SARGASSO


as when a tale records the extravagant price of goods.
There are endless descriptions of sumptuous meals in
Creole folklore--one character always seems to be
plying another with. food and drink. In a well-known
Martinican conte, Macaque is tempted as much, if not
more, by promises of 4crivisses and christophines au
gratin as he is by the prospect of seeing the jolie
porteuse de cafe in the morning. What Macaque forgot
(and what Lapin remembered) is that excess of any kind
can easily destroy its object.

 All those whose interests lie on the side of the
prevailing discourse of authority, then, should take
heed: better to say too little than to say too much.
Better to hear too little than to hear too much.
Baudrillard discusses this theme at length in de la
seduction where his examples range from pornography and
horse-racing to Japanese quadraphonic sound. What makes
pornography the "baroque enterprise" that it is,
Baudrillard maintains, is, precisely, a surplus of
reality, the fact that too much is seen too close--we
see what we have never before seen anywhere (and lucky
for us that we haven't, he quickly adds). In short,
the argument is this: production (or overproduction)
takes and makes manifest what is of another order, the
order of seduction. While production establishes facts,
seduction, on the other hand, pulls something back from
view and from the ear. When everything is said and
expressed, Baudrillard tells us, there is no longer any
ambiguity but ambiguity is what must govern speech if we
are to be charmed.

 And yet, does not Creole do exactly this, charm us?
Suddenly all things are possible, even, to borrow a
phrase of James Baldwin, the most unspeakable longings.
While on the surface it might seem that Creole is a
discourse of neurosis--the verbal delirium present in the
language mirrors the mental disarray of the people,
argues Glissant--I should like rather to emphasize the
"abjective," in Kristeva's sense of the word, aspect of
Creole talk; that is, it both attracts and repels those
who speak it. Although the French language is still
considered in the Antilles to be the only source of
culture and knowledge and although Creole over the years
has been consistently denied and banned, in schools and
elsewhere, at the same time the tenacious existence of