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By The Book Hold in contre-voyages —

Contre-voyages

In the interwar period, a cluster of works out of France did something strange with the travel-writing genre. They took it apart, limb by limb. This series attempts to make sense of this moment, collectively, and the individual works that contributed to it.

Between the two world wars, something remarkable happens in French travel literature: A group of works, subtly at first, and then loudly, dismantle the genre. The goal of this series is to try to capture the significance of this moment.

The works I’m interested in are these:

  • Roussel, Impressions of Africa (1910)
  • Roussel, Locus Solus (1914)
  • Segalen, René Leys (1922)
  • Cendrars, Moravagine (1926)
  • Cendrars, Dan Yack (1927, 1929)
  • Michaux, A Barbarian in Asia (1933)
  • Leiris, Phantom Africa (1934)
  • Artaud, Journey to Mexico (1936)

This is a provisional, working document. As of this writing (9/25), I haven’t read and fully digested these works; they’re what I am reading. My below summaries are based on dust jackets, skimming, and online summaries; I know enough about the works individually to include them in this particular arc, and I describe the justification for the inclusion of each below. I’ve collected these works, also, in a Bookshop shelf that is here.

First some background.

Background

Since Marco Polo, travel writing in the European tradition has served as a prologue to colonization. Writers travel to some ‘exotic’ locale or another, and simultaneously construct two complementary narratives:

  • The place is so marvellous
  • The people are so simple/stupid/evil

Travel writing in this tradition thus provides two reasons to colonize the place: It’s a magical, neat place (or particularly arable, say), and its inhabitants would be better off if they were colonized. Maintaining a balance between enchantment toward, even vulnerability (even fear) in the face of, the environs, and, at the same time, authority and superiority toward its human dwellers, is the signature challenge of the genre.

In the writings of Chateaubriand, Pierre Loti, and Jules Verne, as in the paintings of, for example, Gaugin, French literature and art at the turn of the last century betrayed an appetite for the ‘exotic’ that hewed to this familiar, centuries-old tradition. And then a cluster of works emerged that suddenly, and without compromise, dismantled the genre entirely, and simultaneously paved a new path for conceiving of the travel narrative.

There are in fact a few threads of interest in this brief moment: some literary, others of a more theoretical sort, which I’ll outline separately. The core thread is the one outlined here: travel narratives that tear apart the genre.

Texts

First a general point: Some of these texts are tricky to find new (many of these as of 09/25 are on backorder), although used copies generally abound. I give below Bookshop and Thriftbooks links, as well as ISBN numbers, which should make it relatively easy, at least, to see if copies are available.

Raymond Roussel, Impressions of Africa (1910)

The idea of this book, and the reality of its composition, are too bizarre to be believed. Suffice it to say: Impressions is not about Africa, there is no real “Africa” referred to in the title. It is simply an imagined Africa. The “impressions” are impressions of imagination.

Now, of course, this is funny, unless we read it as part of a genre of works that pretend to have immediate understanding of, or access to understanding of, foreign lands and people. But anyone who has read Polo or Mandeville can see the patent falsehoods for what they are: projections of the imagination, and strange for what they reveal about the nature of imagination, and not at all about the places or people they purport to be about.

Roussel’s deliberately imaginary impressions of “Africa,” then, serve as a kind of critical gesture at the imaginary dimension of the genre. Impressions doesn’t depart from the tradition. It distills it, and by distilling it reveals one of the tradition’s fundamental absurdities: to travel so far, and to get no further than the imagination’s interior.

Text

Raymond Roussel, Locus Solus (1914)

In this second entry from Roussel, an inventor gives a tour of his estate (the titular Locus Solus). Each invention demonstrated on the tour is stranger than the last. The exotic dimension of Locus Solus is inevitably to be appreciated against its literal backdrop: It takes place in France.

But it fits—and simultaneously forces us to question—the travel genre, for its guide-and-itinerary tour; for the cataloguing-as-narration; for the fact that, wherever it is, it is strange and foreign. Locus Solus is either within or directly parallel to the travel-narrative genre, not for the travel, but for the particular way in which the exotic is presented.

In a sense, if Impressions shows that you don’t have to go to Africa to write travel narratives about it, Locus Solus shows that you don’t even have to pretend to leave where you are to write travel narratives. Ultimately, however, the content here matters less than the form: Locus Solus offers a vivid and focused occasion for study of the structure of the genre.

Text

There are a few reprints of the same translation by R.C. Cunningham.

  • Locus Solus, trans. R.C. Cunningham (New Directions, 2017), ISBN: 9780811226455, is readily available.

There is another edition of the same translation published by Calder in 2017 (ISBN: 9780714544564).

Victor Segalen, René Leys (1922)

Segalen is the author of two other works, Stèles (1912) and Essay on Exoticism (posthumous, 1978), that are also of interest, but of a different variety than this current thread. René Leys, a novel, depicts a traveler in Beijing enticed by a Belgian’s (René Ley’s) tales of mystery and conspiracy in the Forbidden City.

In René Leys we get vivid instances of two problems: problems of access to foreign worlds (the traveler’s inability to enter the Forbidden City); and problems of mediation (the Belgian’s lurid tales), which further complicate questions of access and immediacy.

Segalen himself, we know from his other writings, is keenly aware of these theoretical issues, so even if authorial intent doesn’t matter, there’s no question that critical engagement with the tradition and with genres of travel writing is deliberate here.

Text

  • René Leys, trans. J.A. Underwood (NYRB, 2003), ISBN: 9781590170410, is readily available.

Blaise Cendrars, Moravagine (1926)

Cendrars is himself a character in Moravagine; the narrator, a doctor, is evidently a friend of his. Moravagine is a murderer. He and the doctor embark on a globe-trotting expedition, from Russia to the Americas.

One of the fascinating dimensions of Moravagine is the fact that many of the ‘spectacles’ encountered on the trip are the crimes Moravagine himself commits, the violence he provokes. The translation of this dimension of the travel narrative from the marvel of the foreigner to the violence of the traveler and narrator is both an inversion of the traditional interest, and a commentary on the violent wake of the traditional travelogue. Behind every Polo and Ralegh is a train of conquistadors, plunderers, colonial administrators, re-educators. In Moravagine the writer and the conqueror travel side by side.

Text

  • Moravagine, trans. A. Brown (NYRB, 2004), ISBN: 9781590170632, is readily available.

Blaise Cendrars, Dan Yack (1927, 1929)

First, a note on publication.

  • Le Plan de l'Aiguille was published in 1927, and
  • Les Confessions de Yack in 1929.

Translations of these works are most readily available, respectively, as:

  • Dan Yack, trans. A. Brown (Peter Owen, 2002).
  • Confessions of Dan Yack, trans. N. Rootes (Peter Owen, 2002).

Bookshop has the second but not the first. Dan Yack is available elsewhere, new and used. Peter Owen was acquired by Pushkin Press in 2022, but neither of the above were released under Pushkin’s Classics series, so it could be Cendrars is spinning in inter-publisher limbo for the time being.

Dan Yack offers a parody of the Antarctic expedition, obviously a rich literary tradition and, given the inhospitable terrain, one somewhat out of key with certain main strands of the tradition travel literature.

The journey is, in the precise sense, a quixotic riff on the genre of expedition. Yack brings along a veritable troupe of Sanchos, ill-equipped and incapable. Gradually the voyage devolves into farce and failure.

Confessions is interesting for a few reasons, and connected to the current thread, admittedly, by the contingent fact of its continuity with Dan Yack. But I’ll leave more particular commentary to a later thread, because it wanders into other waters.

Texts

  • Dan Yack, trans. A. Brown (Peter Owen, 2002), ISBN: 9780720611571, is irregularly available. Search by ISBN for a copy.
  • Confessions of Dan Yack, trans. N. Rootes (Peter Owen, 2002), ISBN: 9780720611588, is just as irregularly available. Search by ISBN for a copy.

Michaux, A Barbarian in Asia (1933)

It was attempting to read this book that compelled me to trace out the current thread of works. Michaux’s “barbarian” is . . . such a brute, I thought, such a performance, there must be some broader context I’m missing out on. I was; I am.

Barbarian above all questions the impartiality and authority of the traveler—something Michaux had already cast doubt on in his earlier travelogue, Ecuador (1929). As a consequence, the impartiality and authority of the account are suspect. Put differently, Barbarian is written from the perspective of someone who makes use of the occasion of travel as an opportunity to reflect on the nature and content of subjectivity. The result is a profoundly distorted lens, and a deeply questionable narrative.

Text

Michel Leiris, Phantom Africa (1934)

Leiris spent nearly two years in Africa on an ethnographic expedition, the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, led by Marcel Griaule. (Roussel was one of its sponsors.) Phantom Africa is his journal, in which Leiris comments not only on the people and places they visit, but on the other participants of the genre, and on himself—his homesickness, his sexual fantasies, his sense of guilt, even squabbles he has with other members of the expedition.

Alongside the psychosexual, interpersonal, and ethnographic observations, Leiris also documents his difficulties with the ethical dimensions of the expedition—for example, the coercion, bribery, and theft involved in its acquisition of sacred objects. Less literary than some of the other entries on this list, and more literal critical ethnography, Leiris consciously and plainly draws the connection between ethnography and colonization.

Text

Antonin Artaud, Journey to Mexico (1936)

This relatively recent (2024) volume brings together writings and lectures from before, during, and after Artaud’s ten-month stint in Mexico in 1936, including a transformative two months among the Tarahumara.

Perhaps one of the most interesting things about Artaud’s Journey is the way it cuts against the grain of one of the central motifs of the other works collected here. From Roussel to Leiris, writers critical of the travel genre employ metaphors of invisibility or inaccessibility to emphasize the fact that the traveler, as it were, never quite gets there. Artaud, on the other hand, gets there; there is no question of distance between author and subject. But his point of arrival isn’t clear description of the manners and customs of a foreign people; it’s the transcendence of his own mystical experience.

In that way, there is nothing ‘usable’ about Artaud’s journey, virtually no ‘ethnography’ at all. With Artaud, the travel journal becomes a twisted version of itself: a means of self-knowledge through escape.

Text

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