Patrick Chamoiseau, Chronique des sept misères, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, 221 p.

Les trois marchés de Fort-de-France sont pour les djobeurs les champs de l’existence, une manière de destin à l’intérieur de laquelle ils battent leur misère. Riches de leur seule brouette, mais aussi de leur verve et de leur tendresse, ils transportent les paniers de légumes, et les marchandes les payent selon leur cœur. Parmi eux, le meilleur : Pierre Philomène Soleil, dit Pipi, amoureux sans retour de la belle métisse Anastase. Pour s’arracher à sa passion et à l’agonie des marchés, il part à la conquête du trésor d’Afoukal, puis crée un jardin luxuriant, qui sera détruit par de savants technocrates. Il meurt comme il aura vécu, dans la misère. Aux autres djobeurs de dire et de redire les souvenirs de leur vie, mi-pleurant mi-riant sur leur monde condamné, comme Pierre Philomène et ses rêves, à la disparition.
(Présentation de l’éditeur)

WELLS, Catherine, « Les Métamorphoses narratologiques dans Chronique des sept misères et Solibo magnifique : une étude postclassique de Gérard Genette et de Patrick Chamoiseau », thèse de doctorat, département d’études françaises, Queen’s University, 2001, 431 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
Recent research in the field of narratology has highlighted a profusion of new, postclassical méthodologies which explore, exploit and expand older, classical models. According to David Herman, author of Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (1999), postclassical narratology has three goals: “(1) to test the possibilities and limits of classical, structural narratological models […]; (2) to enrich, where necessary, the classical models with postclassical models, thereby coming to terms with aspects of narrative discourse that eluded or even undermined previous narratological research; and (3) to achieve goals 1 and 2 through interprétations of particular (literary and other) narratives […] (3). In accordance with these guidelines, the following postclassical criticism exposes the possibilities and the limitations of Gérard Genette’s revised classical model (Nouveau discours du récit) while creating a set of new methodological tools which elucidate the narratological métamorphosés in Patrick Chamoiseau’s first two novels (Chronique des sept misères and Solibo Magnifique). In order to study the surprising phenomena of transdiegetic convergence in Chamoiseau’s novels, whereby the voice of each primary narrator is inextricably entwined with that of his secondary narrators, we exploit Genette’s classical concept of diegetic levels while creating a postclassical typology which includes such catégories as parasitical, modulating, appropriating, and ethnobiographical narratives. Analogously, in order to analyse the author’s interesting mechanism of relational modulation, whereby each of his primary narrators (singular and plural) evokes an oscillating character represented altematively in the first and third person (singular and plural), we expand the original model to include two new typologies. The first présents three types of nanation (singular, oscillating and hybridised) which characterise the original identity of the narrator and the second exposes three types of dissociation (figurai, actorial, and narratorial) which provoke his relational transfigurations. Finally, in order to study the innovative procédure of transtextual emergence, whereby the fantasmatic narrator of the second novel reveals himself to be the implicit orchestrator of the first, we apply several of Genette’s intratextual notions to Chamoiseau’s transtextual narration. This paradigmatic shift permits us to recover twelve distinct versions of “Patrick Chamoiseau” in the text, the paratext and the intertext of a transdiegetic macro-narrative which frames the ethnobiographica! micronarrative recounted in Chronique des sept misères, thereby transforming its extradiegetic narrator into a intradiegetic construct.

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BIZEK-TATARA, Renata, « Quelques propos sur l’humour dans Chronique des sept misères de Patrick Chamoiseau », dans Tomasz SWOBODA et Wierzbowska, Ewa WIERZBOWSKA (dir.), Autour de Patrick Chamoiseau, Sopot, Fundacja Rozwoju Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2008. +++ Chapitre de collectif

FAUSTMAN, Jean, « Chapitre II : monde fictifs représentés. Chroniques des sept misères », dans Le creuset des cultures. La littérature antillaise,  New-York, Peter Lang (Francophone Cultures and Literatures), 2004, p. 35-48. +++ Monographie

CHANCÉ, Dominique, « De Chronique des sept misères à Biblique des derniers gestes, Patrick Chamoiseau est-il baroque ? », Modern Language Notes, vol. 118, n° 4 (septembre 2003), p. 867-894. +++ Article de revue

### Chancé, 2003, pdf ###

GOSSON, Renee K., « For What the Land Tells : An Ecocritical Approach to Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows », Callaloo, vol. 26, n° 1 (hiver 2003), p. 219-234. +++ Article de revue

### Gosson, 2003, pdf ###

CASAS-OLGA, Janeth, « L’oraliture dans Chronique des sept misères de Patrick Chamoiseau », Lettres romanes, vol. 55, n° 3-4 (2001), p. 319-329. +++ Article de revue

FIGUEIREDO, Euridice, « La réécriture de l’histoire dans les romans de Patrick Chamoiseau et Silviano Santiago », Études littéraires, vol. 25, n° 3 (automne 1992-hiver 1993), p. 27-38. +++ Article de revue

BULLO, Alain, « Patrick Chamoiseau : Chronique des sept misères, de l’oraliture à l’écriture », thèse de doctorat, facoltà di letter e filosofia, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, 1994, 229 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

CALDWELL JR., Roy Chandler, « Creole Voice, Creole Time : Narrative Strategies in Chamoiseau’s Chronique des sept misères », Romance Quarterly, vol. 47, n° 2 (printemps 2000), p. 103-112. +++ Article de revue

###Abstract (Academic Search Premier)
Presents information on the book Chronique des sept misères, by Patrick Chamoiseau. Narrative system operating in the novel ; Collective voice in the novel that refused to unravel into the several potential strands of first-person narration ; Most important analeptic network of the novel.

Caldwell Jr., 2000, HTML ###

LOICHOT, Valérie, « Fort-de-France : pratiques textuelles et corporelles d’une ville coloniale », French Cultural Studies, vol. 15, n° 2 (2004), p. 48-60. +++ Article de revue

###Abstract (Sage Journals Online)
Interweaving Patrick Chamoiseau and René Ménil’s representations of the city of Fort-de-France, Martinique, with notes and photographs from my personal peregrinations in the city, I show that the urban space, like a resisting text, cannot be seized, fixed, and ultimately read by the alien walker. It is precisely through the polyrhythmic movements of the urban dwellers, which Chamoiseau calls ‘djobeurs’, that the city resists and escapes the grid and other colonialist marks imposed by Metropolitan France on the cityscape. These perambulations, I argue, create an ‘oralcity’ contrasting with the city written by colonialism. ###

NIANG, Sada, « Stratégies de contextualisation linguistique dans la littérature antillaise », dans Jean-Michel LACROIX et Fulvio CACCIA (dir.), Métamorphoses d’une utopie, Paris / Montréal, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle / Éditions Triptyque, 1992, p. 77-90. +++ Chapitre de collectif

### Résumé
La littérature antillaise francophone n’est pas restée en marge de son héritage socio-linguistique originel. Car de Parépou à Césaire en passant par Depestre et Glissant, les textes littéraires ont tenté de rendre compte des phénomènes sociaux et idéologiques de leur situation de locution. Quelle langue est adoptée, quelle formalité linguistique est respectée, quel type de sémanticité a été choisi pour actualiser une telle prise de parole ? Telles sont les questions qui se posent au chercheur. ###

DUCHANAUD, Elizabeth Boxley Bowles, « Reading the French Caribbean through Édouard Glissant », thèse de doctorat, Department of French, New York University, 2006, 326 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

###Abstract
Positioning the French Caribbean and its literature within a postcolonial context is not only tricky, but erroneous. A new area of study, the francophone postcolonial, however, offers a francophone voice to what has come to be called the postcolonial. While this francophone postcolonial idea argues for less hegemonic visions of what the postcolonial has come to represent, it continues to be expressed via the anglophone world, creating a paradox that reinforces the real need for francophone critical perspectives.
Through the theoretical tenets of Edouard Glissant, one of the most prominent thinkers and writers of the French Caribbean today, contemporary francophone criticism within a postcolonial framework can be developed. Glissant offers insight into the theoretical threads of the francophone postcolonial, and in turn proposes fresh new ways to read its literature. Through a specifically French Caribbean corpus of novels, I study the alternative approaches to reading that Glissant promises through theories of home, langage, opacity, and madness. To the concept of migration that lies at the heart of Maryse Condé’s La Migration des coeurs, a rewriting of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the application of Glissantian theories of Relation and Tout-monde offer a comparative edge by which to read spaces, as well as key concepts of francophone postcolonial thinking. Patrick Chamoiseau’s development of language through the djobeur and the Creole town in Chronique des sept misères becomes the platform upon which Glissant’s innovative theories of “langue” and “langage,” of dominant and minority languages, come to life. It is through Glissant’s concept of detour that the narrator of André and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes molds her voice and her past despite darkness, solitude, and forgetting. Finally, Glissant’s figure of the “déparleur,” or Caribbean mad poet, argues for alternative approaches to revolution and collective voice, in turn shedding new light on the motifs of madness and resistance that underlie the whole of Marie Chauvet’s trilogy Amour, Colère, et Folie. Finally, through Glissant, I hope not only to redress postcolonialism’s traditional anglophone bias, and decolonize the term francophone, but to suggest reading literature as an always relational, multicultural, comparative endeavor. »

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CURTIUS, Anny Dominique, « La créolité de Chamoiseau : phénomène nouveau ou continuité d’un détour “nègzagonal” », French Literature Series, vol. 29 (2002), p. 181-196. +++ Article de revue

PÉPIN, Ernest, « The Place of Space in the Novels of the Créolité Movement », dans Mary GALLAGHER (dir.), Ici-là, Place and Displacement in Caribbean Writing in French, Amsterdam / New York, Rodopi, 2003, p. 1-24. +++ Chapitre de collectif

DE BLEEKER, Liesbeth, « Translating Space in Narrative Fiction: Patrick Chamoiseau’s Martinique Seen from a Dutch and English Perspective », Language and Literature: Journal of the Poetics and Linguistics Association, vol. 23, n° 3 (août 2014), p. 227-243. +++ Article de revue

### Abstract
This article analyzes what happens to the space of a narrative when it is translated. Its main goal is to demonstrate how we can deepen our understanding of space by seeing it through the twin lenses of narratology and comparative translation analysis. I will refer to the fictional universe created by the French Caribbean author Patrick Chamoiseau to illustrate this point. In particular, examples will be taken from Chronique des sept misères (2002 [1986]), from Texaco (2003 [1992]), and from the English and Dutch translations of these novels.
After an introductory first section, the article sets out the narratological framework used in the analysis, based on a three-layered approach to space: the space constructed by the reader, its textual rendering, and the discursive space of the text itself. Adopting the same threefold structure, the third section offers an analysis of Chamoiseau’s texts, through a comparison of original and translated texts. In Section 4, the results of the analysis will be confronted with Chamoiseau’s own view on translation. The analysis shows how space is not only created by narratological and stylistic procedures, but also on the level of discourse, in the space the text creates for itself to speak from, which Maingueneau (1993: 123) has termed ‘scenography’. It also demonstrates how insights gained from translation studies can help narratologists to become aware of this interaction, and how a thorough narratological analysis that takes into account constructed space, its textual manifestation, and the space of enunciation, may help translation scholars better evaluate the impact of the translator’s choices.

De Bleeker, 2014, HTML ###

MABANA, Kahiudi C., « Esquisse d’une poétique créole dans Chronique des sept misères de Patrick Chamoiseau », dans Isabelle CONSTANT, Kahiudi C. MABANA et Philip NANTON (dir.), Antillanité, Créolité, Littérature-Monde, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 2013, p. 49-60. +++ Chapitre de collectif

LORE, Elisabeth, « Tangled Voices: Multilingualism at Work in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chronique des sept misères », dans Isabelle CONSTANT, Kahiudi C. MABANA et Philip NANTON (dir.), Antillanité, Créolité, Littérature-Monde, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 2013, p. 61-72. +++ Chapitre de collectif

COUTI, Jacqueline, « L’errance d’exil et le recadrage mémoriel dans Pélagie-la-Charrette d’Antonine Maillet et Chronique des sept misères de Patrick Chamoiseau », dans Romance Studies, vol. 29, n° 2 (avril 2011), p. 93-107. +++ Article de revue

### Résumé
In the first volume of Les lieux de mémoire (1984), Pierre Nora describes memory and history as non-synchronized oppositions in the modern world. In parallel to Nora’s discussions, Antonine Maillet in Pélagie-la-charrette (1979) and Patrick Chamoiseau in Chronique des sept misères (1986) reveal that the presupposition of synchronization is a dangerous delusion. Indeed, this delusional presupposition of memory and history has induced the loss of cultural legacy among displaced populations in the New World. A comparison of Maillet’s and Chamoiseau’s novels suggests that the quest for the return to the native land is central to Pélagie-la-Charette, while the polyphonic narrative voice in Chronique des sept misères underscores the foolishness of such an enterprise. This contrast illustrates how these authors use narrative voices to amplify the imaginary in order to construct positive myths about communal histories and memories. The mythical narrative, stemming out of the Americas, stands as a counter account that opposes histories deemed ‘official’ by Western nations. While Chamoiseau and Maillet manipulate social and historical frameworks, they are simultaneously rewriting local stories, promoting new visions of History. In so doing, they also bring forth a conflictual relationship to space and territorial organization. Their endeavour reminds readers not only of colonialism’s impact on the descendants of both slaves and colonists, but of the diversity among diasporic voices within the Americas.

Couti, 2011, PDF ###

BURTON, Richard D. E., « Débrouya pa peché, or Il y a toujours moyen de moyenner: Patterns of Opposition in the Fiction of Patrick Chamoiseau », Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters, vol. 16, n° 2 (printemps 1993), p. 466-481. +++ Article de revue

### Burton, 1993, PDF ###

OUÉDRAOGO, Amadou, « L’initiation dans le roman et le cinéma francophones de l’Afrique de l’Ouest et de la Caraïbe », thèse de doctorat, Department of French, University of Iowa, 2007, 405 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### La version PDF de la thèse est disponible pour les membres de communautés universitaires qui ont un abonnement institutionnel auprès de UMI - Proquest ###

FAUSTMAN, Jean, « Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle et Chronique des sept misères : une comparaison », thèse de doctorat, Department of Modern Languages (French and Spanish), Middlebury College, 2000, 223 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### La version PDF de la thèse est disponible pour les membres de communautés universitaires qui ont un abonnement institutionnel auprès de UMI - Proquest ###

GOSSON, Renée K., « From The Mornes To The Mangrove: An Ecocritical Approach To Resistance In The French West Indian Novel », thèse de doctorat, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2000, 186 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
This study adopts an ecocritical approach to French West Indian literature of the post-Négritude era. I examine the ways in which Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau use land and space metaphors in their novels to portray the degree of ecological and cultural subjugation suffered in Martinique. Embedded in both the physical and narrative landscape of this fiction is an endangered Creole culture, struggling to survive the encroachment of French assimilation. Ecologically speaking, the natural physical landscape of Martinique is manifesting sym ptom s of over-development. The concrete used to build condominiums, marinas, and superm arkets is irreparably polluting the island’s natural space. This process of betonisation is illustrated, for example, by the land filling of the mangrove swam p to m ake room for the Lamentin airport, and the “colonization” of the hills by secondary residences and access roads. This ecological infringement allows Glissant and Chamoiseau to dramatically situate a vicious and mutually exclusive rivalry betw een Creole and French cultures. In their novels, the assim ilating force behind Departmentalization (1946) is embodied by the increasing presence of concrete, which is drastically transforming the diverse, and culturally imbued, Creole landscape of the island. A close reading of Glissant and Cham oiseau’s representations of the spaces in which these cultural battles are fought, and lost, reveals a topological evolution which takes us from the novelistic space of the m ornes (lieu de resistance because of the maroons, or escaped slaves, who fled enslavement) down to the plaines (topologically and morally lower plantation societies below). This novelistic descent represents not only the steady physical m igration of Martinicans away from the hills of their former agriculturallyproductive existences, down into a consum er-oriented, modernized, and unmistakably French industrialized center. It also signifies a cultural alienation of the Martinican from the land, which acts as a repository for an otherwise unrecorded cultural history. In tracing the literary lineage of the maroon figure, any number of resistant characters who in some way attempt to repeat the primordial gesture of the maroon (errant djobeurs, factory strikers, indigenous fruit and vegetable farmers), I discuss how their continual assertions of resistance are countered by increasingly intensive economic and environm ental destruction from France. In novels such as Glissant’s Malemort (1975) and Chamoiseau’s Chronique des sept misères (1986), the maroon figure suffers a denigrated status, metaphorically linked to the devastated hinterland in which he sought refuge. I also situate the French West Indian writer as the last avatar of the maroon. He inscribes him self into a lineage of resistors and in a textual topography which, like the Creole landscape itself, is a territory dom inated by the forces of French standardization. His written French literature, like the transformative power of concrete, necessarily betrays the fluid nature of the Creole oral tradition. By continually draw ing comparisons between land and text, Glissant and Chamoiseau interrogate their ow n process and paradox of writing themselves out of subjugation in the language of the colonizer. Their narrative strategies offer new paradigms of resistance.

Voir plus particulièrement le quatrième chapitre « Patrick Chamoiseau, from the Plaines to the En-ville » (p. 121-167)

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