Excerpts from
The Orchid: a Hybrid Flower for an Imaginary Eighteenth century in The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste by Patricia Eakins
Claire Fabre
Université de Lille III
One of the games that Patricia Eakins's novel The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste Father and Mother First and Last invites the reader to play consists in immersing oneself into an illusory eighteenth-century world, formed by a combination of historical and intertextual references. It is a trompe l'oeil eighteenth century, where real quotations rub shoulders with fabrications, and historical figures are mentioned alongside fictional characters, all of these "dressed" in eighteenth-century typography and language. To create her illusion, Eakins summons and intertwines several literary genres typical of the period — the slave narrative, the philosophical pamphlet, the travel narrative and all of their fictional counterparts and derivatives — the imaginary slave narrative, the philosophical and utopian tale, the imaginary travel narrative....
The orchid, a recurrent motif of the text, is one of the elements which help construct [the] illusion [of the eighteenth century] and, as such, provides a thematic and aesthetic portal into Patricia Eakins's fictional epistemological and poetic testament. First of all, the flower metonymically designates the eighteenth century, as it elicited scientific interest for the encyclopedists (Linnaeus recorded 69 different species of orchids in his Genera plantarum, 1753). And indeed, the "author" of the narrative is a slave who becomes a poet, philosopher and naturalist in accordance with the encyclopedic tradition.
The plantation world implicitly attributes a place to every living creature and places the slaves at the bottom of the pyramid along with animals, as Henry Louis Gates, commenting on Frederick Douglass's Narrative, reminds us ....
Pierre’s intention is to redefine a proper place for the Blacks as he exposes clearly. Following the method of his fellow encyclopedists, Pierre envisages his work in the form of an exhaustive catalogue:
My intrigue were to shadow M'sieu in the philosophic project he had undertaken with the Sage of Montbard. I would compile a prodigious compendium of natural and moral histories, setting forth in orderly fashion the commemorative particulars of Guinée, fauna & flora & diverse terrains along with accounts of industries & customs & beliefs, not neglecting the maxims and fables by which we bondsmen have been guided since captivity and transportation. (46)
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The scientific argument is but the pretext on which is grafted his poetic quest, and, of course, Eakins’s writing... Eakins uses the motif of the orchid to put into perspective the encyclopedic approach of the real and to offer her own poetic vision through the voice of Pierre Baptiste, exploiting the traditional sexual and magical powers associated with the flower....
The natural world seems to provide Pierre with an endless supply of metaphors and similes, always placed under the sign of hybridity. Flesh and fowl are thus indistinguishible, and the correspondences made between the different kingdoms of nature imply actual interpenetration of attributes rather than purely ornamental imagery. .....in spite of his training as a scientist, Pierre's reality proves impossible to catch hold of, including when he talks about his own "progeny"....
The very names of the children "Jéro, Léo, Framo, and Emlo" (203) seem to obey the laws of a proliferating series.
By insisting on the proliferation of orchids and fish-creatures alike, Eakins underlines their "molecular" nature which is opposed to the "molar" order of the plantation. In Mille Plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari draw an opposition between molar and molecular entities: they show the subversive power of multitudes, packs, swarms, (etc) which are all of a "molecular" nature. Whereas the established order deals with single units that form the structure of power (Family, Society, Religion etc.), multiplicity has the power to subvert order through the "deterritorialization" dynamics that it imposes. Hybrids (and, more precisely, what Deleuze and Guattari call "devenirs-animaux") are especially likely to fulfill this function.[1]
The specific laws of reproduction applied on Pierre's utopian island inaugurate a new kind of sexuality in which sexual differences are not negated, but at least where they become confused, if not secondary. Thus Pierre is able to sign his manuscript in a manner which redistributes gender — "Pierre, Mère et Père/Premier, Dernière" — and this aspect is another reason why his children are unclassifiable:
Curiously, they lacked those external organs by which we ascertain gender, having between their legs neither the stamen of the male nor the female’s sepals and calyx. They had been reproduced ; their presence in my hand proved progenitors. Yet, if they bore no organs of reproduction, how would they generate themselves?...The disciple of Buffon must here confess the disloyalty of framing a most Linnaean question — with what other creatures did his progeny fit in the great panoply of speciation ? (199)
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Thus, if Pierre fails in his avowed project — to go to France, to write the story of the people from Guinée — his eventual wreckage on the new island proves to put into practice an aesthetics of proliferation opposed to a vertical colonization of the real by the encyclopedic taxonomy and, incidentally, to any form of verticality. As it condenses all of these attributes, the orchid could well serve as an emblem for the poetical (and political) force of Eakins's novel.
1. Il y a toute une politique des devenirs-animaux, comme une politique de la sorcellerie : cette politique s'élabore dans des agencements qui ne sont ni ceux de la famille, ni ceux de l'Etat. Ils exprimeraient plutôt des groupes minoritaires, ou opprimés, ou interdits, ou révoltés, ou toujours en bordure des institutions reconnues, d'autant plus secrets qu'ils sont extrinsèques, bref anomiques. Mille Plateaux, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980, p. 302.
Works Drawn On for This Excerpt
Deleuze Gilles et Guattari Félix. Mille Plateaux, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980.
Eakins Patricia. The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, Father and Mother, First and Last. New York: New York UP, 1999.
Gates, Louis Henry Jr. (Ed.).The Classic Slave Narrative, Penguin: New York, 1987.
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