Editorial craft and francophone African literature: The case of Malick Fall

Abstract

This article considers Senegalese novelist Malick Fall’s 1967 novel La Plaie [The Wound] in the light of material from the archives of Parisian publishers Editions du Seuil. It explores to what extent and with what effect traces of editorial mediation revealed in publishers’ archives can be written into the history of francophone African literature. Fall’s long-neglected text is one of the earliest francophone African novels of post-independence disillusionment. Described by an early critic as the first African “existentialist” novel, its fragmented narrative draws on seams of poetic symbolism, burlesque comedy, and philosophical reflection to portray a vagrant protagonist. The complex structure and unstable narrative voice mark a departure from realist modes of African novels in the 1950s. Moreover it troubles any reductive account of a linear transition from realism to modernism. Yet Fall’s work remains much less known than the celebrated stylistic innovation of Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances (1968) or Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence (1968). Readers’ reports at Le Seuil, a publisher with clear anti-colonial sympathies, show how editors sought to revise Fall’s manuscript according to normative ideas of language, genre, and literary craft, tentatively pointing to the text’s modernist leanings without fully articulating what such modernity might constitute or imply. While clearly not exclusive to African or postcolonial literature, such stylistic tempering (or tampering) arguably shaped the text’s meditations on trauma, freedom, and alienation. This evidence leads to a revised, multivalent understanding of Fall’s literary innovation.

The experience of editing can incite feelings of confluence, exchange or frustration, whether with oneself or another. On the one hand, good editing is one of the closest forms of close reading and demands a form of creativity and intimacy. On the other, literary editors are gatekeepers: double figures whose literary interests are (unavoidably) yoked to commercial forces in the literary marketplace and the ever-present question of projected readership; border guards who police the world republic of letters. Editing is never neutral as it takes place in the intertwined political, social, and cultural contexts of literary production, yet it remains an under-examined, clandestine, stage of literary production (Simonin, 2000). This article asks how we can account for the often-maligned craft of literary editors in the context of recent debates concerning world literature. My contention is that although the power structures that underpin the editorial process are usefully invoked in existing models, the detail of that process remains insufficiently accounted for and demands a renewed critical engagement with archival sources.

An editor’s selection and subsequent shaping of the literary manuscript is a result of complex social and cultural positioning that informs subjective taste (Bourdieu, 1977). The institutional setting of the publishing house acts as a prism, refracting wider commercial, political, and aesthetic interests (Bourdieu, 1992; Sapiro, 2012). With this in mind, fuller consideration of editorial craft by literary scholars not only has implications for perennial debates of authorship, but demands our renewed methodological reflection: what sources are available for the study of editorial intervention and how can they be evaluated? What do sociological tools bring to world literature debate, as it develops differentially in the French and in English-speaking academies? How can existing methods of literary analysis and close-reading test the rigidity those tools might appear to impose?

With such methodological reflection in mind, the central example here will be a case study of La Plaie (1967), a largely forgotten text by Senegalese writer, Malick Fall. It is arguably the first novel of postcolonial disillusionment in francophone sub-Saharan Africa. ¹ Fall was educated in Paris and worked in the Senegalese Department of Information, before pursuing a diplomatic career as Senegalese ambassador to Ethiopia. He published a volume of poetry, Reliefs, in 1964, prefaced by Léopold Sédar Senghor. La Plaie is his only novel. Before being published at Albin Michel, Fall’s manuscript was turned down by readers and editors at Editions du Seuil, a process traced in archived correspondence that will be examined below. La Plaie is rarely read and little-studied, but remains a significant pre-cursor to the work of Ahmadou Kourouma, Yambo Ouologuem, Sony Labou Tansi, and other writers of the late sixties and early seventies whose literary work satirized the failings of post-independence African governments. ² In ways which in some respects anticipated Kourouma’s much-commented “Malinkization” of French in Les Soleils des indépendances, Fall’s novel tested the normative expectations of its Parisian editors regarding language, form, genre, and narrative technique in African fiction.

There has been sustained speculation regarding the extent to which francophone African writers were subject to generic, grammatical, stylistic, and ideological norms by Parisian publishers (King, 2003; Miller, 1986). Such indications of symbolic violence raise further questions: Who were the publishers? What were their criteria of evaluation? What claims did they make for the universality of those criteria, and how do they relate to contemporary literary and political debate? The overarching discussion is thus concerned with how universality, as a marker of literary merit manifested in the editing process, is constructed according to certain cultural, aesthetic, or linguistic norms. ³

The analysis that follows is based on research in the archives of the French publishing houses to which Malick Fall’s text was first sent, via its strategic passeur, Léopold Sédar Senghor. ⁴ Three readers’ reports and several letters between editors and the author survive; there is no manuscript. The reports show how editors sought to revise Fall’s manuscript according to aesthetic criteria. That gesture, positioned in the complex debates between committed literature and the nouveau roman, reveals the difficulty of defining African literary autonomy in primarily political terms of anti-colonial critique in this period. Tracing the archival details of this literary “non-event” against the grain of African literary history (i.e., in relation to events in the metropolitan literary avant-garde) enables a glimpse of the ways in which the particular struggles of the literary field worked against and into the texture of the novel.

The editorial mediation of Fall’s text reveals interwoven social, political, and aesthetic criteria of critical evaluation which continue to underpin twenty-first century discussions of world literature in French. Malick Fall’s text was subject to and actively negotiated changing ideas of political and aesthetic legitimacy in Paris in the 1960s, a period marked, in existing accounts, by a shift towards greater concern for literary form and a decline in interest in realist fiction by African writers (Steemers, 2012). Recent debate surrounding “world literature”, as percolated through a French context, highlights the long-standing strain between writers’ global, or at least transnational, aspirations, the ongoing hegemony of the French language, and the peculiar status of the French language in French cultural policy (Lebovics, 1999); between the desire to move beyond the centripetal force of the Parisian centre of cultural consecration, and the ongoing reliance on publishing prestige and literary prizes bestowed by institutions in that centre (Casanova, 2004). These tensions re-emerged with vigour in responses to 2007’s “Manifeste pour une littérature-monde en français”, signed by 44 writers, who argued that the demise of a centre–periphery opposition masquerading under French-Francophone labels was self-evident: “Personne ne parle le francophone, ni n’écrit en francophone” [“Nobody speaks or writes in francophone”] ⁵ (Collective, 2007). The manifesto, and some contributions to the edited volume which followed, criticized a self-consciously intellectual mode of French fiction: “une littérature sans autre objet qu’elle-même” [“a literature whose only object is itself”], while arguing for an international perspective that broke the “pacte exclusive” [“exclusive pact”] between nation and language. ⁶ The early years of the twenty-first century, according to the manifesto, have marked a new beginning for a generation of writers “débarrassée de l’ère du soupçon” [“unburdened of the age of suspicion”].

Despite this surface-level connection, via the implicit reference to Nathalie Sarraute’s landmark essay on the nouveau roman, and the manifesto’s strategic opposition to insular notions of French literature, the conscious concern with literary form that galvanized metropolitan debate of the 1960s has rarely been brought into dialogue with the production and reception of African literature in the same period. How might one have informed the other? Such dialogue reminds us that despite political independences, the autonomy of the African literary space remained relative in this period. The manifesto has been much-discussed: criticisms range from its “overwhelming presentism” (Hargreaves et al., 2010: 4), to barbs directed at its (white, French, male) authors’ rhetoric of salvation (Kleppinger, 2010). Elsewhere, Françoise Lionnet (2009: 203) argues that the text’s stumbling block lies in its attempt to “rename other literatures in order to have them fit into the world Republic of Letters as defined and understood by a universalizing French perspective”. It represents, in other words, a transposed form of assimilation. Lionnet goes on to suggest there is a failure to attend to the impact of multilingualism on French language and literature in the manifesto: an apparent indifference to “the intricate layering of linguistic codes and rhetorical practices that are the philological hallmark of many Francophone texts” (Lionnet, 2009: 203-04; emphasis in the original). Lionnet’s response confirms the need to attend carefully to the formal concerns of non-metropolitan writing in French, but largely bypasses the often uneven, shared, contexts in which this writing is produced and then evaluated. The following analysis seeks to unpick any homogenized or monolithic view of Paris as a centripetal literary centre by investigating the initial reception of Fall’s manuscript, as shaped by contemporary debates in the French capital regarding literary form.

Publishing African literature in Paris: Some brief background

When Malick Fall’s novel was published in 1967, the vast majority of literary writing on sub-Saharan Africa in French was still published in Paris, despite a nascent publishing industry in Cameroun, Togo, and Senegal (Hage, 2009). ⁷ Paris had been a publishing centre for black diasporic cultural production since the landmark publication of René Maran’s Goncourt-winning novel, Batouala in 1921, subtitled: “un véritable roman nègre” [“A true negro novel”], and the vogue for black artistic forms, in art, music, dance, and literature in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. As Gary Wilder reminds us, this period is best described in a series of contradictions:

The French imperial nation-state was an internally contradictory artifact of colonial modernity that was simultaneously imaginary and real, abstract and concrete, universalizing and particularizing, effective and defective, modern and illiberal, republican and racist, welfarist and mercantilist, Franco-African and Afro-French, national and transnational. (2005: 21)

Strong connections between the French avant-garde — namely the surrealists — and négritude writers from Africa and the Caribbean performed a significant “working-through” of these oppositions in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Following the “années noires” of the Nazi occupation of northern France, French political and intellectual discourse was dominated by another contradiction: the consolidation of the Republican national imaginary and the will to create political and cultural dialogue in a new spirit of internationalism (Sapiro, 1999). The number of literary publications on and of Africa increased steeply in the post-war period in the years leading to the independences of 1960. The specialist journal Présence Africaine was founded in Paris in 1947, followed by its publishing house under the same name in 1949, which published works by Aimé Césaire, Cheikh Anta Diop, Ousmane Sembene, David Diop, and many others (Mudimbé, 1992; Salgas, 2009). In general terms, however, during the decades either side of the independences of 1960, commercial publishers and metropolitan French readers continued to value representations of sub-Saharan Africa that either preserved the colonial status quo in terms of both form and content, or offered témoignage [testimony] in the form of literary realism. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes described “the petit bourgeois myth of the negro” (1957: 70): a residual exoticism that dominated mass metropolitan readership during the 1950s. Elsewhere, Mongo Beti wrote scathingly of Camara Laye’s autobiographical bestseller, L’Enfant noir, and its author’s reluctance to portray social and political realities in French West Africa. For Beti, “écrire sur l’Afrique Noire, c’est prendre parti pour ou contre la colonisation. Impossible de sortir de là” [“Writing about black Africa means taking sides for or against colonisation. It’s impossible to get away from that.”] (Beti, 1955: 138), and he rejected the taste for reductive fictional representations. Despite the symbolic significance of Présence Africaine as a relatively autonomous hub for African and diasporic knowledge production, bibliographical analysis confirms that African writing was widely dispersed across the literary field in the post-war period, appearing at both commercial publishing houses, and avant-garde, politically committed publishers. ⁸ This brief sketch of the publishing context provides necessary background to the more ambiguous positioning (and position-taking) that surrounded Fall’s manuscript in the years following independence.

Publishers’ archives and the avant-texte

To date there has been relatively little archival work on African literature, a fact attributable to the lack of archived sources and theoretical resistance to the messiness of textual materiality. An important exception to this tendency is the groundbreaking work of the francophone manuscripts group at ITEM-ENS (Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes–Ecole normale supérieure), which has produced genetic editions of work by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Madagascan poet Jean-Jacques Rabéarivelo, and is currently working on a new edition of Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances. The French tradition of genetic criticism, which emerged in the 1960s, provided a significant tangent to post-structuralist approaches to literary analysis. Rather than trying to reach an originary meaning, or set of meanings for a text, or to show endless contingency of meaning, this critical school can be described as: “the study of textual invention” (Deppman, Ferrer and Groden, 2004: 11). Its methods seek to show concrete traces of textual instability in the avant-texte — the “aesthetic process” of literary production prior to the publication of the text (De Biasi, 2007). The work is based on careful reconstruction using available documents (letters, drafts, manuscripts, etc.), with less attention to the reconstruction of social positioning that is central to sociological approaches. ⁹

The archives of a publishing house such as Le Seuil offer clues, if only ever fleeting or partial, to its editors’ literary negotiations. Documents range from readers’ reports and manuscripts to contracts, correspondence with authors, production invoices, rights paperwork, and press dossiers. This material, in particular readers’ reports detailing the rejection of manuscripts, requires a careful process of contextualization and interpretation: the aim is not to draw anachronistic conclusions regarding Le Seuil’s editorial policy, but to understand the symbolic conditions faced by Fall’s manuscript. When placed against a broader understanding of the literary field, such avant-texte provides significant material traces of editorial craft as one mode through which political and cultural contexts work into, and at times against, the texture of literary writing itself.

Paris-based publisher, Editions du Seuil was founded in 1935. After a hiatus during the Nazi occupation, it developed a reputation for commitment to intellectual fiction and non-fiction, and its Catholic tastes (in both senses of the term). Le Seuil’s professed lack of emphasis on commercial concerns was an important aspect of the firm’s self-definition (Serry, 2005, 2008). Editor Paul Flamand was the central figure in promoting African writing at Le Seuil, largely due to his association with Léopold Sédar Senghor. The Senegalese president and négritude poet was part of Flamand’s small group of close friends and often sent him manuscripts, including that of Malick Fall. Flamand himself was not part of the Parisian intelligentsia; he came from a middle-class family in the west of France, was largely self-taught and received no financial assistance from his family when he decided to commit to a career in publishing, a fact which distinguished him from many other avant-garde, left-wing publishers of the period, such as Jérôme Lindon or François Maspero. According to his letters, Flamand’s rejection of Fall’s novel was based less on the potential commercial viability of a topical book on sub-Saharan Africa, than on a lack of belief in the integrity of the manuscript as a literary text.

Though neither explicitly avant-garde, nor politically radical, Le Seuil did publish several significant anti-colonial texts, including works by Frantz Fanon, Kateb Yacine, and Senghor. Unlike their more radical contemporaries, Editions de Minuit or Editions Maspero, Le Seuil refused, or at least claimed to refuse, to publish in direct response to political trends of third-worldism. As one editor wrote: “Il ne doit pas y avoir, dans notre catalogue, une catégorie à part d’auteurs de qualité inférieure, acceptés pour la seule raison qu’ils appartiennent à des pays ‘sous-développés’” [“There must not be a separate category in our catalogue for writers of inferior quality, accepted for the sole reason that they come from ‘under-developed’ countries”]. ¹⁰ The letter suggests the tensions of a publisher with anti-colonial sympathies, simultaneously concerned with preserving its reputation for non-partisan good taste in the metropolitan literary field. Novels of and on sub-Saharan Africa that tested generic and stylistic norms were only gradually and conditionally admitted by Le Seuil in this period and do not seem to have been considered at Minuit — the main publisher of nouveau roman. Early ideas of African literature and African literary autonomy were inextricably tied up with these socio-historical contexts of literary production, as will be shown in the case of Fall.

Largely hidden, immaterial processes of editorial mediation operated at the stage of selection and editing by tempering political polemic, revising vocabulary and style, choosing a title, as well as in the later processes of packaging and distribution. Such mediation is not unique to African writing — indeed it is the very stuff of editorial work (Simonin and Fouché, 1999). Rejection is an everyday act in the publishing industry. Indeed, we might draw comparisons with Le Seuil’s rejection of other texts, such as an early manuscript by Samuel Beckett, turned down on the basis of the editor’s lack of conviction for its “noir absolu” [“Absolute blackness” ] (Flamand, cited in Simonin, 2008: 292), and described in a reader’s report as “une littérature odieuse […] un piège pour amateurs de langage” [“odious literature […] a trap for language amateurs”] (Béguin, in Serry, 2012: 56). Postcolonial critics should therefore tread carefully in publishers’ archives if they wish to avoid what Eli Park Sorensen terms the “critical fetish of literary resistance” (2010: 140). With that in mind, sociological approaches which seek to objectify the agents and structures of the literary field (while thinking critically and self-reflexively about that process of objectification) provide helpful paradigms for critical interest in material book history.

La Plaie at Editions du Seuil

The episodic structure, unstable, self-reflexive narrative voice, and groundbreaking use of the metaphor of bodily decay found in La Plaie together mark a formal departure from previous modes of African fiction. These modes, which cannot be simply reduced to the category of realism, included forms of historical fiction (Paul Hazoumé’s 1938 novel Doguicimi), autobiography (Laye’s L’Enfant noir), and the burst of novels by Ferdinand Oyono, Mongo Beti and Ousmane Sembene during the late 1950s, celebrated for their anti-colonial satire (Le Vieux nègre et la médaille), realist depictions of colonial oppression (Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba), and témoignage of collective resistance (Les Bouts de bois de dieu). Despite its role in a general shift away from linear narrative and direct social commentary, Fall’s novel remains much less known than the celebrated innovation of Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances (1968) or Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence (1968), both of which were also initially turned down by editors at Le Seuil (Corcoran, 2008). The manuscript’s trail in the publisher’s archive leads us to reconsider the criteria of “innovation” by which African fiction was evaluated in the period following the independences.

La Plaie is set in Saint-Louis, former colonial capital of French West Africa, at an unspecified point in the early to mid-twentieth century. Its homeless protagonist, Magamou Seck, refuses all treatment for a festering wound in his ankle sustained in an accident during his migration to N’dar — the market and fishing district of Saint-Louis — from his ancestral village. Once there, as we discover retrospectively in the novel, Magamou is driven to an individualistic existence eating scraps left over from the day’s trade in the market: “Je rassemblais tous ces petits riens que des personnes avaient touchés, possédés, aimés. Ces objets devenaient des êtres, trait d’union entre les autres et moi-même” [“I gathered up all these little scraps that people had touched, owned, loved. These objects became beings, a link between others and myself”] (Fall, 1967: 51). ¹¹ In the book’s opening pages, Magamou is arrested and detained as a lunatic. Despite the self-conscious lucidity made obvious by narrative contrasts of internal and external monologues in the opening chapters, Magamou colludes with this assessment of his condition, encouraged by the reaction of the caricatured European Doctor and his Senegalese interpreter, an important trickster figure in the narrative. His incarceration leads to his contemplation on the bounds of the individual’s freedom in society. Once set free from the asylum he seeks treatment for his wound, and is completely cured. When he returns to the market however, he struggles to adjust to his invisibility as a physically “new man”. He considers suicide and undergoes a near-death experience which fails to bring any clarity to his existential wavering. The novel ends in an act of revolt as he deliberately gashes open his own ankle, seeking a return to the sense of belonging he found in his wounded state.

Understandably perhaps, given these themes of alienation, freedom, suicide, and revolt, the text was described as the first African “existential” novel (Blair, 1976). Elsewhere, Mohamadou Kane draws on the text’s unconventional exploration of the theme of rural–urban migration and the moral significance of Magamou’s “immense orgueil” [“immense pride”] (Kane, 1982: 332–7), while more recent readings have placed the book in relation to other African texts depicting maimed or damaged bodies (Wynchank, 1994). It is interesting to note that none of the archived editorial correspondence picks up on the possible symbolism of Magamou’s physical and psychological pain identified by Kane and Wynchank. Alioune Diané’s close reading offers the only sustained engagement with the novel as “une aventure linguistique […] dont on n’a pas assez dit la nouveauté” [“A linguistic adventure […] whose novelty has been insufficiently recognized”] (Diané, 2002: 1), though his discussion of what weight that “newness” might carry is limited to praise of the text’s “modernité”. In the light of editorial archival traces, we can now ask how such modernity signified in the midst of literary and philosophical debates circulating around existentialism and the nouveau roman in the early 1960s. These debates concerned the nature of political commitment and engagement and the role of literature in articulating human experience of the world. By positioning Fall’s text retrospectively in these currents, a fuller and more multivalent account of French and African textual invention begins to emerge.

Senghor sent Fall’s text to Flamand in March 1966 having received it via his cultural attaché, André Terrisse. Fall sent a second, revised version of the manuscript directly to Le Seuil some weeks later. As might be expected given his proximity to the architect of négritude, Terrisse sought to establish the novel’s African specificity in his reader’s report. The text is “prenant, original, poétique et profondément africain […] une alliance imprévue des littératures archaïques et modernes” [“Absorbing, original, poetic and profoundly African […] an unexpected alliance of archaic and modern literatures”], though he suggests cutting 30 of its 250 pages. ¹² Terrisse was a prominent Primary School inspector in francophone West Africa and author of school textbooks for the Caribbean and African markets. ¹³ His interests lay outside metropolitan literary debates, but his report also seeks, beyond its implied essentialisms, to position the text in relation to those debates. He recognizes the text’s non-realist, dreamlike qualities, suggesting that there is an internal coherence that might be compared as “contre-point” [“counter-point”] to the technique of the nouveau roman.

Though far from being united in their aims and methods, the nouveau romanciers sought to work against the constraints of nineteenth century realist narrative and uphold a self-consciously new mode of literary composition (Robbe-Grillet, 1961: 33). Jean-Paul Sartre and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s dispute over the latter’s novels and the changing notion of literary engagement, is central to the publishing context under consideration here. These debates purported to set a new agenda for the future of the novel which grappled with France’s changing place in the world, though with recourse to the aesthetic coordinates of a modernist canon. In his essays, Robbe-Grillet’s interest in objective description of objects and surfaces places his political commitment at the prior level of literary form and language. This emphasis — though revised over the course of Pour un nouveau roman — precipitated Sartre’s barbed comments:

La faim du monde, la menace atomique, l’aliénation de l’homme, je m’étonne qu’elles ne teintent pas toute notre littérature. Croyez-vous que je puisse lire Robbe-Grillet dans un pays sous-développé? Il ne se sent pas mutilé. Je le tiens pour un bon écrivain, mais il s’adresse à la bourgeoisie confortable. Je voudrais qu’il se rende compte que la Guinée existe. En Guinée je pourrais lire Kafka. Je retrouve en lui mon malaise. (Piatier, 1964)

[The world’s hunger, the nuclear threat, human alienation, I’m surprised they don’t colour all of our literature. Do you really think that I can read Robbe-Grillet in an underdeveloped country? He doesn’t feel mutilated. I think he’s a good writer, but he addresses the comfortable bourgeoisie. I’d like him to realise that Guinea exists. In Guinea I could read Kafka. I find my malaise in him.]

Sartre’s retort is characteristic of the tension between literary form, content, and class politics which marked this often acrimonious and highly strategic debate over the status of literature, and in particular the literary representation of individual agency in the world (Britton, 1992: 12–47). Here Sartre elevates Kafka — gold standard of modernist fiction —as a mode for working through his troubled perception of under-development in Guinea. The reference to Kafka recurs in the readers’ reports on Fall’s novel at Le Seuil, yet the contention might be judged problematic in a period when political independence in West Africa was closely linked to calls for autonomous cultural traditions and institutions. There remains a tension between “universal” literary value and the need for particularized expressions of African experience.

Without foreclosing or predetemining interpretations of the text, Terrisse’s report encourages us to ask how Fall’s text might be positioned in relation to ongoing critiques of realist representation of man in the world. In her account of Africanist discourse in the French press, Vivan Steemers suggests that in the 1960s metropolitan institutions did not have the same reflex towards literary innovation from the “periphery” as towards that generated by consecrated writers of the “centre” (2012: 155). We can compare Fall’s situation to editorial quibbling over texts by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Yambo Ouologuem, and Kourouma — all since celebrated as part of a wave of experimental African fiction following on from anti-colonial realism. Such comparisons require a more nuanced account not just of African literary history in this period, but of each text’s complex literary qualities, which resist any overly simplistic (and often Eurocentric) categories of realism and modernism.

Fall’s manuscript was originally submitted under the title, “Les frontières de la nuit”. Senghor’s attaché, Terrisse, suggested the title “La Plaie”. He described Magamou’s wound as the text’s “‘personnage’ central” [“central ‘character’”], which expressed “le problème de la condition de l’homme” [“the problem of man’s condition”], thus anticipating subsequent critics’ remarks concerning the text’s existential qualities. ¹² In doing so, Terrisse also highlighted a commodifiable universality in the text, as an editor at Le Seuil agreed: “on peut voir symbolisée une situation qui, pour profondément africaine qu’elle soit, outrepasse les limites d’un pays ou d’un continent et signifie pour tous les hommes” [“We can see symbolised a situation which, as profoundly African as it is, goes beyond the limits of a country or a continent, and signifies for all mankind”]. ¹⁴ In a later interview, Malick Fall himself noted that his text “[pourrait] se situer dans n’importe quel pays du monde” [“could be situated in any country in the world”] (cited in Kane, 1982: 530), concurring with this universalizing gesture. In subsequent correspondence, Fall suggested alternative titles: “Une vie marginale, L’Entaille, La répulsion, Prisons sans fin, Jusqu’au sang” [“‘A marginal life’, ‘The gash’, ‘Repulsion’, ‘Endless prisons’, ‘Until blood comes’”], ¹⁵ which avoid any particularizing references to race or to Africa.

Despite Terrisse’s praise, the manuscript met with a muted response at Le Seuil. The first reader’s report criticized the style of the novel:

Une perpétuelle oscillation, un perpétuel balancement entre deux genres (réaliste et transposition du réalisme), entre deux styles (réaliste et poétique), entre deux mondes (blanc et noir) entre deux langues (le français appliqué et le français quotidien). ¹⁶

[A perpetual oscillation, a perpetual balancing act between two genres (realist and transposition of realism), between two styles (realist and poetic), between two worlds (white and black), between two languages (applied, and everyday French).]

The reader sets out aspects of the author’s craft in this series of binaries that juxtapose language, genre, style, and race, thereby registering the text’s complexity. He remains indecisive in his final evaluation: “Mes sentiments sur ce livre sont un peu à l’image du livre lui-même et de son héros: ambigus, flottants, hésitants, partagés entre l’indulgence et la sévérité” [“My feelings regarding this book are somewhat in the image of the book itself and its hero: ambiguous, hesitant, split between indulgence and severity”]. He laments excessive contrasts in register and “incoherence”, particularly in the shifting narrative perspective of Magamou’s internal monologues in the opening chapters of the novel. The reader detects — in another nod to a modernist benchmark — “un faible écho de Faulkner dans la manière de passer du subjectif à l’objectif” [“a weak echo of Faulkner in the manner of shifting from subjective to objective narrative voice”], but overall he notes the lack of a desired “unité de ton” [“unity of tone”]. Faulkner’s modernist style was a key point of reference in the French literary marketplace (Casanova, 2004: 131), though it is only recently that Nicholas Brown has shown the critical potential of expanding on Faulknerian intertext in his reading of L’Aventure ambiguë (Brown, 2005: 60). In so doing, he argues for an approach that fissures the “methodological quarantine” (2005: 1) of categories of modernist and African literature by reading them against a shared interpretive horizon (that of the global expansion of capitalism). Brown’s aim is to avoid sinking into “the same compromise that characterized modernism’s aesthetic utopia: a purely private compensation for problems whose origins lie at the level of the social totality” (2005: 78). The challenge remains how to avoid such compromise while paying sufficient attention to literary production as a local and specific process; to recognize that this process takes place within global economic and political systems while acting according to its own internal rules and strategies that play out at the level of literary texture.

The report at Le Seuil makes clear suggestions of ways to “improve” or “balance” the manuscript: for example by tightening the structure at particular points or by expanding the section describing the healing of Magamou’s wound. In his response to Fall (via Senghor), Flamand also recommends removing “baroque” expressions, reducing incongruous words, clichés, and “une abondance de qualicatifs, épithetes, adjectifs, qui afflaiblit la phrase, la boursouffle, gomme le trait net que l’on aperçoit au-dessous” [“an abundance of qualifiers, epithets, adjectives, which weaken the sentence, swelling it and erasing the clean line we can perceive running underneath”]. ¹⁷ He advocates a certain notion of “literary” language and form that steers away from forms of linguistic excess and poetic accumulation in favour of clean lines. The tendency to correct “bavures” [“flaws”], though no longer framed in the language of a colonial schoolmaster (unlike an earlier report on Abdoulaye Sadji’s Maïmouna), confirms the role of the metropolitan publisher as border guard and guarantor of the French language. Unlike Fall’s eventual publishing house, Albin Michel, editors at Le Seuil appear to have been less interested in the commercial potential of this text than in revising its prose in accordance to normative standards of literary style. The situation bears some resemblance to the earlier reception of the manuscript of Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s landmark poetic-prose text, L’Aventure ambiguë, also turned down by Le Seuil after being put forward by Senghor. In his letter accepting this rejection, Senghor recognized — albeit with some regret — the need to respect “la ‘sacro-sainte’ distinction des genres” [“‘sacrosanct’ generic distinctions”] and “la technique romanesque de l’Europe, singulièrement de la France” [“novelistic technique in Europe, and singularly in France”]. ¹⁸

Fall’s narrative technique: Modernity and anti-colonial critique

The theme of narrative construction articulated in La Plaie belies the negative charges of disunity and incoherent oscillation made by Le Seuil’s readers. Magamou is an adept wordsmith whose narrative voice is integral to his characterization as “un véritable feu follet […] aussi changeant que le temps” [“a real will o’ the wisp […] as changeable as time”] (105). The fragmented narrative of his arrival in N’dar, for example, is told retrospectively from his prison cell through reported dreams and passages of spoken monologue. The voice shifts from the third to first person as its description is constructed through references to a narrator “[qui] s’était engagé à raconter, sans parti pris” [“[who] promised to tell the story, without bias”] (67). This narrator admits “sa tendance à caricature” [“his tendency to caricature”] and queries the tale’s verisimilitude: “c’est à se demander si la version qu’il donnait de ses aventures correspondait vraiment aux faits qu’il avait vécus” [“one wonders if his version of events really corresponded to the facts he experienced”] (92). This deft handling of a self-conscious narrative voice enables Fall to maintain the reader’s uncertainty regarding Magamou’s feigned madness in prison.

There remains, however, some distance from the narratological preoccupations of the nouveau romanciers and their attempts to remove entirely the narrator (as in Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie) or to interweave narrative perspectives (as in Sarraute’s Le Planétarium). Diané argues that Fall’s choices of form and content are contrary to calls for collective action expressed in earlier realist African novels. The splitting of Magamou’s voice into internal and external monologues, for example, enables the author to “contourner la loi de la société africaine qui interdit le soliloque” [“circumvent the law of African society that forbids soliloquy”] and thereby illustrate the impact of the oppressive environment on his protagonist (Diané, 2002: 15). While this unconventional narrative might be read as a sign of the text’s “modernity” (2002: 18), such a conclusion leads us, via these archival traces, to question the role of editorial mediation in constructing notions of literary modernity. Editorial correspondence directed Fall towards narrative unity and cohesion and reduced his linguistic range, yet the novel self-consciously performs different strategies of narration, pushing at the possibilities of literary form, and beyond those admitted by editors at Le Seuil.

The report concludes by expressing doubt in Fall’s capacity to do the necessary edits. While the aim of this article is less to give a new reading of the novel, than to set out more clearly the pressures under which Fall’s novel entered the literary marketplace in this period, the question still remains: how far did these comments, relayed to Fall via Senghor, alter the published text? Without manuscripts it is impossible to give a detailed answer, but the evidence does signal the contingency of what is considered, within the general narrative of francophone African literary history, as the post-independence “new African novel” (Dabla, 1986). When sending his revised second version of the manuscript to Flamand, before receiving the editor’s comments and readers’ reports, Fall enclosed a note, accounting for his revisions. These consisted of “un ‘escamotage’ de l’aspect violemment anti-colonial de l’oeuvre” [“a ‘cover-up’ of the violently anti-colonial aspects of the work”]. As he explains: “toutefois, je n’ai pas voulu nier les réalités coloniales d’alors; elles demeurent comme cadre secondaire de l’action” [“while I didn’t want to deny the colonial realities, they remain a secondary framework to the action”]. ¹⁹ We see this, for example, in Magamou’s cynical, misanthropic commentary on the effects of assimilation on the “blancs-becs entichés de milieux parisiens” [“fledglings obsessed with Parisian milieus”] (58–9). Fall also mentions the removal of secondary and peripheral characters, suggesting the manuscript was revised to focus more consistently on his main protagonist rather than a broader social canvas. ²⁰ Fall’s cover-up of overtly political content is striking, particularly as this content is not picked up in the readers’ report on the first version of the text. His response suggests that his initial critique of colonial realities has become secondary to the novel’s symbolic interest, rather than its central crux or driving force. Fall here appears to anticipate the comments of the metropolitan publisher, in an act verging on self-censorship, yet the revisions also imply the careful, strategic, negotiation of political content. The “action” to which Fall refers in his letter now takes place principally at the level of the novel’s formal inventiveness.

Conclusion

If the nouveau roman was “the product of a historically specific crisis in the reading of fiction” (Jefferson, 1980: 208), it seems pertinent to ask what place such a crisis shaped for non-metropolitan writing published in the same institutional setting. How did the changing politics of reading fiction stretch and adapt the nature of editorial craft? The national narrative of French literary history has habitually separated metropolitan and non-metropolitan writing, despite their overlapping contexts of intelligibility in the post-war period and beyond. The mediation of African literary manuscripts by Parisian literary institutions revealed in these archival traces encourages us to rethink those distinctions.

Flamand invited Fall to meet and work on the manuscript face to face. At the time Fall was Senegalese ambassador to Ethiopia, and since he came to Paris rarely, he replied that he would be happy to edit by following the editors’ written guidance on the manuscript. Unfortunately there is no trace of these annotated manuscripts other than these signs pointing to their paths between Addis Ababa, Dakar, and Paris. The editing process appears to have faltered, and the novel was instead picked up by Albin Michel. This generalist publishing house had won the 1964 prix Goncourt with journalist Georges Conchon’s novel L’Etat sauvage, a realist depiction of post-independence Congo. Conchon’s novel was praised in the French press for its “solidity” and “moderation” (Albin Michel press file, IMEC). Regarding La Plaie, a review in Le Monde commented: “Ce livre touffu, semé de digressions, de retours en arrière, de monologues lyriques, ne peut laisser indifférent. Sans doute la préciosité du style nous déroute-t-elle” [“This dense book, full of digressions, of jumps back in time, lyrical monologues, doesn’t leave you indifferent. Its precocious style is unnerving”] (Rolin, 1967). Nevertheless, the novel had little commercial success and was not reprinted. For readers at Le Seuil, perceived problems of literary style and form in Fall’s novel could not be located comfortably either within existing ideas of African writing or within avant-garde literary debate in the metropolitan literary field. Fall’s writing, whether positioned in productive symbiosis with or an antagonistic opposition to that of his editors, is inextricably caught up in the political and aesthetic contingencies of a field in which modes of literary invention did not emerge freely.