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3 Conflicted Epiphanies Politicized Aesthetics in Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano L’art avait triomphé des tartuferies de la peau. Jean Fouchard, Le Théâtre à St-Domingue In a footnote in her formidable Haiti, History and the Gods, Joan Dayan says the following about the Haitian author Marie Chauvet (1919–1973, also known by her maiden name, Vieux-Chauvet): “Haiti’s greatest writer has suffered the curse of near oblivion.”1 The dramatic history of the publishing of Chauvet’s novels is itself almost worthy of a novelistic depiction. After Gallimard published Amour, colère et folie in 1968, a fictional triptych that contains thinly disguised allegorical criticisms of the Duvalier regime, Chauvet’s husband seized most of the available copies and sequestered them for twelve years. Chauvet was subsequently exiled to New York, where she died in obscurity.2 For decades, Chauvet’s family in Port-au-Prince erected obstacles impeding the reprinting, distribution, and translation of her work. Dayan reports that “stories are told about a family still embarrassed by her unremitting analyses of lust and hypocrisy under the signs of romance and authenticity .”3 At the time of this writing, a translation of Amour, colère et folie (Love, Anger, Madness), undoubtedly Chauvet’s most well-known work, is finally scheduled to be published by Modern Library, a full forty years after its initial publication. Ironically, the one work by Chauvet that has been readily available to the English-reading public, thanks to Salvator Attanasio’s translation, is La danse sur le volcan (1957, Dance on the Volcano, 1959), which nevertheless has received very little critical commentary.4 And compared to Amour, colère et folie and Fonds des nègres, novels in which violence and sexuality gather intensity with each page, Dance on the Volcano, though also a story of violence, since it recounts the explosive days leading up to the Haitian Revolution, in some ways hardly seems like a work by the same author. An observation by Ronnie Scharfman about Amour, folie et colère may provide us 88 Chauvet, Condé, and the Postmodern Turn with a clue to determining what it is about Dance on the Volcano that distinguishes it from Chauvet’s subsequent novels: “Marie Chauvet’s discourse deconstructs oppressive power by exceeding it through the violence of the text.”5 Dance on the Volcano may be as much about violence as Fond des nègres and Amour, colère et folie, but these latter texts integrate violence into the fabric of their narration and exude it from within the narrative voice. One need only think of Claire’s perverse and destructive fantasies about her brother-in-law Jean Luze or the climactic dream scene in Amour that culminates in her sacrificial murder. In contradistinction to this narrative, subjective violence that attempts to rival or exceed the realist, objective violence of the world depicted in Amour, the omniscient narrative voice of Dance on the Volcano struggles to maintain an incongruous equanimity in the face of seething racial and colonial hatred. According to J. Michael Dash, “Maryse Condé may be the only major female novelist other than Chauvet to pursue the postmodern in Caribbean writing.”6 Though I engage the polyvalent implications of postmodernity in a Caribbean context in later chapters, for now I will let it suffice to characterize Caribbean postmodernity as a general attitude of wariness and suspicion toward the project of Enlightenment-informed modernity and the assumption that this project, the rudders of which are in the hands of the state, will lead to a horizon of social progress. Joan Dayan, too, though not addressing the question of postmodernity directly, states that Chauvet’s Fonds des nègres entails a complete “reversal of the claims of progress or enlightenment.”7 What is striking about these points of view is that they seem almost utterly inapplicable to Dance on the Volcano, which was published only three years before Fond des nègres. Not only does the former novel take place in the eighteenth century, but the author earnestly engages the categories of the Enlightenment. In a movement that could be described as the inverse of Carpentier’s novelistic evolution from Ecue-Yamba-O to The Kingdom of This World, Chauvet’s internal conflicts and tensions regarding race, gender, and European heritage are on full display in Dance on the Volcano, a historical novel whose (dare I say) naïve narrative voice is in stark contrast to the scathing irony and...

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