Posthumous Louisiana: Louisiana’s Literary Reinvention in Alfred Mercier’s The Saint-Ybars Plantation (1881)

Alfred Mercier’s 1881 novel L’Habitation Saint-Ybars ou maîtres et esclaves en Louisiane, récit social (The Saint-Ybars Plantation or Masters and Slaves in Louisiana: A Social Narrative)¹ portrays antebellum and postbellum Louisiana—with the Civil War functioning as a rupture, a foreign body that cuts the story in two. The first part of the narrative carefully describes the plantation and the personal dynamics between its members in the period up until the Civil War; the second part unravels the first by showing the plantation house’s steady demise and the deaths of every member of its close-knit community one after the other. At the end of the novel, its main character Pélasge goes back to Europe, leaving nothing behind him—not even the graves of his loved ones, which are completely destroyed in a storm. Mercier’s novel is a literary attempt to posthumously reconstruct a world its author used to know intimately, a meditation on what is left of his Louisiana in the wake of the Civil War and the Reconstruction period. Examining the novel’s historical sources, narrative structure, and concern with the decline of French and Creole languages, I will argue that The Saint-Ybars Plantation is a Proustian remembrance of things past set in Louisiana—an attempt to undo the consequences of the Civil War by recreating a bygone world out of words. Admittedly, Proust emphasized involuntary memory, the phenomenon of recollection without conscious effort that he illustrates in various scenes of his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time (including the famous “madeleine episode” in Swann’s Way). This has no equivalent in Mercier’s novel, where the past is recreated by the use of third-person narrative and autofiction, a form of autobiographical writing that I will come back to later. But Mercier is very much like Proust in that he places the experience of grief at the very heart of his literary project.² He describes the irruption of a devastating conflict that provokes a complete reconfiguration of the society his characters used to inhabit—turning the recollection of the time before the war into so many memories of a lost world. Just as the advent of World War I had a dramatic influence, both on the elaboration of Proust’s œuvre and on its narrative content³, the same can also be argued about the Civil War’s impact on the structure of Mercier’s 1881 novel and the events it recounts. Proust and Mercier chose to depict the irremediability of the process of time and to represent the disastrous effects of war on individual lives. Mercier shares with Proust the hope that a work of art may capture the memory of a lost era and in so doing save that era from complete oblivion. Like Proust, Mercier is convinced that, something, at the very least, of the people we loved, of the experiences we lived, will be preserved as memory between the pages of a book—it is their artistic remedy for the turmoil of the upheavals their novels depict. Mercier and Proust produce posthumous representations of worlds gone by: worlds that no longer exists outside of the literary form given to them by authors who mourn the death of what they have lost all the while asserting their power to preserve its reinvented image for posterity.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

In The Saint-Ybars Plantation, Mercier uses memories of his own past to construct what is generally considered to be his masterpiece⁴. “The story’s accuracy cannot come as a surprise,” Edward Larocque Tinker observes, “since it is partly a literal transcription of the life Mercier was living on his father’s plantation” (Tinker 289).⁵ What exactly are the points of convergence between the writer’s life and the story he tells in The Saint-Ybars Plantation?

“Alfred Mercier’s roots run deep in the French colonial world,” observes Mary F. Cashell (6). His father, Jean-Baptiste Mercier, was born near Bordeaux in 1772. At...