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A
Note on Nineteenth-Century New Orleans, Yellow Fever,
and Daguerreotypes
by Josh Russell
In New Orleans, the worst days of yellow fever and
the heyday of the daguerreotype were contemporaneous.
Between 1839, when the first daguerreotypes arrived
in the city, and 1860, when other photographic processes
made the technology all but obsolete, more than 26,000
New Orleanians fell victim to "Yellow Jack." The annual
epidemics became so notorious that northern newspapers
often referred to New Orleans as "The Necropolis of
the South." The city, meanwhile, was thriving. Its
population grew from just over 70,000 in 1839 to almost
170,000 in 1860, at which time New Orleans's volume
of trade equaled that of New York City. New Orleans's
residents proudly recorded their prosperity in daguerreotype
after daguerreotype.
They also memorialized "Mister
Jack's" victims in daguerreotypes. These days, viewers
often find pictures of dead people ghoulish, but during
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries memorial
photographs were an accepted way of remembering the
dead all over the world, not just in New Orleans,
a city with a unique relationship with death. Even
the very poor could afford to have a memorial portrait
made of a loved one; the advent of photography made
portraits, once available only to the rich, available
to almost everyone.
By the end of the nineteenth century,
both yellow fever and the daguerreotype had all but
disappeared from New Orleans. Mosquitoes were finally
recognized as the disease's carrier, and successful
steps were taken to cut their numbers. Except for
1897's mini-epidemic, which claimed 298 victims, several
dozen summers passed with only one or two recorded
fever deaths. The last half of the 1800s witnessed
rapid progress in photographic technology. In the
1850s and 1860s the daguerreotype was gradually made
outmoded by the less expensive ambrotype, which was
later made obsolete by the even cheaper tintype. Daguerreotypes,
ambrotypes, and tintypes are a one-of-a-kind objects,
like paintings or drawings. All but abandoned by 1900,
these technologies were replaced by the now ubiquitous
print photographic process, in which a negative is
used to make unlimited reproductions of a single photograph.
Discussion
Questions
1. We are first introduced to Claude Marchand by a
modern-day narrator, and then Marchand himself starts
to tell his story. How many different points of view
does Josh Russell use in the novel? Do you think the
third-person objective point of view enhances the
first-person narrative?
2. Discuss the shifts in historical
time throughout the novel. How do the present-day
descriptions of Marchand's plates lend structure to
the story of nineteenth-century New Orleans?
3. Do you think Millicent's journal
entries broaden the scope of the novel? Does her perspective
add any insight to Marchand's story?
4. Claude Marchand says, "The supreme
trick of language is to say exactly and fully what
you mean and have others hear only the bits you wish
them to hear" (p. 85). How does this comment relate
to Russell's use of point of view in Yellow Jack?
5. Discuss the use of the daguerreotype
as a metaphor in the novel. How does Russell use the
daguerreotype as a device to heighten the plot? to
foreshadow events? to enhance character development?
6. Discuss the evolution of Marchand's
art. Keep in mind Marchand's lying and cheating, as
well as his ironic reluctance to make certain moves
concerning his art and his business. What is Russell
trying to say about the path of art and the artist?
7. Do you find Claude Marchand
a likable or sympathetic character? Why or why not?
8. Many artists are in constant
pursuit of the impossible, whether it be creating
the perfect work—or the perfect world. What are Marchand's
main pursuits? Do his professional motivations differ
from his personal ones?
9. How does Marchand hurt other
people with his good intentions, artistic and otherwise?
10. Discuss Marchand's turbulent
love life. What does he seek or find in his relationship
with Millicent? With Vivian? How do you react to his
affairs?
11. How do Marchand's romantic
liaisons relate to the artist's need for—and fear
of—love or intimacy? Explore his needs as an artist
and as a man. How does he fulfill these needs with
different women?
12. We learn at an early stage
that Vivian will marry Marchand. How does this early
revelation affect your experience in reading the book?
Does Russell seem to give the plot away by revealing
more about the characters' fate?
13. Discuss the significance of
Vivian's death after giving birth to a child who is
named Daguerre.
14. How does yellow fever function
as a metaphor for Marchand's plight?
15. Who is the most powerful minor
character in the novel? Why is this character essential
to the telling of the story?
16. How does Russell handle the
subjects of sex, drugs, death, corruption, and other
complex areas of human nature?
17. If you were to make a film
based on Yellow Jack, how would you incorporate the
descriptions of Marchand's plates and Millicent's
journal entries?
18. Does Russell successfully bring
to life the setting of 1840s New Orleans? Did the
setting and other historical elements (the daguerreotype,
the yellow fever epidemic) feel like an organic part
of the novel, or merely a backdrop for the narrative?
19. Could you imagine telling this
same story but in a different historical period or
setting?
An
Interview with Josh Russell
by Michael Sims
In the late 1830s a French physicist and artist named
Louis Daguerre perfected the first practical means
of recording a photographic image. Daguerreotypes
were produced by coating a copper or brass plate with
silver and iodide, exposing it to light focused through
a camera, developing the image with mercury vapor,
and fixing it with a salt solution. For the first
time, human beings didn't have to depend on painters
to depict their lives.
Like the grain of sand inside a
pearl, this fact nestles at the heart of Josh Russell's
extravagantly inventive novel, Yellow Jack. In Russell's
account, Daguerre has an apprentice named Claude Marchand,
who not only assists in the invention but takes his
expertise—and some of Daguerre's technology—with
him when he flees Europe. Soon Marchand is in New
Orleans, where his story really begins. The novel's
title comes from a nickname for yellow fever, which
terrorizes the Delta during the entire book.
Yellow Jack is Josh Russell's first
novel. He was born in 1968 in Illinois and received
his M.F.A. in 1993. He is currently teaching at the
University of Florida. In an interview shortly after
the publication of Yellow Jack, Russell discussed
the genesis of the novel: "I wrote it as a one-page
stand-alone story—what is now, I think, the first
three pages of the book—which encapsulated Claude
Marchand's entire life. And then I wrote another little
stand-alone that was rolled into a larger daguerreotype
section. I sent them to a magazine called Epoch,
which is published at Cornell, a literary magazine
that I'd admired for years." The editor "innocently"
asked for more, and over the next year Russell wrote
a longer story, consisting of a Marchand photography
catalog roughly as it appears interwoven throughout
the book.
The fictional Claude Marchand begins
his career as a painter's apprentice. An unreliable
narrator, he unwittingly reveals his method of autobiography
when he admits, "I adored the way things could be
left out in a painting, others made more vivid." However,
this remark could also be Josh Russell talking about
the virtues of fiction over history. We think of historians
as hobbled by a detective's respect for clues. But
every historian is an interpreter who makes choices,
who extracts—or imagines—themes. Historians both
consciously and unconsciously shape a narrative out
of fragments of a vanished world.
Yellow Jack is about what historians
cannot retrieve—motivations, uncertainties, passions.
It is about the unacknowledged pain and hopeless confusion
of everyday life. Throughout, Russell questions the
need for art, the reliability of photography, and
even the role of historians. Claude Marchand sums
up the essential problem of the human condition: "We
are a jumble of wants." Marchand himself certainly
is. He's also a thoroughly unpleasant character—brutal,
manipulative, obsessed. To spend 250 pages in his
presence is to journey into an increasingly dark and
disturbed mind.
Russell slyly comments on the indeterminacy
of history by providing three interwoven narratives—Marchand's
own first-person account, excerpts from the diary
of his octoroon lover Millicent, and a series of exhibition
notes written by an art historian for a catalog of
Marchand's daguerreotypes. "My intention," Russell
explains, "was to play with the way that history,
especially art history, works. If it's art, we can
forgive anything. Look at Pound, Hemingway, Picasso.
The art history stuff provided me with a rough map—and
also a map that I could contradict." Russell says
that Millicent, writing in her diary, strictly for
herself, "is telling as near to the truth as anyone
can tell. Claude's narrative I almost think of as
a monologue—defending himself, trying to explain
himself."
One role the exhibition notes perform
is foreshadowing. Without giving away the story, they
nonetheless spark in us the same frisson of anxiety
we experience when reading a biography. Learning early
on that mercury poisoning and opium addiction will
steal Marchand's health and sanity, and that he will
die at the age of 25, only adds to the poignancy of
his narrative. Once you reach the end of the novel,
a glance back at the art historian's notes will reveal
how slyly Russell foreshadowed much of Marchand's
life. The novel ends roughly where the catalog began.
It's easy to understand how the historian's analysis
could stand alone as a short story à la Jorge Luis
Borges, but readers can be grateful that Russell gave
in to the invitation to flesh out the life of Claude
Marchand.
Having an unreliable narrator was
part of the fun, Russell says. "A third-person narrator
would be able to render the truthful narrative in
a way that I'm not particularly interested in. I wanted
the question of who was telling the truth. I wanted
the question of who even knew what the truth was.
Would a man tell a different truth than a woman? Would
a white character tell a different truth than a black
character?"
Considering that the elusive truth
of history—private and public-is the theme of the
book, and that New Orleans is as much a character
as any of the people, it seems appropriate that Russell
can trace the germ of Yellow Jack to a particular
place and subject. "New Orleans and photography,"
he says flatly. "Just living in the city provided
the settings. My apartment became one of the settings;
where I worked became another."
After receiving his M.F.A. in 1993,
Russell took a job at a photography gallery in the
French Quarter. During this employment, which Russell
says mostly involved packing expensive photographs
for shipping, he saw daguerreotypes for the first
time. He says he "handled them and looked at them
and read about them." And he began to imagine the
stories that happened before and after the photograph
was taken. Slowly these imaginings grew into the brief
fiction made of the art historian's notes, and finally
into the novel you hold in your hand.
Nabokov said that in Madame
Bovary Flaubert transformed what he conceived
as "a sordid world inhabited by frauds and Philistines
and mediocrities and brutes and wayward ladies" into
a work of poetic fiction. Josh Russell has performed
the same sort of alchemy with Yellow Jack.
He has distilled the New Orleans of the mid-1800s,
the fever of the title, and the savage lives of his
characters into a novel of terrible beauty.
Michael Sims is the author of Darwin's
Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the
Arts. His interview with Josh Russell originally
appeared, in slightly different form, in the Nashville
Scene (August 5, 1999).
Praise for
Yellow Jack
"One of the best first novels I've ever read. [Yellow
Jack] is a book that restores my faith in the historical
novel, fresh, jagged, elegant, and so emotionally
engaging that I wanted, by God, to somehow will myself
back in time. . . . This is a writer who can really
turn a story on its head. . . . This is a book for
the ages."—Ben Neihart, Baltimore Sun
"Authoritative, ambitious,
stylistically elegant. . . . [Russell] is an heir
to Poe not only in shifty narrative technique but
also in his stark, unsentimental depiction of New
Orleans' plague and the citizens' decadent defiance
of it. . . . the beginning of a serious, and seriously
accomplished, fiction career."—Diane Roberts, Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
"Russell's poetic, magic-realist
ear makes Yellow Jack blazingly dynamic, as Claude's
dramatic declarations of passion and artistic integrity
unfold through lyrical language. At certain moments
Russell reads like a more risque Caleb Carr, at other
times a tamer Louis-Ferdinant Celine. . . . A rich,
seductive and absorbing debut."—Max Winter, Time
Out New York
"Josh Russell gives us a
feverish, nineteenth-century New Orleans in dizzying
motion. . . . This is a novel full of tar smoke and
romance, vibrant images and raucous life. Yellow Jack
is thrilling from start to finish-an audacious and
significant work of fiction by a brilliant writer
who knows how to make it new."—Joanna Scott, author
of The Manikin
"Yellow Jack [has] considerable
beauty and a complex wit. . . . The wit gives scintillating
energy to the writing. . . . Mr. Russell portrays
[New Orleans] with convincing imagination."—Richard
Eder, New York Times
"While there are clear echoes
of Edgar Allan Poe's Masque of the Red Death and Vladimir
Nabokov's Lolita, along with characters that could
have stepped out of Flannery O'Connor's writing and
the kind of atmosphere that was so evident in The
Alienist by Caleb Carr, author Josh Russell makes
this story his own by presenting it in his own unique
voice. . . . He lushly evokes the sultry atmosphere
of the city and its demimonde."—Larry D. Woods,
Nashville Tennessean
"Josh Russell turns on a
gusher in this novel, his first, and long may it flow.
I found Yellow Jack intoxicating-a lush, inventive
novel that makes New Orleans in the nineteenth century
come alive in all its febrile intensity. There is
everything to like here: a richly evocative style,
lots of tenderness and eroticism, a headlong narrative
voice that pulls you into its sweep and swoon. I recommend
this book strongly."—Jay Parini, author of Benjamin's
Crossing
"Yellow Jack comes as a double-shocker:
one, because its young author is already well ahead
of the pack in his command of narrative; and two,
because Russell is working from the ground up, the
ground being that rare thing these days in a work
of fiction—the imagination."—Memphis Flyer
"Josh Russell is developing
a surreal cosmology intended to light a path through
the gumwrappers dropped by generation X."—Andrei
Codrescu
"With a fevered voice, distinctive
yet reminding us of the writing of Flannery O'Connor
and photographs of E. J. Belloq. . . . Russell's very
fine debut novel portends a career of literary substance."
—William W. Starr, The State (Columbia, South
Carolina)
"Buoyantly detailed, briskly
paced, and masterfully sad."—Publishers Weekly,
starred review
"A feat of historical reconstruction
and dexterous plotting, unquestionably worth reading."
—Kirkus Reviews
"A dark treat."—BookPage
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