Phototextual journeys: Nicolas Bouvier in Asia

Abstract

Travel literature's inherent intergenericity extends into the realm of the interaesthetic in Nicolas Bouvier's textual and photographic representations of Asia. Although produced as distinct narratives, successive editorial decisions and the layering of these two media in the mind of the reader have transformed Bouvier's already palimpsestic texts into fluid, phototextual constructs. This article will offer ‘contrapuntal’ readings of a selection of Bouvier's texts in relation to the photographs charting his intercultural encounters in China and Japan. Countering the relegation of these photographs to the conventional status of aide-mémoire, the article will consider the shifting relationships of complementarity, tension, or disjuncture between image and text. These relationships are characterised by slippage, subversion and paradox. Text does not ‘load’ image, and images do not illustrate text. Indeed, Bouvier's photographs frequently contest, modify, or debunk the textual narratives. Ultimately, the article will argue that Bouvier's representations of Asia, both textual and visual, offer a challenge to cultural essentialism, to self-other binaries, and to monolithic discourses of otherness.

Keywords:

• Nicolas Bouvier
• photography
• Japan
• text and image
• representation

Notes

Notes

1. Pour une littérature voyageuse (Brussels: Complexe, 1992), 121.

2. Bouvier's poem ends: ‘la vie était si égarante et bonne / que tu lui as dit ou plutôt murmuré / “va-t’en me perdre o[ugrave] tu voudras” / Les vagues ont répondu “tu n’en reviendras pas”’ [life was so disorienting and so good, that you said to it, or rather murmured, ‘Go on, lose me wherever you wish’. The waves replied ‘you will not return’]: Nicolas Bouvier, Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 827. All French quotations are taken from the 2004 Gallimard edition and will be given parenthetically in the text preceded by the following abbreviations: CJ: Chronique japonaise; NV: Notes en vrac sur le visage; PS: Le Poisson-Scorpion; RD: Routes et déroutes; X: ‘Xian’. English translations of quotations from Chronique japonaise and Le Poisson-Scorpion are taken from: The Japanese Chronicles, trans. Anne Dickerson (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1992), and The Scorpion-Fish, trans. Robyn Marsack (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987). Page references are preceded by the following abbreviations: JC: Japanese Chronicles, and SF: Scorpion-Fish. All other translations are my own.

3. See Jean-Xavier Ridon, ‘Le Poisson-Scorpion’ de Nicolas Bouvier (Geneva: Editions Zoé, 2007), 75–6, for echoes of Bouvier's work in the contributions to the Pour une littérature voyageuse collection by Alain Dugrand, Gilles Lapouge and Jacques Meunier.

4. See Charles Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 159, for a discussion of this ‘mise entre parenthèses du monde’.

5. Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures, 161.

6. In a radio interview, Charles-Henri Favrod describes Bouvier's photographs as a way of taking notes, of helping him to ‘remémorer […] ne pas perdre le fil de la route’ [recollect […] not lose track of the route]: Entretiens avec et autour de Nicolas Bouvier, 2 CDs, produced by Editions Zoé and Radio Suisse Romande, 2005.

7. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 2004 [1994]), 5. Striking parallels may be noted in this regard between Bouvier's photographic practice and that of fellow Swiss traveller-writer, Ella Maillart (1903–1997), for whom photography was, in its own right, a mode of intercultural contact and of ‘writing’ travel. In his edition of her photographs, Bouvier also identifies a humanist agenda in Maillart's visual record: ‘Ce qui me touche dans ces photos, c’est qu’elles sont pur constat, ni pour ni contre, sans pédagogie ni emballement politique’ [What touches me in these photographs, is that they offer a pure record, neither for nor against, neither pedagogical nor politically motivated]: Ella Maillart: La Vie immédiate, ed. Nicolas Bouvier (Lausanne: Éditions 24 heures, 1991), 20–2.

8. This is noted by Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures, 160.

9. See Nicolas Bouvier, ‘Motionless at a Great Stride: In Praise of Folly and Some Swiss Vagabonds’, trans. Carol Volk, Literary Review, 36, no. 4 (1993): 501–7 (501–2).

10. See Jean-François Guennoc, ‘Chambres noires, chambres claires: La Photographie chez Nicolas Bouvier: Un usage inquiet du regard et du monde’, in Artful Deceptions: Verbal and Visual Trickery in French Culture, ed. Catherine Emerson and Maria Scott (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), 49–62 (50).

11. Quoted in Derek Gregory, ‘Emperors of the Gaze: Photographic Practices and Productions of Space in Egypt, 1839–1914’, in Picturing Place: Photography and the Visual Imagination, ed. Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan (London, New York: I. B Tauris, 2003), 195–225 (198).

12. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 155.

13. Gustave Flaubert, Voyage en Égypte, ed. P.-M. Biasi (Paris: Grasset, 1991), 213.

14. For Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète, see Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures, 53–6. Victor Segalen's Équipée, perhaps most urgently among his works, portrays the ‘exote’ seeking diversity in a world where difference is progressively declining. See Victor Segalen, Equipée: Voyage au pays du réel (Loverval: Editions Labor, 2006 [1929]).

15. Quoted in Joan M. Schwartz, ‘Introduction’ in Picturing Place, 5.

16. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995 [1978]), 49.

17. This was the only text published as a mixed-media work by Bouvier himself. See Guennoc, ‘Chambres noires, chambres claires’, 50.

18. The commonly accepted status of the photograph as a visual artefact which both illustrates and is ‘connoted’ by the text surrounding it is explored by Roland Barthes in his essay, ‘Le Message photographique’ in Image-musique-texte (Paris: Seuil, 1977). Barthes’ deconstruction of the coercive scopic regime created by image/text juxtapositions is complemented by the playfulness with which he integrates images into his own phototextual narratives. The most interesting example in the context of the present discussion is his dialogue with Japanese culture in a text that includes, among other images, photographs taken by Bouvier: L’Empire des signes. A prefatory remark impresses on the reader that: ‘Le texte ne “commente” pas les images. Les images n’ “illustrent” pas le texte: chacune a été seulement pour moi le départ d’une sorte de vacillement visuel, analogue peut-être à cette perte de sens que le Zen appelle un satori; texte et images, dans les entrelacs, veulent assurer la circulation, l’échange de ces signifiants: le corps, le visage, l’écriture, et y lire le recul des signes’: L’Empire des signes (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 9 [the text does not ‘gloss’ the images, which do not ‘illustrate’ the text. For me, each has been no more than the onset of a kind of visual uncertainty, analogous perhaps to that loss of meaning Zen calls a satori. Text and image, interlacing, seek to ensure the circulation and exchange of these signifiers: body, face, writing; and in them to read the retreat of signs: Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983), xi].

19. John Osborne, Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 79.

20. Osborne, Travelling Light, 87.

21. Barthes's essay appears in Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 121–5 (123).

22. Gregory, ‘Emperors of the Gaze’, 208.

23. On these features of Bouvier's mode of travel, see Charles Forsdick, ‘A quoi bon marcher: Uses of the Peripatetic in Contemporary Travel Literature in French’, Sites, 5, no. 1 (2001): 47–62.

24. I am grateful to the editors of the Journal of Romance Studies for granting me permission to introduce here some of the ideas on the wall theatre and on representations of the Ainu explored in Claire Gorrara and Margaret Topping, ‘Photography and the Cultural Encounter in François Maspero's Balkans-Transit and Nicolas Bouvier's Chronique japonasie', Journal of Romance Studies, 8, no. 1 (2008), 61–75.

25. On the transitional period in Japanese history witnessed by Bouvier, see Forsdick ‘“(In)connaissance de l’Asie”: Barthes and Bouvier, China and Japan’, Modern and Contemporary France, 14, no. 1 (2006), 63–77 (65). For the radical reforms introduced by American policy during the Occupation, see also R. H. P. Mann and J. G. Caiger, A History of Japan (Rutland, VT, and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1997), 354–61.

26. Mary-Louise Pratt's understanding of the ‘contact zone’ as the ‘spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’ is particularly pertinent here. See her Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, New York: Routledge, 2008 [1992]), 7.

27. Jean-Didier Urbain, Secrets de voyage: menteurs, imposteurs et autres voyageurs impossibles (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 438.

28. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), 14–5.

29. See Guennoc, ‘Chambres noires, chambres claires’, 55–6, on ‘photographic absence’ in Bouvier.

30. What is, for Bouvier, a necessary setting aside of one's own ‘points de repère’ in approaching other cultures also exposes the traveller to the risk of a ‘disparition de soi’. See Jean-Xavier Ridon, ‘Pour une poétique du voyage comme disparition’, in Autour de Nicolas Bouvier, ed. Christiane Albert, Nadine Laporte and Jean-Yves Pouilloux (Geneva: Éditions Zoé, 2002), 120–35.

31. Gregory, ‘Emperors of the Gaze’, 211.

32. Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard; Seuil, 1980), 135. Barthes’ own integration of Bouvier's photographs into Empire of Signs embodies this eschewal of a photographic appropriation of the cultural other. Indeed, what unites the photographs taken by Bouvier that Barthes includes in his text is a subtle meditation–emerging either in the images themselves or in their relationship to the surrounding text–on the problematics of knowledge and/or representation. One, of the Japanese character ‘mu’ (meaning ‘nothing), reflects, as Forsdick has suggested, ‘the apparent failure of another culture to yield to the traveller's desire for meaning’: ‘“(In)connaissance de l’Asie”’, 67. Another, showing a hand painting a calligraphic text, is juxtaposed, not to Barthes’ words, but–as if to deny any single, unifying vision–to a decontextualised, and disorienting extract from Philippe Sollers's On Materialism [Sur le matérialisme] which itself seems to imply the mobility and elusiveness of meaning of the written word: ‘L’écriture, donc, sourd du plan d’inscription parce qu’elle se fait depuis un recul et un décalage non regardable […] qui divise le support en couloirs comme pour rappeler le vide pluriel o[ugrave] elle s’accomplit–elle est seulement détachée en surface, elle vient tisser en surface, elle est déléguée du fond qui n’est pas un fond vers la surface qui n’est plus une surface’ (L’Empire des signes, 79) [Writing, then, rises from the plane of inscription because it results from a recoil and a non-regardable discrepancy […] which divides the support into corridors as though to recall the plural void in which it is achieved–it is merely detached on the surface, it proceeds to weave itself there, delegated from depths which are not deep toward the surface, which is no longer a surface (Empire of Signs, 57)].

33. The idea of travel prompting a necessary vulnerability and paring away of the self is perhaps most acutely conveyed in the intensely personal and unguarded travel diaries of Bouvier's periods of residence in Japan between 1964 and 1970, first published in 2004 as Le Vide et le plein: carnets du Japon 1964–1970 (Paris: Hoëbeke, 2004).