Breaking the Rules: Irrelevance/Irreverence in Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove

Author
Celia Britton
Mots-clés
History & Archaeology
Postcolonialism
Barthes, Roland
Conde, Maryse
Guadeloupean Fiction
Semiology
Stereotype, Stylistics
Résumé
this article focuses instead on the small-scale discursive structures of Traversée de la mangrove, analysing them via Barthes’s concept of semiological codes and rules. Traversée de la mangrove transgresses the ‘rules’ of literary style through deliberately inelegant digressive sentences and paragraphs that disorientate the reader with a mass of irrelevant detail. This works as an ironic deflation of cultural and literary stereotypes (e.g., exoticism), and makes it impossible to construct the hierarchy of meanings that underlies Barthes’s definition of the ‘texte lisible’, while at the same time retaining a commitment to realism that disqualifies them as a ‘texte scriptible’.
Année de parution
2004
Journal
French Cultural Studies
Volume
15
Issue
1
Number of Pages
35-47,
ISBN Number
0957-1558