Semiologies of Travel: From Gautier to Baudrillard (review)

[N]ulle part, si ce n'est à Berne, l'enseigne ne déploie un tel luxe. […] Les lettres d'or tracent leurs pleins et leurs déliés sur des champs d'azur, sur des panneaux noirs ou rouges, se découpent en estampages évidés, s'appliquent aux glaces des devantures, se répètent à chaque porte, profitent des angles de rue, s'arrondissent autour des cintres, s'étendent le long des corniches, profitent de la saillie des padiezdas (marquises), descendent dans les escaliers des sous-sols, et cherchent tous les moyens de forcer l'œil du passant. Mais peut-être ne savez-vous pas le russe, et la forme de ces caractères ne signifie-t-elle rien de plus pour vous qu'un dessin d'ornement ou de broderie? […] Tout cela est amusant pour le flâneur et a son caractère.

(95–96)

[N]owhere, if not in Bern, is the shop sign on such sumptuous display. . . . Letters of gold trace their downstrokes and upstrokes against fields of azure or on panels of black or red, carved out like stamps. The characters cover storefront windows, recur at every door, benefit from street corners, curl around arches, stretch the length of cornices, make the most of the marquee's awnings, wend their way down basement stairways, and look for any means to attract the eye of the passerby. But perhaps you do not know Russian? Maybe the form of those characters means nothing more to you than an ornamental design or embroidery? . . . For the flâneur, all of this is entertaining and familiar.

—Théophile Gautier, Le Voyage en Russie. 1867.
Paris: Le Boîte à Documents, 1997.

In descriptive delight, Théophile Gautier—poet, writer, and art critic—revels above in the colors and textures of the store front signs he encounters in St. Petersburg's Nevsky Prospekt and lingers on the artful letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, "nothing more" than "an ornamental design or embroidery" to the foreign flâneur. That this passage can be read for insight into the writer, poet, and art critic's alienation as a foreigner should be no revelation to those familiar with the topoi of travel literature. That David Scott, author of Semiologies of Travel, artfully compares similar passages from Gautier's Voyage en Espagne to Roland Barthes' meditations on Japanese calligraphy in L'Empire des signes (1970) while exploring the role of signs and semiology in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French travel literature is perhaps somewhat of a surprise.

Indeed, it is, but the surprise is a welcome one. For scholars of travel literature, cultural studies, and French studies, this first critical examination of the place of the sign as described by French travel writers provides highly provocative explorations of and novel perspectives on the import of a semiotic reading of the travel text, the role of the travel writer, and our understanding of the genre's evolution. The author's broad aim is to demonstrate "the ways in which confrontation of difference—through anthropology and history—and the clarification of the operations of the sign—through semiotics—became fundamental strategies in modern French travel writing in the pursuit of the quest"(3). Within the theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault's Les Mots et les choses (1966) and semioticians Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce, Scott skillfully reads his corpus across the multiple boundaries of centuries and disciplines. Though not a comprehensive list, his study includes the travel works of writers (Gautier, Victor Segalen, Henri Michaux, and André Gide), semioticians (Barthes and Jean Baudrillard), political and social thinkers (Alexis de Tocqueville, Astolphe de Custine, Baudrillard), ethnologists (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marc Augé, Michel Leiris), and artist-writers (Eugène Fromentin, Paul Gauguin, and Michaux).

As with his ambitious choice of works, Scott's theoretical approach is complex. Arguing with Foucault that the shift from an analogical épistèmè prior to the Renaissance towards a post-Enlightenment more rational mode of thinking created...