Nicolas Bouvier

Nicolas Bouvier

Nicolas Bouvier (March 6, 1929 - February 17, 1998) was a 20th-century Swiss traveller and writer as well as an iconographer and photographer.

Life

Bouvier was born at Grand-Lancy near Geneva, 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'").

Major voyages

Khyber Pass (1953 - 1954)

Without even waiting for the results of his exams (he would learn in Bombay that he had obtained his Licence 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" ^[1]. 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."

Sri Lanka|Ceylon (1955)

With intermittent company, Bouvier crosses Afghanistan, 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 Osaka) 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 Islands, 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 Orpheus or that of Krishna. 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

See also

• Travel writing

References

1. ^ "Book review of 'The Way of the World' by Nicolas Bouvier"

External links

• Routard page on Bouvier (French)
• An association founded to honour the memory of the writer
• Some images from his 1953-1954 trip
• Chroniques japonaises

Persondata
Name	Bouvier, Nicolas
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	March 6, 1929
Place of birth
Date of death	February 17, 1998
Place of death