Paralyses: Literature, Travel, and Ethnography in French Modernity by John Culbert, and: Voyages contemporains: voyages de la lenteur ed. by Philippe Antoine

Abstract

Reviews 217 Delvaux ends on the notion of our collective responsibility for acknowledging the atrocious crimes that Delbo puts before us. Delvaux accurately questions Delbo’s use of “je” as being a collective voice rather than an individual memory, stating that “Toujours, le ‘je’ est au service de l’autre” and that it is “la voix d’une communauté” (217). While the overall aim of this collection is to share Delbo’s texts with a larger audience, most readers will need to be familiar with or at least have read part of Delbo’s trilogy to appreciate the arguments presented in the critical essays. Overall, Caron and Marquart successfully tackle the issue of developing and expanding upon the notion of communaut é and introducing Delbo to a wider audience. This compilation will be an important reference for readers and scholars. Florida State University Virginia Osborn Culbert, John. Paralyses: Literature, Travel, and Ethnography in French Modernity. Lincoln: UP of Nebraska, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8032-2991-4. Pp. x + 444. $65. Antoine, Philippe, éd. Voyages contemporains: voyages de la lenteur. Vol. 1. Caen: Minard, 2010. ISBN 978-2-256-91157-6. Pp. 223. 20 a. Culbert examines paralysis as the recurrent symptom of the crisis of Western travel, focusing on French literary texts from the early nineteenth century to the postcolonial present. He investigates how the modern traveler’s“encounter with the other provokes a breakdown in the journey and its narrative” (21). This is why Culbert is concerned, in part, with ethnography for its distinctive form of storytelling, and chooses modernity, an age of progressive mobility, in terms of physical as well as virtual movement and human contact. However, the transports in question do not refer to the physical progression of the voyager but to the journey within his psyche. The transports that assail the voyager are in the realms of enraptures, ecstasies, dérives, and other emotions that produce plots gripped by aporia and eventually stasis. Culbert borrows Derrida’s neologism paralyse to study salient paralyzing features in several travel narratives, and he also uses the trope for his critical approach, aiming to show how paralyses “undo the certainties of knowledge, presenting alternatives to the normative codings of travel, transport, and narrative” (13). These alternatives, which may be political, sexual, or affective, always challenge the foreign or strange ‘other.’ Moreover, the anthropological discourse calls language into question, as language is the essential component of the narrative of the journey and of the encounter that seeks to transmit knowledge and authority. Culbert applies his critical methods of reading to selected texts by Michel Leiris, Eugène Fromentin, Jean Paulhan, and Roland Barthes. Two chapters are devoted to Leiris. The first one explores Scraps (Fourbis)— the second volume of his autobiography—in which the ethnologist-voyager merges his tenacious writing block with“the question of death as trespass, as figure of a limit and border” (63). In an attempt to recapture his memories, the ethnologist ventures into a multitude of wandering paths all leading to an impasse. The chapter devoted to his ethnographic writings, and particularly L’Afrique fantôme, analyses how the ethnographic expedition across Africa, recounted in the form of a journal, turns out to be a failure, both scientifically and narratively. In chapter two, Culbert discusses Fromentin’s Algerian narratives, which subvert the traditional colonial discourse, and question the voyage itself to the point of paralysis; in the following chapter, he discusses Paulhan’s work on the ‘secret’ of Malagasy proverbs, a deciphering project marred by linguistic errors.The fifth chapter,devoted to Barthes,examines the recurrent theme of the “utopia of language” in its “intermingling of power and servility” that takes the form of a chiasmus leading to paralyzed writing (259). The final chapter focuses on the writing of post-colonial authors, such as Sam Selvon, Rachid Boudjedra, Assia Djebar, and others, who are subjects of their own paralyzing journeys homeward and to the métropole. Culbert offers a study of major texts filled with intertextual references,an application of rich and varied literary theories,and a re-telling of colonial history. Although Voyages is much different in its concerns, this collection of essays about travel narratives (in...