Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: Literature, Theory, and Public Life by Nicole Simek (review)

This book forms an elegant complement to its author's earlier work on Maryse Condé, extending the study of interpretive ethics to a new set of writers and texts and anchoring the question of how to read French Caribbean literature on a productive exploration of irony and hunger as modes of representation and discourse. As before, Simek demonstrates a talent for the judicious selection of themes and tropes that prove to crystallize many of the most pressing questions particular to the literature of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Taking up texts by Patrick Chamoiseau, Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and others, this book ably deploys the multiple meanings and consequences of the ironic to address such topics as human agency, artistic authority, materiality, epistemology, opacity, and utopianism. While the works of Barthes, Derrida, and Glissant underpin the analysis, Simek also takes care to attend to the interpretive moments and implications that might escape the purview of predominant theoretical perspectives.

Irony serves as subject and method here, as Simek explores the ethical, interpretive, and affective instabilities that inhere in the mode to illuminate the essential dialectics of French Caribbean art and politics: the hair's breadth between productive strangeness and commodified exoticism, between invisibility and hypervisibility, between humor and despair. Tracing how irony opens up interpretation by "shifting thought and feeling from their resting place" (180), the book demonstrates how vexed and yet crucial that very uncertainty can be for Antillean writers and their work. The craft of literature, for example, comes up against mainstream consumerism on the one hand and charges of elitism on the other. Writerly authority undergoes the crisis of faith that accompanied the global postcolonial moment, but also must grapple with the ambiguities of its local "postcolonial" history to reconcile literature's oppositional stance with the French Caribbean's departmental status. Pairing irony with hunger, meanwhile, both reins in the parameters of the study and sustains the dynamic movement of interpretation. Hunger "gives irony direction, aiming it at particular historical and material conditions and social problems" (178), while ensuring that the critical impulse remains unsatisfied. At the same time, hunger functions as interpretation's ethical compass, a reminder of the material and economic conditions that escape the reach of literary criticism.

The book's primary objects of study are carefully selected, ranging from such well-known novels as Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique (1988) and Condé's Histoire de la femme cannibale (2003) to the understudied Ti Jean L'horizon (1979) by Simone Schwarz-Bart, Chamoiseau and Jean-Luc de Laguarigue's collaborative photo-essay Elmire des sept bonheurs: confidences d'un vieux travailleur de la distillerie Saint-Étienne (1998), and the manifesto signed by a group of Caribbean artists and intellectuals in conjunction with the general strikes that took place in Martinique and Guadeloupe in 2009. Simek's thoughtful pairings of these texts in each chapter generate unexpected resonances, as for example in her chapter on self-writing which ties together Chamoiseau's inscription of himself in his fiction and criticism with Condé's autobiographical La Vie sans fards (2012) and Gisèle Pineau's reflection on writing and mental illness in Folie, aller simple: Journée ordinaire d'une infirmière (2010). Here the figure of the Antillean writer emerges as a fraught portrait of uncertain heroism and cynical idealism, aligning self-questioning with the interrogation of the relationship between politics and esthetics, between intellectual authority and personal vulnerability, between the artist and the community. These writers, Simek proposes, "portray themselves as speaking not so much on behalf of the public interest, but to the public, in an attempt to bring into being a community to come: a fallible, self-questioning, but creatively engaged and interdependent collectivity" (84).

Throughout this study, Simek is highly attentive to the nuanced politics of genre, weaving into her reflections on reading and interpretation an insightful sensitivity to what is varyingly at stake in autobiography, criticism, prose...