Recherches sur la litérature maghrébine de langue française: Le cas de kateb yacine by Jacqueline Arnaud (review)

Book Reviews Jacqueline Arnaud. R e c h e r c h e s s u r l a l i t t é r a t u r e m a g h r é b in e d e la n g u e f r a n ç a is e : Le c a s d e k a te b y a c in e . 2 vols. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1982. Pp. 1171. Jacqueline Arnaud was a member, in the 1960’s, of Albert Memmi’s pioneering research team on Francophone North African literature, and has been a generous, indefatigable, and respected scholar in that field ever since. Her massive and long-awaited doctoral thesis is the result of over 20 years’ work, much of that time spent in North Africa. Volume I reviews the circumstances of Maghrebian writers with respect to language, publication, and audience—presenting little that is new, but presenting it all more clearly and systematically than is often the case—and surveys fairly exhaustively the work of Jean Amrouche, Mohammed Dib, Driss Chraïbi, and Albert Memmi. The biographical research in this volume is thorough and the critical readings are often insightful, if fragmented. Still, it is a doctoral thesis, subject (and generally succumbing) to the endemic pressures of that genre to blanket a topic rather than to select a useful thread and develop an argument from it. What is awaited with far more interest by Arnaud’s readers and colleagues, however, is the second volume (nearly twice as long as the first), on Kateb Yacine. This extensive study of Algeria’s best known Francophone writer will both fascinate and disappoint—and for the same reason: it is a celebration of Kateb first and a critical analysis only second. As a celebration, it makes all previous praise-songs to this already much celebrated writer appear superficial by comparison. Arnaud readily and disarmingly admits the sub­ jectivity of her research, in which, she says, “je me suis autant cherchée que je cherchais à comprendre l’Algérie, le Maghreb.” Rejecting the notion that literary criticism could ever be a “science” and embracing a concept of literature as “toujours lecture de l’inconscient,” she sets out to study the “context” of the works under consideration. Not content to carry out such research from a distance, she visited “maintes fois” the tribe of Keblout and the region of the Nadhor, sources of most of the mythic underpinnings of Kateb’s work, eventually finding herself “adopted” by the tribe. Whether or not it is true, as Arnaud maintains, that one must have sat interminably on a sheepskin being inter­ rogated by the tribal cousins in order to understand that a peasant of the Nadhor measures time differently than a French citizen, the reader is nevertheless grateful to Arnaud for hav­ ing undertaken such experiences and for bringing them constantly to bear on Kateb’s work. A rich and sympathetic foliage of images and anecdotes, drawn from Arnaud’s knowledge of this “context” and her long personal friendship with Kateb, and supplemented by relevant ethnographic data, slowly grows up around a discussion that ranges over virtually every text, published or unpublished, ever composed in French by Kateb. It is the textual discussion itself that is problematic. At a line-by-line level of commen­ tary, there is no more intelligent or subtle reader of Kateb than Arnaud. But her fascination with the details of Kateb’s life and world, her insistence on his stature as a personality and a legend, and her unwillingness to allow any aspect of his work (virtually canonized in these 94 Spring 1986 B ook R eviews pages) to go uncommented on, prevent the development, here again in Volume II, of a pur­ poseful argument, apart from polemics such as the following: “Pour lui, l’oeuvre ne doit jamais être séparée de la vie, bourgeon terminal détaché, élixir quintessencié. Elle n’a pas de sens si elle ne porte en elle l’ambition de changer la vie, de transformer le monde.” The detailed discussion of Kateb’s transition to popular theater, on the other hand, will be of great interest to Kateb scholars...