Travel writing, as a result of its subject matter, is an inherently transcultural, transnational, even translingual phenomenon. It might be argued, in addition, that of all literary genres, the travelogue is itself–along with perhaps one of its closest relations, the novel–the literary form most likely to be subject to cross-cultural displacement. Travel accounts travel, through time, through space, through different cultures and between languages, often, as Loredana Polezzi's study of the contemporary Italian tradition eloquently illustrates, being transformed by such processes.Footnote1 Despite the increasing banality of such an observation, the extent to which this essential characteristic of travel writing is reflected in the ways in which the form is studied remains unclear. While journals such as Studies in Travel Writing, as well as major international conferences such as ‘Borders and Crossings’, have consistently shown a commitment to the comparative and cross-cultural dimensions of studying the literature of travel, much criticism still appears to evolve along exclusively national or monolingual lines. A number of key texts, such as The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, are for instance concerned predominantly with material in English, but the appearance of several recent collections suggests that a genuine internationalisation of research in the field is well under way.Footnote2
Such developments are doubly welcome, for travel writing studies has–since its emergence–been one of a few fields in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in which there is genuine, widespread potential for interdisciplinary and international research, positively federating the work of scholars across the traditional boundaries, institutional and disciplinary, by which their activity is often fragmented. What is striking, for instance, is the way in which many of the most common works of travel writing criticism, from which the field's core critical terms and concepts have been drawn, themselves illustrate an exemplary comparatist practice, dependent on corpora of works belonging to different language traditions. Through familiarity with key studies by scholars such as Ali Behdad, Chris Bongie, James Clifford, Michael Cronin, Sara Mills, Dennis Porter, Edward Said and David Scott, even researchers without first-hand knowledge of major French-language travelogues are aware of the centrality of French and francophone material to the development of the critical apparatus of studies in travel writing. In the work of these critics, analysis of texts by writers such as Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Segalen, Leiris, Bouvier and Baudrillard has permitted the exploration of key concepts (e.g. gender, Orientalism, semiology, translation) as well as the formulation of essential terms (e.g. ‘belatedness’, ‘exoticism’, ‘transgression’).Footnote3 It is perhaps no coincidence that so many seminal studies have emerged from scholarship with cross-cultural, comparative emphases, and this special issue of Studies in Travel Writing is in part inspired by a commitment to such an underlying project. By making available to an English-language readership the latest scholarship on contemporary travel writing in French, it aims to complement and expand the general familiarity, already alluded to above, with earlier French-language traditions of travel literature, not least that of the Romantic era. (Some of the material discussed in the articles that follow–works by Nicolas Bouvier, Jean-Paul Kauffmann, Ella Maillart and François Maspero–is already published in English translation, but most of it is still only available in French.) At the same time, it intends actively to expand the field of studies in travel writing in order to permit exploration of a particularly fruitful period of travel-related literary production, namely the past two decades, which coincide with the prominence of the Pour une littérature voyageuse movement in France. Given the traditional resistance of the French academy to the study of contemporary literary production, it is perhaps not surprising that such work should emerge outside France itself.
Of the travel writing discussed in this special issue, most has therefore been published since 1990. Of the texts that are exceptions to this chronological rule, most notably works by the Swiss travellers Ella Maillart and Nicolas Bouvier, their inclusion is justified by the fact that these were ‘discovered’ (or, in the case of the former, re-discovered) in the final decade of the twentieth century, in the context of the Pour une littérature voyageuse movement. The importance of this literary tendency in considerations of travel writing in late twentieth-century France is reflected by the fact that the movement's 1992 ‘manifesto’–also entitled Pour une littérature voyageuse–is a common point of reference in most of the articles that follow, and that a number of the authors discussed have been associated to a greater or lesser degree with the movement's journal Gulliver or its annual festival in Saint-Malo, ‘Etonnants voyageurs’, the twentieth ‘edition’ of which was held this year.
The range of travel-related activity gathered under the Pour une littérature voyageuse banner emerged in the late 1980s, in a very particular ideological and literary historical niche. Michel Le Bris, a key figure in the movement and director of the Saint-Malo festival, claims that post-war French literature–dominated, in his view, by the New Novel and structuralist experimentation–was characterised by a ‘mise entre parenthèses du monde’, a bracketing-off of the world that for several decades proved detrimental to the reception of travel writing (including, in Le Bris's account, key works by Nicolas Bouvier).Footnote4 Although such an analysis ignores a series of important travel texts–including those produced by structuralists and New Novelists themselves–it nevertheless reflects the relative lack of coherent attention, both critical and commercial, afforded to travel writing in France in the 1960s and 1970s. By the late 1980s, however, the situation had rapidly evolved, and the genre had achieved a reputation and popularity similar to that it had enjoyed earlier in the century. This publishing phenomenon was due in no small measure to the efforts of Le Bris himself, who in 1990 inaugurated the ‘Etonnants voyageurs’ festival, and also launched the journal Gulliver (in many ways a French-language Granta). He was in addition responsible for several travel writing series with a number of different publishers.Footnote5 Twenty-nine different series devoted to le travel-writing were published in France in 1992, although these had declined to 13 by 1998.Footnote6 This literary trend consisted of two distinct strands, both of which are apparent in the essays that follow, on the one hand encompassing the work of emerging and established contemporary authors, whilst on the other remaining reliant on the re-publication of numerous earlier travelogues (by authors such as Ella Maillart, present in this special issue in my own article as well as in the study of Bouvier by Margaret Topping). The retrospection inherent in this element of re-packaging of out-of-print narratives is complex: not only does it often imply an element of 1990s imperialist nostalgia, equally evident (as Jacqueline Dutton and Siobhán Shilton suggest in their contributions to this special issue) in the work of certain contemporary travel writers; but also–and these two elements are clearly related–it signals the anxiety of exhaustion of the narrative potential of contemporary travel, and the resultant need to retrace previous journeys.
The Pour une littérature voyageuse manifesto–including the work of authors such as Alain Borer, Nicolas Bouvier, Jean-Luc Coatalem, Jacques Lacarrière, Gilles Lapouge, Kenneth White and Le Bris himself–was produced in 1992, and–through the production of a selective bibliography grouping both contemporary and re-published earlier texts–it creates a specific guild identity.Footnote7 The aim of this special issue of Studies in Travel Writing is to offer, through its eight specific case studies, a timely consideration of the travel narratives of some of the authors associated with the movement, highlighting the issues of class, gender, nation and ethnicity that their self-performative statements of identity often eclipse. At the same time, it addresses the reliance (or otherwise) of these authors’ works on intertextuality or on a nostalgia for earlier modes of journeying. The focus of the articles is deliberately not, however, restricted to the writings of Le Bris and his colleagues; it will also encompass other French-language travel writers seemingly excluded from the movement's activity, but whose work reflects the new directions their chosen genre may be seen to have taken over the past two decades. The inclusion of studies of Swiss (Bouvier and Maillart), and more particularly Congolese (Mudimbe) and Vietnamese (Lefèvre), authors is a reminder that the notion of ‘French’ travel literature is itself too restrictive, and that ‘travel literature in French’ is perhaps a more helpful and accurate critical term. As the articles that follow make clear, such a corpus provides a means of exploring France itself, as well as more mobile concepts of French-ness; at the same time, it permits delineation of a wider French-speaking world, the identification of which is dependent on a conceptual shift from a political or diplomatic ‘Francophonia’, in which intercultural communication and exchange are grounded in the residually asymmetrical situations of power, towards a postcolonial ‘francophonia’, understood as a ‘world region held together by historical events, [by] the binding strength of joint common experiences and places of remembrance’.Footnote8
The special issue accordingly provides the first critical study of travel writing in French in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It brings together an eclectic range of articles, focused on a variety of material in French, and adopting a diversity of critical approaches. The pieces are all associated, however, with travel writing published, produced or read in France and the wider French-speaking world over the past two decades: given the emergence of links between the articles, and the clear dialogues the reader is invited to establish between them, it is hoped that the collection constitutes more than the sum of its parts. The emphasis, as the subtitle of the special issue suggests, is on the tension between, on the one hand, the establishment of a literary orthodoxy and, on the other, the generic experimentation that persists among those active both inside and outside the movement. From the emphasis on ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation’ emerges a third term essential to the studies that follow, that of ‘boundaries’, variously policed, expanded or transgressed. Any characterisation of studies in travel writing along national or linguistic lines risks descent into stereotyping and essentialism, but if there is a distinctive tendency with which the previous study of French-language travel writing may be associated, it is related to genre studies and the exploration of the genericity, specific or otherwise, of the travelogue. Guillaume Thouroude's exploration of the generic autonomy of the travelogue, considering the récit de voyage as mode, genre and form, brings some welcome clarity to such debates by suggesting that by developing conceptual tools adequate to the analysis of their object of study, scholars of travel writing might avoid repeated statements of generic hybridity and contribute more firmly to recognition of the form's legitimacy. To this end, in my own study of accounts of the 1935 journey across Xinjiang by Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart, I propose that ‘stereoscopy’ and ‘polygraphy’ may represent writing practices more widely constitutive of travel writing as a genre. In a related piece, focusing on the reportage of Olivier Weber and Jean-Claude Guillebaud, Catharine Mee additionally explores the boundaries between the travelogue and journalism, suggesting that traditionally antagonistic understandings of this relationship may obscure the ways in which travel writing can in fact benefit from its association with the journalistic. Finally, in a highly original study of Nicolas Bouvier's photography of Japan, Margaret Topping outlines the ways in which the empire of the text implicit in the label ‘travel writing’ is interrogated, destabilised and regularly undermined by the inclusion in the phototextual travelogue of images and by the interaesthetic considerations that their presence generates.
The consensus among contributors to this collection of articles appears to be that, unwittingly or not, the Pour une littérature voyageuse movement represents a continued policing of the boundaries of what constitutes travel writing, and of who has the right to be associated with the ‘guild’ of authors associated with the form. At the same time, however, the studies that follow reveal the ultimate futility of any such regulatory efforts. A number of the articles signal the existence of divergent or alternative journey narratives. Kathryn Jones provides a stimulating study of the aesthetics of astonishment that underpins François Maspero's travel practices; she reveals the ways in which key texts such as Les Passagers du Roissy-Express (1990) operate according to a mechanics of inclusion, permitting an openness to polyphony that leads to an understanding of the concept of travel broader than that common among many of his metropolitan contemporaries. The existence of other voices or traditions is also apparent in the articles by Aedín Ní Loingsigh and Siobhán Shilton. Ní Loingsigh casts light on a hitherto unexplored travelogue by V.Y. Mudimbe, Cheminements: Carnets de Berlin (avril–juin 1999) (2006), suggesting that the text's refusal to conform to any of travel writing's usual conventions, far from excluding the work from any theoretical debate on this particular genre, in fact reveals the ways in which it has an invaluable role to play in critical processes that challenge commonplace understandings of travel and its textualisation. Shilton similarly studies a text excluded from the canons of travel writing, Kim Lefèvre's Retour à la saison des pluies (1995). She adopts and adapts Edward Said's notion of ‘counterpoint’ to re-read this account of postcolonial return to Vietnam against a more conventional journey narrative by Jean-Luc Coatalem, revealing the ways in which travel accounts as apparently disparate as these may illuminate what Said classed in Culture and Imperialism ‘overlapping territories’ and ‘intertwined histories’.
Shilton's article is an eloquent reminder of the comparatist imperative essential to studies in travel writing, with reference to which these introductory observations began. Jacqueline Dutton's study of imperialism in recent travel narratives to Antarctic regions by Jean-Paul Kauffmann and Francis Spufford similarly reflects the potential of this approach, interrogating the universal applicability of concepts such as the ‘imperial gaze’ and highlighting the buried imperial histories on which postcolonial travel narratives are often overlaid. Dutton's article is a clear indication, in the context of this current special issue, of the risks of replacing one nation-based, monolingual tradition of studying travel writing with another. The studies that follow accordingly articulate no coherent critical or theoretical orthodoxy. They often share, however, common points of critical reference in the work of key travel writing critics, such as Michael Cronin, Edward Said and Mary Louise Pratt, whilst at the same time extending their critical reach to draw repeatedly on other essential research, published in French, by scholars such as Franck Michel, Adrien Pasquali, Jean-Xavier Ridon and Jean-Didier Urbain. The anglophone dominance of studies in travel writing, as of other fields such as postcolonial studies, is widely recognised. The modest aim of this special issue of the journal has been to raise awareness of the existence, in languages other than English, of alternative corpora of contemporary texts and of associated criticism. At the same time, however, the intention is to illustrate the enabling potential, for scholars of travel writing, of continued dialogue across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries.
Notes
Notes
1. See Loredana Polezzi, Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).
2. See, for example, Steve Clark and Paul Smethurst, eds., Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and South East Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), and Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, eds., Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility (London: Routledge, 2008).
3. See Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994); Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Michael Cronin, Across the Lines: Travel, Language and Translation (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000); Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991); Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge, 1978); and David Scott, Semiologies of Travel: From Gautier to Baudrillard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
4. See Michel Le Bris, ‘La vie, si égarante et bonne’, in Le Vent des routes: hommages à Nicolas Bouvier (Geneva: Zoé, 1998), 57–61 (57).
5. On these phenomena, see Michel Le Bris, ‘Historique’ [http://evgulliver.blogspirit.com/archive/2005/09/21/historique.html] (accessed 26 June 2009).
6. See ‘L’étonnant paradoxe de la littérature de voyage’, Livres de France, 208 (1998): 36–8.
7. See Pour une littérature voyageuse (Paris: Complexe, 1992).
8. See Matthias Middel, ‘Francophonia as a World Region?’, European Review of History, 10, no. 2 (2003): 203–20 (205).