The Paradoxes of Description in André Gide's Voyage au Congo and Le retour du Tchad

Abstract

The Paradoxes of Description in André Gide's Voyage au Congo and Le retour du Tchad Matt Reeck (bio) I don't promise extraordinary adventures; you will not find the charm of the desert or that of Islam, which has seduced everyone. But there is contour and color. When you have traveled here a little, you gain, I believe, a very exact and pure view of primitive Africa. It's not the North African village, it's not the forest, but it's a land, wooded in places with large trees, watered by beautiful rivers, inhabited by a splendid naked race that our Western civilization hasn't yet sullied.1 On January 16, 1925, Marcel de Coppet, a French colonial officer stationed at Fort Archambault near Lake Chad, wrote to André Gide about his upcoming visit. Through their mutual friend Roger Martin du Gard, Gide had met Coppet in Paris in 1920. The fact that Coppet had been stationed at Fort Archambault for four years by the time that Gide and Marc Allégret began to plan the course of their trip to Africa provided the traveling duo with a natural turn-around point for their voyage through French Equatorial Africa. Coppet writes ahead to his new friend that there will not be adventures; at Fort Archambault, there will also not be "charming" desert scenes or those of Islam, the staples of late nineteenth-century Orientalist representations of Africa and the Middle East. Instead of these classic exotic scenes, Gide would be able to witness the "real" Africa, primitive Africa, that Africa inhabited by a "splendid naked race" that existed beyond the sullying touch of Western civilization. This is the same vision of Africa that elicits the name Congo as a blanket term meant to describe sub-Saharan Africa—black Africa—as a primal zone of origin, originality, and infrangible authenticity, available still for discovery to the intrepid European traveler. In short, this encapsulates Africanist discourse,2 which also happens to be the primary lens through which Gide's African travelogues have been read since the advent of postcolonial studies. Coppet's letter is remarkable evidence of aspects of the thinking of the time, as well as the literary style of which Gide himself might be the best representative—a style that increasingly would come to stand for the [End Page 82] best and worst of the French tradition, elegant and formal, contemplative and yet displaying a racial, if not racist, worldview. Coppet's letter also shows us the epistemological and aesthetic connections between natural history writing and ethnographic writing, including the blurred line dividing description of nature with descriptions of people and culture. In attempting to adumbrate the importance of ethnographic description to French modern literature, I read Voyage au Congo (1927) and Le retour du Tchad (1928) in the following ways. Gide's double book—the one charting his course to Fort Lamy, and the next, his return—reveals the continuity of epistemology and aesthetics from the natural history monograph to the ethnographic. Demonstrating this continuity is important. It will help show how descriptive practices are not bald-faced equations of transparency and objectivity, but that ethnographic description carries with it a complex history that includes an inheritance from natural history writing and the natural sciences. Ethnographic description, then, viewed as a surface phenomenon of rendering a worldview visible, must be thought of as part of a multi-faceted system of descriptive practices. Uncertain Designs, Open Form Jeffrey Geiger argues that whatever expectations a postcolonial reader might have in regards to Gide's worldview breaking down upon the encounter of cultural others, this does not come to pass. Gide's "persistent self-regard" leads to more of "Gide's self-projections"; the works are "works of egoism" that do not show any of the risks of "going native,"3 a characteristic that Henrietta Moore cites as being shared by modern ethnography and travel narratives.4 Walter Putnam, too, writes that Gide himself stands at the center of the voyage. The travelogues relied upon the stature of Gide as an author at the height of his popularity to convince readers that political redress...