Reading Je suis un écrivain japonais - Je suis un écrivain japonais – A Contextualization

Je suis un écrivain japonais -A ContextualizationDany Laferrière is one of the most celebrated contemporary Francophone authors in North America.Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised by his maternal grandmother in Petit-Goâve, Laferrière worked as a journalist before being forced to move to Canada in 1976 by the regime of Jean-Claude Duvalier and the murder of a journalist friend.Laferrière began his literary career in Montreal, where all of his novels were published.His first novel, Comment faire lʼamour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985), was an immediate success and was made into a movie of the same name, released in 1990.While the novel is a metacritical approach to racist discourse and imagery that plays with the limits of stereotypes, it has also been viewed with concern by critics because of its ambivalent tone, which can simultaneously be used to stabilize racist images (Daniel Coleman 1998, 52 ff.).The rather one-sided reception of the novel did indeed have an impact on his career as a writer, since Laferrièreʼs fame at the beginning of his writing career, and despite many other subsequent publications, was almost exclusively linked to this book (Skallerup 2013, 9 ff.).In fact, Je suis un écrivain japonais was his first book after a long break from writing due to racist and ethicizing attributions and categorizations.In 2001, Laferrière published Je suis fatigue ([2001] 2005), a title alluding to the reception of his first novel and its enormous, lopsided popularity.In this publication, Laferrière declared that he would quit writing altogether because he felt tired of such simplistic readings (Skallerup 2013, 10).Je suis un écrivain japonais is therefore an important milestone in his career, almost seven years after this critical reflection, as it not only poignantly symbolizes a return to writing but also makes space for writing beyond (dominant and colonial) unintelligible gestures.In this sense, Je suis un écrivain japonais is also a debut novel of a different kind.Since his first work, Laferrière has published more than 25 novels.Laferrièreʼs oeuvre is considered »une véritable fête de lʼesprit et de la langue«, »pour tous les lecteurs francophones«. 1 This celebration of Laferrièreʼs work has so far found expression in major literary prizes and acknowledgments, like the French literary Prix Médicis and the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal for his book LʼÉnigme du retour (2009); he has also been awarded the Grand Prix littéraire international Metropolis Bleu as well as le Prix des libraires among others.Since 2015 Dany Laferrière has been a member of the Académie française and thusCf. Les Éditions du Boréal (17.10.2022).2 Kirsten Dickhaut (2014), for example, is, on the one hand, well aware that Laferrière tries to complicate the meaning of identarian assignments but links this approach rather to a cosmopolitan Haitian trait in his attitude (Dickhaut 2014, 391; 392, 392, 399) and puts the word American in quotation marks (Dickhaut 2014, 393).Je suis un écrivain japonais 373 grain develops, what poetic language does, always remains to be seen and experienced.This is the work of (good) literature, and this is what Laferrièreʼs novel, with its allusive, amused and amusing and yet serious, rapturous title, seems to be trying to say -and perhaps to disentangle -meaning-fullness as the most elaborate form of style, in which humor leaves a sometimes sunny, sometimes rainy, glittering trace.Humor in Laferrièreʼs text is an elegant rhetoric of interruption, of relief and pause, but also of innovation, all at once and in a thoughtful way; it thus becomes itself what it wants to show and for which a Japanese form of writing stands symbolically: a ›wise‹ (unknowing?) style, in touching literary spaces, which joyfully and gently points to the bizarreness and complexity of things, in and of ›our‹ wo(r)lds, and in this way gives our material and discursive bruises and heartbreaks an aesthetically embellishing, soothing and healing flavor.This may be why Laferrière was affectionately nicknamed the Basho of Montreal after the publication of this novel (Marchand 2010).This style of writing is also what frames the novelʼs paratexts, and it is possible to see and unfold their workings as a poetological framing of the story.The allusive title, Je suis un écrivain japonais, becomes particularly vivid in conjunction with a work of art with a similar gesture: René Magritteʼs La Trahison des Images that depicts the painting of a pipe and beneath it the phrase Ceci nʼest pas une pipe (Marchand 2010; Dickhaut 2014).In both cases, the arts, which are regularly condemned as mimetic and of secondary quality to the spoken word, to ›nature‹, ›reality‹, ›creation‹ (and thought?), question their own work as well as its categorization in discourse as if to infer ›knowledge‹ from querying it or to doubt others, who think they know what they mean or who see ›more‹ in them than they supposedly show; in any case, they enter a dialogue with those who pass by and take the time to sneak a peek.This might stand for the power-less work of art.While Magritteʼs painting claims not to be what it appears to be, Laferrièreʼs Je suis un écrivain japonais claims to be what it seems not to be.Derridaʼs favorite questioned question, the question of being (of certainties?), is thus again questioned and put into a state of (constant) flux.And this, art and Derrida, seem to echo -is it really ›reality‹ (or is it not?).Both ›texts‹ the painting and the novel, invoke what Derrida has in fact humorously (perhaps ironically) called mimetologism (Derrida [1972(Derrida [ ] 1981)), the ancient (Western European) philosophical attempt to distinguish (and construe) itself by naming what it considers to be its other, poetic thought, poetics encompassing both the art (poetry, certainly) and the limitless ›knowl-edge‹ (and power) of art (poetry) -›knowledge‹ about poetry as well as ›knowledge‹ that poetry comprises generally.5 Both ›texts‹, the painting and the novel, are forms of ›fiction‹ outside of any mimetologism and the place of this outside of mimetologism is precisely within the realm of the poetics of art/poetry, »fiction affirms itself as a simulacrum and, through the work of this textual feint disorganizes all the oppositions to which the teleology of the book ought violently to have subordinated it« (Derrida [1972(Derrida [ ] 1981, 36), 36).The poetology of the textual feint, is, at the same time, perhaps the unconscious, unknowing power-lessness of poetics that lies in this double structure.

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