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Abstract
Aiming to provide a practical illustration of Edward Said's theorisation of ‘contrapuntal reading’, this article will read Jean-Luc Coatalem's Suite indochinoise (1993) as a counterpoint to Kim Lefèvre's Retour à la saison des pluies (1995). Both texts depict journeys from France to Vietnam. However, whilst Coatalem's narrative recounts his journey as a French tourist and travel writer, Lefèvre's text represents her journey as a Franco-Vietnamese exile ‘returning home’. Reading these texts ‘contrapuntally’ will enable a mutual illumination of discrepant, yet intertwined, European and non-European histories of French colonialism and the journeys on which this depended. It will show how the postcolonial journey of a Franco-Vietnamese female subject renegotiates the semantic field of travel at a particular historical moment, thus enabling a re-reading of contemporary travel literature in French, and foregrounding the possibility–for travellers habitually defined as ‘French’ or ‘Francophone’–of reciprocal, non-hierarchical dialogue between specific, yet interconnected, cultures.
Notes
Notes
1. Jean-Luc Coatalem, ‘Un mauvais départ’, in Pour une littérature voyageuse, ed. Michel Le Bris (Brussels: Complexe, 1999 [1992]), 83–6 (84).
2. Coatalem, ‘Un mauvais départ’, 85.
3. Nicolas Bouvier's work diverges from that of the other writers included by Le Bris. The emphasis in his work on the traveller's état d’esprit, on immobility and introversion, runs counter to the horizontal journeys and chronic extroversion promoted by the majority of contributors to the manifesto (see ‘La Clé des champs’, in Pour une littérature voyageuse, 41–4 (42); see also Le Poisson-scorpion (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). Bouvier seems to avoid zones associated directly with colonialism. His work does not convey nostalgia for a colonial or even a pre-colonial period. But more importantly, his project challenges the rigid spatial binaries on which traditional models of travel depend; its stress on the importance of travel as a concept (unwittingly) renders travel available potentially to subjects of all cultures and ethnicities. His contribution disrupts the discourses of conventional (colonial) travel that dominate in the manifesto.
4. Gilles Lapouge, ‘Les Timbres-Poste de l’Exotisme’, in Pour une littérature voyageuse, 109–18 (114). For a discussion of Lapouge's strategies for inhibiting contact and communication with, as well as understanding of, cultures outside France, see Siobhán Shilton, ‘Postcolonial Approaches to Travel Literature in French’, in Charles Forsdick, Feroza Basu and Siobhán Shilton, New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literature in French: Genre, History, Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 59–130
5. Coatalem, ‘Un mauvais départ’, 85.
6. See especially Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994 [1993]).
7. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 59.
8. See Said's chapter on ‘Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories’, in Culture and Imperialism, 1–72. As Catherine McGlennan-Martin comments, Said's definition of contrapuntal reading remains hazy. See ‘Resolving Cultural Disjuncture: an Evaluation of Saidian Counterpoint Through the Work of Roger Vailland and Ousmane Sembene, 1950–1960’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, 2001, 45. According to McGlennan-Martin, no working model for a contrapuntal approach is actually provided (‘Resolving Cultural Disjuncture’, 52–3). Whilst Said's reading of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park from the point of view of the Bertrams's Antigua plantation suggests that contrapuntal reading requires only a single text (Said, Culture and Imperialism, 69–70), elsewhere in Culture and Imperialism, he implies that texts should be read together (see McGlennan-Martin, ‘Resolving Cultural Disjuncture, 43–4). In this article, I will read two texts together.
9. Charles Forsdick, ‘Edward Said After Theory: the Limits of Counterpoint’, in Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism, ed. M. McQuillan, G. Macdonald, R. Purves and S. Thomson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 188–99 (194; emphasis in the original). Forsdick focuses specifically on Said's treatment of Victor Segalen's work, which Said considers to be colonial.
10. Charles Forsdick, ‘Edward Said After Theory’, 196.
11. On the gendering of travel as masculine, see Janet Wolff, ‘On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism’, Cultural Studies, 7, no. 2 (1993): 224–39. Women travel writers, like those of non-European countries or immigrant descent, are noticeably absent from the main body of the Pour une littérature voyageuse manifesto. The bibliography includes very few, amongst whom are Ella Maillart, Annie Dillard and Annie Van de Wiele. For more on the movement's marginalisation of women travellers, see Charles Forsdick, ‘Hidden Journeys: Gender, Genre and Twentieth-Century Travel Literature in French’, in Cross-Cultural Travel: Papers from the Royal Irish Academy Symposium on Literature and Travel, ed. Jane Conroy (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 315–23.
12. See bell hooks, ‘Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination’, in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 165–78. In her article ‘Revisiting Vietnam, locating home in Kim Lefèvre's Retour à la saison des pluies’, Srilata Ravi's decision to discuss Lefèvre's journey in terms of ‘displacement’ intimates a similar unease with ‘travel’ and reinforces the traveller/migrant binary (IJFS, 5., no. 1 (2002): 39–46).
13. See James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), in particular ‘Traveling Cultures’, 17–46.
14. Jean-Luc Coatalem, Suite indochinoise. Récit de voyage au Vietnam (Paris: Le Dilettante, 1999 [1993]), 14–15. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text, with the abbreviation SI.
15. Pierre Loti, Un pèlerin d’Angkor (Paris: La Nompareille, 1989 [1911]).
16. Coatalem similarly retraces an exoticist route in Je suis dans les mers du Sud (Paris: Grasset, 2001), subtitled Sur les traces de Paul Gauguin.
17. See Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: the Remaking of Social Analysis (London: Routledge, 1993 [1989]).
18. Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 132.
19. The phrase ‘denial of coevalness’ was first used by Johannes Fabian to describe the fixing, in anthropology and ethnographic practice, of the other as object locked in a spatial and temporal elsewhere. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
20. Distinguishing between the traveller and the migrant, Srilata Ravi comments that the traveller's journey is ‘a circular confirmation of self-identity’ (‘Revisiting Vietnam’, 43).
21. Kim Lefèvre, Retour à la saison des pluies (La Tour d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube, 2001 [1995]), 121. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text, with the abbreviation RSP.
22. See Kim Lefèvre, Métisse blanche (La Tour d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube, 2001 [1989]), 409.
23. See Lefèvre, Métisse blanche, 87–8.
24. Lefèvre, Métisse blanche, 155–60.
25. Clifford, Routes, 30.
26. A comparison can be made with Leïla Houari's Zeida de nulle part (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985), in which the protagonist attempts to conform to the role expected of her by Moroccan society in order to be considered Moroccan.
27. Ravi has commented on Lefèvre's ‘gendered relocation of the family's past’ through the language of her mother and sisters (‘Revisiting Vietnam’, 41).
28. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 13.
29. Nicolas Bouvier, L’Usage du monde (Paris: Payot, 2001 [1963]), 12.