Vigné d'Octon, the Blockhouse, and the Paradox of the Sublime

In her essay “Malaria and the Femme Fatale: Sex and Death in French Colonial Africa”, Jennifer Yee discusses the relationship between medical discourse, race, and sexuality in framing the European encounter with West Africa in fiction, and in particular naturalist fiction, after the tradition of Émile Zola. In her analysis, Yee refers to two novellas by the French naval doctor, novelist, and later politician, Paul Vigné d’Octon, Chair noire (1889) and L’Amour et la mort (1890). This chapter extends discussions around both novellas by opening up previously unexplored directions in their narratives. It does this through analyses of the blockhouse and of archival material on the impact of Malaria and Yellow Fever on Europeans over the half millennium of trade with West Africa. The chapter is interdisciplinary in its approach, drawing on a range of discourses (the sublime, abjection, disgust, and the necropolitical) and research techniques (archival research, literary analysis, and architectural visualisation) to better understand the “exile” turned “abject” and the perverse enjoyment colonial occupation in West Africa presented for European audiences. This chapter makes two arguments: firstly, as suggested by Yee and following earlier research by Henri Brunschwig (1975) , that Vigné d’Octon used his stories to warn against the moral anguish and physical suffering brought upon French officers exiled to West Africa, as much as to entertain his readers; and secondly, extending Yee’s exploration of the vampiric metaphor, that the novellas demonstrate elements of what Erich Fromm would describe as the necrophilic and what Achille Mbembe would consider the necropolitical.