로랑 고데(Laurent Gaudé)의 서사시적 글쓰기 조건으로서의 아프리카

Abstract

Laurent Gaudé is a young writer living in Paris. He was awarded with two of the most important literary prices in France, the Prix Goncourt in 2004 and the Prix Goncourt des lycéens in 2002. The novel that first brought him to fame, La mort du roi Tsongor (The Death of King Tsongor), as well as the plays he wrote at the same period, Salina and Medea-Kali, are all set in a familiar and yet imaginary Africa. This paper aims at revealing why Africa was the necessary setting for these works as they attempt to pay tribute to the epic poems of Ancient literatures. The Africa Gaudé uses as the background for his stories is to some degree a very fantasized Africa ; it has more to do with the idea Western culture has of a primitive Africa than with an actual observation of what the African continent is or has been. This Africa, seen as the craddle of mankind, thus becomes the perfect setting for a narrative with many mythological accents. Whereas the Ancient Greece of Western myths belong to our literature’s history, this new African Antiquity can provide a new epic literature, with all its stylistic features. Known for its use of heavy emphasis, the epic style is not fit for a story set in a contemporary Italy, as Gaudé tried to do with his 2004 novel, the Sun of the Scortas. This novel was mocked by the critics for its grandiloquent style, for its metaphores and clichés that don’t belong with a contemporary story. Yet this attempt to get the epic genre’s feature out of its quintessential Antiquity reveals that Gaudé too is aware of the limits of his African epic tales. For he is on the verge of being guilty of Africanism, a stand inherited from the colonial times, with his Africa having more to do with a Westerner’s imagination and preconceptions than with an actual understanding of the continent. In later novels such as In the Mozambic Night (2007) and Eldorado (2006), Gaudé comes back to Africa but with a new perspective, a new understanding of Africa’s contemporary history. He then seek the setting to unfold his epic writing in other aspects of his stories, such as the odyssey-like journey of clandestine migrants or the hurricanes that hit our shores with an almost mythological violence.