| Ken Bugul is the author of eight novels published to date. Her ninth novel is in press and will be titled: Cacophonie. She is one of the most important figures of African literature of French expression, but also one of the most controversial. Because of some experiences shared by the narrative voices of her novels, her writing language is not a language of communication. It is a literary language made of maternement and mutilation. There are pell-mell the babble of the child who learns to speak, the silence of being deprived of speech and the delusion of melancholy. These features of the Bugulian language drive from the various fictional practices of the author a poetical language sitting on a certain musicality that emanates from the literary text. They are also the basis of different forms of repetition and questioning aspects of the language that carries them. As for the aesthetic that comes from combining the practices of language in the Bugulian novels, it is made of a hybrid of genres in which orality and writing intersect in a perpetual sliding movement: in each of her books, there is a multitude of arts classes in whose creation one is called to participate as a reader/player.;In my dissertation, I showed how the literary language that support this kind of heterogeneity of genres in Ken Bugul's novels offer a field of friction and dislocation of ordinary language. In fact, language in Ken Bugul's novels is a poetic language based on: mathesis, mimesis and semiosis, the three elements needed to create art as taught by Roland Barthes in the lecture he gave at the inauguration of the department of Semiotics ("Chaire de semiologie litteraire") at the College de France on January 7th 1977. Therefore I deduce from the foregoing that the writing of novel according to the Ken Bugul's style is a work slip. Every step in the process is in a floating state and nothing is built around a fixed axis generator of forms or substance. This allowed me in the conclusion to ask the question of modernity in the Bugulian writing. |
