Doubling the discourses of the self: Language and memory in maryse condé’s autobiographies

Maryse Condé, the celebrated Guadeloupean novelist and critic, has pro-duced three separate and distinct autobiographies, Le coeur à rire et à pleurer (1999), La vie sans fards (2012), and Mets et merveilles (2015). These works engage a series of latent paradoxes and contradictions that implicitly subvert claims to autobiographical veracity, but there remain traces of the author’s sojourns and encounters that can be unearthed in a number of other texts. If autobiography functions by creating a split between past and present selves, such a division, in temporal and psychological terms, is itself doubled in character, content, and implication, while the typically linear structure of autobiographical narratives assumes that we have access to the truth of the autobiographer’s life and experience(s). In Condé’s works, both the discernible facts of her life and manner of their representation generate a creative instability, as writing and the invention of subjectivity encounter the presumed infallibility of memory.