When André Schwarz-Bart set out to write Le Dernier des Justes (The Last of the Just), a few years after the end of the Second World War, he did not anticipate the success and the readership that the award of the Prix Goncourt would give it in 1959. He addressed himself first to a restricted public: that of the children of the deported who, like him, had been deprived of their history by the disappearance of their parents. “In my mind,” he explains in hindsight, “this book was not addressed to the general public. Its destination was a reserved one. I was thinking only of certain Jews of my acquaintance who had lost their families in the camps. Above all, certain young people, met in orphanages, who felt the death of their parents with a pain mingled with a strange shame, on account of what had been said to them on the matter, in one form or another.”1 Schwarz-Bart’s fiction, because it creates a personal myth in the place of a Polish Judaism that neither the author nor the orphans he addresses ever knew, can be read as the family romance of a generation, as a fantasy constructed around an interrupted genealogy. The work of memorial reformulation accomplished by the novel thus becomes a possible response to the question that haunts the children of the deported, deprived of all family transmission: What is to be done with this history that is no longer quite their own? How to recount a past in which they might recognize themselves both as French people, formed by the models of the republican school, and as the children of Polish Jewish immigrants?
The detour through the historical novel — because it serves as a substitute for memorial transmission, because it makes it possible to rewrite history out of the conjoined influences of historiographical documentation and fictional imagination — makes it possible to construct an alternative discourse around a past that, otherwise, could be judged only by criteria of value that were not its own. To imagine History, for Schwarz-Bart, is also to invent the narrative of his own history, of that of his family, to continue this “imaginary chronicle,” today lost, that constituted one of his first literary attempts and in which he had constructed “a mythical representation of [his] parents’ life in a Poland [he] knew only by hearsay”2. It is therefore a matter of transforming into narrative a past that is nothing but a lacuna, of giving voice again to these “absentees from history”3, of creating a novelistic space where, beneath the surface of the French language and references, there pierces the remanence of a Jewishness never completely inherited, and which from now on can be said only in the mode of literary reconstruction, of displacement and transfer.
Whether he evokes the Polish Jewish world — as in Le Dernier des Justes (1959) and L’Étoile du matin (The Morning Star) (2009, posthumous) — or the Caribbean universe he made his adoptive culture — as is the case in Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes (A Dish of Pork with Green Bananas) (1967) and in La Mulâtresse Solitude (A Woman Named Solitude) (1972) — André Schwarz-Bart always seems to come up against a feeling of illegitimacy, a hesitation between belonging and non-belonging, which mean that personal history, perpetually lived as that of another, can from now on be said only through processes of transformation and mediation. Of his own history, André Schwarz-Bart seems to make that of another: never passing through testimony, he recounts the experience of Jewish children during the war only behind the mask of those “he”s that are the little Ernie Lévy of Le Dernier des Justes or the Haïm of L’Étoile du matin. The history of the Other, on the other hand, becomes his own: it is as if assimilated, introjected into his own discourse, in particular in Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, where the narrator adopts certain inflections of Caribbean speech and takes up the pen in the name of the character of Mariotte. It is therefore through displacement, fiction, intertextuality, through the construction of a textual space inhabited by multiple voices, that the diction of the self and the recreation of a family continuity invented in the narrative pass. André Schwarz-Bart, a Jewish and Lorraine writer, of Yiddish mother tongue and French writing-tongue, Polish by origin and Guadeloupean by adoption, can make his writing exist only on this frontier between several places of recognition, where the “French of France” finds itself worked over, in subterranean fashion, by other linguistic and cultural influences.
One must first ask about the role played in his work by Yiddish, this mother tongue so early abandoned, which he never learned to read or write, which he renounced when he lost his parents — this tongue he evokes only rarely and which, nevertheless, through the organic fusion of its Germanic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic elements, already seems to carry within it the cultural fusion that Schwarz-Bart attempted to effect in the French language. Absent tongue, phantom tongue, lost tongue, Yiddish haunts all his writings, and its latent presence, often left unnoticed, may have contributed to the misunderstanding that accompanied the publication of each of his novels. To mishear André Schwarz-Bart is perhaps also to fail to hear this echo of the mother tongue that resonates throughout his work.
If one goes through the interviews that the author of Le Dernier des Justes granted to various journalists, if one explores the biographical details gathered by literary critics, one will find little information on the writer’s relationship to Yiddish and to French, but enough to provoke questions. In Pour relire « Le Dernier des Justes » (Rereading “The Last of the Just”), Francine Kaufmann explains, for example, that
without the war, the little Abraham Szwarcbart could have gone on growing up in this preserved district of the Pontiffroy, where the Jews lived among themselves, speaking only Yiddish […] It is at school that André learns French, as one learns a foreign language. And his first incursions into the non-Jewish world, past the invisible frontier of the rue du Pontiffroy, date back to the crisis of 1938-39.4
Then, a little further on, regarding the postwar years:
After the factory, he studies, alone, and labors fiercely to conquer the French language, which he writes more or less correctly (he learned everything from books), but which he irremediably mangles the moment he opens his mouth: his short schooling, interrupted by the war, did not allow him to prevent the turns of phrase of his mother tongue (Yiddish) from imposing themselves quite naturally, underscored by an accent difficult to conceal.5
Of André Schwarz-Bart’s relationship to his mother tongue, that is all that is known. About his life as a child, about his tongue from before writing, the author of Le Dernier des Justes very often remains mute, and it is only by the roundabout, and often concealed, paths of novelistic transfer that something of this loss manages to be said.
From the moment he finds himself separated from his tongue by the disappearance of his parents, from the moment he acquires mastery of literary French and lends himself to the game of writing, it seems to become impossible for André Schwarz-Bart to speak in his own name. To say Jewishness and the pain of being other, to say a loss that, although it is inscribed within a collective tragedy, could not fail to mark him individually, he chooses the mediation of the novel, which places something like a screen between himself and his narrative. To cease writing about Jews in order to take up the pen in the name of Black women then appears as another form of mediation: a triple mediation that transmutes reality into fiction, man into woman, Jewishness into Blackness, and which allows the narrative for the first time to unfold in the first person6. This is why one cannot radically separate André Schwarz-Bart’s “Caribbean” works from his “Jewish” works. From one novel to another, from one universe to another, bridges are thrown up; his work means to be “reversible,” he once confided to Francine Kaufmann7. And indeed, Jewish writing and Black writing seem to answer one another like two mirrors. In L’Étoile du matin, the hero, Haïm, meets in a train bound for Warsaw a young man with a Jewish mother and a Caribbean father, who calls himself “a two-hundred-percenter: a hundred percent Jewish and a hundred percent Black”8. In Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, the narrator, an old Black woman shut up in a Parisian hospice, mentions in passing the name of Moritz Lévy, a character from Le Dernier des Justes who discreetly renews the link with the previous novel. Moreover, among the residents of the hospice, there is also, as if to counterbalance the Black character of Mariotte, the Jewish character of Biquette, who bangs her head against the walls “each time the word Jew is pronounced in a way that strikes within her some memory buried in dementia”9. And Mariotte herself sometimes evokes her situation in terms that recall the extermination of the Jews, as when she speaks of the “crime of being born; and of the horror of the final absolution”10. In La Mulâtresse Solitude, finally, it is the enslavement of Africans that, in many respects, recalls the description of the concentration camps as one can read it in many survivors’ testimonies.
One can then push the comparison a little further and explore how, in the Caribbean novels, Black identity is constructed in the loss of one tongue and the adoption of another, as if in echo of the author’s personal experience. Perhaps, to fully understand what is at stake in this loss in André Schwarz-Bart’s work, one must begin by exploring the places where Yiddish is not Yiddish, where the lost tongue expresses itself by other paths, traces itself in negative between the lines of the text, revealing in roundabout fashion what is too painful to be said baldly. For if Yiddish is present, though in an astonishingly discreet manner, in Le Dernier des Justes and in L’Étoile du matin, its absence is relayed in the Caribbean novels by other lost tongues: Diola in La Mulâtresse Solitude; Creole in Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes.
In La Mulâtresse Solitude, the first experience of slavery that Bayangumay confronts is that of a prison comparable to a kind of Babel, ceaselessly fed by new arrivals “who spoke ever-new tongues”11. In the boat that takes her far from the African coasts, she remains a long while waiting, “questing for a word of her native tongue in the surge of foreign laments and cries”12. For this character, loss therefore passes first through the exile of language, which she must cease to speak, for lack of anyone with whom to share it. This tongue of childhood, unspoken and untransmitted to the following generation, this tongue that the disappearance of its speakers and of communal life tips into oblivion, strangely echoes the linguistic exile of André Schwarz-Bart, whom the separation from his own forced to abandon his mother tongue in order to adopt French.
Likewise, in Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, the relationship that Mariotte maintains with Creole can appear as a transposition of the author’s relationship to his mother tongue. Like André Schwarz-Bart’s Yiddish, Mariotte’s Creole is the tongue of ghosts, a tongue she calls back to herself only before the specter of her grandmother, come to haunt her old age. When the image of her forebear rises before the heroine, the latter’s first reflex is to speak to her in “French of France,” thereby drawing upon herself the contempt of Man Louise, who accuses her of not being her granddaughter. Mariotte then protests: “Who claims that I no longer know how to speak Creole?… What devil could have put this falsehood into your head?”13 And yet, when, the apparition having vanished, the narrator finds herself alone with her thoughts, the fear of having exiled herself from her tongue and from herself at the same time as from Martinique resurfaces:
And what if suddenly the words of my tongue were to leave me, as they had done just now, while I involuntarily remembered Man Louise in French of France?… This tongue I no longer spoke, was it not at risk of forgetting me, having become entirely… a kind of animal… a household cat of my brain… genius of the place that no longer troubled itself with my consent to enter into a trance?…14
It is as if, faced with the impossibility of formulating his own loss, Schwarz-Bart placed it in the mouths of his characters, thereby effecting a transfer that renders the pain sayable. It is indeed striking to see the extent to which the author allows himself in Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes things that he represses in his “Jewish” novels: whereas the French of the Caribbean novel is often creolized, Yiddish appears little in Le Dernier des Justes. An essential word nonetheless surges up at the very end of the novel, at the very threshold of the disappearance of the Jews and of their tongue, when the hero is about to die in a gas chamber. The narrator then evokes his death in these terms: “So it was for millions, who passed from the state of Luftmensch to that of Luft. I will not translate”15. The sentence plays on the ambiguity between the literal sense of the word luftmentsh (“man of air,” a man reduced to wind) and its real sense, the luftmentsh designating for the Jews of the Russian Empire men without work and without ties, condemned to live from day to day on small expedients. Yet, more than the word itself, more than its meaning, it is its abrupt surging-up at the end of the novel and, above all, its claimed absence of translation that renders it significant. It is through the untranslated word, henceforth empty of meaning, that the disappearance of the tongue is said.
Never, however, is the loss of Yiddish evoked in the first person; never is it expressed individually by the narrator or by a character. To be able to put an “I” upon this loss, to be able to evoke explicitly this tongue that leaves him for want of being practiced, Schwarz-Bart must pass through the character of Mariotte, replace his native Yiddish, too intimate, with Creole. What Yiddish could not do in Le Dernier des Justes, Creole accomplishes in Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes: the tongue of childhood invades the narrative, shapes it through its multiple incursions and through the way it marks French, imposing on it its rhythms, its turns of phrase, its syntax.
In Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant wrote in 1989:
We have acquired it, this French language. If Creole is our legitimate language, the French language (coming from the white Creole class) was by turns (or at the same time) granted and captured, legitimated and adopted. Creoleness, like other cultural entities elsewhere, has marked the French language with an indelible seal. We have appropriated it. We have extended the sense of certain words. We have deflected others. And metamorphosed many.16
André Schwarz-Bart obviously could not have read this manifesto before writing Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, but it seems that the manner in which he proceeds with the French language belongs, to a lesser degree, to the approach claimed by the authors of Éloge de la créolité, as if this skewed relationship to French were common to all authors for whom the writing-tongue imposes itself only at the expense of the mother tongue. Of course, this process of appropriation manifests itself more obviously in Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes than in his other novels: the use of Creole, combined with a writing that fragments and opacifies discourse, seems there to announce the recommendations of Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant, who conceive of creoleness as a way of “breaking the customary order of [the] languages, overturning their established significations”17. One nonetheless already finds markers of this dissociation in Le Dernier des Justes. Like the language of Aimé Césaire or of Édouard Glissant, André Schwarz-Bart’s French is extremely rich and mastered. It forms itself in a mixture of imitation and opposition that recalls the questions raised by Derrida in Le Monolinguisme de l’autre (Monolingualism of the Other), the impossibility of standing on equal footing within the French language combined with the impossibility of anchoring oneself in any other tongue:
The fact remains that no revolt against any discipline, no critique of the school institution, will have been able to silence what will always resemble in me something like a “last will,” the last tongue of the last word of the last will: to speak in good French, in pure French, even at the moment of attacking, in a thousand ways, all that allies itself with it and sometimes all that inhabits it. This hyperbolism (“more French than French,” more “purely French” than the purity of the purists required, even as, from the very beginning, I have been attacking purity and purification in general, and of course the “ultras” of Algeria), this intemperate and compulsive extremism, I no doubt contracted at school, yes, in the various French schools where I spent my life.18
Thus Schwarz-Bart expresses himself in a French that is his only writing-tongue, but which he sometimes approaches with a certain wariness. This, in any case, is how one can interpret the recurrence of italics in Le Dernier des Justes. The author uses them very frequently: sometimes to signal a quotation, sometimes to insert a word in a foreign tongue, at still other times, in passages of direct speech, to underscore a word on which the character lays particular emphasis; but, most often, he uses them in a way that remains difficult to interpret. It seems that these italics correspond to an other discourse, exterior to the text, which would come to superimpose itself upon it. Through this delimitation, the author interrogates the presence of the word he uses, questions its legitimacy. He distances himself from it, in a sense, and it is perhaps precisely in this setting-at-a-distance that one must seek the explanation for such a profusion of italics in André Schwarz-Bart.
On other occasions, however, he may signal an expression foreign to French, as if translated from another tongue: the gap then situates itself on an entirely different level. It is no longer a matter of a discrepancy between the author and his own words, but of a contradiction resulting from the necessity of using French words to say a foreign thought. This is how one can understand the italics in an expression like “folle du pays de Folie” (“mad from the land of Madness”)19, an expression that seems modeled on a construction common to Hebrew and Yiddish20. Likewise, and in a stranger fashion, in Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, the narrator uses in italics an expression she borrows from her mother and which, nonetheless, seems translated from Yiddish. She says thus that the pork stew she had seen her mother prepare in her childhood was intended for “her crony Raymoninque, whom she had to drop in on, by the same song-occasion, in the jail of Saint-Pierre where the fellow was sitting”21. The word “sitting,” thus set in relief by the italics, immediately underscores the strangeness of this construction: in “French of France,” one generally says of someone that he is in prison and not that he is “sitting” in prison. In Yiddish, on the other hand, the locution zitsn in tfise (to be sitting in prison) constitutes the sole way of expressing this idea. No doubt there exists in Creole an equivalent expression, which justifies its presence in the discourse of a Caribbean woman. There remains all the same the distant echo of the Yiddish tongue. An other discourse introduces itself into the French, bending the language to the demands, perhaps conjoined, of the author’s mother tongue and of the narrator’s.
A textual body inhabited by multiple voices through which the ghost of another tongue resonates, Schwarz-Bart’s French sometimes appears as if possessed. And indeed, the figure of the dybbuk, the demon of Jewish folklore generally described as a wandering soul that takes possession of a living body, seems the most appropriate image to explain the way his works are constructed in general, and Le Dernier des Justes in particular. His first novel is literally nourished by all sorts of literary works and testimonies whose voices innervate the narrative and incorporate themselves into his own writing. Accused, on the publication of the book, of having plagiarized the great Yiddish writer Mendele Moykher Sforim, André Schwarz-Bart explains himself thus:
I was not born in 1185, I did not know Hasidic Poland or Hitlerian Germany. I tried to relive all of that through readings, I took masses of handwritten notes, of which a single one, relating to a work almost of folklore and having absolutely nothing to do with my book, appeared to me three days ago in the form of a global accusation of plagiarism. One may believe me or not believe me. There remain these ten lines that more or less passed into my novel.22
He then adds that he drew very largely on the testimonies he was able to find in the works of Poliakov and Borwicz to describe the arrival at the camp: “It is not in inserting these direct testimonies that I had scruples,” he says. “On the contrary, it was when I had to invent, to continue the fiction, to relive these facts through the characters of the novel”23.
Beyond the accusation of plagiarism that provoked a scandal on the publication of Le Dernier des Justes, the choice of this writing technique, which Francine Kaufmann qualifies as innutrition, gives a specific depth to Schwarz-Bart’s writing. To say an experience he did not live, the author borrows the words of others, the words of another time, the words of witnesses and victims. These words he read, and he restores them in French, but many of them were originally written in Yiddish. Thus, although the tongue of reading, writing, and erudition is for Schwarz-Bart French, the fact that his narrative is inhabited by phantom texts necessarily leaves in it the imprint of the vanished tongue. Yiddish does not, to be sure, manifest itself directly, but it remains present beneath the narration. The incursions of Jewish tongues are therefore not rare in the novel, even if they surface only very rarely on the surface of the text.
Yiddish is the tongue of most of the characters of Le Dernier des Justes, a tongue one does not hear, but in which they speak, a tongue that imposes its modulations on the German and French they are forced to learn, as the narrator likes to recall again and again through locutions like “he proclaimed […] in Yiddish”24 or “said Ernie with his strange accent, where the fleeting vowels of Yiddish vied with the slow German palatals”25. But if Yiddish is here a phantom tongue, it is because its presence exists only in an imagined or coded manner, filtered through the French words that let only its reflection be perceived. One finds, all in all, fewer than ten Yiddish words in the whole novel, and not a single complete sentence. Even the vocabulary most intimately bound up with Jewish culture appears Frenchified: the shabes — or shabbat in Hebrew — becomes the “sabbath,” the mikve becomes “hammam,” the traditional payes that frame the faces of traditional Jews are called “cadenettes” or “papillotes,” and even the old Polish peddler is qualified by the narrator as an “Israelite,” thereby borrowing a designation that imposed itself after the French Revolution to replace the term “Jew,” judged too pejorative.
If Yiddish shows through behind the French, it seems therefore also that the words of the French language set their mark upon this Jewish culture that Schwarz-Bart set himself the task of restoring as faithfully as possible, by borrowing the words of others. For the words he borrows are not only those of the writers and witnesses who wrote in Yiddish; they are also those of their translators, who converted their ideas into the French language. This Jewish world that he had so little time to know, Schwarz-Bart imagines in French, and the use he makes of this language can then recall, in certain respects, the most explicitly autobiographical writings of Georges Perec. One can think, for example, of the preparatory notes for the writing of L’Arbre (The Tree), a genealogy never completed, in which Perec imagines his aunt’s childhood thus:
On Saturday afternoons, they put on their Shabbat clogs and their finest fineries and they went to kiss their maternal great-grandmother, who gave them a penny and a few sweets.26
In a work titled Le Deuil de l’origine (Mourning the Origin), Régine Robin cites this passage and underscores the extent to which “these little Jewish girls of the turn of the century, transformed into Berry peasant girls out of a George Sand novel (the clogs, the ‘finest’ fineries), has something irresistible, something displaced in the context of a Polish shtetl”27. If André Schwarz-Bart can recall Georges Perec, it is not so much on account of the extreme control of the language (although, in a less conscious and less playful manner, there is some of that too) as on account of this French that is, as it were, “displaced,” installed in a geography that is not its own, transfused into a world where it did not exist and which is so foreign to it that one wonders where to find the words to say it. Schwarz-Bart’s Polish Jews, clad in a “houppelande” (greatcoat) and addressing one another as “mon cher monsieur,” could easily pass, if not for “Berry peasants,” at least for the characters of a most traditional French novel.
For the literary culture of the author of Le Dernier des Justes, like that of Perec, is made of French readings, and this has repercussions on his own novels, which are all riddled with references to classical authors. One will perhaps have noticed, in a passage cited earlier from Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes where Mariotte speaks of Creole as a “household cat of [her] brain” and a “genius of the place,” the references to Baudelaire’s “Cat.” These incursions are recurrent, and from Villon to Voltaire, by way of Mme de Sévigné, Schwarz-Bart draws on the entire pantheon of French literature. In Le Dernier des Justes, one finds whole pages pastiched from Candide; elsewhere, the presence of the expression “addressed him more or less in this language”28 recalls a line of La Fontaine known to every schoolchild; one even finds an allusion to Marie-Antoinette’s famous (and apocryphal) remark when, regarding a Just Man of Zemyock, the narrator tells us that “he would prepare himself enormous potfuls of vegetable soup in which he would soak black bread, or, failing that… brioche”29.
It sometimes seems that the author compensates for the loss of Yiddish and of his culture of origin by an irreproachable mastery of the French language. Indeed, the French he uses belongs most often to a very elevated register, refined by the episodic use of the imperfect subjunctive and by a vocabulary so rich that it sometimes slides toward the recherché. The use he makes of Creole is presumably just as careful: if his interviews are to be believed, he gave meticulous attention to the restitution of “the authenticity of the language,” going so far as to solicit in this domain the participation of his wife, Simone Schwarz-Bart, of whom he says that she “knows Creole as a total language”30. Conversely, the rare words of Yiddish and Hebrew that erupt into the text seem ill-mastered, sown with errors and approximations that surprise when one compares them to the rigor the author displays when he writes in French. The codes for transcribing the Hebrew alphabet into Latin letters are, to be sure, not fixed, which authorizes certain variations from one text to another, but in André Schwarz-Bart’s case one nonetheless finds a few unusual oddities: the word lekekh (cake) is, for example, spelled “lekhech,” which presupposes a different pronunciation of the central consonant; the words vilt ir (do you want), spelled “vhilh thyrb,” are at once cut in the wrong place and laden with a host of superfluous letters; likewise, the Hebrew word tamar, which means “date,” is replaced by “tawar,” even though it is borrowed from a French edition of a novel by Mendele in which the error does not appear. Here again, how can one not think of Perec? Even setting aside the troubling coincidence that inverts the “m” to make a “w” of it — the emblematic letter of a “memory of childhood” still to come at the moment when André Schwarz-Bart was writing Le Dernier des Justes — there remains this contradiction between the perfection of the French and the errors that slip into the words in Jewish tongues31. In both authors, there is something like an impossibility of measuring oneself against Yiddish, a difficulty in approaching it in a reasoned manner: the tongue of the parents remains present, but it is damaged, mangled, as if it could not be resurrected in its totality.
The word that runs through Schwarz-Bart’s novels is therefore above all a mutilated word, a silence masked beneath the apparent eloquence of French, where what wants to be said is precisely what is not said, what remains concealed in the folds of the text. From Solitude’s stammer to the strange accent of Ernie Lévy, the word is always split, hacked, curbed, inverted; the Jewish characters and the Black characters are all misheard by others, who fail to grasp the individuality of their language, situated in the margins of their own, on the frontier between the mother tongue and the foreign tongue. If these characters fail to speak, it is because a word is expected of them that is not their own, as when Mariotte is compelled to translate herself “into pidgin”32 so that Monsieur Moreau may understand her. Faced with this impossibility of speaking, faced with the danger of language, which can go so far as to constitute a threat of death for certain characters33, it is very often silence or the cry, an absent word or a deformed word, that takes over from words. After his failed suicide, Ernie Lévy refuses to speak again and “his tongue grew heavy”34; after the pogrom that the young man from Galicia survived, his tongue becomes “like a knife in [his] mouth”35; when the mulatto woman Solitude, at once humiliated by the whites and rejected by the Blacks, finds herself alone in the world, “her mouth open[s] upon a hanging tongue” and she begins to utter “little animal cries”36. The tongue as an organ degrades at the same time as the tongue as speech, and thus becomes the sign of the impossibility of saying, of the incapacity of words to formulate certain things. From the very first page of Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, Mariotte asks herself about the pertinence of French, about the legitimacy of using the word “event” to designate what she means to describe:
What would be needed, in consequence, is a word… that unfortunately does not exist […]. I cannot employ any language other than that of the living, but I warn the phantom of the notebook that all words concerning a hospice must be drained of their blood, to the last drop.37
And, as if in echo, the Haïm of L’Étoile du matin answers her:
How to express the sky of Auschwitz? How to express one’s impressions before the heap of corpses? Or simply: a day at Auschwitz? Impossible. The French language was not made for that, but what language was? The obstacle was too high: it was a veritable obstacle course, some real, others imaginary; the imaginary of the public, the imaginary of the author.38
This discrepancy between what the writer thinks he is saying, what the language can say, and what the reader wants or is able to understand crystallizes the whole ambiguity of André Schwarz-Bart, compelled to say the world of the dead in the tongue of the living, to speak of his own in a tongue that is not theirs. If the author of Le Dernier des Justes, of Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, and of La Mulâtresse Solitude was so poorly understood on the publication of each of these novels, it is because he spoke a tongue that was no one’s. After having strung throughout all his novels this motif of identitarian and linguistic scission, after having reached as far as possible toward a language that would border on the universality of music, André Schwarz-Bart, ill understood, misheard, made the same choice as his characters: that of silence. Only L’Étoile du matin, like the echo of a voice returned from among the dead, bears witness one last time, through the character of Haïm, openly presented as a fictional double of the author, to the scar left by all this incomprehension:
Haïm had sojourned in Guyana, in Africa, and he had settled in the island Americas. He had published two or three books, long ago, and now he lived himself as a shlemiel, a man who had lost his shadow. But he had not only lost his shadow, he had also lost his self, and he was like the mulatto woman Solitude, the heroine of one of his novels, from the time when she did not exist. He was in mourning for literature, in mourning for himself. Was it the consequence of certain Parisian affairs? Without any doubt, this bruise would outlive everything. To have a spiritual family: what a privilege, what a support, what a light in daily life. Alone, he was alone, bearing the night of the world and his own chaos.39
Notes
Francine Kaufmann, “Entretien avec André Schwarz-Bart,” in Pardès, no. 6, 1987, p. 149.↩︎
Francine Kaufmann, « Le Dernier des Justes » d’André Schwarz-Bart. Genèse, structure, signification, doctoral thesis, Université de Paris X (Nanterre), 1976, p. 48.↩︎
See Michel de Certeau, L’Absent de l’histoire, Tours, Mame, coll. “Repères. Sciences humaines-idéologies,” 1973.↩︎
Francine Kaufmann, Pour relire « Le Dernier des Justes », Méridiens Klincksieck, Paris, 1986, p. 15.↩︎
Ibid., p. 17.↩︎
There is a first person in Le Dernier des Justes: the first paragraph, where the words “my friend Ernie Lévy” appear, immediately designates the narrator as homodiegetic. Yet this character, barely sketched by the possessive article, disappears almost immediately, drowned in the third-person narrative, only to reappear at the very end of the novel, without our having learned anything whatsoever about his identity. Apart from these rare indices, he has all the attributes of a heterodiegetic and omniscient narrator.↩︎
Francine Kaufmann, “André Schwarz-Bart, le Juif de nulle part,” L’Arche, no. 583, December 2006, pp. 84-89.↩︎
André Schwarz-Bart, L’Étoile du matin, Seuil, Paris, 2009, p. 234.↩︎
André Schwarz-Bart, Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, Paris, Seuil, coll. “Points,” 1996, p. 88.↩︎
Ibid., p. 43.↩︎
André Schwarz-Bart, La Mulâtresse Solitude, Paris, Seuil, coll. “Points,” 1996, p. 37.↩︎
Ibid., p. 42.↩︎
Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, op. cit., p. 48.↩︎
Ibid., p. 79.↩︎
André Schwarz-Bart, Le Dernier des Justes, Paris, Seuil, coll. “Points,” 1997, p. 424.↩︎
Jean Bernabé; Patrick Chamoiseau; Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la créolité, Gallimard, Paris, 1993, p. 46.↩︎
Éloge de la créolité, op. cit., p. 48.↩︎
Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, Paris, Galilée, 1996, pp. 81-82.↩︎
Ibid., p. 61.↩︎
It is a matter of the structure where the ellipsis points replace the same adjective (or possibly a noun) repeated twice. For example, for “mad from the land of madness,” meshuge she-be-meshuge, which can become in Yiddish meshuge fun meshuge-land, and which is roughly equivalent in French to “fou de chez fou.”↩︎
Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, op. cit., p. 114.↩︎
L’Express, no. 437, October 29, 1959, p. 31.↩︎
L’Express, no. 437, October 29, 1959, p. 31.↩︎
Le Dernier des Justes, op. cit., p. 48.↩︎
Ibid., p. 314.↩︎
Régine Robin, Le Deuil de l’origine. Une langue en trop, la langue en moins, PUV, coll. “L’Imaginaire du Texte,” 1993, p. 215.↩︎
Ibid., p. 215.↩︎
Le Dernier des Justes, op. cit., p. 318.↩︎
Ibid., p. 41.↩︎
“Interview avec Simone et André Schwarz-Bart. Sur les pas de Fanotte,” Textes, études et documents, Paris, Éditions Caribéennes; Fort-de-France, Centre universitaire Antilles-Guyane, 1979, p. 14.↩︎
On this phenomenon in Perec, see Régine Robin, Le Deuil de l’origine, op. cit.↩︎
Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, op. cit., p. 34.↩︎
This is often the case in Le Dernier des Justes where, in 1240, “death hovered over every answer of the Talmudists” (p. 15), where the wariness of the Just Man Israel is lulled by letting him think that, though a Jew, he has a “true human tongue” (p. 17), where the Jewish children of Stillenstadt are afraid to ask their way for fear that their Yiddish accent might denounce them as Jews, etc.↩︎
Le Dernier des Justes, op. cit., p. 296.↩︎
Ibid., p. 104.↩︎
La Mulâtresse Solitude, op. cit., p. 98.↩︎
Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes, op. cit., p. 12.↩︎
L’Étoile du matin, op. cit., p. 204.↩︎
Ibid., p. 203.↩︎