Breaking the Rules: Irrelevance/Irreverence in Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove

Maryse Condé’s ironic treatment of stereotypes is a major feature of her novels. It has been much discussed in relation to plot and characterization; this article focuses instead on the small-scale discursive structures of Traversée de la mangrove, analysing them via Barthes’s concept of semiological codes and rules. Traversée de la mangrove transgresses the ‘rules’ of literary style through deliberately inelegant digressive sentences and paragraphs that disorientate the reader with a mass of irrelevant detail. This works as an ironic deflation of cultural and literary stereotypes (e.g., exoticism), and makes it impossible to construct the hierarchy of meanings that underlies Barthes’s definition of the ‘texte lisible’, while at the same time retaining a commitment to realism that disqualifies them as a ‘texte scriptible’.