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Qu'iraient faire des Antillais dans la demeure de ce planteur du Sud?1
THIS ESSAY PROPOSES TO READ FAULKNER'S Light in August through the lens of Caribbean theorist Edouard Glissant.21 will demonstrate the need to take Light in August beyond a focus on the history of the U.S. South to the transnational histories of the Plantation Americas. I will not examine Faulkner's fictions as fathering texts of Glissant's novels and theories, even though the point could be made. Indeed, countless are the fictional rewritings of Faulkner by Glissant, both thematic and structural: Faulkner's attribution of the same name to an uncle and a niece (Quentin in The Sound and the Fury'') is barely transposed in Glissant's situation of a daughter named after her father (Liberté in Le Quatrième Siècle4); Glissant's use of time-lines (Caribbean Discourse) and family trees (Le Quatrième Siècle) are obvious digestions of Faulkner's chronologies (Absalom, Absalom!5) ; Glissant's comments and explanations on his own novels (Traité du tout-monde) imitate the gloss of Faulkner's Compson Appendix, Quentin, the character remastering the story, recurs in Glissant's Mathieu; the deranged sense of time (The Sound and the Fury, Le Quatrième Siècle, La case du commandent'), the narrative mazes, and the threat of incest (Absalom, Absalom!, Caribbean Discourse)-these are all elements that would justify a rendering of Glissant's productions as Faulknerian novels. But I will not take this path. Nor will I simply invert the line of filiation and power by showing Faulkner as Glissant's inheritor, by turning the master-narrative into a slave-narrative. This is the move Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls for in her Critique of Postcolonial Reason: "A deconstructive politics of reading would acknowledge the determination as well as the imperialism and see if the magisterial texts can now be our servants, as the new magisterium constructs itself in the name of the Other.'" As Patrick O'Donnell warns us when he reads Faulkner through Morrison, such an inversion only creates a new genealogical reading which does not challenge lines of authorities as such, rather only reverses them.8 Instead, I propose that, the process of rereading and repetition happening between Glissant's and Faulkner's texts does not follow a rectilinear movement; rather, these texts infinitely rebound, recoil, and oscillate with each other, in an incessant call and response,...