Bass-Bassina-Boulou ou le parcours migratoire d’un primitif moderne
Bass-Bassina-Boulou or the Migration Route of a modern Primitive

Summary/Abstract: Dedicated to the novel Bass-Bassina-Boulou (1922) of the Belgian writer Franz Hellens, this study questions the way in which the concept of migration declines at all levels of the work: thematic, aesthetic, metapoetic. First, we present the fable of the voyage of an African god of wood, with its two distinct stages - the African adventure and the discovery of the Parisian environment at the beginning of the twentieth century - focusing on the contrasts that di-vide and the identity change that they entail. We then explore migration from an intertextu-al angle, in order to place the Hellenian novel among the literary movements of the time, including the exotic and colonial novel, the orientalizing fiction, the picaresque novel. Final-ly, by relying on the role of avatar of the writer played by the black god, guardian of the memory of events and manipulator of the narrative perspective, we analyze the aesthetic shift that the novel operates towards primitivism revisited by the modern art and in particu-lar by the adventure novel, as theorized by Jacques Rivière in 1913.

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