The Adventures of the Epic and Novel in Ahmadou Kourouma's Writings

Study demonstrates that be it the search for the Absolute or the quest of the total self, Kourouma's narrative is always in and by itself a trip, as textuality and as existential drama of a consciousness of lack. By its composition, the narrative is circular, going from the narrator's I and coming back to it, in a perpetual movement of writing on itself. The autobiographical pact of Kourouma is a thematic one and therefore illustrative of life in Africa. The phantasmagoric pact creates a distance between the writer and the subject of his text to allow the symbols to convey more than the momentary dream's drama. The textual reality is better suited to the desire to construct this what-I-am. Past and present form but one body to evoke a unique presence. The lived is at the service of the self Image. The epic, metonymy of the tradition, in which the writer is immersed, anonym among anonyms: tradition, metonymy of the past only possible cover in this undifferentiated plural, and this tearing of time and space, of uproar and number. The novel, metonymy of present; the present, metonymy of disruptions linked to colonization. The oxymoron is the trait par excellence of these wranglings and ambivalences. It comes from a contradictory perception of the world, undermining the principles of ordinary logic that sustain it.

For Bogumil Jewsiewiecki