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  • Veiled Encounters: Representing the Orient in 17th-Century French Travel Literature
  • Ellen R. Welch
Veiled Encounters: Representing the Orient in 17th-Century French Travel Literature. By Michael Harrigan. (Faux Titre, 321). Amsterdam and New York, Rodopi, 2008. 300 pp. Pb €60.00.

Michael Harrigan's ambitious, comprehensive study of more than 60 seventeenth-century French travel narratives about the Levant and East Asia represents a significant contribution to the emerging fields of early modern French Orientalism and seventeenth-century travel writing. The book aims to assess seventeenth-century French travelers' representations of the Asian 'Other'. While Sophie Linon-Chipon's excellent Gallia Orientalis: Voyages aux Indes Orientales, 1529-1722 (Paris, Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003) provides a more thorough literary analysis of French récits de voyage as a genre, Harrigan's book makes the compelling case that this body of texts contributes to the transhistorical study of Orientalism and representations of the Other. Measuring his large and diverse corpus of récits de voyage against Edward Said's definition of Orientalism, Harrigan argues that the travelers' portraits of the East blended first-hand observation with entrenched tropes and stereotypes, revealing 'the tension between the concept of the Orient and what travellers actually saw' (p. 17). The first two chapters present a synthetic reading of the travel narratives as a means to explore the feasibility of any cross-cultural representation. Harrigan draws on the insights of anthropologists and language theorists to argue, convincingly if not originally, that all encounter with the other is necessarily mediated through the observer's pre-existing conceptual and linguistic tools for understanding and transmitting the experience of strangeness. Chapters 3 and 4 refine this hypothesis by distinguishing French representations of the Levant or Middle East from those of the East Indies and Far East. Influenced by a long tradition of contact and representation, travelers to the Levant portrayed a threatening land ruled by tyrants and mined with seductive, sequestered women. The Indes orientales, in contrast, appeared as a fertile [End Page 459] paradise of natural riches peopled by indolent or violent barbarians. This depiction of the Indies as a land of unexploited precious resources both reflected and encouraged European economic intervention. Chapter 5 adopts a more formalist approach, focusing on the narrative structure of the récits de voyage, especially the role of adventure tales, stories of transgression and other dramatic anecdotes that both embellish the narration and reinforce long-held stereotypes such as that of the duplicitous Jew or the forbidden seralgio. Here, Harrigan perceptively illustrates the complicity between travel writers' aesthetic concerns and their perpetuation of Orientalist tropes. Without claiming to present a totalizing portrait of French accounts of Asia, this study offers an intriguing synthesis of a corpus defined equally by its poetic form and by the geographical and imaginative topos it describes. Through Harrigan's overview, readers discover a vast quantity of individual texts, including well-known accounts (those by Chardin, Bernier, Challe, Tavernier, etc.) as well as lesser studied and anonymously published works. A rich, well-organized bibliography of primary and secondary sources guarantees that Harrigan's book will foster new scholarship in this promising literary territory.

Ellen R. Welch
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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