Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Matilda Poizat-Amar and I'm a lecturer in
French in the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent.
My research interests focuses on travel literature in the 20th and
21st century. Today, I'm going to talk to you about travel literature and more
specifically I would like to explore a few aspects of a question that has
been bothering me for a couple of years now, which is why does travel literature
still exist? Why do we bother writing about our own travels?
Why do we bother reading about them? Why do we bother reading about travels of
other people when we could actually just take a plane and experience the world
ourselves, when we could just more easily actually scroll down Google maps
to find a decent idea of what the St Basil's Cathedral looks like in Moscow
or the Eiffel Tower looks like in Paris for instance. Why does travel literature still exist
is a wide and an important question. So let's break it down a bit and let's start
by the beginning. Why do I mean, what do I mean by travel literature exactly?
In English this term is often used interchangeably with another one, travel
writing. Travel writing is often used interchangeably with travel literature.
This is for a good reason, the meaning of these two terms is indeed very very
close. They both describe a text in which the overarching plot focuses on
the movement of at least one protagonist to a foreign land or across a foreign
land or land or space that is unfamiliar to them. However, I wouldn't say that
travel writing and travel literature are exactly synonymous.
On the one hand, travel writing encompasses all texts focusing on the
trajectory of one protagonist, whether or not these texts are part of
literature or not. It includes not only travelogues, novels, and so on but also
exploration reports, scientific theory reports, some go as far as including
travel guides into this category. On the other hand, travel literature is a bit
more restrictive in the sense that it only includes texts that belong to
literature. Texts that can be fictional, such as Kerouac's On the Road
for instance, or non-fictional such as The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara. However, it excludes non-literary
texts, text that don't belong to literature, it excludes exploration reports, it excludes scientific reports
and it excludes travel guides. So, today we are going to focus on travel
literature and more specifically French travel in literature. Why focus on
French travel literature? Well French travel literature holds a long-standing
tradition of publishing travel and narratives across centuries and gives us
a clear idea of the evolution of travel literature as a whole. By longstanding
tradition I mean that it goes back at least, at least to the 13th
century with the travels of Marco Polo that were actually written for the first
time in Old French by an Italian writer. Moving on to the Enlightenment and the
18th century, we find texts such as Voltaire's Candide published in 1759
that also focus on the travel of a protagonist to be able to mock the
French society. In the 19th century travel literature still exists and
sometimes take a more personal take or stance with romantics
writing about their own journeys. Here we have, for instance, Chateaubriand's
Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem published in 1811. In the 20th century
writers still published travel narratives in France of course, sometimes
reflecting and redefining notions that are traditionally associated with travel
such as exoticism, here we see Segalen's essay on exoticism. However,
despite this very long solid tradition of publishing travel narrative in
France, the 20th century is a bit of a crisis for French travel literature.
France travel literature experiences a bit of a crisis because academics and
writers alike question the relevance and the future of such narratives.
These crises it has been so important that a conference was organised in 2005
on French travel literature to discuss whether or not the 20th century would be,
would have been, the last century of travel literature. That's quite a
pessimistic view on the question here. But actually this important claim was
supported by a web of relevant arguments. Some of these arguments had to do with
the changes that were happening in the world such as for instance the lack of
unexplored spaces, the fact that the map of the world was pretty much
definite at that stage and that perhaps reading about travels was less of a
necessity to be able to understand the world.
These arguments are so focused on the importance of globalisation which
rendered the experience of travel a bit less exceptional, a bit more banal and
maybe less worthy of being written about.
The access of Internet. of google maps for instance also was problematic
perhaps threatening to the existence of travel writing. All the arguments
also focus not so much on the changes that were happening in the world but
also changes that were happening in French literature at the time. Michel Le Bris
in 2002 for instance expresses with a serious concern about the fact
that in the second half of the 20th century French literature was on the
whole more concerned with questions of the self, subjective types of
writing such as the autobiography or to fiction. For instance, they were very
popular in the 80s, much more so than questions of the world and travel writing.
Finally, writers themselves were a bit dubious and expressed some concerns
about whether or not travel literature was still an appropriate
platform for them to express their views on the world and this actually goes back
to at least the 20th century. As early as 1927 a Belgian-born writer Henri Michaux
right at the beginning of a travelogue that he wrote
'Un homme qui ne sait ni voyager ni tenir un journal a compose ce voyage' the man who wrote this travelogue knows
neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal, which is a bit concerning. A few
years later in '55 another famous writer called Claude Levi-Strauss writes at the
beginning of a travelogue, ‘Je hais les voyages et les explorateurs’ which is I hate travel and
explorers. These strong statements actually exemplify a conflicting
relationships the writers held with travel literature throughout the
20th century and suggests that perhaps the traditional form of travel
narratives was no longer able to provide these writers with an appropriate
platform to express their views on the world. Fast forward a few years, nowadays
in 2018, can we say that travel literature is dead. Of course not, and
actually not only does it still exist which is actually grown stronger both in
terms of popularity and critical importance. The rise of popularity in
travel literature can first be noticed in the emergence of new
publishing houses that were created in the last twenty years only and
specialised in travel literature alone. I'm speaking for instance of a few French
publishing houses that were created for instance, Elytis in 2000 or in 2002
Anacharsis or bigger one even Transboréal created in 2005, which
focused almost exclusively on travel narratives, demonstrating
that not only writers still write about their travels but that people are still willing
to engage with these texts and read them.
Travel narratives have actually gained critical attention in literary prizes
and I'm speaking here of a text published in 2015
called 'Boussole' by Mathias Enard, which received a prestigious prize the Prix
Goncourt, the Goncourt prize for a piece of writing that was very much inspired by
this long-standing tradition of travel writing and travel literature and
more importantly, perhaps, the amount of academic works including
publications, colloquiums, conferences, research centres on travel
literature has blossomed in which unprecedented lvels in the last 20
years, which means that not only travel literature sells well but it's also
interesting to look at for scholars that are interested in literature. So what is
it? What is it that allowed for travel literature to survive despite these
crises that it experienced and what is it that makes it so fascinating for
scholars interested in literature. The first reason that comes to mind to
explain the survival of travel literature has to do, of course, with the
nature of these texts. All these texts in one way or another can be read as an
invitation to cross boundaries, to overcome obstacles. They tend to prefer
flexibility, resilience to rigidity and stillness. Likewise all these travel
narratives as a whole tend to navigate the broader map of literature with a
similar sense of playful flexibility and they tend to push the boundaries further
and every obstacle that could have threatened the existence becomes a new
strength. Think about the access of the internet which we mentioned earlier on
as a possible threat to the existence of travel literature, actually not
only has it not stopped travel literature from existing but it
has also provided a practical source of inspiration for so many of these writers.
We can for instance take the example of this text a Eclats D'Amerique (Fragments
of America) published by a French writer, Olivier Hodasava, in 2014. This text,
apparently offers quite a traditional narrative structure and quite a traditional
narrative plot. It is the story of a Frenchman
who embarks into a road trip in the United States so far nothing exceptionally
new. However, there was a twist to that plot, there is noticeable from the
structure of the text itself, we follow the protagonist state by
state as he progresses through the United States. However, we do not follow
his movements, we follow him state by state by alphabetical order, Alabama,
Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, and so on. This explicitly arbitrary structure that
breaks away from the traditional narrative line of a travel text can be
explained by the fact that this journey isn't the result of a geographical
journey but actually the result of hours and hours spent on google maps, it is the
result of a virtual journey to the United States through a computer screen.
This text is illustrated not exactly by pictures as such but rather by
screenshots of google maps that the author found on his virtual journey. By
writing such a subversive piece of literature the author of course
playfully questions the boundaries between experience and imagination,
movement and immobility, the virtual world and the real world, but in doing so
he also questions the relevance of the definitions that we give to all the
components or almost all the components of a travel narrative including
space, movement and experience, which leads to my second point about why is
it so fascinating for travel for scholars interested in travel
literature to look at this text. It is because as a whole these travel
narratives have been and still are very difficult to grasp.
They're even difficult to grasp as a genre, they encompass so many different types
of writing including novels, poetry, diaries, pictures, writing, fiction
non-fiction, that some academics have struggled and still struggle to define it
as a genre, sometimes referring to it as a cross genre genre or as a non-genre. These
debates on the generic definition of travel literature
is of course interesting, beyond this it reveals also the fact that the critical
terminology that we usually use to describe texts does not really work when
it comes to travel literature because of this tendency for this text to
misbehave, to push boundaries even further than we're used to.
As a result also academics have to find new ways to approach these texts, a
new flexible approach to these texts, that not only focuses on traditional
questions such as the poetic, stylistics, the genre of a text but also allows us to
focus on what should actually at the core of these texts which is of course
the movement, the rhythm, which is the accelerations the decelerations,
the strolling points, the breaking points, and in turn finding a set of tools that
is flexible and allows us to describe accurately this text, to understand what
makes them breathe, what makes them move, what makes them exist, also help us
reflect on how we approach literature as a whole
and look at all the texts, not only travel literature but all literary texts,
focusing not on traditional questions but also focusing on their own
individual movement, on their own individual reason. In conclusion,
why does travel literature still exist? There are many answers to that question and
I have yet to find a few of these, but in the terms of this very short
discussion we can already establish that A) it exists because it is a flexible form
of writing, which thrives on change, which thrives on the difficulty, that is open to
change, B) it is difficult to grasp as a whole and for an academic that makes it
very interesting. And C) the necessity to find new ways to approach these texts
that keep moving around allow us to reflect on our traditional approaches to
literature as a whole. Thank you very much for listening.