Maryse Condé. Mythe, parabole et complexité (review)

In Maryse Condé. Mythe, parabole et complexité, Deborah Hess analyzes all of Maryse Condé's novels to date except The Tree of Life and Victoire, as well as two collections of stories (Land of Many Colors and Tales from the Heart). Her reading of Condé's œuvre is based on cultural, historical, and autobiographical contextualization. It draws on the sciences of complexity, aiming at providing the meanings of symbolic or narrative elements in relation to the writer's own quest for meaning as well as the wider identity quest of Antilleans.

In part one, "Complexity and Antillean Literature," Hess starts with her theory of complexity, based in the necessity of taking into account a point of departure that is not easily identifiable, in order to explain the disorder and the unknown resulting from the contact of cultures. Her approach to literature then is to give "as complete an account as possible [...] of metaphorical, narrative, logical, and aesthetic points of view as well as of the surrounding cultural milieu." (Hess, Politics and Literature. The Case of Maurice Blanchot. NY: Peter Lang, 1999, 7). She starts with the cultural milieu in this section, providing a wealth of information on the contexts of Condé's life and works. Chapter one, "Complexity and the Antilles," covers the geological, climatic, demographic, and linguistic conditions for the production of Guadeloupe's complex culture. Chapter two, "The Clash of Cultures," presents the economic and political situation of metropolitan France in the 1950s and early 1960s as it stood when Condé arrived and lived in Paris, focusing on the instability characterizing postwar politics and decolonization.

In chapter three, "Literary Complexity," Hess proposes five traits of complex systems (fragmentation, indeterminism, the presence of variables and multiple factors, non-linearity, dynamic evolution) and illustrates how they are manifest in Caribbean literature. She then goes on to review the work of five Francophone Caribbean writers —Édouard Glissant, Raphaël Confiant, and Patrick Chamoiseau from Martinique, and Dany Laferrière and Gérard Étienne, writers from Haiti but nationals of Canada— and how their novels exemplify these attributes of complex systems, in order to give the literary context to Condé's œuvre. While this section provides a useful overview of these writers' works and of the elements that make them complex, it also raises questions about the criteria for selecting them: why are there no Guadeloupean or women authors? How and why is the work of Haitian writers relevant to Condé's œuvre? Do they have specific influences on Condé or are there intertextual relationships with her novels? Why is Aimé Césaire, who is an important reference for Condé, not included?

Each of the seven chapters of part two, "The Identity Quest in the Work of Maryse Condé," focuses on a particular theme that Hess contextualizes and analyzes within one or two works: reversal in Heremakhonon and A Season in Rihata; shifting social paradigms in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and La Colonie du nouveau monde; fragmentation in The Land of Many Colors and Tales from the Heart; the complexification of narration in The Last of the African Kings and Desirada; the collapse of social structures in Windward Heights; infinite borders in Who Slashed Celanire's Throat and The Story of the Cannibal Woman; and the mythical sacred in La Belle Créole and Les Belles ténébreuses.

Readers unfamiliar with Condé's œuvre may find this general contextualizing approach to her corpus combined with detailed historical accounts of its contexts, summaries of the works, and descriptions of their spatial and temporal structures, a useful point of entry into this vast body of texts. Nevertheless, it leaves this reader hungry for a deeper exploration of the multiple ways the literary text formulates its own reflection on the issues it raises, for instance, the identity quest, the relation between reality and representation, history and literature, or text and context. This study would also have benefitted from situating itself in relation to, and entering in...