Fin de partie au Mali. Oreille rouge d’Éric Chevillard

Abstract

The issue of the “end” has been tackled extensively in travel literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: not only does the idea of travelling, and of experiencing the world in this way, seem to be under threat but the very possibility of faithfully reporting these experiences seems itself to be in doubt. If the first chapter of Tristes Tropiques (1955) encapsulates this trend, one cannot but note that a very large number of travel accounts strike a similar, plaintive note privileging “la vision pessimiste d’une disparition de l’altérité, plaçant les espaces lointains sous le signe de l’éphémère, du déclin, du glissement irrémédiable et parfois fascinant, vers une dissipation dans la monotonie culturelle mondiale” (Moura, La Littérature des lointains, 1998, p. 409). In this context, travel accounts such as Oreille rouge by Éric Chevillard (2005) deserve particular attention as they do not simply reproduce clichés (whether in terms of travelling itself or of writing style) but overcome them and cross yet another boundary (no longer geographical but rather stylistic and/or narrative), thus inviting the reader to explore this uncharted space of writing, often perhaps more than place as such. Attention to the construction/fragmentation of the text, ironic distance, the duality of the narrator/traveller roles, wordplay, all of these doubtlessly enable him to “reinvent” travelling but also to look closely into one of the most important dimensions of contemporary literature: writing about oneself.