The Modernist Traveler: French Detours, 1900-1930

Introduction

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [First Page] [1], (1) Lines: 0 to 1 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [1], (1) Introduction In  Paul Nizan wrote of the era, “During those soft years, in which disgust, and impatience to be men, rose in everyone like an attack of fever, an irresistible centrifugal force pulled the least weighty of them away from the center of the earth called Paris” (Aden Arabie, /).1 From Victor Segalen to Claude LéviStrauss , French writers and thinkers of the twentieth century traveled to discover a world far from Paris while writing against a literary tradition of exoticism, adventure stories, and novelistic travelogues. This book is an analysis of French narratives about travel in the early twentieth century and their impact on literary modernism as writers were pulled away from Paris and its literary establishment. My focus here is on writers who actually traveled and who claimed to be accomplishing something new or different in their writing about travel. The most interesting and important of these include Segalen, Nizan, Paul Morand, Blaise Cendrars, Isabelle Eberhardt, Henri Michaux, Albert Londres, Valéry Larbaud, André Malraux, Ernest Psichari, and others. As I am primarily interested in literary inquiries within the travel text, this book does not focus on a particular destination or geographical milieu but rather follows modernist themes common to travelers. My approach to the works in this book resonates with René Magritte’s  painting, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” and Michel Foucault’s little book of the same title. Most of the texts that I have brought together here could be prefaced with the remark, “this is not a travelogue” since they all seek to escape this generic category in one way or another. What ultimately matters is not that the works I discuss here resemble or represent journeys but that, in Foucault’s words, similitude replaces representation. The texts are very like travelogues, but upon closer examination they often have little in common with traditional travel narratives, though all the while claiming to tell tales of travel. Resemblance and discourse are dissociated 1 2 Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [2], (2) Lines: 16 ——— 0.0pt P ——— Normal P PgEnds: T [2], (2) and ruptured by the travel texts that I discuss. All of the works are and are not travelogues in the same modernist manner that Magritte’s pipe is and is not a pipe. As I show, many of these supposed travelogues purport to recount a journey but ultimately are tales of stasis, self-examination, and psychic immobility. In this manner they are modernist and metatextual, much like the pipe painting, rather than unilaterally representational of the world of travel. Nonetheless, they are as entirely travel narratives as Magritte’s painted pipe is wholly a pipe. French writers’ reflections on the world as they move away from France consistently reveal more about French culture at the beginning of the twentieth century than about their specific destinations. In a similar manner, travel literature itself, as a marginalized genre, serves as a revelatory zone for France and the field of French studies. I use the French rather than the English word zone to underline the heterogeneous and fluctuating nature of the spaces found in travel texts. The space of the zone is liminal, latent, and often an imaginary rather than real demarcated space, whereas the English zone simply refers to an area distinguished from other areas. French culture at the beginning of the twentieth century was neither a closed nor a homogeneous cultural space. The Modernist Traveler reveals the porous nature of the nation’s literal, textual, and symbolic borders. Travel narratives inform our critical awareness of the relativity of such notions as self, time, space, and the physical body. Although travel literature may exist on the margins of the literary canon, texts about travel have been instrumental in shaping the way the world and self are understood and written in the twentieth century. Travel compels writers from Segalen to Michaux to Psichari to reflect anew on themselves and the modern world about which they seek to write. The...