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

It is often hard, when teaching the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, to draw my students’ attention to the quotation marks surrounding the triptych of dramatic, declarative statements that serve as an epigraph to this chapter. My students—and, I suspect, readers in general—simply do not want to see them.³ Overwhelmed by the relentless humiliations described in the opening pages of the Cahier, the reader yearns to believe that in this passage the poetic persona has at last achieved an apotheosis, that he has discovered his vocation and is now assuming that vocation in a performative gesture of almost oracular authority. And indeed, the images are potent: “the sterile attitude of a spectator”; “a sea of miseries”; “a dancing bear.” Further, the triple negation in the last paragraph and the thrice repeated “I would say” are rhetorically powerful, constructed along the lines of classical oratory and fortified with the imperative “beware.”⁴ Césaire demonstrates his command of precisely the kind of speech his poetic persona dreams of performing. To take control of language in this way—and thereby to take control of a people’s destiny—is an act that would transform mere speaking (“if all I can do is speak”) into an event with material consequences. Such a speech act would strike down the “proscenium” and lift the masks off the actors, revealing them—their complaints and sufferings but also their gestures toward emancipation—to be real. Given the litany of sufferings and degradations that precede this passage, it is no wonder that readers long for the passage to be historical rather than rhetorical, and for the persona, the speaking “I,” to rise fully to his elevated station, bearing the torch of resistance forward toward the dawn.

However, we must note that Césaire undercuts this moment of imagined apotheosis in several ways. First of all, the passage (entirely in the conditional and the future tenses) is followed immediately by the defeated, sarcastic exclamation in the present: “Et voici que je suis venu!” (And behold here I am!). We learn in the next line that all has returned to status quo: “De nouveau cette vie clopinante devant moi” (Once again this life hobbling before me). If we have read this far, we know that the victory has proved illusory and the grand gesture merely theatrical. We might notice, in addition, the persistent parabasis, the rhetorical act in which the actor—dramatically—steps away from his dramatic role. The fact that “I would say” is followed by quotation marks signals that we are in the genre of soliloquy, privy to an interior monologue addressed to an absent “pays mien” (“my country,” then “my people”). Although we might long for the speaker to assume his heroic role, we are obliged to acknowledge that he is merely quoting himself. He is rehearsing a speech he would like to make. In the guise of an authentic, inaugural intervention in history, the speaker is actually performing a theatrical act. In sum, the speaker repudiates performance (“a man who cries out is not a dancing bear”) even as he indulges in performance, rendering his own gestures ambiguous, increasingly similar to an elaborate rhetorical act.

What, then, is the status of his warning: “beware of assuming the sterile attitude” of spectatorship? Against what, precisely, does the speaker need to guard himself? Why must his “body” and “soul” beware of spectating, of taking a safe distance from the “sea of miseries” that marches by before him like a parade across a stage? Is the warning (not to be a distanced spectator) precisely the kind of warning a leader, a speaker for “his people,” must heed? Is the temptation of distance, of rhetoric, really so great? Finally, does it matter that the words “body” and “soul” have an intertextual ring (“above all, my body as well as my soul, beware”), that they conjure up the final lines of Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer in which the poet promises himself that “il me sera loisible de posséder la vérité dans une âme et un corps” (“I will be able to possess truth in one soul and one body”)?5 Is the danger of spectatorship linked somehow to the danger of allegory, to the fear that even when speaking to oneself, one is really quoting another, and that even when speaking for the other, one is reciting (white) lines? Or is the true danger of the dramatic situation that it highlights the possibility that one is not able to “possess truth” in “one” soul and “one” body? Could it be that truth distributes itself across many voices that inhabit (but are not exclusive to) a single self?

What would happen if these questions were brought to the stage, if the promise—“My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth”—were spoken out loud? What if the warning—“beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator”—were addressed to a group of live spectators watching a play? Or, alternatively, how would it feel to play the role of leader off the stage and beyond the text, to lend one’s “voice” to “those who break down in the solitary confinement of despair” for real? And what if, in doing so, in acting out an ideal in the empirical world, one discovered that playing roles is in fact coextensive with being a leader who makes speeches? That is, what if the “empirical subject” were in some ways (which ways?) an aestheticized being?

In the previous chapter, I followed Adorno in maintaining a distinction between the “aesthetic subject” and the “empirical subject”; in this chapter I begin to trouble the boundary between the two through a close reading of Césaire’s first play, Et les chiens se taisaient. Adorno elaborates on the notion of the “aesthetic subject” that he inherits from the German aesthetic tradition in sections of Aesthetic Theory where he treats the “lyric I.” He neglects, however, to develop a clear account of the other of the “lyric I,” what he calls the “I” of “empirical existence,” the “private person” of the author, or the “historical subject.”7 From the citations I have provided, it would be easy to conclude that the “aesthetic subject” is highly mediated whereas the “empirical subject” is not. After all, Adorno tells us that the living writer “constantly admit[s] into the production of his work an element of negativity toward his own immediacy,” implying in this way that such an “immediacy” could exist.⁸ Yet, clearly, Adorno never considers the human subject unmediated or fully coincident with himself. He indicates, to be sure, that the heightened mediation of aesthetic expression provides a greater scope for self-invention than the pressures of lived conditions would allow; even so, no subject functioning in the realm of everyday lived reality could remain consistently wedded to one essential identity or one “authentic” role. Adorno’s critique of “the jargon of authenticity” and his treatment of the individual in Negative Dialectics and Minima Moralia is enough to dissuade any reader from erecting an Adornian “empirical subject” that would be consistently self-identical and transcendent of relational constraints. Still, Adorno’s corpus is arguably not the place to look for a theory of the empirical subject as citational, or as defined by a series of different roles.

Instead, I turn to a text that I believe contains Césaire’s own incipient theory of the “empirical subject” as a creation of performance, Et les chiens se taisaient. The model Césaire implicitly offers in this play resonates well, I hope to show, with the model of subjectivity advanced by scholars in the field of performance studies, one of the main contributions of which has been to put pressure on the distinction between performance and authenticity and thus to complicate our notion of what constitutes a person in “real life.” Peggy Phelan has stated the matter succinctly: “It takes more than one person to be who you are.”⁹ From this perspective—which Phelan calls “the performance world view”—the question to ask is not “Which is the authentic self?” but rather “What are the many voices that inhabit and constitute the self?”¹⁰ To do justice to a text as complex and enigmatic as Et les chiens se taisaient—an early work that has inspired surprisingly few critical readings—we need to bring Negritude studies into conversation with performance studies, a field that interrogates the very dichotomy between authentic and inauthentic on which many scholars of Negritude rely.

It is relatively easy to find Negritude texts in which the distinction between role-playing and sincerity, contingent identity and fundamental essence, serves as the rhetorical undergirding. For instance, in Damas’s “Solde,” the image of the inauthentic self-conscious évolué is contrasted with the fully revealed black body. Damas captures the speaker’s fragile construction of identity through colonial mimicry in the following lines: “J’ai l’impression d’être ridicule / dans leurs salons / dans leurs manières / dans leur courbettes / dans leur multiple besoin de singeries” (I feel ridiculous / in their salons / with their manners / their bowing and scraping / their insatiable need for pretense).¹¹ Damas’s conceit appears to be that if only the assimilated black could be liberated from his confining costume (the “smoking,” “plastron,” and “faux col”), the authentic African would finally burst out. Such a conceit, at least, is suggested by the engraving supplied by Frans Masereel that formed the frontispiece of the original 1937 version of Pigments.¹²

We might locate in Césaire’s work evidence of a similarly dichotomous understanding of the subject (as either authentic African or inauthentic assimilé). For instance, in the earliest piece of writing by Césaire that scholars possess, “Nègreries: Jeunesse noire et assimilation,” the author, like Damas, places “acting” on the side of assimilation (colonial mimicry) and authenticity on the side of “being oneself”: “Mais pour vivre vraiment, il faut rester soi” (To truly live, one must remain oneself). “L’acteur,” he writes in his contribution to the first issue of L’Étudiant Noir (March 1935), “est l’homme qui ne vit pas vraiment: il fait vivre une multitude d’hommes—affaire de rôles—mais il ne se fait pas vivre. La jeunesse Noire ne veut jouer aucun rôle; elle veut être soi” (The actor is the man who doesn’t truly live: he brings alive a multitude of different men—really, a multitude of different roles—but he doesn’t really bring himself to life. Black youth do not want to play any role whatsoever; they want to be themselves).13

The article’s opposition of “être” (being) and “paraître” (seeming) is stark indeed; however, it is worth noting the arresting nuance introduced by the epigraph that Césaire draws from Jules Michelet: “Le difficile n’est pas de monter, mais en montant de rester soi” (What’s difficult is not to rise in the world, but in doing so, to remain oneself).¹⁴ By adding this epigraph, Césaire suggests that it is not only the black évolué who alone fears losing himself in the roles he is obliged to play; rather, social ascension entails self-alienation in general.¹⁵ Césaire’s intention is clearly not to conflate colonial mimicry with the congealment of personality that comes from assuming any representational function whatsoever; yet he demonstrates an awareness that role-playing is part of every public life—and increasingly so as one rises (“monter”) in standing. Michelet’s verbs (“monter” and “rester”) tell the full story in gestural terms, the very same gestural terms that Césaire will evoke in “Nègreries,” the Cahier, and throughout Les chiens: the problem is how to be consistant and stay in place (“rester”) and yet evolve (“monter”), how to advance upward (“debout”) and remain anchored (“lie-moi”)—both at the same time.

Whereas much scholarship on Negritude has portrayed Césaire as the famous “nègre fondamental,” highlighting the passages in which he seeks an originary African identity in the face of colonial subjectivation, I argue here that there exists another Césaire, one who refuses the rhetoric of identity and shows himself to be “multiple et difficile” (as the Rebel describes himself in Les chiens).16 In Nick Nesbitt’s probing terms, Césaire’s works present “something more than the unambiguous affirmation of a self-identical black subject.”¹⁷ Les chiens is central to developing an alternative reading of Césaire that interrogates the rigid dichotomy between identity and performance, “être” and “paraître,” for not only is Les chiens a play, and thus intrinsically concerned with the question of staging authenticity, it is also a sustained reflection on what it means to become a leader, to “monter” while struggling to “rester soi.” The question Les chiens implicitly raises is whether identity is in fact inherently theatrical and citational. Can the “empirical subject”—the actor in history—“rester soi” (remain himself)? Isn’t being a subject of any kind already a matter of negotiating various selves, voicing heterogeneous impulses, performing roles?

Until recently scholars believed that the first version of Les chiens was the one published in the 1946 volume, Armes miraculeuses (subtitled “Tragédie”), and that subsequently this version was transformed into a radio play, then a stage drama in 1955–1956 with the help of the German Africanist (and actor) Janheinz Jahn. In 2008, however, Alex Gil discovered what he calls the “Ur-text” of the play in the archive of Yvan Goll, the Alsatian poet responsible for translating and publishing Césaire’s work while in New York during World War II.18 Apparently, Césaire sent a copy of this “Ur-text” (subtitled “Drame”) to André Breton during the war in order to keep it in safe hands; subsequently, Breton conveyed the manuscript to Goll, perhaps to be published. But Césaire did not want the manuscript to be published; on this point he is adamant in his letters to Breton. His comments (as well as Gil’s own account of the manuscript) reveal to what a great extent the first version was attached to “circumstances.” It related specific historical events, including the revolt and imprisonment of its historical hero, Toussaint Louverture. The reason Césaire gave for not wanting this version published was that “la part de l’histoire, ou de l’historicité’” (the quotient of history, or historicity) was too great and would have to be “éliminé à peu près complètement” (eliminated more or less completely) in the versions to come.¹⁹ Between the time Césaire began writing the play—which may have been as early as 1941—and the moment when he judged it complete—the play’s publication by Présence Africaine in 1956 (subtitled “Arrangement théâtral”)—he did indeed eliminate almost all traces of “historicité.” The figure named Toussaint Louverture becomes the generic “Rebelle,” and the scenes of a slave revolt in Haiti enacted in the first version on center stage become figments of the Rebel’s imagination, “frescos” presented as memories or hallucinations occurring in an unspecified place and time.²⁰ In the first version, only the third act shows the hero imprisoned in a cell; in the final version, the entire play takes place in “solitary confinement,” an echo chamber peopled by voices and figures produced in the delirium of the Rebel’s last hours on earth.

As far as scholars have been able to ascertain, Et les chiens se taisaient was performed only a handful of times—as a radio play on January 16, 1956 (Radio Frankfurt, directed by H. O. Müller),²¹ and at least four times as a staged performance (in Paris, for the Premier Congrès des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs in 1956; in Basil in 1960; in Hanover in 1963; and in Haiti in February 1993).²² For this reason, the text is often considered a “textecharnière,” a “hinge” or transition text, located somewhere between the page and the stage.²³ Césaire himself designated Les chiens a “lyric oratorio,” a genre that stages the voice in a very particular way. As a lyric, the text would focus on the internal drama of a single speaker, but as an “oratorio,” the act of speaking would be drawn closer to collective spoken performance, presumably with little or no action realized on the stage. The voice in a lyric oratorio (as in a musical oratorio) bears the full burden of bringing all the action alive either through episodes of narration and description or, alternatively, through reenactments of scenes that hover somewhere between the imagined and the real. The fact that the text wavers ambiguously between genres is worth pointing out in itself. The generic ambiguity of Les chiens indexes an ontological problem at the heart not only of the play but of Césaire’s work as a whole. Les chiens asks us where to draw the line between poetry and drama, drama and reality—or, to put it in Adorno’s terms, the creation of an “aesthetic subjectivity” in writing and the action of the empirical person in history. More, it asks us to define what an “empirical person in history” is. The play, in other words, refuses to take for granted the nature of a living being, and it uses textual means—the poetry of the written word—to explore that nature on a page that is always, potentially, a stage.

Césaire stated in a 1969 interview that Les chiens was the obscure source—or “nébuleuse” (diffuse nebula)—from which all his other plays were generated.24 He also admitted elsewhere that it bore the scars of the “problems” he was experiencing in his own life at the time.²⁵ These two statements taken together strongly suggest that Les chiens was the crucible in which he worked through many of the tensions fundamental to his creative and political lives. As A. James Arnold has written, “The problematic relationship of a heroic persona, lyric or dramatic, to the mass of colonized people is at the heart of the question.”²⁶ If we return to the passage from the Cahier cited at the beginning of this chapter, we can see a pattern emerging: in both the poetic and theatricalized versions of the dilemma (that is, in both the Cahier and Les chiens), we meet a hero who yearns to speak for others, to lend his voice so that their words may be heard (“Ma bouche sera la bouche des malheurs qui n’ont point de bouche, ma voix, la liberté de celles qui s’affaissent au cachot du désespoir”). Yet this same hero worries about spectacularizing himself; that is, he worries that in the act of lending his voice to others, rising onto the stage of history, he might himself become a spectacle, an actor playing a role and thus false and inauthentic in his own eyes. In Les chiens, Césaire underscores even more clearly his fear that in representing others, one risks acting against one’s own inner convictions, betraying one’s own moral truths—which may be plural rather than singular, conflicting rather than univocal. How to lend one’s voice to others without losing one’s integrity is the moral problem staged, appropriately, in the form of a play of voices (not actions). “Integrity,” this play of voices suggests, may consist not in the self’s consistency, that is, not in the reduction of the self to a single objective or impulse; rather, “integrity” may entail a resistence to univocity, an admission of self-difference and internal contradiction. If the function of leader demands the performance of only one role, is assuming that role the accomplishment of authenticity, or is it instead a betrayal of being?

Many aspects of the play indicate that “the voice” (“la voix”) is Césaire’s central figure for the selfhood that he wishes to interrogate on stage. For instance, the very first stage directions of the play indicate that Les chiens will provide a soundscape, not a landscape; the curtain does rise, but it reveals an aural rather than a visual world: “Pendant que lentement se lève le Rideau on entend l’écho” (7) (While the curtain is slowly rising, the Echo is heard [3]). One hears the “echo”—and that aural phenomenon is the very essence of the character named “Echo.” Indeed, one could argue that the Césairean character is, at bottom, a sonic entity, one that echoes, rather than produces, words. Beyond the main character of the play, “Le Rebelle” (the Rebel), we hear no fewer than forty-nine other voices, some of which receive names explicitly referring to their purely aural function, such as “Le Récitant” and “La Récitante” (“Reciters,” male and female); the “Orateur”; “La Voix Céleste” (Celestial Voice); “La Voix souterraine” (Underground Voice); “Écho”; “Chantre” (Cantor); or simply “Voix.” Many of these characters (or “Voix”) speak only once in the play, and few receive more than one line. Césaire in fact added to the number of “Voix” on stage every time he revised the play, complicating in this way the sonic environment more and more. Speeches uttered by one character in the earliest version were splintered into clusters of lines and distributed among an ever-increasing number of individual speakers in the later versions. It is as though the author had chosen to separate out and personify—to incarnate in a set of differently textured voices—the multiple and contradictory impulses that had originally been collected together and accorded to a single role.

For this reason, perhaps, Les chiens has proven difficult to stage, requiring as it does a large cast of characters lacking individuation (and whose means of entrance or egress are never indicated). The play is also a somewhat intimidating read, for it combines the metaphorical density of the Cahier with stage directions that, as textual and gestural elements, also deserve attention. Carried over from the Cahier we find the image of revolt as a volcanic force, of voyage as a path toward self-affirmation, of flora and fauna as figures both for the island’s disease and its potential rebirth. Recent scholarship on the play has indicated that the passages the author introduced over time—from the initial draft, to the Armes miraculeuses edition of 1946, to the stage version of 1956—all move the plot toward a “mise en valeur de la problématique coloniale” (a privileging of the colonial problem).27 Césaire indeed clarified the stakes of the play by adding the figures of the “Administrator” and the “Promotor,” unidimensional straw dogs that parody the arguments of Empire in lines like: “Et nous leur aurions volé cette terre? … Dieu nous l’a donné” (10) (And they say we have stolen this land from them? … God gave it to us [5]).

While the author obviously wishes to emphasize the general attack he is making on colonialism (in terms consistent with his Discours sur le colonialisme of 1950), and while the change in the hero’s name from Toussaint Louverture to “le Rebelle” also generalizes the action, there are reasons to believe that, over time, the figure of the Rebel was actually rendered more—not less—specific. This specificity derives not from any precise association with a given historical character but rather from the author’s efforts, through revision, to place in the Rebel’s mouth questions that reflect his own quandaries of the time. Following his visit to Haiti from May to December of 1944, Césaire ran on the Communist Party ticket and on May 27, 1945, was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and a few months later, on November 4, representative (“député”) of Martinique at the Assemblée Nationale in Paris.28 In the immediate postwar period, after suffering the isolation imposed on the island by the Vichy regime, Césaire was able to experience renewed and enriched contact not only with France but with many different regions of the world. The composition of the 1946 version coincides with the period during which Césaire prepared and successfully argued for the “Loi de départimentalisation” of Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guyana, and La Réunion (ratified March 19, 1946). Also during the late 1940s, he deepened his affiliation with the French Communist Party and published the first version of Discours sur le colonialisme in a Parisian communist review, Réclame, on June 7, 1950. The first Congrès International des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs held at the Sorbonne September 19–22, 1956, brought him into contact with the African American writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Further, the Pan-African sentiments that had motivated his collaborative journalism while studying at the Rue d’Ulm were confirmed and nourished by his friendship with the Senegalese teacher, writer, and senator Alioune Diop, with whom he cofounded the review Présence Africaine in 1947. The third version of Les chiens was written during the years 1955–1956, a period that coincides with his growing dissatisfaction with and final departure from the French Communist Party and the publication on October 24, 1956, of his Lettre à Maurice Thorez.

In sum, it is hard to imagine a time of greater political turmoil in Césaire’s life than this one. As critics have observed, the underlying narrative of most of Césaire’s works is the “problematic relationship” between private and public, or individual and crowd; but in Les chiens, the author’s struggle with this relationship is reflected in the fundamentally unstable generic identity of the work, the way it borrows conventions from tragic, historical, mythic, and lyric modes.29 First a “drame,” then a poem, then an “oratorio,” then a “tragédie,” Les chiens offers us a main character whose identity cannot be exhausted by a single genre (with its genre-based understanding of the subject). No posture Césaire could assume, no image he could fabricate, could entirely resolve the issues with which he was faced. In a language heightened by dense metaphor, scored as symphonic arrangement, and accompanied by physical gestures of great dramatic resonance (the Rebel lies prone in the form of a cross; he wanders blindly through a sea of corpses), the play eludes representation while drawing communicative force from a plethora of genres and intertexts. The Rebel is at once a tragic hero, a mythic demigod, a historical figure, and a vulnerable subject. To serve as the vessel through which Césaire could project his own dilemmas, questionings, reversals, and transformations, the Rebel had to be all at once.

As one might expect, a study of the text reveals that the scenes added to the 1956 revision tend to underscore the Rebel’s complexity, his many facets as a human being, even as the basic plot line is maintained. This plot line unfolds as follows: A slave (le Rebelle) who has killed his master is placed in a cell to await execution; during a long night, he relives in a kind of dream state scenes from the history of slavery and colonialization, imagining the arrival of the whites (“Les Blancs débarquent!”), evoking a lost African past, and describing the historical conditions of enslavement. Intermittently, he also rehearses personal travails: in scenes that could be played as occurring in real time or as hallucinations (depending upon the choice of the director), he hears but denies the pleas of his mother, who wants him to renounce his role as leader, and he fends off the seductions of the Lover (L’Amante), who reminds him of his responsibilities to his son. For the dramatic version of 1956, Césaire enlarged the role of the Lover, suggesting the greater pull on him of carnal and domestic needs. In addition, Césaire inserted two long and important monologues to the second and third acts, monologues that lend the hero a depth of self-reflection we tend to associate with the speaker of the Cahier. The inserted passages challenge what is otherwise a continuous momentum leading us from the early scenes in which the Rebel refuses intimacy with the important figures in his life (the Lover and the Mother), to the culminating scene in which he fuses with an anonymous cry of revolt, the “cri farouche” that gives voice to “trois siècles de nuit amère conjurés contre nous” (61) (three centuries of bitter night conspiring against us [35]).

One of the major themes of the play is that of solitude, understood both as a physical condition (the “solitary confinement” of Toussaint in his cell) and a metaphysical condition (the loneliness of the martyr who chooses transcendence over implication in the prosaically human). The Rebel’s exchanges with the other characters suggest that he must break all personal ties that identify him as a unique individual in order to serve singlemindedly his people and his cause. First the Lover comes to visit him in his cell, then the Mother; both scenes end with the Rebel’s rejection of the compromise they offer. Here Césaire is employing the topos of the epic hero who must choose solitude over intimacy in order to perform his duty to a greater (and anonymous) collective. Given that a similar scene takes place in La tragédie du Roi Christophe between Christophe and his wife (the scene between Aeneas and Dido in Virgil’s Aeneid is probably the intertext for both plays), it is easy to assume that Césaire also understood his own dilemma (as a young father and husband) in this way. To represent a people, to be “la bouche de ceux qui n’ont point de bouche,” a leader must shut his ears to the voices of libidinal desire and filial affection calling out to him. Appropriately, then, in Les chiens the Rebel’s quest for metaphysical solitude is figured as a series of vocal dispossessions (and, at times, repossessions). Abjuring all earthly temptations, he longs to become the vessel of only one cry—the authentic cry of revolt. In one of the most compelling scenes of the play (in act 2 in the 1956 edition), the Rebel puts this desire into words:

After the Lover leaves the scene (but before the Mother arrives), two potentially more dangerous temptations assail him, both represented as “voices.” The “Première Voix Tentatrice” (First Voice of Temptation) seems to do nothing more than echo the Rebel’s own fears, namely, that he cannot maintain a steady course because he has no guide, no ancestry, and no future. In the Rebel’s words: “j’ai beau aiguiser ma voix / tout déserte tout … ma voix tangue dans le cornet des brumes sans carrefour / et je n’ai pas de mère/ et je n’ai pas de fils” (36) (no matter how I sharpen my voice / all deserts me … my voice pitches in the foghorn of mists without crossroad / and I have no mother / and I have no sons [20]). These sentiments are repeated by the First Voice of Temptation, who echoes: “je n’ai pas de mère je n’ai pas de passé” (39) (I have no mother I have no past [22]). Specifically why total forgetting (“oubli”) should be a temptation is not clear, but we might surmise, given other indications in the play, that reconnection with the past is an arduous task, one the Rebel would at times prefer to abandon. This path is denied not just by the whites in the play but also by his fellow slaves who, speaking in the guise of the “Choeur,” consistently urge the Rebel to choose compromise over vengeance, a connection with the living over a connection with the dead, and therefore forgetting over remembering.

The Second Voice of Temptation sounds yet another note of hopelessness; near the close of act 1, this “Voice” exclaims that there is no more justice in the world: “l’action de la justice est éteinte” (40) (judicial function is finished [22]). Apparently, in the “Ur-text” of Les chiens, the speech delivered by the Second Voice of Temptation was originally part of the Rebel’s own monologue; in revising his play, Césaire transferred what were the Rebel’s own words into the mouth of an external character.31 The fact that the Rebel’s thoughts and observations could be assigned to other characters suggests that many of the voices we hear in the play are actually vessels for the Rebel’s own inner voices. That is, those who contradict, tempt, or echo him may be stage incarnations of parts of his own psyche. These stage incarnations, these multiple voices of consciousness, are highly seductive, as continuous allusions in the play to the sensual texture of the speaking voice confirm: “Ma voix froisse des mots de soie,” states the First Voice of Temptation (84) (My voice rustles with silken words [48]). Again, it is the character’s “voice” that seduces, not the character’s appearance or actions. The voice, as a conveyor of words, bears the threat of dissuading the Rebel from his course.

The two Voices of Temptation that we first encounter in act 1 reappear later in the play as well. This time their function is clearer: they are there to encourage the Rebel to assume yet another role he will ultimately decline, the role of King. These Voices of Temptation are joined by the “Récitant” who also insists upon the royal nature of the Rebel: “il habite en toi un être royal” (84) (I say that there lives in you a regal being [48]). The First Voice of Temptation then follows up with a more insidious form of seduction: “veux-tu de l’argent? des titres? de la terre? Roi? … c’est ça … tu seras roi” (85) (is it money you want? Titles? Land? King … that’s it … you will be king [49]), to which the Second Voice of Temptation adds: “c’est vrai qu’il y a quelque chose en toi qui n’a jamais pu se soumettre” (85) (it’s true, there’s something in you that could never submit [49]). We find articulated here the same temptation that the speaker in the Cahier also encounters, then rejects: “Je refuse de me donner mes boursouflures comme d’authentiques gloires. … Non, nous n’avons jamais été amazones du roi du Dahomey …” (I refuse to view my sick swellings as true glory. … No, we have never been amazons of Dahomey’s king [PA 38]). In both poem and play, the hero insists upon refusing all roles other than that of the incorrigeable rebel, rising up against historical injustice. To the chorus’s “Tu n’échapperas pas à ta loi qui est une loi de domination” (86) (You will not escape your own law, which is the law of domination [50]), the Rebel responds that his law is, conversely, to efface himself, to become the pure voice of revolt: “Ma loi est que je courre d’une chaîne sans cassure jusqu’au confluent de feu qui me volatilise qui m’épure et m’incendie de mon prisme d’or amalgamé”(87).32 Ultimately, what he seeks is to be transformed from a human being (lover, son, father, king), traversed by all sorts of desires, voices, and imperatives, into a hollow vessel, something “intact” and “nu” but also emptied of life: “Eh, bien, je périrai. Mais nu. Intact” (87) (So, I will perish. But naked. Intact [50]); “je suis nu / je suis nu dans les pierres / je veux mourir” (88) (“I am naked / I am naked in the stones / I want to die” [51]). The Rebel’s “law,” he states, is not to consolidate an identity but rather to advance ever further toward the dispersal of that impure amalgam that is the self: “my prism of amalgated gold” (50). Finally, in a scene in which a messenger arrives to announce an offer of clemency, even the act of hearing or acknowledging the voice of the other is associated with the betrayal of a singular “law” or mission. The Messenger, at first unheard, repeats his greeting, “J’ai dit salut” (I said, hail), to which the Rebel responds: “qui m’appelle? J’écoute je n’écoute pas … / ravale ton message / je veux mourir ici/ seul” (78–80) (Who calls me? I listen I don’t listen … / Swallow your message / I want to die here/ alone” [45–46]).

As the play draws to a close, the Rebel pulls himself up one last time to announce his radical solitude, only now that solitude is the precondition for an even greater fusion with the larger community of the suffering, also represented as “voices” that penetrate the self. He has been badly beaten by his two jailors (both a woman and a man) and now feels his entire body rupturing and breaking apart: “des mains coupées … de la cervelle giclante” (108) (Severed hands … spurting brain” [61]). With all temptations now in the past, he assumes the role he always wanted to play, that of a disembodied mouth, channeling the voices of the dead. He begins his final monologue by invoking the gods of the “en bas” (as opposed to some distant, celestial divine), then alludes to his injured “gueule,” an animal mouth or muzzle, and designates it a vessel for the sounds of anonymous beings: “Dieux d’en bas, dieux bons / j’emporte dans ma gueule délabrée / le bourdonnement d’une chair vivante/ me voici” (116) (Gods below, benevolent gods / I bear within my broken muzzle / the buzz of a living flesh/ here I am33). The deictic, “me voici,” which the Rebel repeats again and again, could almost be read as a confirmation of his reduction to pure voice—“me voix-ci,” for his person has been reduced to a ruined mouth, a “gueule délabrée.” What follows is a long incantation in which he imagines other sounds, not simply the “bourdonnement” of his flesh but also “une rumeur de châines” (a rumble of chains) from the depths of the sea, “un gargouillement de noyés” (a gurgling of the drowned), “un claquement de fouet” (the cracking of a whip), and finally, “des cris d’assassinés” (cries of the murdered) (116; 67). By hollowing himself out, by refusing to allow others to “inhabit” the “paroi” of his bones, the Rebel has recreated the self as a cavity within which the voices of the past may now resonate. The imagery suggests that an entire ship of drowned slaves has reached the surface via the vessel that is his throat. He thus imagines himself speaking not for himself, nor even for the crowd, but rather for an entire people, including generations of ancestors carried over the Middle Passage, as in the Cahier’s final passage: “la négraille assise / inattendument debout … debout et non point pauvre folle dans sa liberté et son dénument maritimes” (PA 61–62); “je te livre mes paroles abrupte … embrasse-moi jusqu’au nous furieux / embrasse, embrasse NOUS” (PA 64).

In the final climactic scene the Rebel’s broken body welcomes the voices of the dead—“Obstacle donc salut!”—as though they were his salvation (the alternate meaning of “salut”). The “gargouillement des noyés” and the “cris d’assassinés” mingle with voices emerging from the local landscape: “Oh le cri,” he exclaims, “toujours ce cri fusant des mornes … et le rut des tambours” (117) (oh the cry … always this cry bursting from the mornes … and the rutting of the drums” [67; translation modified]). However, in the final moments, even these sonic presences are drowned out by the beating of the drums. The stage directions indicate that all voices on stage have been overwhelmed by one sound alone: first that of the barking dogs, then that of the tom-toms: “Le Rebelle s’affaisse, les bras étendus la face contre terre, à ce moment des tams-tams éclatent, frénétiques, couvrant les voix (117) (The Rebel collapses, his arms outstretched, his face against the ground; at that moment a frenetic burst of tom-toms blocks out the voices” [68]). “Aboyez tams-tams / Aboyez chiens” (Bark tom-toms / Bark dogs), the Rebel implores. It seems that the ultimate battle between forces is finally to take place. As “secrets enfermés sous un tour de gorge montent dans le clocher du sang” (119) (secrets choked back by a twist of the gullet ascend to the steeple of the blood” [69; translation modified]), the barking of the dogs and the beating of the drums rise up to meet them.34 The entire soundscape is saturated with a cacophony that gradually fades out as the last human presences, the Récitant and the Récitante, also die. We are left, then, not with the sound of human voices, and not even with the barking of dogs or the beating of drums, but with a soundless tableau of an unpeopled world. The final stage directions of the play depict a purified but mute “Vision”; “Vision de la Caraïbe, bleue semée d’îles d’or et d’argent dans la scintillation de l’aube” (120) (Vision of the blue Caribbean spangled with gold and silver islands in the scintillation of the dawn [70]). If the play is, as I have been arguing, a theatricalization of consciousness through the multiplication of voices, then why does it end with silence, all sound replaced by a singular Vision? What does it mean when the cacophony of a conflicted consciousness fades into the muteness of the seen?

At this point, we might want to recall that before being performed live on a stage, Et les chiens se taisaient existed as a radio play. Césaire’s first revisions to the 1946 text (as a result of Janheinz Jahn’s prodding) were thus completed with the goal of producing a set of radiophonic voices. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead have observed that the radiophonic voice tends to establish a curious (and media-specific) type of intimacy between the speaker and the listener.35 Radio, although a nonimmediate form of communication, nonetheless produces the fantasy of a unique address; the listener, often secluded in a room rather than outside in public, feels as though the voice coming over the airwaves were destined for her ears alone. In contrast, the staged drama presupposes a numerous spectatorship; it draws on both the aural and the visual senses, offering at once the proximity implied by hearing and the distance ensured by the faculty of vision. By choosing to end his drama with a “Vision”—afforded by the silencing of the dogs—Césaire underscores the visual dimension of the theater, the way in which it approximates (and partakes of) pure spectacle. (There can be no “Vision” in a radio play; silence can only be described by yet another voice.) As in the Cahier, where “spectacle” is associated with oppression, indifference, and the denial of suffering (“car la vie n’est pas un spectacle … un homme qui crie n’est pas un ours qui danse”), so too in Les chiens pure visual spectacle may be associated with domination, with the stamping out of the “cry” and the silencing of all rebellion and critique. Such an association is established in a speech the Rebel delivers to the Lover, the mother of his son: “Dis-lui que je n’ai pas voulu que ce pays fût seulement une pâture pour l’oeil, la grossière nourriture du spectacle” (61) (Tell him that I did not want this country to be nothing more / than fodder for the eye, the crude stuff of spectacle [35]). In a sense, these lines provide an explanation for the Rebel’s actions: he has raised his voice (uttered the “cri” and proferred the “Parole”) specifically so that the “pays” will not be reduced to an empty spectacle (“une pâture pour l’oeil”). If one keeps Césaire’s symbology of the visual in mind (his association of spectacle with suppression), then one cannot help wondering whether the final “Vision” at the end of the play might represent not merely the death of the Rebel but also the death of subjectivity, the total silencing and suppression of consciousness understood as a lively contest of voices.

In The Ritual Theater of Aimé Césaire, Marianne Wichmann Bailey reads the ending in more positive terms than I have offered here. She sees in the final “Vision” an “apocalyptic scenario” in which “forces of obliteration” clean the slate (clear the stage) so that a new, purer world may emerge. The barking dogs, she contends, represent “heralds of the Apocalypse, messengers of the fruitful death.”36 There is much to be said for a mythic interpretation of Les chiens; as Bailey observes, the dramatic arc of the play follows the classical trajectory in which a hero passes through the land of the dead (the Rebel channels the voices of drowned slaves) in order to rise up again and die—spectacularly—in an act of cathartic self-immolation that purifies the world. Femi Ojo-Ade, however, has also questioned the positive reading of Les chien’s conclusion as hearkening a new day. In Aimé Césaire’s African Theater: Of Poets, Prophets, & Politicians, Ojo-Ade contends that the play ends inconclusively with a Rebel who has become tragically disconnected from his people.³⁷ The supposed leader suffers from an inability to reconcile his craving for solitude—which Ojo-Ade finds “cynically” expressed in the line “One does feel better alone”—with his desire for “total brotherhood.” What remains unexplained in these two insightful, if incompatible, readings is the symbology of the voices, which is not exhausted by recourse to a mythic subtext. Why, for instance, would the Rebel’s mouth, finally sheltering voices of the past, become a “gueule,” a dog’s muzzle, emitting the “cri d’animal pris au piège” (78)? Why would the retrieval of the past, the painful recall of human suffering, require a protest that has lost its human tone?

Bailey surmises that animality constitutes the appropriate response to the savagery of Empire: “Unbearable atrocity mounts to its apex” at the end of the play, she writes, “and invokes its own culmination.” The land, “despoiled and plunged into bestiality, finds again its primitive, barbarous face, its monstrous animal powers.”³⁸ But if Césaire ever believed that showing a “barbarous face” was the appropriate way in which to confront the barbarity of colonialism, he did not consistently aver that this should be so. When he published the play a second time in 1956 as an independent volume, he added two significant passages that address the difference between human voices and animal sounds, and the difference between a reasoned response to violence and bloodthirsty revenge. It is now time to turn to those revisions and examine the way in which they complicate the kind of mythic reading Bailey offers. The revisions also provide further evidence that the author was by no means convinced that a complex and conflicted interiority (the variety of human voices that constitute the self) could be replaced by a single, authentic identity. Indeed, the added passages, like the dramatic ending of the play, suggest instead that the alternative to polyvocal heterogeneity is not authenticity but rather the spectacularization (and silencing) of the self.

Already in 1946 the author had made significant revisions to the play, replacing vivid scenes of action with heroic monologues in which that action is recalled or hallucinated (played out in the background). For instance, the slave revolt that initially occurred in act 1 in the 1944 version became a pantomime two years later. We read in the stage directions of the 1946 version:39 “Loin, très loin, dans un lointain historique le choeur mimant une scène de révolution nègre …” (27) (Far, very far, in a historical distance—while the chorus mimes a scene of black rebellion … [15]). The hero also describes the murderous revolt, presumably so that, if the text were read or performed as a radio play, listeners could still imagine what had taken place. He tells us that a group of slaves (which the stage directions call “énergumènes,” suggesting that they are possessed, like followers of Dionysios) shouted out the refrain “Mort aux Blancs. Mort aux Blancs” (28) (Death to the whites, death to the whites [15]). The 1956 version distances the action even further, for here, in the added scene, the Rebel explicitly repudiates his earlier participation in the revolt: “pourquoi ai-je dit ‘mort aux Blancs’?” he asks himself; “est-ce qu’ils croient me faire plaisir avec ce cri farouche?” (55) (Why did I say ‘Death to the whites? / Do they think this savage cry pleases me? [32]). Perhaps overhearing the cry “Mort aux Blancs” coming from the crowd outside the jail, the Rebel now winces at the reminder of his own unleashed fury.

The 1956 addition suggests that, at least at this moment in the (revised) play, the Rebel no longer identifies completely with the animal-like (“farouche”) cry he embraces at the play’s end. Césaire chose to leave the ending of the play unchanged, yet the passage added in 1956 suggests an equivocation:

We might speculate that Césaire added this expression of remorse to the 1956 version in order to remind his audience that rebellion against enslavement does not have to become an incitement to murder. Césaire might have been sensitive to the accusation that Negritude could become a racist antiracism, a movement as inhumane as the inhumanity it protests.40 The addition appears to reflect a growing suspicion on the part of the author that violence and hate are morally unacceptable—and perhaps even ultimately ineffectual—ways to end the violence inflicted by colonialism itself. It is not incidental that during the 1950s Albert Camus was also reflecting on the problem of violence, particularly the violence incited by injustice and thus potentially legimized as a form of resistance. In 1951 Albert Camus published L’homme révolté, a philosophical-political text that considers killing another human being, even in a rebellion against injustice, to be morally repugnant. Césaire may very well have been influenced by this work as well as by the post-Occupation debates around the “épuration,” the Nuremburg trials, and the growing tensions in French intellectual circles caused by the behavior exhibited by Stalin’s Soviet Union, not to mention the rising turmoil in Algeria that would erupt into war in 1954.

It is clear from literary and extraliterary evidence that all throughout the era immediately prior to the decolonization of Africa and the establishment of independent African states, Césaire was battling within himself to reconcile his yearning for change with a fundamental mistrust of violence. For instance, in the essay “L’homme de culture et ses responsabilités” (The man of culture and his responsibilites), the text he presented at the Second Congrès des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs in April 1959, he supports armed resistence as an inevitable facet of revolution; yet later he chose to suppress the text from publication in the 1976 Désormeaux edition of his Oeuvres complètes.⁴¹ Perhaps he considered lines such as the emphatic “l’impérialisme aura été militairement vaincu” (imperialism will have been vanquished by military means) and “la décolonisation vraie sera révolutionnaire ou ne sera pas” (true decolonization will be revolutionary or not at all) too incendiary to be preserved for posterity.⁴² The tensions that arose between Césaire and Fanon between 1956 and 1959 (or, the First and the Second Congrès des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs) were caused by what the latter perceived as the older statesman’s reticence with regard to militant action. Although Césaire expressed several times his admiration for Fanon’s involvement in Algeria’s resistence movement, the Front de Libération Nationale, he maintained a distance from armed struggle all his life.⁴³

In short, the role of violence was a problem for Césaire, and it is a problem for the Rebel as well. Although “rien de tout cela n’est simple,” as the Rebel states, the play makes it clear that the violence of reprisal—the violence that counters violence—is generated by the contagion of colonialism itself. Thus, by saying “no” to “Resentment” and “Rancor,” the Rebel is indicating that he does not want to have his actions determined by the actions of the colonizers. Stated figuratively, the Rebel does not want his body to be burdened by taking on the weight of the hate that the white colonizers have generated: “Qu’est-ce la haine, sinon la bonne pièce de bois / attachée au cou de l’esclave.” Perceiving that a reaction-formation is at the root of the slaves’ cry “Mort aux blancs!” he challenges himself not to make that cry, to step outside the relentless cycle of retribution, to cry “death!” to the “cri de ‘Mort aux Blancs’” itself. Of course, there is some irony in Césaire’s recycling of the same terms (“death” to “death”), yet calling for the death of a deathwish is not the same thing as calling for the death of a human being. The latter, the call to murder, is a “cri farouche,” a savage cry that makes men into dogs. “Hatred” is the “awesome barking of the dog that sinks its teeth into his throat,” we read in the passage inserted in 1956. To utter the cry of hatred is, in effect, to become a dog, to allow one’s throat to be transformed into a dog’s “gueule.”44

The last lines of the 1956 addition intimate that there might be an alternative to the cycle of violence, an alternative to identifying with this “cri farouche … qui vous prend à la gorge.” Instead of repeating the cry “Mort aux Blancs,” that is, one might imagine a world in which the howling of dogs—and the shouting of cries (“Mort aux Blancs”)—would cease. This world, depicted by the Rebel in the passage cited below, resembles one we have already seen in the Cahier. As in the earlier poem in which the speaker claims that there is sufficient room “pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête” (PA, 57–58), in the play the Rebel envisions a world in which diverse races (figured here as diverse species of trees) might grow together and flourish:

In terms of the plot, the inserted scene serves to interrupt without reversing the momentum of the play, a momentum that leads from the first scenes in which the Rebel describes himself as “coupé” and “vaincu,” to the end, when he dies with his “cri intact,” “Intact et nu” (78). “O mes membres de mur bousillé,” the Rebel addresses his ruined state, “vous n’étiendrez pas de fatigue et de froid / mon cri fumant mon cri intact d’animal pris au piège” (78; added emphasis) (O my limbs of smashed walls / you will not extinguish my fatigue and my cold / my smoking cry my intact cry of a trapped animal [45]). Yet the scene of reflection in which the Rebel disassociates himself from the bestiality of an instinctual response produces interesting ripples throughout the play that build up to the second monologue Césaire added in 1956, the monologue the Rebel recites just before he expires in act 3. It is clear that Césaire wrote both insertions with the same themes in mind. We find again the motif of the “cri farouche,” the image of building an edifice or statue, and even the image of the “glèbe usée,” the abused, sterile soil of inaction from which nothing may grow. Just as the earlier addition to act 2 included a scene in which the Rebel complicates—and interrogates—an initial instinctual response, so too the addition to act 3 proposes an alternative to the naked howl of vengeance, the “cri d’animal pris au piège” (78), namely, a “Parole” (Word), or “nom” (name):

Many reprisals in the passage indicate that the author wished to suture the additions of the 1956 version to the 1946 version rather than make an entirely new play.45 Still, the 1946 version never fully succeeds in associating the “cri” of suffering and ferocity with a verbal sign, even though the Rebel claims (in that version) that the word is his only offering: “je n’ai pour moi que ma parole,” he states; “ma parole puissance de feu … ma parole qu’aucune chimie ne sauraient apprivoiser ni ceindre” (46) (All I have is my word … my word the power of fire … my word that no chemistry could ever tame or encompass” [27; translation modified]). The suggestion here is that the “parole” is itself wild, untameable; as in Une saison en Congo, the hero considers his word a “weapon.” Lumumba: “J’ai n’ai pour arme que ma parole” (My only arm is my word). But a fissure has opened up between the hero and his people, between a reflexive, reasoning (verbal) character and a chorus composed, as in the original Greek drama, “of satyrs: wild, primitive creatures, half animal, half human.”⁴⁶ The Rebel prides himself, in fact, on having brought his people to a higher state of self-consciousness: “J’avais amené ce pays à la connaissance de lui-même” (36) (I had brought this land to the knowledge of itself [19]), he explains to the chorus (who demands, instead, a king, someone who will “sing” for them) (31). Yet this self-consciousness, which awakens the people to revolt, does not bring them to language, which remains the sole possession of the Rebel. He (much like Césaire himself) has both the gift of oratory and the gift of analytical recursiveness, that is, he has the ability to reflect upon, to consider from a distance procured by the Symbolic (“la Parole”), his own instinctual reactions. Ultimately, the dilemma of the Leader is that he can see himself as Leader, he can step away, momentarily, from his role. It is this seeing as, this aspectual consciousness or parabasis, that distinguishes him from those whose anger, understandably, compels them toward acts of “Rancune” and “Ressentiment.”

Césaire was obviously not comfortable with this distinction between (reflective) Leader and (impulsive) crowd, for he returned to it incessantly in his poetry and plays.⁴⁷ Perhaps this is why his 1956 additions work so hard to reunite the reflective Leader (with his privileged access to the “Parole”) with the crowd and their impulsive “cri.” In the 1956 version, the Rebel’s task is to bring the Word into line with the energies of revolt, or, to evoke the imagery of the Cahier, to lead “un peuple à côté de son cri” back to a “cri” that has been rendered verbal in the speaker’s “mouth.” This verbal, legible cry would allow the “cri farouche” to be heard—in Jacques Rancière’s terms—as speech. Césaire’s 1956 additions seem to have been forged precisely to prefigure this reconciliation, to harmonize the “cry” and the “Word,” or, conversely, to animate that which is frequently described pejoratively as “mere words” (34) with a force as strong as the river’s “current” (66). The “cri” provides a directional force, a pull that the Word must obey.⁴⁸ Both are required: the energy of righteous anger and the gravitas of reflection. The cry of suffering must be sounded again, but not necessarily through the “gueule” of a dog.

In the end, of course, the Rebel’s reasoning voice is overwhelmed by the beating of the drums and the barking of the dogs. Nonetheless, the significance of the reflective moment in act 2 should not be underestimated, given that it was intentionally added to the edition that Césaire considered the most definitive version of the work. The moment of self-reflection introduces a crucial structural element that is often present in a heroic narrative (the hero doubts his own resolve, or regrets the means he must use to obtain his goal) but rarely commented on in the case of Les chiens.49 When Césaire personifies the cry “Mort aux Blancs” (with the pronoun “il”), he suggests that the cry, or the instinctive recourse to violence, only intermittently inhabits the self, just as all the other voices—of love, desire, ambition, despair—circulate like moods within the Rebel’s being. In the full version of the play we witness the Rebel undergo a complete identification with the “cri farouche”; the will to revenge, to seek justice, is not expressed in a voice like any other but rather subsumes him completely. However, in the reflection scene, we are invited to imagine the possibility of a hero who could step away, momentarily, from the role he feels called on to play. This slight hint of parabasis opens up the potential for an alternative reading, one that would stress the heterogeneous and performative rather than singular and essential nature of the empirical self. In performance terms, we might say that the two monologues Césaire added to the 1956 version allow the Rebel to acknowledge that he is indeed “inhabited” by a number of different impulses, none of which may be his alone. The role of murderer filled with “rancune” and “ressentiment” is not the only role available for him to play. Neither, however, does he have to renounce that role entirely since such renunciation might lead to passivity and inaction. The act of reflection thus entails neither total identification with, nor complete eradiction of, the other (“il”), the “cry” that “inhabits” the self.

The added scene suggests, finally, that the true accomplishment of reflection is not the acceptance of violence as an inevitable part of the fight against injustice—although that may be the conclusion at which the Rebel arrives. Rather, the true accomplishment of reflection is the recognition that the self is internally conflicted, possessed by more voice than one.50 On the one hand, the passage Césaire inserted into the 1956 edition could be seen as introducing a new theme, or a new mode of staged action (reflection) to a host of other actions already admitted to the blocking of the play (such as “Il s’arrête,” “Il s’incline,” and so on).⁵¹ On the other, the staged reflection seems consistent with the play’s overall structure: the scene in which the Rebel expresses one thought, then a conflicting thought, then yet another could be seen, that is, as a microcosm of the entire play as itself an act of reflection. Just as the Rebel’s self-reflection reveals not a single self or consistent identity but instead a complex self who raises questions (“Comment débrouiller tout ça?”), expresses contradiction (“mais oh!”), refuses participation (“Non”), advances speculations (“je suppose que …”), promotes violence (“Mort aux Blancs”), and condemns violence (“mort au cri ‘Mort aux Blancs’”), so too the play points to an authorial presence, an “empirical subject,” that is splintered into multiple voices distributed into distinct roles and even distinct versions of the same play.

I wrote at the beginning of this chapter that the Rebel worries about “spectacularizing himself”; he fears that while lending his voice to others, “he might himself become a spectacle, an actor playing a role.” My evidence for this claim is drawn from one more scene Césaire added to the 1956 version, and it is with a reading of this scene that I will conclude. In the 1946 version, the Lover dies near the close of act 1. As previously stated, Césaire chose to bring her back in 1956, inserting a rather long dialogue between her and the Rebel in act 2. Critics have interpreted her return as furthering the seduction plot: she holds out the promise of a fulfilling domestic and romantic life. What has not been noted, however, is her role as accuser: she does not merely tempt the Rebel; she also draws from him the most succinct, even mechanical rearticulation of his mission, revealing the possibility that his motives might be less than pure:

Césaire has chosen his words with great care, making sure to integrate the imagery from the 1956 additions into the imagery of the earlier version. For instance, the expressions “sculpter une belle mort” and “bâtir un monument” echo the Rebel’s earlier allusion to his desire to erect a “statue” (“La statue que nous sommes en train d’ériger, camarades, la plus belle des statues” [50]). What is most interesting, though, is that Césaire adds the verbs “jouer” and “feindre” to the Lover’s characterization of his behavior, thereby underscoring the theatricality of the Rebel’s persona, the danger he runs (at least according to the Lover) of losing touch with reality as he gains rhetorical power and dramatic force. The accusation that the Rebel may be playing a role, that he may be aestheticizing his task (“sculpter une belle mort”), cannot be contained once it has been uttered; in fact, such an accusation reverberates throughout Césaire’s entire dramatic oeuvre, where heroes often acknowledge (and regret) their self-aggrandizing motives.52 We need only think of King Christophe’s desire, at the end of La tragédie du Roi Christophe, to exit the “formidable spectacle” he creates in his “théâtre d’ombres” to see that for Césaire, leadership involves a kind of theatrics.⁵³ Leadership of the people always threatens detachment from the people (“gardez-vous de vous croiser les bras en l’attitude stérile du spectateur” the speaker of the Cahier warns himself)—and it also threatens detachment from the self. To return to the epigraph by Michelet cited by Césaire in “Nègreries: Jeunesse noire et assimilation,” “to rise up” (“monter”) and “to remain oneself” (“rester soi”) are gestures that may be deeply incompatible.⁵⁴ Yet the problem is even more serious than that, for to “rester soi” may be to stand still, to congeal into a figure, or, worse, to be nothing at all. What posture can the Rebel assume that is not, in some sense, a role? To what voice can he listen without becoming, to some extent, a ventriloquist? What does an authentic voice sound like if not a fusion (“amalgam”) of voices, each of which represents some contingent aspect of the self?

And what are we to make of the “monument sans oiseaux” that the Rebel evokes in the passage quoted earlier? If, as the speaker announces in the Cahier, “ma négritude n’est ni une tour ni une cathédrale” (47), then why does the Rebel insist upon envisioning self-affirmation as erecting a “statue” or building a “monument”? Could it be that a lifeless monument (“sans oiseaux”) is ultimately not the best affirmation of black identity? Could it be that the “négritude” the speaker evokes in the Cahier requires instead an unfolding, ever changing, ever self-revising text (not a monument), a malleable document (not a statue) that can be cut into, altered, shifted around, and revised—that is, precisely the kind of text that Césaire provides? Could it be that textual revision, the process in which Césaire engaged during almost his entire lifetime, is the literary equivalent of a racial identity that cannot be congealed into any single “definitive” form?

If self-consciousness entails self-questioning, and if acting requires parabasis, then performance cannot be entirely repudiated or treated as a falsification of the self. After all, representing the self (or others) is an operation that must draw on conventional verbal and gestural languages, otherwise, the representation would not be recognizable to others as the exterior face of an internal state.55 There is, of course, an important distinction to be made between a play-acting, or a “feigning,” that falsifies in an intentional manner and the quotidian role-playing in which any individual engages throughout his life. Césaire is clearly concerned with policing the boundary between the two. That boundary, however, may be difficult to discern.

A performance world view does not neglect that boundary, however. It suggests neither that all affect is acting nor that all persons are “personas” (although, as Marcel Mauss has shown, the two are etymologically linked).56 Rather, a performance world view locates identity in a subject formation “structured through multiple and sometimes conflicting sites of identification.”⁵⁷ The model of the empirical subject that emerges in Les chiens is close to a performance studies model insofar as it depicts the subject as “inhabited” by a variety of voices, identifying and disidentifying (through acts of reflection) with a number of roles. The orchestration of those roles constitutes the subject at any given point in time. The self depicted in Les chiens—at least the versions from 1946 on—is thus the self of a lyric oratorio, an interwoven fabric of melodies and refrains that together constitute the persons one is. Although the Rebel never abandons his mission (and to that extent he remains faithful to an impulse he has at the start), to complete that mission he must echo, he must quote; that is, he must verbalize the “silenced” speech of the Dahomey that rises up in his throat in act 3. By citing, he finds aural support for urges sincerely felt. Sincerity, then, can be seen to require, not repudiate citation. How to tell the difference between the speech imposed upon us by others (colonial mimicry, or the interpellations of authority) and the speech we seek to retrieve (ancestral voices we recognize as continuous with our own, and thus the interpellations of a community we accept)—such is the problem the play seeks to resolve. Césaire suggests that reflection is the act that might potentially allow us to differentiate between the two: feigning an identity that is not ours versus locating identity in a variety of roles. Like parabasis, reflection encourages us to examine the source of the voices that inhabit us, to step away momentarily from our (their) words.

While it would be a stretch to consider Césaire a poststructuralist, wedded to the notion that the subject is a discursive construction, it is arguable that there exist proto-poststructuralist moments in his work. That this would be the case seems both logically consistent and historically inevitable, given that he matured during the period when Alexandre Kojève’s version of Hegel was circulating in Paris, the same version that would inform the work of Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler.⁵⁸ Further, Césaire was alive, well, and traveling regularly to Paris during the 1960s and 1970s, a time when many intellectuals were attempting to balance a theory of the subject “whose access to itself is opaque and is not self-grounding” with an ethics of agency.⁵⁹ It is not clear to me that these intellectuals—Césaire included—would have believed that moments of parabasis, or even “permanent parabasis,” are necessarily at odds with ethical action.⁶⁰ Thus, I am not convinced that Césaire would have found a “performance world view”—according to which we are composed of heterogeneous voices—inconsistent with a sincere commitment to any one of those voices at a given moment in time.⁶¹ We can always interpret Les chiens as a play that offers implacable resistance to colonial authority—indeed, it does. But the way in which it does so may be less obvious than we first assume. The resistance against colonial authority that Césaire depicts may include moments when resistance to the dominant narrative of selfhood is imperative as well.

As readers, we hope for a victorious ending. We look to Negritude for the articulation of a clear political message, the indication of a straight path. Magisterial works such as Le discours sur le colonialisme and “L’homme de culture et ses responsabilités” provide precisely that. But I am not convinced that a work like Les chiens is, as Roger Toumson and Simonne Henry-Valmore maintain, “une oeuvre de combat, un pamphlet politique. …”⁶² Neither do I believe that Les chiens (or the Cahier, for that matter) constructs a frozen image of authentic blackness, as other critics have asserted, one that is blind to internal hybridity or self-difference. To both groups who, for different reasons, seek in Césaire a single message, I would reply that, on the contrary, the author creates heroes whose search for authenticity is at once relentless and frustrated, celebrated and ironized. We never really know whether Césaire’s protagonists embody their authentic identity because they find or escape an image of themselves.

It is a premise of genetic criticism that various versions of a work reflect the evolving perspective of an author as he returns to the same issues over time. Taken together, the various versions constitute the textual record of an empirical subject’s diachronic unfolding. Certainly, this premise may be applied to the author of Et les chiens se taisaient: Césaire was maturing during the decade between 1946 and 1956, and, as scholars have averred, the changes he made to the play testify to the dilemmas he was facing during a tumultuous period both in history and in his own life. What is less obvious is that the text—even one version of it—may reflect the empirical subject’s synchronic identity (or rather, his non-self-identity), the complexly layered and self-contradictory impulses of a self that is authentic not because it is consistent but because it is not. Even the 1946 version of Les chiens already contains contradictory voices; indeed the difference between the Cahier and Les chiens is not that one presents a consistent, coherent subjectivity and the other does not but rather that in the play the supposedly unified utterances of the Cahier’s lyric subject have been broken up and distributed among a large cast of characters, or “Voix.”

The genre of the lyric oratorio was the ideal medium for Césaire to depict his own conflicting impulses, for he could realize (that is, attribute to diverse speakers) the many voices inhabiting him without having to identify thoroughly with any single one. We would be mistaken, though, to believe that the lyric oratorio, as a genre, is substantively different from a lyric poem. To be sure, the lyric poem, with its pretense of a singular aesthetic subjectivity, or lyric “I,” suggests that all utterances in the poem emanate from one source. But the lyric oratorio may simply reveal what has always been true about the lyric poem, namely, that it is composed of a heteroglossic fabric of harmonizing and dissonant voices, performing in succession or overlapping, in dialogic interaction or drowning each other out. It is precisely because a lyric poem is, ultimately, an oratorio—and a lyric subject is, ultimately, a cast of characters—that we may legitimately interpret an aesthetic subject as a reflection of the empirical subject, or author. Since both author and aesthetic subject are internally heterogeneous, they can stand for each other in this regard. However, whereas the empirical subject continues to evolve through, as Adorno puts it, the “experience of himself and what he encounters,” in contrast, the aesthetic subject evolves only through the revisions the author makes, the readings the poem receives, or the stagings the drama inspires.63 And here, finally, is where the significance of Césaire’s tendency to revise (and republish) appears in its true light: Modernist textuality—the medium but also the media of small reviews, pamphlets, small presses, and grand maisons d’éditions—allowed Césaire, the empirical author, to treat his texts as if they were performances, to interpret and reinterpret his reasons for writing them again and again. Césaire shows that the printed text lends itself not just to a reading but to a rewriting, that is, to a reincarnation in multiple forms. Far from being opposed to performance as the stationary is to the mobile, the fixed to the fleeting, the printed text is impermanent, provisional, only one incarnation of itself. Ever since Montaigne (at least), print culture has offered authors the opportunity to rearrange, excise, and add passages, to produce multiple editions, reprintings in different formats (with changes of title or subtitle), new versions on the page, the airwaves, or the stage. Modernist print culture in particular, with its invention of the “work in progress” genre, made it possible for authors to circulate mobile texts, to publish in transition—or Volontés—works that could, like their empirical authors, evolve and change under the public eye. To ask “Which is the ‘definitive’ text?” is thus like asking “Who is the authentic subject?” There is no answer except that provided by a reading, which in turn is an act of ventriloquism that animates the text with being.