Le quatrieme cote du triangle, or Squaring the Sex: A Genetic Approach to the "Black Continent" in Sony Labou Tansi's Fiction

Sexuality is not what one keeps silent but what one is obliged to admit.

--Michel Foucault

Every discourse is double: it wanders between what one wants to keep silent and what one wants to say.

--Sony Labou Tansi

Sony Labou Tansi's published works fuse all genres and directions. As with the Borgesian garden "aux sentiers qui bifurquent" 'with forking paths,' they are presented to us as a labyrinth. ¹ To us as readers but also, and first, to the author himself since he is the first reader of a work in progress, the first critic:

Je ne sais pas dans l'édifice, ce qui craque, ce qui tient, ce qui part, ce qui reste, ce qui boude, ce qui ment, ce qui trahit . . . . Je voudrais l'édifice. Qu'il gicle dans le ciel, chaque mot étant une pierre, un frontoglyphe, des labyrinthes incessants, voilà ce qu'est la création. Le temps aussi tient du labyrinthe. Comme la vie. Labyrinthes emmêlés, embrouillés . . . .

I do not know what cracks in the edifice, what holds, what leaves, what remains, what pouts, what lies, what betrays . . . . I would like the edifice. Whether it spurts into the sky, each word being a stone, a mark in the monument, endless labyrinths, that is what creating is. Time is also labyrinthine. Like life. Intermingled, blurred labyrinths . . . . (L'autre monde 49)

Sony makes this magnificent confession of uncertainty about his last novel while in the process of its elaboration, Le commencement des douleurs (1995), a text we know he reworked through many versions (see Blachère; Devésa). He admits his doubts, his hesitations, his writerly agony, not when faced with the white page nor an entry into writing ("Le premier pas" is the title of his first novel), but rather with the difficulty of completing, of coming to the end of a text. And it so happens that unbeknownst to him (but what do we know? how do we know?), the metaphor of the labyrinth finds its verity once the work is completed, since it is not only the novel in gestation to which he must give birth with such pain but indeed the entire edifice, which receives its last stone, its definitive configuration, with this posthumous novel.

Keeping to the novelistic side of things, which after all forms a fairly considerable corpus since it "gicle vers le ciel" 'spurts towards the sky' at the height of six novels, and if one were to consider these six works retrospectively, which is admittedly cavalier in method, one notices that they do not flow from one single block and are even less drawn from the same source of inspiration. And yet, they are not really distinct monuments: they seem to belong to an "edifice" that is certainly solid and not without solidarity, but which, in the course of its construction seems to have grown, "spurted" in different directions: "towards the sky" and, previously, as we will see, in man's liquid (la flotte). This is in keeping, anyway, with Sony Labou Tansi's kind of writing practice, which could provide the perfect paradigm for writing-as-process (versus "writing-as-program" in the current terminology of genetic criticism).

In fact, if examined still with a certain distance, the six novels can be easily grouped into symmetrical series of equal importance, let us say two cycles characterized by a certain homogeneity in thematic material and in the system of enunciation adopted. The first, which includes in the order in which they were written, L'anté-peuple, La vie et demie, L'état honteux, deals in more or less realistic or grotesque terms, in the third person, with political power, particularly "ugly" and (because) male...