Boucquey Thierry (General Editor). Encyclopedia Of World Writers. 3 volumes

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pleasures, and despite the terrors they also enact

and arouse, they create a wild, apocalyptic beauty.”

He sums up Carey as “a tribal teller of tales, whose

stories strive to articulate an indigenous Australian

mythology needed to replace the cultural narra-

tives of successive colonial masters.”

Other Works by Peter Carey

Collected Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland

Press, 1994.

The Big Bazoohley. Illustrated by Abira Ali. New York:

Henry Holt, 1995.

The Tax Inspector. New York: Vintage, 1993.

The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith: A Novel. New York:

Vintage, 1996.

30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account. Lon-

don: Bloomsbury USA, 2001.

Works about Peter Carey

Hassall, Anthony J. Dancing on Hot MacAdam: Peter

Carey’s Fiction. St. Lucia: University of Queens-

land Press, 1998.

Huggan, Graham. Peter Carey. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1997.

Woodcock, Bruce. Peter Carey. Manchester: Man-

chester University Press, 1997.

Carpentier, Alejo (1904–1980) novelist

Alejo Carpentier was born in Havana to European

parents. His father, a French architect, and his Russ-

ian mother, a medical student, had been living in

Cuba for only two years when Carpentier was born.

Carpentier’s first language was French, and the

family returned to Paris while he was still young,

so he received both his elementary and secondary

education in French schools. Nevertheless, Carpen-

tier felt very strongly attached to his Cuban roots.

All of his literature was inspired by what he felt to

be the inner spirit of the indigenous Cuban culture.

Carpentier was obsessed with music and was

particularly influenced and inspired by the experi-

mental techniques of Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky’s

ballet The Rite of Spring, which employs tribal

rhythms, awakened Carpentier to the creative re-

sources that Afro-Cuban music and culture offered

for use as raw material by avant-garde literature.

Carpentier went on to become a distinguished

musicologist, and his interest in music guided his

literary development throughout his career.

When he returned to Cuba in his early 20s, he

did not have much time to write fiction because of

his political activities. He joined the resistance

against Cuban dictator Machado and, in 1927, was

arrested. He spent seven months in jail, which

ironically gave him time to begin his first novel,

Ecue-Yamba-O! (1933), which means “God be

praised” in the language of the native Cuban reli-

gion of Lucumi. This realistic historical novel de-

picts the struggles of Africans in the new world;

however, the book also includes many scenes of

mythic and religious rituals that prefigure

MAGIC

REALISM, one of Carpentier’s key contributions to

world literature.

Carpentier was released from jail but was not al-

lowed to leave Cuba. Using forged papers, he es-

caped and returned to France, where he became

involved in surrealism and contributed frequently to

André BRETON’s journal Révolution Surréaliste. How-

ever, he later rejected the shocking absurdity of sur-

realism for a literary style that was closer to myth.

Carpentier’s historical novel, The Kingdom of

This World (1949), takes place in early 19th-cen-

tury Haiti under the rule of the Emperor Henri

Christophe, a Haitian man who became ruler of

the island after the French were overthrown. It is

based on research that Carpentier did when he vis-

ited Haiti in 1943. While The Kingdom of This

World still follows many of the conventions of tra-

ditional historical novels, in this book Carpentier

first displays his particular style of magic realism,

using historical facts as a backdrop for a narrative

filled with myth and magic.

In his collection of short stories War of Time

(1958), Carpentier used the same musical and

mythological style to tell four vaguely autobio-

graphical tales in which he explores the theme of

how individuals interact with the larger forces of

history around them. These stories examine how

everyday reality can take on mythic force. For ex-

78 Carpentier, Alejo

ample, in “The Pursuit,” which takes place in a Ha-

vana concert hall during a Beethoven symphony, a

young man listens to the music and waits to be as-

sassinated for betraying the Cuban Communist

Party to Machado’s forces. The story, which has the

plot of an espionage tale, is told in a kind of sym-

bolic montage that is itself a sort of symphony.

After the Cuban revolution, Carpentier became

an active member of Castro’s government and

continued to write lyrical novels that, most impor-

tant, saw individuals as capable of determining

their own fate through acts of everyday magic.

Other Works by Alejo Carpentier

Explosion in a Cathedral. Translated by John Stur-

rock; introduction by Timothy Brennan. Min-

neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

The Lost Steps. Translated by Harriet de Onis; intro-

duction by Timothy Brennan. Minneapolis: Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press, 2001.

A Work about Alejo Carpentier

Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto. Alejo Carpentier: The

Pilgrim at Home. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

Press, 1977.

Castellanos, Rosario (1925–1974)

diplomat, novelist, poet, short-story writer,

playwright, critic

Born in Mexico City, Rosario Castellanos grew up

in the town of Comitán, Chiapas, Mexico, close to

the Guatemalan border. She was educated at the

University of Mexico, where she eventually taught

literature, although her work as a novelist and poet

was the major source of her income. Her familiar-

ity with the lives of the Indians of Chiapas and

Guatemala caused her to focus on their plight in

many of her works.

Castellanos began her writing career as a poet,

publishing her first book of poems, Trajectory of

Dust, in 1948. She continued to write many vol-

umes of poetry, including Poetry Is Not You (1972),

which focused on human frailty, the limitations of

love, and the problems generated by social injus-

tice. Her first novel, The Nine Guardians, first ap-

peared in 1958 and was translated into English in

1970. The story tells of a seven-year-old girl who

fights the prevailing exploitation of the indigenous

(native) people, as well as social and gender preju-

dice prevalent in the 1930s in Chiapas. The Nine

Guardians won the 1958 Chiapas Prize.

Castellanos’s involvement in the arts and her ef-

forts on behalf of the Mexican feminist movement

and indigenous Mexican women led her to be a cul-

tural promoter at the Institute of Science and Arts

in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas. Her play, The Eternal

Feminine, published posthumously in 1975, was

first performed in Mexico in 1976 and is considered

among the most original and important feminist

works of literature in Latin America today.

Castellanos’s 1960 collection of short stories,

City of Kings, which focuses on the deceitful treat-

ment of the Chiapa people by white landowners,

won the Xavier Vaillaurrutia prize, and her novel,

Labors of Darkness (1962), earned the 1962 Sor

Juana Inés de la Cruz prize, the 1967 Carlos

Trouyat Prize in Letters, and the 1972 Elías

Sourasky Prize in Letters. When she accidentally

died of electrocution while serving as Mexico’s

ambassador to Israel, Rosario Castellanos was

regarded as Mexico’s major 20th-century female

novelist, a title she continues to hold.

Another Work by Rosario Castellanos

A Rosario Castellanos Reader. Translated by Maureen

Ahern et al. Austin: University of Texas Press,

1988.

A Work about Rosario Castellanos

Bonifaz Caballero, Oscar. Remembering Rosario: A

Personal Glimpse into the Life and Works of Rosario

Castellanos. Translated by Myralyn F. Allgood. Po-

tomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1990.

Castro, Rosalía de (1837–1885) poet,

novelist

Rosalía de Castro was born in Santiago de Com-

postela, a region in the northwest of Spain where

Castro, Rosalía de 79

Galician, similar to Portuguese, was the dominant

dialect. She was illegitimate, the child of Teresa de

Castro y Abadía, a Galician from a well-off family,

and José Martínez Viojo, a seminarian who even-

tually rose to become the chaplain of Iria. Castro

was raised in the countryside with a peasant family

and then “reclaimed” by her mother when she was

13. Thus, her early years gave her the opportunity

to learn the folklore and songs of Galicia, while her

adolescence introduced her to a more traditional

education typical for women of her time: learning

how to play music, draw, and speak a foreign lan-

guage.

At the age of 21, Castro married another Gali-

cian, Manuel Murguía, a dwarf who had favorably

reviewed her first book of poems, The Flower

(1857). After returning with her husband to her

native Santiago in 1859, she bore six children and

lived to bury three of them. Her life was difficult,

characterized by illness, poverty, and the frustra-

tions associated with being a woman writer in a

male-dominated society.

Although her early work is written in the more

widely read Castilian, the Spanish language, Castro

later chose to write in her beloved Galician, the

musical language in which Spanish medieval po-

etry was written. However, by the 19th century,

Galicia was a poor region that provided many of

the servants employed by wealthy Castilians, so her

work was not appreciated or read by the majority

of people. Critics now believe that writing in Gali-

cian most likely limited Castro’s audience and

postponed her current recognition as one of

Spain’s major 19th-century poets.

Rosalía de Castro was the author of four nov-

els. The first, Daughter of the Sea, was published in

1859, and the last, The First Madman, was pub-

lished in 1881, both touching on the pain experi-

enced by children. During this period she

published two volumes of poetry written in Gali-

cian, Galician Songs (1863) and New Leaves (1880),

with themes of nature, solitude, and the plight of

women and the poor. Her final volume of poems,

On the Shores of the Saar (1884), expressing the

disillusionment of adulthood, was written in

Spanish and appeared shortly before she died of

cancer.

Although Castro’s novels contributed to her

fame, her poetry established her talent and success.

As noted by Salvador de Madariaga, quoted in The

Defiant Muse: Hispanic Feminist Poets from the

Middle Ages to the Present, Castro’s poetry can be

considered “the best written in Spain in the nine-

teenth century.”

Another Work by Rosalía de Castro

Poems. Translated by Anna-Marie Aldaz and Barbara

N. Gantt. Albany: State University of New York

Press, 1991.

Works about Rosalía de Castro

Dever, Aileen. Radical Insufficiency of Human Life:

The Poetry of R. de Castro and J. A. Silva. Jeffer-

son, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2000.

Stevens, Shelley. Rosalía de Castro and the Galician

Revival. London: Tamesis Books Ltd., 1986.

Cattopadhyay, Bankim-Chandra

(Bankim Chandra Chatterji) (1838–1894)

novelist

Bankim-Chandra Cattopadhyay was born in Kan-

talpara, West Bengal, India. His father worked as a

tax collector for the government. Cattopadhyay

was the first Indian to graduate from Calcutta Uni-

versity (in 1858) at a time when only British peo-

ple were enrolled. He worked for the government

for 30 years while also writing literature. He

founded the literary magazine Bangadarsan (Mir-

ror of Bengal) in 1872 and was always very in-

volved in supporting Bengali journalism.

Cattopadhyay started to write poetry but soon

turned to the novel. His attempt at the novel was

written in Bengali and submitted for a writing

contest; it did not win and has never been pub-

lished. Cattopadhyay’s first published novel, Raj-

mohan’s Wife (1864), was written in English and is

considered to be a reworking of his earlier unpub-

lished novelette. He published numerous romance

novels, which display his ability to rewrite histori-

80 Cattopadhyay, Bankim-Chandra

cal moments within romantic and melodramatic

contexts. His development of the novel in India

had an immense impact, as he rejected the con-

ventional Sanskritized literary movement, which

supplanted Perso-Arabic words with Sanskrit ones

and developed a more Westernized approach to In-

dian themes. Western ideas, such as romance and

sensibility, were seen to be more important than

the Indian sense of duty. This shift comes out most

strongly in his depiction of women who are often

compelled to transgress convention in the pursuit

of love. Their love is tragic, however, because it can

never be fully realized. In Durgesnandini (1865),

for instance, the volatile politics between Pathans

and Mughals in 16th-century Bengal is offset by a

Pathan princess’s refusal to accept racial bound-

aries in her love. Famous for such historical novels,

Cattopadhyay is today viewed as the “father of the

Indian novel.”

Cattopadhyay is also seen as a national poet.

The patriotic poem “Vande Materam” (“I Worship

Mother”) from his novel A

nandama¯th (The Abbey

of Bliss, 1882) was adopted throughout India as its

unofficial national anthem in the early decades of

the 20th century. It was adopted into a song by an-

other famous Bengali poet Rabindranath TAGORE.

The novel is a powerful story based on the 1773 re-

sistance against Muslim and British conquerors of

India by a group of Hindu hermits.

Cattopadhyay’s work has been translated into

every major Indian language. In 1884, his novel

Bishabriksa, was translated into English for publi-

cation outside India. In 1892, the British govern-

ment awarded Cattopadhyay the title of Ray

Bahadur (Brave leader) in honor of his worldwide

literary achievements.

Another Work by Bankim C. Cattopadhyay

Krishnakanta’s Will. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions,

1962.

Cavafy, Constantine P. (1863–1933) poet

Constantine P. Cavafy was born in Alexandria,

Egypt, on April 29. He died in Alexandria on the

same date. The son of a wealthy English business-

man, he moved with his mother to England after

his father’s death in 1870. He stayed there for seven

years, until the family business folded, causing

Cavafy and his family to return to Alexandria in

poverty. During his time in England, Cavafy be-

came fluent in English and developed a love of

English literature that would ultimately influence

his decision to become a poet.

Cavafy’s first job in 1885 was as a journalist.

During this time, he began to publish a few poems

on conventional romantic themes. Eventually, he

gained steady employment and continued to write

poetry. Between 1891 and 1904, he distributed his

poetry exclusively to friends. His collected works

did not emerge until two years after his death and

did not become well known among English audi-

ences until 1952.

After his death, Cavafy’s reputation grew, and

his poetry, often referred to as disturbing yet

beautiful, began to influence other Greek poets.

His poetry is known primarily for its themes of

love and longing, as well as for its open expres-

sion of homosexuality. Often filled with a sense of

nostalgia and regret at the decay of culture and the

failure of human aspirations, his works are unsen-

timental.

Cavafy spent most of his life alone. He devel-

oped two short-lived relationships, both with men,

which shaped the sense of longing in his poems.

He also had a long-term acquaintance with the

English novelist E. M. Forster. Cavafy died of can-

cer in Alexandria. It was reported that his final ac-

tion was to draw a circle on a sheet of paper and

enclose within it a period.

Another Work by Constantine P. Cavafy

Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems

of Constantine P. Cavafy. Translated by Theoharis

Constantine Theoharis. New York: Harcourt

Brace, 2001.

A Work about Constantine P. Cavafy

Keeley, Edmund. Cavafy’s Alexandria. Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1995.

Cavafy, Constantine P. 81

Cela, Camilo José (1916–2002) novelist,

short-story writer, essayist

Camilo José Cela was born in Iria Flavia, Spain, the

eldest of seven children in a conservative upper-

middle-class home. When he was 20, the Spanish

civil war erupted and he was caught in the siege of

Madrid. The horrors he saw at that time became

the source for much of the imagery he uses in his

later novels. He joined Franco’s army and, after the

fascists’ victory, was given a number of important

literary and political positions. His work, however,

can be seen as an ironic subversion of some of the

regime’s principles.

Cela’s first novel, The Family of Pascual Duarte

(1942), has been compared to Albert CAMUS’s novel

The Stranger. The Family of Pascual Duarte tells the

story of a peasant, Pascual Duarte, who is waiting

in jail to be executed. Pascual relates, in a distant

and emotionally flat tone, a series of horrible acts

that he has committed. Cela uses this contrast to

explore existential feelings of disconnection. The

novel shows the influence of Pío BAROJA Y NESSI in

its terse style and complicated structure, and it has

inspired many imitators in modern Spanish prose.

It is also one of the precursors of OBJECTIVISMO.

Cela went on to write a number of innovative

novels that experimented with structure. San

Camilo 1936 (1969), written entirely in the second

person, is a long monologue that depicts life in

Madrid just before the outbreak of war.

In 1989, Cela won the Nobel Prize in literature.

His novels and essays walk a fine line between rep-

resenting traditional literary and political modes

and ironically undermining them. His address to

the Nobel Committee expresses his respect both

for tradition and for the need to push against its

limits: “Let us never forget that confusing proce-

dure with the rule of Law, just as observing the let-

ter rather than the spirit of the Law, always leads

to injustice which is both the source and conse-

quence of disorder.”

Another Work by Camilo José Cela

The Hive. Translated by J. M. Cohen in consultation

with Arturo Barea. New York: Noonday Press, 1990.

A Work about Camilo José Cela

Kirsner, Robert. The Novels and Travels of Camilo José

Cela. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 1964.

Celan, Paul (Paul Antschel)

(1920–1970)

poet, essayist, translator

Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel, the only child of

German-speaking Jewish parents, in Cernauti, Ro-

mania. Young Celan attended German-speaking

school and Hebrew school in his childhood. He

shared a passion for German poetry with his mother,

Fritzi Antschel, especially the ROMANTICISM of No-

valis. Celan went to Paris in 1938 to study medicine

and then to the University of Czernowitz to learn ro-

mance philology. He was particularly attracted by

the poetry of Georg TRAKL and Rainer Maria RILKE.

During World War II, Celan’s parents were killed by

the Nazis in a concentration camp. Celan was able

to survive by working in a forced labor camp until it

was liberated by Russian troops in 1943.

In 1944, Celan moved to Bucharest, Romania,

where he worked as a translator and editor for a

publishing company. In 1947, he emigrated to Vi-

enna, and the following year, he permanently set-

tled in Paris, where he taught German language

and literature at the École Normale Superieure.

Celan began writing poetry in the late 1940s to re-

late his experiences of the Holocaust. He was pub-

lished in several magazines and newspapers

throughout West Germany.

Celan gained critical recognition and acclaim in

1952 with the publication of Poppy and Memories,

a collection that thematically focused on the Holo-

caust and the Jewish experience under the Nazi

regime. The imagery in the collection is nightmar-

ish and surreal, marked by the underlying violence

of the place and time, as can be seen in “Death

Fugue,” the most famous poem in the collection:

“Black milk of morning we drink at you at dusk-

time . . ./We scoop out a grave in the sky where it

is roomy to lie.”

During the 1960s, Celan extensively translated

French poetry into German. In 1960, he was

82 Cela, Camilo José

awarded the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize for

his poetry. Celan’s mental health deteriorated rap-

idly during these years; apparently, he could not

reconcile his Jewish origins and the Holocaust ex-

perience with his love for the German language.

Although he visited Israel and frequently intro-

duced Jewish themes in his work, the memory of

his suffering and the medium of his poetic expres-

sion (German) proved to be utterly irreconcilable.

He entered a psychiatric hospital in 1965. After

being accused of plagiarism, seemingly without

grounds, Celan suffered a complete nervous break-

down. He killed himself at the age of 49.

Paul Celan made a tremendous contribution to

the German language and the expression of the

Jewish experience during and after the Holocaust.

The fragmented syntax and minimalism often

found in his verse represents the violence and the

shattered world of the Holocaust survivor. He is

widely read and studied throughout the world.

Other Works by Paul Celan

Glottal Stop: 101 Poems. Translated by Nikolai

Popov. Boston: University of New England Press,

2000.

Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Translated by

John Felsteiner. New York: Norton, 2000.

A Work about Paul Celan

Felsteiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New

Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001.

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1894–1961)

novelist

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was born Louis Ferdinand

Destouches on May 27 in Courbevoie to a work-

ing-class family. He grew up in Paris, where his

mother ran a lace shop. In 1912, he enlisted in the

army and served in World War I, where he was se-

verely wounded and left with permanent disabili-

ties. He returned to France to study medicine,

going on to become a doctor.

Céline became famous as a writer with the pub-

lication of his first novel, Journey to the End of the

Night (1932; translated 1943). Praised by right-

wing extremists, the work was largely based on Cé-

line’s own adventures: in the trenches during

World War I, running a trading post in Africa,

working in a factory in the United States, and re-

turning to Paris to practice medicine. His second

novel, Death on the Installment Plan (1936; trans-

lated 1938), which continues the protagonist’s

story from Journey to the End of the Night, was also

a critical success. Céline’s popularity stemmed

largely from the contemporary nature of his writ-

ing and its relevance to the understanding of cur-

rent events and world situations.

In the late 1930s, Céline traveled to the Soviet

Union, where he wrote the first of several notorious

anti-Semitic, pacifist pamphlets, declaring his dis-

enchantment with war. He began to focus his writ-

ing in an attempt to prevent his country from

entering World War II. After the war, Céline was

accused of having Nazi sympathies. He fled to

Germany, where he remained in exile until 1951.

In all of Céline’s works, his characters’ lives are

filled with failure, anxiety, and nihilism. He had

difficulty communicating during his life and sank

progressively into depression, madness, and rage.

His novels display this through their depictions of

giants, paraplegics, and gnomes, as well as graphic

visions of dismemberment and murder.

Céline died on July 1 of a ruptured aneurysm.

Though his works remain controversial, his attacks

against war have influenced such writers as Henry

Miller and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. His influence on

world literature stems largely from his willingness

to write about controversial subjects and his inno-

vative style (his use of first-person narrative and

slang).

Another Work by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Ballets Without Music, Without Dancers, Without Any-

thing. Translated by Thomas and Carol Chris-

tensen. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999.

A Work about Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Hewitt, Nicholas. The Life of Céline: A Critical

Biography. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999.

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 83

Césaire, Aimé (1913– ) poet, teacher,

playwright, politician

Aimé Césaire was born into a family of seven chil-

dren in Basse-Pointe, Martinique. Césaire’s father

worked as an accountant for the colonial internal-

revenue service, and his mother was a seamstress.

After earning a scholarship in 1924, Césaire left

his local elementary school to attend the Lycée

Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, the capital of Mar-

tinique. There Césaire met classmate Léon Damas,

who later contributed to

NÉGRITUDE, and instructor

Octave Manoni, whose theories of colonization

Césaire later critiqued.

The top student at Lycée Schoelcher in 1931,

Césaire earned a scholarship to Paris’s prestigious

Lycée Louis-le-Grand. There Césaire read widely,

including the works of Marx,

FREUD, and the pre-

cursors of surrealism, LAUTREAMONT and RIMBAUD.

With Léopold Sédar SENGHOR, head of the African

students, and Damas, Césaire published L’Étudiant

Noir (The Black Student) in 1934 “for all black stu-

dents, regardless of origin.” Now considered the

cofounder of négritude with Senghor, Damas

claimed that Césaire first used the word négritude

in a L’Étudiant Noir editorial. The small student

newspaper appeared five or six times during the

next two years until funding difficulties and

French authorities stopped publication.

After taking and passing entrance exams to L’É-

cole Normale Supérieure in 1935, Césaire went to

Yugoslavia with classmate Peter Guberina. A visit

to Martinska, or St. Martin’s Island, contributed

to notes which became Cahier d’un retour au pays

natal (Return to My Native Land), published in

1939, near the time Césaire became a teacher of

classical and modern literature at the Lycée

Schoelcher. Themes of black West Indian identity

run through this and subsequent works, including

Tropiques, a quarterly journal founded in 1941

with his wife Suzanne and other Martinican intel-

lectuals. Reading Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

prompted André BRETON to publish “Un grand

poète noir” in a 1943 New York–based French-

English review. This essay served as the preface to

subsequent editions of the original text.

Césaire lived in Haiti and lectured on French

poetry after the Provisional French government,

which took over in 1943, sent him there as a cul-

tural ambassador. Working in Haiti gave Césaire

enough material to write a celebratory historical

study on Haiti and his first play written for the

stage, La Tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy

of King Christophe, 1963). The play draws on the

life of Henri Christophe, one of Haiti’s earliest

leaders, and employs Shakespearean style and tone.

In 1945 Césaire became Mayor of Fort-de-

France on a Communist ticket and the following

year was the deputy for Martinique in the French

National Assembly. In response to criticism of his

critiques of French government, Césaire published

Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonial-

ism, 1950). The pamphlet critiques racist tendencies

in French government and “universal” values based

on white civilization, and it calls for political change.

Césaire continued combining literary endeav-

ors with political activism. The surrealistic style of

his poetry prompted praise from Jean-Paul

SARTRE

and criticism from Communist Party members,

who called it “decadent.” Frustrated with attitudes

and actions of the French Communist Party, which

Césaire accused of “empire building” in the Third

World in a Lettre à Maurice Thorez (Letter to

Maurice Thorez), Césaire founded the Martinican

Progressive Party in 1958.

Plays published during the 1960s caused some to

consider Césaire one of the leading black dramatists

of French expression. Une saison au Congo (A Sea-

son in the Congo, 1966) focuses on the demise of

Congolese premier Patrice Lumumba and was not

as well received by critics or audiences as Césaire’s

first play, La Tragédie du roi Christophe. Césaire’s

radical adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as

Une tempête (A Tempest, 1969) focuses on the rela-

tionship between the colonizer and the colonized

and uses modern language and three acts instead of

five. Une tempête initially generated much negative

commentary by Western critics but was well re-

ceived by international audiences when performed.

The younger generation of Martinican writers,

including Bernabé,

CHAMOISEAU, and Confiant,

84 Césaire, Aimé

disagree with Césaire’s allegiance to writing black

literature in French. As Ernest Moutoussamy re-

marks in Aimé Césaire, Député à l’Assemblée Na-

tionale, 1945–1993 (1993),“His poetic discourse is

that of a prophet, his political discourse is that of

a realist and as such makes room for compromise.”

Other Works by Aimé Césaire

Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry. Translated by

Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1983.

Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946–82. Translated by

Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Char-

lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990.

Works about Aimé Césaire

Davis, Gregson. Aimé Césaire. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1997.

Hale, Thomas, ed. Critical Perspectives on Aimé Cé-

saire. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press,

1992.

San Juan, E. Aimé Césaire: Surrealism and Revolution.

Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State Uni-

versity Press, 2000.

Chamoiseau, Patrick (1953– ) nonfiction

and fiction writer

Patrick Chamoiseau was born in Fort-de-France,

Martinique. Educated as a lawyer in Martinique

and France, Chamoiseau worked as a full-time

probation officer for 15 years. In an interview with

James Ferguson, Chamoiseau said, “It sounds

terrible, but understanding these people’s experi-

ences has helped me hugely as a writer, as it has al-

lowed me to look into aspects of life that you

wouldn’t normally encounter.” By writing eve-

nings, weekends, and holidays, Chamoiseau man-

aged to publish prolifically—novels, memoirs,

literary criticism, and a collection of short stories.

Chamoiseau sees himself as a “word scratcher”

—novelist or writer—who communicates tradi-

tions of créolité. To Chamoiseau, “Créolité tries to

restore to the modern-day writer that status of sto-

ryteller by breaking down the barrier between the

written and spoken French and Creole. If a writer

can use Creole, then he’s much more in touch with

the thoughts and expressions of ordinary people.”

Chamoiseau’s own multivocal novels explore

sociolinguistic realities by juxtaposing French and

Creole, producing what Pierre Pinalie calls

“Fréole,” a nonspoken, partially invented, and play-

ful language. In his first published novel,

Chronique des sept misères (Chronicle of the Seven

Sorrows, 1986), he examines the lives and stories of

Martinican workers. His second novel, Solibo Mag-

nifique (Solibo Magnificent, 1988), a murder sus-

pense story, allegorizes the Creole oral culture.

Themes of slavery, class, and colonialism run

through Chamoiseau’s fictional works.

Inspired by Edouard Glissant’s Discours Antil-

lais, Chamoiseau collaborated with Raphaël Con-

fiant and Jean Bernabé on “Éloge de la Créolité.”

Published in 1989, the first sentence reads, “Nei-

ther Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we pro-

claim ourselves Creoles.” The literary manifesto

sparked the French-Antillean Créolité movement

by challenging many ideas proposed by another

Martinican writer, Aimé

CÉSAIRE, including the

NÉGRITUDE literary movement.

“Éloge de la Créolité” generated much contro-

versy, but it was the novel Texaco, published in

French in 1992, that more staunchly positioned

Chamoiseau as an exceptionally talented, interna-

tionally significant writer. In Tex aco, the character

Marie-Sophie Laborieux tells the history of the vil-

lage of Texaco to save it from an urban planner’s

intended alterations. Texaco won France’s presti-

gious Prix Goncourt the year it was published,

prompting the translation of a number of

Chamoiseau’s works into multiple languages.

Apart from novels, Chamoiseau has published

two autobiographical narratives on his childhood

in Fort-de-France: Antan d’enfance (Childhood,

1993) and Chemin-d’école (School Days, 1994).

Antan d’enfance explores Chamoiseau’s magical

experience of childhood and foregrounds his

mother, who raised five children amidst poverty.

The sequel Chemin-d’école introduces readers to

Chamoiseau’s Francophile and Africanist teachers,

Chamoiseau, Patrick 85

as well as the imaginative Big Bellybutton, who

tells fantastical stories. Like Chamoiseau’s other

works, Chemin-d’école received accolades: “Imagi-

native and moving,” said the Washington Post.

In the 1999 afterword to the English translation

of the Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, Linda

Coverdale asserted, “Chamoiseau is a free-range

writer who tries to keep his language ‘open’ so that

readers will feel its humble, questing flexibility, a

kind of remarkable mongrelism that proves perfect

for the task at hand: presenting a deftly self-con-

scious form of Creoleness in this chronicle of

‘mouth-memory’ telling stories to a word scratcher.”

Other Works by Patrick Chamoiseau

Creole Folktales. New York: New Press, 1994.

Seven Dreams of Elmira: A Tale of Martinique.

Nashville, Tenn.: St. Albans, 2001.

Strange Words. London: Granta Books, 1998.

Works about Patrick Chamoiseau

Milne, Lorna.“From Creolite to Diversalite: The Post-

colonial Subject in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Tex aco.”

In Paul Gifford and Johnnie Gratton, eds., Subject

Matters: Subject and Self in French Literature from

Descartes to the Present. Amsterdam, Netherlands:

Rodopi, 2000.

———. “Sex, Gender and the Right to Write: Patrick

Chamoiseau and the Erotics of Colonialism.”

Paragraph: The Journal of the Modern Critical The-

ory Group 24, no. 3 (2001): 59–75.

Shelly, Sharon L.“Addressing Linguistic and Cultural

Diversity with Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chemin-d’é-

cole.” French Review: Journal of the American As-

sociation of Teachers of French 75, no. 1 (October

2001): 112–26.

Char, René (1907–1988) poet

One of the early surrealists, René Char was born in

Provence and educated at the University in Aix. A

controversial figure, he had a great many admirers

and an equal number of detractors. As a writer,

Char was a key figure in the surrealist movement,

from which he later branched off to pursue his

own unique direction. His poetry was marked by

its extreme economy of language. As a political fig-

ure, he was very active in the French Resistance

movement.

Char was most deeply affected and inspired by

his experience as the leader of a resistance group in

Provence during World War II. He understood the

tragic nature of war and the difficult attempts of

humanity to achieve freedom. These themes are re-

flected in his works, such as the poems in his col-

lection Hypnos Waking (1956). Unlike the majority

of his contemporaries, however, Char does not

focus on the disillusionment and despair inherent

in war. Instead, he is more concerned with human-

ity’s capacity to hope and to love. What bothered

him most was immobility, the lack of change that

allowed for the acceptance of the status quo.

Char’s major contribution to world literature

stems from his use of the written word as a means of

bringing about positive solutions to social change.

In his introduction to Hypnos Waking, Jackson

Matthews say that Char “has faced the difficult con-

ditions of human freedom, and understood the role

of the imagination in the life of man.”

Other Works by René Char

Leaves of Hypnos. Translated by Cid Corman. New

York: Grossman, 1973.

Poems of René Char. Translated and annotated by

Mary Ann Caws and Jonathan Griffin. Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976.

Works about René Char

Caws, Mary Ann. René Char. Boston: Twayne, 1977.

Matthews, Jackson. “Introduction.” In René Char,

Hypnos Waking: Poems and Prose. New York: Ran-

dom House, 1956.

Piore, Nancy Kline. Lightning: The Poetry of René Char.

Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981.

Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte

(1768–1848) novelist, nonfiction writer

François-René de Chateaubriand and Jean-An-

thelme Brillat-Savarin once met at a restaurant to

86 Char, René

celebrate the publication of Chateaubriand’s The

Genius of Christianity. The chef surprised the din-

ers by already having prepared a new recipe and

named it in honor of the author, thus giving birth

to the famous Chateaubriand steak.

Chateaubriand was born to nobility, and he

grew up in the castle of Combourg, his family’s

isolated estate in Brittany. His world was devas-

tated by the French Revolution, which forced him

into exile. An avid adventurer with a great inter-

est in American Indians, Chateaubriand visited

the United States in 1791 to do research for a

book on the massacre of the Natchez and to

search for the Northwest Passage. However, his

journey took him only as far as Niagara Falls, at

which point he returned briefly to France before

becoming an émigré and living in England until

1800. While there, Chateaubriand decided to pur-

sue a career as a writer and published his first

book, Essai historique, politique, et moral sur les

révolutions anciennes et modernes (Historical, Po-

litical, and Moral Essays on the Ancient and Mod-

ern Revolutions, 1797). The publication of his

book The Genius of Christianity (1802; translated

1856), with its frank and honest treatment of its

subject matter, brought Chateaubriand’s name to

the forefront of French literature. In spite of his

upper-class background, Chateaubriand worked

diligently during the French Revolution to eradi-

cate religious barriers, which he viewed as directly

responsible for the severe restrictions levied

against the poor and the uneducated. The Genius

of Christianity was his attempt to restore a lost re-

ligion to his people. His The Martyrs (1809; trans-

lated 1812) celebrates Christianity’s triumph over

paganism.

In addition, two tragic love stories, the unfin-

ished Atala (1801) and René (1802), stand

as prime examples of the ways in which

Chateaubriand utilized the melancholy and ex-

otic descriptions of nature and the language of

nostalgia that came to characterize the

ROMANTIC

movement in French literature. Other works that

fall under this style of writing include Les Aven-

tures du dernier des Abencérages (The Adventures of

the Last of the Abencérages, 1826), a romance novel

set in Spain.

In addition to his writing career, Chateaubriand

was also politically active. He was appointed by

Napoleon in 1803 as secretary of the legation to

Rome and promoted, in 1804, as minister to

Valaise. However, on hearing of the execution of

the duc d’Enghien, he became outraged and re-

signed from his position. He channeled his anger

into becoming a bitter anti-Bonapartist, going on

to support the Bourbons. He served as ambassador

to London in 1822 and as the minister of foreign

affairs from 1823 to 1824.

Chateaubriand abandoned political activity in

1830 to devote the final years of his life to com-

posing his own personal history, which he col-

lected as Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb (1849).

Although he was often accused of plagiarism and

exaggeration by scholars, particularly in his pur-

portedly factual travel narratives, his richly de-

tailed and evocative language greatly enhanced

and influenced the romantic movement. In re-

sponse to this criticism, Chateaubriand once said,

“The original writer is not he who refrains from

imitating others, but he who can be imitated by

none.”

Another Work by François-René vicomte

de Chateaubriand

Travels in America. Translated by Richard Switzer,

Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1969.

Works about François-René vicomte

de Chateaubriand

Painter, George Duncan. Chateaubriand: A Biography.

New York: Knopf, 1978.

Smethurst, Colin. Chateaubriand, Atala and René.

London: Grant and Cutler, 1995.

Chatterjee, Upamanyu (1959– )

novelist

Upamanyu Chatterjee was born in India. He

comes from a family of civil servants, and after

completing a degree in English Literature, he

Chatterjee, Upamanyu 87