The Poetics of Becoming

This essay explores how the “epistemological deficiency” that characterizes the past becomes a necessary part of the historical imagination with which to portray it—that is, the problem of historical content becomes part of the narrative form through which Édouard Glissant envisions a past replete with uncertainty, based on the traces of a disastrous abolition process. His The Fourth Century (Le quatrième siècle) challenges the monological authority of French historiography and mobilizes instead a nonlinear dialogism replete with aporias and recursions. In this way, the novel stages a “search for duration” marked by a rhetoric of repetition, amplification, and juxtaposition that drives it increasingly toward a revelation of trauma. This duration, which also reveals the possibility for a divergent temporality of relation, helps to fashion the unique structure of Glissant’s “critical emplotment”: one that invites a rethinking of the present, in light of the past, to urge a divergent future.