necessarily stand for someone dominated, by fate or social condition, but also characterises the dominators as much as the dominated once the regime of domination comes under the sway of forces which are reactive’ (p. ix). Albert Memmi comes close to this distinction in his characterization of the colonizer and the colonized as both equally trapped and defined by their relation to one another. As such, Memmi argues, even if the colonizer should desire the destruction of the colonized, ‘it would be impossible for him to do so without eliminating himself [...]. With all his power he must disown the colonized while their existence is indispensable to his own’ (1974, p. 54). Insofar as both the colonizer and the colonized depend for their very existence upon the presence of the other, both are defined by reactive forces, since only a dominated force reacts to other forces. What Memmi diagnoses in the colonial condition, therefore, is the increase of reactive forces: the will to dominate rather than the will to power. Viewed from this perspective, the will to power is never the desire to have power over someone else (to dominate), but rather the power of transformation. Creation, the eternal return of difference, transmutation: these are the active forces which do not depend on a dialectical relation, moment of recognition, lack, or negative difference in order to simply be. The key figure of postcolonial literature and agency, according to this diagnosis, is therefore neither the colonizer nor the colonized, but the Overman, a figure or body in which the active forces prevail. Glissant’s concept of diversion as either the potential for the creative expression of a people or a derivative status, far from signalling an early commitment to the productive drive of the dialectic is, I argue, best understood in terms of a distinction between prevailing active or reactive forces. Diversion which remains bound to the trickster strategy ‘leads nowhere’ (Glissant 1989b, p. 23) precisely because it is a sign of an unending ressentiment: ‘it still functions as if the Other is listening’ (p. 22). Negative diversion depends on the recognition of the other (‘as if the Other is listening’), a distinction that encompasses the derisive structure



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of Creole as much as the oppositional counter-poetics of negritude. Negritude, Glissant argues, ‘if it is understood to be the reaction against the denounced enemy, abolishes itself as soon as a being has taken possession of himself’ (2010, pp. 134–5). If negritude is a stage to be overcome (Hallward 2001, p. 76), this cannot be achieved through a dialectical process that will either produce a new opposition or achieve the ultimate aim of resolution (the management of difference). Rather, negritude understood as a reactive state of affairs is overcome ‘as soon as a being has taken possession of himself’: as soon as the will to dominate becomes the will to power. In other words, as Soyinka argued, where negritude remains a defensive position structured in opposition to the colonizer it is a force produced in relation to what it is not. Even where negritude becomes a collective expression of solidarity in the face of inequity or oppression, while that may serve an appreciable and necessary political function in certain circumstances, it nevertheless cannot be characterized as an active or properly postcolonial force since it remains orientated by what Harris terms ‘the structuralization of feud’ (1981, p. 132): a framework by which each ‘side’ gains its determination by means of its situated opposition to an (external) other. The aim of postcolonial discourse, then, is one that works towards the emergence of a body in which active forces prevail. Again we recall Deleuze’s comparison of Bergson and Hegel: ‘in Bergson [. . .] the thing differs with itself first, immediately. According to Hegel, the thing differs with itself because it differs first with all that it is not’ (cited in Hardt 1993, p. 7). Or, in Glissant’s words: Such a startling condition, that a man withstands being so hunted by an artifice, that simply to say what he is requires him to proclaim what he isn’t, and that before naming himself he has to incite the names that fasten him from such a distance. (2010, p. 27) The distinction at work here is, as before, one made between an active force that differentiates itself in the first instance and a reactive force dominated by others. Negative diversion for Glissant leads nowhere because as a reactive force it is trapped in ressentiment and the bad conscience of the slave. In the case of an active form of diversion, on the other hand, we find an affirmative force capable of ‘develop[ing] into concrete “possibilities”’ (Glissant 1989b, p. 22). Glissant stresses the non-dialectical nature of this concept in a footnote that accompanies his comments on productive or positive diversion:

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In this work [Caribbean Discourse], positive or positiveness is taken to mean that which activates a process in a way that is continuous or discontinuous [. . .] with the thrust of a collective will, whether impulsive or deliberate. Consequently, the negative (or negativity) is not a stage in the dialectical process, but the loss, the absence that prevents a natural collectivity (that is, whose conditions for existing are given) from becoming an actual collectivity (that is, whose capacity to exist becomes stronger and more explicit). (p. 22) I will return to the Deleuzian notion of the becoming-actual of a collectivity or ‘a people who are missing’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 4) suggested in this statement. However, what is important to emphasize at this point is Glissant’s characterization of the positive as an active process in contrast to a non-dialectical negativity that signals the impossibility of a ‘natural’, that is possible, collective. Where negative diversion relies on a moment of external recognition, productive diversion depends, in the first instance, on internal forces to determine its form. The ‘political’ position of the Afro-Caribbean in Martinique offers another clear example of prevailing active forces in Glissant’s work. Avoiding reversion, the ‘French Caribbean individual does not deny the African part of himself’ but nor does he ‘have, in reaction, to go to the extreme of celebrating it exclusively. He must recognize it’ while understanding that ‘another reality has come about’ (Glissant 1989b, p. 8). In other words, while the individual does not react to the external forces that attempt to shape his identity, this is not to say that he cannot acknowledge or interact with other forces and states of affairs. Like the Nietzschean Overman, the individual appropriates those forces that affirm his life, that can be utilized in the creation of another, new reality: He is no longer forced to reject strategically the European elements in his composition, although they continue to be a source of alienation, since he knows that he can choose between them. He can see that alienation first and foremost resides in the impossibility of choice, in the arbitrary imposition of values, and, perhaps, in the concept of value itself. He can conceive that synthesis is not a process of bastardization as he used to be told, but a productive activity through which each element is enriched. He has become Caribbean. (p. 8, emphasis added) The individual becomes in the Deleuzian sense of the word insofar as this is a purely affirmative and active process of enrichment: a becoming-Caribbean



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undetermined by pre-existing models and freed from the oppositional logic of counter-/colonialism. True alienation is identified as prevailing reactive forces (the inability to choose freely to draw from any force that enriches one’s own state of affairs) and the will to dominate (‘the arbitrary imposition of values’). Rereading Glissant’s diversion along Nietzschean/Deleuzian lines does not merely suggest that even in this early moment his work can be seen to reflect the affirmative model required by Bignall in her critique of postcolonial theory; it highlights the extent to which political critiques of Glissant have overlooked the crucial ways in which the writer challenges dialectics. Of course, the risk remains that this analysis simply demonstrates that Hallward’s critique of Glissant and postcolonialism did not go far enough and that even within Caribbean Discourse the fundamental argument takes us to the point at which difference emerges immediately, without mediation, forsaking ‘specific relations-with and between’ (Hallward 2001, p.  67). However, as will be clear from my Introduction and subsequent chapters, Hallward’s account of Deleuzian singularity is deeply problematic and, I believe, at odds with the reading of Deleuze that I offer in this study. As the following discussion of Poetics of Relation will argue, if we view the ‘politics’ of Glissant’s writing in light of a shift away from dialectical opposition towards a fraternal relationality characterized by the free appropriation of those forces which enhance the individual and effect change, which, rather than return us to ‘reversional’ stasis, lead to the creation of ‘something new’ (the very definition of creolization as we shall see), then a much more consistent Glissant emerges.5 Far from viewing the shift from a dialectical to a non-dialectical ontology as marking the boundaries of a politicized and revolutionary Glissant versus a post-political body of writing of little interest to postcolonial critique today, his theoretical works reflect the minor line of thought that emerges from the Caribbean surrealist movement, connects with the writings of Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott and Deleuzian post-continental philosophy, and influences the next generation of Caribbean writers.

The Literature of a People Yet to Come The politics of early versus late Glissant has emerged as a dominant point of contention in recent criticism and, as a result, the question of poetics has tended to be overlooked. Both Bongie’s Friends and Enemies and Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial specifically argue that we approach literature as

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literature, and yet both ultimately pursue decidedly political arguments in their evaluation of writing. Deleuze, as I shall argue in the next chapter, offers the literary critic a strong foundation for understanding literature as literature by arguing that while literature may indeed intersect with other domains, there are specific processes unique to literature (the production of affects and percepts). Both terms speak to Deleuze’s rejection of representationalist thought and underpin the pre-individual logic of his work: ‘Percepts aren’t perceptions, they’re packets of sensations and relations that live on independently of whoever experiences them. Affects aren’t feelings, they’re becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them (thereby becoming someone else)’ (Deleuze 1995, p. 137). Affects and percepts are differentiations (‘the determination of the virtual content of an Idea’ [Deleuze 2004b, p. 258]) and as such remain individuations on the plane of consistency as singularities. Thus a colour (red) is both a singularity or virtual concept (the redness of red in any context) and an actualization within the world (this particular red). The former retains the greatest degree of the power to become since it remains virtual. Literature, to the extent that it creates affects and percepts, moves beyond the realm of representation and signification (the actual) towards a creative becoming. Glissant’s own valorization of poetics similarly extends towards an understanding of literature’s non-representational, virtual force of becoming, or what Walcott refers to in Omeros as ‘that light beyond metaphor’ (1990, p. 271). Poetic Intention, which is notably focused on literary examples throughout, offers an example of such a becoming in the snow falling outside the writer’s window: This snow compels me [. . .]. Something in me offers itself to the cold and the solitude, which can stand neither one nor the other: this cold cannot be evaluated by the degree of temperature, nor this solitude by the absence of people. (2010, p. 10, emphasis added) The coldness expressed here is a singularity: a coldness which cannot be specified as a particular degree of temperature. Such singularities Deleuze and Guattari term haecceities: the mode of individuation that is not that of ‘a person, subject, thing, or substance’, but of a state of affairs which has ‘a perfect individuality’ and is composed ‘entirely of relations of movement and rest’, such as ‘[a] season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date’ (2004b, pp. 287–8). A cold, a wind such as that which rages in the opening chapters of Glissant’s The Fourth Century, these are haecceities, ‘capacities to affect and be affected’: ‘Tales must contain haecceities that are not simply



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emplacements, but concrete individuations that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and subjects’ (p. 288). The wind of The Fourth Century, for example, has often been interpreted as a metaphor for the past (cf Dash 1995, p. 82), and indeed for Papa Longoué it is associated with the Middle Passage: ‘this wind like the endless ocean’ (Glissant 2001, p. 3). From a Deleuzian perspective, however, this is to reduce the power of literature since metaphor works through the logic of representation and implies a hierarchy of literal and metaphoric meaning (cf Lecercle 2010, pp. 125–6). As a haecceity the wind is a perfect individuation in itself, defined as movement and rest, speed and slowness, and which has the capacity to affect and be affected. Furthermore, as a singularity it persists on the plane of consistency and in the time of Aion, ‘the indefinite time of the event’, as opposed to Chronos, ‘the time of measure’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, p. 289). The wind of The Fourth Century, in other words, is a haecceity formed within the Bergsonian pure past with the capacity to affect both Mathieu and Papa Longoué; opening up a block of becoming between the two in the becoming-Longoué of Mathieu (the Béluse heir) and the becoming-Béluse of Papa Longoué. This is not a metaphor for the impact of the past on the present, but as a haecceity the wind itself de/reterritorializes the present, actual bodies of Mathieu and Papa Longoué. And it is this twin movement of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, the expression of singularities and their actualization, that Glissant insists upon. In Poetic Intention, for example, the poet must ‘experience the world [. . . its] “actuality”’ (Glissant 2010, p. 70), but in doing so must inspire ‘the creation of that which doesn’t exist’ (p. 78), building ‘a world, analogic (and not repetitive) of the world’ (p. 71). ‘The poem reaches toward that indistinction [between creator and created] which is not confusion but synthesis’ (p. 79). Freed from the individual as source or receptor, haecceities, affects and percepts are not the poetic representation of a feeling or world, but the expression of its becoming. Glissant’s recourse to haecceities is aligned with the Deleuzian view that it is the work of literature itself to create possible worlds or ‘landscapes’ from ‘a single signifying expanse’ (p. 10): ‘We must exhaust our landscapes, in other words, realize them. But we must not fear discovering them endlessly: new, tempting, possibly prohibited’ (p. 11). The process of actualization is an endlessly re-creative and repeated process: one that returns to the virtual plane of immanence, counter-actualizing existing forms, in order to create new assemblages. Difference, Glissant stresses, is not reducible to a difference of degrees or opposition of two individual beings, but an immanent different/ciation: ‘Creation includes difference, but as a variety

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of its totality, not as a modality of the being who, with this difference, opposes and proposes himself’ (p. 101). Such moments of creation and difference do not lead out of this world as Hallward’s account of Deleuze suggests, but makes the work of literature that of a radically empirical or material engagement with this world. As Glissant argues, ‘[t]he poet is also an ascetic of the concrete. Having escaped the temple of books [. . .], the man rediscovers the immanence of things, which solicits and includes him’ (p. 70). This resolute focus on the ‘concrete’ world means that the work of literature (the creation of affects and percepts) is always also an engagement with this world: the expression of singularities on the plane of immanence and bodies on the plane of organization that both deterritorialize and reterritorialize upon one another. And it is in this sense that Glissant’s evocation of singularities and becoming does not amount to the abandonment of the political task of nation-building that has been the subject of much critical praise. Indeed, as Glissant affirms in Poetic Intention, the ‘decisive act’ confronting the writer is not merely to invent new fictions, but ‘consists also of building a nation’ (p. 171). In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975) Deleuze and Guattari find evidence of a ‘Kafka politics that is neither imaginary nor symbolic’ (1986, p. 7). In other words, Kafka’s novels are not approached by Deleuze and Guattari as the representation of a political reality, as a metaphor for politics, but, in themselves, as an expression which constitutes a politics. The various lines of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that are produced by Kafka’s texts are themselves a politics. Indeed, this is true of all minor literatures. Where major literatures are preoccupied with ‘individual concerns’ and ‘the social milieu’ is reduced to ‘mere environment or a background’, a ‘[m]inor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately with politics’: a ‘collective enunciation’ (p. 17). Social context does not form the background against which an individual’s particular struggle plays out, rather, as Glissant observes, ‘landscape in the work stops being merely decorative or supportive and emerges as a full character’ (1989b, p. 105): an active part of the collective assemblage that creates their own history, or what Deleuze and Guattari might term a haecceity – no mere backdrop to action, but ‘concrete individuations that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and subjects’ (2004b, p. 288). As Poetic Intention underscores, for Glissant the close proximity of poet, people and landscape as well as their capacity to affect and be affected is key to his vision: ‘For the poet, knowledge will no longer impede immediate contact with the world. On the contrary:



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knowledge of things is knowledge of the self as a function [. . .] and [. . .] a condition of the Ensemble’ (Glissant 2010, p. 94). Literature and language for Deleuze and Guattari are tied to the creative production of a collectivity. Since there is no transcendental cogito or subject as the a priori ground from which one speaks or a collective forms, every collective produces itself (becomes) through the act of speaking. The enunciation itself is the process by which the collective takes shape (an active affirmation of the forces that come to it). Were it otherwise, were a collective to seek to represent themselves through language, this would signal the formation (reterritorialization) of an identity that sought external recognition (a reactive state of affairs).6 Thus the writer’s task becomes one that seeks to express possible communities, not to represent existing ones. This is what Deleuze calls, following Bergson, literature’s ‘fabulating’ function (1995, p. 174): a term that, while in some respects is interchangeable with minor literature, stresses that the creative work of a minor literature is allied with the processes by which a people emerge: ‘Artists can only invoke a people [. . .]. When a people’s created, it’s through its own resources, but in a way that links up with something in art’ (p. 174). This visionary people to come, Deleuze argues, is not utopian, ‘it’s more a question of “fabulation” in which a people and art both share’ (p. 174). Fabulation captures the myth-making function of literature, around which communities coalesce: the creation of myths of origin (or, for Glissant, of digenesis [1999, p. 195]) that are creative of a future community, not reflective of an existing one.7 It is in this sense that, for Glissant, the writer’s task consists of ‘building a nation’, of ‘assembl[ing] a common will, by which we might be forged’ (2010, p. 171). No mere reflection of one’s surroundings, literature, Poetic Intention stresses, is a collective enunciation that creates rather than represents: it ‘is born with them’ and ‘illuminate[s] the progress of their growth’ (p. 171). In other words, rather than giving expression to an actual Caribbean collectivity, Glissant’s early work is committed to the notably Deleuzian task of inventing a people who are missing, a people yet to come (cf Deleuze 1997, p. 4). Such literature, Glissant notes, is constructed through a ‘stammering’, a minoritarian language that is ‘[n]ot codified, since it will result from the effort of the collective body that we aren’t yet’ (2010, p. 179). Envisioning a literature that stammers and resists coding, that places the poet in immediate contact with the world, and that expresses a collective assemblage, Poetic Intention echoes precisely Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature.8 Furthermore, it is the central task of creating a people yet to come that persists throughout Glissant’s later Caribbean Discourse,

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where the Martinican collective evoked is a future potentiality: men that will ‘one day’ realize their creolized existence (1989b, p. 3). ‘The tale has given us a sense of the collective, while implying that we still have to possess the latter [. . .]. This collectivity that is the subject of the narrative, what is basically spoken’ (p. 86, emphasis added). The political vision of Caribbean Discourse, then, remains a creative, not prescriptive account of a community’s becoming-Caribbean, becoming-postcolonial. The particular violence of colonization and continued neo-colonial dependency has been to encourage the French Caribbean people ‘to deny themselves as a collectivity’ (p. 7), to fail to become-Caribbean. The Martinican has been ‘fettered’ by ‘the impossibility of producing by and for themselves and [by] the resulting impotence in collectively asserting their true selves’ (p. 9). How has this denial been manifest? In the predominance of negative diversion, including in particular, the derivative status of Martinican Creole. The very language that is the condition of a collective enunciation remains, for Glissant, a tool that requires external recognition, ‘that still functions as if the Other is listening’ (p. 22). In turn, Caribbean Discourse explores the ways in which literature has been employed to majoritarian ends in the service of History, while simultaneously envisioning an alternative path. The linear character of narrative, for example, reinforces the imperialist structures of affiliation (p. 73): an ‘uninterrupted lineage from father to son, with no illegitimacy’, which secures the ‘community’s ontological relationship with territory’ (Glissant 1999, p. 114). However, Glissant seeks to transform the relationship between literature and history in such a way as to express the collective assemblage of the Caribbean people: their diverse histories, entangled present and unforeseeable future. Such a literature is ‘not only fragmented, it is henceforth shared. In it lie histories and the voice of peoples. We must reflect on a new relationship between history and literature. We need to live it differently’ (Glissant 1989b, p. 77).

Becoming-Caribbean: Dream Country, Real Country Poetics of Relation is, Glissant tells us, ‘a reconstituted echo or a spiral retelling’ (1997, p. 16) of Poetic Intention and Caribbean Discourse before it: an assertion challenged by critics such as Bongie, Hallward and Nesbitt who draw a distinction between these earlier works and the post-political late Glissant. In the account of Glissant’s early texts offered above, I hope to have unpicked this division by highlighting the non-dialectical nature of



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Glissant’s theoretical work and thereby complicating the approach to the political adopted by Bongie, Hallward and Nesbitt, for example. And Poetics, in this respect, follows suit. Like the Bretonian surrealists whose resistance to totality led to the formulation of an unlimited anti-thetics that fell short of a properly Hegelian dialectics, Glissant characterizes his core concept of Relation as an always-incomplete totality.9 As he argues, ‘Relation is not an absolute toward which every work would strive but a totality [. . .] that through its poetic and practical and unceasing force attempts to be perfected’ (p. 35). There is in the concept of Relation a vitalist impulse towards a creative evolution (to evoke Bergson), a ‘motor driving universal energy’ (p. 30), founded on the expression of difference rather than progression towards an absolute. Yet, in order to draw a clear distinction between dialectical thought and the vitalist tradition which runs throughout Glissant, Wilson Harris and Caribbean surrealists such as René Ménil, we must turn our attention not merely to the question of totality, but to the role of the negative within it. Relation and more pointedly creolization are, as I shall argue, terms that seek to theorize how newness enters the world, but it is the movement – active or reactive – by which the new emerges or is actualized that is the key to understanding the philosophical basis of Glissant’s work. Far from characterizing evolution in terms of a dialectical or negative opposition, Poetics of Relation critiques the imperialist connotations of such a model, arguing that we must depart not only from totalitarian modes of thought, but from all ‘dualistic’ conceptions of culture that are determined by ‘pitting citizen against barbarian’ (p. 14). The negative ground of difference is, for Glissant, incompatible with his thought of Relation since it, like imperialism, is associated with exclusion, filiation and absolutism: ‘exclusion is the rule in binary practice (either/or), whereas poetics aims for the space of difference – not exclusion but, rather, where difference is realized in going beyond’ (p. 82). Here the difference of Glissantian theory departs from the mainstay of postcolonial thought in which opposition or lack serves as the basis of ontology. Rather, difference is ‘realized in going beyond’. Difference is not, in this case, a specific or quantifiable difference determined by the opposition of self and other, but, like the singular sense of coldness depicted in Poetic Intention, is an immanent different/ciation of pure difference, of the new. In ‘going beyond’ this actual world, Glissant’s difference traces the path of the eternal return or becoming, and echoes Deleuze’s own concern not to ‘subordinate difference to identity’, resemblance or opposition by viewing it from the perspective of a subject who judges differences from their own transcendental position (Deleuze 2004b, p. xiii).

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If in following Spinoza and Nietzsche we accept that identity is not ‘first, that it exists as a principle but as a second principle, as a principle become’ (p. 50) rather than pre-constituted essence, then identity is nothing other than this becoming. If we further acknowledge that identity ‘revolve[s] around the Different’ (p. 50), then this becoming is one of different/ ciation, an actualization of the virtual as the production of difference or the new. It is in this sense that Glissant develops a concept of relationality that operates immanently and through the preservation of difference rather than dialectically between opposed parties. That one can ‘speak of a poetics of Relation’ without the requirement that we ‘add: relation between what and what?’ (Glissant 1997, p.  27), is, as I shall argue, less a symptom of a world without any form of specific or locatable identity whatsoever, and more a sign of Glissant’s own development of a philosophy of difference freed from dialectics, dualisms and pre-determined transcendental subjects. As with Deleuze’s concept of judgement, to assert that one no longer needs to ask ‘between which identities is a relation enacted or difference produced?’, does not mean that all things are indistinguishable or of the same value (cf Deleuze 1997, pp. 134–5). Glissant’s argument, like Deleuze’s, is that it is misleading to begin from the point of view of the subject and then talk about difference, relations and identity; it is, rather, the processes by which identities, values and differences are produced that constitute the primary ground of ontology. It is in this light that Glissant’s claim that the concept of creolization ‘is only exemplified by its processes and certainly not by the “contents” on which these operate’ (1997, p. 89) may be better understood. Rejecting the negative drive of anti-thetics as well as the oppositional logic of dialectics, creolization designates a process, ‘one of the ways of forming a complex mix’ (p. 89), that does not depend on predetermined ‘contents’ as the a priori cause of its movement. One does not begin with a set of fixed contents or identities that then intermix and creolize; creolization is the process (becoming) by which identities emerge and change. Moreover, it is the process by which they emerge as difference. ‘It is not merely an encounter, a shock (in Segalen’s sense), a métissage, but a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open’ (p. 34); creolization ‘opens on a radically new dimension of reality [. . . it] does not produce direct synthesis, but “résultantes”, results: something else, another way’ (1995, p. 270). The newness of creolization distinguishes it from terms such as métissage and, as I argued in the previous chapter, a counter-colonial discourse which remains trapped by ressentiment and the oppositional logic of colonialism. Insofar as creolization ‘opens on a radically new dimension



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of reality’, it always designates a moment of difference that ‘is realized in going beyond’ (1997, p. 82) current possibilities. It is a relation of active forces that create their own difference and not the reactive effect of a dialectical structure of forces in opposition. And, accordingly, it is creolization that marks the properly postcolonial moment of Glissantian Relation: the coming to prominence of the active forces of the ‘master’ and a departure from the ressentiment of the ‘slave’. Where creolization differs from related concepts such as créolité, especially as theorized by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant in their Éloge de la créolité, is in its pre-individual basis. Glissant’s assertion in Poetics of Relation that ‘[c]reolizations bring into Relation but not to universalize; the principles of creoleness regress toward negritude, ideas of Frenchness, of Latinness, all generalizing concepts’ (p. 89) casts a critical light over the proclamation of creole identity celebrated in Éloge published a year earlier. While créolité sought to express the diversity of Caribbean identity, promoting ‘an open specificity [. . .]. Expressing [creoleness] is not expressing a synthesis, not just expressing a crossing or any other unicity. It is expressing a kaleidoscopic totality, that is to say: the nontotalitarian consciousness of a preserved diversity’ (Bernabé et al 1993, p. 89), it nevertheless ultimately privileged a majoritarian concept of creole identity, rather than the becoming-creolized of Glissant’s post-continental philosophy. If Caribbean Discourse sung the potential of a creolized people yet to come, Éloge appeared to evidence the fact of an actual creole ‘we’ – ‘[n]either Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles’ (p. 75) – even if that ‘we’ could only be said to include the manifesto’s authors. The political act of Caribbean Discourse lay in the radical potential of a community endlessly caught in a process of becoming-creolized, becoming-new; exceeding current possibilities, challenging the status quo, and becoming-postcolonial, becoming-Caribbean. Créolité’s creole present, on the other hand, arrests the always-renewed potential to become and of Relation. Glissant’s poetry similarly invokes the possibility of, what Deleuze would term, a different/ciation of the virtual past as the process by which a (creolized) people yet to come emerges. His collection of poems, Dream Country, Real Country (1985), for example, presents postcolonial Caribbean identity and culture as an always-deferred becoming characterized as both an actual, tangible present and a virtual, intuited past. And between these two planes, actual and virtual, ‘real’ and ‘dream’, Caribbeanness perpetually emerges in unforeseeable ways. The collection, which moves between present-day Martinique and mythical, ancestral lands, demonstrates that both the ‘dream’ and the ‘real’ country are necessary for a complete

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appreciation of Martinique. But more than this, in a Bergsonian turn, Glissant further suggests that the experience of the present is always both a lived actuality and a carrying forth of the virtual past. This dual intuition is evident from the opening stanza of the first poem in the series ‘Country’, which recounts both the real and ‘present’ experience of contemporary Martinique and the virtual, ‘dream’ recollection of the Middle Passage: We raged at your holds the wind peopled Your high rails for counting the bodies We spelled our herd of cries from the wind You who know how to read around the landscape of words where we wandered Detached from us who cry out our blood to you And on this bridge hail the trace of our feet. (Glissant 2005, p. 183) Several elements combine to evoke the Middle Passage: ‘We raged at your holds’ and ‘herd of cries’ instantly creates an image of a slave ship. However, this stanza also depicts the ‘real’ and immediate experience of a hurricane on the poet’s native island: ‘the wind peopled/Your high rails for counting the bodies’ suggests the devastation to both the land and the people wrought each hurricane season. There is, then, a simultaneous evocation of both the real (the experienced land) and the imagined (the poetic recreation of historical memory). In the ‘glossary’ which follows the poem Glissant lists his cast of characters under the two headings ‘Legend’ and ‘Real’: distinguishing between the mythical presences in the poem, such as Laoka, Ichneumon and Milos, primarily associated with an ancestral memory, and the ‘real’ voices of Mathieu, Mycea and Thäel, who are contemporary representatives of the Martinican people. Recalling René Ménil for whom the ‘actuality of a being is its present’ (1996f, p. 130), but a present that is without contradiction at once present and past, Glissant’s Dream Country, Real Country demonstrates the coexistence of actual present and virtual past: ‘We crack the county of the past in the fetter of this country/We moor it to this mangrove that feigns memory’ (Glissant 2005, p. 184). For Glissant, the ‘country of the past’ is not only Africa (which would evoke negritude), but is composed of the diverse cultures that meet in the Caribbean. Crucially, while access to the unconscious provided the surrealists with a route beyond the confines of daily reality, liberating the conscious mind as we saw in Chapter One, for Glissant it is the virtual presence of the past



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that offers the poet something more than this actual world: Laoka is ‘the hidden taste we give to our words’ (p. 191), ‘And it is Milos and Ichneumon whose word has unlaced/The suffering of the country of the past/From the broken ravine of this present county’ (p.  192). The past (‘dream’/ virtual) exists in ‘the broken ravine’ of the present (‘real’/actual), and, moreover, it gives additional meaning, ‘the hidden taste’, to the present. It is in this sense that for Glissant creolization represents the production or, better, different/ciation of a new dimension, a going-beyond current possibilities within the actual present. Echoing Deleuze’s third synthesis of time in Difference and Repetition and his development of Bergsonian élan vital as the actualization of the virtual, pure past, Glissant’s Dream Country, Real Country offers a vision of the present that is at once fully actual and at the same time haunted by a virtual past or event. Yet, far from seeing this as a sign of the community’s failure to move on from the legacies of its colonial past, it is precisely because the (virtual) past remains constant that the poem and the present are able to open up to a future freed from the ‘suffering of this country of the past’ and ‘broken ravine’ of the present: The land has unlaced, blade by blade what yesterday You bore as cargo on your overflowing river Your hand calls back this pack of rumours into something new You are astonished to burn more than old incense. (pp. 196–7) Bringing dream and reality, past and present, into relation within poetry (that privileged site of the marvellous for Ménil), Glissant’s poem envisions a future with the ability to become-new, to become-creolized. As with the Deleuzian third synthesis of time, here the actualization of the virtual past turns ‘this pack of rumours [the past] into something new’; a poetic expression that ‘burn[s] more than old incense’. Glissant’s ‘prophetic vision of the past’ (1989b, p. 64) in Dream Country, Real Country is, according to the Deleuzian model, an engagement with the traumatic history of colonialism that, nevertheless, creates a new, unpredictable future. As we saw in Chapter Two, the value of this move for the postcolonial present is underscored by other Caribbean writers such as Wilson Harris, for whom ‘continuities running out of the mystery of the past into the unknown future yield proportions of originality, proportions of the “genuinely new”’ (Harris 1996, p. 6), and both writers acknowledge the importance of a poetics that simultaneously commemorates colonial pasts and facilities an original future undetermined by historical legacies.

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What Dream Country, Real Country demonstrates, moreover, is the close correspondence between a philosophy of time that holds no irreconcilable contradiction between past, present and a future that maintains the ability to become-new, and the philosophy and aesthetics of surrealism. Grounded in a reality composed of consciousness, the unconscious and the relation between the two, surrealism is a practice in which ‘contraries can intimately rub shoulders’, making the two incommensurable sides of reality ‘mutually compelling’ to one another (Ménil 1996c, p. 92). At the same time, the work of Glissant demonstrates how the relation between dream and reality does not merely represent a metaphor for the functioning of the imagination but corresponds to a similarly creative actualization of the past within the present.

Philosophy of Relation The philosophical concept of creolization occupies a key position within Glissant’s early writings both theoretical and poetic: representing the process by which a Caribbean/creole people will emerge. With Poetics of Relation, that marker of the now post-political Glissant, the concept is overshadowed by that of Relation. Yet, what works such as Dream Country, Real Country demonstrate is the correlation between a process of creolization as the expression of a community’s becoming and the virtual presence of the past. Creolization deals in the actualization of communities, identities and their expression. Relation, it will become clear in Poetics, is a much broader concept that incorporates the plane of immanence or composition from which creolizations or actualizations emerge. Relation is perhaps Glissant’s most self-evidently Deleuzian concept. ‘Rhizomatic thought is’, he writes, ‘the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other’ (1997, p. 11). Predictably, critical discussions of Glissant’s use of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome have fixated on the issue of specificity. Andrea Hiepko, for example, writes that, while Glissant acknowledges the influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘image of the network of rhizomes to construct his own theory of identity, we should not confuse his usage with their completely different notion. For them, the rhizome is in fact an abstract model for the philosophy of immanence in which the question of identity is not taken into account’ (Hiepko 2003, p. 243). While the particular reading of Deleuze offered in Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial is one at odds with the approach taken by this study,



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what makes his analysis stand apart from readings such as those offered by Hiepko or Shireen Lewis (2006) is his refusal to explain away Glissant’s Deleuzian philosophy. In the example above, Hiepko can offer no explanation to account for the particular prominence afforded to Deleuze and Guattari in Poetics of Relation, an association signalled within the very first few pages of the text: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari criticized notions of the root and, even perhaps, notions of being rooted. The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it. In opposition to this they propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently. The notion of the rhizome maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other. (Glissant 1997, p. 11) What Glissant’s work acknowledges, despite Hiepko’s claim, is precisely the capacity of a philosophy of immanence to offer a non-hierarchical concept of identity as a relative and constantly changing factor. To suggest rather reductively that ‘the question of identity is not taken into account’ by Deleuze and Guattari (Hiepko 2003, p. 243) misunderstands the role of actualization, stratification and organization in Deleuze’s philosophy: ‘Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, p. 10). Far from wholly ignoring the question of identity, what in fact emerges by this account is an approach to identity remarkably close to Glissant’s own. Consider Deleuze and Guattari’s argument in the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus where they claim that the rhizome is an attempt to ‘reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves [. . .]. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied’ (2004b, pp. 3–4). It is such a point that Glissant’s concept of creolization seeks. For Glissant, creolization is emphatically not another identitarian category, it is not simply the glorification of the composite nature of people [. . .]. The idea of creolization demonstrates that henceforth it is no longer valid to glorify

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‘unique’ origins that the race safeguards and prolongs [. . .]. To assert peoples are creolized, that creolization has value, is to deconstruct in this way the category of ‘creolized’ that is considered as halfway between two ‘pure’ extremes. (1989b, p. 140) In other words, creoleness is not the point at which race no longer exists, but where the question ‘To which race do I belong?’ is no longer of any importance.10 As for Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome offers Glissant an alternative model to the totalitarian root. It is exempt from the processes of invasion and domination characteristic of the root and is not fixed in an oppositional relationship to its environment, nor by any other pre-established ‘content’. However, it ‘maintain[s] the fact of rootedness’, of place. While Hallward might find such appeals to specificity ultimately unconvincing, it is certainly clear that Glissant intends to offer a concept of identity as a variation or becoming that, furthermore, is always context-specific: ‘Identity’, Glissant argues, ‘is no longer just permanence; it is a capacity for variation’ (1997, p. 141). ‘Identity as a system of relation [. . .] challenges the generalizing universal and necessitates even more stringent demands for specificity. But it is hard to keep in balance’ (p. 142). Relation, which signals a matrix of actual and virtual lines of de/reterritorialization, is paradoxically both the potential of becoming and the eternal return, and an awareness of the need for specificity in order to avoid ‘the danger of being bogged down, diluted, or “arrested” in undifferentiated conglomerations’ (p. 142). In such statements Glissant demonstrates a prescient awareness of the kind of objections that Miller (2003) and Hallward (2001) raise against Deleuzian thought: the specific remains an essential part of his ontology even while it remains in a difficult ‘balance’ against the virtual plane of Relation. In his reformulation of postcolonial or Caribbean identity as ‘a system of relation’ (p. 142), Glissant echoes not merely Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, which has been the focus of much critical analysis, but at a more fundamental level the processes of different/ciation, lines of flight and de/ reterritorializations that characterize Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence from works including Difference and Repetition to the late ‘Immanence: A Life’. Thus the shared ground of Glissant and Deleuze’s post-continental philosophy extends far beyond the common concept of the rhizome towards an ontology of immanence, becoming, active forces and multiplicity. In Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter on the ‘Rhizome’ in A Thousand Plateaus, the concepts of multiplicity and assemblage come to prominence



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and, in turn, are reflected in Glissant’s development of his theory of Relation as a dynamic, limitless and interactive totality. The rhizome is a multiplicity of lines of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that are not relative to one another as if in a series, but rather interconnected as in the example of the wasp and the orchid: the male wasp is attracted to the orchid by a scent and patterning that it believes to be of a female wasp, and in the subsequent interaction it pollinates the plant. Such is an example of ‘a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, p. 11). The wasp and the orchid do not produce a hybrid third-term (a model of filiation), rather, the alliance between the two creates what Deleuze and Guattari term a block of becoming. ‘What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes’ (p. 262). In other words, Deleuze and Guattari do not start with the wasp and the orchid as pre-existing identities that then become-other through their interaction. Such would reintroduce transcendence to a philosophy of immanence. Instead, each is nothing other than the becomings that connect, ‘interlink’ and ‘form relays’ within new assemblages or haecceities.11 In Poetics of Relation Glissant envisions a similar process by which Relation, which ‘does not precede itself in its action and presupposes no a priori’ (1997, p. 172), ‘relinks (relays), relates’ (p. 173). Like Deleuze and Caribbean predecessors such as Ménil, Glissant grounds his philosophy of Relation on an immanent conception of being: Relation is defined as ‘a totality finally sufficient to itself’ with the caveat that such a totality is in no way taken as an a priori, absolute and fixed concept: The difference between Relation and totality lies in the fact that Relation is active within itself, whereas totality, already in its very concept, is in danger of immobility. Relation is open totality, totality would be relation at rest. Totality is virtual. Actually, only rest could, in itself, be legitimately or totally virtual. For movement is precisely that which realizes itself absolutely. Relation is movement. (p. 171) In Glissant’s glossing of Relation as movement or speed there is an echo of Ménil’s realm of the imagination characterized as an interactive relation of varying speeds of the mind.12 However, the influence of A Thousand Plateaus remains. Glissant is well aware of the Hegelian overtones to the

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concept of totality that he employs and is in this work at pains to stress that what he refers to is no final state but an open unity; a unity that ‘has nothing to do with a ground buried deep within things, nor with an end or a project in the mind of God. Instead, it is a plane upon which everything is laid out [. . .]. A plane of immanence’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, p. 280). For Glissant, as for Deleuze and Guattari, the totality contains no a priori elements that can subsequently be related to one another. Rather, Glissant conceives of a vitalist force (Relation) that differentiates itself solely through movement.13 Or as Deleuze and Guattari claim of their plane of immanence or consistency: ‘There is no structure, any more than there is genesis. There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements [. . .]. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages’ (2004b, pp. 293–4). What Glissant refers to as ‘rest’ is perhaps better understood as a plane of consistency, since there is nothing at rest so to speak, only the undifferenciated virtual recognized as infinite speed. The infinite speed of particles on the plane of immanence or consistency characterizes the plane as one of chaos; a chaosmos. It is without structure or organization, but not necessarily undifferentiated: ‘chaos envelops and distributes, without identifying, the heterogeneities that make up the world’ (Toscano 2005, p. 43). In other words, the chaosmos is a ‘virtual totality’ (p. 43), the virtual, pre-individual ground which immanently different/ciates individuals: first as a differentiation – the process, to recall Bignall, by which ‘an original, uniformly chaotic ground [. . .] select[s] and determine[s] the content defining a virtual and problematic Idea’ – then as a creative differenciation or actualization which gives expression to ‘individuated actual bodies as forms of solution that exist as responses to the particular problem given by that virtual Idea’ (2010, pp. 103–4). There are, then, Deleuze and Guattari argue, two modes of individuation which, in turn, correspond to the two modes of temporality discussed in Chapter Two of this study: Aion and Chronos. As they write in A Thousand Plateaus: the individuation of a life is not the same as the individuation of the subject that leads it or serves as its support. It is not the same Plane: in the first case, it is the plane of consistency or of composition of haecceities, which knows only speeds and affects; and in second case, it is the altogether different plane of forms, substances, and subjects. And it is not in the same time, the same temporality. Aeon: the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds [. . .]. Chronos: the time of measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject. (2004b, pp. 288–9)



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The co-presence of both planes and of both times challenges the assertion that Deleuze’s is a ‘singularizing’ or de-specifying philosophy which leaves no room for actual identities or expressions. It is always a time of the pure event and of its actualization within this world; a life that is not bound to finite existence and this particular life with its brief time span. An individual’s becoming (rather than being) captures the twin movements/ moments: the subject is differenciated as an actual thing (this particular life), but the life that runs through it remains virtual, ‘an impersonal and yet singular life’ (Deleuze 2005, p. 28). It is this singular sense of a life that means that each individual remains open: my particular life can become something very different and it can do so in ways that I cannot foresee. Thus there are always two impulses at work, two poles: The plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization [. . .]. Conversely, the plane of consistency is constantly extricating itself from the plane of organization, causing particles to spin off the strata, scrambling forms by dint of speed or slowness, breaking down functions by means of assemblages. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, pp. 297–8) In other words, for Deleuze and Guattari, the actual and the virtual, the specific and the singular, represent two irreducible poles or planes that deterritorialize the other. Specific, determinate being is actualized on the plane of organization yet each actual thing remains open because it exists on a plane that is always threatened by deterritorialization (counter-actualization). Returning to the plane of consistency, counter-actualization is the potential for the creation of a new assemblage; a becoming-new as the individual is, in turn, actualized on the plane of organization once again. Deleuze and Guattari’s account of individuation both as a process of actualization where ordered and specific being emerges (becomes) from the chaotic plane of immanence, and as a counter-actualization in which form and strata are broken, offers a philosophical account of individuation and change within immanence. As elsewhere in Deleuze’s work, the influence of key philosophical forbearers such as Spinoza is clearly evident. In describing the plane of immanence or consistency as a ‘plane of nature’ with a ‘unity’ that ‘has nothing to do with a form or a figure [. . .] nor with an end or a project in the mind of God’ (2004b, p. 280), Deleuze and Guattari draw on the Spinozist sense of God or Nature as immanent substance. Their description of form or content as differential movements

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of speed and rest is also, they acknowledge, drawn from Spinoza (p. 280). Furthermore, we might better understand the importance of actualization within Deleuze, and, in doing so, oppose critics such as Hallward who prioritize counter-actualization in order to critique Deleuzian thought, by highlighting its proximity to the Spinozist idea of conatus. For Spinoza, each finite or actual thing ‘strives to preserve in its being’ (1994, p. 159). In other words, as Stuart Hampshire explains: We conceive of ourself as forming particular parts of a single res extensa, and therefore as in our bodies subject to the laws of physics which govern the movement of all material things in the perceived world. At the same time every person’s body has some internal coherence among its parts, matching the internal coherence of the mind that reflects it. The conatus, the drive to self-maintenance and coherence, is a universal feature of any person’s mind and of his body. (2005, p. xxix) It is this drive to coherence that reminds us of the value of actualization within immanence. Although Deleuze’s philosophy often seeks to explore moments of deterritorialization and their potential to lead to new forms and assemblages, the conatus principle highlights the essential role that the plane of organization plays in giving expression to specific forms of life. The constant pressure of the plane of organization ‘working away at the plane of consistency’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, p. 297) is just as essential as the deterritorializing plane of consistency in the process of creating new becomings, of becoming-new. Crucially, it is this awareness of a twin movement of counter-/actualization that lies at the heart of Glissant’s philosophy of Relation: an important acknowledgement given the closeness of Hallward’s critique of Deleuze to that of his reading of Glissant. Put simply, if, for Hallward, Deleuze is guilty of privileging counter-actualization such that all that is specific will return to the singular plane of immanence or consistency (the virtual), then this is the charge directed at Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Poetics details a plane of chaos or a chaosmos as the ground of being (becoming). The virtual totality that Glissant refers to is further defined as a chaos-monde: ‘Relation is that which simultaneously realizes and expresses this motion [the movement of totality]. It is the chaosmonde relating (to itself)’ (Glissant 1997, p. 94). In other words, chaos-monde operates as an immanent totality within which ‘parts’ are individuated through the movement of Relation. As in A Thousand Plateaus, for Glissant the concept of chaos should not be mistaken for undifferentiation;



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‘[c]haos is not “chaotic”’ in the sense of a ‘uniform blend’ or ‘muddled nothingness’ (p. 94), since both imply a heterogeneous or ordered norm against which chaos could be measured and judged as respectively uniform or disordered.14 The chaos-monde is, rather, the universe ‘cleared of a priori values’ (p. 94); a plane of consistency upon which individuation occurs without organization or hierarchy, as differentiation. It is this image of chaos as movement, as ‘totality in evolution’ (p. 133), that Glissant captures in the chapter ‘Black Beach’, in which he recalls the volcanic beach at Le Diamant, which sits by Mont Pelée in Martinique. In this section Glissant identifies the rhythm of the waves hitting the shore with the perpetual turbulence of Relation, the movement of the chaosmonde, and writes: I thought how everywhere, and in how many different modes, it is the same necessity to fit into the chaotic drive of totality that is at work, despite being subject to the exaltations or numbing effects of specific existences. I thought about these modes that are just so many common.  .]. That these commonplaces, whose quantities are both places [.  countless and precise, in fact produced this Roar, in which we could still hear intoned every language in the world. Chaos has no language but gives rise to quantifiable myriads of them. (pp. 124–5) Both sides – the virtual and the actual, the Spinozist infinite creative force and structure of finite modes – are evoked in this extract as the chaos-monde gives rise to countless ‘commonplaces’ and ‘specific existences’. If Relation is Glissant’s privileged term (both here and in Philosophie de la Relation it is afforded a headline position) it is because it refers to the movement between planes: the actualization of the virtual totality or chaos-monde as well as a process of counter-actualization, a line of flight or deterritorialization: ‘Destructure these facts, declare them void, replace them, reinvent their music: totality’s imagination is inexhaustible’ (p. 95). Each and every actual thing remains open to the potential to become-new, becomecreolized within Relation through a process of ‘destructuring’, a return to the chaos-monde, where a new assemblage is formed. Relation, then, like the Spinozist God/Nature understood as a virtual creative force and actual created world, encompasses the two sides of a single reality: it is the ‘position of each part within this whole: that is, the acknowledged validity of each specific Plantation yet at the same time the urgent need to understand the hidden order of the whole – so as to wander there without becoming lost’ (Glissant 1997, p. 131). Far from leading us

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to a wholly singular reality, Glissant’s Poetics maintains the importance of specific existences to avoid ‘becoming lost’ in the chaos-monde. Yet, as in Caribbean Discourse, such an assertion should not be mistaken for a return to transcendent concepts of identity, being or the self. Rather, specific moments of individuation are designated échos-monde or ‘the folds of Relation’ (1997, p. 93). Again there is a strong Deleuzian influence: the concept of the fold is what allows Deleuze and Guattari to maintain that ‘pluralism = monism’ (2004b, p. 23). The difficulty facing a philosophy of immanence is, as John Mullarkey suggests, that it is constantly threatened with a return to transcendence. Indeed, at the most basic level, how ‘can one say that there is no outside without also thinking within the element of transcendental certainty (the outside) again?’ (2006, p. 9). To think critically and creatively about this world, to assert an opinion or take a side, even to offer a philosophy of immanence, requires a measure of stock-taking at some degree of distance from the situation to which one responds. We find this argument in Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial, where Naipaul’s narrator is positioned at a critical distance outside the world he casts commentary on (2001, p. 332). However, that Naipaul (his texts and in himself) courts such controversy is a sign that the prerequisite distancing of author and subject is an impossible act of judicial detachment from this world. In other words, the question of subjectivity is caught within a double bind. On the one hand, the critical impartiality of the writer as cultural commentator apart requires an unattainable degree of transcendental detachment from their world. On the other hand, individuals as finite modes within an infinite single-substance seem unable to secure any ground as the basis of thinking about the world. Deleuze’s solution to this impasse, in The Fold, is to present inside and outside as so many folds within an immanent substance.15 As we fold a curve with a piece of paper, we create a provisional inside and outside that remain immanent to the paper. Thus, finite modes are created within substance as folds: exteriority and interiority, outside and inside, ‘the pleats of matter, and the folds in the soul’ (Deleuze 2006a, p. 3). By formulating the concept of écho-monde as a folding of Relation, Glissant responds to a similar problem. He rejects transcendental notions of being and yet remains aware of the need to retain a sense of the specific to avoid ‘becoming lost’ in the chaos-monde (1997, p. 131). Échos-monde are, therefore, instances of specific existences within the chaotic movement of Relation: The only discernible stabilities in Relation have to do with the interdependence of the cycles operative there, how their corresponding



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patterns of movement are in tune. In Relation analytic thought is led to construct unities whose interdependent variances jointly piece together the interactive totality. These unities are not models but revealing échosmonde. Thought makes music. (pp. 92–3) Importantly, these unities are defensive strategies against the overwhelming force of Relation and, accordingly, may be characterized as a form of conatus: ‘In order to cope with or express confluences, every individual, every community, forms its own échos-monde’ (p. 93). However, these unities are not ‘models’, fixed and essentialized entities resistant to change, but folds in Relation. The concept of échos-monde performs two functions: illustrating that within the immanent play of Relation it is necessary, in order to express an opinion or take a position, to ‘construct unities’, while at the same time maintaining that these are not absolute, but finite, partial and subject to further change or becomings through the continued process of Relation. Crucially, like all finite modes and actualizations, these are reactions to the specific contexts and realities that individuals and communities face, but they remain parts of the whole because they signify the way in which particular situations may be expressed in relation to all other elements of the totality. This is why Glissant argues that every individual makes a ‘sort of music and each community as well’; that ‘[t]hought makes music’. Music, in this case, is a harmonizing of échos-monde, a sense of the pattern that Relation forms as well as the ability to sense when these movements are in tune with one another. To understand the individuation of specific existences within Relation we can turn once again to the surrealist paintings of Wifredo Lam. The Jungle, as I argued in Chapter One, gives us an image of immanence: ‘a vast space, without gaps, all of whose parts act at the same time, all equally free and equally dependent on the totality [. . .]: a living whole, knowing no other laws than those of the rhythm’ (Mabille 1996b, p. 211). Here transcendentalism is wholly rejected. Opposing the European perspective in which a ‘series of laws or relations strictly determines the position of the peripheral parts in terms of the centre’ (p. 209), Lam’s painting frames a perspective on the whole that remains immanent and is continually subject to the changing ‘rhythm’ of the ‘living whole’. It is a fold (or series of folds) that creates a provisional inside and a provisional outside within the immanent whole. In turn, this characterization of immanence as a particularly non-European perspective, recalls Deleuze’s discussion of American writing and in particular Walt Whitman, in Essays Critical and Clinical. In his short essay, ‘Whitman’, Deleuze discusses the part or fragment as ‘innately

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American’ (1997, p. 56), both in terms of its literature and its socio-political make up. While that fragmentary nature is what gives the work of writers such as Whitman ‘the immediate value of a collective statement’ (p. 57), as was signalled in Lam’s painting, ‘the whole, nonetheless has to be conquered and even invented’ (p. 58) or constructed from that non-hierarchical body of parts. While there is, then, a movement from fragments to wholeness, this should not be confused with a dialectical progression since this would imply a ‘European’ perspective in which a God or ruler determines a priori the position of parts in relation to the whole. Or, as Deleuze writes of Whitman: Whitman sometimes places the Idea of the Whole beforehand, invoking a cosmos that beckons us to a kind of fusion; in a particularly ‘convulsive’ meditation, he calls himself a ‘Hegelian’ [. . .]. He is then expressing himself like a European, who finds in pantheism a reason to inflate his own ego. But when Whitman speaks in his own manner and his own style, it turns out that a kind of whole must be constructed, a whole that is all the more paradoxical in that it only comes after the fragments and leaves them intact, making no attempt to totalize them. (p. 58) A whole that does not precede its parts and that makes ‘no attempt to totalize them’ is precisely what Glissant presents in his non-dialectical theory of Relation, which, in turn, far from leaving behind the work of nation-building is, like the writing of Whitman, the expression of a collective statement.16 Within this immanent framework, Deleuze argues, fragments do not dissolve into an undifferentiated nothingness but remain ‘intact’, and it is precisely this rejection of predetermined relationality that marks the point of separation from Hegelian thought for both Glissant and Deleuze. The work of the writer, then, is to ‘invent nonpreexisting relations’ between fragments (Deleuze 1997, p. 58); relations that ‘are not internal to a Whole; rather, the Whole is derived from the external relations of a given moment, and varies with them. Relations of counterpoint must be invented everywhere, and are the very condition of evolution’ (p. 59). A ‘living whole, knowing no other laws than those of the rhythm’ (Mabille 1996b, p. 211): this is precisely why immanence underpins the poetic and artistic expressions of New World writers and artists from the surrealists to present-day figures. And, as we have seen, this is precisely what Glissant offers Caribbean thought in his concepts of écho-monde (non-totalizable fragments in evolution), chaos-monde (the non-pre-existing, virtual plane on which fragments are different/ciated) and Relation (the unrealizable



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totality of relations external to their terms and which must always be invented or imagined). That relations must continually be reinvented as the very condition of evolution and change within Relation, hints at the privileged role of the imagination in Glissantian philosophy. Like the Caribbean surrealists before him, Glissant views the imagination as key to unlocking the creative potential of the virtual totality. In our everyday lives, he argues, we live in a ‘sort of generalized suspension’ (Glissant 1997, p. 155), a ‘mute actuality’ (p. 156). In order to escape the strictures and suffering of our current lives, our task is to open our imaginary to ‘the other of Thought’ (p. 155): ‘The world’s poetic force (its energy), kept alive within us, fastens itself by fleeting, delicate shivers, onto the rambling prescience of poetry in the depths of our being’ (p. 159). In such statements Glissant draws close to the Bergsonian élan vital, posing a creative vitalist force, a force that we will recognize ‘as the newness of the world not setting itself up as anything new’ (p. 160). This life-force, moreover, can be accessed only through an imaginative Relation with the other of Thought, achieved through a ‘distancing in relation to the predetermined or imposed norm’ (p. 155). The other of Thought, then, is that which lies ‘outside’ representation, hierarchies and the plane of organization: a relation of speed and rest on the plane of consistency or immanence, understood, Glissant makes clear, as the source of creation, experimentation and, as such, poetics.

Opacity and (Af)filiation As for the Guyanese writer and theorist Wilson Harris, for Glissant the work of postcolonial literatures and thought must be directed towards the creation of a new potentiality specific to, but not specified by the colonial past that engenders it. Where Harris followed a more distinctly surrealist route by exploring the event of actualization as a creative dialogue between actual and virtual, consciousness and the unconscious, Glissant echoes the vitalist impulse of Ménil and Harris. Creolization and Relation are concepts that articulate the processes of creation, individuation and different/ ciation within a post-continental philosophy of immanence. The ways in which Glissant specifically draws on Deleuzian thought in order to develop his poetics of Relation are numerous and take us far beyond the rhizome, which has been the focus and limit of much critical discourse on Glissant’s late work. Deleuze’s post-continental philosophy offers Glissant a model of immanence that provides a route towards thinking about creativity,

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expression and the individuation of finite bodies within the two-sided reality he encapsulates in the term Relation. As outlined above, Relation designates the movement of different/ciation from the plane of immanence or chaos-monde to the commonplace reality in which we live. Like Deleuze, Glissant’s interest is drawn to lines of flight, deterritorializations and counter-actualizations that disrupt the norms and hierarchies, such as colonialism, that structure our plane of organization; demonstrating a sensitivity to moments of creativity and newness as signs of a vitalistic force we can never fully access. Creolization and Relation form part of his critique of transcendental and binary thought, both of which set predetermined limits on becoming. If the Martinican people yet to come of Caribbean Discourse represent the promise of a postcolonial identity or, better, écho-monde, it is because they remain an open potentiality, not fixed or specified by the colonial context that engenders them. Following on from Glissant’s concept of becoming-creolized as the creative and political expression of a postcolonial people yet to come, Poetics of Relation further develops Glissant’s critique of colonization by highlighting a move from being to becoming, and associating this with a rejection of filiation as an imperialist logic. As he argues, relational identity ‘is produced in the chaotic network of Relation and not in the hidden violence of filiation’ (Glissant 1997, p. 144). In this too he echoes Deleuze and Guattari when they argue that becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent and filiation. Becoming produces nothing by filiation; all filiation is imaginary. Becoming is always of a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance. If evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation. (2004b, p. 263) The move away from understanding evolution as a progressive development within a single species towards evolution as a relation between different orders of being, is reflected in Caribbean Discourse as Glissant presents creolization as the production of identities apart from the discourse of filiation and genesis that legitimized the colonial project. As he argues, For the Western mind, it is a matter of learning the natural Genesis, the primordial slime, the Eternal Garden [. . .]. Man, the chosen one, knows himself and knows the world, not because he is part of it, but because he



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establishes a sequence and measures it according to his own time scale, which is determined by his affiliation. (1989b, p. 73) This model of genesis suggests transcendent man, man separate from nature, and establishes the standards of filiation and linearity, both of which result in the hierarchies of difference and ideals of legitimacy that are the features of atavistic communities. Glissant further elaborates this point in Faulkner, Mississippi: In atavistic cultures the community takes shape around a Genesis, a creation story in which there is uninterrupted lineage from father to son, with no illegitimacy. The community’s ontological relationship with territory is so tight that it not only authorizes an aggrandizement of territory – as with colonialism – but it also foresees what is to come, what is going to be conquered, and what is going to be discovered. (1999, p. 114) Filiation ensures not only undisputed succession but determines a future that is necessarily an uninterrupted continuation of that lineage. In other words, filiation fixes identities and is closed to the possibilities of crosscultural mixing and creolization: it is ‘the insistence on fixing the object of scrutiny in static time, thereby removing the tangled nature of lived experience and promoting the idea of uncontaminated survival’ (Glissant 1989b, p. 14). Glissant’s fundamental assertion is that being cannot be understood apart from its becoming. There is no a priori or transcendent ground of being, no position that one can take outside lived experience. Filiation, by contrast, depends upon fixed being, it judges becomings on the basis of its own fixed point of view, and therefore will always fall back on the same rather than difference. The shift from filiation to affiliation in Glissant’s work not only responds to the perpetuation of an imperialist world-view but situates difference at the heart of his philosophy. As we have seen, Deleuze and Guattari similarly celebrate the productive force of the eternal return and associate their model of affiliation with becoming. If postcoloniality is, as this study has suggested, best understood as a becoming-postcolonial, as opposed to a fixed state of being, then it is one that rejects the colonialist logic of filiation and instead functions through a process of affiliation between the elements or échos-monde in Relation. However, Deleuze and Guattari’s model of affiliation goes further than this. The affiliation of the wasp and the orchid, for example, does not result in a wasp-orchid or orchid-wasp, but rather ‘a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp’:

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The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on the level of strata – a parallelism between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an animal organization on the other. At the same time, something else entirely is going on [. . .], a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, p. 11) The two poles or planes of consistency and organization are depicted here in a process of de/reterritorialization of the other. At one level, on the plane of organization, imitation and mimicry operate within the logic of representation and the signifier. The orchid that mimics the image and scent of a female wasp is, therefore, of a second order to an original identity that is the wasp. Of course, such arguments have precedent within the field of postcolonial studies: mimicry along with the stereotype and hybridity were cemented as key theoretical concepts in Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. Mimicry, according to Bhabha, far from marking the success of the colonizer’s ‘civilizing’ project, instead disrupts the certainty of their worldview: ‘a discursive process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely “rupture” the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty’ (1994, p. 86). Mimicry remains a discursive process, an ambivalent parallelism that functions within representation and through a chain of signifiers. At the same time, ‘something else entirely is going on’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, p. 11): the creation of an excess, a slippage, a hybrid in-between that is ‘new, neither the one nor the other’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 25) and which serves to destabilize and disrupt signifiers.17 The colonizer is deterritorialized by the mimic who reterritorializes on their image, but it is not the reterritorialization of the colonized/mimic that marks the emergence of a postcolonial identity, since their act of mimicry submits to an order of representation in which it is judged against a predetermined standard (the original). For example, in Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette, the creole wife of Rochester, appears to her husband wearing a white dress that ‘had slipped untidily over one shoulder and seemed



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too large for her’ (Rhys 2000, p. 105). In doing so, however, she mimics the image of English femininity as depicted in her ‘favourite picture “The Miller’s Daughter”, a lovely English girl with brown curls and blue eyes and a dress slipping off her shoulders’ (p. 30, emphasis added).18 Antoinette’s later mirroring of this image is, therefore, a misunderstood attempt to conform to Rochester’s cultural values, to project an image of what, to her limited understanding, ‘a lovely English girl’ should look like. Antoinette deterritorializes by forming an image of the girl in the painting, yet in Rochester’s reaction to her appearance, he reterritorializes his wife by reducing her becoming-other to an order of representation – in this case one of female sexuality which, as Carine Mardorossian argues, evokes an association with ‘(black) female sexual wantonness and prostitution’ (1999, p. 1076). In other words, Antoinette becomes postcolonial only to the extent that she deterritorializes her own identity and escapes imperialist representation. As she is reterritorialized by Rochester she once more takes on the role of the colonized other. At the same time, just as the novel traces the de/ reterritorializations as Antoinette ‘becomes’ Bertha, so Rochester finds his fixed imperialist world-view deterritorialized by Antoinette’s act of mimicry as he realizes that ‘everything I had imagined to be truth was false. False. Only the magic and the dream are true – all the rest’s a lie’ (Rhys 2000, p. 138). The ‘something else’ or ambivalence of mimicry, then, is that which deterritorializes the plane of organization. As such, it is not the synthesis of a hybrid object that is the focus of a properly postcolonialist critique, but rather the line of flight in-between the colonizer and the colonized; the movement that deterritorializes both subjects of representation within colonial discourse. Glissant’s work on the concept of creolization and affiliation operates according to a corresponding model of becoming. This is why Caribbean Discourse should not be misunderstood as merely detailing the existence of an actual postcolonial community, but rather the possibility of a people yet to come, since an actual people is one always already subject to representation and reterritorialization. The process of becoming-creolized is, rather, an ever-expanding circuit of becomings, each of which ‘brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, p. 11). We have seen how creolization and Relation together account for the lines of deterritorialization and different/ciation that affect becomingpostcolonial, however, Glissant elaborates his theory of individuation with a final concept: opacity.

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Consistent in Glissant’s work is a rejection of a priori norms and binary forms of representation, and in Poetics of Relation this results in an account of individuation that operates along lines of becoming and affiliation. Opacity, however, has an important role to play in detailing how affiliations can be seen to deterritorialize actual identities and affect becomings. Difference understood dialectically as a negative determination is, Glissant argues, an act of evaluation: ‘In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgements. I have to reduce’ (1997, p. 190). To conceive of difference within a system of representation is, as Deleuze cautions, to reduce it to the same, to a reactive force that gains its determination only through a negative relation to another. Even if that comparison operates in the absence of a hierarchy of terms, the very act of relating one thing to another, Glissant argues, necessarily involves a reduction of difference or the power to become: the other must be grasped and understood by the self in order to be evaluated. As we saw in Caribbean Discourse, this reactive model is insufficient to account for the creative force of creolization and becoming-postcolonial: ‘perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of a scale’ (p. 190). Opacity has often been celebrated by postcolonial critics as a limit to understanding, offering a caveat to Glissant’s theory of the interconnected field of échos-monde in Relation while gesturing towards a more decidedly political vision of conviviality: ‘I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me, without reproach for my opacity for him. To feel in solidarity with him or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him’ (p. 193). This approach is exemplified in the work of Celia Britton who characterizes opacity as ‘a defence against understanding’ (1999, p. 19); allowing Glissant, she argues, to praise writers such as William Faulkner, whose black characters are only ever represented from the outside and thereby are taken as ‘evidence of the author’s honesty in recognizing the limits of his own understanding and “dramatically taking on board the Other’s opacity to oneself”’. More importantly, Faulkner’s blind spot locates and reveals the ‘real density’ of the black Other’s presence as it resists assimilation and confronts him with a barrier that he will never cross. (p. 21) Read in this way, Christophine, Antoinette’s black nurse in Wide Sargasso Sea, represents not only ‘the limits of its own [the text’s] discourse’ (p. 130) and the novelist’s fear of re-enacting imperialism by turning the other into



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a self, but also marks Rhys’s recognition of the opacity of her character. Christophine’s opaqueness, in other words, dramatizes the acceptance of the inaccessible difference between self and other. Opacity becomes a strategy that not only overcomes comparative and essentialist notions of difference, but offers what Britton suggests is the ‘only possible mode of resistance to the stereotype’ as defined by Bhabha, for ‘it confronts the stereotype’s attempt to fix racial difference with a self-representation that cannot be fixed because it is deliberately unintelligible’ (p. 24). Opacity as a limit to understanding functions as an escape from representation, a deterritorialization of the plane of organization.19 However, Britton’s reading of opacity risks reintroducing transcendence within Glissant’s philosophy of immanence. As a strategy of resistance, opacity is only represented from the outside and the author-function serves to articulate a transcendental perspective on the world and on others from a stance apart. Opacity remains caught within a logic of judgement and scale: the acceptance of an unquantifiable difference as estimated from the transcendent perspective of the self’s transparent norm.20 On the other hand, if we follow Glissant’s philosophy of immanence and in particular the specific use that he makes of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome in Poetics, opacity may be refigured as a sign of the active forces of difference-in-itself. Following his rejection of a difference measured according to scale, Glissant proclaims a right to opacity: ‘Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity’ (Glissant 1997, p. 190). Such a claim returns us to his early Poetic Intention in which the snow falling outside the window was a ‘cold [that] cannot be evaluated by the degree of temperature’ (Glissant 2010, p. 10). As a concept, opacity, an irreducible singularity, recalls what Deleuze and Guattari term a haecceity: ‘A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, pp. 287–8).21 A coldness that cannot be measured as a particular degree of temperature is precisely this: an opacity, a haecceity. As such, haecceities individuate the unique ‘thisness’ of a particular person or thing on the plane of consistency not organization. Their unrepresentable quality, therefore, is not simply a failure of one subject to grasp or understand another, but stems from the fact that the self’s opacity operates on a different plane to that of representation and signification. The indefinite article or pronoun – he, she, they,

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a father, a mother – ‘implies no indetermination from this point of view; it ties the statement to a collective assemblage, as its necessary condition, rather than to a subject of the enunciation’ (p. 292). In this Deleuze and Guattari free language from the logic of representation; ‘a father’ is not to be interpreted by the psychoanalyst as ‘my father’: ‘The he does not represent a subject but rather makes a diagram of an assemblage. It does not overcode statements, it does not transcend them [. . .], it prevents them from falling under the tyranny of subjective or signifying constellations’ (p. 292). Rather, a haecceity draws together (differentiates) the contents of collective assemblage on the plane of consistency in such a way as to allow ‘for a maximum number of occurrences and becomings’ (p. 292). Opacity, viewed in this light, signals the unique ‘thisness’ of a person or thing beyond representation and as the basis for a ‘maximum’ range of becomings (becoming-creolized, becoming-new). And ‘what remains of souls once they are no longer attached to particularities, what keeps them from melting into a whole? What remains is precisely their “originality”, that is, a sound that each one produces’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 87, emphasis added; cf Glissant 1997, p. 93). Far from limiting Relation, opacities guarantee the widest possible range of becomings, representing the coexistence of irreducible or pre-personal singularities that are nevertheless fully individuated with the chaos-monde or plane of consistency: ‘In Relation, elements don’t blend just like that, don’t lose themselves just like that. Each element can keep its [. . .] essential qualities’ (Glissant cited in Diawara 2010, p. 63). Rather than returning us to the Cartesian cogito, Glissant envisions a mode of subjectivity that is instead ‘a singular composition, an idiosyncrasy, a secret cipher marking the unique chance that these entities had been retained and willed, that this combination had been thrown and not another’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 120). Opacity, in other words, affords selves or échos-monde an irreducible ‘thisness’ that is both specific to their particular individuality and the ground of their relationality and becoming. A virtual configuration (differentiation) that can create new assemblages on the plane of consistency that, in turn, are actualized (differenciated) as becoming-creolized, becoming-new in this actual world. What Glissant’s conception of opacity emphasizes is both the relational, shared experience of difference as identities interact in Relation and, importantly, the always-renewed virtual potential to become in unforeseen ways. If creolization points towards a moment of actualization and the production of difference through differenciation, opacities function as the virtual configuration of that becoming, as a differentiation. The right to opacity, then, is more than an attempt to limit relationality or resist



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representation through a negative and reactive movement; it is an assertion of the ‘master’s’ (in the Nietzschean sense) active force of becoming and creation. It brings us full circle to the Glissant of Poetic Intention and the expression of haecceities, recalling his vision of a collective assemblage and the unforeseeable potentiality of a postcolonial Caribbean people yet to come. Glissant’s work may stand out from other Caribbean writers and theorists explored in this study by merit of the self-acknowledged application of Deleuzian terms such as the rhizome in his work; however, beyond these signposts, a philosophy of immanence permeates and unites his body of work. Both in terms of the consistency of his vision from Poetic Intention to his ‘post-political’ Poetics of Relation, and in terms of his place in the wider evolution (or, perhaps, rejecting evolution and filiation, becoming) of Caribbean poetics, Glissant articulates a philosophy that allies the postcontinental thought of Deleuze with an affirmative postcolonialism that can be traced in Caribbean writing from the mid-twentieth-century surrealist movement to the present day.

Chapter 4

Postcolonial Literature as Health: Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson

Borges’ universe refigured as the Library of Babel; Melquíades’ laboratory in which the master text of the Buendía family’s history lies awaiting the final Aureliano who will decipher its code; Saleem sitting in his study recording, rewriting, and endlessly revising the stories of those children born on the eve of India’s independence: Robert Antoni’s 1991 novel Divina Trace opens onto a familiar scene that both recalls and distorts these literary forbearers. In his seminal study of Latin American fiction Myth and Archive, Roberto González Echevarría identifies the central figures of the archive and the archivist as foundational tropes within the New World canon. Testifying to the search for origins and the desire to record and preserve the past, the twin figures of the archive and the archivist evoke something of the difficult relationship between the colonial past and the postcolonial present explored in the works of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury writing from the formerly colonized regions of the world. However, with Antoni’s Divina Trace, although the archive remains, it is a very different figure that we find sitting behind the desk: The bottle was big and obzockee. I was having a hard time toting it. It was the day before my thirteenth birthday, seventy-seven years ago: tomorrow I will be ninety years of age. I am still a practicing physician, and as I sit here in this library, at this desk of my father’s, of my father’s father [. . .] I can still hear him. (Antoni 1992, p. 3) As these opening lines demonstrate in the simultaneous presentation of the protagonist’s recalled childhood and present old age, while Antoni’s novel remains concerned throughout with the past, its relation to the present and how it can be recollected and transformed, gone is the figure of the New World historian or archivist, and in his place we find a physician. And for the Deleuzian literary critic this represents a telling difference:



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one that asks us to consider what the specific role of literature as literature might be within a postcolonial context, and, subsequently, to define what the departure from the oppositional logic of colonial and counter-colonial discourse might mean for a truly postcolonial aesthetics. For Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier’s novel The Lost Steps (1953) represents the ‘founding archival fiction’ since it is in this work that ‘all the important narrative modalities in Latin America, up to the time it was published, are contained and analysed as a kind of active memory’ (1990, p. 3). In turn, it is the role of the archivist, ‘an inner historian who reads the texts, interprets and writes them’ (p. 22), to participate in this active analysis. The archive, then, is not simply a storehouse of narratives or collection of texts, but deals more precisely with narrative modes. In other words, for Echevarría the archive functions as the condition of narrative itself, foregrounding what can be said and how it can be said. Or, as Foucault argues, the archive is not ‘the sum of all the texts that a culture has’, but ‘first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events’ (2002, p. 145).1 Echevarría may be aligned with both Foucault and Derrida, as each characterizes the archive not only as the sum of a culture’s discursive possibilities and forms at a particular moment, but also as an active, productive framework that conditions what can be said. Thus, as Derrida argues: the archive [. . .] is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, as such, without the archive [. . .]. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. (1995, p. 17) For both Derrida and Foucault the archive marks the present limits and possibilities of what can be said or known and in what form, and as such it conditions future ‘content’. Within the context of New World writing, the active and future-orientated function of the archive is complicated by the anxiety experienced by the archivist who attempts to break from the discursive possibilities offered within the framework of imperialist discourse. Where the limits of what can be said are determined by colonialist ideology, the New World writer must search ‘for a new, original narrative’ that, nevertheless, ‘must contain all previous ones’ (Echevarría 1990, p. 4). Such is the task undertaken in Carpentier’s The Lost Steps as the protagonist is ‘reduced to erasing and

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rewriting what he has composed’ (Echevarría 1990, pp. 1–2): returning to the primary act of writing in order to reveal that the very conditions within which one writes remain permanently marked by history. This is what Glissant finds most productive in Carpentier’s novel: its premise of discovery and lost origins gives way to an acknowledgement of the impossibility of return (Glissant 1989b, pp. 81–3). In terms of the archive, then, the rejection of a return to an ideal pre-colonial state (the idea that Glissant critiques in negritude), finds a parallel in the act of writing: it is similarly impossible to imagine a form of New World writing that emerges unconditioned by the discursive formations made possible by colonialist ideology. At the same time, as in the case of Glissant’s comments on diversional negritude, this does not mean that New World writing is forever trapped within an imperialist framework of knowledge. Rather, as Arnold Davidson argues with respect to Foucault, the archive sets out the necessary conditions for the production of ‘new structures of knowledge’ (1997, p. 11). It is a relatively straightforward task, given the arguments set out in previous chapters, to see how we might draw on Deleuze’s notion of different/ciation to explain the production of the new (and, of course, Deleuze does specifically engage with Foucault’s concept of the archive in Foucault).2 By marking the limits of current possibilities, the archive establishes ‘the discontinuity that separates us from what we can no longer say, and from that which falls outside our discursive practice [. . .], it now bursts open the other, and the outside’ (Foucault 2002, p. 147). As such, if the archivist can escape the established framework of knowledge, ‘remain mobile’, then they can ‘read what could not be apprehended before’ (Deleuze 1988a, p. 1). This is precisely the function that Deleuze promotes in his concept of the event. The historian who reads the event in terms of its evolution in historical time (Chronos) recounts what actually happened, repeating actual events as identity not difference. Drawing a parallel with the archivist, then, we can argue that the archive’s conservative function, therefore, serves to enforce majoritarian structures by delineating what can be said and how: knowledge and discourse are reproduced by the archivist as identity and the same. The future-orientation of the archive in this sense is akin to the Deleuzian first synthesis of time: productive of a continuous and knowable past-present-future continuum. However, the archive, like the event, retains a virtual, pure side: that which ‘could not be apprehended before’. The active archive, in something like Nietzsche’s sense of the term, is the condition for different/ciation since it carries



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forth the virtual.3 Thus a different sort of relation to the archive, one that ‘remain[s] mobile’, can access and repeat the archive’s virtuality, creating the potential for a new set of narrative possibilities. To this extent, the archivist is not ‘an inner historian’ who reads, interprets and explains the ‘texts’ and discursive forms that constitute the archive (Echevarría 1990, p. 22), but a philosopher, creating concepts from the pure, virtual side of current discourse or the historical event, or a writer, creating a universe of affects and percepts that embody it. Furthermore, we better understand why Echevarría adds the caveat that ‘a new, original narrative must contain all previous ones’ (p. 4): the Deleuzian model outlined above implicates a future with the potential to become new (the third synthesis of time) and carry forth the pure, virtual, whole past (the second synthesis of time). The task of the archivist, then, is not to be easily dismissed as that of the historian. Rather, by writing and rewriting the archival text, the archivist/ author returns to the event of colonization in order to different/ciate that which could not have been apprehended before. The eternal repetition is one of difference, not the same. The pure event of colonization, intuited in the sense that an experience has been too much, is embodied, given a ‘universe’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 177) in the archival fiction, and to that extent Echevarría may be elaborated in order to develop a theoretical framework through which we may read Latin American writing as a genuinely postcolonial literature that creates new, possible worlds from the colonial event. However, within the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the event, the radical potential of literature turns not upon the position of the archivist as inner historian, but as a writer and as a physician: Literature then appears to us as an enterprise of health: not that the writer would necessarily be in good health [. . .], but he possesses an irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him, while nonetheless giving him the becomings that a dominant and substantial health would render impossible.(Deleuze 1997, p. 3, emphasis added)4 While in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari distinguish the work of literature and art from that of philosophy, Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical draws attention to the role of the writer. Where literature ‘incorporates or embodies’ the pure event by composing a ‘universe’ of affects and percepts (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 177), the writer intuits in their

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experiences of the world (what they have seen and heard) something of the pure event (too big, too strong). Their ‘delicate health’ stems from this event because, as argued in Chapter Two, any wounding event is the virtual potential for a creative becoming, for health. The possible worlds that literature creates and which incorporate the pure event, then, are the potential for health in this actual world in the wake of events that wound us. This is where the Deleuzian reading of the event exceeds the archivist function outlined by Echevarría. ‘The world’, for the Deleuzian writer, ‘is a set of symptoms whose illness merges with man’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 3), and, therefore, in dealing with the past, whether that be, simplistically, Chronos, or even the pure time of the event, Aion, at issue is not the writer’s inability to escape history or even their attempt to extract a new and original narrative from the event, but rather the way in which the possible worlds created by the literary text offer signposts towards health. This shift in critical focus from history to health is one that resonates for us with a moment in Édouard Glissant’s The Fourth Century where Mathieu, the young historian in search of a ‘methodical procession of causes followed by effects, logical chronology, history unfurled like well-carded cloth’ (2001, p. 282), comes up against a past that is rather a ‘whirlwind of death from which we have to pull memory’ (p. 52) and the quimboiseur, Papa Longoué, ‘the man who was in charge of the future’ (p. 10). Evoking Deleuze’s distinction between Chronos (historical, linear time) and Aion (the virtual, pure time of the event), Glissant’s novel marks the displacement of the New World archivist as historian as he faces the circular time of the event. And in his place the quimboiseur, a seer and, crucially, a healer, delves into the Bergsonian pure past in order to bear witness to a new future and diagnose the Caribbean’s chances of ‘health’. While previous chapters have explored the creative and future-orientated drive of literature in relation to the works of the canonical figures of Caribbean writing – Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris and Édouard Glissant – this present chapter focuses predominately on texts which have received much less critical attention to date, notably Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace and Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads. Where Glissant shifts focus from history to health, and characters such as Philoctete and Helen in Walcott’s Omeros allow the poet to diagnose certain forms of colonial malaise, in this chapter I suggest that Antoni and Hopkinson further displace the figure of the archivist in favour of the healer in contemporary Caribbean writing. In particular, I explore the narratives of two ‘doctors’, that of Dr Johnny Domingo as he struggles to make sense of his tangled family history on the fictional island of Corpus Christi in Divina Trace, and the plantation slave



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and healer, Mer, in Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads. By suggesting the ways in which these contemporary examples may be seen to build on the writings of the Caribbean surrealists, Walcott, Harris and Glissant, the intellectual history traced throughout this study is brought into the twenty-first century with Hopkinson. As such, in this final chapter I contend that the postcontinental turn to philosophies of immanence was not only anticipated by Caribbean surrealists like René Ménil, but extends throughout the field of contemporary Caribbean writing through the implicit and explicit influence of Deleuze, and offers us the opportunity to reassess literary responses to the colonial event as an enterprise in postcolonial health.

Dr Domingo’s Genealogy Recalling Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace relates a family history across several generations. However, like the family tree which prefaces the novel itself, it soon becomes clear that this genealogy is no straightforward narrative, but one riddled with contradiction, absences and unexplained events. The story is concerned with two mysterious events in the history of Corpus Christi – the birth of the ‘frogchild’ Manuelito Domingo and the miracle of the Black Virgin, Magdalena Divina – told from the perspective of seven different characters – Granny Myna, Papee Vince, Evelina, John Domingo (Johnny’s father), Mother Maurina, Magdalena, and finally, the Hindu monkey-deity Hanuman. Each narrative is addressed to Johnny Domingo who receives and relates each different voice and fragment of the tale as he tries to unravel his family’s past. While this might suggest Johnny as the archivist of the novel, Antoni avoids what Pierre Mabille calls a ‘European’ perspective (1996b, p. 209): the positioning of a hierarchical, transcendent ego through which each fragment of the tale gains its determination. Instead, memories and words come to Johnny as if they were his own, or, better, as if he were no longer himself, becoming-other. As he says when receiving Evelina’s narrative: ‘It was as though the smell of that rum which still lingered on my forehead [. . .] was Evelina’s own memories of those distant events, memories which I could see now through her eyes, which I could recollect in Evelina’s own voice’ (Antoni 1992, p. 332). This is not the appropriation of another’s narrative (speaking for the other), but rather in this moment Johnny becomes Evelina, his creole nursemaid and, as it is later revealed, his aunt. These recurring lines of flight, Johnny’s becoming-woman, becomingcreole, deterritorialize the mediating consciousness of Johnny. He becomes

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animal as he sees himself as the frogchild swimming in the glass jar: ‘twisted on my back appearing now to float inside of the bottle myself – my head protruding out from the rim looking up at myself looking down’ (p. 226). And, as signalled in the opening lines cited previously, the ninety-yearold Johnny becomes child in a moment that is not the recollection of childhood memory, but the opening up of a block of becoming between the two: ‘I: the eighteen-year-old boy sitting there on that pew sweating in my new suit. I: the ninety-year-old physician sitting here behind this desk [. . .]. The two of us watching together now through the same single cyclopseye as Mother Maurina stands slowly from her pew’ (p. 164, emphasis added). As in Deleuze’s analysis of Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, Divina Trace does not present the reader with ‘one story within another, but one next to the other [. . .] contiguous stories, with passages that constantly shift from one to the other, sometimes owing to a fragment of a sentence that is common to both stories’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 22). Shared sentences that are repeated, such as the recurring phrase ‘toting this obsockee glassbottle’ (Antoni 1992, p.  101) and the recollection of an indeterminate kiss – ‘I cannot tell you how it ended or how long it lasted: for me it could have been three days’ (p. 95) – in the narratives of both Johnny and his father, or are inverted, such as the opening lines of both Myna’s and Maurina’s narrative in part one, enforce the sense of the novel as a series of fragments sitting side by side, interacting, de/reterritorializing on each other, not co-opted under a master narrative.5 As a result, Antoni does not merely displace History with a text that records a range of subjective histories, but rather, creates a collective assemblage: ‘It was only Evelina’s voice in the dark. But it was also Granny Myna’s voice, and Papee Vince’s voice: a collection of voices merging and separating, and occasionally falling into rhythm with my own quick breathing’ (p. 82).6 Crucially, however, it is an assemblage that can only be formed through the repeated lines of becoming that the novel creates; which is to say that Divina Trace is inherently involved in a process of different/ciation such as was found in the Caribbean surrealists and the work of Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott and Édouard Glissant. It is in the distinctly surrealist realm of the collective unconscious that the solipsistic I of the novel is destructured and brought into Relation with other fragments (Glissant would say échos-monde): ‘Not the imagined I but the I of my imagination: the imagining I. The third eye in the middle of my forehead through which I saw myself’ (p. 170). This continual displacement of the self into the realm of the imagination markedly deterritorializes Johnny as the central ‘I’ of the text to the extent that he often remarks that he is no longer in control of his thoughts and questions his own reality.



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As he says after hearing Mother Maurina’s story: ‘like the sleeper who is conscious of his dream, I felt some vague control over it, though I knew I possessed none whatsoever’ (p. 157). Once again this serves to undermine the idea of Johnny as archivist or author of the collective histories that together form Divina Trace. But it also suggests something of the way in which the novel maintains a dualistic framework where, as for the surrealists, as for Deleuze, reality is presented as both consciousness and the unconscious, actual and virtual. This is most pronounced in the seventh chapter of the novel, which is modelled on Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake: a dense, symbolic text offered as the story of Hanuman, the Hindu deity who appears in the form of a monkey. Importantly, this section is characterized as the unmediated expression of the imagination and unconscious: as psychic automatism. As the text notes at the end of the preceding chapter, it was time to ‘surrender myself up to this monkey of my imagination and let him speak, even in his own impenetrable monkey-language’ (p. 172). The (literal) mirror-page which forms the centre of Hanuman’s tale provides a visual example of the act of relation and mediation between the two sides of a single reality: as Mabille argued, ‘in front of the mirror, we are led to ask ourselves about the exact nature of reality, about the links connecting mental representations with the objects prompting them’ (1998, p. 7).7 As a borderline or perhaps, even, fold, between one’s internal world and the external one, the mirror represents access to the unconscious and its actualization within this world. If the novel’s own incorporation of a mirror at the centre of its narrative suggests a reality that is always at once actual and virtual, it is the error of its protagonist to attempt to see this in terms of a Cartesian split. As in Pauline Melville’s tale ‘The Parrot and Descartes’ where the separation of magic and science is pinpointed as the moment at which European rationalism struck out on a path that would end in imperialist domination, Divina Trace presents Johnny with an apparent choice: the magic and mystery or science and reason. Trying to escape the nightmare of the frogchild which defies reason but which is part of his family history, Johnny puts his faith in science, arguing that it is far easier to believe that, in ‘daddy’s language of medical science [that] understands everything clean clean’ (Antoni 1992, p. 109), the frogchild is an anacephalitic baby. At the moment that the actuality of the frogchild comes too close to his own family history Johnny turns to science and medicine, believing that ‘the best way to forget that frogchild and this Magdalena and the whole confusion fagood faever, is to become a doctor like daddy and learn to speak that language’ (p. 109): ‘That night I made up my mind to become a physician. It was as if the world were suddenly divided,

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as if I could choose between science and religion and disregard the other. It was as though I’d found the answer to all my problems’ (p. 96). Yet, as Melville’s story cautions, this Cartesian separation is inadequate to account fully for the Caribbean and indeed human experience.8 In turn, what Johnny comes to realize is that both magic and science, dream and reality, the unconscious and consciousness, understood as the two sides of a single reality, are necessary to begin to understand the whole story of Divina Trace: ‘the truth remains that there are certain things in this world which defy explanation. Explanation, that is, in terms which we recognize: the explicit terms of science and logic. What’s more [. . .] such things are encountered every day’ (p. 42). While Johnny anxiously questions his experiences, the world of the marvellous is one never called into doubt in Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads, a novel which follows three disparate narrative strands tentatively linked by the voice of Ezili, a Power who floats in the aether – the story of Mer, a plantation slave in Saint Domingue in the years leading up to the Haitian Revolution; that of Jeanne Duval, the mixed-race lover of the French poet Charles Baudelaire; and finally, Thias/Meritet, an Alexandrian prostitute whose story merges with that of Mary of Egypt. Where Antoni’s Dr Domingo identifies his practice with logic, reason and science, Hopkinson’s novel focuses on Mer, a healer who can recognize the legendary Makandal even in animal form and can speak with the African deity, Lasirén, when she appears to her. Her role on the Simenon plantation tending to the sick slaves combined with evidence of her privileged access to the Caribbean’s marvellous reality, might, superficially, suggest Mer the healer as a more fitting successor to the New World archivist. However, the concept of the writer (or in the case of Divina Trace the writer’s fictional persona) as a physician is more nuanced than this and we will require a better understanding of how Deleuze frames this concept in order to consider its impact on these literary texts.

Literature as Health The task faced by the creative writer and reader is one that Deleuze defines, in a work of this name, as at once critical and clinical. Here we once more encounter the anti-representationalist nature of Deleuzian thought: literature is no longer understood as merely a reflection of a state of affairs, but the creative production of new symptomatologies that help us to better understand the ills of the world. The Deleuzian writer ‘makes a diagnosis,



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but what he diagnoses is the world; he follows the illness step by step, but it is the generic illness of man; he assesses the chances of health, but it is the possible birth of a new man’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 53). Such a critique remains immanent to the text itself, however, because the author as physician or symptomatologist deals primarily in signs: the nature, production, matter and system of signs that constitute the work of literature itself. Sacher Masoch, to use Deleuze’s example, gave us a new symptomatology of masochism because in identifying the contract as its primary sign, he delineated the symptoms of masochism from those of sadism where previously they had been treated as a single neurosis.9 Therefore, by creating new ‘symptomatolog[ies] of different worlds’ (1995, p. 142), writers at once allow us to better understand actual illnesses (as in Masoch) and create the potential for health. In other words, by showing us how particular symptoms or illnesses come to be what they actually are, counter-actualizing states of affairs in order to retrace the lines of becoming, literature suggests alternative ways of becoming and ‘the possible birth of a new man’ (1997, p. 53). ‘Signs imply ways of living, possibilities of existence, they’re the symptoms of life gushing forth or draining away’ (1995, p. 143). In this, Deleuze does not reduce literature to an account of an author’s or character’s evaluation of the world. Rather, literature itself is composed of signs, the nature of which, to recall Deleuze’s Nietzsche, reveals the prevailing active or reactive forces at work in the actual world: as symptoms of the heath of life in both its singular and specific sense. There is no transcendent basis to this, only the radical empiricism of an affirmative philosophy. Deleuze’s approach to literature is clear: there is nothing to interpret or understand when reading a text, all we seek is a sense of how it works, what assemblages it creates, and the new connections it forges. Where philosophy represents the creation of concepts, literature is the domain of the affect and percept: ‘Affects, percepts, and concepts are three inseparable forces, running from art into philosophy and from philosophy into art’ (p. 137). As with Deleuze’s philosophy of different/ciation and creation, affects and percepts must be approached as pre-individual singularities and not as the affects or percepts of an affected or perceiving subject. Interpretative approaches to literature are rejected within this model. When we look to a text in order to discover facts about the author’s life, or project into a narrative our own repressed neuroses, we fall back into the familiar patterns of Oedipal structures and place a limit on becoming: There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if

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you are even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question [. . .]. Or there’s the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? [. . .] This second way of reading’s intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. (pp. 7–8) As I argued in Chapter One with regard to Deleuze’s critique of surrealism as dream interpretation, the problem with such an approach lies in the transcendent limit placed on the creative process: determining, from the outset, its content or meaning in relation to the a priori patterns of Oedipus or the reader’s own experience. Or, alternatively, it places a final limit on becoming: viewing the world of the text as fiction to be dialectically overcome in the realization of a greater truth. Divina Trace offers a similar degree of scepticism when it comes to the work of interpretation, of chasing signifiers. This is perhaps most pronounced in Hanuman’s narrative in which ‘he’ (both Hanuman and Johnny’s imagination) speaks in ‘his own impenetrable monkey-language’ (Antoni 1992, p. 172). For example, ‘“Wanderloo,” he now sololoquize. “Tu-tupaia, ono toque? Twoolly tisnobler tabear teasing stones of orangutudinous fortune? Thomasi? Presbytis obscura? Aye, rub de rub!”’ (p. 200). In this we might find, as has Raphael Dalleo (2001), evidence of Antoni’s own training as biologist and subsequent laboratory work with primates (orangutan, dusky leaf monkey [presbytis obscura], tupaia). Or we might note the reworking of Hamlet’s soliloquy and the uneasy relationship between source and scribe that is evoked throughout the novel – Hanuman’s tale is itself presented as a reworking of Valmiki’s Ramayana: ‘Tink you is dawson dis yana, stead of Valmiki?’ (p. 198). Or we might even follow the signs that take us from ‘4+4+2+2+4+4+6+6= a manly 32, assureassourorange, / sec / sec, one blow – boodoom!’ (p. 201) to ‘Leopold Bloom’s constant mental repetition of 32 feet per second per second, the law of falling objects. A “sour” orange falls from the tree at this rate’ (Smith 2000, p. 106). Or we can stop asking ‘what does it mean?’ and instead pose the more important question, ‘how does it work?’. Because while Dalleo, Smith and Hawley offer convincing, thorough and detailed interpretations of the Hanuman chapter, unpicking the dense language, even offering ‘translations’ (Dalleo 2001, pp. 35–6, 44), the text itself mocks the attempt to uncover the truth of a story. As Johnny himself comes to realize, ‘no matter how far I go back,



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explanation will still be impossible. I have realized too soon that failure is the point of all this. That failure is the meaning of all this confusion’ (Antoni 1992, p. 172). The reader who will not give up on the search for meaning is identified as ‘you page-searching [. . .] simian primate missinglink’ (p. 202) and is led literally to their own image in the mirror page. But this is not passage to a world of depth where meaning must be searched in the subsoil, but one of surfaces: like Lewis Carroll’s Alice ‘[w]e no longer penetrate in depth, but through an act of sliding pass through the looking-glass’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 21); a world of surfaces in which one story is not embedded within another under a master narrative, but where they sit side by side, sliding from one into the other. The search for meaning in depth, chasing signifiers, cannot reveal the truth of the novel, since all we will find in it is the mirror image of ourselves: ‘in the end, as with any other tale told by man or monkeys since the beginning of time, you can only tell your own story. You can only hear your own story too’ (Antoni 1992, p. 342). In which case, as in the tale of the frogchild, some will see the story as salvation, others as damnation, but no single perspective will capture its truth.10 The world of the novel is one in which both creation and destruction, magic and science, true and false coexist: ‘from de beginning of dis crapostory everything is a boldface lie, but time as you reach de end, everything ga turn out true as truth-self too’ (p. 325, emphasis added). Rather than embark on an ultimately solipsistic search for meaning in the novel’s playful language, if we focus instead on how it works, then we uncover a process of deterritorialization akin to that of Johnny’s becomingwoman, becoming-animal. The Hanuman chapter, like all minor literatures, creates ‘a kind of foreign language within language’ (Deleuze 1997, pp. 5, 71; cf Deleuze and Guattari 1986, pp. 19–27), which works not through interpretation or translation, but by deterritorializing the major language: ‘What we look for in a book is the way it transmits something that resists coding: flows, revolutionary active lines of flight, lines of absolute decoding rather than any intellectual culture’ (Deleuze 1995, p. 22). Antoni’s novel works by resisting coding and structures of representation, and as such embraces a becoming that not only escapes majoritarian ideologies and hierarchies, but signals, for Deleuze, the singular power of literature itself. As Deleuze argues in Essays Critical and Clinical, literature embraces ‘the power of an impersonal – which is not a generality but a singularity at the highest point’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 3). To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. Literature rather moves in the direction of the

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ill-formed or the incomplete [. . .]. Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any liveable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the liveable and the lived. (p. 1) This account of literature maps onto the processes of different/ciation: the text incorporates not merely lived experience, but the pure event which exceeds it and which marks its virtual power to become. In the same way, Deleuze draws a distinction between a singular or virtual conception of life and specific or actual lives. His reading of Dickens in ‘Immanence: a Life’ highlights this point: the dying man in Our Mutual Friend is despised by all, and yet as he is brought to the point of death, a care and respect for this man’s life is evident in those around him: A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degree that he comes back to life, his saviors turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens. (Deleuze 2005, p. 28) The carers’ affections are directed not at the individual’s life, but life itself: ‘an impersonal and yet singular life’: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, for it was only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of things that made it good or bad. The life of such individuality fades away in favor of the singular life immanent to a man who no longer has a name [. . .]. A singular essence, a life. (p. 29) Life for Deleuze has two concurrent senses: this particular life, the individuated actual instance of being, and a life, the virtual flow of pre-personal, singular life which is embodied by specific individuals but which nevertheless persists beyond them. It is a life that represents the ever-present potential for



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life, and for different forms of life, just as the virtual denotes the possibility that each and every actual thing might become new. Literature, then, gives us the opportunity to intuit the coexistent moments of this specific life and singular life as the power to become: literature as ‘health’.

Postcolonial Resistance: A (Deleuzian) World without Conflict? Understanding the role and function of literature as literature is, I suggest, essential to move postcolonial studies beyond the current impasse of deconstructionist versus post-Marxist critique. Indeed, despite the points of debate raised against Peter Hallward’s Deleuzian critique of the field in Absolutely Postcolonial, his work voices an important but often overlooked concern: too often postcolonial critics conflate the cultural and the political. Revealing his own key philosophical influence, Alain Badiou, Hallward strictly delineates the properly political task of realizing to the highest-degree universal principles of justice and equality – a recognition not of equal difference or respect for otherness, but that of sameness (Hallward 2001, p. xx) – from the role of literature: What is distinctive about literature is its capacity to invent new ways of using words [...], at a disruptive distance from inherited norms and expectations – in other words, its capacity to provoke people to think, rather than merely recognise, represent or consume. To be sure, these new ways of using words may have an indirect political effect, but there is no theoretical justification for claiming that they should always have such an effect. Literature and politics can both be revolutionary, but only within the limits of their own field. (p. xx) There is something particularly Deleuzian in this insistence that we take a serious interest in what literature as literature, not as representation of the real, political commentary or social critique, can do. However, it is a task that Absolutely Postcolonial seems unable to fulfil, since what follows the preface’s claims for literature is a thorough critique of ‘what can quite precisely be called postcolonial literature’ (p. xxi), grounded on political values.11 What is problematic in postcolonial literature, claims Hallward, are the conceits of difference-without-others, fragmentation, hybridity, creoleness and so on. Yet, even within the bounds of Hallward’s own argument, such tendencies are only problematic if they lead readers to

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think in singular, deterritorializing ways. In other words, we are always in the position of locating the value of literature outside itself, recasting the text in a negative, oppositional relation to its ‘other’. We cannot escape dialectical process, to recall the Deleuzian/Bergsonian formula, unless we privilege the internal processes of different/ciation that produce a state of affairs or assemblage as a form of individuation in which the thing differs immediately with itself and not in the first instance from all that it is not. Postcolonial literature and criticism, therefore, is caught between the twin poles identified by Hallward: the specific and the singular. On the one hand, as postcolonial critics we must be mindful of Simone Bignall’s caution that the negative, oppositional logic of dialectical differentiation cements an imperialist framework that seeks to both fix and overcome difference. On the other, the ongoing neo-imperialist exploitation of vast numbers of the world’s population, and continuing inequity, speak to the idea that we derive literary value from the degree to which a text reveals a situation of exploitation or imagines alternative futures for oppressed communities. Absolutely Postcolonial seeks to reconcile these two claims in its formulation of creative practice as the articulation of an expression ‘irreducibly specific to (though not specified by) the situation of its articulation’ (Hallward 2001, p. 62). The literary text, by this account, reflects or responds to a locality but is not over-determined by that context. In this I read Hallward as attempting to delineate a properly postcolonial ontology from an imperialist framework in which the power to specify denotes a colonialist ideology. The text escapes the status of mimesis or that of being a mere representation of a social situation to the degree that there is ‘some degree of despecification’ (p. 333), something that resists absolute coding (specified). Posing the specific as an alternative to the singular, Hallward argues in Deleuzian fashion that ‘[t]he privilege of literary study is the privilege of that detachment which allows us as readers to step back from representation, suspend its natural flow, and pay an “artificial” attention to how it works. Like any specific process, this paying-attention is value neutral’ (p. 333). The text, then, creates a space for ‘relational detachment and imaginative engagement’ (p. 334), enabling readers to evaluate ethical positionings and make decisions without recourse to some transcendental ideal. This is the essential but little-appreciated argument of Absolutely Postcolonial. It stakes a claim for literature apart from the specifying contexts and material conditions that Marxist postcolonialists insistently evoke without arguing that literature should have ‘nothing to do with society or culture’ (p. 335). Hallward, in maintaining his opposition to the



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singular throughout, nevertheless upholds the primacy of the political, such that the writers he ‘single[s] out for attention [. . .] produce a directly progressive political effect’ (p. 333), and in the example of Naipaul, the novels frame ‘a position of judgement, as alternatively judge and judged’ (p. 332). That Naipaul cuts such a controversial figure in postcolonial studies, however, may be explained by the fact that his judgements are emphatically not ‘value neutral’. Ultimately, the ground upon which one passes judgement on a work of literature is one that is not its (the text’s) own. Premising ethics upon a neutral act of evaluation, Hallward affords the reader/writer a transcendent position of detachment from this world in order that they may make sense of the world, to choose between alternative positions, since the prerequisite neutrality required to avoid prejudice is hard to countenance when one is tied to a specific existence. Thus, Naipaul, as a writer concerned with his place in the canon of English literature, claims that no woman, as a woman, has written or could write a better novel than he; whereas his fictional persona in The Enigma of Arrival fulfils the Hallwardian formula since it is only from his secluded cottage in Wiltshire that he can pass judgement: ‘a place of relative security from which one can evaluate the world (fairly or unfairly)’ (p. 332).12 Here Hallward focuses on the end result of the process of evaluation: Naipaul’s views on women writers can be classed as fair or unfair, and the argument and discussion that is created as a matter of course is of itself valuable to the ongoing positioning of selves. While the process of negotiation and critique is something that I wish to retain in the concept of postcoloniality developed by this study, it is not enough to point to the end product without reflecting on the processes that led to it, and, by this account, the process of evaluation envisioned by Hallward is one that assumes a transcendent detachment from the world in order that the subject may escape the specifying constraints of this life. The problem remains that the creation of value itself is linked to an oppositional and judgemental positioning of the self. As Deleuze argues in Nietzsche and Philosophy, we are in a paradoxical position when we acknowledge both that a) ‘values appear or are given as principles’ and as such ‘evaluation presupposes values on the basis of which phenomena are appraised’ and b) that ‘it is values which presuppose evaluations, “perspectives of appraisal”, from which their own value is derived’ (2006b, p. 1). The core problem, then, is not that of particular values per se but the processes by which they are created. The lessons offered by Absolutely Postcolonial – the literariness of literature, a radically empirical way of being freed from specifying structures, and a

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postcoloniality that must be strictly delineated from the logic of imperialism – can offer a framework for reimagining contemporary postcolonial studies and Caribbean writing if we first understand the common ground it shares with Deleuzian thought, not its opposition to ‘singularity’. As argued throughout this study, Hallward’s particular approach to Deleuze and to singularity is problematic and tightly bound to the Hegelian model of dialectical negation that both a Deleuzian and a properly conceived postcolonial philosophy cannot accommodate. Rather, Deleuze offers an alternative to negative difference: an affirmative philosophy that values literature as literature and accounts for the ways in which texts open towards zones beyond representation (deterritorialization), create new possibilities for this world (embodying events), and offer an ethics and relationality beyond judgement. In other words, to better understand Absolutely Postcolonial and the full value of its claims for literature, we must first better understand Deleuze.

Beyond Judgement The theoretical problems associated with judgement sketched out above are signalled in both Divina Trace and The Salt Roads, in which the increasing dominance of ressentiment is manifest in the position held in both works by the Church. In the story of Thais/Meritet, the third narrative strand of The Salt Roads, for example, Hopkinson draws on and disrupts the story of the ‘dusky’ Saint Mary of Egypt – a girl who ‘pursue[d] a life of prostitution, not because of need, but to gratify her insatiable physical desires’ (Hopkinson 2003, p. 302), before repenting and receiving a vision of the Virgin. The source of the legend, the monk Zosimus, who discovered Mary’s miraculously uncorrupted corpse, is fictionalized in The Salt Roads, and during the course of his encounter with Thais we see how he creates the legend of the saint by distorting and misunderstanding Thais’s story. For example, when she tries to explain that she was unable to enter the church at Capitolina because she suddenly fell very ill and miscarried a pregnancy, the monk enforces the majoritarian stereotype and repeats, ‘[y]ou couldn’t enter the house of our Lord [. . .] because you debauch your body with men’ (p. 384). In Divina Trace, on the other hand, Mother Maurina fails to secure the sanctification of Magdalena Divina because, unlike Zosimus, she is unable to translate her story into one that the Church will recognize. As Johnny’s father explains, ‘the Vatican required some physical evidence that this woman had in fact lived. Realize: without



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she corpse, all that remained of her were we own stories [. . .]. And boy, you know as well as anybody else, when it comes to matters of faith, the Church don’t believe nothing without hard scientific proof’ (Antoni 1992, p. 295). The miracle of the walking statue of Magdalena Divina, the black Virgin, is, in the absence of physical remains, dismissed by the Vatican as nothing ‘but a fiction of your collective imagination’ (p. 312). The Church is time and again revealed as a majoritarian institution par excellence: Teaching [the slaves] that the kingdom of heaven was not of this world [. . .] but of the next. It was a gospel encouraging the slaves to disregard the deplorable existence they were living, and place all they hope in the life to come. In this way the Colonial Government worked with the Church hook-in-sharkskin-bait to maintain the institution of slavery. To sustain the old social order. (p. 360) However, rather than simply viewing the Church as complicit in reinforcing social hierarchy, which is function of any majoritarian or stratifying body, Antoni’s novel further diagnoses the state of such an institution as one ruled by reactive forces in the sense developed by Deleuze in Nietzsche and Philosophy. The judgement passed on Magdalena is one determined by an assumed a priori relation to a transcendental ideal (such as the word of God, or scientific truth in this case), and as such may be read as a sign of prevailing reactive forces and ressentiment. Where the work of Édouard Glissant casts a critical light on the reactive, oppositional framework of counter-colonialism and negritude, here Antoni’s novel brings to the fore a further aspect of Deleuze’s Nietzsche: his critique of judgement. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, as I argued in Chapter Three, Deleuze draws on Nietzsche’s rewriting of the Hegelian master-slave relationship in order to outline his distinction between a negative, oppositional philosophy and an affirmative, relational one. Within the context of dialectics ‘everything depends on the role of the negative’ (Deleuze 2006b, p. 8), and as such falls within the trap of an imperialist framework (cf Bignall 2010, pp. 18–20). In Nietzsche, on the other hand, the oppositional positioning is rejected insofar as he shows us that ‘it is important to see that forces enter into relations with other forces. Life struggles with another kind of life’ (Deleuze 2006b, p. 8). More than suggesting a way beyond the impasse of dialectics, here the turn to immanence and affirmation is framed within terms that directly evoke Deleuze’s approach to literature. A text that remains purely on the level of representation – a reflection of ‘the

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accidents of internal and external life’, determined by the ‘subjectivity and objectivity of what happens’ (2005, p. 28) – is dominated by reactive forces. Such literature is driven by subjective and objective events. An active literature, on the other hand, is one in which life struggles with ‘another kind of life’: ‘the power of an impersonal – which is not a generality but a singularity at the highest point’ (1997, p. 3). The singularity of literature, then, signals not only a turn to becoming and pre-personal forces, but witnesses the ascendancy of active forces. Given that no one work can operate purely on the level of singularity (a life is always only intuited as the virtual side of this particular life), these two positions must be seen as the twin ends of a spectrum that ranges from ressentiment to affirmation. The role of the philosopher or creative writer as physician is to evaluate and interpret these different forces, which is to say that, although Deleuze via Nietzsche does critique judgement and oppositional thinking, it is emphatically not the case that there is no place for an evaluation of the forces acting upon this world in his work, for an ethics. Since creation, becoming, and newness are signs of the eternal return of difference or actualization of the virtual, the creative relation envisioned by writers such as Glissant and Harris as the production of the new must be understood as a symptom of the predominance of active forces, as health. The postcolonial writer or ‘physician’ is not in the position of the judge but in that of the Overman, a figure or body in which active forces prevail, since ‘[i]n the act of writing there’s an attempt to make life something more than personal, to free life from what imprisons it’ (Deleuze 1995, p. 143). Literature escapes the specifying and majoritarian constraints of actual existence (as Hallward maintains), but not to judge. And this is precisely what Antoni’s novel suggests in the way in which it characterizes the Vatican’s judgement of Magdalena as ‘a fiction of your collective imagination’ (1992, p. 312). Such an act is not merely symptomatic of an assumed Western superiority, but of a process of judgement that is itself characteristic of the reactive world-view of the ‘slave’ as Nietzsche defines the term. Judgement as an evaluation determined from the point of view of higher values or a transcendental ideal signals reactive forces and the will to dominate. That ‘[m]en judge insofar as they value their own lots, and are judged insofar as a form either confirms or dismisses their claim’ (Deleuze 1997, p.  129), reveals the persistent issue with Hallward’s celebration of the specific as a value-neutral appraisal. Indeed, Deleuze can be seen to anticipate Hallward’s critique when he argues that:



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What disturbed us was that in renouncing judgement we had the impression of depriving ourselves of any means of distinguishing between existing beings […]. But is it not rather judgement that presupposes preexisting criteria (higher values), criteria that preexist for all time (to the infinity of time), so that it can neither apprehend what is new in an existing being, nor even sense the creation of a mode of existence? [. . .] Judgement prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence. For the latter creates itself through its own forces, that is, through the forces it is able to harness, and is valid in and of itself inasmuch as it brings the new combination into existence. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. (pp. 134–5) There can hardly be a more precise condensation of the work of postcolonial literature and literary criticism: ‘to bring into existence and not to judge’. Judgement not only extends the reactive will to dominate but prevents newness from entering the world, since what is new is eternally new: that is to say, to judge is to depend on the knowledge that a judgement can be made because of the existence of absolute criteria against which a claim can be measured, whereas what is new in a being is that which exceeds anything that actually already exists. But Deleuze does not argue that without judgement everything is of equal value, that we are left in a world without difference and conflict. While Naipaul’s position as alternatively judge and judged signals the prevalence of reactive forces and ressentiment, the Nietzschean model still offers grounds for negotiation: ‘It is not a question of judging other existing beings, but of sensing whether they agree or disagree with us, that is, whether they bring forces to us’ (p. 135). Such is the difference between the Nietzschean master and slave: the master encounters a range of different forces, appropriating and transforming them in an active relation; the slave encounters forces and submits them to a pre-existing image of thought. In The Salt Roads, for example, not only are the plantation slaves denigrated by slavery, but, as Memmi observed (1974), the European masters are equally as trapped and over-determined by external forces. When the plantation owner, Simenon, debates whether to accept the return of the runaway slave, Patrice, he not only goads him by asking, ‘[w]hat was it like to be free? To dig in the soil with sticks for your food, or to hunt wild beasts for your meat’ (Hopkinson 2003, p. 89, emphasis added), but also, ‘[n]o juggling and juggling to make the books balance [. . .]. No weevils in the flour, eh? No accursed frock-coats plastered to your body in this hellish heat and no mildew in your wig! No

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wig, for that matter’ (p.  89). The European plantation owners speaking ‘France French, not the Saint Domingue French’ (p. 83), dressed in velvet jackets and white wigs in the tropical heat, maintain the colonial hierarchy by means of a continual repetition of their separateness from the slaves and, as such, preserve an atavistic French identity rather than creating a new Caribbean one. Therefore, while ‘he must disown the colonized’ as uncivilized and less than human, ‘their existence is indispensable to his own’ (Memmi 1974, p. 54). The position of both the colonizer and the colonized, plantation owner and slave, depends upon a moment of external recognition: it is reactive and one of ressentiment. Just as the rejection of judgement does not lead Deleuze to the position of assigning all things with an equal value, so his Nietzschean ethics, beyond good and evil, should not be mistaken as an image of the world without conflict. Indeed, just as judgement is characterized as reactive insofar as it defers to higher values, war and the will to dominate offer a model of combat antithetical to the affirmative philosophy of Deleuze: combat-against tries to destroy or repel a force [...], but the combatbetween, by contrast, tries to take hold of a force in order to make it one’s own. The combat-between is the process through which a force enriches itself by seizing hold of other forces and joining itself to them in a new ensemble: a becoming. (Deleuze 1997, p. 132) The combat-between is an affirmation: the action of the master, not the revenge of the slave, as Nietzsche defines them. All existent things are signs or symptoms of a succession of prevailing active and reactive forces that compete for dominance. The relations that one enters into with other things are yet further encounters with such forces, and to the extent that one judges or attempts to destroy opposing forces one is in the position of ressentiment and the negative. Combat-between operates without judgement, but not necessarily without value. Like the writer who diagnoses the world and our chances of health, we can view the body without ressentiment as evaluating the forces with which it comes into contact. Yet this process of value creation remains immanent. What is of value are the forces that connect with us, that counter-actualize current states of affairs and return to the plane of composition from which a new assemblage emerges. Combat-between represents the struggle for active forces in a world overwhelmingly dominated by reactive ones. To have done with judgement is to envision an alternative relationality that does not posit self against other, colonizer against colonized, but a fraternal relationship in which



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forces ‘pass between parties, which provoke a change of state and create something new in them: an affect’ (p. 127). The work of postcolonial literary criticism, as such, must reflect that of literature itself: not to strive for the transcendental neutrality of a position that will enable us to judge and be judged, but to create. ‘Critique is not a re-action of re-sentiment but the active expression of an active mode of existence’ (Deleuze 2006b, p. 3). And this is, of course, what Walcott demands when he writes that: What we have to say in terms of our criticism is no longer to think in terms of criticism, but to think of something that is more than criticism, and this is a reality because of the Caribbean context [. . .]. Caribbean criticism at its best is not just criticism. It is not just social and historical. It is imaginative. (2003, pp. 44–5) To move towards an imaginative criticism that does not merely reflect social or historical realities but is itself creative, following lines of flight that lead out from the colonial event, is to engage with the at-once critical and clinical task that Deleuze sets readers.

Combat-Between the Colonizer and the Colonized in The Salt Roads The literary text itself offers the conditions for becomings and lines of flight that escape the actual trauma of colonization, slavery or the Middle Passage only to the extent that it incorporates the virtual event. And this is precisely what The Salt Roads offers in the narrative of Ezili, the African Power who links the stories of each ‘enslaved’ woman (Mer the plantation slave, Jeanne enslaved to Baudelaire’s money, and Thais who was sold to a brothel owner as a child).13 Ezili is presented as an African deity with the ability to posses certain characters, such as Simenon’s fiancée, Mer and Jeanne, who she uses to act out her will. In this way, she is able to move between the disparate narrative strands of the novel. However, the world in which she exists is not that of this (actual) world, but one of flows, currents and absolute deterritorialization: ‘Time does not flow for me. Not for me the progression in a straight line from earliest to latest. Time eddies. I am now then, now there, sometimes simultaneously’ (Hopkinson 2003, p. 42). She exists within the pure time of Aion, not the linear, ‘human time’ (p. 293) of Chronos. Specifically, then, the ‘aether’ (p. 293) in which she moves is not a chaotic virtual, but the virtual made consistent, a

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differentiation or individuation of the chaosmos. In other words, through the affects of Ezili’s becoming-woman in the characters of Jeanne and Mer, her becoming-animal as she becomes the mermaid or whale that speaks to Mer (pp. 65, 306), and the percepts of the sea littered with the bodies of Africans, The Salt Roads incorporates the pure wounding event of the Middle Passage. Thus, the aether is populated with assemblages, the ‘[m]any flows, combining, separating, all stories of African people’ (p. 193), and in particular one flow that is marked as a ‘rancid, stagnant place [. . .]. I cannot get by it. Its taste is foul. It reeks of grief and horror’ (p. 293). This latter virtuality corresponds to the Middle Passage and, in turn, The Salt Roads attempts to give a body to the wounding event of slavery, just as Jeanne and Mer embody Ezili and enable her to act in the world of human time and actual events. The event to which The Salt Roads returns, however, is not only that of slavery but, specifically within Mer’s narrative, that of the Haitian Revolution. Hopkinson’s novel reminds us that ‘[t]here is a time to fight, fierce as a cornered dog, for your freedom’ (pp. 376–7), but its presentation of struggle and combat is a nuanced one, played out in the tensions between the character of Mer and that of Makandal. As in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, Hopkinson draws on the mythology of Makandal, the one-armed runaway slave who ‘had the power to take the shape of hoofed animal, bird, fish, or insect’ (Carpentier 1975, p. 26) and who encouraged the slaves of Saint Domingue to poison the food and water supplies of their masters. Makandal’s metamorphoses are non-human becomings in the Deleuzian sense, a becoming-animal that enables him to escape capture, a line of flight that defies the colonist’s rational world-view. However, Hopkinson presents him as a contested character: both Ezili and Ogu claim to act through him and, ultimately, fight for the right to do so. Thus, Mer, who is by her very name linked to the sea goddess Lasirén (of which Ezili is an aspect), remains suspicious of Makandal, and the sharpened straws she uses to inoculate children from smallpox or heal sick slaves become in his hands an instrument to poison the water supply: ‘If for healing, why not for harming?’ (Hopkinson 2003, p. 108). While Hopkinson writes that Makandal is a ‘fierce and necessary man’, one who can ‘burn Saint Domingue clean’ (p. 318), her novel is wary of what Deleuze terms combat-against. It is the force of Ogu in Makandal that seeks to destroy, to fight with steel and fire: ‘There is a smile that certain fighters get in the thick of battle. Ogu rides them, and they know their cause to be righteous, and they fear nothing. See nothing but the fight. Feel no pain’ (p. 326). It is this absolutism and pride that Mer



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fears in Makandal, despite their common desire for freedom. Combatagainst, the destruction of plantation society, returns to the colonial event and repeats its imperialistic aim (the management of difference) and oppositional logic. The blockage that Ezili finds in the aether, the ‘grief and horror’ of slavery (p.  293), is precisely this perpetuation of ressentiment. In contrast to the ‘Male’ (p.  322), majoritarian method of Ogu who seeks war and destruction, Ezili fights through her ‘sisters’, the ‘female’, minoritarian deities: learning that she ‘must fracture in order to fight’ (p. 322). Mer’s ‘every act of love, of healing, strikes a blow to the evil we fight’ (p. 306), since it refuses to bow to the destructive force of plantation society, and instead embraces the potential for life, no matter how denigrated. As she tells the newly arrived Mamadou who refuses to eat the food given to the slaves and is starved to the point of death, ‘I know that you don’t want to live this life no more’, but ‘[n]o man should take a life, even his own’ (p. 197). This is not religious zeal, but a move towards amor fati: ‘embracing the event and the transformations it induces – not its brute actuality’ (Reynolds 2007, p. 153). It is a mark of literature’s potential to intuit a life beyond good and evil as the basis of our revisionary becomings. ‘The life of the individual’, which is denigrated by the condition of slavery, ‘gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens’ (Deleuze 2005, p. 28). A singular life, embodied in the character of Ezili, releases from the actual, historical event of slavery a pure event, which is the possibility for health as one lives creatively and ‘becomes’ out of one’s wounds. Such a becoming defines the Deleuzian combat-between: ‘seizing hold of other forces and joining itself to them in a new ensemble: a becoming’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 132). The Salt Roads itself is one such ensemble of affects and becomings, and as such it ‘fights’ not by means of structuralized opposition, but by fracturing; following lines of flight and becomings that disrupt the majoritarian order. Makandal’s becoming-animal, not his acts of destruction, in a literary context, then, signals the forms of resistance that move in-between, not in opposition to, the colonialist and majoritarian structures of oppression. Furthermore, because such a becoming is always a becoming-minor not only does it serve to counter-actualize on the colonizer, but draws on the singular power of the event, of life. In this way, The Salt Roads reveals the ways in which the tools of harm may become instruments of health, and how the struggle against hegemonic forces may be an active appropriation or combat-between.

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Beyond Comparison: Omeros To return to Omeros, which was introduced in Chapter Two of this study in terms of its impact on the concept of writing back, Walcott’s epic poem offers a further example of the wounding event and, crucially, the way in which one can write creatively out of it. Unlike The Salt Roads, the poem is more explicitly critical of what Echevarría would term the inner historian or archivist. As noted in Chapter Two, both the poet, as he is imagined in the work, and the character of Major Plunkett attempt ‘the historian’s task’ (Walcott 1990, p. 95) of reading, explaining and rewriting the past. Driven by the desire to give Helen and the island itself a history, both find in the lives of the islanders ‘Homeric repetition’ (p. 96) as Helen becomes Helen of Troy and the feud of two fishermen, Hector and Achille, is ‘Like Hector. Like Achilles’ (p. 47, emphasis added). While such an act of comparison is less an attempt to imply that ‘the Caribbean is secondary to the Aegean’ (1997c, p. 232), and more an act of ‘register[ing] exact parallels, proportionally speaking, between the Caribbean experience and that of Homer’s Greece’ (p. 230), the task of observing parallels is itself a complex procedure that always risks reducing difference (minor lines of becoming) to the same (majoritarian categories of identity). While Plunkett and the poet may have different motivations behind the creation of Homeric repetitions – ‘Plunkett, in his innocence,/had tried to change History to a metaphor,/in the name of a housemaid; I, in self-defence,/altered her opposite’ (1990, p. 270) (suggesting that while Plunkett maintains the historical narrative, the poet challenges the historical source by altering our perception of the original Helen of Troy) – they both ultimately reduce difference to identity: What I had read and rewritten till literature was as guilty as History. When would the sails drop from my eyes, when would I not hear the Trojan War in two fishermen cursing in Ma Kilman’s shop? [. . .] When would it stop, the echo in the throat, insisting, ‘Omeros’; when would I enter that light beyond metaphor? (p. 271) The poet’s guilt is an awareness of his act of simplification, reducing the singular power of a life (‘that light beyond metaphor’) to a



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representationalist framework that fixes the Caribbean as underdeveloped, exotic and other. The question, ‘Hadn’t I made their poverty my paradise?’ (p. 228) haunts the poet: ‘Didn’t I want the poor/to stay in the same light so that I could transfix/them in amber, the afterglow of an empire’? (p. 227). Both the poet’s and Plunkett’s attempts to fix the Caribbean as a metaphor for History, Homeric repetition, or simply a product of empire is, as was seen in Divina Trace, to define the island and its people wholly from an external perspective: a diversional attempt to look elsewhere and, accordingly, the creation of a state of affairs dominated by reactive forces and ressentiment. While the poet’s self-defence claims that he ‘altered her opposite’ (p. 270) (Helen of Troy), such an act nevertheless maintains the opposition of white Helen and black Helen, ‘one marble, one ebony’ (p. 313): aligning the move with a countercolonialist stance and enforcing a view that defines Helen through opposition. This is precisely what provokes Achille’s resentment against the tourists who photograph him and his boat as if his life were a metaphor for underdevelopment in the Caribbean:14 ‘When he smiled at Achille’s canoe, In God We Troust,/Achille said: “Leave it! Is God’ spelling and mine”’ (p. 8); the rage of Achille at being misunderstood by a camera for the spelling on his canoe was the same process by which men are simplified as if they were horses [. . .] Waiters in bow-ties on the terrace laughed at his anger. They too had been simplified [. . .] They laughed at simplicities, the laugh of a wounded race. (pp. 298–9) In terms of the argument explored in this chapter, the interrogation of the ways in which literature and history simplify the Caribbean by reducing it to a predetermined concept of identity, such as tropical paradise, underdeveloped region, or Homeric repetition, is here linked to a state of being wounded. It is the task of Omeros, like that of Divina Trace, therefore, to undertake a search for a cure for this reactive state of affairs: rejecting the historian’s task of interpretation and, instead, following the literary path towards diagnosis and health.

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In the character of Philoctete, the search for a cure for ressentiment is most explicit. Throughout the poem, Philoctete is afflicted by a festering wound given to him by a rusted anchor on the seabed, however ‘He believed the swelling came from the chained ankles/of his grandfathers. Or else why was there no cure?/That the cross he carried was not only the anchor’s/but that of his race’ (p. 19). What Walcott diagnoses in Omeros, in other words, is a people wounded by, on the one hand, the simplification of a neo-colonialist discourse that fixes the Caribbean in terms of underdevelopment and poverty, and, on the other, by the over-determining presence of historical memory. The latter recalls Walcott’s critique of the ‘pastoralists of the African revival’ (1998, p. 9) who remain fixated on recovering lost origins, as well as, to cite his earlier Another Life, ‘Those who peel, from their own leprous flesh, their names/who chafe and nurture the scars of rusted chain’ (2009, p. 127). Philoctete’s scar is explicitly aligned with this diversional impulse that seeks ‘revenge in nostalgia [. . . and] a schizophrenic daydream of an Eden that existed before its exile’ (1998, p. 18) and as such refuses to see the Caribbean itself as the ground on which a community can come together. Omeros diagnoses a condition of ressentiment and domination; however, its cure cannot be uncovered by the ‘historians’ who reduce the islanders’ difference to identity. Rather, it is the poem’s healer, Ma Kilman, who finally cures Philoctete’s wound. Crucially, her method of treatment is not simply to reject the historical legacies that torment Philoctete, rather, they are part of the cure. The African gods Erzulie, Shango and Ogun are evoked in the obeah ritual; she locates the root required for the healing bath by following a trail of ants, refigured as the island’s plantation past (tracing ‘the vine/of the generations of silent black workers’ [1990, p. 244]); while the container in which Philoctete will receive his treatment is a cauldron from an old sugar-mill. Each is a marker of colonization and the history of plantation society and slavery; however, Ma Kilman is not in the position of the Nietzschean ‘slave’, dominated by reactive forces, but in that of the master, wielding the power of transformation and creation. With her obeah knowledge, the plants of the new land and the industrial remains of the colonial past, she brings each together not in a dialectical synthesis but in the creation of a new assemblage, a new subjectivity: ‘So she threw Adam a towel/And the yard was Eden’ (p. 248). Ma Kilman’s cure creates a new assemblage of the colonial past that, crucially, refuses the moment of external recognition (it is neither wholly African nor European). As such, it challenges not only counter-colonial ressentiment but also the neo-colonial discourse of tourism and underdevelopment: as the poem tells us of



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Philoctete facing the tourists who photograph his now-healed scar, ‘He does not explain its cure./“It have some things” – he smiles – “worth more than a dollar”’ (p. 4). Just as Divina Trace culminates in the islanders’ rejection of the Vatican’s judgement by sanctifying Magdalena themselves, in Omeros, Philoctete’s claim that there are some things that cannot be bought for the consumption of tourists signals a move towards the realization of a postcolonial Caribbean community in which the active will to power prevails. This will is, Deleuze argues, primarily associated with becoming and acts of creation, and moves beyond the representationalist role of the historian. It is in this sense that Omeros brings the various threads of the colonial past together in the creation of a new assemblage: ‘strong as self-healing coral, a quiet culture/ is branching from the white ribs of each ancestor’ (p. 296); ‘the mirror of History/has melted and, beneath it, a patient, hybrid organism/grows in his cruciform shadow’ (p. 297). When viewed as the task of the healer not the historian, the poet’s own work of uncovering Homeric repetitions is freed from the representationalist logic that reduces Helen’s difference and becoming to a predetermined category of identity: There, in her head of ebony, there was no real need for the historian’s remorse, nor for literature’s. Why not see Helen as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow, swinging her plastic sandals on that beach alone, as fresh as the sea-wind? (p. 271) For the poet who looks upon Helen as she walks across the beach, his own quest ends too in the affirmation of active forces: his decision to see Helen as she simply is. To see only her becoming, not her becoming-Helen.

Diagnosis: Divina Trace To take both a critical and clinical approach to a text like Omeros or Divina Trace is to be attentive to the particular ills that the writers diagnose, the symptomatologies that are redefined, and the assessment of our chances of health. And what do these writers diagnose? In the words of Papee Vince: a ‘reality of poverty, of malnutrition, inadequate housing and medical care, lack of education. An all-pervasive lack of hope, of belief in weself.

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It was the end result of half a millennium of Colonial and Church subjugation’ (Antoni 1992, p. 395). Omeros and Divina Trace diagnose a range of social, political and economic ills that afflict the contemporary Caribbean (poverty, lack of education, poor health care and so on), but both also demonstrate how majoritarian constructs (neo-/colonialist ideology, government and the Church, for example) function as reactive forces. Operating through the oppositional logic of imperialism and reactive basis of judgement, government and state, particularly in Divina Trace, affect a climate of ressentiment. And, for Antoni, this prevailing condition is linked to one of the core threads that runs through the novel: paternity. The incomplete family tree that prefaces the novel signals that this is a work concerned with origins and the relation between fathers and sons, and the plot as a whole is self-consciously evocative of Freudian analysis and Oedipal structures (albeit with a slight role-reversal). As Johnny’s father surmises: soon as you get a quiet minute to logically analyse all of this commess, you will realize that this man Barto had actually married off he own son to he own daughter, soon as he’d finished making the daughter haveen [pregnant] heself. And as if all that isn’t enough, then in a father-son rivalry over the same sister-daughter – who had in fact just killed sheself in the middle of bearing a child both claimed resolutely belonged to them – the father had actually murdered he own son. (p. 281) Later, John Domingo dreams of ‘this man Barto’, his own father who disappeared without a trace and is assumed dead, and rather than simply recalling the moment where, to save his mother’s distress, he buried a coffin full of stones, he instead dreams his father in his place: ‘in this dream daddy substituted fa me – daddy substituting fa me substituting fa heself – daddy busy filling up he own coffinbox with the same chockstones I had substituted fa him [. . .]. But I quickly wrote off that baddream as the old proudfoot one about patricide’ (p. 297). While clearly acknowledging Freudian readings of the story, moments such as these, as in the Hanuman chapter, undercut the act of interpretation itself. The unity of the self is disrupted in favour of a process of becoming in which John becomes his father in the same way that we saw Johnny becoming Evelina or the frogchild. John himself acknowledges such a slippage in his own words to his son, Johnny, when he says that ‘it is not even you sitting listening to me now, na. Not yet. Sometime down the road yes, but fa the time being it is some other youngboy sitting here [. . .]: fa the time being it is me sitting



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here listening talking to me’ (p. 102). Here John is both father and son, old man and child at the same moment, deterritorializing the adult self. The nightmare of history understood as a chronological sequence of events, of the relationship between fathers and sons, haunts Johnny as the eldest child of a family whose members have been both slave liberators and owners. He is particularly troubled by the fact that his grandfather Barto, whose own great-granduncle was ‘General Francisco Monagas, twice president and liberator of the slaves in Venezuela’ (p. 45), had himself been a slave owner (p. 324). However, the novel works against the chronological schemata of a history considered purely in terms of an inheritance passed from father to son. As Glissant has argued, such an approach is not only incompatible with a Caribbean reality, but enforces an imperialist world-view: In atavistic cultures the community takes shape around a Genesis, a creation story in which there is uninterrupted lineage from father to son, with no illegitimacy. The community’s ontological relationship with territory is so tight that it not only authorizes an aggrandizement of territory – as with colonialism – but it also foresees what is to come, what is going to be conquered, and what is going to be discovered. (1999, p. 114) In a move that resonates with Deleuze’s first synthesis of time by which the future emerges as a continuation of a particular series, for Glissant here genesis not only ensures a clear or legitimate succession, but also determines a future that is necessarily an uninterrupted continuation of that lineage. On the other hand, ‘composite cultures’, such as that of the Caribbean, ‘do not generate their own creation story but content themselves with adopting myths from atavistic cultures’ (p. 115). We see this profoundly in Divina Trace in the history that Papee Vince gives of the statue of the black madonna, Magdalena Divina. As he tells Johnny, ‘here is a statue coming most likely from somewhere in Northern Spain, or at least pasted out by some Pañyol Capuchin living most likely in Valley Cutacas. Here is a Roman Catholic statue, with this absolutely incomprehensible tilak of an East Indian from India stamped in she forehead’ (Antoni 1992, pp. 345–6). The composition of the statue brought to the New World by the Capuchin monks – black complexion, straight, thick, black hair ‘made from real human hair, probably that of a young Warrahoon girlchild, perhaps a little Pañyol shepherdess’ (p. 345), and with a tilak ‘stamped into the original plaster’ (p. 347) – enables a range of identifications with the madonna. After the Capuchins, the Amerindians adopt reverence to her but in doing so ‘transform her into a zemis or idol

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of they own’ (p. 343) called Akambo-mah. Then to the African slaves she becomes Mama Latay, ‘among the strongest of African powers, standing side-by-side with the great Shango, God of Fire’ (p. 361). And, in turn, the indentured East Indian labourers find in the icon ‘Mother Kali, Black Hindu Goddess of Death and Destruction’ (p. 349). Each of these incarnations exists virtually within the original statue: the tilak, Papee Vince stresses, was not painted onto the statue at a later date, but ‘stamped into the original plaster’. As a result, the statue itself offers an example of a repeated process of becoming in which the form that the statue ‘becomes’ is variable in relation to its particular context (the different stages of imperial exploitation in the New World). However, as Glissant reminds us, this is not a becoming-new in the precise sense that he and Deleuze employ, since it still remains indebted to the pre-existing, atavistic cultural source (European, Amerindian, African, and East Indian respectively): ‘each knew the black madonna by a different name [. . .] each of these names came from cross the sea. We, on the other hand, did not: now we belonged to Corpus Christi. But so also did we black madonna’ (p. 380). The first four incarnations of the black madonna come from elsewhere, ‘cross the sea’, and therefore offer only a form of diversion. The collective expression of a Caribbean icon, on the other hand, must be one that reflects the composite nature of the culture. Indeed, this, Deleuze argues, is characteristic of all literatures of the Americas in which the fragmentary nature of narrative is adequate to the expression of the collective. Such is ‘the affirmation of a world in process, an archipelago. Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has a value in itself but also in relation to others’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 86). Moreover, as he argues in his reading of Herman Melville, this is allied with a rejection of the dominance of Oedipal structures and the ‘paternal function’ (p. 77). This paternal function establishes a system of identification based on ‘natural affiliation’ (p. 78) and as such cannot operate according to a mode of becoming that takes flight between two allied bodies, such as the wasp and the orchid, or Ahab and Moby-Dick.15 Adapting Deleuze, one might say that in Antoni’s Divina Trace, John renounces the image of the father in favour of his mysterious relation with his half-sister Magdalena; while Johnny’s imitation of his father (‘I had always known I would grow up to be a physician. As the eldest son of a doctor, as his namesake, I was always told that this would be so’ [p. 87]), is ultimately distorted by the novel’s interrogation of mimicry, paternity and the logic of representation, and instead he reaches a zone of indistinction with his halfbrother, Manuelito, and becomes frog.16 As in the work of Melville, although



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the novel begins with the image of the grand/father, Barto, ‘something strange happens, something that blurs the image, marks it with an essential uncertainty, keeps the form from “taking”, but also undoes the subject’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 77). Indeed the figure of Barto as the founding father of Corpus Christi remains hazy throughout: his words recalled in the opening paragraph ‘[n]a-me-na-na-ha! Na-me-na-na-ha!’ (Antoni 1992, p. 3) are never translated or understood by Johnny; while his image is fractured by Myna and Maurina who both identify him by his toes: toes ‘so beautiful she [Myna] could not look up from them wherever he went in the room’ (p. 28).17 This already fragmentary image of Barto is further distorted as he is imagined by different characters variously (as Magdalena is) as an angel (Maurina sees him as the archangel Michael with his burning sword delivering the word of God, prophesying the future), the devil (Evelina calls him ‘dis wajankdiab who is Satan self, who defile Papa God own sweet saint of heaven to beget dis diab-crapochild’ [p. 69]), and even as a frog. As Myna claims in her tirade against Magdalena, who she believes must have been watching ‘those frogs fucking’ the moment she conceived Maneulito ‘to make the impression of that frogface’ on the child, ‘a crapo is the only creature on the skin of Papa God earth that can hold on and singando passionate for three days and three nights without even a pause for a breath of air’ (p. 13). However, in both Maurina’s and Papee Vince’s narratives it is Barto himself who is endowed with these supposedly ‘frog-like’ qualities: Papee Vince tells Johnny that Barto and Magdalena ‘made love fa three days and three nights: continuously. Without pause’ (p. 54), while Maurina claims that Barto appeared to her and ‘for three days and three nights [they made love] without even a pause, without even a moment to breathe’ (p. 139). Such repetitions and distortions do not signal Myna’s naivety regarding her husband’s activities. Rather, as argued in the beginning of this chapter, these shared sentences refuse to privilege one perspective above another and, instead, work by de/reterritorializing each narrative voice and, indeed, the image of Barto himself as he here becomes frog. Displacing the paternal function, Antoni, like Deleuze’s Melville, moves towards a fraternal alliance: a ‘universal fraternity that no longer passes through the father, but is built on the ruins of the paternal function, a function that presupposes the dissolution of all images of the father, following an autonomous line of alliance or proximity that makes the woman a sister, and the other man, a brother’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 78). In the society of brothers, alliance replaces filiation [. . .] drawing its members into an unlimited becoming. A brother, a sister, all the more

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true for no longer being ‘his’ or ‘hers’, since all ‘property’, all ‘proprietorship’, has disappeared. A burning passion deeper than love, since it no longer has either substance or qualities, but traces a zone of indiscernibility in which it passes through all intensities in every direction, extending all the way to the homosexual relation between brothers, and passing through the incestuous relation between brother and sister. (pp. 84–5) This is the zone of indiscernibilty that opens up between Johnny and the half-brother frogchild that he sets free, and between the incestuous Barto and Magdalena – a father-daughter relationship that is echoed in the narratives of both John (who ruptures his half-sister Magdalena’s hymen during a medical examination) and Johnny (who does the same to his own daughter under similar circumstances). For Deleuze, this community of brothers is ‘not an Oedipal phantasm but a political program’ (p. 85), since it is the collective expression of a people yet to come. Thus, it is not a question of an incestuous relationship between particular characters, but a relationality freed from the determining presence of the father, operating as a mode of alliance between parties. Glissant himself develops such a mode through his concept of ‘digenesis’ as the collective expression of a community’s diverse origin. A collective that, he argues, must emerge ‘from a point that is hybrid’, and as such, would create a ‘digenesis’, a ‘new type of “origin”, which is not about the creation of a world’ (1999, p. 195). As a result, ‘this is a Genesis, founding the sacred, but doing so outside the absolute legitimacy of possessing a community when it feels chosen by an unhesitating creator-god’ (p. 195). The concept of digenesis disrupts a community’s claim of legitimacy and territory, and refers to a founding moment that is not absolute but a revisionary moment, a repetition that builds to a sense of ‘[v]ertigo’ (p. 203) and ‘tell[s] us nothing absolute about how Genesis takes place’ (p. 207). The digenesis of the Caribbean community would lay no claim of legitimacy or right to a particular territory, however it would point back towards patterns of creolization, a mythology – not unique, but continually revised – wherein European, African, Indian and Amerindian cultures are brought into relation. Glissant, then, presents a theory of cultural ‘origin’ that is itself creolized, rejecting the absolute, while maintaining a sense of the sacred as ‘what is woven in the Diverse and in the Relation’ (p. 207). Importantly, Glissant not only characterizes myth as a revisionary moment while retaining a sense of the sacred at the heart of human communities, he also suggests that the response to historical trauma and displacement



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is to be found in the imaginative recreation of a fiction of origin (a fabulation, to use Deleuze’s term).18 Of course, as noted above, this is precisely what the black madonna offers in her various incarnations as the Capuchin’s Divina Pastora, as Akambo-mah, Mamma Latay and Kali Mai: a sacred icon that is continually reimagined. But it is only in her final incarnation as Magdalena Divina that she becomes Caribbean: now the Africans were free, the East Indians were free, and the few Europeans who remained were reduce to paupers no different from anyone else. But son, now at least we could look we face in the glass fa the first time. A face we could scarcely identify. A face childlike, and geegeeree, and hopeless. And it was precisely at this historical moment, the moment we needed her most – the moment of we greatest confusion and desperation – that the black madonna came to all of we together and collected in she fifth and final reincarnation. Because she had already come to each of we individually in we time of need: to the Pañyols as Divina Pastora, to the Amerindians as Akambo-Mah, to the Africans as Mamma Latay, to the East Indians as Kali Mai. Now she came to all of we collected and together as Magdalena Divina. Of course, before she could come to we as Magdalena, she had to resurrect and reunite she previous four incarnations: she had to flock we up. (Antoni 1992, p. 377) It is only as Magdalena Divina that the black madonna encompasses the collective expression of the emerging Caribbean community. The statue of the black Virgin is identified here with a universal and fraternal vision. Even in her first incarnation she is attached to a mythology that claims ‘she will bring together all Papa God’s people, flocking we up in she one universal sheepfold’ (p. 343); that ‘the most salient feature of this black madonna [. . .] is she universality, the all-embracing all-comprehending expansiveness of she great love’ (p. 347) so that all may speak to her ‘in they own separate tongue in they own special kind of ritual’ (p. 160). But it is only when she becomes a vehicle for the emergence of a community freed from its paternal ties that Magdalena Divina fully realizes the potential of a diverse and creolized Caribbean community that always already existed virtually in her. And this is the point where her atavistic incarnations are rejected in favour of the name that ties her to Corpus Christi: Magdalena Divina. When the judgement of the Papal authorities that lie elsewhere is cast aside and ‘we [. . .] sanctify Magdalena weself’ (p. 387). In this moment the collective refuses to be determined by outside forces and instead makes the statue their own in a creative expression

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of active forces and, as this study has defined it, a properly postcolonial becoming: Corpus Christi seemed miraculously transformed: racial tensions which had marred we entire history seemed suddenly to disappear. The many religions did more than accept they former rivals: they now sought to incorporate each other. Whatever class differences remaining after we long years of colonialism were finally torn down, dissolved without a trace. (p. 384) Rejecting the paternal function and oppressive hierarchies of state and church, through Magdalena the community of Corpus Christi moves towards a fraternal relation, a political reality of brothers, beyond conflict and the opposition of colonized and colonizer by asserting a will to power and the affirmative forces of the so-called ‘master’. If, ultimately, this state of dominant active forces cannot be long sustained it is, as Papee Vince tells Johnny, because of the social, economic and political realities that are ‘the end result of half a millennium of Colonial and Church subjugation’ (p. 395). In a world ruled by reactive forces and the will to dominate, the collective expression of a properly postcolonial community under the sway of active forces and the will to power remains a virtual potentiality: a people yet to come, as Glissant and Deleuze suggest. However, that Magdalena Divina only briefly served as a line of deterritorialization that disrupted the majoritarian structures of church and state, opening a zone of indiscernibility where the paternal function gave way to a fraternal relationality in which becoming-woman, becoming-animal took flight, does not mean that the community of Corpus Christi is fated to a future of ressentiment. Rather, to return to the point with which this discussion began, literature is health insofar as a writer diagnoses certain pathologies or ills, and, in doing so, assesses the chances of health. As I have argued, Antoni diagnoses precisely the mechanisms by which ressentiment prevails: the determining force of majoritarian or striating structures such as church, history, paternity and colonialism. In turn, the chances of health within the Caribbean community lie not merely in the syncretic, diverse digenesis of a sacred object such as Magdalena Divina, but by the collective assertion of the will to power: rejecting the paternal mode of history in favour of a fraternal interaction, of becoming over being, and of relational selves not the solipsistic I. As the grandson of Oldtalk, the man who asked Johnny to bring back some medicine from America – ‘De kind dey does have in America to make you shit halfdollars!’



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(p. 129) – tells Johnny, himself now an old man: ‘Doctor, dey ain’t no magic Yankee medicine could save any of we. Few halfdollars in we shit would help, but de only medicine could save we is we weself!’ (p. 410). Diagnosing dependency on the external moment of recognition (Europe, America), Divina Trace nevertheless locates the Caribbean’s chances for health in a collective expression that brings together the fragments of all stories, all voices without hierarchy, and open to the revisionary potential of becoming.

Narratives of History; Collective Health If the turn from history to health observed in the work of Derek Walcott, Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson can be reread with Deleuze, not simplistically as a reflection of existing worlds, but as the properly literary task of the active creation of possible ones, then this brings into focus the ways in which contemporary Caribbean writing may be seen to develop the theoretical terrain of post-continental philosophy. Creating new symptomatologies that diagnose society’s malaise, that shed new light on old problems, writers such as Antoni and Walcott enable us to better understand the ways in which persistent problems of social, political and economic underdevelopment in the formerly colonized regions of the world create a people with a lack of hope, as Papee Vince observes. What Divina Trace in particular reveals is that such a situation cannot be overcome by the development of counter-colonial resistance, since that very model of, what Deleuze would term, ‘combat-against’ (1997, p. 132) is founded on a reactive, oppositional and paternal function equivalent to that of colonialist government or Papal authority. In other words, by detailing a symptomatology that connects colonialism, contemporary government, History and the question of paternity (both in the sense of the particular relations between fathers and sons in the novel, but also in the very question posed throughout, ‘who fathered this text?’) to a critique of reactive forces, Antoni enables us to look at the problem of neo-colonialism and underdevelopment in the Caribbean in a new way. And, by reframing the problem as prevailing ressentiment, Divina Trace increases the chance of postcolonial health by creating a world (Corpus Christi) in which the active assertion of the collective that sanctifies Magdalena Divina stands as the potential of any community to embrace this will to power and become postcolonial. If, however, such is the role of the text and the author, how then to reframe this discussion in terms of the specific shift from archivist to

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physician? In Echevarría’s formulation, the archivist is envisioned as ‘an inner historian who reads the texts, interprets and writes’ the ‘unfinished manuscript’ of the archive (1990, p. 22). Thus, the archivist serves as a metaphor for the writer, struggling with the incomplete manuscript and tasked with the job of recording, rewriting and narrating the history of the New World. In turn, Caribbean writers such as Patrick Chamoiseau (Texaco) or Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), both extend and disrupt this tradition by adopting a postmodern, self-reflexive archivist/ narrator as the central consciousness through which histories and voices are mediated. In Chamoiseau’s work, names that play on the author’s own or which underscore the character’s status as scribe, such as Oiseau de Cham or the Word Scratcher in Texaco, serve to highlight the sense of author as historian while nevertheless casting doubts over the very process by which diverse narratives are recorded. In Texaco, where the history of Martinique is witnessed, recorded and retold across several generations, this is precisely what concerns Marie-Sophie as she documents her father’s past: that ‘[e]ach written sentence coated a little of him, his Creole tongue, his words, his intonation, his laughs, his eyes, his airs, with formaldehyde’ (Chamoiseau 1997, p. 321).19 However, as we have seen, loyalty to fathers is no longer of concern to the new literature of the postcolonial world, and perhaps that is Chamoiseau’s point as he interrogates the layers of interpretation implicit in the recording of history. Nevertheless, my point is that in replacing the archivist with the physician we are faced with a new set of concerns. Since we have moved from an understanding of literature as representation to creation, and from individuation viewed from the perspective of an a priori Cartesian cogito to a process of becoming, the question can no longer be one that asks whether or not the author/ character is being ‘true’ to the collective source of the work, or if the a priori subjectivity of the narrator inflects and distorts the original version of events. Rather, as in Divina Trace, the text places fragments of the story next to (not within) one another, creating the possibility of alliances between characters and for their becoming-other. The question that the writer’s fictional persona as physician seeks to address is, rather, in what way does the character become as a result of this alliance, what de/reterritorializations occur, what new assemblage is created? This does not mean that we must abandon the sense that characters may act as mediators. Rather, such an approach suggests that the focus of critique ought not to be centred on the way in which mediation disrupts a source, but on the assemblage that is created through acts of mediation: the becoming-other of the narrator. To return to the essay that has



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underpinned much of this chapter, Deleuze’s ‘Bartleby; Or The Formula’ in Essays Critical and Clinical, Melville’s work offers an example of this new sense of character as mediator: ‘Melvillian psychiatry constantly invokes two poles: monomaniacs and hypochondriacs, demons and angels, torturers and victims’ (1997, pp. 78–9). Yet this is not a matter of representation, but of characteristics that are expressed in terms of a relation of speed and rest: We are now in a position to classify Melville’s great characters. At one pole, there are those monomaniacs or demons who, driven by the will to nothingness, make a monstrous choice: Ahab, Claggart, Babo . . . But at the other pole are those angels or saintly hypochondriacs, almost stupid, creatures of innocence and purity, stricken with a constitutive weakness but also with a strange beauty. Petrified by nature, they prefer . . . no will at all, a nothingness of the will rather than a will to nothingness [. . .]. They can only survive by becoming stone, by denying the will and sanctifying themselves in this suspension. (pp. 79–80) The frenzied ‘delirium of action’ (p. 82) that is the will of the demon; the petrified innocence of the angel: these occupy the poles of Melville’s work, but we find them too in Antoni. Barto, ‘dis wajank-diab who is Satan self’ (Antoni 1992, p. 69), who rapes his daughter and murders his son, according to Evelina; and Magdalena, ‘Papa God own sweet saint’ (p. 69) who petrifies, becoming the statue of Magdalena Divina. Of course, from the subjective perspective others Barto is the saint and Magdalena the whore; however, beyond these subjective positions both characters are marked by an ambivalence that escapes representation. We are given only snatches of Barto’s direct speech, and in Magdalena’s own chapter, rather than recounting her version of events (as everyone else does), she retells the Ramayana. Barto, Magdalena and the frogchild are opaque figures; their composition, nature and form changing with each narrative: for Granny Myna, the frogchild ‘was born a man, but above he cojones he was a frog’ (p. 7); while Johnny clearly recalls the legs of a frog as he swims away – ‘I watched his long angular legs fold, snap taut, and propel him smoothly through the water; snap, glide’ (p. 25). What makes Barto, Magdalena and the frogchild characters apart from the other voices collected in Divina Trace is the degree of their opacity. As in Melville, then, two types of character appear in Divina Trace: originals and particulars: particulars, who tend to be quite populous in a novel, have characteristics that determine their form, properties that make up their image;

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they are influenced by their milieu and by each other, so that their actions and reactions are governed by general laws, though in each case they retain a particular value [. . .]. By contrast, we do not even know if an original exists in the absolute sense, apart from the primordial God, and it is already something extraordinary when we encounter one [. . .]. Each original is a powerful, solitary Figure that exceeds any explicable form: it projects flamboyant traits of expression that mark the stubbornness of a thought without image, a question without response, an extreme and nonrational logic. Figures of life and knowledge, they know something inexpressible, live something unfathomable. They have nothing general about them, and are not particular. (Deleuze 1997, pp. 82–3)20 Although ‘not subject to the influence of his milieu’, the original nevertheless ‘throws a livid white light on his surroundings’ (p. 83) and, moreover, displays an ability to influence his world. This discussion inevitably recalls Hallward’s critique of the ‘singular’, which in this case designates the originals that ‘have nothing general about them’. Such a lack of generalizable qualities, from Hallward’s perspective, makes impossible any collective or political will expressed as universal values: the original is not specific to his milieu even while he can expose its ‘emptiness, the imperfections of its laws, the mediocrity of particular creatures’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 83). However, the focus of postcolonial critique is not the original but the mediator, the narrator as physician: diagnosing and creating chances for health. In Melville, this character is the prophet: ‘The role of prophets, who are not originals, is to be the only ones who can recognize the wake that originals leave in the world, and the unspeakable confusion and trouble they cause in it’ (p. 83): Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Captain Vere in Billy Budd, and the attorney in Bartleby all have this power to ‘See’: they are capable of grasping and understanding, as much as is possible, the beings of Primary Nature [. . .]. Though they are able to see into the Primary Nature that so fascinates them, they are nonetheless representatives of secondary nature and its laws. They bear the parental image – they seem like good fathers, benevolent fathers (or at least protective big brothers [. . .]). But they cannot ward off the demons [. . .]. Nor can they save the innocent [. . .]. Behind their parental mask, they have a kind of double identification: with the innocent, toward whom they feel a genuine love, but also with the demon, since they break their pact with the innocent they love



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[. . .]. Torn between the two Natures, with all their contradictions, these characters [. . .] are Witnesses, narrators, interpreters. (pp. 80–1) The role of the prophet is to bear witness to the effects of originals as well as the light they throw on the world. It is to intuit the play of a singular life (the originals and the events that exceed the logic of representation, that cannot be located on the plane of organization), within a milieu of particular lives: to grasp ‘the innermost depths of life and death without leading us back to reason. The novelist has the eye of a prophet, not the gaze of a psychologist’ (p. 82). The fictional persona of the writer and the narrator, in turn, looks at his world with ‘the eye of a prophet’. Johnny bears witness to the unfathomable events that surround Barto, Magdalena and the frogchild, characters who escape knowledge and representation, but who shed new light on the world of Corpus Christi. This revelation enables the narrator-as-witness to formulate a symptomatology of his milieu, creating a new understanding of particular forms of life. At the same time, because he also senses, as much as is possible, something of the singular life that originals express, his is a narrative that contains the virtual potential to become. A life means the potential for life (and for different ways of life) in any context: life as becoming, not being. Therefore, at once, the author/character as physician/prophet both creates new diagnoses from the particular lives that populate their milieu and intuits something of the virtual potential of a life as the power to become: literature as ‘health’. We have come a long way from the Caribbean surrealists and their exploration of immanence and imagination; however in the work of Antoni, Hopkinson, and Walcott we find a common concern to explore that which is creative and minor. Throughout this study, the departure from a negative and dialectical process of differentiation has revealed what Wilson Harris might term a curious ‘resemblance of line’ (2006, p. 25) leading out from the surrealists, through the works of Harris, Glissant and Walcott, and into the contemporary period with Antoni, Hopkinson and Pauline Melville, while resonating at all levels with the philosophy of Deleuze. And, as suggested in this final chapter, it is this minor tradition that marks a crucial distinction between active and reactive forces as the measure of postcolonial health. To argue that contemporary Caribbean writing may be read between postcolonialism and post-continental philosophy is not to return to hybridity or to imagine the dialectical realization of a new critical paradigm. Rather, it is, according to the Deleuzian model, the creation of a block of becoming between the two, a process by which each is variously

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de/reterritorialized by the other. As a result, the act of literary criticism undertaken in these pages is one that I hope will reflect the creative imperative that Walcott has set us. While postcolonial critique seems set on pursuing a political line of enquiry into the specificity of literatures (cf Lazarus 2011a), paying due attention to Hallward’s caution against cultural politics, this study has argued the specific value and work of postcolonial literatures. Giving a body and a universe to the wounding event of colonization, postcoloniality denotes the creation of possible worlds in which ressentiment no longer holds sway. The properly philosophical task of postcolonial criticism, then, is to survey these worlds and the new symptomatologies that they establish, and in turn to evaluate the ways in which they might connect with our own, actual world. The political task of postcolonial literatures, therefore, is neither reflective nor derivative, but creative, and the question of how newness enters this world is a measure of health in the aftermath of empire and in the neo-colonial present.

Notes

Introduction All islands are, philosophically speaking, deserted: ‘That England is populated will always come as a surprise; humans can live on an island only by forgetting what an island represents. Islands are either from before or for after humankind’ (Deleuze 2004a, p. 9).  2 In earlier works, Walcott more expressly conflates the two figures. For example, in ‘The Figure of Crusoe’ (1965) he writes that ‘[m]y Crusoe, then, is Adam [. . .]. He is Adam because he is the first inhabitant of a second paradise’ (1997b, p. 35). And, in ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry’ (1974), he writes that, for the Caribbean ‘history is irrelevant, not because it is not being created, or because it was sordid; but because it has never mattered’ (1997a, p. 53). Walcott’s later sensitivity to the ideological biases that Crusoe brings to the New World is indicative of his changing critical perspective on the role of history in shaping the Caribbean.  3 Harris does employ the term creoleness rather than creolization in his work. As he argues, ‘creoleness made me aware of the complex labyrinth of the family of humankind into which I was born’ (Harris 1998, p. 24). This form of creoleness, however, is distinct from that which is employed by the authors of the créolité movement, for whom it signifies the attainment of a definitively creole identity. The constantly evolving state of creoleness that Harris envisions in his work is best understood in light of Glissantian creolization, which signifies a ceaseless process – creolization – as opposed to an achieved state – creoleness. Given this distinction between verb and noun, I suggest that creolization more accurately denotes the world of cross-cultural interrelations and mutations that Harris envisions.  4 Glissant’s comment in Poetics of Relation that ‘Segalen’s crucial idea was that encountering the Other superactivates poetic imagination [. . .], however, that Segalen does not merely describe recognition of the other as a moral obligation (which would be a banality) but he considers it an aesthetic constituent’ (1997, p. 29) seems directed against Levinas as much as it praises Segalen. However, John Drabinski’s recent Levinas and the Postcolonial (2011), does much to explore the place of Levinas in contemporary thought, including that of Glissant. While the Glissantian trope of opacity speaks to Levinasian otherness to a certain degree, and Glissant shares Levinas’s concern to think creatively from traumatic pasts, he often exceeds this critical frame in ways that I would suggest are strongly Deleuzian. See Drabinski (2010) and (2011, pp. 145–83).  5 All quotations from Philosophie de la Relation are my own translations. For consistency, I have followed Betsy Wing’s translation of ‘errance’ as ‘errantry’ in  1

190 Notes Poetics of Relation, rather than the more straightforward translation ‘wandering’. While Wing’s translation does usefully avoid any associations with an aimless and ‘idle roaming’ (translator’s note Glissant 1997, p. 211), one should bear in mind that the overtly romantic connotations of errantry as well as the negative sense of errant disrupt the rhizomatic quality of errance. ‘There are no points or positions in a rhizome, [. . .] only lines’, connections and the creation of non-subjective multiplicities (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, p. 9). It is with this sense of a non-hierarchical, chaotic movement not fixed to or determined by a subject (‘a rhizome or multiplicity’ is ‘tied not to the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibres’ [p. 9]) that errance should be understood. Implicit in Wing’s note is a sense that this is a wandering or errantry from the point of view of a subject who wanders (with or without intent), which is to misunderstand the pre-individual, non-subjective basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic philosophy and its value to Glissant’s work. An errant philosophy, in the Deleuzian sense, would simply be the rhizomatic creation of concepts; a minoritarian philosophy that was not determined by dogma or tradition, but which would be ceaselessly creative in its response to the problems of an interconnected, diversifying world. Errantry and its derivatives, therefore, should be read as both a rhizomatic proliferation of connective lines and, as in the English sense of the word, as a straying from accepted standards (not in the sense of one who strays, but, in the Deleuzian sense, as a non-subjective minoritarian becoming as opposed to a majoritarian/standardized one).  6 The distinction between capital ‘R’ Relation and small case ‘r’ relation is intentional; one maintained by Glissant and, as I have argued elsewhere, key to understanding the immanent basis for Glissant’s concept which can function as both a noun (Relation, the structure of the totality) and a verb (relation, as always-incomplete movement or becoming in the Deleuzian sense) (Burns 2009, p. 108).  7 Miller’s particular reading of nomadology in Nationalists and Nomads (1998) has been interrogated by the Deleuzian critic Eugene Holland, and as Miller’s response demonstrates (as I shall argue later in this Introduction), there is a fundamental difference between the reading of the Deleuzian virtual that I pursue and Miller’s own Hallwardian account of it. Other Deleuzian-inspired readings of postcolonial theory include Aldea (2011), Bewes (2011), Bignall (2010), Bignall and Patton (2010), Bogue (2010), Burns (2010), Greedharry (2008), Huggan (2008, pp. 28–30), Leonard (2005, pp. 51–75), Patton (2010) and Wuthno (2002). See also Burns and Kaiser (2012).  8 Similarly, Greedharry notes, Deleuze’s concepts of difference and identity must be distinguished from the Derridean/Lacanian grounding of Homi Bhabha’s reading of difference (2008, p. 117).  9 See, for example, Ahmad (1996), Lazarus (1999), Parry (2004), and for a recent analysis of the materialist critique Lazarus (2011b). In a Caribbean context, Silvio Torres-Saillant (2006, p. 44) has bemoaned the generalizing tendency of postcolonial theories at the expense of local specificity. 10 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze uses the term ‘differenciation’ to designate the actualization of the virtual: ‘We call the determination of the virtual content of an Idea differentiation; we call the actualisation of that virtuality into species

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and distinguished parts differenciation’ (2004b, p. 258). There is therefore a twin process by which the virtual both determines itself and produces the lines of its actualization: different/ciation. 11 I follow Mullarkey’s specific glossing of post-continental philosophy and its associated sense of immanence rather than the more general approach of Maldonado-Torres, who defines it as operating between analytic and continental philosophy, or, more broadly, as signifying ‘a deep affiliation to national or continental ontologies [. . .] not restricted to Europe’ (2006, p. 2). 12. This shared commitment to a philosophical concept of the new is one explicitly acknowledged by Deleuze. Commenting on the perceived parallels between his work and that of Foucault, Deleuze argues that ‘[w]e weren’t looking for origins, even lost or deleted ones, but setting out to catch things where they were at work, in the middle [. . .]. We weren’t looking for something timeless, not even the timelessness of time, but for new things being formed, the emergence of what Foucault calls “actuality”’ (1995, p. 86).

Chapter 1 The title, Légitime défense, was taken from a work by André Breton and, indeed, many of the short texts published in the single issue of the journal were developed in dialogue with Breton (see Richardson 1996, pp. 4–9, 30).  2 Kathleen Renk (2009) traces a similar trajectory from Enlightenment reason to a postcolonial aesthetics of relationality and (although not a term she uses) immanence in an article that draws parallels between Melville, marvellous realism, and Wilson Harris’s concept of the alchemical imagination.  3 Another notable engagement with Enlightenment legacies in postcolonialism may be found in the work of David Scott (2004).  4 See Letter 48 to Fabritius, dated 30 March 1673 (Spinoza 1995, pp. 250–1).  5 See Bogue (2010, pp. 21–3).  6 For further discussion of the unconscious in Deleuze see Kerslake (2007).  7 References to surrealism in the post-1960s period are explicit in the work of Édouard Glissant (Philosophie de la Relation), Patrick Chamoiseau (Texaco, Éloge), Daniel Maximin (L’Isolé soleil), Wilson Harris (The Ghost of Memory), and in Anthony Joseph’s black surrealist manifesto Teragaton (1997); and implicit in the poetry of Stanley Greaves, and writings of Pauline Melville, Robert Antoni and, as Milan Kundera has argued (1991, p. 50), an array of writers who draw on the rhythms of creole speech in their work. For a comprehensive anthology of African, Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean surrealists see Rosemont and Kelley (2009).  8 The list of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean writers who fall under Kundera’s categories of either (or both) marvellous realism or creole speech/ rhythms is expansive. The poetry of Claude McKay, Louise Bennett, Una Marson, Kamau Brathwaite and Linton Kwesi Johnson, and the novels of Sam Selvon (particularly the Moses trilogy that begins with The Lonely Londoners) offer a few examples of creole rhythms, while a sense of the marvellous emerges in the works of Robert Antoni, Mayra Montero, Patrick Chamoiseau, Junot Diaz, Alejo  1

192 Notes Carpentier, David Dabydeen, Wilson Harris, Pauline Melville, Édouard Glissant, and Giséle Pineau, to begin an incomplete list in this respect.  9 Discrepancies exist between the political ideologies of Légitime défense and those of the key figures of the negritude movement, especially Senghor (cf Lewis 2006, pp.  1–23; Rosello 1995, pp. 34–66). As A. James Arnold outlines, Senghor’s narrow, political negritude is distinct from Césaire’s glossing of personal and collective black identity. In particular, ‘Césaire has been at pains to dissociate himself from the possibility of a racist interpretation of his own version of negritude. He has insisted that it is not a biological but a historical concept’ (Arnold 1981, p. 37). 10 Another example of the surrealists’ rejection of European cultural and political dominance can be founded in a redrawn map of the world published in 1929 in which the cartographic representation of each country was a reflection of its importance to surrealism. For a discussion of this and the other ways in which surrealism pre-empted postcolonialism see Louise Tythacott (2003). 11 Ménil paraphrases Breton in ‘Introduction to the Marvellous’ (1941) and characterizes the land of the marvellous as the persistence of contradictions – ‘Life and death, the communicable and the incommunicable, past and future, the possible and the impossible, are interdependent and cease to be perceived as contradictory’ (1996c, p. 92). As we shall see, his omission of ‘the point at which’, which appears in Breton, takes Ménil even further away from the dialectic. Aimé Césaire offers a direct citation of Breton’s definition in ‘Poetry and Knowledge’ (1945) (1996, p. 138). Suzanne Césaire evokes Breton in her claim that Caribbean surrealism will deliver a more comprehensive surrealism where ‘those sordid contemporary antinomies of black/white, European/African, civilized/ savage will be transcended’ (1996a, p. 126). Finally, Wilson Harris’s The Ghost of Memory is heavily indebted to surrealism, claiming that the novel is about ‘life and death or rather – to put it somewhat differently – about the close, almost indefinable cross-culturalities between moments of life and death’ (Harris 2006, p. vii; see Burns 2011b). For further discussion of Hegel’s influence see Breton’s ‘Surrealist Situation of the Object’ (Breton 1978, pp. 285–90). 12 Baugh’s study goes far beyond surrealism to include a survey of French thought that includes Bataille, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze. What he finds in common among these philosophers is both the persistence and rejection of Hegelian thought, particularly via an ontology that views reality as in a constant process of differentiation, passing from one term to the next without finding resolution in a final whole. 13 That Ménil provides an account of the marvellous is of great significance since it links his work to that of the surrealist ethnographer Pierre Mabille, whose Mirror of the Marvellous is acknowledged as a vital influence on Ménil’s exploration of the concept. It also bears relevance to the genre of marvellous realism which links Alejo Carpentier (who coined the term), surrealism and contemporary Caribbean literature. These points are taken up and explored later in this chapter. 14 See Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, pp. 5–7). For Glissant’s reworking of this account see Poetics of Relation (Glissant 1997, p. 11).

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For Spinoza’s account of unique substance see The Ethics Part 1 (Spinoza 1994, pp. 87, 93–4). Stuart Hampshire’s Spinoza and Spinozism (2005) offers a clear introduction to the ideas discussed here. 16 Singularity is used here in the sense of an essential quality of a thing. For example, the idea of colour is both a singularity, a pure or virtual concept (the redness of red in any context), and an actualization within the world (this particular red). 17 While it is not necessary for the argument of this study to view Deleuzian thought in terms that include the unconscious, other Deleuzian scholars have explored this connection. Christian Kerslake’s Deleuze and the Unconscious (2007) argues that Deleuze offers a theory of the unconscious drawn from Jung and Bergson, though emphatically not Freud: an important distinction since Deleuze’s theory of desire is based not on sexuality (Freud) but memory and time (Bergson) (2007, p. 7). 18 Ambivalent insofar as Breton sought to utilize the dialectic while refusing its fundamental characteristic: the progression towards totality. For a detailed discussion of the difficult relationship between Hegel, surrealism and a range of twentieth-century French philosophers (including Deleuze) see Bruce Baugh (2003). 19 For Glissant’s discussion of Relation and opacity see Poetics of Relation (Glissant 1997, pp. 190–3). 20 The surrealism of Césaire is referenced in Glissant’s Philosophie de la Relation (2009, pp. 132–3) and in Bernabé et al Éloge de la créolité (1993, pp. 80–1); Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco (1998, p. 249); while specific reference is made to Tropiques in Daniel Maximin’s L’Isolé soleil (1981, p. 192). 21 For a specific discussion of how Deleuzian philosophy may be made productive for an understanding of the genre of magical/marvellous realism see Aldea (2011). 22 See, for example, Breton’s incendiary ‘Speech to Young Haitian Poets’ (1945) (Breton 1978, pp. 258–60; for commentary see Richardson 1996, pp. 20–1). 15

Chapter 2 As a recipient of the Noble Prize for Literature in 1992, Derek Walcott remains one of the Caribbean’s most significant poets on the world stage, while Wilson Harris has exerted a profound influence on a generation of Guyanese writers including Mark McWatt, David Dabydeen, Fred D’Aguiar, Andrew Jefferson-Miles and Pauline Melville. Dabydeen’s Our Lady of Demerara (2004), for example, fictionalizes Harris as both Father Wilson and Father Harris; McWatt presents a Harrisian-inspired short story in Suspended Sentences (2005, p. 70); and the poetry of Jefferson-Miles (2003) is strongly indebted to Harris. See also McWatt (1989, 2002, 2011) and D’Aguiar (2002) for critical commentary on Harris.  2 Lamming’s point of reference as a Barbadian is the Anglophone Caribbean and the former colonies of Britain; hence England is singled out as the force defining culture. However, Francophone writer, Aimé Césaire’s Shakespearean rewriting, A Tempest (1969), suggests not only the extent of writing back across the Caribbean, but that this form of engagement need not only occur between  1

194 Notes the colony and the metropolis: Césaire writes back to the European canon rather than an exclusively French one.  3 For further discussion see Burns (2010). Other interpretations which follow a similar, Deleuzian, approach include, briefly, Claire Colebrook (2002, p. 121) and Carol Dell’Amico (2005, pp. 57–95).  4 The famously open ending in which Antoinette is left in the dark corridors of Thornfield Hall with her flickering candle only suggests that she might enact Bertha’s predetermined role. As a result, Rhys’s ending remains alive with the potential to become a very different story (see Huggan 1994; Burns 2010). Other masks or becomings are suggested in her increasing proximity with other characters/traits such as Tia (becoming-child, becoming-black) and her mother (becoming-mad, becoming-creole).  5 For further discussion of Walcott’s attitude to this historical moment, particularly in relation to his dispute with Kamau Brathwaite, see Ismond (1971); Collier (1985); Walcott (1997d); King (2000); Burns (2011a).  6 Early critical responses to Omeros remained divided on the question of Walcott’s fidelity not merely to the ‘source’ texts, but to the epic tradition itself (Figueroa 1991, pp. 193–213 and Farrel 1997, pp. 247–73). However, a focus on creative adaptation has come to prominence in Baugh (2006, pp. 185–97); Callahan (2003, pp. 1–90); Davis (1997, pp. 321–33); Hamner (1997, pp. 1–32); Moss (2003, pp. 146–61); Thieme (1991, pp. 151–87).  7 ‘Chronos is the present which alone exists. It makes of the past and future its two oriented dimensions, so that one goes always from the past to the future [. . .]. Aion is the past-future’ (Deleuze 2004c, p. 89).  8 Jay Lampert similarly implies this sense of archiving in his description of the second synthesis as ‘a “storehouse” of temporal moments’ (2006, p. 41). If the ‘flaw in [this] metaphor is that it suggests inert memory packages’ (p. 41), then Williams’s evocation of the Foucauldian/Derridean archive better underscores the creative force of the second synthesis. See Chapter Four on the archive.  9 For a detailed analysis of Deleuze’s philosophy of time see Lampert (2006) and Williams (2003, 2011). 10 Harris is notoriously reluctant to discuss his philosophical influences, however, as Peter Hallward suggests, Harris anticipates Deleuze in a number of respects and shares his vitalist impulse (2001, p. xvii). For a discussion of the particular relationship between Deleuze and vitalism see Colebrook (2010). 11 See also Williams (2008) for detailed commentary. 12 This, Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes, is a key difference between the Deleuzian event and that which is theorized by Alain Badiou (see Lecercle 2010, pp. 175–8). ‘The Badiou event is [. . .] both real and actual’ (p. 177), in the sense that he thoroughly rejects the role of the virtual. 13 See also Bogue (2003, p. 25) for an analysis of Deleuze’s application of paradox and sense in literature. 14 In a similar vein, Nick Nesbitt (2010) has discussed the event of decolonization. 15 This point is reiterated by Reynolds: ‘Empirical explanations fail to see that what has occurred is never wounding because of any particular actuality, whatever it may be, but that we are wounded because of the prospect of worse “to come” or because of the relation that any given actuality bears to the complex temporal

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syntheses that is our past [. . .]. As such, it is the future and the past that wound us; that is the time of the event’ (2007, p. 149). See also Nesbitt (2010) on decolonization as a wounding event. 16 Harris’s application of alchemy as a metaphor for the imagination has been well observed (Gilkes 1975, p. 36). Although Gilkes acknowledges Jung’s influence, the important influence of the surrealists’ revival of alchemical practices has been overlooked by Harrisian scholars: Linguanti even credits Harris with the resurrection of a practice that ‘ceased to exist with the birth of scientific chemistry (after Bacon and Paracelsus)’ (1999, p. 247). 17 Harris has specifically discussed the value of surrealism in exploring ‘crossculturalities’, ‘the life of the imagination’, and the development of a universality ‘re-visioned as rooted in synchronicities that bring into play a range of partial systems within a dynamic of space and time’ (Harris 1997, p. 96). For a detailed analysis of Harris’s conversation with surrealism see Burns (2011b). 18 By associating the function of alchemy with the processes of different/ciation as the condition for the emergence of newness in this world, my reading of Harris stands in opposition to the more Hallwardian account pursued by Sam Durrant who dismisses alchemy as a ‘marriage of preconstituted, and thus undialectical, terms’ that cannot account ‘for the subject’s relation to the world or to history’ (2004, p. 59). While alchemy may be undialectical, Harris assumes no preconstituted ground but a vitalist force on the Deleuzian/Bergsonian model. 19 I have in mind John Mullarkey’s example of the frame as a provisional transcendence within a philosophy of immanence: ‘The frame is what is supposed to keep the inside in and the outside out. The outline is what creates a provisional outside – a transcendence – and an inside – immanence. But the frame and the outline bleed. Immanence is never perfect, the transcendent leaks in. All the same, it is always only a relative transcendent that impinges, one outside relative to this inside, never The Outside’ (Mullarkey 2006, p. 159). 20 The particular relationship between these two novels is suggested by the fact that Harris cites an extract from The Mask of the Beggar in his epilogue to The Ghost of Memory. Harris’s claim that The Ghost of Memory will be his last novel is cited by Jaggi in The Guardian 16 Dec 2006. While Harris’s readers might speculate on the possibility that his ‘South American, Venezuelan/Brazilian’ protagonist (2006, p. 89), killed by armed police in an undisclosed major Western city, is based on the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by London Metropolitan police in 2005, the novel remains ambivalent about its context. 21 To recall Breton, surrealist activity is the search for the point at which the dichotomies of ‘life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future [. . .] cease to be perceived as contradictions’ (Breton 1972, p. 123; cf Burns 2011b).

Chapter 3 For examples of Glissant and the rhizome see Bongie (1998, pp. 179–80), Drabinski (2011, pp. 160, 169–78), Hiepko (2003, p. 243), Hoving (2004, p. 215), Lewis (2006, p. 87) and Weidorn (2008). Mignolo (2000, p. 77) refers to Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad in relation to Glissant.

 1

196 Notes This point is echoed by Weidorn (2008, p. 2), whose work reflects a growing interest in the diverse connections between Deleuze and Glissant: exploring Glissant’s ‘vitalism’ and commitment to univocity in being.  3 Dash comments on this divide in his comparison of Césaire and Glissant, arguing that ‘[t]he former is used to symbolize the affirmation of home, as an unambiguous foundation for the assertion of difference in the face of a deterritorializing incorporation into the colonial system [. . .]. The latter is seen as the prophet of indeterminacy whose totalizing project emphasizes consciousness more than belonging, whose post-territorial agenda is taken to promote a placeless nomadism’ (2001, p. 105). Rejecting ‘this new supposedly Deleuzian phase of his theoretical writing’, Glissant’s late work, Dash maintains, ‘hangs on to the specifics (opacité, densité) of locale’ (p. 109). While in this chapter I argue in favour of viewing a consistency of vision and specificity in Glissant’s work, suggesting that ‘opacity’ may indeed signal a particular ‘thisness’ of a place, person or thing (a haecceity), this by no means amounts to a rejection of Glissant’s ‘Deleuzian phase’. To the contrary, it is precisely by following the detail of Glissant’s dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari that we gain a full sense of his strength of vision and theoretical depth. While Dash employs the Deleuzian term ‘deterritorialization’ in this article and, further, is clearly aware of the Miller/ Hallward critique of both Deleuze and Glissant, he offers no real engagement with Deleuzian philosophy. For further commentary on critical approaches to the ‘split’ in Glissant’s work see Britton (2009).  4 Wilson Harris makes a similar claim against negritude as the ‘reification of European malaise’ in which ‘the West by natural edict, so to speak, deemed itself superior to other cultures it had exploited or ruled’ (1997, p. 96).  5 Even in early Glissant the ‘universal fraternity of various civilizations’ (2010, p. 119) is upheld as the aim of ethnology, for example.  6 For further discussion and examples see Colebrook (2002, p. 117).  7 See also Bogue (2010), Lambert (2000) and Smith (1997) on fabulation.  8 ‘The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, p. 18).  9 See Baugh (2003, p. 5) and Chapter One for further discussion on the relationship between French surrealists and Hegel. 10 Another play on the quote from Deleuze and Guattari is offered in Poetics of Relation where Glissant writes that ‘when we speak of a poetics of Relation, we no longer need to add: relation between what and what?’ (1997, p. 27). 11 ‘A degree, an intensity, is an individual, a Haecceity that enters into composition with other degrees, other intensities, to form other individuals’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, p. 279). 12 See Ménil (1996b) and Chapter One for detailed commentary. 13 For an extended consideration of Glissant’s specific link to vitalism see Weidorn (2008). 14 Harris similarly argues that ‘[c]haos is misconceived as an anarchic phenomenon. Whereas it may be visualized as portraying an “open” universe’ (1996, pp. 5–6). 15 The solution that Mullarkey offers in Post-Continental Philosophy draws from this. For Mullarkey, the outline is that which creates a provisional inside and outside  2

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that nevertheless remains immanent to the whole: ‘The frame is what is supposed to keep the inside in and the outside out. The outline is what creates a provisional outside – a transcendence – and an inside – immanence. But the frame and the outline bleed. Immanence is never perfect, the transcendent leaks in. All the same, it is always only a relative transcendent that impinges, one outside relative to this inside, never The Outside’ (2006, p. 159). 16 Handley’s discussion of Glissant and Whitman proceeds in a very different fashion, not least in his central use of Hegel. However, the article does usefully highlight literature’s creative (even fabulating) function of imagining ‘[t]he origins of a culture [. . . that] are not in the past but in a future possibility, in what is yet to be’ (2003, p. 543). 17 I discuss the importance of Bhabha’s observation that the postcolonial hybrid is new within terms that draw on Deleuze’s philosophy in Chapter Two. 18 Mardorossian also notes the parallel between Antoinette’s dress slipping off one shoulder and the depiction of the Miller’s Daughter (1999, p. 1076). Elsewhere, I have offered an extended reading of Wide Sargasso Sea through a Deleuzian frame (Burns 2010). 19 Nick Nesbitt draws on Hegel to reread opacity similarly as a barrier to understanding. Within this account, Nesbitt stresses the historical, constructionist basis of opacity as opposed to a view of it as absolute (2003, p. 44). 20 Similarly, Eric Prieto’s recent argument that opacity ‘is that part of one’s identity that, by definition, cannot be understood by others’ and, as a result, demands that relation proceed according to a process of analogy (2010, p. 116) ultimately promotes a concept of opacity that, as in Hegel, gains its (in)determination in the first instance through a negative relation with what it is not (cf Deleuze in Hardt 1993, p. 7). In other words, the opacity of the self is dependent on the external recognition of the other (even if that recognition is one of incomprehension): a reactive, negative, derivative force. 21 Réda Bensmaïa discusses haecceities in a postcolonial context in relation to the Algerian writer Nabile Farés, suggesting that one might speak in terms of postcolonial haecceities as the marker of becoming-other (2010, p. 137).

Chapter 4 On Foucault’s archive in this respect see Megill (1979), Gutting (1989, p. 242) and Richard (1992). Richard’s article also usefully considers the way in which the archive was employed in nineteenth-century imperialist discourse.  2 In this Deleuze explores Foucault’s sense of the archive as the production of the new, proclaiming the arrival of the ‘new’ archivist who will ‘ignore both the vertical hierarchy of propositions which are stacked on top of one another, and the horizontal relationships established between phrases in which one seems to respond to another. Instead he will remain mobile, skimming along in a kind of diagonal line that allows him to read what could not be apprehended before’ (1988b, p. 1).  3 Nietzsche, as discussed in Chapter Three, distinguishes active forces as those which are creative and affirmative (Deleuze 2006b). Nietzsche’s ‘untimely’,  1

198 Notes however also bears relevance on the Deleuzian event: a point clearly argued by Paul Patton who brings together Nietzsche, Kant, Derrida and Foucault to comment on Deleuze’s concept of the event as a future potential in the context of postcolonialism (2010, pp. 88–93).  4 For further discussion of the clinical and critical task of literature, as well as the associated concept of fabulation, see Lambert (2000), Bogue (2010).  5 Johnny’s words are repeated in his father’s story, when he recalls Magdalena kissing him: ‘I cannot say how long that kiss lasted or how it ended, because fa me it could have been three days’ (p. 112). Both father and son also share a nightmare of the, supposedly dead, frogchild swimming (pp. 25, 118). Myna’s narrative begins by explaining the birth of the frogchild: ‘He was born a man, but above he cojones he was a frog. It happen so, because Magdalena Domingo was a whore, and a black bitch, and on top of that she was a very bad woman’ (p. 7). Maurina inverts this: ‘He was born with the cojones of a man, but he was the son of Papa God. It happen so because Magdalena Divina was a saint, un ángel blanco caminando esta tierra negra, and the proof of that is she die a freshvirgin’ (p. 170).  6 Along similar lines Raphael Dalleo writes that: ‘There is no pure story [in Divina Trace], no transcendent truth, no smooth and simple narrative to be related; instead there are only the various relations in all of their incongruity’ (2001, p. 29).  7 This is enforced by an email correspondence between Antoni and Patteson where the author claims that the mirror is used in the novel to signal a ‘move “into the unconscious”’ (Patteson 2010, p. 13).  8 John Hawley similarly recognizes that Johnny ‘surrender[s] himself to a communal identity, less ego-driven, less Cartesian’ (1993, p. 102).  9 For further discussion of Deleuze on Masoch and health see Bogue (2003, pp. 11–22). 10 As Papee Vince says of the frogchild: ‘What sort of child he was, I would not venture to guess. Some called him the jabjab heself, son of Manfrog, the folktale devil-sprite who waits in a tree to rape young virgins at dusk [and indeed it is in this light that Evelina views his father, Barto]. Others saw nothing peculiar in the child a-tall. Some even said that the child was beautiful, perfect: that the child was the reflection of he viewer’ (p. 58). This parallel between the frogchild and the novel itself is again underscored by Barto who prophesies that a child will be born ‘with thirteen different heads and in each of he thirteen heads is five mouths and three eyes [. . .] and therefore the composition of this child is thirteen with a division of three that is five and three and five which in truth is one with a division of two’ (p. 159). This is precisely the composition of the book: thirteen chapters; three parts; the five ‘mouths’ of Myna, Papee Vince, Evelina, John Domingo and Maurina; the two stories of the frogchild and Magdalena, which ‘in truth’ is the one single story of Johnny’s life (thus the Hanuman chapter is part of this) and of Corpus Christi itself. 11 Andy Stafford observes this apparent contradiction between Hallward’s claims for literature and his politically inflected reading of Glissant (2003, p. 169). 12 For Naipaul’s comments on women writers, see Amy Fallon’s interview in The Guardian 2 June 2011, accessible at guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/02/ vs-naipaul-jane-austen-women-writers.

Notes

199

For another Deleuzian reading of The Salt Roads see Marinkova (2012). Wilson Harris makes a similar observation, writing that ‘[d]isadvantaged peoples become pawns of the camera. Their ills are made visible to millions of viewers and then they fade from the news. The camera becomes a weapon with which we shoot an animal or a savage and bring him home as a trophy in a television box’ (1999, p. 257). 15 This model of becoming is discussed in detail in Chapter Three. See Deleuze and Guattari (2004b, p. 11) for a discussion of the wasp and the orchid, and Deleuze (1997, p. 78) on Moby-Dick. 16 I am reworking the following quote from Essays Critical and Clinical: ‘Redburn [of Melville’s Redburn] renounces the image of the father in favor of the ambiguous traits of the mysterious brother. Pierre [of Pierre; or, the Ambiguities] does not imitate his father, but reaches a zone of proximity where he can no longer be distinguished from his half sister, Isabelle, and becomes woman’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 78). 17 When Barto visits Maurina in the convent she raises her eyes only as far as his toes before closing her eyes ‘quick no to see my death in he face this time sure certain’ (p. 139). Rampaul (2008, p. 5) provides evidence to suggest that ‘Na-mena-na-ha’ translates as ‘I don’t understand’, again undermining Barto’s dominant role. 18 For a detailed discussion of the links between fabulation and myth-making in particular, see Bogue (2010, pp. 14–20). 19 Her notebooks detailing her father’s life literally become an archive as they are referenced in the text as documents held in Schoelcher Library. 20 Deleuze notes Melville’s difficulty in incorporating more than one original in the same work. Divina Trace ought not necessarily be seen to incorporate three originals, but rather one, the frogchild who encapsulates both poles occupied by Barto and Magdalena. 13 14

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Index

Absolutely Postcolonial (Hallward) 12–18, 110–11, 117, 128–9, 161–4; on Glissant 128–9; on literature 161–4; on postcolonialism 12–13, 16–17, 50; on the singular 16–18 active and reactive forces 10, 40, 113–15, 116, 117, 125, 144, 157, 165–9, 173, 182, 183, 187, 197, 197n. 20 actualization 14–15, 38, 39, 56–7, 79–81, 99, 100–1 affect and percept 101–7, 118–19, 120, 132, 151, 157, 169, 171 Agamben, Giorgio 62 Aion 76, 85, 87, 119, 132, 152, 169, 194n. 7 alchemy 31, 63, 65, 94, 195n. 16 Alexis, Jacques Stephen 66 archetype 82, 84, 86, 94, 95 archive 80, 148–51; and the archivist (as writer) 148–52, 184 Arnold, A. James 47–8, 192n. 9 art 101–5 assemblage 38, 52, 101, 104, 120, 122 Attridge, Derek 20 becoming 37–8, 50, 52, 56, 75–6, 85–7, 89, 101–2, 105, 107, 118, 140–2, 146, 151, 157, 168, 179–80; becoming-animal 97, 105, 106, 153–4, 170, 182; becoming-minor 10–11, 72–3, 77, 106–7; block of 131; desire as 9–10, 72; identity as 10, 21–2, 35–6, 72–3, 84, 123–4, 153–4; and writing 160, 171; see also actualization; affect and percept; Aion

Benítez-Rojo, Antonio 4–5; The Repeating Island 23–6; see also machine Bergson, Henri 33, 34, 39, 68, 73, 79–80, 121, 193n. 17; and surrealism 47–9, 56–7, 59; see also élan vital, Ménil Bhabha, Homi 39, 68–9, 81, 109–10, 142, 145 Bongie, Chris 12, 13, 111, 117, 123 Breton, André 28, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45–7, 48–50, 51, 52, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64–5, 67, 94, 123, 192n. 11, 193n. 18, 193n. 22 Britton, Celia 58, 109–10, 144–5 Caribbean Discourse (Glissant) 112–13, 116–17, 121–2, 140–1, 143; on Creole language 112–13, 115, 122; and people yet to come 76, 116–17, 121–2, 125, 128, 140, 143, 182; see also Glissant; Poetic Intention; Poetics of Relation; prophetic visions of the past Carpentier, Alejo 4, 30, 58, 65 Carroll, Lewis 66–7, 86, 154, 159 Césaire, Aimé 2–3, 5, 22, 27–8, 45, 47–8, 64, 68, 193–4n. 2, 196n. 3 Césaire, Suzanne 22, 28, 45, 46–7, 51–2, 53, 62, 64, 192n. 11 chaos 25, 37, 88, 101, 132, 134–5, 196n. 14 chaos-monde 134–6, 138, 140, 146 chaosmos 37, 132, 134 Chronos 76, 85–6, 87–8, 89, 100, 105, 119, 132, 150, 152, 169, 194n. 7 combat-against/combat-between 168, 170–1, 183

212 Index contrapuntal 78–9, 81, 83 counter-actualization 39, 88, 90, 101–3, 134, 135, 157, 171 creolization 4–5, 7, 24, 68, 117, 124–5, 127, 128–30, 141, 180, 189n. 3 Deleuze, Gilles 32–3; and Bergson 79–80, 115; on creation 1–2, 14–15, 57, 79, 133; Difference and Repetition 76–7, 80, 127; fold (concept of) 104, 136–7; on the fragment 137–8; and Hegel 34–3, 115; Logic of Sense 69, 85–6; on Melville 179–80, 185–7; on origins 2; on repetition 76, 78; on representation 11, 75–6, 118–19; and Spinoza 13–14, 33, 133–4; on surrealism 40–3; on Whitman 137–8; see also difference; Glissant; Harris; Hegel; immanence; literature; metaphor; newness; postcolonialism; Spinoza; surrealism; whole Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari; A Thousand Plateaus 129–32, 134; and the concept 101; imperialism of the signifier 76; on individuation 132–3; on philosophy 101; on politics 120; What is Philosophy? 86, 90, 101; see also art; minor literature; speed Deleuzian Concepts (Patton) 86–8 Derrida, Jacques 67, 149 Descartes, René 13–14, 29–32, 24, 48; Cartesian philosophy 13–14, 121, 33, 36, 41, 52, 92, 94, 93, 97, 146, 156 desire 9–10, 25–6, 72 deterritorialization 12, 17, 25, 52–3, 95–6, 102, 104–7, 119–20, 129–31, 133–4, 135, 142–4, 145, 159, 162, 196n. 8 dialectics 15, 17–18, 35–6, 38, 42–3; Glissant and 111, 114–16, 123–5; Harris and 94–5; Nietzsche on 113–14, 165; surrealism and 47–8, 49–50, 52, 57

difference 62–3; Deleuze on 11, 35, 38–9, 75–6, 123; eternal return of 76, 81, 89, 114; Glissant on 119–20, 123–4, 144–5; Harris on 84, 104; negative production of 17–18, 35–6, 50, 75–6, 123–4, 144 different/citation 37–8, 41, 79, 84, 94, 98–9, 103–4, 190–1n. 10 digenesis 121, 180 diversion 70–1, 112–17; positive form of 115–16; negative form of 114–16, 122 Divina Trace (Antoni) 148, 152–6, 158–9, 164–5, 175–83, 185, 187; becoming in 153–4; Cartesian dualism in 155–6; Deleuzian classification of characters in 185, 187; paternal/fraternal function in 176, 178–80, 183; ressentiment in 164, 176, 182–3; unconscious in 154–5 Echevarría, Roberto Gonzalez 4; Myth and Archive 148–51, 184 écho-monde 136–8, 140, 144, 146 élan vital 48–51, 57–8, 59–60, 63, 67, 79, 127, 139 Éloge de la créolité (Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant) 43, 45, 80, 125 Enlightenment 28, 29–33, 34, 94, 105 event 69, 85–91, 100–1, 107–8, 150–1; colonization as 22, 87–90, 108, 151; and postcolonialism 107–8; time of (see Aion); and wounding 90, 152 fabulation 121 Fanon, Frantz 71 Foucault, Michel 9, 21, 149–50, 191n. 12 Ghost of Memory, The (Harris) 83–4, 104–7; affect and percept in 103, 105–6; and immanence 104–5; wounding event in 106–7; see also Harris Glissant, Édouard 7, 27, 150, 177–8, 180, 189–90n. 5, 191n. 7; on

Index creolization 4–5, 52, 124–5, 127, 128–30, 146; and Deleuze 110, 128–30, 139–40, 147; Dream Country, Real Country 125–8; Faulkner, Mississippi 141; critique of filiation 140–1; The Fourth Century 118–19, 152; on identity 124, 130, 136 (see also opacity); and nation 111, 120–2, 138; Philosophie de la Relation 6–7; and poetics 118–20, 122, 139; and postcolonial theory 109–10; pure past in 126–8; on specificity 130, 136–7; and vitalism 123, 132, 139–40; see also Caribbean Discourse; chaos-monde; écho-monde; dialectics; digenesis; diversion; opacity; Poetic Intention; Poetics of Relation; Relation; whole

213

6, 32–3, 35–6, 59, 84, 93, 111, 113–14, 131, 138, 197n. 16, 197n. 19, 197n. 20; see also dialectics; Deleuze; Spinoza hybridity 68–9, 131, 142–3 immanence 33–4, 62–3, 136–8; Deleuze and 14–15, 20; Glissant and 120, 124, 129–32, 134, 135–6, 145; Harris and 93–4, 98–9, 104–5; plane of 13–14, 37–8, 42, 88, 101, 119–20, 132–4, 140; and surrealism 28, 48, 64–5, 67, 137; see also post-continental philosophy judgement 40–1, 123–4, 144, 145, 163–9, 176, 181 Kincaid, Jamaica 71–4

haecceity 118–19, 120, 132, 145–6, 147, 197n. 21 Harris, Wilson 4, 28–9, 49, 69, 81, 139; and the collective unconscious 83–4; and creation 104 (see also Palace of the Peacock); and creolization 52; and Deleuze 83–4, 92–3; rejection of Descartes 97; and imagination (the unfinished genesis of) 93, 100, 104; on intuitive clues 82, 84, 98, 109; Jonestown 90–2, 104; and Jung 84, 86; The Mask of the Beggar 103–4; and the past (as a creative relation to the present) 69–70, 81, 84–7, 91–2, 95, 107; and philosophy 93; Resurrection at Sorrow Hill 97; and vitalism 85, 94–5, 97, 98–9, 103–4; and the Void 91–2, 104; on wholeness 62, 94, 97, 100; see also alchemy; difference; Ghost of Memory, The; marvellous realism; newness; Palace of the Peacock; surrealism; whole health, literature as 151–3, 156–7, 166, 187 Hegel, G. W. F. 17–18, 47, 48, 49–50, 54, 63; Hegelian philosophy

Lam, Wifredo 60; The Jungle 61–2, 64, 137 Lamming, George 70–1, 73 Légitime défense 44–5, 60 life, a 105–6, 113, 133, 160–1 literature 12, 70–2, 74, 118–20, 161–4; Deleuze on 77, 100–2, 106–8, 121, 137–8, 157–61, 165–6; see also Absolutely Postcolonial; affect and percept; health; minor literature; postcolonial literature Mabille, Pierre 28, 43, 48, 60, 64, 93, 104; on The Jungle 61–3, 137; Mirror of the Marvellous 56, 64–5, 155, 192n. 13; see also whole machine 24–6 majoritarian 9–11, 25, 33, 34, 36, 72, 75, 92, 105, 165, 171 marvellous 4, 28, 30, 51–9, 64–7, 74, 127, 156; see also marvellous realism marvellous realism 4, 43, 44, 65–6, 191n. 8, 193n. 21; Harris on 65–6 Memmi, Albert 114, 167–8 Ménil, René 27, 74, 126; on actualization 56–7, 66; on

214 Index Bergson 48–9, 56–7, 59, 63; and Breton 51; on creation 55; on the imagination 52; on the marvellous 51, 56–9, 65–6, 74, 127, 192n. 13; and philosophy 48–9, 51–60, 63; on surrealism 51, 55; see also metaphor; Tropiques; whole metaphor 118–19; Deleuze on 53, 120; Ménil on 53; Walcott on 172–3 Miller, Christopher 8, 18–19 mimicry 73–4, 142–3 minor literature 75, 120–1, 159, 196n. 8 minoritarian 10–11, 19, 72, 189–90n. 5; language as 121; see also minor literature Naipaul, V. S. 17, 19, 136, 163, 167; see also judgement negative philosophy 15, 18, 32–3, 35, 62, 113–14, 165; postcolonialism as 36, 111–12 negritude 27, 39, 40, 45, 47, 64, 70, 73, 129n. 9; Glissant on 115, 125; Harris on 196n. 4 Nesbitt, Nick 32, 90; on Glissant 110 newness, Deleuze on 1–2, 11, 14, 21, 35, 40, 42, 76, 78–81, 88–9, 157, 166–9; Glissant on 69, 116–17, 127, 139, 180; Hallward on 13; Harris on 69, 84–5, 94, 98, 103, 106; Ménil on 57–9; and postcolonialism 2–5, 8, 11–12, 68–70, 77, 80–1, 149, 151–2 Nietzsche, Friedrich 33, 38, 41, 47–8, 113–14, 116–17, 157, 163, 165–7, 168, 174, 197n. 3 Omeros (Walcott) 75–7, 89–90, 108, 172–6; acts of creation in 175; reactive forces in 173–5; as writing back 75–6; see also Walcott; writing back opacity 143–7, 185, 189n. 4, 197n. 20 Palace of the Peacock (Harris) 93, 97–8, 104; and creation 98–100;

identities in relation 96; and the wounding event 99–100; see also Harris ‘Parrot and Descartes, The’ (Melville) 29–32, 34, 67, 94, 155 people (who are missing/yet to come) 116, 121–2, 125, 140, 143, 180, 182 plane of composition 37–9, 42, 101, 103–5, 107–8, 168 plane of consistency 38, 88, 118–19, 132–5, 142, 145–6; see also immanence (plane of) plane of organization 88, 120, 133–4, 140, 142, 145 Poetic Intention (Glissant) 118–21, 122, 123; and creation 119; and singularity 118–21, 145; and act of writing (as building a nation) 120–1; see also Caribbean Discourse; Glissant; Poetics of Relation Poetics of Relation (Glissant) 122–3, 129, 131–2, 134–40, 144–6; conatus in 137; counter-/ actualization in 134–5, 137; fold (concept of) in 136–7; immanence in 131–2, 135–6; singularity in 146; Totality in 131–2, 135; wholeness in 135–6; see also Caribbean Discourse; chaos-monde; Glissant; écho-monde; opacity; Poetic Intention; Relation positive philosophy 15, 33, 76, 165 Postcolonial Agency (Bignall) 35–40, 111–12 postcolonial literature 11, 16, 18, 30, 65, 69–70, 75, 78–9, 89, 92, 107, 114, 151, 161–4, 184, 186; see also writing back postcolonial temporality 3, 5, 7–8, 39, 69–70, 77, 79–80, 88–90, 108, 127, 150–2; see also Harris; newness; prophetic visions of the past post-continental philosophy 20–3, 28–9, 33, 35, 67, 110, 191n. 11

Index postcoloniality 19, 25–6, 39, 69, 75, 88–9, 114–15, 141, 142–3, 182–3; and Deleuze 8–12 16–20, 71–2, 74, 77; oppositional politics of 17–18, 112; postcolonial theory 8, 12, 27, 36, 38–9, 67, 68, 71–2, 109–10, 169, 188; see also Absolutely Postcolonial; event; Postcolonial Agency; postcolonial literature; postcolonial temporality; surrealism prophetic visions of the past 7, 69, 87, 127 Refusal of the Shadow (Richardson) 27–8, 40, 60; Harris rev. of 63–4 relation 6–7, 21, 62, 109, 110, 123–5, 128–32, 134–40, 141, 143, 146, 180 ressentiment 90, 91, 114–15, 124–5, 164–5, 166, 167–8, 173–4, 182 rhizome 8, 10, 52, 61–2, 109, 128–32, 142, 189–90n. 5 Said, Edward 78–9, 81, 83 Salt Roads, The (Hopkinson) 152–3, 156, 164, 167–8, 169–73; resistance in 170–1; ressentiment in 167–8; time and the event in 169–71 singularity 37, 41–2, 118; Hallward on 13, 16–18, 111; of literature 20, 166 Soyinka, Wole 39, 70, 73, 82, 94, 115 speed (relation of parts) 38, 131–4; and Deleuze and Guattari 52, 132–3; and Ménil 52–3 Spinoza, Benedict de 13–14, 17, 32–3, 47–8, 51, 54–5; on conatus 134; and Deleuze 13–14, 18–19, 21, 33, 133–4; Hegel on 17–18; parallelism in 54–5; see also positive philosophy; substance Spivak, Gayatri 9–10, 71–2 substance 13–14, 15, 17, 33, 54; see also immanence; singularity surrealism 61, 63–4, 45, 49–50; Caribbean 27–8, 43–59; and Caribbean literature 66–7,

215 191n. 7, 191–2n. 8; Deleuze on 40–1; Harris on 63–4, 94; and postcolonialism 43, 67; see also Breton; S. Césaire; Ménil; Tropiques

Tempest, The 29–30 Texaco (Chamoiseau) 66–7, 184 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 87 time, philosophy of 16, 59, 68; first synthesis of 77–80; second synthesis of 80, 89; third synthesis of 69, 79–81, 89, 127; see also Aion; Chronos transcendence 21, 33–6, 37–8, 62, 93, 98, 121, 123, 136–7, 141, 145, 162–3, 166–7, 195n. 19 transcendental empiricism 34–5, 37 Tropiques 46–7, 49, 51–60, 63, 67; Harris on 64; see also Arnold; S. Césaire; Ménil unconscious 41–2, 49, 53, 58, 94, 99, 105, 126, 128 value 116–17, 163, 166–7 virtual (relationship with the actual) 13–17, 18, 19, 21, 36–9, 41–2, 56–8, 79, 88, 99–100, 101, 107–8, 133; idea 37, 118, 132; as pure past 16, 59, 79–80, 84–5, 88–9, 125, 127, 151–2; as unconscious 42, 94; see also actualization; deterritorialization; different/ citation; event Walcott, Derek 57–8, 70, 73–4; Another Life 74, 174; and Caribbean criticism 169; and memory of the imagination 74–5; on the New World poet 3–4, 73; White Egrets 73; see also Omeros whole, the 34, 192n. 12; Deleuze on 138, 146, 178; Glissant on 135, 137–8; Harris on 63, 93–4, 100; Mabille on 61–2, 137–8; Ménil on 53–4

216 Index Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys) 72, 83, 108, 142–5; Harris on 81, 83, 85 will to dominate 40, 114–15, 117, 116–18, 182 will to power 40, 114–15, 182 wounds 89–90, 92, 100, 106–7, 152

writing back 22, 63, 68–9, 74–5, 78–9, 81, 83, 89–90, 107; see also Omeros; Wide Sargasso Sea Young, Robert 5, 8, 12