By WILBERT J. ROGET From his earliest writings, one can see the adumbration of an esthetic in Edouard Glissant which establishes a close affiliation between space, time, land, legend, and the urgent necessity of an ardent, unending search for authenticity in the life, language, and techniques of literary expression of his island and archipelagic home, Martinique, the Caribbean. The use of as opposed to the officially recognized geographic designation West Indies is deliberate here, for it is in keeping with the notion of a cultural identity (in this case Martinican/Caribbean) considered distinct and distinguishable from, even while being related to, the metropolitan French gestalt. A parallel enterprise is apparent in recent Francophone African writings and criticism, where the search for authenticity Afrocentricity, if you may requires as its point of departure a recognition that the process of search/discovery is necessarily inclusive of the findings by contemporary European theorists on culture, language, and discourse, with all the contradictions that such a recognition entails.2 In this presentation I shall confine my discussion mainly to the novels of Glissant, since fiction by its nature is more appropriate for the exploration of multiple dimensions of social reality, and particularly since the author's productivity has recently been most prolific in this genre.3 Of his five novels, I shall consider primarily La Lezarde; and necessarily, this discussion will accord appropriate attention to Glissant's two essay volumes, Le discours antillais and L intention poetique, for it is my view that land and myth are accorded the greatest representation and elaboration in these three works. During an interview granted me by Glissant in January 1972,4 at a time when he was completing the manuscript of Malemort, the question of the use of myths in Caribbean literature was broached: what myths, I wanted to know, can the Caribbean writer, and specifically the Antillean writer, appropriate as his own, given the fact of the long separation from the informing cultural matrix, Africa? Glissant's response