The Art of the Text

Visuality in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literary and Other Media

Susan R Harrow

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780708326596
• eBook ISBN: 9781783165797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Art of the Text contributes to the fast-developing dialogue between textual studies and visual culture studies. It focuses on the processes through which writers think and readers respond visually and, in essays by researchers in literature, screen and visual studies, the volume explores the visuality of the literary and non-literary text, with a sustained focus on French material of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visuality is appraised here not as a state, but as a set of processes of adaptation, resistance, negotiation, and transformation. By reading visually, the contributors here reactivate the visual-textual relations of canonical texts - from Romanticism to Naturalism, Surrealism to high Modernism; from film to fan literature, television to picture language.

Portraits and Neologisms: Understanding the Visual in Henri Michaux’s ‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’1

Nina Parish

Henri Michaux composed many different types of travel narratives during his lifetime and the idea of travel is central to his creative concerns. He writes in ‘Observations’: ‘J’écris pour me parcourir. Peindre, composer, écrire: me parcourir. Là est l’aventure d’être en vie.’2 The first of his imaginary journeys, ‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’, was published in 1936, at around the same time as this poet-artist was beginning to publish books including his own texts and images and when the visual was becoming established as an important part of his output. ‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’ contains no visual elements, however. There had been plans for an atlas including maps, sketches and portraits to accompany the text, but these projects never came to fruition. In this chapter, I shall examine the place of this text in Michaux’s visual and verbal production, its publishing history and its relationship to the traditional travel narrative in order to demonstrate that the absence of images in this work is telling for the representation of Michaux’s fictional stay in Garabagne. Although there are no physical images in ‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’, the visual is still very much present. Using Mieke Bal’s visual analysis of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as a starting point, I shall explore her questions in relation to Michaux: ‘So where is the visual situated in a literary text? How can we read “visually”?’3 It seems that in ‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’ portraits and neologisms pre-empt the emergence of the visual in Michaux’s works and add to the sense of otherness created in this depiction of exotic lands. Studying the absence of conspicuous visual elements in ‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’ helps us to understand the creative process and how representation works.

‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’ was published for the second time alongside two other accounts of invented countries, Au pays de la magie and Ici Poddema in Ailleurs in 1948.4 These texts participate in an extensive cycle of travel narratives in Michaux’s œuvre, which range from his so-called real journeys evoked in Ecuador (1929) and Un barbare en Asie (1933) to the imaginary journeys related in books such as Ailleurs, to the drug narratives published in the 1950s and 1960s, which can arguably be referred to as metaphorical spiritual or inner journeys across mescaline country. Michaux travelled widely throughout his life and visited various countries in Latin America and Asia, as the titles of these early writings imply. He comments on his reasons for travelling in Quelques renseignements sur cinquante-neuf années d’existence:

Il voyage contre.

Pour expulser de lui sa patrie, ses attaches de toutes sortes et ce qui s’est en lui et malgré lui attaché de culture grecque ou romaine ou germanique ou d’habitudes belges.

Voyages d’expatriation.5

Michaux travelled in order to escape the constraints imposed on him by the Western world and to start anew. But, rather than experiencing some type of liberation or revelation offered by faraway places, in the writing of his first travel narratives, Michaux finds himself instead confronted with an uneasy and sometimes confusing relationship between the real and the imaginary. Michel Butor has categorized these first travel narratives as ‘livres de pérégrination’, adding: ‘C’est d’abord le voyage réel qui sert de modèle à l’imaginaire’.6 They will in turn give rise to the creation of the imaginary countries and peoples evoked in texts such as ‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’.

Ecuador, with its purposely misleading subtitle ‘journal de voyage’, supposedly relates the actual journey that Michaux undertook with the Ecuadorian poet Alfredo Gangotena at the end of 1927. Its preface immediately throws the reader off track with the following words: ‘Un homme qui ne sait ni voyager ni tenir un journal a composé ce journal de voyage.’7 According to Raymond Bellour, editor of Michaux’s complete works in the Pléiade edition, this journey into the unknown and the exotic, inscribed in the authentic native spelling of the place name in the title, is transformed into a ‘lieu d’écriture’ through its very subtitle.8 Michaux’s initial travel writings are, therefore, less to do with the experience of travelling itself than with the writer’s own efforts to represent this experience. In these travel works, the real journeys are as imaginary as the imaginary journeys are real. The preface to Ailleurs underlines this friction: ‘Il traduit le Monde, celui qui voulait s’en échapper, qui pourrait échapper? Le vase est clos.’9

Some critics have identified allusions to real events – such as the German occupation of France or South African apartheid – in the evocations of imaginary countries in Ailleurs.10 Indeed, recent research on ‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’ has explored its extra-literary relevance and underlined its intertextual links with other travel narratives, whether literary or scientific, countering claims by writers such as André Gide that this text’s interest lies in its actual ‘inactualité’.11 These extratextual and intertextual links confirm that all texts are woven out of existing structures and other texts. No text is ever completely original or contained in a cultural and linguistic vacuum because of the need to use a conventional signifying system. Indeed, it could be argued that this impossibility of total originality leads Michaux to disrupt textual conventions and to experiment with other expressive forms. But, to return to Gide, the inactuality of Michaux’s writing is ultimately liberating because it points to the role of literature as a means of subtracting the factual and of opening up possibilities for reimagining the world.

In his travel narratives Michaux interweaves reflections on different journeys and the creative process (both verbal and visual) itself, which in turn produce tensions between the real and the imaginary. From an early stage, Michaux argues that through leaving language and expressing himself using visual means, he will be able to render the real in a more direct way. In Ecuador he writes:

Le nom. Je cherchais des noms et j’étais malheureux. Le nom: valeur d’après coup, et de longue expérience.

Il n’y a que pour les peintres dans le premier contact avec l’étranger; le dessin, la couleur, quel tout et qui se présente d’emblée!12

Michaux is attracted to the representational possibilities offered to him by the visual, in this case, painting. But his conscious and written fictionalisations of his various journeys represent the condition of all travel writing or writing in general. Michaux is well aware that any textual representation can only ever be figurative; it can never be real, thus highlighting how language constructs and shapes the world rather than the world determining language. This is why Roland Barthes makes reference to Michaux’s ‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’ in the opening pages of L’Empire des signes, his visual and verbal exploration of Japan:

Si je veux imaginer un peuple fictif, je puis lui donner un nom inventé, le traiter déclarativement comme un objet romanesque, fonder une nouvelle Garabagne, de façon à ne compromettre aucun pays réel dans ma fantaisie (mais alors c’est cette fantaisie même que je compromets dans les signes de la littérature).13

L’Empire des signes and ‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’ remind us powerfully that the creative process does not depend on some pre-given reality, but can transcend the empirical and intimate the new.

Michaux started work on a first version of ‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’, entitled ‘Moeurs et coutumes des tribus et des peuples de Grande Garabagne’, in 1934. A turbulent publishing history ensued and the book appeared two years later, the first volume of Jean Paulhan’s ‘Métamorphoses’ collection with Gallimard.14 In the introduction to this first edition, Michaux alluded to a parallel project, an Atlas de Grande Garabagne (cartes, portraits, croquis), which was also mentioned amongst the works that he was said to be preparing at the time: ‘Il a paru intéressant à l’éditeur de publier séparément, en un atlas de grand format, les belles cartes de Fitzgerald, et les croquis et portraits que j’ai faits des différentes races observées. Cet ouvrage sera bientôt terminé.’15 A work containing both visual and verbal elements was planned, reminding us of the importance for Michaux of the visual as well as the interaction between these two expressive forms at that time. Bellour elaborates on this point:

C’est la première des trois tentatives avortées par lesquelles Michaux tenta de lier l’écriture de ses voyages imaginaires à sa création de dessinateur et de peintre, qui commence alors à prendre forme: Entre centre et absence, son premier recueil illustré, paraît deux mois à peine après Voyage en Grande Garabagne, et le jour victorieux de son ‘Eurêka’ en peinture, annoncé à Paulhan, date du 6 janvier 1936.16

In this quotation, Bellour places this visual project in the context of Michaux’s contemporary interdisciplinary produ...

Table of contents

• THE ART OF THE TEXT
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction
• I Thinking the visual image
• Jules Verne: The Unbearable Brightness of Seeing
• Affinities of Photography and Syntax in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu
• Portraits and Neologisms: Understanding the Visual in Henri Michaux’s ‘Voyage en Grande Garabagne’1
• The ‘trou noir’: Visualizations of Nihilism in Nietzsche and Modiano
• II Intermedial migrations in the 1920s
• Painting and Cinema in Aragon’s Anicet
• Isotypes and Elephants: Picture-Language as Visual Writing in the Work and Correspondence of Otto Neurath
• Colette: An Eye For Textiles
• Stars as Sculpture in the 1920s Fan-Magazine Interview
• III Visual negotiations and adaptations
• Victor Hugo and Painting: The Exceptional Case of the Orientales
• Visions and Re-visions: Zola, Cardinal and L’Œuvre
• Donner à voir: Poetic Language and Visual Representation according to Paul Éluard
• ‘La lettre au cinéma n’est pas une excellente solution’: A Heteromedial Analysis of Chantal Akerman’s Proust Adaptation
• Translation sources
• Bibliography