From Chef-d'OEuvre to Hors-d'OEuvre: The Role of Tongue in Four Caribbean Novels. A Gastro-Semantic Reflexion.

摘要

Like the pot in which various ingredients together undergo the transformative force of the fire, the Antilles are a privileged place where many populations have been brought together and have thus intermingled. The particular historical circumstances of this region have inevitably resulted in a juxtaposition of different traditions, stories, cultures, languages, tones, and, of course, flavors. The richness inherent in the encounters of these elements has given rise to a new hybrid reality, which includes the art of cooking. Nevertheless, the complexity of this cultural product is not exempt from the typical rivalry that arises when differences come face to face. Take, for example, the antagonism between the oral tradition of the storyteller and the written tradition of literature. In the Caribbean imagination, written literature competes with orality, threatening its permanence. The binding capacity of the written word may seem to take the place of the performative expression of the oral exchange, suggesting the disappearance of that which the defenders of the Creole identity label as the essence of the people of the Antilles.;Differing from this line of thought, we affirm that writing and orality do not compete with each other because they cannot cancel each other out; each one responds to distinct needs and possibilities of expression. It is precisely by way of this aspect of the currency of orality that a text offers the possibility of transformation into a performance space. In this thesis, we explore how the culinary is inserted into text as a sensory element, transforming it into a delicacy to be savored. The integration of culinary elements into certain novels of the Antilles responds to the need of authors to offer not only a text to read but also a text to savor. The culinary, seen as a language, as a way to communicate, is incorporated into the text and takes over the role of the articulated language when the latter proves to be insufficient. Through "gastronomic reading" the reader feasts through by experiencing reading.