Le voyageur étonné: François Maspero's alternative itineraries

Abstract

This article examines the alternative itineraries of four travel narratives by François Maspero, one of contemporary France's foremost travel writers: Les Passagers du Roissy-Express (1990), an innovative home tour through the Parisian suburbs; Balkans-Transit (1997), a journey through the southern Balkans in the spring of 1995, his autobiography Les Abeilles et la Guêpe (2002), and the collection of travel writings Transit & Cie (2004). Maspero's self-definition as a voyageur étonné [amazed traveller] who admires the world appears to mark him out as a very different kind of traveller from his contemporaries associated with the Pour une littérature voyageuse movement, and this article will explore the ways in which his journeys represent both a parallel and opposing trajectory. His engagement with cultural diversity is characterised by a mechanics of inclusion rather than exclusion. Instead of recounting the solitary traveller's traversal of great open spaces, Maspero's polyphonic travel narratives privilege human landscapes and give equal prominence to the voices of his travel companions and the ‘travellees’ he encounters. His narratives are haunted by the figures of refugees, migrants and exiles who remain in transit, and the article will analyse the ways in which the portrayal of these intersecting journeys implies a broader understanding of the concept of travel.

Keywords:

• François Maspero
• Pour une littérature voyageuse movement
• cultural diversity
• polyphony
• migrancy

Notes

Notes

1. François Maspero, Transit & Cie (Paris: Quinzaine Littéraire; Louis Vuitton, 2004), 26. All references are to this edition and will be placed in parenthesis in the text. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. The phrase étonnant voyageur [amazing traveller], which is the title of the annual festival of the Pour une littérature voyageuse movement, is a quotation from Charles Baudelaire's poem ‘Le Voyage’ from Les Fleurs du Mal: ‘Amazing travellers, what noble stories // We read in the deep oceans of your gaze!’. See Roy Campbell, ‘The Voyage’, in Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952), 171–6 (172).

2. Charles Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 161.

3. François Maspero, Les Passagers du Roissy-Express, photographs by Anaïk Frantz (Paris: Seuil, 1990). It was reissued in 1993 with an additional postface, and again in 2004. It was translated into English in 1994 by Paul Jones as Roissy Express: A Journey Through the Paris Suburbs (London and New York: Verso, 1994), and all quotations are from this translation.

4. Elizabeth Wilson, ‘The Rhetoric of Urban Space’, New Left Review 209 (1995): 146–60 (155).

5. Adrien Pasquali, Le Tour des Horizons. Critique et récits de voyage (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994), 72.

6. François Maspero, Balkans-Transit, photographs by Klavdij Sluban (Paris: Seuil, 1997). All references are to this edition and will be placed in parenthesis in the text. Balkans-Transit was adapted for the stage by the Greek director Anne Dimitriadis and the first production was staged in Paris in March 2003.

7. François Maspero, Les Abeilles et la Guêpe (Paris: Seuil, 2002). All references are to this edition and will be placed in parenthesis in the text.

8. Olivier Hambursin, ed., Récits du dernier siècle des voyages: De Victor Segalen à Nicolas Bouvier (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2005).

9. A chapter devoted to Maspero's Roissy-Express is included in a monograph by British-based academic Jean-Xavier Ridon examining attempts to reinvent the journey by twentieth-century French authors. Ridon, Le Voyage en son miroir: essai sur quelques tentatives de réinvention du voyage au 20e siècle (Paris: Kimé, 2002), 73–96. See also Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures, 184–96.

10. To take one example, extracts from Maspero's travels to the southern Balkans were published first in Le Monde in the summer of 1996, before appearing in book form as Balkans-Transit in 1997.

11. On the relationship between Maspero's work as a publisher, activist and travel writer see Anne-Louise Milne, ‘From Third-Worldism to Fourth-World Flânerie? François Maspero's Recent Journeys’, French Studies 60, no. 4 (2006): 489–502.

12. Jacobo Machover, Revista Hispano Cubana (1999); Gianni Minà, Rifondazione Communista. See Transit & Cie, 86–7.

13. This decentring of the travelling self also occurs in the titles of Maspero's travel narratives, which contain elements of anonymity, plurality and even passivity, for example Balkans-Transit, Transit & Cie and Les Passagers du Roissy-Express.

14. See my article ‘Voices of the Banlieues: Constructions of Dialogue in François Maspero's Les Passagers du Roissy-Express’, Sites, 8, no. 2 (2004): 127–34. On the relationship between text and image in Les Passagers du Roissy-Express, see Dervila Cooke, ‘Connection and Peripheral Encounters in Paris bout du monde and Les Passagers du Roissy-Express: Text and Photography by François Maspero and Anaïk Frantz’, Journal of Romance Studies 8, no. 1 (2008): 91–106.

15. See Transit & Cie, 27. This is especially the case in Balkans-Transit, in which Maspero is heavily reliant on his travel companion's linguistic skills.

16. Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1992), 57–74 (59).

17. Patrick Kéchichian, ‘De la mémoire à l’histoire’, Le Monde des Livres, 3 October 2002.

18. See also Claire Gorrara and Margaret Topping, ‘Photography and the Cultural Encounter in François Maspero's Balkans-Transit and Nicolas Bouvier's Chronique japonaise’, Journal of Romance Studies 8, no. 1 (2008): 61–75.

19. See Les Abeilles et la Guêpe, 143, 322, and Balkans-Transit, 467.

20. James Clifford, ‘Traveling Cultures’, in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 17–39 (38).

21. Charles Forsdick, ‘Reading Twentieth-Century Women's Travel Literature in French’, in Seuils et Traverses 4, ed. Arzu Etensel Ildem (Ankara: University of Ankara Press, 2004), 361–73 (370).

22. The phrase ‘paysages humains’ is taken from Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet's poem ‘Paysages humains’ written during his imprisonment in Brousse prison in the 1940s. See Les Abeilles et la Guêpe, 280–1.

23. Roland Barthes, ‘The Blue Guide’, in Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973), 81–4 (82).

24. See for example Balkans-Transit, 81, 120, 220.

25. Sadek Aissat, ‘François Maspero: J’ai toujours eu la chance de respirer et de faire respirer l’air du large’, Regards, 24 (May 1997), http://www.regards.fr/article/?id=488&q=Francois%20Maspero (accessed 14 February 2008).

26. Aissat, ‘François Maspero’.

27. Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures, 162.

28. Jacques Lacarrière, ‘Le bernard-l’hermite ou le treizième voyage’, in Pour une Littérature Voyageuse (Brussels: Complexe, 1992), 105–7 (105).

29. This theme also features in Maspero's fictional works. In La Plage noire (Paris: Seuil, 1995), a man in an unnamed Latin American country is handed an inadvertent death sentence when he is refused a visa to return to France.

30. See Adrien Pasquali's claim that immobile journeys represent a new type of travel writing in French (Le Tour des Horizons, 77).

31. Clifford, ‘Traveling Cultures’, 38.