Introduction

‘The end of travelling’ – this often cited quote by Claude Lévi-Strauss hints at a modern feeling of disillusionment with a practice and a genre considered problematic. It has led to a long tradition of works that scrutinise the meaning of this ending and the implications it has for disciplines such as anthropology or artistic practices such as travel literature. Lévi-Strauss's position hints at a failure of travel as a (Western) practice of gaining knowledge through a spatial exploration and the often subsequent colonisation of this space. In this sense, it confirms the structural voids in the underlying epistemology of Western travellers discovering and conceptualising a geographical and anthropological other. It can be read as one of the consequences of the paradigmatic break initiated in the human sciences and artistic practices by (post)structuralism, but also in the context of a growing globalisation, which tends to erase cultural differences. The broader, epistemological problem Lévi-Strauss detects echoes a more specific, literary issue with the genre of travel writing and its narrative scenography that does not seem appropriate any longer in the postcolonial transition.

Within this context of an eroding belief in its hermeneutical potential, there is, surprisingly, a persistent fascination for travel writing within the community of francophone writers, artists and philosophers. Echoing the tradition of japonismes and chinoiseries, which influenced French painting of the late nineteenth century, many francophone writers particularly see their journey to East Asia as a kind of modern Grand Tour, recounted in travel stories with variable physiognomy, ranging from the exoticism of Pierre Loti to the postmodern, fragmented Japan of Amélie Nothomb. In his excellent article about francophone travellers to Japan, Jean-Pierre Dubois chooses to focus on the empirical reasons that led different authors in their undertaking and especially on the effect the Japanese experience had on their writing: which impressions did they choose to hide, which ones to stress?

My research question takes a less personalised perspective and lies in this apparent paradox between Lévi-Strauss's statement of the end of the (possibilities of) journeys during the twentieth century and the plethora of travel to, and travel narratives on, East Asia.