FICTION

OURIKA by Claire de Duras, translated by John Fowles. (The Modern Language Assn. of America: $5.95; 47 pp.) This novel, first published in 1823 and based on a true story, is part of the scaffolding of modern literature. Its heroine, a young Senegalese woman plucked from a slave ship by the Chevalier of Boufflers and raised by his aunt, the Princess of Beauvau, is the first black female narrator in French literature.

In spite of the fact that the first edition of about 30 copies was printed without the author’s name (Claire de Duras was the wife of the Duke of Duras), the novel became a raging success, with four printings in 1824, of close to 10,000 copies, not to mention the many plays and poems and paintings the story inspired. This was the generation traumatized by the French Revolution, the decade in which the novel is set. It is a decade Duras herself spent in exile in her mother’s native Martinique.

Ourika is raised and educated as an aristocrat, and she does not become aware of her race until she is old enough to think about love and marriage. The object of her affection, and later obsession, is the brother she grew up with, Charles, grandson of the princess. When she overhears a friend of the princess asking what on earth should be done about Ourika, now that she is old enough to marry, she is forced to realize herself as an outsider, as John Fowles puts it in his introduction, “the eternal etranger in human society.”

She has a brief period of respite during the Revolution: “When personal destiny was overthrown, all prejudices had disappeared, a state of affairs might one day come to pass where I would feel myself less exiled.” But it was not to be. Ourika wilts and falls in a keen reminder of the certainty that when the spirit is isolated and dies, the body follows close behind.