1 - Beings Without Borders

Summary

Mûr à crever and Ultravocal

To live in the Caribbean is essentially to manage one's anxiety.

—Jean-Claude Fignolé

Frankétienne's Mûr à crever is in many respects the most accessible—the most traditional, it might be argued—of all the Spiralist prose works. With an articulation of the Spiralist perspective woven into the very fabric of the narration, the novel offers at once the most explicit delineation of the Spiralist aesthetic and, by that very fact, the most atypical illustration of the creative practices it describes. The basic elements of the story are straightforward and uncomplicated, and the narrative trajectory of a central character is presented with relative coherence. In this, Mûr à crever would seem to depart from the chaotic fictional universes I have described above. Despite its ostensible conventionality, however, this 1968 novel provides an initial example of real creative possibilities for narrativizing a Spiralist aesthetic—the first hints of the configurative strategies that appear more dramatically in Frankétienne's subsequent writings as well as in the works of Fignolé and Philoctète. Frankétienne himself regarded Mûr à crever as something of a template for his future works—a sort of pre-text that would serve as the point of departure from which to introduce his provocative aesthetic. He explains as much in a 1992 interview:

As it described the journey, both real and fictional, of a character searching for his double, Mûr à crever was also an attempt at renewing the novel genre. […]