Semiologies of Travel: from Gautier to Baudrillard (review)

In Semiologies of Travel David Scott offers the reader a veritable kaleidoscope of literature, images, and criticism in order to illustrate how the experience of travel demands its own sort of reading. The book's span is impressive, moving from Jean de Léry to Disneyland to Roland Barthes on sukiyaki. This vastness of interrogation allows Scott to present a grand narrative: traveling is all about learning to read symbols, other people, oneself, icons, cultural systems and certain landscapes. Scott is particularly interested in travelers who actively seek out foreign semiologies and who are motivated by: "the nostalgia for epistemic systems in which the symbol maintains an authentic connection with the real or sacred" (14). He carefully dissects the various elements of these sign systems using a wide array of examples. The introduction could be a useful essay to introduce students to both the ideas of semiology and the importance of travel in French literary culture. Scott's arguments about semiology find their sources in a canonical France which he presents as being firmly rooted in the Englightenment and Romanticism.

Scott's pace is demanding, with new writers and artists cited at length every few pages. A good third of the book consists of long citations, their translations and illustrations. For some readers, the extensive citations may just be extra raisins in the fruitcake, adding a richness rarely seen in academic works. For others these large chunks of text may seem rather undigested as they are not always closely read or integrated into the text. Scott has a wealth of material at his fingertips and might have better resisted the temptation to paste in so much from his obviously extensive reading on the subject. The long and extremely varied quotations detract from the book in two ways. First, they distract the reader from Scott's underlying essay which is a lucid and poetic reflection on the semiologies of our time. His writing on semiology covers creative and historical questions in a manner that is (without the citations) enjoyable to follow and inspires more reflection. For example in the first chapter Scott examines both how sign systems are perceived by the native (sic) and also how western travelers perceive these systems. In this chapter Scott seems to be saying that the western traveler and the primitive (sic) both have difficulty reading native semiologies. Further into the chapter, however, Scott writes that "It is the aim, however, of this chapter primarily to focus on the semiotic issues at stake in Baudrillard's experience of American culture" (48). What began as a cogent discussion of how to read the other and what the other is reading becomes instead a rather breathless trek from Eugène Delacroix to Jean Baudrillard to Michel Butor to Andy Warhol to Marshall McLuhan. The second chapter introduces the concept of the dynamic interpretant and the differences between a discourse of discovery and scientific discourse. The third chapter discusses the making and unmaking of the self through experiences of travel. In the fourth chapter Scott presents utopias, dystopias and the myths they bring with them. Chapters 5 and 6 treat the semiologies of landscape, how to read the desert and the jungle, respectively. The seventh chapter is an entertaining and creative look at what Scott refers to as "grammars of gastronomy." The chapters are diverse and his critical questions are evocative, one only wishes there were more written by him.

The second drawback of the lengthy and diverse citations is the limited information about specific authors. There are too many and their citations appear as excerpts rather than as contextualized examples of larger works. For example, specific titles of Victor Segalen's works are not always mentioned and the author has made the curious choice of drawing most Segalen citations from a 1978 anthology. The complete works of Segalen are now available in multiple critical editions and Segalen himself underscored the generic differences of works such as Equipée or Feuilles de Route. It is...