Tragic Narratives: The Novels of Haitian Tradition

For Haitian critics, the "true Haitian novel" is born in 1901 with the publication by Ollendorff in Paris of Frédéric Marcelin's Thémistocle-Epaminondas Labasterre, subtitled "petit récit hatien" (short Haitian narrative). Marcelin's novel breaks with the "exoticism" of Haitian novelists of the 19th century (Bergeaud, Delorme, Janvier) to impose a text which wants to be "national," in other words a "realistic portrayal of mores, customs, family traditions and political habits common to the Haitian milieu" written in a French "which includes [. . .] a wealth of words, expressions and proverbs from [Haitian] soil" (Berrou and Pompilus 515-16). ¹ However, in the wake of Marcelin's realist and nationalist aesthetics, the hundred or so novels published between 1901 and 1961, ² —which I call "novels of Haitian tradition" since both their authors and their critics consider them the "authentic national Haitian novels,"—endlessly repeat the same story of fatal loss, that recalls Greek tragedy as the very history of that Haiti which Jean Métellus calls a pathetic nation. My objective here is not so much to discuss the reasons for the presence of these tragic stories, whether in fiction or in Haitian society. Rather, I would like to show how this Haitian narrative model (which finds its roots, at least in part, in voodoo tradition) that we can trace from Fernand Hibbert's Séna (1903) to Jacques Stephen Alexis' Compère Général Soleil (1957) through Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la Rosée (1944), to recall some best known Haitian novels of this period, ³ reactualizes the Attic theatre and also at the same time allows a better understanding of this ancient form, highlighting their common grammar.

To underline that the novels of Haitian tradition relate or peddle first of all tragic stories is not without interest, since there is an obvious analogy between one of the objectives of Haitian works, exemplarity (as stated in their paratexts), and that of the Greek tragedy. Indeed, as E. Chambry explains in his "Notice sur les Eumenides," an author like Aeschylus "was so highly ranked among the Athenian tragic poets [. . .] perhaps less because of his poetic genius than because of his noble teachings as a moralist" (208). Moreover, the very syntax or grammar of tragic Haitian narratives evokes those of various Greek tragedies like Agamemnon, Antigone, Oedipus the King, or Medea.

Like the novels of Haitian tradition, these Greek tragedies are narratives of fatal loss (Aristotle's "change of fortune from good to bad") linked to a quest or a practice of jouissance and/or power organized around two key compulsory sequences: the initial one, which is a prospective narrative or discourse (caution or warning), and the final one, which is a retrospective narrative or discourse (clarification or explanation). The terms "caution " or "warning" and "clarification" or "explanation" are used here not in their literal or current sense, but in a very specific way that expresses more adequately perhaps my original French concepts, "mise en garde" and "mise au point." ⁴ They translate a certain pragmatic relationship between text and reader or text and spectator. Therefore, every narrative or discursive segment that allows the reader or spectator to apprehend the denouement to come is a warning just as every narrative or discursive segment that in one way or another informs the reader or spectator about the outcome of the crisis—resulting from the drama that has been played out off-stage—is an explanation that allows an evaluation, interpretation or understanding of the denouement.

These textual segments—which can be motifs, as they are in the narrative of the imposed priesthood of Boss-Brutal in L'Héritage sacré by Cinéas (1945)—are initial or final primarily according to the order of the story (its fictional chronology) rather than according to the order of the narration itself. The Women of Trachis by Sophocles is a good example of how warning (anticipatory narrative or discourse) and explanation (retrospective narrative or discourse...