Ghostwriting History: Subverting the Reception of Le regard du roi and Le devoir de violence

I think one also writes for the dead.

—Jacques Derrida

In the European marketplace, literature by African writers is often commodified as a distinctly cultural product, having an “African” identity. This need not be clearly defined either in terms of the writer’s ideological, geographic, or ethnic orientations, just so long as the work reflects some vague traces of its “Africanness,” which can be thematized through lurid imagery splashed across the cover of a book or comprised of equally lurid blurbs on its back cover. In some cases, critics exhibit complicity in minimizing complex identities by regarding literary works as cultural products and describing them as “truly African,” or “the first of its kind.”¹ Emphasizing either the originality or authority of the writer, such critics seem caught up in the search for a “Zulu Tolstoy,” tending to bestow laurels only to rescind them immediately.²

Deceptively laudatory remarks about particular African literary and cultural productions can be problematic not only because they often assume an impossible intimacy with the sum of African cultures in all of their complex and variegated forms. Such remarks can also represent a backhanded gloss on the quality of African work as a whole. Moreover, a hostile solicitude toward the history of African letters tends to ignore its indigenous oral and literary past and assume that it constitutes a relatively new history, originating only through colonial influence.³

The market of African literature unevenly distributes capital and mystification between author, publisher, and audience. It domesticates the text while exoticizing the product. In this study, I explore this paradoxical trend as illustrated by the critical reception of two novels by West African authors: Le regard du roi by Camara Laye and Le devoir de violence by Yambo Ouologuem. The literary criticism of these two novels is haunted by discrepant responses of authentication, uncertainty, and contempt. At the same time, the works themselves evoke another form of haunting, namely the specters of violent histories of colonialism and neocolonialism. Illustrating the kind of European writing about these histories that Laye and Ouologuem subvert, this study includes a brief discussion of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. My examination of Conrad’s novel foregrounds the other works in this study against the horizon of colonialism.

Laye and Ouologuem have each been accused of plagiarism or forgery. The cases against the authors are very different, and it is my own opinion, especially with regard to Laye, that these accusations are tenuous and unfair. However, I do not wish to engage directly in the debates over these authors’ authority or originality. Rather, I would like to examine the terms of this debate for the values they reflect. I argue that staking the value of a work on the identity of the author disengages one from the text and can lead to violent misreadings. Shifting these stakes, I look to a concept that undermines legal or proprietary judgments about the pure originality and authority of either Laye or Ouologuem: ghostwriting. Being neither the sole property of the publisher, critic, nor author, the ghostwritten text manifests a complex relation between itself and its audience while suggesting the involvement of specters in the writing of history.

Authority and Originality

Critical judgments about an author’s originality can cut at least two ways: while bestowing authority on the work, they may also occlude the heterogeneous concatenation of voices that leads to a work. Closely associated with this idea of originality are notions about the artist’s inspiration and genius. Yet to dwell on the originality of the work is to refuse one’s inheritance and a denial of the share one has in the ideas of others. Addressing this problem of seeing the modern work as plopping out of thin air, a pure product of conjuration, Edward Said writes that “the originality of contemporary literature in its broad outlines resides in the refusal of originality, or primacy, to its forebears. … The best way to consider originality is to look not for first instances of a phenomenon, but rather to see duplication, parallelism, symmetry, parody...