Sur les pas de Flaubert: approches sensibles du paysage ed. by Philippe Antoine (review)

When on his first extended trip away from Normandy, to Southern France, the Pyrenees, and Corsica, Flaubert claimed in his travel notes that he wanted his sentences to smell of the leather of his shoes. This collection of essays, edited by Philippe Antoine, begins by evoking the whiff of Flaubert’s travelling feet, asking questions about the connections between the ambulatory reality experienced by writers such as Flaubert, and the practice of writing. As Antoine remarks in his own article in this collection, on Par les champs et par les grèves, Flaubert’s travel writing stresses the corporeal, mobilizing all the senses in its attempts to get to grips with the realities of the world experienced through the journey; Antoine suggests that in the account of his tour around Brittany, Flaubert optimistically works towards dismantling the boundaries between mind and matter, travelling and writing, sensory pleasure and the pleasure of the sentence. The essays assembled here, which focus on nineteenth-century travel writing, give prominence to the practice of walking. The walk is figured as an experience that facilitates the embrace of sensory perception. As in studies on the senses (such as The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, ed. by David Howes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), or Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (London: Routledge, 1994)), the dominance of the visual is downplayed in favour of discussion of the significance of the aural and the olfactory. Alain Guyot’s article examines the presence of soundscapes in Chateaubriand’s travel writing, arguing that striking examples of sonority tend to be positioned at textually significant points, such as at the end of syntactic sequences or as the climax of episodes. Sarga Moussa compares the representation of the senses in the Oriental landscapes described by Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Flaubert, privileging nocturnal experiences so as to debunk the authority of the visual. The problem lies in the somewhat misleading title of the collection and the prominence it gives to Flaubert: these heterogeneous essays deal with nineteenth-century trips to Spain, Tenerife, and Tibet, among other destinations; of the twelve articles, only two focus primarily on Flaubert. Attention is given mainly to writers whose works either predate the publication of Flaubert’s travel writing or make no connection with Flaubert: Sophie Lécole discusses Théophile Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne; Pierre Dufief examines the Goncourt brothers’ trip to Algeria; Lauric Guillaud draws on comparison with Baudelaire in an article on Rosny Aîné’s ‘wonderlands’ of travel. The essays here follow less in the footsteps of Flaubert’s stinky sandals than in the wake of Jean-Pierre Richard’s study of nineteenth-century writers’ perceptions and sensations of the material world in his Littérature et sensation (Paris: Seuil, 1954), a work which receives surprisingly fleeting reference across the collection. Interest in this volume will lie less in the attention directed towards Flaubert, and more in the wider realms of nineteenth-century travel writing and studies of the representation of the senses.