Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation (review)

Using Derrida’s model of reading as an ethical practice of “eating” that seeks to move beyond binary oppositions such as absorption and expulsion, this refreshingly well-written and sophisticated study is structured around the question of exemplarity in the fiction of Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé. Building on the work of a number of contemporary critics, Simek carries debate surrounding the place of examples in narrative theory and ethics to the postcolonial arena. Arguing that exemplarity lies at the heart of any ethics of reading, which she defines as a process involving “the tactical deployment and elusive reception of examples” (11), Simek points out that European colonialist discourse raised Europe to the level of a universal paragon to be emulated by colonial subjects. As a response to this model, the rhetorics of anti-colonialism and later of “postcoloniality” have also often demanded that the writer serve as a role model, or exemplar, for his or her “people.” In this view, as spokesperson for the “nation,” the postcolonial writer should be someone whose works should serve as a prescriptive formulation of anti-colonial or postcolonial identity, however problematically the latter term is defined. However, as Simek shows, Maryse Condé repeatedly resists this conception of exemplarity, preferring instead to deploy “unruly examples,” examples that often involve “opacity” rather than transparency. Recalling Martinican Edouard Glissant’s call for the “right to opacity” as a means to resist reductive universalism, Simek argues that Condé’s works not only display an ethical concern with violence, trauma, and justice, but that they also valorize literature’s ethical value as critique.

Simek returns to this point in each of her four main chapters, respectively organized around issues of history and globalization in Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . Noire de Salem (1986) and La Belle Créole (2001); intertextuality and reception in La migration des cœurs (1995) and Célanire cou-coupé (2000); trauma and subjectivity in Hérémakhonon (1976) and Desirada (1997); and community and ethics in Traversée de la mangrove (1989) and Histoire de la femme cannibale (2003). Simek concludes that Condé “eats well” since her work intertextually assimilates, or “cannibalizes” other works in a non-didactic fashion, “disrupting readerly attempts to bring the other fully into the self”(204).

Declaring that her own project is to “go beyond attempting to distinguish ‘correct’ readings from ‘incorrect’ ones” (22), Simek proposes an ethical approach to Condé’s novels that appreciates what she shows to be her “subtle ruses and insolent disobedience of hermeneutical conventions”(202). Nicole Simek has accomplished her declared goals admirably well. Through the deft and expert use of a wide range of theoretical approaches, Eating Well, Reading Well engages constructively and creatively with a number of well-known critics of Condé’s work in order to propose new and theoretically provocative readings that nevertheless do not claim to be exhaustive. Eating Well, Reading Well is a great credit to Rodopi’s Franco Poly Phonies series, and leaves this reviewer looking for more insightful work from this bright, young scholar.