Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze

Literature Between Postcolonialism and Post-Continental Philosophy

Lorna Burns

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441156211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze maps a new intellectual and literary history of postcolonial Caribbean writing and thought spanning from the 1930s surrealist movement to the present, crossing the region's language blocs, and focused on the interconnected principles of creativity and commemoration. Exploring the work of René Ménil, Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Pauline Melville, Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson, this study reveals the explicit and implicit engagement with Deleuzian thought at work in contemporary Caribbean writing. Uniting for the first time two major schools of contemporary thought - postcolonialism and post-continental philosophy - this study establishes a new and innovative critical discourse for Caribbean studies and postcolonial theory beyond the oppositional dialectic of colonizer and colonized. Drawing from Deleuze's writings on Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, this study interrogates the postcolonial tropes of newness, becoming, relationality and a philosophical concept of immanence that lie at the heart of a little-observed dialogue between contemporary Caribbean writers and Deleuze.

Chapter 1

Surrealism and the Caribbean: A Curious Line of Resemblance

In what would be the final theoretical treatises of the Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation, the author draws attention to a persistent but often overlooked legacy within twentieth-century Caribbean writing: surrealism. Highlighting the time that Aimé Césaire spent in Paris as a student in the 1930s, Glissant argues that the period witnessed a significant intellectual emigration from the colonies to the colonial metropolis. It was an exchange that forged relationships between writers such as Aimé Césaire, Etienne Léro, René Ménil, Jules-Marcel Monnerot, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Pierre Yoyotte, and produced important journals including L’Étudiant noir and Légitime défense that drew from the Marxist intellectual tradition and emerging surrealist movement in 1930s Paris.¹ Yet this intellectual emigration did not merely consist of individuals travelling from the colonies to study at the Sorbonne. More than this, the moment witnessed an exchange of ideas: the point at which Caribbean writers, artists and intellectuals exposed the colonial centre to the politics of (what would later become) negritude, questioned society’s racial prejudices, and at the same time encountered a French literary and artistic avant-garde committed to overthrowing the hegemonic dominance of white Europe.

This chapter argues the importance of this surrealist exchange platform to understanding the parallel emergence of both postcolonialism and post-continental philosophy within the context of contemporary Caribbean writing. While often overlooked in criticism, surrealism raises important questions about difference, the self, the other and the power of the imagination that remain of great significance to postcolonialism. While in the Caribbean context there has been scant attention paid to this period of interaction, I argue that the legacies of surrealism are fundamental to understanding the historical development of Caribbean literature and thought. Michael Richardson’s anthology Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (1996) is an important but little-appreciated text in this respect: bringing together key essays from both Caribbean (Ménil, Léro, Monnerot, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, René Depestre and Paul Laraque) and French (André Breton, André Masson, Michel Leiris and Pierre Mabille) surrealists.

Reassessing the value of the works collected in this anthology, this chapter stresses the philosophical value of surrealism, both French and Caribbean. From this perspective, surrealism’s immanent world-view, evident, notably, in the writings of Breton, Mabille, Ménil, and Suzanne Césaire, the paintings of Wifredo Lam, and in key terms employed such as the marvellous, alchemy and the unconscious, reveal the full extent of the movement’s continued influence on contemporary aesthetics. At stake is not only a better understanding of the relationship between postcolonialism and surrealism, but a clearer appreciation of postcolonialism’s relation to contemporary thought. Where post-continental philosophy has refocused critical attention on immanence as the foundation of philosophical thought, I argue that contemporary postcolonial Caribbean theory mirrors post-continental philosophy (particularly that of Deleuze) in its own embrace of immanence as the basis for Relational thought and a universality re-visioned. Exploring the resonance that Deleuze’s characterization of creation as actualization finds with surrealist practice, this chapter exposes two parallel lines of thought: one leading out from the legacies of the Radical Enlightenment and the philosophy of Spinoza into the contemporary thought of Deleuze (via Nietzsche and Bergson), exploring the creative potential of a single, dual-faced reality; the other, an aesthetic attempt to liberate the imagination through the search for the ‘certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions’ (Breton 1972, p. 123).

Surrealism’s embrace of a fundamentally unified, single, immanent reality expressed through the relation of apparent opposites – real and imagined, consciousness and the unconscious – not only continues to influence the contemporary writings of Édouard Glissant and Wilson Harris, who I shall discuss in subsequent chapters, but resonates with Deleuze’s philosophical account of difference, becoming and newness. As a result, this chapter, indeed this study, does not merely argue that Deleuze’s post-continental thought can be seen to influence Caribbean postcolonialism. More than this, by looking to surrealism and its impact on Caribbean aesthetics since the 1930s one may find what Wilson Harris might well term a curious ‘resemblance of line’ (2006, p. 25) that reveals a parallel evolution of thought common to both post-continental philosophy and contemporary postcolonialism. As in my Introduction, this is a story that begins with the radical appraisal of Cartesianism established by Spinoza and his continued influence on contemporary post-continental philosophy. And it is with this in mind that I begin this chapter with the tale of a South American parrot with phobias of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest and the father of rationalism, René Descartes.

Fearing Descartes

In her short story ‘The Parrot and Descartes’, published in The Migration of Ghosts (1998), the Guyanese-born writer Pauline Melville presents a historically situated, humorous tale of a parrot captured by Sir Thomas Roe during his visit to Guyana and the Orinoco region in 1610–11. While this tale recounts a remarkable history that takes us from the discovery of the New World to Europe during the Age of Enlightenment, it simultaneously poses important questions about the philosophy of postcoloniality and, as such, offers a salient point of departure for this chapter’s analysis of the moments of convergence between surrealism, Deleuze and Caribbean writing. The allegorical nature of the tale sets it up as an exemplary interrogation of postcolonial themes. From the outset, for example, the mythology of El Dorado is evoked by Roe’s voyage to the New World: at first ‘Fat Thom thought that sunlight was falling on the bird’s head, then he saw that it had a golden beak. In other words the creature was a traditional plain and not particularly fancy South American parrot’ (Melville 1999, p. 101). Evoking both the search for the riches of the New World and imperial exploitation, Melville’s allegory serves to expose the relationship between Europe and the New World in the period immediately preceding the Age of Enlightenment. However, rather than focusing solely on imperial expansion the text turns its attention to what it identifies as a fundamental shift in European thought.

The unfortunate parrot of the tale is captured by Roe and taken to England as a wedding present for the marriage of James I’s daughter, Elizabeth Stuart, to Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine. As the royal pet, the parrot, who lives far beyond a normal lifespan, is witness to significant moments in European history. In particular, there are two episodes that impact appreciably on the parrot’s consciousness, being, as he is, a creature who recalls and repeats (mimics): a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest performed at the royal wedding and, later, his encounter with the father of rationalism, René Descartes:

Having survived a rough journey and upset by the climate, to his horror, the parrot was forced to sit on a lady-in-waiting’s shoulder and watch one of the worst productions of The Tempest the world has ever seen. The parrot’s genetic construction, however much he willed it to the contrary, ensured that every word sank ineradicably into his memory. Sensibly, he refrained from ever repeating any of it – including the sotto voce ‘Oh no’ from the bard himself, as Ariel slipped on a piece of orange peel and skidded across the apron stage into the wedding party. How the scions of literature would have torn that bird wing from wing had they known that Shakespeare’s own voice was faithfully transcribed on his inch-long brain. He kept his counsel and tied to look dumb.

The parrot naturally developed a phobia about The Tempest. Why he should also have developed an irrational loathing of the philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes, is something I shall address later. (p. 102)

Melville constructs her story around a remarkable family history: Frederick did commission for his wife an ‘English-wing’ and gardens at their court in Heidelberg, gardens designed by Salomon de Caus and influenced by his hermetic, mystical Rosicrucian background; Frederick and Elizabeth were crowned king and queen of Bohemia in 1619, only to be overthrown at the Battle of the White Mountain – a battle during which Descartes fought on the side of the attacking Hapsburgs and later established a well-known acquaintance with Frederick and Elizabeth’s daughter Princess Elizabeth. But more than this, what Melville emphasizes is that this historical period was witness to a fundamental shift in European thought: the point at which ‘the unity of magic and science’ (p. 109) was destroyed; the birth of the modern world, triumph of rationalism and the separation of art and science, imagination and technology.²

‘The Parrot and Descartes’ returns to this moment in order to evaluate its impact. With The Tempest, the mastery of Prospero over Ariel as well as the savage figure of Caliban have become well-worn symbols for postcolonial writers and theorists seeking to reclaim the stereotypes of colonial discourse. However, the polarization of magic and science raises a theoretical concern that implies a far-reaching critique of the Enlightenment, one that is of great significance to Caribbean writers who, as Alejo Carpentier (1995) argues, are faced every day with examples of the marvellous, the unexpected and the magical. In Melville’s story the parrot experiences with some pleasure the hermetically inspired gardens at Heidelberg and sits in on the secret meetings of the Rosicrucian Order as they plan to perform a version of The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, a symbolic text revealing the alchemical and esoteric beliefs of the Brotherhood. It is, however, when the family reach Prague that the parrot gains his most rewarding experience of Europe; a Prague, the narrator notes, with religious liberty guaranteed by the law set down by Rudolf II in 1609 (that is until the defeat of Frederick V at the Battle of the White Mountain and the establishment of the Catholic Hapsburg dynasty). This Prague is most clearly identified as Europe’s golden-age: ‘before the Hapsburg attack, the wondrous city of Prague was host to every sort of cabbalist, alchemist and astronomer and housed the most up-to-date artistic and scientific collections’ (Melville 1999, p. 105);

so it came about that Descartes, innocent symbol of reason, skulking in the back rows of the soldiery, watched and participated as little as possible as the Battle of the White Mountain was fought outside Prague. The battle put to flight the newly ensconced King and Queen, smashed the spirit of Bohemia and destroyed the unity of magic and science which had developed as one under the liberal auspices of Rudolfo and his successors. Magic and technology were, from then on, to go their separate ways. (p. 109)

Descartes, ‘the man who contributed to the rout of a certain sort of imagination’ (p. 110), becomes (irrationally, the text tells us) an anathema to the parrot, both in terms of his association with the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but also for the accompanying triumph of the written word over the oral: the point at which the ‘parrot, a natural representative of the oral tradition, began to sob’ (p. 112). Escaping a Europe that no longer has any place for the irrational, the mystical or the oral, the parrot returns to the New World in 1652, only to find ‘that ideas from Europe were gaining ground in his own territory’ (p. 114), notably the ideas of Descartes, which two Jesuit priests, overheard by the parrot, plan to introduce as part of their college lectures. By the end of the story we see not only the growth of Western culture within the New World in the form of US tourism and the company of actors who capture the parrot and force him to be part of their touring production of The Tempest, but in particular the spread of Enlightenment ideas. One of the final images of the parrot at the end of his tour in 1801 notes that with ‘wings clipped and wearing an ornamental chain on one leg, [he] set off wearily for a new life in North America’ (p. 115). With his freedom of flight denied and shackled by chains the parrot evokes another image of postcolonial critique: transatlantic slavery. But more than this, the date of his journey to the US marks a further stage in the triumph of rationalism: the parrot arrives in 1801 in time to witness the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, yet another flag-bearer for the Enlightenment and, echoing Descartes’s division of magic and science, a strong advocate of the separation of church and state.

If Melville’s story draws attention to the colonial encounter, appraising a particular strand of Enlightenment thought and a ‘certain sort of imagination’, it nevertheless remains a critique that offers little sense of any way beyond this impasse. ‘European thought’ is vastly simplified in the tale as the Enlightenment is reduced to the work of Descartes and the division of art and science. But perhaps this too serves as an allegory of postcolonialism: the Enlightenment essentialized as a discourse of a distorted universality that served to underpin colonization and imperial expansion. Recently, however, critics such as Nick Nesbitt have explored the legacies of the radical Enlightenment, particularly the philosophy of that great opponent of Descartes, Spinoza, and have considered the example of the Haitian Revolution as an instance in which the ideals of the Age of Revolution were taken up and adapted (not mimicked or parroted) to the ends of the revolutionary movement (Nesbitt 2008).³ As suggested in my Introduction, Spinoza is an important figure for the ideas explored in this study and while Melville points to the particular division between magic and science, it is another Cartesian separation, that of thought and extension, that is crucial in the debate between Spinoza and Descartes. Spinoza himself had a role to play in the family history introduced by Melville’s tale: in 1673, and against a background of hostility towards Spinoza as an excommunicated Dutch Jew of Spanish descent with liberal ties and political sympathies that lay with Jan de Witt’s republican party, not to mention ‘the stupid Cartesians’ who were ‘abusing everywhere my opinions and writings’ (Spinoza cited in Deleuze 1988b, p. 5), Charles I Louis, Elector Palatine (son of Frederick and Elizabeth) offered Spinoza a professorship in philosophy at Heidelberg. Although Spinoza refused the offer, claiming that it was never his desire to teach in public, it nevertheless hints at the emergence of a minor line of thought in opposition to the dominant Cartesianism.⁴

Echoing, for us, the sentiments of Melville’s parrot, Deleuze reflects on his philosophical training at the Sorbonne during the 1940s under Ferdinand Alquié (a stammerer who harnessed his voice ‘to the service of Cartesian dualisms’) and Jean Hyppolite (a man with ‘a powerful face’ who ‘beat out Hegelian triads with his fist’) (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, p. 9): ‘I could not see any way of extracting myself. I could not stand Descartes, the dualisms and the Cogito, or Hegel, the triad and the operation of the negative. But I liked writers who seemed to be part of the history of philosophy, but who escaped from it in one respect, or altogether: Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson’ (p. 11). In both Dialogues II (1977) with Claire Parnet and Negotiations (1990), Deleuze draws attention to a minor tradition in European philosophy set apart from the dominant Cartesian and Hegelian modes of thought and which ‘proceed[s] only through positive and affirmative force’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, p. 12).

It is this total critique of transcendent, dualistic and dialectical philosophies, then, that lies behind Deleuze’s post-continental turn to immanence and a positivist conception of difference. In doing so, Melville’s arguments against the Enlightenment’s rationalism – the formation of a dominant and majoritarian image of thought that privileged reason, science and progress over magic and art – take on further resonance: pointing the way towards the minor philosophical tradition that this study sees as feeding into contemporary postcolonial thought as well as Deleuze’s post-continental one. This gains greater significance in light of the 1940s Caribbean surrealist movement where the shift towards immanence, creativity and a positive sense of difference is given expression within the surrealists’ philosophy, literature and art. However, bearing Melville’s Enlightenment critique in mind, I want to turn to how Deleuze’s thought draws from this minor philosophical tradition (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson) in order to move beyond the transcendent Cogito and, adding a further dimension to this debate, Hegelian dialectics.

The Cartesian dualism of thought and extension, which resonates with the magic/real split that Melville’s text draws attention to, is reformulated in Spinoza’s classic concept of God or Nature as a single substance characterized by the two attributes natura naturans and natura naturata (an intensive creative force and the created structure of physical things). In this formulation there is a strong echo of Deleuze’s later account of the actual and the virtual as the two asymmetrical sides of the real, but more than this it anticipates the concept of immanence upon which John Mullarkey’s definition of post-continental philosophy depends. For Deleuze, it is the unfortunate legacy of Platonism that transcendence has supervened on immanence: where Plato introduced ‘a new type of transcendence’, ‘a transcendence that can be exercised and situated within the field of immanence itself’, modern philosophy has simply followed suit and erected ‘a transcendence at the heart of immanence as such’ (Deleuze 1997, p. 137). So, for example, the Platonic Idea takes on a transcendent function since it stands as the pre-existing determination of the thing. In other words, the quality of the thing is differentiated not internally or immediately, but by its relation to the Idea which it realizes to varying degrees of accuracy. This of course recalls Deleuze’s comparison of Hegel and Bergson: ‘in Bergson […] the thing differs with itself first, immediately. According to Hegel, the thing differs with itself because it differs first with all that it is not’ (cited in Hardt 1993, p. 7). Accordingly, we can argue along with Deleuze that the move which is common to Plato, Descartes and Hegel is one which posits a transcendent ground as the a priori first or final cause of being: the cogito as the knowing subject who then experiences the world, or the ideal unity which is the endgame of dialectical transformation.

Philosophies of pure immanence, such as those of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, on the other hand, offer no external foundation such as Truth, God or the Subject as the basis for being. Rather, for these philosophers there is only the flow of life: ‘there are no such things as universals, there’s nothing transcendent, no Unity, subject (or object), Reason; there are only processes, sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but just processes all the same’ (Deleuze 1995, p. 145). By arguing that there is only the flow or process of life Deleuze does not mean to suggest that there is no such thing as the subject or reason, but rather that it is erroneous to view these concepts as the predetermined, fixed, and transcendent causes of being rather than as themselves created within the process of life and theref...

Table of contents

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