“Short-Circuiting Hunger:
Reading French Antillean Fiction”
Nicole Simek (Whitman College)
From the starving island of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land to Simone Schwarz-Bart’s sun-swallowing beast in Ti-Jean L’Horizon to Maryse Condé’s voracious narration in Story of the Cannibal Woman, hunger has served as a literal marker and metaphor for economic, historical or personal suffering and desire in France’s Caribbean colonies. This paper examines the place and structure of hunger and hungry narratives in Antillean literature. Taking hunger first as a technique for disrupting or short-circuiting colonial discourses, this analysis considers in particular the function of hunger as a trope within, and structural model for, Antillean tragedy. Turning next to the use of the comic as a mode of short-circuiting tragic fiction itself, this paper examines the deployment of hunger in the definition of tragedy and comedy as complementary, opposing, or nondistinct narrative forms, the ethical or political goals of these forms, and their affective or cognitive effects on the reader or the community. How, this paper asks, has the relationship between hunger’s referential and metaphorical dimensions been conceived in Antillean writing? What ethics or politics have governed its representation? How has its definition—as discursive or extradiscursive, as violence and/or desire—contributed to the articulation of colonized or postcolonial subjectivity and agency? How has comedy functioned to detach hunger from (or, conversely, to fix it to) the various and sometimes contradictory attributes (tragic/comic, physiological/intellectual, passive/active, infinite/closed) associated with it?