CONDÉ'S TRIALS OF THE SPIRIT

Romanic Review, May-Nov 2003 by Dayan, Joan

In his second edition of the Essay on Human Understanding (1694), John Locke added a section on personal identity that caused numerous theological disputes. In what, Locke asked, lies that self that makes a human a person? He concluded that sameness of person is indifferent to sameness of body. It did not matter, he argued, what the frontispiece was, the shape or structure, for person is a forensic term, and its continuity over time lies in consciousness. Edward Stillingfleet, then Bishop of Worcester, wrote a series of letters condemning Locke's doctrine regarding personality and personal identity, since he argued, it was inconsistent with the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. "My idea of personal identity," Locke replied, "makes the same body not to be necessary to making the same person, either here or after death; and even in this life the particles of the bodies of the same persons change every moment, and there is no such identity in the body as in the person."

Can matter think? If God can add thought to persons, then He can also "super-add" the thinking principle to inert matter. What I would call Locke's thought is a limb argument, his obsession with considering that consciousness could as easily be in our little finger as in our mind, helps us to test the connection between the set of practices in the Caribbean associated with the sacred, literal, and metaphorical and what we might call the uses of ritual-not exactly the underside of the sacred, but its haunting. How did rituals of belief redefine matter and spirit, persons and property in the Americas?

Locke describes the "self" as "that conscious thinking thing, whether substance made up of (whether spiritual or material, simple or compounded, it matters not)." And here's his example. If you allow a piece of body, the little finger, for example, to depart from the whole, carrying consciousness with it, "it is evident the little finger would be the person; and self then would have nothing to do with the rest of the body." What kind of metamorphoses would this supposition inspire in the colonies? If a piece of body could carry mind along with it, then we are dealing with a world in which the meaning of mind and matter, once rendered in codes of law, would be reconfigured as the logic of punishment.

The stories that Condé tells are tied up with such a haunting: "whether spiritual or material ... it matters not." The vestigial remnants of bodies return to confound the legal categories of persons and property. Her refutation of transcendence, her emphasis on the materiality that attaches itself to spirit as well as to body, ordains in the least expected of places the convertibility of the heavenly and the earthly domain. The legal idiom of possession, especially in the case of human chattels that could be passed around, damaged, or consumed encouraged novel transactions between physical organisms and animated spirits. This marking of perishables, consumed by use, says something unique about the sober intelligence of ritual.

What does the obsession with matter, the disavowal of innate ideas-in contrast with the Cartesian doctrine that the soul always thinks-have, you might ask, to do with Condé's work? What would belief be like if it were as absolute, as real as a fist to the stomach? If it were as natural, as concretely held as the sense of touch? What, then, are the exigencies of spiritual work? Doesn't "spirit" itself have to be redefined, or rather held in suspension as St. Paul exacts in 2 Corinthians: "I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven-whether in the body or out of the body I do not know." It seems to me that the study of Caribbean literature has been blunted by a too-general approach to the nature of divinity, religious sentiment, and embodiment. How are we to delimit the difference between body and spirit? What is the nature of what-in Haitian ritual, especially-came to be nothing less than a militant consecration?

These questions occupy me greatly. As I have come to sec, we cannot separate the enchanted object from the wreckage that accompanies it. Condé has understood and come to claim, as has no other writer in the French Caribbean-unless we return to Marie Chauvet in Haiti-the way intangibles such as love, spirit, or consciousness are thinglike and their thinglikeness is of their very essence. In her later work, in particular, she is committed to agnosticism about the ultimate nature of mind and matter. She has no illusions about the extent of human knowledge.

Since my first reading, little over a month ago, Célanire cou-coupé has possessed me. I don't take that word lightly. This is, I suspect, a risky, fabulous, and rather fleshly matter-this embodiment, this proximity of the common and the sacred. For this novel is not just a story of a stunning woman whose identity is caught in the ugly scar encircling her neck, but in tales of dogs, those Cuban dogs, "chasseurs des neg mawon," a heroine thought to leave her skin and roam through the night, returning with her mouth daubed with blood, and landscapes littered with mutilated bodies, but also made so manifest that to read of the dawn replacing night becomes a nearly physical experience. "Les heures passèrent. Peu à peu, insectes et crapauds-buffles se turent. Le ciel blanchit. Les coqs se mirent à chanter. Les chiens à aboyer. Le désordre du jour, tellement différent de celui de la nuit, recommence." Ultimately, most fascinating is Célanire, whose beauty can contain and eradicate its cruel effects, that is, the trail of corpses it leaves behind.