Prince Fama in Ahmadou Kourouma's Les soleils des indépendances: From honors to horror
Introduction
In many cases, Ahmadou Kourouma's works mobilize the eyes and senses. His heroes are subjected to a kind of visual and sensitive capture, under which they embody either a laudatory image, or an abracadabra, even unhealthy figure, depending on whether they are presented in a positive or negative light. The analyst thus strives to grasp the significant aspect or affect of these characters, whose appearances make no secret of a militant ideology. In Les soleils des indépendances, the world of independence appears as the end of an authentic universe, where honors and the solemnity of insignia seem to have given way to horror.
Here, the meaning of "honor" is confusingly polysemous. Nevertheless, Furetière's dictionary and the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française agree that it designates any social recognition of a virtuous attitude.[1]. This recognition can take the volatile form of public esteem and reputation, or that of the granting of honors, i.e. the awarding of offices of authority and power, entailing the granting of material privileges and increased rights of precedence.
According to Le Grand Robert de la langue française, horror is "a violent impression caused by the sight or thought of something that frightens or repels (often accompanied by a shudder, a shudder, a recoil). (https ://www.lerobert.com)
This contribution is based on the observation that notions of honor and horror are present in African novels such as Les soleils des indépendances. From this point on, essential questions guide and structure the reflection: Is honor a principle that governs the life of the hero-character in the novelistic textual universe? Should this principle be understood in terms of its link to deviance? Can honor only be thought of in terms of its relationship with horror? If this relationship is established, what are the mechanisms chosen in the novel to create the horror effect?
Drawing on narrative semiotics and sociocriticism, the study will explore some of the major features of honor and horror. It will establish that the schema of honor is integrated into the diegesis as a principle that governs the life of the hero-character. It will also show how Fama prospers on the altar of a duty of honor that the novelist alienates in the tragicization of the horrible.
- Honor: a principle that governs the hero-character
Although it applies to satellite characters in Les Soleils des indépend ances , it remains a primordial moral principle for Fama. The hero character's relationship with his era, "l'ère des Indépendances (les soleils des Indépendances, disent les Malinkés)" (Kourouma 7-8), has a strong moral bent.Fama, who neither understands nor accepts his era, does not vouch for any political, historical, economic or sociological analysis. He insults, condemns or enthuses. He approaches history as a moralist, according to moral criteria derived from the traditional values of the Malinké people.
- Fama and honors: between conservatism and jactance
As Barthes wrote: "The essence of narrative is not action, but the character as proper name" (13), at least we can recognize both the fact that there is no novel without a proper name, and, empirically, a reading function, the decisive role of names in what Jouve called "L'Effet-personnage". Fama (the name means "king", "chief") has a vital need for consideration and admiration. A few days before his death, he shouted this need to the men: "Look at Doumbouya, the prince of Horodougou! Admire me...! (Kourouma 199). This is not a personal fault of pride: this feeling is the chief's, the hero's, to see himself honored, celebrated. The plot shows the hero seizing with relish the postures or scenarios of valorization: "[...]; he had the palaver, the right and an audience of listeners [...]" (Kourouma 13) and he enjoys with voluptuousness the greetings of his vassals: "Fama trônait, rengorgeait, bombait. Did he look at the greeters? Hardly" (Kourouma 113).
Fama's feelings of esteem and consideration correspond to a principle, that of the dignity of the human person and, above all, of social belonging. "Whatever his birth or vacation, no one can escape the feeling of the value of his own social being; nor can anyone escape the concern to preserve it [...] no traditional society can be conceived without bonds of honor between its members. The concern for shared honor is consubstantial with any viable and lasting social bond". (Drevillon and Venturino, www.pur-editions.fr ).
However, in the diegesis, this is called into question by a less-than-praiseful metadiscourse: "Un prince presque mendiant, c'est grotesque" (Kourouma 11), "sous les soleils des Indépendances, les Malinkés honnissaient et même giflaient leur prince" (Kourouma 15) or "Cette vie-là n'était-elle pas un soleil éteint et assombri dans le haut de sa course?" (Kourouma 29). Fama's honor and respectability are scorned by disrepute, contempt, humiliation, dishonor and lowliness. He goes to great lengths to protect his integrity, his self-respect and his "ideal sphere" from external threats. Yet Fama cannot guarantee the inviolability of his honor without referring to otherness: "[...] as a good Malinke, what else could he seek? He [...] moved [...] paved himself so that everywhere he was seen". (Kourouma 13). The writer uses the verbs of movement "se déplacer" and "se pavaner", the adverb "partout" and the verb of perception "voir", preceded by the conjunctive locution "de sorte que". They highlight Fama's desire for elevation, especially if we consider the semantics surrounding the words in quotation marks. Belorgey deduces that "Honor is then inseparable from the public space" (197); it corresponds to "face", to " the staging of oneself " (Goffman), "it is to make us believe as we are [with a view to being recognized]". (Billacois 79).
Through this attachment to the rules of being together, Fama claims the attention or devotion of Malinke and non-Malinke alike. This is why, according to Green, "honor is closely linked to social existence". (39) . The positive opinion of the group is an important piece of the puzzle. The honors of Fama, an authentic Doumbouya prince, are then equivalent to the honor felt, demanded and witnessed. Dilmaç points out that "Honor then appears as a principle turned towards the self: it constitutes a set of values, but also a morality chosen by people in order to give meaning to their actions, but above all to protect their integrity" (346). Fama, in fact, rejoiced "when [...] the griots and griottes sang of the Doumbouya's durability and power" (Kourouma 19). Animated by these sentiments, Fama is in harmony with his chiefly persona, "for the hero feeds on poems and music that exalt him, otherwise he softens and commits suicide". (Kourouma Act I).
To merit these honors, Fama usually pays close attention to the nobility of her bearing. "With [...] royal gestures and majestic salutes" (Kourouma 106), even if it is sometimes derisory, "too bad the boubou was dusty and wrinkled!"(Idem).
Fama never loses his keen sense of his family's dignity. On several occasions, we see him marking what is and isn't appropriate for a Doumbouya: "a Doumbouya, a real one, doesn't give his back to danger, he boasts"; (Kourouma 164). That's why he's so upset when "the little customs officer, fat, round, paunchy, all bundled up, from chest to toe, with his belt and his molletières" (Kourouma 104), doesn't show him the expected consideration:
The last village on the Ebony Coast arrived, followed by the customs post separating the Socialist Republic of Nikinai. There, Fama piqued the kind of anger that clogs a snake's throat with insults and slime, and imparts the quivering of leaves. A bastard, a real one, unbridled by the offspring of the forest and a mother who has surely never known the slightest strip of cloth, nor the dignity of marriage, dared, standing on his two testicles, to come out of his mouth that Fama foreigner couldn't cross without an ID card! Did you hear right? Fama foreigner knew this land of Horodougou! (Kourouma 103-104).
He immediately calms down when someone knows "how to distinguish gold from copper" (Kourouma 104) and recognizes in him "the descendant of the Doumbouya"(Idem). Recognition earns Fama "the appropriate honors and apologies"(Idem).
According to Biard 2009, Fama's honors can be summed up as "civic honor". It includes all civilities, but also legal elements (such as respect for the Other, respect for the dignity of the hero-character). Far from being unreasonable or excessive, this honor could then be envisaged as "promoting virtue" (Billacois 79). This so-called "civic" honor, borne by the so-called "honorable" individuals (Kourouma 100) of whom Fama is the prototype, would have its antithesis characterized by another type of honor, rather based on deviance.
- The honor of the prince or the paradox of deviance
In the words of Ahmadou Kourouma, the world of independence appears as the end of an authentic universe. It is a degradation of the traditional universe. For example, Fama, the prince of yesteryear, known as the honorable, no longer finds himself; not only do they dispossess him, but independence abolishes traditional chieftaincies and reduces princes to "a pack of hyenas" (Kourouma 9), beggars in search of pasture. "Fama Doumbouya, father Doumbouya, mother Doumbouya, last and legitimate descendant of the Doumbouya princes of Horodougou, panther totem, was a vulture [...] Ah! the suns of Independence" (Kourouma 9). Fama is reduced to crisscrossing anonymous crowds, from funeral to funeral, in search of his substance. "He walked with the redoubled step of a diarrhea sufferer" (Kourouma 9), jostled by onlookers, "onlookers planted as in Papa's hut" (Kourouma 9). He sweats, threatens, curses, covered in an incredible din of "horns, engines backfiring, tires beating, shouts and calls from passers-by and drivers". (Kourouma 10). So-called "civilized" honor is relegated to the back burner, and civic norms are disavowed: they take shape in the restraint of behavior. Designated honor, on the other hand, is "barbaric", vile. It refers to deviant behavior, a pure paradox. Hence the parallel between the description and Kourouma's famous line: "He, Fama, born in gold, food, honor and women! Educated to prefer gold to gold, to choose food among others, and to bed his favorite among a hundred wives! What had he become? A scavenger...". (Kourouma 10). By analogy, the term "scavenger" gives rise to a lexical register of Fama's attributes. Now poor, he lives off the largesse of friends of the deceased, whose funerals are celebrated. The illustration opposite is supported by a metanarrative commentary.
hyena → cemetery
Fama carrion →scavenger → Fama vulture → back of huts
Hyenas live in the vicinity of cemeteries, while vultures hover behind huts. Here and there are places of decomposition, deposits of "detritus". Hyena, vulture and scavenger connote Fama, just as cemetery, back of huts and carrion connote both places of celebration for funerals or births, Fama's favorite places. The attributes are both zoological and mineral. Fama is therefore condemned to marginality, a "bastard" in contemporary society. No one feels they owe him respect. Here he is, arriving late at a funeral ceremony: Fama is taunted by a griot who associates the Doumbouya, panther totem, with the Keita, hippopotamus totem. In proportion to the reaction of the griot, a symbol of the Malinké people, Boadi provides some edifying explanations:
This decline, this sort of unfornunate end or bad end , profoundly mars the itinerary of the novelistic hero [...]. He loses his glorious artifice. His madness and limitations self-destruct him, for he lacks the science of great men that generates the mystique of superhumanity. Between him and the people, there is always a sudden break, a break that comes at a crucial moment and produces the incommunicability that accelerates failure, creates setbacks and fuels setbacks (87-88).
"These various attacks on physical (and even behavioral) integrity are part of the great modern trend of caricaturing characters, [...] of their impotent, inarticulate dreams." (Vaïs 197). The trajectory of these hero-characters, particularly Fama, ultimately shows a total demarcation from "the epic scheme of heroism" (Boadi 87), because the honor that governs the character's life is constantly undermined, defiled. Honor established through negativity leads inexorably to catastrophe.
- "The Honourable" Fama Doumbouya: at the end of the race, the folklore of horror
Ohaegbu cruelly asserts: "Fama was made to be a failure" (260). Indeed, the hero of Les Soleils des Indépendances seems, through his clumsiness and inconsistencies, to take pleasure in facilitating the task of a destiny that persecutes him. He is lucid, but does not act consistently. The only will he shows is to cross the border and die. But Fama's death leaves a sense of horror.
- The representation of horror: monomania and Hollywoodism
The proleptic narration of the horror portrays with eloquence and gravity the threat hanging over Fama's life: "Fama moved towards the left side of the bridge. The parapet was not high, and under the bridge was the riverbank. The big sacred caimans were floating in the water, ready to attack the last Doumbouya descendant" (Kourouma 200).
According to Mellier, horror features "supernatural, monstrous, excessive figures of otherness" (147) at the source of the phenomenon. TheOther is revealed as a physical and psychological threat, as evidenced by the aforementioned excerpt which, however, lacks the supernatural dimension mentioned by Mellier. In this prefigurative horror story, the aggressors are not the product of the victim's imagination: they actually exist. Horror then translates into a paranoid unconscious, as Ahmadou Kourouma transforms himself into a horror-maker and "develops a fiction in which the Other appears only in the context of explicit antagonism" (147). Consequently, threats are actualized through confrontation with a real evil entity: "the big sacred caimans".
The narrative makes use of figuration through the poetics of description. The narrative is a show, not a suggestion. Here, the folkloric, the spectacular or the spectatorial emerge. Descriptive representations seem to be realized through photography, as Mellier points out: "This visualization by the text must suffice to give [the reader] the impression of [the] actual presence" (37) of the threat, whose properties are intensified in the reader's mind. "It is in the terror produced by "monstration" (a term that plays on the action of showing the spectacular event of the monster) that the character's universe collapses and the reader surrenders to the pleasure of the pathetic" (31). From this point of view, it is possible to understand the art of horror as a device for unveiling: "Fama moved towards the left side of the bridge. The parapet wasn't high, and under the bridge there was the riverbank. The big sacred caimans were floating in the water or warming themselves on the sandbanks [...]" (Kourouma 200).
The unveiling can be observed in certain characteristic phrases: " Fama moved towards the left side of the bridge" (1), " the parapet was not high " (2), " the big caimans were floating in the water or warming themselves on the sandbanks " (3) and the expression " in this place " (4). In element (1), the primary meaning of the verb "s'avancer" is: "to carry oneself forward", its secondary meaning is: "se hasarder" which, in turn, means "to go to a place where one may run into danger". The "left side of the bridge" (1) mentioned instead of "right side" indicates that the place specified would present risks. Hence the evocation of element (4) "in this place". In element (2), a word draws the analyst's attention: "parapet". This word has the following semantic content: "a wall at support height designed to prevent falls". The negation shows that it's not in its highest position, so the probability of damage - i.e. death - is enormous. The element (3) materialized by key terms such as "caiman", "floated" and "warmed up" are also covered in meaning. The caiman is an antediluvian, man-eating monster; flottaient, from the verb flotter, has the denoted meaning "to remain on the surface of". It is opposed to the expression "to remain in depth". The verb se réchauffaient has the infinitive se réchauffer , meaning "to warm up". Heat should be understood as "vigor" for action. The lexical field of key words and expressions taken, semiotically and semantically, overlap and complement each other in the description. They refer to death.
We have to admit that mystery has no place in an unveiling sequence. Indeed, Kourouma's task appears quite different. By altering the reader's state of expectation, the writer ensures that they no longer apprehend the denouement of the scene as an unknown event, but rather anticipate it, imagining the horror they will witness. In addition to textual strategies, rhetorical devices are used to describe the horror.
- Telling Fama: a rhetoric of horror
Fama's death was voluntary. However, he threw himself into the river with the assurance that the caimans "would not dare attack the last representative of the Doumbouya" (Kourouma 200). Unfortunately, he was more hurt than frightened: "Fama climbed the parapet and let himself fall onto a sandbank. He got up, but the water didn't reach his knees. He tried to take a step, but saw a sacred caiman hurtling towards him like an arrow. A [horrible] scream was heard from the banks" (Kourouma 200).
Kourouma uses comparisons in particular.
- a sacred caiman is that which is compared: the compared,
- an arrow the word that makes the image: the comparator,
- as : the comparison tool,
- the common point is not expressed, but is to be deduced from the comparator: show a direction, along the line, to attack lethally.
Thanks to the revealing clues, the author had gradually prepared the reader for a scene of horror and disgust. Indeed, the descriptive passages insist on the visibility of the elements depicted, amplifying the repugnance of the scene: "A rifle shot rang out: from a watchtower in the Republic of the Ebenes, a sentry had fired. The crocodile snarled so horribly as to shatter the earth and tear the sky; and with a swirl of water and blood, it leapt into the reach, where it continued to struggle and snarl". This explosion of blood and the criminal excitement of giant reptiles captured in a scene of macabre gluttony constitutes a scenic peak where horror and fantasy inform a tragicization.
The unveiling of things has mainly required the use of excessive terms: éclata, grogna d'une manière horrible, déchirer le ciel, tourbillon d'eau et de sang.... These amplifications convey the paroxysm of horror, and the reader becomes the helpless witness of a horrifying scene. The narrator does not hesitate to describe it: "Fama lay unconscious in the blood under the bridge. The crocodile was moaning and struggling in the turbulent water [...]. Fama was still lying under the bridge. The caiman was struggling in a whirlpool of blood and water" (Kourouma 201). These sentences feature redundant groups of words in a recurring formalization, anaphoric to the extreme: Fama gisait, sous le pont, le caïman se débattait, sang, not without omitting the semantic charge of the adverb toujours. These considerations are backed by what Mellier calls "the fantastic of representation."[2] linked here to horror, where an aesthetic of externalization and excess emerges.
Yet the shooting had stopped. The border guards of the Nikinai republic, white flags in their hands, came to relieve Fama, who had been hit under the part of the bridge under their jurisdiction. Their brigadier examined him: he had been severely mortally wounded by the saurian. [...] . A massive, hard pain nailed his leg, his whole body had become a stone, he felt alive only in the throat where he had to push to breathe, in the nose that blew burning, in the stunned ears and in the bright eyes. Fama had finished, was finished. The head of the medical convoy was notified. (Kourouma 202-203-204).
The narrator reports the death of Prince Fama. But the brutality of his death, caused by the saurian (caiman), is softened by the use of the verb finish. The euphemism uses softened terms to designate a cruel reality: "Un malinké était mort" (Kourouma 205). "The whole of Horodougou was inconsolable, because the Doumbouya dynasty was coming to an end, and the dogs who had first predicted that the day would be evil were howling to the dead, their throats full, unconcerned by the stones thrown at them by the guards. The wild beasts roared back from the forests, the caimans growled, the women wept" (Kourouma 202).
The horror in Les soleils des indépendances is perceived through the depiction of actions. It does not suggest the unspeakable. It relies more on the visible and tangible. Through a detailed description of events, which here can be likened to a kind of hyperrealism, the author describes Fama as a focal point, a beast of show that he takes the painful pleasure of exposing on the screen, precisely a cinema screen. To better grasp the impact of Kourouma's large-format imagery, the reader should take into account Boadi's observations: "Description is no longer mere enunciation, but becomes language, in other words, a code, a systemic montage. The abstract expressionism of words gives way to a theatrical discursivity, a kind of mise en cinéma, a spectacularization of novelistic discourse". (83-84). He adds:
This form of mise en spectacle is even more akin to hypotyposis in that it brings the scene to life through grating humor, the grotesque, the farcical, decaying irony, black comedy and so on. Assimilation to hypotyposis in fact proceeds from the enumeration of concrete, striking details that are molded into an animated folklore of vivid, scriptable words that bring the object described to life. (84).
On the border between the Ebony Coast and the Socialist Republic of Nikinai, Fama suffers the affront of not being recognized as Prince of Horodougou. The monomania of honor has turned into a sacrificial blindness whose symbolism induces the social universality of horror.
- A universal tragedy
The symbolic value of Les soleils des indépendances opens up to wider dimensions. Kourouma's work infers a tragedy.
- Fama and the tragedy of the end
The characters have a dramatic destiny or are directly responsible for the tragic outcome: in Les soleils des indépendances, the protagonist's initiatives are the indirect cause, at first glance, of his death. But the second-degree understanding of this death is facilitated by a long-standing prophetic verve:
Fama was going to Horodougou to die as soon as possible. It had been foretold for centuries before the sun of Independence that Fama would die near the tombs of his ancestors; and it was perhaps this destiny that explained why Fama had survived the torture in the cellars of the Presidency, and the life of the nameless camp; it was this destiny that explained the surprising liberation that launched him back into a world to which he had thought he had said goodbye. (Kourouma 193)
Fama knows he's lost, but he goes through with his destiny, which is to disappear from this world that refuses him. The world he no longer wants is the one he closes his eyes to as he leaves the capital: "Fama closed his eyes and slept".(Idem 194). Fama's "jusqu'auboutisme" operates in the work as a leitmotif and a negation of the bourgeois values dominant in the era of independence. In Mayako prison, by praying deeply and very often, he had resigned himself, he had come to accept his end, whatever the circumstances. Death was thus a solution to his existential anguish. "He was ready for the rendezvous with the spirits, ready for Allah's judgment. Death had become his only companion; Fama already had death in his body, and life was nothing but an evil to him." (193).
Clearly, Fama behaves like a true tragic hero. His end, both miserable and glorious, makes him a defeated hero. This scenario, which portrays a hero of defeat, is not excluded from contemporary African novel writing. According to Boadi, the hero-character is "totally out of step with the reading of ritual heroics" (87), as described by Martel, for whom "the hero comes from the multitude, giving them the example of courage [...]. In return, the hero receives from the multitude a fantastic power " (11) that royally opens "the floodgates of glorious epiphany". (Boadi 87).
In the contemporary African novel, the scenario of sad or tragic endings, the recurrence of stories that end in a dotted line or that end badly, build up against the current anti-epiphanic heroic trajectories: here Evil prevails over Good. This downfall considerably darkens the trajectory of the novel's heroes, and comes as a shock to the African readership frustrated by the counter-publicity of the heroic. Rewriting the hero from a perspective of decanonization doesn't seem to go in the direction Bourneuf and Ouellet want: "The novel can surprise, even deceive the reader's expectations, but above all, the story has to end well to satisfy and save the moral [...]". (47-48). The novelist should write a good story that holds his reader in suspense, that lets him experience, at the end, the pleasures and vertigo of fictional immersion. The opposite epilogue is served up to the reader in Les soleils des indépendances.
Fama fought for justice and respect for others, because the advent of the new times should have enabled him to regain his power as a leader, or even to gain access to power in some way. He gets nothing of the sort. His story brings to the fore material, psychological and even religious difficulties that make the character's maladjustment to the realities of the new age all the more apparent.
- Fama's hypostasy seen as maladjustment to a world of contingencies and improbability
Fama is a hero who comes up against an incomprehensible world. He doesn't recognize himself in the new Africa. This feeling is a factor of tragic disarray: "As long as there is a feeling of alienation, the writer will recall the old days, the mythical times, so to speak, when man felt himself to be in a coherent world devoid of antagonisms." (sic) (Ohaegbu 116).
Faced with the new realities, Fama is a man on the run. Fama embodies the image of a character disconnected from the new political order, symbolically behind the times. "At the seventh-day funeral of the late Koné Ibrahima, Fama was late. He was still hurrying, walking at the doubled pace of a diarrhea sufferer. He was at the other end of the bridge linking the white city to the Negro quarter at the hour of the second prayer; the ceremony had begun". (Kourouma). Fama's odyssey is nonsense, an eschatological dystopia:
From there, his odyssey begins through a world he doesn't understand, right up to the border imposed by the barrier that stands absurdly before him, the Prince of Horodougou, and whose meaning he can't understand either:
A bastard, a real one, a dehorned scion of the forest and of a mother who has surely known neither the slightest strip of cloth, nor the dignity of marriage dared, to come out of his mouth that Fama foreigner couldn't cross without an ID card! Did you hear what she said? Fama foreigner on this land of Horodougou! [Is the world turned upside down?] (Kourouma 103-104).
Finally, the tragedy of maladjustment is a collective one, that of an entire population. In Les soleils des indépendances, Fama is the hypostasized figure of the mal de vivre and the impossible alchemy of change, the difficulties of living through the mutations of the independence era. The tragedy suffered by Prince Fama is a reminder of the social contradictions of an era that are reflected in the lives of the people of the Côte des Ebènes, whose representatives in the novels could include Okonkwo, Mélédouman and others.
Through the destiny of Okonkwo, a prominent member of his clan, Chinua Achebe evokes the cultural shock represented for the natives by the arrival of the British. Almost cut off from the outside world, the inhabitants of the equatorial forest could imagine a world in their own image, made up of multiple gods, ancestor worship, rites and taboos. The arrival of the Europeans and their religion, Christianity, overturned all traditional beliefs, hence the title of the novel The World Collapses.
Mélédouman, in Jean-Marie Adiaffi's La Carte d'identité, is an Agni prince required to report to the office of the circle commander, Kakatika, to attest to his identity because of a doubt about the document produced. Unable to provide proof of his identity, the prince was molested and thrown into prison in irons. The arrest and imprisonment of this prince, who embodied obvious authority and power in his cultural milieu, aroused the dismay and consternation of his people, who venerated royalty. In the end, Prince Mélédouman was exonerated. But beyond the African microcosm, the malaise extends to the macrocosm, i.e. the universe outside the small world, indeed all traditional societies faced with modern and contemporary constraints and experiencing a similar fate.
Conclusion
Ahmadou Kourouma ultimately assigns Fama's problematic heroism a narrative trajectory whose ideological credentials stem from the material bulimias, psychological tensions and religious radicalisms of an African society resistant to the socio-political innovations of the post-independence era. In Les Soleils des indépendances , the reader's emotions are subject to the tragedy of "disarticulated" characters, the cultural fundamentalism of the Ancients and collective disillusionment. Above all, Kourouma reinvents the opposition between tradition and modernism, disavowing the monolithism and clichés of acting. In particular, the story focuses on political (new powers), sociological (new social classes) and philosophical (new values) dividends.
A sense of honor is now a mere figment of the imagination, and dignity is no longer a school subject. Fama abandons his eulogistic posture and alienates his existence in a macabre wandering. The hero loses his insignia of essence and opts instead for moral nihilism and irreverent slingshot. The heroic figure of which Fama is the embodiment takes its strength from a scenography of horror where descriptions are vivid, amplified and raised to a high level of cruelty.
Textual and narrative strategies and rhetorical devices are at the service of representation. They have been forged by the writer as the appropriate instruments for expressing himself in a sincere and heartfelt way. Similarly, the visual and realistic art of description and the expressiveness of discourse are subordinated to the desire to describe accurately and bear witness to a universal tragedy: "Fama is an authentic tragic hero insofar as an entire society rich in tradition dies with him [...]". (Kourouma 185). In this way, Kourouma's novel joins André Malraux's "universal human condition".[3]
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How to cite this article:
MLA : Danho, Yayo Vincent. "Prince Fama in Ahmadou Kourouma's Les soleils des indépendances: Des honneurs à l'horreur." Uirtus 1.1 (August 2021): 34-50.
[1] For Furetière, the term honor means, among other things, "testimony of esteem or submission that one renders to someone by one's words, or by one's actions"; "is said in general of the esteem that is due to virtue & merit"; "applies more particularly to two kinds of virtue, to valour for men, & to chastity for women"; "is also said of the thing that honors, that gives glory", etc. (Furetière A., Dictionnaire universel contenant généralement tous les mots français tant vieux que modernes, La Haye-Rotterdam, 1690, article Honneur). In the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française : honor is: "action, external demonstration by which one makes known the veneration, the respect, the esteem that one has for the dignity, or for the merit of somebody"; honor "also means, Virtue, probity"; "is also taken for the glory which follows virtue, for the esteem of the world, & for reputation"; "is also taken for Dignity, Charge; but in this sense it has use only in the plural"(Le dictionnaire de l'Académie française, Paris, 1694, article Honneur).
[2]- In his book La littérature fantastique, Denis Mellier takes up this categorization, replacing the fantastic of representation with the fantastic of presence. Although the analysis of these categories remains much the same, Mellier renames some of the elements studied in relation to each of these trends: the textual strategy or program in the fantastic of representation becomes the stakes in the fantastic of presence, and the writing in the first type of fantastic is now called the poetics in the second.
[3]- La Condition humaine is a novel by André Malraux. In this novel, Malraux defines his characters as heroic types in whom culture, lucidity and aptitude for action are united. But aren't they also permanently immersed in the mire of the human condition, alternating between greatness and decay? Kyo commits suicide in the hope of a brotherly fusion. But this hope is illusory. This is the tragedy of the human condition. Eschatological anguish is doubled by the impossibility of surpassing oneself, by apprehension in the face of one's own conscience. Life is absurd, and man is incapable of knowing who he is. Is there not a correlation between the facts described and Fama's story? (Emphasis added).