Autofiction and Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'aventure ambigue

Cheikh Hamidou Kane belongs to a whole generation of francophone African writers who felt the need, at a specific stage in their development, to give an account in fictionalized form of their intellectual itinerary. This exploration invariably involves a clash of cultures, with the "new school," l'école des Blancs, introduced by the colonizing power acting as catalyst in the transition from the traditional world of the African village to the wider world influenced by European values, frequently represented by a crucially formative period spent in Paris. Sometimes the emphasis is on the lost childhood world, and the Paris period mostly implicit, as in what is probably the most famous of these novels of childhood, Laye Camara's L'enfant noir; sometimes Paris is foregrounded to convey dramatically the psychological trauma caused by contact with an alien world: Ousmane Socé's Mirages de Paris and Aké Loba's Kokoumba, l'étudiant noir spring to mind in this context, or Mudimbe's L'écart; sometimes it is the alienating effect of school itself that is emphasized, and the disrupting effect it has on the families involved, as in Seydou Badian's Sous l'orage. In all these novels, the autobiographical element, while exploited differently, is crucial. In this article, I want to explore the way in which Cheikh Hamidou Kane uses autobiographical material in the structuring of his first novel, L'aventure ambiguë, and, to a lesser extent, of his second, Les gardiens du temple, at the same time giving a broader perspective on what this material actually comprises.

Some general considerations of form seem appropriate at this point. African prose fiction can be difficult to classify, if only because the form of the novel does not exist as such in the African oral tradition. Mohamadou Kane, as long ago as 1975, deplored the European critic's apparent need to classify at all costs, even if classification discounted the tradition from which the form arose (16). The form of the autobiography is by general agreement purely European in origin, "une création de culture occidentale" 'a creation of Western culture' (Schipper 7), ² and its absence in the African tradition is entirely understandable in the context of the collective, nonindividualistic nature of African culture. Referring to the very profession of the writer, Cheikh Hamidou Kane himself notes that:

Le métier d'écrivain n'existait pas dans nos cultures, et à plus forte raison, on n'a pas de poètes, des romanciers et des mémorialistes. Tout cela, ce sont des formes, des genres qui sont liés à la pratique de l'écriture. Chez moi, ce qui existe c'est la parole, c'est le conte, c'est la légende, c'est le proverbe, etc., c'est le dialogue.

The profession of writer did not exist in our cultures, and even less so that of poet, novelist, memorialist. All those are forms associated with the practice of writing. Where I come from, there is the word: stories, legends, proverbs, dialogue. (Interview, IJFS 119)

The author's own definition, récit, appears on the title page, a definition that can be justified in particular regarding the discretion and lack of direct involvement in the narrative on the part of the narrator, as well as the narrator's perspective, necessitating the use of past historic and pluperfect (Moriceau and Rouch 57). For the purposes of this article, I shall be retaining the nearest English equivalent, "novel," but Kane's choice of the term récit can be seen as one of a number of distancing devices, which brings us immediately to the relationship between the author and the literary work produced.

Any consideration of autobiography or autofiction requires the assessment, among other things, of the relationship between the author and the narrator, and the author and the main character of the fiction. There is an argument to be made, of course, for the...