Boualem Sansal entre tardivement en littérature, ce qui lui confère un certain recul sur les difficultés auxquelles se trouvent confrontés le roman algérien francophone de la décennie noire. Aux yeux de l’auteur, la première de ces difficultés serait l’aphasie, corrélative d’un référent aussi opaque que douloureux. Cette aphasie serait aussi la conséquence du relativisme prudent des romanciers démocrates-laïques qui se traduirait, sur un plan littéraire, par des romans muselés par le doute et l’autocensure. Et, quand bien même ces romanciers parviendraient à dépasser l’indicible, un autre écueil les guetterait : leur statut linguistique particulier les exposerait à n’être véritablement reçus ni en Algérie, ni en Occident. L’ensemble de ces phénomènes formerait alors une zone inaccessible. Mû par la volonté de défendre ses convictions de démocrate laïc, l’auteur met tout en œuvre pour entrer dans cette zone. Mais même si, la notoriété venant, il s’ouvre à l’essai ainsi qu’à une abondante parole médiatique pour diffuser l’engagement qui conditionne sa démarche, c’est sur le terrain du roman que s’exerce principalement sa recherche. Le chemin qu’emprunte le roman sansalien passe par une revalorisation complémentaire du discours engagé et de la fiction, entendue comme droit à inventer et à renouer avec tous les plaisirs du romanesque. Décidé à trouver un équilibre entre un roman à thèse autoritariste et un roman sans thèse relativiste, Boualem Sansal théorise également, et ce dès son premier roman, le rôle du lecteur. C’est lui qui, seul, permettrait de sortir véritablement de l’impasse. L’auteur transforme alors son œuvre en une propédeutique qui forme à des pratiques de réception responsables et autonomes, pratiques que le lecteur est invité à réinvestir dans sa vie citoyenne. / Having entered literary world quite lately in his life, Boualem Sansal has benefited from a precious hindsight on the difficulties experienced by Algeria’s black decade novelists. Dealing with an extremely intricate and painful political context that threatened to result in a muffled and self-censored literature, these latter has also had to tackle an awkward position between Algerian and Western countries’ public expectations making them unheard on both sides. Eager to defend and disseminate his secular-democratic vision of the society, Sansal has spared no effort to break with this deadly aphasia. Even if, with increasing recognition, he has decided to explore new forms of expression such as essay and to be more present on the media sphere, he soon realized that the real way-out of impotence is to find precisely in his literary work by reconciling a strongly committed speech with the power of pure literary fiction. Pursuing, novel after novel, his endeavour to reach this zone, he theorises a new key role for his reader to whom he asks to become more autonomous and responsible in his practice. Reading experience thus become a training area to acquire necessary skills for an active citizenship, the only way, in Sansal’s mind, to break general apathy threatening his democratic ideal.

This thesis problematizes the recent transdisciplinary turn to melancholia by grounding the concept within the literature of three contemporary Algerian authors: Assia Djebar, Yasmina Khadra, and Boualem Sansal. If Freud figured melancholia as a pathological response to loss, much recent scholarship has reconceptualized it as an ethico-political model of remembrance that safeguards the memory of the lost or marginalized other. Yet the recent and ubiquitous depathologization of melancholia is only possible insofar as theorists overlook its more insidious elements. By analyzing how melancholia emerges within the postcolonial novels of Djebar, Khadra, and Sansal, this thesis reveals how melancholia in fact undermines an ethico-politics of remembrance, further displacing those lost others that theorists of melancholia would recuperate. Divided into two sections, the first part of the thesis thus challenges the ethico-political viability of melancholia as a mnemonic model. Through close readings of the texts, the first four chapters reveal postcolonial melancholia in Algeria to be imbricated in amnesia, immobility, repetition, victimhood, apolitical retrospection, and the unethical appropriation of the lost object. Part II investigates how the authors imagine different models of remembrance that move beyond the limits of the mourning and melancholia dyad. If melancholia has been depathologized, it nonetheless remains ensnared within a binary system in which the subject either forgets (mourns) or engages in a putative act of hyper-remembrance (melancholia). Building upon the recent theory of Dominick LaCapra, Mireille Rosello, and Judith Butler, the final two chapters explore the critical potential of ‘working upon’ the past. As an on-going and conscious model of remembrance, ‘working upon’ actively resists the closure inherent to mourning but it also circumvents the melancholic (re)appropriation of the past and its lost others. Ultimately, then, this thesis signals the need for emergent models of memorialization that move beyond the restrictions of the Freudian binary of mourning and melancholia.