Literary Critics

"My own writing was born in Algeria out of a lost country of the dead father and the foreign mother."

"I never thought I was at home [in Algeria], nor that Algeria was my country, nor that I was French."

"Woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display."

"I shall speak about women’s writing about what it will do."

"The opaque is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence. (p. 191)"

"What is here is open, as much as this there. (p. 190)"

"As far as my identity is concerned, I will take care of it myself. That is, I shall not allow it to become cornered in any essence; I shall also pay attention to not mixing it into any amalgam. Rather, it does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and the fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it. (p. 192)"

"Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. (p. 190)"

"If we examine the process of "understanding" people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce. (p. 189-90)"

"Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. (p. 190)"

"I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me, without reproach for my opacity for him. To feel in solidarity with him or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him. It is not necessary to try to become the other (to become other) nor to "make" him in my image. (p. 193)"

""All this wind," said Papa Longoué, "all this wind about to come up, nothing you can do, you wait for it to come up to your hands, then your mouth, your eyes, your head. As if a man was only there to wait for the wind, to drown, yes, you understand, to drown himself for good in all this wind like the endless ocean..." -And one can't say, he went on thinking (on his haunches in front of the child), one can't say there is no obligation in life, even though here I am a helpless old body just mulling over things already done-and-gone, the land with its stories for ages and ages, yes me here so I can have this child in front of me, and look, Longoué, call him the kid, but look he has Béluse eyes a Béluse head. That's a race determined not to die. A tag end that just won't end. You figure that's just being a child--but that already is strength, that's tomorrow. This one won't do like the others, he's a Béluse, but he is like a Longoué, something will come of him, Longoué I'm telling you something will come of him, you don't know what, but still the Béluses have changed over time; and if not well then why would he come, why does he come here and not talk never talk Papa Longoué you understand, why all alone with you if there is no obligation, some malfini in the sky the eagle pulling strings, don't pull Longoué don't pull the strings, you just repeat yourself, you say: "Truth shot by like lightning," you are an old body Longoué, all that is left is memory, so OK, it would be better to puff on your pipe go no further, except why old devil why?..."

"Trees that live a long time exude mystery and magic. As if they were creating strong potions of happiness and calamity in their ripe old age, stirring together heaven and animal nature, and using these mixtures to control us and come to our aid. An herb's magic is perishable; a potion made from it can only work on bodies, be useful for love or for doing harm to others. But a tree, though more reserved in how it serves, makes understanding possible for us. Because a tree slowly reads the forest out to us, letter by letter, multiplying everywhere its depths. A tree is an entire country, and if we ask which country, we plunge immediately into the ineradicable darkness of time where we struggle to clear our way painfully through branches that hurt and scar our arms and legs indelibly."

"We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone. (p. 194)"

"The tremulous thought is not a thought out of fear, not scared thinking. It is thought that is opposed to systematic thinking. We understand the world better if we tremble with it. Because the world trembles every which way. It trembles organically and geologically. It also trembles with the climate. But the world also trembles through the relations that we have with each other."

"Having a bit of earth amounts to nothing when the earth as a whole does not belong to everyone. ("Dry Season at La Toufaille")"

"For me, the arrival is the moment where all the components of humanity ... consent to the idea that it is possible to be one and multiple at the same time; that you can be yourself and the other; that you can be the same and the different."

"Pythagore Celat went around loudly trumpeting "we" though there was not one soul who could guess what he meant by it. (beginning of "Trace of the Time Before")"

"Diversity, the quantifiable totality of every possible difference, is the motor driving universal energy, and it must be safe guarded from assimilations, from fashions passively accepted as the norm, and from standardized customs. ("Poetics," p. 30)"

"Roots make the commonality of errantry and exile, for in both instances roots are lacking. We must begin with that. ("Errantry, Exile")"

"Creolization ... is a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and in errantry. ("Poetics," p. 34)"

"It is difficult for a French Caribbean individual to be the brother, the friend, or simply the associate or fellow countryman of Fanon. Because, of all the French Caribbean intellectuals, he is the only one to have acted on his ideas…to take full responsibility for a complete break. (Reversion and Diversion," p. 25)"

"Sameness is sublimated difference; Diversity is accepted difference. ("National Literatures")"

"To move from the oral to the written is to immobilise the body, to take control (to possess it). ("Poetics")"

"All of Édouard Glissant's work, as a poet, novelist, playwright, or theoretician from the very beginning (Les Indes and Soleil de la conscience [1956], La Lézarde [1959]) has been concerned with exploring the possibilities of a language that would be fully Antillean. Such a language would be capable of writing the Antilles into history, generating a conception of time, finding a past and founding a future. It would escape the passivity associated with an imposed language of fixed forms (French) as well as the folklore traps of a language that is no longer one of material production, its vocabulary fixed because stagnant (Creole). This Antillean language would provide the means for this place and its people to relate to the world as one among equivalent entities. Carrying the work of other theorists of Caribbean self-formation, such as Fanon and Césaire, into new dimensions, Glissant sees imagination as the force that can change mentalities; relation as the process of this change; and poetics as a transformative mode of history...Glissant's intent, finally, is to realize Relation in concrete terms--in which language is made of rocks and words and in which the future can be made to open for the Antilles by beating a time other than the linear, sequential order of syntax. Verb, noun, subject, object, are not fixed in their places because, in the words of Glissant, "in Relation every subject is an object and every object a subject.""

"This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to aIl the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another-from forest to city, from story to computer-at the bow there is still sornething we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. ("The Open Boat")"

"Contemporary violence is the response societies make to the immediacy of contacts and is exacerbated by the brutality of the flash agents of Communication.' It is not all that easy to forego the comfortable expanses of time formerly allowing changes to occur imperceptibly. In cities this speed becomes concentrated, and the response explodes. These same mechanisms are at work both in cultures of intervention and in emerging cultures: New York or Lagos. In the shantytowns and ghettos of even the smallest cities the same gears engage: the violence of poverty and mud but also an unconscious and desperate rage at not "grasping" [com-prendre] the chaos of the world. Those who dominate benefit from the chaos; those who are oppressed are exasperated by it. (beginning of "Distancing, Determining")"

"The tangle of crowding memories and things forgotten" transports us, the hullabaloo hurtles, here we have landed, ludicrous and aghast at these two barriers: the swell of words of which we understand scratch, their music rains down and hurts in the back of our minds, where occasionally some of the usual ones open up and fill us with such brilliant joy (for example, when we discover that "koutla" doesn't simply mean "machete," it really means the thing that will serve as our refuge, the thing that cuts through the days and nights and allows you to believe that you will survive) and the density of the forest we look up to, daring to think that one day we'll go up there. (beginning of "Burnt-over Memories")"

"From the persistent myth of the paradise islands to the deceptive appearance of overseas departments, it seemed that the French West Indies were destined to be always in an unstable relationship with their own reality. It is as if these countries were condemned to never make contact with their true nature, since they were paralyzed by being scattered geographically and also by one of the most pernicious forms of colonization: the one by means of which a community becomes assimilated. Indeed, there are numerous opportunities that were lost by the French West Indians themselves. The cruel truth is that Guadeloupe and Martinique have undergone a long succession of periods of repression, following countless revolts since the eighteenth century more or less, and the result on each occasion has been a more visible abandonment of the collective spirit, of the common will that alone allows a people to survive as a people."

"The world's poetic force (its energy), kept alive within us, fastens itself by fleeting, delicate shivers, onto the rambling pre-science of poetry in the depths of our being. The active violence in reality distracts us from knowing it. Our obligation to "grasp" violence, and often fight it, estranges us from such live intensity, as it also freezes the shiver and disrupts pre-science. But this force never runs dry because it is its own turbulence. Poetry-thus, nonetheless, totality gathering strength-is driven by another poetic dimension that we all divine or babble within ourselves. It could well be that poetry is basically and mainly defined in this relationship of itself to nothing other than itself, of density to volatility, or the whole to the individual. (beginning of "That That")"

"In creolization, you can change, you can be one with the other, you can change with the other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself. You are not lost because you are a multiple. You are not broken apart, because you are multiple."

"Our intention in this work was to pull together all levels of experience. This piling-up is the most suitable technique for exposing a reality that is itself being scattered. Its evolution is like a repetition of a few obsessions that take root, tied to realities that keep slipping away. The intellectual journey is destined to have a geographical itinerary, through which the "intention" within the Discourse explores its space and into which it is woven."

"W is to be found the best text of ? Of the many s before the public, which one is the one to be preferred? These are questions which are pretty certain to be asked by him who is about to take up for the first time the study of that author's dramatic productions. It may and it sometimes does cause a feeling of disappointment when the answer is made—as no other answer can fairly be made—that not only is there no best edition of Shakespeare's works, but there never can be and never will be one."

"The pronouncing dictionary has not only come, but is treated with a deference to which, at the outset, it was an utter stranger. It seems as if its production must have been due in the first instance to the desire for a work of such a nature manifested by the imperfectly educated middle class, rising more and more into social prominence. The members of this body wanted somebody to tell them precisely what to say and how to say it. They did not care to exercise the right of private judgment, or, rather, they did not have sufficient faith in their own cultivation to trust it. Authority was what they were after; and when men are longing for authority on any subject, some one will be considerate enough of their welfare, and confident enough in his own sufficiency, to come forward and furnish it."

"Professor Lounsbury's name, I suppose, is most closely associated by the public with his studies in Chaucer and Shakespeare. His literary taste, however, was singularly catholic. Pope and Dryden, for example, appealed to him strongly because of their pugnacity and the keenness of their satire. Their poems he knew intimately, and he often quoted passages from them in conversation, not always accurately but rather by way of a paraphrase which gave new edge to an epigram. Of later poets the ones he read most were Byron, Browning, and Tennyson. From any one of the three, he would repeat, when in the mood for it, long stretches running to hundreds of verses."

"The appreciation which gladly recognized Chaucer as standing at the head of all living English poets never, to our knowledge, inspired a solitary disciple to place upon record the slightest particular in the story of his career. His superiority remained unchallenged during the century that followed his death. Yet no account of him on even the most insignificant scale was even attempted till after he had been in his grave almost a hundred and fifty years. Nothing could show more pointedly how alien was the spirit of the past to that of the present."

"The , the s, the , the , and the have met or succeeded one another upon British soil; and the occupation of the country by each has left ineffaceable records of itself in the tongue we use to-day. But English was to the original speech of the island. In the modern form in which we know it, it can, indeed, hardly lay claim to a higher age than five hundred years."

"It was in the that the forces which give stability and credit to a language began first to operate powerfully upon the speech employed by the great body of the people. It was in the latter half of that century that , in the strict sense of the word literature, properly begins. Numerous works had, indeed, been written between the and this period; but, with the exception of some few specimens of lyric poetry, there had been nothing produces, which, looked at from a purely literary point of view, had any reason to show for its existence. If known to the cultivated classes at all, it was probably treated with contempt; for it was certainly contemptible in execution, whatever it may have been in design. The men who, during those centuries, wrote in English, seem to have done so in most cases because they had not the knowledge or the ability to write in Latin or in French. To a very large extent, their works were translations."

"}} in the course of time became the literary autocrat of his age. He was disliked by many; but there was no one to dispute his supremacy. As he was conspicuously identified with the of the , it was inevitable that his advocacy of it and his example should affect in some measure the belief and practice of his contemporaries."

"It was the attacks connected with the controversy about the "Naval History" that more than anything else embittered ’s feelings. He had striven hard to write a full and trustworthy account of the achievements of his country upon the sea. Because he had refused to pervert what he deemed the truth to the gratification of private spite, he had been assailed with a malignity that had hardly stopped short of any species of misrepresentation. Rarely has devotion to the right met with a worse return. The reward of untiring industry, of patriotic zeal, and of conscientious examination of evidence, was little else than calumny and abuse. He felt so keenly the treatment he had received that he regretted having ever written the "Naval History" at all."

"By Shakespeare Voltaire was both attracted and repelled. As a Frenchman, trained in the strictest rules of the s, and disposed to render those rules even more rigid, he was shocked beyond measure by the irregularities, the gross improprieties, or rather indecencies, as he looked upon them, in which the greatest English dramatist had indulged with no apparent consciousness that his course was anything but perfectly proper. A man who could in all sincerity assert, as did Voltaire, that in the , all other laws, that is to say, all other beauties of the drama, are comprised, was not likely to be impressed favorably by the persistent disregard of them which Shakespeare had manifested. He shuddered furthermore at the mixture of the comic and the tragic in the same production; at the low characters which were brought upon the stage, and the low language in which they indulged; at the scenes of violence, of horror, and of carnage which were enacted in full view of the audience. Such practices ran counter to all his personal tastes and prejudices, as well as to the traditions of which he believed, or tried to believe, surpassed not only that of all modern nations, but themselves."

"Once a sign of economic power, reading is now the province of those whose time lacks market value."

"Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure."

"I think that the sense that someone else cares always helps because it is the sense of love,—at least I think it is so with you."

"Home from the lonely cities, time's wreck, and the naked woe, Home through the clean great waters where freemen's pennants blow, Home to the land men dream of, where all the nations go."

"The sweetest roamer is a boy's young heart."

"If you can’t have faith in what is held up to you for faith, you must find things to believe in yourself, for a life without faith in something is too narrow a space to live in."

"You may name a bronze statue Liberty, or a painted figure in a city hall Commerce, or a marble form in a temple Athene or Venus; but what is really there is only a representation of a single woman."

"... If to owe nothing to other men is to be original, a more original man than Swift never lived; but, with the wonderful subtlety of thought so rarely joined to the same robustness of intellect which placed his wit and philosophy on the level of Rabelais, he had the same habit as the great Frenchman of turning things inside out, and putting away decencies as if they were shows or hypocrisies. In both it led to an insufferable coarseness."

"By 1831, when Forster was 18 and Lamb 55, they had met and become friends. Lamb was then living in retirement at as a distinguished literary man. Like Leigh Hunt he would have attracted Forster because of his links with the recent and glamorous past, for Lamb had known the young Wordsworth, had known Southey and Hazlitt; Coleridge had been his 'fifty years old friend without a dissension'. ... He was a fine critic and a great essayist. His sister was a lunatic and he himself a saddened, garrulous, humorous, and gregarious bachelor who often drank too much. Drinking and gregarious gossiping suited the young Forster, and Forster suited Lamb, who treated him with a mixture of patronage, affection and reliance."