ABSTRACT WONDERS OF THE WAKING WORLD: EXPLORING THE SUBJECT IN MARYSE CONDÉ’S TRAVERSÉE DE LA MANGROVE By Jennifer Lynn Wahl Maryse Condé’s novel Traversée de la Mangrove follows the people of a small, fictional town in Guadeloupe on a long night’s journey through the funeral wake of one of their most notorious, and enigmatic, citizens – a man known as Francis Sancher. The novel sets forth a dizzying topography, of individuals and islands, paths and blind alleys through the life of the deceased and the lives of those whom his influence forever changed. As at all wakes, however, the man at its center has no voice of his own. Rather, he is reconstructed and reanimated by the testimony of others. Through the optic of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “rhizomatic” theory of literature, I examine Condé’s re-membering of Sancher through the voices of those in his community. In the novel, subjectivity does not rely solely upon social class or racial identity but is constructed by each individual through a process of self-examination and envisioning the future. WONDERS OF THE WAKING WORLD: EXPLORING THE SUBJECT IN MARYSE CONDÉ’S TRAVERSÉE DE LA MANGROVE A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of French and Italian by Jennifer Wahl Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2009 Advisor: ________________________________ Mark McKinney Reader: _________________________________ Elisabeth Hodges Reader: __________________________________ Anna Klosowska TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………… 1 CHAPTER ONE…………………………………………………………….... 3 THE MANGROVE Tracings on a Map of the Mangrove ............................................................. 8 Mapping and Tracing .................................................................................... 11 Impasses on a Search for Freedom ............................................................... 14 CHAPTER TWO ……………………………………………………………... 21 THE INDIVIDUAL, HISTORY AND IDENTITY Mapping the Subject ...................................................................................... 21 Tracing Bloodlines ........................................................................................ 29 Music and History ......................................................................................... 41 CHAPTER THREE ………………………………………………………….. 43 TRAVERSING THE SUBJECT The Singular Subject ..................................................................................... 47 Towards Subjectivity ..................................................................................... 56 Transgression and Redemption ..................................................................... 62 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………….. 65 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................. 66 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Without the help and constant support of many colleagues, family members and friends, I would never have been able to finally complete this project. First and foremost among these important and beloved individuals is my dear husband Chris, who has always shown me unconditional love and support and is a wonderfully careful and critical reader. Without his infinite patience and encouragement I would never have found the courage to finally put these words to paper and feel confident with the result. Chris inspires me every day with his thoughtful intelligence, hard work, eloquence, compassion and generosity of spirit and love. I would like to thank my parents, Tom and Mary, my wonderful siblings Brian and Karen and their families, Ako, Derek, and Sadie for their constant love, support and advice. I am grateful to the Palkovacs family for their infinite support. I have been blessed with the best family in the world. A secret to any success I’ve had, academically or otherwise, has been a strong network of fabulous friends and colleagues. Thank you to my “gradies”, especially Jenny, Nicky, Erin, and Emilie; you are all incredibly inspiring. It has been such a great pleasure to work and play with you; you have always shown me such wonderful unwavering support, and I look forward to speaking more French, talking more theory and eating more raclette with you in future travels. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the esteemed Professors of French at Miami University; without you, this thesis and Master’s degree quite literally would not exist. Furthermore, I spent six incredible years in your midst, including the most rewarding and rigorous two years of my life: the graduate program in French. Jonathan Strauss and Jim Creech: you are amazing. Thank you so much for your help in supporting my efforts throughout my time at Miami. Special thanks to Nick Nesbitt for inspiring me to continue my French studies into graduate school and for his encouragement of my thesis project. He has been an invaluable influence on my choice to study postcolonial literature and theory, and his wonderful teaching and interest in Maryse Condé’s work directly inspired this thesis. I am also indebted to my wonderful thesis advisor, Mark McKinney, and his careful, thorough and extremely helpful reading of the various iterations of this paper: thank you so much for your patience and encouragement! Big thanks to Elisabeth Hodges and Anna Klosowska: I have so loved taking your classes and becoming friends with you both. You are inspiring beyond measure. Thank you for your help on my thesis committee. Paul Sandro, you have been a great friend in addition to one of the best professors I have met. I cannot thank you enough for your thoughtful and constant support. I’d also like to thank all of my dear friends from Oxford, Minneapolis and beyond. Thank you to my friends and colleagues at Sofitel Minneapolis, especially Joseph Colina, who had encouraged me to finish this paper for years and gave me time off especially for that purpose. Thank you Dori Handy and Luda and Matthieu Lafaurie for your interest and encouragement and getting on my case about not working hard enough on my thesis. Thank you to the various friends and coffee shops of Bemidji, Minnesota. It took living in a small but very northern town to finally find the time to write about a small town in the Caribbean. iii INTRODUCTION Traversée de la Mangrove , Maryse Condé’s 1989 novel, is set during a single evening in a small, backwater community named Rivière au Sel on the island of Guadeloupe. The mangrove of the book’s title refers to a type of brackish wetland found along coasts in the tropics. The mangrove evokes the topography of the Caribbean, as well as islands and continental coasts in tropical climates around the world. A coastal frontier in which salty and fresh waters mix, a mangrove is both a resilient, densely wooded boundary and an important habitat for diverse species of fish, birds and insects. The mangrove is an example of a rhizome, a botanical model employed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their seminal work, Mille Plateaux . By exploring the novel through the optic of Deleuze and Guattari’s “Rhizome”, I argue that the mangrove of Traversée de la Mangrove represents the rhizomatic form of the community of Rivière au Sel. Rivière au Sel, a place described as “fermé, retiré” 1 in a lost corner of Basse-Terre, exists, like a mangrove, on the periphery of the insular Guadeloupean world. Like plants and trees of the mangrove, individuals in Rivière au Sel are connected; morever, these connections lie beneath the murky surface of superficial (mis)understandings of their community. Individuals are not aware of their interconnectedness with one another, and instead understand their society in hierarchical terms. In order to go beyond the illusions of order and hierarchy that keep individuals rooted in place, they must discover and understand truths and map their escape from alienation, loneliness and dissatisfaction. Crossing a mangrove involves many risks; as one character envisions, it is impossible: “On s’empale sur les racines des palétuviers. On s’enterre et on étouffe dans la boue saumâtre” (192). Therefore, a mangrove represents both a flourishing ecosystem, a rhizomatic web of connections and a confusing obstacle abundant with hidden perils that threaten to swallow a traveler whole. Francis Sancher, the elusive, enigmatic stranger who mysteriously died in Rivière au Sel, was such a traveler. During his brief time there, he attempted to write an autobiography and family history, also named “Traversée de la Mangrove”, but instead fell over dead on a forgotten path. The novel, bearing the same name as the deceased’s project, is a collection of testimonies of community members who gather together at Sancher’s wake, memorializing him and reflecting on their own lives. The novel itself comprises a rhizome composed of individual testimonies connected to one another through memories, however contradictory or imperfect, of Francis Sancher. The rhizomatic structure of the novel reflects the complexity and multiplicity of a Caribbean community. The novel also manifests another rhizomatic form, the map. The novel provides a map, in the Deleuzian sense, of the community and of Sancher. Mourners at the wake perform a collective act of mapping Sancher’s life in Rivière au Sel, and in so doing create maps of their community and their own strategies for self-liberation. In light of Deleuze and Guattari’s comparison of writing to mapping, one can see that Traversée de la Mangrove does not follow a traditional,