"Bug Jargal, Translationally," J 19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 3:2 (Fall 2015): 376-384. (original) (raw)
Related papers
"Victor Hugo and the Melancholy Novel: Reading the Haitian Revolution in Bug-Jargal" (2018)
French Studies
In the two decades following the Haitian Declaration of Independence in 1804, a wide array of French writers from across the political spectrum returned, with obsessive frequency , to the subject of Saint-Domingue/Haiti in an attempt to grapple with the effects of 'traumatic' loss through discursive revisitings of the forever lost imperial object. Reflecting on the (largely disavowed) centrality of Haiti to an understanding of Romantic-era French cultural production, this article situates Victor Hugo's 1826 novel about the Haitian Revolution, Bug-Jargal, as the culminating expression of those melan-cholic narratives lamenting the loss of France's precious 'pearl of the Antilles'. It does so, specifically, by discussing the plagiaristic relation of key passages in Hugo's novel to a hitherto unidentified source, Philippe-Albert de Lattre's Campagnes des Français a ` Saint-Domingue (1805). The youthful Hugo's word-for-word reliance on this earlier account of the Haitian Revolution can, to be sure, simply be written off as yet another piece of evidence for the artistic 'immaturity' of Bug-Jargal. A very different argument will be mounted here, however: this mimetic reliance of Hugo's novel on a text that mourns the loss of Saint-Domingue, denies the legitimacy of Haitian independence, and consolidates the hierarchies of racial science, needs to be read as exemplifying — in its purest, most 'mature' form — a collective practice of retelling colonial stories that is characteristic of what Paul Gilroy has dubbed 'postimperial melancholia', and that is arguably one of the constitutive features of the literary habitus in Restoration France.
Victor Hugo's second novel, Bug-Jargal (1826), is one of the most important works of nineteenth-century colonial fiction, and quite possibly the most sustained novelistic treatment of the Haitian Revolution by a major European author. Between 1833 and 1866 Hugo's novel was translated into English no less than four times. This article provides a comparative analysis of Bug-Jargal and the first of its English translations, The Slave-King (1833), which, unlike all subsequent translations, departs radically at points from its French model, demanding to be read not simply as a translation but as an adaptation of what Hugo wrote. Rather than respect the novel's troublingly ambiguous attitude toward slavery and racial relations, the 1833 translation takes every opportunity to erase those ambiguities and adapt the novel to the requirements of abolitionist discourse. Examining the ways in which the 1833 translation conscripts the in-manyways politically reactionary 1826 original to the liberal cause, this article reflects on the extent to which our own postcolonial sensibility remains implicated in the seemingly very different ('reactionary', 'liberal') colonial visions put forward in Bug-Jargal and its English double, The Slave-King.
A Book to Hold the Event: "Acting Out" and "Working Through" Loss in Victor Hugo's Bug-Jargal
2015
This paper examines Victor Hugo's Bug-Jargal (1826) and considers why a text that focuses on French losses incurred during the Haitian Revolution in the colony then known as Saint Domingue also opens and closes its narrative with reference to the French Revolution. Utilizing Dominick LaCapra's understanding of acting out and working through trauma, as well as Freud's distinction of conscious and unconscious loss, I argue that the novel functions as an attempted working through of the conscious loss of French lives and colonial wealth in Saint Domingue. It is by drawing the violence of both revolutions into comparison that Bug-Jargal produces evidence of an unconscious loss also at work in the text: a general destabilization of French identity as the meaning of whiteness is rendered uncertain in Saint Domingue, and the privileges of the aristocracy are eliminated in France. In its struggle to reinvest the figure of the French aristocrat with discursive, racial, and social...
Set in Haiti: The Construction of Race in Historia de una bala de plata
Latin American Theatre Review, 1996
Literary and cultural critics must invent a term that surpasses "marginalized" to describe Haiti's place in literary history. Now that so many are claiming that politically coveted spot on the margin, what are we to do with Haiti, the Western half of an island which in multiple ways really exists on the fringes? Haiti is a small country in a region that, aside from Cuba, is only beginning to receive attention in drama and theatre studies-the Caribbean. Rather than as a producer of literature in general or theatre in particular, it is Haiti's history that has been significant to the Caribbean and the Americas, most particularly, its 18th century slave rebellion. This insurrection's symbolic importance is evident in Cuban Alejo Carpentier's novel El reino de este mundo (1949), while Trinidadian C.L.R. James links Haití to Cuba's 1959 Revolution in his essay "From Toussaint L'Ouverture to Fidel Castro." James, in fact, repeatedly returns to Haiti in his writings, for his best-known work, The Black Jacobins, lends its title to both a play about L'Ouverture (1936) and a history of Haiti in this period (1938). Another West Indian, Derek Walcott, published a historical drama Henri Cristophe in 1950 and Aimé Césaire from Martinique continued this focus with his 1963 play, La Tragedie du roi Christophe. There is an indirect reference to the Haitian backdrop in North American Eugene O'Neill's 1920 play The Emperor Jones (set "on an island in the West Indies as yet not self-determined by white marines") and a direct allusion to it in Colombian Enrique Buenaventura and the Teatro Experimental de Cali's La tragedia de Henri Cristophe from 1963, continued in his 1979 drama, Historia de una bala de plata. Almost all of the works I have cited in some sense presage the most recent U.S. occupation of Haiti for, while foreign intervention is not the main theme in every case, each, in its concentration on Haitian history, foregrounds the force or risk of radical mass mobilization. This activity can be envisioned as either liberating or menacing; Allan Nairn in an article from the Nation (Oct. 3, 1994) calls attention to an American perception of the threat of the Haitian populations'
Interesting Beings and Racial Difference in Fictions of the Haitian Revolution
Karib: Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies, 2018
This article examines two novels about the Haitian Revolution, namely Leonora Sansay's epistolary novel Secret History, or the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) and an extended rewriting of this novel entitled Zelica, the Creole (1820), which has been attributed to Sansay. While Secret History narrates the events in Haiti through the lens of the American coquette Clara and her prudish sister Mary, Zelica transforms that sororal relationship into a crossracial friendship between Clara and the mixed-race character Zelica. In Secret History, Clara escapes both Saint Domingue and her abusive husband. In Zelica, she is killed by Zelica's father, a philanthropist who believes in emancipation through amalgamation. The aim of the article is not to provide definitive answers to the question of Zelica's authorship but to examine the motivational claims underlying the rewriting. It argues that the foregrounding of a mixed-race character reflects the increasing fixation on race-mixing in nineteenth century culture.
Migrant revolutions: Haitian literature, globalization, and U.S. imperialism
Choice Reviews Online, 2008
Imperialism interprets Haitian literature in a transnational context of anti-colonial_and anti-globalization_politics. Positing a materialist and historicized account of Haitian literary modernity, it traces the themes of slavery, labor migration, diaspora, and revolution in works by Jacques Roumain, Marie Chauvet, Edwidge Danticat, and others. Author Valerie Kaussen argues that the sociocultural effects of U.S. imperialism have renewed and expanded the relevance of the universal political ideals that informed Haiti's eighteenth-century slave revolt and war of decolonization. Finally, Migrant Revolutions defines Haitian literary modernity as located at the forefront of the struggles against transnational empire and global colonialism.