L’ESPACE DANS LE PLEURER-RIRE ET LA NOUVELLE ROMANCE D’HENRI LOPES

ABSTRACT

This study, entitled “L’espace dans Le Pleurer-Rire et La Nouvelle Romance d’Henri Lopes”, looks at how the structure of spatial setting serves the discourse of the two texts. The antithetic or contrastive structure of the spatial setting, made up of Places of domination, characterized by power, luxury, infrastructural development, but also torture, repression, discrimination…, and Places of disenchantment, typified by insalubrious conditions, poverty, suffering and misery, were studied in the two novels. These two categories of places, respectively inhabited by a handful of privileged political authorities (especially the Head of State and his collaborators) and man, on one hand, and the teeming masses and the woman on the other, enclose events and activities that necessitate the insurrection of the underprivileged group against the privileged one, thereby creating a third category of places named Places of revolt. Using the two novels, Le Pleurer-Rire and La Nouvelle Romance, as the source of most of its data and a structuralist approach in its analysis, the study reveals among other things that, the spatial organization of the novels, as shown, reflects the political, social, economic and cultural problems that have bedevilled the postcolonial African society, speaking volumes of the failure of the independences and the need to reorganize this society. The study concludes that quality education is an indispensable element in the quest to liberate any oppressed group. This is evident in the multiplicity of places of learning in the places of revolt.