New routes and reasons for leaving home
TRAVEL IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE CULTURES. The persistence of diversity. Charles Forsdick. 255pp. Oxford University Press. £50 (US $95). 0 19 925829 5.
When the narrator of Michel Houellebecq's novel, Platform, a forty-something French civil servant called Michel, decides to take a package tour to Thailand with money bequeathed by his father, his reasons are simple. "Like all of the inhabitants of Western Europe", he tells us, "I want to travel . . . . To put it more bluntly, what I really want, basically, is to be a tourist". Michel has no pretensions to elitist ideas of "travel" (a word that owes its history to the shifting stresses of travail and the Latin trepalium, a three-pronged instrument of torture); he is a rational consumer with expectations commensurate with cost and an appreciation of that entirely functional index of potential pleasure: the star rating system. Tourism is, for Michel, the most refined form of travel, a way of sampling Asia's exoticism through a string of secluded resorts, nightclubs and massage parlours. His tour with the travel company Nouvelles Frontieres does not yield any surprises, but then neither does it disappoint; it combines the mildly stimulating spectacle of Asian village life, glimpsed through the parted curtains of an air-conditioned coach, with the carnal gratifications so readily available to the Western sex tourist.
His tourism is a kind of travelling voyeurism without the ideological baggage or physical discomforts that encumber traditional ideas of travel.
If Michel's view of Asia appears a particularly debased image of banal exoticism and sexual exploitation, in which culture and human bodies are prostituted with equal ease, it is worth remembering that this is not only a vision of global capitalism at the close of the twentieth century, but a way of seeing that is shaped by a long history of travel to the East. One hundred and fifty years before Michel, a young Gustave Flaubert was pursuing his own itinerary of sex tourism in the Orient, travelling with his friend Maxime Du Camp to Egypt and recording his impressions in an extensive collection of travel notes and letters home. Flaubert was seduced by the chaos and grotesquerie of the place, the freshness of experience it seemed to offer, and his vivid descriptions of street markets, brothels and mosques blend the neo-Romantic exoticism of the aspiring artist with the finely observed realism he would later develop in his fiction.
Flaubert had a low opinion of travel writing as a genre, however, believing that the true purpose of travel was to "enliven one's style" in literary writing. His travel account was thus conceived both as an exercise in style and as an appropriation of images and impressions that would animate the novels he dreamed of writing. In this respect, Flaubert's orientalism was, as Edward Said has pointed out, typically "revivalist", a way of speaking about the Orient that brings it to life in order to deliver it to himself and his readers.
Despite his protestation to Alfred le Poitevin that his lack of bourgeois illusions spared him from disillusionment, Flaubert arrived in Egypt with an imaginative vision of the Orient already in place, a dream of "cities with domes of gold and minarets of porcelain, palaces of lava built on plinths of alabaster, marble-rimmed pools where sultanas come to bathe their bodies at the hour when the moon makes bluer the shadow of the groves and more limpid the silvery water of the fountains". His travel notes record his frequent experiences of deja vu, and he wrote to Jules Cloquet that "anyone who is a little attentive rediscovers here much more than he discovers". Although Flaubert's own account embellishes this experience of "refreshed memories" with the suggestion of a spiritual homecoming, it is not difficult to detect echoes of an Orient already mapped out in his imagination -"always young because nothing changes".
Neither Flaubert nor Houellebecq are the direct subject of Charles Forsdick's Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures, which focuses instead on French travel literature written between the 1890s and 1990s, but their thoughts on exoticism, diversity and tourism are useful framing devices for the work of a figure who is central to this study: the French writer and traveller Victor Segalen (1878-1919). For in one respect, at least, all three are fellow travellers: voyaging is less about understanding "elsewhere" than inventing a personal aesthetics of the exotic.
Segalen's eclectic body of work has come increasingly into vogue over recent decades, particularly among postcolonial academics, for whom his thinking on such key concepts as "difference" and "the Other", avant la lettre, has proved both influential and problematic. His ambitious Essai sur l'exotisme was never completed, but was published posthumously in 1955 as a fragmentary, often detailed, series of notes (the English translation, Essay on Exoticism, had to wait until 2002). Segalen's Essay attempts to work through some of his anxieties over the apparent decline of "Diversity" ("le Divers"), an umbrella term sheltering everything "foreign, strange, unexpected, surprising, mysterious, amorous, superhuman, heroic, and even divine, everything that is Other". It is precisely our experience of this diversity - "the feeling which Diversity stirs in us" - that Segalen calls l'exotisme. Exoticism is thus understood as an aesthetic experience, a vision of the world.
