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Excerpts from Brigitte Felix
Pierre, the narrator in Patricia Eakins's The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, Father & Mother, First & Last, defines himself as "a man of his word and of words" (114). From the very first page, Pierre's existence is closely tied to the text that he has written and that we are reading. Although it is no surprise that freedom and language should be linked in a story of emancipation that uses the genre of the slave narrative, it is language, rather than freedom, that seems to be placed at the core of the novel. Despite the first-person narration, the autobiographical components often recede into the background while the text foregrounds the activity of writing as inscription and material trace, notably through intriguing typographical clues. Reading and deciphering are an integral part of the story as the pseudo-18th-century language and style also stand out on the page in old-fashioned signs and capital letters that draw the reader's attention to the physicality of letters, to the body of writing.... The opening, which presents the book as the disclosure of Pierre's will, establishes the centrality of the theme of inscription. This could explain why the verb "write" is deliberately excluded and replaced by verbs emphasizing the act of inscribing something on homemade paper:
....In addition to the mention of the feather, the ink and paper, the very first two sentences concentrate a number of lexical keys like the verbs "reads," "scribed," and "scratched". "I, PIERRE BAPTISTE" inscribes the fictional author's name in capital letters as on a book cover.... The fictional existence of Pierre is activated by our reading of the novel ("Thus am I able to scribe the words you read", 246) and the evocation of his impending death ("My shadow grows shorter with each new day now," 242) is linked with the fact that his chronicle is "drawing to a close," which coincides with the end of the novel. Where life ends, literature begins. The man of letters and words is the one that matters — living, but by letters only[1] — as the junction of the beginning and the ending shows.... Series of metaphors contribute to the "metafictionalization" of the narrative, for example when through an apposition Pierre is assimilated to his own writing tool ("I was dipped at once, pen in ink-pot, into the BUSINESS OF THE PLANTATION", 25), or when the adjective "black" — like an explicative afterthought — follows the adjective "inky" in Pierre's description of the pages of figures he copies in his master's ledgers: "All the rest were but inky numbers, black numbers, yes, black numbers crossing the page, loss to profit and profit to loss, lives disappearing while numbers like ants crossed back and forth across the page, number-slaves at a master's bidding [...]" (26). The secret hidden in the signs is exposed: formerly buried in what retrospectively appears as a metaphorical expression ("inky numbers") because of the specification "black numbers" and the confirmation ("yes"), the noun "slaves" finally surfaces, after transiting through the animal comparison to the ants, in the compound "number-slaves," a neologism that translates the word "number" into a "non-figurative" language as "slaves." The sentence is remarkable in the manner it uses the intertwining of the literal and the figurative to expose the deceptiveness of signs (numbers or words) and imagery, their capacity to conceal their referents in abstraction and comparison. First taken literally in its immediate context, "inky" is compelled by the driving force of the sentence structure to become figurative: a metaphor for blackness, hence for the condition of black people and the literal reality of slavery. The point is not only that slaves are mere numbers but that the numbers are slaves, that signs do not refer to signs only.... [Whereas] the more conventional aspects of the metafictional practice seem to be taken for granted — the narrative as a comment on its own writing — Pierre Baptiste shows an obsession with writing as the production of a material trace, like a return to the A, the B and the C of the writer's activity, as if it had become urgent to reassert that the subsistence of any narrative depends on its substantial embodiment in the letters drawn or printed on a page. The text's "visual performance" is rather "delicate" — there are no flashy or used-up tricks, such as the insertion of blank or black pages, or of illustrations. In a sort of displacement in the working on forms — and their re-invention — Patricia Eakins, instead of playing with spatial arrangement in and for itself, relies on a temporal relocation by situating her narrative in the eighteenth century. More precisely, it is not so much the narrative that gives the page an unusual typographical appearance, as the language of the narration with its deliberately archaic, eighteenth-century-flavored lexicon and sentence structure. Though the imitation of an eighteenth-century style is never caricatured, the words and word formations revived or recreated from the past stand out on the page. Their visible difference produces varied and sometimes opposed effects on the activity of reading. The use of the ampersand, a lost sign in contemporary writing[2], and the recourse to elision tend to speed up the reading. Conversely, the use of a sometimes precious[3], often archaic or pseudo-archaic vocabulary and syntax tends to slow down the reading, together with the unsettling presence of French words....How undecidedly French-English the narrative's idiom can be, for instance in the title of Part the Sixth, "Voyage of an Apprentice Savant"! ....As for the most constant typographical play, the use of capital letters.... transforms the reading into deciphering because the shape and size of upper-case print tends to arrest the eye. The question that comes to mind is: is there a system? Does it make sense and how? Like pauses in an otherwise dense text, the capitalized words, when listed, form something akin to entries in an encyclopedia — like Pierre's notes in his talisman pouch — a sort of table of contents, a potential index of keywords, or a summary of the major stages in the development of the plot. Sometimes, the fragility of the "system" is betrayed by the displaying of the artifice: such capitalized words as "AH" (13), and its mirrored double "HA !" (88), or "BOOTS" (161) are ironic interpretative dead ends.... [There] seems to be no end to the possibilities of punning and the wordplay in Pierre Baptiste....[A ]perplexing [example] is the conspicuous and ubiquitous "fish," whether word or suffix, from the "garden of fishes" — the title of the first chapter — to the implicit redefinition of Pierre as a "fisher [...] of words from books" (58), the use of John Fish to designate the penis (71) and the climactic pun "PHILOSO-FISH SAVANTS" (215) that describes the nature of Pierre's fabulous offspring. The latter pun reverberates blatantly in the next paragraph on the same page where its metamorphic power is enhanced:
The rest of the paragraph elaborates on the memory house, writing and spatiality, as well as on the evils of classification[4], thus providing the interpretative machine with labyrinthine avenues of meaning(s) to wander along. The thematic lure works quite well, taking careless readers swiftly away from the "Pierre ... Philosophic," while the capitalization of the adjective "philosophic" encourages the aggregation of the two words. Some will not be able to refrain from substituting a "pierre philosophale" to "Pierre... Philosophic," and going back to page 203, will be satisfied to find Pierre calling himself an "alchemist of old".... Is there really some hidden order in the play? The text favors the quest for a system through metatextual allusions, while thematically positing the impossibility to have access to any meaningful pattern: "They [Pierre's offspring] play all their games in a group, Troll-Madame & Lasquenet & Papillon, & games of their own devising, with rules I cannot fathom, for they never take their turns in the same order"(211). Nonetheless, like traces from the distant history of American letters to be finally consumed in Patricia Eakins's enterprise, like a reminiscence of Hawthorne's scarlet portent, fiery signs appear capitalized on the horizon of the page:
As with the gigantic A spreading in the sky of The Scarlet Letter and reshaping perception and interpretation within the narrative, the world of Pierre Baptiste is metamorphosed into a natural alphabet, a literal geography, inscribed on the surface of the earth.... [Many] traces in Pierre Baptiste [lead] to the familiar interrogation... phrased by Tony Tanner in a comment on Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: "Is nature encoded or blank?", which raises the fundamentally American question of "whether there are significant patterns and signs to be detected in reality" (Tanner 26). This questioning is at the core of the American literary tradition that is represented by the three seminal works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville singled out by Tanner: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,The Scarlet Letter, and Moby Dick. That Pierre Baptiste should be a black slave in a story written by a white woman ironically complicates any critical onslaught of political correctness. It certainly does not prevent Patricia Eakins's novel from finding its place and re-inventing its form along the line of those writers who sensed "the problematic relationship between the languages we inherit and the new worlds into which we sail" (Tanner 26-27). If writing a story is the unraveling of signs into scenes, Pierre Baptiste also reverses the process, and shows that writing a text involves the transcription of scenes into signs. Therefore, the "shadow histoire" of Pierre Baptiste is not so much the dark history of slavery as the novel's kinship with Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, with the transcendentalist obsession with the letter, and the emblematic relationship between the world and the word.[5] ....Pierre the "scrivener"(117)...ends his tale with the reaffirmation of the power of inscription — like the anonymous voice in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket leaving a final enigmatic message in which the only verb is "graven"—: "We have copied onto our coats the pattern of light & dark bands that was woven into the relict pouch. The pattern will be preserved when the talisman crumbles to dust"(247). The "pattern" recalls the alternation of blanks and printed lines on the page — at least that will remain and be preserved in the fabric of the coats — an image of the texture of the text — for those intent, like Pierre Baptiste, on the "delicate duty" of reading the lines. A trace of the transcendentalist heritage filters into the text when Pierre observes his conjure house from an outside perspective....Pierre becomes a reader of his own writing at the moment when his story as a scribe is about to end and the readers are invited to take over:
The pun on eye/I... epitomizes the reversal of positions and directions from the outside ("through a porthole") to the inside and [takes] us back, like a Moebius strip, to the starting point, the "sea" seen through the porthole at the end of the sentence. Like an anachronistic heir of nineteenth-century American Romanticism, Pierre asserts the central position of the subject — evoked by the word "belly" and the polysemic "chests"--that engenders universal truth and the world, heralding Thoreau's declaration in Walden: "Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly" (55). Thus Pierre Baptiste seems to bridge the gap between the two traditions it seems to claim as its own, the black and the white, the African and the American, sharing the same initial letter. The correspondence is not impossible, like the exchange of letters between Buffon and Pierre via Dufay. After all, Pierre's letter does reach Buffon — as we know from page 15 —, which could be a warning against hasty analogies: Pierre is Pierre and not quite Bartleby either, who ended up working in the Dead Letter Office. Pierre Baptiste can be read as a sort of "missing link" in American letters, if we consider that the novel's "shadow histoire" links it with nineteenth-century interrogations on signs, their dissemination and uncertain decipherment, rather than with eighteenth-century Enlightenment....[Like] Pierre, [his readers are] caught in the endlessly fascinating confrontation between, or maybe simply coexistence of, the world and the words and signs we inscribe in it, and receive from it: "Thus did I contemplate the delicate imbalance, the disorder of the order of the world, even as I learned by sums and letters" (23). Patricia Eakins's text and the story of how Pierre made his book are necessary reminders of the "effort and expense of writing," as William Gass argues (Finding a Form, 327-328), insisting that we have lost the sense of how precious and delicate is the material foundation of the inscription of words....At a time when computers offer the "sand-slate" of their screens for virtual inscriptions, Pierre Baptiste tells the story of the fabrication inherent in writing and of the essential materiality of words. This is metaphorized by Pierre's constantly renewed quest for writing instruments and an adequate surface to scribble on. Facing the command, from one of the "children of [his] mouth" (244): "you must write us down" (247), Pierre has no choice but to make his own paper (242) and ink (247) to begin with. Writing, Patricia Eakins's material metaphor intimates, can be as exacting and delicate a duty as that: starting from scratch.
1. To pastiche the title of Annie Dillard's essay, Living by Fiction.
Works Drawn On for These Excerpts EAKINS, Patricia. The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste: Mother and Father, First and Last. New York: New York UP, 1999. |
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