To measure the beautiful singularity of Charles Bonn, specialist in contemporary Maghreb literature, who died in Lyon on November 6 at the age of 82, we must return to these New readings of the Algerian novel (Classiques Garnier, 2016), which he defined as a “intellectual autobiography essay”. The researcher resumes his journey, intellectual and personal, but does so at a distance and with a lucidity that is rare in the exercise.
France in 1968, the difficult memory of the Algerian war, the first steps of the independent nation, the structure of the literary fields that each country develops, the weight of ideologies, the expectations of readerships, students or not, the established grids by prominent French critics… This is a vast panorama where one could not find a better guide.
Nothing predestined Charles Bonn to become one of the finest connoisseurs of French-speaking literature from the Maghreb. Born in January 1942 in Alsace, then annexed to the Reich, into a German-speaking family, he studied literature in Strasbourg, already fascinated by the richness of comparativism. Certified, he obtained his first position in Pas-de-Calais, in Lillers (1967), but the chance of his early career took him to the other side of the Mediterranean, in 1969, as part of a “ cooperation mission” at the faculty of Constantine, in a recently emancipated Algeria. He remained there for six years, assistant, then assistant professor. Although he did not choose the position, Charles Bonn was immediately seduced by the prospect of discovering a literature completely absent from literary education in France – and doomed to remain neglected for a long time to come.
Anti-colonialist commitment
If his anti-colonialist commitment was established during his studies at the University of Strasbourg, where he was responsible for the National Union of Students of France (UNEF) for the year 1961-1962, the discovery of the field shook his certainties . The cultural and ideological ferment of the moment invites him to explore a continent about which he knows nothing.
Unsettled by the“literary requirement” by the Constantine writer Kateb Yacine (1929-1989), which he read upon his arrival, the decisive shock came from the meeting with Mohammed Dib (1920-2003), novelist and poet, close to Albert Camus, Louis Guilloux , by Jean Sénac and Jean Cayrol, who attracted him to Seuil and whose view of post-independence society reveals deep disillusionments. The man immediately had a strong influence on the young man as well as on the teacher who never ceased to emphasize that Dib’s considerable literary contribution undoubtedly goes beyond the North African location.
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