Shamelessness and Violence In L’Étoile d’Alger by Aziz Chouaki

Résumé

Aziz Chouaki is a French-speaking Algerian writer. His writing is characterized by a remarkable stylistic and linguistic novelty. His third novel L’Étoile d’Alger (2002) has caused a lot of ink to flow since its publication. Some describe it as a “nervous and brawling” novel where shamelessness and violence are presented through raw words that “spit on each other, rush on each other, exchange violent blows...”. This is why, for many readers, Chouaki’s writing is bizarre in that it refuses to obey literary conventions.
Thus, through L’Étoile d’Alger, we do not have the impression of reading Chouaki but of listening to him. Academic language loses its prestige, rhetoric too. Decorum and the beau monde of literary language are almost absent from the text. Unusual terms for the literary context arise in order to represent a shamelessness, a violence characterizing what one could call the “houmist culture”.
The primary objective of our communication proposal is to highlight the question related to the effects produced by this shamelessness. In other words, to what extent is the sensitivity of the reader affected by the writing of shamelessness and violence? What is the author’s intention?

An analytical reading of L’Étoile d’Alger will allow us to provide some answers to these questions in order to determine to what extent shamelessness and violence contribute to creating a new stylistic particularity.