Victor Segalen, Essai sur l’exotisme, une esthétique du divers: scénario. Édité et annoté par Valérie Bucheli

Abstract

Crucial to his endeavour as a writer, argued Victor Segalen in June 1916, was the concept of exoticism as ‘une Esthétique du Divers’. The formulation served as subtitle for his Essai sur l’exotisme, which was to remain a work in progress. Published versions of it only appeared decades after his death in 1919. It was first printed (as ‘Notes sur l’Exotisme’) in the Mercure de France in 1955 and there followed editions by Fata Morgana (1978), Livre de poche (1986), and Robert Laffont, in its Victor Segalen: Œuvres complètes (1995). Across these various editions, Valérie Bucheli sees broad confirmation of the 1955 version. For the new publication brought out by Droz, Bucheli has revisited the original manuscript of the Essai, which comprises a dossier of folios held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Noting that some of these do not feature in the earlier editions, Bucheli chooses to include them, arguing that the text needs to be read not as an essay but rather as the work diary (running between 1904 and 1918) for a project that remained fragmentary and exploratory in character. Beyond providing an exhaustive transcription of the full range of feuillets, Bucheli also departs from earlier editorial practice by re-ordering the fragments. Her chapter contents are informed by rubrics which Segalen provided for the structure of his work. Bucheli’s editorial apparatus is rigorous and painstaking. She attends carefully to the various intertextual links signalled, sometimes obliquely, by Segalen and provides a full bibliography of his sources. In addition, we have three indexes: one of names, one of concepts, and a third providing an exhaustive list of the feuillets in the BnF dossier and of their location in the new edition. Of particular note among the annexes included is a substantial, detailed set of notes reflecting Segalen’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. (These can now also be found in Victor Segalen, Œuvres, ed. by Christian Doumet, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 2020), i, 787–802.) The reproduction of a small number of facsimiles from the original manuscript (with accompanying transcriptions) shows Segalen’s extremely neat handwriting and his methodical listing of a complex series of exoticisms. The lacunae in the original dossier are respected in the new edition, with the suggestive rubrics ‘Exotisme spatial’, ‘Exotisme des plantes et des animaux’, and ‘Exotisme extra-terrestre: les mondes martiens et autres’, each featuring as a single-page entry (pp. 49, 50, 63). The layout of the Droz edition thus conveys Segalen’s wide-ranging and capacious understanding of the exotic. In a similar way, his pithy ‘Me défendre d’être colonial’ on Feuillet 102 is to be explained and read, as Bucheli points out (p. 74, n. 184), as a counter-argument to a press cutting from La Dépêche coloniale of 17 December 1913 on the subject of ‘[les] âmes de ceux que la conquête a assujettis’ and the colonial hope of finding a French Kipling. Bucheli’s accomplished edition allows for fuller appreciation of a text whose author’s modest-sounding ‘une page en moyenne, par jour’ (p. 27) belies a project of intense seriousness and scope.