From Aesthetics to Allegory:

and Interdisciplinary Translation

Justin Izzo

Emily Apter devotes two chapters of The Translation Zone -

ining creolized modes of communication and translational language as well as the ways crolit
allows for a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of literary history.1

La migration des curs that draws provocative conclu-

sions about genre and narrative in the creole -

creates and thematizes its own literary conditions of possibility by pointing to the way in which

ability to narrativize its literariness and its commitment to the transcoding of language politics into
narrative structure.2
plot and narrative, the creole novel also tells the story of its status as literature, and I argue that for

1 Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 160, 190.
2 Ibid., 190.

small axe 42 November 2013 DOI 10.1215/07990537-2378937 Small Axe, Inc.

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solder together without effecting a seamless integration that would result in their indistinguishability.

Lalle
des soupirs, draws on and moves between different modes of writing (the treatise, the novel, and

novel.3
it advocates powerfully for the ethnographic as a representational model for Caribbean literature.
-

-
rative, the creole novel appears to embed theory within practice in such a way that the former term

and literature slip deftly from political and aesthetic theory into readily consumable narrative form.

here signals that translation also accounts for the conversion of ethnographic modes of writing and
Lalle des soupirs, aesthetic
debates on Creole language politics can be translated into the novel-form via considerations of how

Le ngre et lamiral
on his home island during World War II and contains a humorous cameo appearance by anthro-

1941.4

of representation, bent as they are on burrowing into the cultural minutiae of everyday life, and for
the ways the ethnographic writ large might be brought into the realm of the creole novel. These
broad concerns are echoed in Eloge de la crolit, the now-canonical treatise on creole aesthetics

Lalle des soupirs

Islands and Exiles: The

Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 5859.
Le ngre et lamiral
Tristes Tropiques
Penguin, 1992), 2936.
 42 Justin Izzo | 91

approaches this problem by translating the aesthetic precepts set out in Eloge into a creole novel
that ethnographically allegorizes its own conditions of production.

Note that holism, as they refer to it here, does not imply a totalizing account of another culture

Lalle des soupirs -

Eloge

racial categoriesnot to mention disparate racial(ized) ideologies in a newly postcolonial context

The 1959 riots thus do not so much happen in the novel as they are written into existence via an
-

conventional sense as an organizing or totalizing narrative perspective.9

Lalle des soupirs as offering an

Lalle des soupirs AS. All translations from this

novel are my own.
Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences, 2nd ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2425.
7 Ibid., 23.

Georges Placide, Les meutes de dcembre 1959 en Martinique: Un repre historique

operating in the novel. I would suggest that this aesthetic is predicated more on demonstrating how Creole literary pro-
Crolit and
Lalle des soupirs, French Review 73, no. 3 (1999): 30111, 303.
|

for a mode of expression capable of capturing the linguistic, cultural, and racial characteristics of

you!, exclaims Chartier at one point [AS

coexisting with the decidedly dystopian and disastrous cultural present of the text. In less abstract

10
and it

As James Clifford has reminded us, allegory as a rhetorical device encourages us to observe

representation. Pointing out that ethnographic writing is allegorical in both its form and content,
Clifford sees stories and storytelling as vehicles for the production and transmission of ethno-

11

same conceptual well when they highlight how allegory draws special attention to the narrative
character of cultural representations.12 If the ethnographic approaches literature and storytelling
via allegory, though, can we not claim that the reverse also holds true? In the francophone Carib-
bean context especially this seems to be the case, as novelists have narrativized creole cultural

10 These literary issues have properly anthropological antecedents, as ethnographers in the Caribbean have sought to

Ainsi
parla loncle
Le vaudou hatien (Paris: Gallimard, 1958).
-

Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe (Paris: Gallimard/UNESCO,

1955).
11 Writing Culture: The Poetics
and Politics of Ethnography
12 Ibid., 100 (emphasis in original).
 42 Justin Izzo | 93

representations in terms of strategies we can recognize as anthropological. To mention only several

13

a similar move in Texaco

14
In Hadriana dans tous mes rves
playfully constructs and defends scholarly ethnographic propositions as explanations for the
prevalence of zomberie 15
If, as Clifford argues, allegory allows

ethnographic understood in its broadest sense.

Lalle des soupirs both allegorizes debates on the

aesthetic possibilities it sets out to describe. This is why we can observe a relationship between
-

and accounts of a given event or situation (some more plausible or magically realist than others),

reason she does not share their low extraction. Illiterate, she brandishes a slip of paper she claims

code noir she had

the contrary to whites for whom the straight line is the shortest distance between two points, other
versions of this episode are also worthy of being heard (AS
what these other versions could be, but it is enough for our purposes to observe that he carefully
explains how a creole method of approaching storytelling might reshape what we can refer to as a

13

Ladieu au voyage: Lethnologie franaise entre science et littrature (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 438.
14 Texaco
Ecrire en pays domin
15 Hadriana dans tous mes rves (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 13443.
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literary culture differs from that which is easily recognizable to white Europeans, represents only
Lalle des soupirs is also in implicit dialogue with a

to outline at the end of the 1980s in their now famous treatise, Eloge de la crolit. In this text

that what amounts to Caribbean literary production is a form of writing that neither calls upon nor
16
-

has characterized writing from and about the francophone Caribbean (EC, 7587) and, second,
with overcoming this exteriority by dialectically writing it into a vision of postcolonial literary history
that would account for the contemporary lived realities of creoleness as a nontotalizable identity
(EC, 82, 89). With its focus on the related categories of lived experience and everyday life, the text
in many ways offers ethnographic solutions to aesthetic problems, since the aestheticization of
creoleness is treated here as a question to be lived more than as one that would possess a cor-
responding literary solution of some sort (EC
Eloge already seems to point to how creoleness as a problem for art must
be translated into lived experience, a crucial translational idea to which we will return below. Above

determines the patterns and structure of the imaginary. To perceive our existence is to perceive
us in the context of our history, of our daily lives, of our reality (EC, 100).17

ourselves (EC
(namely, ethnographic) ways of perceiving, interacting with, and accounting for the complexities of
Lalle des soupirs
debt, I suggest, because it translates these tenets of Eloge
the creole novel.

16 Eloge de la crolit / In Praise of Creoleness, bilingual ed.,

EC. Writing about Edouard

Eloge in its openness and resis-

Eloge

Textual Practice
Texaco, Small Axe, no. 36

The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 1025.
17 The authors do go on to state that these realities ought not to be described ethnographically (EC, 101), however, as the
 42 Justin Izzo | 95

This passage from a theory of creole aesthetics to the literary praxis of the creole novel (which,
as we will see, allegorizes this process in turn) also sets in motion a form of translation between
ethnography and literature. Ethnography is particularly amenable to translation because as a genre
it already represents a sort of conversion from the rich messiness of everyday practices, beliefs,
discourses, and struggles to the polished ethnographic text as organized by the anthropologist, who
appears as a translator in his or her own right. As Lawrence Venuti puts it, translation is scandal-
ousbut productively sosince it unavoidably creates new practices of reading and writing as
18

a concurrent postulating of the translational relationship between ethnography and literature, a

relationship that endows Lalle des soupirs with its generic and representational power.
-
ing in translational and disciplinary free play, they are able to set in motion ethnographic thought

world)19 -

is an outlier of sorts, since no one in the proletarian neighborhood of Terres-Sainville, where the

style and, by extension, what he perceives as the defects inherent to all hitherto existing poetry in

poets prefer the pure air of nature, how should I put it, untouched, yes, untouched by man, rather
than diving into the foulness of everyday life (AS, 113). On the one hand, Chartier indicts what he

out that poetry is largely unconcerned with the social drama of everyday life. Poetic language, it

18 See Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference

19 Eloge, Negritude represents one form of literary exteriority among others (EC

Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 15, no. 1

(2011): 20.
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untranslatable, insofar as it cannot be converted into a language-based account of lived experi-

Cahier dun retour au pays natal

AS

a certain excess of the reality of island life. It is the disproportion between this permanent excess
AS
-

disproportion and dmesure

AS, 110). What these

Later in the novel, the two characters continue their discussion, and Chartier begins to lay out
 42 Justin Izzo | 97

20
Chartier

a hundred or two hundred pages on his deeds and actions. Or if one manages to do it, it comes at
AS

Chartier, already distended and spilling over its own representative boundaries. Jean provocatively
replies that le ngre must be nothing but a literary vellitaire, then, since he cannot constitute a hero
strong willed enough to hold a novel together. Chartier corrects him by replying that anyone and

to scratch the surface of everyday life to realize that everyone here is the product of an incredible
sum of madnesses, of intermingled legends, of unheard-of biological and social heritages (AS,

creole literary hero is also in certain respects a cultural construct, the repository of any number

because of the histories of colonization, slavery, indentured labor, and migration that comprise the

form. To write an ordinary creole character with a view toward representing everyday life is to tap
into a history and ontology of the cultural present that weighs far too heavily to be treated as mere
contextualization and that demands to be dealt with via a literary form capable of approaching and
moving beyond the surface of everyday life.

of reality without pretending to be able to exhaust it. We need to build the Creole novel with the

houses (AS

patches of the social existence of ordinary human beings whose lives are sewn together in such
a way that the seams are always intentionally left showing. This is a realism that is at once up to

creole culture in any simplistically holistic manner. Incredibly enough, entrenched as he is in his

20

Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 1 (1997):

1516.
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around him stems from his awareness that his poetic rhetoric does not measure up to the excs

the same time too simple and too pure, or rather they were superior to their own personal history

-
tions or beliefs, weigh more heavily than their meager selves (AS

story comes from the fact that he refuses to choose from among all these heroic points of view.

-
tion of the Creole language (which Chartier refers to as a verbal elixir [AS, 239]), the text is inter-

Chartier near the end of the novel that he will never stray from the poetic word, we as readers come
Lalle des soupirs is precisely the novel he could have written had

Since we can read Lalle des soupirs as offering an ethnographic allegory of its own produc-

-
 42 Justin Izzo | 99

bk (white creole) community on the island. Each of these characters has her or his own life story

Lalle des soupirs

and because it actually enacts the terms of this debate in the very form and narrative organization
of the novel. Additionally, the text is in dialogue (insofar as all translation is necessarily dialogic, as

and harmony with the intentio of an original)21

Eloge and

creole hybridity and mtissage in the francophone Caribbean imaginary. These ethnographic rep-
resentations, which lead the novel deeper into a narrativization of everyday life, also lead the novel
beyond itself into a metatextual allegory that relies upon the inherent suppleness and translatability

translatability is part and parcel of what I have called interdisciplinary translation in the novel. To
conceive of translation as mobilizing various disciplinary logics and modes of representation has

its entrance into and reformulation of literary history and literary modernity,22 then the concept of
interdisciplinary translation encourages us to observe how this provocative form of narrativization

with extraliterary strategies of perception and representational modalities. Second, and relatedly, to

more than creatively and playfully experiment with new conceptions of language politics. Allegory
in the creole novel thus allows for and facilitates the mutual translatability of the ethnographic, the

21

22 See Apter, Translation Zone, 18082, 18990.