In Maryse Condé’s fictional universe, the protagonists often fail in their search for a clearly defined paternal origin and a continuous family lineage. Her 2006 text Victoire, les saveurs et les mots marks a turning point: the narrative no longer aims to demystify a patriarchal figure, and Condé turns towards her own maternal genealogy instead. This article proposes that instead of an effort to restore the life of an unknown grandmother, Victoire is Condé’s attempt to seek an aesthetic alternative for genealogical writing. By staging her ambivalent identification with a paradoxical ancestor figure as well as the paradoxical representation of the quest that led to the lost aïeule, Condé demystifies the genre of the récit de filiation and pushes us outside of the kind of genealogical thinking that emphasizes linearity and coherence. A radical literary (pro)creation, Victoire privileges invention over retrieval and presents genealogy as fictional. Condé turns the genealogical order upside down as she transforms her grandmother into the textual (grand)daughter of her own literary creativity.
Yan Zhao (Sun,) studied this question.