Visions lointaines d’une Algérie certaine

Abstract

We tried during this research to demonstrate that not all of Azouz Begag's novels are confined to the French suburbs even though it is true that the author always identifies himself with his novel’s characters. Azouz Begag's novels are always taken as pretexts for ideological, ethnographic or sociological discourses and are rarely approached as true literary texts to be analyzed with the same critical requirement and theoretical rigor as any other text of the international literary production. In the first part of our work, we studied representation and mimesis from a theoretical point of view, the opposition that we find between the oldest Western tradition that asserts that the artistic work speaks about the world, and the structuralist and post-structuralist literary theory that considers that the reference is a just illusion. In the second part entitled “Au sein des romans” (within the novels) we first presented the novels, then we carefully analyzed all the passages from the chosen corpus, that is to say from “Le Gone du Chaâba” (Shantytown Kid) to “Dites-moi bonjour” (Tell me hello). We have extracted five groups, each of which refers to a theme which is distinct from the other: the warmth of the native country, the community, the land of the ancestors, the integration and colonization of Algeria. It follows from this investigative study of these passages that our corpus abounds with images, symbols, allusions that refer to Algeria even if the stories have as a spatial framework metropolitan France, or an undefined space, products of the imagination of the author and often located in an adjoining area.