SOURCE: “Dis-figuring Narrative: Plagiarism and Dismemberment in Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence,” in Blank Darkness, University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 216-45.

In the following essay, Miller examines Le Devoir de violence with respect to the charges of plagiarism.

At its extreme, the myth of the Negro, the idea of the Negro, can become the decisive factor of an authentic alienation.

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

The African and the Novel

Time can become constitutive only when the bond with the transcendental home has been severed.

—Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel

If the rise of the European novel is tied to the rise of the bourgeoisie,¹ it must also be tied to the rise of colonialism, the relationship with those exotic countries that supply raw materials destined to be, in Baudelaire's words, “marvelously worked and fashioned.” The crude, unredeemed nature of the primitive element...