In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

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] [139], (1) Lines: 0 to 1 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [139], (1) Conclusion In a  photograph taken in Tunisia we see the poet Philippe Soupault standing with his back to the photographer on a beach in a white suit jacket. The sky is leaden, and the beach around him is empty. He looks out toward the sea and to several much smaller figures in white robes on a tiny pier. This huge European man in the foreground of the photo could be any one of the traveling writers whom I discuss in this book. He stands isolated and completely distanced from the other clearly local figures on the horizon. With his face turned away this figure in a fedora presents a clear image of the European who is always European in his time and body, no matter how far he has traveled. The traveling writer continues to stand alone in the modernist text. In these concluding remarks, we must turn, even if Soupault is frozen with his back toward us, to look at the photographer and her role. The major difference between this photograph and the texts I have examined in this book is that here the author is being observed by an other, his much less well-known wife, Ré Soupault.1 After studying the modernist nature of the travel texts in this book, it is important to step back and once again broaden one’s horizons to include other observers besides those who dominate the foreground. It is true that the writers I have presented here managed to distance themselves from Paris, what Nizan calls the “nombril de la terre” or the world’s navel. In so doing they write many exceptional texts that would prefigure important critical and literary movements of the twentieth century. Reading Segalen today one immediately begins to wonder if he himself weren’t postcolonial before his time. His writing on the self and the other calls to mind the much later ruminations of a figure like Homi Bhabha. As we read about Morand and speed in chapter , one could also think of postmodern theorists like Paul Virilio or Jean Baudrillard. Cendrars’sandApollinaire’sexperimentswithpoeticformandversewouldhavea 139 140 Conclusion 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 [140], (2) Lines: 18 ——— 0.0pt P ——— Normal P PgEnds: T [140], (2) lasting impact on poetics in France and the Anglophone world. The relativization of time and space continues to haunt our current discussions of postnationalism, virtual reality, and technophobia. The theme of the body that I presented in chapter  also prefigures many late twentieth-century concerns about gender, physicality, and quests for a mind/body connection. The writers I discuss are thus modernist and often strangely postmodern avant la lettre. “This is not a travelogue” is often a prefatory remark for something seen to be much more important than what is negated—this is not a travelogue but a mission statement, a presidential speech, a serious film, a cultural inquiry, a literary text, an artwork. In this book I hope to have shown that saying “this is not a travelogue” is the very beginning of the process in which the writer questions his role as dominant observer and chronicler of the world. Travel literature as a genre has not been credited with much critical impact, yet the writers I have selected write about travel in order to take their first steps toward a modernist and possibly postmodern awareness of the world. Although modernism is often characterized as having more to do with form than subject matter, I hope to have shown that the particular subject of travel impacts modern writing in ways that are not purely driven by chance. Travel narratives inform our critical awareness of the relativity of such notions as self, time, space, and the physical body. Travel literature may exist on the margins of the literary canon, as Morand hinted at, yet the experience of travel was instrumental in shaping the way the world and self were understood and depicted in the twentieth century. The experience of travel causes writers from Segalen to...

Share