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Callaloo 24.1 (2001) 301-309



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Reading Death
Allegory In Maryse Condé's Crossing The Mangrove

Dawn Fulton


Nos anciens disaient bien que la mort n'est qu'un pont jeté entre les êtres, une passerelle qui les rapproche sur laquelle ils se rencontrent à mi-chemin pour se chuchoter tout ce qu'ils n'ont pas pu se confier.

[Our ancestors used to say that death is nothing but a bridge between humans, a footbridge that brings them closer together on which they can meet halfway to whisper things they never dared talk about.]

--Traversée de la Mangrove 1

Recent critical interest in allegorical texts has suggested a revaluation both of the mode itself and of its role in modernist and post-modernist considerations of history. When these redefinitions confront texts which come out of a post-colonial context, the status of allegory in current theory is complicated further, since such texts often presuppose a highly ambiguous relationship with history and a profound suspicion of interpretive authority. Maryse Condé's Crossing the Mangrove, a novel set in a small village in Guadeloupe, challenges the assumptions fundamental to theories of modern allegory, while resisting convenient classification as "post-colonial" allegory. Within the novel's intricate plot and structure emerges a striking commentary on reading as an interpretive act, and on the possibility of collective understanding in a fragmented community. Francis Sancher, the enigmatic character at the center of the narrative, is at one level an allegorical figure and at a second level functions as an allegorical text within the novel, subject to the readings of the various characters voiced throughout the text. It is this thematic insistence on reading and interpretation that reveals Crossing the Mangrove as a brilliantly complex mise en scène of the practice of allegory. The intricacies and contradictions of the text put into question the nature of the allegorical mode, and offer unique insight into the interplay of reading, history, and temporality.

As allegory is a widely used and elusive term, it will be helpful to identify certain elements which appear to be essential to the allegorical text. First, allegory involves an extra-textual doubling. The meaning of the text thus articulates an inside/outside dichotomy as defined by Paul de Man: the reader finds meaning "inside" the text as a reduplication of meaning "outside" the text. This doubling is linked to a second and more controversial aspect of allegory, which is the implication of a shared matrix of interpretation on the part of the readership. In other words, since the "outside" is never explicitly signaled in the text, the double reading of the text depends entirely upon the shared referential system of its readers. Modern theories of allegory tend to focus on this question, since the existence of such a system, more readily accepted in the medieval context, is hardly a given in the current one. 2 The extra-textual [End Page 301] component of allegory points to the third characteristic element of the mode: interpretation. The link between allegory and interpretation is such that the terms can be difficult to untangle: in a certain sense all reading could be said to be allegorical, in that reading is always a reproduction, a rewriting of the text based on a certain interpretive code. It is the dependence on the act of reading that gives the allegorical text its particularity: its doubled meaning exists only as a product of the reader's active engagement of a system of interpretation.

The productive role of the reader in allegory has important ramifications for the meaning of a text. Given the interdependence of form and interpretation in the allegorical mode, the reader can in a sense be seen as the central focus of an allegory. 3 In fact allegory provides a striking illustration of Barthes' theory of reading: that at the first reading of a text the reader inevitably reads him- or herself. This interpretive priority of the reader threatens to displace entirely the "inside" of the text: since the doubled meaning of allegory is by definition not articulated in...

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