Victor Hugo and the Melancholy Novel: Reading the Haitian Revolution in <i>Bug-Jargal</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In the two decades following the Haitian Declaration of Independence in 1804, a wide array of French writers from across the political spectrum returned, with obsessive frequency, to the subject of Saint-Domingue/Haiti in an attempt to grapple with the effects of ‘traumatic’ loss through discursive revisitings of the forever lost imperial object. Reflecting on the (largely disavowed) centrality of Haiti to an understanding of Romantic-era French cultural production, this article situates Victor Hugo’s 1826 novel about the Haitian Revolution, Bug-Jargal , as the culminating expression of those melancholic narratives lamenting the loss of France’s precious ‘pearl of the Antilles’. It does so, specifically, by discussing the plagiaristic relation of key passages in Hugo’s novel to a hitherto unidentified source, Philippe-Albert de Lattre’s Campagnes des Français à Saint-Domingue (1805). The youthful Hugo’s word-for-word reliance on this earlier account of the Haitian Revolution can, to be sure, simply be written off as yet another piece of evidence for the artistic ‘immaturity’ of Bug-Jargal . A very different argument will be mounted here, however: this mimetic reliance of Hugo’s novel on a text that mourns the loss of Saint-Domingue, denies the legitimacy of Haitian independence, and consolidates the hierarchies of racial science, needs to be read as exemplifying — in its purest, most ‘mature’ form — a collective practice of retelling colonial stories that is characteristic of what Paul Gilroy has dubbed ‘postimperial melancholia’, and that is arguably one of the constitutive features of the literary habitus in Restoration France.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".