Algerian Letters: Mixture, Genres, Literature Itself

Summary

‘Le propre du dialogue platonicien, c'est l'absence de forme et de style engendrée par le mélange de toutes les formes et de tous les styles […]’. Il [Nietzsche] va un peu fort, je trouve, et si c'était le contraire? Le mélange, c'est la lettre, l'épître, qui n'est pas un genre mais tous les genres, la littérature même. (Derrida, 1980: 54)

We can easily trace epochs when the letter, having played out its literary role, sinks once more into everyday life, no longer impinging on literature, and becomes a fact of everyday life, a document, a receipt. But when circumstances are right this fact of life can again become a fact of literature. (Tynyanov, 2000: 42)

In 1956, Jacques Stephen Aléxis wrote that the ‘Western genres and organons bequeathed to us must be resolutely transformed in a national sense’ (1994: 197). He argued for an expansion of aesthetic form, which, while maintaining the importance of social realism, would accommodate the expression of the Haitian people. This transformation of genre by Haitian artists and writers was, argued Aléxis, to be viewed as a ‘renovation’ and a ‘widening’ of ‘universal models’ that would allow for the articulation of nations beyond Europe.

This view of literary genres as synecdoche of the ‘national character’ is asserted differently by Edouard Glissant in 1976 when he questions if the written word, and the genres which frame it, are sufficient to render the archives of collective memory. Glissant critiques genre on a number of fronts: history, as a genre, cannot simply be the affair of historians alone, and literature cannot be reduced to a collection of distinct genres.