Tierno Monénembo’s “Pelourinho”: L’auteur est mort, vive l’auteur!

Abstract

Tierno Monénembo, a Guinean novelist and winner of the 2008 Prix Renaudot, starts his novel Pelourihno with the words “Maintenant que tu es mort, Escritore.” This complex story, driven by myth and linguistic virtuosity, revolves around the murder of an aspiring writer. It acquires a different immediacy, however, when read in dialogue with Roland Barthes’ “La mort de l’auteur,” as a work where the author is dead from the outset. What happens in the interregnum following the death of the Barthesian Author-God? And what does it really mean to proclaim the birth of the Reader?

This paper, partially informed by personal correspondence with the author, is an attempt to analyze this “francophone” novel's intricate dialogue with French literary theory. Drawing on a fusion of African and French cultural heritage, it seeks a possibility of writing and reading even in an authorless universe. Rather than falling apart, the novel's structure is rejuvenated by a self-creating drive that responds to the methodological challenge of post-Barthesian literature and its demand for constant renegotiation of our notions of authorship and readership alike.

Keywords:

• Monénembo
• Death of the Author
• Myth
• Reader
• Francophone
• Postcolonial

Notes

1 Japp, p. 223: this is the epigraph of his article.

2 See p. 66: “Selon lui, tu n’es pas une vulgaire bête humaine […] mais un pur esprit. […] Il t’attendait plus ou moins avant ton arrivée.” See also p. 37: “la chanson m’avait déjà tout dit sur toi” (Leda).

3 See p. 148: “À t’entendre, tu n’étais pas un être de chair et de frissons, mais quelque principe sorti de l’Esclavage […] Redempteur.”

4 They are, too, artists of a sort—no inspired crime ever happens without their involvement.

5 J. C. Carlier's unconventional reading of Barthes’ intention as satirical would render this “rebirth” more literal than intended here (“Roland Barthes's Resurrection of the Author and Redemption of Biography,” Cambridge Quarterly (2000) XXIX (4): 386–393).

6 See Gbanou's chapter entitled “L’Écrivain africain: Ulysse d’autre temps”.

7 The depictions of violence, in particular the accidental murder, are starkly reminiscent of Meursault's killing of the Arab.

8 See above. See also Léopold Sédar Senghor, Pour une lecture négro-africaine de Mallarmé.

9 Other criteria mentioned in “Poetics” (the advice to involve heroes, gods, or royal families in the tragic plots, and to base them on myth material) are also adhered to, even if the relevant imagery is largely metaphorical.