Rereading Camara Laye (review)

This reviewer is in a particular position (as are all reviewers to some extent) in attempting to provide an unimpeded judgment of the text he has set out to review. Adele King has written a meticulous, if not conclusive, study that purports to demonstrate that the real author of Le regard du roi (1954) was not Camara Laye, but rather a Belgian homosexual literary critic named Francis Soulié. An evaluation of her arguments, and of the larger issues and accomplishments of her study, is to follow. First, my own dilemma in undertaking the review.

When I first read Le regard du roi around 1980, I was taken by its vision, and explored the critical responses to the novel. They ran the gamut from those that drew upon vague generalities about mysticism to those that searched for Kafka's influence, all the way to those that found in Clarence, the protagonist of the novel, a Christ figure. Although I had been exposed to innumerable quests for "Christ figures" in my undergraduate and graduate studies in the 1960s, it seemed odd to me that an African Muslim author would have had to have recourse to a Christ figure in order to evoke a mystical tradition when such traditions were already to be found in the Muslim world. Thus I undertook a search for critical analyses of Islamic African literature to guide me, and discovered that they did not exist. I researched the Muslim traditions in upper Guinea to see if it was reasonable that an Islamic influence might have been exerted on Camara Laye, and discovered two things: first, that Sufi traditions, i.e., Islamic mystical traditions, had long existed in Kankan and its surrounding area (which encompasses Kouroussa, Laye's home town), as well as various parts of the region; and that a coherent reading of the novel could well be constructed on the basis of Sufism. I set out not only to restore some integrity to the process of reading African literature (inasmuch as "Christ figures" were treated as universal types by New Criticism readers), trying now to take into account the frame of reference within which the novel would have been composed. I also published two edited volumes on the topic of Islam in African literature that would aid those seeking knowledge of relevant Islamic traditions.

My difficulties in providing an unbiased judgment as a reviewer of King's deconstruction of Laye's authorship could not be more apparent. That said, my critique should be taken not as that ideally unbiased reading with which the critic conventionally deludes himself, or her readers, but as one deeply invested in the arguments.

The notion of the "death of the author" has often been misread to mean that the text somehow exists and derives its meaning apart from the actual author. Similarly, the appeal to contextualization has often been taken as an attempt to substitute context, as efficient cause of the text's hermeneutic meaning, for author. Both are completely failed positions based on the same mistaken notion that a text's meaning can be derived apart from its discursivity, that is, if only one were to look in the correct location (i.e., the biographical account of the author, the historical context of the novel). King's study both thrives and flounders on these assumptions.

First, to its strengths. The need to establish the historical and political frame within which Regard was written led King down the paths of extraordinary detective work. The meticulous task of tracing Laye's acquaintances, those who might have influenced his career, who collaborated with him, or whose work went into his writing, is indeed impressive. I know of no comparable study. To be precise, King has delved into the relevant archives of the decades of high colonialism from the 1920s to the 1950s, tracing every conceivable lead in the Belgian, French, and African record to discover any link to Laye's work that might offer definitive proof about the authorship of Regard. She emerged convinced that he was not the author in...