French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

Avigorously cosmopolitan strain has run through French intellectual and cultural life since the Enlightenment. It exists alongside nationalist arguments in favor of “True France,” a notion that implies the existence of a core of stable values guaranteeing continuity in the ideal narrative of an authentically French cultural identity.¹ Sometimes the two strains coexist in instructive ways, promoting forms of universalism that are recognizably—and exceptionally—Gallic in spite of, or indeed perhaps because of, their ambition to be global. From colonial ideologies of “la plus grande France” (greater France) to the 2007 manifesto in favor of a “littérature-monde” (world literature), the French devotion to a diffusionist model of culture générale that includes active promotion of the French language is a well-known, if often critiqued, twentieth-century phenomenon. By contrast, the history of the nation’s engagement with otherness, understood as an outside that is also internal to its borders and to its linguistic system, has not been easy to acknowledge, let alone deal with, whether in academic, popular, or political circles, although thinkers such as Julia Kristeva and Jean-Luc Nancy provide important theoretical tools for doing so productively.²

The way internally other, culturally diverse influences get incorporated into language and literature has become the object of greater scrutiny thanks to comparative studies of French and Francophone literatures that highlight borrowings and cross-fertilizations. Cultural interferences can create, in Lise Gauvin’s terms, linguistic hyperawareness or the surconscience linguistique common to minority writers who work the language over, transforming it through a creative practice that is nourished by their multilingual sensibilities.³ Attention to the heteroglossic nature of verbal dissonances serves to defamiliarize a language by pointing to its lexical or syntactic limits and its internal heterogeneity. The créolistes of the Caribbean argue that “L’exigence première de l’acte littéraire” consists in “savoir produire un langage au sein même de la langue (the first requirement of literary creation . . . is to be able to bring about a language within the tongue itself).”⁴ Edouard Glissant speaks of the living presence of the “imaginaire” of all languages, which undoes the possibility of writing as if one were simply monolingual.⁵ The Moroccan Abdelkebir Khatibi insists, “French is not French: it is more or less all the internal and external languages that make it up as well as break it up [qui la font et la défont],” and that infuse it with a multiplicity of echoes.⁶

But such echoes are present not just in well-known Francophone texts from the Maghreb or the Caribbean. They were already evident in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works of Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, Moreau de Saint-Méry, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; in the nineteenth-century poetry of Baudelaire; in the Mauritian tales collected in 1887 by Charles Baissac and the imaginative recreation of Réunion Island by George Sand.⁷

Bernardin’s Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia, 1787) and Sand’s Indiana (1832), which were both immediately and widely popular when published, privilege a nonfictional nature writing that had a significant impact on the perception and idealization of the tropics and of its wilderness as “the ultimate landscape of authenticity” and purity, uncontaminated by civilization.⁸ The vocabulary used to describe this “wilderness,” however, consists in the “singular, obscure, and bizarre words” that so disorient Gustave Lanson. In his Histoire de la literature française (History of French Literature), the eminent historian writes:

Le cadre est séduisant: c’est la nature des tropiques avec sa richesse éclatante et ses étranges violences. . . . Des mots propres, inouïs, bizarres, palmistes, tatamaques, papayers, dressent devant les imaginations françaises, toute une nature insoupçonnée et saisissante. . . . Ici, nous sommes dépaysés; et l’étrangeté de ce monde exotique a une force particulière pour exciter en nous le sentiment des beautés naturelles.⁹

[The setting is seductive: tropical nature with its stunning abundance and strange violences. . . . Singular, obscure, and bizarre words, palmettos, tacamahacs, papaya trees, lay out for French imaginations, a vegetation of striking and unsuspected proportions. . . . Here, we are disoriented; and the uncanny strangeness of this exotic place has an exceptional force that stimulates our appreciation of natural beauty.]

These “bizarre” words, however, serve to break up the homogeny of the French tongue, to hybridize it by opening it up to early forms of creolization and globalization, while also creating the sublimely melancholic landscape that suitably reflects Paul’s dejection upon Virginie’s departure to France: “He sat down in that desolate spot which is buffeted unceasingly by the winds that shake the tops of the palmettos and tacamahacs. Their low, dull moaning, like the sound of a distant organ, inspires a deep melancholy.”¹⁰

An armchair traveler to the tropics, George Sand read Bernardin, Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, and Jules Néraud’s Cahier to learn about the region. She used “the proper words of Reunion Island”¹¹ to develop a style that Lanson qualifies as “simultaneously picturesque and poetic”¹² as she follows her Creole heroine Indiana “into the wilderness” (la savanne), and leaves her male characters “on the veranda” (la varangue) to savor slowly their “aromatic faham tea” and their cigars.¹³

Bernardin’s and Sand’s descriptive practice reinforced Romantic understandings of the nature-culture divide, filling with the colorful images of a fresh new environment “the secret emptiness and profound ennui of the heart” to which the extreme refinement and sophistication of prerevolutionary society had led.¹⁴ But this practice also prepared the ground for the subsequent emergence of a Creole ecological consciousness tied to the postcolonial subjectivities that are the focus of Edouard Glissant’s La lézarde (The Ripening, 1958) and Nathacha Appanah’s Le dernier frère (The Last Brother, 2007). In dialogue with the authors who first wrote this Creole reality into French, Glissant and Appanah develop a style that clarifies the long-standing significance of the colonial environment as space charged with meaning, as landscape generated by and generative of myth and history.¹⁵ Implicitly refuting French critical pronouncements about literary exoticism, Glissant and Appanah thematize and allegorize the importance of local landscapes, the way these function (for metropolitan readers as well as inhabitants of the tropics) “not as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed.”¹⁶ They depict nature as a site of memory and identity, as a locus of literal and metaphorical triages and transplantations, and they return us to the overlooked innovations of their precursors, and to the latter’s not so hidden but largely unappreciated debt to nonhexagonal sites and epistemes.

By focusing here on what I will call triages and transplantations, I want to propose a different genealogy of the global, one that originates from the insular peripheries of the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, the East and West Indies of the colonial imagination. I point to the social and linguistic practices common to both French and Francophone writers, and my aim is to underscore how the latter build shared literary identities across time and space, with each other and their readers, in a global context of reception that shifts extant hierarchies of major and minor authors.¹⁷

The present moment of mondialisation invites us to consider what a specifically French idea of the global in literature might imply and what processes of worlding have been in place since colonial times. I begin, then, by returning first to the cosmopolitan ideals of literary criticism as embodied by a literary historian of the early nineteenth century, Jean-Jacques Ampère, who had an acute understanding of the social and institutional construction of value and taste. He deserves attention as a forerunner of contemporary sociologists of literature. Ampère’s relative openness to difference was obscured by the lansonisme that prevailed at the turn of the century, with its promotion of reason and l’esprit français as the primary, patriotic, and “nationalist goal of civic education.”¹⁸ Editorial dictates and critical processes of selection were necessary to shore up the teaching and the marketing of a tradition of classical literature with universalist pretensions, constructed as a national one and thus concealing a form of hegemonic thought avant la lettre.¹⁹ These imperatives have served the purpose of articulating a pedagogically sustainable narrative of nation-building based on ideals of homogeneity and laced with phantasms of power and purity. Ampère provides an instructive alternative to the trends exemplified by Lanson and his followers.

By thus foregrounding what a nationalist literary history has overlooked in the canonical texts themselves, that is, in what Franco Moretti calls “powerful literatures,”²⁰ I want to propose an optical shift that draws attention, first of all, to the influences on the writers from the center whose creative practice is striated by the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism, the ecology of the tropics, and the idioms of creolization. Because I look at these hexagonal writers from the perspective of the smaller, insular margins or peripheries, the littératures de l’exiguité,²¹ I am much less concerned than Moretti with the way a “powerful” text from the so-called core intersects with and asymmetrically alters literary production from the continental peripheries of Africa, Asia, or Latin America. Rather, I want to show how a Francophone writer’s linguistic or generic “foreign debt” to an author from the core actually enables a new vision of the core, and its linguistic debt to the periphery, thus undoing Moretti’s model of two distinct and hierarchized poles, with “waves” of influence that originate in one place only. To reread the canon from the angle of vision provided by Francophone writers means underscoring what Sherry Simon terms the “brouillage culturel” or cultural mixing that already existed in the earlier texts.²² It also means focusing on a different, less-traveled path that results in the creolization of the national literary landscape, and in the destabilization of traditional categories of identity, cultural identification, and literary periodization.

A useful point of departure for this critical reorientation is Ampère’s inaugural speech, pronounced on February 14, 1834, as newly elected chair of the history of French literature at the Collège de France.²³ A germaniste, reader of Goethe’s Weltliteratur and friend of Mme de Staël, Mme de Récamier, and Tocqueville, Ampère was a noted contributor to the controversial daily newspaper Le Globe, which was banned in 1832. He was an early advocate of a global approach to French literature and a believer in its fundamental heterogeneity. In his speech, he foregrounds his version of what Gérard Noiriel calls the French melting pot,²⁴ the multiculturalism that is an integral part of the fabric of history: “There is a whole portion of our literary tradition,” Ampère states, “the origin and endpoint of which are outside of us.” Promoting an open stance rather than a narrow national one, he suggests that literary history must be viewed according to “a broader perspective than the one used most often.” He surveys the evolution of genres and modes of representation, and recognizes the essential cosmopolitanism of literary activity over the centuries. Using a rather paternalistic orientalist rhetoric, he paints a humorous and affectionately critical picture of the French nation’s tendency to appropriate the foreign, and the foreign nations’ apparent gratitude toward France:

France . . . is not like China, a country isolated behind its great wall. . . . France is a curious and easy nation, and although a bit vain and condescending, she listens, half-smiling and half-delighted, to the tales from foreign countries; then she re-tells them her way, according to her own disposition, her brisk and lively mood, her clear and loud voice with the logical, determined, and even cutting tone for which she is notorious but forgiven. And the other peoples are then willing to take back from her the treasures they had given because after she has made her mark on those stories, they acquire the value [le titre] that renders them fit to circulate in the market of ideas [qui les rend propres à la circulation et au commerce des idées].

It is the honor of French literature that her history is linked to that of all Europe, and through the Arabs, the Jews, and the Crusades, to that of the Orient. France is the heart of Europe, she receives the blood that arrives from all the parts of this great body and pumps it back to its extremities, more colorful and revitalized: a circulation that has always existed and is more active than ever today.

Ampère’s rhetorical gestures, while patronizing, are the legacy of the cosmopolitan ideals of his time and intellectual circles, and these ideals are well worth dwelling on. In his model of tolerant exchanges, France incorporates with delight stories from abroad, then retells and revivifies them in her signature style, thus increasing their value and legitimation within a global system of cultural circulation. That system, with France at its center, is presented as a living organism that thrives on the appropriation and transformation of the fables and supplements that come from its furthest reaches. By stamping these “foreign” traditions with her label or guarantee of quality, le titre, as he puts it, France underwrites the recognition and the prestige that gets attached to them. This accelerates their recirculation in global cultural and intellectual spheres. France thus guides a process of mutual cross-fertilization that generates important new forms of enlightenment. Ampère notes that the free circulation he promotes “deplaît à certains esprits [bothers some people]”; he writes this in 1834, three years into Louis-Philippe’s repressive reign and the July Monarchy, and two years after the banning of the Saint-Simonist Le Globe. But he remains confident that cosmopolitan ideas will continue to flow freely, and that “the generous heart of Europe [i.e., France] will not stop beating and throbbing.” Intent on encouraging the rapprochement and study of all cultures, he asserts, “to broaden one’s perspective by means of comparative work is to ascend from the observation of one’s surrounding objects to that of the globe, and from the spectacle of the globe to the contemplation of all universes.”

An early promoter of comparative studies, he invites his audience to reject sectarianism in favor of a reasoned appreciation of literary value within a rational global frame. He also insists, however, on a more irrational or romantic element, a mysterious and innately French faculty “that is hard to define, and that cannot be denied”: good taste. With this appeal to “le goût français,” he reintroduces aesthetic hierarchy into his pedagogical project. Literary appreciation, he argues, must be acquired through education of the judgment of taste, even if taste is something ineffable and indefinable: “Le goût, c’est la conscience délicate du beau [taste is the subtle understanding of beauty].” It is characterized by the ability to be at once bold and graceful. It is “un sentiment mâle autant que délicat [an aptitude both male and refined]” that implies a fundamentally androgynous and spontaneous grasp of beauty. This ability or “sentiment” can and should be cultivated.

Ampère’s detour via the global or the universal thus serves to reinforce a “delicate” and entirely French ideal of beauty already consecrated in the “heart” of the system, an ideal that filters the best of what has been thought and expressed. His philosophy of literary history presupposes neither indiscriminate inclusiveness nor weak forms of relativism. He suggests instead that a properly understood and comprehensive approach requires openness to what is “other” coupled with an intuitive ability “to recognize genius and to revere it.” He concludes with a call in favor of intellectual freedom, independence, and continuity in this particularly troubling period of the 1830s during which, as he puts it, France is experiencing something like “an intermission in the great social drama that began in [17]89.” Ampère’s observations exemplify what Julia Kristeva has noted in Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Strangers to Ourselves):²⁵ “Nowhere is one more a foreigner than in France. . . . And yet, one is nowhere better as a foreigner than in France,” since to be a “foreigner” there means to be subjected to the generous but condescending terms set by Ampère’s “curious and easy nation” whose citizens blithely display their characteristic style, namely, the “determined, even cutting tone” that the foreigner is however willing to forgive them for, presumably because France can give so much in return. But as Kristeva notes, willingness to assimilate to the standards the nation holds dear will often result in the reification of one’s position of marginality vis-à-vis the ever-elusive essence of French taste, what is known as the je ne sais quoi that is meant to remain forever out of reach of outsiders, however much they acquire insider status.

France’s interest in the “étranger,” the stranger, confers symbolic value on the person or thing or corpus of texts selected for incorporation and assimilation; but because this foreign body must correspond to a set of recognizable parameters to be valued, it gets caught in a double bind. The situation reinforces the status of the foreigner as both problematic and desirable: he or she will continue to be perceived as if existing within a frame that demands the preservation of distinctive forms of difference that can produce exotic “delight,” but the foreign must also potentially be subject to appropriation and transformation, to relabeling or repackaging. Openness to the “other” thus becomes a paradoxical game of cultural exchange in which seduction and distancing, compliance and resistance are part of the logic of interminable assimilation. France needs a constant influx of “new blood” in order to remain vital, and the “other” who provides such extraneous but necessary fare is thus, in Kristeva’s useful formulation, “a problem, a desire—positive or negative, never neutral” in relation to that which becomes the transplanted, translated text of another culture. The “other” is thus alternately appropriated and rejected, incorporated and expelled.

Ampère believes in the social function of literature as a beacon of truth and progress in dark times. His emphasis on the global centrality of France (the heart), with its unique sense of “taste” and its cosmopolitan interests, suggests that he has an acute understanding of the hierarchies that are constitutive of the sphere of legitimacy. In this sense, Ampère is the precursor of contemporary sociologists of literature, from Bourdieu to Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and James English, who study the importance of literary capital, a prestigious “center” or metropole, and the distinction bestowed by a coveted award or literary prize in the creation of global culture.²⁶ Texts that are granted universal recognition in the “center” thereby acquire the symbolic capital that encourages their recirculation within the république mondiale des lettres (world republic of letters). Recognition by that center confers distinction on a select few, and it includes them in the symbolic transactions that reinforce the unequal distribution of value as well as how this value structures the field of literary history. For Casanova, the transfer of literary capital remains mediated by Paris as a symbolic, editorial, and financial hub that enshrines the hierarchical stratification of writers from the periphery within an economy of domination and dependence that is indeed constitutive of the internal dynamics of what remains (for her) the autonomous domain of the literary: “Paris has a two-fold claim on the universal: because it believes in its own universality, and because of the real effects produced by this belief.”²⁷

James English critiques “the economy of prestige,” its inflationary tendencies, and the “feverish proliferation” in recent decades of prizes for books, movies, and music. He discusses awards such as the Nobel, the Goncourt or the Booker, which have now honored authors from all continents, and examines how this “globalization of cultural prestige” generates several serious concerns from different ideological positions. He points out that on one hand, critics who value certain forms of cultural authenticity have bemoaned the risks of dilution of local specificity into “an essentially false and touristic product, specially, if not always consciously, made for Euro-American consumption, masquerading as a representative form of indigenous cultural production.” Publishers’ appeal to transnational Westernized literary tastes is also in evidence in the proliferation of mediocre anthologies of world literature, another symptom of the rampant marketing hype that serves to construct artificial, and quite possibly short-lived, canons. On the other hand, he adds, traditionalists who complain about the “abandonment, under pressure of ‘political correctness,’ of universal aesthetic principles” redouble their defense of (a rather racist) universalism. Overall, English argues, the rules of literary competition have now been changed by the intervention of global institutional players who “introduce new wrinkles into the game.” He concludes by declaring “What Goethe claimed, wrongly because prematurely, back in 1827, that ‘nowadays, national literature doesn’t mean much; the age of world literature is beginning,’ has finally become a supportable statement.” What English neglects to consider and account for, however, is the way that the “national” already contains transcultural elements, occluded by the conventions and exclusionary practices that have rendered invisible the extrinsic and not-so-muted influences long present at the heart of the canonical corpus, and familiar to Goethe, Ampère, and their circle of peers.²⁸

Where Ampère is content to advocate in favor of critical expertise carefully cultivated through pedagogical means and spiked with an intuitive dose of taste, Casanova believes that Paris will maintain its monopoly on legitimacy and taste, and that it will continue to absorb within an autonomous literary space many excentric international writers; her approach thus remains close to Moretti’s. English, by contrast, bemoans the business of prizes and the extent to which it has destroyed any possibility of aesthetic autonomy. To different degrees, though, they all focus on the same process: the means by which selection or classification generates a canon and elevates certain titles to the rank of the global. In other words, these critics lay out before us the very editorial and critical practice that I am calling here a process of triage that has been central to ideologies of exclusion, but that can often be masked or naturalized as aesthetic judgment or false standards of objectivity.

According to the Trésor informatisé de la langue française, the word “triage” has several specialized meanings that include, for my purposes, three useful definitions. First, in the expression “gare de triage” (railyard or area off the main tracks where cars or wagons are parked, waiting to be routed), we have a model of temporary exclusion before reintegration into the system for further circulation. Second, as used in the textile industry and the processing of wool, triage refers to the act of removing impurities, “les pailles et autres corps étrangers,” straw and other foreign bodies; it thus indicates permanent exclusion. Third, the term was used in the nineteenth century to refer to the selection of hierarchized professional elites, “personnes choisies, triées pour leur appartenance à l’élite”: it named a flexible unit or category of elements, specialists who could be incorporated at will—when and if needed. To these French dictionary definitions, we can add two other useful concepts or codes: the (universal) medical emergency coding or triage of patients and victims according to their vital signs, and the code-switching practiced by multilingual speakers whose lexical choices are tailored to contextual signals. A highly polysemic term, triage serves to highlight a variety of possible institutional dispositions, from inclusiveness and incorporation to outright banishment, with many intermediate positions, as the preceding examples demonstrate.

The term triage thus suggests many possible conceptualizations of power. As a result, it can serve to complicate these critics’ understanding of literary and cultural dynamics and to reveal the limitation of any understanding of the global that remains presentist or tied only to strictly contemporary economies of prestige. Furthermore, the travels of the term and its circulation into medical and linguistic contexts, especially with regard to both the forms and meanings of emergency, can allow us to articulate, for postcolonial Francophone studies, a much more nuanced view of cosmopolitanism and creolization than is allowed for by the binary model in place in Anglophone studies since The Empire Writes Back. That model stresses “counter-discursive rather than homologous practices,” whereas triage serves to highlight instead the multidirectional forms of mediation that result from patterns of colonial selection and resistance. These can be metropolitan or postcolonial appropriations and transplantations or translations and borrowings, including intertextuality and dialogism.

For those situated in the “core” of Frenchness where linguistic purity is valued, code-switching and the heterogeneity of creolized idioms may be read as exotic, but such idioms actually serve to describe with precision the very real, banal or everyday world of the periphery, and the agency of its speakers. In his critique of Paul et Virginie, Lanson engages in exoticizing linguistic triage when he qualifies “palmistes, tatamaques, papayers” as “bizarre” words. By italicizing the names of these tropical plants, he sets them apart and demarcates them from standard French, something Bernardin does not need to do, because his own descriptive practice is congruent with the kind of internalized bilingualism or surconscience linguistique that Lise Gauvin attributes primarily to Francophone writers, as pointed out before.

Lanson acknowledges the talent and originality of Bernardin, his pivotal role in revolutionizing writing. “Without even thinking about it, he leads us toward a revolution in language,” the critic points out, although he refuses to elevate Bernardin to the rank of a “major” figure in his literary pantheon, which favors more classically French geniuses. The mandarin historian thus wears his provincialism on his sleeve instead of giving us a useful or illuminating critique of Bernardin, the botanist and traveler. Bernardin worked as a protégé of Pierre Poivre in the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, then called Île de France. His travels expanded his lexical range, and he transplanted into his text the words that Lanson codes as exotic foreign bodies, dismissing the book as romantic or baroque or both. Paul et Virginie thus remained for its critics, an instance of linguistic excess combined with the naïve portrayal of young love and untamed nature. Lanson judges it “mince et fade [thin and insipid]” and rules it out of his canon, triaging it off the singular “axis” of masterpieces that can only include instances of French “grand gout.”²⁹

For readers from the Francophone tropics, however, Paul et Virginie has the merit of being the first popular text to represent tropical nature in a realistic, quasi-scientific mode, and not simply in the preromantic vein of fantasy writing with which it is primarily associated. Bernardin’s practice conveys a familiar universe, and reading him produces clarity and the recognition that breeds elation. Indeed, his novella remains a permanent reference and a lasting anchorage for Mauritian writers, from Marcel Cabon and Loys Masson to Marie-Thérèse Humbert and J. M. G. Le Clézio.³⁰ In contrast to Lanson’s radical process of elimination, Bernardin’s triage consists in the inclusion and incorporation of new lexical elements that he introduces into the French language, allowing it to become more permeable to otherness: le palmiste (palmetto) and la papaye (papaya) are now part of the standard lexicon, referring to widely available foodstuffs; by contrast, le tatamaque (tacamahac) is an indigenous tree like the ebony that has all but disappeared from the island’s ecosystem, and its linguistic trace serves today to denounce the subsequent mismanagement of the indigenous forests by different colonial regimes.

The literal relocation of new species—flora and fauna—by eighteenth-century scientists made it possible to grow new crops in the “torrid zones” of the globe, but it also encouraged overexploitation of rare and valuable woods and caused demographic and environmental upheavals.³¹ Paul et Virginie participates in the critical labor of witnessing this historical transformation of nature and of its representations. It is illuminating to reexamine it through the lens of the burgeoning field of postcolonial ecocriticism and to recognize its value as a transformative intervention, one that participates in the rhetorical creation of Creole environments, which are themselves the transplanted landscapes of imperial botanical, agricultural, and economic triages common under all tropical latitudes.

Ampère’s and Lanson’s diverging understandings of a comprehensive literary history, and the theories to which those differences give rise, are rooted in specific notions of otherness developed in relation to universalizing aesthetic judgments. Their views of the global expose different but related facets of a uniquely French understanding of taste that consecrates certain writers while eliminating others or setting them on a different, parallel or marginal track, until their transplantation into the system becomes possible, especially after their recognition by means of a literary award, as has happened in recent decades to writers from Africa, the Caribbean, or the Mascarene Islands, some of whom were among the signatories of the Manifesto of the 44 on la littérature-monde.

If the success of nonnative, nonhexagonal French writers has shown anything, it is the widespread presence of, and the increasing value that attaches to, the “foreigner” within: the heart of the nation’s cultural and literary capital has become once again a site that facilitates, à la Ampère, the circulation and exchange of ideas among Francophone intellectuals who publish their work there. But that site is not exactly the cosmopolitan Paris of Casanova’s model of mediation; rather, it is an always-already transplanted heart that exposes the fictions of a “True France” which served to stifle temporarily the differences within. Or, put the way Jean-Luc Nancy formulates it, “Strangeness could come from outside only because it had sprung up from inside.”³² Diversity has always been internal to the nation, but it takes the heightened presence of visible others to expose the mechanisms that institutional exclusions have been successful at concealing.

In L’intrus (The Intruder), his lyrical autobiographical meditation on alterity and his own heart transplant surgery, the philosopher asks, “what can it really be, to replace a heart?”—a sick heart that has become the body’s own enemy within. He muses: “My heart became my uncanny stranger [mon étranger]: uncanny precisely because it was inside [justement étranger parce qu’il était dedans]. . . . Such emptiness suddenly in my chest or soul—it’s one and the same—[dans la poitrine ou dans l’âme—c’est la même chose] when I was told: ‘you’ll need a transplant.’” Nancy goes on to discuss modernity’s programmed “mastery and possession of nature,” in which technology’s staging or “exhibition” of the deferral of death has replaced religion as the means to our simulated immortality, giving humans an illusory sense of sovereignty. For the heart patient, however, the tangled web of treatment, immunodeficiency disorders, and recovery only proves, in the final analysis, the obscure dependency of inside and outside. The body’s permeability to viruses shatter any possible sense of the propre or self-same: “We arrive at a certain continuity of intrusions, at a regime of permanent intrusion,”³³ where the transplanted organ or supplement is but a part of an ongoing phenomenon of transformation of the original body with its porous metabolism and dependence on either internal parasites or medical prostheses. Similarly, then, in literary history, open scrutiny of the received conventions or confidently dispensed critical diagnoses will reveal the foreign debts that accrue to a canonical corpus, and the logic of dependency that drives its formation over time, and changes or even transplants its very heart, even as this heart appropriates difference in order to revitalize its traditions and reinforce its own sovereignty. This, as Ampère suggests, is in fact the age-old Gallic practice of elevating a dominant particular to the status of the universal.

It is this “permanent” intrusion of otherness that intersecting readings of canonical and Francophone authors can help identify by underscoring the degree to which “Frenchness” was always manifold and, like the feminist subject theorized by Teresa De Lauretis, “multiply organized . . . along several axes and across mutually contradictory discourses and practices.”34A few short examples, which highlight the “stunning abundance” and “strange violences” (Lanson) of the tropics, will demonstrate how descriptive echoes reverberate along multiple geographical and historical literary axes. By echoing each other, these examples point to the limitations of the one-way model, the “wave” or diffusionist model of civilization, and encourage us to think instead in terms of dynamic models of mutual influence, rooted in the unique ecology of these “distant” regions of the planet and capable of inspiring new critical conversations and comparative methods.

Here Bernardin describes the aftermath of a tropical hurricane, and the power of nature to refashion human-made places:

By evening the rain had ceased; the south-east trade wind began to blow again as usual; the storm clouds were driven towards the north-west and the setting sun appeared on the horizon.

Virginia’s first wish was to see how her resting place had fared. . . . Clouds of white mist rose from the rounded crests of the mountain; here and there its slopes were furrowed by the foaming torrents which were now diminishing on all sides. As for the garden, it was completely devastated; dreadful gullies scored its surface; most of the fruit trees had been uprooted; great piles of sand covered the borders of the meadows and had filled in the basin of Virginia’s pool. The two coconut-trees still stood in their places, green and flourishing [debout et bien verdoyants], but round about them not a lawn nor a bower nor a bird remained—except for a few bengalis which, from nearby points of rock, bewailed the loss of their little ones in plaintive song.³⁵

This passage brings together the major topoi of minor romantic genres: the picturesque (sky, setting sun), the sentimental (plaintive song), and the exotic (unusual plants and animals). Bernardin uses the word bengali to refer to a species of bird, the common waxbill of Mauritius, which is native to the African continent but was mistakenly believed to be from South Asia. The word was introduced into French by the ornithologist Mathurin-Jacques Brisson in 1760, and it figures today in the Petit Robert. It had passed into the local vernacular or Mauritian Creole by Bernardin’s time and had lost all exotic connotations for the Mauritian reader.³⁶ The coconut tree or coco-palm, ubiquitous in coastal areas under those latitudes, is an emblematic tropical plant for the European imagination. It epitomizes the essence of the exotic: sun, sea, and sand, the breezy languor and indolence of its balancing fronds, its abundant fruit that grows without effort or cultivation.³⁷ Hence, the tree rarely connotes ideas of strength and permanence. Yet, Bernardin alludes to its endurance: in the midst of widespread devastation, the trees are “debout et bien verdoyants.”

George Sand also depicts the ferocity of the tropical zone, its roaring winds and water, which can inspire awe and wonder, another common topos of the romantic sublime: “A moment later a fierce wind arose and swept the mist away in a split second. . . . Torrents of rain filled up the beds of the rivers. . . . In an hour, everything was flooded and the mountain sides, streaming with water from all directions, were turned into a huge waterfall which rushed furiously down to the plain.”³⁸

The power of nature, which the colonies’ slaves and their descendants had to learn to befriend, is also present throughout Edouard Glissant’s oeuvre. Glissant’s Indies are a site of alternative modernities, and his poetic prose in La lézarde confirms the polysemic significance of coconut trees in the Caribbean imaginary:

Le long des sables, les cocotiers brûlés par le soleil—quand on connaît la force terrible de leurs racines, quand on a su leur fraternité sèche—nul ne peut plus les confondre avec l’image exotique qu’on en donne: leur office est plus sauvage, et leur présence plus pesante. Ils sont la floraison extrême, la ligne inflexible et sans cesse menacée, le fil et la frange, ce moment d’éternel équilibre entre ce qui demeure et ce qui déjà s’en va. Avec eux la terre s’ouvre vers le large; par eux la mer décide du visage de la terre. Lieu de reniement et d’acceptation, cette couronne d’arbres est dépositaire de l’essentiel, enseigne la mesure pesante en même temps qu’elle suscite l’audace irréfléchie.³⁹

[Along the shore stood coconut trees burnt by the sun. When one knows the tremendous strength of their roots, when one has experienced their arid fraternity, their conventional exotic image fades away. Their true function is more untamed, and their presence more solemn. They are the last growing things, the steadfast but always threatened front line, the edge and the fringe, the moment of eternal equilibrium between what survives and what is already disappearing. With them, the land opens up onto the sea; through them the sea decides on the features of the land. In this place of denial and acceptance, this band of trees is the guardian of being, it teaches the wisdom of moderation and at the same time inspires reckless audacity.]

Melancholic figures in an inhospitable environment, “brûlés par le soleil,” these trees signify the ambiguous and menacing potential of the margin or contact zone between life and death, dry earth and foaming sea, “le fil et la frange,” moderation and recklessness. Like the subject of modernity, the trees stand between renewal and loss, survival and disappearance in that moment “d’éternel équilibre” and ephemeral reciprocity. But unlike the Foucauldian human who “would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,” the trees are the front line of an enduring and tenacious species, representing an adaptive and evolutionary ecology in a landscape laden with contradictory diachronic meanings—the measure of the past and the audacity of the future—and altered by both human relocations and botanic transplantations.⁴⁰

I cannot elaborate here on the knot of implications that antihumanist discourses and evolutionary biology together raise in the context of postcolonial ecocriticism. Suffice it to say that the conversations to which I am drawing attention serve to undermine contemporary romantic understandings of environmentalism as the unproblematic stewardship of nature and protection of all species according to the static Linnean taxonomic model. The work of these authors underscores instead the adaptive capacity and forcible variations—or triages—to which humans, animals, and plants have been subjected throughout history.⁴¹

Nathacha Appanah picks up the same environmental thread in Le dernier frère, a tale of friendship and tragedy that pays homage to Paul et Virginie and its two young protagonists. She stages an encounter, in the lushly described Mauritian forest, between two nine-year-olds: Raj, an Indo-Mauritian boy who has lost both his brothers in a flood, and David, an orphaned Czech-Jewish deportee, held in the Beau-Bassin prison along with a contingent of Eastern European Jews who were triaged off to this British colony after being denied entry into Palestine in 1940.⁴² Describing the impact of a cyclone, she dwells on the devastation and ravages caused by the storm: the manguier, the mango, a large and majestic shade tree, has been toppled. Its shallow root system makes it much more vulnerable than the otherwise fragile-looking coco-palm:

On the fifth day, the clear sky and its light shimmering like bubbles [une lumière qui éclatait par-ci par-là en bouillons] all through the forest exposed the devastation of the landscape . . .

All my signposts, my favorite spots, my hiding places, my secrets had vanished . . .

The mango tree [manguier] had been deracinated and was lying on top of the house with the bougainvillea. The roots reminded me of a huge flower and I could not believe my eyes, this giant shade tree with its thick foliage and juicy fruits was now down.⁴³

La lézarde and Le dernier frère take place in the same year, 1945, in their authors’ respective islands, which were far apart geographically and “conversationally,” if I might put it this way, despite their obvious Creole cultural commonalities. This mutual ignorance, reinforced by vertical colonial axes of power has fragmented, if not completely impeded, Creole solidarities until quite recently.⁴⁵

Glissant’s and Appanah’s novels unfold far from but on this background of world history. But the authors’ meticulous emphasis on nature allows them to develop a different sense of temporality and history, of community memory and amnesia, punctuated in Mauritius by the cyclone of February 1945 and the polio epidemic of the same year, and in Martinique by an election campaign that remains unspecified in the book, but that corresponds to Aimé Césaire’s successful mayoral campaign, in which the young Glissant had participated.

An award-winning author whose luminous style and serious social and historical thematic has attracted the attention of international panels of judges, Appanah has been compared to Arundhati Roy and J. M. Coetzee, and each of her books to date has received a prize, propelling her into the rarefied orbit where artistic value and social esteem can be said to enter into perfect correlation: her place in the pantheon of global authors is likely to be secured in due time. In the meantime, the literary conversations in which her books participate help trace new lines of affiliation among French and Francophone authors, as well as with other postcolonial ones.

In conclusion, let me stress that instead of replaying a Francophone version of the “Empire Writes Back” postcolonial methodology, my goal has been to point to the heterological nature of “French” literature, to show how the tropical ecology of island colonies marked Bernardin’s and Sand’s texts. Writers from the same tropics have returned to the works of their metropolitan precursors as quasi-mythical sources of disappearing local knowledge, providing today’s critic with a unique opportunity to examine the conditions under which implicit and explicit forms of reciprocity emerge between North and South or Western and postcolonial strategies of representation and semantic choices. These choices underscore the materiality of historical and literary representation, and they correspond to modes of selection, triage, and transplantation that have occurred in both directions over time.

What does it mean, then, for Francophone writers to engage with the environment, with their native physical space and cultural place through the mediation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts? How does the destruction of this topography by natural forces (cyclones, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and volcanoes) or colonial agriculture, with its disastrous pioneering of large-scale single-crop or monoculture of valuable commodities (rice, sugar, tobacco, tea, coffee), translate into a critique of the nature-culture binary? How has the modification of nature transformed the conditions of life and the narrative practices of those who are now reshaping our literary landscapes? These are the larger questions this essay ultimately raises and that cannot be resolved here. These questions, however, will become ever more urgent because they disclose with dramatic clarity the continued resilience and relevance of the field of literary studies to a historically sound understanding of human and ecological diversity.