L'Esprit Créateur

In the Name of the Father Chronotopia, Utopia, and Dystopia in 77 Jean Vhorizon Clarisse Zimra Nous sommes tous les descendants de Colon. —Tzvetan Todorov F IVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO (plus one), a bold voyager from Genoa sailed west into modernity by “ discovering” a new conti­ nent. Five centuries later (give or take a few years), looking west from Europe in a blur of ethnocentric and phallocentric myopia, Tzvetan Todorov still pronounces “ us all” heirs to Columbus—even though gallantly dedicating La Conquête de l’Amérique “to the memory of a Mayan woman devoured by dogs.” Looking east from America, Edouard Glissant had already bypassed Europe whence, according to Todorov, all originated (their books were published within a year of each other by the same press). Searching for alternative beginnings, Le Dis­ cours antillais glimpsed an African history at once denied and erased.1It would seem that the oppositional reading of the collision of two worlds was fated to continue indefinitely. However, similarities are often more telling than differences: both the scholar from the Old World and the scholar from the New World defined “the question of America” as a circular quest that doubles back upon itself in time and space simultaneously. This movement constitutes the narrative “ chronotope” of our thinking about the continent.2To the historian of ideas, the voyage leitmotiv that marks our contemporary meditation on the “ New” World comes as no surprise; the mysterious (is)land to the west has been a common topos from the Greeks onward. For the Ancients, this locus classicus reenacted radical beginnings in the characteristic gesture of Myth, Ur-time enfolding and enfolded into Ur-place.3 In its modern variations, the quest for the perfect place (Eu-topia) has uncovered either its non-existence (U-topia) or its trans­ formation into the regimented structures of dystopia, unfolding a textual drama of containment played upon an obviously ideological stage. The modern Utopia, argues Fredric Jameson, is an attempt at circumventing Vo l . XXXIII, No. 2 59 L ’E spr it C r éa teu r the totalizing drive of History.4It is the motif that I propose to examine in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s 77 Jean l’horizon (Paris: Seuil, 1979), a work published at about the same period, and one that excavates much of the ground that Todorov and Glissant sought to cover. Denied a reality of their own making in the grand Hegelian scheme, the non-Europeans in the Americas were refused the right to their own historicity. It is therefore not surprising to see their writers coming back to the need, time and again, of repositioning the fractured self on the psychic map of the past—the Caribbean version of the “ return of the repressed” as it were. Negritude upended the fact of discovery and conquest, refiguring the Noble Savage and inverting the triangulation of the Middle Passage; to wit, Césaire’s Une tempête. Was Negritude a utopia, the prophetic dream of the oppressed, as Cahier d ’un retour au pays natal would have it? Or would it eventually self-destruct on its own repressed dystopia, as Caliban’s increasing cruelty seemed to imply? Broached in Negritude’s master-text, Et les chiens se taisaient, the question raises the specter of evasive textual strategies, a displacement constitutive of the Caribbean corpus for which the Bakhtinian chronotope serves as a structuring meta­ phor.5This is the question Schwarz-Bart’s last novel to date addresses. The new generation of Eloge de la créolité now joyously claiming to be “tous fils de Césaire,” an obvious response to Todorov’s “ tous descendants de Colon,” does so without the reluctant ambiguity once exhibited by Glissant’s first charting of “ antillanité” in L ’Intention poétique, or the gleeful causticity of Maryse Condé’s shot across the ancestral bow in “ Négritude senghorienne.” 6 This is not to imply that créolité could not have come about without Schwarz-Bart, but simply to observe that, primum inter pares, Ti Jean l’horizon signals a turn in the collective literary project that, in the French Caribbean, has recast all ideological moorings. The novel seems to be a perfect illustration...