Matilda Poizat-Amar Think Kent (Modern Languages)

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 focus 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 ItinŽraire de Paris ˆ JŽrusalem 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 narratives in France, the 20th century is a bit of a crisis for French travel literature. French travel literature experiences a bit of a crisis because academics and writers alike question the relevance and the future of such narratives. This crises 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, ÔJe hais les voyages et les explorateursÕ which is I hate travel and explorers. 

These strong statements actually exemplify a conflicting relationship 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  an even bigger one TransborŽal 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 levels 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.