Laurent Cantet by Martin O'Shaughnessy

Laurent Cantet by Martin O'Shaughnessy

Author:Martin O'Shaughnessy [O'Shaughnessy, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780719091513
Goodreads: 26265739
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-04-01T00:00:00+00:00


From novel to film

Laferrière was born in Port-au-Prince in 1953 and began his career as a journalist in the Haiti of the Duvalier dictatorship. Following the murder of a fellow journalist, he went into exile and has since moved between Miami, New York and Montreal. He is what one might call an American writer rather than simply an exilic one, as long as one takes American to refer to the Americas and not to the United States. He came to literary fame with the publication of his first novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired; 1985), a work whose self-consciously inflammatory title points to the decidedly edgy subject matter of the writings and his willingness to engage with inter-racial dynamics while mobilising and subverting stereotypes. La Chair du maître works on similar ground. An episodic, multi-character novel, it narrates a series of often sexual encounters between blacks and whites and Haitians and foreigners. These are never simply erotic, although they are almost always that: rather, the flow of desire is used to highlight and subvert uneven power dynamics. In a country where a gulf separates rich and poor, sex can break down barriers and brings those who would not normally interact into intimate collision. If this bridging capacity might seem potentially utopian, one should underscore how, in Laferrière’s work, sex and domination are too tightly entwined for the former ever to exist beyond the grasp of the latter. However, the novel does suggest that, in a country where the poor have so little, sex may be empowering, desire a tool for revenge, and the poor person’s body a credit card (Laferrière, 2000: 16).

Cantet came to Laferrière by chance. His parents, who are members of a non-governmental organisation, often went to Haiti for humanitarian work. Having gone to visit them, he found himself somewhere that other westerners were almost all engaged in aid work. He felt profoundly out of place, almost as if he were one of his own characters who simply did not fit in. At the airport on his way home, wanting to get closer to Haitian reality, he looked for a novel by a Haitian novelist, found La Chair du maître and read it on the plane. Its capacity to straddle the deeply intimate and the overarchingly social spoke immediately to his own concerns (Morice, 2005). He would read other Laferrière works but his film would rely essentially on La Chair du maître and especially on some of the stories contained in its loose narrative. This turn to adaptation raises a series of questions, some general, others more specific.

The last ten years have seen a tremendous renewal of the field of adaptation studies with important works by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Stam and Raengo, 2004, 2005; Stam, 2005), Linda Hutcheon (2006) and others. Such works have moved on from regressive analyses of adaptation in terms of (an impossible) fidelity to literary texts and the



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