The Bodily Grotesque: Monstrosity as Social Critique in Ananda Devi’s Manger l’autre

Abstract: Through a critical reading of Mauritian Ananda Devi’s depictions of stigmatized bodily difference and ponderous corporeal forms in Manger l’autre (2018), this essay reflects on the intersections of existential dis-ease and monstrous social systems. The story of a morbidly obese teenager, whose constant and voracious appetite is insatiable and altogether unrelenting, Devi’s most recent novel locates its protagonist within a genealogy of pathologized bodies that function as both allegory and social criticism. Indeed, tinged with Rabelaisian notions of grotesque and freakish characters as mirroring broader social structures, Manger l’autre is loaded with themes that have become quintessentially Devi: insularity, social exclusion, abjection and othering. In a marked departure from the writer’s enduring focus on Mauritius as the setting of her large novelist oeuvre, however, the location of Manger l’autre in a Western context of excessive hunger and compulsive appetite has left critics grappling with the novel’s deeper meanings. This study establishes that Devi’s sustained deployment of structures and processes that contain and constrain individual agency gradually evolves into a provocative commentary on the growing insularity and narrowing of horizons in our ever-materialistic world. The novel also draws attention to practices that are increasingly visual and crucial, as technology becomes ubiquitous and pervasive in everyday life. Accordingly, in its portraiture of the layered convergence of hypervisibility and invisibility with online publics’ rampant craving for lurid and sensationalist headlines, the novel resonates with particular poignancy as remote work and virtual communication become ever more predominant.