3 - Novels of time and space: La Lézarde, Le quatrième siècle

Summary

Je me suis toujours efforcé d'aller dans I'âme des choses

… Pas de monstres et pas de héros!

Gustave Flaubert, 31 December 1875

Nothing is perhaps more fascinating than to observe the way in which, in some artists, a certain mental disposition, tendencies in sensibility, a repertoire of images, begin to acquire a kind of definitive realization. The next phase of Glissant's literary development is of great importance because we sense that the governing impulses in the early writing are beginning to produce highly original work. His tendency to penetrate, to use the words of Gustave Flaubert, ‘into the soul of things’, to move from graphic detail to an intense concentration on associations that go beyond the realm of appearances, lead to spectacular success with prose fiction in the late fifties and early sixties.

These years saw Glissant produce two moving and original meditations in prose on Caribbean landscape and history. His first novel, La Lézarde (‘The Ripening’), won the prestigious Prix Renaudot in 1958 and his second work of fiction, Le quatrième siècle (‘The Fourth Century’), the Prix Charles Veillon in 1964. These major works concentrate on Martinique and the fates of a group of characters, more specifically of two families through whom the diverse aspects of a community's experience could be probed and articulated. Given the official silence in departmentalised Martinique about the past, and the self-inflicted amnesia among the Martiniquan people, these novels proposed new and disturbing insights into the perception of space and the importance of memory in that community.