Posthumous Louisiana: Louisiana’s Literary Reinvention in Alfred Mercier’s The Saint-Ybars Plantation (1881)

Abstract

Alfred Mercier’s 1881 novel L’Habitation Saint-Ybars ou maîtres et esclaves en Louisiane, récit social (The Saint-Ybars Plantation or Masters and Slaves in Louisiana: A Social Narrative)1 portrays antebellum and postbellum Louisiana—with the Civil War functioning as a rupture, a foreign body that cuts the story in two. The fi rst part of the narrative carefully describes the plantation and the personal dynamics between its members in the period up until the Civil War; the second part unravels the fi rst by showing the plantation house’s steady demise and the deaths of every member of its close-knit community one after the other. At the end of the novel, its main character Pélasge goes back to Europe, leaving nothing behind him—not even the graves of his loved ones, which are completely destroyed in a storm. Mercier’s novel is a literary attempt to posthumously reconstruct a world its author used to know intimately, a meditation on what is left of his Louisiana in the wake of the Civil War and the Reconstruction period. Examining the novel’s historical sources, narrative structure, and concern with the decline of French and Creole languages, I will argue that The Saint-Ybars Plantation is a Proustian remembrance of things past set in Louisiana—an attempt to undo the consequences of the Civil War by recreating a bygone world out of words. Admittedly, Proust emphasized involuntary memory, the phenomenon of recollection without conscious effort that he illustrates in various scenes of his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time (including the famous “madeleine