Virginie Gautier (Autrice, Cergy Paris Université / Chercheuse associée UMR 9022-Héritages) : "Déplacer le paysage, converser avec le monde"

What is a "geopoetic landscape" and how does it hold a dialogue with the works that give today another perspective on our relationship with the landscape? 

This paper will delineate the contours of a "geopoetic landscape". It will focus on four waybooks: The Blue Road (1984) [La Route bleue, 1983], The Wild Swans (2003) [Les Cygnes sauvages, 1990], The Winds of Vancouver: A Nomadic Report from the North Pacific Edge (2013) [Les Vents de Vancouver, 2014], L’archipel du songe (2018), and, from the concept of nomadism, develop three landscapes. 

Kenneth White's building of a nomadic thought, which turns every territory into a possible habitat and the place/space for a poetic praxis, rests on a double heritage. This is why his landscape is first and foremost a world landscape. 

1. Lines & movements of writing — the wanderer / the wayfarer.

A first series of landscapes will develop the tropism of free moving, of wayfaring along an always fluctuating line. Anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that thinking the line as a path is experiencing what Robin Jarvis (1997: 69) has called a "progressional ordering of reality", or integrating knowledge along a path of travel. The waybooks, as will be seen, are frought with the stylistic elements of this moving perception (collecting, transcribing what has already been lived, cinetic tales), with a focus on the place of poetry (of haikus notably) as particularly topical moments, and "freshness of perception".

2. Documented territories — the reader.

A second series of landscapes is perceived from maps and waybooks. The recurrent presence of toponyms, as "the word's physicallity," is White's true poetics. Documenting a myriad of explorers and authors while shaping a landscape stratified in geographic layers and historical thickness is also an important aspect of White's poetics. Therefore, from the reading of Baptiste Morizot's L’inexploré, the question of the referential historal framework will be addressed and the notion of exploration put in perspective.

3. Mental space — the meditator.

Other geographical motifs (the white world, the blue road…) are to be interpreted as metaphors of the construction of an ontiological subject. Landscape phenomenas and the inspiration of the being are intertwined. Interiorizing the landscape seems to lead to a wish for transcendance, but also to look foro a path to be reconnected with the something archaic in the ladscape. This will to "reconnect with the eath" is to be taken seriously. 

As a conclusion, this paper will situate this "geopoetic ladscape" from a perceptive of today's territorial conceptions, taking as a port of entry different ecologically-inspired lines of thought. For instance : entering in correspondances with anthropologist Tim Ingold; recharting with historian Frédérique Aït-Touati; developing a culture of the living with philosopher Baptiste Morizot.

Peggy Pacini (Cergy Paris Université / UMR 9022-Héritages): "Kerouac’s ‘Sea’ poem: experiencing the land- and sea-scape."

Gérald Peloux (Inalco / IFRAE, CRCAO) : "Les Cygnes sauvages : d/écrire le Japon"

In Les Cygnes sauvages, published in 1990, Kenneth White describes in the form of a waybook his journey, in autumn 1984, from Tokyo to Hokkaidô, Japan’s northern island, to meet the wild swans. To do this, he followed in the footsteps of the poet Matsuo Bashô (1644-1694) and the yukar, the songs of the Ainu gods.

Les Cygnes sauvages has a parallel structure made up of two lines that eventually interpenetrate and respond to each other, like two lines of a different song. The presence of poetic forms throughout the text, whether haiku in the first part or yukar as we approach Hokkaidô, reinforces this impression. These two lines of song - uta and yukar - run throughout White's text, providing rhythm, one of the essential components of michiyukibun, a narrative structure specific to classical Japanese literature.

What does White have to say about Japan? His first descriptions are particularly deceptive. The Japan described in the first pages of Les Cygnes sauvages conjures up an image of a country heavily influenced, even distorted, by the West, not to say America. But White explains that he knows that behind all this mayhem, there is ‘another Japan’. While this other Japan is initially described as the Japan of ukiyo-e (alleys, gardens, canals, etc.), it is soon identified with a cosmopolitanism that White ends up poetising, as if his writing somehow accepts the presence of this non-archaic Japan as an inescapable component of this country.

White's description of Japan as a country swept by a wave of westernisation and kitsch ultimately means that his Japan is not the one he has in front of his eyes, that it is not the one he describes. He invites us on a ‘mental journey’. This is a call to discover, or rather to construct, a Japan that does not really exist, but is based on the connection between cultural and literary elements chosen by the traveller. In fact, the statement that ‘there are virtually no literary monuments’ in Tokyo is once again arbitrary: there are many such ‘literary monuments’ in this city, which has seen the consecration of a literary culture since the 18th century. But these ‘literary monuments’ take a different form to ours in the West. However, by claiming that they are ‘discreet in the extreme’, White can more easily give substance to his ‘mental journey’. In this way, White was confronted with a vision of space that was beyond him, but this was perhaps also what he came to Japan in search of. The criticism of modern Japan gradually gave way to a reconsideration of the latter and its integration into his dreamed, fantasised Japan, moving from description to writing.

White arrives in Hokkaidô via the port of Hakodate, one of the first ports opened to the West, in 1854, a cosmopolitan city par excellence in the Japanese imagination. This city is linked in White's text to the poet Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912), who was to try his hand at Japanese texts written in Latin characters, but it is above all here that White offers the reader his first reading of a yukar. These will henceforth be the only works presented (‘The Song of the Thunder God’, ‘The Song of the Whale’, ‘The Song of the Blood Red Bird’, ‘The Song of the Ainu Raven’).

In the final pages of Les Cygnes sauvages, we witness a radical transformation, both affirmed by White and implied by the choice of these yukar. This transformation, linked to his overall questioning, seems to be part of a desire to integrate himself with Nature. The writer physically melts into Nature, in a way shedding his humanity. The transition from haiku, which is above all a poem of perception, to yukar is fundamental from this point of view. Although yukar are written in the first person singular, this first person represents the voice of the god. The reciter is haunted, as it were, by the divinity, be it that of an animal, a plant or a natural phenomenon. In other words, Nature speaks through the reciter. Could we not see in this search for emptiness, one of the other leitmotifs of this text, White's desire to make room within himself for a higher element to express itself?