Colonizing the Canon: Metonymy and Metropolitan Fiction

The geographical focus of the French realist and naturalist novel is overwhelmingly on metropolitan France. However, a postcolonial reading of these metropolitan novels reveals links to France’s colonies that cannot easily be reduced to colonialist propaganda. Such a reading deploys modes that might be qualified as suspicious (Ross Chambers) or contrapuntal (Edward Said). It reveals off-stage spaces that can be approached in terms of Foucault’s ‘colonial heterotopias’ or Bakhtin’s distinction between adventure and everyday chronotopes. This article examines off-stage colonial heterotopias that appear through metonymy. Drawing on cultural studies and ‘thing theory’ it reads inanimate objects—imported colonial goods, or fake exotic objects manufactured in Paris—as metonymically suggesting a broader history beyond France. Such objects sometimes point to events that are usually passed over in silence, such as the Haitian Revolution. They expose consumerism as imperialist voracity or nostalgia for slave-ownership. And at times they show us Romantic exotic posing as part of the July Monarchy’s use of the Algerian conquest for self-publicity. Metonymy thus brings colonialism into the metropolitan text by the side door. At the same time, colonial metonymy introduces a disturbance within the realist machine. It breaks up the continuity of spatial and conceptual proximity, since an object imported from Algeria circulates within metropolitan space but points towards North Africa. And while the realist mode usually depends on verisimilitude or familiarity, colonial metonymy self-consciously confronts the reader with something that is not familiar and does not obviously belong in the metropolitan context.