Travellers' Tales

Narratives of Home and Displacement

Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Melinda Mash, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, Lisa Tickner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134912971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Most of us, at various moments in our lives, either adopt a `tourist' identity of are framed within another's tourist experience. Travellers' Tales investigates the future for travelling in a world whose boundaries are shifting and dissolving. The contributors bring together popular and critical discourses of travel to explore questions of identity and politics; history and narration; collecting and representing other cultures. Travellers' tales oscillate between the thrill of novel experiences and unexpected pleasures, and the alienation and loneliness of exile in a strange land. The contributions review recent work on the discourses of tourism, travel and cultural politics; the effects of global interactions and local resistances, and the ways in which records, memorials and signs have all been used to describe the experience of encountering the `other'.

Part I

Neighbours

Chapter 2
Discovering new worlds: politics of travel and metaphors of space

Jacques Rancière

At the end of the Gospel of John, as in Matthew and Luke, the angel of the resurrection tells the holy women to warn the apostles to move towards Galilee, where Jesus will precede them. This appears to contradict the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, which infers that they had remained in Jerusalem. And the contradiction invites us to have a closer glance at the singularity of that journey back home. The apostles have to come back to their land, to their home or ‘here’, and they must do so to discover the ‘here’ as a ‘there’, a place where ‘he’—the Lord whose body fulfils the meaning of the holy scripture—has preceded them, precedes them in any time.

Now the Gospel of John relates that journey in the shape of a strange appendix, strange enough to have commentators think that the passage has been added by another writer. In fact it looks like a new performance of one of the most famous episodes of the gospel, the miraculous catch of fishes. Let us look at the scene.

The apostles, we are told, have been fishing the whole night without success. At daybreak they hear somebody calling them from the shore and telling them to throw the net on the right side of the boat. So they do and, of course, they catch plenty of fish and recognize the one on the shore as the Lord.

Nothing new in a sense but the scene itself has a curious tonality, familiar in itself. We are told that Peter, who was naked, dresses and dives into the lake straightaway to reach the shore. And when the apostles come ashore, they see a fire of burning coals with fish on it, and some bread.

Of course, we are aware that this is a symbolic representation: the light of the Word coming into the world, and becoming flesh. In a sense, it is the prologue of John’s gospel illustrated for the children in the shape of a rather crude and artless symbolism. That’s why the passage was taken to be the addition of another, a more naïve writer. But precisely this new performance of the miracle merges the great mystery of Incarnation, the great mystery of the Word made flesh, with everyday life as if it was to link definitively Incarnation with little scenes and little narratives of fishing and eating; of ordinary life and people, boats and nets, the dawn on the water and the heat of the charcoal. Then the great mystery of the Word made flesh comes to be identified with the modest power of the little narrative of labour and days. We are told that the miracle happened there. Far from the town of the book and the doctors of the law: not too far, just as far as necessary. It is like additional evidence for the great mystery; but correspondingly it endows everyday life, on the mere condition of a slight displacement, with the virtuality of the miracle, the virtuality of its ordinary flesh becoming the body of Truth.

What makes the point more relevant is the oddness of the whole appendix, which relentlessly starts again, relates new meetings, and gives new evidence. It looks as if the writer were on the verge of getting out of the book; of making the perilous leap out of the narrative; as if he were obliged to go overboard on the reliability of the narrative. He can’t stop proving that ‘he’, the Lord, was there and that he too, the writer, was there—that he is really the one that the Lord chose to stay there and bear witness to the truth of the whole narrative of the Word made flesh, which obliges him to witness to his own having been there and having been called by the Lord to bear witness and so on.

It is not a distant voyage from Jerusalem to Tiberias. But this shows us precisely what is theoretically at stake in travelling: not discovering far countries and exotic habits, but making the slight move which shapes the mapping of a ‘there’ to a ‘here’. That mapping is the additional way, that is to say the human way of making flesh with words and sense with flesh.

Let me put this differently: the very space of theoretical travelling is the narrow and vertiginous gap that separates the inside of the book from its outside. Travelling is making the book true out of itself, in the hic et nunc which is its negation and has to become its confirmation. We all know the drastic opposition framed by Plato’s Phaedrus between two modes of discourse. On one side, the living logos is endowed with the power of getting written in the very soul of he who receives it. On the other side, the dead letter—the written word—is like a painting, unable to give help to itself, unable to say but indefinitely the same thing. Now I would assume that travelling is the way of overcoming the opposition. In fact, there are two ways of overcoming the opposition. There is the Book of Life, the book which is more than a book, the Holy Scripture whose promise is fulfilled by the advent of the Word made flesh, and there is the little ‘book of life’, the narrative of the slight move which meets the point of a living word which is neither voiced by a ‘father’ of the logos nor written in dead characters. The living word the traveller meets is written in the very flesh of things, in the very framing of natural scenery. It is written ‘here’ but it is only visible on condition that a traveller goes ‘there’ and relates the coincidence of its ecceity with the discovery of a new land.

I have tried to exemplify it with the journey of the young Wordsworth in revolutionary France as he related it in The Prelude. Let us look at the way his verse framed the meeting. He had decided to go away from the dusty books and classrooms. He crossed the Channel and he had to go through France to reach the point of the journey: the snowy mountains of the Alps. Then he met something he had not come for: the French Revolution and, more specifically, its brightest day, the great Festival of the Federation. He didn’t care so much about politics. As he tells us: ‘Nature then was sovereign in my mind’.

Now this is precisely the meeting point of the living word in the ecceity of its incarnation. Nature was the very divinity whose reign was being celebrated in those days of July 1790. Just as he came ashore he met the identification, under the concept of Nature, of the harvest and flowers of July with the emblems of the Revolution. He met the sun shining down through the shade of the elms, the flowers of the triumphal arches or the garlands in the windows, Liberty dancing beneath a starry sky, the ripening of the grapes on the hills as the boat slid along the Saône, the scenes of fraternization with the plucking of violins and the songs in the taverns of Burgundy, the maiden spreading the haycock on the slopes of the Alps. As he said, he saw ‘no corner of the land untouched’. The visible and tactile evidence of liberty and brotherhood needed no book, no theoretical or political statement in written letters, in ‘dead’ letters, because the book of life was before the eyes of the travellers, a book where one could only read

Lessons of genuine brotherhood, the plain

And universal reason of mankind.

What is at stake here is something much deeper than the enthusiasm of a young man. For we know that the scene has been replayed many times and not only because other generations of enthusiastic young men and women came in turn. What the young poet and traveller in the land of Revolution lighted upon was the very point of meeting of the modern aesthetic revolution with the modern political Utopia.

Roughly speaking, the modern aesthetic revolution can be summarized in the main themes of the Kantian Kritik der Urteilskraft, published at the same time: the abolition of the distance between the eidos of Beauty and the spectacle of the sensitive; the power, proper to the object of the aesthetic judgement of being appreciated without a concept; the free game of the faculties which witnesses a power of reconciliation between Nature and freedom, even if no concept of the reconciliation is to be determined. As for the modern political Utopia, I don’t designate by this term the projects of ideal communities. Utopia for me is not the distant island, the place which is nowhere. It is the power of mapping together a discursive space and a territorial space, the capacity to make each concept correspond to a point in reality and each argument coincide with an itinerary on a map.

This power is first of all the power of the traveller who goes along, walking and sketching the little scene on his pad. Wordsworth is generally taken to have been the first who discovered and made poetry discover Nature. What he had discovered, I think, is more accurately the way of seeing along the walk, of drawing the sketch in which Nature presents itself to itself, signifies itself without the aim of signifying, and gives their flesh to the key signifiers of politics: people, freedom, community, etc. In the very first verses of The Prelude, we can read:

Should the chosen guide

Be nothing more than a wandering cloud

I cannot miss my way

That power of safely wandering with a wandering cloud as a guide is given a name in the following verses: the name of liberty, not English native freedom but French or Latin liberty. In the close association of this name with the movement of walking, we can’t help hearing the echo of the French revolutionary Chant du départ: ‘La liberté guide nos pas’ (Liberty guides our steps). The traveller could recognize in the scenery of Nature the evidence of political liberty because the liberty of its own wandering ‘as a cloud’ guided his feet, preceded them in the same way as the Lord had preceded the apostles on the shore of Lake Tiberias. With such a precedency, walking, seeing and sketching in a glance become the enactment of a power of schematization through which Nature presents itself as ruling the community. Therefore politics itself can the aestheticized, that is to say, it can be appreciated without a concept. A worn-out topic of ethics reminds us that ‘Travelling does not heal one’s soul.’ True enough, it doesn’t: it does much more. Travelling means healing the very defect of the concept, giving it the body in which we can ‘read’ it, see it in the hic et nunc of its sensitive incarnation.

This does not necessarily require great popular movements, festivals and demonstrations of the marching people. This does not require long walks, not even the fragrances of the harvest and the summer flowers, the sunny sky, ripening grapes, pretty maids and happy dances which delighted the young English poet. It is enough that we can recognize, in Hegelian terms, ‘the rose of the concept’ in the ‘cross’ of any little scene. Most of us have experienced it. It was just a matter of taking the bus or the train up to the terminal of certain suburban lines: there the miracle could happen. A gloomy winter sky on blocks of concrete flats or barracks made of planks, zinc or cob was enough to fulfil the promise if it allowed the visitor to meet at ‘its’ place, under the shape of ‘its’ identity, a proletariat or a common people long dreamed of and found there, so close and so different. There it was, the reality of the concept was there in its ecceity, far from the books, no more in deceiving words and yet exactly similar to that which the book had made us hope, the words had made us love. Here it was there, identical to itself because it was identical to the occupation of a space.

There is a strong image of this in Rossellini’s Europe 51. In the film, Ingrid Bergman plays the part of an upper-class lady whom her cousin, a communist, sends to see the other side of the society in order to heal her own pain. Then she takes the bus up to the suburbs, goes into the concrete block, and in a single glance is given everything. This astonishing vision is a very simple sight. In a single shot, she sees the Other, the common people at home. We realize, by following her, that it is indeed easy to grasp the common people in one shot. No need of picturesque details, popular accent and so on: the common people is first of all a framing of the visible. There is a rectangular form and many people in the frame and that’s all you need. The common people is a frame in which many people are included. That formal matrix generates by itself an ethos, it generates ethical qualities of the common people: being close together in a small space means being in the warmth of community and solidarity.

One shot is thus enough to give the ecceity of the concept. Hoc est corpus meum. The process of identification is first of all a process of spatialization. The paradox of identity is that you must travel to disclose it. The Same can be recognized on condition that it be an Other. It is identical to its concept in so far as it is elsewhere, not very far but somewhere else, requiring the little move. Now discovering his or her identity is framing the space of that identity. Identity is not a matter of physical or moral features, it is a question of space. Spatialization presents by its own virtue the identity of the concept to its flesh. It ensures that things and people stay at ‘their’ place and cling to their identity. We can even feel it in the horrific narrative of travelling down to the hell of popular misery which flourished in nineteenth-century literature and political rhetoric.

All of us have read some of those little and dramatic narratives of short travel towards the slums or cellars of the suburbs. The narrative is always framed in the same topos: the obscurity of a den where the noxious air seizes the visitor. He walks in the mud and obscurity without seeing anything and suddenly,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• As the world turns introduction
• Forwards
• Part I Neighbours
• Part II Home and away
• Part III Crossroads
• Part IV Take the high road
• Part V Backwords
• Index