Figuring the East: Segalen, Malraux, Duras, and Barthes (review)

Figuring the East: Segalen, Malraux, Duras and Barthes, by Marie-Paule Ha. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999. 192 pp. ISBN 0-79144385X.

Marie-Paule Ha's essay focuses on texts by four French authors that are grounded solely in a specific region of the "Oriental" world referred to as the "Far East," a geographical area that includes Victor Segalen's and André Malraux's China as well as Marguerite Duras's Indochina and Roland Barthes's Japan.

Figuring the East engages in "a discussion of the postcolonial reading of colonial and exotic texts." Its originality is located in the fact that it renews and updates the study of known works by focusing on previously downplayed or ignored Eastern characteristics of the texts. The book is formally organized around these four authors who span the canon formation of twentieth-century French literature (Victor Segalen was born in 1878 and Marguerite Duras died in 1996), and only those texts that are concerned with Eastern influences and representations--their "Eastern writings"--are distinguished and scrutinized to expose "an 'off-center' reading." This particular focus that prioritizes a common denominator for the texts allows Ha to bring in the appreciation of franco-French canonical works, a certain postcolonial critical discourse "on the Western representations of the Far East" (4), an endeavor that has been, she notes, "surprisingly limited." Considered in chronological order, from Segalen's Essai sur l'exotisme to Barthes's L'empire des signes and Duras's several "Indochinese" novels, the works examined are not strictly speaking "post"-colonial in a historical sense but span both colonial and postcolonial eras (Indochina officially broke away from French colonial rule in the mid-1950s.) If one considers that postcolonial discourses literally grow out of colonial discourses and therefore include them, the essay could be an attempt to render an account of the sliding of the colonial into the postcolonial. Hence the use of theoretical anchorings that will be familiar to "early" postcolonial readers and practitioners, with a twist: the conception of the Other, for example, introduced through Edward Saïd's Orientalism, is ultimately disengaged from the Insider/Outsider, Self/Other paradigms through the concept of third space; or the contention that because of its "positioning" within the writings of Europeans, Orientalism (xiii) is no longer a one-way construction by the West but is "constantly appropriated, re-worked, and re-accentuated in the utterances of others" (xii), and that it may include "the complicity of the 'Orientals.'" In fact, a third space is already reclaimed in the titles of the chapters of the book, be it the "quexotic" (a graft of Don Quixote's quest onto the exotic project) in "Segalen's 'Quexotic' Quest" (ch. 2) or the "Other" in both chapter three, "The Other in Malraux's Humanism," and chapter five, "Another Barthes," that is equivalent to "the margins" in "Duras on the Margins" (ch. 4). Chapter one, "Reading of the Asian Other," is an introduction useful in setting up the frame for the study. What stands out is the suggestion that the distinction between the colonial and the exotic in (French) literature must be kept, and the attempt made at "deterritorializing" the reading of the texts by recalling Elleke Boehmer's three-pronged classification of (Eastern?) Literature "according to [its] relationship to imperialism: colonial, colonialist, and postcolonial." I cannot help notice that the author's positioning of herself as a "Western-educated postcolonial subject," and reader (13, 15), who espouses the "us the (ex)colonized," may be a limiting factor for a critic, an impasse she tries to circumvent by introducing Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia. Ha has enough breadth as a critic to disengage herself from this precarious, cautious position. Or she may conversely welcome as postcolonial subject anyone of "us" (Westerners in postcolonial studies) who is engaged in the reading of "exotic" and "colonial" texts.

An essay that belongs...