De la littérature coloniale à la littérature africaine (review)

In bringing together in this collection twenty of his articles that have been published in journals and international collections, János Riesz allows us to gauge the breadth and coherence of one of his principal axes of research: the modalities of colonial inscription in African literature. The subtitle of this work perfectly demarcates the goal of this study: colonial discourse is both a pretext (in the double sense of pre-text and alibi), a context, and an intertext for African literature such as emerges and develops in the twentieth century.

The question of “pretext” is approached in two parallel manners. Three articles examine the status and function of the image as “pre-text” in the development of a discourse. The article entitled “Images d’Afrique, Images d’Africains” (Images of Africa, Images of Africans) emphasizes the importance of “true images” in the genesis of a discourse on Africa, and proposes a critical review of publications by historians and literary scholars on imagologic and iconographic matters. Two other articles focus on the role of illustrations in the identity of colonial books (La randonnée de Samba Diouf by the Brothers Tharaud and A travers l’Afrique by Lieutenant-Colonel Baratier) and on the role of photos of African writers that are inserted into critical works. In each case, János Riez shows the power of influence and orientation of the image, which is never merely an illustration of a discourse, but which acts upon it.

The attention that Riesz brings to bear on what he calls “the metamorphoses of a book,” to the work through its possible re-editions, is related to that critical awareness he has of the “pretext” as agent of influence upon the text. The second article of the volume, entitlted “Littérature coloniale et littérature africaine: Hypotexte et hypertexte,” shows the subtle play of influential variations in the passage from one system of writing to the next. In no case does Riesz’s method consist of layering one literature upon the other. It is always a matter of bringing into play the complex network of contextual and intertextual variations that transfigure the text: this principle of variation derives from “pretext,” as a critical principle of formidable power. The analysis of Docker noir, Sembène Ousmane’s first novel, for which Riesz proposes a critical reevaluation starting from an intertextual reading of the “last voyage of the slave ship Sirius,” a novel-within-the-novel Tamango by Prosper Mérimée, is illustrative of the Riesz method: find the point of variation from which the global reading of the work could be reoriented.

The articles that are more directly related to the question of “context” reveal how the texts are distanced from context, the stakes of the notion of “gaze” which is necessarily always critical (in the noblest sense of the word): the gazes that Robert Randau and Robert Delavignette, Birago Diop, or Mongo Beti bring to colonial society are analyzed as acts of writing, putting into play the text and its ability to keep context at a distance. That is indeed the entire problematic of the article devoted to Paul Hazoumé in which Riesz shows how, and at what price, the African novel was able to emerge from the ethnographic text.

The work on “intertext” is a natural result of these principles of “variation” and “distance” dealt with up to this point. János Riesz succeeds masterfully, through several studies of specific cases, in bringing to light relationship, which is also a demarcation; he proposes to us conjoined readings of Jusqu’au seuil de l’irréel by Mamadou Koné and L’état sauvage by Robert Delavignette; of L’état honteux by Sony Labou Tansi and L’état sauvage by George Conchon; of La vie et demie by Sony Labou Tansi and Les flamboyants by Grainville. In every case, Riesz shows how these texts interact, in the act of reading, in a bilateral manner. Questions of...