Explore the treatment of the jungle and the city in the travel texts you have studied.

(i) Introduction
This essay shall examine the themes of the jungle and the city in two authors and two travel texts: Andr Gides Voyage au Congo (1927) and Henri Michauxs Ecuador (1929). The selection of these texts needs little justification: firstly, Gide and Michaux are arguably the most eminent French literary voyagers of the twentieth century and the two texts chosen are, in the first case, a prominent and controversial work, and a considerable early literary achievement in the second. Aside, then, from reasons of literary history, the differences in approach taken by Gide and Michaux are themselves illuminating of the process of writing travel and representing, in particular, the jungle and the city from Central Africa to Equatorial Latin America. In the face of colonial injustices, Gide seeks to highlight the truth of the situation for the greater good: Je ne veux tenir pour certain que ce que jaurai pu voir moi-mme, ou pu suffisament contrler (Congo: 31) and adopts a fitting documentary narrative for his voyage. Michauxs writings, on the other hand, have an impressionistic, subjective texture absent in the Gidean texts; a point framed by his texts publication in the Gallimard LImaginaire series. This study will aim to elucidate the difference in the manner of apprehension of the new in the texts of each writer and the effect this has on representation. Our chief concern here is these visited places, for the writers, exotic and far-flung; however, reflecting the pattern of the texts themselves, we cannot completely forgo consideration of the mtropole; though Michaux, a Belgian, did not take French nationality until 1955, he identifies with France and displays scorn for Belgium (Ecuador: 12-13). In their treatments of the jungle, French and European landscapes and trees figure prominently for purposes of contrast and comparison: references to the European landscape abound especially in Congo (see, for example, Congo: 118, 123, 136, 141, 251). Similarly for the city, the European model, especially Paris, serves as the primary concept of a city; a concept

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to which cities these writers come across can either conform or contrast, in terms of people, atmosphere and architecture. The European comparison is now implicit, now explicit.

(ii) Une indfinissable atmosphre de paix, doubli, de bonheur (Gide) ; Rien nest plus dsesprant (Michaux): reactions to the city
Michaux realises his experience of the new is directly or indirectly mediated through the known when he writes, Une contre ou ville trangre est aussi remarquable par ce qui lui manque que par le spcial de ce quelle possde.(Ecuador: 37) In other words, one recognises equally the absence of the familiar and the presence of the different (le spcial) in a land- or cityscape. Gides early experience in the city of Dakar in effect illustrates Michauxs point. Gide can imagine rien de moins exotique (Congo: 15); the French quarter presents nothing new to his senses: hotels, garishly-lit cafs and braying laughter. It is remarkable for what it lacks, chief of which we discover, par la suite, is black people. Conversely, the charm of the African quarter is that there are no white people there: Joie de se trouver parmi des ngres (Congo: 15). Gide derives his pleasure from the city as much from absence as presence. What is valued is difference. The difficulty of finding difference in the cities explored is a common theme in these writers: Gides conclusion, drawn while still at Brazzaville, that he cannot make real contact (contact rel) with difference will persist throughout his voyage, as Lucey contends (1995: 150). Western is the withheld epithet of Gides cran de la civilisation (Congo: 30) which actively intervenes between him and the potential of his African experience. It is the Western presence which detracts from his anticipated enjoyment of the town of Bangassou. Meeting des gens coiffs de faon extrmement bizarre on the outskirts of the town, Gide is disappointed (Bangassou me doit un peu) that the town has lost much of its strangeness. He attributes this impression to the military occupation of the town: searching for simple difference, the Western presence negates any interest in the town (Congo: 71). When Gide does encounter une ville indigne, we note his belonging to the tourist category outlined by Todorov (198: 378-379). He wishes to observe but not engage with the town. On horseback, Gide can look into the living enclosures which he believes affords him dtranges intimits. This town, ostensibly untouched by Western influence, is furthermore, the Quintessence dexotisme. The comparison he makes with Swifts Lilliput
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confirms ones impression that Gide derives pleasure from the scene in so far as it conforms to some phantasm of a utopian existence and that Gide has not succeeded in breaking through the cran de la civilisation [occidentale]: Une indfinissable atmosphre de paix, doubli, de bonheur (Congo: 221). The city for Michaux tends to a single significance, which carries over from Old World to New: imprisonment. Cities remove freedom and constrain Michaux physically and viscerally: the prospect of the return to Paris means on sent dj les crampes de la misre, et on se tracasse malgr soi pour la chambre punaise quil sagira de trouver dans ce grand Paris (Ecuador: 118). Later, on his return voyage, he writes, Paris? Et puis quoi?/ Ah que ce retour a de crampes (Ecuador: 170). A museum exhibition on the Equatorial Indians in Berlin provokes a tirade against the pressure he feels to faire le voyageur intelligent, lamateur dexotisme; the stasis of the Berlin museum represents the removal of his intellectual freedom (Ecuador: 98). Quito, where Michaux spends some time on different occasions, is, however, the main target of Michauxs anti-city writing: Mais Quito! Ltouffement mme (Ecuador: 83). The city becomes an enlarged prison which Michauxs mind longs to escape: Pour une ville, un esprit dune certain dimension ne peut avoir que haine. The urban landscape instantly controls and limits the individual. The identification of city and prison is not restricted to physical features, like walls, which obviously support it, it pervades the entire physical and notional structure and Michaux equates the city directly with the French penal code:
Les murs dabord, et puis tout nest quimages acharnes dgosme, de mfiance, de sottise, de rigidit. Pas besoin de connaitre le code Napolon, suffit de regarder une ville, on est fix. (Ecuador: 80)

The city is linked with regulation, punishment and authority wielded over the individual. Notwithstanding these unambiguously odious characterisations, cities retain some irresistible pull on Michaux. He can acknowledge this even as he re-affirms the citys danger: El Oriente, un Equatorien donne ce mot comme Paris, dangereux tous deux, peu accessible, sans doute merveilleux. (Ecuador: 88, emphasis in original). In the prose poem Je suis n trou, this paradoxical need for the pernicious city is again voiced. Quito is now only a petit village, and the hate and envy he needs for his health can only be found in a city: Une grande ville, quil me faut./Une grande consommation denvie (Ecuador: 94). Is it the excitement, the merveilleux, Michaux needs of a city? An excoriation of Quito in the latter half of his journal perhaps confirms this view. A visiting troupe of singers enlivens the
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town and Michaux comments ironically that this nous exhorte croire que tout Quito nest pas irrmissiblement prvu depuis toujours (Ecuador: 101). It seems that what Michaux requires still of the city, despite his distaste for it, is the imprvu, the merveilleux.

(iii) Knowing my jungle, knowing your jungle: Gide in Africa and Michaux in Amazonia
Gide habitually represents the jungle in European terms. The following instance is exemplary of his practice:
La fort change un peu daspect ; les arbres sont plus beaux ; dsencombrs de lianes, leurs troncs sont plus distincts ; de leurs branches pend une profusion de lichen vert tendre, comme on en voit aux mlzes de lEngadine. Certains de ces arbres sont gigantesques, dune taille qui doit dpasser de beaucoup celle de nos arbres de France [] (Congo: 56)

In characteristically elegant and balanced prose, Gide provides a finely detailed description of the jungle. The description of the forest makes the European connexion both positively and negatively; that is, Gide draws out the similarity to the Engadin valley and the dissimilarity of these taller trees to those found in France. The repeated reference to the European landscape makes familiar the exotic jungle landscape. In expressing both the similarities and differences of the jungle in accessible European terms, the jungle is domesticated, its exotic qualities reduced through his desire to catalogue the jungle in European categories. What we find in Gides many descriptions of this type, as Victor Segalen the seminal theorist of lexotisme wrote, Cest le dbut de trs honorables sciences exactes. Ce nest pas de lExotisme (1978: 79). Our argument is that though Gide and Michaux are both seeking the exotic, the different, semiosis for Gide occurs chiefly through his previous knowledge or expectations. He attempts to explicate the unknown in terms of the known. Under this rubric of the known may be included past travellers reports and accounts, including the novel, previously viewed images, including film and, of course, cultural and geographical features of his French, Western European civilisation. For all his palpable eagerness to come across the exotic, his representation of it is constantly in tones of disappointment, which denudes the jungle of its exotic mystery:

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Je mattendais une vgtation plus oppressante. Epaisse, il est vrai, mais pas trs haute et nencombrant ni leau ni le ciel. Les les, ce matin, se disposent sur le grand miroir du Congo dune manire si harmonieuse quil semble que lon circule dans un parc deau. (Congo: 40) Ce ntait pas encore la grande fort tnbreuse [] (Congo: 44) Si intressante que soit cette circulation parmi les vgtaux inconnus, il me faut bien avouer que cette fort me doit. Jespre trouver mieux ailleurs Ni fleurs, ni fougres arborescentes. (Congo: 46)

It is the very specificity of the exoticism Gide seeks in the jungle which is oppressante: the minute attention he pays to the height of the trees and the thickness of the foliage, as if an attained benchmark of height and density immediately qualified a scene as exotic. There is a dcalage between the jungle as he expects it and the jungle as he finds it in the real world, between the sign of the jungle and the object. The shortcoming is explained by his previous expectations, by what he previously knew of Africa. His visual expectation encumbers him to such an extent that any profound appreciation of the scene is fleeting, through its reliance on the atmosphere or impression created by the vegetation:
Abondance darbres extrmement hauts, qui nopposent plus au regard un trop impntrable rideau ; ils scartent un peu, laissent souvrir des baies profondes de verdure, se creuser des alcves mystrieuses et, si des lianes les enlacent, cest avec des courbes si molles que leur treinte semble voluptueuse et pour moins dtouffement que damour. (Congo: 43)

The succeeding entry in his journal describes the failure of this sense of the mysterious and eroticised jungle to endure: Mais cette orgie na pas dur (Congo: 43). Gides repeated wish to reach the real heart of the country (Congo: 35, 44, 46) underline the point that his visual expectations are not matched by his experiences. His imaginary representation of the jungle dominates to the extent that, once he finds himself in the Congo, he is chasing its shadow and repeatedly disappointed by what he does see, as shown in the quotations above. His search for a precise correspondence between his imagined and the real Africa condemns this aspect of his mission to failure when the success of a jungle scene is determined by its correspondence to his preconceived visualisation of it, whether an image in his own mind or one externally supplied in a magazine of picturesque scenes:
Ma reprsentation imaginaire de ce pays tait si vive (je veux dire que je me limaginais si fortement) que je doute si, plus tard, cette fausse image ne luttera pas contre le souvenir [] (Congo: 95) Image de lancien Magasin Pittoresque : la barre Grand-Bassam. (Congo: 18)

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This jostling of sights seen, sights imagined and produced images results in the semiotic tautology (Scott, 2004: 165) characteristic of this voyage, where a successful jungle scene is one which becomes ressemblant (Congo: 43, emphasis in original), which conforms to an existing visualisation of Africa. Gides reliance on realistic botanically-informed description of the jungle shows his desire to gain a complete knowledge of the jungle, the fantasy of an ultimate centre and a correspondingly englobing sign (Scott, 2004: 178). His search for knowledge determines his writing of the exotic jungle. To modify Todorov, knowledge (la connaissance) is seen to be incompatible with the representation of the exotic (1989: 298) and this ultimately accounts for the weakness of Gides exoticist writing of the jungle. Michauxs strength lies in his appreciation of the foundation of exoticism, shown through his modification of literary defamiliarisation. This, conventionally, is the depiction of the common in such a way as to reveal it in a new light, to make it strange or unfamiliar. Michauxs technique in his best passages, rather, is to preserve the exotics essential otherness by representing it in an imaginative and unfamiliar way. Unlike Gide, Michaux does not set out to familiarise the exotic for himself nor for a domestic readership, he realises the immensity of a forest does not stre laiss saisir (Ecuador: 183). His technique conforms to exoticisms constitutive paradox as identified by Todorov (1989: 298). Exoticism is un loge dans la mconnaissance. Michauxs text operates in such a way as to preserve the exotic in his representation to his readership; he makes his own use of Flauberts policy, Drouter le lecteur and cultivates the exotic in his representation. Michauxs writing is suffused with irony and humour, techniques in themselves inimical to straightforward understanding and familiarity. Michaux first presents the jungle to us in a paradoxical metaphor: Cette fort est chauffe. Immense appartement. On se mfie. On est mal laise. Cest la fort tropicale (Ecuador: 59-60). The forest is transformed in metaphor into an apartment, a conventional domestic space. This initially familiarising aspect is ironically reversed when the apartment takes on some unspecified sinister and unsettling quality. Michaux succeeds not only in maintain the mysterious allure of the jungle but manages also to inverse the conventional figuring of the apartment as a comfortable space. Thus, the reader experiences Segalens moment of exoticism as the comparison of the self (Western apartment) with the jungle other prompts la perception aigu et immdiate dune incomprhensibilit ternelle (1978: 44), an irreconcilable difference between the European reading self and the Amazonian jungle other and further
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prompts reflection on the self incarnate in the apartment, endowed as it now is with these sinister and unsettling qualities1. Michaux stresses his subjectivity in the jungle by twice repeating, Ici, il y a pour moi and, unlike Gide, mentions European trees only to deride them: nus, sans famille, lisses, abandonns (Ecuador: 60). He branches into another metaphor to give another impression of the jungle. It begins, La fort nenterre pas ses cadavres; this last word activates a rich personification of the jungle. The distinction made between morts and vivants no longer simply refers to alive and dead trees but also to living and dead people. The forest is immense et mouvemente, trs humaine, haute, tragique; trees have une grande famille (Ecuador: 60-61). The attention of the narrative now switches to the king of the trees: Matapalo (tueur darbres). Received western visualisations of kingship are activated, only to be quickly dispelled and dismissed in the subsequent sentence:
Ce Roi a une couronne. Pas cette espce de bol renvers comme tant dautres. Non, sa couronne est de trois branches ou cinq et point la mme hauteur, mais rameaux et feuilles arrangent a. Etonnante, vraiment impriale ; parfois elle fait croix, croix mise plat, parfois ruption. Toujours tte de dfi, et de domination. (Ecuador: 62)

Note that the ambiguity of this description prevents any precise visual grasp of the appearance of this tree. We know the trees qualities: surprising and truly imperial, with a defiant and dominant aspect, but a visualisation of it is denied us through the ambiguity of the number of branches, the verb, arranger, and the parfois... parfois... phrasing. Michauxs account of the jungle is a paradigm of writing of the exotic. It firstly confronts the Western locus (the apartment) with the exotic other of the jungle, destabilising, and provoking reflection on, the heretofore unquestioned safe domestic space and awareness of alterity. Secondly, it allows us to experience the exotic of the jungle through this vivid extended metaphor of the jungles animation, while nonetheless maintaining the mconnaissance, the lack of complete and total knowledge, necessary to the exotic experience. It forcibly cultivates the readers negative capability, his or her capability of accepting uncertainties and doubts as intellectually valid, without recourse to rational explication and connaissance and embracing le moment dExotisme (Segalen, 1978: 43)2. One of the concluding images of this diary entry is that of the lumberjacks felling Matapalo and discovering some other tree, un Cumbi... ou un cdre ou quelque grand arbre at its centre, et le bois est tout diffrent de
1 2

The interpretation of Segalens theory of the exotic derives from Scott (2004), 58-59 A useful account of negative capability is John Deweys Art as Experience, (1934 (2005)), pp 32-35

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ce quon attendait (Ecuador: 63). The diversity contained within Matapalo and this individual tree is a metonym for the entire unknowable and unpredictable diversity of the jungle. To travel in Michauxs jungle is sentir le Divers (Segalen, 1978: 43).

(iv) Conclusion

The essential differences between these two writers works are not generic: both are travel journals with appended (and footnoted) essays. Yet, Gides text is undeniably documentary, while Michauxs is the fruit, as Bowie rightly point out, of his attempts at the craft of literary travel (Bowie, 1973: 54). Gide, at the height of his fame, was reporting on the situation in colonial Congo and his narrative grounds itself therefore in documentable fact. Michaux, at the beginning of his career, writes imaginatively of his real voyage to Latin America. Travel is for both a means of encountering difference; their methods of representation differ radically in their willingness to experience difference. Gide relies heavily on his expectations and represents the city and the jungle as accurately as he can. Michaux, however, does not trouble to detail his expectations of his travels; rather, he communicates his experience if the exotic in exotic ways: defamiliarising and ultimately denying to the reader the comprehensive knowledge of the exotic Gide strives to impart.

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Bibliography

Primary Texts:
1. Gide, Andr Voyage au Congo (Gallimard: Paris, 1927 & 1928, repr. 1995)

2. Michaux, Henri Ecuador (Gallimard: Paris, 1929, repr. 1968)

Secondary Texts:
3. Bowie, Malcom, Henri Michaux - a study of his literary works (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1973)
4. Dewey, John, Art as Experience (New York, Minton, Balch and Company, 1934,

repr. London: Perigee Books, 2005)

5. Lucey, Michael, Gide's bent: sexuality, politics, writing (New York ; Oxford : Oxford

University Press, 1995)

6. Scott, David, Semiologies of Travel from Gautier to Baudrillard (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2004)

7. Segalen, Victor, Essai sur lexotisme (Fontfroide: Bibliothque, 1908, repr. Paris:

Fata Morgana, 1978)

8. Todorov, Tzvetan, Nous et les autres : la rflexion franaise sur la diversit humaine

(Paris: ds du Seuil, 1989)

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