Fashioning Universality in Literature: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes

Abstract

There are two predominant approaches to universality in the contemporary discussion of world literature. The first, rooted in neo-Marxist or Bourdieusian social theory, contends that universality is produced in material processes of circulation and cultural hegemony across the fields of translation and publishing, and through frictions between centres and peripheries. Here, universality is related to norms produced in social and political interactions. A second approach takes recourse to Walter Benjamin and Erich Auerbach and the idea that the anthropological dimension of narration can open up concrete settings towards a shared horizon, humanity and historical justice. In this case, universality, as experience brought to language, “appears” as an emotional and normative possibility that is able to transcend the problems singled out in the first approach. While these understandings are often considered mutually exclusive, the essay argues this is not the case. In his novel La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men), 2021 Goncourt Prize winner Mohamed Mbougar Sarr develops a form of rewriting (literary) history cognizant of the material conditions of the European-African relation and its narrative articulation. Taking into account the first approach, Sarr fashions a new, minor form of universality in the reparative process of writing.