Breaking the Rules
Breaking the Rules
Irrelevance/Irreverence in Maryse Condé's Traversée de la mangrove
Condé's ironic realism, her deflation of stereotypes, operates not only in the themes of her novels but also on the stylistic level of paragraphs and sentences. By breaking the rules of conventional literary style, her ‘skidding’ and ‘looping’ sentences undermine the stereotypical hierarchies of importance that structure our understanding of social reality. This chapter analyses her style in terms of Barthes’ structuralist theory of literary meaning as an integrated, coherent hierarchy of levels, and his later concept of the codes that structure the realist text and thus reinforce the ideology that underpins it. For Barthes, only anti-realist literature can overturn the codes and subvert the ideology; but Condé's writing achieves the same result in a novel that remains entirely realist and thus impacts on our experience of the real world.
Keywords: Maryse Condé, Roland Barthes, realism, stylistics, stereotypes
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