„Faux comme un diamant du Canada“

Abstract

Abstract The European travel narratives that follow the discovery of the New World have already been extensively studied, from historical, anthropological and literary perspectives. However, we would like to reread them from the perspective of the tension between a “marvellous possession” (Greenblatt 1991) and a more profound failure. The early travelogues show a complex discursive architecture with a textual subject facing an absolute Other, seeking to establish on the one hand an analogy based on a reassuring fictional intertextual horizon and on the other an exaggeration of otherness, symbolised by anthropophagy and monstrosity. If, as Todorov (1982) thinks, such an architecture was indispensable to the enterprise of conquest, it is nevertheless at the root of a triple failure. If the undeniable intercultural failure has already been widely studied, we will develop two others: the failure of the genre of the travelogue from the Middle Ages as an interpretative matrix, and, more profoundly, the failure of a Western knowledge paradigm, which will be shown in an exemplary way by the criticisms of las Casas and Montaigne.