Among V.Y. Mudimbe’s novels, Le bel immonde has often been considered as the only one to possess a plot and to clearly display its subversive intentions within the theme of the marginal. The novel’s protagonist is a prostitute, in love or not, we do not know for sure, with an influential minister in the country. In my opinion, the modernity of the novel appears in its reflexive practices (metatextuality and mise en abyme) and in various figures of displacement such as metalepse or anamorphosis. In the present paper, I propose to illustrate that Mudimbe’s text is often accompanied by a metatext, represented as a mise en abyme, a hypotyposis, a metalepse, an anamorphosis. The french word « immonde », referring to the religious notion of the impure and to the aesthetics of beauty, is encompassed within the most ordinary utterance, gesture, fact or even silence. A dialectical relationship between self and other subverts clichés on social life in Mudimbe’s novel.