Semiologies of Travel: From Gautier to Baudrillard (review)

David Scott's innovative study of the semiologies of travel is a welcome addition to the growing field of works analysing francophone representations of travel. Most previous studies in French have focused on definitions of the genre or the sociology of travel, whereas their Anglophone counterparts have concentrated on questions of exoticism and postcolonialism. Scott's systematic application of semiological analyses to a plethora of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts in French therefore provides an illuminating new approach and raises central issues regarding the nature of travel as a cultural encounter and the visual and textual inscription of this experience. Noting that 'travel writers are sign-readers in many senses of the word' (p. 23), the author makes a convincing case for the advantages of reading travel narratives through signs in the French context in particular. Focusing on the genre of the travel journal, Scott has selected a wide-ranging corpus of authors from varying disciplines, encompassing conscious or unconscious semioticians, ethnologists, sociologists, political thinkers, and literary writers. The author's ambitious grouping of contrasting destinations explored by key writers from the Romantic, modern and post-modern periods within the space of an individual chapter leads to instructive intertextual dialogues and fresh perspectives. Taking the first chapter as an example, which deploys a Saussurean approach to reading signs, the author skilfully charts a trajectory from Gautier in Spain to Butor in the United States, via Segalen in Polynesia and Barthes in Japan. The links between ethnology and travel writing constitute a key leitmotif in the work, which considers the tensions between personal accounts and scientific objectivity, and Scott's admiration for the personalized ethnological writings of Leiris shines through. The work is structured around a series of central themes, such as identity crises and the other as interpretant, as well as key destinations and experiences such as utopias and dystopias, jungles and gastronomies. A particular highlight is provided by the incisive textual analysis in the chapter 'Signs in the desert', which expertly applies the Peircian concept of the triad in order to produce revealing comparisons between Chateaubriand on Judea, Fromentin on the Sahara and Baudrillard on Death Valley. Semiologies of Travel will appeal to all readers with an interest in the study of travel cultures, as well as the application of semiotics to new fields, and excellent translations are provided of longer quotations in French. The study's conclusion offers some timely reminders, as Scott warns that modern travel writers also run the risk of essentialising and converting the other into 'the mere realisation of a theoretical category' (p. 212). One minor limitation is that the comparative analyses can obscure the contrasting ideological, socio-historical and geographical contexts of travel in the colonial and post-colonial eras. Conversely, Scott amply illustrates his claim that there is a marked French tendency to elaborate a conceptual basis for the experience of travel. As the first full-length study to analyse the relationship between travel and semiotics, this important new work paves the way for new modes of investigating travel in the twenty-first century.