‘Au Tonkin’, suivi d’extraits de sa correspondance et d’un choix de ses nouvelles (review)

In January 1884 the young Paul Bonnetain, fresh from the scandal of his notorious naturalist novel on the dangers of masturbation, Charlot s’amuse (1883), set off for five months’ travel in Tonkin and China. He was travelling as correspondent for Le Figaro, which published his accounts in instalments; in 1884 they appeared as the book on which this re-edition is based. In Tonkin, or what would later be called North Vietnam, Bonnetain was a witness to conflicts between French and Chinese forces that were to escalate into the Sino-French war (August 1884–85) and result in France’s protectorate over Tonkin. Bonnetain’s account is thus most immediately that of a journalist shadowing an army. His remit from Le Figaro was to provide propaganda that would encourage nationalist pride in ‘our boys’ fighting in Indochina, something his predecessor Julien Viaud, writing under the pseudonym Pierre Loti, had singularly failed to do. This mission was not necessarily helped by Bonnetain’s explicit and reiterated contempt for the native Tonkinese, who were not, after all, supposed to be the enemy. In any case, Bonnetain’s writings also reflect his own very literary aims, which coexist uneasily with the purposes of jingoism. The young novelist, who in 1887 was to be the initiator of the ‘Manifeste des cinq’ denouncing Zola’s descent into vulgarity, is much more interested in the problem of writing itself. His disillusionment is at times expressed in deliberately poetic echoes of Baudelaire’s ‘Le Voyage’, dense with neologisms and edgy syntax: ‘Et maintenant, voyage, artiste, ou rêveur. Sois réaliste, lamartinien, romantique; broie du Schopenhauer, ou emmaillonne des rimes riches, soudures de mots sur de postiches idéals, tu verras partout la vie pareille et le monde également petit’ (p. 32). He plays on the sheer difficulty of travel writing, the humidity that yellows the paper and makes the ink disappear off the page; and he dwells on the problems of capturing the sensations of a land so alien that it does not conform to the exotic dream of the Orient (p. 71). Within the context of this self-conscious fin-de-siècle pessimism, he pursues the ideal of a ‘littérature instantanée comme la photographie’, which would, it too, be ‘de l’impressionnisme’ (p. 73, emphasis original). Da Silva’s Introduction points out the many different angles from which a modern reader can approach this highly ambivalent writer, and gives us invaluable information situating Bonnetain’s travel writing in relation to his controversial encounters with the Parisian literary world — Zola, of course, but also, for example, Mirbeau, with whom he fought a duel. Da Silva’s scholarly apparatus also provides discreet but very useful footnotes, notably to Parisian and Indochinese slang, which Bonnetain was fond of using. The annexes reproduce Bonnetain’s passionate letters to his indifferent ex-mistress, and some journalism and short stories not included in the 1884 publication.