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‘Chambres d’Asie, chambres d’ailleurs’ 179 Traveller, writer, novelist and journalist, the late Nicole-Lise Bernheim (1942– 2003) left a diverse body of work which reveals her passion for travel. This author’s work ranges from journalistic reportages for newspapers such as Le Monde, L’Express and Le Matin, to production work for French radio station France-Culture. However it is two of Bernheim’s récits de voyage which are of interest here, namely Chambres d’ailleurs (1986) and Saisons japonaises (1999). These texts, which evoke her experiences of travel and travel-indwelling in Japan, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Singapore and India, allow an exploration of the way in which the writing of one author can evolve through different modes of travel and different approaches to the exploration of place and provide a valuable case study for issues of gender and self-performance in travel and travel writing. Chambres d’ailleurs is the account of the author’s six-month journey around a number of countries in Asia, in the company of her partner. As the title suggests, Bernheim uses the rooms in which she stays as a central motif throughout the text, suggesting both the fragmentary nature of the travel undertaken and its account, and the importance of these temporary homes and shelters to the traveller as places of refuge.1 Although these chambres d’ailleurs do not always fully reflect the sense of place in which they are located, they are not as anonymous or as easily relocated as the non-places described by Marc Augé.2 Instead a sense of place is implied by the traces and spectres of other travellers, previous inhabitants and also by the details of each room. Perhaps this approach to travel and place should be seen, as James Clifford 12 ‘Chambres d’Asie, chambres d’ailleurs’: Nicole-Lise Bernheim’s ‘Vertical Travels’ in Asia Katy Hindson 180 Katy Hindson suggests, as ‘dwelling-in-travel’,3 where the focus lies upon the preservation or invention of a sense of home in a series of transitory abodes. While travel seems at first to imply an abandonment of the home by the traveller, this text suggests the fluidity of the concept of home. The author seems to challenge the traditional binary opposition of the home and ‘foreign’ space, by recreating aspects of home with her in travel.4 While many of the places visited during this journey are described and travelled through only fleetingly, there is a sense in which Bernheim’s attention to detail and everyday experiences creates a type of microscopic travel, where the reduction of the traveller’s field of vision and experiences, rather than being limiting as it might at first seem, actually highlights the complex interaction of home and abroad in travel and travel writing. Microscopic travel is taken here to indicate a mode which enables the traveller to stop and focus on the small details and textures of the places she travels to and through. Deceleration and attention to detail are characteristic of this approach to place, allowing a reactivation of the senses and a re-inscription of the travelling body into the experience of travel. Michael Cronin discusses this in terms of a ‘fractal travel mode’ which he offers as a counter to the discourse of exhaustion expounded by critics such as Paul Fussell. Such an approach, which can be traced back to Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre [1794],5 allows for infinite possibilities for travel within a finite space. The moments of deceleration and inertia between periods of motion which punctuate and direct Chambres d’ailleurs (conveyed stylistically by the division of the text into short sections) allow stasis to become as important to the travel experience as the displacement which usually is seen to characterise it. The more recent Saisons japonaises is the account of the author’s prolonged, lone, stay in Koyasan, a Japanese town, famous as a site of pilgrimage. This narrative, in certain ways, stands in contrast to the author’s earlier text. Having travelled to Koyasan as part of the journey described in Chambres d’ailleurs, Bernheim returns, this time alone. Now the traveller burrows down in the place and carries out an extended version of the microscopic travel commenced in the earlier narrative.6 The focus shifts, in this text, from the transience and brevity found in Chambres d’ailleurs, to what we might call travel-in-dwelling, or ‘vertical travel’: exploring a place...

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