The Postcolonial Caribbean Dialogue with the French Renaissance: Maryse Condé’s Intertextual Relationship with François Rabelais

This dissertation deploys close readings to trace sustained patterns of intertextuality that Maryse Condé engenders with the works of François Rabelais. I argue that her systematic engagement with Rabelais differs significantly from authors who imitate Rabelais on certain narrative or thematic levels; Condé’s persistent convergence and confrontation with his satire, both stylistic and motivic, forge a cross-temporal conversation through provocations to the reader to re-read Rabelais’s texts with new postcolonial perspectives. I thus uncover her novels’ invocation of a broader transtemporal dialogue between the postcolonial Caribbean and the French Renaissance. In doing so, I join emerging scholarship that explores how meaning is made dialogically through the patterns of reception of older texts by a cultivated transtemporal interactivity in praxes of reading and writing. My primary theoretical framework is Rancière’s notion of anachrony, a nonchronological mode of relationship between works of art. I anchor the conversation through four key lenses. Chapter One explores Condé’s subversive use of the contrafactum as a narrative device to disassemble Rabelais’s biblical topoi and reassemble them as expressions of Caribbean folklore, invoking the resurrective nature of postcolonial aesthetics. Chapter Two considers the ways in which Condé and Rabelais connect to the scholastic tradition of dialoguing through disputatio, a rhetorical trope of the Renaissance and Middle Ages that, as argued by Pierre-Henri Bas, discursively emulates models of combat. Chapter Three turns to the utopian thematics that appear intertextually in Condé’s island-themed representations in ways that engage with Rabelais’s utopian framework of the Quart Livre by subverting the sixteenth-century literary practice of the isolario, a literary geographical shaping for a social imaginary. In Chapters Four and Five I demonstrate the ways in which ingestive metaphors expressed in literary cannibalism are the primary representational mode through which Condé and Rabelais write. They enact a mutilative past-present dialogue through the notion of textual afterlife, (in Condé’s case, between Caribbean and colonial discourse, and in Rabelais’s case, between ancient classical works and Renaissance humanism), positing consumptive reading and writing as modalities of free creativity.I show that Condé makes intertextual ripostes to Rabelais’s stagings of learned debate in vernacular storytelling, by seizing kernels of metatextual humanistic discourse, and reconfiguring them in a Caribbean context in order to rethink these questions from other angles, valorizing uncertainty and ambiguity. This project thus proposes a praxis of reading at the intersection of two transtemporal intellectual contexts, studying postcoloniality and early modernity side by side, as distinct from periodized literary study.