Transcending Exoticism? Sound and Voice in Dai Sijie and François Cheng

This chapter examines the French-language novels written by two first generation Chinese migrant writers in France, Dai Sijie and François Cheng. It demonstrates how the Chinese linguistic traits are thematically, stylistically, and æsthetically constituent of the French textuality from the perspective of sounds and voices. Existing scholarship on the impact of Chinese on these writers’ French texts focuses almost exclusively on the visual aspect. Departing from this oculocentric approach, this chapter argues that attention to their novelistic engagement with sound-inspired imaginations through accents and dialects, and the translingual reinvention of "voices" as voix/Voie in relation to music, poetry, and spirituality (e.g. Daoism and Orphism) furthers our understanding of the creative dynamic of exoticism as well as the authors' fundamental desire to transcend cultures.