Making the Break: Alain Mabanckou's Tale of Impossible Origins

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the question of origins in Alain Mabanckou's critically acclaimed novel, Verre Cassé (2005). While it has been argued that Mabanckou's text falls in line with the littérature-monde paradigm and thus debunks the notion of Francophonie, I contend that it depicts the entire enterprise of origins as always already doomed to failure and proposes in its place a relational thought-model that surpasses the dialectical thought that grounds universalism and particularism alike. Thematically, Mabanckou portrays character quests for originality as absurd; on the level of narrative mode, he uses murky narrative positions and temporality to unhinge the authority of the singular speaking subject; finally, through the incorporation of intertextual references, he defies the very logic driving the notion of origins. Composing his text out of others’ gone before, Mabanckou pushes diversity to a higher conceptual level; he appropriates and repurposes old fragments, joining them up in one relational space so that they might gain new meaning.

KEYWORDS:

• Diversity
• Francophonie
• intertextuality
• littérature-monde
• origins
• relation

Notes

1. For this view, see notably Mouhamadou Cissé’s, John Walsh's, and Winifred Woodhull's respective analyses.

2. For this view, see notably Irène Affni Amaglo's, Marie-Claire Durand Guiziou's, Sim Kolosho Kabale's, and Pierre-Yves Gallard's respective studies.

3. Reductionist language such as this peppers the narrative. Because of his straight hair, for instance, bar patron Casmir “[se] rapproch[e] un peu plus de la race blanche dans ce pays où avoir les cheveux très crépus est la plus grande des malédictions” (96). So, too, does Verre Cassé typify his wife's kin: “c'est des pauvres moujiks de l'arrière-pays, ils ne pensent qu’à cultiver la terre, à épier l'arrivée de la saison des pluies, […] ils n'ont pas de manières, il n'ont jamais appris à manger à table, à utiliser une fourchette, une cuillère ou un couteau à table” (162).

4. Verre Cassé’s act of telling his tale also points toward this shift, for, by so doing, he deflects the notebook's purpose: he arrogates L'Escargot entêté’s design of immortalizing “Le crédit a voyagé,” redirecting it from its point of origin.

5. Even this example, however, does not follow the norms of reported speech, as Verre Cassé admits citing from memory, which, in turn, divests the quotation marks of their authoritative function.

6. That said, the use of quotation marks to signal a second layer of speech is not systematic; the reported speech structure is also frequently employed. Le type aux Pampers continues his story: “les pompiers m'ont demandé pourquoi je n'avais pas les clés de mon propre domicile, j'ai dit qu’en partant travailler la nuit je les avais oubliées à la maison,” etc. (53; my emphasis).

7. When beseeching Verre Cassé to pen his story, for instance, L'Imprimeur claims, “il paraît même que tu écris quelque chose sur les types bien de ce bar, tu écris ça dans un cahier, ça doit être ce cahier-là qui est à côté de toi, n'est-ce pas?” (63; my emphasis).

8. This is the case, for instance, with Mouyeké the fetish swindler, about whom Verre Cassé states: “voyons donc, je ne sais pas par exemple pourquoi je n'ai pas encore évoqué la petite histoire de Mouyeké, […] je ne pouvais pas ne pas parler de ce type, je ne pouvais pas l’écarter de ce cahier” (117).

9. Similar caveats pepper the first half of Verre Cassé, the eponymous narrator conjecturing that the reader “se demandera bien ce qui m’était arrivé à moi, il se dira « c'est bien de parler des autres, […] mais que t'est-il arrivé à toi, Verre Cassé, parle-moi de toi, dis-moi tout, ne tourne pas en rond, confesse-toi »” (154–55).

10. Verre Cassé seems to foresee this conundrum, asserting in an earlier chapter, “je reprends mon cahier et mon crayon, je suis déjà hors de l’établissement, mais je rapporte mon dialogue de tout à l'heure avec L'Escargot entêté, comme s'il se déroulait en direct, au présent” (240; my emphasis). This statement, however, little assuages the disconcerting quality of the text's temporality. It has, rather, quite the opposite effect, explicitly alerting the reader to the text's paradoxical temporality.

11. Following Tiphaine Samoyault, my use of the term intertextuality refers to the “phénomènes de réseau, de correspondance, de connexion” between Mabanckou's works and others published texts (29). Samoyault's understanding of intertextuality in contemporary literature as a form of literary memory is particularly cogent for my analysis.

12. Much scholarship has been dedicated to inventorying these intertextual references, of which Steemers tallies up to three hundred instances. For more comprehensive analyses, see also Gbanou, Guiziou, Herbeck, and Kabale.

13. Gbanou's, Herbeck's, Kabale's, and Steemers's analyses all flirt with such conclusions, if not espousing them entirely.

14. Pierre Yves Gallard echoes this remark, which I follow closely: “[q]u'elle passe complètement inaperçue ou qu'elle soit modifiée afin de mieux s'insérer dans le propos du locuteur, la citation semble bien souvent se détacher de la situation culturelle à laquelle elle fait référence au point que celle-ci est oubliée” (n.p.).

15. It is in this sense that Guiziou's allusion to intertext as “plagiarism” seems a bit too strong, for Mabanckou does not try to pass others’ works off as his own—in some cases, he even recognizes his precursors—but rather molds them into something entirely new.

16. The systematic use of nicknames for characters constitutes another example of this: without surnames, the bar patrons appear as if without heritage, without patrilineal origin. They function like the X in Malcolm X, as Slavoj Žižek understands it. “Malcolm X,” writes Žižek, “when adopting his family name […] was not fighting on behalf of the return to some primordial African roots, but precisely on behalf of an X, an unknown new identity” (44).

17. Herein lies the fundamental disjunction between author and narrator, who, on the level of sentence structure, seem to coalesce. Indeed, if Verre Cassé functions as the figure of an author in this work, it is certainly not of the author of this text, or the “double de l’écrivain réel,” as Gbanou contends (423).

18. Addressing the displaced peoples of the New World, Glissant advances strategies of detour as a means to navigate between assimilation to dominate power structures and the always impossible return to origins. Glissant writes, “[l]e détour est le recours ultime d'une population dont la domination par un Autre est occultée: il faut aller ailleurs chercher le principe de domination, qui n'est pas évident dans le pays même: parce que le mode de domination (l'assimilation) est le meilleur des camouflages […]. Le Détour est la parallaxe de cette recherche” (Le discours antillais 48).

19. This is Gbanou's formulation, though I cannot agree that this results in a “fusion harmonieuse” (430). The key, on the contrary, lie in relational movement—be it harmonious or disharmonious—rather than in ultimate fusion. It is also for this reason that viewing the text as a “puzzle,” as Kabale and Amaglo do, seems slightly misguided.

20. Both the title of Césaire's poem—“très vite je retournais au pays natal” (210)—as well as its opening line—“toujours est-il qu'un jour, au bout du petit matin” (156)—can be found; for Céline, like the name of the fictional bar, it is a mishmash of his first two novels that appears: “je leur réponds que le crédit est mort, il a voyagé depuis longtemps” (215; my emphasis).

21. Voyage au bout de la nuit, as Woodhull reminds us, “was the first acclaimed novel to systematically incorporate slang and obscenities into ‘legitimate fiction’” (195).

22. To this list must also be added, as both Herbeck and Kouvouama point out, Congolese poet and vocalist Lutumba Simaro's song, “Verre Cassé,” which effectively brings the African, Caribbean, and Metropolitan French traditions into one space of interrelation.

23. This indeed seems to be the vision of littérature-monde that Mabanckou espouses, though unfortunately he formulates it under the aegis of universality. Mabanckou writes, “[l]’universalité est le constat que nous faisons de l’état de notre intelligence, de nos rencontres et du mélange de nos cultures” (“Le change de l'oiseau migrateur” 63).

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Rebecca Loescher

Rebecca Loescher is a visiting assistant professor of French at Hamilton College. Her research focuses on relational modes of storytelling in contemporary literatures in French. She has published articles on the construction of seeing in François Bon's Autobiographie des objets, the function of touch in Annie Ernaux's oeuvre, and Patrick Chamoiseau's and Maryse Condé’s divergent visions of Creoleness.