Victor Segalen Research Articles

Diversification or sensory unification? Controversies around the senses in fin de siècle culture

This article analyses the evolutionist discourses on the senses that emerged in the late 19th century, when theories on the evolution of species were in full sway. Drawing on newspapers, essays and medical literature, this article aims to set face to face the two currents of thought that I have identified regarding sensory evolution: the one that stressed the value of the progressive specialisation of the senses as evidence for human evolution mainly supported by Max Nordau, and the one which regarded the sensory regrouping, exemplified by the phenomenon of synaesthesia, as the true symptom of evolution, strongly supported by Victor Segalen. A close examination of their arguments will provide clues concerning their relative position vis-à-vis the theory that stressed the exceptional nature of humankind among all living beings. Based on newspapers, essays and medical literature, this paper, which straddles several fields (history of science, philosophy, cultural history and aesthetics) aims to set both positions face to face, examining their arguments in detail and establishing their genealogies. This will lead to a better understanding of the scope and range of evolutionist discourses in the fin de siècle culture and on their impact upon artistic practices.

Inside the History of the World: Syntheses of Literary Form between Prose Poetry and China

AbstractWhat is the international literary history behind Xi Chuan's Chinese prose poems, and what is the literary history behind translating them into English as prose poems? Did Hegel's belief that poetry can be “translated into other languages without essential detriment to its value” contribute to the birth of prose poetry, through a synthesis with poetic form? If so, what does this notion say about Hegel's idea that China lies “outside the World's History”? In the light of the historical association between China and prose poetry in the literary history of French (Judith Gautier, Victor Segalen, Henri Michaux) and English (Allen Upward, Nathaniel Tarn, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Joan Retallack, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Sarah Howe, Ken Chen, Cathy Park Hong, Eleanor Goodman, Jennifer Kronovet, and Nick Admussen), I discuss prose poetry as an outcome of what Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson call a translational “deformation zone,” to argue that translating Chinese prose poetry demonstrates China to be inside, not outside, the history of the world.

Inventing reality: Obstinate Orientalism in Victor Segalen’s René Leys

ABSTRACT This article explores how Victor Segalen’s novel René Leys ([1921] 1922) problematizes the ways in which the west has imagined China and how this novel reflects obstinate Orientalism – a stubborn insistence on exoticist fantasies despite their being repeatedly denied by reality. The article argues that, through a portrayal of this obstinacy, René Leys offers a sound critique of the colonial encounter that goes beyond Segalen’s impressionistic reflections included in Essai sur l’exotisme (Essay on Exoticism [1955] 1978), typically considered his main contribution to postcolonial theory. The article also shows that the novel’s lucid and critical exposure of the creation of the Orientalist object has remained unnoticed by previous interpretations due to the novel’s ironic structure, which eclipses its own criticism and makes it more difficult to be perceived by western readers. This article offers insight into the literary mechanisms that obscure the hierarchical values underlying frames for cross-cultural interactions such as cosmopolitanism and World Literature.

Victor Segalen, l’écrivain incertain

"This contribution examines the dual reception of Victor Segalen. Within Segalenian critics, there is a divergence, even a tension, which has been little studied. This dual reception includes scholars who present Segalen with a comprehensive approach to otherness, with clear ideological positions in his questioning of Christianity and deconstruction of colonial myths. Other critics take the opposite approach, relativizing the idea of the writer as open to intercultural exchange and hostile to the phenomenon of colonization. In fact, many critics have shown that Segalenian critics have consistently misinterpreted the traveler as a defender of other cu."

A Story with Characters and Action

A Story with Characters and Action

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

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.

Poésie martiniquaise du tournant du XIXe siècle : fictions d’une identité et d’une altérité

This paper focuses on Martinican poetry at the turn of the 19th century, which is defined by critics as Doudouist or exotic poetry. It is the distinct notion of exoticism that we will try to capture as a fiction of the self, since these poets frequently assume the persona of an outsider — a stranger to their own island — and adopt an exotic gaze on Martinique. Admittedly, the use of exoticism seems to be a consequence of the alienation of the colonial subject, preyed upon by metropolitan hegemony. And yet, it may offer a poetic outlook on the world capable of bringing about Diversity, as defined by Victor Segalen. To that end, this study attempts to compare two specific conceptions of exoticism which stem from the exotic ethos adopted by Martinican poets. Firstly, the idea that the traditionally criticised Doudouist poetry embodies the alienation of an author who adopts metropolitan poetic models, inventing a fiction of the self that is foreign to his identity. Secondly, the reinterpretation of exoticism as a poetics that allows the author in a colonial context to remodel the landscape while regaining his identity in the process. In essence, exoticism in Martinican poetry presents a conundrum in so far as it acts both as a mark of alienation, and as a poetics threatening colonial order. This article aims at rehabilitating a much-decried Martinican poetry by emphasizing the literary practices of detour, parody and writing back. It will be a question of grasping how such practices allow Martinican poets to conquer their identity, paradoxically — and this is what seizes our attention here — by adopting the ethos of an exotic person, an outsider. The fiction of otherness, albeit veiled, ultimately reveals the unique identity of the Martinican subject.

From Transformative Travels to Translingual Poetics: the "Ultime voyage" of Victor Segalen and François Cheng

François Cheng and Victor Segalen are widely acknowledged for their common role of “cultural ambassador” between China and France. However, according to Jean Mouttapa who wrote the preface for Cheng’s book L’Un vers l’autre. En voyage avec Victor Segalen (2008), there exists a “spiritual affinity” between the two authors that connects them in a fundamental way. Focusing on this unusual bond, this article examines how the dual destinations of travel – lieu (Other/Elsewhere) and milieu (Self/Home) – are represented in two poetic creations, namely “Perdre le Midi Quotidien” by Segalen and “Ultime voyage” by Cheng. At the intersection of French and Chinese, the travelers-poets trace and translate the courses of their internal progress through their physical displacements. Drawing on essential concepts from Segalen’s theory such as the Divers and the Exote, my analysis reveals the extent to which Segalen and Cheng’s translingual poetics serve as a powerful vehicle to display and disseminate their positive view of the Self-Other bond.

Victor Segalen’s 1914 archaeological mission in Sichuan: The untold story

This essay challenges the French poet, naval doctor, archaeologist and sinologist Victor Segalen’s established image as a literary modernist who broke with colonial exoticism. I use a set of previously understudied primary sources, including Segalen’s own travel journals, archaeological accounts, letters and photo albums, as well as Chinese gazetteers and a stele inscription documenting his excavation of a tomb associated with Bao San Niang 鮑三娘 – the supposed daughter-in-law of the famous Chinese general Guan Yu 關羽. Through a study combining both textual and field investigations, this article not only points out the disjuncture between Segalen’s progressive theory and his actual practice, but also questions the tendency among critics – both Western and Chinese – to overstate Segalen’s contribution to East–West cross-cultural representation, while intentionally omitting his exploitative deeds.

Mapping Modern Beijing: Space, Emotion, Literary Topography

Mapping Modern Beijing: Space, Emotion, Literary Topography

‘De-exoticizing’ the Exotic: Victor Segalen’s Aesthetics of Difference

If Segalen’s radical approach to the exotic has earned him the appreciation and the consideration of such authors as Michel Leyris, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Abdelkébir Khatibi, and others, it has gone almost unnoticed by Edward Said in his Orientalism, who mentions him only once in passing, and dismissively so, among writers who were not ignorant of “the wisdom of the east” such as Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Arthur Waley, Fenellosa, and Paul Claudel. Although Said does not inflict on Segalen the bad treatment he inflicted on some other French Orientalists, and in fact puts him alongside such ‘venerable’ figures as Pound, Yeats, and Claudel, one would expect him to make a more honourable mention of Segalen whose views on colonialism and exoticism were radically opposed to the then-accepted colonial views on such issues. Whether this was simply an oversight on the part of Said or an intended critical dismissal, it is, nonetheless, a fact that Segalen is becoming more and more ‘incontournable’, difficult to ignore, overlook, or dismiss, and this, for the exceptional views he expresses on the question of exoticism and colonialism.

Revisiting Debussy’s Relationships with Otherness: Difference, Vibrations, and the Occult

Abstract To commemorate the centenary of Debussy’s death, this article proposes a new perspective on the composer’s relationship to Otherness. While many have argued for the influence of japonisme and Javanese music on his oeuvre, here I look at experiences, influences, and ideas that shaped these and similar encounters, together with their implications. I argue that symbolism was not alone in motivating Debussy’s resistance to overt mimesis and ambivalence about assimilation; Japan’s evolving political identity between 1868 and 1904 may also have played a role. I examine what Debussy may have learned from, or at least shared with, Edmond Bailly, Robert Godet, Victor Segalen, and Louis Laloy. These connections draw particular attention to contemporary conceptions of sound, as promoted in esoteric philosophy, and especially nature’s relationship to the arts through ‘vibrations’—ideas later implicit in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s philosophical approach, here re-evaluated after the 2012 colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. They offer intriguing historical foundations for today’s ‘sound studies’ research.

Staging the Buddha: Victor Segalen’s Siddhârtha and the Unsettlement of Western Culture

Staging the Buddha: Victor Segalen’s Siddhârtha and the Unsettlement of Western Culture

Gauguin, Segalen : Révéler Tahiti

Paul Gauguin and Victor Segalen, craftsmen of a symbolic recomposition, chose wholeheartedly to reveal Tahiti through their respective works: Noa-Noa (Gauguin) and Les Immémoriaux (Segalen). This article seeks to determine the singular place that the two works occupy within Polynesian cultural heritage by studying the common traits that unite the two artists. It seems rather clear that the Polynesian oral language as a cultural revelation and the historical "void" of the archipelago provoke the reflection of these authors.

세갈렌과 중국의 인문화된 자연

세갈렌과 중국의 인문화된 자연

Littérature Coloniale and The Failure of the Novel

I first consider how Louis Cario and Charles Régismanset's 1911 L'Exotisme, la littérature coloniale and Marius-Ary Leblond's 1913 La France devant l'Europe and 1926 Après l'exotisme de Loti: Le Roman colonial instrumentalize littérature coloniale to criticize the novel genre. I then show why Victor Segalen's novel Les Immémoriaux—for Cario, Régismanset, and Leblond the only example of littérature coloniale—constitutes an even harsher critique of the genre. I conclude with an examination of the reception of Segalen's novel, arguing that rather than the formal innovation of Les Immémoriaux, it was the ideological climate that rendered its reception tepid.

Un Matérialisme littéraire. L’Écriture des passages dans Équipée de Victor Segalen

ABSTRACTEquipée. Voyage au pays du Réel stands out in the work of Victor Segalen. A critique of idealism, it is both a poetics of the moving body and its implementation through the encounter with the substance of reality. I demonstrate that this literary experiment is underpinned by a worldview, going back to the materialistic philosophical tradition and drawing its inspiration from the discoveries of early twentieth-century physics. It is a discontinuous and moving fabric that becomes the backdrop to the journey told here. In this context, writing is assigned to representing the fractures, the streaks of reality and the irremediable partition of bodies.

Global France, Global French: beyond the monolingual

The article considers the theme of “Global France, Global French” in the frame of current debates on monolingualism and multilingualism. It explores questions of language use in contemporary France, and focuses on the linguaphobia evident in a number of contemporary ideological, political, social, and cultural contexts. The study suggests that the study of France and French in a global frame requires greater attention to questions of multilingualism and of the contact of the French language and francophone cultures with other linguistic zones. The phenomenon of the “translingual” or “exophonic” writer is presented as a key example of such shifts, and the article concludes with a study of the academician Francois Cheng, whose writing may be seen as a “translation zone” situated between French and Chinese cultures. The relationship between Cheng and the earlier twentieth-century author Victor Segalen reveals the extent to which the sociolinguistic situations evoked at the opening of the article cannot be li...

Exoticism or the Translation of Cultural Difference = Exotismo o la traducción de la diferencia cultural

In this paper the author analyses the criteria of judgment we bring to bear on artworks in our times of movement, where people and art objects travel the world, but don’t always carry in their baggage movements of thought and opinion. In view of the contemporary situation of art as coming from anywhere, and the culturalcritical aspects inherent in that situation, he zooms in on a text from the beginning of the twentieth century as an example of how ideas about aesthetics in relation to otherness have impacted on our thinking about art «in movement», namely Victor Segalen’s Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity.

Mâcher des poèmes, croquer des statues. Les faims formelles de Victor Segalen et Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss and Victor Segalen share the same obsession, that of the loss of knowledge, established by the law of thermodynamics as a universal constant. In fact, the journeys they undertake are each based on a quasi-immediate transcription, as a defence mechanism against entropy. In Équipée and Tristes tropiques, the two writers pace their walks with poetry. While Segalen memorises them and draws the formless to allow memories to survive, Lévi-Strauss invents them and draws them in order to exorcise unbalanced form.