Kateb Yacine's Modernity: Rewriting Surrealism

Abstract

KATEB YACINE'S POPULAR SUCCESS and critical acclaim are due largely to his sense of oeuvre, of the totality, continuity and dynamism of the creative act. In Le Polygone dtoild he writes, 'The reader was warned long ago that Nedjma, Le Cercle de represailles, Le Polygone 6toild, the poems to appear in an upcoming volume are all the breath of a single work always in gestation (4). It is precisely this sense of oeuvre which characterizes an entire generation of writers--Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, to cite but a few of the Avantgarde whose influence continues to dominate today's literature. In his celebrated poem, La jolie Rousse, which serves as exergue to Renato Poggioli's book on the Avant-Garde, Apollinaire describes the modern poet as Ce quCteur d'aventure, toujours aux frontibres de l'illimit6 (The adventure seeker, always on the frontiers of boundlessness (Poggioli, 17). At once cosmopolitan and national, the modem poet will feed on actuality, fugitive sensations, and immediate reality. He will be rooted in his soil but attuned to the exterior world. For the Maghrebian poet, particularly Kateb, the beckoning of Apollinaire and the Avant-garde to draw from sources broader than their own is more than an opening on the world, it is an historical exigency: for the writer educated in the French system, the Other is within himself.