Words, Wounds and Pre-oedipal Oneness: Maryse Condé’s Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer

Abstract

This essay reads Maryse Condé’s 1999 récit d’enfance, Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer, as a “generational text”; a text that is both about the unresolved and ambivalent feelings aroused by writing about the dead mother, and also about this loss as the site and source of (literary) generation. Le Cœur defiantly rewrites the classic narrative of Antillean matrifocality, and yet, although the mother’s death is relegated to a single line, maternal loss suffuses the entire narrative. Moreover, the text is a reflection on language, writing and literature more generally, and can be read as an exploration of the painful transition from preoedipal to symbolic. Words in this text are destructive entities that wound and distort all relationships, but especially the relationship with the mother, igniting a sustained yearning to return to the security of the prelinguistic pre-oedipal.

Keywords:

• Condé
• memoir
• mother
• daughter
• preoedipal
• language
• semiotic
• symbolic

Introduction

As Lorna Milne observes in her contribution to this “Caribbean Literary Generations” collection, “the measure by which time is understood in much of Antillean literature tends to be provided by the notion of familial generations.” It is undoubtedly for this reason that French Caribbean fiction so conspicuously privileges intergenerational transmission and exchange, and returns again and again to the dynamic between experience and innocence, to the relaying of narrative from survivors, sages, witnesses and mentors to younger heirs, successors and initiates. For male authors, such transmission tends to take place within a pseudo-familial structure; their writing is more often concerned with the active transference of intergenerational collective memory from mentor to novice than with strictly genetic, familial inheritance.¹ Meanwhile women novelists privilege intergenerational and transmissional relationships within the family.² Inevitably, both male and female writers, when responding to the autobiographical impulse, interrogate individual, genetic and intergenerational inheritance. The proliferation of childhood memoirs published between 1990 and 2000, by writers such as Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Gisèle Pineau, and Maryse Condé, was, as I have argued elsewhere, catalyzed at least in part by the coincidence of a series of key historical anniversaries in that decade. The devoir de mémoire generated by successive commemorations of “discovery” (1992), departmentalization (1996) and Abolition (1998), somewhat paradoxically sharpened the sense of the obliteration of collective memory (McCusker 2004). This heightened awareness of the inaccessibility of history as a longue durée encouraged reflection on the more accessible, proximate and compartmentalized contours of familial history. This history is composed of generations rather than of epochs, and peopled by parents, grandparents, siblings and friends, rather than by the often-obscure figures of the local Antillean past, or the rollcall of overly familiar names of colonial Histoire. Hence the embrace of the genre intime could be seen to compensate for what Derek Walcott calls the “deep amnesiac blow” of slavery (1992, 29), privileging instead the physical and emotional bonds within and between generations. In these memoirs, the relationship with the mother (or grandmother) has been particularly foregrounded, as one might expect in a profoundly matrifocal culture like the French Antilles.

While Pineau, Chamoiseau and Confiant were relatively early adopters of the autobiographical genre—their récits d’enfance emerged while they were in their thirties and early forties, alongside their becoming established as novelists—Condé largely shied away from autobiography until she was in her mid-sixties.³ The publication of her 1999 memoir of childhood, Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer. Contes vrais de mon enfance, signaled at once a notable departure, and the start of an intergenerational auto- and alto-biographical turn, which would continue with the publication of Victoire, les saveurs et les mots in 2006 (a fictional biography of the maternal grandmother who died before her birth) and in 2012 La Vie sans fards (a memoir that takes up where Le Cœur left off). Le Cœur sits within, and diverges from, the childhood memoirs of other Antillean writers; as Louise Hardwick observes, “Jeanne is positioned against a tradition of poteau-mitan mothers who display boundless affection and represent a bond with Creole culture, and her own identity is far more complex, formed both from motherhood and from her career as a teacher” (2013, 190). Dedicated “à ma mère,” the text positions the mother at its emotional core, and conveys an acute sense of generational loss and ending, of fracture and continuity.

Generations are capacious, mobile entities; they are both horizontal and vertical, and operate within and across geographical borders. If Condé’s narrative shares some features with récits d’enfance by her own, broadly speaking, Caribbean generation, it is notably distinct from both the transmissional intergenerational narratives of French Caribbean fiction by Zobel, Glissant and others, and from narratives celebrating the “poteau-mitan” mothers to whom Hardwick alludes. The text departs also from another (female) tradition within which Condé is often productively positioned: that of her generation of Afro-American women novelists such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Alice Walker and Toni Cade Bambara.⁴ This generation of American writers has been said to write from a premise of “generational continuity,” with the mother serving as “the female precursor who passes on the authority of authorship to her daughter and provides a model for the black woman’s literary presence in this society” (Mary Helen Washington qtd. in Hirsch 1989, 177). As Marianne Hirsch observes, in her influential study, The Mother-Daughter Plot, these Afro-American women were themselves often first-generation college graduates, committed to writing down the stories handed on orally by their matrilineal heritage, and to the “public celebration of maternal presence and influence”; white feminist writers, conversely, she argues, tend to define their artistic identity as “separate from or in opposition to their mothers” (Hirsch 1989). Condé’s mother, a highly educated educator and member of a social elite, is not only steeped in the written tradition but is also an active agent of the suppression of the oral (in this case, of the Creole language and its associated culture). In many ways her position as distant and authoritarian matriarch aligns more with some of the mothers of metropolitan French and US writing, in which “the mother stands as a barrier to the development of the female artist [and] looks darkly on the aspiration of the headstrong heroine” (Huf 1982, 55). As we see below, the stories told to the child by her mother are primarily sources of hurt, judgement and confusion, rather than wellsprings of familial history or maternal wisdom, and her early forays into writing are received by her mother with hostility, shock and hurt. Small wonder, then, that Condé’s memoir connects in significant ways with those of metropolitan peers and foremothers, too,⁵ above all recalling another foremother in both its form (the episodic structure, often focused on a fragment of dialogue), and in its primary affective focus (the intense scrutiny of the intergenerational mother-daughter relationship): Nathalie Sarraute’s 1983 Enfance.⁶ Like Sarraute, Condé grapples with the quest for autobiographical truth. For both, themes such as alienation, authenticity and the struggle with language and writing are key concerns, and for both, the mother’s words are prominent pain-inducing capsules which become lodged in the memory and whose effect endures long beyond their utterance. Both also explore how pain can reverberate back to the mother through the daughter’s discourse.

This essay reads Condé’s memoir as a “generational text,” a text that is both about the unresolved and ambivalent feelings aroused by writing about the dead parent, and also about this loss as the site and source of (literary) generation. Le Cœur defiantly rewrites the classic narrative of Antillean matrifocality, and yet, although the mother’s death is relegated to a single line, maternal loss suffuses the entire narrative. Moreover, the text is a reflection on language, writing and literature more generally, conforming to Nancy Miller’s view that “the memoirs devoted to a dead parent are almost always meditations on a writer’s authority, her right to tell this story, the path she followed to telling it” (2006, 3). For Miller, the dead parents’ history, “especially their family’s relation to language and writing, seem inextricable from the story of the living child’s vocation” (2006). For Condé, this relationship to language is a strongly gendered one, grounded in the frustrated desire to achieve physical and emotional intimacy with the mother, and in the out-workings of an acute separation anxiety. Words in this text are destructive entities that wound and distort all relationships, but especially the relationship with the mother, igniting a sustained yearning to return to the dark security of the prelinguistic pre-oedipal.

Receiving “l’arme blanche de ses mots”

Le Cœur is composed of seventeen short vignettes or contes, each of which is triggered by a particular, usually painful, childhood incident (Michael Sheringham’s description of the autobiographical incident as “a minor event to which the autobiographer’s discourse ascribes a heavy payload of meaning,” [Sheringham 1994, 102], perfectly chimes with Condé’s “incidents bien ordinaires” (1999, 26) made meaningful in retrospect). Very often these revolve around a fragment of spoken language, often endlessly repeated and usually issuing from the mother, which functions as a verbal carrier of shame, guilt or regret. These incidents culminate in a life lesson learned, an epiphany (often tongue in cheek) or in an irresolvable conundrum, condensed in a closing statement or question, as one might encounter in the tale or conte referenced in Condé’s subtitle. These self-contained vignettes could be read in any order, although they follow a broadly linear arc in which chronological development is on the whole maintained: the narrator progresses from the womb to childhood to early adulthood. The taut and controlled internal microstructure of each leads the reader from exposition to elaboration, and then to either resolution or aphoristic enigma.

From the opening episode, in which the narrator lambasts the solipsism of her parents, who experienced World War II as an inconvenience that prevented their annual trips to France, Condé treats her parents with a strong sense of disdain. Theirs is a bourgeois, educated and authoritarian household, in which Western (and especially French) culture is valued and celebrated. When in Paris, her father avoids the Rue des écoles so as not to be confronted with the black intellectuals of the 1950s, clustered around Présence Africaine and its charismatic founder Alioune Diop. Her mother polices her language and company, ensuring that Creole is not spoken, and that she doesn’t play with poorer black children. The child fears a mother who is “capable de tuer avec l’arme blanche de ses mots” (Condé 1999, 83), and maternal expectation weighs heavily and oppressively; summoned to excel in all things, the child is consequently terrified of disappointing her mother: “Ma terreur était d’entendre ce jugement sans appel que, bien souvent, elle portait sur moi : ‘Tu ne feras jamais rien de bon dans ta vie’” (55). The crushing (double) negative, symptomatic of the mother’s discourse (such negative utterances are a key feature of Sarraute’s Enfance too) conveys not only disappointment in the present, but also despair for the child’s future.

Maternal cruelty is especially vested in the daughter’s body, specifically in those twin sites of sensitivity for the Black female adolescent, body shape and skin color. The narrator notes that “Elle était toujours à critiquer. A me trouver trop haute pour mon âge, je dépassais tous les enfants de ma classe, trop maigre, je faisais pitié avec ma peau sur mes os, mes pieds étaient trop grands, mes fesses trop plates, mes jambes jattelées” (Condé 1999, 55). On her sixteenth birthday, Maryse stays in the sun for an extended period trying out her new bicycle. Her enraged mother confronts the narrator on her return, in an episode that emphasizes her own internalized racism: “Est-ce que je n’étais pas assez laide et assez noire comme cela ? Je ressemblais à une Kongo” (118).⁷ Her mother (who sports tights that are two shades too light, presumably to appear paler [15], and yet also espouses ideas that “préfiguraient ceux de Black is Beautiful” [93]), predicts that the narrator’s pigmentation, darkened by the sun, will repulse potential husbands. Such examples convey the impossibility for the child of winning maternal approval, an impossibility grounded in the contradictions of maternal behavior and attitudes: Maryse is at once too big and too small, too tall and too thin, her feet too large and her bottom too flat, too interested in boys but incapable of attracting one, forbidden from admiring whiteness, as we see below, but warned not to become too Black.

Such crushing indictments give rise to a text that is suffused with an overwhelming, but almost entirely frustrated, desire for a sustained and sustaining intimacy with the mother. The second conte, “Ma naissance,” is a genesis story. Detailing the physical and psychological challenges faced by the mother in pregnancy, it describes how the quadragenarian’s pride in her own fertility overtakes any sense of shame at this late pregnancy. And yet the narrator is also forced to listen to the mother’s oft-repeated story (“dix fois par jour”) of the drab banality of her birth, in contrast to that of her sister Emilia, for example, born during the Bastille Day fireworks. Maryse’s arrival was heralded by no spectacular portent, such as lunar eclipse, earthquake or cyclone (the mother’s disdain for local customs ensures that the fact that Maryse is born to the noisy backdrop of Mardi Gras is ignored). The episode closes on a poignant note of nostalgia for the pre-natal period:

J’étais toute petite, assise contre elle, sur ses genoux. Rien ne me faisait comprendre pourquoi je n’étais pas restée à l’intérieur de son ventre. Les couleurs et les lumières du monde autour de moi ne me consolaient pas de l’opacité où, neuf mois durant, j’avais circulé, aveugle et bienheureuse avec mes nageoires de poisson-chat. Je n’avais qu’une seule envie : retourner là d’où j’étais venue et, ainsi, retrouver un bonheur que, je le savais, je ne goûterais plus. (Condé 1999, 26–27)

Crucially, this scene of imagined inter-uterine pleasure, triggered by corporeal intimacy in the present (the infant is “toute petite,” not yet subject to criticism for her physical size, and poised on the mother’s lap), is in response to another repeated verbal wound—the mother’s insistence on the mundanity of her birth. This “take-give,” “wound-comfort” dynamic is characteristic of the intergenerational relationship more generally. The infant seeks solace in the imagined sounds and rhythms of the womb, a space of freedom and haptic fusion, which recalls Kristeva’s chora, a maternal paradise of mobile and instinctual drives in which the boundaries of self and other become tenuous and fluid. The rush of terms connoting motility and joy (circuler; nageoires; the blind and blithe abandon of the catfish-foetus) are strongly suggestive of the semiotic, a pre-verbal, pre-oedipal fusion between infant and mother which is “enigmatic and feminine […] rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation” (Kristeva 1984, 29). Extra-uterine life, in contrast, is experienced by the narrator as a fall from this edenic state of grace, a primal expulsion from the dark safety of the womb, which initiates a boundary between daughter’s and mother’s body. This inaugural loss, with its concomitant assault of “couleurs et lumières,” and of course, and above all, language, severs her from the protective “opacité” of the inter-uterine, and propels her instead into a territory demarcated by language, structure and regulation.

Seeking the Mother’s Body

This first decisive loss is the model of all separation to come, and a rupture which creates an ongoing longing to fall back into choric plenitude. Throughout the text the child strains to return to this elusive, watery, uterine wholeness with the mother and yearns for this present-absent figure, who is more often associated with stone and rigidity than with the liquidity of the preoedipal. The family photograph taken in the Luxemburg Gardens shows Maryse “entre ses jambes” as if seeking return to the womb (Condé 1999, 17). The Gardens (also a privileged locale for the pre-separation phase of the mother-daughter relationship for Sarraute) are here the Edenic site of prelapsarian innocence, unfettered by any intimation of her parents’ mortality. Looking at her sulky teenage pout in the photo, the narrator realizes that such behavior was the prerogative of a girl untroubled by the shadow of parental death, blissfully unaware of “le sort qui frappe toujours trop durement les enfants ingrats” and which would make her an orphan by the age of twenty (Condé 1999); later, in a rare instance of care, the mother comforts Maryse after the death of the beloved Mabo Julie, domestic servant, nanny and mother substitute for the child (and of whom the mother is profoundly jealous), and when Julie haunts the child’s nightmares, the mother “m’avait prise sur ses genoux et caressée comme elle savait si bien le faire !” (59). Such rare moments of physical and emotional comfort, in which the child is enveloped by the maternal body—in the lap of the mother, the child is as close as she can be to the mother’s womb—are moments of yearning for return to the plenitude of the pre-oedipal uterine.

More commonly, however, the child’s attempts to achieve fusion are frustrated by a mother who is generally distant, inaccessible and rejecting, provoking a regressive desire for the all-encompassing maternal bond experienced only in the womb. In another story that she repeatedly tells the child, the mother recalls her initial shame on discovering that she was pregnant at forty-three. She endeavors to hide her growing belly, an unwelcome sign, for her, of sexual activity: “Elle avait beau ajouter en me couvrant de baisers que sa kras à boyo était devenue son petit bâton de vieillesse, en entendant cette histoire, j’éprouvais à chaque fois le même chagrin : je n’avais pas été désirée” (Condé 1999, 12). Once more, maternal affirmation and affection—the child, now her support in older age, is bathed in the mother’s kisses—is tempered and undermined by the verbal wound. This is one of only three episodes in which the Creolophobic mother uses the reviled language,⁸ and the only time it is the medium of communication between mother and daughter. The mother’s Creolism, which describes the foetus as “kras à boyo,” is glossed in the text as crasse à boyaux, literally the filth of the bowels. The term is usually reserved for the last-born child in a large Antillean family (although even Chamoiseau, also the last of a large brood, renders the same expression in standard French, “dernier bout des boyaux,” and without the scatological kras [Chamoiseau 1990, 23]). The metaphor conflates the foetus with faeces, the womb with the gut, and the unborn baby with waste products; it is conveyed, moreover, in a language that the mother herself reviles and that she strives throughout the text to expel. If the prenatal is the realm of joy and freedom, the moment of birth is here associated with the flushing out of excrement and the elimination of waste and dirt; the child’s sense of rejection, insecurity and even at times self-loathing is painfully instilled. Despite the compensatory gesture of the kiss (a gesture that we see the child seek and replicate with (m)others as we see below), Maryse concludes that she had not been wanted by the mother. The futility of maternal attempts at verbal and physical mitigation of this wound is registered in the concessive “elle avait beau,” signaling the inadequacy of these repeated compensatory gestures and the extent to which the hurt endures in the present.

This existential insecurity ensures that separation from the mother is experienced by the child as trauma, rejection and expulsion. The child’s gestures of affection and intimacy, most often the kiss with which she wants to “couvrir,” “manger” or “dévorer” the mother, are either avoided, misunderstood, rebuffed or redirected to others. When a camping trip is cut short and the child returns to an unexpectedly empty home (the family having decamped to their summerhouse), Maryse is disconsolate at a further separation from the mother, describing herself as a “zombie” on realizing that she would fall asleep yet again without her mother. When finally reunited with her, however, the child’s gestures of affection and attempted physical proximity are spurned by the mother: “Laisse-moi tranquille, tu m’étouffes, protestait-elle quand je la mangeais de baisers” (Condé 1999, 72). These moments of maternal indifference, rejection and denunciation resurface as repeating aftershocks, for example when the pain of exile strikes.

On the boat to France, Maryse is overwhelmed with longing for the mother, who dominates her waking and her sleeping: “comme le dit le poème d’Auden, ‘mon matin, mon midi, mon serein, mon carême et mon hivernage’. Je me réveillais de sommeils fiévreux espérant que j’allais me retrouver serrée contre sa poitrine” (Condé 1999, 138). This insatiable desire for the “poitrine” is a recuperative search for the lost, geographically distant and emotionally indifferent, mother. On disembarking in Dieppe, the teenager has written ten lengthy letters to the mother, begging her forgiveness and insisting on her unconditional love for her; each prompts in return “de courts billets sans âme que terminait invariablement la formule creuse: Ta maman qui pense à toi” (Condé 1999). Physical exile in France is compounded by the mother’s emotional detachment; the formulaic niceties of perfunctory correspondence exacerbate the sense of loss. Successive emotional rejections—this one stimulated by the watery space of the ocean—echo the original dynamic of expulsion from the mother’s body, and reinscribe the child’s loneliness and insecurity. The endurance in the present of such wounds is emphasized in the flash forward: “J’essaie encore maintenant de me consoler” (Condé 1999).

Comfort, where it is found, is more commonly experienced with a number of surrogates and proxies, therapeutic substitutes with whom physical intimacy is freely offered, received with abandon, and prodigiously returned. The frustrated desire to ingest the mother, like the attempt to achieve physical comfort by sitting in her lap, finds uncomplicated, and crucially, non-linguistic, expression with these (m)others, maternal avatars with whom the narrator seeks refuge and physical affection. Her scout leader Nisida cuddles her on her knee (“J’étais son chouchou. Elle m’asseyait sur ses genoux et me dorlotait” [Condé 1999, 71]). But above all it is with Julie, the adored nanny, that the child enjoys an uninhibited sense of physical pleasure that stands in marked contrast to the formality and complexity of the relationship with the mother. The child exuberantly expresses her affection for the elderly woman whose reciprocal embrace instils security, joy and playfulness: “Je l’enlaçais si violemment que son madras se dénouait et découvrait ses cheveux de soie blanche. Je la dévorais de baisers. Je me roulais sur ses genoux. Elle me donnait entièrement accès à son cœur et à son corps” (Condé 1999, 56). The cœur and the corps are here intertwined; there is no access to the heart without the body also giving of itself; the haptic and the emotional are consubstantial, and markedly detached from the verbal. Moreover, the imperfect tense, deployed here as in the scene above with Nisida the scout leader, registers ongoing, repeated and continuous expressions of untrammeled affection, in contrast to the perfect or pluperfect tense used for instances of maternal care (family photo, or the mother’s embrace after Julie’s death). The intensity of the relationship with Julie is described in palliative and transferential terms: in later life the narrator observes that Julie “me manquait comme un onguent à une blessure” (Condé 1999). The blessure described is clearly the wound inflicted by the mother; physicality intimacy with Julie operates as substitution and displacement, and as a temporary physical balm that soothes but cannot heal a primal hurt.

A final scene between daughter and frail and ill mother, the last time the two are physically co-present, prefigures the maternal deathbed, but also resonates with the pre-oedipal plenitude of “Ma naissance.” Yet again, the scene of symbiosis has been triggered by the verbal wound: the mother’s fury at her spending too much time outdoors, and predication of her skin darkening, discussed above. Once more the narrator, sixteen years old and now on the brink of adulthood, imagines herself as a small child. Although she enters the maternal space under the weight of “interdiction,” there is no attempt by the mother to rebuff her, only a return to the porous boundaries of the pre-oedipal:

Je grimpai sur son lit comme du temps où j’étais petite, où rien ne pouvait m’en empêcher, même les plus sévères interdictions. Je la serrai dans mes bras, fort, fort, et la couvris de baisers. Brusquement, comme à un signal, nous nous mîmes à pleurer. Sur quoi ? sur le bien-aimé Sandrino qui se mourait au loin. Sur la fin d’une certaine forme de vie. D’un certain bonheur. Je glissai la main entre ses seins qui avaient allaité huit enfants, à présent inutiles, flétris, et je passai toute la nuit, elle agrippé à moi, moi roulée en boule contre son flanc, dans son odeur d’âge et d’arnica, dans sa chaleur. C’est cette étreinte-là dont je veux garder le souvenir. (Condé 1999, 135–36)

This scene takes us full circle, from beginnings (“Ma naissance”) to endings (of the mother’s life, of Sandrino’s, her beloved brother, as well as of childhood and of “un certain bonheur” more generally), from womb to tomb, from the jouissance of the prenatal semiotic chora, to the tenderness of the women locked in an embrace. Maryse, curled in the foetal position against the mother’s “flanc” (the term can mean side or womb), touching the now redundant breast that has suckled eight children, is bathed in sensory impressions: acrid sweetness, warmth, embrace and liquidity. Tears have replaced amniotic fluid in this shared moment of grief and love, and crucially there is no dialogue: the women cry instinctively and spontaneously, “comme à un signal,” rather than in response to any verbal or discursive trigger. Language, which has acted as weapon and barrier, is now redundant, and the women spend the night in this pre-oedipal intimacy.

Straying into the Symbolic

If, as we have seen, moments of failed, partially achieved or (rarely) successful physical intimacy are often triggered by the verbal wound of the mother, it is also the case that the narrator’s attempts to express herself within discourse are consistently misunderstood or censored, and that Maryse’s words are frequently also missiles of hurt. Wounding is a two-way linguistic street, though one more frequently adopted, in this text, by the mother. Displacement from the semiotic, with its comforting “opacité,” into the clear lines of the symbolic, is an effect of language’s denotative, connotative and syntactic elements, which have the power to distort, fail and wound; the effect of words, both spoken and written, on the receiver, cannot be determined, controlled or attenuated. We see this in the love letters exchanged with Gilbert Driscoll (Maryse’s pique at having her eyes misrepresented as blue in his letter being surpassed by her own shame at regurgitating the tired tropes of romance fiction in response to him), and in the essay she writes about her best friend Yvelise, whom she unintentionally wounds by describing her as a girl who is “pas jolie [et pas] non plus intelligente” (Condé 1999, 41). But two episodes in particular, situated precisely half-way through the text, “Bonne fête maman” and “La Plus belle femme du monde,” form the emotional pivot of the collection. Both contes explore the capacity of the child’s language inadvertently to hurt the mother, as well as the reciprocal damage caused by maternal judgement. The first describes one of the mother’s birthday celebrations; these are lavish events marked by extravagant gifts, champagne, and a range of familial rituals, among them a performance by her children in her honor. The lackluster play performed by her older siblings is followed by ten-year old Maryse’s poetic tribute to her mother, the first one that she has been allowed to present, and one that she has been preparing over many months. Over three quarters of an hour, the child declaims a tribute, in free verse, to her mother and her “metamorphoses.” She first compares Jeanne to the Medusa, “la tête couronnée d’une chevelure de serpents venimeux.” In the second movement, she compares her to “Léda, dont la douce beauté séduisit le plus puissant des dieux” (Condé 1999, 85).

Jeanne listens to the performance in stony silence, before withdrawing to bed in tears. The child, in shock at the power of her words, becomes distraught at their effect: the door of the maternal bedroom remains stubbornly closed when she attempts to make amends, and Maryse spends the night crying tears of guilt and frustration. The pre-scripted, performed and lengthy nature of the tribute, as well as the mother’s uncharacteristic silence in response, and the fact that it is the first time the child has seen her mother cry, marks the episode out as being as especially formative in the mother-daughter plot, and positions language, and notably language’s abstractive capacities in metaphor and analogy, as pitiless weapons capable of causing unintended and irrevocable harm. The duality of this mythic (m)other, Goddess, seductress and monster (beauty is a key characteristic of both goddesses, and of the mother), is emphasized: the snake hair and deadly, petrifying gaze of the Medusa positions her in myth as “the archetypal figure of the ‘Terrible Mother’” (Neumann 1963, 166). The narrator thereby imagines her mother as a figure of dread and horror, of stoniness, rigidity and silence, in contrast to the nurture, love and the liquidity of the desired pre-oedipal maternal.⁹

The second episode, “La plus belle femme du monde,” follows “Bonne fête maman,” and similarly explores ideas of beauty and idealized femininity. The child attends church with her family, where her gaze is drawn to a young white woman. This is Maryse’s first encounter with the mesmerizing power, and compelling otherness, of whiteness; the encounter culminates in her declaration to her mother that the woman is her “idéal de beauté” (Condé 1999, 93). The adult’s reaction is characteristically stony and judgement-laden: “Silence de mort. Elle resta sans voix […]. Elle exposa mon crime : comment mon idéal de beauté pouvait-il être une femme blanche ?” (Condé 1999). On one level, of course, the scene can be read in purely racial terms (see McCusker 2014): as an example of a child having internalized the desirability and prestige of whiteness, and of a mother who, for all of her Francophilia, is fiercely proud of belonging to the black bourgeoisie, as evidenced in the photograph above her bed of a large bourgeois Afro-American family, taken from the US magazine Ebony.¹⁰ On the other hand, though, the mother’s excessive reaction can be read as a personal, as well as a political, response. In idealizing the béké woman, in choosing one version of femininity over another, in preferring white to black, youth to age, the child commits the “crime” of maternal rejection. One thinks of the hairdresser’s dummy scene in Sarraute’s Enfance, in which the child comments that the plastic doll is more beautiful than her mother (Sarraute 1983, 92); Sarraute’s mother’s response, that “un enfant qui aime sa mère trouve que personne n’est plus beau qu’elle” (95), echoes directly in Condé’s chapter title. Maryse’s mother convenes the entire family and asks pointedly, “N’existait-il pas des personnes de ma couleur qui méritaient cette distinction ?” (Condé 1999, 93).

The ambiguous “ma,” attributed to the child in the mother’s tirade, betrays perhaps the extent to which the mother internalizes the slight. The following Sunday, glimpsing the white woman under the stony stare of the Medusa-mother, the child does not dare to look, having understood that “sa beauté m’était interdite” (Condé 1999, 94). Maternal interdiction successfully polices the child’s gaze, ensuring that rival regimes of beauty are out of sight. The verbal wound, unwittingly inflicted by the child, is reappropriated and weaponized by the mother, whose censorious reaction pivots power back to herself. She is thus repositioned in her rightful place as sole, primordial and incomparable female other.

***

Condé uses the term blessure explicitly (1999, 56 and 85) to describe the child’s separation from the mother. Writing in another context, Suzanne Henke links this wound to the woman writer’s vocation: “it is precisely the wound of separation, the traumatic umbilical cut, that scars the psyche and spurs its creativity.” Although the woman writer experiences “nostalgia for a protective continuum of oceanic engulfment and regression to infantile, undifferentiated consciousness” (Henke 2000, 17), this primordial fall from maternal grace—and from the “subvocal iterations of semiotic discourse”—are crucial in igniting what she calls the “desire for the recuperative act of writing” (Henke 2000). Le Cœur can indeed be read as a foiled quest for “oceanic engulfment” and as a sustained exploration of “the wound of separation,” a wound that is indeed the catalyst for Maryse’s vocation as writer. This is most clearly explored in the memoir’s closing episode. The narrator, now resident in Paris, is symbolically located in the heart of the intellectual Latin Quarter, on the cusp of her career as literature student in the Sorbonne and also, now, a writer inspired by, and a critic of, male-authored texts: she has written a creative response to Zobel’s La Rue Cases-Nègres and published an essay on Jacques Roumain. The memoir closes, therefore, with a stark entry into the symbolic order of literature, metropolitan intellectual life and heterosexual love (with Olnel, mentioned only in passing in this closing conte). Standing on the corner of the Boulevard Saint Michel and the Rue Cujas, she is poised for what she terms “la vraie vie” (the scene strongly recalls the final sequence of Sarraute’s Enfance, in which the narrator, standing on the corner of the Boulevard Saint Germain and the Lycée Fénélon, hovers on the threshold of a “nouvelle vie” [1983, 276]).

As in Enfance, the closing lines of Le Cœur stage a heightened moment of letting go:

Ce soir-là, sans que je m’en aperçoive, ma solitude se détacha de moi et me fit ses adieux. Elle m’avait fidèlement accompagnée pendant plus de deux ans. Je n’avais plus besoin d’elle. Je venais de la rencontrer, la vraie vie, avec son cortège de deuils, de ratages, de souffrances indicibles, et de bonheurs trop tardifs. Elle resta debout au coin de la rue Cujas agitant faiblement la main. Mais moi, ingrate, je ne la regardai même pas tandis que je m’avançais faussement éblouie vers l’avenir. (Condé 1999, 155)

The mother is not named in this excipit, and indeed in the sequences following the pre-oedipal bedroom scene discussed above, she has faded from view. However, the striking and sustained personification of the narrator’s “solitude,” waving goodbye to Maryse (such abstraction is unique in an otherwise entirely realist text), along with the insistent female gendering of the noun, and the apparent intensity of the relationship between them, appear to connect the farewell of the closing lines to a definitive severance with the mother. We know that the narrator was denied the chance to say a final goodbye to her mother, who died when she was in Paris. The two years of “solitude” coincide with a period of miserable exile in France without her mother. In bidding adieu, belatedly, to her “solitude,” configured here as a constraining and limiting force, and one that has held her back from the joys of real life, love and literature, the narrator dismisses the mother and embraces a new chapter. And yet, if we accept that solitude stands for the mother (the passage also conjures Solitude, legendary Guadeloupean icon of female power, resistance and motherhood, and a heroic maternal counterpart, perhaps, to the Medusa),¹¹ the daughter’s heedless farewell is attenuated by intimations of filial guilt, neglect and above all a lack of gratitude (“ingrate, je ne la regardai même pas”). In her regret for deserting “solitude,” and in her sneaking acknowledgement of solitude’s qualities—devotion, loyalty, and perhaps above all, the willingness to let her go—the daughter appears to recognize her own selfishness, her own capacity to wound. In this oblique acknowledgement, the mother-daughter plot is perhaps if not resolved, at least nuanced and complexified, and the work of mourning belatedly begun.

Conclusion

Celia Britton, in a 2014 essay, locates her critical practice in generational terms: “Unlike most of the current generation of researchers in francophone studies, I came to the field having already worked for twenty years in Linguistics, avant-garde French literature (the nouveau roman in particular), structuralist and poststructuralist literary and film theory” (6). Britton explains that this background has influenced her approach to francophone Caribbean texts, not only in her dominant focus on language and textuality, but also in the theoretical works on which she draws. We are all, of course, generationally located and shaped as readers, critics and human beings, a truth that has been explicitly explored, and implicitly present, throughout the essays collected in this Special Issue. My own essay, grounded as it is in the French and US feminist theory which animated literature faculties in the 1990s, is also a product of the generation of its author, whose undergraduate and postgraduate studies were enriched not only by belated attempts to decolonize a literary curriculum that remained steeped in the “classics,” but also by the ongoing interactions and clashes between these schools of feminist thought, in both of which the mother’s body was, nonetheless, in some way at the core of intellectual endeavor. Condé’s Le Cœur can be read and understood, as I have argued, in the light of these intellectual traditions. It also speaks to a universal generational challenge that transcends criticism, theory and literature itself. As Nancy Miller notes, “a parental body in decline reminds us of the founding ordinariness of life that is lodged in the body itself.” Miller calls this “the plot of generations. Parents, children, parents, children, grandparents”; she plays here, knowingly, with the “plot that ultimately awaits us all,” the familial grave (2006, xi). Such narratives confront us with the realization of the contingency, “somehow avoided until then, of the physical bond between generations” (37). The mother’s body, the primal site of generation and genesis, surely embodies such anxieties and realizations in a uniquely powerful way. Condé’s brief but affecting narrative, studded with love, guilt, frustration and pain, can be read as a privileged textual site in which gender, genre and generation coalesce to produce an exploration of the “plot of generations” which has universal and timeless significance.

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Notes on contributors

Maeve McCusker

Maeve McCusker is Professor of French and Caribbean Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. Her most recent book, Fictions of Whiteness. Imagining the Planter Caste in the French Caribbean Novel (Virginia University Press, 2021) was awarded the Gapper Prize by the Society for French Studies, for the best book in French Studies in the UK and Ireland. She has written on contemporary narrative (Chamoiseau; Condé; Glissant; Placoly), and on nineteenth-century fiction from the French Antilles (Traversay; Levilloux), and is the editor of a scholarly edition of an early novel by Martinican author Louis de Maynard (Outre-mer 2010 [1835]). She has also published on topics such as autobiography, memoir, and the oral tradition, and an essay on decapitation in plantation fiction, “Headless Horror,” is forthcoming in PMLA. She is currently President of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies.

Notes

1 This often takes the form of a didactic dynamic between childless mentor and eager heir: the Médouze-José dyad in Zobel’s La Rue Cases-Nègres (1974); Solibo, Marie-Sophie and Bibidji’s relationship with younger interlocutors in Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique (1988), Texaco (1992) and Biblique des derniers gestes (2002) respectively; the paternalistic relationship between Papa Longoué and Mathieu in Glissant’s Le quatrième siècle (1964).

2 Examples include Gisèle Pineau’s Mes quatre femmes (2007) and L’exil selon Julia (1996) or, more destructively, L’espérance macadam (1995); Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972) opens with the famous genealogy, the “Présentation des miens,” and provides a sweeping account of five generations of women in the Lougandor family.

3 That said, Condé had reflected on her life in many interviews, and indeed her work has been read through a highly “biographical” prism. Moreover, a critical work such as Heah D. Hewitt’s 1990 Autobiographical Tightropes reads her first novel, Heremakhonon, as autobiographical. Hewitt, in this excellent early study of Condé, is one of very few critics to consider the Guadeloupean writer alongside French writers such as Beauvoir and Sarraute.

4 All were born within eight years of Condé. See, for three examples among many, studies by Kathleen Gyssels (2000), Anthea Morrison (2010), and Emmanuelle Recoing (2009) that compare Condé’s work to that of her US generation.

5 This is notably true of her exact contemporary, Annie Ernaux, whose first-person autofictional works, like Condé’s memoir, are written in a deceptively straightforward style; if Ernaux’s autofictional writing coalesces around the class, Condé, in Le Cœur, confronts race.

6 Like Condé’s memoir, Enfance was a turn to a genre that Sarraute’s generation of nouveaux romanciers had already embraced.

7 Kongo is a term used locally to describe Caribbeans with the darkest skin tone. As Louise Hardwick notes, the term “suggests that a person is as dark as a newly arrived slave” (2013, 189).

8 The other examples are also connected to pregnancy and childbirth, one being motivated by communicational necessity, when Jeanne helps deliver her cousin’s baby (110), another a “rare” instance of a song passed, down by her mother, that she sings while pregnant (20).

9 The mother is frequently associated with stony silence: examples include “le beau masque de ma mère resta impassible” (84); “Brusquement elle me fixa” (1963); “elle resta bouche cousue” (105).

10 The prominence of the Ebony picture is yet another example of the mother’s inconsistency, given that her parents “haïssaient l’Amérique sans y avoir jamais mis les pieds” (45).

11 Solitude, famously, is a mulâtresse; Jeanne is the daughter of a mulâtresse, whose “peau de sapotille” is synonymous with this ethnocaste (78–79).