On s'enterre et s'Г©touffe dans la boue saumГўtre. On s'empale sur les racines des palГ©tuviers. Keywords: Mikhail Bakhtin, polyphony, Maryse CondГ©, voice, silence, Milan Kundera, Caribbean fiction, ethics, TraversГ©e de la mangroveД®ach person who enters the labyrinth of the polyphonic novel somehow loses his way in it and fails to hear the whole behind the individual voices. It argues that the uncritical use of the term вЂњpolyphonyвЂќ in relation to CondГ©'s fiction (and that of other authors from the Global South) has obscured our understanding of ethics and representation, and muted the social critique present in many of these texts. The chapter assesses the aesthetic strategies and ethical priorities of CondГ©'s writing against those of other major Caribbean writers: CГ©saire, Glissant, and Chamoiseau. This reading attends to the distinct levels of narration at work in CondГ©'s novel to show how the text creates a false impression of intimacy and community, while maintaining an aesthetic of opacity. On closer examination, however, the novel challenges a common misperception about literary polyphony, namely the idea that a written text can approximate oral culture and give voice to disenfranchised subjects. Because it takes the form of a ritual wake and features multiple narrators, critics have widely hailed CondГ©'s novel as an exemplary instance of polyphonic writing. This chapter puts forth a more precise definition of polyphony by reading Maryse CondГ©'s canonical novel, TraversГ©e de la mangrove, against leading theorists of literary polyphony, Mikhail Bakhtin and Milan Kundera.

Critics have classified African and Caribbean novels as вЂњpolyphonicвЂќ with little consideration of what precisely this entails.

Polyphonic novels