Collective Narrative Voice in Malemort, La Case du commandeur and Mahagony
Collective Narrative Voice in Malemort, La Case du commandeur and Mahagony
In these novels Glissant addresses the problem of the absence of a collective sense of identity in Martinique through the development of a collective narrative voice. Since the communal solidarity which such a voice implies does not in fact yet exist, it has to avoid imposing a false coercive uniformity; rather, it must be sufficiently fluid and flexible to include all the characters’ voices and, ideally, situate them in relation to each other. The three novels discussed here embody different phases of this search for a communal ‘nous’, from Malemort's despairing, indeterminate and fragmented ‘nous’, through the more vigorous and structured quest for collective identity in La Case du commandeur, to Mahagony's staging of a plurality of individual narrators existing in relation to each other and its metadiegetic critique of the two earlier novels. All three demonstrate the political relevance of the formal category of narrative voice.
Keywords: Malemort, La Case du commandeur, Mahagony, narrative voice, collective identity
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
