This paper applies Gabriel Tarde's analysis on lying in La Criminalité comparée (Paris, 1924) to the various facets of lying within Proust’s oeuvre as well as within several of the works of Ahmadou Kourouma. These include Les Soleils des indépendances, Monnè, outrages et défis, and En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages. As Madeleine Borgomano has recently shown, building on Roland Barthes’s “Grammaire africaine” entry in Mythologies, official language rarely shares anything in common with the way African administrations exercise their authority. In this type of environment, an ethic of prevarication trickles down from the empowered to the disenfranchised. To paraphrase another of Tarde’s concepts the post-colonial situations adheres to certain “laws of imitation,” namely imitation of the colonial construct that had in its own day mirrored a feudal hierarchy.

Remarkably, in La Criminalité comparée, Tarde’s argument concerning the permeable moral boundaries of various cultures hints at what we might term today as the globalization of ethics. What is considered morally reprehensible or even criminal, by one society but accepted by another, Tarde would argue, is eventually allowed by both. One might argue then that lying is not only a consequence of colonial domination, a strategy of dealing with an oppressive power, but also a vestige of the same power’s influence. Conversely, this same ethic of lying, it will be argued, in many ways, remains foreign to Anglo-Saxon culture and literature. This last point is particularly fascinating when one considers to what extent the same readership has canonized and, arguably, sanitized Proust.
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