Thinking Tradition

TRADITION

Tradition appears to me at this point as a dialectical enterprise and not necessarily as a solid grounding; a constantly shifting and fluctuating concept that, to exist, necessitates movement.  Furthermore, the positions, our positions face to tradition, are not stable.  It is important to see the instability of what we study.  We are attempting to freeze a movement, which is no doubt a necessary step if we are say anything, but it is essential to acknowledge this reality.  

 

Every time we have assumed a position we have adopted an arbitrary differentiation method to capture the movement.  The real constant is movement, yet we need to apply a solid method to understand this instability… or can we think of concepts that allow for this movement, without our methodological approach becoming a circular argument? 

 

The appreciation for movement that I have recognized in mapping formation of identities in literature appears as a constant across disciplines.  This may sound a bit cliché, but really recognizing the tendency to oversimplify and assign “labels” when the reality is much more complex and diverse that we are ready to accept.  Kocku von Stcuckard's approach to esoteric discourse illustrated for me this constant search for a subjectum – or grounding- in which we all engage and have probably engaged in the history of scholarship.  Probably that a more honest approach would be to speak of TRACES (something that a thinker that Derrida will do) we can only follow the movement of the different, track it, attempt to understand it, but any fixed version is destined to change. 

 

Our own limitations, namely the fact that we are dealing with writing, seems to put a blindfold that prevents us from understanding the oral component of most traditions.  We only see the part that has been transcribed into paper.  Notwithstanding, around the written word an entire universe of ideas has been mobilized.  We ought to acknowledge the importance of that universe and how the artifact we study, the written narrative, is only one aspect of a larger system of  relations that construct what we conceive as Tradition.  

 

What larger and bigger mythology is at work?

In short, we must understand tradition as twofold;  one is conservative, refusing change, and perceived as necessary for the maintenance of the unity of a community. At least, this is how it justifies itself: people submit themselves to it, with the hope of forming a larger, collective whole.  The other is progressive; open to an ongoing endless process, always changing, shifting and just as necessary for the unity of the whole as the conservative.  As critics, we must observe how these two elements are 

negotiated. 

 

I am interested in looking how Maryse Condé and René Depestre resist the conservative, how their hybrid writing pushes the progression of the written tradition of the French canon forward, combating the forces that seek to push it down (under the argument that it does not qualify as quality literature) and resisting exclusion from the Traditional canon.  

 

Death appears as one of the vehicles these writers have recourse to state their independence at the same time that they become part of the main discourse.