Victor Hugo's Politics and Aesthetics of Race in Bug-Jargal
1998; Columbia University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2688-5220
Autores Tópico(s)Renaissance Literature and Culture
ResumoIn March of 1818, Victor Hugo published the first installment of a short story in his Conservateur Litteraire; this story was taken up again and greatly amplified seven years later, republished anonymously as the novel Bug-Jargal. Five years later, on the occasion of yet another edition, this one signed, Hugo explained that the first version had been written to win a bet, but that the later novel was being republished in order to inform readers what the author's early interests had been, ces voyageurs qui se retournent au milieu de leur chemin et cherchent a decouvrir encore dans les plis brumeux de l'horizon le lieu d'ou ils sont partis (I, 278). Hugo thus, at thirty years of age, presented the novel as a curiosity, interesting, if not in itself, at least for the light it might shed on its now-famous author. Further, he implied that the views of potential interest were those of the novel, not those of the story: it is the circumstances of the story's composition, not its content, that he explains.(1) And yet the novel, set during the slave revolt in Santo Domingo of August, 1791(2), sits uneasily with late 20th-century racial sensibilities: it recounts the progress whereby a young white colonialist comes to recognize a black leader of the rebellion, Bug-Jargal. What is at stake in this recognition is Bug-Jargal's identity (as the son of an African king), his courage, his strength, and, most importantly, his moral worth. But all is measured by the hero's own standard: it is not a question of whether Bug-Jargal is strong, good, or brave, but whether he is as strong, as good, or as brave as his white adversaries. The hero's sidekick, Thadee, even comes to say of Bug-Jargal: c'etait le premier brave de la terre, apres vous ... mon capitaine (I, 904). Despite these tips of the hat in the direction of racial equality, the phrase un negre, as in sa figure etait belle pour un (I, 884), returns frequently enough to make modern readers prefer to take Bug-Jargal as Hugo himself suggested in 1832, as a curiosity rather than as an exposition of his views on race. Nevertheless, one must give Hugo credit: other public stands on issues of race should suffice to indicate commitment to a cause of racial equality. In 1859, for example, he wrote a letter on the trial of John Brown protesting the institution of slavery: y a des esclaves dans les etats du Sud, ce qui indigne, comme le plus monstrueux des contre-sens, les etats du Nord (X, 513). And after Brown's hanging, writing to the editor of the Haitian journal Le Progres, he wrote: Puis qu'il n'y a qu'un pere, nous sommes tous freres ... Poursuivez votre oeuvre, vous et vos dignes concitoyens. Haiti est maintenant une lumiere. Il est beau que parmi les flambeaux du progres, eclairant la route des hommes, on en voie un tenu par la main d'un negre (X, 526). Of course, these are relatively safe positions to occupy: a self-exiled Frenchman, and a world-famous one at that, Hugo could easily afford to criticize slavery, and he did so. But why was he so ashamed of Bug-Jargal that he presented it as a curiosity rather than as a work of which to be proud? The modifications that Hugo made to the story in the course of its 1825-6 revision, the revision that made it into a novel, did indeed, as Georges Piroue and Kathryn Grossman have argued, transform it from a novel into a Hugolian novel. At the same time, however, those changes represent a retreat from the political engagement of the first Bug-Jargal, and make of it a more coherent work, even if it is the curiosity that Hugo presented in 1832. In a word, Bug-Jargal represents the two poles of a fundamental choice made by Hugo in the late twenties, between politics and aesthetics. This choice defined his later aesthetics, and rendered some of his later political positions ambiguous. Let me summarize the story from 1818, and indicate what additions Hugo made to it when he published it as a novel; it runs thus: The hero, Delmar, is asked to explain how he came to own the dog Rask, so beloved of him and his men that one of the latter, Thadee, risks his life to save him. …
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