“Les Morceaux Épars D'une Mosaïque Détruite”. Language, Literature And

Pour citer cet article : Charles FORSDICK, «Les morceaux épars d’une mosaïque détruite», Viatica [En ligne], n°HS1, mis à jour le : 20/11/2020, URL : https://revues-msh.uca.fr:443/viatica/index.php?id=772. Les articles de la revueViatica sont protégés par les dispositions générales du Code de la propriété intellectuelle. Conditions d’utilisation : respect du droit d’auteur et de la propriété intellectuelle. Licence CC BY : attribution. L’Université Clermont Auvergne est l’éditeur de la revue en ligneViatica. Viatica HS n°1 “Les morceaux épars d’une mosaïque détruite” Language, Literature and the Poetics of Travel « Les morceaux épars d’une mosaïque détruite » : langage, littérature et poétique du voyage Charles FORSDICK Université de Liverpool Mots-clés : Bouvier (Nicolas), poétique du voyage, multilinguisme, fragmentation, mosaïque Keywords: Bouvier (Nicolas), travel poetic, multilinguism, fragmentation, mosaïc …je me bricole de petits morceaux de savoir comme on ramasserait les morceaux épars d’une mosaïque détruite, partout où je veux, sans esprit de système. […] La seule chose qui me fasse accepter l’idée de vieillir, c’est de compléter cette mosaïque encore lacunaire.1 When asked by Irène Lichtenstein-Fall whether he accepted the label “écrivain- voyageur”, Nicolas Bouvier replied with a certain ambivalence, commenting how he appreciated the way the designation had allowed him to become associated with a wider network and a new generation of travel writers, especially through the “Étonnants voyageurs” festival in Saint-Malo.2 The elliptical and characteristically modest response disguises the impact on the author’s literary recognition of his affiliation to the Pour une littérature voyageuse movement. In the context of Michel Le Bris’s late twentieth-century promotion of a French-language tradition of “une littérature qui dise le monde”3, Bouvier’s first – and many would argue most important – work, L’Usage du monde, attracted the readership it had failed to reach on its first publication with Droz in 1963. Le Bris has repeatedly focused on this delayed recognition, associating the neglect of this classic modern travelogue with the specific niche, both poetic and ideological, in which it was published : for the founder of the “Étonnants voyageurs” festival, the 1960s are associated with a “mise-entre-parenthèses-du-monde”, with the rise of Structuralism and the Nouveau Roman, and the decline of the realism with which the travel genre is often associated.4 It is not the intention of this article to engage with one particular account of post-war French literary history. It is important to note, however, that observation of the world in which they lived was arguably equally intense in the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and others 1 Nicolas Bouvier, Routes et déroutes : entretiens avec Irène Lichtenstein-Fall, dans Œuvres, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Quarto”, 2004, p. 1249-1387 (p. 1280). 2 Ibid., p. 1364. 3 Not only via the Saint-Malo festival, but also through the launch of the periodical Gulliver and several book series including the ‘Voyages’ strand in Payot’s “Petite bibliothèque” collection. 4 See Michel Le Bris, “La vie, si égarante et bonne”, in Le Vent des routes : hommages à Nicolas Bouvier (Carouge-Genève, Zoé, 1998), p. 57–61 (p. 57). 1 Viatica HS n°1 associated with the New Novel,5 and also that the French appetite for travel writing in the trente glorieuses was perhaps linked more to decolonization and the further democratization of tourism than to trends in experimental literature and theory.6 Le Bris’s granting of L’Usage du monde an avant-garde status in relation to what he dubbed variously “une littérature qui dise le monde” or “une littérature voyageuse” raises additional questions relating not so much to literary history or its ideological frame, but more specifically to the poetics of travel writing. These are what interest me in the current article. The signatories of the essays collected in the 1992 livre-manifeste entitled Pour une littérature voyageuse display an eclecticism of approaches to the writing of their journeys, ranging from the geopoetics of Kenneth White to Le Bris’s own practice in the tradition of the roman d’aventure of the earlier twentieth century, passing via the allusive, aphoristic, often classically-inflected work of Jacques Lacarrière.7 In short, whilst the movement retained a certain consistency in terms of the gender and ethnicity of those associated with it, the poetics of this “littérature qui dise le monde” was far from homogeneous, but this creative diversity has rarely attracted the critical attention it merits. The aim of this article is to consider, therefore, in such a contextual frame, the distinctive modes of literary creativity and experimentation, including recurrent stylistic and rhetorical devices, that underpin the work of Nicolas Bouvier – and in particular L’Usage du monde.8 This approach is framed in a more general consideration of the ways in which the text manifests an interest in language and literature, in reading and in writing, that is unusual for the genre to which it belongs, but characteristic of Bouvier’s wider œuvre. The focus here on a single text by Bouvier is accompanied by two caveats : first, I acknowledge that the author’s work is characterized by rich variations in terms of genre, medium and forms of artistic creativity : his texts range across forms, including the more traditional travelogue, poetry and various formes brèves, and his writing is also complemented by an important corpus of photographic works ; at the same time, Bouvier’s approach to transforming travel into text varies considerably across his writing, a tendency particularly apparent in the multiple accounts of the foundational journey in Bouvier’s life, from Switzerland to Japan via Sri Lanka between 1953 and 1956. The literary narration of that journey lasting three years took a further quarter of a century, and evolved in a non-linear fashion as L’Usage du monde was followed, over a decade later, by an account of the final stage of the journey in Chronique japonaise (1975), with the middle section of the itinerary eventually presented in Le Poisson-scorpion (1981). Central to much of Bouvier’s reflection on travel is thus a key question about when the journey begins 5 See Lynn Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics : Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1996. 6 There are, moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, more links between Bouvier’s work and Structuralism than Le Bris appears to admit. See Charles Forsdick, “(In)connaissance de l’Asie : Barthes and Bouvier, China and Japan”, Modern and Contemporary France, 14.1 (2006), p. 63-77. 7 See Pour une littérature voyageuse, Bruxelles, Complexe, 1992. 8 For a more hermeneutical approach to Bouvier’s work, notably in the context of travel writing and Orientalism, see my “L’Orient quoi ! Bouvier and the Post-Orientalist Journey”, in Margaret Topping (ed.), Eastern Voyages, Western Visions : French Writing and Painting of the Orient, Bern, Peter Lang Publishing, 2004, p. 325-45. 2 Viatica HS n°1 and when it ends, echoing issues central to the work of Victor Segalen in Equipée (1929) where he too reflects on the tensions between the réel and the imaginaire in the field. For Bouvier more than for many other authors, the afterlives of the journey extend far beyond the physical activity on which any individual itinerary depends, and this process of re-visiting and re- working manifests itself in processes of polygraphy, i.e., in multiple rewritings of the same journey or stages of the journey at different moments and often across different genres. Multilingual soundscapes and the functions of language Bouvier’s poetics of travel – and his often-artisanal interest in the creative mechanisms whereby a journey becomes text – is related to the fact, noted above, that L’Usage du monde is a work that shows a degree of interest in language that is unusual for the travel narrative. By this, I do not refer to the writerly nature of the narrative itself, often dependent on the crafting of retrospective narration (of which more below) ; I allude instead to a marked awareness of the written and spoken languages that serves not only as the backcloth to the journey, but also as the means of facilitating intercultural encounter. As Michael Cronin has noted in his Across the Lines, many travelogues reveal a surprising degree of linguistic indifference, actively disguising or concealing the competence (or otherwise) of the traveller in the languages of the countries through which they travel.9 Apart from a small subgenre of work in which languages – as a marker of cultural diversity and its loss – are foregrounded,10 the representational practices of many travel writers depend on the reduction of the dynamic multilingualism of the field to the fixed monolingualism of the text. Following such a logic, linguistic difference and the misunderstandings it can engender are regularly reserved for little more than comic effect. Countering this tendency, Bouvier presents the countries through which he travels in their multilingual variety : varying degrees of linguistic (in)comprehension reveal his own limitations as an often exotic other, whilst also providing a clear indication of the diverse and often entangled cultures and histories with which he comes into contact. As the text of L’Usage du monde opens, Bouvier surrenders his own narrative voice after only one sentence – in a process described by Jean-Xavier Ridon as a self-effacing “esthétique de la disparition” – to cite a letter received in Zagreb from Thierry Vernet11 describing a chance meeting with a peasant riding a pony, Vernet focuses on their exchange : Avec mes quelques mots de serbe je parviens à comprendre qu’il ramène des pains chez lui, qu’il a dépensé mille dinars pour aller trouver une fille qui a de gros bras et de gros seins, qu’il a cinq enfants et trois vaches, qu’il faut se méfier de la foudre qui a tué sept personnes l’an dernier.12 9 Michael Cronin, Across the Lines : Travel, Language, Translation, Cork, Cork University Press, 2000.

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