A Comic Escape Story

I have just finished reading Henri Charrière’s, Papillon (1969) in an English translation by June P. Wilson and Walter B Michaels, done the year after the French edition was published. It was a best seller and there was soon a movie with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.

Charrière treats us to two different escapes in the first half of the book. Both are spectacular: the first because of the escape from the infirmary on the mainland of French Guiana, the kind and grisly help of the nearby leper colony, and the successful sailing voyage first to Trinidad and then to Colombia, where only his having to stand in so close to the shore to drop off the three prisoners who were essentially interlopers got Papillon caught because the wind dropped. The next, solo escape of Papillon is successful and leads to whole new life among the Guajira Indians with two wives, both pregnant when Papillon decides he must resume his absurd plan to avenge himself on those who condemned him in Paris. This very conventional element of the story (one of many) is dropped without another mention at the end.

            A failed series of attempts to escape from the Colombian prison of Barranquila approaches the comic, with Papillon and his comrades getting progressively more damaged with each attempt, until finally they try to blow a hole in the wall of the prison, through which Papillon, unable to walk, will be carried. Everything fails.

            Papillon minutely describes the way he coped with two years of solitary confinement on Ile Saint-Joseph, and here it is difficult to avoid the conventional, since everyone in such a situation tallies the days somehow. When he returned to Royal Island, he had a complicated wooden raft ready for his escape attempt when another convict, whom Papillon later stabbed after provoking him to draw his knife, told the authorities. An eight-year sentence of solitary was reduced when Papillon heroically tried to save a girl who had fallen into the sea and was surrounded by sharks.

            Papillon feigns insanity and another attempt from the asylum on Royal Island fails. He manages to get to Devil’s Island, and from there the most spontaneous and reckless of all his cavales or escape attempts, succeeds; it involves throwing himself into an unusually large wave as it crashes against the rocks, with only bags of coconuts to buoy him up. He makes it to the mainland, but then there is quicksand that swallows a companion. The brother of a Chinese friend Papillon met on Devil’s Island helps him, and they sail a boat to British Guiana. After a short stay Papillon sails with other convicts to Venezuela, where, after a stay in a cruel detainment camp, he is released and eventually becomes a Venezuelan citizen.

            There are many funny moments in this book, as well as ongoing jokes. One of the latter is Papillon’s shifting relationship with god, whom he has not been raised to worship or even think about, but Papi takes the time to curse him in the middle or end of one of his many failed cavales. But when he finally succeeds—in the least thought out, most spontaneous, and even reckless attempts, he suddenly develops a warm, fuzzy relationship with God, whom he’s willing to forgive for having finally come through.

            Certain parts of the book strike me as conventional narratives, including the visit to the leper colony in the first successful escape. The finger stuck to Papillon’s coffee cup is over the top. But then so is the final, successful cavale. How exactly does an ordinary criminal get sent to the island for political prisoners, so he can muse on what Dreyfus was thinking as he looked out to sea? And the coconut sack water wings, the jumping into the big wave—not the ninth wave, à la Eugene Burdick, but the seventh—the friend who gets sucked under by the quicksand, and so on. I loved the pig who shows the Chinese where to walk to avoid the quicksand, though I think that bit might be a steal from The Hound of the Baskervilles. I point out my reactions not to disparage the book, because they just make it more interesting. For one thing, I don’t know anything about how the conventionality of slave or captivity narratives plays against or is separable from “the truth.” But I suspect conventions are irresistible. If you don’t carve dates on the wall of your solitary chamber, you do something to mark the time. No one denies that Papillon brought off seemingly impossible escapes. The only thing I will not accept as other than impossible is his publisher’s assertion that all he did was correct the punctuation.

            The book is also so very French. You will have your favorite places where something Charrière expresses seems so very obvious to him when it is not so to you, but for me the funniest French attitude in the book is that when you speak rationally to your captors, they will simply have to see it your way. And they do.