Fantastique et littérature africaine contemporaine: entre rupture et soumission aux schémas occidentaux par Pierre Martial Abossolo (review)

At a juncture where 'transnational', 'transcultural', or 'global' French studies are driving research and teaching agendas in the US and UK academy, this book offers a salient reminder of critical work conceived beyond that institutional space. Its author proposes a comparative account of 'le fantastique' in French and African literature, arguing that the existing critical apparatus (notably that articulated by Tzvetan Todorov in Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Seuil, 1970)) is ill equipped for analysis of the style, language, form, and content of African fiction. The book's corpus is of particular note, drawing comparisons between canonical texts by Balzac, Mérimée, Maupassant, and around ten novels or short stories by authors including Jean Pliya,Étienne Goyémidé, Amadou Koné, Charly Gabriel Mbock, Pabé Mongo, and Joachim Tabi Owono (most of whom are published in Yaoundé, Johannesburg, or Abidjan). The starting point for the central argument is that the French literary fantastic emerged in distinction to 'le merveilleux' during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as response or resistance to Enlightenment rationalism. As shown through a series of focused readings, that powerful distinction between rational and irrational, and between natural and supernatural, cannot simply be transported as a critical framework for African fantastical literature, where magic, sorcery, divination, shadowy 'doubles', and metamorphosis are often presented as natural, everyday occurrences. The 'fantastic' does not provoke an equivalent destabilizing effect if these elements remain familiar both to readers and to characters. With this in mind, there is some probing close reading that reveals a relative absence within African texts of the discursive 'flou', or 'brouillage' found in the French fantastic (p. 226). Elsewhere, Pierre Martial Abossolo notes that recognizing the slippage from natural to supernatural is rarely straightforward for readers of African fiction. The sound of animals braying, a change in wind direction, a whistling noise, or the image of a toe hitting a root carry culturally contingent meanings. What emerges is a more plural approach to the genre that allows for 'différents fantastiques aux modalités différentes' (p. 37) and directly confronts the complex matter of cultural translation at stake for 'uninitiated' readers of African fiction, and, more broadly, in the (transcultural) definition of generic paradigms. Given that this argument chimes indirectly with many current concerns in French studies and African literary studies, it is unfortunate that the secondary reading is so dated: there are recurrent references to the influential work of Sunday Anozie, Jacques Chevrier, Roger Chemain, and Robert Cornevin, while the most recent work in the bibliography was published in 2004. This leads to some reductive assertions of the opposition between 'Africa' and the 'West', which call for nuance (the section on 'le fantastique' in Chinese and Latin American literature offered a promising, if brief, avenue for comparison), and fuller discussion of the theoretical and socio-historical counter-arguments to a unified 'vision négro-africaine' (p. 51) proposed by the author. The extensive references to work by African critics, including unpublished theses (especially that of Ismaël Abdourahman), are welcome, however, and provide an excellent foundation for building upon the arguments presented here.