Les voyageurs d'îles: sur la route des Indes aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles par Arlette Girault-Fruet

Abstract

GIRAULT-FRUET, ARLETTE. Les voyageurs d’îles: sur la route des Indes aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Garnier, 2010. ISBN 978-2-8124-0152-7. Pp. 598. 84 a. Presented as a search for “la topique de l’île,” Girault-Fruet’s study catalogues the commonplaces shared by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel narratives to Madagascar and other islands of the Indian Ocean. The book synthesizes nearly a hundred texts written by over seventy-five European authors— first-hand travelers as well as those who chronicled others’ adventures from the comfort of home. Offering an essentially structuralist analysis, the book is organized according to the four stages of the typical island journey. “Le temps de la navigation” covers the sea voyage itself, with its inevitable storms, shipwrecks, navigational errors, encounters with sharks and sea monsters, and worries about day-to-day survival. In “Le temps de la découverte,” travelers recognize the island as a locus amoenus, a characterization elaborated during the “Escale, ou le temps de l’île d’or,” when authors revel in the abundance of flora and fauna. Throughout these three parts, the book demonstrates the commonalities among texts separated by many decades and authored by travelers from different countries and social groups. Indeed, the author argues that the works’ efficacy depended on these repetitions. To convince readers that their accounts were truthful, writers had to repeat what was already known about the place. Readers of travel literature will be familiar with this self-referential quality of the genre. Often, though (and perhaps especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), travel writers cited their predecessors in order to correct or augment those earlier accounts, so that appeals to authority served to highlight the originality or superiority of the new narrative. Such gestures become invisible in the early sections of Les voyageurs d’îles, as Girault-Fruet’s approach to the texts inevitably elides their individuality. The book offers little in the way of close reading, supporting its observations instead with ample quotes from various authors. At times, this assimilation of texts from two centuries of travel leads the reader to question the functioning of the topoi that the author identifies. How did they become commonplaces in the first place? When and how were authors influenced by those travelers whose footsteps they retraced? The book deals with these questions in the final and most successful section, “Le peuplement, ou le temps de l’île,” which examines representations of a “fallen” island paradise, mostly in later eighteenth-century texts, where writers lament “l’ampleur des dégâts” (435) caused by the European presence, comment on the slave system, and describe the island with an “exotisme désenchanté” (439). Girault-Fruet illustrates how travelers’ experience of disillusionment stems from their disappointment as readers upon finding that the island fails to live up to the Paradise described by their predecessors. The tonally complex passages cited in this part are especially compelling to modern readers, due to their resonance with today’s languages of environmentalism. In addition to presenting a synoptic overview of early modern travel writing about the Indian Ocean, Les voyageurs d’îles considers the island as an imaginative place as well as a geographical one. The author characterizes travelers’ island depictions as imago rather than image, “à la fois portrait et fantôme, description et vision” (166). Contemplating the island’s emotional connotations (desire, euphoria, nostalgia, isolation), Girault-Fruet draws parallels to islands in modern literature from Defoe to Baudelaire and Aragon. These trans-historical observations tantalizingly suggest how early modern travel narratives might have participated in the evolution of the insular paradise in the European imagination. Although it does not present such a genealogy of literary 180 FRENCH REVIEW 86.1 islands or island travel, this study offers an admirably thorough exposé of a relatively uncharted body of literature, uncovering themes and questions worthy of future exploration. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Ellen R. Welch GROVE, LAURENCE. Comics in French: The European Bande Dessinée in Context. New York: Berghahn, 2010. ISBN 978-1-84545-588-0. Pp. xiv + 346. $100. Il est de coutume de commencer tout article concernant la bande dessinée en...