Glissant's Le Quatrième Siècle is concerned with Martinican society and the island's history, and above all with the connections or lack of connections between the historical past and social experience in the present. The novel's narrative structure is determined by this thematic concern; so too is what one might term its discursive structure: that is, the way in which different types of fictional discourse interact in the text to produce a particular kind of representation of the past. I shall argue that while Benveniste's concepts of ‘discours’ and ‘histoire’ are relevant and illuminating in relation to Le Quatrième Siècle, the novel also questions the distinction between these two categories; and that it does so by implicating them in a socio-political problematic that is not present in their original formulation.

The narrative is divided into four sections, which on one level form a straightforward chronological progression from 1788 – the date of the arrival in Martinique, on a slave ship, of two Africans who are later given the names Longoué and Béluse – up to 1946, the year in which Martinique acquired the status of a Département d'Outre-Mer. But the first three of these sections each juxtapose two periods of time: the historical past, and a narrative present which is situated in the 1940s and consists mainly of a series of conversations between Papa Longoué, an old man, descendant of the first Longoué, and an adolescent, Mathieu Béluse, descendant of the other transported slave Béluse. It is these conversations that lead into the historical narrative, on the basis of Mathieu's curiosity about the past, and Papa Longoué's role as a source of knowledge about it. These dialogues frame and at times interrupt the narration of the Longoué and Béluse family histories, and of the longstanding enmity between them. The ‘present time’ which the dialogues constitute itself extends over five years from 1940, when Mathieu is fourteen, to 1945, when Papa Longoué dies.

For the first two sections, the past consists of events occurring before Papa Longoué was born; in the third, they are contemporaneous with the first part of his life: his childhood and youth, marriage, the birth of his son, the death of his wife and the death of his son in the First World War;…