By Zsófia Hauk
In my cranny of this ethereal website, I analyse Etienne St. Dominique. He is a mulatto from the Caribbean Island of Martinique, who “[spends] much of his time in Quayside trying to induce the seamen, especially the colored ones, to go to the [Communist-sponsored Seamen’s Club] for recreation and reading and lectures” (McKay 74). I argue that the reading of the narrative text renders St. Dominique’s identity static; moreover, in the spaces of political and economic activity that he visits, his agency is suspended.
Essential Distinctions
(or terms to chew on as you read my analysis)
Narrative fiction distinguishes between text-time and story-time. Text-time, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan writes, is the unidirectional, linear disposition of text elements (45). Principles of combination (e.g., temporal succession or causality) fuse together the story’s events and sequences of events to construct story-time (16–17).
The experience of time in narrative fiction primarily includes three axes: order (“when?”), duration (“how long?”), and frequency (“how often?”). This analysis will primarily discuss order and will invoke Gérard Genette’s 1972 distinction between analepsis and prolepsis (77–182). Analepsis “returns to a past point in the story” (Rimmon-Kenan 46). Prolepsis is an “an excursion into the future of the story” (46).
In Romance in Marseille (henceforth, RM), analepses recount the memories of individual characters. These memories are accessed via types of speech presentation. In my analysis, I implement free indirect discourse (FID) and free direct discourse (FDD). FID “offers a way of reporting a person’s thoughts as if we could listen to the person talking to herself” (Eckardt 2). I limit the FID cues explored in this analysis to question and exclamation marks. FDD, or “the typical form of first-person interior monologue” (Rimmon-Kenan 111), generates the illusion that the character’s thought progression is purely imitated. I limit the FDD cues explored in this analysis to ellipses.
Next, the African, European, Caribbean, American characters in RM hail from different ends of the world. Further, the social, political, economic, etc. activities that they later practise in Marseille varies.
In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau defines place as “an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability” (117). Elements exist “beside one another” (117). Marseille is a physical place in France that looks onto the Mediterranean Sea. The places that they (the landmass and the body of water) occupy are separate in geographic coordinates and in time.
In contrast, “space is a practiced place“ (117). Mobile elements (e.g., humans, animals, etc.) operate within a place to practise an activity; they transform a static place. Moreover, change in activity changes space. The bodies that occupy this port-city construct spaces of social, economic, political, etc. activity. The titular Romance is an activity that is also practised in Marseille.
Literary Analysis of St. Dominique
(or St. Dominique’s character/identity and physical movement in the narrative text)
The proper name that this character bears alludes to François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, leader of the successful Haitian Revolution over the French regime. He is a figure of the past. So then, the proper name evokes an inescapable allusion to the past. The military general’s identity shrouds St. Dominique: he is rendered subordinate to the information (the time, the name, and the qualities of the military general) that his own proper name carries. In effect, the reading of the text captures St. Dominique in an identity of the past. It implicates the interpretation of his present and future being (his qualities and actions) in the novel: a past, and a reputation for revolutionary (political and military) agency, that is not his own precedes him.
At the start of Chapter Eighteen, St. Dominique aims to see Babel in prison. However, he must first be granted access. He visits the prison, the police, the judge’s office, the municipal department, and returns to the prison via taxi. Thereupon, he speaks with Babel, then goes to a café “to telephone his friend, but was informed that the person could not be reached until the next day” (McKay 99).
I generated the above Google MyMaps of Marseille; it tags the Old Port of Marseille, the prison (Prison Saint-Pierre; it was deconstructed after the Baumettes prison’s 1936 construction), the police station (Préfecture – Bouches-du-Rhône), the city hall (Hôtel de Ville), and the courthouse (Palais de Justice). To place these localities, I referenced the David Rumsey Map Collection (“David Rumsey Map Collection”). The map traces St. Dominique’s path at the start of Chapter 18.
However, this digital transformation of McKay’s text made certain assumptions: 1) the text does not make clear from where St. Dominque begins to first visit the prison, 2) the map assumes the exact walking and taxi driving routes that St. Dominique makes, and 3) after his second visit to the prison, St. Dominique visits a café that is not mapped.
However, transforming textual data to a format that is readable by digital mapping software renders other assumptions, as well. In Mapping the Lakes (a digital project that mapped the English Lake Districts via Thomas Gray’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s descriptions), the grid references of the place-names gazetteer (to which raw place-names are matched) are “accurate at best only to the nearest kilometre but for linear features, such as rivers, or vague features, such as valleys, may be somewhat misleading” (Gregory and Cooper 4).
St. Dominique’s physical movement is mapped above. I argue that the journey exhibits stasis because it ends where it began, with little to no improved means of reaching Babel.
Furthermore, the narrative condenses its summary of these events. Minimal text is devoted to the passage, limited to approximately 20%—504 of 2,089 words total—of the chapter (BBEdit), though these events must have taken the better half of the day, for St. Dominique can only resume his aim the morrow when he visits the office of the shipping company responsible for Lafala’s frostbitten legs. Here, summary elicits the negligence of time—the duration of these events is condensed. Story-duration and text-duration are unequal.
Additionally, to retreat for a moment, at the municipal department (a space of political administrative activity), St. Dominique speaks with “his white friend” (McKay 98), the clerk with whom he had attended college (in France). Via FID, the narrative peers into the mind of the white clerk, and the past is accessed:
the aesthetic movement towards modern art excited him and even made him curious about the Negroid colony in Marseille and St. Dominique’s work. And through St. Dominique he had obtained a few pieces of African wood sculpture and carved masks and sticks from some West African seamen. (98)
The content of the analepsis, the clerk’s collection of black cultural capital, immobilises St. Dominique: the next day, in the office of the manager of the shipping company (responsible for Lafala’s frostbitten legs, or physical immobilisation), he enters the clerk’s narrative, whereby he functions to display cultural capital. He arrives “with his credentials as a man of letters in the respectable tradition” (100): an Aframerican newspaper clipping of a “colourful” description of Quayside and his photograph in the magazine. It is the white authority figure’s memory of the past that defines St. Dominique’s function in the future. Here, the axis of frequency reproduces, and so immobilises St. Dominique (he executes the narrative of the white figure of political authority).
Further, in the municipal department (a space of political activity) and in the shipping company’s manager’s office (a space of economic activity) St. Dominique’s function is static. In these spaces, he exercises no agency beyond the production of material assets. Specifically, St. Dominique’s photograph is a static replication of himself; this inanimate version of St. Dominique is the material cultural capital subject to the white manager’s evaluation. These conversations in combination render St. Dominique immobile and inanimate.
Moreover, the manager of the shipping company aims to edit Lafala’s analepsis invoked at the novel’s start (that of his stowing away): Lafala’s legs were sick prior to boarding (100-101). If St. Dominique admits this incorrect expository statement, then the shipping company evades the implication of causality. Lafala would have had no grounds on which to sue; unchanged sick legs do not hold up in court. No evidence would support the judicial activity from which Lafala had won compensation. The courtroom (a space of judicial activity) would not recognise his trauma. Thus, the white manager’s edit would exclude Lafala from the space of judicial activity.
The chapter concludes with a conversation between St. Dominique and Falope, his “dearest friend in Marseille, although intellectually they did not agree upon anything” (75). Rimmon-Kenan writes, “In scene, story-duration and text-duration are conventionally considered identical. The purest scenic form is dialogue” (54); the conversation at topic here narrates an event in the moment that it supposedly takes place. However, in a moment where the text imitates (mimesis), as opposed to reports (diegesis), an event, St. Dominique mentions the past. To Falope he advances, “You must go and read the histories of the peoples of the world and then think it out for yourself” (McKay 103). What St. Dominique recommends in a moment where the narrative text cannot compress event via summary is the past. Thus, where there is “the relative effacement of the narrator” (Rimmon-Kenan 54), his speech neglects an opportunity for spontaneous verbal agency.
Additionally, the placement of this conversation after the conversation between St. Dominique and the shipping company’s manager discredits St. Dominique’s recommendation; just a few lines past, the shipping company’s manager proposed a distortion to Lafala’s analepsis, so history, especially its retelling, is liable to subjective manipulation.
Computational Tools
(or digital software that mined and dissected RM)
Throughout the text, the narrative pries into characters’ minds. Question and exclamation marks and ellipses (typographic indicators) in the absence of the quotation marks (that signpost dialogue) offer immediate visual cues of narration that imitates, as opposed to objectively reports, events as they unfold. To identify locations in the complete text where such cases of mimetic speech presentation occur required that I reference additional AntConc 4.2.4 tutorials (Anthony). The target corpus settings must be set to identify “Unicode Punctuation” and “Custom Punctuation” as unique word tokens. However, to separate these marks from the word tokens that precede them, a space between the final word token of the sentence and the punctuation must exist. As a result, I found and replaced all uses of exclamation and question marks and ellipses in BBEdit, a text editor (BBEdit). Additionally, the question mark is also a wildcard that searches for any one-character word token (such as, “a” or “I”), so when searching, I ensured that I escaped this, via \?. The AntConc software enabled me to locate fruitful chapters in the text that integrate FID or FDD.
Also, both AntConc and BBEdit list the total number of words in a corpus, as well as in a selection of text within that corpus. As a result, I can quantify the amount of textual compression or detail a given story-period is designated; this can be used to track textual constancy of pace (acceleration or deceleration of events or conversations) in a narrative.
In a similar flavour, Matthew Jockers’ “Syuzhet” package applies sentiment analysis to extract the a literary work’s plot shape (Jockers). However, the algorithm is a Fourier Transformation, where components are broken into cyclical events. In “Do Digital Humanists Need to Understand Algorithms?”, Benjamin M. Schmidt lists various texts (such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick) where this transformation, and its internal assumptions, renders false results: Madame Bovary’s death is delivered, and Dick Hunter’s riches is not reverted to rags, respectively (ch. 48). In effect, the state at the end of the work of fiction is unlike the state at the start of the work.
In my analysis, I analyse the textual compression between St. Dominique’s initial start at the prison and his return to it. However, if I were to measure action based on the social flux of the café Tout-va-Bien in Quayside, different results may arise; in Chapter Nineteen, lively dancing to celebrate Lafala’s release takes place in the evening in this space of pleasure-seeking activity (McKay 106). In fact, I chose to measure story- and text-time in chapters that capture the description of a suffocating prison, where “many wild animals were brought in from the woods and locked indiscriminately together in one cage” (105). Moreover, St. Dominique “[learns] that they could be imprisoned for about six months; besides, they might be held for an indefinite length of time before being brought to trial” (99). So then, is the prescription of computational analysis (textual compression quantification) to gain insight on story- and text-time data valid in scenes where time is overbearingly ambiguous?
This is the type of question that echoes Digital Humanities work, and, as I continue to conduct humanities research, I will address this and many other types of questions in turn.
As I’ve now stolen far too much of your time, I’ll leave you to proceed onwards. . . .
Software Sources
Anthony, Laurence. (2023). AntConc (Version 4.2.4) macOS Big Sur 11.7.9. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available from https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.
BBEdit (Version 14.6.7), Bare Bones Software, 2023. Available from http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/.
Jockers, Matthew L. (2015). Syuzhet: Extract Sentiment and Plot Arcs from Text. Available from https://github.com/mjockers/syuzhet.
Scholarly Sources
“David Rumsey Map Collection.” David Rumsey Map Collection, https://www.davidrumsey.com. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Randall, 3rd ed., University of California Press, 2011.
Eckardt, Regine. The Semantics of Free Indirect Discourse: How Texts Allow Us to Mind-Read and Eavesdrop. 1st ed., vol. 31, BRILL, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action?docID=1877187.
Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Éditions du Seuil, 1972.
Gregory, Ian, and David Cooper. “GIS, Texts, and Images: New Approaches.” Poetess Archive Journal, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–22.
Larousse. Plan Des Grandes Villes de France (Marseille, Lyon, Le Harve, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Lille). 1990. https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~267499~90042009.
McKay, Claude. Romance in Marseille. Penguin Books, 2020.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2002.
Schmidt, Benjamin M. “Do Digital Humanists Need to Understand Algorithms?” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452963761.
Helpful Sources
“Gaston Castel.” Ministère de la Culture, https://www.culture.gouv.fr/en/Regions/Drac-Provence-Alpes-Cote-d-Azur/Cultural-policy-and-actions/Remarkable-contemporary-architecture-in-Paca/Studies/Arles-Tarascon-Inventory-of-architectural-and-urban-production-1900-1980/Arles-city-and-architecture-of-the-20th-century/Biographies-of-the-main-architects-working-in-Arles/Gaston-Castel. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023
Milheroua, Dominique. “Baumettes Prison, the 7 Deadly Sins, Marseille Penitentiary Center and Les Beaux Mets Restaurant.” Tourisme-Marseille.Com, https://tourisme-marseille.com/en/fiche/baumettes-prison-the-7-deadly-sins-marseille-penitentiary-center/. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023.
—. “Prison Saint-Pierre, 1864, General Directorate of the APHM, Marseille.” Tourisme-Marseille.Com, https://tourisme-marseille.com/en/fiche/saint-pierre-prison-general-management-of-aphm-marseille/. Accessed 7 Dec. 2023.
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