Extending Generic Boundaries: Werewere Liking's L'amour-cent-vies

Werewere Liking's plays and novels call attention to the potential of African literature to renew and regenerate its forms as much as the to content expressed by those forms. Indeed, in an interview conducted in 1983, Liking states that it is the "forme qui décide de l'efficacité du fond" 'the form that determines the efficacy of the content.' ¹ Her novel L'amour-cent-vies (1988) is a hybrid text that includes numerous genres and stylistic features present in oral traditions: praise-naming, lullaby, allegorical and etiological tales, proverbs, legends, myth, and some of the formal and thematic components of both the epic and the initiation story. In this novel, it is not only the recontextualizaton, adaptation, and reworking of traditional oral materials through the written word that modify these forms, but it is also the relationship that develops between genres that ultimately compels the reader to reexamine his or her preconceptions about the ideological limitations of certain genres in written literature.

An author's decision to enlist the services of oral tradition is aesthetically, ideologically, and functionally determined, as Eileen Julien has stressed in African Novels and the Question of Orality. Likewise, his or her choice of genre(s) is not only strategically assumed, as Julien has rightly declared, but is, in fact, fundamental to authorial intentionality and to the reader's interpretation. ² Yet, as Jean-Marie Schaeffer has remarked, a reader selects only a part of the "generic impulses" (152) of an author, and this selection is guided by the historical and social context and the generic canon, as well as a host of other factors in the "communicational" and "discursive act." ³ The author as "reader" of both oral and written texts necessarily applies a similar selective process in his or her own use of given themes, characters, texts, or portions thereof.

The "reactualization" of certain features or the whole does not necessarily render the same meaning, according to Schaeffer, but rather can transform the adopted material as a result of the change in what he calls "situational context[s]" (authorial- and/or lectorial-based) (81). In the same vein, he argues persuasively that the original generic identity of a text may be subject to change through the process of reactualization (see ch. 3). This concept of reactualization is particularly complex when applied to African orature, not only since the teller or tellers may have selected certain traits and impulses from several variants of those stories they have learned and appropriated into their repertoire, but because, in retelling a story, they are directly influenced by the live audience and the social context in which they rework the material. And while one might have to agree with Western critics who declare that no text is ever received the same way by different audiences (to say nothing of individuals), in the case of African orature, it is more difficult to conceptualize the idea of a change in fundamental meaning in every case. That is, while in orature every performance differs, as does the audience reception, one still speaks of the epic of Soundjata, the myth of Wagadu, or the Mwindo epic. To deal with the phenomenon of variants of a story, scholars of African orature speak of a "common core" (Innes 26), "core episodes" (Johnson, Attempt to Define 173), and "the heroic essence" or "stable element" of the tale (Azuonye 32) that allow them to engage in discussion about genres and narratives that are not standardized through the written word. ⁴ This distinction between the reactualization of written texts and variants in orature may be a false complexity tied to the application of Western theory to African oral traditions, yet there is at least one question that begs asking, namely, how far can a composer or author go before fundamental changes in meaning occur? ⁵ Certainly, Niane's prose version of the epic of Soundjata (collected in Guinea...