Nicolas Bouvier
Encyclopedia
Nicolas Bouvier was a 20th-century Swiss traveller and writer as well as an iconographer
and photographer.
, the youngest of three children. He grew up in "a Huguenot
milieu, rigorous and enlightened at the same time, intellectually very open, but where the entire emotional aspect of existence was strictly monitored." He passed his childhood in a house where, in his words, "the paper-cutter counted for more than the bread-knife", a double reference to his librarian father ("one of the most amiable beings I should ever have met") and his mother, "the most mediocre cook west of Suez
". He grew up indifferent to gastronomy and a hardy traveller as well as an avid reader. Between the ages of six and seven, he devoured Jules Verne
, Curwood, Stevenson
, Jack London
and Fenimore Cooper
. "At eight years, I traced with my thumbnail the course of the Yukon
in the butter of my toast. Already waiting for the world: to grow up and clear off."
From 1946, various escapades (Bourgogne
, Tuscany
, Provence
, Flanders
, the Sahara
, Lapland, Anatolia
) got him started on the path of the voyager. Nevertheless, he enrolled at the University of Geneva in the faculty of Letters and Law, indulged an interest in Sanskrit and medieval history, and thought about pursuing a doctorate (which he did not in the end take up) doing a comparative study of Manon Lescaut
and Moll Flanders
.
His travels all over the world incited him to recount his experiences and adventures, the most famous works being L'Usage du monde and Le Poisson-scorpion. His work is marked by a commitment to report what he sees and feels, shorn of any pretence of omniscience, leading often to an intimacy bordering on the mystical. His journey from Geneva
to Japan was in many ways prescient of the great eastward wave of hippies that occurred in the sixties and seventies - slow, meandering progress in a small, iconic car, carefully guarded idiosyncrasy, a rite of passage. Yet, it differs in that the travelogues this journey inspired contain deep reflections on man's intimate nature, written in a style very much aware and appreciative of the traditions and possibilities of the language he uses. (He wrote mainly in French, though he does mention writing a series of travel articles in English for a local journal during his stay in Ceylon.)
"To reach the heart of this man, one must return to the slim volume that contains all his poems," wrote Bertial Galand, Bouvier's editor. The work in question is Le dehors et le dedans, a collection of texts written for the most part on the road and published for the first time in 1982. This is the only book of poetry by Bouvier, who nevertheless said in an interview, "Poetry is more necessary to me than prose because it is extremely direct, brutal - full-contact!"
At the end of the 1950s, the World Health Organisation asked him to find images on the eye and its diseases. Thus Bouvier discovered, "through the chances of life", his profession of "image searcher," which perhaps appealed to him because "images, like music, speak a universal language," as suggested by Pierre Starobinski in his preface to Le Corps, miroir du Monde - voyage dans le musée imaginaire de Nicolas Bouvier. Another posthumous work, Entre errance et éternité, offers a poetic look at the mountains of the world. The iconographer commented on some of his finds in a series of articles for Le Temps stratégique, collected together as Histoires d'une image.
That Nicolas Bouvier lived in movement does not mean that he did not enjoy himself in Switzerland. Quite the contrary: he was involved in various activities, creating the progressive Gruppe Olten
with Frisch
and Dürrenmatt
, after having left the Swiss Writers Society, which he found too conservative. In L'Echappée Belle, éloge de quelques pérégrins he celebrates a Switzerland "rarely spoken of: a Switzerland in movement, a nomadic Switzerland." The Swiss, sedentary? "You must be joking! In fact, the Swiss are the most nomadic people in Europe. Every sixth Swiss has chosen to live his life abroad." Reasonable? "It remains to be seen! Under the ordered surface, the varnish of the Helvetic 'as it should be,' I sense the passage of great strata of the irrational, a deaf fermentation, so present in the first thrillers of Dürrenmatt, in Fritz Zorn's Mars, a latent violence that, to me, renders this country bizarre and engaging." The traveller-writer, a close friend of Ella Maillart
, thus sees in the history of his country "a constant of nomadism, of exile, of quest, of anxiety, a manner of not staying in place that have profoundly marked our mentality and, therefore, our literature. There has been, for two thousand years, a Switzerland, vagabond, pilgrim, often forced on to the road by poverty, and of which we speak all too rarely."
Bouvier received the Prix de la Critique (1982), the Prix des Belles Lettres (1986), and in 1995 the Grand Prix Ramuz for the entirety of his work. On February 17, 1998, suffering from cancer, Nicolas Bouvier died, in the words of his wife, "in complete serenity." A few months earlier, he had written these words: "Henceforth it is in another elsewhere / that reveals not its name / in other whispers and other plains / that you must / lighter than thistle / disappear in silence / returning thus to the winds of the road" (Le dehors et le dedans, "Morte saison'").
in Letters and Law), he leaves in June 1953 with his friend Thierry Vernet in a Fiat Topolino
. First destination: Yugoslavia
. The voyage lasts till December 1954. The voyage leads the two men to Turkey
, to Iran
and to Pakistan
, Thierry Vernet leaving his friend at the Khyber Pass. Nicolas Bouvier continues alone. But his words and the drawings of Thierry Vernet come together a few years later to recount this journey in L'Usage du monde, later, in October 2009, to be published in English translation as "The Way of the World" . The pilgrim finds the words to express himself, and his feet follow them faithfully: "A journey does not need reasons. Before long, it proves to be reason enough in itself. One thinks that one is going to make a journey, yet soon it is the journey that makes or unmakes you." The book has been described as a voyage of self-discovery "on the order of Robert M. Pirsig
’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
" . Later, in The Paths of Halla-San: "If one does not accord the journey the right to destroy us a little bit, one might as well stay at home."
, Pakistan and India, before reaching Ceylon. Here he loses his footing: the solitude and the heat floor him. It would take him seven months to leave the island and almost thirty years to free himself of the weight of this adventure with the writing of Le Poisson-scorpion, a magical account oscillating between light and shadow. It ends on a quote from Louis-Ferdinand Céline: "The worst defeat of all is to forget and especially the thing that has defeated you."
) and a complete re-edition. Of this country, he would say: "Japan is a lesson in economy. It is not considered good form to take up too much space." In The Japanese Chronicles, he blends his personal experiences of Japan with Japanese history and re-write a Japanese history from a Western perspectives. It is a very interesting rerepresentation of the Far East from a personal Westerner perspectives.
, Nicolas Bouvier wrote Journal d'Aran et d'autres lieux, a tale of travel that slips at times into the supernatural, the voyager suffering from typhoid.
Not that that gets in the way of his appreciation of the air of the Irish islands, which "dilates, tonifies, intoxicates, lightens, frees up animal spirits in the head who give themselves over to unknown but amusing games. It brings together the virtues of champagne, cocaine, caffeine, amorous rapture and the tourism office makes a big mistake in forgetting it in its prospectuses."
Iconography
Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...
and photographer.
Life
Bouvier was born at Grand-Lancy near GenevaGeneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
, the youngest of three children. He grew up in "a Huguenot
Huguenot
The Huguenots were members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France during the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the 17th century, people who formerly would have been called Huguenots have instead simply been called French Protestants, a title suggested by their German co-religionists, the...
milieu, rigorous and enlightened at the same time, intellectually very open, but where the entire emotional aspect of existence was strictly monitored." He passed his childhood in a house where, in his words, "the paper-cutter counted for more than the bread-knife", a double reference to his librarian father ("one of the most amiable beings I should ever have met") and his mother, "the most mediocre cook west of Suez
Suez
Suez is a seaport city in north-eastern Egypt, located on the north coast of the Gulf of Suez , near the southern terminus of the Suez Canal, having the same boundaries as Suez governorate. It has three harbors, Adabya, Ain Sokhna and Port Tawfiq, and extensive port facilities...
". He grew up indifferent to gastronomy and a hardy traveller as well as an avid reader. Between the ages of six and seven, he devoured Jules Verne
Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...
, Curwood, Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....
, Jack London
Jack London
John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...
and Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring frontiersman Natty Bumppo...
. "At eight years, I traced with my thumbnail the course of the Yukon
Yukon
Yukon is the westernmost and smallest of Canada's three federal territories. It was named after the Yukon River. The word Yukon means "Great River" in Gwich’in....
in the butter of my toast. Already waiting for the world: to grow up and clear off."
From 1946, various escapades (Bourgogne
Bourgogne
Burgundy is one of the 27 regions of France.The name comes from the Burgundians, an ancient Germanic people who settled in the area in early Middle-age. The region of Burgundy is both larger than the old Duchy of Burgundy and smaller than the area ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy, from the modern...
, Tuscany
Tuscany
Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....
, Provence
Provence
Provence ; Provençal: Provença in classical norm or Prouvènço in Mistralian norm) is a region of south eastern France on the Mediterranean adjacent to Italy. It is part of the administrative région of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur...
, Flanders
Flanders
Flanders is the community of the Flemings but also one of the institutions in Belgium, and a geographical region located in parts of present-day Belgium, France and the Netherlands. "Flanders" can also refer to the northern part of Belgium that contains Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp...
, the Sahara
Sahara
The Sahara is the world's second largest desert, after Antarctica. At over , it covers most of Northern Africa, making it almost as large as Europe or the United States. The Sahara stretches from the Red Sea, including parts of the Mediterranean coasts, to the outskirts of the Atlantic Ocean...
, Lapland, Anatolia
Anatolia
Anatolia is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey...
) got him started on the path of the voyager. Nevertheless, he enrolled at the University of Geneva in the faculty of Letters and Law, indulged an interest in Sanskrit and medieval history, and thought about pursuing a doctorate (which he did not in the end take up) doing a comparative study of Manon Lescaut
Manon Lescaut
Manon Lescaut is a short novel by French author Abbé Prévost. Published in 1731, it is the seventh and final volume of Mémoires et aventures d'un homme de qualité . It was controversial in its time and was banned in France upon publication...
and Moll Flanders
Moll Flanders
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders is a novel written by Daniel Defoe in 1722, after his work as a journalist and pamphleteer. By 1722, Defoe had become a recognised novelist, with the success of Robinson Crusoe in 1719...
.
His travels all over the world incited him to recount his experiences and adventures, the most famous works being L'Usage du monde and Le Poisson-scorpion. His work is marked by a commitment to report what he sees and feels, shorn of any pretence of omniscience, leading often to an intimacy bordering on the mystical. His journey from Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
to Japan was in many ways prescient of the great eastward wave of hippies that occurred in the sixties and seventies - slow, meandering progress in a small, iconic car, carefully guarded idiosyncrasy, a rite of passage. Yet, it differs in that the travelogues this journey inspired contain deep reflections on man's intimate nature, written in a style very much aware and appreciative of the traditions and possibilities of the language he uses. (He wrote mainly in French, though he does mention writing a series of travel articles in English for a local journal during his stay in Ceylon.)
"To reach the heart of this man, one must return to the slim volume that contains all his poems," wrote Bertial Galand, Bouvier's editor. The work in question is Le dehors et le dedans, a collection of texts written for the most part on the road and published for the first time in 1982. This is the only book of poetry by Bouvier, who nevertheless said in an interview, "Poetry is more necessary to me than prose because it is extremely direct, brutal - full-contact!"
At the end of the 1950s, the World Health Organisation asked him to find images on the eye and its diseases. Thus Bouvier discovered, "through the chances of life", his profession of "image searcher," which perhaps appealed to him because "images, like music, speak a universal language," as suggested by Pierre Starobinski in his preface to Le Corps, miroir du Monde - voyage dans le musée imaginaire de Nicolas Bouvier. Another posthumous work, Entre errance et éternité, offers a poetic look at the mountains of the world. The iconographer commented on some of his finds in a series of articles for Le Temps stratégique, collected together as Histoires d'une image.
That Nicolas Bouvier lived in movement does not mean that he did not enjoy himself in Switzerland. Quite the contrary: he was involved in various activities, creating the progressive Gruppe Olten
Gruppe Olten
The Gruppe Olten was a club of Swiss writers who convened at Olten's "Bahnhofbuffet" located in the canton of Solothurn in the Swiss plateau...
with Frisch
Max Frisch
Max Rudolf Frisch was a Swiss playwright and novelist, regarded as highly representative of German-language literature after World War II. In his creative works Frisch paid particular attention to issues relating to problems of human identity, individuality, responsibility, morality and political...
and Dürrenmatt
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theatre whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author's work included avant-garde dramas, philosophically deep crime novels, and often macabre satire...
, after having left the Swiss Writers Society, which he found too conservative. In L'Echappée Belle, éloge de quelques pérégrins he celebrates a Switzerland "rarely spoken of: a Switzerland in movement, a nomadic Switzerland." The Swiss, sedentary? "You must be joking! In fact, the Swiss are the most nomadic people in Europe. Every sixth Swiss has chosen to live his life abroad." Reasonable? "It remains to be seen! Under the ordered surface, the varnish of the Helvetic 'as it should be,' I sense the passage of great strata of the irrational, a deaf fermentation, so present in the first thrillers of Dürrenmatt, in Fritz Zorn's Mars, a latent violence that, to me, renders this country bizarre and engaging." The traveller-writer, a close friend of Ella Maillart
Ella Maillart
Ella Maillart was a French-speaking Swiss adventurer, travel writer and photographer, as well as a sportswoman.- Life :...
, thus sees in the history of his country "a constant of nomadism, of exile, of quest, of anxiety, a manner of not staying in place that have profoundly marked our mentality and, therefore, our literature. There has been, for two thousand years, a Switzerland, vagabond, pilgrim, often forced on to the road by poverty, and of which we speak all too rarely."
Bouvier received the Prix de la Critique (1982), the Prix des Belles Lettres (1986), and in 1995 the Grand Prix Ramuz for the entirety of his work. On February 17, 1998, suffering from cancer, Nicolas Bouvier died, in the words of his wife, "in complete serenity." A few months earlier, he had written these words: "Henceforth it is in another elsewhere / that reveals not its name / in other whispers and other plains / that you must / lighter than thistle / disappear in silence / returning thus to the winds of the road" (Le dehors et le dedans, "Morte saison'").
Khyber Pass (1953 - 1954)
Without even waiting for the results of his exams (he would learn in Bombay that he had obtained his LicenceLicentiate
Licentiate is the title of a person who holds an academic degree called a licence. The term may derive from the Latin licentia docendi, meaning permission to teach. The term may also derive from the Latin licentia ad practicandum, which signified someone who held a certificate of competence to...
in Letters and Law), he leaves in June 1953 with his friend Thierry Vernet in a Fiat Topolino
Fiat Topolino
The Fiat 500, commonly known as Topolino , is an Italian automobile model manufactured by Fiat from 1936 to 1955.-History:...
. First destination: Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
. The voyage lasts till December 1954. The voyage leads the two men to Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
, to Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
and to Pakistan
Pakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
, Thierry Vernet leaving his friend at the Khyber Pass. Nicolas Bouvier continues alone. But his words and the drawings of Thierry Vernet come together a few years later to recount this journey in L'Usage du monde, later, in October 2009, to be published in English translation as "The Way of the World" . The pilgrim finds the words to express himself, and his feet follow them faithfully: "A journey does not need reasons. Before long, it proves to be reason enough in itself. One thinks that one is going to make a journey, yet soon it is the journey that makes or unmakes you." The book has been described as a voyage of self-discovery "on the order of Robert M. Pirsig
Robert M. Pirsig
Robert Maynard Pirsig is an American writer and philosopher, and author of the philosophical novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals .-Background:...
’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values is a 1974 philosophical novel, the first of Robert M. Pirsig's texts in which he explores his Metaphysics of Quality.The book sold 5 million copies worldwide...
" . Later, in The Paths of Halla-San: "If one does not accord the journey the right to destroy us a little bit, one might as well stay at home."
Sri Lanka|Ceylon (1955)
With intermittent company, Bouvier crosses AfghanistanAfghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
, Pakistan and India, before reaching Ceylon. Here he loses his footing: the solitude and the heat floor him. It would take him seven months to leave the island and almost thirty years to free himself of the weight of this adventure with the writing of Le Poisson-scorpion, a magical account oscillating between light and shadow. It ends on a quote from Louis-Ferdinand Céline: "The worst defeat of all is to forget and especially the thing that has defeated you."
Japan (1955-1956)
After Ceylon, he leaves for another island: Japan. He finds a country in the throes of change and he would return a few years later. These experiences would lead to Japon, which would become Chroniques japonaises after a third sojourn in 1970 (Bouvier had produced some books for the Swiss pavilion at the World Exposition in OsakaOsaka
is a city in the Kansai region of Japan's main island of Honshu, a designated city under the Local Autonomy Law, the capital city of Osaka Prefecture and also the biggest part of Keihanshin area, which is represented by three major cities of Japan, Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe...
) and a complete re-edition. Of this country, he would say: "Japan is a lesson in economy. It is not considered good form to take up too much space." In The Japanese Chronicles, he blends his personal experiences of Japan with Japanese history and re-write a Japanese history from a Western perspectives. It is a very interesting rerepresentation of the Far East from a personal Westerner perspectives.
Ireland (1985)
Building on a report for a journal in the Aran IslandsAran Islands
The Aran Islands or The Arans are a group of three islands located at the mouth of Galway Bay, on the west coast of Ireland. They constitute the barony of Aran in County Galway, Ireland...
, Nicolas Bouvier wrote Journal d'Aran et d'autres lieux, a tale of travel that slips at times into the supernatural, the voyager suffering from typhoid.
Not that that gets in the way of his appreciation of the air of the Irish islands, which "dilates, tonifies, intoxicates, lightens, frees up animal spirits in the head who give themselves over to unknown but amusing games. It brings together the virtues of champagne, cocaine, caffeine, amorous rapture and the tourism office makes a big mistake in forgetting it in its prospectuses."
Quotes
- A journey does not need reasons. Before long, it proves to be reason enough in itself. One thinks that one is going to make a journey, yet soon it is the journey that makes or unmakes you. (Translated from L'Usage du monde)
- The voyage will not teach you anything if you do not accord it the right to destroy you - a rule as old as the world itself. A voyage is like a shipwreck, and those whose boat has never sunk will never know anything about the sea. The rest is skating or tourism. (Translated from Le Vide et le Plein)
- Experience proves that we make nothing of what we keep for ourselves. We don’t make anything of what which we set aside (as savings) either. Instead of understanding this, we are reluctant both to give and to ask. (Translated from Le Vide et le Plein)
- That day, I thought that I held something important and that my life would be changed. But nothing of this nature is acquired definitively. Like water, the world traverses you, and for a while, lends you its colours. It then draws back, leaving you once again to face the emptiness that one carries in oneself, to face that central insufficiency of the spirit that one must learn to live with, to fight, and which, paradoxically, is possibly our surest driving force. (Translated from L'Usage du monde)
- Time lay suspended. In this graceful arrangement of echos, reflections and coloured, dancing shadows, there was a sovereign, fleeting perfection and a music that I recognised. The lyre of OrpheusOrpheusOrpheus was a legendary musician, poet, and prophet in ancient Greek religion and myth. The major stories about him are centered on his ability to charm all living things and even stones with his music; his attempt to retrieve his wife from the underworld; and his death at the hands of those who...
or that of KrishnaKrishnaKrishna is a central figure of Hinduism and is traditionally attributed the authorship of the Bhagavad Gita. He is the supreme Being and considered in some monotheistic traditions as an Avatar of Vishnu...
. The same that resonates when the world appears in its original transparence and simplicity. He who hears it once, never recovers from it. (Translated from Le Poisson-scorpion) - Time passed in brewing tea, the odd remark, cigarettes, then dawn came up. The widening light caught the plumage of quails and partridges...and quickly I dropped this wonderful moment to the bottom of my memory, like a sheet-anchor that one day I could draw up again.You stretch, pace to and fro feeling weightless, and the word 'happiness' seems too thin and limited to describe what has happened. In the end, the bedrock of experience is not made up of the family, or work, of what others say or think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love. Life dispenses them parsimoniously; our feeble hearts could not stand more. (Translated from The Way of the World)
Œuvre
- L'Usage du monde, 1963, Payot poche, 1992
- Japon, éditions Rencontre, Lausanne, 1967
- Chronique japonaise, 1975, éditions Payot, 1989
- Vingt cinq ans ensemble, histoire de la television Suisse Romande, éditions SSR, 1975
- Le Poisson-scorpion, 1982, éditions Gallimard, Folio, 1996
- Les Boissonas, une dynastie de photographes, éditions Payot, Lausanne, 1983
- Journal d'Aran et d'autres lieux, éditions Payot, 1990
- L'Art populaire en Suisse, 1991
- Le Hibou et la baleine, éditions Zoé, Genève, 1993
- Les Chemins du Halla-San, éditions Zoé, Genève, 1994
- Comment va l'écriture ce matin?, éditions Slatkine, Genève, 1996
- La Chambre rouge et autres textes, éditions Métropolis, 1998
- Le Dehors et le dedans, éditions Zoe, Genève, 1998
- Entre errance et éternité, éditions Zoé, Genève, 1998
- Une Orchidée qu'on appela vanille, éditions Métropolis, Genève, 1998
- La Guerre à huit ans, éditions Mini Zoé, Genève, 1999
- L'Échappée belle, éloge de quelques pérégrins, éditions Métropolis, Genève, 2000
- Histoires d'une image, éditions Zoé, Genève, 2001
- L'Oeil du voyageur, éditions Hoëbeke, 2001
- Charles-Albert Cingria en roue libre, éditions Zoé, Genève, 2005