Translation and the Arts in Modern France
284
Translation and the Arts in Modern France
284Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253026149 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/10/2017 |
| Pages: | 284 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
Transposing Genre, Translating Culture
MARSHALL C. OLDS
CHANGES BROUGHT TO A LITERARY GENRE — IN THIS INSTANCE, the sentimental novel circa 1820 — may result from any number of factors, including the need to accommodate and make accessible a new subject matter (slavery and racial equality). As I hope to show, this change was effected by the transposition, or overlay, onto the frame of the sentimental novel that of the historical novel, a sister-form in France that allowed for substantial documentation of the novel's veracity. The resulting form could effectively translate for the French reader of 1825 much that was foreign and new using the different cultural discourses of scientific observation and sentimental persuasion.
The focus of this opening chapter, then, is on literary history, prompted by the fact that the long overlooked narrative literature of the Restoration (1815–1830) is beginning to receive new attention. This is occurring primarily from the perspectives of feminist inquiry, since much of the production of the period was by women novelists, and of race and the ongoing abolitionist movement in France during the first half of the nineteenth century. Also requiring more study, it seems to me, are the effects that this radically new subject matter was having on traditional literary forms and, more especially, the changes that were occurring to the novel in the 1820s. For the purposes of illustrating this new literary history, I focus on only one genre, the sentimental novel, and present only one example of that genre, hoping that I can show, with a kind of Mallarméan logic, que le reste peut exister [that the rest can exist].
That example is the 1825 novel by Gabrielle de Paban, Le nègre et la créole; ou, Mémoires d'Eulalie D*** [The Negro and the Creole; or, The Memoirs of Eulalie D], referred to hereafter simply as Eulalie. Little is known of the putative author — Gabrielle Paban, not the aristocratic de Paban — beyond the fact that she was the sister-in-law of Jacques Collin (who often signed as Jacques Collin de Plancy), one of the most prolific littérateurs [writers in all genres] of the Restoration. He published scores of books under his own (slightly embellished) name and used more than a dozen pen names, some of them feminine. Collin de Plancy seems to have maintained a veritable atelier of writers, which included his wife, churning out books on all manner of subjects, and so it is entirely possible that he had a hand in the composition of this six-hundred-page opus, which was Gabrielle's one and only novel, or at least the only novel to have appeared under her name.
Eulalie is of interest to us today, as it certainly was in 1825, because it was published in response to Madame de Duras's widely discussed novella Ourika, which appeared in print two years earlier:
C'est la publication de la touchante histoire d'Ourika qui me décide à mettre au jour les aventures d'Eulalie D***: le sort de cette jeune créole semble fait pour contraster avec celui de l'intéressante négresse; et pourtant leurs malheurs ont entre eux un point de ressemblance bien frappant, puisqu'ils sont dus à la même cause, c'est-à-dire à leur déplacement dans l'ordre social.
[It is the publication of Ourika's touching story that compels me to make public the tale of Eulalie D***. The fate of this young Creole seems to contrast perfectly with that of the interesting Negress, and yet their misfortunes have a striking similarity because, due to the same cause, each lost her place in the social order.]
The second novel is, in many respects, the reverse image of the first. The créole of the title, Eulalie, is the five-year-old child of a plantation and slave owner on Saint-Domingue at the moment of the slave uprising of August 22, 1791. Separated from her family during the violence, she is hidden and saved by her slave nanny, Maky. A captured ship allows those of the newly liberated population who wish to return to the Guinea Coast to do so. Having been separated from her husband while pregnant nine years previously, Maky decides to return to the Kingdom of Benin with her young son, Zambo, and her now adoptive "daughter," Eulalie. Renamed Lily by her new community, Eulalie will grow up in the city of Benin as a member of Maky's family. In a variant of Ourika's conflicted feelings for her childhood companion, Eulalie will come to have a similar relation with her adoptive brother. Although among the Béni there is no taboo with respect to racial miscegenation, she cannot bring herself to think of Zambo as anything other than her brother, and because she cannot bear the thought of being separated from him and from Maky, she resolves in her heart that she will never marry.
Eulalie catches the eye of the young king, who determines to marry her, and so she, Zambo, and Maky flee Benin in an attempt to make their way to Sierra Leone, of which Zambo has some vague knowledge from his hunting and warring expeditions. Far beyond Benin and dangerously near the coast, they are captured by black profiteers and sold to English slavers. After adventures too numerous to relate but that include a failed revolt onboard, led by Zambo, the ship reaches San Juan, where Eulalie and Maky are put in the care of a priest and Zambo is sold to a plantation owner from Martinique. It is 1805. With the tireless help of the priest, Eulalie makes her way to Paris where she will be rejected as an adventuress by all surviving members of her family except her youngest brother, who, having left the imperial army — it is now 1813 — recognizes her as his sister. Eulalie's health is poor and in 1815, the two go to live with an aging uncle on Martinique, recently recaptured from the English, where, meanwhile, Zambo has been busy. Having escaped from his master, he leads a community of runaways in the mountain region of the island. He is captured by the authorities and sentenced to hang. Eulalie recognizes the identity of the rebel leader and, with grief added to her weakened condition, will herself expire directly after Zambo's death. After the novel's close, in 1815, there follow some twenty-five pages of notes containing historical, philosophical, and literary material.
Eulalie's memoir is clearly in the tradition of sentimental literature. It presents an impossible obstacle to personal happiness and fulfillment. The main character is a young woman, which was true for many of these novels, though appreciably less frequently than is sometimes claimed. Her health will be eroded by moral conflict — again mostly true — and she will die an early death, which is just about always the case in this genre. The novel's form shares traits of the two principal subgenres, bringing them together in a fruitful way.
By about 1815, the two forms of the sentimental novel were the historical and what might be best called the ahistorical novels. The historical variety presents conflicts between virtue and interest where the exemplary lives of famous historical figures could be dramatized. The genre's main practitioner was Madame de Genlis, who, in novels such as Les chevaliers du cygne (1795), about Charlemagne, and Pétrarque et Laure (1825), admittedly and unabashedly wrote to illustrate moral principles. In her critical writings, she forcefully defended the historical accuracy of her accounts. They were researched, and her novels concluded with many pages of notes documenting her sources and discussing their value. The notes were central to her conception of the historical novel and separated such works from legendary tales. Following Stendhal and Balzac, the post-1830 novel would find other means of documentation, but for the historical novel of Madame de Genlis, the notes were an integral part of the work's meaning and also of its form.
The second mode of the sentimental novel is the "ahistorical" variety where no dates are given, and no major social events are referenced. Deborah Jenson has helped us to recognize these works as marked by the collective trauma of the Revolution and regicide, but quietly and indirectly, where the characters are orphaned or otherwise cut off from their past. René (1802), Corinne (1807), and Adolphe (1816) are prime examples of this genre as it came to the Restoration. Where Ourika and Eulalie differ from their immediate predecessors is in their treatment of historical and contemporary subject matter. Those earlier works are so intently focused on the drama of the characters that little else that may be going on in the world is brought into play. If they are historically marked, it is only indirectly through what might be characterized as a modern consciousness or sensibility. What in 1823 made the publication of Ourika such a broad topic for praise, deprecation, and imitation was not only its author's prominence and her presentation of a main character who was black, but the fact that Ourika's private story coincided exactly and explicitly both in time and place with the public story of the French Revolution and, in that coincidence, engaged a very new understanding of the Revolution, especially with respect to narrative. The sentimental novel was, then, breaking new ground: it was directly engaging contemporary material that placed individual lives within a specific social and historicized context. Ourika was not alone: as Doris Kadish has shown, there had been, since the turn of the century, other works of narrative fiction — some of them sentimental — and of the theater that were tied to the abolitionist movement, an ongoing part of the unfinished agenda of the Revolution. Sentimental literature brought the heroine in touch with anti-esclavagisme [abolitionism] and so encouraged the tie between these two oppressed groups: black slaves and women. The practice was broader, however. Other populations provided subject matter during this period, notably Jews, suggesting a literary program that was larger than abolitionism and feminism. If in the 1820s the Revolution was largely viewed as a failed social experiment, the disappointment registered by some suggested that important Enlightenment ideals persisted.
Along with the historicizing of the sentimental novel, the second important development of the 1820s was that such books became, in their own way, an effective vehicle for ideas. I do not wish to exaggerate this claim; it would take some time — perhaps until the early work of Émile Zola in the 1860s — for the discourse of sentimental persuasion to be replaced fully by a discourse of ideologies. In its new militancy, however, the sentimental novel was becoming informed by social philosophies and other branches of science.
The thinkers whose writings lie behind the narrative and the argument deployed in the notes to Eulalie are the two militant abbots, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal and Henri Grégoire. As is well known, both had an immense influence on abolitionist thought, in France and abroad. Raynal's opus magnum was the eight-volume Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes [The Philosophical and Political History of European Trade in the Two Indias], published in 1770. The work was an encyclopedic and scientific view of European expansion and colonial activity. Widely read until the time of the Revolution, though far less so in France after the Terror, the section that held the interest of abolitionist sympathizers were the chapters documenting the Guinean slave trade. These pages were frequently excerpted as a standalone volume and were doubtless the book evoked in the short history of the liberation of Saint-Domingue given in Paban's notes: "Toussaint-Louverture marchait à la tête des insurgés, ... tenant à la main le livre de Raynal" [Toussaint led the insurgent army, ... holding Raynal's book in his hand].
Raynal strives to give as complete a portrait as was possible at the time from original sources of the geography, flora, and fauna of the coastal regions of Guinea. An exact understanding of climate and local physical conditions, for example, was seen as necessary to a scientific accounting for differences of temperament. Raynal also discusses the different theories explaining skin color: theological, anatomical, chemical, and climatological, which he espouses, based on the preponderance of observed evidence. He is equally balanced on all topics, from Guinean topography to the economics of slavery ("Méthodes pratiquées dans l'acquisition, dans le traitement et dans la vente des esclaves" [Methods practiced in the acquisition, treatment and sale of slaves]). The discussions are detailed and descriptive. All of this is to make as sharp a distinction as possible between fact and opinion, the clearest example of which is the chapter entitled, "Origine et progrès de l'esclavage. Arguments imaginés pour le justifier. Réponses à ces arguments" [The origin and development of slavery. The various arguments justifying slavery. Responses to these arguments]. The first half of this crucial chapter is an economic and social history of Western civilization from earliest antiquity to the present, as studied from the point of view of forced servitude. Raynal follows the different ameliorations and relapses in the conditions of slaves according to cultures and events, outlining a very modern sense, for the times, of historical dynamism.
This historicist view situates the present and discusses, and refutes, the justifications put forward for the then-current practice of slavery. Not surprisingly, these justifications reflect the mentality of nascent colonialism, appealing to the right of the strongest and to the view that Africans were born for slavery, that slavery was the surest way to convert a heathen population to Christianity, and that slavery was necessary to economic development.
There are numerous references in Eulalie to the ideas and precepts enunciated by Raynal. The kingdom of Benin into which Eulalie arrives is neither a place without characteristics nor a European fantasy. On the contrary, it is as replete as contemporary knowledge allowed, down to its vegetation and wild animals, its architecture, cultivation and what people ate, domestication of horses and cattle, marriage customs, how warfare was conducted, and how war was propagated by the slave trade. And, unlike her adoptive family, Lily is constantly having to protect herself from the sun, not out of some sense of the delicacy of European women of a certain class but simply because she's white. Continued pressure from the American slave trade for sellable captives results in frequent wars. Using Raynal's historicist's lens, Gabrielle de Paban presents the kingdom of Benin as a feudal society having recognizable parallels with medieval France. The survival of a small but perseverant Christian church, which had been introduced by the Portuguese a century earlier to compete with fetish worship, offers a further suggestion of possibility for social change.
The second prominent cleric-philosopher, the Abbé Grégoire is often quoted in the notes to Eulalie as well as being referenced throughout the narrative. His principal work on the subject of slavery is the 1808 De la littérature des nègres; ou, Recherches sur leur facultés intellectuelles, leurs qualités morales et leur littérature [On the Literature of Negroes; or, An Inquiry into Their Intellectual Faculties, Their Moral Qualities and Their Literature]. He continues Raynal's universalist and historicized view of humanity, providing responses to newer, putatively scientific arguments about racial difference based on relative cranial size. His work is also an updated compendium of European and North American published materials. More accounts of travel to Guinea had been written, in Dutch, English, and French, sometimes by ship's surgeons, who described coastal and now interior life in some detail: dress, agriculture and diet, more on religion, marriage and warfare, funerary customs, relations among peoples, and also unpleasant truths of slavery and human sacrifice, and the equally painful details of the European slave trade. All of these observations are incorporated into the novel.
As proof of his arguments for universal humanity, Grégoire provides published or otherwise documented examples of prominent social, intellectual, and literary achievements of slaves or former slaves. Although Grégoire's literary examples come from Europe and the New World, to make this point, Gabrielle de Paban supplies in her novel a purported sample of African poetry, almost certainly of her own invention, the "Romance des négresses," "un chant répandu sur toute la côte de Guinée" [a song commonly heard along the Guinea Coast] for which she provides a "traduction presque littérale" [a nearly literal translation] in octosyllabic, cross-rhymed huitains, or or eight-line stanzas. This sort of awkward translation was not uncommon in the factual texts of the time; in his travelogue from 1820, one John McLeod, a ship's surgeon, provided the musical transcription of a dance tune he had heard. It is in G Major and in dotted 2/4 time.
(Continues…)
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