A part le bonheur, il n’y a rien d’essentiel: The Transnational Narrative Model in Maryse Condé’s Desirada

The chapter contends that Maryse Condé’s novel Desirada has been repeatedly read as an identity quest novel, since the narrative impulse is determined by the protagonist’s search for her father’s identity. It argues, however, that Condé goes one step further by entirely subverting the identity quest narrative and presenting us with an excess, the production of fiction, which becomes something entirely different: a quest for an aesthetic truth rather than a filially determined identity. As such, by presenting us with a pastiche of the identity quest model, Condé’s transnationalism moves from minor to major, as her critique aims to dismantle the solidification of postcolonial ideology within the fields of literary and cultural studies.