Tobias Warner, Yale French Studies, 144 & 145, Special Issues on “Senegalese Transmediations: Literature, New Media, and Audiovisual Cultures,” ed. Calhoun and Thiam

Has there ever been a writer who anticipated their own reception as clairvoyantly as Mohamed Mbougar Sarr? La Plus Secrète Mémoire des hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men) (2021) is acutely aware of the deep-seated structural inequalities that African authors still face in the contemporary literary landscape. With its fictionalization of the notorious affaire Yambo Ouologuem, Sarr’s novel could easily be read as a skewering of the French literary establishment. On the other hand, perhaps the book’s Goncourt win ought to be seen as the apotheosis of the same problematic dynamics of consecration that Sarr set out to satirize in Secret Memory without being able to overcome, as he himself has mused publicly. The Senegalese novelist’s recent stratospheric ascent into the French literary firmament presents a puzzle that resists the usual critical tools employed to frame questions of literature, cultural capital, and consecration—in part because Sarr’s work is already well aware of such approaches and determined to toy with them.

Literature itself is what is at stake in Sarr’s recent work. But in order to grasp the shape and novelty of his intervention one must appreciate that he is not just writing self-aware fictions; rather, his works actually seem quite conscious of the very methods which scholars might employ to understand them. To put it simply, Sarr’s depictions of literary culture are not self-conscious in any generic sense. Rather, they appear to be modeled specifically after the literary sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.

This essay explores the ways in which Sarr’s recent fictions stage a complex engagement with Bourdieu, especially around the concept of the literary field. While there is an abundance of reflection on literary culture in Sarr’s writings, I focus here on Secret Memory and as well his 2018 novel De purs hommes (Real Men). These two novels are formally very different, almost to the point of appearing to have been written by two different people; and yet each yields a profound and surprising reflection on literature that becomes amplified when the two works are read in tandem.

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