Esthétique de la vitesse pour lire la poésie de Tchicaya U Tam’si

Abstract

Aesthetics of Speed for Reading the Poetry of Tchicaya U Tam’si

Poetics, according to Roman Jacobson, answers the big question of what makes a verbal message a work of art. In other words, it examines the way in which a writer or an author works or updates the language, common good of everyone, to achieve a work of art. This is why, in the text he is analyzing, the poetician invests himself exclusively in the quest for processes and means of all kinds that create his poeticity. These processes and means, which structuralist theories have helped to formalize through the levels of syntactic, semantic and rhetorical analysis, are those which concern, among others, lexicon, sound, figures of speech, rhythm, versification, of the enunciation, of the actantial system, of the genre and its categories and of the scriptovisual area. In the literary text, the aestheticization processes work by interaction to produce poeticity but also and above all meaning. Both in school and academic curricula and in scientific analyzes, as Jacobson had hoped, we have become accustomed to taking the process as a unique character. But, in this propensity to study the process and the parameters of poetic aestheticization which condition them, there is one of these parameters which seems to be left behind while it is, like rhythm, consubstantial with discourse. whatever it is, and which determines the pragmaenunciative or communicative function of the literary text. It is the speed of language which, unfortunately, is little considered or even neglected by readers, no doubt out of ignorance or because of its complexity or even because of its very high relativity. It is this aesthetic parameter of verbal creation, which at first glance seems evanescent, that we have decided, for our part, to question in the poetic text, precisely in the poetry of an African writer considered by the critics as a hermetic author and therefore difficult to access, namely Tchicaya U Tam'si. To achieve this, we decided to ask ourselves questions, those which seem necessary when we are faced with texts like those of the African Poet U Tam’si, texts which do not easily reveal their determine both verbal creation and its reception by critical reading and how, despite the discursive individuation in which it participates, speed remains a criterion of success of the pragmaenunciation. These questions are all the more essential since studying the phenomenon of the speed of speech means seeking to understand the internal relationship of a speaker to his speech, that is to say his personal way of saying who, itself is constrained by the choice of the speaking time or the duration necessary for enunciative efficiency. From the point of view of the parameter of the speed of language, we observe that the time and duration of speaking in U Tam’si is an internal quality, as Gerard Dessons clearly defines it. The poet does not speak like everyone else and, therefore, his speech cannot be received like any other speech and in fact immediately understood by everyone. The speech of the African poet is fundamentally individual because the speed of his saying tightens the meaning of what is said, the decoding of which remains relatively painful or even uncertain for the reader. The interest that we had in approaching the question of speed in the speech of the poet U Tam'si is that this question situates our contribution as prolegomena to the study of the phenomenon of speed which reconciles the poles of creation and of the reception of literary discourse by giving them an equal importance in the particular exchange which binds them, that is to say the literary exchange. For having chosen the poetic approach to analyze speed in language, our gain was twofold: We were able to technically analyze the scriptural markers of speed, which contribute to the poetry of the poetry of the African poet, and also, we have been able to assess the success of the enunciative pragmatics of said poetry as it produces meaning intended to provoke in drives active responsiveness. There is no doubt that the poetic analysis of speed in the poetry of Tchicaya U Tam'si not only highlighted the literary aesthetics of this poetry but also the success of its function of communication because, despite of their fundamentally individuate character, the poems of the corpus studied respect the conversational maxims of quantity, quality, relation and discursive modality. Ultimately, our contribution is likely to encourage other researchers to take an interest in the speed of language and to approach it in other corpora, by means of other scriptural markers so that we manage to formalize and integrate into our reflexes as poeticians and literary analysts take into account this aesthetic parameter of verbal creation.