René Maran, Forgotten Father of the Francophone Novel

In 2010, Susan Rubin Suleiman and Christie McDonald co-edited an impressive collection of essays entitled French Global: A New Approach to Literary History. In their book, Suleiman and McDonald envisioned "an approach to literary history, as defined by the multiple implications and resonances of the 'global'" (ix.). Within this global worldview close attention is paid to "transactions between and among cultures and peoples, both outside and inside France's national boundaries" which are "present in every period of literature in French" (x). The transaction between and among cultures is particularly relevant, as it is a necessary component of the study of French literature from former colonies-the broad category offrancophone literature. In particular, French Global raises questions "about the relation of the (territorial) center to its extraterritorial peripheries", as analysis of this network of relations has "become crucial to discussions of Francophonie" (xi). It is the focus on the continuing tension between the relation of the center (I. 'Hexagone) to the colonies in French Global that has brought Rene Maran's Batouala back to the global literary stage.The inclusion of an essay on Maran's 1921 novel Batouala within this collection is remarkable, as it is not a particularly well-known novel outside of francophone specialists. What is proposed within French Global is the reconsideration of this novel, and others, within a "more dynamic and more inclusive model, both spatial and temporal" that emphasizes "points of contact" (xix). This global view allows us to re-read novels such as Batouala through a lens other than the classic binary paradigm of colonizer/colonized or master/ slave. Accordingly, Suleiman and McDonald propose an analysis that echoes the work of David Damrosch in What is World Literature? Damrosch proposes a more dynamic model of literary analysis: "a more elliptical approach, to use the image of the geometric figure that is generated from two foci at once" (133). Undoubtedly, a re-examination of Maran's Batouala would certainly benefit from such a different approach. That said, though we should certainly favor a "more dynamic model of literary analysis," as engaged readers we must remain conscious of the following:We never truly cease to be ourselves as we read, and our present concerns and modes of reading will always provide one focus of our understanding, but the literature of other times and eras presents us with another focus as well, and we read in the field of force generated between these two foci, (ibid.)This dynamic approach is remarkable in that, although it permits new scholarly analysis of a somewhat forgotten text, it helps one avoid the trap of "presentism" and dealing only with contemporary literature (Suleiman and McDonald xvii). Thus, the challenge is to re-read a work such as Maran's Batouala "in relation to the globe: as world, as sphere, as a space of encounter with others and with the very idea of otherness" {ibid.).However, we might ask the question: "Why Batouala and why now?" In the introduction to A History of Literature in the Caribbean, J. Michael Dash suggests that literary history, much like contemporary history, is "inevitably conditioned by the present, by the preoccupations, intellectual fashions and crises of our own times" (309). Dash further elaborates on the variability of literary history by stating:If this proposition is valid in general terms, it is even more true in the francophone Caribbean. Part of the problem stems from the fact that we are dealing with less than two centuries of writing [... ] It is consequently, difficult to have a clear sense of what are great moments of this literature [... ] These questions are even further complicated by the fact that we are not dealing with a homogeneous corpus of literary works, {ibid.)If it is, as Dash suggests, quite difficult to pinpoint the "great moments of literature" within francophonie and its varied corpus, then one might be led to once again ask why a seemingly obscure author like Maran was included in a modern analysis of French and Francophone literature within what Suleiman and McDonald describe as "the multiple implications and resonances of the 'global'" (ix. …