Martine Fernandes, University of California, Berkeley
Francophone literary texts are widely studied in the contemporary Anglo-Saxon academy. In France, many critics (including Dominique Combe, Jean-Marc Moura, and Michel Beniamino) deplore that they have not been fully recognized as worthy objects of study. Examining the history of the French literary institution and its specific relationship with the French language, they argue for the development of stylistic approaches to the Francophone text, but disagree on which linguistic theory to use. For Dominique Combe (1995) the Anglo-Saxon postcolonial framework is a useful theoretical tool since it is concerned, among other things, with hybridity, new forms of writings and with changing the canon. However, Combe claims that the mainly cultural readings it has produced should be coupled with stylistic readings based on the French theory of enunciation. Michel Beniamino (1999) rightly shows that the theory of enunciation does not take into account multilingualism or multiculturalism, which are characteristics of Francophone works. In this article, I argue that cognitive linguistics, which is concerned with the conceptual apparatus that shapes our language, is useful to account for the literary representation of hybrid identities in postcolonial Francophone novels. My contention is that textual hybridity lies in emergent conceptual structures and not so much in the lexicon, i.e. in the mixing of codes, as most linguistic studies of hybridity in Francophone novels claim (Zabus 1991, Donadey 2000). Drawing upon George Lakoff's contemporary theory of metaphor, and Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's theory of conceptual integration, I propose a definition of cultural hybridity as "conceptual blending" that enables me to describe textual hybridity in its multiple forms (including but not limited to code mixing).In this paper, I analyze the style of Farida Belghoul's Georgette!, a Francophone novel that exposes the condition of children of Maghrebian immigrants in France as they are torn between their family cultural values and those of the French school system and I examine how contradictory metaphorical concepts of identity undermine the construction of the young narrator's identity. I show how Belghoul creatively explores metaphorical conceptions of identity to represent the construction of a Beur identity and I claim that she puts these metaphors into question by revealing their violent impact on the Beur's psyche and body. This cognitive approach not only addresses the need for a formal methodology to study Francophone literary texts but also contributes to the recognition of Francophone novels as ideologically and aesthetically complex literary productions. [M.F.]