Fignolé

The stylistic choices Fignolé makes in his prose fiction works might certainly be considered a direct response to the traumatic silencing he evokes in his description of Frankétienne's fiction. Similarly to Frankétienne, Fignolé addresses the perceived opposition of the spoken and the written word, and his narratives reflect a decided discomfort with, or at the very least an implicit challenge to, the privilege and privileging of the scribal. Both Les Possédés de la pleine lune and Aube Tranquille take up this issue of the ostensibly fundamental linkage between writing and silence through the almost excessive orality of the textual worlds they narrate. In both works, the strands of multiple narratives are woven together by a host of often frenetically verbal participants in the various dramas being played out in their pages. Challenging his readers’ expectations for coherent revelations from a centralized narrative authority, Fignolé more and less directly references a folk tradition in ways that destabilize parameters of literature and productively engage with conventions of orality.

Les Possédés de la pleine lune explicitly calls upon the Caribbean/ Haitian folk tradition throughout the narrative. The explicitly oral is directly put forward in the transcription of Agénor's courtship tale—the fable of two breasts taught the meaning of existence by the mouth of an ardent suitor, in the inclusion of verse after verse of Violetta's never-ending love song to the savale, or in the insertion of Brother Paul's apocalyptic couplets into the story. Elsewhere, passages that in a more strictly ordered, literary context would be considered “digressions” take up significant portions of the narrative—instances in which some small thing “distracts” from the “main” story and leads to a teasing out of a tangentially related element thereof.