Life Is Not a Book. Creuse: Literature and Representation in Sony Labou Tansi's Work

The title of this article comes from the analysis by Nicolas Martin-Granel of Sony Labou Tansi's still unpublished manuscripts (Martin-Granel 225); it refers one to the "processus de la création en train de se faire" 'the process of creation in the ongoing creation.' From La France qui rend fou, an unfinished novel by Sony Labou Tansi, the writer reports a conversation between two prisoners who can no longer escape from their jail and are condemned to sink even much deeper:

Il faut creuser. Parce que la vie, c'est là-dedans, on la creuse.
--J'ai lu ça quelque part.

--Life is not a book. Creuse.
You must dig, because that's what life is about. You dig it up.
--I read it somewhere.
--Life is not a book. Dig it up.

I wish to first make a number of hypotheses that underline the general framework of my research. Indeed, my research is based on two apparently distant disciplines: on the one hand, the institutional approach of literary facts and, on the other, the discursive analysis of the work of art. One of the points of contention in sociocriticism, and particularly in institutional research, is to often link the internal specificity of the work of art with the conditions of its production. Much as the understanding of distinctive mechanisms is satisfactory when one has to analyze the work within its production structure (that is, its strategies, the writer's itinerary, its position within a literary field, etc.) the study of internal textual strategies has been able to offer only partial conclusions. But it appears that if one can talk about the writer's positioning strategy within a given state of the institution, one has to be able to determine the place of tactical involvement as provided by textual mechanisms, because it is through the work that the process of production, publication, and acceptance is established. More than often, institutional mechanics walk over writers and their works by exploring the questions of distinctive, pure logic rather than their specificity. These mechanics have provided too much weight on the production of goods, forgetting that they are also and certainly more symbolic.

In my latest contribution on Sony Labou Tansi, I demonstrated that the critical value of the writer is full of paradoxes: one admires the artist in Sony Labou Tansi, but it is the man who is often studied. Even though criticism has provided too important a place to his work's supposedly biographical data, we still do not have the genuine intellectual biography of the Congolese writer. On the other hand, if the concept still means something, what should one say of the reputation of realist in a writer who always declared rejection of realism and would have answered someone who stated that La vie et demie is a political satire by asking the question: why does the reader only see that aspect?

I have chosen to work, not in the much explored area of African political dictatorship and its corollaries, but in a slight phonemic gliding that shows a different perspective, in the less explored area Sony Labou Tansi's work of fictional writing, particularly the relationship between literature and representation. However, militant realism has survived well in this writer's novel. With the publication of La vie et demie in 1979, his first novel, Sony Labou Tansi demonstrated he had a future. One can say that he also had a present. It would be wrong to say that the African novelist of the 1980s simply explored to the limit the entropic logic that the imagination of the time seemed to consider its own. Sony Labou Tansi's novels laid the basis of a new African novel that is seeking its own form. His works obviously show the atmosphere of disappointment in the end of...