Bug-Jargal (review)

Bug-Jargal, Victor Hugo's second published novel is set in 1791, during the Haitian Revolution. The plot ostensibly turns around a love triangle between the slave and heroic leader of the revolutionaries Pierrot/Bug-Jargal, the French captain D'Auverney, and a barely-sketched Virginie-like character, Marie. Hugo organizes his narrative as a flashback: D'Auverney, a captain in the republican army tells the story of Bug-Jargal, the demoniacal fool Habibrah, and the devious revolutionary leader Biassou. He extends this narrative framework with a final on the Terror and the end of D'Auverney's life, footnotes that insist on the authenticity of the text, and a preface that seeks to disassociate the novel from the political agendas of the Restoration. This self-referential structure took shape over several editions. First published as a feuilleton in the Conservateur littéraire in 1820, as a novel in 1826 (a year after the Franco-Haitian accord) it acquired chapter divisions in 1829 and a new preface in 1832.

In this new English edition of Bug-Jargal since 1833, Chris Bongie approaches the text as a historian of colonial and post-colonial literature, putting his previous reading of the novel in Islands and Exiles: Creole Identities of Post-Colonial Literature (Islands and Exiles, Stanford University Press, 1998, 231-261) into editorial practice. He gives a highly readable and accurate translation of the novel, its 1820 short-story version, and of the supporting documents. He also devotes much of the introduction and notes to demonstrating how Hugo had pieced together portions of the novel from historical sources. Hugo's manipulation of colonial historical documents have prompted Bongie to argue that between 1791 and 1826, the memory of the revolt in Saint Domingue had already suffered from politically-motivated obscurantism that culminated in the Restoration's "erasure of revolutionary history" (26). He rejects interpretations of Bug-Jargal that solely attempt to situate the work in the "majestic trajectory" (29) of the hugolian corpus. Bongie focuses instead on what he calls Hugo's manipulation of authoritative memory. He uses Biassou's letter to the Colonial Assembly in chapter 38– which Hugo paraphrased from Pamphile de Lacroix's 1819 Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue – as a prelude to a detour about a 1991 debate over the voodoo ceremony in Bois-Caïman that inaugurated the Haitian Revolution. Certain scholars have proposed that historical accounts of this ceremony are as many variations, or (diss)imilar versions, of a ceremony invented by Frenchman Antoine Dalmas (41). Bongie's parallel between literary and historical uses of documents leads him to conclude that language "betrays" history (36-37).

Bongie attempts to demonstrate the relevance of Hugo's poetics to the question of language with appendices devoted to Hugo's early ideas on literature, particularly his 1823 review of Sir Walter Scott's Quentin Durward (255-264). However, he does not connect these ideas to one of the principal plot lines of the novel. Habibrah, D'Auverney's uncle's fool, betrays his master, murders him and becomes D'Auverney's enemy. The subterranean battle between the fool and the captain in chapter 54 not only parallels the mounting tension between rebels and colonists but is an early example of the hugolian sublime. The relevance of Habibrah's betrayal to linguistic betrayal falls outside of Bongie's analysis. Bongie more convincingly demonstrates how Hugo's conception of the events in Saint-Domingue participate in an ideological transition between the Enlightenment concept of the noble savage to a backlash against Haiti in post-revolutionary literature (326). Supplemental materials such as Jean-Baptiste Picquenard's novels (Appendix F, 325-338) and Pamphile de Lacroix's Mémoires (note on page 67 and Appendix E, 301-321) support the historical argument in the introduction.

The introduction, however, weakens the scholarly aspect of this English edition by insisting on two caricatures: one of Hugo as a "man-ocean" in a critique of the 2002 exhibit at the Bibliothèque nationale (45...