Honorons Le Temps Dans Sa Voracité: Weathering the Exotic in the Work of Victor Segalen

Abstract

Throughout his travels, Victor Segalen remained an observer of the effects of the weather, but his writings on this subject are far from cohesive and reflect the radical shifts in his thought. As soon as he arrived in Polynesia, Segalen came into contact with a cyclone in the Tuamotu archipelago. His accounts of this explore the processes of cultural transformation in colonial Polynesia. The tension between natural and cultural processes are seen as emblematic of wider processes of levelling of diversity. It is in China that the effects of the weather — and specifically erosion — become a central element of Segalen's aesthetics of diversity. The Chinese statuary on which he focuses is an integral, almost organic part of the landscape. The erosion of stone statues becomes a key to the processes of Segalen's Chinese exoticism. This weathering, however, reveals an inevitable tension between an exploration of Chinese understandings of impermanence and the steady erosion of a pre-Revolutionary China. The result is a new poetics of ruins which rejects preservation and focuses on the processes of flux. Weathering is therefore the focus of the problems of intercultural contact and homogenization, and of issues of permanence and flux, fixity, and mobility.