Abstract:
Rachid Boudjedra ‘s artwork draws the outline in an original post-modern literary aesthetic through a scriptural undertaking of systematic generic crosses. The intertextuality for the writer is an obligation, an absolute necessity that is a requirement for any scriptural undertaking. In fact, his artwork is a watercolor protean crossed by diverse rich and varied multi-cultural discourses, crossing the widest and the most distant times and countries. The inter-textual relations as complex mechanisms of post-modern writing produce in the case of Rachid Boudjedra an effect of continuity and assure the harmony of this artwork as a whole.
The scriptural undertaking of Boudjedra autobiography undermines the conventions of deictic functioning and the canonical autobiography contributing to the setting up of an oscillating multiple and unstable auto(bio)graphic game that causes the establishment of an equivocal referent. The writer, in a hostile socio-cultural territory with an exaltation of the self, cultivates a singular writing of the ‘ego-scriptor’.
Boudjedra’ stories re-interpret, adjust and correct the contents and points of view on the past, above all the colonial ones, refusing a European centrist vision of history. This questioning, putting the historical substrates to severe tests, waters and involves a re-definition of the concept of history itself: a positioning coming from the post-modern thought that delegitimizes the meta-discourse of history.
Through the metaphor of the palimpsest of the representation of the self and the memorial writing. Rachid Boudjedra has found an essential medium to dispatch the traumas of the past, the appropriate guarantor of the reconstitution of the self and … of History by the prism of fiction.
The scriptural undertaking of Rachid Boudjedra is an epistemological break in the field of the French-speaking Maghrebi literature, even universal. A sign of a post-modern writing.
