The Tale and the Mask: autobiographical ambivalence in Maryse Condé's "Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer"

Abstract

This article aims to study the link between fiction and autobiography in Maryse Condé’s Le Cœur à rire et pleurer, whose generical ambiguity has not always been perceived by readers willing to see it as the authentic narrative of the author’s Guadeloupean childhood. Nevertheless, many elements, including paratextual ones, should be interpreted with circumspection, beginning with the unquestioned notion of “true tale”, or the Proustian epigraph that seems, on the threshold of the book, to denounce the pointlessness of any pretention to render the past, as well as too naively biographical readings. Without any doubt, the mask and obliquity aesthetic settled by Maryse Condé lies in the oscillation between the two contradictory poles of reality and fiction, as the only way to reach a truth of being, deeper, more painful, that the autobiographical language could not reach in its meticulous exactitude