STYLISTIC TROPES IN SELECTED NOVELS OF SONY LABOU TANSI AND CALIXTHE BEYALA

Abstract

Stylistic tropes, a writer’s aesthetic use of linguistic features for an intended non-literal meaning, create a unique artistic effect in literary texts. Existing studies on the novels of Sony Labou Tansi and Calixthe Beyala dwell on themes and narrative strategies with little attention paid to their stylistic tropes. The use of the resources of language for desired aesthetic purposes in the selected novels of Sony Labou Tansi and Calixthe Beyala were, therefore, examined with a view to identifying how the authors negotiate coherence in their texts.

Leech and Short’s Stylistics Approach and M.A.K Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar were adopted as framework. Four novels, namely Sony Labou Tansi’s L’anté-peuple (LAP) and Les yeux du Volcan (LYV), and Calixthe Beyala’s La Petite fille du Réverbère (PFR) and Maman a un amant (MAA) were purposively selected based on the authors’ shared colonial, cultural and linguistic backgrounds and similarities in their styles of writing. Data were subjected to content analysis.

In all the novels, linguistic categories are restructured to distort the standard rule in French. They include lexis, rammatical and sentence patterns, cohesive ties, clausal nesting, punctuation, paragraph design, phrasal and clausal typology. In coinage, linguistic flexibility of contextual structural and syntactic rules demonstrate mastery of discourse (LYV, MAA, PFR): In LYV, légivores is a coinage in which legal Latin and local language is used instead of criminels “criminals”. Linguistic revolt subverts the rigidity that pervades French morphology by shifting the meaning of existing words (LYV, PFR): In LYV, ‘rie’ is a suffix alien to French but used in ‘moche’, to change the meaning of the word from ugly or rotten to ungrateful act. There is deconstruction of structural and syntactic rules, and adulteration of French expressions and noun phrases in MAA, LAP, PFR, LYV: In MAA, M’appelle pas Loulou, is a sentence without a subject and with an incomplete negative marker, which makes it capable of five meanings, thus, ‘Je’ is not the only grammatical element that can stand in the subject position in the statement: Tu/Il/Elle/On ne m’appelle pas Loulou. The non-linear narrative and conscious adherence to appropriate matching of characters with diverse linguistic and educational backgrounds in PFR and MAA draw from oral tradition and promote African cultural heritage. The texts deploy deconstruction by blending French with Kikongo (LYV, LAP) and Douala (MAA, PFR), varieties of street French replete with African words and expressions to achieve contextual meaning. There are weighty clausal nestings and network of lexical selections that do not blur context-coherence in all the text.

Sony Labou Tansi and Calixthe Beyala achieve differentiated context-coherence by creatively manipulating linguistic properties of standard French. Thus, they reflect African linguistic interests and peculiarities as desired aesthetic purpose.