Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print: Aesthetic Subjectivity, Diaspora, and the Lyric Regime

In “Césaire’s Notebook as Palimpsest,” A. James Arnold carefully separates out the layers of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, demonstrating how, with each successive edition, the poet built on—and altered—its initial articulation in print.¹ That initial articulation appeared in a small review titled Volontés in August of 1939; it was followed by seven more versions, the last few labeled by the publisher “definitive” (from 1956 on).² Arnold points out that the first publication of the Cahier as a separate volume was in a Cuban translation by Lydia Cabrera, prefaced by Benjamin Péret and brought out in Havana during World War II. This fact suggests what Arnold calls “the Caribbean vocation of Césaire’s poetry at this time [1943]” and reveals “the role of the surrealist group in its diffusion.”³ In effect, Arnold reads the poem through the nature of its later reception, claiming that, because the Cuban surrealists were the first to publish the Cahier under separate cover, the poem must have had a “Caribbean vocation … at this time.” While Arnold’s observation holds some weight, it is not clear that the 1939 version was intended primarily for a Caribbean audience. Who were Césaire’s first readers? How might they have shaped the Cahier’s first appearance in print?

Cabrera, a Cuban poet with an interest in diasporic religious syncretism, and Péret, an ex-surrealist studying pre-Columbian culture in Mexico, may indeed have felt an affinity with Césaire’s work. I believe it would be a mistake, however, to take Cabrera’s gesture of appropriation for a grasp of the poem’s essence. Of course, a different appropriation, interpretation, or framing (mine, for instance) would also overdetermine the nature of what we find in the poem. The site where we choose to begin the story—in Havana or Paris or Martinique—has an impact on the reading we produce. My argument, though, is that the claim for a “Caribbean vocation” of the poem, as popular as it currently is, obscures another equally important but less fashionable reading. Without wishing to create a hierarchy of interpretations, I suggest that our understanding of Césaire’s Cahier and of its place in transnational modernism is incomplete if we do not study the circumstances in which the 1939 pre-Cuban version arrived on the French literary scene.

It is clear that the surrealists were instrumental in bringing Césaire’s writing to the attention of publishers, and we should never forget the subsequent influence they exerted on the development of both the Cahier and Césaire’s entire career.4 However, the “vocation” of the original 1939 poem was neither Caribbean nor surrealist alone, if what we mean by “vocation” is the direction intended, the public first addressed.⁵ This is not to say that Césaire had no Caribbean readership in mind but rather that, given his situation as a black assimilé living in Paris yet identifying increasingly with the Africans he met there, he had to envision (and accommodate) several reading publics with differing orientations at the same time. We know that the original publication of the Cahier was facilitated by one of Césaire’s professors at the Rue d’Ulm, Pierre Petitbon. Curiously, Arnold insists that this 1939 edition is not the original edition but rather the “pre-original” edition. “We must abandon the maddening habit [la fâcheuse habitude] of returning to the first edition of the Cahier,” he asserts; “The text of August 1939, published in the Paris review Volontés, constitutes a pre-original.”⁶

Arnold’s stated reason for neglecting the Volontés version—despite the fact that it contains more than three quarters of the “definitive” version—is that it flew beneath the critical radar: “Nobody commented on it before the war and thus its public history [son rapport à l’Histoire] only begins in 1947.”7 This is a strange way of understanding “History,” even literary history. The publication history of a poem comprises not only the readership it gains but also the milieu in which it is first appreciated, even before it reaches publication. If we “abandon” the “maddening habit” of consulting the Volontés edition, we neglect the fact that Césaire’s very first readers were not Caribbean surrealists but rather the cosmopolitan globe-hoppers of high modernism.⁸ To be sure, Césaire’s immediate milieu was not that of the Volontés editorial board (or readership). During the same period he was composing the Cahier, he was engaged in publishing articles in the student review L’Étudiant Noir. These articles remain important intertexts, just as his collaborations with other students from Africa and the Caribbean constitute the background of his affective and political engagements. Yet the fact that Volontés was produced by an odd assortment of French and American modernists—unaffiliated with any of the movements with which Césaire is usually associated—should not prevent us from asking why it was these modernists who chose to publish him early on. What was it, precisely, about his style that persuaded them to devote twenty-eight pages of their penultimate issue to his work? Why would a distinguished scholar like Arnold opt to neglect this inaugural reception of the poem in print? Why would attention paid to the earliest (“pre-original”) edition distort our understanding of the work—its contents and “vocation”?

Paradoxically, Arnold has done much to advance Césaire as a modernist in Negritude and Modernism, his monograph of 1981, in which he demonstrates the influence of modernist writers and anthropologists on the development of Césaire’s style and concerns.9 His demotion of the Volontés edition to a “pre-original”—and thus his relative lack of interest in the conditions of the Cahier’s initial publication—may have something to do with the shift in critical orientation that has occurred since Arnold first published his ground-breaking book; the effort to establish a properly Caribbean literature, with a properly “Caribbean vocation,” has accelerated ever since Césaire’s review, Tropiques, was reprinted in 1978. It is understandable that Arnold might not want to recall an earlier time before the notion of Antillanité (not to mention Créolité) had time to change the very way we regionalize (and thus read) literatures of the Atlantic. Be that as it may, there is no historical reason to neglect the productive conditions that led to the Cahier’s first publication. On the contrary, an examination of these conditions offers insight into the way in which even an engaged text, one that employs heavily charged referential language, responds to discrepant demands. The grandeur of an author’s oeuvre is by no means diminished when we acknowledge that the conditions of its production and reception inevitably exerted pressure on the form the text could take. Negritude poets obviously felt inspired (or compelled) to address a variety of editors and audiences, and their expectations left marks on the texts we now read.¹⁰

I suggest, then, that it is worth rehearsing the particular conditions that led to the appearance of the first edition—the original print edition—of the Cahier, if only to understand better how the print medium and the mediological register of the small review affected the creative process of a major Negritude writer. It has been established in biographical accounts that after the manuscript was rejected by the first review Césaire sent it to, his professor put him in touch with Georges Pelorson, the editor of Volontés.¹¹ Despite considerable archival research, I have been unable to ascertain which review rejected the Cahier, but I suspect it was one of several that his close friend Léon Damas was publishing in at the time: between 1934 and 1936, Damas placed poems in Charpentes and Cahiers du Sud (soft rather than hardcore surrealist reviews of southern France), Esprit (a leftist Catholic review run by Emmanuel Mounier) and, most interestingly, Soutes, a socialist pamphlet in which Jacques Prévert and Louis Aragon were also publishing at the time. (We will get back to these venues in chapter 3.) The Cahier did not fit the mold of the directly militant Damas (or Prévert) poem, nor does the Cahier appear to have received a warm welcome from the more mainstream French reviews of the period. However, his work did find a sympathetic audience in the milieu of Volontés, as did Senghor’s first published works.¹²

Volontés promoted a very specific wing of the avant-garde—not surrealist, not militantly socialist or communist, but rather high modernist international. There were several important French contributors—Raymond Queneau, quite frequently, and Jean Follain, Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois, and Le Corbusier, sporadically—but most consistent was the participation of Henry Miller, whose work appears in almost every issue.13 Miller was in fact a member of the editorial équipe, along with Pelorson and—most significantly for our purposes—Eugène Jolas, a founding member. This is the same Eugène Jolas who created transition in 1927, the English-language journal in which James Joyce’s “Work in Progress”—or Finnegans Wake—first appeared. Transition existed from 1927 to 1939, overlapping with Volontés by one year. In a sense, Volontés served as transition’s Franco-American relais; during the first year of its monthly run, Volontés consistently ended with an advertisement for transition announcing the imminent publication of a French translation of Joyce’s “L’oeuvre en cours.”¹⁴ Transition, however, was decidedly a more international, multilingual modernist review than Volontés, which promoted a heterogeneous set of writers whose only shared tendency, as far as I can discern, was a resistance to the Freudism of the surrealist movement and a preference for vaguely Nietzschean theories of will and self-determination (d’où le titre: Volontés). Aside from Jolas, the most interesting collaborator was Raymond Queneau, who could have been the reviewer for the Cahier and thus would have left his own small mark on the history of Negritude.¹⁵

It is hard to detect a connection between Queneau’s style and Césaire’s, but the affinity between Césaire and Jolas is clear. Jolas’s particular contribution to the poetics of Volontés was an emphasis on multilingual experimentation fostered by the poet’s lived, almost ethnographic experience of modernity (rather than the poet’s surrealist quest for unconscious truths). Multilingual experimentation was, as we know, the tenor of the time: Ezra Pound’s “linguistic flexibility” was showcased in his review, Exile, where several of the Cantos were first published in the late 20s;¹⁶ T. S. Eliot’s shored, multilingual ruins appeared as The Waste Land (in The Criterion) in 1922; and Jolas began publishing Joyce’s “polysynthetic” Work in Progress in 1927.¹⁷ I believe that one of “Jolas’s multilingual legacies” (to evoke Marjorie Perloff’s terms) was in fact Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (although it has never been recognized as such). Jolas’s name on the masthead set a tone for Volontés that made it uniquely hospitable to the kind of work on language that Césaire was engaged in—the very work on language that makes him at once an iconoclastic experimentalist in the context of Caribbean poetry and a crafter of words conforming surprisingly well to the cosmopolitan, modernist poetics of both transition and Volontés.

Jolas writes in his memoir, Man from Babel, that during the interwar period he sought “an enrichment of language, new words, millions of words.”18 Significantly, in “Revolution of the Word,” transition’s manifesto of 1929, he associates this linguistic enrichment and innovation with the creation of neologisms.¹⁹ Jolas courted neologisms, both in his own verse and in the verse of the writers he published—Joyce, to be sure, but also Léon-Paul Fargue, Henri Michaux, and Césaire.²⁰ In the 1929 issue of transition, Jolas presents his foremost aesthetic axiom as the “right” of the “literary creator … to use words of his own fashioning”; he vows to promote writers who “disintegrate the primal matter of words imposed … by text-books and dictionaries … the writer expresses: he does not communicate,” Jolas concludes: “the plain reader be damned.”²¹ Of course, Jolas was thinking of modernists like Joyce, not Césaire, when he penned these words, but they nonetheless indicate the aesthetics of the literary milieu to which Jolas belonged, the same milieu that first introduced Césaire’s variety of writing onto the literary scene. I suspect that Césaire would have published anywhere he could have, and the fact that he ended up in Volontés does not necessarily reflect his intentions or his own sense of his place in the mid-1930s field of literary production. But the Cahier’s first publication venue does tell us something about the nature of his earliest reception; it indicates how his poem appeared to members of a sophisticated, cosmopolitan modernist elite distanced from specific schools; and it helps us to discern aspects of the Cahier that have not yet received sufficient attention. Before André Breton marveled over the richly figurative passages printed in Tropiques, another public had already found in Césaire an experimental impetus consistent with modernism’s most adventurous word-crafters. Ostensibly, Césaire was published by Volontés because the editors judged him to be an experimental writer, able to invent, as Jolas put it, “words of his own fashioning.” A glance at the leftist literary journals of the time, however, reveals that other, less literary factors were involved. Soutes regularly published poems by someone named “Nigg” (one titled “Lynch” in 1936), and we read in a 1939 issue of Charpentes that the editors are actively seeking the contribution of “voices from the colonies.”²² Césaire’s was certainly a voice from the (former) colonies, but he also offered much more. With his modernist sensibilities and his overt positioning as “nègre,” he fit a unique bill.

Let us recall another relevant aspect of Jolas’s poetics. Increasingly during the interwar period, the modernist editor and poet came to associate linguistic innovation not only with multilingualism but also with “racial and ethnic equality.”23 In “Logos,” an essay published in transition in 1929, he celebrates what we would now call “créolisation”: “In modern history we have the example of the deformations which English, French and Spanish words underwent in America, as in the case of Creole French on Mauritius, Guyana, Martinique, Hayti [sic], Louisiana, and Colonial Spanish.”²⁴ Despite his use of the word “deformations,” it is clear from the context that Jolas is applauding the intermingling of languages as a form of cultural renewal. In fact, the salient difference between transition and Volontés, or the Jolas of the 1920s and the Jolas of the 1930s, is the accent placed on the role of black expressive practices and the phenomenon of diaspora in the salutary revision of Western languages and cultures. In 1933 Jolas returned to New York (he was born in the United States but moved to Europe as a child) and, as he tells us in Man from Babel, walked the streets in thrall to the melodies of new idioms, dialects, inflections, and—most important to Jolas—individual words. In the two poems he published in Volontés (in issues immediately prior to the one that contains the Cahier), his persona relates sentiments familiar to readers of Césaire in an anaphoric manner that Brent Hayes Edwards has attributed specifically to black American writing of the interwar period.²⁵ From “Frontière” (no. 1, 1938) we read:

While we have no direct evidence that Césaire read Mots-déluge, it is hard to believe that all these resemblances are merely coincidental. Even the name of the publishing house that produced Jolas’s volume, Éditions des Cahiers Libres, resonates uncannily with the title Césaire chose for a poem he submitted to a journal that sported Jolas’s name on its masthead. If recent scholarship is to be trusted, Césaire employed the neologism “négritude” as early as 1935 in an article titled “Nègreries: Conscience raciale et révolution,” published in the third issue of L’Étudiant Noir; he was clearly attracted to neologisms before contacting Volontés.²⁹ The point is not to prove that Césaire read Mots-déluge, or, more broadly, that he developed neologisms like “négritude” and “verrition” as a result of the influence of Jolas et compagnie, but rather that he belongs to a generation of writers invested in word creation as both art and act.

I do not mean to imply that Césaire was simply following the mandate of his publisher. On the contrary: if we look closely at the poem, we note how carefully the word “verrition”—the neologism that concludes the last stanza of the Cahier—has been anticipated by the sonic landscape of the entire poem. (This is not the place to enter into a thorough analysis of that sonic landscape—I do so later in chapter 5.) Obviously, poetic decisions are informed by more than one consideration alone. Césaire might have wanted to end the poem with a neologism—or something resembling one—because his poem had finally found a public who celebrated, even expected them. Or, alternatively, “verrition” might have blossomed from its root in “vertere,” to turn, for semantic reasons; Césaire needed a word that could suggest the action of spinning, but “tourbillonnement” (used previously) didn’t fit the rhythmic bill. Or, a further possibility (the one I find most convincing) is that the choice of the word “verrition” presented itself as a morpho-phonemic inevitability, given the startling number of words with the morpheme “vers” already contained in the poem. There were clearly many reasons why Césaire chose to end his poem with the word “verrition,” but the atmosphere around Volontés, which was favorable to neologisms, arguably contributed to his decision.

It is important to note, however, that “verrition” may not even have been a neologism—or at least, not a creation of Césaire’s—although most readers experience it as such. Countering the popular belief that Césaire invented the term himself, René Hénane claims to have discovered the word “verrition” in a work by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin titled Physiologie du goût, which he located—on Césaire’s suggestion—in the library of the École Normale Supérieure at the Rue d’Ulm.34 If we consult Brillat-Savarin’s work, we indeed find the word “verrition,” which in context serves to designate an action of the tongue, one of several movements of mastication that Brillat-Savarin distinguishes during the course of an investigation into man’s “superior” taste buds.³⁵ “Verrition” is the name Brillat-Savarin gives to the action “when the tongue, curling itself around, dislodges portions of food remaining in the semi-circular canal formed by the lips and gums.”³⁶ What Hénane does not underscore is that Brillat-Savarin himself invented the technical term. It is one of several neologisms that the annotator of the second edition—none other than Roland Barthes—identifies as original to the author. In his preface to Physiologie du goût, Barthes indirectly suggests why the word might have been so compelling to Césaire—both as a gesture of word creation and as a bridge between two understandings of the “tongue.” The metaphor, “la langue maléfique de la nuit,” takes on new significance when we consider it in light of this source. “La langue” referred quite directly to Brillat-Savarin’s meaning (“langue” as tongue) while opening onto the field of language (“langue”) as a site of enchantment and transformation.

It is Barthes who underscores in his preface the continuity between the tongue as an organ of mastication and the tongue as an organ of speech, characterizing Brillat-Savarin as a writer who savors the nuances of language in the same manner as he savors the flavors of food. The author of Physiologie du goût, Barthes observes, “is clearly bound to language—as he was to food—by a love relationship: he desires words, in their very materiality.”37 This tendency to enjoy words as though they were full of flavor and texture, as though they were a material substance, is a trait Brillat-Savarin shares with the modernists in the circle of Volontés (not to mention Barthes himself). The lingual pleasure taken in using the tongue (either to pronounce words or to taste food) is described by Barthes as a “double jouissance,” a figure thoroughly consistent with the verbal erotics of James Joyce and the “gourmandise” of Césaire. Of course Césaire could not have read Barthes’ preface since it was published in 1975; however, he might very well have read Brillat-Savarin’s own. Here the author indulges in a veritable hymn to the neologism (worthy of Jolas) in which word invention is associated with the sensual pleasures of speech. The relation between the tongue (la langue) as language and the tongue (la langue) as the organ of taste is exploited in Césaire’s own ending, where the speaker calls for the invention of a language that moves, a performative language able to touch the cosmos, like the “Colombe” who, not incidentally, “licks the sky” (lecheur du ciel). For Césaire, words are clearly a form of nourishment; they lend strength to the project of emancipation. It makes sense, then, that he would call in the Cahier for a “pays restitué à ma gourmandise” (a country restored to my gourmandise) (V, 27; PA, 14). The poet is hungry not simply for the milk of the “gros téton” of the “morne” (large breast of the hill) but also for the rich, succulent words whose pronunciation provides sensual satiation (like the “goutte de lait”—drops of milk—that gush out near the end of the poem). Given the poem’s insistence throughout on the physical pleasures of word formation, Césaire must have been delighted when he struck upon the neologism “verrition” in Physiologie du goût. Not only does it extend beautifully the resonant alliterative technique of the poem (echoing all the instances of the morpheme “vers” scattered throughout), but it also encapsulates the thematic bond between word craft and physical nourishment that Césaire established even before composing the new ending for his editor at Volontés.

What comes more fully to light when we resituate the Cahier in the context of its first publication is that the word craft Césaire develops is by no means uniquely oral in nature, as critics have so often insisted. Rather, this word craft is fully implicated in the Gutenberg revolution, drawing on the inventions peculiar to print—in this case, Brillat-Savarin’s scholarly, Latinate neologisms.38 One of the most interesting features of poetic neologisms—and this is true as well of neologisms introduced in scientific (or pseudo-scientific) texts like Brillat-Savarin’s—is that they exist as writing before they exist as speech. Few of Césaire’s readers, if any, would have heard the word “verrition” pronounced before they saw it typographically produced. (Césaire himself had probably never heard the word uttered before adding it to his poem.) Such a prioritization of writing over speech is not inconsistent with Césaire’s lexical choices in general. In fact, “verrition” strikes the reader of the Cahier in the same way that many other unfamiliar words do, words that are not neologisms but rather obsolete, rare, or erudite terms known only to a small group of specialists. Césaire is particularly prone to saturating his texts with words so consistently indecipherable (at least without a set of specialized dictionaries) that he enforces a kind of silent reading on the part of the reader, a “subvocalization” of the written word.³⁹ The written-ness of the Cahier is thus what leaps into view when it is considered in the company of transition and Volontés. In addition, the tight relation between writing and the body becomes palpable as a result of this recontextualization of Césaire’s work.

Césaire’s claim, then, that his writing is performative, similar to the propulsive gestures of the body, merits our attention. Contemporary cognitive science has recently buttressed with empirical evidence the notion that reading is a process involving activation of the organs of speech. Stanislas Dehaene, for instance, has argued that confrontation with the rare or unknown word in particular is likely to stimulate the silent miming of pronunciation.⁴⁰ If Dehaene is correct, then Césaire’s poems actually make our tongues move. We can understand the Cahier as a performative work, then, not because it imitates the beating of the drum (pace Martin Munro) or the sorcerer’s incantation (pace Lilian Pestre de Almeida) but because it encourages through lexical means the transformation of marks into vibration, into sound.⁴¹ Césaire’s interest in written language as a medium in and of itself—an interest he shares with modernist poets in general—merges with his unique political project of self-affirmation, forcing phrases never before uttered into the reader’s mouth.

Césaire takes much of his lexicon not from spoken language but rather from the grapholect, that curious vocabulary that Walter Ong associates specifically with book learning and the invention of print.42 The bookish nature of his poetry is thrown into even greater relief when one places it next to contemporaneous works by Langston Hughes, for instance, a poet who uses a fairly colloquial vocabulary when discussing features of diasporic experience. In contrast, Césaire’s poetry appears practically clotted with erudite terms drawn from treatises on botany, anatomy, zoology, geology, pathology, ornithology, mineralogy, and archaic Latin, producing a unique texture we easily recognize as his own. Hénane lists over six hundred entries in his Glossaire des termes rares dans l’oeuvre d’Aimé Césaire, terms like “noctiluque,” “cyathée,” “érésipèle,” and “squasme” that at first appear to the reader as obdurately opaque and thing-like.⁴³ They belong to no previously existing poetic (or even literary) idiom, although their use might recall the precision of discrimination and the breadth of technical know-how we associate with a William Shakespeare or a Herman Melville (or a James Joyce, for that matter). There is indeed in Césaire a kind of encyclopedic conceit; the “Cahier,” as a genre, could be read as a massive set of notes integrating all that the poet has ever heard or found in books. And this last point is crucial: Césaire insists on terms found only in books, and he does so with a frequency that is striking. These print-generated words—not just neologisms but technical terms and obsolete words from Medieval Latin—draw attention to themselves first and foremost as clusters of letters on a page. They resemble the units of a dead language whose individual phonetic elements one can discern even though one has never before heard them pronounced. For the average reader, these rare words appear to the eye as virtual sonic phenomena (“acoustic images,” in Ferdinand de Saussure’s terms) lacking, at first, a conceptual content. The experience of reading a line such as “ma reine des squasmes et des chloasmes”—closed as it is to immediate comprehension—resembles closely the experience early readers first have of written words, an experience of the visual opacity and the aural viscosity of language. Whereas for some, confrontation with the materially present but conceptually void letter cluster is frustrating and disenfranchising, for others—that is, for lovers of the written word—this confrontation constitutes a variety of the sublime.

It is plausible, then, that Césaire (whether consciously or not) sought in poetry a way to recall for his reader the primal experience of literacy acquisition, that strange and magical act by which letters of the alphabet morph into sounds. Césaire’s poetry obliges the reader to extrapolate from the known (the recognizable phonemes of French) the pronunciation of the unknown (a word that uses these phonemes in a new way). In a sense, Césaire denaturalizes the process of reading, reminding us of the techne required. He renders French strange, making it into a written language we need to learn to read—phoneme by phoneme—all over again. Ever since the famous interview with Jacqueline Leiner in which Césaire describes his desire to “inflect French” (infléchir le français), the critical tendency has been to associate his neologisms and rare words not with the modernist enterprise to renew language in general but, more specifically, with an active resistance against colonial power as it is incarnated in the French language.44 Ultimately, however, it is not clear that Césaire’s lexical strategy was motivated by a desire to “cannibalize” French, as scholars later claimed.⁴⁵ Certainly he practiced a variety of appropriation (or “piratage”) that directs a quotation or strategy toward new ends.⁴⁶ But much of his work on language remains an extension of his lifelong obsession with marks on the page as generators of sound. It is no accident that the young Césaire, who listened for hours to the books his father read to him out loud (books that contained words he would never hear in his daily life) ended up becoming a student of the classical “dead” languages, Latin and Greek. These languages share roots, prefixes, and suffixes with French—they share its phonemic palette—yet they demand many long hours in the company of dictionaries and a willingness to confront opacity as a fundamental aspect of the verbal world.

Thus, instead of “cannibalizing” French, I would speculate that Césaire was developing—even globalizing—its morphological and lexical possibilities. Along with Latin and Greek terms, Césaire incorporates into his poems words specific to Martiniquan experience—“morne,” “marigot,” “balisier,” “piton,” “fer de lance,” “cassave,” and many more—in effect creolizing the text as well as the mouth that pronounces it.⁴⁷ His poetry makes as full a use as possible within French orthography of the entire grapho-phonemic repertoire of his Creole/French/Greek/Latin larynx, registering creolizations, regionalisms, expletives, and erudite vocabularies in order to increase the physical, gesticular, and choreographic range of the poem’s potential actualizations. His expansive diction could be seen as an effort to break through the boundaries of French phonetics in order to express a body afforded more than one linguistic habitus. There is indeed something violent in his expansiveness, as if he wanted to explode the limits of French not to do damage to French per se, or exorcise it from his mouth, but rather to realize the full multiplicity of lingual movements available to his Franco-Creole-Greco-Latin tongue.

The lexical strategy pursued by Césaire in the Cahier (his use of neologisms and rare terms) is thus only one of several modernist techniques that he adapted for his own use. Generations of scholars have followed Jean-Paul Sartre in identifying Césaire’s style with the surrealist “rapprochement” or the technique of the “métaphore filée”—and to be sure, hypotaxis and an unusual combination of lexemes à la Lautréamont are marked elements of his approach. Yet Césaire perfected another text-based technique that has hardly received the attention it deserves: the technique of grapho-phonemic and syllabic repetition he first encountered in Rimbaud. Mallarmé is also an important role model for the word craft of the Cahier; however, it is Rimbaud who figures most prominently in Césaire’s unpublished lectures on poetry, the “Notes de classe” from his preparatory classes at the Lycée Schoelcher only recently donated to the Archives Départementales of Martinique.⁴⁹ I want to close this chapter by attending to these “Notes de classe” and the huge influence of Rimbaud on the Cahier that they reveal.

Although it is well known that Césaire was an avid reader of Rimbaud, until now it has not been possible to pinpoint exactly which compositional techniques Césaire borrowed from the nineteenth-century poet. As early as 1947 André Breton associated Césaire directly with Rimbaud; in “Un grand poète noir” (first published in Hémisphères in 1943, reprinted in Tropiques in 1944 and then again in the Bordas edition of the Cahier in 1947), Breton mentions that during his brief sojourn in Martinique Césaire was in the process of conducting preparatory classes on Rimbaud at the Lycée Schoelcher.50 The “Notes de classe,” transcribed by two of Césaire’s pupils, indicate precisely what Césaire’s technical preoccupations were, not only during the 1940s, when he was teaching Rimbaud, but also earlier, when he was studying literature at the École Normale Supérieure and ostensibly collecting the materials he would later present to his students in Martinique. These “Notes de classe” tell us that in the course of a lesson devoted to the concluding passage of Une saison en enfer, Césaire brought in a copy of Jacques Rivière’s 1914 essay on Rimbaud in order to explicate his use of alliteration and assonance. “Le choix de syllabes est calculé” (the choice of syllables is calculated) we read in the handwriting of Michael Yang-Ting, who meticulously copied down the words from Rivière that Césaire must have quoted or circulated in class.⁵¹ “There is a composition of sonorities, an arrangement of vowels and diphthongs according to the most subtle but premeditated laws.”⁵²

Césaire’s decision to quote (or assign) these lines was not an arbitrary one. As any reader of the Cahier knows, an attention to the “arrangement” of sound values is a marked feature of the work. In fact, if we open up the Cahier at almost any point we find that tremendous care has been exerted to produce the same intricate sound effects that Rivière attributes to Rimbaud. Consider the following passage, chosen at random but typical of the Cahier as a whole:

While it is true that persistent reprisal of the same or similar sounds is possible in speech as well as writing, it is harder to sustain phonemic and syllabic echoes over a very long period—the two and a half hours it takes to read the Cahier out loud, for instance, or the fifty-eight pages of the current Présence Africaine edition. Writing has a much longer memory than speaking, and these kinds of effects result, as Albert Lord has shown, from the technical possibilities open to written, not oral, forms.54 Césaire extends such paronomastic soundplay over a vast number of stanzas. According to Rivière, this is also the strategy employed by Rimbaud: both poets distribute “les sonorités dominantes” over a large space of text, creating an underlying “vibration” that replaces the rhythms vouchsafed formerly by metrics.⁵⁵ “I regulated the form and movement of every consonant” (Je réglai la forme et le mouvement de chaque consonne), wrote Rimbaud, to which Rivière replies: “he knew how to make use of consonants, how to exploit their natural inclinations [leurs dispositions naturelles] as means of expression. In effect, he harnesses all that can be suggestive: the noise they make once pronounced … the ‘movement’ they impress on the lips or the tongue.”⁵⁶

While it is not clear what the “natural inclination” of a consonant would be, we can surmise that Rivière is referring to the way in which verbal sounds can take on affective meanings in context, both through their cross-modal connotations (the /k/ as a hard or sharp sound, for instance) and through the differential values they develop in the given poem (e.g., dentals as sharp when contrasted with labials as smooth or liquid). Rivière makes another important observation that applies to Césaire as well, namely, that the sound effects he is analyzing in Rimbaud are produced through the modality of the “letter.” “It is impossible not to see here,” he writes with reference to “Nocturne Vulgaire,” “the use of the letter o, taken by turns in all its sonorous variations.”57 For Rivière, the letter “o” is at the root of the soundplay in Rimbaud’s poem. That is, a letter—not a particular phoneme—returns repeatedly, registered differently each time by the internal voice according to its placement among other letters: as nasalized in the case of “songe,” for instance, or long and perfectly round in the case of “Sodomes,” or yet again swallowed in the /wa/ of “envoyer.” Rivière points to—without theorizing—a crucial element of the acoustics of written poetry, an acoustics that so many poets exploit: the fact that the marks on the page we call “letters” (abstract and arbitrary atomizations of the full spectrum of verbal sound) possess a wide range of potential phenomenalizations. The return and methodical variation of these letters as letters can become the object of patterning, creating one rhythm that is visual and another that is aural at the very same time.⁵⁸

The poetic innovations introduced during the period Rivière studies are in fact predicated on the existence of a textual voice, that is, on the existence of an order of sonic phenomenality that is unique to the medium, not thoroughly identical to any preexisting authorial voice or utterance. Rimbaud and Mallarmé both evince an awareness that the text is performative in just this way—that it may generate rather than imitate patterns of sound. The repetitions of a letter might produce various or identical phonemes, but in each case it is a graphemic patterning that is governing an aural experience. While Rivière merely gestures in the direction of Mallarmé in his essays on Rimbaud, it is clear that his reading of Rimbaud’s “composition of sonorities,” his “arrangement of vowels and diphthongs according to the most subtle but premeditated laws,” is richly informed by his familiarity with “Crise de vers.” What Mallarmé knows as surely as the scholars of sound writing today is that, ever since poets began committing their words to a durable support, there has emerged a soundplay unique to the printed text. A specific “acoustics of textuality,” as Garrett Stewart puts it, animates our readings of the printed poem.59 “That the letter signified for Mallarmé the principle of rhythmic expansion in the space proper to literature is one of the essential aspects of his poetics,” Roger Dragonetti also reminds us.⁶⁰ And this “space proper to literature” is, for Mallarmé, not the handwritten manuscript but “The Book.” If the metered musicality of orature relies to a far greater extent on accentual organization (beats), syllabic counting, and phonic rhyme, the written poem—extended by the printed book—sets up an oscillation between patterns addressed to the ear and patterns addressed to the eye. In this regard, the book-length publication of the Cahier takes on particular relevance. As opposed to Damas and Senghor, who began their careers with short lyrics, Césaire enters the literary scene with a poem that calls out to be printed in codexical form. The lineation of the final passage achieves its effect largely through contrast with the earlier nonlineated stanzas that accumulate over the previous pages. The format (twenty-eight pages in the Volontés version; fifty-eight pages in the Présence Africaine version) offers an immense canvas upon which visual and sonic networks may be elaborately extended. On the thematic level, the length of the Cahier permits for epic development; on the sonic level, the length encourages an arrangement based on the reprisal of letters and syllables—another structure, or “Structure, une autre,” in the words of Mallarmé.⁶¹ In the sequence just parsed, rich chains of sound glitter in print—” l’archipel arqué comme le désir inquiet”—recalling “une virtuelle traînée de feux sur des pierreries” (a virtual swooping of fire across precious stones).⁶² In what Adorno calls the “constructivist writing” of Mallarmé, “words, through the clash of their ordered inequalities … light each other up.” The poet “cedes the initiative” to these patterns, which come to “replac[e] the primacy of the perceptible rhythm of respiration or the classic lyric breath, or the personal feeling driving the sentences.”⁶³

This last allusion to Mallarmé’s famous synesthesic metaphor is far from gratuitous: the Rimbaud that Césaire presents to his students (via Rivière) is the Mallarméan Rimbaud, the poet concerned with the relation between words and other words, not the relation between words and the world beyond them. The turn toward what Rimbaud calls an “objective poetry” is exaggerated in Mallarmé to the point where “personal feeling” no longer dictates what the poem says.64 It might seem perverse to emphasize Césaire’s commitment to a tradition of “objective” or “constructivist” poetry when the contents of the Cahier are so explicitly personal in nature, so tied by concrete references to the conditions of life and struggle in the colonized Caribbean. But time and again Césaire reveals himself to be wedded to a poetry that is capable of offering “to the ear or to the eye an unexpected but ineluctable body of vibrations” that he himself associates with Mallarmé.⁶⁵ Time and again he expresses his preference for “textual acoustics” over what he calls “the primitive” rhythms of African music derived from “the basest order of humanity, its nervous system” (his words), even if his goal is also to reflect subaltern experience.⁶⁶ In this context, it should be recalled that his main reservation concerning the African American poets he studied, translated, and admired was specifically that they failed to provide—to “a strictly lettered mind” (“un esprit strictement lettré”), as he puts it—the treasured Mallarméan “vibration.”⁶⁷ Such remarks indicate that Césaire was fully a member of the modernist generation—and that he could not have been otherwise. Having grown up with the written rhythms of Victor Hugo ringing in his ears, Césaire might have found the textual vibrations of French poetry to be as visceral to him as the Creole rhythms he heard around him and the “black” rhythms he chose to study later in life. Of course, it is important to consider the attraction African American writing exerted on him—and this influence has received attention.⁶⁸ Further, we should take into account the role that black writing from many regions—including Haiti and Senegal—played in complicating his relation to the white French Symbolist tradition.⁶⁹ But during the first part of his career, Césaire was as influenced by the textual acoustics of Mallarmé and Rimbaud as he was by the verses he translated by Sterling Brown and the prose he admired by Claude McKay. It makes some sense, then, to place Césaire in the lineage of the French lyricists insofar as he, too, sought to “hear what is transpiring within the material, to see with the work’s own eyes.”⁷⁰ Pursuing what Adorno terms the “constructivist” impulse in modernist practice, Césaire yielded to the letter some of the initiative usually retained by constraints either prosodic (metrical, formal, generic) or expressive (representational, descriptive, declarative) in nature.

It is important to note, however, that listening to the relations among words, seeing their unfolding from the perspective of form, is significantly different from charging language with the task of revealing the true self. To be sure, “listening” to the medium (“elle,” “la langue”) is something the surrealists believed they were doing as well. We read in the Manifesto of Surrealism that the surrealist writer does nothing more than record an inner voice with an “appareil enregistreur.” At least since Sartre’s appraisal in 1947, Césaire has been read in the context of surrealism as if he, too, engaged in a variety of “automatic writing” for the purpose of divulging a true black unconscious. But it is specifically this image, inherited from generations of Césaire scholarship, that I wish to question here. In “Orphée noir,” Sartre first depicts Césaire as a surrealist, casting him as the eponymous figure who descends “the royal road of his soul … to reach its limits and awaken the immemorial potentialities of desire.”71 The advantage of an account such as Adorno’s (or Mallarmé’s, or Rimbaud’s, for that matter) is that it portrays writing as a much more complicated business, one having to do less with the revelation of some personal, or even collective unconscious than with a dialogue between a situated subject and equally situated means.⁷² These means arguably expose an aspect of subjectivity—the writer’s inscription in a particular field of cultural production—that cannot be equated with the writer’s identity—understood either as his ethnic affiliation (his politics) or his unique psychological being. As Adorno observes in Aesthetic Theory, “technique,” while instantiating “the extended arm of the subject, also leads away from that subject.”⁷³ Exercising an aesthetic “sensibility,” that singular “capacity to hear what is transpiring within the material, to see with the work’s own eyes,” involves activating another part of the self, a receptive, affective self that Adorno associates with attending to the internal relations among words.⁷⁴

Of course, the craft of poetry writing in general requires that the poet “learn to be affected,” as William James once put it.⁷⁵ The poet must develop an “ear” for the sounds that letters can make as well as an eye for the patterns that graphemes and words form on a page. All poets learn to be affected in this way. However, Adorno’s point is that some (his canon of constructivists) privilege that affectual responsiveness, the mind’s submission to language as thing, even at the expense of the communicative or referential function of language. Césaire’s participation in this tradition is a matter of degree; every poet could be placed along a spectrum leading from one pole (the declarative, constative, referential, expressive) to the other (the metaphorical, alliterative, “constructive,” “objective”). Although Césaire might not have been able to acknowledge it at the time, the African American poets he discusses in his “Introduction à la poésie nègre américaine” of 1941 are—as poets—also practicing a cultivated sensitivity to language; they are also “listening” through the “ears” of the work and “seeing” through its “eyes.” But what distinguishes Césaire—and what makes his poetry so unique—is that he makes the page a site of friction between constructivist and expressivist modes. To a greater degree than most black poets of his time, Césaire “cedes the initiative to words,” thereby relinquishing the insularity of the empirical self in an effort to discover a deeper “Self” registered in textual effects. In an interview accorded to Jacqueline Leiner published in 1978, Césaire associates these textual effects specifically with the constructivist conceit. In his words: “Influenced as I was by Mallarmé, I believe that the word has its own music, color, form, and force. I also believe that the word is PREHENSILE. The word allows me to grasp my Self. I only grasp myself through a word, through the word.”⁷⁶ Or, in Adorno’s rendering: “It is as labor, and not as communication, that the subject in art comes into its own.”⁷⁷

What is the relation between Césaire’s contention—that “the word” grasps the “Self”—and Adorno’s formulation—that labor on language reveals “the subject in art”? To begin with, one might want to register the difference between a “Self” with a capital “S,” hypothetically a truer, deeper version of the subject, and “the subject in art,” that is, a subject constituted only in the art object and existing nowhere else. Yet, on reflection, Césaire’s “Self” and Adorno’s “subject in art” do not appear so far apart. Adorno is stating that, while labor on language constructs an aesthetic subjectivity that is not identical to the empirical author, this labor nonetheless reveals important truths about that author (his or her implication in a set of productive conditions) that would otherwise remain foreclosed. In that regard, the “subject in art” provides a truer, more authentic account of the “I” than the author could consciously render without the mediation of a technique (“labor” on language).

Similarly, Césaire seems to be indicating that the mediation of writing is required to disclose aspects of his being that colloquial language use, or a less aestheticized approach, could not disclose. In both cases, it is forms of alienation (ideological constructions embedded in ordinary language) that obscure the truths that writing reveals. Writing—as mediation, not “communication”—works against these forms of alienation, allowing another order of discernment, another grasp on the world, to emerge. We might conclude, as does Sartre, that Césaire is pointing to the necessity of using writing—more precisely, automatic writing—to penetrate the carapace of identity that assimilation into French culture has imposed. But Césaire is not talking here (in his interview with Jacqueline Leiner) about automatic writing. He is not referring to the surrealist practice by which one putatively allows words to flow forth from the unconscious to reveal a deeper, un-alienated Self. Instead, Césaire is referencing Mallarmé’s belief in what we might call the personality of words, his belief that “the word has its own music, color, form, and force”; Césaire then conjoins this belief to his own: “I also believe that the word is PREHENSILE.” “Prehensile,” we should note, is a zoological term meaning the faculty of being able to seize, to grasp, “with the hand or the mouth.”78 The craft that consists in relying upon one’s syllabic intelligence to compose sonorities, to hear with the ears of the work, thus lends the word a kind of body (a “hand” or “mouth”—as well as “ears” and “eyes”). The paradox here is that a high level of craftsmanship (and thus agency) is needed to abandon volition (or agency); that is, a Mallarméen sensitivity to the “music, color, form, and force” of words is required to by-pass reified forms of expression (to derail the “direction personnelle enthousiaste de la phrase”), thereby allowing a “locus of authenticity” other than the personal to appear. Cultivating impersonality becomes a way of bursting open the confines of a congealed identity. Or, put differently, the act of fusing with the body of the text (refusing the author/medium, or subject/object, divide) is a way to avoid reiterating the stereotyped images of subjectivity that have been imposed on the raced, classed, and gendered self.

It is an attention to the letter that reveals a world of unpredictable images to Césaire. It is this same attention to the letter that draws Césaire closer to the high modernist craftsmen he admires. In response to the question I raised earlier—Why would some scholars wish to overlook Césaire’s strong attachment to a text-centered modernism?—I would thus offer the following. By privileging Césaire’s relation to Rimbaud and Mallarmé (as well as to Jolas and Joyce), we do indeed risk neglecting the African “soundscape” to which he might have been exposed.⁷⁹ To situate Césaire in the European modernist canon could indeed distort both the provenance and the purpose of his poetic experimentation. Yet by admitting that several orders of language—both written and oral, European and Afro-Caribbean—braid together to form his unique voice in writing, we facilitate a more complex account of diasporic literary production. Further, by resituating Césaire in the context of interwar modernist discourse, we discover the opportunity that an emphasis on textual experimentation can provide to re-think the very category of the self. Adorno’s “subject in art,” or aesthetic subjectivity, represents an alternative to more fixed notions of identity insofar as this aesthetic subjectivity will always escape definitive form. An aesthetic subjectivity rendered in letters will be sounded (phenomenalized) and interpreted in a limitless variety of ways as the text receives new readings. Such readings complicate the image of a self-identical subject, productively releasing the “I” from the hold of prefabricated representations while placing that “I” within the “grasp” of the circulating written word.

The subject who writes, the aesthetic subject or the “subject in art,” clearly gives up something of his empirical, biographical substance. The act of writing lifts him out of the sphere of what Sartre would call his “situation” and allows him to engage in an imaginative performance guided by conventions, lexicons, and possibilities of technical innovation unique to a given métier.80 In a sense, then, writing lends the empirical subject a new body, an affective subjectivity with textual eyes and textual ears. As Sartre writes in Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, writing offers freedom from facticity, transcendence from all determinations except those of the “prehensile” word.⁸¹ Yet it must be stressed that the writing subject, as an empirical living being, also mediates the medium, bringing to bear an equally urgent set of communicative and expressive objectives that focus the project of “listening to” and “seeing” language in singular ways.⁸²

Thus an important question remains, one that is particularly pressing in the case of Césaire: What happens when the modernist writer’s charge is not only to “see with the eyes of the work” but also, and equally importantly, to convey a historical experience of trauma, to speak for a collective whose voice also demands to be inscribed? Adorno’s own answer to that question is to insist that trauma as empirical fact can either silence language entirely (“after” Auschwitz) or, alternatively, reveal itself in negative form, as the cancellation of whatever remains of the subjective voice. Any attempt to forward the individual voice is complicit with a capitalist regime that has hypostatized (and marked) the “individual” as the ultimate end in itself. If art must go on, he concludes, the only viable (“authentic”) artistic response to subjection (“total administration”) is mimesis: the author mimes within the realm of language his abdication to powers beyond his control. A “ceding” of the initiative to language in the nineteenth century becomes, in the twentieth, a complete absorption into the linguistic machine, and lyric registers this state of total alienation by making the “linguistic quality” of the poem its “veritable subject.”83 In Adorno’s most extreme articulation, that which speaks in the poem is a “latent I immanently constituted in the work through the action of the work’s language [durch dem Akt von dessen Sprache].”⁸⁴ If the “latent I” or “poetic subjectivity” that “speaks in the poem” is “on no account identical” with the “empirical I”—if the “part played by the empirical I is not, as the topos of sincerity would have it, the locus of authenticity”—then the voice in the poem is nothing other than a kind of performative residue of the text, as Adorno’s use of the German “Akt” (as in “speech act,” or Sprechakt) implies.⁸⁵

But is the work’s “linguistic quality” the veritable subject of Césaire’s poem? Is it the case that the “I” of the Cahier is “immanently constituted,” that it is simply a linguistic object generated through internal textual play? Can we reduce the voice we read in the text entirely to the “action [Akt]” of the work’s language? Or does Césaire’s poem transmit something more, something other, than the driving agency of language alone?

Several problems derive from a strictly Adornian reading of the Cahier, a work written by a colonial subject racialized as black and only just beginning to emerge from colonial isolation in 1931. The first problem, of course, is that Adorno’s theory is based on his reading of a European tradition of art and aesthetic thought, and that the Cahier fits only partially into this tradition.86 Adorno is “not readily portable,” as Deepika Bahri has observed, even if the conditions he analyzed—those of increasing global capitalization—underlie aesthetic epiphenomena throughout the colonized world.⁸⁷ As many critics now acknowledge, geographical distance and uneven histories of modernization create alternative temporalities of modernity and modern writing in the marginalized spaces of the colony (and postcolony). A second problem thus presents itself as a corollary of the first: If Beckett is the logical twentieth-century result of a nineteenth-century gesture (the abdication of authorial initiative to language), the question still remains why Césaire differs so strikingly from Beckett, why the “I” in the Cahier cannot—even for the sake of argument—be reduced to a “speech act” of language, witnessing and commenting on its own effects. The temporality of Césaire’s modernism is obviously quite different from the modernist temporality (not to mention the modernist geography) of the canonical authors Adorno invokes.

And yet the possibility that an aesthetic subject might be constituted by a conflict between two equally strong forces—here, a need to communicate a shared condition of oppression (and establish a space for subjectivity) versus a desire to explore textual acoustics—is not foreign to Adorno’s understanding. To be sure, similar to many Marxists of his generation (with the equivocal exception of Sartre), Adorno neglects the category of race as a distinctive case of alienation; for that reason alone his theory of the lyric voice fails to account for the singular positioning of the black author with respect to European culture and its implication in centuries of slavery and exploitation. Nevertheless, a reading of the Adornian corpus through the Cahier ends up shedding light on precisely those moments in his work when he returns to the empirical subject—not simply a “diminished” subject to be subsumed in textual dynamics, or “abdicated” in order to reflect the oppressive conditions of “total administration,” but rather the empirical subject as a site of difference that exerts an agency all its own. In Negative Dialectics, a work that is clearly critical of the category of the “individual” as a twentieth-century commodied form, Adorno paradoxically states that the “sphere” of the individual is in fact the space that must be preserved if any freedom is to be won: “In this age of universal social repression, the picture of freedom against society lives in the crushed, abused individual’s features alone.”⁸⁸ And in Minima Moralia, Adorno’s more sustained hymn to the contingencies of empirical subjectivity, he avers that “in the period of his decay, the individual’s experience of himself and what he encounters contributes to knowledge. … In the face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere. If critical theory lingers there, it is not only with a bad conscience.”⁸⁹

Ultimately, then, Adorno seems to be saying that the specific perspective the individual brings to poetic composition (gleaned from “the individual’s experience of himself and what he encounters”) is what determines the positionality—and provides the elocutionary energy—of resistance. What is not articulated in Adorno’s text—but what rings clear in the writings of Negritude—is that confirming the individual may be a way of confirming the subjecthood, the political interiority, of the entire community to which the individual belongs. Bringing their trauma to expression via the individual allows that trauma to be heard, albeit in a mediated—but not necessarily reified—way. If it is true that “part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere,” then a work that hopes to advance “liberation” must draw its force, at least in part, from that “individual sphere.” Some of the resistant (and innovative) quality of the text—and thus its expressiveness—must derive from the lived experience of the author who composes it. Although Adorno is clear (sometimes to the point of blind insistence) that the writer’s “subjectivity is on no account identical with the I that speaks in the poem”—and that the “part played by the empirical I is not, as the topos of sincerity would have it, the locus of authenticity”90—it is impossible to maintain the strictness of this assertion in the face of his equally urgent retrieval of “the crushed, abused individual’s features” as “alone” the site of resistance to reification.⁹¹ The empirical “I” of the author, his “experience of himself and what he encounters,” contributes to the formation of the aesthetic subjectivity manifested in the poem in ways that must be examined in turn.⁹²

Césaire’s fascination with the French lyric tradition and his various modes of identification with that tradition’s most celebrated figures have been well documented.⁹³ So, too, have his affinities with African American, Martiniquan Kreyol, Haitian Creole, and African expressive practices.⁹⁴ But Césaire did not merely absorb the influence of the latter (the African-inflected traditions), nor did he merely “cannibalize” the former (the French tradition). Instead, he worked to balance a sophisticated constructivist poetics inherited from Mallarmé and Rimbaud (leading “away from the [empirical] subject”) with an expressive poetics developed alongside other members of minority and subaltern communities. As a black poet, he engaged in the modernist project to advance the most sophisticated textual techniques of his era. Yet as a black poet, he employed these techniques to represent a particular psychobiography informed by a particular collective experience—and of course representing the particular always involves developing yet another set of tools.

Césaire was “absolument moderne,” then, in at least two senses. He lived a modern life, deeply involved in the twentieth-century vicissitudes of world war and decolonization; these vicissitudes left an imprint, as scholars have observed, on the various editions of a poem he felt compelled to rewrite again and again.95 He also lived a modern poet’s life, exposed early on to the printed word, educated to carry forward the flag of the Western canon, and enmeshed in the most progressive literary circles of interwar Paris. Thus, instead of writing a dated Parnassian poetry in the vein of Emmanuel-Flavia Léopold and Daniel Thaly, and instead of emulating the rhythms of dialect or composing oral epics associated with Africa or African-derived peoples, Césaire reworked the textual techniques he admired to produce effects I will call “oralisms”—innovative solutions to the pressures of both a biographical dilemma and “un esprit strictement lettré.” These oralisms include most prominently the numerous refrains (e.g., “Au bout du petit matin”; “Ce qui est à moi”), modeled after what Albert Lord has called the “formulaic” nature and repetitive syntactic structure of oral epic; the rhetoric and anaphoric pattern of chant (e.g., “Eia pour …” [PA 47]; “voom rooh oh” [PA 30–31]); the repetition of single words in an enumeration intended to evoke for the eye (as well as the ear) the rhythmic pulse of the drum (e.g., “debout à la barre/debout à la boussole / debout à la carte/debout sous les étoiles” [PA 62]); and finally, the exploitation of the page itself to direct the reader’s subvocalization. The ending of the Cahier, for instance, employs the “vers en escalier” (staircase verse)

Finally, the most pertinent (and symptomatic) oralism in the Cahier may be found in the multiplicity of its editions, the restless rewritings that characterize the history of its evolution (and presentation to the public) over the course of Césaire’s entire lifetime. Just as oral epics change over time, so too the Cahier evolved, integrating fragments of stories, myths, and belief systems that the poet came across as he traveled and read. Critics who stress Césaire’s debt to orature are correct insofar as oral forms also assimilate new events (or “encounters”) into the narrative fabric. An oral poem is not fixed for all time on the page but rather is allowed to develop in ways not dictated by the letter. The newly integrated passages stand as marks of the empirical experience of the author, marks that may introduce inconsistencies on the level of graphemic and phonic patterning, symbolic structure, and narrative flow, endangering even the coherence of the perspective offered by the poem’s “I.” Such inconsistencies produce the sensation of the poem’s restlessness or mobility. Lilian Pestre de Almeida relates this mobility of the Cahier to the oral aspirations of its author: “We discern in these constant revisions a visceral refusal of a ne varietur version,” she writes; “it seems that this moving text [ce texte mouvant] is so because the author is most deeply attached to the word, not the letter [il se rattache à la parole et non pas à la lettre].”96 Pestre de Almeida is right to underscore the sensation we have of the text as a moving object. However, I would attribute the restlessness, the numerous revisions and additions that transform the Cahier over time, to Césaire’s simultaneous frustration with and deep attachment to the letter. If he had not maintained a respect for the letter’s possibilities, then why would he have continued to write? Encounters with the letter and encounters beyond the text exerted equal pressure on Césaire, producing the unique quality of an aesthetic subjectivity that knows no rest.

We might think of the movement of the Cahier as a kind of nonidentity politics in the realm of writing, a refusal to treat the poem as a reified thing, just as Césaire’s theory of Negritude refuses to treat “black” identity as congealed and defined for all time. While never relinquishing a commitment to context, Césaire proposes a model of writing as a process of perpetual unfolding that can also serve as a model of selfhood in general and Negritude in particular. His repeated attempts to revise the Cahier evince a desire to stage Negritude again and again, as a politics of identity and a politics of nonidentity—it had to be both at once. The Cahier’s failure to integrate all its multiple fragments, to massage its conflicting impulses into a seamless and stable whole, should thus be seen as its success. Only as an inconsistent and evolving aesthetic subjectivity—only as a text incorporating the aesthetic values of high modernism as well as the existential challenges of diasporic experience—could Césaire testify fully as a writer—not as a person but as a writer—for his time and place.

Through the action of the work’s language, then, the Cahier speaks for a medium (the printed word). Yet simultaneously, through the pressure of the subject’s history on the work’s language, the Cahier speaks for a racialized experience. To evoke the terms provided by Nathaniel Mackey in Discrepant Engagements, a text that remains fully pertinent twenty years after its publication, we might say that Césaire explored to the fullest extent his commitment to two “discrepant,” potentially incompatible programs. By advancing procedures associated with the avant-garde—for example, foregrounding the agency of the written support—Césaire ended up inflecting his racial identity, displaying an affinity that might have appeared “discrepant” at the time with respect to his political and racial affinities.97 Conversely, Césaire also developed an experimental practice that is in turn inflected by his other “engagement,” his commitment to a specific political agenda. To quote Mackey, he engaged “the discrepancy between [the] presumed norms [of modernist textuality] and qualities of experience that such norms fail to accommodate.”⁹⁸ The many versions of the Cahier and the fact that Césaire found himself incapable of finishing it suggest that the historically situated subject continued to exert significant pressure, to push back against what Adorno calls the purely “linguistic quality” of the work. In this sense, the Cahier really is a work of “immobile verrition,” in constant movement even as it remains fixed on the page. Challenging the autonomy of the text, Césaire maintains a constant dialectic between the empirical “I” constituted by facticity and the lyric “I” constituted “immanently through the action of the work’s language” such that the law of this dialectic, its circular advancing rhythm, becomes the law of the work itself.