Gâteau? Usually less complicated than one’s relationship with time. The student of literature might think of Proust’s madeleine, the journey on which this petit gâteau takes the narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu : Du côté de chez Swann (1913). The novel Tu t’appelleras Tanga (1988) by Calixthe Beyala might also come to mind: the character Anna-Claude in her spare time creates birthday cakes for the demons that have been disturbing her. The writer Annie Ernaux notes in Une femme (1988) that through trial and error she figured out which gâteaux her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother could eat. And in the poem “Quelconque” by Aimé Césaire from his collection Soleil cou coupé (1948), how ordinary, nondescript, trite, or commonplace can night be really if it is a cake with fireflies for candles? Moments need not be marked with any gâteau, of course: in a 2014 interview for the website Ile en île, the writer Axel Gauvin spoke of “les fêtes sans limonade[,] sans gâteaux, mais la vraie joie de la fête.” Yet cake can play a necessary role in a writer’s writing process: in a 2007 interview for the French-German-Polish website boeser-wolf.schule.de, Marie NDiaye offered that making a cake can be preferable to writing at times.
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. “Assiette à gâteau.” Etcher: Félix Bracquemond (1833-1914). The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1866 – 1878. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-43ad-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Moules à gâteaux en terre. 1907. Société du Musée Alsacien (Strasbourg). Bibliothèque nationale de France. https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb41918740g
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References & Suggested Reading
Césaire, Aimé et al. The Complete Poetry of Aimé Cesairé: Bilingual Edition. Germany: Wesleyan UP, 2017.
Gauvin, Axel. Interview by Françoise Sylvos and Thomas C. Spear. “Axel Gauvin, 5 Questions pour Ile en île.” Ile en île, 16 April 2014 and 8 July 2009, https://ile-en-ile.org/axel-gauvin-5-questions-pour-ile-en-ile/
NDiaye, Marie. Interview by Alina, Anastasia, and David. “ ‘Il faut juste avoir un crayon et un papier…’ : une interview avec l’écrivain Marie NDiaye.” Boeser-wolf.schule.de, January 2007, https://www.boeser-wolf.schule.de/interviews/ecrivaine-marie-ndiaye.html
