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French travel writing, unlike French cooking or deconstruction, has been slow in gaining appreciative readers on this side of the Atlantic. Recently I heard about a conference on the art of travel writing at the Sorbonne that carried the title "From Segalen to Bouvier." Few Americans would know of either Victor Segalen (1878-1919) or Nicolas Bouvier (1929-1997), let alone the main literary link between them, the by now almost equally neglected Henri Michaux (1899-1984). Yet all three are brilliant craftsmen, creating what has every right to be called major literature.
The Breton Segalen, the Belgian Michaux, and the Swiss Bouvier differ too markedly to constitute a school. But as travelers who write - a different species from writers who travel a lot - they do share certain features. Travelers who write tend to discover their art and themselves simultaneously, as they plunge into territory new to them. Their forays into the unvisited have an experimental quality, their structures seeming as mutable as the institutions from which they derive. The ground they are breaking is as much a literary one as it is geographical.
I suspect that the experimental burden of travel writing has led the academy to undervalue its achievements. By what standards do you assess a genre whose realm is insistently the exceptional? Joy and the unique are given pride of place by writers and readers of travel prose, which is unlike, say, autobiography where writer and audience are constantly groping for common ground. I choose to travel to a particular place; the overall choices that govern a life are more obscure. Unfortunately, the exceptionality of the genre limits the readership, as do issues of education and class: for most of the world, travel is and always has been a luxury. There may also be, after centuries of colonial exploitation, a resistance to the literature of exploration; we know all too well where the exoticism leads. No wonder the writing struggles to earn a small following. The real wonder, commercially speaking, is that work that features private sensibility so emphatically ever finds its way into print. (The same, of course, holds true for memoirs; the distillation of sensibility is what both forms have to offer.) What makes such works, editors ask, noteworthy? Are the...