NEW CONSCIOUSNESS AND NEW GENRE: A FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN NOVEL OF TRANSITIONAL TIME

Title  NEW CONSCIOUSNESS AND NEW GENRE: A FRANCOPHONE AFRICAN NOVEL OF TRANSITIONAL TIME
Author(s)  N.D. Lyakhovskaya
Information about the author(s) Nina D. Lyakhovskaya, DSc in Philology, Associate Professor, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Received  January 19, 2017
Published  March 25, 2017
Issue  2017 Vol. 2, №1
Department  World Literature
Pages  132-149
DOI  10.22455/2500-4247-2017-2-1-132-149
UDK  82.09
BBK  83.3 (3)
Abstract  In the 1990s and in the beginning of the 20 th century, Congolese and Ivorian literatures witnessed the birth of a new character, an African with bifurcated mentality that, on the one hand, keeps, at least on the superficial level, affinities with archaic consciousness while, on the other hand, is characterized by emerging individualistic and egotistic ambitions. In the mainstream genre of the novel-story, action is replaced by reflection and inner monologue that are typical of self-reflective literature. A character of the novel Le chercheur d’Afriques by a Congolese Lopes is a teacher of Nantes seeking the Africa in his childhood memories about his white father, a doctor. Various cultural values and notions merge in his consciousness. He is asocial, obsessed with one maniacal idea, and passive aggressive; when he presents himself to his father, the latter dies. Champs de bataille et d’amour by an Ivorian Tadjo represents the inner world of a married couple — a university professor and his white wife. Socially passive, obsessed with themselves, they are alienated from both the social life and each other. Widening of the mental horizon with the help of scientific knowledge and contacts with the Western culture accompanied by the simultaneous collapse of the archaic collective consciousness results at best in abstract dreaming as in the case of the astronomer in Dongala’s novel Les petits gar ç ons naissent aussi des é toile. At worst — with sociopathic behavior and madness as in the novel L’impasse by a Congolese Biyaoula where the character-sociopath ends up in a psychiatric clinic. Existential dead-end is the theme of the postmodernist novel Le monsieur Ki. Rapsodie parisi è nne à sourire pour caresser le temps by an Ivorian Kwahul é . A Congolese Sony Labou Tansi was the only writer whose satirical trilogy about Beregue (fictional name) written in the style of avant-garde realism (with the use of postmodernist devices) managed to represent the types of bifurcated consciousness of the African in their diversity and create a solid picture of the contemporary Africa.
Keywords  consciousness, bifurcation, sapiention, imagology, magic realism, avant- garde realism
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