SOURCE: “Dis-figuring Narrative: Plagiarism and Dismemberment in Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence,” in Blank Darkness, University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 216-45.

[In the following essay, Miller examines Le Devoir de violence with respect to the charges of plagiarism.]

At its extreme, the myth of the Negro, the idea of the Negro, can become the decisive factor of an authentic alienation.

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

THE AFRICAN AND THE NOVEL

Time can become constitutive only when the bond with the transcendental home has been severed.

—Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel

If the rise of the European novel is tied to the rise of the bourgeoisie,¹ it must also be tied to the rise of colonialism, the relationship with those exotic countries that supply raw materials destined to be, in Baudelaire's words, “marvelously worked and fashioned.” The crude, unredeemed nature of the primitive element that makes it unable to “evolve” on its own also makes it perfect in a scheme where progress meets stasis and where the former is imposed on the latter by an outside agency: this is colonialism. In literary terms, the novel is arguably the genre that imposes “progress,” the evolutionary conception of time, where before there was only “inertia.” The relationship between this genre and its not completely digestible raw material is, as we have seen in reading Sade, Conrad, and Céline, central to the European novel written about Africa. Those three novels took advantage of the difference between their genre's penchant for progress, for “travel,” and the Africanist material depicted as outside or prior to linear time. But the particularity of those works, unlike more mediocre colonial novels, was to show progress stymied rather than imposed.

What happens when Africa “writes back,” when the people who previously played shadow-like roles in European literature take up a discourse of their own? Is this the moment when the Other is perfectly wedded to language, when raw material and finished expression coincide without violence? Such questions assume that the African novel will address itself to the concerns posed by the European discourse of Africanism. While the new African genre will come to be explicitly concerned with forging an authentic voice for itself, the inherent irony is, of course, that this discourse of one's own is written in the language of the Other. The novel is that which alienates the African from his own language, his own past; it will be both a barrier and a medium of retrieval. But in certain literary productions of the colonial period, it is as if a single discourse imposed itself, combining the French language, the genre of the novel, the European image of Africa, and colonialist ideology.

In Le Fils du fétiche, a novel by David Ananou, European religious values are espoused as the sign of progress and evolution away from “this very curable ill which glowers over the African continent,”² i. e., fetishism. Conversion to Christianity and the break with “ancestral conceptions” are necessary to “emancipate” Africa. Ananou uses the verb émanciper, but affranchir would be more suitable, because becoming free in this ideology is synonymous with losing your difference, becoming “Frank, free,” French. Ananou asks, “What good is an emancipation of people still completely faithful to fetishistic practices?” (p. 216), and he warns that “the foreigners are watching our performance and are awaiting results”: “Let us purify our customs … by dropping everything trivial and idolatrous. Let us put some light in our practices. Obscurantism is not favorable to progress” (p. 217). The terms of Le Fils du fétiche would be completely familiar to Charles de Brosses. It is in the novel that this story of imposed progress is told; it is the novel that serves the literary imposition of progress, i. e., colonization.³

Ananou's discourse might be compared to that of the domesticated versions of Aniaba and Zaga-Christ, in which otherness is obliterated in favor of harmony. Zaga-Christ's epitaph should serve as a warning in approaching African literature: “Ci-gît le roi d'Ethiopie / L'original ou la copie” (“Here lies the king of Ethiopia / The original or the copy”). The question of originality has been a preoccupation of European Africanists for centuries: the supposed “earliest beginnings of the world,” the “perpetual childhood,” is a state of origin that Africanist discourse desires. In their radically divergent avatars, Aniaba and Zaga-Christ were made to either reflect or refute that desire. Ananou's discourse, by “copying” European discourse, addressed itself to European questions in terms that Europe would recognize as its own. In order to redeem Africa from its originary state, Ananou had to copy a discourse that put Africa there in the first place. His novel illustrates the type of conundrum in which African literature can get involved once a European question is asked of it. As with Chinese handcuffs, the more you struggle to get out, the more you are stuck.

The African novel in general is preoccupied with its own originality and authenticity, as well it might be for a genre imported from and usually edited in Europe and written in European languages. Thus, although there is no reason why the African novel should address any of the same questions that the European Africanist novel addresses, the very desire to break away and negate can lead African discourse back to certain ancient European preoccupations, namely, that of the origin and the copy. “Africa” is often used as a figure for a lost origin in African novels, as it is in European ones: the comparison of the two remains to be written. My purpose here is to look at one novel that consciously engages itself in the cross-cultural and interliterary “zone of interferences” between the two continents and does so not to forge a synthetic response but to exaggerate and undermine the whole tradition we have been reading. Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence is not a work that can be held up as the African “answer” to the European Africanist tradition or as a work completely and authentically detached from the tradition. It is a negative response if, by “negative,” it is understood that no true contradiction takes place, only a brazen act of trifling with the idols of literary creation, respecting the taboos of neither the African nor the European literary establishment. The problem is that Ouologuem engages the European Africanist tradition and leads one to expect a positive repudiation and refutation of it. My purpose here will be to show that it is not on the thematic level that Ouologuem's “answer” should be sought but in the symbolics of writing itself.

In the early 1960s, four hundred years after Zaga-Christ, Yambo Ouologuem, a student from Mali, arrived in Paris. He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (roughly equivalent to being baptized by Bossuet), and his first and only novel was published in 1968. Hailed by Le Monde as a “great African novel,” Le Devoir de violence was seen as a welcome antidote to the “savannas of pseudo-lyricism,” the “complacency” of the African novel. This was not only a good novel; it was a “true” novel, opposed to others that must have been false. Indeed, it was “the first African novel worthy of the name.”⁴Le Devoir de violence would thus be literally the original African novel. From Le Monde to the American Today Show on television, Ouologuem's success redounded, and his novel received the 1968 Prix Renaudot. The adulation began to be offset, however, by two objections: some Africans had found the book ideologically offensive, its violence and pessimism too open to anti-African interpretations, and some critics had begun to find an excessive amount of “borrowing” (the polite quotation marks showing that they didn't want to call it outright plagiarism). Confrontation of Le Devoir de violence with other texts, from the Bible to André Schwarz-Bart's Le Dernier des justes (1959) and Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield (1934), revealed a tissue of quotations, translations, and incorporations, which, depending on your point of view, would be either an “original” and creative exercise in intertextuality or “copied,” plagiarized, tainted with crime. The ensuing succès de scandal was proportional to the initial succès d'estime. The literary establishment had been duped, and it might well have buried Le Devoir de violence under Zaga-Christ's epitaph.

The question of originality and plagiarism, once posed, generates a discourse with only one axis, that of truth and falsehood, paternity and kidnapping, white and black. It will be my contention that Le Devoir de violence cuts across those categories with its “operative gymnastics of writing” and that the continual rocking of those binary questions has precluded another reading of the novel: as an assault on European assumptions about writing and originality. Plagiarism as a problem in literary criticism tends to elicit two responses: either an accusation of criminality or a recuperation as originality. Le Devoir de violence, both in its narrative method and in its narrated content, posits destructive violence and theft as origin itself.

PLAGIARISM, LEGALLY

There is no more legitimate or respectable right than that of an author over his work, the fruit of his labor.

—Leopold II

IDENTITY OF THE TEXT

Copyright is a defense between one literary body and another, and plagiarism is a violation of that defense. To own a copyright is to delimit a certain sequence of words, sentences, and paragraphs from other sequences that might infringe on the integrity of the first. The right of the text is to not be copied.

Seth I. Wolitz has analyzed in detail the stylistic and narrative differences between these two passages. His comparison tends toward reversing the accusations, attributing to Ouologuem the true creative powers: “an intelligence which knows how to chose and eliminate in order to tighten and intensify the narration.”⁵ Greene, the “original” writer, is judged guilty of being “cold and anodyne,” “banal”: “Greene presents us with a disjointed text, almost devoid of resonance; Ouologuem tightens and intensifies everything.” Wolitz concludes that Ouologuem's translation has nothing to do with plagiarism. But it is interesting to note that his argument against plagiarism borrows the vocabulary of originality and falsehood, leaving the categories intact, with only the places exchanged: Ouologuem, instead of kidnapper and falsifier, becomes the avatar of authenticity and creation, the “Urtyp of the creator, of this fertile young Mandarin African literature.”

One would be hard pressed to find a translation that did not manifest differences of tone, style, attribution, and grammatical aspect, all of which make a translation susceptible to value judgments in relation to its precursor. Translation is a relationship of distance as well as sameness; like plagiarism, it is understood as the removal of a single object to another place.

Once that distance is of sufficient magnitude, plagiarism is no longer a question. Passages from the Bible, the Koran, or Aesop's fables obviously have no copyright nor any single author, for that matter. It is difficult to imagine a plagiary of Shakespeare; even were some playwright to lift passages verbatim and use them in his own play, it (a) would not violate any existing copyright and (b) would probably be interpreted as creative intertextuality. If T. S. Eliot had not included footnotes in “The Waste Land,” would that highly borrowful text have been considered plagiary? Like Le Devoir de violence, Eliot's poem is largely a patchwork of other texts, but, aside from the nature of the texts quoted (some of which had no copyright), those he quotes are safe between quotation marks or in italics. If distance is the relationship that plagiarism falsifies by producing a simulacrum of identity, then quotation marks, along with footnotes and italics, are the guardians of that distance, of good faith.

Plagiarism has played a curiously prominent role in the European Africanist tradition, to such an extent that one's perspective tends to be reversed by immersion, and one begins to see theft as origin itself. I began this study by quoting Pigault-Lebrun, who was copying Raynal. Labat plagiarized Loyer, who copied Villault, who lifted passages from Dutch travelers.⁶ Reaching back far enough, one finds everyone copying Homer. The distance between texts is violated as European writers attempt to close another distance, that between themselves and Africa.

But in the situation of the African writer, that distance has always already been violated from the moment he or she commences to write in French (or English or Portuguese). Any original African utterance in French must already be a translation from a more authentic source into a medium of useful communication but also of exile. A logic of alienation from one's own literary productions is thus implicit in Francophone writing. This is important to keep in mind while reading Ouologuem, an author who establishes his discourse frankly in the void of that distance.

THE PURLOINED QUOTATION MARKS

Discourse in the novel could be said to have two basic types: the unattributed, unquoted recounting of events, known as narration itself, and the speech of characters within that narration, framed by quotation marks. No real novel, of course, conforms to this division, for techniques such as embedded narrative, free indirect discourse, and “stream of consciousness” tend to blur distinctions. Narration, in this narrow definition, would be a direct perception of the world, opposed to the second-hand, mediated mode of quotation.

In the passage from Le Devoir de violence reproduced above, a mystery surrounds the status of the narrative discourse. After the Times Literary Supplement (May 5, 1972) had established the derived nature of the paragraph, Ouologuem defended himself in Le Figaro Littéraire (June 10, 1972) in the following terms:

Thus the passage from Mr. Graham Greene incriminated as plagiarism, but in fact cited between quotation marks (as were some lines from Schwarz-Bart) in my manuscript, which I have given over to my lawyer, preceded a wild scene in which a White man … made a Black woman have intercourse with a dog. I am Black. It is obvious that if the facts I evoked had been the product of my imagination, my racial brothers would scarcely have forgiven me for having besmirched the Black race. … In these conditions, putting Mr. Greene's text in quotation marks was not an act of plagiarism, but a way to be not disavowed by my own people, by casting a legal fact in a literary light. [Emphasis mine]

Ouologuem goes on to say that the coupling of the Black woman and the dog “is a true fact, as are all the facts reported in my novel.” In an article in West Africa (July 21, 1972), “K. W.” reports on an interview with Ouologuem, in which,

To demonstrate the injustice of the charges against him, he spent some time taking me through his original hand-written manuscript (in an old exercise book) of Le Devoir de violence showing me all the places where there had been quotation marks, if not actual mentions of his literary allusions and quotations. … I saw, for instance, where he had written “here ends The Last of the Just,” a reference omitted like so many others, for whatever reason, from the published version.

[p. 941]

Ouologuem's defense thus consists of two arguments: that the quotation marks he used to set off the passage from Greene had been lost, stolen, or otherwise waylaid, probably by the publisher;⁷ and second, that while verisimilitude demanded the recounting of that certain sequence of events, fraternal feeling made it necessary to use someone else's voice. The text that Ouologuem showed to “K. W.,” and which he claims was the one submitted to Editions du Seuil, would thus contain narration between quotation marks. Reading the passage over again with this change inserted (see pages 220–21, above) one is faced with a stylistic maelstrom. Unless some other narrative agency were inserted, such as “X then recounted that …”—and Ouologuem mentions no such clause as having been deleted—those additional quotation marks would belong to no one. Furthermore, they would alter the status of the marks that are already there, scrambling direct and indirect attributions.

Ouologuem's defense on the grounds of attributability, while working from the traditional assumptions about narrative, points the way to the general subversion that his novel perpetrates. By invoking some lost or stolen quotation marks, he would have us believe that his manuscript was constructed according to the strict rules of proper borrowing. One can only wish that his exercise book were available, for if it indeed cited and acknowledged all its sources, it would be a remarkable scholastic novel, with a whole new set of rules concerning voice and attribution. According to Ouologuem's self-defense, it is the publishers who are responsible for the crime that the final text commits. Yet a study of the borrowings already discovered reveals that no proliferation of quotation marks, italics, or footnotes could restore Le Devoir de violence to a primal state of pure textual autonomy in which each intertextual relationship is identified.⁸ From the first words (which are taken from Le Dernier des Justes) on, throughout the two hundred pages of the work, this is a novel so highly refined and perverse in its manner of lifting titles, phrases, and passages from other texts that it makes the binary system of quotation and direct narration irrelevant. The symmetry of acknowledgment no longer applies. Ouologuem's defense appears to argue on the basis of those standard binary terms while, at the same time, subverting them.

In the context of a new literature trying to define its own ground, claim its own territory, Ouologuem's stance seems at first to respect the principles of identity and distinction that are necessary for such a literature to establish itself and to repress all awareness of an ironic, inevitable collapsing-together of self and Other when one writes in the Other's language. Respect for the rules of borrowing imitates respect of national borders, the delineation of distinct subjectivities. Thus far Ouologuem has argued on those terms. But this study has tended to show that involvement with an Other—Africa, “irreflection,” the “night,” the Negro—can blur the distinctions between subject and object: by describing the Other in your writing, your writing becomes the Other's. Thus our European authors have tended to become alienated from their own meanings, surrendering them to someone else, becoming a nègre. Ouologuem had some explicit remarks to make on this subject—remarks that upset the principle of sole authorship and property as well as the founding basis of authenticity.

LETTRE à LA FRANCE NèGRE

The logic with which Ouologuem opposed himself to his accusers and precursors was first developed in a quirky book of essays called Lettre à la France nègre. Published in 1969, at the high tide of the acclaim for Le Devoir and so before the controversy, the second book was greeted as “a pamphlet in every way inferior to his novel.”⁹ And no wonder: the irreverence of the Lettre is but a sign of its subversive intent. Its humor does not reason or argue but rather opposes itself asymmetrically: “I deliberately chose the path of pamphlet humor. I hope it will have been ferocious enough to begin the demise of that comedy, the brawling but untouchable Negro” (p. 11). The essays include such titles as “Letter to all those who don't know what a Black is or who have forgotten what a White is,” “Letter to all those who frequent Negroes,” and “Letter to the copy-pissers, Negroes [i. e., ghost-writers] of famous writers.” The last title is the one that concerns us here.

Ouologuem exploits the double meaning of the word “nègre” in French, where Negro, originally synonymous with slave, came also to mean (since the eighteenth century) ghost-writer. If the plagiarist is a slave of another text, merely repeating it while passing himself off as its master and creator, then the ghost-writer/nègre is a master passing himself off as a slave. The plagiarist kidnaps and rewrites someone else's words; the nègre sells his own words to be rewritten under someone else's name. In the “Lettre aux pisse-copies, nègres d'écrivains célèbres,” Ouologuem likens the exploitation of the ghost-writer to that of the black, and he proposes a solution:

Chère négraille,

… Vous êtes encore moins qu'un manoeuvre: car lui, n'est-ce pas, est salarié et peut, sans rougir, avouer sa profession. Mais vous! comment oseriez-vous confesser que vous avez un souteneur, lequel exploite votre tête fêlée, en brandissant l'opium de la gloire posthume?

Vous seriez, en vous révélant obscurs tâcherons, plus que déclassés; on se garderait de vous admirer; ou, plutôt, on vous admirerait rétrospectivement.

C'est pour tous les pauv'gars de votre acabit, que moi, un Nègre, j'ai travaillé comme un Blanc: en pensant. Hihi! …

Voilà donc, à votre usage, une thérapeutique dénégrifiante, et rudement commerciale. …

Nègres d'écrivains célèbres, vous êtes terriblement frustrés, et châtrés dans votre génie par la loi du silence: je veux que par ces pages, vous sachiez comment faire pour être pisse-copie et rester blanc.

[pp. 165–66]

Dear Nigger-Trash,

You are even less than a manual laborer: at least he has a salary and can admit his profession without blushing, can't he? But you! How would you dare confess that you have an underwriter, who exploits your cracked head by brandishing the opium of posthumous glory? By revealing yourselves as dark jobbing-laborers, you would be more than déclassés; people wouldn't let themselves admire you, or, rather, they would admire you in retrospect. It's for all the poor blokes of your ilk that I, a Negro, labored like a white man: by thinking. Heehee! Here, therefore, for your use, is a denigrifying therapy, damned commercial. … Negroes/ghost-writers of famous writers, you are terribly frustrated and castrated in your genius by the law of silence: I want you to learn from these pages how to go about being a copy-pisser while remaining white.

The problem of “Nègres, Négrilles, Négraillons, and Négrillons” is already complicated enough, the author says, without these white nègres adding to the misfortune of fate. The nègre—ghost-writer is defined as an écrivaillon, half writer and half slave boy, from the terminology of the old slave codes and of Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal via Le Devoir de violence.¹⁰ The écrivaillon is a debased, decapitated, castrated, nonthinking object that nonetheless persists in producing “copy,” churning out or rather urinating verbiage. The écrivaillon, like the plagiarist, represents the inability of one literary body to “contain itself” completely—to hold back the impulse to excrete, spill over the edges, and invade other bodies.

The project of “denigrifying” the nègre, however, neither ends that interpenetration nor elevates the status of the ghost-writer. “Remaining white” is associated with “thinking,” which, ironically, the ghost-writer does for a living anyway. But it is the “white,” the overseer of the nègre—ghost-writer, who maintains the pretense of noninterpenetration and autonomy. The “famous writers” for whom the nègres produce copy are “white” in their false wholeness; the nègre is castrated and thus is not whole unto himself. But importantly, the project consists not in restoring wholeness to the nègre but in inventing a cleverer dismemberment. The author therefore proposes that the nègre become a plagiarist as well. He would thus become the controller of the interpenetration of textual bodies in a system that has become doubly perverse.

The “new gadget” proposed will permit the ghost-writer “to compose one after the other all the works [his] boss will order.” It consists of reading, cutting, and pasting together “the finest vintage of the detective novel. …, which should permit you to invent, in the corridors of your imagination, A BILLION NOVELS PAINLESSLY!” (p. 168). In the charts and tables that follow, including a large fold-out of passages from Ian Fleming, Carter Brown, and Simenon, numerous permutations are demonstrated.

Encore une fois, c'est un exemple, mais non point la révélation absolue de toute la diversité de la gymnastique opératoire de l'écriture. …

Sous cette forme, chère négraille, pour qui exécute ce travail avec une conscience trés lucide de la demande du marche, être le nègre d'un écrivain célèbre c'est se donner, comme une liberté, la clé d'un langage envisagé dans ses puissances combinatoires—mises à la disposition de la clientèle. C'est un peu de l'algèbre, mais de l'algèbre pour petits enfants.

Cet algèbre-là n'est pas une analyse d'objet, c'est une analyse d'action.

[p. 176]

Once again, this is an example, but not the absolute revelation, of the whole diversity of the operative gymnastics of writing. … In this form, dear nigger-trash, for whoever executes this labor with a keen awareness of the market's demands, being the ghost-writer [nègre] of a famous writer is giving to oneself, like freedom, the key to a language envisaged in its combinative powers, made available to the clientele. It's a bit of algebra, but algebra for little children. This algebra is not an object analysis but an action analysis.

The “Negroes” will disappear as the novel proceeds, losing all status as a constituted group (the word nègre remains, uncapitalized, as an adjective). It is the négraille, those “nothing men” like Sade's No One, who are the counterpart of the Saïfs; it is they who will persist as the irredeemably oppressed and alienated “trash.” The Empire reduces itself to a pure oppressor and a pure oppressed, Saïf and négraille, a binary opposition that knows no mediation. The Saifs are represented in this paragraph as assuming “true history” and Negritude unto themselves.

Simultaneously, the narrative moves toward an authentically African point of view, defined by the speech and the chant of the oral historian, the griot, and at the same time toward a negative interpretation of African history. Those who will proffer “true history” are not influenced by European ideas or preconceptions in any way; neither are they the voice of the négraille; they are the “ancients, notables and griots” (p. 9). Those who speak are the same as those who, claiming an obscure legitimacy, will establish dominion over the négraille. The history of violence that begins to unfold thus has a spoken and repeated, inherited status, and the chapter proceeds with such reminders as “they say”; “it is told in the talismanic annals of the wise Ancients, among the narratives of the oral tradition”; “our griots recount …”; etc. At one point, narration without quotation marks is interrupted thus: “There followed a pious silence, and the griot Koutouli, of precious memory, completed the exploit thus,” and a quotation follows (p. 10).¹¹ But we did not know we were listening to the griot Koutouli or to his chanson de geste; in fact, the crossing of voices is so complex that no single narrator can be isolated.

The question that dominates the chapter is that of singularity and origin. The legitimacy of the Saïfs depends on the legend of the single original hero: “the tradition of the Saïf dynasty, at the origin of which is found the grandeur of one man alone, the most pious and devout Isaac El Héït, who, every day, would free one slave” (p. 12). Thus “detaching itself from this table of horrors, the fate of Saïf Isaac El Héït was of a prodigious singularity; rising well above common destiny, it endowed the legend of the Saïfs with the splendor in which the dreamers of the theory of African unity still slumber” (p. 11). The method by which Ouologuem disassembles that theory still lets it be known that legends are necessary things.

No sooner has the figure of Isaac El Héït been established than the following warning is issued:

Ici, nous atteignons le degré critique au-delà dequel la tradition se perd dans la légende, et s'y engloutit; car les récits écrits font défaut, et les versions des Anciens divergent de celles des griots, lesquelles s'opposent à celles des chroniqueurs.

[p. 11]¹²

Here we reach the critical degree, beyond which the tradition is lost in legend and is swallowed up; for written accounts are lacking, and the versions of the Ancients diverge from those of the griots, which are opposed to those of the chroniclers.

The project of “true history,” dependent on a certain accord of voices, is swallowed up and lost. If history for Africa is tradition, an inheritance and repetition of oral evidence, then this “critical degree” is Ouologuem's device for problematizing history. Described as a result of the absence of written records, this “black hole” in the text, with all its loss of authority, is the sine qua non of the legend that will emerge. The absence of writing is a pretext for fragmentation and mythification. The gap between the various accounts of the griots, the Ancients, and the chroniclers will be filled by the legend of the Saïfs' origin: “the splendor of a single man, our ancestor the black Jew Abraham El Héït, a half-caste born of a Negro father and an Oriental Jewish mother—from Kenana (Chanaan)” (p. 12)¹³ The unity of that origin, the singleness of the hero, involves at the same time an outside determinant. Abraham El Héït's parentage ties Black Africa both with the West, through the Bible, and the East, in that his mother is “Oriental.”

His heirs will exploit the prestige of this birthright to lord it over the négraille: the Saïfs, a dissenting voice will say later, “claim to be Jews … only for the delight of proving that [their] ascendance makes [them] superior to the Negro. … Because the Negroes couldn't get along on their own, direct themselves, govern themselves, could they?” (p. 64). The Saïf is a “fétichiste musulman et négro-juif” (p. 87), a multifaceted system of masks that has no one true face. Ouologuem's Saïfs thus reflect a conscious effort to be “any figure that you like”; they are an African exploitation of an Africanist myth.

Their legendary foreign origin permits the Saïfs to expropriate any incipient intervention in their empire and to pit their vassals against one another: “fomenting between the backward peoples … [in the words of one Saïf], ‘as many misunderstandings as possible'” (p. 19). At the moment of the Arab conquest, the Saïfs and notables sell the négraille into slavery (pp. 24–25), and Islam proves to be a useful tool: the Saïfs affect great Islamic piety and “convert the fetishistic populace, dumbfounded by the blackness of its soul” (p. 29). At the time of the French colonial conquest, the Saïfs adopt a progressivist mask and make sure the new laws work to their benefit: “Since French law had to be made for someone, the notables made it be for the populace” (p. 64). While the Saïf dynasty is the only principle of unity, it is also the principle that resists identity, giving itself all identities in order to dominate consistently and denying any identity to the négraille. The dynasty is unopposable in two senses of the word: it is all things at once and therefore cannot be opposed symmetrically by any one thing; consequently, its dominion is total.

If that “critical degree” of obscurity is the necessary condition for the Saïfs' legend, then it is also a part of what was called “true history.” Ouologuem's attitude toward that ambiguity between truth and fiction comes through in the following passage:

Véridique ou fabulée, la légende de Saïf Isaac El Héït hante de nos jours encore le romantisme nègre, et la politique des notables en maintes républiques. Car son souvenir frappe les imaginations populaires. Maints chroniqueurs consacrent son culte par la tradition orale et célèbrent à travers lui l'époque prestigieuse des premiers Etats. …

Mais il faut se rendre à l'évidence: ce passé—grandiose certes—ne vivait, somme toute, qu'à travers les historiens arabes et la tradition orale africaine, que voici:. …

[p. 14]

Whether fact or fable, the legend of Saïf Isaac El Héït still haunts Negro romanticism and the politics of the notables in many republics. For his memory appeals to the people's imaginations. Many chroniclers pay homage to him in the oral tradition and through him celebrate the grand epoch of the first States. … But one must face up to the evidence: this past—for all its glory—lived only, in the final analysis, through the Arab historians and the African oral tradition, which follows:. …

The net effect of these paragraphs is surprising. In the first paragraph, the epoch of ancient African civilizations is treated as if it were a romanticized fantasy, self-indulgent and politically expedient.¹⁴ Yet within the context of the chapter, the denial is less of the history itself than of the good faith of its uses in politics. “True or fabled,” “original or copy,” the legend persists; the veracity is less important than the persistence of the haunting traditions, this perpetual error. The second paragraph opens as if to set the record straight and finally define the status of history. But by saying that past “lived only … through the Arab historians and the African oral tradition,” the life of the legend is given substance—for how else would such a tradition persist in West Africa but through those two agencies? Yet the tone and grammatical restriction of the sentence give the impression that this is a diminished, inferior status—compared to what, we do not know. Is the narration that then follows a viable history, a living tradition growing organically out of a legitimate ancestry, or is it a mere fable, patched together, like the Saïf dynasty, out of usurpation and violence? The question is perpetuated rather than answered by this passage and by the novel as a whole.

The global effect is to depict the African past as a purloined, kidnapped, and usurped origin, as an originary violence that precludes the autonomy of any given object, leaving only a void. Wole Soyinka, in his sensible discussion of Le Devoir in Myth, Literature, and the African World, writes that it is “a fiercely partisan book on behalf of an immense historic vacuum.” In answer to the most essential question—“What was the creative genius of the African world before the destructive alien intrusion?”—we find only “another rubble-maker of cultural edifices” trying to “stuff up the cultural black hole of the continent.” Soyinka rightly points out that “the positive does not engage his [Ouologuem's] re-creative attention.”¹⁵ The violent partisanship that runs through the novel is opposed to everything and symmetrically counterbalanced with nothing.

On the smaller scale of immediate plot devices, sex and violence are the armatures by which human interaction proceeds through time: the primal usurpation of the Saïf dynasty by Saïf El Haram, who marries his mother and has the heir to the throne eaten alive by worms; the devouring of the sexual parts of defeated enemies (p. 22); the colonial administrator whose dogs have sex with a black woman (pp. 70–71); etc. Violent atrocities destroy the barriers between one life and another; sexual intercourse, which more often than not becomes violent, is depicted as a breach in the body's integrity, the opening of a wound. We are close to the “grotesque image of the body” described by Bakhtine and to the “disorganization” of Sade's Butua. Bearing in mind that cannibalism and the grotesque interpenetration of bodies was part of a European vision of the “earliest beginnings of man,” one wonders to what end Ouologuem is exploiting these themes.

Tambira, the mother of the protagonist, Raymond-Spartacus Kassoumi, is forced to have sex with a sorcerer named Dougouli in order to gain his help for her children. Their encounter is representative of the way in which any two bodies interact in Le Devoir de violence:

L'oeil révulsé par le désir, les lèvres lourdes, les mains tremblantes, ils se dévisagaient. Les cuisses nues de Tambira se miraient dans la flaque. …

La flaque dansait devant les yeux de Tambira fascinée, attirait, mordait furieusement ses yeux ivres; les formes tourbillonnaient toujours, s'emplumaient de violence et de luxure où sa propre ignominie était insignifiante. … Et ce fut le néant. Plus rien que le reflet du sexe de Tambira, entrouvert au-dessus de la flaque.

[pp. 148–49; emphasis mine]

Their eyes turned back by desire, lips heavy, hands trembling, they stared at each other [disfigured each other]. Tambira's naked thighs were mirrored in the puddle. … The puddle danced in front of Tambira's fascinated eyes, it attracted her, furiously chewed at her drunken eyes; the shapes still flew about in a whirlwind, fledged in violence and lust, in which her own ignominiousness was insignificant. … And then nothing. Nothing but the reflection of Tambira's genitals, opening above the puddle.

Desire is at the same time the very process of turning away, of revulsion. The act of looking at each other involves a breach of the body's integrity: dévisager, which normally means “to stare someone down,” means literally to dis-figure, to deface.¹⁶ Later, under the magician's curse, Tambira dies, and her body is found with “worms crawling in her nostrils; her head stuck out from among the feces, held by a noose attached to one of the boards.” Her husband, Kassoumi, “lifting up the sticky body of his beloved, washed it gently, … from time to time … sucking the nose and spitting out a worm.” The head and the feces, love and putrefaction, commingle. Disfigurement entails the violation of all oppositions: life/death, sex/violence, oral/anal, desire/revulsion. The human body in Le Devoir de violence is not an integrity but a “masse de pâte molle, plaies vives” (“mass of soft paste, live wounds”). Intercourse, even in its most positive instance (the homosexual affair between Raymond Kassoumi and a Frenchman), involves the destruction of the self, loss of “face”: “soiling of his face,” “wearing-away of the flesh.” That destructive process is defined as “linking and opposing irremediably the White man and him [Kassoumi].” The act of linkage and union is immediately an opposition: attraction does not occur without revulsion; love cannot be distinguished from violence.¹⁷

The creator, progenitor, and lover is also the kidnapper, murderer, and rapist. As Le Devoir de violence narrates violence and the flowing of one body into other bodies and into the world, the narration itself is disfiguring a prior text, violating the integrity of another literary body. Chaulet-Achour makes the following connection:

Le Devoir de violence, p. 144

Parmi les décombres de la guerre, Kassoumi rêvassait sous son bananier, promenant, audelà des feuillettes grisâtres des fruits bourgeonnants, son pauvre regard sur la rive du Yamé, empestée par l'odeur saumâtre de carcasses de squelettes que les pêcheurs ramenaient souvent du fond de l'eau, dans leurs filets, cadavre d'Allemand décomposé dans son uniforme, tué d'un coup de lance ou de sabre, la tête écrasée par une pierre ou flanqué à l'eau du haut d'un pont. Les vases du fleuve ensevelissaient ces vengeances obscures, sauvages héroïsmes inconnus, attaques muettes, plus périlleuses que les batailles au grand jour, et sans le retentissement de la gloire.

Among the ruins of the war, Kassoumi day-dreamed under his banana tree, letting his eyes wander beyond the grayish little leaves of the burgeoning fruit, to the bank of the Yamé, tainted by the brackish smell of skeleton carcasses, which the fisherman often hauled up from the bottom in their nets, a German's body rotting in his uniform, killed by a lance or saber, the head crushed by a rock, or thrown into the water from up on a bridge. The vessels of the river enshrouded these obscure, savage acts of vengeance, unknown heroism, silent attacks, more perilous than battles in broad daylight and without the resounding glory.

Maupassant, Boule de suif (Paris: Librairie de France, 1934), p. 7.

Cependant, à deux ou trois lieues sous la ville, en suivant le cours de la rivière, vers Croisset, Dieppedalle ou Biessart, les mariniers et les pêcheurs ramenaient souvent du fond de l'eau quelque cadavre d'Allemand gonflé dans son uniforme, tué d'un coup de couteau ou de savate, la tête écrasée par une pierre, ou jeté à l'eau d'une poussée du haut d'un pont. Les vases du fleuve ensevelissaient ces vengeances obscures, sauvages et légitimes, héroïsmes inconnus, attaques muettes, plus périleuses que les batailles au grand jour et sans le retentissement de la gloire.

Meanwhile, two or three leagues downstream from the city, toward Croisset, Dieppedalle, or Biessart, the sailors and fishermen often hauled up from the bottom some German's body, swollen in his uniform, killed by a knife or kicked to death, the head crushed by a rock, or shoved into the water from up on a bridge. The vessels of the river enshrouded these obscure, savage, and legitimate acts of vengeance, unknown heroism, silent attacks, more perilous than battles in broad daylight and without the resounding glory.

I have italicized the words that are identical in the two passages. A sufficiently close reading could demonstrate that the alterations of Maupassant in Ouologuem's text—the total change of context, the transplanting of the scene to Africa—produce a completely new meaning. This is the thrust in current criticism of Ouologuem.¹⁸ It redeems the kidnapper, making him in a creator, and the validity of the point is indisputable. But that redemption should not deny the violent nature of Ouologuem's enterprise. The precursors of Le Devoir de violence, as best seen in the passages I have just quoted, by virtue of being lifted and reorganized, become swollen bodies with crushed heads, both more and less than they used to be, with words added and words deleted, worms crawling out of their orifices.

In the incongruously “harmonious” last section of the novel, “L'Aurore,” which consists of a dialogue between Saïf and the European bishop Henry de Saignac, the double tension of the novel is clarified:

—Vous parliez du Nakem tout à l'heure.

—Je voulais être seul, pur.

—Mais la solitude s'accompagne d'un sentiment de culpabilité, de complicité …

—Pardon, de solidarité, rétorqua l'évêque.

—L'homme est dans l'histoire et l'histoire dans la politique. Nous sommes déchirés par la politique. Il n'y a ni solidarité ni pureté possible.

[p. 201]

“You were speaking of Nakem just now.”

“I wanted to be alone, pure.”

“But solitude comes with a feeling of guilt, of complicity …”

“Excuse me, of solidarity,” retorted the bishop.

“Man is in history, and history is in politics. We are torn apart by politics. There is no possible solidarity or pureness.”

Politics, a subset of human intercourse, is a force not of unity but of dismemberment and fragmentation. You cannot be pure, because other bodies interfere with yours. According to the model of interaction as defacement, solitude is spoiled by intervention from the outside, and the configuration of solidarity is also out of the question. The closing section of the novel has been seen as an espousal of the Euro-Christian values of the bishop, as if corrupt Africa, in the person of Saïf, is reaching toward its last best hope. But the relationship between the two men is described as the sharing of a secret—“that they were the sole authentic conspirators of Nakem-Zuiko” (p. 203)—and as an uncanny tension between attraction and repulsion: “their stares linked them in an unnameable strangeness” (“leurs regards les liaient en une indicible étrangeté”; p. 203, emphasis mine).

Several pages earlier, the bishop tells a parable that comes close to naming that strangeness, which is the link between himself and Saïf, Europe and Africa, and even between Le Devoir and its precursors:

Les Chinois ont un jeu: le trait d'union. Ils capturent deux oiseaux qu'ils attachent ensemble. Pas de trop près. Grace à un lien mince, mais solide et long. Si long que les oiseaux, rejetés en l'air, s'envolent, montent en flèche et, se croyant libres, se grisent de battements d'ailes, de grand air, mais soudain: crac! Tiraillés. …

L'humanité est une volaille de ce genre. Nous sommes tous victimes de ce jeu; séparés, mais liés de force.

[pp. 193–94]

The Chinese have a game: the tether. They capture two birds, which they attach to each other. Not too closely. Using a thin but long and solid cord. So long that the birds, when they are thrown up into the air, take flight, rise like arrows, and, believing themselves free, get drunk on beating their wings in the open air. But suddenly: bam! Pulled short. … Humanity is a bird of that feather. We are all victims of that game; separated, but linked by force.

The Chinese game describes Ouologuem's vision of the world as a whole: a forced linking of unwilling opposites, which proceed to tear each other apart. The irony of the name “trait d'union” lies in the fact that the birds will eventually “peck each other's eyes out,” and one or both will wind up dead, all because of this “union.” But “trait d'union” also means “hyphen,” a link by punctuation, which might describe the authorship of Le Devoir de violence: “Ouologuem-Schwarz-Bart,” “Ouologuem-Greene,” or “Ouologuem-Maupassant.” The political violence to which the bishop's parable obviously refers is echoed by the separation and forced linkage between the text itself and its precursors, leaving authorship, authority, and authenticity “teased” (“tiraillé”) between the two.

Ouologuem's “theory” and practice thus tend to apply the grotesque image of the body to the interrelations of literatures. Le Devoir de violence, in both its thematic content and its stylistic practice of plagiarism, violates the notion of an integral body, whole unto itself. That notion is generally taken for granted in the face-off between two literatures: one assumes that one knows which “corpus” one is reading. But there is another metaphor at work; for if two bodies exist side by side, one can or must be different from the other, probably older, and hence “better.” This is the root of theories such as Lukács', which projects a hierarchy according to age, between “childlikeness” and “virile maturity,” between epic, drama, and novel. Lukács saw the novel as the genre of progress from one to the other, and a work such as Le Fils du fétiche fits perfectly into that scheme. But in the world of the grotesque, such closed, smooth bodies are unknown; and hierarchies, as with the Saïfs, are a matter of deceit. Le Devoir de violence is written in the excrescences, the orifices, and the intrusions between European and African literature, by a sort of nègre franc, if one permits a play on words: not only a “frank” ghost-writer, with no compunctions about the nonintegrity of his text, but also a “Frankish Negro,” a perverse and “unnameable strangeness” instead of a national identity. No wonder the novel was controversial.

Ouologuem is a dangerous writer to put in the context of this study, under the weight of the European Africanist tradition. Le Devoir de violence can too easily be interpreted as warmed-over European prejudice, especially when one thinks of the Saïf dynasty, taking on any figure it wants to, like soft wax, and of the négraille, the irredeemable nullity. But it is Ouologuem's willingness to face those phantoms that makes him an appropriate “answer”: fully conscious of the Africanist tradition (even Aniaba appears in the novel at one point [p. 43]), Ouologuem is able to look it in the eye and disfigure it in his fashion. His relation to his European precursors defies the rules that would place him in the position of “childlikeness” compared with their “virile maturity.” Le Devoir de violence is difficult to read because Ouologuem involves himself to such an extent in those myths while refusing to resolve them. He refuses to be either “original” or “copy.”

OUOLOGUEM AND LIBERTINISM

Do you know that some people said I was a black Sade?

—Yambo Ouologuem

Another text, attributed to Ouologuem, brings us back to the crossroads of libertinism and Africanist writing. Les Mille et une bibles du sexe is a work of episodic libertine adventures ostensibly “edited” by Yambo Ouologuem but, according to Jahnheinz Jahn, actually written by him.¹⁹ One is reminded of Sade on two accounts: by the theme of sexual adventure and by the quirky narrative frame by which the author effaces himself. Ouologuem signs his name to the preface and returns to introduce each episode, centered on a French foursome: Régis and Vive, Harry and Emmanuelle. The fact that one of their adventures leads them to Africa invites speculation on the role of Africa in erotic writing (“ce côté safari … qu'est-ce que c'est dans l'érotisme?”)²⁰ or, more importantly, on the role of eroticism in Africanist writing.

The fictive Yambo Ouologuem of the preface is an editor at Editions du Seuil who is approached by a “great Parisian aristocrat” with a 2,400 page manuscript of “poker confessions” sorely in need of revision. This new genre is a combination of gambling, sex, and tale-telling, in that order, interconnected. A game is played with sex as the prize, all of which is then related in a “confession.” The six hundred persons who had contributed their confessions had not been able, however, to go beyond “a pornography of dubious taste,” as Ouologuem says. But due to apparent affinities between these texts and his own Le Devoir de violence, Ouologuem says he accepted the task of editing and correcting the work. Referring to the banning of Le Devoir de violence from certain African countries as if it had been out of prudery rather than politics, Ouologuem writes a small manifesto for erotic writing.²¹ The poker confessions reveal, he writes, “all the originality of the freshest, the most troubling eroticism.” Their freshness will not, however, be without resonance in the history of libertinism: an obsession with rules, numbers, counting, and recounting. The betting game depends on the quality of the tale one tells, thus on recounting (conter); eroticism is dependent on language and vice versa. Sex is “essentially irrational and marvelously visceral,” but “eroticism alone speaks. … The metaphysical utterance is thus inseparable from eroticism.”²² Eroticism rises above mere physical sex and above pornography, which is apparently the rendering of sex in writing; eroticism is made to speak and promise.

This brings to mind remarks by Michel Foucault on sexuality and language since Sade:

La sexualité n'est décisive pour notre culture que parlée et dans la mesure où elle est parlée. Ce n'est pas notre langage qui a été, depuis bientôt deux siècles, érotisé; c'est notre sexualité qui depuis Sade et la mort de Dieu a été absorbée dans l'univers du langage, dénaturalisée par lui, placée par lui dans ce vide où il établit sa souveraineté et où sans cesse il pose, comme Loi, des limites qu'il transgresse.

Sexuality is decisive in our culture only in spoken form and to the extent that it is spoken. It is not so much that our language, for almost two centuries now, has been eroticized; it is our sexuality that, since Sade and the death of God, has been absorbed into the universe of language, thereby denaturalized, placed in that void where language establishes its sovereignty and ceaselessly poses as Law the limits that it transgresses.²³

Foucault insists that Sade was the first to lock sexuality inside a single discourse, of which “he suddenly became the sovereign” and in which a frustrating game of transgression and limitation takes place ad infinitum: “the questioning of boundaries is substituted for the search for a totality” (“Préface à la transgression,” p. 753). The value judgment expressed by Foucault, whereby language denaturalizes sexuality and establishes a dictatorship over a void, is a common one. Discourse for Foucault is a means of repression in which the “free circulation” of sex is chaneled, reduced, controlled (Volonté, p. 25). The problem is that any discourse, even or especially a libertine one, by unleashing the “secret” of sex confirms the repression it is combating. This is why the entry of sex into language makes sex into both “something to be said” (p. 45) and something “at once banished, denied, and reduced to silence” (p. 10). Foucault can offer no positive vision of a world free from all this, because any liberation is only transgression, confirming one's imprisonment. Yet, before Sade, things must have been better; Foucault cannot help but imply that a renaturalized, nondiscursive sexuality is the object of his obscure desire. In a critique of the libertine duality between surface “natural animality” and the sought-after “Absence” (“Préface,” p. 752), can one escape creating a dualism of one's own, whose object is the escape from dualism?

Foucault states that language interferes in sexuality “in our culture,” but Ouologuem's eroticism, which “alone speaks” and is “inseparable from the metaphysical utterance,” seems caught in the same scheme. This is to say that Ouologuem's eroticism is involved in a very European conceptualization of itself and is understandable in terms of the libertine tradition, the dialectic of law and transgression, exile and return.

That dialectic, a design for the release of tension, can therefore be seen as an obstacle to its own design. If the desire of the libertine is to reach back to a primal state of unity (the state “before Time, before Form, before the Fall of man”),²⁴ the observance of ritual is both a means toward that end and proof that one has not yet arrived. In Sade, at least, libertines seemed to be offered no alternative to the perpetual motion of their machines: “Justine … se laisse faire machinalement.” The performances in Les Mille et une bibles seem to constantly involve the technology of the industrialized world: cars (mostly Rolls Royces and Jaguars), trains, elevators, even switchblade knives, telephone receivers, and so on. The process is more self-perpetuating than successful in producing perpetuity. On the one hand, there is this illusion of a return to Eden:

Le couple couché se caresse, et s'abreuve de cris de gorge en galop. Aldo a les yeux d'Annabelle dans la gorge, et son corps se trahit. Aldo se crispe, il ne veut pas mourir. Annabelle sans cesse répète des sanglots qui emplissent l'espace. Et tous deux soudain sont comme au début. Quand la terre était oeuvre de Dieu, et l'homme le bout du monde. Ils ne savent pas si le soleil reviendra après la nuit, si la lune saluera le coucher du soleil. Ils vivent sans fin.

[p. 100]

The couple, lying down, caress each other, and each drinks in the cries from the other's throat. Aldo has Annabelle's eyes in his throat, and his body betrays him. Aldo shrinks back; he doesn't want to die. Annabelle ceaselessly repeats her sobs, which fill the space. And suddenly both of them are like at the beginning. When the earth was God's work, and man the edge of the world. They do not know if the sun will return after the night, if the moon will greet the setting sun. They live without end.

But, on the other hand, “living without end” is the problem itself, to which death is the only true answer: “Les hanches de Régis voyageaient à la mesure des râles de la femme qu'il prenait, et cette femme-là grondait à voix basse. Elle pleurait. Elle mourait. Elle s'éveillait de son agonie, puis s'affaissait tout doucement. … Comme tuée de plaisir. Inerte.” (p. 48). (“Regis' hips were traveling in time with the death-rattle of the woman he was taking, and the woman groaned in a low tone. She was weeping. She was dying. She woke up from her agony, then eased herself back down. … As if killed by pleasure. Inert.”) Those, in brief, are the two poles of the libertine dilemma.

The possibility of a geographically based solution is raised by James Olney in his discussion of Les Milles et un bibles du sexe and Le Devoir de violence.

In his reading of the former, Olney sees an important difference between the practice of libertinism in Europe and the promise of eroticism in Africa:

The atmosphere of Africa that embraces the figures the moment they step from the plane seems somehow to offer promise in itself of a kind of fulfillment—the individual in relation to the surrounding, enveloping sensory universe—denied to the human creatures in the thin air of France. … Immediately they drown themselves in the abundant fruits of nature that in their variety and plenitude render any less natural satisfaction for the senses irrelevant.

[Tell Me Africa, p. 226]

On the one hand, Olney sees a promise; on the other hand, actual “satisfaction.” Nature—the fruits and vegetables that become synonymous with women's bodies—replaces machines: “the union of interior and exterior, the joining, ‘beyond fear and death,’ of the individual with nature, realizes itself in highly erotic sexual performances … [pointing to] mystic dissolution and natural reunion” (pp. 228–29). Nature is by definition that which needs no explanation, that which is self-evident and nonironic: if man and man's eroticism are sublated into Nature, then a solution has been found to the perpetual labor of the libertine machine. It is in such a reading of Les Mille et une bibles that Olney is able to assert the existence of a “straight face” in Ouologuem's writing, “somewhere behind the irony.” If a straightforward eroticism or happy libertinism is meant to relieve the tension of European Africanist experience and writing, can we now close the book on the idols and fetishes that have peopled this study, or have we in fact created another one?²⁵

Let us suppose that behind the irony of Le Devoir de violence and of the rest of Les Mille et une bibles there is “Africa,” an allegory of mystified eroticism. What happens in the African passage of Les Mille et une bibles to justify such an interpretation? The four principal libertines have met three Africans from Liberia (the name of which becomes symbolic), who have given them round-trip airline tickets to Africa. Here the story is interrupted for a comment from Ouologuem the editor, who declares that he is “sorry to see Africa mixed up in this business” (p. 275) and that he would have preferred a “less collective exoticism.” He concludes with some grudging admiration for the “poor great exoticism that dreamed the art of violence for the erotic banquet.”

Africa welcomes them like an anxious lover: “naked earth, trembling in the air stirred by the last breath of the sirocco … the beaches, lined with palm trees, stretched out without end, licked by the Atlantic” (p. 283–84). If Africa “herself” is a sensuous woman, African women have become allegorical figures as well; landscape and humanity are metaphorically linked in their erotic appeal:

Or le paysage était luxuriant de baroque, avec son folklore exubérant de carmins, de bougainvilliers, d'hibiscus, d'amaryllis de vermeille, d'orchidées de formes étranges, de couleur diabolique.

[p. 284]

And the landscape was baroque, luxuriant, with its folklore exuberant with carmine, bougainvillaeas, hibiscus, rosy amaryllis, strange forms of orchids in diabolical colors.

[p. 284]

Si l'on en croit le voyage de Régis et de ses compagnons, l'Afrique avait autant à dire, avec ses femmes noires aux seins insolents, avec ses joliesses en boubous lamés et sans corsage, leur démarche canaille de nonchalance, leurs silhouettes agrémentées de laisser-aller, leur fesses qui bombent au bas de leurs reins cambrés, leur sexe: crépu et électrique quand le frotte le pubis masculin, leurs poitrines: redondantes sous le soleil lourd, le robuste ouvrage de leur sensualité, née comme du climat, débordant les corps comme la volupté de cieux autres

[p. 286: emphasis mine]

If the voyage of Régis and his companions is to be believed, Africa has as much to say, with its black women and their insolent breasts, with its pretty young things in spangled boubous and no top, their rascally, insouciant gait, their silhouettes adorned with unconstraint, their buttocks bulging out from their well-set loins, their sex: frizzy and electric when the man's pubis rubs against it; their chest: superfluous under the heavy sky; the robust work [product] of their sensuality, born as from the climate, overflowing the bodies like the voluptuousness of other heavens.

The burden of idealization is literally stated to “overflow” the confines of the physical body in this second passage, and it seems to me that the role of artificiality (“product of their sensuality,” “like the climate”) is important. The differential, removed perspective from which this kind of writing must be done is seen in the phrases “formes étranges,” “la volupté de cieux autres”: this is more reminiscent of Baudelaire than anyone (“this vegetation, disturbing” to the eye of the traveling academic, “these men and women whose muscles do not move according to the classical gait of his own country”).²⁶

Traveling to Kenya, the four friends set off on safari with a local guide. The two couples wander into the bushes at one point and find themselves confronted by a lion, who “knew that the men were naked and making love” (p. 290). Unarmed, they must try to distract the beast, and sex is their method. The guide immediately takes his clothes off. Régis recommences intercourse with Vive, as the lion lies down and masturbates with his tail. Harry and Emmanuelle join the other two, but the black guide approaches the lion with a gourd and a forked stick. Stimulating the lion with the stick, to the point where the beast is incapacitated, the guide stuffs the gourd down the throat of the lion, who then dies in piteous contortions. The chapter ends there, and the next “confession poker” takes place in Europe.

It is in this African chapter that Olney sees Ouologuem's “descriptions of the sensual, the exotic, and the erotic take a rather new turn—more natural, less strained, less grotesque, and less pornographic” (p. 225).²⁷ But the difference seems quantitative to me and inadequate to prove a “union of interior and exterior,” “of the individual with nature,” or “beyond the irony, a straight face.” The irony of libertinism, as I have tired to indicate, is that the persistence of its efforts makes unity and resolution recede before it. If a “natural libertinism” substitutes a black man, a gourd, a stick, a lion, and an African landscape for white men, elevators, cars, and Europe, has libertinism been released from its burden, lifted up and canceled out? The stakes have certainly changed, but in my opinion not toward any resolution of the problem.

The role of sex in Africanist writing has been a continual subtext in this study. On the one hand, there has been a close relationship between the opposition of races and the opposition of the sexes: “the Black seems to me the female race.”²⁸ In reading works such as “Sed non satiata” or “La Belle Dorothée,” the relation of center to periphery seemed to conceal a relation of superiority, white over black, male over female. The act of poetic redemption—of bringing materials back from the tropics—implied simultaneous sexual submission. The libertine program demands passive submission and resignation to such an arrangement (“Justine se laisse faire … machinalement”). When a figure such as Africa is placed in a libertine context, therefore, the writer's liberation may well cost the African's liberty: in the Ouologuem passage above, Africa is made to speak (“l'Afrique avait autant à dire”), and her people thus become figures in a discourse of idealized sensuality, allegorical puppets.

On the other hand, seductiveness is a natural part of writing, and, if allegory exploits, pure irony cannot satisfy. Africa in Les Mille et une bibles du sexe is illustrative of this double bind. On the positive side, Africa makes a promise of fulfillment and erotic splendor. But the other side of the same coin is the fact that Africa is thereby reduced, for the millionth time, to the role of primitive, natural Garden of Eden, like Homer's Ethiopia, a playground for the gods (Olney: “this perception of the countryside as an immense vagina,” p. 228).

A look at the illustration for the African “confession poker” should make this clear. Les Mille et une bibles is something of a “fine edition,” carefully designed typographically, and illustrated with surrealistic drawings and photographs. On one level this is indeed a sign of some nonironic seductiveness, an embrace of the subject that Le Devoir de violence never permits itself. But the plate representing Africa looks like this: the dominant figure is a lion, roaring, his mane contiguous with the long blond hair of a naked woman, who is embracing a blond-haired man. The white couple are situated alongside, perhaps as part of, the lion's flank; but flat on his back, being trampled by the lion, with one hand on his own penis and the other apparently on the lion's, there is the black man, on whom the lion is ejaculating. The symbolism is excessively transparent: the couple represent Europe, the black man Africa, and the lion, it seems fair to say, is that discourse of mystified eroticism, “la volupté de cieux autres.” The “naturalness” of that discourse is both derived—the conscious, willed result of a difference and a need—and unequal—subjugating one figure in order to liberate another. The language of idealization and mystification seems to produce difference at the very moment it is claiming unity and identity.

When one looks beyond the surface, Les Mille et une bibles du sexe is actually a much less scandalous, less original, and more “European” work than Le Devoir de violence. The refusal of discourse in Le Devoir to obey the rules of European logic emerges as a triumphantly hopeless gesture, whereas the false hope erected in Les Mille et une bibles seems ill conceived and slightly treacherous.

Notes

1. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), chap. 2, “The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel.” On the idea of progress in the interpretation of the novel, see Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 71: “The novel is the art-form of virile maturity, in contrast to the normative childlikeness of the epic (the drama form, being in the margin of life, is outside the ages of man even if these are conceived as a priori categories or normative stages). … The novel, in contrast to other genres whose existence resides within the finished form, appears as something in process of becoming” (emphasis mine). The significance of those “ages of man” need not be embellished.

2. David Ananou, Le Fils du Fétiche (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1955), p. 9.

3. The fact that the novel is seen to be the depiction of change and progress makes it suitable for the importation of “maturity” (see the quotation from Lukács in note 1); the search for something “outside the ages of man” was more the concern of Negritude poetry, which is now being reproached for an idealized vision of the African past: “Le concept de la ‘négritude' concerne plutôt les éléments permanents de la tradition” (Robert Pageard, “Individu et Société: La vie traditionnelle dans la littérature de l'Afrique noire d'expression française,” Revue de littérature comparée 3–4 [July–December 1974]: 421). See “Wole Soyinka: ‘La négritude ne me satisfait pas, je lui préfère l'africanisme,’” interview in Jeune Afrique 544 (June 8, 1971); Stanislas Adotevi, Négritude et Négrologues (Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1972).

4. Matthieu Galey, “Un grand roman africain,” Le Monde, October 12, 1968.

5. Seth I. Wolitz. “L'Art du plagiat, ou une brève défense de Ouologuem,” Research in African Literature 4, no. 1 (Spring, 1973): 132.

6. William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 29.

7. See Eric Sellin, “The Unknown Voice of Yambo Ouologuem,” Yale French Studies 53 (1976): 151–57.

8. The most complete analysis of the intertextuality of Le Devoir is to be found in the thesis of Christiane Chaulet-Achour, “Langue française et colonialisme en Algérie: De l'abécédaire à la production littéraire” (Dissertation, University of Paris III, 1982), vol. 2, pp. 419–43.

9. J. Mbelolo Ya Mpiku, “From One Mystification to Another: ‘Négritude’ and ‘Négraille’ in Le Devoir de violence,” Review of National Literatures 2, no. 2 (Fall, 1971): 124. Ouologuem, Lettre à la France nègre (Paris: Edmond Nalis, 1968).

10. Cf. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1971), p. 147: “La négraille aux senteurs d'oignon frit retrouve dans son sang répandu le goût amer de la liberté.”

11. That sentence introduces a quotation in two senses: the quotation that follows in the text and the other, unseen quotation that “preceded” it by ten years, the sentence from Schwarz-Bart's Le Dernier des justes on which it is modeled: “Suit un pieux commentaire et le moine achève ainsi sa chronique” (p. 12).

12. Cf. Schwarz-Bart, p. 13: “Ici, nous atteignons le point où l'histoire s'enfonce dans la légende, et s'y engloutit; car les données précises manquent, et les avis des chroniqueurs divergent.”

13. Cf. p. 59: “S'il est vrai … que le peuple de Cham dont parlent les Ecritures est le peuple maudit, s'il est vrai que nous sommes partis de ce peuple nègre et juif. …” This single ancestor is thus the link with both the “Orient” and the West, through the Bible. Rimbaud comes to mind for two reasons: first, Nakem is here postulated as a sort of “vrai royaume des enfants de Cham”; second, the singularity of origin, the sole person who defines the identity of the dynasty, is the one who makes that identity into an otherness, a link to the outside: “Je est un autre.”

14. Ouologuem was not made popular in Africa or among some European critics by this cynical interpretation of a history still struggling to be discovered by the West. See Yves Benot, “Le Devoir de violence de Yambo Ouologuem est-il un chef d'oeuvre ou une mystification?” La Pensée no. 149 (January—February, 1970).

15. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 104–6.

16. Grand Larousse: “Dévisager—Déchirer le visage de quelqu'un, défigurer.”

17. See Raymond O. Elaho, “Le devoir d'amour dans le devoir de violence de Yambo Ouologuem,” L'Afrique littéraire 56 (1979): 65–69.

18. See, especially, the Chaulet and Wolitz works listed in the Bibliography.

19. Jahnheinz Jahn and Claus Peter Dressler, Bibliography of Creative African Writing (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus-Thomson, 1971). James Olney, whose treatment of Les Mille et une bibles du sexe I will discuss here, accepts this opinion, which certainly seems justified (Tell Me Africa: An Approach to African Literature [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973], p. 223n).

20. Les Mille et une bibles du sexe (Paris: Editions du Dauphin, 1969), p. 275.

21. “Si j'ai pris sur moi de présenter Les Mille et une bibles du sexe, c'est également parce que, en raison de certains aspects érotiques de mon premier roman, divers pays africains ont rejeté de leurs frontières Le Devoir de violence. J'étais, aux yeux de chefs d'Etats irresponsables ou incultes, j'étais, pour avoir osé dire du Nègre qu'il faisait l'amour, un cartiériste vendu à une France raciste, laquelle s'amusait de voir dénigrer par un Noir les moeurs des peuples noirs. Soit. Il est bon d'être primitif, certes, mais impardonnable d'être primaire. Tant pis pour les primaires qui se revent censeurs” (p. 18).

22. “Il a fallu dépeindre, autant que ces confessions, les arrières-mondes dont elles étaient lourdes. L'érotisme seul parle; la littérature n'apporte que la sensibilité cachée, inconsciente, inconnue de soi, qui allume l'intelligence des sens et vivifie ses données. … Le propos métaphysique est ainsi inséparable de l'érotisme à l'oeuvre: comme un chef d'oeuvre poétique” (p. 17).

23. Foucault says that Sade was the first to place sexuality in a new discursive “realm of irreality” (as we will see, Ouologuem's “cieux autres”) (Michel Foucault, “Préface à la transgression,” Critique 19 nos. 195–96 [August–September 1963]: 751–69). A more recent rendering of Foucault's thesis on language taking over sex is to be found in his Histoire de la sexualité: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 25–49.

24. Alice M. Laborde, Sade romancier (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1974), p. 137.

25. Is Les Mille et une bibles to Le Devoir de violence as Sade's South Seas utopia Tamoé is to his depraved African kingdom of Butua? The lost Léonore travels to Tamoé with Captain Cook, it will be recalled, and Sainville follows, setting up his long interview with the noble King Zamé, a mouthpiece of the idealism of the philosophe. Tamoé is indeed a land of justice and goodness; the first problem is that, once desire has been fulfilled, it can no longer be admitted or allowed: “A l'égard des crimes moraux … je ne reçois jamais ni un libertin ni une femme adultère,” says Zamé (Aline et Valcour [Paris: Cercle du livre précieux, 1962], p. 300); in order for everything to be virtuous, everything must be controlled by the state, as Zamé declares: “l'Etat est tout ici” (p. 343; the conformity to Foucault's model is striking). Sainville's objection is also relevant: “Si vous avez peu de vices, vous ne devez guère avoir de vertus” (p. 297). But Tamoé's value as a foil to libertinism, as a solution to the endless vacillations of desire, is well destroyed by Sade's “Avis de l'éditeur” (quoted above, p. 186), which labels Tamoé a pays de chimères, alienated from nature. The ultimate return to nature is ultimately unnatural. Sade's “answer” is thus similar to Ouologuem's, or at least to Olney's interpretation of Les Mille et une bibles; the difference is that Sade tells us that his answer is illusory.

26. Baudelaire, “De I'idée moderne du progrès …,” in Curiosités esthétiques (Paris: Garnier, 1962), p. 212.

27. “Comparatively, the forms of sex in Africa, as Ouologuem renders them in Mille et une bibles, are natural—one to one, man and woman, the ordinary appendages and orifices, no foreign instruments such as smoking guns, telephone receivers, whips, fragile crystal flutes, switch-blade knives, ‘godemichets,’ etc. True, a lion does get into the act in Kenya, but even then the beast carries some of his nobility with him, and the passage is nothing like as depraved as the one that deals with the massive dog, the woman on a block of ice, and a crowd of voyeurists back in Paris, or the scene of Golda, Harry, the motorcycle policeman, and a hot Maserati automobile beside a French superhighway” (Olney, Tell Me Africa, p. 226).

28. Gustave Eichtal and Ismayl Urbain, Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche (Paris: Chez Paulin, 1839), p. 22.