Mûr à crever and Les Possédés de la pleine lune

Although, again, more straightforward in many ways than others of the Spiralist prose works, Frankétienne's Mûr à crever proposes striking destabilizations of time and space. The text functions primarily through the maintenance of certain tensions (between the public and the private; among the real, the remembered, and the imagined; among the insular, the regional, and the global; etc.), and so problematizes spatial boundaries and undermines chronological progression. On the one hand, Mûr à crever is very precisely situated in time and space: multiple references to the war in Vietnam suffice to establish the time of the present and set the tone for Frankétienne's critique of US imperialism; the city of Portau-Prince is named, and its geography presented in almost excessive detail. Yet while the prevalence of specific spatio-temporal markers establishes a realist frame for Mûr à crever, the narrative's presentoriented backdrop is consistently disrupted by the first person narrator's recounting of his childhood memories—seminal moments from a presumably distant past. The porousness of the boundaries separating the various narrative “positions” in Mûr à crever thus sets the stage for a corresponding spatio-temporal unpredictability and obliges the reader to engage with the narrative from various and at times seemingly unrelated points of view.