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Emmanuelle Peraldo - Literature and Geography - The Writing of Space Throughout History-Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2016)
Emmanuelle Peraldo - Literature and Geography - The Writing of Space Throughout History-Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2016)
Geography
Literature and
Geography:
Edited by
Emmanuelle Peraldo
Literature and Geography:
The Writing of Space throughout History
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... x
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
The Meeting of Two Practices of Space: Literature and Geography.
Emmanuelle Peraldo
1 ................................................................................................................. 20
Adventures in Literary Cartography: Explorations, Representations,
Projections
Robert T. Tally Jr
2 ................................................................................................................. 37
Cartography and the Contemporary American Novel.
Nic Pizzolatto: An Example of Geocritical Analysis
Fabrizio Di Pasquale
3 ................................................................................................................. 52
Murder on the Orient Express: A Literary and Train Journey
from Istanbul to Europe
Anna Madoeuf
4 ................................................................................................................. 64
The Place of the Enigma: Time and Space in ArMen (1967)
by Jean-Pierre Abraham
Isabelle Lefort and Thierry Coanus
vi Table of Contents
5 ................................................................................................................. 81
“Non-places” and u-topos in The Cosmonaut’s Last Message
to The Woman he Once loved in the Former Soviet Union
and Europe by David Greig
Jeanne Schaaf
6 ............................................................................................................... 100
From Literary Myth to Literary Tourism: Cashing in on Expatriates’
Metaphorical Paris
Amy Wells
7 ............................................................................................................... 126
When Space Renews the Literary Workshop: The Oulipo Movement’s
Spatial Literary Practices
Geraldine Molina
8 ............................................................................................................... 150
Geography through Texts: Evidential Strategies in the Travel Accounts
of Navigationi et Viaggi (Venice 1550-1559)
Fiona Lejosne
9 ............................................................................................................... 168
The Perception of the Spaces in the Mediterranean Chorographic
Literature of the Seventeenth Century
Valeria Manfrè
10 ............................................................................................................. 189
Writing Space through the Work of the French Botanist Tournefort,
Relation d’un voyage du Levant
Isabelle Trivisani-Moreau
Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space throughout History vii
11 ............................................................................................................. 206
Walter Scott and the Geographical Novel
Céline Sabiron
12 ............................................................................................................. 222
Walking and Writing: Paul Auster’s Map of the Tower of Babel
Caroline Rabourdin
13 ............................................................................................................. 234
Amitav Ghosh’s Historical and Transcultural Geographies
in Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke
Catherine Delmas
14 ............................................................................................................. 248
Rudyard Kipling’s Writing of the Indian Space: The Shifting Lines
of Fiction and Reality, Adventure Narrative and Journalism
Élodie Raimbault
15 ............................................................................................................. 264
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Transtextual Map to Venice
Fabien Desset
16 ............................................................................................................. 287
W.H. Auden and the Mezzogiorno
Aurélien Saby
17 ............................................................................................................. 305
Mapping out the North in Simon Armitage’s Poetry and Prose
Claire Hélie
viii Table of Contents
18 ............................................................................................................. 322
French Psychogeography Today? The Case of Thomas Clerc’s
Paris, musée du XXIe siècle, le dixième arrondissement
Joshua Armstrong
19 ............................................................................................................. 340
London in The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: From a “Monstrous Town”
to “A City of Marvels and Mud”
Nathalie Martinière
20 ............................................................................................................. 354
The City and its Double: Brasília Narrated by João Almino or the Myth
of Urban Modernity through the Prism of Everyday Life
Paskine Sagnes and Laurent Viala
21 ............................................................................................................. 371
Myth and Reality, Peking in René Leys of Victor Segalen
Xiaomin Giafferri
22 ............................................................................................................. 390
A Geographer Disappears: Politics and Fiction in Purgatorio
by Tomás Eloy Martínez
Matei Chihaia
23 ............................................................................................................. 407
Describing Space in the “Land of the Imaginary Line”: How the Novelist
Javier Vásconez Depicts Ecuador in his Novels
Anne-Claudine Morel
24 ............................................................................................................. 423
The “Frontier Lands” of the South-Western Alps: Analysis of Local
Territorial Processes through the Literary Constructions of Francesco
Biamonti and Jean Giono
Marina Marengo
Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space throughout History ix
25 ............................................................................................................. 438
Chicago: Literary Geography Approaches to an Egyptian Emigration
Novel
Delphine Pagès-El Karoui
26 ............................................................................................................. 457
A Geocritical Approach to Literary Representations of Pakistani Spaces
Juliane Rouassi
The quality of the conference, and as a consequence of the book that came
out of it, has been guaranteed by the expertise and availability of the
scientific committee composed of Isabelle Lefort (Université Lyon 2),
Jean Viviès (Aix Marseille Université), Yann Calbérac (Université de
Reims), Catherine Delesalle (Université Lyon 3), Bertrand Westphal
(Université de Limoges), Marc Brosseau (University of Ottawa), Jess
Edwards (Manchester Metropolitan University), Gerd Bayer (Erlangen
University, Germany) and Benjamin Pauley (Eastern Connecticut State
University). Their work is gratefully acknowledged.
I also wish to thank all the speakers of the conference and more
particularly the contributors of this book for their good work and will to
provide the best essays they could. Last but by no means least, I offer
heartfelt thanks to the following friends and colleagues for their advice,
encouragement and general support: Stéphanie Gourdon, Alexandre
Palhière, Florent Villard, Lawrence Gasquet, Florence Labaune-Demeule,
Philippe Pelletier, Denis Jamet, Whitney Bevill and David Beyris.
INTRODUCTION
EMMANUELLE PERALDO
literature, their interactions, and the way they work on the referential level
(mimesis) and on the creative level (poesis).
The conference gathered about sixty researchers from all around the
world (Canada, the US, Australia, Germany, Spain, Italy, Great-Britain,
Switzerland, France) and from several disciplines: some were literary
academics working on geographical objects, as a consequence of the
Spatial Turn; and some were geographers interested in literary texts, as a
consequence of the Cultural Turn that occurred in the 1980s and which
questioned the positivist approach by focusing on culture, that is to say,
circumstances which constitute the specificity of human beings. There
were also architects, artists and cartographers. Suggestions have come
from all disciplines on how to take into account representations and
discourses: texts, including literary ones, have become more and more
present in the analysis of geographers. The speakers focused on the cross-
fertilization of geography and literature as disciplines, languages and
methodologies.
This volume’s title also contains the terms “Literature and Geography”
(as in the many previous studies listed by Juliane Rouassi) precisely to
participate in this trans-disciplinary global debate and to propose a
“survey” (an “état des lieux”, to borrow the title of Lévy and Westphal’s
Reader on Geocriticism, 2014) of current research in that field. The
volume presented here contains some of the proceedings of the conference
that have been adapted and gathered in three parts entitled “Literary
Cartography, Literary Geography and Geocriticism”, “Geography and the
Mapping of Literary Genres” and “Landscapes, Urbanscapes and
(Geo)politics in Literature”. These three parts contain 8 chapters, which
themselves contain 26 essays.
The use of models and other abstract forms in literary study has recently
seen a revival in a digital age that puts data and sophisticated data
management systems in the hands of the literary scholar, teacher, and
student. Pedagogical applications of these abstract models are rich with
possibility for the literary classroom, and offer exciting opportunities for
The Meeting of Two Practices of Space: Literature and Geography 5
Confronted with the incapacity of the sequential text to account for space,
which has no beginning, no ending and no chapters, two processes usually
come to mind. The first one consists in describing space through words,
while the second one amounts to recounting space thanks to narration. An
alternative solution is proposed to compensate for the shortcomings of the
text by completing it with the specific language which has been developed
to tell space: cartography. A map is indeed “a representation founded on a
language whose characteristic is to build the analogical image of a place.”
(Lévy 2003, 128) But to exhaust a place, isn’t it necessary to combine both
languages, i.e. text and map? Many writers (Melville, Stevenson, Dickens,
Swift, Carroll to quote a few) insert maps – real or imaginary – for
realistic purposes but they are sometimes truly part of the narrative.
Robert Tally, in the keynote speech entitled “Adventures in Literary
Cartography” that he gave at the conference by video-conferencing from
Texas and that is reproduced in Chapter 1, Part 1, deals with inserted maps
but also with other forms of narrative maps. He uses the figure of the
“adventure” / “venture toward” as a way of looking at both his own
interest in the subject and the ways the field has developed. In his essay,
Tally ponders the distinction between the itinerary and the map, between
the narrative and the descriptive, between text and image, between the
verbal and the iconic to show, with Spinoza, that they are “not opposed but
different”. Fabrizio Di Pasquale then analyzes the symbolic and aesthetic
functions of places in Nic Pizzolatto’s novel Galveston and he traces on a
map the locations and the routes of the characters. He shows that the map
can be considered as a pattern of representation of reality, able “to stage”
or to provide imaginary solutions. Both Tally and Di Pasquale adopt a
geocritical perspective in their articles.
Chapter 2 (“Geographical Imaginations”) contains three case-studies.
Anna Madoeuf deals with the mythical Orient-Express train, that “non-
place” (Augé 1995) between Europe and a hazy Orient, in which time and
space never stop. Thierry Coanus and Isabelle Lefort also tackle the space
and time dichotomy in their essay on Armen by Jean-Pierre Abraham in
which, “[t]he lighthouse, a quasi geodetic point without surface or
thickness, has proved to be a place – a singular place, by definition, since
it exists only through the reflection of a third presence, that of the writer
who inhabits it temporarily”. After the discussion of these two novels,
Jeanne Schaaf brings in theatre in her essay on two plays by David Greig,
6 Introduction
Even if many essays have already underlined this fact, the second
chapter of Part 3, which is also the last chapter of the volume, shows that
the writing of space is never purely aesthetic, but always ideological or
political. The geopolitical endeavour, as Yves Lacoste – the founder of the
review Hérodote – defined it, consists in the study of power differentials
on territories, taking into account the contradictory representations that are
made of them and that fuel debates among citizens. Matei Chihaia’s essay
is on Tomás Eloy Martínez’s novel Purgatorio (2008), which evokes the
trauma of the “disappearance” of victims of the dictatorship in Argentina,
in this case that of a young member of a topographic expedition. Politics
and fiction are thus strategically intertwined in this novel which shows
“the effort to map the real as well as of the struggle to map the imaginary”.
Next, Anne-Claudine Morel analyses the dialectics between invisibility
and visibility in the writing of space in Ecuador in the 21st century – the
invisibility of the imaginary line of the Equator which crosses the country
and the desired visibility (in writing, in space and communication) of
Javier Vásconez (1946), the writer she analyses. Morel focuses on
Vasconez’s depiction of the unnamed yet easily identifiable Ecuador. The
concepts of lines, frontiers, limits and boundaries, which are highly
geographical, are also extremely (geo)political as they conjure up a
consciousness of space. Marina Marengo dwells on “frontier lands” in her
essay, more particularly, in the Italian-French south western Alps,
employing Raffestin’s definition of “frontier lands”, which are inherently
areas of transit, not only of things, people and ideas, but also between
different “worlds”. The borders, which cut across frontier lands, not only
fail to truly separate, but are an “exchange of promises.” These hybrid
areas are excellent examples of espaces troués. (Deleuze and Guattari
1980) This article enables us to reflect on the processes of production of
territory, marked by numerous borderlines, which bear testimony to the
various manifestations of power over the centuries. Juliane Rouassi’s main
interest in her article is the representation of Pakistan in the novels of
Nadeem Aslam and Fatima Bhutto. They both depict peaceful places and
spaces but they also show how conflicts and bomb attacks brutally change
urban and natural landscapes. Can one really escape violence in what
seems to be a hostile place? Last, but not least, Delphine Pagès-El Karoui
proposes an essay on Chicago, an Egyptian emigration novel by Alaa Al-
Aswany. The topic of migrants is timely, and it connects geographies with
geopolitical situations and individualities being displaced. “Migration
appears in Chicago to be a resource and an attribute of power”, says
Delphine Pagès-El Karoui. Each character illustrates a particular type of
migrant, who emerges, at the end of the narrative, having been
12 Introduction
References
ADAMS, Percy G. 1980. Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1800. 1962.
New York: Dover Publications, Inc.
AÏT-TOUATI, Frédérique. 2011. Fictions of the Cosmos. Science and
Literature in the Seventeenth Century. Susan Emanuel (trans). Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press.
ALAMICHEL, Marie-Françoise and Olivier BROSSARD (eds). 2010. La
Géographie dans le monde anglophone : espace et identité. Paris:
Michel Houdiard éditeur.
AUGE, Marc. (1995). 2008. Non-Places. An Introduction to Supermodernity.
London, New York: Verso.
BACHELARD, Gaston. (1957). 2004. Poétique de l’Espace. Paris : P.U.F,
coll. Quadrige. Grands textes.
BAKHTIN, Mikhaïl. (1981). 1989. “Forms of time and of the chronotope in
the novel”. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: Univ. Texas Press, 84-
258.
BARON, Christine. 2011. “Littérature et géographie: lieux, espaces,
paysages et écritures”, LHT 8.
BÉDARD, Mario and Christiane LAHAIE. 2008. “Géographie et littérature :
entre le topos et la chôra”. Cahiers de Géographie du Québec, Vol. 52,
Nb 147, 391-397.
BESSE, Jean-Marc. 2003. Les Grandeurs de la Terre. Aspects du savoir
géographique à la Renaissance. Lyon: ENS Editions.
BESSE, Jean-Marc, Hélène BLAIS, and Isabelle SURUN (eds). 2010.
Naissance de la géographie moderne (1760-1860). Lieux, pratiques et
formation des savoirs de l'espace. Lyon: ENS Editions.
BROSSEAU, Marc. 1996. Des Romans-géographes. Paris: L’Harmattan.
The Meeting of Two Practices of Space: Literature and Geography 13
Notes
1
“La littérature est la forme artistique d’une géographie expérimentale.”
(Rosemberg 2007, 261)
2
Juliane Rouassi established a non-exhaustive list of these publications including
the terms “littérature et géographie” or “literature and geography” in her article
“Géocritique, carte et géographie littéraire” (in Clément Lévy and Bertrand
Westphal (eds). 2014. Géocritique : État des lieux / Geocriticism: A Survey.e-
book, fr-eng. Limoges: PULIM, coll. Espaces humains, 222). It includes: Paul
Claval, 1987, “Géographie et littérature. Le thème régional dans la littérature
française”; Jean-Louis Tissier, 1995, “Géographie et littérature”; Marc Brosseau et
Micheline Cambron, 2003, “Entre géographie et littérature : frontières et
perspectives dialogiques”, 2003; Mario Bédard et Christiane Lahaie, 2008,
“Géographie et littérature : entre le topos et la chôra”; Christine Baron, “Littérature
et géographie: lieux, espaces, paysages et écritures”, 2011; Douglas C. D. Pocock,
1977, “Geography and literature”; Yi-Fu Tuan, 1978, “Literature and geography:
implications for geographical research”; John Douglas Porteous, 1985, “Literature
and Humanistic geography; William E. Mallory and Paul Simpson-Housley, 1987,
Geography and Literature: A Meeting of the Disciplines.
3
For more on ecocriticism, see Peraldo 2015.
4
“Geos-graphia: it is the earth, it is writing: the earth related through a world of
scriptural signs.” (Vincent Broqua, in Alamichel and Brossard, 2010, 120, my
translation)
5
A book entitled Teaching Space, Place and Literature is currently being edited
by Robert T. Tally Jr. and it will appear in the Modern Language Association’s
“Options for Teaching” series.
6
Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Exeter: Webb
and Bower, [1727] 1989, 235.
PART 1:
LITERARY CARTOGRAPHY,
LITERARY GEOGRAPHY
AND GEOCRITICISM
CHAPTER ONE:
LITERARY CARTOGRAPHY
1
lake-men, and, of course, a dragon. But, after all of these adventures, the
final scene of novel portrays Bilbo sitting with Gandalf in his cozy little
home at Bag End in Hobbiton, sharing the tobacco-jar with the wizard,
who tells him that, notwithstanding the role he has played in the great
world-historical events of the Third Age of Middle-earth, “You are a very
fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only
quite a little fellow in the wide world after all,” to which Bilbo assents,
“Thank goodness!” (305)
Is it any surprise that, when he writes up the narrative of this
adventure, Bilbo Baggins chooses to name it “There and Back Again”? If
we were to characterize the adventure story as a distinctive literary genre,
we might conclude that the adventure is only accomplished at this point,
with the return (or advent) of the wandering hero. That is, the narrative
becomes an adventure only when this ultimate arrival, often a
homecoming, takes place. Indeed, it cannot be entirely accidental that
Tolkien’s much grander adventure story, The Lord of the Rings – with its
much larger geopolitical and historical range of reference, its
exponentially greater number of characters, toponyms, and plots –
nevertheless ends in the humble homecoming of an adventuring hero. The
sequel to The Hobbit, which had concluded with an altogether homey or
domestic scene, also ends with a hobbit (Sam) returning to the comforts of
hearth and home, ending with these words: “Well, I’m back.” (Tolkien
1986, 340)
Structurally, then, the adventurer sets forth, but only to come home
again, and this homecoming lends color to all that had come before. As in
the greatest adventure of the classical antiquity, the Homeric narrative of
Odysseus’s postwar travels – now unavoidably mediated by Horkheimer
and Adorno’s astonishing reconsideration of it in the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, – the most memorable scenes contain bizarre, exotic, or
otherworldly phenomena and locales, but the bourgeois gentleman’s
arrival and reclamation of his domicile establishes the ultimate stability, or
we might even say, in a Foucauldian key, the “epistemic regularity,” of the
world depicted in the adventure. At this point, perhaps, one is capable of
envisioning a map of the world, charting one’s knowledge of the places
visited and peoples encountered, projecting an overarching diagram of use
for further reflection and exploration. The narrative of adventure thus
becomes a map, a literary cartography of its own world system.
In fact, the adventure does have an epistemic or scientific quality as
well: the protagonist, who is also an observer, sets forth into exotic or
unknown lands, and his or her account brings such places into the register
of geographical and historical knowledge, which can then be brought to
Adventures in Literary Cartography 23
I had a passion for maps. […] At that time there were many blank spaces
on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map
(but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, “When I grow
up I will go there.” (10–11)
all the colours of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red – good to see
at any time, because one knows that some real work is being done in there,
a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East
Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink
the jolly lager-beer. (14–15)
finds this dramatized in the well-nigh constant back and forth between the
adventurer’s dynamic adventures, explorations of exotic lands and
experiences, and the narrative’s almost static moments of description or
“still life” in which the places are rendered more fully visible. (Goethe
referred to these moments in Homer’s Odyssey as “retarding elements” of
the story.) The Hobbit, in its rather episodic form, appears to combine
these in somewhat dramatic ways, as each “scene” nearly stands on its
own, many taking place during a moment of rest or pause, which is thus a
break from the overall narrative trajectory of “there and back again.” The
isolated adventures – for example, among the Trolls, riddling with
Gollum, fighting Spiders, or escaping from the Wood Elves – take place at
various “stops” along the road. Yet, as in Tuan’s example, these pauses are
crucial not only for the narrative’s more general meaning, but also for
lending significance to these places, which can now appear on the
narrative map. Bilbo Baggins’s individual adventures are therefore only a
small part, albeit an essential part, of Tolkien’s broader literary
cartography. In order for the literary cartography of Middle-earth to
emerge from the story of The Hobbit, the existential or phenomenological
registers must be supplemented with a more abstract, theoretical, or
speculative project. The sense of imaginary overview achieved by the
narrative map helps to reinscribe both the experience of the characters and
the topographical features of the imaginary world into a larger geopolitical
and historical system, a system that in turn makes meaningful those
discrete phenomena encountered along the way.
3. Structural Coordinates
Earlier I mentioned the distinction between the itinerary and the map.
In Jameson, the reference comes from his famous discussion of “cognitive
mapping” in his original, influential 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or, the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” which became the first chapter of his
1991 book of that name. Jameson there argues that the dramatic
permutations of lived space occasioned, if not entirely caused, by the
radical restructuring of the world system in an era of late capitalism had
produced a sort of postmodern hyperspace with which individual subjects
are not physically (and certainly are not politically) equipped to deal. The
result is a novel form of existential alienation and political impasse, an
aporia that now stifles even our capacity for imagining potential
alternatives. Analogizing the spatial bewilderment of an individual subject
attempting to move about in an unmappable postmodern space – famously,
it was the 1982 MLA convention held at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los
30 1
“it becomes clear that there can be no true maps,” but “at the same time it
also becomes clear that there can be scientific progress, or better still, a
dialectical advance, in the various historical moments of mapmaking.”
(52) Jameson concludes this digression by returning to the problem of
ideology, noting that “we all necessarily also cognitively map our
individual social relationship to local, national, and international class
realities.” (52) Jameson later conceded that “‘cognitive mapping’ was in
reality nothing but a code word for ‘class consciousness’,” albeit a class
consciousness of a hitherto undreamed of kind, with a consideration of the
“new spatiality implicit in the postmodern.” (418) For Jameson, such a
figurative map – the projection of an imaginary cartography that can
somehow make sense of the social totality – is the necessary if impossible
prerequisite for any meaningfully utopian political or artistic program
today.
My conception of the aesthetic practice of literary cartography draws
upon this vision of cognitive mapping, which, truth be told, is in
Jameson’s own work a kind of supercharged metaphor for something like
narrative itself. The “desire for narrative,” as he once wrote, functions as a
way of mapping our own, existential spatiotemporal finitude onto an
alternative system of space and time, that of the great economic cycles,
natural history, or just History itself (see Jameson 1988, xxviii). The
conflicting, but not ultimately incommensurable, registers of individual
subjective perception and experience, on the one hand, and an abstract,
totalizing or systemic theorizing on the other, are maintained in the literary
cartographic project. The itinerary informs the map, which in turn makes
possible the significance of all those points encountered along the way.
Just because one cannot represent the totality does not mean that one
cannot try; in fact, as Jameson would point out, we do so all the time,
whether we are aware of it or not. And the effort to map the totality is, in
part, what underwrites the more limited sense-making or form-giving
practices of storytelling itself.
Let me return to my poor, unadventurous little hobbit for a minute.
Bilbo Baggins, although loathe to undertake any adventures when we meet
him at the beginning of The Hobbit, was very intrigued by the history and
geography of the wider world; in this, he was apparently unlike most of
his fellow Shire folk, who preferred the comfort of a rather narrow, largely
ignorant Weltanschauung. Like a young Joseph Conrad, Bilbo was partial
to map-gazing, and he delighted in stories of elves, dragons, and other
mythlore. That is, after all, why Gandalf selects him. The wizard knows
that, in this otherwise unassuming person lies a consciousness equipped to
countenance the ineluctable ruses of history, even if he himself does not
32 1
know it yet. The final lines of the book, which I quoted above – “you are
only a very little fellow in a wide world” and “Thank goodness!” – remind
us of the humble origins of Bilbo’s personal adventure, but they also
advert our attention toward the vaster spatiotemporal adventure that
exceeds any individual’s personal experience. (As a side note, the presence
of immortal beings complicates this somewhat, since characters such as
Elrond and Galadriel vividly recall events that took place thousands of
years before, but even among such persons, the overarching geohistory
appears to be beyond anyone’s individual ken.) As we later learn from The
Lord of the Rings and from the immense backstory provided in The
Silmarillion, Tolkien’s little bourgeois burglar participates in what we can
now see is but a brief episode of a much longer epic, extending backward
into prehistory and anticipating further adventures that manifest
themselves only in some dimly descried future. But, then, such is the
nature of all of our adventures.
What emerges from these narratives, even those that follow closely the
itinerary of a wandering protagonist, is a sense of overview, not very
unlike the projection of a map. The bird’s-eye view – or, maybe I should
say, the dragon’s-eye view – makes possible a kind of mapping that can
empower otherwise bewildered or alienated agents to act, if only
tentatively, and based on provisional and transitory information. Amidst
the apparently chaotic and incomprehensible forces and relations affecting
us, the adventurers, on this shifting, unstable terrain, the clarifying
overview of a map-like figure is frequently needed. Like Oedipa Mass in
Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, alone in the planetarium and
utterly bewildered by the circumstances in which she finds herself, we
might well decide to “project a world”; as she concludes, “Anything might
help.” (1966, 82)
The map, as so many politically engaged critics have correctly
observed, is itself a tool that can be wielded by powerful interests against
the powerless, and geography – like other sciences and arts – has
undoubtedly been complicit in various regimes of domination, from
straightforwardly imperialist appropriations of territory to more subtle
redistributions of power and knowledge relations across an array of social
institutions and spaces. For these reasons, some have found the “map”
form to be inherently repressive. Certeau suggests as much in his famous
analysis of “Walking in the City,” where he finds the urban itineraries of
the pedestrians, postmodern variants on Baudelaire’s flâneurs, to be free,
liberatory, or revolutionary activities, resistant to the panoptic, ultimately
static vision of the map, the view from above from some “Solar Eye.” The
view from above, in Certeau’s reckoning, freezes the fluid mobility of the
Adventures in Literary Cartography 33
References
ARAC, Jonathan. 2005. The Emergence of American Literary Narrative,
1820–1860. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
AUERBACH, Erich. 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature. Willard R. Trask (trans.). Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
BAKHTIN, Mikhaïl. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds and trans.). Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Adventures in Literary Cartography 35
BARTHES, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Stephen Heath (trans.). New
York: Hill and Wang.
CERTEAU, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Steven Randall
(trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
CONRAD, Joseph. 1926. “Geography and Some Explorers.” Last Essays.
London: J.M. Dent, 1–31.
—. 1969. Heart of Darkness. New York: Bantam Books.
—. 2012. “An Outpost of Progress.” Tales of Unrest. Allan H. Simmons
and J. H. Stape (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 75–
100.
DELEUZE, Gilles, and Félix GUATTARI. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Brian
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—. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
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—. 1992. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World
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36 1
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2
FABRIZIO DI PASQUALE
In other words, the novel establishes a relationship with reality that goes
beyond embellishment and mere imitation, so the map could
metaphorically represent its “frame”, its embodiment. As far as Galveston
is concerned, the description of its geography allows the reader to create
an outline also suitable for the map. This way, we have at our disposal
several options for the exploration and representation of space, due to the
relationship of analogies we wish to establish with the examined novel.
40 2
The analysis of the novel and its tropes offers the opportunity to utilize the
map as a fast and useful reading tool, in which it is possible to highlight,
thanks to the use of graphic symbols, the locations and the itineraries Roy
Cady crosses (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Galveston. Modified from West Central States and States of the Plains,
Southern Division, 1887.
Source: http://www.usgwarchives.net/maps/texas/misc/1887txarea.jpg
geysered hot over my face and mouth. I left the blade in and fell behind
him as the other two raised guns. One shot at me and smacked plaster off a
wall as the other fired at Angelo and the top of his pompadour flew off and
he fell to his knees. They both fired at me. The shots went thwap like
pneumatic bolts and all struck the third man. He spasmed at the bullets, the
blade still in his neck. My gun was right in front of me, stuck in the man’s
waistband. I pulled it out and raised it and fired through the blood fountain
at the closest one. I didn’t have time to actually aim, and I was half-blind
with arterial spray, but I hit him in the throat and he twitched and fired and
dropped backward. I never shot like that in my life. […] The last man
looked at his gun, his foot, and then at me, just as I shot him in the head.
The whole thing took maybe five seconds. Smoke spread over the foyer
like ground fog. The top of Angelo’s face had broken off, his cheeks
slicked with tears and blood. I threw up. The girl in the chair cried louder,
made a moaning sound. (Pizzolatto 2014, 18-19)
I found the address Stan had given me, a sinkhole apartment building next
to a line of warehouses: pale, graffitied brick, high weeds and crabgrass
blending into the vacant lot next door. Clunkers in the parking lot, that air
of oil and hot garbage that circles New Orleans. […] I slipped in and shut
the door. A small place with a couple pieces of furniture and trash
everywhere, newspapers and a ton of old racing forms, fast-food wrappers,
a dial television with a cracked screen. Empty bottles of well-brand vodka
stood along the counter. I always did hate a slob. (Pizzolatto 2014, 10)
Chance and need4 are the elements that determine the connection among
3
the characters, while the city turns into a suffocating place, a sort of “a
sunken anvil that sustained its own atmosphere.” (Pizzolatto 2014, 4) The
42 2
The earliest maps are thought to have been created to help people find their
way and to reduce their fear of the unknown. […] Now as then, we record
great conflicts and meaningful discoveries. We organize information on
maps in order to see our knowledge in a new way. As a result, maps
suggest explanations; and while explanations reassure us, they also inspire
us to ask more questions, consider other possibilities. To ask for a map is
to say “tell me a story”. Writing is often discussed as two separate acts.
[…]
One is the act of exploration […] and this includes scribbling notes,
considering potential scenes, lines, or images, inventing characters, even
writing drafts. […]
The other act of writing we might call presentation. Applying knowledge,
skill, and talent, we create a document meant to communicate with, and
have an effect on, others. (Turchi 2004, 11-12)
In this logical system, our map defines itself through leitmotivs regarding
the wide-ranging organization of the local geographical complex and its
dynamics. The notions of direction, movement, and more generally all
those dynamic phenomena within the concept of space are explained here
through lines. If we carefully observe the picture, it will be possible to
notice that the combination of lines and dots, if connected the ones with
the others, traces a pattern, it becomes a sort of “texture”, in some ways
very similar to a “carte-réseau” (Network Interface Card). Our literary
map has a place in a system of knowledge, showing a specific image of the
world reflecting the author’s point of view and his perception of reality
and representing the place where reality and imagination meet. In fact,
each map is able to reconcile “historical diachrony” and “spatial
synchrony”, thus preserving its function as a “stratigraphic space.”
(Westphal 2011b, 66-67)
Within this graphic system, the road appears to be an essential element,
in that it shows the characters’ journeys and traces the distances within
space itself. In addition, it marks the beginning and the end of a
geographical and yet existential trip. The chronotope of the street, as it is
connected to temporal and spatial relationships, then acquires a physical
and symbolical value.
The author describes streets such as Highway 90 and Pontchartrain
Expressway in a very detailed manner every time he talks about them.
They become the emblematic space in which Roy Cady moves and in
which his escape is fulfilled. However, the streets are mostly a meeting
point among the several urban spaces and the surrounding territories. In
fact, these allow the relocation from the city to the countryside or to the
coast, towards a wild and abandoned nature, characterized by stretches of
cotton fields:
44 2
I drove across the Pontchartrain Expressway and left the radio off and my
thoughts hummed like a bee’s wings. Gretna. On Franklin street I
wondered when the last time I did things would be. Every beat of sunlight
that struck the windshield as the trees passed kind of demanded that I
appreciate it, I can’t say that I did. I tried to conceive of not existing, but I
didn’t have the imagination for it. I felt that same choking and hopeless
sense as when I was twelve, thirteen, staring down the long fields of
cotton. (Pizzolatto 2014, 9)
The streets accompany the protagonist’s thoughts and, sometimes, are seen
as true monsters that spoil the landscape. I-10, for example, is described in
the novel as a prehistorical snake hanging onto waters:
Her body washed up on Rabbit Island, this empty patch of forest in the
middle of Prien Lake where the I-10 cantilevered over the waters. […] Old
hopes bayed like ghost dogs inside me, just the old frustrations, old
resentments and I was pissed to find them at my heels this morning,
tracking me across the years. I got up to have a smoke and left Rocky
curled on the bed. A snapped pine craned over the parking lot and marked
the beginning of a weedy field that fell down into a shallow ravine full of
broken bottles and burst garbage bags. (Pizzolatto 2014, 46)
The roads that Roy Cady travels are the interpretation of the events that
unfold around him and in the meantime express that relationship existing
between the space and the time of the narration. For instance, a cyclical
and slow motion of time is associated with the countryside, while a
dynamic and fast paced motion of time is associated with big cities,
whereas suspended time characterizes internal settings.
If on the one hand the street dictates the temporal rhythm, on the other
hand it allows most of all to highlight the different feeling involving the
characters, seen as a sort of psychological and sensorial path. This way,
the concepts of “internal journey” and “external journey” are established
in a direct and suggestive and, at times, symbolic relation with some
geographical areas, such as in our case Louisiana and Southern Texas.
These two areas actually represent the sensorial spaces of the novel, those
through which the protagonist’s perceptions, as well as all the negative
and positive impressions are clearly manifested. The reader’s perception of
space is particularly negative. Sure enough, as we can infer by looking at
the map, Pizzolatto’s world is mainly dystopian.
Cartography and the Contemporary American Novel 45
Depending on the places we passed, the night around us shaded from ink
black to red and purple to a washed-out yellow that hung like gauze in
front of the dark, like you could see the dark sitting under the light, and
then it would be back to ink black, and the air would change smells from
sea salt to pine pulp to ammonia and burning oil. Trees and marshland
crowded us and we passed over the Atchafalaya Basin, a long bridge
suspended over a liquid murk, and I thought about the dense congestion of
vines and forest when I was a kid, how the green and leafy things had
seemed so full of shadows, and how it had felt like half the world was
hidden in those shadows. Refinery towers burned in the night and their trail
of bright gray smoke made me picture Loraine sitting on that beach in
Galveston, with her head cradled on my chest, telling her about the cotton
fields. (Pizzolatto 2014, 28-29)
The land we passed split like a shattered clay tablet into grassy islands and
all the dark, muddy water spread down to the Gulf in the southern distance.
The sunlight glazed ripples and mud shallows with white fire. We crossed
Sulphur and the petroleum refineries, a kingdom of piping and concrete,
noxious odors. She stopped singing and turned off the radio. […] She
narrowed her eyes at the windshield and then turned to look at the broken
cypress trees that passed like brown bones reaching out the mud.
(Pizzolatto 2014, 51-52)
in Louisiana, huge and polluted prairies in Texas, where fast food chains,
gas stations, refineries, leafy contours of oak and willow trees, and rusty
trailers dominate the landscape:
A green sign said Orange was eight miles away. […] She folded her
fingers on her purse and sighed. All this rolling world of kudzu and bony
trees and black water seemed to mean something to her, the way it meant
things to me, and she watched out the window with a surrendering gaze.
For both of us the landscape had a gravity that tugged us backward in time,
possessed us with people we used to be. We passed a small main street of
shabby food joints, a gas station, credit union. High, wild grasses. […] The
flat prairie stabbed outward to the sky, crowded at the fringes with bushy
trees, whiffs of ammonia and wet wood. The very air in these parts is so
bright, it actually collects light, and you have to squint even when looking
at the ground. […] In this climate all things seek shade, and so a basic
quality of the Deep South is that everything here is partially hidden.
(Pizzolatto 2014, 53)
The stories have become the place. I read a writer who said that stories
save us, but of course that’s bullshit. They don’t. […] Farther out, the gray
cypress of the pier has rotted and the boards are broken and collapse into
the brassy fog. A few gulls perch on the posts near the end of the thing,
their chests out like tiny presidents. Fiddler crabs scuttle away from my
feet. The calm, rhythmic slap of the tide. You can see the winds building
farther out in the Gulf – the sky beginning to stir in a very slow, sweeping,
churn. […] Bramble and thistle crust the dunes, and a barge crawls out the
fog toward the shipping canals, slides across my good eye. (Pizzolatto
2014, 68-69)
In 2008. I’m walking my dog on the beach. Trying to. I can’t walk fast or
well. […] Right here and to the south the bronze fog in the morning
appears endless, and the dusky color of it makes me think of sandstorms
blowing in from far out in the Gulf waters, as if a desert sat beyond the
Cartography and the Contemporary American Novel 47
horizon, and to watch the shrimp boats and jack-ups and supertankers
materialize from it, you think you must be seeing another plane of
existence breaking through to this one, and all of it freighted with history.
(Pizzolatto 2014, 65)
The gale whips the rain into stinging darts, and the clouds turn the
afternoon dark as a widow’s dress. The heavy air teems with ozone and
seawater. It snaps and crackles into the distance, and flares pop over the
ocean as if the sky had swallowed dynamite. At its heaving rim I can
almost make out another darkness, a form of denser black slouching up
from the horizon in a shape I can’t imagine. Branches scraping the boarded
windows sound like something trying to claw its way inside, and the wind
howls like the voice of that animal, a low, wounded moan. It’s been twenty
years. I was worried I’d live forever. (Pizzolatto 2014, 257-258)
Conclusion
This analysis demonstrates how every novel is a map, every map tells a
story, and every story is connected to a territory. The criteria that were
used in our map comply with the intent to create a graphic model, which is
as concise and as faithful to the themes described in Pizzolatto’s novel.
Cartography, or mapping, aims to reproduce an image as a form of a
reading experience and explore the full potential of the map seen as a
perceptive organ of reality capable of reflecting the mental attitudes of a
society, its cultural horizons, and its interpretation of the world. Overall,
48 2
even if the cartographic production is not reality, this can lead to the truth
and to the image transmitted by the literary text. Literary maps present a
subjective and selective interpretation of reality and can be designed to
advance a viewpoint or agenda.
The comprehension of a literary map is a creative process allowing the
readers to identify the codes of intrasignification and extrasignification of
the narration. Therefore, regarding contemporary American crime fiction,
the places shown on the map act as semiotic indicators. In other words,
they pose as lived spaces and they are produced through senses, capable to
translate a particular socio-geographical condition. Writers incorporate
maps into their work as illustrations or metaphors, by turns embracing and
troubling the territorial imperatives that maps represent, and writing itself
becomes a form of cartography. This way, the geocritical approach
recognizes narration essentially as a cartographic activity and vice versa.
References
BROSSEAU, Marc. 1996. Des Romans-géographes. Paris: L’Harmattan.
BUELL, Lawrence. 2003. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature,
Culture and Environment in the U. S. and Beyond. Cambridge
Massachusetts, London England: Harvard University Press.
IRWIN, John Thomas. 2006. Unless the Threat of Death is behind them:
Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
PIZZOLATTO, Nic. 2014. Galveston. London: Sphere, Little Brown Book
Group.
TALLY Jr., Robert. 2013. Spatiality. The New Critical Idiom. New York:
Routledge.
TURCHI, Peter. 2004. Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as
Cartographer. San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University Press.
WESTPHAL, Bertrand. 2011a. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces.
Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
—. 2011b. Le Monde plausible. Paris: Les Editions De Minuit.
Further Reading
HARLEY, John Brian. 2001. The New Nature of Maps. Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
HARVEY, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the
Urban Revolution. London: Verso Books.
Cartography and the Contemporary American Novel 49
Notes
1
To better understand this aspect, it is necessary to delve into the representation of
the urban space and verify the influence that this new environment carries out onto
the narrative texts. In fact, by drawing on hard-boiled novels, cinema will be
mostly play, thus making visible, the constant urbanistic, topographic, and social
changes of the megalopolis.
2
In the French edition of the book, the author states: “La trame n’est pas un simple
‘circonstant’, ni le pur produit de l’action. C’est donc sur une double organisation
du sens de l’espace, et la tension qui s’installe en ces deux pôles, que l’intrigue
trouve son moteur et l’œuvre, son statut symbolique: celle du narrateur, d’une part,
qui pose une première interprétation de la topologie, de l’autre, celle(s) des
personnages qui, tant dans leurs actions que leurs perceptions des lieux, informent
cet espace de significations multiples". (Brosseau 1996, 88)
3
The map presents itself as a mark for the literary text, for which its capacity of
reflection and metacommunication is the most important trait. According to this
point of view, the location described establishes an iconic and symbolic relation
with the novel itself.
4
On these two aspects a clarification is necessary. In the examined texts, chance
and necessity are conceived only in a literary sense, as conditioning elements,
whether they might be positive or negative, as the narrative story and the
existential paths of the characters. Here, chance is a game of probability, while
necessity comes out of the “survival instinct”. A constant of Pizzolatto’s novel is
represented by movement: Every character is either stalked or is a stalker, running
away out of necessity and being in danger or safe only out of chance. On a
philosophical, ethical, and mathematical point of view, both concepts take on
different meanings.
CHAPTER TWO:
GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATIONS:
TIME, SPACE AND IMAGINATION
3
ANNA MADOEUF
The title and setting of Murder on the Orient Express, one of Agatha
Christie’s best-known detective novels, published in 1934, are taken from
this emblematic train1. The best-selling novel is both inspired by and part
of the myth, contributing to the fantasy about the king of trains, the train
of kings2. Many international celebrities have traveled on it, including the
Emperor Haile Selassie, Josephine Baker, Leopold II, Mata Hari, Isadora
Duncan, Lawrence of Arabia, Agatha Christie herself, and… James Bond3.
The Orient Express, “the Maltese Falcon of international express trains”4,
is without doubt the train that has been the source of the greatest literary
inspiration, for example in the work of Joseph Kessel, Paul Morand,
Colette, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, John Dos Passos, and Ernest
Hemingway. In fact, the story of the Orient Express began at its
inauguration, with the journalist Edmond About’s account of the epic
initial journey on 4th October 1883, when it steamed out of the Gare de
l’Est (known at the time as the Gare de Strasbourg) in Paris to the sound of
Mozart’s Turkish March, for a journey of approximately 80 hours and
3200 kilometers5. From its creation to the present day, it has been the
setting and source of endless stories, from journalistic accounts to novels,
Murder on the Orient Express 53
The plot of Murder on the Orient Express may be original, but the
singularity of this narrative lies somewhere else, in the mechanisms of the
staging of space, time and the illusion of movement.
My aim is thus to draw a parallel between that geo-literary mechanism
end the creations of the Alexander Calder, carver (1898-1976) that were
instigated and animated by that triptych (space/time/movement). Calder
did indeed create constructions that were said to be mobile for some of
them (as they were suspended in the air), and stabile for others (as if they
were suspended on the ground), or even mobile and stabile at the same
time (hybrid shapes).The stabile can only be imagined as a follow-up of
the mobile, being in a way its antonym. The latter only exists through its
instability, whereas the stabile ossifies in its own object a denial of fixity.
Between the two possible shapes, all the asymmetrical tones of an
unbalanced balance, and vice versa can be observed, from the most
constructed to the most unstructured. These objects, mobile and stabile,
also denote an obsession with time, in the questions it raises, in its
manifestations, expressed in his way by Calder, the artist who “carves
times”, as Jacques Prévert said. (1971, 3) The movement of these
constructions is time, whose energy is created by mobility, whose
evolution is composed of the interaction of stable and mobile things. This
essay will hence make use of the qualities of these artefacts to imagine the
action mechanisms, the places and the landscapes of Murder on the Orient
Express as determining and interpretative configurations of spatial
situations. For that aim, we need to travel back to the beginning of the
1930s, have a seat in that fictional train leaving from Stamboul and going
to the suspense of the criminal plot imagined by Agatha Christie.
also where the shuffling ballets and codified rituals of boarding and
alighting occur, but they are not treated as features of the modernity of the
time, obligatory thresholds of passage and arrival, but rather as non-places
breaking the journey. Aleppo station, for example, is described as follows:
“Nothing to see, of course. Just a long, poor-lighted platform with loud
furious altercations in Arabic going on somewhere.”13 (9) Belgrade is
dismissed in a similarly terse manner:
The two platforms, symbols of the cities quoted, are uninteresting and
hostile: foreign voices and no lighting on one, cold and snow on the other.
The stations are not used to introduce reminiscences or parallel erudite
comments. They merely serve as props to re-set universal time, incidental,
ill-defined spaces, apparently imperfect, which are neither exotic nor
firmly standardized. The station is “outside and inside” the town (Sansot
1973, 85), but here, is it even part of the country to which it belongs?
Sirkeci station in Istanbul, even though it is where the story starts, is not
even mentioned; it is just the departure point, and the departure itself is
only indicated by the movement of the train along the platform: “There
was a sudden jerk. Both men swung round to the window, looking out at
the long, lighted platform as it slid slowly past them.” (20) A station is just
a station; it can even be reduced to a platform. Ultimately, a country is
concentrated into a city, which in turn becomes a station, summed up in a
platform, which becomes a track. In other words, it is a synthesis of the
entire space, masterfully reduced to a geometric outline. And yet, Agatha
Christie’s story is based on a remarkable journey, starting in Syria on a
Sunday morning and finishing in Croatia (then Yugoslavia) the following
Wednesday. In only four days, they travel a dizzying 2,000 kilometers
(from Aleppo to Vincovci) through stations, towns, plains, mountains,
straits, regions, frontiers, countries and even continents; explicitly a vast
area, but only implicitly hinted at. Murder on the Orient Express has all
the appeal and appearance of a travel novel, but it is far from being such,
or at least, it does not provide any geographical account.
As observed by Guy Laflèche when analysing the novel as material for
a narrative grammar: “The geography is that of crossword puzzles.” (1999,
104) In fact, only nine places are named, but not described: six stations
(Aleppo, Konya, two in Istanbul – one in Asia and one in Europe,
Murder on the Orient Express 57
(Clues: the connection between the Taurus and the Orient Express taken by
Hercule Poirot was created in 1930, and the novel was published in 1934.)
Season: Winter. It was very cold in Aleppo station, it was snowing in Belgrade,
and the train was caught in snow in Croatia, for the first time of the season. With
regard to the number of passengers, it was low season, and according to a director
of the railway company, the train should have been half empty.
Timescale: The story unfolds over 4 days (from the departure at 5 o’clock on
Sunday morning to the final stop, at about 11 o’clock the following Wednesday
night) and approximately 1,900 kilometers from the point of departure, Aleppo in
Syria, to where the train comes to a stop, somewhere between Vincovci and Brod
in Croatia (890 km from Aleppo to Istanbul, 810 km from Istanbul to Belgrade,
150 km from Belgrade to Vincovci, 65 km from Vincovci to Brod).
On reaching Istanbul, Hercule Poirot crosses the Bosphorus by boat from Asia to
Europe; on arrival at the Galata Bridge, he was driven to the Tokatlian Hotel in
Pera (where Agatha Christie stayed, and which was destroyed in the 1950s).
– Tokatlian Hotel, Pera, Monday, between approx. 7.30 and 8.30 p.m.
– Belgrade station (where the coach from Athens was attached), arrival Tuesday
8.45 p.m., departure 9.15 p.m.
– Vincovci station (where the coach from Bucarest was attached), Wednesday,
about 10 minutes after midnight.
– Between Vincovci and Brod, Wednesday from 12.30 a.m. until the dénouement,
the evening of the same day (the end of the book). The train is snowbound. Had it
not been delayed, it should have arrived in Brod at 12.58 a.m.
– After dinner, the travelers assemble in the restaurant car where Hercule Poirot
draws his conclusions and where the novel ends.
breaking it down into two separate journeys, with different directions and
periods of time. Two starting points, polar opposites in a scalar sequence
of events; two sequences materialized by the elastic movement and
direction of the rebound: there and back. The return journey is essential,
and any delays or disruptions are feared and dramatized. With great
subtlety, Agatha Christie set her story explicitly in the context of the return
journey. This defused and forestalled any excitement associated with
traveling, preventing it from disturbing or interfering with her railway
plot. The return is not a journey of discovery, and thus the meaning of the
journey loses its interest and becomes dull, blunting the vividness of the
landscape. Taking a journey means going somewhere, but what about
coming back? The return is the finalisation of the journey.
“Snow?”
“But yes, Monsieur. Monsieur has not noticed? The train has stopped.
We have run into a snowdrift. Heaven knows how long we shall be here. I
remember once being snowed up for seven days.”
“Where are we?”
“Between Vincovci and Brod.”
“Là là”, said Poirot vexedly. (31)
References
ABOUT, Edmond. 2007. L’Orient-Express. Paris: Magellan et Cie, coll.
Heureux qui comme.
CALDER, Alexander and Jacques PREVERT. 1971. Fêtes. Paris: éd. Maeght.
CHRISTIE, Agatha. 1968. Le Crime de l’Orient-Express. Paris: Librairie
des Champs-Elysées, Livre de Poche.
—. 1975. Mort sur le Nil. Paris: Librairie des Champs-Elysées, Livre de
Poche.
GREENE, Graham. 1979. Orient-Express. Paris: Robert Laffont, coll. 10-
18, domaine étranger.
LAFLECHE, Guy. 1999. Matériaux pour une grammaire narrative. Laval:
Les Cahiers universitaires du Singulier n°1.
LOTI, Pierre. 2010. Fantôme d’Orient. Paris: éd. Phebus, coll. Libretto.
PÉREC, Georges. 1974, Espèces d’espaces. Paris: Galilée, coll. l’espace
critique.
ROUX, Céline. 2007. Danse(s) performative(s). Paris: L’harmattan, coll.
Le corps en question.
SANSOT, Pierre. 1973. Poétique de la ville. Paris: éd. Klincksieck.
Further Reading
Il était une fois l’Orient Express. Catalogue de l’exposition tenue à
l’Institut du Monde arabe à Paris. 2014. Paris: SNCF, IMA, Snoeck.
MADOEUF, Anna, and Raffaele Cattedra (eds). 2012. Lire les villes.
Panoramas du monde urbain contemporain. Tours: Presses
Universitaires François-Rabelais, coll. Perspectives Villes et Territoires.
PAMUK, Orhan. 2007. Istanbul: Souvenirs d’une ville. Paris: Gallimard.
LASSAVE, Pierre. 2002. Sciences sociales et littérature. Concurrence,
complémentarité, interférence. Paris: PUF, coll. Sociologie
d’aujourd’hui.
LONDRES, Albert. 1985. Si je t’oublie Constantinople. Paris: Union
générale d’éd., 10-18, série Grands reporters.
ROSEMBERG Muriel. 2012. Le Géographique et le littéraire. Contribution
de la littérature aux savoirs sur la géographie: Habilitation à diriger
des recherches. Paris: Université de Paris 1.
SAÏD, Edward W. 1980. L’Orientalisme: L’Orient créé par l’Occident.
Paris: Seuil.
SERVANTIE, Alain. 2003. Le Voyage à Istanbul : Byzance, Constantinople,
Istanbul du Moyen Âge au XXe siècle. Paris: éd. complexe.
62 3
Notes
1
Quotations from the book are taken from the edition published by Fontana 1959
(16th impression, 1976).
2
A film of the novel was made by Sidney Lumet in 1974, with an all-star cast.
More recently, a number of Agatha Christie’s novels have been produced as
comic-strip books, including Le Crime de l’Orient-Express, by François Rivière
and Solidor, published by Emmanuel Proust in 2003. There is also a video game
named after the train and which uses its décor as a setting.
3
In the film From Russia with Love (1963), based on the novel by Ian Fleming
(1957).
4
As described by Douglas Kennedy, 1988, Beyond the Pyramids.
5
The Orient Express was the brainchild of a Belgian businessman, Georges
Nagelmackers, who founded the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits et des
Grands Express Européens in 1884. The train was then called the Express d’Orient
and was renamed the Orient Express in 1891.
6
As still shown today by the success of the exhibition “Il était une fois l’Orient-
Express” at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (April – August 2014).
7
It was in one of the train’s carriages that both the armistice of 11th November
1918 and the capitulation of France on 22nd June 1940 were signed. The route has
varied considerably, from the initial route through Strasbourg, Munich, Vienna,
Budapest, Bucarest and Varna (crossing the Black Sea), to the most southerly route
(following the opening of the Simplon tunnel) taken by the train on which Hercule
Poirot travelled (Belgrade, Trieste, Venice, Milan, Lausanne, Paris Gare de Lyon).
8
Pierre Loti, Fantôme d’Orient, 57.
9
Agatha Christie (1890-1976) travelled to Baghdad in 1928; returning from
Nineveh in 1931, she took the Simplon Orient Express in the other direction and
was delayed by problems caused by bad weather. She used this experience and an
episode in January 1929 when the train was snowed up in eastern Thrace for four
days. The plot was based on elements of the sensational Lindbergh affair (the
kidnapping and murder of the son of the famous American aviator in 1932), as the
victim of the Murder on the Orient Express, Samuel Edward Ratchett alias
Cassetti, had murdered a child.
10
In the novel, the city is called either Stamboul (name of the old town of the
historic peninsula) or Constantinople, a name that was no longer used after 1926,
when the name Istanbul was imposed by the Turkish authorities but never in fact
adopted by Agatha Christie.
11
Agatha Christie married the archeaologist Max Mallowan in 1930, and
subsequently, several of her most famous novels were set in the East, where she
spent long periods. After Murder on the Orient Express, Hercule Poirot figured in
other oriental mysteries: Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) set in Tell Yarimjah
(Iraq), Death on the Nile (1937) in Upper Egypt, and Appointment with Death
Murder on the Orient Express 63
(1938) between Jerusalem and Petra. They came to Baghdad (1952), published
after the war, whose heroine is a young woman from London, is a spy story set in
Baghdad.
12
The Simplon tunnel in Switzerland was built in 1906. After the First World War,
the train was called the Simplon-Orient-Express, and its new route was London -
Calais (or Boulogne) - Paris - Vallorbe - Lausanne - Simplon - Milan - Venice -
Trieste – Zagreb. At Vinkovci, there were two alternative routes: Bucarest-
Constanza-Odessa and Belgrade-Constantinople-Athens.
13
A comment made at the very beginning of the novel (8), when Hercule Poirot
boards the Taurus Express in Aleppo bound for Constantinople (which makes up
the first part of the novel). The Taurus Express, inaugurated in 1930, crossed
Anatolia and linked Constantinople to Aleppo, where it branched into two, one line
going to Damascus, the other to Baghdad.
14
Vinkovci and Brod are towns in Croatia, 63 km apart, located respectively in the
county of Vukovar-Srijem and in Slavonia. In relation to the route of the train,
Vinkovci is 150 km from Belgrade going towards Zagreb.
4
T.COANUS, I. LEFORT
entrails, the scouring of every corner and grain of the materials that
compose it. Alive but able to breathe only in acquaintance with human
labour, this machinery watches over the sea like an immobilized boat in
charge of the maintenance of maritime order and the safeguard of men.
The human suffuses the lighthouse’s windows and stones.
This point – this place vis clearly situated, and its eminence over the
Ocean affords it an overlooking position: Such is its very function. Yet
while this landscape, rare though often researched by geographers,8 could
have given rise to spectacular panoramic views in an essentially
descriptive vein, it is not what is being exploited and worked on here. No,
the 360° panoptic viewpoint rarely intervenes in the text. It does so for the
first time only midway through, after the test of bad weather (the test of
place) has made it possible to face not the storm outside, but the intimate
one (the test of self) within an I that is beginning to find its place:
I am going to watch the other lights from the gallery. This landscape of
mine bears specific names. It is made of different lights that lie in the night
in their proper place. To the north, the beacons of Ouessant: the white
flashes of La Jument and Créac'h, the red ones of Le Stiff and Kéréon. In
the channel of Fromveur: Pierres Noires and Le Four. Sometimes, over
there in the English Channel: the light beam of Ile Vierge. On the coast:
Saint-Matthieu, Minou, Portzic, and further down the cursed lighthouse of
Tévennec—the wonderful white house, alone and abandoned on that rock,
where I once lived an entire day—but also La Plate and La Vieille in the
strait of Raz de Sein, the green Cornoc-an-ar-Braden at the entrance of
Port de Sein, Audierne, Penmarc'h. And to the West, the white glow—six
seconds, three seconds—of the Bouée Occidentale. All the landmarks of
my night, boat lights running to each other: In these words, I breathe
freely9 (87-8810).
light comes, and then vanishes when it goes. Thus, it is time, in its
duration (day/night succession) and in its “quality” and texture
(visibility/opacity), which constitutes space and the architect. “Time
surfaces” (Virilio 1984, 15) in that it produces in Armen a specific
chronotope, always moving and always shifting, like the surface of water
that never looks the same. Between this point and the surrounding
maritime expanse are immaterial lines – those of the sheltering sunlight
that wraps itself with or emerges from the clouds, the white glow that
flashes three times every twenty seconds, but also the beams and streaks
that show the way and bring forth the place in its location. The place,
Armen, is born of light.11
To save some eggs, we have started eating dried fish. I opened the large
crate this evening and desalinated a nice piece of conger. The lighthouse is
filled with its strong smell. (46)
Martin managed to make an omelette, fries, a bland rice cake, and since
there was some rum left, we tried to make island-style prune tea at the end.
It had a taste of sulphur. (58)
duration, punctuated by the rites and rhythms of watches and tasks. The
double tension between place/space, on the one hand, and instant/duration,
on the other, constructs a sort of homothety between the two variables of
the chronotope. But for Armen/Armen, the temporal category is
unquestionably a factor of the variability and constitution of space, as well
as of action. Time subsumes place and gestures. Repetitive yet random,
uninterrupted yet discretized (working time, resting time), it inscribes one
of the questions at the heart of Armen’s literary tension in the duration of
continued human experience: How to render and capture the fragment of
place in the fragment of time. Yet if one considers that the restitution of
activity can overcome the plurality of tasks by producing a functional unit,
then there is, in this text, unity of place, time and action – the triple unity
of classical dramaturgy. A drama, and hence an action, is indeed unfolding
in Armen. This action is a movement whose gestures – and writing is one
such gesture – make sense in both their fleeting urgency and their
repetition. There is no longer a vectorization in space, but an equally
discontinuous and fragmented vectorization of the I/narrator, or, more
precisely, of a narrator in search of an I. This is because the text
solves/tends to solve the fracture of the “in-between”: between the
emotionality of the moment and the patience of duration, between place
and horizon, between the salience of highpoints and sacrifice in work.
There is passion in endurance.
3. Nested Chronotopes
The space-time of Armen (and Armen) is a mise en abyme, for the
present carries within itself the past of other places and other experiences.
It could not be otherwise. Armen/Armen contains nested space-times
whose memory is charged, and whose resurgence, voluntary or not,
permeates one’s presence to the place. Thus, in the second part of the text,
the second stay ashore is inscribed, unlike the first, in the form of
fragmented memories. The immediate places of the lighthouse are also
filled with – and enfold – mediated places from a more or less distant
elsewhere: Ile de Sein during a shift change, but also doubly mediated
places. These are from three carefully chosen books: one on a Cistercian
monastery whose name we will not know, a collection of poems by Pierre
Reverdy (Main-d’œuvre, 1949), and a volume devoted to the paintings of
Vermeer.
The link between the lighthouse and the cloister is clear enough: A
space of enclosure as well as light, of crowded solitude, meditation and
work, hardship and forbearance – an elevated place for the tending of
The Place of the Enigma: Time and Space in ArMen (1967) 69
silent. Every day of one’s life, doing the same thing, at the same time.
Friars. Counting on rituals, on the cold, on hunger, on violent desires to
reduce the gap. What gap? (57)
But how to talk about Vermeer? When faced with what I love, I am
overpowered by an anguish that prohibits all haughty comment. At best I
can go from image to image, return, prowl, watch those faces without
being seen. It is then that the worst in me is activated. (…) Museum Guard.
Prison guard. Guard of a disused monastery. (65)
Even the rain is traveling. Nothing will stop here. We possess nothing. We
watch, observing passages, tracking the traces of an incomprehensible
carousel. We see the wind turn and the ebb tide lose its strength, find its
balance, then flow again. Everything starts anew. (…) The time for lighting
has come. In a thousand years from now, the dashboard will be the same.
(102)
Yet early on in the book, clues reveal that the presence of the narrator is in
no way fortuitous:
The weather was the same when I first saw Armen. The sea was grey, as it
always is when sailing on a warship. I thought I recognized the place. I
wanted to live in this lighthouse. This was the best way for me to no longer
see it. When I set foot the first time on the toy dock, I felt at home. But I
remember little of this whole period. (17)
But in the worst moments, I know that nothing in the world could force me
to leave. One thing is undeniable: the impression that I am in my proper
place. For the rest, the uncertainty that now so rightly guides me is not
weighed down with unnecessary words; it does not let itself be seduced. I
constantly feel its needle prick. Surely, it is all much simpler than I think. I
have to sleep. I must blow out the lantern. (41)
Lighting takes place a little earlier each night. The long nights are coming.
There is no need to worry about anything now. The depression forecast in
the south, which is coming straight towards us, most likely marks the
beginning of a long series. We must close everything, put bars on the door
and wait. Somebody in me must not come out of here alive. (19)
I walked for a long time on the gallery, watching the horizon. I did not feel
comfortable in the watch chamber. My lantern bothered me, I think. Even
now that my shift has ended, the flame remains still on the old desk:
Nothing is more distant, more foreign. How to approach it? How
transparent must one be? Is the desert not enough? A total desert, my
lantern, its circle and its high walls. Winter is just beginning. One will need
even longer nights, endless rains; one must learn how to go and return, like
the current and the wind. (25)
Will I be able to sleep before midnight? The wind presses against the
window. The lantern is distant again. To approach it, one must push
through the drought. Retaining in oneself only the severe trembling.
Obviously this country is not for thieves. (41)
I will do nothing more tonight. Things are not going very well. This is
what I meant to say. (9)
Will I continue to write like this without knowing why? For three nights, I
seem to have been keeping vigil over a deceased with my lantern. I make
knots in my hair until, exasperated, I cut them off. I will look at myself in
the mirror. (13)
I hardly feel more confident tonight. I am not sure that I can continue. And
yet, I have found in myself for this battle of words a zone of intense
activity—an essential zone, surely. If this were not the case, I would not be
so beaten. (…) And I hate the sentences—weak, drawn out—that I have
been writing today; I would like them to burn, instantly, to become black
and twisted, like a lit blade of grass, the running red point; I would like
them dead. (…) All this brief past, all these winter months, are akin to a
scorched heath. Further, much further behind, a landscape still stirs; some
days search for their high noon in the future. Might the exact use of words,
which I have just discovered, offer it to them? (95-96)
Savage words. I do not know how to surprise them. I can only be attentive,
ensure their passage. I think I am wasting time; something else pushes me.
When words finally emerge, I lag far behind. (134)
10 pm. Clet is afraid. He talks far too much. I cannot answer him and I see
he is getting increasingly frantic. He no longer shaves. His hair is too long.
He fears he will not be able to ignite the foghorn’s engines. He is afraid of
blackouts. He fears a radio blackout. He speaks every night to his wife,
repeating always the same thing (...). We no longer see the island.
Apparently, two boats have been lost already. (…) The sea is bombarding
us. The same sounds as last winter, exactly: the same cries below,
incomprehensible squeals. Behind the opaque panel of the kitchen, long
shadows pass. Clet is always jumpy. I cannot reassure him. (19)
What if the sea were strongest after a hundred years? It is attacking with
unprecedented violence. What if, in a final leap, it swept away the
lighthouse, us and our pots, at long last? I do not mind; I will have
accomplished nothing. You have to be an idiot not to experience fear. The
day that I will be truly afraid, will I be saved? (57)
Now I remember that moment when I was very calm, motionless in the
dark, hands on my knees. I had no urge to light my lantern. I was dressed
with the lighthouse. Everything seemed friendly. (23)
74 4
I return to the staircase, a habitable place in the thick of escape and rupture.
Something is stirring here. My lantern awakens the stones. It stares at them
in silence. One by one, it offers them a reassuring shade. The outdoors
press against the high walls. The sweat of dawn. I listen. The space grows
hollow as I go down. It grows lighter, becomes too large a vestment for
me. (28)
Dawn approaches. The fog has not thickened. It is cold. The memory of all
the gales of the past months comes back muted. They have opened nothing.
My body is aching. Who will question me, besiege me so that at last only
the proper words will drip? (66)
I met up with this wind last night. It passed in front of the open door, so
compact, so rapid that, in the doorway, it could not be felt at all. A wall,
into which I entered my hand. The true wall of the lighthouse, the true wall
of my home. (...) I was a prisoner at the top of the tower. Why do I always
feel less dizzy when I am perched? I live in a tree. All the sea is its foliage.
(107-8)
Upstairs, shortly before midnight, I decided to try out the large emergency
lamp. A copper lamp with an asbestos gas mantle, as powerful as real fire.
I put it on the floor between the three pillars. It heated slowly. I raised the
wick and the mantle became invisible. A white, raw light invaded the
room, upsetting everything, crushing the usual shadows. It was awful. I
must not talk about it. I wanted to escape, go out on the gallery, but the
wind was too strong for me to open the door. I remember this as a bad
action. (40)
What is key here is less the hostility of the lighthouse or the natural
elements than the author’s temporary inability to harmonize himself—as
would a tuning fork – with the multiple fragments that compose his
perception. A strange moment arises in springtime when, after having
repainted the interior of the dome summit, the two keepers suddenly
decide to embark on a complete overhaul of the lighthouse. Once the metal
panel that protects the kitchen has been removed, “A cold light invaded
the room at once, denouncing with cruel precision the wearing down of
things, the slow ravages of winter.” (113) It is, in fact, “the dismal state of
the lighthouse” (114) that is being revealed. An enthusiastic stripping
frenzy then follows, which occupies a singular place in the last and third
part of the text. Maintenance, to which taking initiative is key, consists in
engaging in work that is simply human, but also in joyful teamwork: “This
restoration now delights us. From morning to night we make plans. We
talk a lot.”21 (115) To claim this humanity is to dress with an apparently
useless or gratuitous project a building that, from the point of view of the
administration, represents strictly functional equipment. In some ways, the
men are there merely to fulfil this function, as if they were themselves
extensions of the machine – the light, its optics, and the mechanics that
ensure its operation.
76 4
Conclusion
Since 1990, Armen has been nothing but an automated beacon, empty
of its occupants, whose general condition is deteriorating22 – as if human
action, of which it is now deprived, had proved after the fact vital to its
survival. A place without men, now reduced to its dry and hence
perishable function, proves unworthy of the fight against the double
assault from le temps – understood all at once as duration and clouds.
Armen the lighthouse may be the place of the enigma, but Armen
constitutes its shadow. The latter is a singular place/text, highly localized
yet not without reference to the universal, concerning which the
Portuguese author Miguel Torga (1907-1995) once wrote “O universal é o
local sem muros” (Torga 1990): The universal is the local without walls.
At the dawn of his adult life, a university degree in hand, a young man
asks: Who am I? What to do with my life? Can I become a writer? An
imperious need for meaning gave birth to this unlikely text, Armen,
halfway between zero and infinity.
Jean-Pierre Abraham’s Armen has imposed itself at the crossroads
between literature and geography. The lighthouse, a quasi geodetic point
without surface or thickness, has proved to be a place – a singular place,
by definition, since it exists only through the reflection of a third presence,
that of the writer who inhabits it temporarily. Though rich with natural
elements (the wind, the sky, the ocean, and their intertwined plays) and
anecdotes (life “on board” is nothing but simple), the text is by no means
saturated by them. Besides, were it a mere description, even a brilliant
one, banality would have caught up with it.
Nevertheless, like an ivy wrapped around a radical unspoken, Armen is
the ultimate product of an incandescent quest whose beacon is at once the
operating tool and the symbolic place. From the confrontation between a
geographic point and an acute consciousness a genuine literary fragment
has emerged, akin to a pebble deposited on the beach by the tide.
References
ABRAHAM, Jean-Pierre. 1988 (1967). Armen. Paris: Le Tout sur le tout.
—. 2004. Au plus près. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
BAKHTIN, Mikhaïl. 1978, Esthétique et théorie du roman. Paris:
Gallimard.
The Place of the Enigma: Time and Space in ArMen (1967) 77
Notes
1
Several blogs praise the book, while extensive quotations taken from it circulate
on the internet.
2
See for instance Le Cunff (1992 [1954]).
3
By convention, the book by Jean-Pierre Abraham will be referred to here as
Armen (in italics), while the lighthouse will be designated as Armen (without
italics).
4
The lighthouse of Armen was designed in the early 1860s and mainly built from
1867 to 1881 – the year of its inauguration. The presence of the Chaussée de Sein,
whose reputation as a ship cemetery was well established, made this ambitious
project necessary. Extensive studies were required beforehand and construction of
the lighthouse is still remembered today as epic (the first year, only eight hours
were actually worked due to excessive swell). The building was considered safe
only in 1897, when the base of the lighthouse was fully protected with a masonry
envelope. Shift changes could not take place in bad weather, and were often made
via a cable along which men, equipment and provisions would slide, these being
rarely transhipped dry as docking was almost always impossible. Armen was
electrified only in 1988, and fully automated in 1990 – the year that the last shift
change took place (on April 10th). For more information, see for instance Le Cunff
(1992 [1954], 79-113), and more recently http://www.dirm.nord-atlantique-
manche-ouest.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/phare-d-armen-a76.html.
5
Geocriticism is a theoretical approach developed by Bertrand Westphal (2011
[2007]) that contributes to the study of spatial dimensions in literary works.
78 4
Mobilizing the analytical tools of literary criticism, philosophy and the spatial turn,
geocriticism enables the joint reworking of spatial and temporal approaches.
6
The notion of chronotope, first put forward by Mikhaïl Bakhtin, refers to the
intrinsic solidarity of space-time in a narrative, whether fictional or not. The
chronotope can correspond to the space-time of an entire text (here Armen is a
chronotope), but also to that of its parts (the night or the watch each constitute a
specific chronotope).
7
Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918) was a French geographer, founder of the
French school of geography.
8
Ever since geographers began doing fieldwork (following A. von Humboldt),
they have historically and intellectually privileged the vision from above, which
allows them to look at a view in its (almost) entirety. This overlooking position has
fuelled the methodological prevalence of maps in geographical research.
9
TN: All citations were translated into English by Arianne Dorval, except those
extracted from works already published in English.
10
The pages in square brackets refer to the 1988 edition. The initial 1967 edition
was published by Éditions du Seuil.
11
Here a Deleuzian reading would oppose striated space – the organized space of
the safeguard apparatus, of which the lighthouse is part – and smooth space – the
space of the maritime surface, always moving, without ties or direction, the space
of freedom in movement. The latter is no doubt that of the author/narrator, who has
come here to watch others so as to find himself (Deleuze and Guattari 1987
[1980]).
12
TN: The French word temps has two meanings: time but also weather.
13
The historian François Hartog uses this expression as a title for a book of
interviews. The preface makes explicit reference to Armen by Jean-Pierre
Abraham. The work of the historian can be compared to that of the lighthouse
keeper: “There too, within the space of the office, exchanges occur between what
is seen and not seen. There is what you try to see, what you think you see, what
you hope to make seen. And too often, there is that which, for whatever reason,
escapes you.” (Hartog 2013, 11)
14
The reference to tempuscules is primarily linked to the work of formal logicians,
and in particular, logicians of time. “While the moment is a homogeneous and
indivisible point, the tempuscule is understood as an interval of time (a given 't),
‘brief enough’ in relation to a theoretical context for reference.” (...). I believe we
can venture further in this direction and consider that these temporal ensembles
also disrupt the hierarchy, which is determined by a higher authority (i.e., by one
who draws the biographical line). The idea of the tempuscule reveals that the
classic relationship between the moment and duration in time, between the point
and the line, may be superseded beneficially, to interconnect infinitely variable sets
of tiny series or intervals endowed with a modicum of meaning” (Westphal 2011
[2007], 16-17).
15
Jean-Pierre Abraham even indicates the quoted page, which corresponds to the
poem “Tourbillons de la mémoire.” (467)
The Place of the Enigma: Time and Space in ArMen (1967) 79
16
In embroidery, shadow work is preferably done on a light, transparent fabric that
reveals the colour of the threads on the other side.
17
Les coulisses de l’exploit, a television report by Jean Pradinas, commented by
Louis Roland Neil, and broadcast on December 19th, 1962 (11’55”). It can be
watched on the website of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (www.ina.fr).
18
Here we can refer to contemporary writer Pierre Michon, born in 1945, whose
project – a vast saga depicting characters with “small lives” (Michon 1984) – has
no other purpose than to put the narrator to a similar test. To pay a dignified tribute
to the dead, to measure up to them, the latter has no choice but to be a writer. But
is he really? This potentially destructive question is asked in the first line of the
book: “Let us explore a genesis for my pretensions” (Michon, 2008 [1984], 11). A
similar quest, if not for places, at least for ordeals, dots the second half of the text.
Thus, upon returning to his home village: “My journey in the tram was terrifying; I
was going to have to write, and I could not do it; I was backing myself up to the
wall, and I was not a mason.” (Ibid. 142)
19
In general, the marine environment imposes (should impose) great rigour on the
men who frequent it, for an accident almost always results from a series of
oversights. This is also true for the lighthouse—this motionless vessel whose
occupants are sometimes left to their own, like sailors in the storm, especially in
bad weather. An example of this is given by Jean-Pierre Abraham himself in a text
published posthumously, “Velléda mon amour” (Abraham 2004, 17-22). Here he
recounts his experiences by narrating a hasty departure from the lighthouse, as a
potential appendicitis lay in wait. His companion took the threat seriously and
immediately called the emergency shuttle, Velleda, which transhipped him in
extremis. Indeed, the gale foretold would have left the lighthouse isolated for long
hours. It should be noted in passing that this episode does not appear in Armen –
modesty, as always.
20
Pierre Michon continues: “But what is literature? It is God, clearly, since it is
human language at its point of incandescence. It is the same thing. What is God but
the tables...? It is human language at the point where it strikes down the stone. (...)
All good literature is a prayer, that is, a dialogue with the missing third. With the
missing third, yet conveyed through a common word. We can pray together: We
can write and publish books.” In the same interview, shortly before this
development, Pierre Michon says: “But this takes us much too far, because I do not
even know what I am talking about! I know what I am talking about, but I do not
know how to talk about it” (À voix nue, France Culture, third show, November 27th,
2002). The proximity with Jean-Pierre Abraham’s shadow work technique is
obvious.
21
Note here the discreet importance of friendly complicity in a cramped and
enclosed place where two men must coexist for days.
22
On November 29th, 2012, the first president of the Court of Auditors sent to the
Minister of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy and to the Minister
Delegate in charge of the budget a letter outlining serious concerns about the
general state of lighthouses in France, while also pointing out the absence of
80 4
effective action—though measures had been planned at the July 2009 “Grenelle of
the Sea” (engagement n° 103).
5
JEANNE SCHAAF
(...) the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the
truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object – the world
space of multinational capital – at the same time at which it achieves a
breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this
last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual
and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at
present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The
political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its
82 5
Likewise, as the stage directions show in The Cosmonaut, the incipit rests
on darkness and sound: “Darkness. Stars appear. One star is moving,
describing an arc across the night sky. A sad song from a Soviet choir.”
(209) This breaking away from more conventional modes of
representation enables the staging of dislocation (literally dislocare to
move from a former position), a phenomenon that the peculiar settings of
the play and the proliferation of “non-places” also encapsulate. If we
consider the general settings of both plays, they feature problematic
landscapes. At the beginning of the play Europe, the characterization of
the town where the play is set is ambivalent: it is simultaneously “on the
84 5
border” and “On the plains at the heart of Europe.” (5) Paradoxically
located both in the center (heart) and on the margin (border), this
conflicting city impairs the stability of identities. In her article Anja
Müller comments:
(The) play starts from a paradox (sic) spatial situation uniting centrality
and liminality. (...) Whereas centrality suggests fixity and stable identities
(...) the border situation renders the town a potential site for inter-cultural
contact and ensuing processes of hybridization, transcending national
boundaries and their corresponding identities. (Müller 156)
Beyond the mere geographical location of the action, this tension is further
emphasized by the fact that several scenes take place in the local train
station; a particular topos since it is usually positively connoted with ideas
of globalization, travel, and technology. It represents a contact zone where
a city meets the rest of the world and vice versa. However, in the play
Europe, due to the political re-mapping of Europe post-1989, the trains
only pass and never stop, depriving the station from its very identity as a
station. Fret, the stationmaster states “Trains, I mean. None. They’re all
cancelled (...) None stopping.” (E, 8); a paradoxical situation that turns the
ghostly station into a place in which “the predominant mood is of a
forgotten place.” (E, 7) The town is no longer connected; it is off the grid
as Fret foresees when he talks about his town:
They won’t be able to find it. They’ll just see a blur from the train. Express
trains going so fast they can’t even make out the station name as they pass.
That’s all that’ll be left of us. The home you thought you had, the place
you thought you came from, the person you thought you were … whoosh!
Whoosh! Gone pass. Dust on the breeze. By the time they think to turn up
it’s already be gone. (E, 77)
Not only does the train station lose its identity and become a “blur from
the train”, but it also renders the whole town isolated and obsolete,
depriving the community from their sense of place in the world.
In The Cosmonaut two comrades have literally been forgotten in space
on board the module Harmony 114 after the dissolution of the Soviet
Union and they float in space, unable to reconnect with the earth. Between
the Earth and the moon, the module was initially devised as a mean to
apprehend the world more globally, to survey and to connect – but it also
becomes a confining and isolating place, disconnected from any outer
reality. These settings exemplify how Greig constructs a peculiar
cartography that epitomizes the ambivalence of the processes of
globalization. These spaces are indeed present in absence, since they are
“Non-places” and u-topos 85
Katia The place I came from isn’t there any more. It disappeared.
Adele A place can’t just disappear.
Katia Its name was taken off the maps and signposts. I couldn’t find it
anywhere. (E, 41)
For Katia, “maps and signposts” are the only material signs of the
existence of a place, which is otherwise wiped off reality. Her local friend
Adele also feels uprooted: she considers herself an exile in her own
hometown.
However, these bonds between characters can also prove more fragile, or
even more conflictual – as is the case between Katia and Adele – when
freedom is not the same:
Katia Things happen between people. Things happen and then they stop.
Like a summer cold. Trains pass. You can’t just attach yourself to someone
and leave. You can’t do it. Your place is here, Adele. Believe me. I know.
Adele I’ll follow you anyway (E, 67).
In this respect, the movement towards the other is central and finds its
materialization through the medium of language, communication and
images. In the Cosmonaut, Vivienne is a speech therapist and Eric’s work
consists of enabling communication between conflicting parties. While
“Non-places” and u-topos 91
When you’re a business traveller like me, Horse, you carry your memories
everywhere with you like precious stones and every night, in hotels, on
trains, in ditches, you take them out and count them, you examine every
facet, you count and recount for comfort’s sake till you fall asleep. Believe
me your memories are more valuable than money, never mind the
currency. (E, 33)
In this sense, Greig’s characters create maps to read the world, and as
Peter Zenziger notes, “Jameson’s aesthetic of cognitive mapping offers an
apt description of Greig’s practice.” (Zenziger, 265) Indeed, Jameson
defines cognitive mapping as follows:
I proposed the idea that truly political theatre was theatre of any type that
created a world in which change was possible. I wanted to get away from
theatre that proposed dialectical solutions (...) and offer a theatre that tore
at the fabric of reality and opened up the multiple possibilities of the
imagination. (Greig 2008, 212)
This is particularly true for Europe in which the plot necessarily conjures
up real political situations and discourses. However The Cosmonaut
displays other attributes through which the possibility of change can be
apprehended. One peculiarity of the play resides in the fact that it is
written in order to be performed with certain actors playing several parts.
Theatre as such plays with the contrast between imagined space and real
space. It is precisely in this interval, in between those two spaces, that the
possibility of utopia, locates itself. In the theatre, it is common to see one
actor embody several different characters; however, Greig’s use of
doublings is peculiar in the sense that he creates a web of echoes between
the doubles by making obvious connections. The use of doublings of
actors on stage creates a sense of unity, a collective body, a shared
ontological essence. One same actor plays 3 different bar tenders in The
Cosmonaut. As the owner of the French bar he predicts: “One day, I tell
you this, there will come a time when all the stories humanity has ever told
will have been made into films set in American high schools.”(C, 42)
Later in the play, in a scene staged in the Highlands, the bar-owner reads
from the newspaper: “there’s a film I want to see. One Crazy
Motherfucker it’s called (…) It’s set in an American high school. (C, 97)
Language seems to be fluid and to “travel” from one character to
another as a shared material – similarly Keith (in Edinburgh) and Oleg (in
space) have never met, and yet they use similar words to describe different
women: “Oleg : the smells of her body. The tastes of her body. The tiniest
blemish on the skin of her tigh. The scar on her forehead (...).” (C, 224)
This speech is almost literally the same when pronounced by Keith, as if
language could migrate from one character to another: “Keith : (...) I can
taste every inch of her body, you know. I can smell every inch of her
body. The tiny blemish on her thigh. The scar on her forehead.”(C, 236)
Simultaneously these two women (Vanessa for Oleg and Nastasja for
94 5
Keith) lose their own individuality as they are shaped by similar discourse.
Each character no longer is the location of its own identity or language.
Through a web of poetic images, connections and echoes, notions of
frontiers, territory and identity are transcended. A new unity emerges from
the initial fragmentation of the plays, since corporeal frontiers are
transcended to perform communication differently. All characters seem
irrevocably linked through this porous topography in which fluidity allows
images to circulate. The colour blue expresses strong emotions (stroke and
orgasm) for both Eric and Bernard (who have never met in the narrative
structure of the play):
Eric my legs went numb and it felt...blue I can remember that feeling
exactly (C, 285)
Bernard My legs went numb (...) I can still remember the feeling
absolutely precisely. Blue. The color blue. (C, 292)
Bernard (...) The Americans want to write the word ‘Pepsi’ in space. A
giant advertisement.To say ‘Pepsi’.Every night it will compete with the
moon.
Proprietor The moon has nothing to sell. (C, 243)
Conclusion
In David Greig’s work, the presence of identifiable or national territories
is elliptic, avoiding an essentialist vision; instead the notion of identity –
Scottish identity – appears behind the images of the nature of a changing
geography. Therefore the Scottish stage can be conceived as engaged with
the negotiation of transnational aesthetics originating in its openness with
regards to concepts of geographical origin. Far from being defined by
“provincial” features and circumscribed to a local audience, Greig’s
dramaturgy reduces the presence of the “national” to create a more
inclusive and “utopian” theater, which becomes distinctive of a Scottish
voice. The setting and constellation of figures suggest a transnational
condition, constantly challenged by spatial and temporal conflicts, which
the characters have to embrace through mobility, whether physically or
metaphorically. David Greig thus abandons too narrow and confining
notions of identity – individual, national or artistic – and displays a
“geography of identity” anchored in a wider and more global perspective.
In this sense he also asserts the ability of “marginal” voices to become
universal, as Scottish theatre is not associated with the Scottish territory
only, but opens up to the spaces of globalization, encompassing their
ambivalence. Moreover, this truly international aspect of Greig’s theatre is
confirmed by the fact that his plays cross several frontiers since they are
translated and staged worldwide. The use of “non-places” favors a
representation of a universal, cosmopolitan, transnational and transitory
condition: a utopian community, whose contours are perceived – both on
stage and in the audience – during the theatrical representation.
References
AUGÉ, Marc. 1995. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropologie of
Supermodernity. John Howe (trans.). London: Verso.
BAUMAN, Zygmunt. 1997. Postmodernity and its Discontent. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
CLIFFORD, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late
Twentieth Century. London: Harvard University Press.
CRESSWELL, Tim. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western
World. New York: Taylor and Francis Group.
FISHER, Mark and David GREIG. 2011. “Interview: Mark Fisher and David
Greig Suspect Culture and Home Truth”, Cosmotopia: Transnational
Identities in David Greig’s Theatre. Müller and Wallace (eds). 14-32.
Prague. Literraria Pragensia
96 5
Further Reading
BACHELARD, Gaston. 1957. La Poétique des espaces. Paris: PUF.
BROOK, Peter. 1996. The Empty Space. New York: Touchstone.
“Non-places” and u-topos 97
Notes
1
Jameson, Frederic, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham, N.C : Duke UP, 1991, Chapitre 1. Sections I et VI.
www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm
2
Rebellato, Dan, « Gestes d’utopie : le théâtre de David Greig », Ecritures
Contemporaines 5 : Dramaturgies britanniques (1980-2000), éd. J.-M. Lantéri,
Revue des lettres modernes, Paris, Minard, 2002, p. 138. Unpublished english
version of the paper to be found on Dan Rebellatto’s website, p.23,
http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/utopian-gestures/
CHAPTER THREE:
AMY D. WELLS
The city of Paris functions as setting, plot, and even character for many of
the writers who were part of the expatriate movement present in Paris
between the two world wars. Writers such as Ernest Hemingway (The Sun
Also Rises), Gertrude Stein (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas), Henry
Mencken (Europe After 8:15), and Djuna Barnes (Vagaries Malicieux),
write specifically about Parisian geography to the point that their
narratives are mappable to some extent. Plotting out scenes of action onto
Parisian streets helps the reader to imagine, from his or her armchair,
where these stories take place, and on some occasions, the geography, due
to its coded nature, brings additional meanings to the text. At the same
time, these writers are also basing their narratives on the reputation of
Paris—a set of clichés that are developed through writers’ and characters’
own experiences of “space”, turning those locations into “place” (Yi Fu
Tuan 1977, 6; Lutwack 1984, 12). This geographic encoding is examined
through a geocritical lens when we consider Bertrand Westphal’s space—
literature—space cycle1 (Westphal 2001, 21): readers and writers learn
about Paris from books, then they visit Paris, and rewrite their Parisian
experiences into literature, attributing meanings to specific spaces and
even specific addresses. It is in this way that expatriate modernist writers
aspire to experience an authentic, Bohemian ‘Paname’ written of in
numerous texts, endowing the city with its mythic aura. However, this
reality of the city is always deferred as these writers-travelers invariably
transform Parisian space into a touristic trope that further feeds into the
tourism-based ethos of modernism (Kaplan 1996, 27; Méral 1983, 183-
85). This expectation/disillusionment paradigm is heavily critiqued by
From Literary Myth to Literary Tourism 101
place, and rewriting that place into new books: this process is an example
of the space – literature – space cycle we encounter in theories of
geocriticism, as previously mentioned. Most expatriate writers first
learned about Paris from either books or newspapers. In The Sun Also
Rises (1926), Hemingway offers an example of this “reading about a
place,” which represents a negative view of Paris. While narrating his
personal interaction with the city, Jake Barnes talks about how he likes to
walk down the Boulevard Raspail, but how he hates to ride down it:
Jake’s comment is rich in many ways: he points out that people associate
ideas with places and he acknowledges the potential influence of outside
sources on a person (or character’s) interpretation of a place. His reaction
is two-fold and represents the persuasion of both an associative emotional
geography and that of a literary geography. Regarding himself, he does not
like riding down the Boulevard Raspail (emotional geography), maybe
because of something he read about it (literary geography). As for the
other character Cohn, Barnes comments that Robert cannot enjoy Paris,
indicating that a “normal” person does enjoy Paris, and then he comes
back to the idea that it could be the influence of a written source that keeps
Cohn from enjoying Paris (in this case, something written by Mencken).
This fictional example relates expatriates were instructed through literature
on how they should feel about Paris. Over time, literary and journalistic
reports created for Americans a set image of what Paris was like. More
than just stereotypes, these notions of Paris evolved to an iconographic
status, creating a fixed set of anticipated experiences.
As I have argued elsewhere (Wells 2005), there are several geographic
coding systems functioning simultaneously through the corpus of
expatriate literature, such as a geo-parler femme2 or the importance of an
artist having two homes3. These codes are based on the expectations of
what a place will be like or what will take place there. For example, and
quite very simply, from Henry Miller’s perspective in Tropic of Cancer
(1934), France is equated with having a good time: “When he said France
it meant wine, women, money in the pocket, easy come, easy go. It meant
From Literary Myth to Literary Tourism 103
being a bad boy, being on a holiday.” (Miller 1934, 277) Miller likens
France to gastronomical and sexual pleasures and a sense of ease. Yet his
description is dead-on: pleasures of food, sex, and “holiday” are the often-
repeated images associated with the myth of expatriate life in Paris.
Turning next to Djuna Barnes, we get another view of the iconographical
status of Paris as a place that authenticates life experience. Vagaries
Malicieux (1922) is an early Barnes pieces about her trip abroad in which
she brings together her pre-conceived notions of Paris and her real-life
experience in arriving at the coveted destination:
For years one has dreamed of Paris, just why, no man can tell, saving that
no pear from an orchard stolen has been atoned for without the mental
calculation: “A Frenchman would have understood; in Paris all would be
so simple, so charming!”
No man dares have a fixed opinion on life, love or literature until he has
been to Paris, for there is always someone at his elbow to hiss: “Have you
visited the Louvre? Have you reacted to Giotto? Have you run your hand
over the furniture of the fifteenth century? Seen the spot where Marie
Antoinette became most haughty? No? Well then, my dear friend, keep in
your place.”
Every day of one’s life one has heard such things as: “When your dear
father was drinking a whiskey and soda one night on the Avenue de
l’Opéra, he was accosted by two women, one with a rose in her teeth, and
one without” or “Well, of course, I know that all philosophies contradict
themselves in the end, so I have made it a point never to do anything about
it, until I have visited Paris, then I knew that I just had to express myself!”
(Barnes 1922, 5)
This extract reveals several levels of the Paris reputation. The first line
brings forward two ideas: the first part of the sentence reconfirms the
iconographic status of Paris as “one has dreamed of Paris” without being
able to explain why. The second part of the first sentence, in a humorous
and awkward way, addresses the part of the Paris myth which holds that
everything is better, easier, freer, and more charming in Paris. Whereas we
may have expected a sexual or gastronomic example (as above) to
demonstrate the French charm, Barnes has chosen a pear-theft anecdote
that evades clichéd stereotypes on which to transfer a perceived French
tolerance. The next two paragraphs communicate the idea that only a trip
abroad to Paris can bring validity and thus authenticate ideas on love, life,
and philosophy. The second paragraph reinforces the idea of an
experiential geography, consisting of seeing certain artworks and city
104 6
The starting point for a theory of tourism is the notion of seeing or reading
the landscape and interpreting its meanings. Tourism should generally be
understood as a discourse among three sets of actors: 1) tourists; 2) locals;
and 3) intermediaries, including government ministries, travel agents, and
tourism promotion boards. (Knudsen, Metro-Roland, Soper, and Greer
2008, 4).
Indeed, it is the case that a single landscape cannot be the same for any two
individuals because each has had a different interaction with the landscape,
thus their knowledge of the landscape differs. However, while the
subjectivity of reading is complete, meaning does not fracture totally. To
those commonly socialized by family, culture, and history, there are certain
similarities in readings—there are congruencies and concordances. These
unspoken institutionalized understandings, when entered into discourse,
are then shaped, refined, and distilled by the inevitable power relations that
are party to all human interaction. (Knudsen, Metro-Roland, Soper, and
Greer 2008, 4)
Sailing home on the Aquitania a few weeks later, the tourist had a golden
tan, a slight tarnish of sophistication that was very becoming, and a lot
more clothes, though it was hoped that he, and especially she, would
refrain from showing them off at dinner. He was a satisfied customer.
Modern American technology had combined with European “gracious
living” to give him the best of both worlds, in a perfect bubble which
admitted no disagreeable realities. Though the ensemble was touristic, all
the elements were authentic, from the Gainsboroughs on the Aquitania to
the Mediterranean bouillabaisse. All you needed to have these good things
was to know how to make money. (Feifer 1985, 217)
Maistre pinpoints the influence Rousseau has had on Charmettes. Her text,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la Savoie, describes how Rousseau’s literature
has transformed the place:
Some key elements here are that readers go to the place they have read
about so they can “identify with the site.” They are truly “pilgrims”, and in
their experience, literature and nature melt together. A writer himself,
Stendhal explains that Rousseau and his work are always interposing
themselves between the reality and the reader. Charmettes is no longer the
geographic space of Charmettes, it is Charmettes as described by
Rousseau and imagined by his readers. Ian Brown (2012) best summarizes
the situation when he states, “[l]iterary tourism reshapes its sites” (2).
Sometimes, literary tourism not only reshapes sites but calls for their
creation. Like the many examples offered from the literary passages cited,
readers want to visit the locations they have read about themselves to get a
feel for the space. Occasionally, the literary place cannot be visited
because it does not really exist. Many Harry Potter fans dream of visiting
Dobby’s Shell Cottage, which, since its construction (mainly for filming
purposes) in 2009 in Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, is now
actually possible (Daily Mail, 2011). Another example would be that of
George Sand’s mare au diable: there was not a specific mare to visit, so to
complete the George Sand circuit, a location has been identified as being
“based on” one of George Sand’s most famous novels.4 Ian Brown (2012)
views this “creation” or “attribution” of place as having also taken place in
the Trossachs. He explains:
What is remarkable about the ways in which The Lady of the Lake brought
tourists to the Trossachs is that they came to visit a fictional site. Or rather
they came in increasing numbers to visit a pre-existing, but limited, tourist
destination whose significance was much enhanced and overlaid by his
creative output. Something similar could be seen in Verona where
110 6
hotels in Paris, and Saint Phalle mentioned some of the Left Bank women
writers, including Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, Anaïs Nin, and Gertrude
Stein. There are several characteristics shared by these anthologies: the
organization can be thematic or geographic, but there are no maps in these
particular examples. Also, these three collections are all published (or re-
edited) after 2000, which indicates that despite the availability of online
resources and democratized European vacations, printed armchair
traveling anthologies set in and about Paris still have a market of readers.
Another product that is similar in some ways to the anthologies, due to
their shared book format, is the various “Walks” or “Walking” tours. For
those interested in literary cartography, this subgenre offers the greatest
contributions, as in the majority of the examples cited here, maps
accompany the texts, indicating the specific locations to visit. The maps
are hand-drawn or computer generated, varying from artistic creation to
GIS precision-based production. Walks in Gertrude Stein’s Paris dates
from 1988 (Haight). This book presents five different thematic walks: the
Literary Quarter, the Aristocratic Quarter, the Spirit of Odéonia, the
Artisans and Foundries, and the Heart of Bohemia. These walks focus
mainly on residences, studios, editor’s offices, and schools that have a
connection to Gertrude Stein or her circle. This guide is rare in that it
actually mentions Djuna Barnes. Just three years later, Permanent
Parisians: An Illustrated Biographical Guide to the Cemeteries of Paris
by Culbertson and Randall came out. (1991) While “Walking” does not
appear in the title, the book does offer maps of itineraries for visitors to
walk while discovering the different tombs of celebrities, such as writers,
artists, and musicians, giving biographical explanations. The chapter on
Père Lachaise, Tour 4, includes a detailed passage on Gertrude Stein,
citing titles by both Stein and Alice B. Toklas. In this way, the memorial
of the women’s final resting place is used as a memorial to their literary
production. The walking guide trend continues as, seven years later,
Picasso’s Paris: Walking Tours of the Artist’s Life in the City appeared.
(Williams 1999) While focusing predominantly on Picasso’s geography,
divided into four walks (Montmartre, Montparnasse, Étoile Quarter, and
Saint-Germain), many writers are featured, including Gertrude Stein. At
stop 10, 27, rue de Fleurus, walkers can pause in front of chez Stein and
read the story of the Picasso-Stein relationship during the settings for the
1905-06 portrait. (Williams 1999, 95)
This type of literary walking tour guidebook has remained popular
through the turn of the twenty-first century. In her volume entitled In Paris
with Jane Austen: Three Literary Walks, (2005) Vera Quin offers Parisian
tourist walks to Jane Austen enthusiasts, with maps by Veronique Yapp.
112 6
Quin explains her approach to the walks which run about 5 miles as
“tracking Jane Austen’s publishers and printers around the streets and
monuments, mostly on the Left Bank (Faubourg St Germain).” (88)
Adopting a somewhat quirky approach, like the other walking tour guides,
the visits include visiting places of literary production, with the first three
chapters dedicated to the genesis of Austen works and their translations, in
addition to the economic factors pushing the author to write. Referencing
Austin, Quin emphasizes: “The proposed itineraries are ‘so convenient for
even solitary female walkers’” and suggests that there is a distinction to be
made between the regular tourist and the literary one: “These streets hold
no menace, only the irritation of too many tourists, while you and I are
literary travelers.” (88) For Francophone readers, another 2005 guide was
established by the Terre d’écrivains group, which is dedicated to
promoting literature and writing, shedding more light on writers and
authors, on their works and on their life and the places that had an impact
on their presence or imagination5. Balades littéraires dans Paris (1900-
1945) (Sarro 2005) focuses on those literary locations considered to be
part of the expatriates’ golden age: references to Djuna Barnes, Natalie
Barney, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Miller, Anaïs Nin,
Pound, and Stein are included in this guide. In his introduction, Sarot
recommends that readers “let themselves be guided,” assuring readers that
“[o]ver the course of these walks a city is gradually drawn—a city that is
ignored by guidebooks, which invites you to relearn Paris and to build
your own Paris.” (Sarro 2005, 9) Like the propagation of the literary myths
mentioned above, the idea that each person has his or her own Paris
continues through the process of making literary Paris into a consumable
product.
Another French text is noteworthy as an example of the walking tour
guides, because of its date: Le Paris des écrivains (Jean Le Nouvel 2012)
proposes 5 different geographically oriented walks, including a map that
divides Paris into the zones corresponding to the walks. Each chapter
gives literary details associated with the place – what authors wrote about
each location along with historical and architectural information. In the
section “Références des ouvrages cités ou consultés,” the list moves from
from Balzac to Barrès, with no mention of Djuna Barnes or Natalie
Barney; the list also passes from Albert Simonin to Stendhal – but there is
no mention of Stein. However, other American writers are included such
as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kerouac, Miller, and even women writers Nin
and Wharton. In the index of names and places, there is unsurprisingly, no
mention of the rue Jacob, rue de Fleurus, or rue St. Romain.
From Literary Myth to Literary Tourism 113
Guests at our Paris Perfect apartment rentals have asked where some of the
gorgeous scenes were filmed, and we reveal all here. Come along with us
and fall in love with the magic of Paris by visiting some of our favorite
locations where Woody Allen filmed Midnight in Paris!6
114 6
The advertising discourse continues to play into the clichés of the Parisian
myth-making with “fall in love with the magic of Paris.” In this way, as
Paris Perfect promises to “reveal all here,” they sell a combined package –
both the accommodation and the tour together. A competing website, Paris
Underbelly Discovery Tours offers both a day and an evening Midnight in
Paris tour, at 2012 prices of 75€ and 80€ respectively. Figure 3 shows that
the tour promises to “take you to sites featured in the 2011 Woody Allen
film “Midnight in Paris,” and to places that capture the lively and
quintessential spirit of Paris from the past”7. Again, authenticity and
nostalgia are used as selling points for this tour. While both tours include a
cocktail stop, the day version takes tourists to the “upscale right bank
hotel” featured in the film, and the evening version takes tourists to a
“Hemingway Haunt” for drinks. As previously mentioned, visiting filming
locations is part of literary tourism, and in the case of Woody Allen’s
Midnight in Paris, authenticity and the quest to taste the Paris of
expatriates’ past fill the coffers of numerous tourist outfits.
There are, however, other examples of Internet literary tourism offers
based on the expatriate authors themselves. It is important to note that
these deals range greatly in accompaniment and price. If you are a tourist
who “knows how to make money” to purchase yourself some authenticity
while traveling, the website Travels with Teri, “Journeys for the Curious
Traveler,” offers a complete hand-held tour of Gertrude Stein’s France,
including car service to and from the airport. Figure 4 reveals that this tour
takes you on “a literary romp through Paris before exploring Bilignin and
its surrounding area near the Swiss border. Gertrude Stein’s France
introduces you to one of the most charismatic people of our times”8. Four
of the seven days of the tour are dedicated to visiting some hard-to-reach
places that were crucial to Stein’s life in France, including the house in
Bilignin, which is a private residence with limited access. This made-to-
measure tour is probably the best deal for a Stein fan dedicated to seeing
the important locations of the author’s life without renting a car and doing
all the leg work on their own. In juxtaposition to this all-inclusive
package, some Internet literary tourism offers are of the DIY nature,
relying on blogs and Google maps. Bohemian students who wish to follow
Henry Miller’s “good life” may choose a free map, like the one in Figure
5. The map itself only shows dots on a grid with a corresponding legend.
However, it may be read in parallel with a 2004 blog article, “Henry
Miller: Born to be Wild,” on the “Bonjour Paris: The Insider’s Guide” web
site. Giving outsiders the insider’s scoop on the specific locations that
were important to Miller’s life in Paris, this blog entry provides, for free,
the missing stories from the Google map. The fact that offers exist at both
From Literary
L Myth to
o Literary Tourrism 117
Figure 4: “Geertrude Stein’s France” Tour Offer from Travvels with Teri, “Journeys
for the Curiouus Traveler”
From Literary
L Myth to
o Literary Tourrism 119
published, but they also stroll the rue St. Romain, and perhaps enter the
“Russian Church,” St. Julien le Pauvre, and maybe even the Picpus
cemetery, if they can find it. With a new project, though, literary tourism
offers may pass the Left Bank test as these locations and itineraries from
this literary corpus are getting put on the map through the efforts of the
2018 Paris Gay Games. Barnes’s works, along with those of other Left
Bank writers such as Natalie Barney and Radclyffe Hall, are particularly
appreciated by the LGBT community. This organization announced their
plans to valorize the community with visits and literary tours to
accompany the athletic events. Figure 6 displays how the literary cultural
heritage of the Left Bank will be exploited to a fuller potential and made
accessible: the “Lesbians in the Left Bank” and “The Ladies of the
Sixteenth Arrondissement” tours will include the literary locations of
Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas,
Djuna Barnes and Janet Flanner, Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks,
putting forward the elements of “empowerment of women and lesbian
identity”9. Finally, the Parisian literary tourism offers will include access
to packaged services enabling those who wish to do so to visit the
historical literary Left Bank.
Conclusion
To conclude, this analysis has identified the process of how literary
myths are transformed into marketable literary tourism offers. The making
of literary myths occurs through the space—literature—space cycle
identified in geocriticism, and a taxonomy of American spaces within
Paris has been established. The dialogic relationship existing between the
primary literary sources on one hand, and the guidebooks and websites on
the other hand, plays upon a set corpus of clichéd accepted images and
expectations of Parisian expatriate life. Taking visitors to see literary
locations is a way to make and remake traditional Parisian tourist offers,
with the elements of authenticity and nostalgia at the forefront of cashing
in on the deal. Readers have always had the opportunity to travel through
the literature itself or handcrafted armchair traveling anthologies. The
other trends in tourism presented here, such as the printed literary walking
tour guidebooks and Internet offers, indicate that, in addition to being
regular “tourists,” these readers may, as “literary travelers,” consume their
own version of Paris. Through these schemes, they may each seek out that
which he or she “expects” to find, temporarily owning the space…in
exchange for a price.
122 6
References
ARRANGER, Benjamin. 2003. Paris vu par les écrivains. Paris: Arcadia
Editions.
BARNES, Djuna. 1974. [1922, 1936] Vagaries Malicieux. New York:
Frank Hallman.
BROWN, Ian (ed). 2012. Literary Tourism: The Trossachs and Walter
Scott. Glasgow: Scottish Literature International.
BENSTOCK, Shari.1986. Women of the Left Bank. Austin: Texas UP.
CULBERTSON, Judi and Tom RANDALL. 1991. Permanent Parisians: An
Illustrated Biographical Guide to the Cemeteries of Paris. London:
Robson Books.
DE TESSAN, Christina Henry. 2004. City Walks Paris: 50 Adventures on
Foot. San Francisco: Reineck & Reineck.
FEIFER, Maxine. 1985. Tourism in History: From Imperial Rome to the
Present. New York: Stein and Day.
HAIGHT, Mary Ellen Jordan. 1988. Walks in Gertrude Stein’s Paris. Salt
Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books.
HEMINGWAY, Ernest. 1964. Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner.
—. 1926. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Simon & Schuster.
KAPLAN, Caren. 1996. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of
Displacement. Durham: Duke UP.
KNUDSEN, Daniel C., Michelle M. METRO-ROLAND, Anne K. SOPER, and
Charles E. GREER, eds. 2008. Landscape, Tourism, and Meaning.
Hampshire: Ashgate.
LE NOUVEL, Jean. 2012. Le Paris des écrivains. Paris: Editions
Alexandrines.
LUTWACK, Leonard. 1984. The Role of Place in Literature. New York:
Syracuse UP.
MAISTRE, Marie-Gabrielle. 2012. Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la Savoie.
Montmélian: La Fontaine de Siloé.
MENCKEN, H. L., George Jean NATHAN and Willard Huntington WRIGHT.
1914. Europe After 8:15. New York: John Lane Company.
MERAl, Jean. 1983. Paris dans la littérature américaine. Paris: CNRS.
MILLER, Henry. 1961. (1934). The Tropic of Cancer. New York: Grove
Press.
MONCADA, Luisa and Scala QUIN. 2011. Reading on Location: Great
Books Set in Top Travel Destinations. London: New Holland.
QUIN,Vera. 2005. In Paris with Jane Austen: Three Literary Walks.
Cappella Archive: Foley Terrace.
From Literary Myth to Literary Tourism 123
Websites
Bonjour Paris: The Insider’s Guide. 2004. “Henry Miller: Born to Be
Wild. ”Accessed March 2, 2015.
http://www.bonjourparis.com/story/henry-miller-born-to-be-wild/
Google My Maps. “Henry Miller Walks—Montparnasse.” 2015. Accessed
March 2, 2015.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zOJeBKS0T_jk.k3NvAt
CuE8sQ&msa=0
Paris 2018 Gay Games 10. 2015. “Visites Guidées.”Accessed March 2,
2015. https://www.paris2018.com/fr/infos/visites-guid%C3%A9es
Paris Perfect: Paris Apartment Rentals. 2011. “The Magic of Paris –
Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.” Accessed March 2, 2015.
http://www.parisperfect.com/blog/2011/10/midnight-in-paris/
Paris Underbelly Discovery Tours. 2012. “Midnight in Paris Tour.”
Accessed March 2, 2015. http://parisunderbelly.com/tours/midnight-in-
paris-tour/
Travels with Teri. 2015. “Gertrude Stein’s France.” Accessed March 2,
2015. http://www.travelswithteri.com/itinerary/gertrudes-france
Daily Mail. “Harry Potter and the Welsh Beach: Final film Puts
Pembrokeshire on the Map.” 2011. Accessed January 15, 2012.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2015977/Harry-Potter-The-
Deathly-Hallows-boosts-tourism-Wales.html
Terre des Écrivains. “Qui nous sommes.” Accessed August 17, 2015.
terresdecrivains.com
Tourisme au Pays de Georges Sand. “La Mare Au Diable.” 2015.
Accessed August 17, 2015. http://www.pays-george-sand.fr/fr/pages/
patrimoine-naturel?ID=PCUCEN0360070035
Notes
1
“Geocriticism proposes the study of not only a unilateral relationship (space-
literature), but also a true dialectic relationship (space-literature-space), implying
that space transforms itself in function of the text that has previously assimilated it.
The relationships between literature and human spaces are therefore not fixed, but
perfectly dynamic. ” (21) This translation and those that follow are my own.
2
I have previously defined this concept as the use of geography by women writers
as a secret or coded language, communicating emotional or symbolic meanings
that can be understood only by readers who share their context. (Wells, 2005)
3
“After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside
themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to
have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live
From Literary Myth to Literary Tourism 125
really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but
it is really there.” (Stein, 1940, 2)
4
“Dans le bois de Chanteloube, se cache discrète et mystérieuse «la Mare au
diable» faisant référence à l’un des romans les plus célèbres de George Sand.”
(http://www.pays-george-sand.fr/fr/pages/patrimoine-
naturel?ID=PCUCEN0360070035)
5
terredesecrivains.com.
6
http://www.parisperfect.com/blog/2011/10/midnight-in-paris/
7
http://parisunderbelly.com/tours/midnight-in-paris-tour/
8
http://www.travelswithteri.com/itinerary/gertrudes-france
9
https://www.paris2018.com/fr/infos/visites-guid%C3%A9es
7
GÉRALDINE MOLINA1
For quite a long time, the field of geography has focused on spaces
depicted in literature. More recently, it has begun to expose the
relationships that literary works nurture with the settings that serve for
their production and acceptance. The groundwork was primarily laid by a
number of seminal works announcing a “geography of literature”
(Brosseau and Cambron 2003, Molina 2010). This approach has taken on
greater legitimacy in light of the tendency of contemporary literary
practices, like that introduced by the Oulipo movement, to engage in a
special relationship with a given place (Schilling 2003, 2006, 2011).
Initiated at the beginning of the 1960’s, the OuLiPo movement (l’Ouvroir
de Littérature Potentielle: French acronym for a workshop of potential
literature) assembles writers, mathematicians and musicians collaborating
on the same project: exercising language through entertaining and
experimental means, inventing constraints in order to forge new literary
dynamics. Among the devotees of Oulipo, or Oulipians, space becomes
occupied not merely as a literary topic, but moreover as a field of
experimentation for new ways to create literature.
By highlighting the emblematic case of the Oulipian Jacques Jouet2,
this article proposes an exploration of how contemporary literary practices
yield a renewed relationship with space that contrasts with the traditional
process for producing literature. As of the 1990’s, Jouet embarked on
literary experiences with a distinct spatial component. An analysis of his
work, as proposed in this article, will seek to assess how occupying a
space within a given time frame, in association with emerging social
When Space Renews the Literary Workshop 127
writing methods. The first was in situ, whereby the writer present inside
the space attempts to relate his perceptions with objectivity and neutrality.
This technique resembles that of the social sciences researcher employing
an “ethnographic” type method. (Schilling 2003, 145) The act of literary
creation is thus bound to a given space and time that the writer fills. The
second mode adopted during this project was less direct: in absentia, the
writer seeks to physically access the site through the power of his writing
and the exercise of his mind in recalling memories. By superimposing
stringent spatial and temporal constraints and necessitating an endurance
exceeding twelve years, this project begun in 1969 was ultimately
abandoned in 1975. Perec would continue the experiment at other Paris
venues. For example, from October 18th to 20th 1974, he took a seat at the
Café de la Mairie, on Paris’ Saint-Sulpice square. In his Attempt at
exhausting a place in Paris (1974), his project consisted of accurately
transcribing his perception of the space, exhaustively describing the life of
this public sphere. These projects reveal the ambition of making a literary
theme out of day-to-day existence, this “background noise”, the
commonplace as exposed in all its banal immediacy, which a few years
later would constitute the main topic of L’Infra-ordinaire. (1989)
Perec’s projects are to be placed in an era characterized by an
extraordinary intellectual climate. Intellectuals and artists were both keen
on “hitting the streets” (Buren 2005) and gaining greater proximity to
society by demonstrating their interest for the mundane. Two-way
exchanges and shared influences characterized the relationships built
between Georges Perec’s output and the works of contemporary artists,
like Christian Boltanski. (Joly 2010) As of the 1960s, contemporary art
had adopted a “spatial orientation” by exiting the museums and dedicated
institutions to occupy the public space and reestablish proximity with its
public. (Bourriaud 1998, Ardenne 2002, Ruby 2001) These modern artistic
practices suggested the pursuit of “outdoor” spatial strategies, in contrast
with the traditional art world. They developed within a relationship-driven
attitude with respect to their public and their context. (Volvey 2008) Like
artists, writers were intent on establishing direct ties with their times, their
city and their fellow inhabitants who sustain and energize the city. Their
goal was to reside in the world and “work” with the world in refining their
craft.
As of the 1990’s, in drawing inspiration from these literary and artistic
experiences as well as from contemporary artists (like Sophie Calle),
Jacques Jouet would pursue this experience by placing literature and
poetry in a spatial context using even more extreme techniques.
When Space Renews the Literary Workshop 133
The second verse is composed in your head between stations two and three
of your itinerary.
It is transcribed onto paper once the train stops at the third station. And so
forth and so on.
No transcription is to take place while the train is in motion.
And verse composition must not occur while the train is stopped.
The final verse of the poem is transcribed on the platform of your last
station.
Should your itinerary require one or more line changes, the poem will
contain two or potentially more strophes.
(Jouet 2000, 7)
It’s also a working idea. Flaubert’s model is not mine. […] I prefer to work
in the domain of enjoyment, that’s for sure. Beyond that, it all has to do
with energy, I mean it doesn’t have to be the accumulation of hard labor
that’s required… naturally it still might be! But offering a one-size-fits-all
model, that’s not for me. No way. In the metro poem however, it’s all
about compression. The physical realm, energy, it all gets compressed. The
purpose is stated: "I’m working very intensively for a very short time."3
When Space Renews the Literary Workshop 135
136 7
When Space Renews the Literary Workshop 137
Conclusion
Those few pages have helped me explain how the “geography of
literature” could clarify the evolution of the literature production modes
and the fusional relation that contemporary literary practices have with
space. Fed by the sociology of literature and literary criticism, geography
builds its legitimacy as a social science and makes a specific contribution
by exploring the coproduction logics between space, literature and society.
142 7
This article is a synthesized version in English of another one that was published in
a French review in 2014 (MOLINA, Géraldine. 2014. « La fabrique spatiale de la
littérature oulipienne : quand l’espace renouvelle les pratiques littéraires »,
available at Espacestemps.net, http://www.espaces temps.net/articles/la-fabrique-
spatiale-de-la-litterature-oulipienne/)
References
ARDENNE, Paul. 2002. Un Art contextuel. Paris: Flammarion.
BARTHES, Roland. 1984. « La mort de l’auteur (1968) » in Barthes,
Roland. Le Bruissement de la langue. Paris: Seuil, 61-67.
BECKER, Howard S. 2010. Les Mondes de l’art. Paris: Flammarion.
BOURDIEU, Pierre. 1998. Les Règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du
champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil.
BOURRIAUD, Nicolas. 1998. Esthétique relationnelle. Dijon: Les Presses
du réel.
When Space Renews the Literary Workshop 143
Notes
1
In alphabetical order, a big round of thanks for their proofing and valuable input
goes out to: Pauline Guinard, Magali Hardouin, Kelly Harrison, Thierry Paquot
and Anne Volvey, as well as to Jacques Jouet for verifying the details regarding his
approach.
2
Born in 1947, Jacques Jouet became acquainted with Oulipians Georges Perec
and Jacques Roubaud towards the end of the 1970's (he joined OuLiPo in 1983).
He conducted polymorph literary and artistic activities through a practice of the
poetic genre, novels, short stories, theater, essays and collage. His body of work is
drawing increased attention in the field of literary studies, to such an extent that an
international symposium has recently been dedicated to him in Poitiers (“Jacques
Jouet: An Oulipian disciple”, held June 27th through 29th 2013), organized by Marc
Lapprand (UVIC, Canada) and Dominique Moncond'huy (Poitiers) within the
When Space Renews the Literary Workshop 145
scope of the ANR Agency's DifdePo project and with the support of FORELL
(MSHS, Poitiers).
3
Interview conducted on 15th October 2012.
4
Interview conducted with Jacques Jouet on 15th October 2012.
PART TWO:
FIONA LEJOSNE
Italian language the verb “sentire” is used to express two senses: hearing
and touching. As a consequence, it is one of the main entries I used in my
inventory of non-visual evidential strategies. Another entry word for non-
visual indications is the verb “udire”, to hear.
“Hearsay” evidential strategies and “quotative” evidential strategies
are both categories referring to information that has not been acquired
directly by the traveler, but that has been obtained through others: they
offer the possibility to include reported information into the narrative by
underlining the fact that it is such. The distinction between hearsay
evidential strategies and quotative ones is clarified by Aikhenvald as
follows: in the first case, the reported information bears “no reference to
those it was reported by” whereas, in the second case, a “quotative”
expression is the expression containing “an overt reference to the quoted
source” (Aikhenvald 2004, 64). I have analyzed the last two categories of
reported information through the following expressions: “dice che/dicono
che” (he says that, they say that), “avere aviso di”, “avere notizia di” (to
be informed that), “riferire/referire” (to report that), and the two verbs
meaning “to hear”: “udire” and “sentire”.
2. The corpus
The main criterion for the selection of the corpus is its representativeness
within the whole collection of Navigationi et viaggi. First of all, this
representativeness is quantitative: the three volumes of the Navigationi et
viaggi, in the version edited by Ramusio and published between 1550 and
1559, contain a total of 53 texts. In order to chart evidential strategies I
have analyzed 14 of them, which represents nearly 50% of the total length
of the collection in the 1550s editions. The texts selected here contain
some of the most important ones collected by Ramusio, in terms of length
but also when considering the historical interest of the travels and
expeditions they report.
The second criterion is qualitative: in order to have a representative
sample, my selection is also based on the variable characteristics that
distinguish one text from the other: the status of the narrator (traveler or
non-traveler); the time period in which the text was written: from the
Antiquity (Hippocrates of Kos), to the Middle Ages (Marco Polo, Niccolò
de' Conti,) to the Early Modern Age (Ambrogio Contarini, Ludovico di
Varthema, Peter Martyr, Leo Africanus, Antonio Pigafetta, Paolo Giovio,
Oviedo, Cortés, an anonymous Portuguese on the voyage towards India,
Letters from Jesuits on Japan) and the aim of the text and its form, which
often converge (an official report, a letter, a transcribed oral testimony, an
154 8
appear not only as an eyewitness of the new territories but also as the main
player in their conquest, and moreover as someone who hears and knows
everything that is happening there.
Another relevant phenomenon regarding the use of visual evidential
strategies can be observed in Odoric of Pordenone's travel narrative, a text
that I have not included in the inventory corpus as it was added to the
Navigationi only in the 1574 edition of the second volume, that is to say
after Ramusio's death. It is worth mentioning since it is representative of
how evidential strategies are used as displays of proof. In fact, there is a
concentration of such indications in the parts that could be regarded as less
credible or potentially the result of his imagination. For instance, when
reporting that he has seen many dead bodies in the Panj river – commonly
considered to be a river which comes directly from Eden – his whole
description is punctuated with visual evidential strategies: in a single
paragraph Odoric of Pordenone makes use five times of the verb “vedere”,
to see, and twice of “udire”, to hear, at the first person10.
In her introduction to the study of evidential strategies, Aikhenvald
states the following distinction: she argues that “evidence” in linguistics
should be distinguished from “evidence” understood as a legal category.
(Aikhenvald 2004, 4-5) In the case of travel narratives, it appears, on the
contrary, that the border between the two categories is rather a thin line
often crossed. The travel narratives at stake here are referential texts: they
are grounded on the fact that someone has actually traveled. As a
consequence, the challenge for their author is to bridge the gap between
the actual experience and its textual report. The evidential strategies
expressing autoptic experience carry out this function and, as such, they
also take part in giving credit to the content of the narrative: the expression
of one's own experience acts as proof of the veracity of one's statements.
In other words, in the case of travel writing, the mere mention of the
information source plays a role in the expression of the reliability of the
author and consequently of the narrative. Moreover, presenting one's
experience as such takes part in the authentication of the entire narrative. It
thus becomes a testimony which can indeed be understood in the judiciary
sense of “evidentiality”11.
b) Trustworthy sources
In my inventory, within the category of quotative evidential strategies,
I have systematically tried to distinguish between the “plain” indications
and the ones that present an explicit mention of the reliability of the
quoted person. This distinction has given me the possibility to tackle the
question of the testimonial claims: in the case of narrators strongly in
favor of autoptic experience, do they have the same demands towards their
witnesses? I will briefly expose here two cases.
As previously referred, Ludovico di Varthema is a fervent advocate of
autoptic experience, considered as “ten times” more reliable than reported
information. However, Valentina Martino's assertion that Ludovico di
Varthema is constant in distinguishing between secondhand information
for which there is no guarantee and the one that has been verified (Martino
2011, 68) does not completely pass the test of evidential strategies. My
inventory shows that only half of the quotative reported information in
Varthema's account comes from persons presented as trustworthy, and the
other half from plain sources. Moreover, information obtained by hearsay
is twice as numerous as all the quotative considered together.
Nevertheless, when referring secondhand information, Varthema seems to
give the advantage to the category of quotative in terms of reliability. In
fact, many of the indications reported by hearsay in Varthema's account
are completed with the mention that he himself has not been able to verify
the information.
On the contrary, and consistently with his claims, when Oviedo makes
use of secondhand sources in a huge majority of cases he explicitly asserts
their reliability, both in the Sommario and in the Historia. However, the
grounds on which the reliability of the witnesses is asserted by Oviedo are
variable and would deserve further investigation. If their credibility is
systematically affirmed by referring to their autoptic experience, other
parameters are also taken into account. In fact, when quoting secondhand
information, Oviedo is aware of the fact that his initial “referential pact”
with the reader includes that he takes responsibility for what the witnesses
affirm. As a consequence, next to the autoptic status of the travelers he has
Geography through Texts 163
to give evidence that they themselves can be trusted. Often, such guarantee
is offered by references to elements that are external to the evidential
strategies under study here such as their social position or the credit that
they are given from the king, for example regarding the testimony of
Pietro Margarito:
but more that anyone else that I cited, the commander sir Pietro Margarito,
first man of the royal house and held in high esteem by the Catholic king,
is the one who informed me.19
Conclusions
The epistemological issue at stake here is the nature and extent of the
authority given to individual experience in the development of science and
knowledge. I think that my inventory and analysis contribute to proving
that on this matter there is no radical shift in travel narratives between the
Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. Nonetheless, some general
tendencies can be identified and they would deserve further investigation:
an expanding credit conferred to first person – and more precisely to
autoptic experience as the prerequisite to travel accounts used as sources
of knowledge20; major demands in terms of reliability of the sources, both
emanating from the authors of travel narratives and from the compilers; an
increase in the use of visual evidential strategies, in comparison to other
testimonial claims.
The inventory of evidential strategies actually brings up more
questions than answers. The study of evidential strategies echoes many of
the issues faced when studying travel narratives, this very particular field
of study where literature encounters geography. Evidential strategies offer
a fruitful entry point to travel narratives, but I think additional data on the
topic could lead to a new comprehensive approach. Generalizing this study
would imply expanding the corpus of texts while applying a more precise
and systematic analytical framework.
164 8
References
BURGIO, Eugenio, and Mario EUSEBI. 2011. Giovanni Battista Ramusio
“editor” del Milione. Trattamento del testo e manipolazione dei
modelli: atti del Seminario di ricerca, Venezia, 9-10 settembre 2010.
Rome-Padua: Editrice Antenore.
AIKHENVALD, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford, New York:
Oxford University Press.
BARTHES, Roland. 1971. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Paris: Seuil.
BETHENCOURT, Francisco. 2007. “The political correspondence of
Albuquerque and Cortés”, Cultural Exchange in Early Modern
Europe. Vol.III Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe,
1400-1700, edited by F. Bethencourt and F. Egmond, 219-273. New
York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
BOULOUX, Nathalie. 2002. Culture et savoirs géographiques en Italie au
XIVe siècle. Turnhout: Brepols.
FORMISANO, Luciano. 1996. “La scrittura di viaggio come “genere”
letterario”, Antonio Pigafetta e la letteratura di viaggio nel
Cinquecento. A. Chemello (ed.), 25-45. Verona: Cierre Edizioni.
GALLY, Michèle and Michel JOURDE. 1999. Par la Vue et par l'ouïe :
littérature du Moyen âge à la Renaissance. Fontenay-aux-Roses: ENS.
GUERIN DALLE MESE, Jeannine. 1989. “Io e lui (il problema del narratore
in alcune relazioni di viaggio del Trecento-Quattrocento”, La
letteratura di viaggio dal Medioevo al Rinascimento. Generi e
problemi, edited by M. Pozzi, 7-17. Alessandria: Ed. Dell'Orso.
Geography through Texts 165
Further reading
CERRETI, Claudio. 1997. “Breve ragionamento intorno ai sette paradossi
principali del viaggio”, Geotema, III, 8: 52-59.
DESCENDRE, Romain. 2014. “'E certo che più vale la pratica che la teorica'.
Premières remarques sur l'expérience comme enjeu de savoir au dbéut
du XVIe siècle (Léonard, Vespucci, Machiavel)”, Catégories et mots
de la politique à la Renaissance italienne, J.-L. Fournel, H. Miesse, P.
Moreno and J.-C. Zancarini (eds). Brussels: P. Lang, 179-198.
ROUMIER, Julia. 2009. “L'affirmation de l'authenticité du témoignage dans
les récits de voyages médiévaux castillans, fictifs ou réels (XIV-XVe
siècles)”, Revue des Langues néo-latines, 350: 143-160.
RUBIÉS, Joan-Pau. 2007. Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the
History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology. Aldershot-Burlington:
Ashgate.
SERRES, Michel. 1985. Les Cinq sens. Paris: B. Grasset.
Notes
1
In some cases, it is more than a similarity: many of the accounts of the third
volume of the Navigationi, for example, are official accounts delivered in front of
a clerk by a Spanish subject and addressed to the emperor, such as fray Marcos de
Niza's.
2
Autopsy – namely the act of seeing with one’s own eyes – is a noticeable
characteristic of Early Modern Age travel literature but, as Hartog demonstrated,
166 8
was also an element taken into account in the conception of testimonies in Ancient
Greece (see Hartog 1980).
3Of course, travel writings as sources of knowledge is neither new nor specific to
Early modern age geographers (see Bouloux 2002 for medieval Italian travel
writings).
4The other two categories, by inference and by assumption, are also used by travel
writing authors; however, they are less relevant to our topic since they appeal to
arguments based on rationality, and not on experience nor authority like the ones at
stake here.
5The first, second and third person of the singular and plural, as well as the
impersonal phrases “si” + active verb, or the relative clauses introduced by the
pronoun “chi” are all present in all the texts studied but at highly variable rates of
occurrence.
6
Many texts collected by Ramusio are translations, mainly produced by himself.
As a consequence, the versions of the texts under study here are not systematically
the most authentic ones – even if recent philological studies have shown that
Ramusio usually applied a relatively reliable editing method to the texts (Romanini
2007). Analyzing the texts in the version edited in the Navigationi et viaggi seems
however relevant for three main reasons: first of all, since this is, of course, how
they were intended to be read by Ramusio's contemporaries. Secondly, because
such versions enjoyed great success and were very widely read and reprinted. And,
finally, for a very long time the texts edited in the Navigationi et viaggi were
considered as the definitive version of those narrations, since they were viewed as
the most reliable ones, and thus they were often transmitted in the Ramusio form,
like Marco Polo's account. (Burgio and Eusebi 2011)
7 “Di cinque sentimenti, questo frutto sopra tutti gli altri del mondo ne participa di
tre, & ancor del quarto, che è il tatto: perche del quinto, che è l'udito, non possono
i frutti parteciparne.”, Navigationi et viaggi, 1556, 135v.; 1985, 596. I quote
Navigationi et viaggi from the original editions (first volume edition of 1554,
second volume of 1559, and third volume of 1556) as well as from the modern
Einaudi edition in six volumes established by Marica Milanesi.
8 As in Leo Africanus: “vidi con gli occhi propi”, ibid., 1554, 44r.; 1978, 198. The
same in Oviedo: “according to what I learned and came to know through my own
eyes and through experience”, “io, secondo che dagli occhi miei istessi & dalla
esperienzia lo ho appreso & saputo”, ibid., 1556, 201v.; 1985, 870. A similar idea
is expressed by Ludovico di Varthema at the very beginning of his account, when
remembering that he left with the intention of “try[ing] to know through my own
person and with my own eyes”, “con la propria persona e con gli occhi medesimi
cercar di cognoscer”, ibid., 1554, 160v.; 1978, 763.
9 Mainly known with the following titles: La Natural hystoria de las Indias (the
Sommario in Ramusio), and La Historia general de las Indias.
10 Navigationi et viaggi, 1983, 301-302.
11 With an approach based on narratology, Le Huenen (1990) offers an alternative
(yet non exclusive) explanation to the massive insertion of visual evidential
strategies in travel narratives. In fact, he notes that there is a paradox in the genre
Geography through Texts 167
of travel narrative since its necessary narrative dimension is contradictory with the
descriptive element of its didactic purpose: the descriptions interrupts the
continuous (and usually chronological) flow of narration. As a consequence, Le
Huenen considers that the position of the narrator (in the cases of first person
narratives) saying “I saw” next to all visual information is to be understood as a
way for the narrator to present himself in the “descriptor role” (“rôle de
descripteur”, 21) and, as such, to integrate fully the description into the narration –
the description being thus an emanation of the main character.
12 “Con meno auttorita insegna chi parla le cose, che ha udite, che colui che dice
quelle, che ha vedute”, Navigationi et viaggi, 1556, 83r.; 1985, 382.
13 “Massime ricordandomi esser piu da stimare un testimonio di vista che dieci
d'udita”, ibid., 1554, 160v.; 1978, 763.
14 “L'una & l'altra oppenione è falsa: percioche non s'è mai veduto, donde egli
habbia nascimento”, ibid., 1554, 98r.; 1978, 438.
15 “Hanno alcune radici dette batatas, le quali mangiano, io come le viddi, iudicai
che fusser navoni grandi”, ibid., 1556, 28r.; 1985, 142.
16 “Le cose per lui vedute, mette come vedute, & le udite, come udite”, ibid., 1559,
1r.; 1980, 75.
17 “Io proprio non gli ho veduti, ma m'è stato referito da infinite persone”, ibid.,
1554, 102r.; 1978, 455.
18 “Et perche questo caso è notissimo & publico, [...] non mi curerò di referire
altri testimonii”, ibid., 1556, 210v.; 1985, 905.
19
“Ma piu che niuno degli altri, che ho detti, m'informò à pieno il Commendator
Messer Pietro Margarito, huomo principale della casa reale, et tenuto in buona
estimatione dal Re Catholico”, ibid., 1556, 92r.; 1985, 418.
20
I agree with Rubiés when he states that such an evolution can be considered as
“the emergence of an individualistic and partly self-conscious type of observer”.
(Rubiés 2000, 21)
21
On the development of geography as an autonomous field of study during the
fifteenth and sixteenth century, see Milanesi 1994.
9
VALERIA MANFRÈ
2. Chorography
Chorographic literature gained popularity in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, with the publication of hundreds of texts on various
cities, towns and populations, mostly written by the leading historians of
the period. These works are vital sources, not only for the information they
contain, but also in terms of their literary value. (Kagan 1995a)
Chorography can be defined as the detailed study of a country, region or
province, and differs from the mere study of antiquities in that it deals
with contemporary events in addition to the remote past. Throughout
Europe, the growth of interest in urban iconography coincided with the
rise of chorography as a literary genre in the early modern period. The
works of the humanist Konrad Celtis in Germany, William Lambarde and
John Speed in England, and Gilles Corrozet’s Fleurs des antiquités de…
Paris of 1532 are just a few examples.
While the genre’s literary form varied widely, as a whole it clearly
cannot be disconnected from the history of cities. A chorographic work
can be understood as a “specific history” of a place or province that differs
from a general history in that it is a hybrid of topographic description and
historical narrative. (Kagan 1995a, 49) It includes a description of the
major examples of public works, and in particular of civic and religious
monuments and military constructions, whether ancient or modern.
Perception of the Spaces in the Mediterranean Chorographic Literature 171
By looking at both the literary and visual sources, and the contexts of
their signification and circulation, we can study how the rules of
cartographic practice and of written language inform the way a place is
given visual form imaged. The intersection between space and the
practices of representation of the urban context allows us to analyze how
painters, architects, engineers and cartographers responded to a culture
that privileged urban spatiality and how the architectural forms and
aesthetics of buildings were made tangible in different artistic recreations.
To classify the images, we must refer to the distinction between
geography and chorography made in Book I of the Geography by Ptolemy,
who based a whole theoretical discussion on the difference between the
representation of the world – geography – and the representation of a part of
region of the world that goes into some detail – chorography. (Nuti 1996,
25) This distinction extended to the practice of visual representation, as
the styles, forms and technical resources used to represent the world
differed from those used to draw villages, towns and cities. To represent
the earth, the geographer had to use the quantitative values of positions
and distance and make schematic line-based drawings to represent the
coast while cities were represented as dots. The chorographer had to make
use of a pictorial and qualitative language, observe the details of a place,
and be more imaginative in showing what a place looked like. According
to Antoine du Pinet, author of the Plantz, pourtraitz et descriptions de
plusieurs villes et forteresses, published in Lyon in 1564, chorography was
most suited to the representation of places as they were seen and existed in
the moment, and did not need to concern itself with size, proportions,
longitudes and latitudes or other cosmographic measurements. (Du Pinet
1564, 14)
Ptolemy further established the distinction between geographic and
chorographic maps by introducing the comparison of cartography to
painting, and of the body of the earth to the human body: the geographer
depicts the known world just as the painter depicts a face. And just as the
chorographer represents specific place, so the painter depicts the detail of
an eye. The parallelisms instituted by Ptolemy between geography and
painting, and the activities of the geographer and painter, were current in
Renaissance art.
The astronomer, mathematician, cartographer and printer Petrus Apianus
drew on Ptolemy’s concept of chorography and attempted to clarify its
meaning in his Liber Cosmographicus, published in 1524 and widely
disseminated in later sixteenth-century editions; yet he offered a different
theoretical distinction between geography and chorography, arguing that it
was not only a difference in the size of the territory represented, but also in
172 9
number of commonplaces on the city and its landscape. The large number
of manuscript copies that circulated in Sicily indicates the strong interest
in the study of these descriptions and the need of a social environment to
represent the world. To some extent, these texts evoke the beginnings of
tourism and are like the travel guides that cartographers consulted to make
their maps, just as Mercator used Charles Estienne’s Guide des chemins de
France (1522) to draw his map of France. (Estienne 1936)
In comparison to the scholarly interest in the chorographic literature of
France (Conley 1996) and England (Helgerson 1992), the effects of
chorographic description and the revolution in cartography on Sicilian
literature has achieved scant historical attention (Revelli 1911) and awaits
further study. Only the most important descriptions of Sicily produced
during the early modern period in the circle of the viceregal court or for a
cultivated reader have received notice. Not surprisingly, the route traced in
these descriptions takes us through the major urban transformations
promoted by the viceroys and Senate of Palermo. In addition, though, the
observations of the curious traveler deserve greater attention; like the
travelers on the Grand Tour who greatly influenced the paintings,
drawings, watercolors and engravings of cities and architectures, they
allow us to trace a parallel history of the urban space here considered.
As a genre, the travel account had its own characteristics and
personality, and the assertion of the originality of certain buildings or
urban space, as well as the use of comparison to ancient and contemporary
examples were frequent devices. Brimming with anecdotes and colorful
details, and fresher and more spontaneous than the traditionally formal
historical or descriptive genres, travel accounts achieved great commercial
success. A good example of this type of writing is Le voyageur d’Europe
où sont les voyages de France, d’Italie et de Malthe by the French
cartographer Jouvin de Rochefort, who visited the island in 1672. (Jouvin
1995) It contains many observations on the cities of Sicily that he visited,
motivated by knowledge and curiosity.
The literary itineraries produced during the period of Spanish
viceroyalty seem to have been done at the service of the Crown, and
therefore some of the descriptions take second place to political, social and
economic matters. Yet architecture, painting and literary genre could be
used to demonstrate the greatness of the Spanish monarchy and express
the importance of the deeds of the viceroys. In fact, some of the texts
touting the transformation of the urban landscape to the ruling class of
Sicily were financed as well to be sent to the incoming viceroys, or even to
the court in Madrid. This may have been the case for the Descrittione
della fellicisima città di Palermo, a manuscript written in 1599 by the
Perception of the Spaces in the Mediterranean Chorographic Literature 175
courtier Gaspare di Reggio. Its first part describes the urban and defensive
morphology of Palermo, the administrative and political capital of the
island, which reinforces the idea of the “città bella” with its squares,
fountains and noble residences. (Di Reggio 1599, 5r-150v) The text served
to inform the new viceroy, Bernardino de Cárdenas y Portugal, 3rd duke of
Maqueda (ruled 1598-1601) of the state of the city’s defenses and of urban
reorganizations – it went as far as providing the duke with specific
indications on what was needed to complete the works on a new dock.
(González Reyes 2014)
On the other hand, in Jouvin’s text the relationship between power and
architecture, and the different urban scales at which power is materialized
are not to be found. There are no official instructions, and Jouvin never
breaks out of his role as observer or makes any reference to the succession
of viceroys on the island that had promoted the architectural and urban
projects that were themselves instruments of cultural and political
propaganda in the cities described. Jouvin does, however, possess the
ability to make lively descriptions of the existing architecture and a
notable interest in spaces that bore a relationship to other urban realities of
the Iberian Peninsula. Prior to Jouvin, Arab-Islamic travelers had noted a
relationship between Sicily and Al-Andalus. (De Simone 1991, 51-79) The
Valencian traveler Ibn Gubayr, for example, compared the region between
Palermo and Trapani to the countryside of Cordoba; and not unjustly, the
impression of the view of Palermo and its old city or qasr (i.e., Cassaro)
made it comparable to the Omayyad capital of Cordoba, which, as Ibn
Hawqal noted (Mandalà 2012, 47-48), was also due to its large number of
mosques. Now, if similarities between Palermo and Cordoba, and Sicily
and the Iberian Peninsula were perceived by Arab-Islamic travelers, to
Jouvin, who describes the Baroque Sicily that existed prior to the War of
Messina of 1674-78, the aesthetic of the old city of Palermo was to be
found along the Via Toledo, the avenue known formerly as the Cassaro
and re-baptized after the urban modifications that were closely related to
the redesigning of the seafront under the viceroy Marco Antonio Colonna
in 1581, as well as the construction of the Porta Felice. (Fig. 2)
This was followed by the construction of the Via Maqueda (Fanelli
1998, 9-16), a new axis that cut across the Cassaro and divided Palermo
spatially into four parts. (Fig. 3) The authors of chorographic descriptions
of the period certainly recalled the breadth and quality of these urban
transformations, but made allusions to other cities as well. Jouvin, for
example, compared the Via Toledo in Palermo to the Calle Mayor of
Madrid, the city king Philip II chose as the permanent capital of the
powerful Spanish Crown in 1561. (Jouvin 1995, 49-53) Equally interesting
176 9
are Jouvin’ss recollectionss of the prommenade beyondd the Porta Felice that
was built whhen the Cassaaro was extended, and of a tree-lined av venue, not
clearly idenntified, which he comparess to the “Lam meda” of Seviille – the
Alameda de Hércules, a garden
g by the Guadalquivirr river built in
n 1574 by
the count off Barajas to reeclaim this sw
wampy area forr the city, andd adorned
with two coolumns that camec from a Roman tempple to Herculees. (León
Vela 2000) These observvations and the t comparisoons to other European
E
locations theerefore make Jouvin’s desccriptions of Siicilian cities somewhat
s
unique amonng the other teexts studied here.
Figure 3: Plaano de ziu.d dee Palermo capiital del Reyno dde Sicilia, 1707. Source:
Carta Corogrraphica del Reyyno de Sicilia con los Planos dde sus Principa
ales Plazas
el año 1707, ff. 6. Archivoo General Militaar de Madrid.
Viterbo Marrio Cartaro (11581). The maagnificent birdds-eye plan of o the city
that appeareed in the fourtth book of thee Civitates (Fiig. 4) was modelled on
Cartaro’s vieew.
As we hhave seen, thee texts by thee cartographerrs that accom mpany the
maps can bbe interpreted as literary teexts, while thheir literary prose
p also
contains a ccertain cartogrraphic potentiaal. (Conley 20007, 401) Desscriptions
were normally influencedd by maps and d views of thee city, but thesse images
did not alwaays keep pacee with the lateest urban deveelopments. In n fact, the
urban structture of the cityy with the new
w artery of thhe Via Maqued da begins
to appear wwith the view of o Palermo pu ublished in Naaples sometim me during
the last twennty years of thhe seventeenth
h century, accoording to the design
d by
the architectt Paolo Amatoo and engraveed by Paolo P Petrini. (Militeello 2008,
86-88) The outline of thhe city is defiined by the raamparts, and the most
important buuildings in the city are sho own. Within thhe urban netw work, one
can distinguuish the main piazzas and arteries that w were laid outt with the
creation of tthe spectaculaar Piazza Vigliena, also knoown as I Quatttro Canti
(Di Fede annd Scaduto 20011), at the crossing of thee Cassaro and d the Via
Maqueda. T The view refleects the descrriptions that ccirculated at the time,
namely the description by Maja (1985 5, 256): “La ssituation dellaa pianta è
d’una città ddistesa più chhe altramente in
i un quadro bislungo […]] È divisa
180 9
in quattro parti poco men che uguali da bellissime strade, che tagliandosi a
Traverso formano una perfettissima croce.” In comparison to Jouvin’s
description, however, Maja’s text is written in the dry style of someone
who does not seem to have had any real experience of the place he
describes. In culling from earlier authors, Maja does not provide any
personal insights, express admiration for any of the buildings or faithfully
describe the landscape. It seems as though there is no room in his text for
reminiscence or the kind of picturesque detail that is typical of someone
who has traveled through the area that is described.
By contrast, these particulars do characterise the writing of the abbot
Giovan Battista Pacichelli who visited Sicily in 1684 (Scibilia 2014, 776-
788) and fully explored its cities. Fascinated by the architecture of some of
the more important constructions, Pacichelli made many first-hand
observations on the monuments he saw, and these constitute the essential
elements of his Moderno stato della Sicilia, compreso dalla sua
navigatione e passeggio (Naples 1685). As was customary, Pacichelli
visited the main coastal cities of Sicily, and favored those on the north and
east coast, such as Messina, Palermo, Siracusa and Catania. The common
perception of Palermo’s urban structure, as defined by the crossing of the
Via Toledo and the Via Maqueda, is also reflected in Pacichelli’s text and
requires no further comment. (Pacichelli 1685, 31)
Pacichelli’s description of Messina, on the other hand, delights us with
the idea of a city that had developed a new urban identity with the
transformations that were carried out during the sixteenth century. What
most surprised him was the important restructuring of the harbor basin
(Giuffrè 1997, 193-238), noting in particular the building of the imposing
maritime theater, or Palazzata, since destroyed (Aricò 2010), an example
of a uniform city decoration related to the artistic culture of the new
viceroy Emmanuel Filibert of Savoy, who governed from 1622 to 1624
(Pacichelli 1685, 4). He also mentions the royal palace no longer in
existence (Pacichelli 1685, 6). What is most original about his description
of Messina, however, is the lengths he devotes to its defense system, and
in particular to its pentagonal citadel on the San Raineri peninsula, begun
in the 1680’s and designed by the engineer Carlos de Grunenbergh
(†1696). Pacichelli provides certain technical details, such as the
measurements of the walls supported by five entrenched bastions – a
fortification of such a scale that it entailed the destruction of everything
around it in the Terranova area. (Fig. 5) It is surprising, in fact, that there
is not mention of the fabric of the citadel in other chorographic texts of the
period.
Percepttion of the Spacces in the Meditterranean Choroographic Literaature 181
fortresses off the old port (Cala) and theeir towers, annd the construcction of a
new dock. (Cardamone annd Giuffrè 19 997) Of the citty and its squ
uare form,
he mentionss the Cassaroo and its adm mirable palacees and homes, the Via
Maqueda, thhe Piazza Villlena, and prov vides a very ddetailed descrription of
the Fontanaa Pretoria. (Giiuffrè 1973, 112-113) In hiis general app preciation
of Palermo, he expresses a great admiration for its m monuments, sttating that
“Lungo la dismisura olttre che incresscevole riusciirebbe il racccontare a
minuto le nnon poche coose di questaa città, che ppur li meriterrrebbono”
(Giuffrè 19773, 114). Lastlly, he claims that
t it would ttake three yeaars to visit
Palermo andd fully appreciiate all of its palaces
p and chhurches.
Figure 6: Mapp of Sicily, 16777. Source. Gab briele Merelli, DDescrittione del Regno di
dicata all’altezzza serenissima del Signor
Sicilia e dell’’isole ad essa coadiacenti, ded
Don Gio. D’A Austria del teneente di Mastro di campo Ger. le Don Gabriele Merelli,
16 August 16677, f. 24 Bibblioteca Reale, Turin.
T
Among tthe most impoortant defensiv ve structure oof the Val Demmone, the
author makees a referencee to the fortreesses of Messiina and to thee defense
policy of C
Charles V, citting the fortss of Castellacccio, Matagriifone and
Gonzaga (GGiuffrè 1973, 58);
5 yet he on nly briefly reffers to the con
nstruction
Perception of the Spaces in the Mediterranean Chorographic Literature 183
Conclusion
The literary itineraries discussed here make an important contribution
to the history of the stereotypes of the city and its space; and regardless of
form – literary text versus cartographic representation – the urban
184 9
product of the mindset and requisites of the society in which they are
created. The Descrittione delimit a physical space and a human
environment, and show the natural landscape containing the signs of the
passage of mankind. In effect, these works “draw” a geography.
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188 9
ISABELLE TRIVISANI-MOREAU
to the Levant ordered by the King, including the Ancient and Recent
History of several islands of the archipelago, of Constantinople, of the
Coast of the Black Sea, of Armenia, Georgia, and the borders of Persia
and Asia Minor, with maps of Cities and considerable places. The
knowledge, the customs, the trade and the religion of the different peoples
who live there; and the explanation of the Antique Medals and
Monuments. Enriched with Descriptions and Figures of a great number of
rare plants and various animals; and several Observations on Natural
History). The goals set by the authorities were to fill in knowledge gaps or
to correct some information through direct observation. This research was
not only conducted for the botanic field, but also for geography: the
combination of the two fields of study was necessary to verify what was
already known and to learn more about this world. In theory, fiction and
literature did not belong in this context. It is nevertheless the literary
quality of this book that we will try to study here, going back to the
separation between science and literature in the history of scientific travel
stories (Wolfzettel 1996, Montalbetti 1997) in the 19th century. It is
indisputable that Tournefort’s journey at the beginning of the
Enlightenment period had a scientific purpose. But did the ongoing
separation of the fields of science and literature – encouraged by the
academic phenomenon – mean that Tournefort s work had no literary
dimension? We will start by defining the context of the journey to estimate
the dimension of literature in the project. Two aspects of the epistolary
genre will be studied first, followed by the use of the traveler-scientist and
the effect of the complicity with the readership.
Aussi nous comptons que ce fut un bonheur pour les Sciences que l’ordre
que M. de Tournefort reçût du Roi en 1700. d’aller en Grece, en Asie & en
Afrique, non seulement pour y reconnoitre les Plantes des Anciens, & peut-
être aussi celles qui leur auront échappé, mais encore pour y faire des
Observations sur toute l’Histoire Naturelle, sur la Geographie ancienne &
moderne, & même sur les Mœurs, la Religion & le Commerce des Peuples.
(Relation…, t. I, Eloge de M. de Tournefort par M. de Fontenelle)
(Thus we think that it was lucky for Science that Mr de Tournefort was sent
by the King in 1700 to Greece, Asia and Africa, not only to acknowledge
the Plants of the Ancients, and maybe also those that they missed, and
again to make Observations about all Natural History, ancient and modern
Geography, and even on the customs, religion and trade of the local
Peoples.)
192 10
This status is also present at the beginning of the story, entitled “Dessein
de ce voyage ” (Purpose of the journey):
Monseigneur,
Si vous n’aviez pas destiné mes Relations à paroître au jour, je me
garderais bien de vous entretenir d’une infinité de choses que vous sçavez
beaucoup mieux que moi ; mais comme vous m’avez ordonné de faire part
au public de ce qui se passe dans le Levant, je crois que vous ne trouverez
pas mauvais que j’insère dans les lettres que j’ai l’honneur de vous
adresser, plusieurs choses que tout le monde ne sçait pas, ou qui ont reçû
divers changemens depuis qu’on les a publiés : je tâcherai même de faire
sentir les veritables causes de ces changemens. (Relation…, t. II, 1-2)
(Monseigneur,
If you had not planned to publish my Stories, there are a lot of things
that I would not tell you about, because you know more about them than I
do. But since you asked me to render public what happens in the Levant, I
think you will not object that I add inside the letters that I am honored to
send you several things which are not generally known, or which have
Writing Space through the Work of the French Botanist Tournefort 193
been changed since their first publication ; I will also try to explain the
real reasons for these changes.)
Louis 14th’s interest in the Levant, and in the several fields for which the
travelers were asked to work, was linked to the grandeur of France and to
the economical and intellectual interest that it could find in opening up to
these regions. This expansion indicates that the book written by Tournefort
after this trip was not a mere scientific report.
The products from this trip were thus of different natures: a herbarium
meant for scientific use, and also a tale with a whole other purpose. The
intermediality of this book is obvious in the way the herbarium was
“contaminated”. Over fifty plates were inserted in the book since the very
first four-volume quarto edition of 1717. Tournefort had been
accompanied by Andreas von Gundelsheimer, a German doctor, and by
Claude Aubriet, a famous drawer who had drawn the plates for Éléments
194 10
de Botanique. But the plates in Relation d’un voyage du Levant did not
represent only vegetation : they also showed several cities or sites, a few
characters – for the eccentricity of their clothing – and also objects specific
to local needs ; the readers could be drawn into the story through the
pictures (Apostolou 2009). The drawings still appeared in the smaller
(octavo) edition from Lyon, published ten years later in three volumes,
proof that the book had an ornamental dimension. There are two
explanations for the importance of these illustrations: for the plants plates,
the reason is science – many botanist writers think that the description of a
plant should be completed with a figure. For example, Pierre-Joseph
Garidel, a French botanist from Aix-en-Provence, mentioned that same
idea around the same time (Garidel 1714). This iconography, so important
for botany, was then followed by plates depicting journeys in general.
We can try to reconstitute the evolution of the project of this story.
According to Fontenelle’s eulogy, the letters had been written during the
expedition:
Several manuscripts from that Levant expedition are now kept in the
National Natural History Museum, such as MS 1184 which includes
Tournefort’s letters to Pontchartrain and some others, for example letters
from the French ambassador in Constantinople ; ms. 995 which contains
Memoirs along with a catalog and descriptions that Tournefort sent during
his trip ; mss. 996-7, a journal that was mostly written by doctor
Gundelsheimer and was actually the result of a collaboration (one of the
Jussieus who owned this manuscript noted: “Beaucoup de pages sont de la
main de Tournefort, ainsi que les titres. La moitié supérieure de la
première page est de Tournefort, la moitié inférieure de Gundelsheimer ”,
Tournefort wrote most of these pages, and also the titles. The top half of
the first page is Tournefort’s, the bottom half is Gundelsheimer’s). There
are also manuscripts written by Claude Aubriet (mss. 78, 79, 185, and
252). When Tournefort died in 1708, six years after he got back to France,
the book, which was mostly his work, was unfinished. It was finally
completed in 1717, after an intervention from the priest Bignon. From
Writing Space through the Work of the French Botanist Tournefort 195
1702 to 1708 Tournefort took the time to go back over his letters, which
were a good start; but he probably also thought about the general
presentation of his work, so that the book would be accessible to many
despite its scientific dimension.
We can wonder which strategies – and which literary strategies in
particular – were used to seduce that audience, and how elaborate the
presentation of the non-scientific part of the report was. How is that
literature, in the sense we give it today? Because of his concern for science
and of his simple style, Tournefort had to leave out relevant episodes
much more often than other writers. He barely mentioned the working
conditions, said nothing about his relation with his companions, and did
not seem to bond with the natives. Furthermore, one of the motifs of this
genre is missing (Requemora-Groos 2012, 46-76): there is no feeling of
regret in the departure scenes. Even though they did make contacts –
mostly through botany, medicine, or local authorities that foreigners
cannot avoid –, the travelers seemed to keep their distance. Anecdotes are
often used in travel stories to make them more interesting to the readers,
but Tournefort did not use that many of them. A few of them were
chronologically linked to the travelers’ itinerary: they arrived somewhere
and learned that something had just happened. This event was not directly
related to them, but it occasionally added a journalistic dimension to the
tale, and showed both the scientific and the entertaining interest of these
little known places. However, there are very few anecdotes compared to
the quantity of knowledge conveyed through this book.
Si c’étoit ici une piéce de Poësie, je dirois que chaque Lettre est comme
émaillée par l’agréable varieté des sujets. (Relation…, t. I, Lettre à
Monsieur Begon)
(If this were Poetry, I would say that each Letter is almost adorned by this
pleasant variety of subjects.)
The traditional method associated with 17th century classics and the
reference to taste are competed later on by a praise of Tournefort’s
conversation:
Les choses qu’il disoit, grandes par elles-mêmes, belles de leur propre
fond, n’avoient pas besoin de parure étrangere. Sa conversation avoit de
ces charmes naturels, qui plaisent avant qu’on y puisse prendre garde ; on
ne s’appercevoit de leur effet, que par réflexion, & après coup, &
l’agrément qu’on avoit à l’entendre, se trouvoit justifié par l’avantage
qu’on en retiroit.
Comme il avoit cultivé son excellent naturel par une étude prodigieuse,
il y avoit en lui un agréable mélange de nature & d’art, que l’on ne pouvoit
Writing Space through the Work of the French Botanist Tournefort 197
these letters increased their literary quality, and it could also be found in
miscellaneous additions such as verse or connections made between reality
and fiction. (Viala 2008, 49-51) Tournefort did not use both verse and
prose, but his descriptions can still be defined as literary. His tale may not
have been as flowery as some others that undoubtedly belong to literature,
but it was certainly not as dry as his herbaria.
The writer-narrator and the audience-reader are both busy enough for
the text to be pleasant. The writer-narrator is not a mere witness of what
happens before his eyes. Those letters were not only about drawing figures
of people and landscapes, nor about drawing a map: their purpose was also
to show the difficulties of the journey and how different it was from the
life back in France. The travelers had to face the cold, the heat, the storms
and the rain; they had to cross seas and climb mountains, to experience
these new countries with their bodies. The mistakes of European
cartographers exasperated Tournefort who knew now what he was talking
about when he said that there was nothing like traveling to be able to draw
accurate maps.
He lived classic travel stories – both the robinsonade that he liked to
depict and less glorious adventures. As foreigners, they depended on other
people, and sometimes they were deceived – for instance when they were
falsely accused of being spies. They faced other dangers, such as
drowning, or horse-riding on the edge of a chasm so deep that they could
not keep their eyes open. The scientists seemed to be poor adventurers:
there was nothing heroic about them, and they were fearful. They became
the victims of their own curiosity when they had to wait, terrified, for the
end of negotiations that they could not understand between ambiguous
mediators when they met some Kurds in the mountains.
But sometimes their fear was not justified. They were once kept awake
by weird noises – that were actually made by common seals – and another
time by crane flies which bit them and made their faces swell. A lot of
these pitiful nights are described in the eighth letter. They were less about
promoting adventure than to mention the pranks put on by mischievous
natives who offered them to stay “in a lazaretto with some slaves eaten up
by vermin.” (Relation... ; t. I, Lettre VIII, 355-6)
Foreigners usually draw attention to themselves, but Tournefort also
mentioned people laughing at them. Even in their own field of study,
women made fun of them and actually showed them how to use some
kinds of plants. And people mocked them too when they were practicing
their favorite activity:
Conclusion
The Story of a Journey to the Levant written by Tournefort and
published by the priest Bignon was more than a scientific report: it was a
vulgarization that a large audience, used to other kinds of readings, could
understand. The epistolary genre (which Thévenot, Spon ou Chardin had
not used) was part of that project. The knowledge could be shared despite
the simple style. Sometimes the letters became reports in which both the
writer-traveler and the reader-recipient had a bigger role.
Tournefort was careful to reach the high expectations of the Count, but
he also chose to double the reports that he had first sent with the ulterior
publication of an illustrated book. The embellishment strategy that he used
then to conquer an audience larger than that of the scientists and the
politicians of his time included the quest for a literary genre that was
intermediary in many ways: the epistolary genre allows to give more heart
to a subject that could have been dull by incorporating the writer and the
readers, but it is also based on a simple style which forms a compromise
between the geographical and the literary discourse
References
Relation d’un voyage du Levant fait par ordre du Roy contenant l’Histoire
Ancienne & Moderne de plusieurs Isles de l’Archipel, de
Constantinople, des Côtes de la Mer Noire, de l’Armenie, de la
Géorgie, des Frontieres de Perse et de l’Asie Mineure avec Les Plans
202 10
Further reading
ANTOINE, Philippe. 2001. « Préface », Roman et récit de voyage, Marie-
Christine Gomez-Géraud et Philippe Antoine (eds). Paris: Presses de
l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 5-8.
APOSTOLOU, Irini. 2009. L’Orientalisme des voyageurs français au XVIIIe
siècle. Une iconographie de l’Orient méditerranéen. Paris: Presses de
l’Université Paris-Sorbonne.
AUBAILLE-SALLENAVE, Françoise. 2013. « Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
(1656-1708). Un botaniste collectionneur éclairé au XVIIe siècle », Le
Goût de l’Orient. Collections et collectionneurs de Provence,
catalogue de l’exposition « Le Goût de l’Orient » Cité du livre –
Bibliothèque Méjanes, 22 juin – 15 septembre 2013 en coproduction
avec Marseille-Provence 2013. Aurélie Bosc and Mireille Jacotin (ed).
Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 76-84.
DUFIEF, Pierre-Jean. 2007. « Préface », La Lettre de voyage. Pierre-Jean
Dufief (ed). Rennes: PUR, 5-10.
GARIDEL, Pierre-Joseph. 1714. « Explication des Noms des Auteurs
Botanistes avec quelques remarques historiques sur leurs ouvrages »,
Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs d’Aix et dans plusieurs
autres endroits de la Provence. Aix: David, I-XLVII.
LESTRINGANT, Frank. 2002. Le Livre des îles. Atlas et récits insulaires de
la Genèse à Jules Verne. Genève: Droz.
MONTALBETTI, Christine. 1997. Le Voyage, le monde et la bibliothèque.
Paris: PUF.
REQUEMORA-GROS, Sylvie. 2012. Voguer vers la modernité. Le voyage à
travers les genres au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-
Sorbonne.
VIALA, Alain. 2008. La France galante. Paris: PUF.
Writing Space through the Work of the French Botanist Tournefort 203
Notes
1
MS here and in the following paragraph stands for Manuscript.
CHAPTER FIVE:
GEOGRAPHICAL NOVELS
11
CÉLINE SABIRON
organic time boundaries, for order and control purposes, as well as for
critical benefits. This work seeks to question the label of historical novelist
which has been permanently put on Scott since the mid-twentieth century
by reassessing the author’s position within the Enlightenment movement,
which was "a moment, and a movement in space as well as time" (1), as
Charles Withers very aptly indicates in his 2007 book entitled Placing the
Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (1). He
then adds:
the map for literary tourists from the beginning of the nineteenth century,
it is because he adopted an ekphrastic approach. The latter was inspired by
art and based on very visual vivid descriptions, through his taste for travel
literature, with characters who journey from England to Scotland and vice
versa. It is also due to his interest in the picturesque (from “picture”), as
Scott was very much influenced by the theorists William Gilpin
(Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, 1786), Richard
Payne Knight and above all Uvedale Price (Essay on the Picturesque,
1794) who tend to fix nature, including irregular, anti-classical sights seen
during their exploration of rural Britain, into a pictorial composition.
Likewise, Scott’s landscape is often composed, arranged like a picture:
The appearance of the piquetted horses, feeding in this little vale, the forms
of the soldiers, as they sate, stood, or walked, in various groups, the
vicinity of the beautiful little river, and of the bare and romantic rocks
which hedge in the landscape on either side, formed a noble foreground,
while far to the eastward the eye caught a glance of the lake of Menteith,
and Stirling Castle, dimly seen along with the blue and distant line of the
Ochill Mountains, closed the scene. (RR III.6, 271)
In this extract from Rob Roy, the first-person narrator Frank Osbaldistone
sketches a verbal painting of the Highland landscape surrounded by a
stone edge (“the bare and romantic rocks which hedge in the landscape on
either side”) that is “closed”, thus forming like a frame around the picture.
He stages the gaze of the onlooker, through a reference to “the eye”, who
looks at the painting. The latter is composed of a “foreground” made of
very defined outlines (“the appearance”; “the forms”; “in various groups”)
and a background, the limits of which are very blurred (“dimly seen”),
with a blue hue looming in the horizon (“the blue and distant line”), in
accordance with the convention of landscape painting, as developed by
Hélène Bonafous-Murat in her thesis “De L’Idéal à l’organique” (1996,
274).
In Scott's texts, geography is thus composed like a painting or like a
map. In an article published in Études Anglaises in 2010, I have already
argued that describing Edinburgh in Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian
equates to marking it out with a nexus of vertical and horizontal lines.
Indeed, the Scottish capital, surrounded by the Flodden Wall and opened
by four symmetrical gates (I.6, 49), is delineated in the fashion of a mock
Roman city with a street plan in the form of a grid. Laid out in a strict
crisscross pattern, the two main east-west-oriented roads, or “decumanus”,
join in a “large open street, or rather oblong square” (I.2, 21), a sort of
Roman “Forum” called the Grassmarket, a centre of political or social
210 11
activity and “an esplanade for the scene of public executions.” (I.2, 21)
The text registers both its specific location at the bottom of “the steep and
crooked street called the Bow […] descend[ing] from the High-Street”
(I.4, 32), and its relative position by the Edinburgh Castle. Distances are
also indicated so that a scale drawing of places is produced: Reuben
Butler’s “place of residence” at Libberton is located “in a small village,
about two miles and a half to the southward of Edinburgh.” (I.6, 49) Not
only does the writer present two-dimensional, geometrically accurate
images, but he also drafts three-dimensional topographic maps in which
height is taken into account. For example the narrator specifies that Mrs
Saddletree’s “shop-door opened at no great distance from that of the jail,
though on the opposite or south side of the street, and a little higher up.”
(I.6, 48) Geography is thus set on a pedestal in Scott’s texts, whether the
latter describes the Lowlands or the Highlands. As James Reed puts it in
his study of the author, “[w]hatever fictional gloss may be applied, when
he is writing of Scotland, and especially of his own Border region, Scott is
recording, not inventing; his vision grows out of an objective world, a
place of time and the senses.” (Reed 1980, 4) This objective world was
drawn from the Scotland which he was familiar with, and which he
canvassed throughout his life.
from north to south should be used instead of the old more picturesque
path through the Ochil Hills: “[t]he alteration of the road, greatly, it must
be owned, to the improvement of general intercourse, avoids this
magnificent point of view, and the landscape is introduced more gradually
and partially to the eye, though the approach must be still considered as
extremely beautiful.” (FMP I.1, 12)
Topography is often used to symbolise a narrative turning point in
Scott's novels, as noted by Tom Bragg who talks about the “mimetic
relationships between space and narrative.” (Bragg 2010, 208) Both
Waverley and The Heart of Mid-Lothian, which are built like a diptych,
focus on characters who are measured and tested by their encounters with
the novels’ uncertain, unknown spaces, such as Edward Waverley’s being
challenged by his reading of the Highland landscape – seen as both wild
and romantic (W I.22, 110-17) –, and Captain Thornton’s disastrous
misreading of the landscape in Rob Roy that leads to his party’s ambush by
a horde of highlanders guided by Helen MacGregor. (RR III.4, 252-6) The
Antiquary, which deals with the question of interpretation thanks to the
running metaphor of sight and vision, opens on a misreading of the
landscape. The novel's titular antiquary, Jonathan Oldbuck, proudly
displays his estate to the romantic hero, Lovel, and their tour concludes
with a climb to a dearly-bought hillside which Lovel gamely admits
“commands a fine view” (I.4, 27), but which, for Oldbuck, possesses far
more significant layers of meaning:
‘do you see nothing else remarkable? – nothing on the surface of the
ground ?’
‘Why, yes; I do see something like a ditch indistinctly marked.’
‘Indistinctly! – pardon me, sir, but the indistinctness must be in your
powers of vision – nothing can be more plainly traced – […] Indistinctly ?
Why, heaven help you, the lassie, my niece, as light-headed a goose as
womankind affords, saw the trace of the ditch at once. Indistinct ? […]
Indistinct ? […]’
Lovel endeavoured to apologize, and to explain away his ill-timed phrase,
and pleaded his inexperience.
‘My dear sir,’ continued the senior, ‘your eyes are not inexperienced; you
know a ditch from level ground, I presume, when you see them? Indistinct?
Why, the very common people, the very least boy that can herd a cow,
calls it the Kaim of Kinprunes, and if that does not imply an ancient camp,
I am ignorant what does’ (A I.4, 27-8)
The adjective “indistinct” comes back like a leitmotiv, with the old
antiquary fancying himself as a teacher of “space reading”. For him, the
traces are remains of an ancient camp, a Roman fort, and they testify that
212 11
this place was the site of the “final conflict between Agricola and the
Caledonians.” (I.4, 28) In fact, he has located this site by his reading of
history, instead of space, before confirming it visually: the land
correspond[s] with all the marks of that celebrated place of action. It was
near to the Grampian mountains – lo! yonder they are, mixing and
contending with the sky on the skirts of the horizon! It was in conspectu
classis – in sight of the Roman fleet; and would any admiral, Roman or
British, wish a fairer bay to ride in than that on your right hand? It is
astonishing how blind we professed antiquaries sometimes are; Sir Robert
Sibbald, Saunders Gordon, General Roy, Dr. Stokely, – why, it escaped all
of them. (RR I.4, 28)
The land is a pretext for him to project his historical reading of space, as
further demonstrated by his deciphering of the letters A. D. L. L. carved
on an ancient stone and which he takes to mean “Agricola Dicavit Libens
Lubens”, i.e. “Agricola willingly and happily dedicated [this].” (29) Not
only does he refer to Scottish but also, by extension, classical history when
he mentions the plains of Marathon, which is where the first Persian
invasion of Greece took place in the fifth century before Christ: “it was a
national concern; […] Whose patriotism would not grow warmer, as old
Johnson says, on the plains of Marathon?” (29) The scene is interrupted by
the sudden and unexpected apparition of a mendicant and embodiment of
the prophet in the novel, Edie Ochiltree, who explodes Oldbuck’s erudite
lecture by asserting that what he fancies a Roman ruin is nothing more
than the remnants of a fairly recent wedding barbecue. Through this
character, Scott warns the reader against a historical reading of space,
inviting him to look at the landscape and read it without any prejudice or
bias. In addition to being a repository of folk wisdom and local history,
Ochiltree is the character who has an outstanding ability to navigate the
novel's spaces, to read into the palimpsest of space. He is the most
conversant with the landscape, as suggested by his surname which means
"old tree": unremittingly rooted into the ground, he is able to blend into
space. Through his ironic remark, he depicts the failure of typical
knowledge-gathering methods to read the space-history palimpsest.
Walter Scott and the Geographical Novel 213
[Rob Roy] owed his fame in a great measure to his residing on the very
verge of the Highlands, and playing such pranks in the beginning of the
18th century as are usually ascribed to Robin Hood in the middle ages, and
that within forty miles of Glasgow, a great commercial city, the seat of a
learned university. Thus a character like his, blending the wild virtues, the
subtle policy, and unrestrained license of an American Indian, was
flourishing in Scotland during the Augustan age of Queen Anne and
George I.[...]. It is this strong contrast betwixt the civilised and cultivated
mode of life on the one side of the Highland line, and the wild and lawless
adventures which were habitually undertaken and achieved by one who
dwelt on the opposite side of that ideal boundary, which creates the interest
attached to his name. (Weinstein 1978, 115-6)
Highland line which serves as a dividing line, seems to stem from the
anachronistic co-existence of two temporalities, between the erudition of
the Enlightenment era (“the beginning of the eighteenth century”; “the
Augustan age of Queen Anne and George I”) and the obscurantism of the
Middle-Ages (“in the middle ages”). In Scott's novels, the characters’
northward travels seemingly take them backward in time. They go from
buzzing commercial England to the static Lowlands, depicted like a still
life with the Baron of Bradwardine’s house resembling Sleeping Beauty’s
castle in which time, symbolized by a sun-dial (“a sun-dial of large
circumference, inscribed with more diagrams than Edward’s mathematics
enabled him to decipher”, W I.9, 39) displayed at the entrance gate,
appears to have stopped. Further north they get to the Highlands still
dominated by a feudal political system composed of a chief and his
liegemen. These three temporalities stereotypically correspond to three
different levels of economic and social development. The movement in
space is also a movement in time according to the critics who endow Scott
with a chronotopic imagination, like David Lipscomb in his Geographies
of Progress quoted in Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel:
This “vertical layering” (Oliver 2007, 42) is based on the theory of the
four stages advocated by the Scottish philosophers of the Enlightenment,
such as Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson or even Adam Smith. In his 1762
and 1763 lectures at the University of Glasgow, Smith mentions: “[t]here
are four distinct states which mankind pass thro: – 1st, the Age of Hunters;
2dly, the Age of Shepherds; 3dly, the Age of Agriculture; and 4thly, the Age
of Commerce.” (14) Through this reference, Scott’s novels question the
central notion of Progress, considered in the eighteenth century as a linear
historical process through which humanity goes from primitivism to
civilisation. And yet, far from following this “natural” progression
advocated by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, Waverley and Henry
Bertram travel backward through the various stages of social development,
thus defying the law of nature, and thereby the Enlightenment theories:
backward, or against the current. Flora Mac-Ivor symbolically leads
Waverley “up the stream” to the mysterious source of the raging Scottish
Walter Scott and the Geographical Novel 215
torrent: “[i]t was up the course of this last stream that Waverley, like a
knight of romance, was conducted by the fair Highland damsel, his silent
guide.” (W I. 22, 112) The inversion of the natural course of things is
unnatural and monstrous, and therefore not only regressive, but also
transgressive for the border traveler who meets a temporal, but also a
political, economic and social Other during his initiatory geographical
journey. Through this distortion, Scott disconnects the two notions of time
and space in order to show that they work independently. Space is
meaningful by itself, so much so that Scott wishes to reach a universal
geography, with Scotland featuring as the ultimate model in his novels.
geography”, i.e. the passage from realism to imagination, the latter being
particularly powerful in geographical novels. To give an example of this
shift which highlights Scott’s “geographical imagination” – to adapt David
Brown’s 1979 critical work entitled Walter Scott and the Historical
Imagination – let us look at the depiction of the landscape in Waverley,
just as the eponymous character is about to cross the border into the
Highlands. The outlines of the landscape are hardly drawn when they are
blurred by the foam over the stream (“foaming stream”, W I.16, 81) to
give it an unearthly, ethereal appearance favourable to Scott’s imagination:
“Edward gradually approached the Highlands of Perthshire, which at first
had appeared a blue outline in the horizon, but now swelled into huge
gigantic masses.” (W I.7, 34) Scott immediately deprives the landscape of
any characteristics to aestheticize it, following the principles of Burke’s
theory. It is because of the absence of any well-defined limits that the
image of the border partakes of the sublime. While Waverley is nearing
the outlaw’s den on the Highland Line, he sees a light on the horizon:
“[t]he light, which they now approached more nearly, […] appeared
plainly to be a large fire.” (W I.17, 85) This very literal description, given
in plain style (“plainly”) is yet followed by a more figurative depiction
marked by a very vivid imagination. This “sudden figurative leap”
(Moretti 1999, 44) generated by the impact with the border aims at
blurring the image which had previously been clearly outlined: “but
whether kindled upon an island or the main-land, Edward could not
determine.” (W I.17, 85) The fire suddenly turns into a
red glaring orb […] rest[ing] on the very surface of the lake itself, and
resembled the fiery vehicle in which the Evil Genius of an oriental tale
traverses land and sea. […]. Edward could discover that this large fire,
amply supplied with branches of pine-wood by two figures, who, in the red
reflection of its light, appeared like demons, was kindled in the jaws of a
lofty cavern. (W I.17, 85)
the land is intermingled with that of the desired female body, it also
merges with that of the mother found in the watery and breast-like hilly
landscape in the Highlands. The journey northward and the crossing of the
Highland Line is all the more monstrous since it is interpreted as a
reversed and incestuous childbirth. It is a “regressus ad uterum” (Eliade
1959, 115) as underlined by the merging of the geological and anatomical
lexical fields in Waverley. There are ambiguous references to the “mouth
of the cave” (W I.18, 89), looking like a vagina dentata (Eliade 1959, 116)
through which the explorers wish to journey: “[the] dusky barrier of
mountains had already excited his wish to penetrate beyond them.” (W
I.16, 78) The mountainous border seems to split into two, thus tightly
encircling the travelers as shown by the binary structures: “a chasm
between two tremendous rocks” (81); “between two mountains, both very
lofty.” (82) Space serves to map out a symbolic initiatory trial through
which the protagonists face their own organic origins.
Lastly, Dupuy mentions the resort to a possibilistic discourse, which
Scott does when he makes use of the Enlightenment’s theory of stadial
evolution, before discarding any determinism. He points at the correlation
between space and social development but refuses any amalgam and
systematic adequation, as we have seen. According to Arthur Getis’s
definition, “possibilism” in cultural geography is the theory that the
environment sets certain constraints or limitations, but culture is otherwise
determined by social conditions. Scott’s heroes travel through spaces
which conjure up possibilistic thinking.
Scott’s novels thus perfectly match the five criteria spelt out by Lionel
Dupuy. While Scott relies on the historical context to place his characters
in the middle of political crises, the latter are rooted to the ground and it is
thanks to their movement through space, rather than time, that plots
unfold. Scott’s geographical thinking thus takes over his historical
imagination.
Conclusion
To conclude, Walter Scott’s scenic descriptions were one of the
earliest-noted and most celebrated features of the Waverley novels. Before
the series fully caught on, reviewers sometimes praised the descriptive
passages and little else, like the unsigned review of Guy Mannering (1815)
which noted the novel's “enchanting descriptions of natural scenery”.
Despite being bewitching and enchanting, space has gone from casting a
spell to being cast away, expelled from any critical reading of his novels.
Walter Scott and the Geographical Novel 219
References
BAKHTIN, Mikhaïl. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.
Michael Holquist (ed). Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (trans.).
Austin, Texas: Texas UP.
BONAFOUS-MURAT, Hélène. 1996. “De L’Idéal à l’organique : la
représentation de l’Histoire dans les romans écossais de Walter Scott”.
Thesis. Sorbonne-Paris III University.
BRAGG, Tom. 2010. “Scott’s Elementals: Vanishing Points between Space
and Narrative in the Waverley Novels”, Studies in the Novel, 42.3.
BROWN, David. 1979. Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
DUNCAN, Ian. 1992. Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel:
The Gothic, Scott, Dickens. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
DUPUY, Lionel and Jean-Yves Puyo (eds). 2015. L'Imaginaire
géographique: entre géographie, langue et littérature. Presse de
l'Université de Pau et des pays de l'Adour, collection « Spatialités ».
—. 2013. Jules Verne. La Géographie et l’imaginaire. La Clef d’Argent.
Coll. KhThOn, nb3.
ELIADE, Mircea. 1959. Initiation, rites, sociétés secrètes, Paris: Gallimard.
FERRIS, Ina. 1991. The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender,
History and the Waverley Novels. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
FLEISHMAN, Avrom. 1971. The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to
Virginia Woolf. Baltimore: The Johnson Hopkins Press.
220 11
CAROLINE RABOURDIN
The title Walking and Writing inevitably calls for Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and his Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire. In a 2013 interview about the
publication of his autobiographical fragments in Winter Journal, Paul
Auster admits to having read Rousseau at the age of 22, just before
moving to France from his native America. But in the same interview
Auster insists that the autobiographical author who made the deepest
impression on him is in fact Michel de Montaigne, whose Essais he reads
time and time again. The interview I am referring to, led by François
Busnel and published in French in L’Express, is entitled “Tout commence
avec le corps” (“It all starts with the body’). So I will start with the bodily
engagement in writing, the necessary, and even generative engagement of
the body in writing. Writing of course generally involves the hands, either
one holding a pen or two typing on a keyboard, it also involves the brain,
the eyes, but what I am referring to here is an involvement of the overall
body, a mobilisation of the entire body towards the act of writing.
To the first question of the interview “how do you write?” Auster
answers that each project’s incubation and inception is unique and then
talks about the music of writing in the following words:
Writing is, for me, inextricably linked to music. And to walking. Thus to
the rhythm of the body. In fact this is what music is: rhythm of the body. I
find rhythms in the act of walking, which help me compose sentences and
paragraphs. I feel this melody, or cadence, call it what you will, firstly in
the body. It then turns into words as soon as I have a pen in hand. I often
quote this formidable phrase by Ossip Mandelstam: “ I wonder how many
pairs of sandals Dante wore out while writing The Divine Comedy.”
Walking and Writing: Paul Auster’s Map of the Tower of Babel 223
Mandelstam felt the rhythm of the walk in Dante’s writing and poetry. And
indeed, don’t we use the word feet when we talk about verses?1
Firstly about the foot, which is both a part of the body and a measuring
tool, what a great tool! “The lower extremity of the leg below the ankle,
on which a person stands or walks” is the first definition of the word in the
OED. The “unit of linear measure equal to 12 inches (30.48 cm)” only
comes in fourth position, so the foot is first and foremost a part of our
body, one that we use to measure the land, or rather used to use. When we
walk the land, we take measure of it, ultimately we experience its extent,
how much of it we can cover in one minute, one hour, one day, by foot.
We position ourselves and relate ourselves to the land. It was, and still is
in some countries, a measuring unit of phenomenological nature, one that
we can relate to, and that we understand through our very own body.
In 1791, the metre was defined “as being equal to the ten millionth part
of one-quarter of the terrestrial meridian.” In 1875 it was institutionalised
and internationalised through the Bureau International des Poids et
Mesures, still in action today, and the Metre Convention treaty, signed by
17 countries. Although one is inclined to think of this definition of the
metre as purely geometrical, requiring the most precise of astronomical
observations to calculate the circumference of the earth, the metre was not
in fact to be defined solely by looking at the stars. The ten millionth part
of one-quarter of the terrestrial meridian was measured by walking the
Earth. Between 1791 and 1799, two men, Pierre-François Méchain and
Jean-Baptiste Delambre, walked the meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona,
the first traveled from Dunkirk to Rodez in France, whilst the second
traveled the uncharted territories between Rodez and Barcelona. The arc of
9 and a half degrees was measured by triangulation using what is called
the Borda Circle, an instrument pointing at the sky and landmarks on the
territories, including church spires, towers or mounts. The ten millionth of
the quarter of the meridian was then made into a prototype of platinum-
iridium, to be recently replaced by “the distance travelled by light in
vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second”, admittedly a lot more difficult to
remember that the length of my foot. But ultimately, it all started with a
walk from Dunkirk to Barcelona. And with Geometry, which
etymologically comes from the Greek Geometria, combination of geo,
earth, land and metria, measure. So I like to think that the meter was
originally established by walking the land.
Both the meter and the foot are used to qualify, or measure poetry. The
meter, according to the OED, is “the rhythm of a piece of poetry,
determined by the number and length of feet in a line”; it is also
incidentally “the basic rhythmic pattern of beats in a piece of music,”
224 12
I walk within these four walls, and for as long as I am here I can go
anywhere I like. I can go from one end of the room to the other and touch
any of the four walls, or even all the walls, one after the other, exactly as I
like. If the spirit moves me, I can stand in the center of the room. If the
spirit moves me in another direction, I can stand in any one of the four
corners and in this way bring myself into contact with two walls at the
same time. Now and then I let my eyes roam up to the ceiling, and when I
am particularly exhausted by my efforts there is always the floor to
welcome my body. (Auster [1980], 2007, 159)
This extract could serve as the introduction to Auster’s 2007 novel Travels
in the Scriptorium, which is set entirely in the main protagonist’s room.
The space we are invited in in the above-quoted extract is quasi Euclidean
with its four walls, its ceiling and its floor. The perfect cube. Yet it is not
static. First there is the centre within, the “here”, like a dot on the map, but
then comes movement, and with it, its intentionality “I can go anywhere I
like”, seemingly opening up horizons, to be promptly brought back to the
boundaries of the room, its four walls, with, still, this sense of freedom
“exactly as I like” and terminating with an exhausted body lying on the
floor. So the movement, the writing are intentional, they are motivated by
the desire of the writer to explore new spaces and made possible by his
physical or muscular efforts. And Auster adds:
So if his first instinct was to start with the body, he decides against it and
focuses on the void instead; a space is thus deployed, where anything can
happen, a stage enabling movement. But then, strangely, the movement,
Walking and Writing: Paul Auster’s Map of the Tower of Babel 225
1. Mapping
Quinn was struck by the way Stillman had skirted around the edge of the
territory, not once venturing into the centre. The diagram looked a little
like a map of some imaginary state in the Midwest. Except for the eleven
blocks up Broadway at the start, and the series of curlicues that represented
Stillman’s meanderings in Riverside Park, the picture also resembled a
rectangle. On the other hand, given the quadrant structure of New York
Streets, it might also have been a zero or the letter “O”. (Auster [1985],
1990, 82)
In this extract from City of Glass, possibly one of the most potent and
memorable passages of the novel, writer turned detective Daniel Quinn
examines the drawing he has made in his red notebook, of his following of
Peter Stillman, a literary scholar recently released from prison. The red
226 12
notebook is where Quinn records all his observations about the ins and
outs of the mysterious character.
Quinn discovers that the movement of Stillman’s body through the
streets of New York formed the letter O, although he could not be sure at
first. We learn later that he would spell THE TOWER OF BABEL over
the course of fifteen days at the rate of one letter a day and are presented
with a series of drawings of the letters O, W and E, showing the trajectory
of Stillman’s body through the streets of New York. Note that Quinn starts
not with the letter T of ‘The’ nor the T of ‘Tower’, having missed the first
four days of meanderings, but with the letter O as the point Zero of
departure of the mapping exercise.
The streets of New York, with their gridded layout lend themselves to
the drawings, as well as to the Cartesian naming system using sequential
numbers for streets and avenues. There even exists a part of Manhattan
called Alphabet City with Avenues A, B, C and D. But here Stillman’s
letters are of a different nature, they are performed to form a series of
words. Through his steps in the streets of New York, they are slowly
taking meaning, step by step, letter by letter, day after day. The meaning is
carefully and painstakingly constructed. Stillman walks and writes the
words which consumed his entire life to the point of insanity: “The Tower
of Babel”. Obsessed with the episode of the bible, Stillman conducted a
monstrous and failed experiment and locked his child away from
civilization. For nine years, from the age of two, the child was kept in a
blackened out room and forbidden to speak the few words that he knew.
Language was beaten out of him in the absurd assumption that he would
eventually communicate using god’s language. Stillman’s child “could not
see or say, could not think or do.” (Auster [1985], 1990, 23) Unable to
move freely and to communicate throughout his formative years, the
young man’s struggle after his rescue is immensely complex. The struggle
is not only linguistic, it is also a physical and motor :
The act of moving from one place to another seemed to require all his
attention, as though not to think of what he was doing would reduce him to
immobility. Quinn had never seen anyone move in such a manner, and he
realized at once that this was the same person he had spoken to on the
phone. The body acted almost exactly as the voice had: machine-like,
fitful, alternating between slow and rapid gestures, rigid and yet
expressive, as if the operation were out of control, not quite corresponding
to the will that lay behind it. (Auster [1985], 1990, 17)
this passage the same effort is applied to both the act of moving and the
act of speaking.
2. Gesture
Quinn’s thoughts momentarily flew off to the concluding pages of A.
Gordon Pym and to the discovery of the strange hieroglyphs on the inner
wall of the chasm – letters inscribed into the earth itself, as though they
were trying to say something that could no longer be understood. But on
second thought this did not seem apt. For Stillman had not left his message
anywhere. True, he had created the letters by the movement of his steps,
but they had not been written down. It was like drawing a picture in the air
with your finger. The image vanishes as you are making it. There is no
result, no trace to mark what you have done. (Auster [1985], 1990, 85-86)
With the last three sentences Auster seems to dismiss the undertaking of
Stillman as an act without a trace before adding that the letters did in fact
exist, not in the streets where they were drawn, but in the main
protagonist’s notebook, who recorded the meanderings. By so doing,
Auster gives prominence to the written text, the trace on paper, whereas
Stillman’s steps through the streets of New York disappear without a
trace. He compares them to drawing a picture in the air with your finger,
which in turn reminds us of what Merleau-Ponty describes as the geste or
gesture. Merleau-Ponty (1945) makes the distinction between touching, or
holding, and showing with your finger, which is seen as an attempt to
express something. But if he clearly says that showing is not touching, his
endeavour is to show us that the gesture in itself is also the desire to touch
or even hold something. The gesture is intentional; it requires the
mobilisation of the entire body to be accomplished. Someone writing a
word in the air with his hand, just like someone miming an action with
their entire body, is trying to communicate as well as express something
and Merleau-Ponty’s chapter “Le corps comme expression et la parole”
sets out to define the parole (in its broadest sense of spoken and written
word) as a linguistic gesture. He tells us that “[Parole] is a genuine gesture
and, just like all gestures, [Parole] too contains its own sense.” ([1945],
2012, 189)
The parole is an attempt to reach meaning, to make sense of
something, and he adds that the body, through the tone of the voice, a
hesitation etc. contributes to the modulations of meaning. With the
following words, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Auster’s own,
Merleau-Ponty tells us about the immateriality of the thought and the real
sense of parole:
228 12
It is in the same fashion that the spoken word (the one I utter or the one I
hear) is pregnant with a meaning which can be read in the very texture of
the linguistic gesture (to the point that a hesitation, an alteration of the
voice, or the choice of a certain syntax suffices to modify it), and yet is
never contained in that gesture, every expression always appearing to me
as a trace, no idea being given to me except in transparency, and every
attempt to close our hand on the thought which dwells in the spoken word
leaving only a bit of verbal material in our fingers. (Merleau-Ponty [1960],
1964, 89)
The hand draws a map in the air. The hand attempts to grasp meaning, and
fails. Meaning does not appear to be given by words alone. Words are only
instruments of the linguistic gesture through which meaning is made
accessible, but are always part of a wider context and it is for the reader to
make sense of them. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty tells
us that “the sense of gestures is not given but rather grasped, that is to say
seized through an act of the spectator.”2 But the hand of the listener is not
enough to make sense. We cannot grasp, we can only understand. And to
understand, the whole body needs to take part.
In Auster’s novel, both walking and the gesture disappear without a
trace, they appear to have no permanence, no tangible physicality beyond
the actual act. And so I want to ask: do walking and the linguistic gesture
really have no tangible physicality beyond that of the movement? In his
essay White Spaces, Auster invites the reader to consider the verb as
something ephemeral, transient, and further, devoid of meaning:
Speaking and listening, action and perception, are quite distinct operations
for me only when I reflect upon them. Then I analyse the spoken words
into “motor impulses” or “articulated elements”, understanding them as
auditory “sensations” and perceptions”. When I am actually speaking I do
not first figure the movements involved. My whole bodily system
concentrates on finding and saying the word, in the same way that my hand
moves toward what is offered to me. (Merleau-Ponty [1969], 1974, 18-19)
Stillman instead of the first. He asked himself why Christopher, the patron
saint of travel, had been decanonized by the Pope in 1969, just at the time
of the trip to the moon. He thought through the question of why Don
Quixote had not simply wanted to write books like the ones he loved –
instead of living out their adventures. He wondered why he had the same
initials as Don Quixote. […] He wondered what the map would look like
of all the steps he had taken in his life and what word it would spell.
(Auster [1985], 1990, 154-155)
Here both the activity of mapping on the ground and the result of it on
paper are acts of language and contribute to what Merleau-Ponty calls the
“sedimentation of language.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1960, 88) Like Quinn in
Auster’s novel, we will consider our walking – the act of mapping or
surveying in Deleuze’s terms (1980, 11) – diachronically, and ask “what
the map would look like of all the steps he had taken in his life and what
word it would spell.” (ibid) If at the beginning we give a word its most
“common” meaning, the way it is then used will progressively alter this
meaning to the point that we constitute a sense for this word which is
unique, rich with successive layers of associations and interpretations.
That sense, the sense that we make of a word through our own senses, is
constantly evolving, adjusted, expanded. This is what Merleau-Ponty calls
the “sedimentation of language” ([1960], 1964, 91) and it is also this
process which gives a text its texture.
And the sense of the speech is nothing other than the manner in which it
handles this linguistic world, or in which it modulates upon this keyboard
of acquired significations. I grasp it in an undivided act that is as brief as a
cry. (Merleau-Ponty [1945], 2012, 192)
Every further encounter with the word modulates ever more the linguistic
world. Page after page, novel after novel. But as Merleau Ponty points out,
this sense we constitute is then immediately available to us at any given
time, without having to decompose, or enumerate its various associations
and references: once a word is inhabited, once we make sense of it, it is
incorporated (acquis) and leaves a trace in the body itself, it becomes part
of the linguistic world of the reader.
And so the trace is not to be found in the verse, the furrow, but in the
reader’s linguistic world, in the sense that is slowly constituted through the
reader, by the reader, the hearer. In each novel, the reader reaches to the
meaning that the writer is trying to convey. Each reading of a word
reinforces or alters, to various degrees, its signification to the reader. The
word is enriched with a new meaning, it is presented in a new context to
which it remains associated and the reader has a feel for it, a certain sense
of the word. This ever-changing linguistic world is an equilibrium in
movement. If the trace left by the linguistic gesture, by Auster’s words or
by Stillman’s map, is to be found in the reader/writer themselves and their
respective linguistic worlds, then, in virtue of Merleau-Ponty’s sedimentation
of language, the trace is a dynamic trace. The trace is a trajecture, the
result of a diachronic trajectory of the reader, and is unique to each
individual.
Conclusion
Auster’s musing on such phrases as “good egg,” “egg on his face,” “to
lay an egg,” “to be as like two eggs” invites the reader to think about the
instersubjective constituted meaning of the said phrases, but it is also
clearly a reference to the earlier mention of Humpty Dumpty in the book
and its philosophy of language. It is a renvoi, a return to, a cross-reference
which takes us across the text. A rejoinder in the text. Auster invites us to
move across the text and in the same paragraph also writes about
Christopher, patron saint of travel, and the first trip to the moon so as to
232 12
reinforce the idea of travel. Auster juxtaposes the movement of the reader
across the text to the longest and most ambitious trip man has ever taken,
so that the literary travel is effectively compared to a journey most of us
can only imagine. He then brings our attention to Don Quixote, another
character, in another book, by yet another author. We travel not across the
same book, but start and constitute a sense which is intersubjective and
travels further to another author. He remarks that Don Quixote, who bears
the same initials as the main protagonist, chose to live the adventures of
the books he liked so much, instead of simply reading or writing about
them, though of course we know that what he lives out is actually the life
depicted in the books and we remember the passage where Don Quixote’s
maids and servants, worried by the effect the books had on their master,
decided to block him access to the library. All to no avail, since Don
Quixote had already incorporated all his books, to the point that he
believed them to be his life. By using this reference in his book Auster not
only calls on the reader’s knowledge, but also alters it by placing it in a
new context. Daniel Quinn is Don Quixote.
If the sense is constituted by sedimentation, by the successive
encounters of the words throughout various writings, the process is truly
spatial, we follow a certain trajectory not only across a single novel or
piece of text, but across our entire library, and by that I mean across all our
encounters with language, the spoken as well as the written word. The
sense has a unique dynamic trajecture.
And so the linguistic map of all the steps we have taken in our life is a
dynamic one, one where motion is felt, one which contains a trajectory
which knows no boundaries and also contains its future travels.
References
AUSTER, Paul. (1980). 2007. White Spaces. In Collected Poems. London:
Faber & Faber
—. (1985). 1990. City of Glass. In The New York Trilogy. London:
Penguin Books
—. 2007. Travels in the Scriptorium. London: Faber & Faber
—. 2011. Winter Journal. New York : Henry Holt and Co.
BUSNEL, François. 2013. “Tout commence avec le corps “in L’Express,
March 2013
CARROLL, Lewis. (1871). 2010. Through the Looking Glass. London:
Bloomsbury Publishing.
CERVANTES, Miguel de. (1605-1615). 2010. Don Quixote. Tom Lathrop
(trans.). Oneworld Classics Ltd.
Walking and Writing: Paul Auster’s Map of the Tower of Babel 233
DELEUZE, Gilles and Félix GUATTARI. 1980. Mille plateaux. Paris: Les
Editions de Minuit.
MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice. 1945. Phénoménologie de la perception.
Paris: Gallimard
—. Maurice. (1945). 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Donald A.
Landes trans. London: Routledge
—. 1960. « Sur la Phénoménologie du langage », Signes. Paris: Gallimard.
—. (1960). 1964. Signs. Richard C. McCleary (trans.). Northwestern
University Press
—. 1969. « La Science et l’expression du monde », La Prose du monde.
Paris: Gallimard.
—. (1969). 1974. The Prose of the World. John O’Neill (trans.). London:
Heinemann.
MONTAIGNE, Michel de. (1580-1582) 2007. Les Essais. Paris: Gallimard.
POE, Edgar Allan. (1838). 1999. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of
Nantucket. London: Penguin.
ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques. (1782). 1972. Les Rêveries du promeneur
solitaire. Paris: Gallimard.
Notes
1
Original quotation reads: “L'écriture est pour moi très liée à la musique. Et à la
marche. Au rythme du corps, donc. D'ailleurs, c'est ça, la musique : le rythme du
corps. Je trouve dans l'acte de marcher des rythmes qui m'aident à faire des phrases
et des paragraphes. Je ressens d'abord cette mélodie, ou cette cadence, appelez cela
comme vous voudrez, dans le corps. Puis ça se transforme en mots dès que j'ai un
stylo à la main. Je cite souvent cette phrase formidable d'Ossip Mandelstam : ‘Je
me demande combien de paires de sandales Dante a usées lorsqu'il a écrit La
Divine Comédie.’ Mandelstam a ressenti ce rythme de la marche dans l'écriture et
la poésie de Dante. D'ailleurs, lorsque l'on parle de versification, on parle de pieds,
n'est-ce pas?” (Auster, in Busnel’s interview, 2013, my translation)
2
I have used my own translation here instead of Donald A. Landes’s translation
where the idea of grasp had disappeared. Merleau-Ponty’s text reads “Le sens des
gestes n’est pas donné mais compris, c’est à dire ressaisi par un acte du
spectateur.” (1945, 225) and Donald A. Landes translates: “The sense of the
gestures is not given but rather understood, which is to say taken up by an act of
the spectator.” (2012, 190)
13
CATHERINE DELMAS
Many of the book reviews published when Amitav Ghosh’s first two parts
of The Ibis Trilogy were launched1 (Sea of Poppies, 2008, and River of
Smoke, 2011) insist on the historical dimension of his epic saga, in the
vein of The Glass Palace (2000), and his desire to fill in the blanks of
history by focusing on subalterns forgotten by grand narratives. In the first
volume he portrays coolies or girmitiyas ņ i.e. indentured labourers who
had signed a girmit (SP 75) ņ, transported from India to Mauritius in order
to work on the sugarcane plantations after the abolition of slavery (1834).
Among them are Deeti, and Kalua, her lover who rescued her from sati,
but also convicts (an indebted rajah wrongly accused of forgery and
spoliated by the British, and an opium addict, Ah Fatt, the son of a Parsi
merchant, Bahram Modi, whose failure to sell his cargo of opium in
Canton leads him to bankruptcy and addiction in the second volume),
Paulette, the daughter of a French botanist, and Jodu, the son of her wet-
nurse, i.e. people from various origins, castes, religions, displaced from
their own land and transported on board a former slave ship, the Ibis, en
route for Mauritius.
The ship is a kind of Noah’s ark transporting people, some of them
couples, with different languages, cultures, customs, food, clothes, to a
new land, and a whole gamut of personal predicaments that are the result
of the imperial situation and British economic interests in the Indian
Ocean, thriving on the cultivation of opium in India and exports to China.
The Ibis, in Sea of Poppies is a floating jail, a former blackbirder, which
sets in parallel the condition of coolies in the Indian Ocean, and that of
slaves in America, or Mauritius before 1834. The ship is manoeuvred by
Zacharie, the second mate, the mulatto son of an American female Black
Amitav Ghosh’s Historical and Transcultural Geographies 235
opium and the subsequent fall in prices, but the fictional space of the two
novels sets in parallel British interests and triangular commerce with
Africa and America before the abolition of slavery, and with India and
China, i.e. the Atlantic and the Indian ocean. If history is examined from a
kaleidoscopic perspective, as polyphony and dialogism intermingle the
points of view of British, American and Indian merchants, coolies,
convicts, the victims of opium and the Chinese authorities, Ghosh also
revisits geography, which cannot be dissociated from the historical
context, and rewrites (from the etymology geo-graphein) the impact of
free trade on a global scale2.
To that purpose, he opposes his characters’ roots, which they have left
and lost in the process of displacement, and economic and financial routes
along which they are tossed, to borrow James Clifford’s metaphor in his
seminal work. (1997, 1)3 The tossing of people is both literal when some
coolies jump ship before the Ibis leaves the Delta and crosses the Kala
Pani or Black Water, recalling the dead slaves thrown overboard into the
Atlantic, and figurative when echoed by the ebb and flow which
characterizes the narrative, jumping from one set of characters to the next,
until they gather on board in Sea of Poppies, and scatter again in River of
Smoke. The displacement, gathering and scattering of characters in the two
novels are set in parallel with the commerce of opium, grown in northern
Bihar, transformed in Ghazipur, sent to Canton and sold illegally to the
Chinese. Both “thugs and drugs – or opium and coolies as some would
have it” (SP 79) are mere commodities for Burnham, the British merchant,
and the plot of Sea of Poppies clearly exposes and denounces this analogy.
Globalization in Ghosh’s work means “an imperial spatiality consisting
of networks” and “specific juxtapositions or constellations of multiple
trajectories. These trajectories may be those of people, objects, texts and
ideas.” (D. Lambert and A. Lester 2006, 13-14, quoted by Butlin 2009,
38). In Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke they involve the exchange of
commodities, the smuggling of opium and the transportation of coolies.
The trading route is highlighted by the geographical markers which
punctuate the linear journey of the characters (place names like Ghazipur,
Chhapra, Calcutta, the Sundarbans, or distances, which build up the
cartography of the area) and the narrative structure of Sea of Poppies
(“Land”, “River”, “Sea”), and River of Smoke (“Islands”, “Canton”).
Ghosh’s vision of geography is maritime and fluvial as in The Hungry
Tides. (2004) The characters’ stories take place along the Ganges (Deeti
and Kalua’s escape, Paulette and the Burnham’s place of residence) or on
the water: Jodu’s fellow villagers “earn their living by wandering on the
water, working as boatmen, ferry-wallahs and fishermen.” (SP 63) Deeti’s
Amitav Ghosh’s Historical and Transcultural Geographies 237
and Kalua’s journey down the Ganga on board the pulwar taking them to
Calcutta is an opportunity for the narrator to describe the landscape,
through the point of view of frightened subalterns. The geography and the
topography of the area take on a fantastic and mythic dimension when
they reach the Delta, and a subversive one when they hear of “villages put
to flames by the white man’s troops” (SP 258) or are shown Alipore jail in
Calcutta. Both internal focalization and tropes in Sea of Poppies (Deeti’s
hut compared to a “tiny raft, floating upon a river of poppies”, SP 30) and
Robin’s embedded letters in River of Smoke convey Ghosh’s ethic and
postcolonial standpoint, which denounces colonial power and violence,
and the effect on the local people and their environment.
Ships also have a narrative and structural function: a boat often is the
rhizomatic link which enables the shift from one set of characters and one
story to another, like plateaus which connect in a heterogeneous manner to
refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (2004). The Ibis is a
recurrent connector, through Deeti’s vision; a comparison with Raja Neel
Rattan Halder’s palatial budgerow in Raskahli (SP 41) also introduces his
father’s association with Burnham, or Jodu’s aspirations to become a
Lascar; a boy’s dinghy enables the narrator to introduce Paulette‘s story
(SP 67). The loops of the text carry the reader along like the meanders of
the river, the Delta and the Sundarbans, and as with Laurence Sterne in
Tristram Shandy, digression is progression. However, as the pace of the
narrative quickens, the connectors vanish; the various plots are merely
juxtaposed, separated by asterisks, like dots on a map, and the
fragmentation constructs a mental cartography of the characters’ origins
and displacement, roots and routes, encompassing the Indian Ocean, from
Calcutta to Mauritius, Nicobar, Singapore, Burma, Malacca, the Sultanate
of Aceh and China. The various geographical markers, which juxtapose
people, stories, origins, and languages, and the final textual assemblage of
fragments in the two novels help delineate a postcolonial cartography of
dis-location, gathering and reconstruction. The metaphor of the poppy
seeds gathered in a pod, then scattered throughout the Indian Ocean,
obviously illustrates the theme of the diaspora, a term which comes from
the Greek speirein, the sowing of seeds. (Israel 2000, 1) But the metaphor
also is metafictional as it combines the different diegetic, poetic,
cartographic and political plateaus of the text. By focusing on places of
production, exchange, commerce or smuggling, Ghosh’s map unveils
structures of power, and division and administration of territories.
Geography and cartography are epistemological and discursive practices,
supported by institutions which are productive of knowledge and power as
Edward Said explained in his seminal work, Orientalism. (1979) Ghosh,
238 13
Ghosh tackles most of the issues mentioned by Butlin, in his two novels,
first in North India, then in China, through various narrative and thematic
means: the narrator’s description of places and spaces, internal
focalization, embedded narratives and letters, power relations between
subalterns and Westerners (plant owners, sea captains, merchants…), the
effects of the cultivation of opium on farming and the farmers’ lives and
environment, trading links… Ghosh denounces the hypocrisy of the
Western presence in the East: Burnham justifies slavery, then the
employment of coolies, for their own benefit, in the name of the ‘civilizing
mission’4, as he justifies the traffic of opium in the name of free trade,
progress (SP 121) and by divine intervention, or religious beliefs; as a
result the opium factory in Ghazipur which is “among the most precious
jewels in Queen Victoria’s crown” also is “steeped in Anglican piety” (SP
95). But Ghosh’s approach is also human, often close to social
anthropology5 when he examines the plight and destiny of his characters,
all victims of free trade, or when he describes a place through social
activities (commerce on the river) or events such as Diwali (SP 354), or
the effects of the climate on the coolies in the depot, customs, beliefs,
myths, and eventually life in Fanqui town.
Ghosh’s sea chart of the Indian Ocean draws trade routes, based on the
exchange of goods and the circulation of cash-flow. In River of Smoke,
three ships converge to Canton: The Ibis, the Anahita and the Redruth. All
of them transport seeds, but of a different kind: opium exported to China,
Amitav Ghosh’s Historical and Transcultural Geographies 239
Emerging into the busy waterway of the Hooghly, [Jodu] found himself
suddenly in the midst of a great multitude of vessels – crowded sampans
and agile almadias, towering brigantines and tiny baulias, swift carracks
and wobbly woolocks: Adeni buggalows with rakish lateen sails and
Andhra bulkats with many-tiered decks. (SP 65)
Ghosh revisits the meaning generally associated with the tropes of ship
and river, i.e. displacement, migration and diaspora, and he turns them into
places of gathering, a third space, a place of
The Ship and the island are places of transformation. The Ibis changes
names, transforms people’s clothes and activities : Zacharie, a black man
passing for white, a former carpenter, becomes novice sailor then second-
in-command (SP 15), then a “Free Mariner” or “malum” thanks to a
change of clothes or voice (SP 52); Baboo Nob Kissim’s social rise is
echoed by linguistic transformation, from “carcoon”, “cranny”, “munshi”,
“mootsuddy” and “gomusta” (SP 171); Paulette boards the Ibis disguised
in a sari, and the Redruth disguised as a boy. Ghosh deconstructs the myth
of fixed identity and origin, and replaces it with hybridity, crosspollination
as names, identities and languages are enriched by contact with others.8
The exodus abolishes differences and erases castes: “when you [Neel] step
on that ship, to go across the Black Water, you and your fellow
transportees will become a brotherhood of your own: you will be your
own village, your own family, you own caste” (SP 328); “we will all be
ship-siblings – jaházbhais and jaházbahens.” (SP 372) The Ibis is a place
of gestation and a promise of rebirth: “this vessel was the Mother-Father
of her new family a great wooden mái-báp, an adoptive ancestor and
parent of dynasties yet to come.” (SP 373) The Ibis, “a vehicle of
transformation” (SP 440) makes Baboo Nob Kissim‘s spiritual
transformation possible as he is gradually inhabited by the presence of his
mentor, Ma Taramony. Deeti gets pregnant and becomes a matchmaker.
Deeti’s painted images in the shrine act as a founding myth for the Fami
Colver: that of the Founding Father, and the “Parting”, the “critical
juncture” (RS 14) between the past and a new beginning.
The transformation of people is accompanied by that of language:
Zacharie (and the reader) must become familiar with “a new shipboard
vocabulary, which sounded a bit like English and yet not.” (SP 16) Words
are distorted and transformed, become hybrid and fluid. In Mauritius, the
language of Deeti’s family combines Creole and Bhojpuri. But Ghosh also
transforms the act of reading, and urges the reader, like Zacharie who tries
to navigate with a watch and sextant, to use Serang Ali’s “method of
navigation that combined dead reckoning […] with frequent readings of
the stars.” (SP 18) The reader is urged to be carried away by the flow of
numerous foreign words and no matter if he does not understand all of
them, contrary to the characters: Paulette was brought up in a “confusion
of tongues.” (SP69) For Jodu the port’s traffic and its “anarchic medley of
Portuguese calaluzes and Kerala pattimars, Arab booms and Bengal
paunchways, Malay proas and Tamil catamarans, Hindustani pulwars and
English snows” are inkeeping with the variety and the fluidity of the
Lascari’s “motley tongue.” (SP 108) Ghosh’s characters are go-betweens:
Zacharie, Paulette, Deetie, Baboo Nob Kissim, themselves in-between
242 13
This fractal pattern is best illustrated by the “n°1 Fungtai Hong of Achhas”
(or subalterns) in Fanqui town; it is a hybrid, transcultural place, “with its
own foods and words, rituals and routines” gathering people from different
origins and from all over the Indian Ocean: “they were a motley gathering
of men from distant parts of the Indian subcontinent and they spoke
between them more than a dozen languages.” (RS 204) The “lumping
together” or syncretism is the result of migrations and subservience, and
the commerce of opium, and yet it erases origins, castes and religions, and
creates new bonds and a new hybrid nation, “a yet unmade Achhasthan”
(RS 204), along the thirteen factories representing Western economic
power. The ship for Gilroy is also a “means to conduct political dissent”
(17) as the mutiny on board the Ibis shows. “Ships also refer us to the
middle passage, to the half-remembered micro-politics of the slave trade,
and its relationship to both industrialization and modernisation.” (Gilroy
1993, 17)
In spite of the overwhelming effect of polyphony and transculturation
created by the text, and symbolically condensed in Deeti’s Creole, food
and shrine, language remains associated with the characters’ origins:
Deeti’s songs, in Bhojpuri, remind Neel of his infancy, and his nostalgia is
shared by all the coolies on board, “the most stubbornly rooted in the silt
of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop
of story and song?” (SP 416) Ghosh takes up the botanical metaphor when
the plants seen by Paulette on the banks of the Ganga, named by her
Amitav Ghosh’s Historical and Transcultural Geographies 243
father, and her father’s acquaintances remind her of her own “childhood
roots.” (SP 397)
Thus, in Ghosh’s two novels, transculturation also involves a process
of transplantation, and botany is obviously a trope used by the author to
illustrate up-rootedness. Like the plants transported to England, the
migrants must adapt to a new soil. Botany is not an innocent activity in the
diegesis, in spite of what Mr Lambert believes, raising Paulette in “the
innocent tranquility of [Calcutta’s] Botanical Gardens and the French
revolutionary ideal of “Love, Equality and Freedom” taught by Nature.
(SP 143) The botanist collects, labels and classifies plants, naming them in
Bengali and Sanskrit, “as well as to the system recently invented by
Linnaeus” (SP 137), and he is the direct inheritor of the Enlightenment.
Even if a family story is attached to each plant that the Lamberts or
Paulette‘s great aunt have named, in spite of the emotional and personal
dimension of Paulette’s upbringing and passion, naming and classification
are discursive and epistemological practices which are forms of power.
Paulette, too, is eager to “inscribe her name in the annals of botanical
exploration.” (RS 110) Ghosh exposes the traffic of which botany is the
object, by setting in parallel all forms of seeds, opium and decorative
poppies, and the commercial use that is made of foreign species. Like the
coolies, there are collected, renamed, transplanted, sent to Kew Gardens,
sold and exchanged.
Botany in River of Smoke is a lucrative activity, and Penrose is first
seen as a plant hunter, whose purpose is to make money and develop his
company. His ship, the Redruth, symbolically follows the same course as
that of the Ibis and the Anahita, and is involved in the commercial
networks which criss-cross the Indian Ocean. According to Johnson:
References
BAHADUR, Gaiutra. 2008. “Sunday Book review.” The New York Times
November 28. In Amitav Ghosh. 2011. “Sea of Poppies.”
http://www.amitavghosh.com. Accessed February 2015.
BUCHAN, James. 2008. “Lascars, sepoys and nautch girls”, The Guardian,
7 June. In Amitav Ghosh. 2011. “Sea of Poppies.”
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/07/fiction7.
Accessed February 2015.
BUTLIN, Robin. 2009. Geographies of Empire, European Empires and
Colonies, c.1880-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
CLIFFORD, James. 1997. Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late
Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
DELEUZE, Gilles and Félix GUATTARI. (1980). 2004. A Thousand
Plateaus. Brian Massumi (trans.). London: Continuum.
DELMAS, Catherine and André DODEMAN. Re/membering Place. Bern:
Peter Lang, 2013.
GHOSH, Amitav. (2008). 2009. Sea of Poppies. London: John Murray.
(Abr. SP)
—. (2011). 2012. River of Smoke. London: John Murray. (Abr. RS)
—. (2000). 2001. The Glass Palace. London: Harper Collins Publishers.
—. (2004). 2005. The Hungry Tides. London: Harper Collins Publishers.
GILROY, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP.
246 13
Notes
1
To be found on line on Amitav Ghosh‘s personal website: Amitav Ghosh. 2011.
“Books”. Accessed February 2015. http://www.amitavghosh.com/index.html. For
example, Shirley Chew, “Strangers under sail,” The Independent, Friday, 16 May
2008; or James Buchan, “Lascars, sepoys and nautch girls,” The Guardian, 7 June
2008.
2
Although Burnham, the British merchant in the two novels, is a staunch supporter
of free trade, it was actually implemented later, in 1846 with the repeal of the Corn
laws in Great Britain, explains historian Robin Butlin, in Geographies of Empire,
European Empires and Colonies, c.1880-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), p.20. Opium being illegally smuggled into China, the term “free
trade” takes on an ironic dimension in Amitav Ghosh’s novels.
Amitav Ghosh’s Historical and Transcultural Geographies 247
3
Clifford shows that “global history proceed[s] from the fraught legacies of
exploration, colonization, capitalist expansion, immigration, labour mobility and
tourism.” Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century
(Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 1997) p.1.
4
It must be noted, however, that the ‘civilising mission’ was conducted in order to
abolish slavery, for example Livingstone in Africa.
5
Amitav Ghosh has a PhD in social anthropology (Oxford, 1981); he began his
career as a social anthropologist and his field work in Lataifa, a small village in
Egypt, is the topic of his first work, In an Antique Land (1986), a hybrid mix
between fiction, travel writing and autobiography, which contains the seeds of his
subsequent novels (travel, migration and trading routes, history revisited by
subalterns).
6
Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic (Harvard University Press, 1993) proposes new
chronotopes, such as the ship, “a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in
motion” which “focus[es] attention on the middle passage”, p. 4.
7
“Re/membering” as a dual process of recollection and reconstruction among the
diaspora is the issue of the book edited by Catherine Delmas and André
Dodeman. Re/membering Place (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013).
8
The term applies to botany and refers to the transfer of pollen from one flower to
another from another species. As a metaphor, used by Salman Rushdie in
Imaginary Homelands, Essays and Criticism. 1984, it applies to literary and
linguistic cross fertilization.
14
ÉLODIE RAIMBAULT
I do say that as soon as men begin to talk about anything that really
matters, some one has to go and get the atlas. And when that has been
mislaid or hidden, it is interesting to see how far the company can carry on,
scribbling and sketching in the fork-and-tablecloth school, without it. One
discovers then, that most men keep a rough map in their heads of those
parts of the world they habitually patrol, and a more accurate – often a
boringly precise one – of the particular corner they have last come out of.
(Kipling 1914, 368)
Rudyard Kipling’s Writing of the Indian Space 249
The humorous chronicle of the trajectory of the smell enables the narrator
to list the landmarks of central Calcutta for the reader, amusingly giving
exact toponyms and locations as if writing a satirical guidebook. The trope
used in the passage gives the description a mythic dimension through the
hyperbolic characterization of the smell. The smell reaches the status of an
almost supernatural force, with its ubiquitous presence and its notorious
character as “the clammy odour of blue slime”, a legendary designation
complete with its definite article. In “The City of Dreadful Night”,
Kipling’s actual visit of Calcutta gives the description its referential
quality but the introduction of literary tropes make the generic
Rudyard Kipling’s Writing of the Indian Space 251
The visual vividness of the passage and its cartographic precision makes
the fictional space of the crater believable and the first-person narrative
enhances this impression of accuracy and simple referentiality. Here,
Kipling’s fiction and his journalistic output both create literary spaces
which are apparently homotopic, on different scales. This is all the more
striking as the tale is presented as authentic by the narrator, although it
tells a nightmarish story akin to those of the Victorian colonial gothic,
complete with entrapment devices and mummified corpses. The main
protagonist, feverish and overworked, also is the narrator’s only source,
which would not be sufficiently certified for a journalistic account. The
tale seems a little tall, but the character’s status and temperament as a civil
engineer are presented by the narrator as ample evidence of his
trustworthiness: “with a head for plans and distances and things of that
kind and he certainly would not take the trouble to invent imaginary
traps.” (Kipling 1885, 15) Not an engineer himself, the narrator may be
hinting metanarratively at his own propensity to invent imaginary traps,
but at the level of the main narrative, the fiction of authenticity is
maintained.
However, accuracy of description is not Kipling’s only spatial mode of
writing; he also draws analogies between Indian places and territories and
252 14
other parts of the world. These analogies blur the lines of referentiality and
create layers of literary maps which are highly charged ideologically.
The litany is an expressive one and exactly describes the first emotions of a
wandering savage adrift in Calcutta. The eye has lost its sense of
proportion, the focus has contracted through overmuch residence in up-
country stations – twenty minutes’ canter from hospital to parade-ground,
you know – and the mind has shrunk with the eye. Both say together, as
they take in the sweep of shipping above and below the Hugli Bridge:
“Why, this is London! This is the docks. This is Imperial. This is worth
coming across India to see!” (Kipling 1888, 186)
All Hong-Kong is built on the sea face; the rest is fog. One muddy road
runs for ever in front of a line of houses which are partly Chowringhee and
partly Rotherhithe. […] When I went into the streets of Hong-Kong I
stepped into thick slushy London mud of the kind that strikes chilly
through the boot, and the rattle of innumerable wheels was as the rattle of
hansoms. A soaking rain fell, and all the sahibs hailed ‘rickshaws,—they
call them ‘ricks here,—and the wind was chillier than the rain. It was the
first touch of honest weather since Calcutta. No wonder with such a
Rudyard Kipling’s Writing of the Indian Space 253
climate that Hong-Kong was ten times livelier than Singapur, that there
were signs of building everywhere, and gas-jets in all the houses, that
colonnades and domes were scattered broadcast, and the Englishmen
walked as Englishmen should—hurriedly and looking forward. (Kipling
1889, II, 249-51)
Captain compare their knowledge of the Indian wars and the military
campaigns on the border between India and Afghanistan: the Captain
launches the analogy with an anecdote about “a trooper there who had
been in India [and] told me that Arizona was like Afghanistan. There’s
nothing under Heaven there except horned toads and rattlesnakes – and
Indians.” (Kipling 1889, 82) The comparison may well be spurious in fact,
as is suggested by the sentence “we sat up till two in the morning
swapping the lies of East and West.” (Kipling 1889, 87) However, it still
creates a community of experience and a superimposition of the two
spaces. In both the Captain’s and the journalist’s points of view these
border spaces are simultaneously places of confrontation and places of
ethnological study, where the “Indians”, be they Native Americans or
from the sub-continent, are constructed as other and “objectivised”. The
comparison is upheld by the fact that both men draw their ethnological
knowledge from their personal, long-term experience of the territories at
stake, which makes such knowledge inaccessible or even irrelevant to the
metropolitan centre, that is to say on the East coast or in London. Here
again, Kipling’s characters are caught between an imperialist, centripetal
drive and a pragmatic sense of belonging to the liminal spaces of the
Border or the Frontier:
"Nobody knows and nobody cares. What does it matter to the Down-Easter
who Wrap-up-his-Tail was?"
"And what does the fat Briton know or care about Boh Hla-Oo?" said I.
Then both together: "Depend upon it, my dear Sir, the army in both Anglo-
Saxon countries is a mischievously underestimated institution, and it's a
pleasure to meet a man who," etc., etc. (Ibid.)
Their abridged conversation does not give any proof of their knowledge of
either of these native leaders against whom the British or US armies
fought, apart for their names, and they merely stand for almost
interchangeable representatives of the enemy in the colonial context.
Compared to the supposed absolute ignorance of the metropolitans, their
familiarity with native names seems authentic, but the superimposition of
two territories in a generic mapping of frontier warfare spaces nevertheless
reveals the true objectified nature of their knowledge. A decade later,
Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) took up this
comparison between US imperialism and the British Empire in a more
explicit manner, yet the geographical displacement of imperial issues from
the territory of India to that of the USA in the texts just quoted is to be
read as part of Kipling’s theorization of the power shift between the two
imperial centres.
Rudyard Kipling’s Writing of the Indian Space 255
In writing the Jungle Books, Kipling thought not just about the East and its
fables, but also of the modern civilisation denounced by his American
friend, Brooks Adams; the civilisation of the ‘timid social stratum’, which
had lost touch with its ancient myths and forms, and had in turn lost its
appetite for heroism, romance – and empire. In the age of unrelenting
urbanisation, declining rural community, mass immigration, and all the
concomitant social conflicts of an expanding, multi-ethnic population, he
sought to recover the roots of American culture in the raw values and
aspirations of the frontier. The Jungle Stories recovered that common
imperial spirit, building bridges to an imaginary scene of shared suffering,
striving, and belonging. (Hagiioannu, 98)
climbed up the steep incline and plunged on to the hard main road, carter
reviling carter. It was equally beautiful to watch the people, little clumps of
red and blue and pink and white and saffron, turning aside to go to their
own villages, dispersing and growing small by twos and threes across the
level plain. (Kipling 1901, 111)
The character revels in the diversity of colours and sounds and in his
ability to tower above the scene and distinguish several planes in the
distance. Jean-Marc Moura argues that the peculiarity of Kim’s exotic
view of India lies in the combination of its extreme realism and its childish
representation of the land as an immense playground for the boy
protagonist – the childish reverie softening the imperialist exoticism.3
Although the workers are toiling and complaining, Kim remains aloof and
keeps an aesthetic distance to the scene.
In spite of this softening, the indisputable commanding view and
imperialist visualization of the land makes the text veer towards other
types of connection to an objectivized India, seen by the characters in an
encratic and heuristic manner. The encratic mode as defined by Korinman
and Ronai is typically enacted by the administrator of a territory by
organising it and dividing it into separate administrative entities. The
heuristic mode relies on knowledge, acquired through a scientific study of
the land. The superiority of the point of view reveals the commanding
position of the character. Kim may have been raised as a native boy but he
is of Irish descent and he eventually works for the British intelligence
service. Mowgli may have been raised by wolves, but he really is a man
able to master fire. India and the jungle are not only objects of curiosity
and pleasurable sights, they also are objects of knowledge objectivized in
an imperial intention. Here, the exotic point of view of the tourist turns
into the point of view of the adventurer and the colonial administrator,
who use cartographic representations and commanding views of the
territory they intend to master.
In the story “Tiger-Tiger!” Mowgli is living in a village among
humans, herding cattle like other children. His unique position, sitting on
the back of the great herd bull, is commanding, like the one Kim assumes
in the opening chapter of the novel, astride the gun in Lahore. Mowgli
uses his position to understand the lay of the land and prepare the attack
against his mortal enemy Shere Khan, the tiger. He discusses his plan in
topographic terms with one of the wolves:
The big ravine of the Waingunga [River]. That opens out on the plain not
half a mile from here. I can take the herd round through the jungle to the
258 14
head of the ravine and then sweep down – but he would slink out at the
foot. We must block that end. (Kipling 1895, 88)
of the Indian space are not exotic anymore, but on the contrary, endotic,
familiar and internal.
Conclusion
Doubly bound by his imperialist ideology and his practical experience
of the peripheries of the empire, Kipling superimposes on his
representation of India many types of space. It appears that the generic
difference between journalistic travel narrative and fictive stories of
adventure does not create two distinct representations of space: on the
contrary Kipling uses the homotopic quality of his experience as a
journalist to create realistic fictive spaces and places. The most realistic
texts on Anglo-India are not his journalistic letters of travel which give
precedence to ideological analogies between various territories over
simple geographical and social facts, but his short stories, even if they
verge on the gothic. The ideological orientation of Kipling’s spatiality
appears even in his less referential books, his Jungle fables. The
relationship between literature and geography goes beyond the question of
achieving referentiality in a text: it raises the question of how to interpret
the intent of verisimilitude in fiction. Although geographic reality is a
necessary realistic backdrop, the text becomes ideologically charged,
especially in the colonial context when even a fable is a displaced
commentary on contemporary issues.
Kipling’s writing uses geographic methods in the poetic creation of a
fictional space, mapping, naming and delineating territories in a textual
way without including an actual map into his works, but this topographic
text is infused with a very sensitive and personal approach of space thanks
to Kipling’s use of varied points of view.
The use of a shifting point of view in his fiction produces different
approaches to the Indian territory and different experiences of geography
in multifocal texts. The combination of these approaches in the same texts
or in collections of stories gives Kipling’s prose its ambiguous and
contrapunctual character, in a fluctuating relationship to the territory.
Kipling’s texts manage to create a literary space which is not simply
referential yet remains highly realistic. Together with the formal play on
networks and multiple entries, this relationship to the territory creates a
specifically Anglo-Indian literary geography.
260 14
References
BHABHA, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London, New York:
Routledge.
BLOOM, Harold. 2005. “Introduction”, Edwardian and Georgian Fiction.
New York: Chelsea House, 1-40.
BOURDIEU, Pierre. 1980. Le Sens Pratique. Paris: Editions de Minuit,
1980. English translation by Richard Nice: The Logic of Practice.
Cambridge: Polity, 1990.
HAGIIOANNU, Andrew. 2003. The Man Who Would Be Kipling: The
Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
KIPLING, Rudyard. (1885). 2011.“The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes.”
The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories. Janet Montefiore
(ed). London: Penguin, 15-32.
—. (1887). 1913. Letters of Marque. In From Sea to Sea and Other
Sketches: Letters of Travel, Volume I. New York: Doubleday and
Page, 3-189.
—. (1888). 1913. “The City of Dreadful Night.” In From Sea to Sea and
Other Sketches: Letters of Travel, Volume II. New York: Doubleday
and Page, 185-248.
—. (1889). 1913. From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches: Letters of Travel.
2 Volumes. New York: Doubleday and Page. Last accessed April 2nd,
2015: https://archive.org/stream/cu31924029874637
—. (1895). 2000. The Jungle Books. Daniel Karlin (ed). London: Penguin.
—. (1901). 2000. Kim. Edward W. Said (ed). London: Penguin.
—. 1914. “On Aspects of Travel.” The Geographical Journal, 43-4 (April
1914), 365-375.
KORINMAN, Michel and Maurice RONAI. 1980. “Le désert – mode
d’emploi. Aide-mémoire pour une épistémologie de l’aride.” In
Traverses 19: “Le Désert” (June 1980), 80-91.
LANG, Andrew. (1889). 1971. “Mr Kipling’s Stories.” In Rudyard Kipling:
the Critical Heritage edited by Roger Lancelyn Green. London; New
York: Routledge, 44-46.
MOURA, Jean-Marc. 1998. La Littérature des lointains: Histoire de
l’exotisme européen au XXe siècle. Paris: Honoré Champion.
WESTPHAL, Bertrand. 2007. La Géocritique: Réel, Fiction, Espace. Paris:
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WILDE, Oscar. (1890). 1963. “The Critic as Artist”. In The Works of Oscar
Wilde. John Gilbert (ed). London: Spring Books, 857-898.
Rudyard Kipling’s Writing of the Indian Space 261
Notes
1
From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel is a two-volume collection published in 1889,
gathering travel narratives previously published in newspapers. The first volume
contains Letters of Marque (first published 1887), which narrate Kipling’s travels
through India, and the 24 first letters of From Sea to Sea devoted to his trip in Asia
(from Calcutta to Japan) and his arrival in the U.S.A. (San Francisco). The second
volume contains letters 25 to 37 of From Sea to Sea (from California to Chicago)
and three separate pieces, “The City of Dreadful Night”, “Among the Railway
Folk” and “The Giridih Coal-Fields”. This global tour led Kipling to England and
marked the end of his Indian years.
2
Andrew Lang supported Kipling very early, in particular for the novelty and the
informative quality of his short stories for the metropolitan audience: “it may
safely be said that Plain Tales from the Hills will teach more of India, of our task
there, of the various peoples whom we try to rule, than many Blue Books. Here is
an unbroken field of actual romance, here are incidents as strange as befall in any
city of dream, any Kôr or Zu-Vendis, and the incidents are true” (Lang 48). Oscar
Wilde famously wrote of Kipling’s “odd journalistic realism” in his dramatized
essay “The True Function and Value of Criticism”: “As one turns over the pages of
his Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree
reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle
one’s eyes. The jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with
their surroundings. The mere lack of style in the storyteller gives an odd
journalistic realism to what he tells us. […] He is our first authority on the second-
rate, he has seen marvellous things through keyholes, and his backgrounds are real
works of art.” (Wilde 895)
3
“Elle est un monde puéril, et avant tout au sens où elle est vue par les yeux d’un
enfant lancé sur ses routes. Cet espace indien est fragmenté. Conformément à la
vocation de l’exotisme impérial, il apparaît sous l’aspect de facettes changeantes,
étranges, parfois brillantes, n’ayant d’autre cohérence qu’une tradition séculaire et
pesante, faite de superstitions diverses. Il s’agit d’un monde réduit à sa dimension
spectaculaire, organisé selon le principe ludique du dépaysement. […] Toutefois,
cette Inde aux personnages ignorants et aux paysages étranges n’est pas un simple
sous-continent du pittoresque et de l’arriération historique. Kim correspond à une
euphémisation de l’exotisme impérial, car la terre indienne est celle du retour à
l’enfance.” (Moura 320-3)
CHAPTER SIX:
GEOGRAPHICAL POETRY
15
FABIEN DESSET
Meanwhile they had arrived at the Brenta. The Brenta’s stream glided
silently beneath the midnight breeze towards the Adriatic.
Towering poplars, which loftily raised their spiral forms on its bank, cast a
gloomier shade upon the placid wave.
Matilda and Verezzi entered a gondola, and the grey tints of approaching
morn had streaked the eastern ether before they entered the Grand Canal at
Venice; and passing the Rialto, proceeded onwards to a small, though not
inelegant mansion, in the eastern suburbs. (2002, 92)
In the following chapter, Matilda and Verezzi then attend the festival at St
Mark’s Place:
The evening was serene. Fleecy clouds floated on the horizon – the moon’s
full orb, in cloudless majesty, hung high in the air, and was reflected in
silver brilliancy by every wave of the Adriatic as, gently agitated by the
evening breeze, they dashed against innumerable gondolas which crowded
the Laguna. […]
Every eye which gazed on the fairy scene beamed with pleasure;
unrepressed gaiety filled every heart but Julia’s, as, with a vacant stare,
unmoved by feelings of pleasure, unagitated by the gaiety which filled
every other soul, she contemplated the varied scene. A magnificent
gondola carried the Marchesa di Strobazzo; and the innumerable flambeaus
which blazed around her rivalled the meridian sun. […]
266 15
The spacious canal was crowded with gondolas; merriment and splendour
reigned around; enchanting harmony stole over the scene; but, listless to
the music, heeding not the splendour, Matilda sat lost in a maze of thought.
[…]
Meanwhile, the hour was late, the moon had gained the zenith, and poured
her beams vertically on the unruffled Adriatic when the gondola stopped
before Matilda’s mansion. (92-95)
Lido, while it will play a prominent part in his later poems once he has
read Eustace and been to the city.
Curiously, however, “they entered the Grand Canal at Venice; and
passing the Rialto” announces Eustace who, “entering the city, rowed up
the grand canal, and passed under the Rialto” (see below), so that the
authors seem to follow the same transtextual map. Besides the verb
“enter” and “pass,” Eustace uses the past participle of “the unruffled
Adriatic.” In the 1818 edition of A Classical Tour, the change of “rowed
up the grand canal, and passed under the Rialto” into “passed under the
Rialto, and rowed up the grand canal,” only possibly justified by the
preposition “up” meaning the terminus, might even betray a wish to
conceal some (Gothic?) borrowing or plagiarism. However, whereas
Eustace describes a glowing sunset, Shelley prefers the “grey dawn,” then
night, highlighting the moon, and despite Julie’s “blazing” “meridian
sun”- like gondola (in Matilda’s eyes), “silver” overwhelms gold. Shelley
will also again use the verb “glide” for Venetian gondolas, but here he
actually describes the Brenta, although it might be a metonymy. Finally,
the motif of the mirror in his and Eustace’s later descriptions is already
there, although the poet does not use the verb “pave” yet – what Gérard
Genette (1982, 85-86) would call a “Shelleyism”, a stylistic trait or habit
(“tics stylistiques itératifs”): “was reflected in silver brilliancy by every
wave of the Adriatic.” The reflection on each wavelet that breaks the
moonlight, and the greyness of dawn, then the silver light of the moon, the
blazing fire of the “flambeaus” and the darkness of the night also contrast
with the homogenous Laguna, Adriatic and gold of later tableaux.
Shelley will no longer use the poplars to describe the Venetian country
but Tuscany in “The Boat on the Serchio”. (1821, l. 53-54) Another
contrast is the “innumerable gondolas which crowded the Laguna” in
chapter XIII, whereas in his 1818 letters and poems, the poet insists on the
absence of sound and people (“silence,” “you hear nothing,” “isles
depopulate,” “desert streets,” see below), even though silence at the end of
chapter XII is echoed by the mute, musing characters of chapter XIII. As
in the 1818 letters, “the gondolier’s voice […] was the first interruption of
the silence,” but the narrator means the silence that cuts off the three
characters and especially Verezzi from the “music,” “harmony” and
“merriment” of the scene. The change of viewpoint accounts for this
difference: apart from “Ode to Naples” (1820), in which the streets of
Venice are “desert,” it is more particularly the surrounding islands that are
“depopulate[d]” in Shelley’s later poems, where the predominant
viewpoint is outside the city, not inside as in Zastrozzi. Whereas Matilda,
Verezzi and Julia are among the crowd – yet without really belonging to it
268 15
–, the 1818 poet shuns it. This impacts greatly on the representation of the
city.
For instance, the gondolas are more picturesque than the “coffins” of
Shelley’s 1818 letters, even though the blazing “flambeaus” of Julia’s
evoke Hell to Matilda, or a funeral bark, all the more so since it carries her
future victim: “A magnificent gondola carried the Marchesa di Strobazzo;
and the innumerable flambeaus which blazed around her rivalled the
meridian sun.” Still, the narrator prefers to compare it to a “meridian sun,”
which, besides, is apt to exasperate Matilda: “The dark fire which flashed
from her eye more than told the feelings of her soul as she fixed it on her
rival.” The gondola is therefore ambivalent, like the fate of Julia, who may
at that point live or die. The gondola also anticipates on the “frail bark” of
“Alastor” (1815) through the motif of speed: “the gondola rapidly passed
onwards but, immersed in thought, Matilda and Verezzi heeded not its
rapidity.” The “Alastor” Poet does not drown but eventually dies, so
although the gondolas are more picturesque here, due to the motifs of the
“flambeaus” and of the festival, they are already related to death, which
partly accounts for the simile of the 1818 letters.
Other motifs are absent here, like the personification of the city,
although the serene night air is turned into a zephyr (“Exquisite harmony,
borne on the pinions of the tranquil air, floated in varying murmurs”); the
description of Venice as an archipelago, since the narrator only evokes
“eastern suburbs,” which Shelley will never mention again; and especially
the many edifices. In Zastrozzi, Shelley does mention “the clock at St
Mark’s” that slowly “toll[ed] the revolving hours” and Matilda’s mansion,
but that is about it and, due to the different viewpoint, he rather focuses on
the interior, like the ubiquitous sofa whose main function is for the
characters to throw themselves onto it out of Gothic or sentimental
despair. Similarly, it is the interior of the prison of the Inquisition, “the
Consiglio dei Dieci” which is described in chapter XIV:
Like the 1818 gondolas, the madhouse of “Julian and Maddalo” might
have found a prototype here, all the more so since it has a belfry tower
with a bell like the clock of St Mark’s “toll[ing] / In strong and black
relief” (lines 105-106) and since the narrator insists on darkness (“gloomy
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Transtextual Map to Venice 269
About five o’clock we arrived at Fusina, on the shore of the Lagune [the
shallows that border the whole coast, and extend round Venice (n.)],
opposite Venice. This city instantly fixed all our attention. It was [then]
faintly illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, and rising from the waters
with its numberless domes and towers, attended, if I may be allowed the
expression, by several lesser islands, each crowned with [its] spires and
pinnacles, [it] presented the appearance of a vast city, seated [floating] on
the [very] bosom of the ocean. We embarked, and gliding over the Lagune,
whose surface unruffled by the slightest breeze, was as smooth as the most
polished glass, [we] touched at the island of St. Georgio [Giorgio,] half
way, that is two miles from the main land on one side, and from Venice on
the other, and then entering the city, rowed up the grand canal, [ļ] and
passed under the Rialto; admiring as we advanced, the various architecture
and vast edifices that line its sides.1
Some of the motifs I have italicised found their way into Shelley’s letters
and poems. The poet first describes Venice in a letter to Mary Shelley
270 15
Venice is a wonderfully fine city. The approach to it over the laguna with
its domes & turrets glittering in a long line over the blue waves is one of
the finest architectural delusions in the world. It seems to have – and
literally it has – its foundations in the sea. The silent streets are paved with
water, & you hear nothing but the dashing of the oars & the occasional
curses of the gondoliers. […] The gondolas themselves are things of a most
romantic and picturesque appearance; I can only compare them to moths of
which a coffin might have been the chrysalis. (1964 II, p. 36, 42-43, italics
mine)
The August letter to Mary is worth quoting, as it shows the inspiration for
the gondola sailing across the Laguna after the ride on the “sandy island”
in “Julian and Maddalo,” but there is not enough description for any
echoes of Eustace, except for the Lido that “protects the city […] against
[…] the Adriatic.” (Eustace 1813, 74) Byron and Shelley indeed leave
Venice and head eastwards, contrary to Eustace. There are more echoes,
some admittedly inevitable, in the October letter to Peacock, first the
entrance into the city over the Laguna (“over the Lagune… entering the
city” / “approach of it over the laguna”), although the spelling is different
– it will be again in the poem –, then the cityscape (“domes and towers” /
“domes & turrets”) and the line of edifices along the canal (“that line its
sides” / “in a long line”), two of them absent in Zastrozzi and all now in
Eustace’s style. The “foundations in the sea” and the verb “paved with
water,” however, do not really echo the verbs “rising” and “seated on” in
A Classical Tour, especially if Shelley had read the 1818 edition, in which
“seated” is replaced by the less static “floating.” “domes & turrets” and the
replacement of the preposition “across” of the first letter by “over [the
Laguna]” in the second yet suggest that the poet could be remembering the
book two months after reading it, but he here completes the visual and
tactile description with sounds, while omitting the effect of sunset.
“Julian and Maddalo” was begun in late August, but most of it was
apparently written in December, while the epigraph, preface and Maniac’s
soliloquy were composed in the first half of 1819 (Shelley 1989-2011, II,
655):
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Transtextual Map to Venice 271
Maddalo’s more obscure site indeed mirrors his darker, more cynical,
more experienced character: “I […] / Argued against despondency, but
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Transtextual Map to Venice 273
pride / Made my companion take the darker side” (46-49), Julian says.
However, the opening of “Julian and Maddalo” is less a parody of Eustace
or tourists, than a celebration of Shelley’s experience (“It was delight to
ride by the lone sea” again, l. 550), otherwise, the poet would not have
used this sunset “cliché” again in “Lines Written among the Euganean
Hills” (1818). Indeed, Julian’s idealism and love of beauty, even if it
comes from A Classical Tour, are not derided by Shelley, but tested out
against Maddalo’s pessimism, one of the recurrent themes in the poet’s
work and life2. Shelley even seems to sigh out of relief when he describes
a more silent Venice than in Zastrozzi.
Ralph Pite’s interpretation is obviously influenced by the simile “Like
fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven,” whose source, he notes,3
is Shakespeare’s Tempest (IV, i, 151-152):
The word “fabric,” which Shelley seldom uses for buildings, is not,
therefore, a “Eustacism” here. The poet also substitutes the word
“enchantment” – inspired by Byron’s “I saw from out the wave her
structure rise / As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand” in Childe
Harold (IV, 3-4, 1933, 28) – for “vision,” so that Venice also looks like a
fairy city. For Pite, this “self-rebuke” is a criticism of the fantasy visions
of tourists, including Shelley’s, encouraged by such authors as Eustace or
such painters as Richard Wilson. Indeed, Shelley speaks of “the finest
architectural delusion of the world” in his October letter, “The approach to
it over the Laguna with its domes & turrets glittering in a long line over
the blue waves.” The city, in the same letter, really seems to be built on
the sea, without any foundations that is, and in “Julian and Maddalo” the
Euganean Hills become “transparent.” Yet, Shelley was also really fond of
optical effects and the fine line dividing the tangible world of matter from
the intangible world of ideas. His castle in the sky is thus more a
hyperbole than a self-rebuke, and this fairy city is far cry from the cliché
“fairy scene” of Zastrozzi.
His description of the Laguna as “the flood / Which lay between the
city and the shore / Paved with the image of the sky” is reminiscent of the
moon which, in Zastrozzi, “was reflected in silver brilliancy by every
wave of the Adriatic”, but it is here superseded by “the Lagune whose
surface unruffled by the slightest breeze, was as smooth as the most
polished glass” in A Classical Tour, as Ralph Pite also notes. (Shelley
274 15
1989-2011, II, 667, n.) The verb “pave,” which Shelley had already used
in Laon and Cythna (1817: “From the swift lights which might that
fountain pave,” 3007 [IV, xx, 7], 1989-2011, II, 187), suggests yet another
source. It is also used in the October letter (“paved with water”), although
not for the Laguna but, as in the “unruffled Adriatic” of Zastrozzi, for the
sea. The smooth surface of the water makes it possible for the gondola to
“glide:” “so, o’er the lagoon / We glided” also recasts Eustace’s “gliding
over the [equally “unruffled”] Lagune,” with an anglicised “lagoon” this
time and a poetic inversion. The verb “glide,” which the poet only used to
describe the Brenta in his Gothic novella, may still evoke ghosts or a
fateful encounter, as suggested by the metaphor of “funeral bark.” In the
draft, the gondola is indeed described as “the most ghastly bark” (1989-
2011, II, 668, n.), while in the October letter it is compared to a coffin or
more precisely a moth: “I can only compare them to moths of which a
coffin might have been the chrysalis” (quoted by Pite). This announces the
Maniac’s mental, then physical death, as well as Julian’s mental
metamorphosis or at least enlightenment, like Aeneas and Dante crossing
the Acheron. It also reflects the mood of the poet at the time, as his
daughter Clara died in late September. The one year old child had been
carried in various gondolas and, like the moth, was indeed short-lived. She
was buried on the Lido, and the precedent of Zastrozzi completes the
picture.
So, Eustace’s account of a November evening, when it is already
getting dark at five, probably better fits the gloomy mood of “Julian and
Maddalo” than Shelley’s daytime account in August: “faintly illuminated
by the rays of the setting sun” thus becomes “The sun was sinking” (35),
“The broad sun sunk”, “The orange hues of heaven sunk silently”, “How
beautiful is sunset, when the glow / Of Heaven descends upon a land like
thee” or “in evening’s gleam / Its temples and its palaces,” with the noun
“evening” repeated three times and the participle “sunk” also three times
in Maddalo’s “better station.” Then, Shelley contrasts Eustace’s evening
“gleam” (“gleam,” “ere it fades”) with the dazzling sunlight behind the
Euganean Hills (“Brighter than burning gold”), before “gloom” settles. He
adds colour (“purple,” “gold,” “orange”), which evokes Milton’s Hell
lines 81-82 (“lake of fire,” “waves of flame”) and 41, where Julian
compares his conversation with Maddalo to the discourse “The devils held
within the dales of Hell,” since they talk about “God, freewill and
destiny.” (42) The warm light also cheers Julian up, like the conversation,
which is “forlorn / Yet pleasing.” The picture in Eustace and the opening
lines of the poem are not devoid of beauty, and Shelley expands on the so-
called “cliché” to unfold his ambivalent vision (like the gondola in
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Transtextual Map to Venice 275
The “echoing shore” which Shelley borrows in Queen Mab from Southey
only survives in the silence disturbed by the gondoliers’ curses in the
October letter and the waves from which “sound like delight broke forth /
Harmonizing with solitude” (25-26) in “Julian and Maddalo.” The
“burnished [ocean] wave[s]” is also faintly echoed by the overall golden
hue of the later poem (“burning gold”). On the contrary, the “flashing”
light of the reflecting “flood” in Madoc (“brighter lay the ocean-flood,”
“flash’d / Its restless rays, intolerably bright”) and Queen Mab (“flood of
light,” “floors of flashing light”) as well as the “intolerable radiancy” of its
clouds are still very obvious in 1818: “the flood / Which lay between the
city and the shore / Paved with the image of the sky”, “Brighter than
burning gold.” Madoc can even be considered as a competing source for
“Julian and Maddalo,” as the two characters, including the narrator Julian,
evoke “I and Cadwallon,” and the evening, Southey’s. As the bright
clouds and paving water show, Queen Mab also crystallises certain motifs,
like the “purple gold” light of evening, which accounts for the addition of
“deepest purple” in “Julian and Maddalo,” the solidification of the ocean
through the words “pave” and “floors,” and the resting sun (“Meanwhile
the sun paused ere it should alight,” “Where the swift sun yet paused in his
descent / Over the horizon of the mountains”). The experience of Venice
and the reading of A Classical Tour thus concretise Shelley’s earlier castle
in the sky, Zastrozzi’s “fairy scene” and Mab’s “Fairy Hall,” which may
account for Julian’s – and the poet’s – wonder.
Eustace’s influence may also be seen in the description of Venice as an
archipelago of “temples and palaces”: there are “numberless domes and
towers” and it is “attended […] by several lesser islands, each crowned
with its spires and pinnacles.” In “Julian and Maddalo,” the quantifier of
“their many isles” echoes that of “several islands” but also the adjective of
“its numberless domes and towers,” with the possessive determiners
reverting the relation isles-buildings. Eustace’s “domes and towers” and
“spires and pinnacles” are condensed into Shelley’s “temples and palaces,”
which conflates the buildings on the islands with the buildings in Venice.
Despite that condensation of the setting, the motif of the islands
proliferates in the scenery of “Julian and Maddalo,” from the “heaped”
“hillocks” of “sand” that make up the Lido and recall the August letter (“a
long sandy island”), through the island on which the madhouse rises, to
the “peakèd isles” of the mountains, which could be described as islands
“crowned with spires and pinnacles,” to use Eustace’s phrase. The “domes
and towers” of Eustace and the October letter are not altogether absent
either, as Maddalo points to the “belfry tower” and “red tower” (106) of
the madhouse and as Julian later mentions “churches, ships, an palaces.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Transtextual Map to Venice 277
Indeed, the word “pile,” which Shelley seldom uses as a noun, may have
been borrowed from Eustace, all the more so since the latter uses it to
describe the Lido. Julian’s view is characterised by a harmonious unity,
like the Turneresque passage from “dark purple” to “gold,” which Pliny
the Elder might call harmogen, or like the verb “harmonized” actually
used line 26 to refer to the harmony between sounds and silence. This
harmonious unity conveys the serenity of the place, which will then
contrast with the fragmented mind and soliloquy of the Maniac. If this
helps characterise the participants or, as in a symphony, creates themes,
movements and counterpoints, I insist that this has nothing to do with a
parody of Eustace or of Shelley’s early fantasy in Zastrozzi and Queen
Mab.
Indeed, Shelley reproduces that view inspired by Eustace in “Lines
Written among the Euganean Hills,” which was composed in October, the
same month as Shelley’s second letter on Venice:
appears a more direct source for Shelley when the lord describes Venice as
an Anadyomene “sea-Cybele, fresh from ocean, / Rising with her tiara of
proud towers” who “sate in state, throned on her hundred isles.” (1833, 28,
l. 9-13) Shelley thus develops Eustace’s personification thanks to Byron,
while resorting to a traditional representation which Ralph Pite might have
called a “cliché.” Mythological personification is more relevant in this
poem than in “Julian and Maddalo,” as “Lines…” is more politically
symbolical, like the other odes to Naples and Liberty.
Venice is again described as an archipelago, but this time, Shelley is
closer to Eustace when he explicitly means the isles “attending” the Queen
of the Adriatic, “thine isles depopulate.” Benjamin Colbert also notes this
borrowing and especially the motif of solitude:
Even Shelley’s image of “thine isles depopulate” (l. 127) with its ruined
“palace gate” (l. 129) and its superstitious “fisher” (l. 134) glosses
Eustace’s conclusion: “the population of Venice … will diminish, till …
this city shall become a superb solitude, whose lonely grandeur will remind
the traveller, that Venice was once great, and independent” (CT, 1:182-3).
(2005, 151)
Venice enables Shelley to concretise and solidify his city “of battlemented
cloud,” which is not only compared to, but is his vision of Athens, since he
had never visited it. The “castle in the sky,” therefore, but also the verb
“pave,” used once again for watery streets, the “ocean-floors” recalling
Southey’s “ocean-flood” and Mab’s halls, the “purple” clouds belonging
to the same paradigm as towers (“battlemented”), like the Alps sustaining
the sky in “Julian and Maddalo,” obviously suggest the poet’s Venice. The
motifs inherited from Eustace and Byron can even be found here, like the
“evening” sky, although it was already present in Madoc and Queen Mab,
the “gleam,” the “towers” and Cybele’s “crest of columns”. The verb
“arose” echoes the verb “rise” in A Classical Tour, Childe Harold and
“Lines…” so that Athens, like Venice, is described as yet another Oceanid
Cybele or Venus Anadyomene. If there is “self-rebuke” in Shelley’s
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Transtextual Map to Venice 283
Conclusion
The evolution of the representation of Venice in Shelley’s poetry is of
course first and foremost due to the poet’s visit of the city in 1818; what
was mainly fantasy geography eventually turned into realistic, even
autobiographical geography. Yet, the evolution is not that clear-cut. The
names used in Zastrozzi, like the Rialto, or the reference to the clock of St
Mark’s already had a realistic function, while the “fairy” city is still
present in the Venetian poems: Venice is still a Panthea, because reality
matches or transcends fiction. Some of the early Venetian motifs thus
survived the discovery of the city, firmly rooted in Shelley’s repeated
poetical practice, each poem developing the motifs or elaborating new
ones, as Queen Mab did, until some of those poetic forms became
independent, like poetic atoms constituting new meaning. As from
nothing, nothing comes, Shelley did not so much invent them as recreate
them, so that his map to Venice is also transtextual, from the Gothic
(fictional) accounts of the city to the “tours” in prose or verse he read
before or while in Italy.
References
BYRON, George Gordon. 1833. The Works of George Gordon Byron: In
Verse and Prose, Including his Letters and Journals, etc. with a Sketch
of his life. Halleck Fitz-Greene (ed). New York: George Dearborn.
COLBERT, Benjamin. 2005. Shelley’s Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic
Vision. Farnham, Burlington [VT]: Ashgate.
EUSTACE, John Chetwode. 1813. A Tour Through Italy, Exhibiting a View
of its Scenery, its Antiquities, and its Monuments, Particularly as they
Are Objects of Classical Interest and Elucidation: With an Account of
the Present State of its Cities and Towns; and Occasional
Observations on the Recent Spoliations of the French. 2 Vols. London:
John Mawman.
—. 1818. A Tour Through Italy. 4th Edition. 4 Vols. Leghorn: Glaucus
Masi.
GENETTE, Gérard. 1982. Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré.
Paris: Le Seuil.
HUNGERFORD, Edward B. 1941. Shores of Darkness. New York:
Columbia University Press.
PAUSANIAS. 1784. The Description of Greece. 3 Vols. Thomas Taylor
(trans.). London: Richard Faulder.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Transtextual Map to Venice 285
Notes
1
Eustace 1813, I, 66 and n., italics mine. There are a few additions (“it,” “we”),
suppressions (“then,” “its,” “very”) and changes (“floating,” “Giorgio,” the
inversion of “rowed up the grand canal, and passed under the Rialto”) in the 1818
edition (I, 182-184 and n.), as well as an extra note about the “Canal grande”
which the “Rialto crosses,” “one of its most conspicuous ornaments.”
2
In “Shelley and Italy” (2013), which studies the representations of Venice and
Padua in “Lines...” from a more political point of view, Pite seems less critical of
the opening ekphrasis, limiting the cliché to phrases like “sweet Venice” and
“bright Venice” (583), in “contrast with the detailed descriptions of the opening,”
and concludes: “Yet the logic of disillusionment is not followed through in this
poem and, in the remainder of Shelley’s output, he does not renounce or abandon
idealism […]” (2013, 43, 41, n. 25).
3
Ralph Pite (Shelley 1989-2011, II, 663-669) mentions other interesting sources
like Byron’s “Ode to Venice” (8-12) and Marino Faliero (II, ii, 111-113) for the
weeds of the Lido, and Samuel Rogers (Italy, “Venice,” 3-4) for those of the
palace gates.
4
Like Ralph Pite, Colbert’s earlier study of “Lines…” (2005, 142-158) is more
political: “Shelley’s poetical analysis of the Classical Tour engages seriously with
Eustace’s historiographical musings, often sympathetically, and weighs them
against Byron’s personalised account of Italy’s past and present. […], synthesising
through a Byron-Eustace dialectic his own cross-cultural understanding of the
relation between the modern British sightseer and sights seen, the alienated subject
and the outward signs of social, political, and intellectual mutability” (142). In that
perspective, “Light is a crucial motif. The poem begins at sunrise, culminates with
the dioramic effects of sunlight on the Venetian towers, and subsides as ‘noon
descends’ (l. 320). […] Light represents equilibrium between the subject and
object world that repudiates both Byronic solipsism and the empirical travel
writer’s quest for accuracy or objectivity” (146-147).
5
Spenser 1999, II, x, 73, p. 248. See E.B. Hungerford (1941, 182) who interprets
Asia, Ione and Panthea as the classical Ionian sea, the Black sea or Euxine and the
Caspian sea, at the foot of Caucasus, represented by Prometheus. The name of Asia
is even more obvious.
6
K. Everest quotes William Collins, Ode to Liberty (1747), 103-106: “Beyond yon
braided clouds that lie / Paving the light-embroidered sky, / Amidst the bright
pavilioned plains, / The beauteous model still remains,” which draws on Psalms
xviii, 11: “his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the
skies.” Collins may be the source for Shelley’s use of the verb “pave,” since the
verb is again found accompanied with the noun “pavilions” in “Prometheus
Unbound,” II, ii, 72-74: “Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave / The
oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools, / Are the pavilions where such dwell and
float” (Shelley 1989-2011, II, 546).
16
AURÉLIEN SABY
From 1948 to 1957, W.H. Auden (1907-1973) spent his summers on the
island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples, which, in the aftermath of the
Second World War, seemed like paradise. There, in the village of Forio, he
hosted other prominent artists – including Allen Ginsberg or Hans Werner
Henze –, far away from New York where he had settled in 1939. In her
personal memoir of that period, Thekla Clark1 notes that to the poet “Forio
qualified as a moderate Eden” (18), while James Merrill portrays Auden as
an eccentric character already subject to gossip on the island:
So we did our time on Ischia. In those years, W.H. Auden was that
island’s Prospero – invisible to us, though a compatriot of Rolf’s,
joining us for dinner on the terrace of the pensione, repeated this
season’s gossip about the increasingly eccentric genius.2 Many bottles
of wine had glazed over the miseries of the day. “But I mean!” I cried,
adopting Robert’s huffiest voice under the tipsy impression that any note
of solidarity would please him. “Auden goes too far. In New York he
wears his carpet slippers to the opera, with a dinner jacket. Being a great
poet doesn’t excuse that sort of affectation. Of course I’ve barely met him,
so it’s not for me to say…” (Merrill, 226)
Not only did Ischia inspire unprecedented verse spawning a new Anglo-
American literary geography of the Mezzogiorno, but it also allowed
Auden to meditate further on the close relationship between the concept of
utopia and artistic creation. My contention here is that the poems
dedicated to Southern Italy can easily be regarded as “very nearly utopian”
indeed. For one thing, they seem to offer an ideal world inspired from
288 16
And yet everything that these magnificent soldiers touched was at once
corrupted. No sooner did the luckless inhabitants of the liberated
countries grasp the hands of their liberators than they began to fester
and to stink. It was enough that an Allied soldier should lean out of his
jeep to smile at a woman, to give her face a fleeting caress, and the same
woman, who until that woman had preserved her dignity and purity, would
change into a prostitute. It was enough that a child should put into its
mouth a candy offered to it by an American soldier, and its innocent soul
would be corrupted.
The liberators themselves were terrified and deeply affected by this
dire scourge. “It is human to feel compassion for the afflicted,” writes
Boccaccio in his introduction to the Decameron, with reference to the
terrible plague which swept Florence in 1348. But the Allied soldiers,
especially the Americans, faced with the pitiable spectacle of the
W.H. Auden and the Mezzogiorno 289
plague of Naples, did not feel compassion for the unhappy people of
that city: they felt compassion for themselves as well. […] The source of
the plague was in their compassion, in their very desire to help these
unfortunate people, to alleviate their miseries, to succor them in the
tremendous disaster that had overtaken them. The source of the disease
was in the very hand which they stretched out in brotherhood to this
conquered people. […]
Ragged boys, seated on the stone parapet which rose sheer from the
sea, sang with their eyes turned to the sky, their heads tilted slightly on
to their shoulders. Their faces were pale and thin, their eyes blinded
by hunger. They sang as the blind sing, their faces uplifted, their eyes
fixed upon the heavens. Human hunger has a wonderfully sweet, pure
voice. There is nothing human about the voice of hunger. (Malaparte, 34-
36)
But the entry into the bay, occasioned by rocks on the one hand and
shallows on the other, is very dangerous. In the middle of it there is one
single rock which appears above water, and may, therefore, easily be
avoided; and on the top of it there is a tower, in which a garrison is kept;
the other rocks lie under water, and are very dangerous. The channel
is known only to the natives; so that if any stranger should enter into
the bay without one of their pilots he would run great danger of
shipwreck. (More, 32)
290 16
Truman Capote further depicts Ischia as a place entirely distinct from the
rest of the Mezzogiorno and mainly peopled by locals, unlike Capri which
is “the tourist catch-all”:
c) An “Eutopia”
This “Secondary World” may easily be regarded as what Michael
Edwards calls an “Eutopia” – i.e. a “Good Place”, so often glimpsed in
Auden’s work4:
W.H. Auden and the Mezzogiorno 291
Here always is, for our own good, a partly human work of fiction. Here
does not aim at becoming a utopia (corresponding to nothing but the dream
of an ideal place whose non-existence is pointed out by the very shape of
the word – ou-topos – meaning “a place that does not exist”), but an
eutopia, i.e. a good place. […] I for one think that we all have caught a
glimpse at an eutopia, at a certain time of our lives when either a
human being or a landscape, a street, an object or some light suddenly
seems strange. And I strongly believe that art is meant to sound
eutopias and to make us aware of them. (Edwards 2011, 36-37, my
translation)
“Ischia” delineates a scenery where life seems good, easy and sweet. Yet,
for this purpose, Auden adopts what Bertrand Westphal calls “a geo-
critical approach” (see Collot, 88-92), which is quite unusual in his work;
and his description of Ischia corroborates Jean-Pierre Richard’s definition
of the poetic landscape:
What is more, the rich soil provides one with earthly delights turning
Ischia into a Horn of Plenty on a par with Plato’s Atlantis:
Islands are like ships at permanent anchor. To set foot on one is like
starting up a gangplank: one is seized by the same feeling of charmed
suspension – it seems nothing unkind or vulgar can happen to you; and
as the Princepessa eased into the covelike harbor of Porto d’Ischia it
seemed, seeing the pale, peeling ice-cream colors of the waterfront, as
intimate and satisfying as one’s own heartbeat. In the wrangle of
disembarking, I dropped and broke my watch – an outrageous bit of
symbolism, too pointed: at a glance it was plain that Ischia was no place
for the rush of hours, islands never are. (Capote, 45)
One might blame Auden for offering a pale version of Arcadia, where
the characters are overacting in their roles of modern foreign shepherds,
playing the part of idle visitors awkwardly trying to experience the “Italian
way of life”. Yet, even if tourists are capable of averting their eyes from
the daily concerns of a foreign place, and take upon themselves the passer-
by’s immunity from feeling any obligation to love their temporary
neighbor, Auden refuses to take this stance, acknowledging that even in
this earthly paradise where he enjoys the privileged life of an outsider, “all
is never well”. Mention is made to Santa Restituta, the island’s patron
saint, about whom a local superstition persists, according to which there is
one unnatural death on the island every year – a forfeit demanded by the
saint as a blood sacrifice: “Restituta’s all-too-watchful eye, / whose annual
patronage, they say, is bought with blood.” (II, 61-62) The poem actually
ends with a propitiatory gesture declaring to the saint that “since / nothing
is free, whatever you charge shall be paid” (II, 64-65), reminding both the
speaker and the readers of their debt to “these days of exotic splendor” (I,
66) on Ischia.
Moreover, beyond the stereotypes opposing Northern and Southern
cultures which the poet conjures up before deriding them, his lines also
point to the endless search for a more authentic self:
294 16
In order to comment on these lines, and on the way they oppose two
groups (the visitors from “a gothic North” and the locals “down south”),
while underlining the artificiality of the Anglo-Saxons’ adaptation to
southern customs with received ideas in mind (“some believing amore / Is
better down South and much cheaper”), one could quote these remarks by
Thekla Clark:
No matter how much he may play with clichés, Auden is also capable of
putting them at a distance (literally in parenthesis in the stanzas quoted
above). In his poems, the parodies of travel literature or tourist guides
always end up indirectly pointing to a more authentic voice still looking
for itself… “hoping to twig from / What we are not what we might be
next.”
W.H. Auden and the Mezzogiorno 295
b) “noise / As a counter-magic”
Auden never yields to the easy temptation of shallow Arcadian poetry
for too long. If some of the lines of “Ischia” and “Good-Bye to the
Mezzogiorno” might seduce naive tourists by pandering to their
expectations, the “eutopian” spell always remains transient, the island
portrayed being only “very nearly” utopian indeed. His poetry is all the
more forceful as it often gathers both a dream world – sometimes
deliberately verging on mawkishness – and its downside, throwing light on
all its flaws immediately after the phase of enchantment. He repeatedly
insisted that poetry was not magic and that “in so far as poetry, or any
other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the
truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate” (The Dyer’s Hand, 27); and the
verse in “Ischia” and “Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno” does so by offering
a highly critical socio-poetic view of Southern Italy in the 1950s:
In the poem Auden brings to his contrast between the ‘gothic North’
and the ‘sunburnt otherwhere’ just that contrast which readers have
felt between the New York and the Mediterranean poetry, between
‘those who mean by life a / Bildungsroman and those to whom living /
Means to-be-visible-now’, between (predominantly) anxiety and
happiness. We Northerners are eager to learn, but we have nothing to
teach in our encounter with the South (like Goethe in his fifth Roman
Elegy taking time out of an erotic encounter to compose
hexameters). (Fuller, 479)
296 16
Besides, Auden also refers to the sun as an all too dreadful force of
destruction making Italians age rapidly, with no hope of change or
improvement:
Yet (if I
Read their faces rightly after ten years)
They are without hope. The Greeks used to call the Sun
He-who-smites-from-afar, and from here, where
c) American Dream
Ironically enough, in “Ischia”, utopia, for local youngsters, is an
American city where they could escape misery, find a job and live their
American Dream, away from a country where they hardly manage to
survive:
upon
your quays, reminding the happy
stranger that all is never well,
Such moments are remembered in the present tense, whose first value is
that of a narrative present, acting as a lure to make both poet and reader
believe that each time they read the text they are introduced in medias res
into the poet’s intimacy:
Evening life in Forio was centred on The Caffè, where the Table was
reserved for Wystan, Chester and their friends. The owner of The Caffè
was the famous Maria, who rated a column in the national newspapers
when she died many years later. Its official name was Caffè Internazionale,
but I never heard it called anything but ‘Maria’s’. (Clark, 8)
“We all know that Maria waters her drinks. But does she water them
with water? God, I feel awful!”). With the sun warming you, and Maria’s
bamboo curtains tinkling in the breeze, there is no nicer place to wait for
the postman. Maria is a sawed-off woman with a gypsy face and a
shrugging, cynical nature; if there is anything you want around here, from
a house to a package of American cigarettes, she can arrange it. (Capote,
47-48)
What did last was the friendship with Wystan and Chester. It was to
grow and grow, based mostly on shared laughter but also on the ease
we found in each other’s company. It certainly wasn’t ever – with either
of them – a relationship (horrid word) in which one went for ages without
talking. None of those deep understanding silences so prominent in
descriptions of friendship. Not at all, it was talk, talk, talk day and
night. Any subject, nothing was too much or too little. […] Although it
didn’t meet all his requirements, Wystan agreed that Forio qualified
as a moderate Eden. Eden was temporary and ours was no exception.
[…] During the fifties life on Ischia was, for me, indeed blessed; free
from anxiety and full of outward joy. […] When I think of it I think of
Wystan striding along with that dreadful dog of his, swinging a soiled
string bag crammed with books and the day’s shopping. When I asked him
years later if he really had been the person he appeared to be – that
enchanted foreigner trying to belong – he said, ‘Yes, and that is why I had
to leave.’ (Clark, 10-19)
Such a deep sense of reunion still lingers well after the poet’s death, as
Joseph Brodsky (430) underlines in a poem entitled “Ischia in October”
(1993):
In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things in life are earning
one’s living so as not to be a parasite, and loving one’s neighbour… 8
The present tense in “my thanks are for you, / Ischia” therefore also has a
universal value: it is the present of a thanksgiving for a land offered by
God where the poet – who had regained his faith in 1939 – can regenerate
himself through forgiveness and prayer, while ever-renewing his artistic
genius:
I go grateful (even
To a certain Monte9) and invoking
My sacred meridian names, Vico, Verga,
Pirandello, Bernini, Bellini,
b) Towards a “geo-poieisis”
The “fair wind” that brings the poet to Ischia is also unmistakably
rekindling the flame of creation, and igniting what one might name a “geo-
poieisis”. In the poem, this wind is much more than an element of the
backdrop or a mere prop; it becomes an actor through which the landscape
may easily turn into a mindscape or inscape renewing itself at each
reading. Such a metaphor eases the departure from a specific location
towards a place where borders between different identities, cultures and
countries are blurred, thereby testifying to the opening power of poetry to
what Jean-Louis Tissier calls the “land of truth”:
300 16
There are between the imaginary and the real, between representations and
experiences, lingering tensions expressed by writing. […] Poetry does not
aim at teaching any lesson or spreading knowledge; it opens up horizons
and throws a different light on the world. […] In a world where there
aren’t that many secrets left for us to discover, poetry is not some other
data bank; it is a source of intimacy bringing us back home. […] Poetry
is the land of truth where our conscience can freely face the world.
(Tissier, 123-138, my translation)
The poetic text does not content itself with describing the world: it re-
describes it to allow the poet and his readers to inhabit it poetically.
For instance, the wind in “Ischia” calls many intertextual references to
mind, opening up endless horizons within the verse. First, by quoting
Melville, Auden instills in us the impression that the island is a homeland
finally rediscovered after years spent fighting the storms of life and
history:
‘Here !’ cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his
hand towards the weather bow, ‘markest thou not that the gale comes from
the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? … The gale
that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair wind that
will drive us towards home.’ (Ch. 119)10
Moreover, the “fair wind” blowing on Ischia might also remind the reader
of the “gentle wind” that brought Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner back home
after showing repentance, thus symbolizing divine grace, as Auden
remarked in The Enchafèd Flood (70-71):
The wind is always a force which the conscious will cannot cause or
control. In the works we are considering which were written before the
advent of the steamship, it is also the source, good or bad, of all the
movements of life.
In The Ancient Mariner there are four winds described.
[…]
4. Finally, when [the Mariner’s] repentance is complete, so that he can
even look away from the dead men (the proof of his sin), then comes the
gentle wind which fans his cheek and leads the ship back home, i.e.,
the powers of grace and blessing.
The “fair wind” stirs the creation of a poem giving birth to a new literary
island. Each reading of these lines is an invitation to re-discover the world
in a different way – “to see / things and men in perspective” –, suggesting
that Beauty and Goodness (“underneath your uniform light”) remain
accessible if one agrees to follow the path of art and poieisis (“you train
us”), in spite of injuries caused by time and life (“our injured eyes”).
Last but not least, “Ischia” alludes to the following sonnet by Keats
(42):
To one who has been long in city pent,
‘Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open space of heaven, - to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
Who is more happy, when, with heart’s content,
Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair
Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair
And gentle tale of love and languishment?
302 16
Conclusion
All in all, with poems like “Ischia” and “Good-Bye to the
Mezzogiorno”, Auden presents us with a new literary geography in verse
that may be compared to a verbal melting pot where physical elements
from the natural landscape – as well as local customs and habits – serve as
a breeding ground for inspiration, before merging into what Pierre Bayard
calls an “atopic place”: “An “atopism” is an element of the literary space
condensing several places as well as several temporalities while drawing
its strength from this very concentration, hence allowing readers from
various countries and times to believe that they find themselves at home
through the meanderings of thinking.” (Bayard, 137, my translation)
While renewing “The Genius of English Poetry”11, the lines provide both
the poet and his readers with a new home. As Michel Collot claims, “if the
image of the world offered by a writer is not in accordance with the data
associated to an objective topography, this is because it corresponds to a
subjective vision abiding by the rules of the topography of the
Unconscious” (96) – or, to put it in Roland Barthes’s words: “More than
its subject, the place of a work of fiction may be its truth, as it is at the
level of the place […] that the signifier can more easily be expressed;
therefore, this place may well be the representation of desire without
which there cannot be any text.” (Barthes, 158, my translation) With
“Ischia” and “Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno”, the poet takes us to a place
W.H. Auden and the Mezzogiorno 303
approaching the truth of the ideal home where beauty is equated with love.
The harmony of the verse bears witness to such an “Eutopia” while
keeping it at bay through language that inevitably cuts the reader off from
that truth. It is therefore up to each of us to picture our own dream
Mediterranean island in our mind’s eye and remember it as an inscape
with “some vista as an absolute goal.” (“Ischia”, I, 38)
References
AUDEN, W. H. Collected Poems (CP). (1976). 1994. London: Faber.
—. 1988. The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Plays, 1928-1938.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
—. (1951). 1985. The Enchafèd Flood London: Faber.
—. (1962).1989. The Dyer’s Hand. New York: Vintage Books.
—. 1968. Secondary Worlds. New York: Random House.
—. 2010. Prose Volume IV 1956-1962. Edward Mendelson (ed).
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
BARTHES, Roland. 1972. Le Degré zéro de l’écriture suivi de Nouveaux
Essais critiques. Paris: Seuil.
BAYARD, Pierre. 2012. Comment parler des lieux où l’on n’a pas été ?
Paris: Minuit.
BRODSKY, Joseph. 2000. Collected Poems in English. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
CAPOTE, Truman. (1949). 2008. “Ischia”, Portraits and Observations.
New York: Random House.
CARPENTER, Humphrey. 1981. W.H. Auden: A Biography. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company.
CHAILLOU, Michel. 1976. Le Sentiment géographique. Paris : Gallimard.
CLARK, Thekla. 1995. Wystan and Chester : A personal memoir of W.H.
Auden and Chester Kallman. London: Faber.
COLLOT, Michel. 2014. Pour une géographie littéraire. Paris: Corti.
EDWARDS, Michael. 2006. Le Génie de la poésie anglaise. Paris: Librairie
Générale française.
—. 2011. Le Bonheur d’être ici. Paris: Fayard.
FULLER, John. 1988. W.H. Auden: A Commentary. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
HECHT, Anthony. 1993. The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden.
Harvard: Harvard University Press.
KEATS, John. (1817). 2009. “Sonnet 10”, The Complete Poems and
Selected Letters of John Keats. London: Vintage.
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MALAPARTE, Curzio. (1949). 2013. The Skin. David Moore (trans.). New
York: NYRB.
MERRILL, James. 1993. A Different Person: A Memoir. New York:
HarperCollins Publishers.
MORE, Thomas. (1516). 2010. Utopia. Simon & Brown.
TISSIER, Jean-Louis. 1993. “Victor Segalen et la Terre Jaune. Une
géopoétique du loess”, in Michel Chevalier (ed). La Littérature dans
tous ses espaces. Paris: CNRS.
Notes
1
Thekla Clark was one of Auden’s closest friends in the 1950s.
2
In all quotes, the bold emphasis is mine.
3
« Secondary Worlds » is the title of a series of essays by Auden.
4
Inspired from the title of a short story by Henry James (“The Great Good Place”,
1900), Auden’s work often mentions an ideal place named “the Good Place”,
notably in On the Frontier (The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Plays, 1928-
1938, 388), in “A Voyage” (CP, 174), or in “The Prophets”. (CP, 255)
5
The American poet Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) met Auden in Forio at the same
time as Thekla Clark, and later wrote an essay on Auden’s poetry. (The Hidden
Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden).
6
“Ischia” is dedicated to Brian Howard (1905-1958) who was an English poet who
was famous for being an entertainer and for being ostentatiously homosexual (and
ridiculed by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited under a fictive name). Auden
especially prized the gift in others of being amusing (a faculty in which Chester
Kallman excelled).
7
Nino D’Ambra is an Ischian poet and lawyer. In 1957, Auden wrote the preface
to his collection Nulla Vogliamo dal Sogno. (see W.H. Auden. Prose Volume IV
1956-1962, 99-100)
8
Auden quoted by Humphrey Carpenter. (425)
9
« A certain Monte » refers to signor Monte, one of Auden’s landlords who was
quite mean to him and would not sell him his Ischian house (see Fuller, 479). By
quoting Monte in his thanks to the Mezzogiorno, Auden obviously shows his
proneness to forgiveness.
10
This extract from Moby Dick is quoted by Auden in The Enchafèd Flood (72).
11
This phrase is borrowed from the title of Michael Edwards’ essay Le Génie de la
poésie anglaise.
17
CLAIRE HÉLIE
The terms of William George Hoskins’s famous proposal, “Poets make the
best topographers” (Hoskins 1970, 17), can easily be switched around to
assess poet Simon Armitage’s work – topographers make the best poets.
Born in Marsden, West Yorkshire, in 1963, Armitage earned a BA in
Geography from Portsmouth Polytechnic. He then became a probation
officer in Oldham, a job for which he had to walk the poorest areas of
Greater Manchester, but which he quit to embrace a career as a full-time
poet in 1993. Since then, he has walked the Pennine Way and the south-
west coast path; he has been on a trip along the Amazon River and on a
trail in Iceland; he has sailed from Troy in Turkey to the Greek island of
Ithaca, not mentioning the many readings he has given in England, in the
United States, and in Europe. Therefore, a concern for location, for place,
for geography is at the heart of his poetry and prose. His first pamphlet,
published in 1986, was entitled Human Geography, and indeed his work
focuses on how human beings and their environment interact, how we
inhabit the earth and how the land moulds us into the kind of person we
are. One of his latest poems, published in the 2012 volume of Granta
dedicated to Britain, bears the same title as Hoskins’s seminal book, The
Making of the English Landscape (1955): not only does it suggest the
same historical approach to the geography of England, but it also rejects
the exoticism of faraway countries in favour of “matters closer to home”,
taking a “satellite image” (Armitage Spring 2012, 22) of the land that
makes its past and future clearly visible to all.
For even though Armitage has stridden across the world, he has always
gone back to his native Marsden, located on the border between Yorkshire
and Lancashire near Huddersfield. The North is his compass, both in the
moral sense that W.H. Auden gave it in his essay “I Like it Cold” (1947)
and in the affectionate sense that John Donne gave it in his poem “A
306 17
1980 and which includes material on and by the likes of Tony Harrison,
Geoffrey Hill and Peter Redgrove. The archive is attached to the Leeds
Poetry Centre which aims at supporting new poetry and exploring poetry
of the past. Because even though Armitage is not sure about being a
Northern poet, he has always claimed strong affiliation with some
Yorkshire artists: Tony Harrison, Barbara Hepworth, W.H. Auden, Alan
Bennett, Alan Ayckbourn (who is actually a Londoner but who is strongly
associated with Scarborough) are repeatedly mentioned on his it-list. And
he has done a lot to promote local poets, be they minor poets like Samuel
Laycock, or major ones, like Ted Hughes.
So when Armitage says “My work is positional, and it comes from
geography” (MacDonald 2014), we can be sure it is slightly slanted
towards the North. Now, using Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between
“le calque” and “la carte”, between “tracing”, a reproduction of a self-
enclosed world, and “a map”, an open form of experimentation with the
real (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 12), I would like to show that under the
disguise of tracing the North, Armitage actually maps it, which means that
he rejects the mimetic illusion in favour of multiple interactions.
Another way to trace the region on the poetic page is to mention its
flora and fauna, its climate as well as its monuments (be they historical or
cultural). For instance, West Yorkshire is a particularly rainy region of
England. Its climate is described as “a mild humid temperate climate with
warm summers and no dry seasons”1 and the poems tend to reflect that
meteorological fact, as in “Gone” where he writes:
Even when he describes the weather in other places, like Yosemite Park,
he uses very specific words for the rain, just like the Inuits will have many
words for what we call “snow”.
Consequently, the North is a language, an accent, marked by both
scientific words and dialecticisms. Phonologists and linguists, like Katie
Wales who is a specialist in Northern English, use maps so as to locate
specific features; consequently the use of dialect words, structures and
phonemes can be traced on a map or trace a map of their own, not a visual
one but an aural one, one that can be heard through the reader’s inner ear.
Whereas the use of dialecticisms was rather subtle in Armitage’s first
collection, he has extensively experimented with the form in later poems,
for instance in the very self-conscious dialect poems “The Phoenix”
(Armitage 1997) and “On an Owd Piktcha.” (Armitage 2006) Compare for
instance the first lines of “Ten pence story”:
These northern maps become all the more aurally alive when the poet
gives public readings of his works – the accent is clearly heard2.
Recognizing the signs (place-names, referents, dialecticisms) as being
Northern and not merely English, requires a competent reader, one whose
personal library and sense of place are good enough to locate the North.
Yet Armitage does not consider the reader as a holder of meaning but as a
producer of meanings, which implies that the reader is not a passive
Mapping out the North in Simon Armitage’s Poetry and Prose 311
receiver of a tracing but engages in creating the map; in other words, the
reader performs the map. Hence the fact that the reception of Armitage’s
poems are doomed to change. For instance, while tracing a North that can
easily be pinned down on a map, Armitage defamiliarises the very image
he is creating. One case in point is that he constantly pits one place against
another through typical rhetorical devices like metaphors and
comparisons, or on the contrary oxymora. This twinning of spaces create
subterranean connections between places, as in “The Practical Way to
Heaven” in which a Northern Sculpture farm visited by “London people”
becomes the locus of Bacchanalia celebrating the god pie, that Northernest
dish of all, which frightens the Southern sponsors away. More
interestingly, Armitage uses what could be thought of as cinematic
methods like editing, panning, zooming in and out to show a map in
motion. For instance, in the poem “Zoom!” what “begins as a house” in
Marsden ends as a “ringed planet.” (Armitage 1989, 80) Yet, I would
suggest that in this day and age, we have grown so accustomed to new
technologies, for instance Google maps that allow us to situate our house
on a world map in just one click, that the feeling of disorientation is
getting lost on us, or at least has changed what could be read as an attempt
at weighing the homely against the uncanny, into an attempt at seeing
what seems extraneous in the local, therefore embracing heterogeneity.
One may wonder therefore what the function of mapping and naming
is. Place names, scientific words, icons seem to say “this is my region” in
four different ways depending on which word is emphasized. “THIS is my
region” enhances the deictic function of these words used as effets de réel
or “reality effect” (Barthes 1982, 11) that trace the North and bear no
symbolical significance. “This IS my region” claims that the North is
there, that what is pointed at is not a place constructed in the media but the
essence of the real. For instance, in Walking Home, the poet refers to “the
notoriously changing Pennine weather.” (Armitage 2012, 13) “Pennine” is
somehow redundant because the geographical context is extremely clear.
Yet it is a non-literary annotation that makes the reader feel the presence
of the North. “This is MY region” both claims the area for oneself and
states that one is a spud of the region. It calls to a sense of community, it is
popular and demotic. “This is my REGION” turns the area into a
battleground of regional sub-divisions against the national whole, a way of
celebrating the legendary spirit of independence of Yorkshire.
A good example of these four ways to understand what place names
and dialecticisms seem to say is the poem “True North” (Armitage 1993,
3-4), in which the poet, freshly returned from a year at Portsmouth
Polytechnic uses the Portuguese word “Malvinas” instead of the British
312 17
Conclusion
In conclusion, we may wonder what this overview of Armitage’s
poetry on and in Northern England brings to the debate on the interaction
of the fields of geography and literature. This paper has researched the
interaction in four ways, claiming first that mapping a specific literary
production is a relevant approach to a poet’s work in so far as the atlas
thus produced tells a story that sheds light on the writing by revealing the
316 17
position from which it was written; second, that analysing the way the
reference to a specific region is created within the works is tantamount to
questioning the validity of the geographer’s tools (place-names,
coordinates, classifications…) since the questions of the scriptural and the
fictional can be raised in both literature and geography; third, that writing
about place is not the same as fixing place or assigning a one-and-only
meaning to place, but on the contrary opening it to many different readings
by following the lines that connect it to other spaces; finally, that literally
writing on or over or into places can actually change the face of the earth
and of literature, re-enchanting the world we live in and encouraging us to
join forces by making the song of the earth clearly heard and shared by all.
In other words, if the tools and methods of literary geography are many
and constantly sharpened by new researchers, the universal and ecological
purpose of this interdisciplinary field is to remain a focus point.
References
ARMITAGE, Simon. 1989. Zoom! Bloodaxe: Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
—. 1993. Kid. London: Faber.
—. 1997. CloudCuckooLand. London: Faber.
—. 1999. All Points North. London: Faber.
—. 2006. Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid. London: Faber.
—. 2008. The Twilight Readings. Barnsley: The Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
—. 2010. Seeing Stars. London: Faber.
—. 2012. “The Making of the English Landscape”, Granta, 119, p.22.
—. 2012. Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way.
London: Faber.
AUGÉ, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity. John Howe (trans). London: Verso.
BARTHES, Roland. 1982. “The Reality Effect”. R. Cartes (trans.). In
French Literary Theory Today, Tzvetan Todorov (ed). New York:
Cambridge UP, 11-17.
COLLOT, Michel. 2011. “Pour une géographie littéraire”. Fabula-LhT,
Nb8, “Le partage des disciplines”, URL :
http://www.fabula.org/lht/8/collot.html. Accessed on 17 April 2015.
DELEUZE, Gilles and Felix GUATTARI. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Brian Massumi (trans.). Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
HOSKINS, W.G. 1970. The Making of the English Landscape. Penguin:
Harmondsworth.
Mapping out the North in Simon Armitage’s Poetry and Prose 317
Further reading
SMITH, Stan. 1996. “The Things that words give a name to: The ‘New
Generation’ poets and the politics of the hyperreal”. Critical Survey
8:3, 306-322.
WALES. Katie. 2006. Northern English: A Social and Cultural History.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
All websites accessed on 17 March 2015.
http://library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections-leeds-poetry
https://weatherspark.com/averages/28736/West-Yorkshire-England-
United-Kingdom.
http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/listeningbooth/poets/armitage.cfm
http://www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2012/05/Stanza-Stones-Trail-Guide.pdf.
http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2015/01/northern-poets/.
Notes
1
https://weatherspark.com/averages/28736/West-Yorkshire-England-United-
Kingdom, accessed on 17 March 2015.
2
Besides Armitage’s many CDs, the voice of the poet can be heard on the internet.
For instance at
318 17
http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/listeningbooth/poets/armitage.cfm, accessed on
17 March 2015.
3
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-
online/movements/195235?page=2. Accessed on 17 March 2015.
4
http://catlyticpoetry.org. Accessed 17 March 2015.
PART THREE:
LANDSCAPES, URBANSCAPES
AND (GEO)POLITICS IN LITERATURE
CHAPTER SEVEN:
JOSHUA ARMSTRONG
More than half a century has passed since Guy Debord and his Lettrist and
Situationist colleagues began talking about psychogeography and dérive in
the 1950s. The radical, revolutionary spirit of 1968 – which the
Situationist International (SI) would help fuel – seems but a dim memory
in contemporary French culture. Today, Debord’s graffitied slogan, “Ne
travaillez jamais” (“Never work”), sounds hopelessly romantic in a France
of chronic unemployment, where today’s young and jobless become
vulnerable to very different radicalisms. And yet, if the times have
changed, the SI’s critical assessment of the city – “the crisis in urbanism is
worsening” (Constant 2006, 71)2 – is perhaps more true than ever, as the
ever-growing footprint of urban planning leaves no stone unturned, no
space un-purposed. The “dismal and sterile ambiance” (71) produced by
this crisis is even reinforced today by the proliferation of planned and
preconfigured zones, chain stores and hotels, shopping centers, and other
such environments described by ethnographer Marc Augé as non-places.
Moreover, that other enemy of the SI, spectacle, increasingly infiltrates
everyday life via the newfound digital-age ubiquity of the screen. Guy
Debord and the SI sought out the authentic “psychogeographical contours”
French Psychogeography Today? 323
of their cities, but in the digital age that more “passional” urban stratum
(Debord 2006, “Theory”, 62) is increasingly difficult to find, quantified
and reified as it is into information by “a global communication system
that has become quasi-instantaneous” (Virilio 2000, 8-9). In many ways,
then, the dilemmas the SI highlighted persist and are even exacerbated in
today’s world.
Perhaps this is why psychogeography has been resurrected in recent
decades—albeit in an altered form. Psychogeography, with all its avant-
garde trappings, has become a “buzz word” (O’Rourke 2013, 204) in the
contemporary art world, where installations and performances have taken
particular interest in the question of everyday spaces and rhythms in the
city.3 In literature, the term was repopularized in the 1990s in the UK,
thanks to the works of authors like Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, and Will
Self. In 2007, Bloomsbury published Will Self and Ralph Steadman’s
Psychogeography, a sexy, expensive volume with luxurious color plates.
Psychogeography is a testament not only that dérive (drift) has become
one of the UK’s most “popular objects of selective desire” (Smith, 104),
but also that “psychogeography” can be a lucrative commodity in its own
right.
However, if psychogeography is regaining popularity, it is not being
resurrected without significant modifications to its form and function. For
Guy Debord, psychogeography was meant to be – on the one hand – a
practice, a discipline (like geography). Namely: “the study of the precise
laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether
consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of
individuals” (2006, “Introduction”, 8). Walking through 1960s Paris, the
psychogeographer would seek such “effects”, mentally mapping “unities
of ambiance” (zones where one particular mood or feel seemed to
consistently predominate4), and identifying the location of plaques
tournantes that connected such unities. In their literal sense, plaques
tournantes are railroad pivotal points: pivoting platforms upon which a
stationary locomotive can be reoriented. Psychogeography sought
metaphorical plaques tournantes in the city – locations where the walker
would feel compelled to suddenly change direction, suddenly passing from
one unity of ambiance into another.
And yet, if psychogeography was to be a practice – an admittedly
vague one5 – it was also deeply theoretical. Psychogeography performed
the work of the SI’s radical program of “unitary urbanism.” Unitary
urbanism wished to liberate city-dwellers from the forms of alienation
imposed by urban planning and spectacle. It was overtly utopian in scope:
“Unitary urbanism acknowledges no boundaries; it aims to form an
324 18
3. Détournement of Data
To conclude, Clerc’s Le dixième arrondissement does inherit from a
situationist tradition and even shares certain of the SI’s objectives. It
captures with great nuance the ambiances and configurations of its chosen
territory, and it highlights the primacy of radical movement and counters
and demystifies spectacle. It is situational, in that it introduces “certain
artificially constructed elements” into the “flow” of everyday life,
perturbing it “quantitatively, and, especially, qualitatively.” (Debord 1997,
“Moments,” 119) Moreover, what can be called unities of ambiance are
mapped across the urban grid – if in an altogether original way. However,
having been influenced probably less by Guy Debord than by Georges
Perec, Clerc favors practice over theory. He jettisons theoretical or
ideological structure and instead focuses on structuring practice. Like the
SI, his walking and writing are provoked by rapid changes to his familiar
urban milieu. However, in the 21st century, these changes are as much
linked to globalization and information technology as to the more local
urban development of Paris. Clerc’s performance is not exactly dérive, but
it is a radical movement through the urban landscape, and it produces
tangible results. Namely, it reveals the infra-ordinary spatio-temporal
complexity of the Tenth, as this can be experienced in the simple act of
walking. It restores a sense of play and adventure to the experience of
place. Paradoxically, perhaps – and in rather un-situationist fashion – this
ultimately liberating gesture is the result of a complex system of imposed
constraints governing both walking and writing.
In the actual process of walking and documenting the streets, one likes
to think Clerc hit on a practice that prevented “seeing” from “separating,”
but as the real Tenth becomes Le Dixième, as place becomes book with its
contents fixed and catalogued for us to peruse, Clerc carves the Tenth off
the official grid and – in a decidedly un-situationist move – makes of it
something like an object to be perused. True to its title, then, Paris, musée
du XXIe siècle, le dixième arrondissement is, in the end, a kind of museum.
For Foucault, the museum is one of the concrete forms of the heterotopia:
a site “in which all other real sites that can be found within the
culture…are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” (24)
Clerc in fact draws the connection between his literary musée and
Foucault’s heterotopia, when he “subtitles” 23 Rue d’Hauteville precisely
with the term Heterotopia. (133) Moreover, for Clerc, the fundamentally
fluid spatial aspects of the Tenth are heterotopic in that they are
microcosmic of France at large: “Cartography: the Tenth hexagon is a
minifrance.” (160) In fact, because Clerc consistently highlights how
334 18
cultural and physical elements from around the globe intermingle and are
“simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” in the Tenth, one
could argue that the subtitle Heterotopia stands for Clerc’s book at large.
Clerc’s text demonstrates to what extent the Tenth – like a museum well-
curated – is always renegotiating its floor plan and displaying itself in new
ways. Like the visitor to the museum, the reader – liberated by the lack of
fictional plot and facilitated by the index of subjective markers at the end
of the book – is free to choose her path. In one room she finds the Tenth
rearranged according to Danger, in another she peruses it according to
Past City. She gets lost, finds a new way, leaps from one boulevard to
another with the turn of a page: the recombinatory possibilities are
virtually endless, and the finite geographical space of the Tenth becomes
something like an infinitely varied territory, a labyrinth inside of which,
having entered, we lose the kind of topographical bearings that equip us to
envision the spatial as something we might master. In the museum devoted
to such geographies, the visitor is invited to construct her own itineraries:
a kind of agency is restored, but there is no real beginning or ending to the
tour (or to the book).
By becoming an instrument for absorbing the locative and
psychogeographical information of the Tenth, Clerc, as narrator-curator,
becomes dislocated: he is nomadic, homeless in the very arrondissement
he calls home. One wonders how he survives without sleep and food.
Clerc possesses only a fragmentary voice and presence, consumed and
eclipsed, as he is, by the great wealth of information he produces. And yet,
Clerc is not so much buried under an avalanche of information – as we
often feel ourselves to be in today’s world – as he is self-effaced in the
production of information. And it is precisely via the densely
informational character of the text that Le dixième arrondissement pushes
back against 21st-century forms of alienation tied to information overload.
In today’s world of constantly streaming information, “our personal
perception is being ratcheted up to move at mechanistic rates.” (Dixon
2013, 161) One feels this, reading Clerc’s text. In everyday life, our
mobile devices facilitate – and oblige – this ratcheting up of subjectivity,
but at the risk of further distancing us from a meaningful relationship with
place itself. Clerc responds to this by employing a radical system of
constraints that – as we have seen – parodies the informational paradigm
and allows him to create a database that operates the détournement of data.
Accordingly, Clerc has the guile, the ruse, to operate his own reformatting
of the Tenth according to his invented parameters – via his system of
subjective markers. This move allows Clerc to remain true to – and bring
to the surface – the Tenth’s highly fabricated and coded nature. At the
French Psychogeography Today? 335
same time, it affords Clerc (and his readers) a newfound agency in taking
control of the code. If structure and information are to excessively
intervene in everyday life, penetrating and fragmenting our relationship
with place, it will at least be Clerc who ludically builds these structures
and produces this information. In today’s world, where data is everywhere
at our virtual disposal, we would be wise to extrapolate from Clerc’s text a
more nuanced understanding of our relationship to information, so as to
ensure we are not allowing its reifications to separate us from a more
qualitative and meaningful – and perhaps psychogeographical –
relationship with the geographies we inhabit.
Refereences
ARMSTRONG G, Joshua. 2015. “Empiritexxts: Mapping A Attention and Invention
in Post-11980 French Literature.”
L Freench Forum 400 (1): 3-108.
CLERC, Thhomas. 2007.. Paris, mussée du XXIe Ie siècle, le dixième
arrondisssement. Paris: L’arbalète Gallimard.
G
CONSTANT. 2006. “Annother City for Anotheer Life”, Situationist
Internatiional Anthologgy, Ken Knab bb (ed. and traans.). Berkeley
y: Bureau
of Publicc Secrets, 71-773.
DEBORD, Guuy. 1997. “Coontribution à uneu définitionn situationnistee du jeu.”
Internatiionale situatiionniste, Patriick Mosconi (ed). Paris: Librairie
Arthèmee Fayard, 9-100.
French Psychogeography Today? 337
Notes
1
English translations of Situationist Interantional texts will be provided, when
available, from the Situationist International Anthology (see references). Those not
included in that anthology – such as this one – have been translated by the author
from the original French as published in Internationale situationniste (references).
2
Full quote: “The crisis in urbanism is worsening. They layout of neighborhoods,
old and new, conflicts with established patterns of behavior and even more with
the new ways of life that we are seeking. The result is a dismal and sterile
ambiance in our surroundings.”
3
O’Rourke provides a large corpus of psychogeographically-inclined artists,
including the likes of British filmmaker Patrick Keiller, Dutch blogger and postal
worker Wilfried Hou Je Bek, and the Italian urban exploration group Stalker.
4
For a methodical description of unities of ambiance, see Abdelhafid Khatib’s
“Les Halles” (references).
5
The precise purview and methodology of psychogeography remained purposely
vague: “The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographical can be applied to the
findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human
feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the
same spirit of discovery. (2006, “Introduction,” 8)
6
The “situation” the SI sought was to be an “artistic production” that “breaks
radically with concrete works. It is inseparable from its immediate consumption, a
use value that knows no conservation as merchandise.” (Debord “Construction,”
118)
7
For a methodical description of such literary projects, see Armstrong’s
“Empiritexts: Mapping Attention and Invention in Post-1980 French Literature”.
8
In their 2008 état des lieux of contemporary French literature, La littérature
française au présent, Dominique Viart and Bruno Vercier note the postmodern and
contemporary absence of a literary avant-garde: “contemporary literature proceeds
rather by a critical reading of the world surrounding it and a no less critical re-
reading of the discourses that convey the past. It does not echo preconceived
ideologies, but speaks from that defection of grand narratives that Jean-François
Lyotard described.” (253, author’s translation)
9
Even a self-professed psychogeographer like Will Self admits what he is doing is
not exactly psychogeography as the SI intended: “Although we psychogeographers
are all disciples of Guy Debord and those rollicking Situationists who tottered,
soused, across the stage set of 1960s Paris, thereby hoping to tear down the scenery
of the Society of the Spectacle with their devilish dérive, there are still profound
differences between us.” (11) Most of the “psychogeographic fraternity,” Smith
jokes, “are really only local historians with an attitude problem. (12)
10
All English translations of Le dixième arrondissement are the author’s.
11
The SI proposed fantastical urban planning projects (cf. Constant “Another City”
in references).
12
The Naked City map is one of the few works of art produced by Debord. Labeled
as a “Psychogeographical Guide of Paris,” it shows Paris distinctly divided into
French Psychogeography Today? 339
unities of ambiance, and uses arrows to indicate how plaques tournantes suggest
movement across the distinct unities during dérive.
13
In this way, like SI psychogeographer Abdelhafid Khatib, he is able to explore
the “possibilities of contact” to be found between one unity of ambiance and
another. (“Les Halles” 47)
14
Misguided urban planning separates city dwellers from their authentic existence,
because it “conflicts with established patterns of behavior and even more with the
new ways of life that we are seeking.” (“Another City,” 71) Moreover, Part I of
Debord’s Society of Spectacle is entitled “Separation Perfected.”
15
Clerc inherits from a particularly rich French tradition of theorizing and
artistically representing the quotidien. See Sheringham’s Everyday Life.
16
“l’infa-mince me passionne.” Here we find a reference to Georges Perec’s
neologism l’infra-ordinaire (cf. Perec’s L’infra-ordinaire).
17
“Attempt to exhaust.” In Georges Perec’s Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu
parisien. Perec spent three days in Paris’s Place Saint-Sulpice, attempting to
exhaust in writing everything he observed in the square.
18
Clerc adds that this alphabetical GPS “leads and misleads.” (38)
19
“Travelling.” Clerc privileges the metaphor of the cinematic tracking shot
throughout Le dixième arrondissement.
20
Alternative spelling of racaille: translating as “scum” or “riff-raff,” it is a
pejorative term used to describe delinquent youth, especially of immigrant origin,
in France. The mention of racaille is implicitly political, as, in 2005, then Interior
Minister Nicolas Sarkozy controversially applied the term to describe the youth
perpetrating riots in and around Paris.
21
Author’s translation.
22
Special thanks to Professor Robert Roth (UW-Madison, Geography) who made
this interdisciplinary collaboration possible, as well as to French and geography
student Sasha Barkhaus, who created the database, and to geography students
Adam Gile and Scarlett Zhang, who assisted in creating the map. Most especially,
however, the author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the effort, technical
expertise, and creative talents of cartographer Dean Olsen (UW-Madison), lead
designer and builder of the map.
19
NATHALIE MARTINIÈRE
[…] what we see, the painted landscape, is the materialization of the link
between the different elements and values of one particular culture: it
provides a sequencing, a design, a form of “order” to our perception of the
world.
[…] The landscape […] in a way depends on the forms of culture.
(Cauquelin 2002, 6-7, translation mine)
This is why London in The Secret Agent is only partially connected to the
real city: it exists as a major signifier within the narration besides using the
real city as its model. Significantly, what indicates to us that the place is
London is the fact that the name appears from the very start (§2). If, as
Henry James puts it in the preface to Roderick Hudson, “[t]o name a place
in fiction is to pretend in some degree to represent it,” (James 2011, 8) the
repeated mention of a few well-known places like the Greenwich
Observatory, Belgravia or Soho offers the readers landmarks. And the
choice of London is important since the novel makes it clear that London
stands for democracy and the questions and difficulties raised by
democracy: what happens in London (the threat represented by the attempt
to bomb the Greenwich Observatory) is only the mirror image of what
happens to the society that epitomizes modernity and democracy –
England – and to its citizens.
What is particularly interesting for that matter is the way Conrad
reshapes London for his own narrative purposes: while meaninglessness
and the loss of landmarks for the characters are systematically conveyed in
the way places are represented, Conrad’s narration also relies on a number
of strategies that give space a prominent role (abundance of spatial
symbolism, role of geometry, space metaphors) and enable him to convey
a sense of chaos associated with his vision of modernity. For that matter
not only is London a place of defamiliarisation and alienation but – more
interestingly – places are systematically metaphorised in spatial terms, as
if a place could be metaphorised only in terms of another place: space is
where the metaphors that give the novel its structure are articulated.
Relying on the tension between “here” and “there”, the city and the sea,
the systematic choice of spatial metaphors may be read as an attempt to
acknowledge and resist the incoherence of the world simultaneously. It is
above all a way of thinking the stakes of modernity in space, and with
space (and spatial imagery) as a privileged tool.
sharply contrasting with the more “organic” type of life associated with
rural settings. Christopher Butler points out that in most 19th century
novels, the city is a kind of larger village which serves as a backdrop for
the characters’ adventures and social relationships. (Butler 1994, 134) It is
highly codified and works as a mirror of society’s organisation. At the
beginning of the 20th century however, the city had become largely
anonymous, threatening and disorientating, subjecting the individual to
what Georg Simmel in his famous article “Metropolis and the Mental
Life”, published in 1903, four years before The Secret Agent, defines as
“the rapid telescoping of changing images, […] the unexpectedness of
violent stimuli.” (Simmel 2002, 11) Butler points out that:
[…] images are not really comparisons of the world within the novel to an
extrinsic one with which narrator and reader are familiar, but rather they
are part of the process of subverting the reader’s ‘familiarity’ with the
London being described. (Schwartz 1980, 162)
London in The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad 343
a) A polarised city
From the start, what is represented of London in The Secret Agent is
polarised around two distinct areas: the shop in Brett Street on the one
hand and the embassy in Belgravia on the other: both appear from the very
beginning of the novel and stand for larger groups. Associated with Brett
Street are the anarchists’ rooms (the Professor’s; Ossipon’s)4, Winnie’s
mother’s “charity-cottage” or the rooms she lets out (even though they are
in Belgravia); a major characteristic of London in the novel is its gloomy
atmosphere, poverty and grime, even though the fashionable districts
around the Embassy, the Home Office and the drawing-room of the “great
lady” where Mr Vladimir and the Assistant Commissioner meet are a very
privileged environment of high windows, tall mirrors, precious woods and
gleaming chandeliers. Light in The Secret Agent, or rather the absence of
light, is a powerful agent of stylisation of places that contributes to
conveying an impression of secrecy and squalor that dominates the
representation of London but also to suggesting that there is no moral
order left: “the light of […] tall windows” in the “great drawing-room”
(92) contrasts heavily for instance with Brett Street, “a sordid street
seldom touched by the sun.” (40) Communication between the two worlds
remains rare and characters that go from one to the other can do it only in
secret: Verloc has to hide his connections with the embassy, the assistant
commissioner does not feel in his place anywhere and Michaelis is no
longer taken seriously by his friends because he is protected by “the great
lady.” When these juxtaposed, fragmented worlds come into contact, a
catastrophe takes place: Verloc’s visit to the embassy is responsible for
Stevie’s death, Heat’s visit to the shop in Brett Street leads to Verloc’s
murder by Winnie.
Similarly, if plots are schemed indoors (in Verloc’s shop or parlour, or
in the embassy), they are carried out outdoors, and London streets are also
organised according to a pattern of oppositions, creating almost two
parallel networks; “wide thoroughfares” (21, first occurrence of the term)
correspond to the well-lit drawing-rooms, but it is through “narrow lanes”
that the characters move around: Verloc goes to the embassy by “[a]
narrow street along a yellow wall” (21), the Professor meets Heat in a
“narrow and dusky alley” (74) and the Assistant Commissioner walks
from the Home Office to his own office “along a narrow street.” (127) If
the presence of the anarchists in these “narrow lanes” may seem a serious
threat for the people in the “wide thoroughfares”, anarchists feel even
more threatened by “populous streets” – reversing the readers’
expectations:
344 19
After she has killed Verloc, Winnie also dreads walking into the street:
“The street, silent and deserted from end to end, repelled her by taking
sides with that man who was so certain of his impunity.” (206)
With a turn to the left Mr Verloc pursued his way along a narrow street by
the side of a yellow wall which, for some inscrutable reason, had No. 1
Chesham Square written on it in black letters. Chesham Square was at
least sixty yards away, and Mr Verloc, cosmopolitan enough not to be
deceived by London's topographical mysteries, held on steadily, without
a sign of surprise or indignation. At last, with business-like persistency, he
reached the Square, and made diagonally for the number 10. This belonged
to an imposing carriage gate in a high, clean wall between two houses, of
which one rationally enough bore the number 9 and the other was
numbered 37; but the fact that this last belonged to Porthill Street, a street
well known in the neighbourhood, was proclaimed by an inscription placed
above the ground-floor windows by whatever highly efficient authority is
charged with the duty of keeping track of London's strayed houses. (21-22,
emphasis is mine)
this wild and passionate uproar.” (Conrad 2006, 36) Though far less
obvious than in the novella, the similarities between the two continents
(and between their inhabitants) are reinforced by the fact that in both texts,
London is characterised as “a monstrous town”:
“And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town
was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a
lurid glare under the stars.
"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of
the earth."” (Italics mine, Conrad 2006, 5)
Then, the fact that the upper classes are offered to the lower classes’
admiration in what looks very much like a zoo reinforces the idea of a
tamed, weakened kind of civilization, a sham Eden, protected from
confrontation with reality by the railings only.
Similarly ambiguous and ironic is the distinction between culture and
nature. Mr Vladimir, Verloc’s contact at the embassy, asks him to blow up
the Greenwich Observatory because it stands for what he calls the new
“fetish” (21) of the British (and more generally European) middle classes
– science. In the end, it is Stevie, the half-wit, who is blown up in the
Greenwich Park. The fact that the bomb explodes in the park and not in
the observatory underlines the limits of their symbolic value: for if the
observatory is the symbol of modernity, the park’s value is much more
ambiguous. Limited by its railings, containing only domesticated plants,
the park is a degraded image of the Garden of Eden, which rejects man
through the association of the Professor’s bomb (an image of modernity
run mad) and a tree stump (a sign of nature’s degraded state in an urban
environment).
As a result, two usually conflicting myths collapse together: on the one
hand, scientific progress that produces both observatories for the
measurement of time but also lethal and uncontrollable bombs; and on the
other hand the myth of nature as an image of salvation since, in this urban
environment, it is soiled by contact with the city as much as by the bomb
itself. Stevie’s death is a sign of the epistemological break at work at the
beginning of the 20th century: neither nature nor culture can be seen as a
London in The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad 347
refuge; both are threatening for modern man. Osiris/Stevie is not resuscitated
by Isis/Heat and his exploded body does not fertilise the park but
desecrates it. An image of nature imprisoned in the heart of the city, the
park is the place where, symbolically, a degraded form of nature and
culture-run-mad collide and destroy each other.
As mentioned in the Author’s Note, London in The Secret Agent is also
a cannibal city, “devouring” not only the “world’s light” (10) but
individuals like Stevie; and at the end of the story, Winnie kills her
husband with the kitchen knife he had used to carve a joint of meat, a
situation that emphasizes the association of London (or Londoners) with
the repeated transgression of taboos. Again, the image of cannibalism
confirms the parallelism between London and the “heart of darkness”
whose presence cannot be limited to Africa – or to Heart of Darkness. As
Daniel Schwartz has shown, numerous myths superimpose in the London
of The Secret Agent, but they are always corrupted, turned into parodies,
keeping only their more grotesque features: “[… in The Secret Agent,
myths] serve to emphasise how far Western man has strayed both from his
biblical heritage and his epic tradition.” (Schwartz 1980, 171) The
collapse of values being general and the traditional naturalistic rendition of
reality no longer adequate, Conrad’s narrator resorts to other strategies in
order to fight the growing impression of chaos and make the urban
environment legible.
[...] the innocent Stevie, seated very good and quiet at a deal table, drawing
circles, circles, circles; innumerable circles, concentric, eccentric; a
coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of repeated
curves, uniformity of form, and confusion of intersecting lines suggested a
rendering of cosmic chaos, the symbolism of a mad art attempting the
inconceivable. (Italics mine, 45-46)
b) Metaphors as landmarks
The process of metaphorisation of London in spatial terms is not
specific to The Secret Agent, but in this novel it is systematized, as if a
place could be defined only in terms of another: London is repeatedly
associated through metaphors with water and the sea, creating a tension
between here and there, a well-known, supposedly firm environment and
the constantly changing sea. In The Secret Agent, the basic unit in London
is the street; and it is the street that is primarily described in terms of the
sea. What prompts the metaphorical process is the watery element in
London – not the Thames but the rain. When the Assistant Commissioner
looks from his window into the street,
[...] the short street he looked down into lay wet and empty, as if swept
clear suddenly by a great flood. It was a very trying day, choked in raw fog
to begin with, and now drowned in cold rain. (88)
the fact that for man, “elsewhere” is not a refuge but only the reflection of
here.
Conclusion
Conrad’s London mirrors the loss of reliable landmarks and explores
the possibility of new modes of representation. Metaphors offer an
alternative that signals the fact that “reality” boils down to words – an
observation which led Conrad to what Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan defines as
a “metaphysics of absence” (Erdinast-Vulcan 1991, 144), the world being
only “[…] a void covered by a thin network of interpretations.” As a
result, the description of the city veils and unveils the ontological
emptiness at the same time, oscillating between explicit references to the
extra-diegetic reality of London and attempts to give it meaning within the
story, through symbolization, geometric reorganization or metaphors.
Places therefore are endowed with more meaning or transformed into
something different (the sea) in an attempt at coherence, and a fantastic
space is superimposed onto the city. Sea metaphors give the city a new
dimension and underline its mythical potential: as London is turned into a
city swallowed up by the sea, the Verlocs’ story takes on the shades of
tragedy. It would be impossible in the sordid shop of a secret agent but the
situation is different “at the bottom of a black abyss”. (217) Space
metaphors therefore contribute to the (relative) preservation of meaning,
with all locations converging towards a similar symbolical value. In the
end, places become opaque as they all correspond to a similar, very dark
vision of the world, which is an image of meaninglessness and chaos and a
reflection of Conrad’s position on modernity. The Secret Agent is not only
a good instance of the “geographical bias” in Conrad’s fiction, it also
shows how writers reshape spatial “data” for their own purposes, thus
reflecting a period’s way of “thinking space” and influencing the readers’
perception of “real” places.
References
BUTLER, Christopher. 1994. Early Modernism. Literature, Music and
Painting in Europe 1900-1916, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
CAUQUELIN, Anne. (1989). 2002. L’Invention du paysage. Quadrige/PUF.
CONRAD, Joseph. (1899). 2006. Heart of Darkness, Paul B. Armstrong
(ed). New York, London: Norton Critical Edition, 4th ed.
—. (1901). 1996. Lord Jim. Thomas Moser (ed). New York, London:
Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed.
352 19
Notes
1
In his Author’s Note, Conrad writes that The Secret Agent is the “story of Winnie
Verloc.” (10) Winnie’s husband, Adolf, is a triple agent, the member of a group of
anarchists, a third-rate agent provocateur for an Eastern (probably Russian?)
embassy as well as a spy for the London police. At the beginning of the novel, the
Embassy orders him to organise a bomb attack in order to force the English
government to take energetic measures against the anarchists (at the beginning of
the 20th century, London was a hub for such movements): his target is the
Greenwich observatory, the emblem of the general taste for science, the “fetish” of
modernity. Verloc has the bomb carried by Stevie, his half-wit brother-in-law. The
bombing is a failure but Stevie is killed in the process. Mad with grief when she
hears what happened to her brother, Winnie stabs her husband with a carving
knife, tries to flee to France and finally drowns herself in the Channel. Verloc’s
group of anarchists, the Embassy people and two policemen, Inspector Heat and
the Assistant Commissioner, also take part in the story, all of them wandering
through the city.
2
After all, it is not immaterial that London is precisely mentioned when Brussels
in Heart of Darkness is not and remains only a “whited sepulchre.”
3
I have borrowed the word from Marlow who sees things as through a “damaged
kaleidoscope” in Lord Jim. (Conrad 1996, 96)
4
All page references to Conrad, 1994.
5
There is no Brett Street in London but Brett Road exists. It is not located in Soho
though, but in Hackney. What matters is the fact that the name is evocative of
London and therefore verisimilar.
London in The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad 353
6
Cf. W. Worringer, “Abstraction and Empathy: a Contribution to the Psychology
of Style”, New York: International University Press, 1953, 48.
7
Interestingly, though there is no Brett Place in London, Chesham Place has a
triangular shape, a fact which reinforces the connection between the embassy and
Verloc’s place, the fashionable districts and the world of the anarchists. Reality
and symbolic elements superimpose.
20
At the turn of the 1950s, Brazil underwent a major change with the
edification of its new capital, Brasília. The developers of this new city
aimed not only to create a highly symbolic urban form and affirm a
modern style of architecture, but also to forge a national destiny through
both of these channels. The weight of its colonial heritage had never really
allowed it to do so before. The return to the heartlands of legendary Brazil
(Aubertin, Vidal 1997, 39), and the symbol of the cross, masterfully
orchestrated (the Pilot Plan) by the architect Lucio Costa, in an ironic
gesture reminiscent of that of the colonists taking possession of the
territory, made this undertaking possible: Brazil’s destiny would now
unfold on this land thus marked.
With his latest novel, Free City (2012), the Brazilian author João
Almino returned to the city just as construction sites were cropping up
everywhere. The author was obviously not aiming to retell the official
story, but rather to relate “a saga of men and machines creating a new
city.” (Almino 2012, 15) The narrator leads the reader around the Cidade
Livre (the novel’s original title), a temporary city built near the future
capital to welcome a population of labourers who had come in large
numbers from the Nordeste, one of Brazil’s five statistical regions. The
story is set in the four years preceding the inauguration of Brasília in April
1960. As well as the construction workers, this temporary city was home
to immigrants, traders and even mystics who saw in it the possible advent
of a new humanity. The story is based on several figures belonging to the
same family circle, including the narrator and his father, Moacyr Ribeiro,
The City and its Double 355
fiction, would have been able to perform this complex task. The national
destiny, which the country’s politicians and intellectuals dreamed of as
they moved into the inland region, seems to ultimately lose itself in the
Cidade Livre, a prefiguration of the urban and social forms which would
quickly overwhelm the Pilot Plan. Without detracting from the intrinsically
remarkable and exceptional character of Costa and Niemeyer’s architectural
and urban work, the project to forge a national destiny and invent the
Brazilian identity consequently seems more hesitant.
To give the story some life, all I had to do was transport myself back to a
day from my childhood, imagine myself in the middle of an avenue in the
Free City, and then I could see my aunts sporting fine figures and scowls,
Valdivino seated at a table transcribing letters, Dad talking with someone
in the doorway of a bar, a little girl with braids and dark eyes riding a
bicycle […] and I could see the colors of the shops, the wooden buildings,
bulky black cars parked on the side of the street, their white-wall tires
exposed, and then the smell of gasoline would emerge, the smell of oil, the
smell of trash heaps and horse manure, and the stories of crimes, sins,
despair, and grandiose futures would appear on an enormous, colorful
screen. (Almino 2012, 18-19)
It is precisely in this everyday life that the essence of the story happens.
This essence simultaneously reflects the expression of an intense life, of a
determination to experience the diversity of our origins, of a hope for a
better life. Yet on closer inspection, did the city (the Cidade Livre) before
the city (Brasília) not contain within it the reasons for the ultimate failure
of the project for a renewed society? At the end of the day, was the
temporary nature of this city not a harbinger of this story’s unhappy
ending? This double is in fact an opposite. The city which was meant to
stand forever, Brasília, is therefore opposed by the ephemeral, the
impermanent. An ephemeral city which is also built as a contradiction.
The dusty, disjointed atmosphere of the Cidade Livre stands against the
immaculate, regulated appearance of Brasília. The singularity of the
temporary city is a retort to the proclaimed universality of the new capital.
The immensity of the space developed in the middle of nowhere contrasts
with the overcrowding of the village. Because it will resist its planned
358 20
You all just have to know what my name is, or at least whether or not I'm
Joao Almino […] but never mind all that, I'm maintaining my anonymity
for the simple reason that it gives me more freedom, most importantly the
freedom to be honest. (Almino 2012, 11)
As the story goes along, the chronicle of Brasília gives way to the
novelistic intrigue playing out between the characters, who are: “Lucrécia,
Valdivino, Aunt Matilde and Aunt Francisca, the principal characters
without whom the story would not be able to move forward” (Almino
The City and its Double 359
One day all of this will be gone, it will be covered with houses and people,
the river will be full of garbage, and there won’t be so many animals […].
(Almino 2012, 88)
The narrator and his father go on a few expeditions there and are amazed
to find such diverse fauna and flora. This is the first reference point.
A second one examines the relationship of literature to these typically
Brazilian situations of high urban density paired with segregation. While
Brasília does not have a high level of concentration, it has had to deal with
a dual form of ghettoisation. It is true that it takes a very different form
from that seen in Rio or São Paulo for example. Here, the city of the rich
and the well-off middle classes, at the centre, ignores the poorest families
who have chosen to live on the outskirts. The atmospheres and scenes
described by the narrator when writing about the Cidade Livre show us the
life associated with these peripheral realities, which in a short period of
time will proliferate around Brasília. The toughness of the characters and
the difficulties they face cannot make us forget the everyday life that is
revealed, as well as forms of urbanity that in absolute terms have nothing
to envy to the life which the Pilot Plan will offer. The way Almino writes
about Brasília and therefore the Cidade Livre, an archetype of the
peripheral town, echoes the search for a new social and societal model that
will never be achieved. This novel’s motivation is therefore typical of the
Brazilian novel from the very end of the 20th century, that is, the “realistic
representation” (Olivieri-Godet 2005, 15) of the social and urban
phenomena that can be observed in large Brazilian cities. Free City could
have provided a counter-example to this trend if it were not telling us that
the project for the new capital has not kept its promises.
he told me that writing was also a type of construction, that one went along
laying brick upon brick, and with that lesson in hand I have spent many
years carrying this journalistic torch forward, and it is because of this same
lesson that I am now arranging the bricks of this story into their present
shape. (Almino 2012, 11)
All I had to do to start constructing the story was fill in the dry sentences
he told me with sunshine, dust, tears, and fear, as well as everything else
the story of the Free City should be made of. (Almino 2012, 15)
The narrator’s main aim is to tell the story of his childhood spent in the
satellite town with his father, his two aunts Francisca and Matilde, as well
as Valdivino, with the chronicle of everyday life taking over from, even
supplanting, the account of big History, no doubt to better reveal and even
question it. The period described is the time of the narrator’s childhood,
who is six at the time. Four years during which he made a number of
initiatory discoveries that projected him beyond the world of childhood:
experience of sexual desire upon seeing the generous curves of Aunt
Matilde, or discovering his vocation as a journalist. However, everyday
life in the disposable city is much more than just a simple backdrop to this
story of initiation. Several times, the narrator expresses the wish to paint
the picture of an era, the prism of subjectivity being only an artifice to
achieve this goal, attain the sincerity that is deemed essential and which he
describes at the end of his introduction when addressing the removal of
doubt over his real identity, and his possible connection with the author
himself. (Almino 2012, 11) Fiction would be a better way to bear witness
than a historical account. However, the question of memory appears in a
problematic light this time. Indeed, from the beginning of the account, the
narrator stresses its flawed and subjective nature:
I do not presume to know everything that took place in those times. I may
have erred, written too much or too little, memories and research being
flawed and incomplete, as you all know […]. (Almino 2012, 9)
The last pages of the novel refer back to this opening passage, like an
amplified echo:
I didn’t want to say anything, for memory itself has nothing that it wants to
say, it merely speaks amidst oblivion and that which it seeks to hide, and
The City and its Double 363
for that reason there is nothing to interpret – words, like memories, are
what they are, and nothing more. Looking into the mirror of the past,
where at times I don’t even recognize myself, I am inventing nothing,
merely writing an account of what I had lived, which stands as a witness,
among the many that might be in existence, to compose a portrait of an era.
(Almino 2012, 222)
For this reason this is a text to be modified by its readers, as if I’d created a
Wikipedia for this story, with the only rule being that I’m the only one who
is allowed to meddle with my memories and those of dad and Aunt
Francisca. As for the rest – the description of events that gives us the
impression of belonging to the spirit of the times – you readers of this blog
can revise as you will, and if you have any incident to relate or
commentary to make, don’t be shy […]. (Almino 2012, 10)
myth of the nation (2014) and the Brazilian imaginary provide many
insights that can help us understand why the territory of Brasília has been
chosen as a suitable subject for a novelistic work. The deciphering of the
discourses of the main political players over time gives access to a
“mythical narrative”, “a mythical story deeply rooted in the Brazilian
imaginary” (De Oliveira 2014, 13) that reminds us constantly that Brazil is
not a nation and that there is no such thing as the Brazilian people. And
Brasília, appearing as the end point of such a path, paradoxically becomes
an archaic object as soon as it is conceived, meaning that it is already out-
of-date at the moment of its inauguration. Its architectural and urban
modernism makes no difference. For while it believes it is achieving
modernity (the character of modern things) by fulfilling the national
destiny it desired so much, Brazil is actually merely creating a work of
modernism (the taste for modern things).
Today, Brasília and its region are home to hundreds of communities, sects
and orders with a focus on faith in esoteric knowledge, not equal to a
scientific approach or a religion, but freely paving the way for a
comforting outcome for humanity. The idea of the myth of the nation, of
the search for a common destiny, seems to have had its day and is sound
asleep in the museums dedicated to the new city and its developers.
Today, the passionate devotion that can be observed in Brasília lives on in
the new age ideology and the feeling among its followers that they will
find the conditions for bringing about a universal future state for humanity
in this city, which has thus become mythical. The narrator remembers the
words of a journalist and explains:
Subsequently, both the fictional exercise and the reality attached to this
world found in this Brazilian mystique a balance between the subjection of
368 20
the majority to the great discourses and emancipation from the nation’s
burden.
From the great myths of the past to the modern novel, the function of
stories has always been to explore the conditions of a possible experience
– the new relationships to the body, time and space – in the words of
Deleuze, to invent a “missing people”. (Salmon 2007, 199)
1979), Brasília was a response at odds which what the world was
becoming. The supposed self-fulfilling prophecy becomes self-destroying
(Merton 1965). Bringing forth a Brazilian nation and people on the one
hand, and a new society freed from its recurring ills on the other, by
constructing a new capital - was this not a project with a purely
performative utterance (Austin 1970) nurtured by an excess of naivety?
Inaugurated upon the country’s achievement of independence (1822),
the construction of the Brazilian nation is an undertaking that is still
relevant today. What appears to be the latest stage of this complex process
provides Almino’s novel with a realistic setting. His novel is also part of a
history. Apart from the history of Brazilian literature in search of an
identity, there is that of the relationship between the intellectual world and
the task of creating a national community that displays itself by mobilising
historical frames of reference, all too often buried deeply but adapted to
suit the tastes of an agonising modernity. The positioning of this novel at
the intersection of this dual history enables its author to deploy a work of
fiction that questions this process’s modalities of concretisation. Through
Brasília’s double, the Cidade Livre, which is indeed real and associated
with the story imagined by Almino, with a certain realism, the reader
accesses a critique of the political and ideological strategy that takes
concrete form in Brasília. Literary fiction revives a memory that reminds
us of the majority’s enthusiasm for what was at the time only a project,
despite the firm commitment of the construction site and the solemn
inauguration. The activation of this memory testifies to the misleading
power of a modernity that is consecrated, formally embodied, universally
accepted, that dominates nature and is ordered to make society. The great
narrative of modernity, that of a people’s emancipation, was finally lost in
the storytelling of a singular destiny that did not win public support. The
small histories of the Cidade Livre provide a contradiction and, set against
a metafictional backdrop, invite us to consider the possibilities of a
postmodern completion of the Brazilian nation.
References
ALMINO, João (ed). 2012. Hôtel Brasília. Paris: Métailié.
AUSTIN, John Langshaw. 1970. Quand dire, c'est faire. Paris: Seuil.
COURET, Dominique. 2006. “Brasília : une ville contre-nature (sociale) ?”
in Brasília, ville fermée, environnement ouvert, Marcia Regina DE
ANDRADE MATHIEU, Ignez COSTA BARBOSA FERREIRA, Dominique
COURET (eds). Paris: IRD, 17-36.
http://books.openedition.org/irdeditions/342
370 20
XIAOMIN GIAFFERRI
René Leys1 was written by Victor Segalen, a travel writer and adventurer
in the Far East, between two trips to China. The book explores otherness
through a geographical experience. The historical background is the 1911
Revolution that brought the two-thousand-year-old Chinese empire to an
end, but the novel is pervaded by a keen sense of place, which is
materialized in the imperial capital, Peking. Major historical events merely
anchor the story in time and provide a pretext for probing the foreign city.
The description of Peking gives the city a strong physical and spiritual
presence, revealing Segalen's singular approach to geography and fiction
and the various aspects of language employed in the novel to establish a
relationship between them. Although the geographical account, like all
travelogues, is a precious source of information about a distant country
and culture, the “geographicity” or “picturesque geography” developed by
Segalen sheds light on particular ways of turning places into an
incarnation of the confrontation between the real and the imaginary, which
is central to the aesthetics of Segalen’s exoticism.
When Segalen started to write René Leys, China was still a mysterious
world unfamiliar to European readers, although exotic novels had become
popular during the Belle Époque. The first famous traveler to describe
Peking, and the Forbidden City in particular, was, of course, Marco Polo.
His Book of the Marvels of the World brims with details of the city. In
Segalen’s time, the main reference in French was Péking, histoire et
description by Mgr Favier2, who was the bishop of Peking for many years.
Many travelers’ accounts of Peking were published at the turn of the
century and their impressions of the citys splendour were often associated
with an image of decadence at the end of the Empire. Pierre Loti’s Les
derniers jours de Pékin (The Last Days of Peking), evoking the troubles in
China at the time when French troops were sent to help put down the
372 21
Boxer Rebellion, is often compared with René Leys. Both books are set in
Peking and the city overshadows the plot; both explore the role of
foreignness and the myth of the Forbidden City. And yet, Segalen despised
the chinoiseries or shoddy Far Eastern junk that epitomised colonial
exoticism. He also criticised Paul Claudel, whom he had met in Peking,
for his poor command of the language after thirteen years in the
diplomatic service in China. Segalen’s more intimate description of the
place is closer to Péking, by the Comte de Beauvoir3, because of its poetic
tone, and lingering nostalgia for a grandiose past.
Segalen discovered Peking on his first trip to China, from June 1909 to
July 1913. His plan to travel extensively in China dated back to 1908,
when he started learning Chinese at the School of Oriental Languages in
Paris. The following year he passed the Navy’s examination to become a
“cadet interpreter” and set off for China, where he explored landscapes,
archaeological sites and Chinese arts in many different regions. He
embarked on several literary projects during this journey, including Le Fils
du Ciel, his first novel on a Chinese subject, Stèles, scholarly poems first
published in China and Lettres de Chine, his correspondence with his wife
Yvonne, who had stayed behind in France. His letters are full of emotion
and the shock of contact with foreign places.
When Segalen arrived in Peking, he was not at his first brush with
exoticism, but the capital of the North was his chosen city; he called it
“my town” and “the home of my dreams”4. He returned to Peking between
his great treks through the North China Plain, the “Land of Yellow Earth”,
visiting Sichuan, the Yangtze River, and Changde. In 1910 he explored the
treasures of Peking, plunging spiritually into the Chinese symbolism of its
great sites, especially the Forbidden City, which incarnated what he called
the myth. He was in Peking during the 1911 Revolution and, as a doctor,
took care of the son of Yuan Shikai, then president of the Republic. It was
also in Peking that he met the “model” for his René Leys character, and
started his Annales secrètes d’après MR. MR stood for Maurice Roy, a
young Belgian who had been living in Peking for several years. He was a
great connoisseur of Chinese manners and spoke and wrote Mandarin
fluently. Listening to Roy’s strange tales about the Imperial Palace,
Segalen began to work on the plot of René Leys. After a brief stay in
France from July to October 2013 to prepare an archaeological mission,
Segalen returned to China. He wrote the first draft of his manuscript on the
voyage to Tianjin, drawing on the revelations he had noted in his secret
journal. In this sense, René Leys is a true “travel novel”.
Myth and Reality, Peking in René Leys of Victor Segalen 373
Oh, how I wish I could recognize the way we went! I have a large-scale
(1:100) plan of the Forbidden City complete and exact, in color, and
bristling with transcribed names, but in fact a hasty and somewhat childish
piece of work drawn up by the Allied troops during their occupation of the
palace in ‘nineteen hundred’… (Segalen, 87)
Myth and Reality, Peking in René Leys of Victor Segalen 375
His Peking house, “my palace”, as Segalen refers to it, vibrates with the
ontological and cosmological spirit of the Chinese tradition.
I meditated that, lying there with my head in this direction and my feet in
that, so close to the Southeastern corner of the Tatar City, I was lying
exactly along a line from north to south. Like all the houses, palaces and
huts of Pei-king, my house, hut or palace is very astronomically oriented
(and occidented) with all its principal buildings facing south. (Segalen, 34)
I gazed out over my roofs with their elegantly curved corners and saw how
summer was deepening the blue rectangle of Pei-king sky (…) I tried to
gauge the hour at a given moment from the course of my obliquely slanting
shadow as it approached the axis of my principal buildings. And when the
shadow cast by my body fell exactly along that axis I felt in my bones that
this the true noon at the meridian on which I live, on which I was situated
at that moment as I sat on these paving stones, then saturated with light, in
the quadrangular vat of this courtyard which is my Palace! (Segalen, 50)
Pei-king is not, as one might think, a chessboard whose game, fair or foul,
is played on the surface. No -- there is an Underground City complete with
its redans, its corner forts, its highways and byways, its approaches, its
threats, its “horizontal wells” even more formidable than the wells of
drinking and other water that yawn up at the open sky (…) It’s – and I
can’t get away from it; I keep coming back to it in spite of my self – it’s as
mysterious as the Forbidden City itself! All the unknown, thrice immured
behind twenty-foot-high walls, has taken on ten times the mystery in being
Myth and Reality, Peking in René Leys of Victor Segalen 377
furnished with this vertical abyss at their base – the Profound City with all
its subterranean cavitations! (Segalen, 158-159)
The existence of an “inner city”, not marked on any map but solidly
constructed, according to René Leys; who confirms the two ideograms
“Pei-King” inscribed in a place under the road they often rode along,
opens up a new horizon in the narrator’s quest. Unable to pierce the centre
of the city on the surface, the search turns downwards. The underground
city is a dream place, as labyrinthine as the city on the surface. The flat
expanse of Peking acquires disturbing imaginary depth. This fictitious
invention is surrounded by a host of topographical details that make it
plausible, but sow the seeds of confusion and hallucination. The text
becomes dreamlike, confusing appearance and depth. The representation
of Peking based on geographical experience reconciles the paradox of
truth and fantasy.
Only once does he manage to reach the centre. But the longed-for
incursion into the “Within” proves to be a disappointment. Invited to join
the French delegation when the French Minister presents his letters of
credence to the Regent, the narrator goes through the gates of the
Emperor's palace for the first time. Far from being filled with delight, he is
tormented by doubts and worries. The foreign labyrinth makes him
anxious, bewildered and exasperated:
events on the eve of the 1911 Revolution, but the historical chronology is
diluted in this enigmatic place.
René Leys is a mirror reflecting the narrator’s secret wishes and living
out his dream: “I have truly, for the space of a moment, lived the most
intimate life of the Palace.” (Segalen, 104) The story his character tells
seems to be a last-ditch effort to reach the hidden essence of the closed
space. But Segalen grants it less and less credit as the fabulation is
gradually revealed. At first he believed his tale because it gave him a
glimpse inside the palace. “All his confidences really did inhabit an
essential Palace built upon the most magnificent foundations… And the
sets he conjured up… and that teeming ceremonial and secret Pekingese
life that no truth as officially known will ever begin to suspect…”
(Segalen, 206) But Segalen ends up suspecting that René Leys’s fabulous,
contradictory story might be just the reflection of his own suggestions:
“He abode by his word and it may be by my suggestions…” (Segalen,
206) The word of René Leys, like the ground in Peking, “sounded
hollow!” (Segalen, 159) The narrator no longer knows what is true and
what is false. Suddenly called upon to answer his own doubt, he ends the
novel with the burning question: “yes or no?” (Segalen, 207)
The vacuum of the centre metaphorically echoes the failure of the
narration: an empty space and an elusive story. The realization of the
absence of reality annihilates the novel. The end of the story reminds us of
Segalen’s notorious reservations about the novel as a genre, which he
often denigrated as outdated, bastardized and paradoxical. He was
reluctant to turn his secret notes into a novel. The last pages of his first
draft show that he was struggling to write it. In the finished text, he
confides, in an aside: “After that I recall… (I am slipping despite myself
into the style that would be in order should ever come to write this book…
this book that will never be, for is it not better to live it? Problem).”
(Segalen, 112) Behind the narrator's criticism we can hear the author
heaping sarcasm and mockery on his own head. The narration is designed
to inspire both confidence and suspicion, using a narrative process related
to the thriller and language full of innuendo and allusions, to confront
reality and fiction.
2. Ideo-graphic Space
The geographical space of René Leys takes shape in writing that plays
with the compartmenting of the concrete and the abstract. The spatial
dimension of the material and technical landmarks takes on a metaphorical
Myth and Reality, Peking in René Leys of Victor Segalen 381
value: space is not simple matter but a support for perspective and
symbolic inscription.
When Segalen was planning his book, he thought of titling it
Mysterious Garden, or The Mystery of the Purple Room. Both contain an
indication of place. “Mysterious Garden” is also Maurice Roy’s Chinese
name (Mi Yuan). His fascination for strange places prompted Segalen to
consider putting a map of Peking on the cover. On one page of the
manuscript, he wrote in the margin: “If I had to make a book of this, what
more beautiful seal? What more beautiful ‘stamp’ than a map of
Peking12?” Also he wrote at the foot of the page: “Put it like a crescam on
the cover”13.
In the text, the relation between the character and his surroundings is
rendered by a metaphorical discourse linking topographical notions and
synaesthetic phenomena. The vocabulary used to describe geographical
things refers to psychic and psychological sensations, as in “I enjoyed the
feeling of security that the geometrical quietude of my house provides.”
(Segalen, 33) Such descriptions bring to mind Segalen’s earlier medical
research, especially when he evokes “visions” his character has when he is
out riding in Peking: “he is suddenly overwhelmed by the certainty that he
can actually see before him, but in a reversed mirror image, the
corresponding point of the city lying diagonally opposite.” (Segalen, 183)
or “in these strange, private moment he lives in a space turned upside-
down, full of agonizing experiences of penetrating solid matter or of
having the law of gravity reversed…” (Segalen, 184).
The leitmotiv of circumscription gives rise to several recurrent themes,
the first one being the “wall”. Full of resonance and stressed by other
words like “confined”, “enclosure”, “to be walled up” and “immured”, the
“wall” combines with the idea of “no entry” as can be seen in the
following quotations: “I decided I would go out and, for the umpteenth
time, trace and as it were renew contact with that square of walls to which
I shall one day, one way or another, be granted admittance…” (Segalen,
15) or “It is perhaps the twentieth time I have set out thus to lay siege to
the place, encompass it, verify its exact contours, circle like the sun about
the foot of eastern, southern, and western walls, and try if possible to
complete the circle and come back by way of the north”. (Segalen, 16) The
Forbidden City is “all the unknown, trice immured behind twenty-foot-
high walls.” (Segalen, 159) Expressions like “passions immured”
(Segalen, 21) give an intimate impression of the place. The obsession with
walls in René Leys brings to mind a similar obsession in Le Fils du Ciel, a
chronicle of the last years of Guangxu, the Chinese emperor from 1875 to
1908. The moving story of the sovereign shut away after the failure of the
382 21
“Hundred Days’ Reform” hinges on the theme of closing: once he has run
away from the capital, he feels he has escaped from a closed space: “The
walls have fallen, the way is clear.”14 The wall symbolises physical
separation but also an obstacle to communication. It is the language barrier
that led the narrator to René Leys’s tutoring. “He learns a language,
known to be a difficult one. He finds his way into the Palace, known to be
hermetically sealed.” (Segalen, 186) “His prodigious talent for
assimilation… his linguistic gifts—speaking English, Pekingese,
Shanghaian, Cantonese, and Pidgin quite at will.” (Segalen, 203) His
admirable gift for languages gives René Leys access to the closed space
and puts him at the heart of the story. Human adventures parallel linguistic
adventures.
The “well” is another recurrent motif. René Leys’s obsessive fear of
wells appears to be a symbolic phobia, the token of the empty centre and
dead water. The well is a bottomless mirror, a death threat and a
vertiginous drop. “If you don’t see me again, look for me… down some
well” (Segalen, 151), René Leys says on the eve of a police operation he
boasts of leading in the seedy district of Chien Men Wai. While making
fun of René Leys’s anxiety, the narrator does not take any risks and picks
the quietest horse for his ride: “One can never be too sure of one’s wells
and one’s escape routes.” (Segalen, 153) “Beneath the broad, flat expanse
of the capital anything that even nibbles at the dimension of depth is
unexpected, disturbing…” (Segalen, 159) The obsession with wells that
torments René Leys is also found in Le Fils du Ciel, where the great void
is represented by “the depths of the within” symbolising the Imperial
Palace. René Leys also dwells on this image making the “well” a symbol
of Heaven.
And when you look up, your eye pierces the roof of the kiosk, too, through
a hole of the same diameter as the thumb ring, and you expect to see, by a
process of inverse reflection, the well shaft thrusting up-ward to where the
water’s surface is mirrored in the sky…” (Segalen, 71)
The danger of the well not only lurks in the depths, but also lies in wait at
the surface, because there are “horizontal wells”, even more formidable
than the “wells of drinking and other water”. A reader familiar with
Chinese will immediately think of a “pitfall”, which in Chinese is
transcribed in two syllables, xian jing, meaning respectively “trap” and
“well”. The “entrapping well” is no doubt the idea that Segalen wants to
convey. He is receptive to the particularities of the Chinese language,
fascinated by its structure which associates semantics, phonetics and
Myth and Reality, Peking in René Leys of Victor Segalen 383
At the very moment of my expectation, around the stage of the well and
the trap in the house by Chien-men, I received or I intercepted from one of
his so-called friends a Chinese note: the words dancing their figures; the
horses galloping with their four little points. There were some sabres, some
hooked spears. A man under a lid: a tomb, a well, etc… I established a
translation, or rather a suggestion or hallucination.15
Segalen who had already explored the pictorial and architectural nature
of signs in his collection of poems, Stèles, renewed the experience in René
Leys. Instead of the conventional translation, place names are transferred
directly from Chinese and expressions are modelled on the Chinese
wording, for more original colour. Some are already familiar to Western
readers, such as Pei-king (Northern Capital) hyphenated to emphasise the
two graphic symbols, or the Emperor called “Son of Heaven”, others are
found only in René Leys. Thus, the Chinese sovereign is called “Master of
Ten Thousands Ages”, the “Forbidden City” becomes the “Purple and
Forbidden City”, the Imperial Palace is Danei or Ta-neï (Great Within),
and he plays with the double meaning of a dead-end street, the peculiarly
Pekingese alley called hutung or si hutung (dead alley): “…some of which
go through and others of which are dead end. Dead! But of course I
realized – they must all end in wells!” (Segalen, 154)
His bilingualism is even more ostentatious when he inserts Chinese
ideograms in his text. Segalen had a passion for Chinese writing, the
figurative power of which highlights innuendo and spatial references.
Thus, in the French text of René Leys, we can see several Chinese signs,
written in Segalen’s hand, such as the epigraph Tianzi, which literally
means “Son of Heaven”. But, more often, the signs are used alongside
place names: Peking, Tianjin (a northern city near Peking), Chien Men
Wai. As for “Within”, not only must its name be pronounced Tanei, in the
Chinese manner, but this phonetic reading is several times accompanied
by the corresponding character:
The first version became the book's epigraph. The second, given in the
appendix, is a whimsical invention by Segalen composed from disparate
elements borrowed from Chinese ideograms: the top sign is a combination
384 21
of “great” ⮶ and “man”ⅉ, the lower part repeats the element man, inside
some bars, and the whole character is surrounded by a rectangle frame,
symbol of the walls. Segalen adds a note: “Possible translation: ‘to be put
greatly within’.”16 This sign brings to mind another Chinese character ⥩,
which means “prisoner”. To understand Segalen’s passion for signs, it
may be interesting to look at the pictogram for a “well”:
The character symbolizes the well, in its vertical and horizontal forms, but
also the “chessboard” or “criss-crossed” city that Segalen constantly refers
to. Here the writing becomes literally “geo-graphical”.
The metaphorical space developed in its pictorial, graphical and
cosmological truth reflects a Chinese Taoist vision. When the narrator
comes up against a hermetic and hermeneutic space, he begins to doubt
René Leys’s story, just as he doubts his own critical faculties: “I simply
must try and distinguish the true from the false… the possible from the
probable… the credible from the disconcerting.” (Segalen, 186) “It is a
deep, deep sleep I am waking from. For the first time the day is not what I
expected. Pei-king is no longer the haunt of my dreams. My bad mood
invading and besieging the very Palace itself, I even begin to doubt that I
ever wanted to set foot inside it!” (Segalen, 197) These words echo what
Segalen wrote to his wife after reading the Annales secrètes d’après MR to
his friends, before he turned his notes into a novel: “… and it finished, in
the same ambivalence: what is true / what is false?”17 This question seems
to echo the paradox of truth developed by Laozi, the founder of Chinese
Taoism, but also the famous parable “The Dream of a Butterfly” involving
Zhuangzi, another Taoist philosopher. One day, Zhuangzi dreamed that he
was a butterfly, flitting happily about; in turn, the butterfly dreamed that
he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly, he woke up but longer knew whether he was
Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming he was
Zhuangzi.
Conclusion
Whether it is a dream of a place or a dreamed-of place, Peking in René
Leys, constructed on the basis of a geographical survey, is shot through
with imagination. Charged with symbols and metaphors, it is a portrait of
the Other by a dreamy traveler, an esoteric poet of faraway worlds. Going
beyond the purely documentary, Segalen’s narrative bores deep into the
Myth and Reality, Peking in René Leys of Victor Segalen 385
References
CORDONNIER, Noël. 1996. Victor Segalen: L’expérience de l’œuvre. Paris:
Honoré Champion.
DENG, Wei. “Xiangxiang zhong de zhenshi yu zhenshi zhong de
xiangxiang”, Wenxue jiaoyu, 2008, accessed March 11, 2014,
http://mall.cnki.net/onlineview/MagaView.aspx?fn=WXYS200802*1*
FAVRE, Yves-Alain et al. 1985. Victor Segalen, colloque international,
Tome 1, Cahier de l’Université, nb 11, Université de Pau.
FORMENTELLI, Eliane et al. 1979. Regards, espaces, signes: Victor
Segalen. Paris: l’Asiathèque.
GONTARD, Marc. 1990. Victor Segalen: Une Esthétique de la Différence.
Paris: L’Harmattan.
SALABERT, Juliette. 2014. “Faux et usage de faux. Sur le bilinguisme
chinois de René Leys", Trans 5 Est/Ouest, 2008. accessed March 12,
http://trans.revues.org/221.
SEGALEN, Victor. (1922). 2000. René Leys. Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio
classique.
—. René Leys. (1974). 2003. J. A. Underwood (trans.). New York: New
York Review Books,
SONG, Weijie. 2014. “Jiyuan qiejin de muguang: Lin Yutang,
Delinggongzhu he Xiegelan de Beijing xushi”, Suzhou daxue Haiwai
yanjiu zhongxin, accessed March 10, 2014,
http://www.zwwhgx.com/content.asp?id=2698
WESTPHAL, Bertrand. 2007. La Géocritique. Réel, fiction, espace. Paris,
Les Editions de Minuit.
386 21
Further Reading
BROSSEAU, Marc. 1996. Des Romans-géographes. Paris: L’Harmattan.
CHEVALIER, Michel. 1992. La littérature dans tous ses espaces. Paris:
CNRS Editions.
GARNIER, Xavier and Pierre ZOBERMAN. 2006. Qu’est-ce qu’un espace
littéraire? Coll. L’Imaginaire du texte. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
Vincenne.
SEGALEN, Victor. (1929). 1983. Equipée. Paris: Gallimard.
—. (1975). 1995. Les Fils du Ciel. Paris: Robert Laffont.
—. (1907). 1966. Les Immémoriaux. Paris: coll. 10/18, Union Générale
d’Editions.
—. (1967). 1993. Lettres de Chine, Paris: coll. 10/18, Union Générale
d’Editions.
Notes
1
The French version serving for reference is René Leys, Paris: Gallimard, “Folio
classique”, 2000. The English text we quote from is René Leys, translated from the
French and with an introduction by J. A. Underwood. New York, New York
Review Books, 2003.
2
Mgr Favier, Péking, histoire et description, Lille: Desclée De Brouwer, 1900.
3
Comte de Beauvoir, Pékin, Yeddo, Sans Francisco, Voyage autour du monde.
Paris: Plon, 1872.
4
Lettres de Chine, 12 June 1909, Paris: 10/18, 1967, 58. Segalen’s letters to his
wife Yvonne.
5
This date is different from that in the French text (20 Mars 1911): the English
version adopted the chronology used by the first publisher of the book, whereas the
French edition we quote from restored the dates used by Segalen in his first
manuscript. “Pei-king” is the old transcription of the French School of the Far-East
to designate the Chinese capital. Segalen sometimes uses Péking, that was a
common way of calling it at that time.
6
Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) was an Italian Jesuit priest and one of the founding
figures of the Jesuit China missions.
7
Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1591-1666) was a German Jesuit and astronomer.
He spent most of his life as a missionary in China.
8
Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688) was a Flemish Jesuit missionary in China. He
corrected the Chinese calendar and was later given the role of Head of the
Mathematical Board and Director of the Observatory.
Myth and Reality, Peking in René Leys of Victor Segalen 387
9
The “paratext” is a word used by Gérard Genette for the parts surrounding and
prolonging the text: title, sub-title, annotation, preface, appendix and illustrations.
See Gérard Genette, Seuils, Paris: Seuil, “Poétique”, 1987.
10
This detailed map, drawn up by the Cartographic Division of the Royal Prussian
Ordnance Society, is based on surveys carried out by the German East-Asian
Expeditionary Corps sent to China in 1900 as part of the eight-nation operation to
suppress the Boxer Rebellion against foreign influence.
11
Segalen, “Notes et Plans”, in René Leys, Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique”,
2000, 341.
12
Segalen, “Notes et Plans”, op. cit., 400.
13
The “crescam” is the emblem that Segalen’s publisher, Georges Crès, printed on
the flyleaf of his books. The Latin motto crescam (I will increase) incorporates the
publisher's name (Crès).
14
“Les murs son tombés, la Route est libre.” Segalen, Le Fils du Ciel, Paris:
Robert Laffont, 1995, 113.
15
Segalen, “Notes et Plans”, op. cit., 344.
16
Segalen, “Notes et Plans”, op. cit., 333. These graphics are printed in the French
edition but not in the English translation.
17
Segalen, “Notes et Plans”, op. cit., 292.
CHAPTER EIGHT:
A GEOGRAPHER DISAPPEARS:
POLITICS AND FICTION IN PURGATORIO
BY TOMÁS ELOY MARTÍNEZ
MATEI CHIHAIA
1. Disappearance narrated
The violent disappearance of a geographer is the subject of Tomás Eloy
Martínez’s 2008 novel Purgatorio. Violent disappearance is one of the
strategies of the so-called “dirty war”, which began in the mid-seventies
and lasted up to the end of the military dictatorship in 1983, in the wake of
the Falkland Crisis. During this time, the sudden disappearance of citizens
– unionists and civil opponents to the dictatorship, as well as guerilleros,
socialist politicians and politically committed students – became a very
specific form of state terrorism in Argentina. The fact that disappearances
happened in familiar contexts – that people were arrested at their homes –
disrupted family relations and violated the psychological and cultural
opposition between the private and the public, the family and the
community, and even invaded the division between life and death.
(Robben 2005) The impossibility to contact or even locate the person
during his or her detention, as well as the vanishing of the bodies, was part
of this violent disappearance. An individual trauma for the relatives and
friends who were unable to communicate with the victims or to end their
grief by burial, violent disappearance also posits a problem for the
collective memory, as it replaces any possible “lieu de mémoire” with
blank absence1. There are recent “lieux de mémoire” related to the broader
context of disappearance, such as the Centro cultural de la memoria
Haroldo Conti that reinvested the principal site of imprisonment and
torture, or the Madres de plaza de mayo, whose white scarf became a
symbol of those who stood up for the right to see their abducted children –
or to retrieve their bodies. The terror of disappearance, however, cannot be
commemorated adequately, because it eludes any localization or spatial
A Geographer Disappears: Politics and Fiction in Purgatorio 391
representation. Literature and film have filled this void with an important
number of testimonial, fictional and autofictional works on disappearance
– a phenomenon that has already been duly noticed by criticism (cf. for
example Di Marco 2003 and Aletta 2010).
Martínez emphasized in several interviews that the purpose of his
novel was to show what everyday life felt like during the dictatorship.
(Kristal 2012, 474–475, Rosana 2006, 662) Thus, Purgatorio does not
pretend to give a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of violent
disappearance, which would have to include the epoch of exhumations and
re-burials (as analyzed by Robben 2005). In fact, although it provides a
great deal of historical detail (see Valverde 2014, 96), it goes beyond
speaking about disappearance in a historical perspective. At the heart of
the story is the subjective experience of state terrorism, with the
uncertainty about the lost person’s life or death, which makes closure
impossible. This uncertainty receives a political as well as existential and
poetological interpretation, and the present article will insist on the
intricate relationship between these two layers of meaning and geography,
which constitute the principal context of Purgatorio.
The main character of the novel, Emilia Dupuy, stands at the center of
a complex story. The novel explores her relationship with three men. First,
there is her fiancé Simón, a politically committed geographer, who will be
detained during their honeymoon, never to be found again. Second, her
father Orestes, a journalist who essentially works as a spin-doctor and
ideologist for the military government, and whose grip she barely escapes
through exile. And, third, there is the narrator, a fellow exile in New
Jersey, whom she tries to persuade that Simón has reappeared and who
witnesses her own mysterious disappearance. Although every relationship
will be decisive for one specific stretch of Emilia’s life history, the
presence of the three men exceeds their material presence and hovers in
different ways over her entire existence. Simón reappears as an imaginary
friend; the authority of the father lingers on in media that links her to him,
as well as in the personal trauma she has experienced from domestic
violence; and, finally, the narrator is the one who voices the whole of her
biography.
A narration with countless flashbacks emphasizes the fact that the
timeline is more like the curved space of relativity theory, where the past
and the present can connect through ‘worm-holes’. Given that Emila and
her fiancé both work as cartographers, one of the recurrent allegories of
narrative is that of the map. Thus, the opposition between flat
representation and three-dimensional topography, then between space and
time, predominate in the complicated metaphorical web Martínez spins
392 22
illusion and film tricks, the disappeared in this case will not return – which
is why Welles turns down the offer, while at the same time revealing the
Argentinian government’s need for opaque and irrational areas, and giving
Dupuy a lesson in existentialist ontology:
Things exist only when we see them; in fact you might say they are created
by your senses. But what happens when this thing that doesn’t exist looks
up and stares back at you? It ceases to be a something, it reveals its
existence, rebels, is someone with density, with intensity. You cannot
make that someone disappear because you might disappear, too. Human
beings are not illusions, Charlie. They are stories, memories, we are God’s
imaginings just as God is our imagining. Erase a single point on that
infinite line and you erase the whole line and we might all tumble into that
black hole. (Martínez 2009, 210; translation from Martínez 2012, 191–192)
The pampa exhibits its flat and villous forehead, infinite, without known
limit, without remarkable accident: it is an image of the sea on land; of the
land as in a map [la tierra como en el mapa]; earth that still waits for
A Geographer Disappears: Politics and Fiction in Purgatorio 399
Borges developed this idea in two of his best-known short fictions. “Del
rigor en la ciencia” (1946) quotes some early modern source on an
ambitious project. A society fond of cartography makes a map of an
Empire in always larger scale, ultimately reaching the size of the Empire
itself; once the interest in geography decays, the giant map has to be
discarded. (Borges 1958) The place that can serve as a disposal for the
repressed mirror image of the territory is a desert – a clear reference to, as
well as a reinterpretation of, Sarmiento’s topology. The desert is not only
the point where map and territory become indistinguishable; it is also a
blank, uncharted space that is large enough to harbor the repressed image
of that territory. In “Magias parciales del Quijote” (1949), Borges returns
to his idea of a map that is located in the territory and becomes part of the
land it represents. Then, he concludes, the map would have to contain a
version of itself in scale, and this version would be a map that again would
have to include an image of itself, and so on, in an infinite mise en abyme.
This form of cartography becomes, then, an allegory of literature, and of
the vertiginous effect a fictional mise en abyme can have on the reader.
(Borges 1960) The two stories, which reduce “the cartographic ideal of
mimetic representation to an alternative between tautology and infinity”
(Bosteels 1996, 121), have often been commented on in post-structural
theory (Bosteels 1996, 120–136). Indeed, they raise a problem of
representation that goes beyond the politics of mapping.
Both paradoxes of the map-territory relation, the total identity of map
and territory as well as the infinite autopoiesis of the map that forms part
of a territory, develop the metaphor used by Sarmiento. They have often
been compared to the ideas of the semiotician Alfred Korzybski who
wrote the well-known line “the map is not the territory”, as well as to
similar paradoxes explored by Lewis Carroll, and they figure, together
with those other paradoxes, in recent reflections on cartography. (Bosteels
1996, Palsky 1999, Corner 1999, 221–223) Indeed, paradoxes such as
those described by Borges arise from a total or partial coincidence of map
and territory – that is, from the semiotic fallacy Korzybski tries to avoid.4
Most importantly, though, the paradoxical map-territory relation allows
Borges to reflect on fiction’s ability to chart the imaginary.
The theoretical consequences for fiction of Korzybski’s theorem have
been developed by Wolfgang Iser in The Fictive and the Imaginary. Iser
takes up Gregory Bateson’s analysis of play in order to explain the fact
that fiction does not remove the difference between the signifier and the
signified, but splits the signifier, and thereby pluralizes difference. (Iser
400 22
By the time you’ve taken two steps, you are nowhere, there are no
columns, there are no trees, there is no sky, the compass that has guided
you has disappeared, your reason for existing has been wiped out, you are
nothing and you have stopped in a place from which no one ever returns.
Exile. (Martínez 2009, 236, translation from Martínez 2011, 217)
Simón: “I saw you standing in the map. I didn’t know where you were
because the vectors had been erased. It was a desert with no lines.’ And
Emilia: ‘In that case it wasn’t a map.’ Simón: ‘Maybe it wasn’t, but that’s
where you were.’ And Emilia: ‘If it was a map with no landmarks, you
could have left a trail of names, drawn trees for reference, I would have
found you. […]’ (Martínez 2009, 244, translation from Martínez 2012,
224)
Among Emilia’s belongings, the narrator will find a map, which has
become unreadable because of its many stains, tears, saliva, and the name
“Simon” written all over it. The map has become an ontological metaphor
of time, as well as a substitute for the beloved being, whose identity it
harbors not only symbolically (the name), but also physically, corporeally,
through an imaginary body that can only be grasped in its material traces.
The connection between desert and body which pictures the map as a
skin with scars and other traces of life is a topos of avant-garde
performance and land art. Martínez’s title is likely reminiscent not only of
402 22
Conclusion
In conclusion, the metapoetic weight of cartography in Purgatorio
does not only rely on its relationship with the real; it is almost as important
to consider the role of the imaginary. There is no doubt that both express a
concern with the specific limits and potential of fiction in the context of
historical memory. (Mozejko 2010, 586–587) In a prologue to another
book, Martínez emphasizes the fact that he sees the imaginary’s uncharted
territory as the main challenge for fictional writing:
Filling a void of reality, […] write what has been omitted, plant the flag of
imagination in the places where history did not dare to go, or recreate
reality, rewrite it, transfiguring it according to one’s desire or […]
pleasure. (Translated from Martínez 2011, 13).
The “or” divides the attempt into two very different projects and causes a
tension that polarizes Martínez’s essay: filling the void of reality is not the
same as being faithful to one’s desire. It is ultimately this tension between
the real and the imaginary that cartography reflects in Purgatorio: the
uncharted desert and the geographer’s disappearance take on a different
meaning depending on the two sides of this story. Purgatorio tells of the
effort to map the real as well as of the struggle to map the imaginary.
While topography serves the narrator as an often explicated allegory of
fiction, this double effort also allows us to read fiction as an allegory of
geography.
A Geographer Disappears: Politics and Fiction in Purgatorio 403
References
ALETTA DE SYLVAS, Graciela. 2010. “La ficción: espacio simbólico de la
ausencia en la novela argentina contemporánea.” Amerika 2/2010.
Accessed 24.3.2015. http://amerika.revues.org/1177; DOI:
10.4000/amerika.1177
ANDERMANN, Jens. 2000. Mapas de poder. Una arqueología literaria del
espacio argentino. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora.
BATESON, Gregory. 1987. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Northvale and
London: Jason Aronson.
BORGES, Jorge Luis. 1958. “Del rigor en la ciencia.” In Historia universal
de la infamia. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 131–132.
—. (1949). 1960. “Magias parciales del Quijote.” Otras inquisiciones
(1952). Buenos Aires: Emecé, 65–69.
BOSTEELS, Bruno. 1996. “A Misreading of Maps: The Politics of
Cartography in Marxism and Poststructuralism.” Signs of Change:
Premodern, Modern, Postmodern, Stephen Barker (ed). Albany:
SUNY Press, 109–136.
CANOVAS EMHART, Rodrigo. 2010. “Lectura de El desierto, de Carlos
Franz, novela de la dictadura chilena.” Anales de literatura chilena 14:
225–237.
COLOMBO, Pamela and Estela SCHINDEL. 2014. “Introduction: The Multi-
Layered Memories of Space.” Space and the memories of violence:
landscapes of erasure, disappearance and exception. Palgrave
Macmillan memory studies. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshireௗ;
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–20.
CORNER, James. 1999. “The Agency of Mapping.” Mappings, Denis
Cosgrove (ed). London: Reaktion Books, 213–252.
CRANE, Ralph and Lisa FLETCHER. 2014. “Caves as Anti-Places: Robert
Penn Warren’s The Cave and Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God.”
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 14.3. Accessed
24.3.2015. http://reconstruction.eserver.org.
DE DIEGO, José Luis. 2003. ¿Quién de nosotros escribirá el Facundo?
Intelectuales y escritores en Argentina (1970-1986). Buenos Aires : Al
margen.
DI MARCO, José. 2003. “Ficción y memoria en la narrativa argentina
actual: La escritura como táctica.” In V° Congreso Internacional Orbis
Tertius de Teoría y Crítica Literaria, La Plata: Universidad de La
Plata.
http://www.fuentesmemoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/trab_eventos/ev.11/ev.1
1.pdf (Accessed 24.3.2015.)
404 22
FEIERSTEIN, Liliana Ruth. 2013. “Del otro lado del espejo: la pesadilla de
crecer en dictadura.” In Ser nino? Representaciones de la infancia en
África y América Latina, Ruth Liliana Feierstein and Ute Fendler (eds).
München: Akademische Verlagsgemeinschaft, 145–263.
HUMBOLDT, Alexander von. 1991. Reisen in die Äquinoktial-Gegenden
des Neuen Kontinents, edited by Ottmar Ette. Frankfurt am Main and
Leipzig: Insel.
ISER, Wolfgang. 1993. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary
Anthropology. Baltimore: J. Hopkins University Press.
JENCKES, Kate. 2007. Reading Borges after Benjamin. Allegory, Afterlife,
and the Writing of History. New York: SUNY Press.
KRISTAL, Efraín. 2012. “What Is, Is Not: Dante in Tomás Eloy Martínez’s
Purgatorio.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 31 (4): 473–484.
MAHLENDORFF, Andrea. 2000. Literarische Geographie Lateinamerikas.
Zur Entwicklung des Raumbewußtseins in der lateinamerikanischen
Literatur. Berlin: edition tranvía.
MAHLKE, Kirsten. 2014. “‘All Limits Were Exceeded Over There’: The
Chronotope of Terror in Modern Warfare and Testimony.” Space and
the Memories of Violence: Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance and
Exception, Pamela Colombo and Estela Schindel (eds). Palgrave
Macmillan memory studies. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshireௗ;
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 105–118.
MANDOLESSI, Silvana. 2014. “Haunted Houses, Horror Literature and the
Space of Memory in Post-Dictatorship Argentine Literature.” Space
and the Memories of Violence: Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance
and Exception, Pamela Colombo and Estela Schindel (eds). Palgrave
Macmillan memory studies. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshireௗ;
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 150–161.
MARCH, Robert, and Miguel Ángel MARTÍNEZ. 2012. “Poéticas de la
ausencia en El cartógrafo. Varsovia, 1: 400.000.” Stichomythia 13:
116–127.
MARTINEZ, Tomás Eloy. 2011. Ficciones verdaderas. Hechos reales que
inspiraron grandes obras literarias. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara.
—. 2009. Purgatorio. Madrid: Alfaguara.
—. 2012. Purgatory, Frank Wynne (trans.). London: Bloomsbury.
MAYORGA, Juan. 2010. “El cartógrafo de Varsovia, 1: 400.000.”
Memoria-política-justicia: En diálogo con Reyes Mate, Alberto
Sucasas and José A. Zamora (eds). Madrid: Trorra, 347–390.
MONTALDO, Graciela. 1994. “El cuerpo de la patria: espacio, naturaleza y
cultura en Bello y Sarmiento.” Hispamérica: Revista de literatura 68:
3–20.
A Geographer Disappears: Politics and Fiction in Purgatorio 405
Notes
1
On the limits of this concept and the difficulty of installing “lieux de mémoire” in
a Latin American context, see Colombo and Schindel 2014, 7.
2
Both quotes are taken from an article on the play. (March and Martínez 2012,
117–118)
3
The reference to Carroll is, by the way, a common topic in Argentinian art and
literature on disappearance. (Feierstein 2013)
4
Borges was an avid reader of Korzybski’s, although he seems to have been more
interested in his theory of time than in his semiotics. (Jenckes 2007, 104–106)
23
ANNE-CLAUDINE MOREL
The Ecuadorian writer Javier Vásconez (1946) is currently one of the best
known authors in his country. His depiction of Ecuador is problematic
because the country is never named in his novels and short stories. It is
hinted at through a network of spatial references, place names and
topographic forms, such as volcanoes, quebradas1, the páramo2 or the
cordillera, which refer the reader unmistakably to Ecuador and the Andean
region; evocative metaphors such as “the land of the imaginary line” and
“the country of the invisible line” replace direct designation. Some
Ecuadorian towns are mentioned, but the capital city, for example, is never
named. A discerning reader will recognize the city from street names or
emblematic places and buildings: the Dos Mundos hotel, the racecourse,
the El Ejido or La Alameda parks, the La Floresta district, the El Madrilón
café. The writer’s decision to blur the references to the capital or the
country itself is intriguing. Why does he not name Ecuador, when the
country welcomes the main character in his first novel (Vásconez 1996),
Dr Kronz, a Czech doctor who has chosen to settle Barcelona? And why
does the narrator dilute the spatial referent in an approximation that makes
the country hard to pin down, although it is recognizable to anyone
familiar with the region? I shall show that writing about space in Ecuador
and in the twenty-first century is a matter of tension between a universal
denomination and widespread ignorance of the rest of the world.
Paradoxically, it forces the writer to seek visibility: he strives to reveal
both the nation and its literature, but from an unusual perspective far
removed from the tradition of indigenism or the social realism cultivated
408 23
by contemporary writers. The first part of this paper will deal with the
evocation of this invisibility, which creates a mythical, and therefore
universal territory. The metaphor of the “land of the imaginary line” is
used to reveal an Ecuador whose geography is redefined through literature.
The second part will examine this new geographical configuration as a
host country for illustrious foreigners: Javier Vásconez invites the world's
greatest writers to Ecuador; this approach is another way to connect
Ecuador and its literature to the rest of the world and give them a measure
of visibility.
For Javier Vásconez, the name of the country is both a fatality and
fortuitous. A fatality, because it conflicts with the idea of a border, that
invisible line which delimits the shape of a territory -- a horizontal line
cannot trace the contours of a nation, or else it reduces the country to an
abstraction that its inhabitants have trouble imagining. Fortuitous, because
the name of Ecuador was given by “foreigners,” European colonists,
whose main intent was the economic, and incidentally scientific,
exploitation of the territory. The name therefore refers to a geographical
concept which only partly characterizes the country, but nonetheless
reduces the nation to an invisible line and a simple segment of a perfect
circumference. So it is the notion of instability, inherent in the writer as
well,4 that is displayed in the name of the country, and Javier Vásconez
expresses it through a key question that conditions his entire production:
How can we write on an imaginary line? How can writing be used to give
thickness and depth to this country whose name fatally refers to a
geometrical abstraction?
Describing Space in the “Land of the Imaginary Line” 409
When they gaze out to sea, the characters are jubilant and exultant, while
they feel sad and stifled in the landlocked city: “They all lived in the
shadow of a rather comfy sadness, ensconced in their humdrum life; they
were waiting for something better, sensing vaguely that life was
elsewhere.”7 So by a process that I shall call “incrustation”, the writer
creates a special, new geography which scorns the laws of science. For in
several stories, an unlikely sea is “incrusted” in the mountains or else an
ocean and a port loom up in the cordillera. These maritime spaces are an
escape from the feeling of suffocation produced by the Andean city.
This is the main theme in “A Stranger in the Port”. From the very first
paragraph the narrator hints at the possibility of a port. The chimera of the
ship mooring in the midst of the Andes is cleverly served by the narrator’s
410 23
alcoholic haze: “After my first whisky for the evening, I let myself be
carried along on the flow of this story which starts with a foghorn
sounding through the misty port, although there has never been a port in
this town.”8 Realizing the impossible, that is, bringing a port into being in
the Andes, is in my view an aesthetic invention, which answers one of the
questions asked in the introduction: How does the writer imagine the
geography of this country and its capital that he never names? This story
brings an astonishing answer: Quito is not the landlocked city it is thought
to be, just as Ecuador is not only the country crossed by an imaginary line.
Fiction allows a broader view, sweeps away prejudices and theoretical
knowledge. “Fiction does not mimic reality, but […] actualizes new
virtualities hitherto unexpressed, which then interact with the real
according to the hypertextual logic of interfaces […]” (Tally 2011, 103) as
Bertrand Westphal has pointed out. I would add another comment by
Westphal, insisting on the “representation of the real” and “an experience
of the real” which appear in works of fiction as new worlds, and as the
creators of new worlds:
In his fiction, the writer can therefore conjure up the sea, or the memory of
the sea, in the heart of the Andes. The paradox is all the easier to envisage
if the name of the city or the country is not given. Geographic reality is
indeed “unreal”, or rather “surreal” in that the narrator adds a geographical
reference, the ocean, to an existing reality. Imagination and the principle
of confusion, aggravated by exhaustion and inebriation which affect the
narrator’s perceptions, work together to reveal a new geographical feature
in the Andean city; Vasconez's use of tenses (the unreality of the present,
the imperfect which freezes the action first stated in the simple past) and
adverbs is also remarkable:
Although the doctor had not brought the letter, I was sure I could hear the
distant booming of a foghorn of a ship that must be berthing in the port, at
this hour of night. The tide was relentlessly pushing the waves, it was no
Describing Space in the “Land of the Imaginary Line” 411
The metaphor of the “imaginary line” in this short story rolls three
separate geographical spaces – the ocean, Ecuador and the Andean city –
into one: “The fuzzy lights of the port faded little by little until they
formed an imaginary line in my memory.”10 The city with its characteristic
mountain range and high desert plateaus is no longer assimilated to a
prison or a closed space, since the novelist uses fiction to alter the
environment. The story depicts Quito as a port, facing the sea and freed
from the grip of the Cordillera of the Andes.
There is another example of this process of geographical re-creation. In
“Café Concert” a seascape is incrusted in the city through the imagination
and ingenuity of a photographer, Félix Gutiérrez. A Bolivian cabaret
singer dreamed of being photographed by the sea. The photographer
satisfies her wish by posing her alongside a mediocre painting of a
seascape. In fact, the trick is “suggested” by the narrator-writer, who
works his way into the story as a writer called J. Vásconez, “an impossible
writer” but a real demiurge able to remodel geographic realities and
suggest other spaces. It is while he is reading a few lines of an article
signed by J. Vásconez that the photographer thinks of a way to bring the
Bolivian singer’s impossible dream true. The article enlightens and guides
the character: writing becomes the vector of the imagination which makes
any project possible11. Imagination liberates and transcends geographical
laws and everyday reality:
Set free by imagination, the Bolivian singer at last achieves her dream and
leaves the city for other climes. The main character can at last resume his
daily reveries: “As he smoked in his studio, Felix could imagine the cities
where [Gipsy] would stop to sing. Cities that he himself would never go
to.”13
412 23
If I look back on the process of writing The Traveler from Prague I have
the impression of having gone through a series of nightmares. That is
probably due to the fact that I was not born in a country with a rich novel-
writing tradition (I am talking about Ecuador), which gave me greater
freedom and guided my work. [...] I wrote The Traveler from Prague
because, among other things, I was convinced – naive as I am! – that
literature was elsewhere. And I suspected that the risk was elsewhere. I
wanted to escape from the sordid “huasipungos” writing of our suffocating
literary tradition, I wanted to explore the horizon and get away from this
incoherent, muddled rambling, steeped in bad conscience, that is called
“indigenism” or “the Andean world” invented by sociologists. […] I was in
search of other shores, other cities and literary affiliations. In short, I
wanted to write a novel which would connect me unashamedly with the
literature of other latitudes and would let me sit at the same table as Kafka,
to smoke the night away with Onetti, to drink whisky with brilliant crime
writers and play spy games with John Le Carré. I wanted to renew myself
by interpreting other people’s texts15.
The novel [The Traveler from Prague] is the product of profound isolation
and the liberating belief that literature has no temporal and spatial
boundaries. Vásconez is an Ecuadorian who, just like the brilliant, tragic
poet, Alfredo Gangotena, takes inspiration from desolation; and since they
both washed up in the deepest Andes, they decide to play host to their
spiritual mentors. It is that, or death. Vásconez, because he is desperate,
therefore invites Kafka to join him on the imaginary line17.
Ecuador thus welcomes not only Dr Kronz, the Czech doctor who is the
main character in the novel, The Traveler from Prague, but also world-
class writers who have extraordinary adventures on Ecuadorian soil: that is
the theme of a collection of short stories entitled “Guests of Honor”
(Vásconez 2004), whose main characters are Colette, William Faulkner,
Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov and the American film director, David
Butler. A possibility offered by the country’s invisibility, which the writer
exploits to the full. The absence of names for Ecuador and Quito contrasts
strikingly with the explicit naming of certain countries and cities, such as
Spain, Prague, and Barcelona. If we delve deeper into the writer’s ties to
his native city and his country we find a complex idea: he does not name
them, because he feels they lack cultural and literary relief. In his view, for
the South American continent and the rest of the world, they do not exist.
Ecuador’s literature and the country as a whole suffer from the
“invisibility syndrome”. This idea is largely exploited by Javier Vásconez
who insists on the invisibility of the country, in general, and of its cultural
and artistic production, in particular. Of course, this insistence should be
seen as a device to achieve the opposite effect: by drawing attention to
their lack of visibility, he attempts to give them more relief and push them
into the foreground. Vásconez cleverly describes this invisibility by using
Ecuador’s many typical volcanoes as a metaphor. The invisibility he
emphasizes (“In Ecuador, we live in a crater”) allows him to justify his use
of intertextuality, to associate his native land with the homeland of world
famous authors:
The writer filters his knowledge of Ecuador and Quito through the prism
of “ambiguity”. This avoids having to anchor his stories in a specific
geographical context. On the contrary, it opens up to universality. By
keeping all possibilities open – “it is a city with several spaces and several
possibilities and it can be seen in several ways” – he sets his writing in a
context which exceeds the geographical and temporal boundaries of
Ecuador in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He creates a “literary
geography”, as discussed by Horacio Vázquez-Rial21. He develops an
urban and national space which becomes a paratopic place, a “paradoxical
place, or paratopia, which is not the absence of place, but a complicated
negotiation between place and non-place, a parasitic localization which
lives on the very impossibility of stabilization.” (Maingueneau 2004, 53)
That means that the “narrative arises in a place on the fringe of the
ordinary world” (ibid), in a marginal space in a country and a city that are
geographically isolated by their location, because Quito is in the middle of
the Andes and Ecuador spreads out on either side of an imaginary line.
Describing Space in the “Land of the Imaginary Line” 415
This space “materializes the constitutive gap between the author and
society.” (Maingueneau, 2004, 184) This gap is also assumed by most of
the characters in Vasconez’s stories, including Dr Kronz in The Traveler
from Prague: they are outsiders, in a perpetual state of emotional and
territorial instability, going from one country to another, one continent to
another, from one part of the city to another. The city and the country
sketched by the writer therefore belong to the world without belonging to
it; they are like an island22, a quintessentially paratopic place, with
indefinable boundaries.
Conclusions
Javier Vásconez often talks about his search for new geographical and
literary horizons which will bring him a few answers to his questions
about Ecuador. He is a writer whose experience as an ordinary citizen,
coupled with that of a hardened, curious traveler, allows him to wonder
about his country in these terms:
I realized that the history of Ecuador and the way it was interpreted was
full of commonplaces, ready-made comments repeated over and over. I
looked for new horizons, new answers to literary problems. It was a trying,
lonely process, because I had to read and interpret the country in a new
way. From a personal point of view, I discovered a secret country and I
decided to poke my nose into that secret. After that experience I wrote The
Distant City, The Traveler from Prague, etc23.
His writing is a way of redrawing the space of the nation, and in our view
this act sits well in a discourse on Ecuadorianness by reconstructing the
national geography. In a sense, Javier Vásconez shakes up the clichés
about his country. He does not redraw the borders of the nation, which
continue to be “landmarks” for the collective imagination and the
Ecuadorian reader, but he blurs the outline of the country by talking about
the famous line of the Equator. Taking the ingenuous, simplistic view that
other nationalities have of Ecuador, he asks questions and awakens
curiosity that the locals sometimes struggle to formulate about their own
country. Here we touch on the question of redefining a national identity
bound up with a cultural identity, formulated in other terms by the
supporters of geocriticism, which Javier Vásconez was one of the first to
practice. Like the writer himself, most of his characters are stateless,
wandering travelers, rootless individuals briefly anchored in a space that
they explore and shape according to their own perception of it. This
analysis therefore serves the definition of Ecuadorianness which emerges
416 23
This painful realization further refines the links between geography and
literature, and deepens the delicate notion of borders and limits: “Where
can I stand on this line which smashes limits and borders, that will now
have to be abolished?26” asks Javier Vásconez further on in the same
article. The answer seems obvious for anyone who knows the man and the
writer: on the fringe of clearly delimited “territories”, those literary
“freeways” marked out by their inscription in the constraints of a
nationality, he claims a writing space without borders, in which his writing
of space and his fiction could be freely expressed. He maps out a sort of
literary no man's land enabling him to hold the reality of his country at
arm's length while drawing closer to universality which, by definition,
brooks no limits: “That is probably why I have had to construct such an
ambiguous and personal country, based on literature, a country where
anything is possible”27.
References
AVEIGA, Maria. 2007. “De viaje con Vásconez”, Francisco Estrella (ed).
“Apuesta: los juegos de Vásconez”. Quito : Taurus Ediciones.
BALMACEDA, Paz. 2010. “La manipulación del tiempo”. Varios, 18
Escritores. La novela latinoamericana contemporánea. Barcelona:
Colectivo FU, Editorial Barataria.
CASTRO RODAS, Juan Pablo. 2012. “El síndrome de los invisibles, Diálogo
abierto con el escritor ecuatoriano Javier Vásconez.” OtroLunes, nb 22,
http://22.otrolunes.com
HERNANDEZ, José. 2012. “Mientras más se nombra una ciudad, o
cualquier lugar, más lejos estamos de él”. OtroLunes, nb 22,
http://22.otrolunes.com
MAFLA, Mercedes. 2013. “En el jardín con Vásconez”, Revista Ómnibus,
nb 43, Quito.
MAINGUENEAU, Dominique. 2004. Le Discours littéraire. Paris : Armand
Colin.
PEÑAFIEL, Cristóbal. 2012. “Javier Vásconez : mi deseo es ser yo mismo”,
Revista Otrolunes, nb 22, http://22.otrolunes.com
SILVA, Erika. 1986, “El terrigenismo : opción y militancia en la cultura
ecuatoriana”, Fernando TINAJERO (ed). Teoría de la cultura nacional.
Quito: Banco Central del Ecuador y Corporación Editora Nacional.
WESTPHAL, Bertrand. 2007. La Géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace. Paris.
Les Éditions de Minuit.
418 23
Notes
1
Ravine.
2
Barren, cold, high plateau in the Andes.
3
“A veces he llegado a pensar que Ecuador no es un país, sino una línea
imaginaria cuyo nombre fatídico y abstracto se lo debemos a los geodésicos
españoles y franceses del siglo XVIII. Este sentimiento contradictorio y equívoco,
con el que los ecuatorianos nos hemos habituado a vivir, curiosamente posee su
lado enigmático y luminoso. ¿Cómo escribir sobre una línea imaginaria?”
(Vásconez 2002, 195, our translation)
4
“The narrator in a constituent discourse cannot position himself outside or within
society: his writing is necessarily fed by the radically problematic nature of his
own belonging to that society. His utterance is constituted through this very
impossibility of assigning himself a real ‘place’. Paratopia is a paradoxical
locality, which is not the absence of place, but a difficult negotiation between place
and non-place, a parasitic location, which feeds on the impossibility of its own
stability. Without localisation, there is no institution that can legitimise and
manage the production and consumption of literature, but without delocalisation,
there is no real constituance.” (Maingueneau, 2004 , 52-53, in bold in the original
text)
5
Vásconez 1989, 164. All quotations are taken from Vásconez 2009, 77-87.
6
“El mar se me abrió en el horizonte... Era ese mar el que me estaba arrojando
hacia un abismo donde quizá no había nada. […] Corría [mi caballo] como un
ángel. Y yo salí vencedor porque al frente tenía el mar, doctor. Un mar que me
Describing Space in the “Land of the Imaginary Line” 419
21
“'I like to think that the world I have invented is rather like a cornerstone of the
universe.' This elegant remark by Vásconez refers to the process of writing he uses.
Neither he nor Faulkner started by looking at the map of Yoknapatawpha, or the
map of the Andean city; they were drawn in the process of writing and that is how
literary geographies are written.” “ ‘Me gusta pensar que el mundo que inventé es
una especie de piedra angular en el universo.’ Es una formulación elegante del
proceso del propio Vásconez, que algo tiene que decir cuando la obra ya está allí.
Por supuesto que ni Faulkner ni él empezaron por el plano de Yoknapatawpha, ni
por el de la ciudad andina, sino que éste se fue dibujando solo a través de la
experiencia de la escritura, que es como se dibujan las geografías literarias.”
(Vasquez-Rial, 8-9)
22
This image refers us to a definition of geocriticism given by Bertrand Westphal:
“La géocritique correspondrait bel et bien à une poétique de l'archipel, espace dont
la totalité est constituée par l'articulation raisonnée de tous les îlots - mobiles - qui
le composent. [...] Là où l'espace est archipel, les identités culturelles se
compliquent au point de rester à tout jamais définissables, et donc indéfinies.”
(Westphal 2000, 11)
23
“Una de las cosas de que me di cuenta es que la historia del Ecuador y sus
interpretaciones están plagadas de lugares comunes, de frases hechas: muchas se
repiten. He buscado nuevos horizontes, nuevas respuestas a una serie de
inquietudes que el país me planteaba como, por ejemplo, las literarias. Fue un
proceso arduo y solitario a la vez, pues había que releer e interpretar de nuevo el
país. Desde un punto de vista personal descubrí un país secreto y decidí internarme
en ese secreto. A partir de esa experiencia escribí Ciudad lejana, El viajero de
Praga, etc.” (Aveiga, 118)
24
“Resulta agotador explicar literariamente mi país cada vez que hablo de mis
libros. […] Por eso prefiero hablar de la única tradición en la que me siento
cómodo: la lengua. Y también con ciertas zonas geográficas. Pero regresemos a “la
línea imaginaria”, al país literariamente “invisible” llamado Ecuador. […]
Digamos que mi obra está levantada sobre los mapas literarios de otros escritores.
La he ido construyendo como un homenaje visible a Kafka, Nabokov, Onetti,
Faulkner, Celine y Le Carré, entre otros. Pero también he construido una poética
del ocultamiento a partir de invasiones voluntarias, de asociaciones,
superposiciones y recreaciones, utilizando con plena libertad distintos géneros. Y
he cavado obstinadamente como un topo en los parajes de estos escritores, con la
ilusión de salir transformado en esta aventura. Este proceso tan complejo y
apasionante no deja de tener sus limitaciones, sus peligros, ya que muchas veces
yo mismo no soy capaz de saber dónde estoy ubicado.” (Balmaceda 2010, 135-
136)
25
“No intento volver la espalda a ninguna realidad, al contrario, creo en el afán
legítimo de todo escritor de inventar y soñar vidas como la de ese viajero osado, el
doctor Kronz, [...]. O más aún: mantengo vivo el deseo de inventar un puerto en
una ciudad andina, gracias a la visión de un hombre recluido en el estudio de una
casa. Tengo que decir que mi tarea ha sido fascinante. Quizá por eso he debido
construir un país tan ambiguo y personal a partir de la literatura, un país donde
422 23
cualquier cosa es posible, porque cuanto más tiempo vivo en Quito menos me
cautiva esa ciudad. […] Que haya o no un país llamado Ecuador no tiene ninguna
importancia.” Javier Vásconez, “Divagaciones acerca de una línea imaginaria”,
(Varios, El exilio interminable, Vásconez ante la crítica, 196)
26
“¿Dónde encajo yo en esta línea que rompe los límites y las fronteras que hoy es
tan necesario abolir?” (ibid. 197)
27
“Quizá por eso he debido construir un país tan ambiguo y personal a partir de la
literatura, un país donde cualquier cosa es posible […].” (ibid.)
24
MARINA MARENGO
These boundaries, so fractal and come to think of it, ultramodern, are now
the “living membrane” allowing the “frontier lands” to breath. According
to Paolo Cuttitta,
[…] the purpose of these liminal areas, these frontiers extending bi-
dimensionally (that is, they extend not only in length, but also in width), is
to prevent conflict without necessarily preventing […] activities of
exchange and commerce. (Cuttitta 2007, 28)
The recent evolution of the European border area following the Schengen
agreement, formally removed the border lines, however, signs of rough
demarcations still remain from the distant or more recent past.
They have always been areas of contact, despite the modern “silent”
lines chosen by those who drew them: the frontier lands are intrinsically
areas of dialogue, sometimes rather heated, but dialogue all the same.
Furthermore, they are areas of social, cultural and economic contact, as
well as intense curiosity and creativity. In this essay, the specific “frontier
land” in the south-western Italian-French Alps will be analysed. The
subject matter for the analysis is based on the literary works of Francesco
Biamonti, with some additional “forays” into Jean Giono1. They describe
an alpine frontier area that extends across the Italian and French Pre-Alps
(the Alpine foothills), and includes the coastal strips of Western Liguria
and Provence. A vast mountainous area starting from the western parts of
Piedmont and Liguria and covering a good part of the region now
officially known as P.A.C.A.(Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur):
From where he stood, more than five hundred leagues spread out from the
Alps to the massifs along the sea. A part from the sharp peaks high in the
sky and the dark cliffs to the south, all the area was still covered by haze
and dank mists. (Giono 2009, 42)
The inhabitants on both sides of the border, in their daily routines as well
as in their imagination, consider the concepts of border and frontier as part
of their everyday life, and not even the most important part:
In the evening, the solemn sunset on the “Bay of Angels” made her dream
again of the no man’s land, where the dead and the living could meet […]
She leaned against a terrace wall. The first star shone in the fiery sky
beyond Cap Ferrat. (Biamonti 1995, 87)
The “Frontier Lands” of the South-Western Alps 425
The writings of Biamonti and Giono have been chosen because their
precise and meaningful descriptions provide many possible interpretations
of the conceptual categories of border and frontier. Their depictions help
us to reconstruct the territorial, socio-economic and cultural processes,
which have contributed to defining a territorial and cultural identity, which
is unique to this cross-border area and irrespective of the exercise of power
that has “marked” these mountains over time2:
Never speak badly of France: this was one of his principles. Entire
generations of Luvaira and Aùrno had sated their hunger, among other
things, in the port of Marseilles. Longshoremen at the docks, loading and
unloading in the mistral wind. (Biamonti 1994, 88-89)
The aim of this study is to establish how the two novelists have
contributed to the understanding of the Italian-French “frontier land”
which, for millennia, has not only been a border region, but also a
distinctive cultural region – the Maritime Alps being a name that has
disappeared from the official subdivisions of the Alps. This contribution
can be added to research by scholars, who have used specific language and
scientific categories to explain what Michel Butor wrote about the
“frontier lands”:
–Je ne peux pas oublier, monsieur! Je ne peux pas oublier! –What could
she not forget? –The rocky pass where her husband had died years before,
she said. A pass, close by, barred by a gate, with spikes even on the sides.
A guide had abandoned them on a ledge there one night. You had to hang
on the spikes to get across and her husband had been dragged down by the
weight of his suitcase. –A terribly dishonest guide, madam! He chose the
most difficult pass, the shortest, but the most difficult. It is not for nothing
that it is called Death Pass. I am sorry to have to tell you this. –So the one
who took us there was a murderer. Who put the gate there? Who was it? -It
has been there since the 1930s or maybe even before […] The Savoys […]
it could have been them […] –When did it happen? –Twenty years ago.
We had just got married. We were fleeing from Poland and we had already
illegally crossed three borders. (Biamonti 1995, 34)
The political changes in Europe over the last few decades, aimed at the
free circulation of people and goods, have caused the disappearance or, at
least, the transformation of many frontiers from a physical to a virtual
state. A few years after, Francesco Biamonti described the Death Pass and
the ancient narrow path again, but this time the basic conditions, both
political and material, had changed:
The frontier area and even the residual border line within it, is an entre-
deux-cultural space where the natives have learned to attribute special
names to places, things and people, leading one to think of endless and
remote exchanges as well as centuries of hard toil. These have resulted in
intense métissages, both legal and illegal, between the two sides of the
Franco-Italian border:
The vineyard is up there, too far away, abandoned. –Where is it? –On the
summit, at the posatoio3. Do you know where I mean? There is a long
ridge, where those who pass can put down their load and rest, catch their
breath. (Biamonti, 72)
The “Frontier Lands” of the South-Western Alps 427
The frontier inhabitants have adapted with great flexibility to the changes
and fluctuations of the borders. They have defined strategies for survival,
weighing up and regarding with distrust and cunning (a trait which never
diminishes in the inhabitants of these places: part sailor and part mountain-
dweller) those outsiders appointed to enforce power through the control of
the borders. In this vast spatial interstice, the natives have established rules
for interacting with all outsiders “for the sake of peace”:
Remember the Decalogue of the Maritime Alps: “Do not mess with the
state or the local council. With those who are more than you. With those
who have nothing. With those who are crazy”. I will spare you the other
commandments. (Biamonti 1998, 186)
The fact that a “Decalogue” was and still is necessary for survival, is a
cultural, but also material fact of the contemporary age: “All sorts passed
along those short-cuts, some were half-naked others wore tunics or short
kaftans. A silent desperation spread across those rocks, corroding one’s
heart. They were passages without brutality.” (Biamonti 1998, 172) Even
though the basic conditions have changed over the last few decades; in
other words, the strong and sharp features of the borders have gone, the
passage of people heading towards a safe haven where they can settle, the
same yearning for Eldorado, is still as intense as ever.
His olive tree trunks are so big, they must be very old! […] –When do they
date back to? […] –The youngest ones date back to the sixteen hundreds,
the oldest were planted against all odds by the Benedictine monks in the
thirteen hundreds. (Biamonti 1998, 15)
For centuries, the economy of the frontier land centred on the typical
activities of this mountainous, poor and not very fertile Mediterranean
area. Nevertheless, it guaranteed subsistence income to the inhabitants on
both sides of the Alps and their borders:
In the summer we would scythe the hay on the mountains and collect a few
bunches of lavender. –We set off on our mules with our alembic, we
crossed all the Maritime Alps and at every stop we would distil. One man
came from Grasse to buy our essences. –And in the winter? We made coal
in the years when there were no olives. We cut down the holly oak woods.
(Biamonti 1994, 22)
Often olives are a good harvest, despite them being open to all human
transits. Even these olive trees are frontier trees, clinging to the almost
bare rocks, searching for support on the steep slopes and a little earth to
survive in those harsh places:
–Where are his olive trees? –On the boundary face, above the Comba, rock
olive trees, small olives, full of oil, growing on cavernous rock where the
roots went down deep. The olives yielded more than three kilos of oil for
every four when the olives were pressed. (Biamonti 1995, 66)
The traditional activity which has left its mark on the entire frontier region
is pastoralism. The land is poor allowing only for only a meagre
subsistence agriculture, however, sufficiently steep to define the age-old
paths of transhumance. Evidence of this ancient activity is everywhere in
the region, a few have survived to this day and others have been brought
back into use in the last few decades: “He stopped to look at an empty
sheepfold, the shepherd must have stayed on the hills further inland, given
the mild winter weather, almost like a long Indian summer.” (Biamonti
1995, 34) The surviving pastoral culture has handed down age-old
traditions and customs to this day:
The “Frontier Lands” of the South-Western Alps 429
Clouds […] the flock of sheep looked like clouds as he came closer and so
sacred those gestures that the blue-capped shepherd used to restrain his
dog. They both looked at him with curiosity, shepherd and dog. They
stared with sad eyes, the eyes of companions, habitués of the solitary
summits touched by the wind from morning to night. (Biamonti 1995, 52)
That man, quite old and almost sacred, explained how he had walked
through the night to come down, to escape the snow in the air (l’auro de
nèu), the enemy for those having all their possessions in blood, the blood
of God. He spoke in Provencal, a strange sing-song lilt of the Maritime
Alps; high trebles like hiccoughs followed by low, drawn-out sounds […]
The clouds from the high seas (dis auti mar) had not arrived in autumn so
now freezing ice took the place of scorching heat. (Biamonti 1995, 53)
The pastoral routes, for the most part circulatory circuits used with
rhythmical intensity, were also shared, or crossed, by others that used
them for their livelihood and many of them brought precious goods to
areas where they were lacking. The shepherds often encountered these
traveling salesmen, colporteurs, carrying rare goods for those living a
meagre existence: haberdashery, candles, matches as well as other
products that they added to their stock by using their knowledge of the
mountains:
They heard the sound of studded boots crunching the track and then they
saw a man at the crossroads carrying a rather large bag on his back […] he
set down the bag and waived to them again. In the midst of all that hair,
only his smiling eyes could be seen […] –I do not make a fortune, but I
earn a living. […] With the contents of this bag, madam. Plants. I travel far
and wear out my shoes looking for them. They are hard to come by and
you have to have a keen eye. (Giono 2009, 326-327)
The insiders have often transported contraband, now as well as in the past.
A frontier “profession” which has permitted a constant exchange of goods;
not necessarily precious goods, but certainly necessities and rationed items
(for example oil, salt and tobacco). Francesco Biamonti, with a certain
amount of regret for the current evolution of a “profession” that never
suffers a crisis, affectionately describes the smugglers of far western
Liguria:
430 24
–Where do you live? –he asked Mire. –Down here by the sea. But my
home town is Rocchetta Nervina. I sold my goats and olive trees to buy a
restaurant. –Rocchetta, the town of smugglers. They wore white cloaks to
look like monks. (Biamonti 1998, 78)
Another “typical” frontier activity was the one carried out by the passeurs.
While the smugglers dealt in goods (the nature of the goods changing over
the centuries according to the era, the requirements, and the laws imposed
by the ruling power), the passeurs on the other hand, have worked with
people:
We have taken many journeys together […] we have met nomads and
wanders. We were two honest passeurs; he was a professional and I did it
in my spare time. We never left anyone on this side of the border.
(Biamonti 1994, 3-4)
The free movement of people in the European Union has almost wiped out
this profession carried out by the local inhabitants of this particular border
area. This has not been the case for the “long-haul” people-traffickers from
the southern Mediterranean, who continue to accompany those fleeing
endemic wars or recurrent famines to destinations in Central or Northern
Europe. The new migrants now travel without the aid of the local
passeurs, who, nevertheless, being used to the continuous movement of
people across the borders, offer assistance, material or otherwise, to these
people needing a place to rest before resuming their march towards more
welcoming nations. Support and solidarity which are not favourably
regarded by the authorities and sometimes not even by other inhabitants:
“You give them food, don’t you? What are you thinking of? –A little
solidarity, but cautiously. I let live.” (Biamonti 1994, 29) These frontier
crossings are almost always permanent, or at least the protagonists hope
they will be. Very different from the alternating and seasonal migrations
taking place on both sides of the border in the frontier area, in different
eras and for different reasons:
They ended up talking about the new inhabitants in that old town quarter.
They came in waves. First the Dutch, among them an architect who bought
and renovated property. Then English and Danish and a few Germans.
There was also a refugee from Istria. Recently, an Arab couple, who lived
in small lodgings. –It is strange that you are the only French. –there were
others, but they left. You can find places like this in France too. (Biamonti
1998, 11)
So the rumours going around were true! There were people up on the
higher ground and on the ridges of the border, strange people, cunning as
432 24
foxes; although the area is under surveillance they hid away in those places
where nobody would look for them. (Biamonti 1995, 67)
All in all these “ghost” inhabitants may be a little dissolute, but they are
not particularly dangerous.
The reason for this is that some cannot forget certain violent episodes
towards migrants as well as Maritime residents that took place in the past:
There are certain things better not talked about, things that he had found
hard to believe: fleeing Jews, robbed and thrown into the sea by a boatman
in 1938 and 39, shepherds who had their throats slit in their cottages by
transitory people. –It is better not to stay up on the border –he concluded. –
Or maybe the whole world is the same. (Biamonti 1998, 74)
And at night? […] What is it like at night here? –Calm. Even though
occasionally someone mistakes the ridge and looks for the border. We light
small fires to warm ourselves. (Biamonti 1998, 18)
More often than not, they were victims of dishonest passeurs, outlaws,
profiteers taking advantage of their situation or accidents befalling them:
– I forgot to warn the Kurds of the dangers at the border. –The guards? –
Certainly not. There are Arabs that wait for them at the pass. –Where? – At
Cardellino Pass and Death Pass; the police do nothing. Nobody intervenes.
(Biamonti 1998, 23)
[…] every place has an identity derived from a specific link between
phenomena in progress and those already stratified, which make it a
territorial microsystem endowed with a relative autonomy […] and
therefore it is necessary to set up specific processes to plan the
interpretation of endogenous heritage which constitutes the “locality.”
(Carta 2002, 150)
The reason for this being that “[…] the territorial process develops over
time, taking the place of a previous form, another natural state or other
type of territory” (Raffestin 2005, 40), with the help of “[…] creative
imagination, or in other words, the faculty to assemble spatial images
according to principles that do not necessarily reflect reality” (Debarbieux
1992, 894). In addition, “[…] that symbolic imagination, which attributes
a powerful meaning to places” (ibid), and through which
[…] the perceived material world becomes a “raw material”, offered to the
eye, to be processed for the production of images and representations that
can be manifested through different types of language […] The territory,
434 24
And so then, towards that sea only imagined by Jean Giono’s small
mountain-dweller, the relationship between nature and culture brings us
back to the barren and sometimes arid landscapes, always worn away by
an eternal verticality:
There are places up here where the bridle paths end. Steep and barren
terraces above the olive trees, walls like gravestones of the past, almost
poised to fall in the breeze. And never ending ridges. (Biamonti 1995, 52)
Terraces patiently built by man on these “[…] high lands with just a
couple of inches of soil, burnt buy the wind and salt.” (Biamonti 1998, 97)
The sea, back to a wild state despite the wounds caused by the invasive
presence of man and his boats, regains strength:
These French […] could never stomach Napoleon. But now that he has
gone […] they dream about Austerliz in the woods […] this insurgent is
just waiting for the chance to become king of Naples. This is where the
difference lies between the two sides of the Alps. We have no precedents
and this makes us shy. (Giono 2009, 19-20)
The “Frontier Lands” of the South-Western Alps 435
The men of my age remember when the road towards Sainte-Tulle was
lined with a thick row of poplars. It is a tradition from Lombardy. It arrived
as a long procession of poplar trees from the heart of Piedmont. They
climbed the Monginevro, slid through the Alps and reached this place in
their loaded creaking carts, accompanied by curly-haired navvies that
strode along in their Hussar trousers singing songs. (Giono 1972, 3)
Near home, on the path, you feel the dog between your legs […] That dog
belonged to the breed of Maritime sheepdogs, a sort of border guard and a
companion on the path homewards. Grey like a shadow, when it turned
dark, you could hardly see it, but you could hear it breathing How old was
it? It was hard to say. It was gentle, but always seemed to be a little
offended. It could hardly see, or maybe it just pretended to be half-blind.
Up there, at a certain time of day, in between the shadows, it was good to
have a dog with you. (Biamonti 1994, 65)
The description of the Maritime dog is a metaphor for the character of the
south-western Alpine inhabitants and encompasses the ceaseless
movement in this “land of passage” and at the same time, its immobility
imbued with ancient and eternal knowledge. It is a more effective
description than many territorial marketing campaigns and a splendid
visiting card for the whole frontier region.
To conclude this essay, it should be emphasised that the geo-literary
analysis of some of the writings of Francesco Biamonti and Jean Giono
has fully demonstrated how the literary representations of the spatial
dimension allow us to penetrate the local processes in depth. In this
specific case, the representations relating to the frontier have led us to
contexts of everyday reality and repetitiveness over the centuries, which
are difficult to detect directly by using the standard methods of scientific
research.
436 24
References
BIAMONTI, Francesco. 1994. Vento largo.Torino: Einaudi.
—. 1995. L’angelo di Avrigue. Torino: Einaudi.
—. 1998. Le parole la notte. Torino: Einaudi.
BOYER, Jean-Paul.1990. Hommes et communautés du Haut-pays niçois
médiéval : La Vésubie (XIIIe-XVe siècles). Nice: Centre d'Études
Médiévales.
BRAUDEL, Fernand. 2008. “La Terra”. Il Mediterraneo: Lo spazio la storia
gli uomini le tradizioni, Fernand braudel (ed). Milano: Bompiani, 11-
30.
—. 2010. Memorie del Mediterraneo. Milano: Bompiani.
BROSSEAU, Marc. 2008. “L’espace littéraire en l’absence de description:
un défi pour l’interprétation géographique de la littérature”. Cahiers de
géographie du Québec, Volume 52: 419-437.
BUTOR, Michel. 1987. “Meditazione sulla frontiera”. La frontiera da Stato
a Nazione: Il caso del Piemonte, Ossola Carlo, Raffestin Claude, and
Ricciardi Mario (eds). Roma: Bulzoni, 407-413.
CARTA, Maurizio. 2002. L’armatura culturale del territorio: Il patrimonio
culturale come matrice di identità e strumento di sviluppo. Milano:
Franco Angeli.
CUTTITA, Paolo. 2007. Segnali di confine. Milano: Mimesis.
DEBARBIEUX, Bernard. 1992. “Imagination et imaginaire géographiques”,
Encyclopédie de la géographie, Bailly Antoine, Ferras Robert, Pumain
Denise (eds). Paris: Economica, 893-906.
DELEUZE, Gilles, and Félix GUATTARI. 1980. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les
Editions de Minuit.
GIONO, Jean. 1972. “Jean Le Bleu”. Giono J., Oeuvres Romanesques
Complètes, II. Paris, Gallimard- La Pléiade, 3-186.
—. 2009. Le Hussard sur le toit. Paris: Gallimard-Ed. Folio.
GIORCELLI BERSANI, Silvia. 2000. “La montagna violata: il sistema alpino
in età romana come barriera geografica e ideologica”, Bollettino
Storico-bibliografico subalpino, Vol. 98: 425-449.
GUGLIELMOTTI, Paola. 2006. “Introduzione”. Reti Medievali Rivista,
Volume 7: 1-12. Distinguere, separare, condividere: Confini nelle
campagne dell’Italia medievale, Paola Gugliemotti (ed).
http://www.dssg.unifi.it/_RM/rivista/saggi/Confini_Guglielmotti.htm).
HOUSE, John W. 1969. “The Franco-Italian Boundary in the Alpes
Maritimes”. The Structure of Political Geography. Roger E. Kasperon
and Julian V Minghi (eds). Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co, 258-272.
The “Frontier Lands” of the South-Western Alps 437
Notes
1
The novels by Jean Giono that are used for this study are: Le Hussard sur le toit
(Paris, Gallimard-Ed. Folio, 2009) and Jean Le Bleu (Oeuvres Romanesques
Complètes, II, Paris, Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1972, 3-186). Francesco Biamonti’s
novels that are used, are Vento largo (1994), L’angelo di Avrigue (1995), and Le
parole la notte (1998), all published by Einaudi.
2
The whole area described by the two novelists is studied here, and is part of the
Alpine-Mediterranean region of Europe, which covers Piedmont, Liguria and
Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, but also the region of Rhône-Alpes (see the bilingual
site http://medalp.eu/).
3
TN: the resting place.
4
The author comes from this frontier area and can count at least a dozen of her
ancestors, who crossed the Alpine passes to work in the South of France in the last
century. In many cases they were seasonal workers in agriculture. In other cases,
the migrations became permanent and resulted in a veritable “family diaspora”.
25
CHICAGO:
LITERARY GEOGRAPHY APPROACHES
TO AN EGYPTIAN EMIGRATION NOVEL
in scale, the events in reality take place almost exclusively on the campus
of the University of Chicago, on the city’s outskirts.
Emphasizing place by causing it to feature in the title is a way of
anchoring the novel in the real, by appealing to the place’s “narrativity”,
defined by Henri Mitterand as the “ensemble of characteristics that make
the inscription of place indispensable to the realist illusion.” (Mitterand
1980, 194) Mitterand continues, saying that “the name of the place
proclaims the authenticity of the adventure through a sort of metonymic
reflection that short-circuits the reader’s suspiciousness: since the place is
real, all that which is contiguous to or associated with it is too” (ibid.). The
anchoring in the real is reinforced by the autobiographical dimension of
the novel, since Al-Aswany himself studied for a Master’s in dental
surgery at the University of Illinois in Chicago in the 1980s.
While the location of the narrative is clearly specified, the diegetic
time remains somewhat unclear (during the 2000s), though not in a
manner that attenuates the realist illusion, since the novel begins with
university induction (the decision to award scholarships, the arrival of the
new students Nagi and Shaymaa, etc.), reinforcing the centrality of the
university in the novel’s architecture. All we know is that the narrative
takes place between two temporal markers: after the 11th of September
2001, which is clearly evoked on several occasions, and before 2007,
when the novel was published. The events of September 11 thus constitute
a founding moment, more of which below.
Like Al-Aswany’s other novels, Chicago’s narrative structure is not
linear. An omniscient narrator blends together the stories of two
generations of Egyptians in the department of histology at the medical
school of the University of Chicago: professors and students rub
shoulders, allowing for an encounter between two different waves of
qualified Egyptian migrants, that of the 1960s and 1970s, who sought to
integrate and became American, and a more recent one of young medical
students whose intention, at least initially, is to remain only temporarily in
the United States, long enough to obtain their diploma. Al-Aswany also
introduces a secondary narrator, Nagi, extracts of whose journal also
appear in the novel.
freedom and human rights, was founded on the massacre of its indigenous
population. Al-Aswany hastens to associate this barbarity with
Christianity, in an implicit game of mirrors that inverts the contemporary
image of Islam as intrinsically violent:
Anyone reading American history must pause at this paradox: the white
colonists who killed millions of Indians and stole their land and other
possessions were, at the same time, extremely religious Christians. (1)
The characters who leave their living space often find nothing outside but
desolation. Ra’fat Thabit goes to the poor and seedy neighborhood of
Oakland looking for his daughter on two occasions. On the first, at night,
he is mugged before happening onto his daughter as she takes cocaine, and
on the second, during the day, he does not find her since she has moved.
Each time, the reader gets only a very brief description of the location.
She saw streets so wide she could not imagine they existed anywhere and
gigantic skyscrapers that spread as far as the eye could see, giving the city
an enchanted mythical look like those in comic books. (9)
As soon as Ra’fat Thabit drove into Oakland, he was horrified: many of the
redbrick homes were in ruins; backyards were filled with old junk and
garbage; gang slogans were sprayed in black and red on the walls; groups
of young black people were standing on street corners smoking marijuana;
loud music and noise came from some open bars. (162)
2. Geographic Imaginaries
This section draws on Bertrand Westphal’s (2005) geocritical approach
to writers’ geographic imaginaries, and in particular their representations
of elsewhere and the foreign, which he calls imagology. Al-Aswany’s
visions of these themes can be situated in a long tradition of Arab writers’
narratives of the West, the topic of Rasheed El-Enany’s Arab
Representations of the Occident: East-West Encounters in the Arabic
Fiction. Inverting Edward Said’s approach, El-Enany analyzes 56 Arab
authors of whom an important number are Egyptian. He distinguishes
several periods: the pre-colonial period, of “enchanted encounters”, to use
the title of a chapter from his book, in which Europe attracts the
admiration of Arab writers and functions as a model following which the
region could emerge from its under-development; the colonial period in
which admiration for the West persists but in which East and West are
enclosed in different essences and in which the moral degradation of an
overly materialist West is contrasted with an increasingly spiritual Arab
world; the post-colonial period itself is divided into two parts, before and
after the 1967 defeat against Israel. The first part of this period is marked
by the enthusiasm of writers who are proud of their countries’ newfound
independence and who tend to emphasize the similarities between the
West and the Arab World, whereas the second period is more
disenchanted, in which the ambient pessimism leads to a glorification of
European otherness and total self-abnegation. While representations of the
West tend to be dominated by Europe, a special chapter is devoted to the
United States. In it, El-Enany demonstrates a progressive shift in the Arab
view. In the first half of the 20th century, the United States appears as a
place where modern Western civilization might express itself in a manner
that is untainted by the evil of colonialism. In the second half of the 20th
century, the United States’ image is tarnished as it becomes progressively
politically and militarily engaged in the region, and unwaveringly supports
Israel. The United States surpass Europe as the new colonial power,
whereas the latter’s image improves. Certain Egyptian authors, like
Sonallah Ibrahim, in Amrikanli, do not hesitate to openly criticize not only
the United States’ foreign policy but also American society. On this point
Al-Aswany’s vision is more nuanced, since his character Nagi finds
Americans very likable even though he finds the policy of the American
government detestable:
I am now in America, which I’ve often attacked, shouted for it to fall […];
America, which is responsible for the poverty and misery of millions of
humans in the world; America, which has supported and armed Israel,
Chicago: Approaches to an Egyptian Emigration Novel 445
enabling it to kill the Palestinians and steal their land; America, which has
supported all the corrupt, despotic rulers in the Arab world for its own
interests; the evil America I am now seeing from inside. I am gripped by
the […] dilemma […]. A question persists in my mind: those kind
Americans who treat strangers nicely, […] [d]o they realize the horrendous
crimes their governments commit against humanity? (36)
Egypt”, but instead refers to her provinciality, since she is from the Delta.
This formulation clearly implies a double-hierarchy for Tariq: Americans
are more civilized than Egyptians, and people from Cairo moreso than
those from the Delta (see below).
What attracted him to her was something that he felt but couldn’t describe,
something purely Egyptian like ful, taamiya, bisara,7 the ringing laugh,
belly dancing, Sheikh Muhammad Rifaat’s voice in Ramadan, and his
mother’s supplications after dawn prayers. She represented all that he
missed after two years away from home. (60)
All through the novel, nostalgia for Egypt expresses itself less through
attachment to an idyllic landscape than through the celebration of food and
soundscapes. The territory of the Nile is therefore not a foundational
element of this nostalgia. This shared nostalgia creates a link between the
expatriate Egyptians and they express this solidarity by swapping tips.
Thus, Muhammad Salah, who has been living in Chicago for 30 years and
is nicknamed the “mayor” of Egyptians in Chicago, explains to Nagi when
he arrives where to buy typically Egyptian food like ful and taamiya. But
the ties between Egyptians do not amount only to ones of solidarity, and a
strong degree of social control is exercised, even at a distance. For
example Shaymaa, who is still single at age 30, knows that she cannot
afford to be seen too much with Tariq:
(Nagi) The Egyptians have awakened and started demanding their rights.
The corrupt regime is shaking hard and I believe its days are numbered.
(M. Salah) Don’t you think the demonstrations and the strikes will lead the
country to anarchy? (39)
Another theme, which was more central in The Yacoubian Building, is the
re-Islamization of society, under the influence of Saudia Arabia and the
Egyptian migrants returning from the Gulf, about which Zeinab, Muhammad
Salah’s old girlfriend who remained in Egypt, has this to say:
This passage underscores the social change that migrants may propel in
their society of origin, a common line of argumentation of “secular”
Egyptian intellectuals. Paradoxically, Egyptians reflect much less on the
impact of the return of migrants from the West. Be that as it may, the
majority of characters in Chicago are transformed by their migratory
experience and the question of identities is the third theme that must be
examined, since it is at the heart of the narrative structure.
448 25
You’ve never loved me. You regret having married me. You’ve always
believed you deserved a better husband. Every day you make me feel
inferior to you in everything. You’ve done everything to prove to me that I
was just a backward Egyptian whereas you were created from a superior
race. (100)
Ra’fat loses his daughter tragically, following an overdose, after she has
accused him of being responsible for her angst and being imposter:
You’ve made me miserable. […] It’s about time you heard what I think of
you: you’re phony. […] Who are you? Are you Egyptian or American?
You’ve lived all your life wanting to be an American. And you failed.
(296)
of the boys’ high school in Tanta, Shaymaa’s social status does not suit
him. According to Tariq, the social gulf comes from the fact that she is
originally from Tanta, one of the principal cities of the Delta, the
agglomeration of which has close to 500,000 inhabitants. But for Tariq,
like the majority of people from Cairo and Alexandria, and in accordance
with a deep-rooted prejudice, the cities of the Delta are nothing but large
villages populated by peasants. (Pagès-El Karoui 2008)
He openly expresses this territorial gulf between them in these terms:
Later, he adds that “[m]y dignity is more important than my life.” (129)
The ambivalence of the peasant figure is clear, since she represents at once
the essence of the nation (Baron 2007) – “[e]verything about her was
Egyptian” (60) – and the image of inferior status if one is from Cairo or
Alexandria. This prejudice is not just Tariq’s but also the author’s, since
Al-Aswany described Shaymaa in these terms in an interview he gave at
the time of the book’s publication: “in this novel, I gave a primary role to
a young Egyptian woman, she comes from the countryside, wears the
veil…”9
Conclusion
Migration thus appears in Chicago to be a resource and an attribute of
power. The encounter with other cultures is not marked by radical
otherness and the violence of a clash of civilizations, as it has been
depicted in other novels, like Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb
Salih. Rather, the relations between Egyptians and Americans are more
marked by goodwill and sympathy. The disorientation of a new country
may lead the émigré to question his prejudices (Tariq), to distance herself
from the values of her own society (Shaymaa). Although the novel is
solidly anchored in a critical realism and space plays a critical role in the
narrative structures and as a foundation for the characters’ identities,
paradoxically, the near-absence of descriptions and the small number of
toponyms do not anchor it in excessive realism.
Contrary to other authors who are much more critical of America, Al-
Aswany offers a nuanced portrait of the United States, characterizing it as
a country of individual freedom, while at the same time decrying
454 25
References
AL-ASWANY, Alaa. 2007. Chicago. New York: Harper/HarperCollins
Publishers.
APPADURAI, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
BAKHTIN Mikhaïl. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin,
London: University of Texas Press.
BARON, Beth. 2005. Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and
Politics. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California
Press.
BARRÈRE, Anne and Danilo MARTUCCELLI. 2005. “La Modernité et
l’imaginaire de la mobilitéௗ: L’inflexion contemporaine”. Cahiers
internationaux de sociologie 118 (1): 55-79. doi:10.3917/cis.118.0055.
CLAVAL, Paul. 1993. “La Géographie et les chronotopes”. La littérature
dans tous ses espaces, Michel Chevalier (ed). Paris: CNRS ed. 103-
121.
COLLOT, Michel. 2014, Pour une Géographie littéraire, Paris: Corti.
DUPUY, Lionel. 2013. Jules Verne, la géographie et l’imaginaire: aux
sources d’un voyage extraordinaireࣟ: Le Superbe Orénoque (1898).
Aiglepierre: La Clef d’Argent.
Chicago: Approaches to an Egyptian Emigration Novel 455
Notes
1
This research is part of a larger project that compares a corpus consisting of a
dozen films and novels on emigration that appeared in the 1990s and 2000s. As a
geographer, I am interested in migratory imaginaries in Egyptian literature and
cinema and their academic analysis. (Pagès-El Karoui 2012, 2013)
2
In March 2009, Al-Aswany announced that more than 300 000 copies had been
sold in France and a million copies had been sold worldwide. (Jacquemond 2013)
456 25
3
This freedom of tone is afforded among other things by his status as an
independent writer. He is one of the rare Egyptian writers who is not paid by the
Egyptian government. (Jacquemond 2002)
4
All page references refer to the Harper Collins edition translated by Farouk Abdel
Wahab.
5
An ostentation sign of religious practice, claimed to be produced by the rubbing
of the forehead against the prayer rug.
6
A large building from the Nasser period that houses a number of government
offices, it is a symbol of the Egyptian bureaucracy.
7
Lentil purée.
8
In 2004, the Kifaya ("Enough”) movement, of which Al-Aswany was a member,
was founded to press for democratic reform.
9
http://www.babelmed.net/component/content/article/240-egypt/2894-chicago-de-
alaa-el-aswani.html
26
JULIANE ROUASSI
11, and having studied abroad (in New York and London), Fatima Bhutto
is now 32 and lives in Karachi. She has chosen words and not political
functions in order to show that violence will not bring any good to her
country. Her novel depicts urban and natural landscapes, but not from a
contemplative position, as spaces are often perceived by feminine and
masculine characters who are in movement. The action mainly takes place
in Mir Ali, a little town near North Waziristan, in the Tribal Areas, close
to the Afghan border, a region where forests and mountains that were once
an “enchanted kingdom” (117) are now a “wild” place and have become a
refuge for rebels. Mir Ali lives in the “shadow of the crescent moon” of
Pakistan, as many people want to belong to Afghanistan. As for the urban
landscape, it is composed, among others, of labyrinths of streets,
devastated houses or a hospital deeply transformed by a bomb attack.
As for Nadeem Aslam, he left Pakistan with his family when he was
14. The spaces his characters live in (Heer) or just cross (Peshawar,
Meggido) are insecure in this country where danger and hostility can
spring up anytime, anywhere, be it in natural spaces or constructed ones
like the cemetery or the school. In this sense, Rohan’s garden is a
heterotopia (Foucault 2009b), a place that becomes a refuge from the
dominant space.
Our reflection will examine how one can live in what seems to be a
hostile place like Pakistan? And how can one represent it? Firstly, we will
see how the architecture of urban landscapes is transformed by armed
conflicts. Then, can “natural” landscapes be a refuge when confronted to
the destruction and insecurity of the urban spaces? And finally, how can
writers imagine some “other places” in order to escape violence?
Both writers imagine a place for education, but they treat it differently.
Aslam builds two models of schools: an extremist Islamic one, named
Ardent Spirit (founded by Rohan and his wife, Sofia), and a Christian one,
named Saint Joseph (founded by Father Mede), which becomes a target
for the students of the first school. As for Bhutto, she imagines a
University where a group of teachers plot against military control and
organize attacks.
In The Blind Man’s Garden, a group mainly constituted by the
members of the Ardent Spirit School attack Saint-Joseph School and
demand that the Americans leave Afghanistan and free the prisoners.
Before raiding the school, they prepare the surroundings and sever a grove
composed of rosewoods and cypresses, thus modifying landscape in order
to avoid that “the police and army […] storm the school from that
direction.” (189) Leaning against a rosewood, Father Mede understands
that the trees had been severed and that “someone’s blade […] [had gone]
through them at sternum height.” (218) He is afflicted by the
disappearance of the trees and he expresses his disarray faced to such an
act:
They were just standing in place waiting for the merest touch, the meshed
canopies providing the minimum steadiness until now, and they are
crashing around him, the falling boughs generating a wind. In Joseph
Mede’s Key of the Revelation a historical meaning was given to the various
symbols of Revelation and “winds” had always meant “wars”. Dust fills
his eyes, nothing but the torn leaves and branches around him as he
attempts to gain a place of safety, the dark red flowers of the Madagascar
gulmohar erupting into the air as the green limbs come down and he stands
mercifully unscathed and watches how the place has suddenly filled up
with light, the sky painfully exposed. (218)
The felling of trees announces what will happen within the school a few
days later. The void in the sky reflects Father Mede’s state of mind. He is
the one who feels “painfully exposed” by the disappearance of the beauty
and the enchanting odours of the trees. At seventy-five, he is very
sensitive to nature’s beauty. He is brutally awakened from his sensuous
exploration: just before falling, he had “take[n] in [the] scent” (217) of a
rose called Rosa mundi. It was just before reviving his own childscape
(Porteous, 1990) by sucking a wild jasmine flower. His journey is not only
a physical one but also a temporal one as it transports him back to
childhood:
460 26
The perception of space is not only visual, as all senses contribute to it.
While the visual sense keeps the subject at a distance, smellscape and
tastescape immerge on in the heart of nature. The loss of the trees given by
Sofia and maybe the foreboding of what will happen cause him a deep
pain, as the “eutopic landscape” (Porteous 1990, 88) has just changed into
a “dystopic” one. About two weeks later, thirty terrorists attack the school
and take about seven hundred persons present in the schoolyard as
hostages, bringing them to the assembly hall where seven statues of angels
hang from the ceiling. They install bombs all over the room. Inside the
school there is a confrontation between two types of people: the ones who
work for education and the ones who want to impose their vision of the
world. The first victim of the terrorists is the deputy headmaster that
accuses the ones who call themselves “warriors of Allah” (242) of actually
being “thugs with Korans”. His dead body is dragged on the floor and it
draws a blood line that separates men from women. Space is thus divided
into two parts and the only ones who are free to move are the terrorists.
The attack takes place during several days. To children, impressed by
“[t]he shot [that] leaves an echo under every skin” (242), terrorists form a
“landscape of fear” (Tuan 1979). Starved, thirsty and tired, they finally fall
asleep.
Homesick for lost assurances, the children are falling asleep in clusters, the
limbs going limp. The hands are holding on to fistfuls of each other’s
clothing and the place feels somewhat calmer, almost hushed. (259)
None of the other men in the underground have this particular power. They
look contorted by rage, made ugly by vengeance. Their hearts are too
corroded to present any other face. But not Hayat. He lives in the
camouflage of his belief and carries out his services to his homeland
without question.
He is a true soldier. You never see him coming. (72)
The face too is a landscape. It does not only serve to identify a person, but
can also dissimulate the truth behind a mask of sincerity (Hayat) or can
expose one’s true feelings (the others). It is “both the most intimate and
the most exterior of the subject.” (Courtine and Haroche 1994, 275) The
face is ultimately a landscape the signs of which must be decoded. For
Deleuze and Guattari the head does not belong to body strata anymore, as
it is connected to strata of “significance or of subjectivation.” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1980, 2006, 211) The correlation between face and landscape
could be expressed in the term facescape3. Moreover, the Chinese
ideogram that means “face” is the same as that for landscape plus a hat.
(Perrot 1996)
Students are not the only ones who fight the army. And the university
and the school are not the only “cicatricial”4 or “scar territories.” (Gruia
2014) Bhutto mentions some “ramshackle homes”, “crumbling
neighbourhoods” (98), an “annex […] demolished by the bombing of an
462 26
The colours have muted since they left the city’s main roads, the crowds
have thinned and it has grown quieter.
There is something beautiful about the day, something Sikandar hadn’t
expected. Something has shifted. The light has lifted through the early
morning December fog.
Sikandar is completely absorbed in the moment, by the sight of the
clearing view and the sound of Mina’s voice. (118)
The couple in the van finally managed to find a space-time of their own,
after a long period of grief endured at their son’s death. They enjoy the
moment and the quiet landscape around, out of the world, as if they had
found their own world. It is a moment of sharing when Sikandar finds
again the woman he fell in love with, a woman who laughs and sings, as
Geocritical Approach to Literary Representations of Pakistani Spaces 463
before their son’s death. The hospital van becomes a space of intimacy.
But this moment of peace that was so difficult to find is broken by the
sound of a bullet that hits the van. They have entered a tribal zone that is
inhabited by “militants”, as people call the “refugees of the war of drones
in neighbouring Waziristan towns and villages.” (139) Two armed
Talibans force Sikandar to get out of the van and question their entrance
on their territory. In this quiet zone danger can spring up anywhere.
Human nature is as wild as nature is. Young Talibans, usually uneducated
people, are fighting for what they believe is just: faith. Nature is not a
refuge for everybody. It is for the Talibans, but not for Sikandar, or not for
a long time: he does not completely enjoy landscape. The smell of pines
comes once the window is open, but he cannot enjoy it. The rain
contributes to create a dramatic atmosphere. In this remote zone, the
humans are a threat for one another. The landscape is wild and so are
people living in it. Once an “enchanted kingdom”, the forest and
mountains became hostile places for anyone except for the Talibans. They
are not interested in the emergency of the situation, but they take their
time in questioning Sikandar’s faith: is he a Muslim, is he a Sunni or a
Shia? They are convinced they are entitled by their faith to control the
others. There are two camps, two worlds facing each other, but the forces
are asymmetrical. They cannot really confront one another, as one camp
dominates the other. The only hope resides in Mina who transgresses her
place as a woman by getting out of the van, pushing one of the Talibans,
and starting talking. She calls out to the two men by telling the story of the
hospital attack by Talibans and the terrible loss of her innocent child. The
moment is very intense, as she gets to express all the rage that she had
kept inside her for the last few months. Sikandar and Mina finally leave
the place at full speed, as the Talibans are shooting the van.
In The Blind Man’s Garden, Mikal, an expert in arms, is the one who
travels most and gets to explore landscape in East Pakistan, (Heer) to
South Waziristan (Meggido), and to Peshawar. A month after the
September 11 attacks in New York, he left his town with his adopted
brother, Jeo, a student in a medical school, in order to get to a camp in
Afghanistan and help wounded people. On the road, they are betrayed by
the organization that sends Pakistani in Afghanistan and they are given up
to the Talibans. With the help of the Americans, Afghani people attack the
Taliban fortress and Jeo is killed, but Mikal does not know it. Hurt and
unconscious, he is imprisoned by a warlord who cuts off both of his
“trigger finger[s]”. (87) After a few months he is sent on a false mission
that consists in stealing the Prophet’s cloak from a mosque. At one
464 26
moment, Mikal and the two men accompanying him have to abandon the
car and walk. They come across an apocalyptic landscape:
Almost frozen by the snow and cold of January, they recover some
strength when Mikal burns the lichen that grew on the metals. They leave
the “necropolis of steel” (134) and continue on their way to the mosque.
As one of the men accompanying Mikal is hurt and his son does not want
to leave him alone in the snow, Mikal is the only one who has the force to
go to the mosque that now lies “in the far distance.” (135) Exhausted,
Mikal thinks he has the time to rest in front of the mosque, but his hair and
chains get locked in the ice. He lies there helplessly, admiring the façade
of the mosque with inscriptions from the Koran and the celestial nocturnal
landscape, thinking about the contribution that Arab scholars brought to
humanity:
He looks at the sky as he sinks into sleep. Arabic is written up there in the
cosmos too, he knows. Of the six thousand stars visible to the naked eye,
210 have Arabic names. Aldebaran, the follower. Algol, the ghoul. Arrakis,
the dancer. Fomaulhaut, the mouth of the fish. Altair, the bird … (135-136)
Finally there was nothing to steal in the mosque; he and some twenty
persons inside were actually sold to the Americans. He is released after a
while but, hearing some gun fires, he believes that his death is near, so he
kills the two Americans that accompanied him back to the mosque. It takes
him eight days to go to Peshawar. Nature provides for him: he eats the
marrow of a jackal, a rabbit, a snake, termites and steals from an orchard
or a planted field and goes nesting in order to survive. He is given shelter
near Meggido by Akbar, a prisoner he had met in the American prison. He
finds some comfort looking at the sky and sleeping outside, covered by the
starry veil of the night. He finally returns to Heer, then he has to go back
to Meggido in order to help Akbar.
Nature is sometimes a space that is destroyed by the humans and it
becomes a desolate landscape. But nature has also a wild face: if it
provides what is necessary to survival, it remains nevertheless difficult to
live in it. However, natural spaces can bring some comfort, especially the
nocturnal sky that has fascinated humanity since ancient times. It is often
Geocritical Approach to Literary Representations of Pakistani Spaces 465
the case for Mikal who admires the sky at night, but also for Rohan and
Naheed (Jeo’s wife) who are reminded of Mikal by the stars.
Are there some other spaces where people can find some comfort?
3. Escapes?
In a well-known article named “Des espaces autres” (1994), Michel
Foucault writes about “other spaces” than the public and the private ones
and he calls them heterotopias. For the French philosopher space is
heterogeneous and is defined by human relations. Spaces like cemeteries,
prisons, museums, cinemas are the expression of a sort of utopia. They are
also a “counter-space” where “sites are represented, contested and
inversed.” (Foucault 1994, 755) Also named “counter-spaces” (Foucault
1994, 755), they are a contestation or neutralization of dominant spaces
and can be a refuge from them.
The garden too is “another space”. The Persian garden was a sacred
space that united inside it four parts that represented the parts of the world.
In its centre there was a water jet that was even more sacred, and
vegetation all around. To Foucault (1994, 759) “the garden is a carpet
where the entire world accomplishes its symbolical perfection”. It is also
“a sort of happy and universaling heterotopia”. (759)
For Aslam this place plays an essential part, as the title of his book is
The Blind Man’s Garden. The emphasis on this space can be explained by
the fact that different characters visit it and sometimes find comfort in it.
In this constructed natural place where Rohan and his wife planted flowers
and trees, the old man finds a refuge from the outside world. This space is
explored with all senses: birds sing in trees and a variety of colours and
scents are a delight for the human body: Arabian date palms, climbing
roses, Spanish almond trees, carnations, Egyptian blue lotuses, hibiscus,
Persian lilac trees. The vision and scent of a tree’s flowers in his garden
send Rohan back to the time when his wife, Sofia, was still alive and
planted that tree. Smell is a way of traveling back in time:
Rohan looks out of the window, his glance resting on the tree that was
planted by his wife. It is now twenty years since she died, four days after
she gave birth to Jeo. The scent of the tree’s flowers can stop conversation.
Rohan knows no purer source of melancholy. (6)
When Rohan lost his sense of sight, mutilated by the warlord that kept
Akbar’s son prisoner, smell and touch were everything he had left in order
to explore this peaceful place. But this quiet space is also a place for
recollection: after his son’s death, Rohan expresses the despair of not
466 26
being able to search for him or feel him anywhere. Life takes place
between two obscure spaces: before birth and after death. Once he could
feel his son in his wife’s womb, but once his body disappeared, he
wanders in the garden trapped in his souvenirs and searching for the
meaning of what happened:
Before Jeo was born, he had placed his ear to Sofia’s skin, just above and
to the left of the navel, and listened to the small heartbeat, there in the
darkness before life began. Now the boy is in the other darkness and Rohan
doesn’t know where to find a sign of him, what wall or barrier or skin or
veil to place his ear on. (81)
After Jeo’s sister, Yasmin, was struck by some extremist women from the
Ardent Spirit School who forbid access to women in the graveyards, her
husband Basie also finds comfort in nature, in the promise of a new day,
with its colours, sounds and fragrances:
He goes up to the roof and finds comfort in the brightening sky, receiving
his share of the earth through the five senses, the dawn glow of ochre and
cinnabar, the light calling things into existence, the thin voices of birds. As
the sun rises higher he walks through the garden where a near-thousand
flowers are opening […] (233)
The body is also a kind of “another space”. One cannot escape one’s body.
But one can escape the social space thanks to one’s body. Basie and
Yasmin create another reality far away from the public sphere. The couple
tastes the delights of flesh and their bodies escape time, uniting past and
present, in an impression of immortality:
Basie kisses her mouth when they are alone in the room and astonishingly
she wants more, an intensity in her body as when adolescence’s delight had
first found completion years ago, in both of them, here in these very rooms,
and he walks to the door and bolts it shut and comes to her, shedding his
clothes on the stripes of light blazing on the floor. Mortality? When he is
near her his impermanence has no power over him. (233)
Desire makes one forget the limits of one’s body and opens one to another
space, the other’s. The body too is a heterotopia (Westphal 2007, 113), as
it moves between the social and the intimate space. Intimacy is the
occasion of escaping politics and recovering one’s body. There is always a
part of a territory that escapes power. Intimacy is a private space that one
protects from the exterior. Intimacy is the immensity of two people
discovering each other and sharing their innermost being.
Geocritical Approach to Literary Representations of Pakistani Spaces 467
I don’t want to walk on roads that have no memory of my life. I want you
and me to walk our children to school on streets we know by heart, streets
that have known us since we were children. (41)
Aman Erum manages to leave Mir Ali for Montclair State University in
New Jersey. Without meaning to hurt Samarra, he betrays her as he
informs the Pakistani army that she has a lot of information about rebels
before anyone else. Samarra cannot escape her body, this “merciless
topia.” (Foucault 2009, 9) She is hit by Colonel Tarik who tells her, as she
is lying on the floor: “[d]o you know the force of what you are dealing
with? Do you know how small you are, zama lur [my daughter]
underneath me?” (166) The relation between the male body and the
feminine one is asymmetrical and antithetic: vertical/horizontal,
strength/weakness.
468 26
References
ASLAM, Nadeem. 2013. The Blind Man’s Garden. London: Faber and
Faber. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
BHUTTO, Fatima. 2013. The Shadow of the Crescent Moon. London:
Penguin Books.
BROSSEAU, Marc. 2011. “L’espace littéraire entre géographie et
critique.” Après tout, la littérature : Parcours d’espaces
interdisciplinaires, Blanca Navarro Perdiñas and Luc Vigneault (eds).
Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 31-53.
COURTINE, Jean-Jacques and Claudine HAROCHE. 1994. Histoire du
visage. EXPRIMER et taire ses émotions (XVIe-début XIXe siècle). Paris:
Payot & Rivages.
DELEUZE, Gilles and Félix GUATTARI (eds). (1980). 2006. Capitalisme et
schizophrénie 2 : Mille Plateaux, 2nd Edition. Paris: Minuit.
FOUCAULT, Michel. 2009. “Le corps utopique”. Le corps utopique. Suivi
de Les Hétérotopies. Paris: Éditions Lignes, 9-20.
—.1994. “Des espaces autres”. Dits et écrits IV 1980-1988, Paris:
Gallimard, 752-762. First published in Architecture, Mouvement,
Continuité, october 1984, 46-49. It is a shortened version of
Hétérotopies, a Conference held at the Circle of Architectural Studies
14th of March 1967 and finally published in its original version in
2009.
GRUIA, Ioana. 2014. “Territorios cicatriciales en la narrativa de Juan
Marsé : el caso de Rabos de lagartija”. Bulletin hispanique, 116-1, 263-
281.
PERROT, Jean (ed). 1996. Visages et paysages du livre de jeunesse.
Paris/Montréal: l’Harmattan/ Université de Paris-Nord, Centre d'études
littéraires francophones et comparées et l'Institut international Charles
Perrault, coll. “Itinéraires et contacts de culture”.
470 26
Movies
BIGELOW, Kathryn. 2012. Zero Dark Thirty. Universal studios.
RIBOJAD, Stéphane. 2011. Forces spéciales. Easy Company/Studio Canal.
Notes
1
Many critics have written about literary geography, starting with William Sharp,
in 1904 and continuing with Virginia Woolf (1905), André Ferré (1946), Marc
Brosseau (2011), Andreea Răsuceanu (2013), Michel Collot (2014), and others.
The concept seems to be widely accepted by literary and geographical criticism.
Refer to my article “Géocritique, carte et géographie littéraire” (2014), in
Géocritique : état des lieux/Geocriticism : a Survey, edited by Clément Lévy and
Bertrand Westphal, Presses Universitaires de Limoges, coll. “Espaces Humains”,
222-232. Transactions of the 20th Congress the International Comparative Literary
Association (ICLA), Comparative Literature as a Critical Approach, Paris, 18-24
July 2013.
2
My use of the term “deathscape” here is different from that of Malcolm Lowry
who invented it in order to express his pessimistic view of the city. In Dark as the
Grave wherein my Friend is Laid (1968) he writes about the “barren deathscape of
Los Angeles”.
3
In France Sandra L. Beckett writes about “visage-paysage” in “Les visages-
paysages by J M G Le Clezio”, Visages et paysages du livre de jeunesse, Jean
Perrot ed. 1996, 23-37. Refer to my chapter about “visages-paysages” in
Territoires du corps féminin, to be published in 2016, Paris: Orizons, coll.
“Comparaisons”.
4
Ioana Gruia (2014) analyzes the body, the city and history as “scar territories”
(“territorios cicatriciales”). She states that “scar is the visible witness of the wound
and of the presence of a traumatic past.” (265) I prefer the neologism “cicatricial”
to “scar” since the verb “cicatrize” exists.
5
Bigelow’s (2012) movie Zero Dark Thirty is about US army tracking Ben Laden.
It is a propaganda movie that is not interested at all in the point of view of the
locals.
6
Forces spéciales (2011) is about rescuing journalist Elsa Casanova (Diane
Kruger) who is taken hostage in Afghanistan and brought to Pakistan. A
commando frees her and they return to Afghanistan, pursued by the Talibans.
Geocritical Approach to Literary Representations of Pakistani Spaces 471
knowledge combine in this collection. Her main fields of interests are: the
history of geographical knowledge, sixteenth-century Italy as a laboratory
of political ideas, and the first representations of Early modern age
discoveries.
Abraham, Jean-Pierre, 5, 64, 67, 69, 333, 334, 335, 336, 339
70, 76, 77, 78, 79, 168 Collot, Michel, 291, 302, 303, 306,
Almino, João, 10, 354, 355, 356, 316, 439, 454, 470
357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, Conrad, Joseph, 10, 23, 24, 31, 35,
363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369 340, 341, 342, 345, 346, 347,
architecture, 71, 131, 174, 175, 180, 348, 351, 352, 413, 420, 475, 476
187, 201, 269, 354, 367, 440, cosmographers, 7
458, 474, 476 Cultural Turn, 4
Armitage, Simon, 9, 305, 306, 307, De Certeau, Michel, 2, 13
308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, Debord, Guy, 2, 13, 322, 323, 324,
314, 315, 316, 317, 476 325, 327, 328, 330, 332, 333,
Auden, W. H., 9, 287, 288, 289, 336, 338, 339
290, 291, 293, 294, 295, 296, Defoe, Daniel, 8, 13, 16
297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, Deleuze and Guattari, 1, 11, 33, 78,
303, 304, 305, 309, 314, 475 208, 237, 309, 314, 423, 461
Augé, Marc, 5, 12, 82, 85, 89, 94, displacement, 8, 91, 236, 237, 240,
95, 306, 312, 313, 316, 322 242, 254, 302, 394
Auster, Paul, 8, 222, 224, 225, 226, ecocriticism, 2, 16
227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233 Eliade, Mircea, 219
Bachelard, Gaston, 1, 12, 96 emigration novel, 11, 438
Bakhtin, Mikhaïl, 1, 12, 27, 34, 39, environmentalist movement, 2
78, 206, 219, 439, 454 expatriate, 6, 100, 101, 102, 105,
Biamonti, Francesco, 423, 424, 425, 107, 116, 121, 446, 449
426, 427, 428, 429, 430, 431, Fielding, Henry, 15
432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437 Foucault, Michel, 1, 13, 33, 35, 140,
Brasília, 10, 354, 355, 356, 357, 143, 325, 333, 337, 458, 465,
358, 359, 360, 361, 364, 365, 467, 469
366, 367, 368, 369, 370 frontier lands, 11, 423, 424, 425,
Brosseau, Marc, 1, 3, 8, 12, 13, 16, 431
38, 48, 49, 126, 143, 386, 435, Garrard, Greg, 2, 13
436, 469, 470 geocriticism, 2, 3, 4, 17, 65, 78,
Buell, Lawrence, 2, 13, 45, 48 102, 106, 107, 121, 415, 421,
Chorography, 170, 309 458, 468, 473
Christie, Agatha, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, geographical novel, 8, 206, 216
60, 61, 62 geopoetics, 2, 314
chronos, 1 geopolitics, 245
chronotope, 1, 12, 27, 39, 43, 65, Ghosh, Amitav, 8, 234, 235, 236,
67, 68, 78, 206, 439, 443 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242,
Clerc, Thomas, 10, 322, 325, 326, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247
327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 332, Giono, Jean, 423, 424, 425, 429,
Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space throughout History 479
432, 434, 435, 436, 437 49, 63, 87, 92, 95, 96, 122, 123,
Greig, David, 5, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 215, 219, 220, 232, 233, 235,
87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97 239, 245, 246, 252, 253, 254,
Guichonnet, Paul, 217 260, 284, 285, 303, 306, 308,
Hemingway, Ernest, 52, 100, 102, 311, 316, 337, 340, 341, 342,
110, 112, 116, 122, 123 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 349,
heterotopic, 249, 255, 329, 331, 333 350, 351, 352, 353, 403, 404,
Hewitt, David, 220 454, 455, 458, 469, 470, 474
homotopic, 249, 250, 251, 259 map, 2, 5, 7, 8, 11, 20, 22, 24, 25,
identity, 6, 9, 12, 38, 55, 65, 81, 82, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34,
84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 39, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 82, 91,
95, 121, 141, 178, 180, 184, 241, 112, 113, 116, 121, 169, 174,
242, 312, 331, 357, 362, 363, 198, 209, 210, 215, 218, 224,
364, 366, 369, 398, 399, 401, 225, 228, 230, 231, 232, 237,
402, 415, 425, 433, 454 244, 248, 249, 252, 253, 259,
Imagination, 1, 12, 13, 26, 34, 36, 267, 281, 284, 306, 309, 310,
42, 48, 51, 144, 217, 219, 410, 311, 312, 313, 324, 327, 329,
411, 436, 454 335, 336, 338, 339, 374, 375,
Jouet, Jacques, 6, 126, 127, 132, 377, 379, 381, 387, 391, 393,
133, 134, 137, 138, 140, 141, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400,
143, 144, 145 401, 402, 421
journey, 8, 10, 30, 42, 44, 52, 53, Martínez, Tomas Eloy, 11, 390,
54, 55, 56, 59, 79, 102, 106, 155, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396,
190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 198, 397, 398, 400, 401, 402, 404,
200, 209, 215, 218, 232, 236, 405, 406
242, 256, 264, 302, 372, 459 metaphor, 1, 31, 89, 92, 207, 211,
Kipling, Rudyard, 8, 9, 23, 248, 236, 237, 242, 247, 266, 274,
249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 280, 299, 302, 332, 339, 375,
255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 399, 401, 408, 411, 413, 435
261, 475 migrations, 8, 242, 430, 431, 437,
landscape, 44, 45, 46, 55, 57, 59, 477
60, 66, 72, 74, 81, 82, 85, 89, 91, mimesis, 3, 37, 342
104, 106, 107, 109, 133, 137, modernity, 56
170, 174, 177, 180, 181, 184, non-place, 5, 82, 85, 306, 312, 414,
185, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 418
212, 215, 217, 218, 237, 239, novel, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21, 24,
256, 288, 291, 299, 302, 313, 29, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47,
333, 341, 401, 414, 433, 434, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 62,
435, 446, 457, 458, 459, 460, 63, 64, 70, 137, 183, 206, 211,
461, 462, 463, 464 212, 213, 218, 224, 225, 228,
Literary cartography, 2, 4, 19, 25 229, 230, 231, 232, 235, 245,
literary geography, 2, 4, 7, 17, 39, 249, 255, 257, 258, 341, 342,
102, 104, 105, 110, 259, 287, 343, 344, 345, 347, 348, 349,
302, 306, 307, 316, 414, 457, 352, 354, 355, 358, 359, 360,
470, 477 362, 364, 365, 366, 368, 369,
London, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 35, 48, 371, 372, 373, 375, 380, 384,
480 Index
385, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394, Segalen, Victor, 10, 304, 371, 372,
395, 396, 397, 398, 400, 407, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378,
412, 413, 438, 440, 442, 443, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384,
445, 446, 447, 448, 450, 451, 385, 386, 387
452, 453, 454, 458, 460, 462 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 9, 264, 265,
Oulipo, 126, 131 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 272,
Pakistan, 11, 457, 458, 460, 462, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278,
463, 469, 470 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284,
Peking, 10, 371, 372, 373, 375, 377, 285, 286, 475
379, 380, 381, 383, 384 Situationnism, 2
periegesis, 7 Smith, Adam, 220
Pizzolatto, Nic, 5, 37, 38, 39, 41, Soja, Edward, 1, 10, 15, 20, 35, 312,
42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49 317, 468
poetry, 9, 69, 71, 132, 133, 137, Spatial Turn, 1, 3, 4
138, 140, 208, 223, 240, 250, Tally, Robert T., 1, 2, 5, 15, 16, 20,
264, 265, 266, 279, 280, 284, 23, 25, 28, 35, 36, 39, 48, 77,
289, 295, 299, 300, 304, 305, 337, 410, 472
306, 307, 308, 309, 312, 313, The city of Paris, 100
314, 315, 317, 452, 475, 476 theatre, 5, 81, 82, 83, 87, 92, 93, 95,
politics, 10, 23, 53, 196, 242, 312, 473, 476
317, 319, 328, 395, 397, 399, topophilia, 1
438, 466 topophobia, 1
postcolonial, 8, 237, 238, 307, 476 topos, 1, 6, 12, 16, 81, 83, 84, 92,
Psychogeography, 2, 13, 322, 323, 101, 291, 401
337 tourist, 101, 107, 108, 109, 111,
Ramusio, 150, 151, 153, 158, 164, 113, 116, 120, 121, 256, 257,
165, 166, 473 290, 294
realism, 27, 30, 217, 257, 261, 314, Tournefort, 7, 189, 191, 192, 193,
342, 369, 407, 410, 413, 453 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199,
referentiality, 9, 164, 249, 251, 252, 200, 201, 202
255, 259 transdisciplinary, 1
Richardson, Samuel, 15 trauma, 11, 85, 390, 391, 393, 398
Romans-géographes, 12, 386 traveler, 6, 30, 108, 151, 153, 154,
Scott, Walter, 8, 110, 122, 206, 208, 155, 161, 174, 175, 184, 190,
209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 201, 215, 248, 258, 308, 371,
215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 474 384, 415, 416
Guy Mannering, 213 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 1, 15, 16, 28, 29, 36,
Redgauntlet, 220 100, 107, 123, 460, 470
Rob Roy, 209, 214, 220 Vásconez, Javier, 11, 407, 408, 409,
The Antiquary, 13, 16, 211, 220, 411, 412, 413, 414, 415, 416,
221 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 477
The Black Dwarf, 213 walking, 8, 46, 102, 110, 111, 112,
The Fair Maid of Perth, 220 113, 121, 131, 222, 223, 228,
The Heart of Mid-Lothian, 220 230, 253, 258, 315, 324, 326,
The Pirate, 220 328, 332, 333, 344, 349
Waverley, 214, 215, 221 Watt, Ian, 15
Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space throughout History 481
Westphal, Bertrand, 2, 3, 4, 14, 15, 417, 421, 439, 444, 455, 457,
16, 21, 36, 42, 43, 48, 65, 77, 78, 466, 470, 472, 473
100, 107, 108, 123, 249, 260, Wordsworth, 285
291, 331, 332, 337, 385, 410,