The Rhetoric of Travel: The French Romantic Myth of Naples

Abstract

The corpus of travel literature about any given place or people, if systematically examined from a rhetorical point of view, yields up a series of (topol). Only after such topoi are defined might it become possible, in the case of any given example from such a corpus, to discriminate topoi from fact: the rhetorical heritage of received ideas about a place or people which a traveller has brought with him from home, on the one hand, from the record of his actual observations, on the other. Such a search for the commonplaces which recur in a particular corpus of travel literature is illustrated by describing the preliminary results of the author's study of French accounts of Naples from what literary historians call the period, which extends very roughly through the first half of the nineteenth century but has it roots in the pre-revolutionary period of Rousseau. The elements in the myth of Naples which evolved during the troubled romantic period were essentially two, each in tension with the other: power, a creative spirit with the energy of a volcano, ready to be tapped; and bondage, suffering inflicted by a despotic power on a willing slave. Introduction: Traditions of a Genre Travel literature as a genre has a very long history in Europe, going back at least to that time in the later Middle Ages when the growth of trade with the Middle and Far East stimulated interest in exotic regions. The Crusades, particularly, represented a flow of not only money and goods, but also words. The genre is indelibly marked by its origin: typically, late medieval European travel literature purports explicitly to give an account of the details and patterns of life in the Holy Land or Asia, but implicitly takes its focus from the effort to persuade the reader to adopt a particular attitude toward the place described. That is, travel literature is a primarily rhetorical genre which historically masks itself as primarily mimetic. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) attests to the great age the genre had already attained in his day by doing what one can do only to a well-established literary form, one whose conventions are already known to the reading public selected: he parodies travel narrative. The way in which he does so, moreover, casts into relief the rhetorical impetus behind this putatively mimetic genre, so that a brief look at his parody may serve well as a conceptual introduction to an examination of the much later body of travel narrative which is the principal object of the present study. In the second tale in his Decameron,' Boccaccio uses one of his favorite techniques to make his readers both laugh and ponder: He inverts a well-known plot structure. The protagonist of the tale is not a Christian journeying to the Holy Land, but rather a Jew. Abraham, a Parisian merchant, journeys southward, not to the Holy Land of Palestine, his own place of cultural origin, but instead to the sacred city of Rome. There he is appalled to see the Pope and the Curia practice daily sins repugnant to believer and pagan alike, much as medieval Christian travel narNOAKES This content downloaded from 207.46.13.124 on Sun, 11 Sep 2016 05:10:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms