Respondent: Sam Ferguson (New College, Oxford)
17.00-18.30
Massey Room, Balliol College
Wine and Nibbles provided
André Gide
Paper and Discussion:
Examining Gide's late-career travels in Equatorial Africa in the mid-1920s and his trip to Soviet Union in 1936, Elizabeth's paper demonstrated the centrality of his experience of geographical displacement to issues of politics, ethics, and aesthetic creativity in Gide's later works. She argued that the "transformative capabilities of travel" are articulated in Gide's writings in relation to a repeated preoccupation with youth and renewal, a preoccupation which emerges out of, and collides with, Gide's increasing awareness of senescence and the question of his own morality. Elizabeth's paper viewed this shift as more than a straightforward recasting of thematic concerns in Gide's work: it is also accompanied by a formal, stylistic divergence in his writings -- a shift which offers evidence for the existence of a distinctive 'late style' in Gide's corpus.
An enjoyable discussion followed, aided by a perceptive response to Elizabeth's paper from fellow Gidean Sam Ferguson (New College). Issues raised included the relevance of Gide's physical (versus imagined) presence in the country; the issue of sexuality in Gide's diaries and its relationship to his mortality; parallels with another diarist of the period, Roger Casement; and the possibility of a tradition of imaginary and real travel writings in French literature at least as early as the 18th century.
Many thanks to Elizabeth for a provocative and fascinating paper (and for making the trek from Paris!).
Abstract:
This paper considers André Gide’s approach later in life to travel and writing up the travel
experience, specifically in the interwar period, during which Voyage au Congo, Le Retour
du Tchad, Retour de l’U.R.S.S. and Retouches à mon Retour de l’U.R.S.S. all appeared.
It suggests that Gide’s conception of travel evolves with age, as travel becomes for him a
process which has the potential to enable renewal and rejuvenation, as much as it represents a search for the new (understood, in the context of Gide’s travel-based work, in terms of the exotic, the supposed antonym of the everyday). Gide’s evolving approach to travel and travel writing during the interwar period will be explored in the light of his understanding and interrogation of the aging process and his own mortality. The shift that can be detected between the West Africa narratives and the texts on the Soviet Union will be understood as a stylistic as well as a formal development; Edward Said’s posthumous work On Late Style informs this element of the paper. Debating the effect of looking back on one’s work in order to sustain and inspire further artistic production in the face of one’s demise, Said might also be seen to delineate the figure of the aging traveller-writer, in speaking of the ‘increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism, which late style expresses and, more important, uses to formally sustain itself’. Gide, for example, attempts to maintain a sense of apartness as well as a physical and ultimately ideological ‘exile’ in his interwar travel-based writings. Indeed, he will also be seen to resist aging through frequent invocation of his early travel-based works of the fin-de-siècle, whether focused on real or imagined travel, in these later texts. This jarring effect will be explored in detail, especially in relation to the 'progression' that is supposedly central to the traveller-writer’s creative project.
Biography:
Elizabeth Geary Keohane is a postgraduate in the Department of French, Trinity College Dublin, where she recently submitted her IRCHSS-funded doctoral thesis entitled 'Real and Imaginary Travel in Gide and Michaux'. She was also awarded the A.J. Leventhal Scholarship and the Arnould Memorial Prize from Trinity College Dublin. She has previously published an article on Michaux and ekphrasis in French Studies and has an upcoming publication on Gide and bedroom-based imaginary travel in Aller(s)-Retour(s), the conference proceedings of the Society of Dix-neuviémistes, as well as participating in a new proposed interdisciplinary volume entitled Travel and Imagination. She is currently a maître de langue in the Department of English at the Université d'Orléans.
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