Rhythms, History, and Memory in Edouard Glissant’s Le Quatrième Siècle

The past, to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for us, is, however, obsessively present. (Glissant, Caribbean Discourse 63) Tell me the past, Papa Longoue! What is the past? (Glissant, Le Quatrieme siecle 15) Does history have a rhythm? Can the movements and processes of memory be understood in terms of rhythms, repetitions, and cycles? How does one write of a horrific history of uprooting, violence, and slavery, such as that of the Caribbean? In his work, the great Martinican poet Aime Cesaire addresses this history and uses rhythm as a palliative force, a means of catharsis, and as a dynamic way of sounding history and lost memory. Cesaire uses rhythm in his attempt to recover from the depths of time the lost African-ness, the lack of which is in his view the fundamental cause of his (and his people's) neuroses. Rhythm in this sense was used by Cesaire in ways that free rhythm from the essentialist limitations that he and others have tended to impose on it as a natural and innate marker of black cultural and existential specificity. Rhythm appears in Cesaire's work as a very real force for black disalienation, and for effecting the psychological and mnemonic transformations that are the primary objectives of his entire poetic project. Edouard Glissant, Cesaire's no-less-great compatriot and key interlocutor, is similarly preoccupied with the workings of Caribbean memory and with the possibilities of using rhythm as a means of accessing that memory and of understanding and recuperating the history of Martinique. Rhythm and repetition, moreover, feature in the narrative structure of many works of Caribbean fiction, creating circles and waves of narrative rather than linear, progressive movements. In Joseph Zobel's classic novel, La Rue Cases-Negres (1950), for example, as the narrator Jose concludes the novel, he also in a sense starts it, or starts it again, by indicating that the novel the reader has just read is the one be intends to begin writing. (1) In this way, Zobel casts his novel in the kind of circular pattern that typifies oral narrative. He inscribes repetitive rhythmicity into the very structure of his work in a way that prefigures similar structures in the French Caribbean fiction that was to follow his seminal work. (2) Zobel's tentative inclination toward repetitive, rhythmic narrative structure is taken up and developed in all its complexity in Glissant's fiction, which is notoriously and willfully nonlinear in its structure and in its presentation of time and history. The fundamental aim of this essay is to engage with Glissant's use of rhythm in his novel Le Quatrieme siecle (1964) as both a means of sounding and recovering lost history and of structuring the narrative of this mnemonic process. Initial cross-references to Zobel's novel will situate Glissant's work within the context of contemporary Francophone Caribbean fiction, while the subsequent close analysis of Glissant's novel will ultimately consider what is original and idiosyncratic about Le Quatrieme siecle and how it reworks the trope of rhythm as a fundamental aspect of Caribbean poetics. (3) Le Quatrieme siecle is a classic of Caribbean fiction that has the historical sweep of epic narrative in that it traverses more than one hundred and fifty years of Martinican history, from 1788 to 1946, through the retelling of the story of the Longoue and the Beluse families, who are descended from two Africans, one a maroon, the other a plantation slave, both of whom arrived in Martinique on the same ship in 1788. Glissant's narrative is however far removed from conventional historical fiction in that its interest lies less in reordering time and events than in the mechanics of the telling of the history, in recording a Martinican notion and experience of history, and in showing how for him rime is a slippery, elusive concept that contracts and expands, losing itself at certain points in the swirling, rhythmic historical movements around which the book is shaped. …