ICFFS-Diversity & Difference

In a January 1944 letter to Gaston Gallimard, Henri Michaux expressed contempt for his book, Un Barbare en Asie, a romanesque account of his travels in India, China, and Japan. This "détestable livre" seemed doomed to be a work forever in progress and forever unfinished. Editing this work more than any other, Michaux first published Barbare in 1933, later added prefaces in 1945, 1967, and 1984, and throughout those fifty years, added lengthy footnotes that resituated his original writings vis-à-vis his ever-changing frames of mind. Michaux described it in 1967 as "ce livre qui ne me convient plus, qui me gêne et me heurte," for it had started to assert a will of its own, a resistance against Michaux's efforts toward improvement and clarification, as it made them known as "comme ne lui convenant pas." "Ici, barbare on fut, barbare on doit rester," wrote Michaux, excluded into the ambiguous location of an "ici" that defied localization, whether in and outside the book, or somewhere between France and Asia. He seemed to declare himself a barbarian to a book of his own creation.

Despite the tremendous scholarship already conducted on Un Barbare en Asie, scholars still have not fully excavated all of the possible relationships between the book and barbarianism. I offer a novel interpretation of Michaux's "barbarie": I claim that it was primarily in relation to the book that he declared himself a "barbare," not Asia.

Michaux grapples not only with the alterity of Asia, but also with the alterity of the book. In fact, the book displaces Asia as his most urgent problem. He constantly feels a pressure from the book to engage in constant reexamination and reconsideration, whether in regard to his preoccupations with the time that separates him from his travels, the evolving ways in which Japan, China and India may signify to the rest of the world, or especially the book in its becoming — which is to say, its constantly redefined role in these inter-related worlds of change. Perhaps the alienation from the book emerged from the fact that Michaux was always measuring the book against what he wanted it to be: a book that would serve as kind of cross-cultural technology, a different technology of encounter.

I focus on paratextual aspects of Barbare, which is to say, the prefaces that Michaux added in 1945, 1967, and 1984, as well as his use of the footnotes. First of all, it is in these very spaces where Michaux, exiled into the "paratextes" from the main body of the book that rejects him, attempts to redirect this textual body so that it may become an "objet complet" (Michel Butor), a complete work of art that would gather the textual body and channel it into a form of technology that would keep up with the rapid evolution of Asia since Michaux's travels there. Ready to compare the book to other media-technologies such as the cinema or the radio, Butor wonders how "une civilisation du livre" could be re-conceptualized, given the growing "civilisation de l'enregistrement," and thus informs my understanding of Michaux's conceptualization of the book-as-technology as an effort to revitalize the book as a powerful and meaningful medium. An analysis of the 50-year estrangement experienced by Michaux in regard to his own book is crucial to an understanding of the ways in which the author essayed a technology of genuine encounter with Asia.




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