Edouard Glissant lecteur de Claudel

Among the several volumes of essays published by Edouard Glissant from 1956 to 2010, the passages dedicated to other writers, poets, essayists and philosophers are numerous. Together with Saint-John Perse, Faulkner and Césaire, the name of Paul Claudel insistently returns, and in particular the commentary on the IV Ode, La Muse qui est la grâce. We propose here to reconstruct from one essay to another the path of Glissant’s thought on Claudel and to investigate the reasons that led Glissant towards a constant and passionate reading despite the intellectual distance that separates the two poets. The character of Christopher Columbus, whom Glissant engages with in the epic poem Les Indes and in the novel Ormerod and is also present in Claudel’s play Le Livre de Christophe Colomb, allows us to establish a comparison between the poetics of the two writers and synthesises commonality and distance between them.