Le carré véridictoire dans la fiction mbuéenne

Abstract

Abstract

Imbolo Mbue’s novel, How Beautiful We Were, unfolds a postcolonial narrative topography where the hegemonic logics of an extractivist multinational corporation, state complicity, and the ethical resistance of Kosawa’s subaltern subjects collide. To dissect this textual architecture of deception, the present investigation mobilizes the veridictory square derived from Greimasian semiotics, a topological epistemology articulating the semantic investments of being and seeming. This theoretical paradigm allows us to examine the diffraction of veridictory regimes that govern these conflictual interactions, given that the Pexton company initially establishes a fiduciary contract founded on simulacra and opacity, concealing its toxic ontology behind the fallacious prestige of development. At the threshold of this confrontation, although a plethora of critical studies have explored the ecocritical and subaltern dimensions of the work, the cognitive and discursive stratification of its veridictory mutations remains a semiotic terra incognita. Accordingly, Mbue’s text stages the transfiguration of a collective actant initially subjected to illusion, then propelled toward emancipation through gnosic ordeal. As a result, this analysis aims to demonstrate how the textual structure articulates the veridictory conversion between institutional concealment and the advent of the tragic true. The objective of such an analytical exercise is thus to decipher the narrative trajectories of the evaluating subjects in order to restore the discursive kinetics of secrecy and manifestation. To satisfy this hermeneutic ambition, the methodological tool relies on discursive semiotics, whose axiological relevance lies in its rigorous modeling of actantial tensions and doxic dynamics. However, this immanent formalism conceals epistemological limits, flirting with absolute immanentism if it neglects the referential anchoring and historico-political pragmatics of the text. In order to conduct this analytical investigation, the demonstration will be structured around two fundamental and complementary axes: the first, devoted to the discursive regime of the simulacrum, will oscillate between appearing-true and secrecy; whereas the second will focus on the dynamics of veridiction and the emergence of tragic truth.