Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Portrait of the Artist as Dreamer: Maryse Conde's Traversee de la Mangrove and Les Derniers Rois Mages

1995; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cal.1995.0104

1080-6512

Francis Higginson, Lydie Moudileno,

Caribbean and African Literature and Culture

Portrait of the Artist as DreamerMaryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove and Les Derniers Rois Mages Lydie Moudileno (bio) and Francis Higginson Despite the fact that none of Maryse Condé’s novels can be qualified, in the strict sense of the word, as a künstlerroman (in other words a novel in which the theme is the peregrinations of the artist/protagonist in society) one is struck by the recurrence, in her novels, of characters who are artists; Jean Louis, who was struggling in La Vie Scélérate (1978) to complete his main work “La Guadeloupe Inconnue,” was the first such character. Traversée de la Mangrove, published in 1990, introduces us to another writer, Francis Sancher, whose death triggers the tales of the other characters who participate in the narrative. A more recent novel, Les Derniers Rois Mages, recounts the story of a painter who is the grandson of a writer. 1 By sketching these successive portraits, Maryse Condé elaborates a system of representation such that on the one hand the artist serves to unveil the dynamic of their communities, while simultaneously revealing his inability to represent that community. As this process of unveiling the individual and collective illusions, fantasies and phantasms is taking place, the contradiction of these artists also becomes apparent. The process of “mise-en-abyme” (infinite regress), or the “presence of the artist in the novel,” introduces what Dällenbach considers a relationship of coincidence/discordance between the author—who remains in a position of questioning and distance—and her characters. 2 Ultimately, this process allows the author to demythify the status of the artist by also inscribing him in a world regulated by fantasy. What this suggests at the outset is the necessity of a metaliterary reading of the black or mulatto artist’s relation to a black community, be it his own or an adopted one. It is primarily the persistent irony of the narrative voice that prevents the reader from identifying Condé too readily with either artist character. The two novels Traversée de la Mangrove and Les Derniers Rois Mages will give me the opportunity to analyze the issues that are at stake “behind” these portraits as they are framed by the author. By examining these characters’ places in society, their motivations and their dreams, I will try to show to what extent their discourse challenges other portraits and discourses; it constitutes an interrogation of art, representation and race, based on the constant confrontation of the desires and realities, past and present, of the Creole world in which they evolve. Encounter with the artist Francis Sancher, the writer in La Traversée and Spéro, the painter in Les Derniers Rois [End Page 626] Mages, share the status of “outsider” in their respective communities. Neither one of them grew up where they have now taken up residence. Sancher came from Cuba to Guadeloupe, where he has settled to write his novel; Spéro, having started to paint in his native Guadeloupe, has followed his American wife to Charleston, a small town in the Southern United States. Although both characters remain on “Creole ground”—and as such they have in common a diasporic culture—they nevertheless place themselves, at the outset, in the marginal position of the stranger. Simultaneously artists and strangers, both of them erupt into the lives of the other characters on which they exercise an immediate fascination: in the same fashion that Sancher’s mysterious and imposing bearing seduces the men, women, and children of the village, it will take Debbie, an African-American woman, one glance at Spéro and his canvases for her to decide, though she has only just stepped off the cruise ship, that he is the love of her life. Very quickly though, the blindness and fascination of the first instances are replaced by a more nuanced appraisal. Thus we learn, upon hearing of the death of Sancher, that he was greatly despised in the village: “Car tous, à un moment donné, avaient traité Francis Sancher de vagabond et de chien” (M 18) [For all of them, at one time or another, had called Francis a vagabond and a cur, and...