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

In her Introduction Nicole Simek acknowledges that, on the face of it, hunger (‘a threat to biological survival’) and irony (‘a trope associated with playfulness, ambiguity or deception’, p. 2) make unlikely bedfellows. However, her starting premise—that French Caribbean literature’s conjunction of hunger as ‘biological need, as figure for desire, and as a concept or aesthetic structure we might best describe as ironic’ (p. 2)—provides an original and illuminating prism through which to focus on a wide range of contemporary Antillean texts (fiction, essay, manifesto, photography). The writings of Maryse Condé and Patrick Chamoiseau form the analytical core of the monograph, but Simek also discusses such generically disparate texts as the collectively authored Manifeste pour les produits de haute nécessité (2009), Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Ti Jean L’Horizon (1979), and Gisèle Pineau’s Folie, aller simple (2009). An introductory chapter sketches the book’s theoretical foundations (Derrida, Žižek, Glissant). Then Chapter 2, ‘Theory or Over-Eating’, from its incipit— ‘Does literature hunger for theorization?’ (p. 15)—establishes the critic’s provocative approach. Postcolonial critiques of interpretation as consumption, and of theory as cannibalism, parasitism, and/or as negligent of concrete postcolonial realities, ground the analysis of Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique (1988) and Condé’s Histoire de la femme cannibale (2003). The dual detective plot of the latter functions less as a critique of Western rationalism than as a means of showing how ‘literature conveys the unknowable and the known, the unknowable in the known’ (p. 33); or, as Simek pithily observes of Histoire’s protagonist, ‘Rosélie does not not suffer from a complex’ (p. 39). Subsequent chapters are similarly structured around surprising juxtapositions that reveal striking convergences and affinities. The counterpointing of Condé’s La Belle Créole (2001) and Chamoiseau’s Un dimanche au cachot (2007) in Chapter 5 is especially smart: both novels unfold over a twenty-four-hour period and in a context of confinement, and ‘ironize’ (p. 10 et passim) neo-classical unities of place, time, and action. Moreover, in their critique of over-determined interpretation, they question whether literature can effect material change in the world. La Belle Créole is compellingly read as ‘a tragically missed rendez-vous’ between ‘a history and a fiction whose respective over- and under-determinations might productively collaborate’ (p. 136). Chapter 6 stages an equally ingenious encounter between Condé’s Victoire, les saveurs et les mots (2006) and Chamoiseau and Jean-Luc de Laguarigue’s Elmire des sept bonheurs (1998). Both works play to the reader’s appetite for archival authenticity, while undermining documentary certainty and the indexical power of photography. Throughout the monograph, texts (including photography, of which Simek is an astute analyst) are read against their own rhetorical grain and then, in a counter-move, reread to destabilize any (too easy?) conclusions reached in that first oppositional reading. Simek makes a virtuoso case for considering Chamoiseau and Condé as consonant rather than dissonant voices, given their shared capacity for play, and for the making, unmaking, and remaking of meaning. Small wonder that we, as their readers/consumers, keep coming back for more.