Think Like an Archipelago by Michael Wiedorn

Author:Michael Wiedorn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

Writing toward a New World: From a New People to a New Literature

For Bernadette Cailler, part of the novelty of Sartorius lies in the fact that, as she puts it, “Sartorius transcends multiple traditions that oppose the world of the book to the world of life” (“Sartorius” 269). A look at another apparent relationship of influence, that which links William Faulkner’s Sartoris (1929) and Glissant’s Sartorius (1999), helps to illustrate more concretely how Glissant weaves together Cailler’s “worlds.” Somewhat surprisingly, the content of Faulkner’s novel Sartoris, which is mainly concerned with the past, and more particularly with the haunting absence-presence of the character of Colonel Sartoris, has very little to do with Glissant’s text. In Glissant’s novel, the name “Sartorius” is only one phase in a long progression of mutations of a name, and it represents neither the origin nor the end of this genealogy, which in fact is but one of the many that his Sartorius undertakes. As elsewhere in Glissant’s thought, the use of the name/title Sartoris proves to be a critique of the very idea of origins. In the novel Sartorius, the text’s narrator interviews a certain Joachim Sartorius on the history of his family, “For reasons that are in some way Batoutian” (Sartorius 211). The (non)explanation of the family’s genealogy that ensues traces the family line, which begins, or rather which is first invoked, with the tailor Schneider. Schneider, a denizen of Frankfurt, decides in 1518 to Latinize his name (Sartorius 174–75). He thus becomes Sartor, the progenitor (or rather, one of the progenitors) of the clan, and in true Faulknerian fashion, he is deeply concerned with the problem of establishing a foundation for his progeny (Sartorius 208). In this regard, he stands in contrast to the Batouto character Aréko, who understands time differently and who is in no way concerned with tracing lines of filiation or establishing a founding origin for future generations (Sartorius 208).

By 1705 another member of the Sartor line has his name changed to “Sartorius,” a yet more Latinate name (210). Still later, Wilhelm Sartorius, one of his descendents, decides to immigrate to the United States. There, with a brisk “OK Bill” at the immigration desk, he becomes, in a reversion to the Faulknerian spelling, “William Sartoris” (Sartorius 269). Such were the tangled and opaque origins that ended with Glissant’s character sharing the name of Faulkner’s. “I observe, or at least I suppose,” muses the narrator of Sartoris, “that this selfsame u that had been removed from his name … was put back by the writer into his family’s patronymic roughly sixty years later, from Falkner to Faulkner. U’s are imposing, just as much as o’s” (269). (Final o’s in names are, of course, the mark of the scattered Batouto line.) In this quick rumination lies, we are to assume, the entirety of the relationship between Glissant’s text and Faulkner’s. As is the case for Glissant’s following novel, Ormerod (2003), named for his friend and collaborator Beverly Ormerod, the author would have

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