 WESTPHAL, Bertrand

University of Limoges

For a geocritical approach to texts

ARTICLE

In short, spaces have multiplied, fragmented and diversified. There are today of all
sizes and types, for all uses and for all functions. To live is to go from one space to
another, trying as much as possible not to bump.

Georges Perec
E the nave goes.

Federico Fellini
Like time, or even more, space seems to be obvious; like him, he is stuck to the
obvious. Georges Perec is right: we bang easily. Never before has the perception of
space been as complex as since the end of the Second World War. The horrors that
disrupted human history between 1939 and 1945, and whose worst were
concentrated in a few acres of barbed wire, led to a new reading of time; they did
not immediately affect the reading of the space. The conditions were of course
met, but, it seems, it was after the armistices that spatial perception experienced
its most substantial evolution. The reconstruction of the cities devastated by years
of war has nourished a vast reflection on the metropolitan space; it is not
surprising that architecture and urbanism have contributed in the first place to
fueling contemporary thought (postmodernism finds its origins here). On a political
level, the partition of the world sanctioned by the Yalta agreements is a specular
reflection of that which was decreed at Tordesillas in 1494, except that this time
the demarcation no longer concerned exclusively ultramarine territories, often
virtual, but set of a mapped planet. Every place was henceforth connoted; every
place was the fragment of a block itself resulting from fragmentation. Another
connection between Tordesillas and Yalta is that the second treaty has definitively
sanctioned the passing of the first. The process of decolonization began after the
new sharing principles came into effect. But the colonialist view was an essentially
monolithic view, which, by its very nature, embraced space according to one point
of view: his - the others being only marginally taken into account, or seized in their
irrevocable otherness. The colonial space was a more or less differential space, but
its perception was referenced in the center. Yalta has dedicated the bipartition of
the world; decolonization, it officially (which does not mean deliberately )
consecrated the multiplicity of glances on the world.

Since the early sixties (at least), the perception of space, including human spaces,
has further complicated. Fortunately, I would add. The increasing complexity goes
hand in hand with the refinement of each point of view, and the emergence of a
plurality of different, even divergent, points of view. The resulting break-up is not
necessarily the sign of a crisis, as suggested by those who are reassured by
simplicity (monology), but perhaps as a sign of greater lucidity. Literature was not
left out because, being never completely cut off from the world, he had to reinvest
the space according to the new rules. The strange labyrinthine route of the new
novelists has confused more than one reader. In fact, they illustrated, perhaps a
little in advance, how the places were, or were going to be, perceived. Thus there
is an abyss between Pierre Loti's Stamboul and Alain Robbe-Grillet's Istanbul, but,
although the city has undergone profound changes, onomastic, urban and other,
between the time of Aziyade and that of L'Immortelle is above all the mode of
representation that has been reformed.

From the city-table dear to Louis-Sebastien Mercier, we went to the city-sculpture,

in that the statue is multidimensional, appreciable according to the point of view
that we privilege. City-painting, city-sculpture and then, of course, city-book. The
city had been portrayed; we modeled the city; we now read the city. Because if the
city is often transplanted into the book, it also happens that both are seized in
relations of strict equivalence. In other words, for some writers - especially from
the fifties - the city became a book, as the book became a city. The increasing and
concomitant complexification (is it fortuitous?) Of the spatial structures and
structures of the literary work [1]
then made the urban space a metaphor for the
book, and the novel in particular. Sometimes, twinning was done far away, in
Tokyo, for example; it was then said, like Roland Barthes: "The city is an ideogram:
the text continues [2]
". The signs have their empire over which the empires of old
no longer extend their law. As for us, citizen-readers, and sometimes citizens-
authors, we take the arteries as we go through lines. We go astray in some, as we
lose ourselves in others. We return to the path as we find the thread of history.
However, there is one way to avoid going astray: it is to follow a plan when you are
in town, a map when you are in the country or on a highway, a portulan when you
go along the coast. In literature, reliable guides do not exist because we do not
map imaginary spaces. At most, we will write atlases that are themselves
imaginary. But this does not mean that we will deprive ourselves of the pleasure of
thinking. While Gracq, Nabokov, Butor, Perec, Calvino, Pynchon and many others
thought about the relationship between the book and the city, the (not exclusively
literary) theory of space decoding experienced a boom from the end of the fifties.

It is undoubtedly significant that Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space was

published in 1957. Bachelard had numerous followers, including Pierre Sansot,
who, in 1973, published a landmark Poetics of the city . In spite of its totalizing
title, the famous essay of Bachelard sticks to a visit of "spaces of the intimacy",
that guides a feeling of "topophilia [4]
" coming to the purest of the
subjectivities. The Other is absent; it is the I who expresses himself and who
scrutinizes himself in the mirror of places. In Poetics of the city , the frame opens:
from the topophilia, one passes to the poliphilie; the study, which covers the entire
metropolitan space (Paris serving as a milestone), proposes a "poetics of the urban
object [5]
", but the Other remains absent, in any case this Other who does not
share the space of the I.

In fact, it was not until colonialism was emptied of most of its substance that the
Other (as a foreigner) and his image became a specific subject of study. It is indeed
during the sixties that the term imagology took the meaning that we know
today. The imagological approach is frequently adopted; its scope is
interdisciplinary; it meets the favor of all those who relate a culture of observation
(subsumed under the person of the author: the ego) and a culture looked at, both
separated by a differential difference, which will be captured in a representation
more (Pierre Loti) or less (Victor Segalen) stereotyped, and thus more or less close
to a typical image. Although it has its origins in Germany, a country without much
ultramarine past (at least in the traditional sense of the word), the imagology
supports, among other things, fine analyzes of the colonial phenomenon in
literature.
The question is to know if the imagology is able to take into account the whole of
the study of the human spaces in literature, or better: the study of the human
spaces apprehended in their entirety.

No, of course. To tell the truth, it has never been assigned this mission. Here the
Other is invariably different in a world characterized, as Deleuze would say, by an
opposition between identical and negative, identity and contradiction. The
imagology devotes a space of coexistence between two or more entities, but in no
case a con / fusion space. The space looked, in this case, corresponds to an
impression of the looking, or of a homogeneous (identifiable) class of gazes, which,
without striking a blow, will lend itself to the plate-making. It will have the essential
function of revealing the I looking to himself, and even more to the recipient of his
story. The imagology does not pose in principle the active interaction of looks. It
isolates them to better analyze them.

Moreover, besides the imagology, there are at least two other traditional
approaches that examine the relationship between human spaces and literature,
namely the thematic or thematic criticism (the Stoffgeschichte ), and the
mythocritic.

The first will give a special place to the theme of the city, the island or the river or
mountain - but without these categories necessarily refer to designated spaces. If
it is a question of the Rhine, it will not be as such, but because it will be perceived
as a river paradigm, a limes / border and a limen / threshold, which implies notably
blocking and crossing. In this case, the river is sometimes the Rhine, among
others the Rhine: the predicate takes precedence over the subject.

Conversely, the mythocritic integrates spaces with real referent that re-simulate
this reality, but provided that they are hoisted to the rank of myth. Extreme
prestige becomes an indispensable condition. In this case, it often happens that
the name of Venice is mentioned. There would be any place (that's the word!) To
question the foundations of such a recurrence. Venice is probably not just a
mythical place; more generally, it is perhaps the ideal metaphor of myth.

In short, if we resorted to - chance! - in Limoges example, one would find that this
city would be neglected by the mythocritique, because, although
the mythoid word myth has been forged in Limoges, Limoges is without doubt
deprived of such an aura; Limoges could incidentally serve to illustrate the theme
of the city; it could also appear at the corner of an imagological study devoted to
Balzac, Giraudoux or Simenon. The literary dimension of Limoges, its own literary
dimension, would emerge at no moment, or very little. But is she really
private? That's the whole question.

Before coming to the geocritical hypothesis, it would be necessary to fill, by flying

over, the gap that separates the fifties / sixties of this end of the century.

Two simultaneous phenomena, apparently isolated, even contradictory, are

available for analysis. On the one hand, there is the gradual bursting of the
perception of a homogeneous human space, provoked by a continuous decentering of
the point of view, and a constant deepening of the gaze. On the other hand, we observe a
process of globalization of this same space, which is rooted in the nostalgia for a
hegemonic system, which aims to recompact the peripheries by refuting their status,
which finally curbs emergences and discredits the the very principle of variability in the
name of a thought combining unicity and indeterminacy.

The space is apprehended in its double centrifugal and centripetal tension. Pulled
here and there, he loses his anchorage. Borrowing more before the sea, we speak
of floating spaces, navicles - epithet Leon Battista Alberti applied formerly to the
evanescent states ( naviculae ) that formed the Italy of Quattrocento. Today, many
are watching this drift, and commenting on it. As early as the 1970s, Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari had developed a theory that better than others reflected the
complexity of any seizure of human spaces. They evoked the vanishing line
inherent in any territory, albeit narrowly defined, and posed the crucial question:
"We should first better understand the relations between D [deterritorialization],
territory, reterritorisation and land". And to add:

In the first place, the territory itself is inseparable from the vectors of
deterritorialization that work from within [...] In the second place, the D is inseparable
from correlative reterritorializations. It is that the D is never simple, but always
multiple and composed [...] Now the reterritorialization as an original operation does
not express a return to the territory, but these differential relations interior to the D
itself, this inner multiplicity at the vanishing line ... To the point that the D can be
named creator of the earth - a new earth, a universe, and no longer just a
reterritorialization [7] ".

Therefore, the territory appears well as "a hold-together of heterogeneous

elements [8]
", which should be observed in their movement. Deleuze and Guattari
dissociate space and fixity, thus they (implicitly) emphasize the link between
temporality and space. The spatial vanishing line zeroes the time horizon, even
though, for others, the axis of time is distorted to spatialize itself. In short, time
blurs while space is segmented like a line. It would not be incongruous to apply to
the analysis of human spaces the principles of the temporal analysis peculiar to a
certain phenomenology (Husserl, Fink, ...). In What is philosophy ? (1991), Deleuze
and Guattari will return to the notion of deterritorialization; in real poets, they
compare it to the movement of "lobsters that walk in line at the bottom of the
water, pilgrims or knights who straddle the heavenly line of flight." These words
are taken from the fourth chapter of the essay, which is entitled
"Geophilosophy". This chapter has undoubtedly had more than one reader
emeritus; one of them - Massimo Cacciari - became mayor of Venice (still Venice!)
in 1993. A year later, he published a Geo-filosofia dell'Europa , whose French title
- Declinations of Europe - occult the reference deleuzienne [10]
, but whose project
is clear: it is necessary "to risk the trip in the echelon , in the non-obvious, in what
about which it seemed impossible that could be found a hístor [11]
In 1997, Cacciari
returned to this subject, in a once again striking essay : L'arcipelago : The human
space - and more precisely the European space - is perceived as an archipelago, an
ensemble "of kósmoi , structures endowed with an order and dialoguing with each
other" [12]
"- in short, what HRJauss called" enclaves of meaning. " [13]
From Deleuze
/ Guattari to Cacciari, the spatial vanishing line is a little prolonged, or more
segmented: it depends, but what matters is that a principle at first abstract has
finally nourished a study whose object has become concrete - Europe here. As well
as the initial imagology, geo-philosophy goes in the direction of the spatial
designation. Like imagology, it does not find its origins in literature. Philosophy
serves him as a bedrock, as formerly psychology had engendered imagology.

In recent years, the perception of human spaces has continued to be refined, to

the point that a new type of story narrating the "creation of the land" seems to
have emerged. The creation of the earth, following the deterritorialization
movement at Deleuze / Guattari, elsewhere has two names. When it lasts six days,
it is Genesis; as long as it takes a little longer - the time it takes to write a book
could be geo-poietek , geo-poetics. In the latter case, it would have its singers, in
the forefront of which would include Michel Butor, Predrag Matvejevic or Claudio
Magris, who, in 1997, won with his geopoetic "test" Microcosmes the Premio
Strega (the Italian equivalent of the price Goncourt ). Geo-poetics could be the
poetic transcription of human spaces, a true creative writing of the territory. Would
not the bar be placed high up; would the requirements not be
extreme? Geopoetics, it seems to me, would stand out more in creation than in
criticism - unless, from one to the other, differences are
erased, always erased? Another reason that drives me to avoid the
word geopoetic is that it already exists under a particular meaning. In April 1989,
the poet Kenneth White founded an International Institute of Geopoetics with
multiple challenges: protection of the biosphere, links between poetry, biology and
ecology. White's geopoetics finds its foundation in such authors as Hölderlin,
Heidegger, Wallace Stevens or Tchuang-tseu, Taoist of the third century AD.

Nevertheless, the question remains unanswered. It may well be that the time has
come to rethink the link between human space and literature. Is it not time to
begin by federating the approaches that have been going on for thirty or forty
years, and that, in theory, we treat separately? Would it not be appropriate to
explore the city-book metaphor, or even the book-space, and, from the book to the
space, to apply to it the principles of intertextuality? Would it not be desirable to
fully assume the mobility of space, this fragmentation subject to "an infinite speed
of birth and fainting", and to seek to define the "threshold of suspension of
infinity" [14]
? (Deleuze / Guattari), from which it would be possible to probe the
interstice where, for a moment , the places would emerge in their authenticity?

*
Is it not time, in short, to think of articulating literature around its relations to
space, to promote a geocritical , poetic whose object would not be the examination
of representations of space in literature but rather that of interactions between
human spaces and literature, and one of the major stakes a contribution to the
determination / indeterminacy of cultural identities [15]
?
Given the premises, the company does not appear easy; a priori , it would even be
paradoxical. Indeed, is it not contradictory to seek to define the instruments of an
identification of human spaces while we keep repeating that they are subject to a
process of fragmentation whose kinematics results from the degree of lucidity the
observer? Doubt would be allowed, even recommended, if this operation was
equivalent to a global recomposition of space, because this would be alleged by
this same lucidity which also makes possible the perception of the spatial
explosion. One would then face an aporia - insurmountable like all the aporias. It
will be answered otherwise: a new reading of space must have as its condition the
abandonment of the singular; it will orient the reader towards a plural perception
of space, or towards the perception of plural spaces. The geocritics would indeed
correspond to a poetics of the archipelago, the whole of which is constituted by the
reasoned articulation of all the islets - mobile - which compose it. Of all the spaces,
the archipelago is the most dynamic; he lives only through the slips of meaning
that affect him and toss him around in perpetuity. To the extent that sloshing is
vital, it will be emergence (and in its volcanic version: eruption) permanent
sense. Where space is archipelago, cultural identities are complicated to the point
of remaining forever definable, and therefore indefinite. The geocritical trajectory,
because it avoids the firm ground where is only moving the sand, will be
twirling. So, at least, it would avoid the quicksand whose name is stereotype. There
is no doubt, it seems to me, that every space, beneath the surface of evidence, is
an archipelago. Observed under a microscope, the most compact of tissues is just
a network of meshes; observed even closer, it would appear as a cluster of atoms -
an archipelago. In the optative mode, we will say that geocritics, coordinating and
renewing the different approaches of the human space, should be this instrument
of micrographic aiming which would allow to perceive in all space the archipelago
which founds it. By geo-criticism, we pretend to scrutinize, without hindering, the
fundamental mobility of human spaces and the cultural identities they
convey. Through its affinities with certain parts of philosophy, psychoanalysis,
human geography, anthropology, sociology, and political science (especially
geopolitics), geocritics is interdisciplinary. Logically, it would hardly be possible to
study the archipelago space without drawing from the different domains - the
different islands or islets - knowledge.

The primary vocation of geocritics is nevertheless literary; in any case, it is

supported by the text. It will place the work in relation to the human spaces it will
invest, and where it will invest. Because the relations between the work and
human spaces, let's repeat it, are interactive. The principle is simple; by virtue of
this same simplicity, he nourishes many reflections, arouses a whole series of
remarks and interrogations.

1 . A priori , it would be preferable that the geocritics relate to the human spaces
whose catalog is drawn up in the geographical atlas (which themselves are
random, at this time as always). But, from the outset, there emerges a difficulty
peculiar to the relations between space and literature: in what, in a literary work,
does the representation of a "real" (factual) space differ from that of a space
deliberately imaginary, u-topical, out of human geography?

This question was particularly addressed by Jean Roudaut in an essay entitled The
Imaginary Cities in French Literature (1990). According to Roudaut, emulator and
friend of Michel Butor, the distinction between the different categories of space is
irrelevant, insofar as "as soon as there is writing there is a sketch of an imaginary
city" [16]
. It is therefore that "the cities unfold in a mental space [17]
", and thus:

A city, would it be called Paris or Rome, becomes in a novel a construction of words,

which is therefore accompanied by an interpretation. The description recreates the
named place, in the same way as a painting; it is therefore not the fidelity to what the
name that matters, topographically, covers, but the organization of the text [18]

Jean Roudaut then brings a precision which, in a sense, invalidates what has just
been said:

It is necessary to distinguish among the cities that can be said to be romantic those
that claim to evoke a certain space of reality and those that ostensibly give
themselves as imaginary [19] "

Roudaut introduces a new variant shortly afterwards: the imaginary city whose
referent is real. The examples are numerous; some of the most illustrious are
Verrières / Besançon, in The Red and the Black , Yonville / Rouen, in Madame
Bovary , or Chaminadour / Guéret in the work of Marcel
Jouhandeau [20]
. Ultimately, if one draws the sum of what Roudaut proposes, the
city - like any site transposed into literature - would maintain essentially three
types of relations with a referent that would refer to reality: a transposition relation
indicated by what one might call a "toponymic contract" (Paris), a relationship of
transfiguration, claimed or not (Verrières / Besançon), a relation denying any
referent, any toponymic strain (Utopia, Erewhon). One could conceive legal
variants: the fraudulent contract ( La Chartreuse of Parma ), the denounced
contract (Elio Vittorini who, in a final note, states that Sicily of Conversation in
Sicily "is only by chance Sicily; it is only that the name of Sicily sounds better in my
ear than that of Persia or Venezuela [21]
"), & c. [22]

This taxonomy would be exclusively applicable to the connections between "real"

city and "literary" city [and thus, for Roudaut, "imaginary"], because:

A context modifies the literary status of a city: in a geography book any city
appointment is held for referring to an architectural, political and economic
organization, whereas a "real" city cited in a fictional work becomes imaginary [23]

The remark seems innocuous; it brings with it a new difficulty: from what moment
is a book a fictional work? In short, as long as literature and fiction coincide, it
would be necessary to know where literaryness begins to know if the city which
appears in a text is imaginary or not. On the other hand , we should be able to
define as literary any text in which the represented city is imaginary. The city has
long remained labyrinthine; here it is filled with dead ends.

Geocritics will not have to follow this path, because it is based on the inverse
postulate: human spaces do not become imaginary by integrating literature; it is
literature that gives them an imaginary dimension, or better, that translates their
intrinsic imaginary dimension by introducing them into an intertextual
network. Geocritics, in fact, proposes to study not only a one-sided relation (space-
literature), but a real dialectic (space-literature-space) which implies that the space
is transformed in turn according to the text that previously had assimilated it. The
relations between literature and human spaces are therefore not fixed, but
perfectly dynamic. The space transposed into literature influences the
representation of the so-called real space (referential), on this space-strain which it
will activate certain virtualities ignored until then, or re-orientate the reading. If the
city were a book, or even palimpsest, it would be normal for it to be the subject of
an aesthetic of reception. One could possibly read a city by following the
indications of Gerard Genette or Hans Robert Jauss.
Thus Claudio Magris very quickly realized that Trieste, his native city, was a paper
city, because "Svevo, Saba, Slataper are less writers who are born in her and by
her, than writers who generate it and create it, which gives it a face, which,
otherwise, in itself, might not exist as such. " [24]
Virtually untouched space in the
nineteenth century, Trieste has gradually become a space surconnoté, to the point
that Magris spoke about him about "literature squared [25]
". It would be enough to
prove that the square of a literature raised to the power of space that frames it
would make this space a literary space squared. In order for this strange arithmetic
to be conceivable, it must of course be understood that the space in question has
previously known prestigious literary transpositions - for since spaces and
literature are confused, arithmetic is born with variable geometry (which is strange
in mathematics, but credible in literature!). This is of course the case for
Trieste; this is still the case for Petersburg / Dostoievski, Dublin / Joyce, Prague /
Kafka, Tangier / Bowles and Lisbon / Pessoa. There, human spaces and literature
are indissociable; imagination and reality are intertwined; the referent is not
necessarily the one we believe. In two words, or in three, it is the writer who has
become author of his city. Dostoievski and Kafka are the cosmogonic heroes of
modern times; Joyce, Svevo and Pessoa are invested with the most authentic of the
authorities: they exercised in their city an auctorial function [26]
.

On the plane that brought him to Lisbon on a winter day, Gianfranco Dioguardi, a
journalist with Corriere della Sera , read The Book of Intranquility . Arrived at the
edge of the Tagus, he was inclined, and perhaps destined, to consider "the city like
a book to leaf through even before reading it." [27]
The author of this book was
Pessoa. Ulysses / Nobody had founded Lisbon (Oulissipona); Pessoa / Nobody wrote
Lisbon. All that remained was to read the city; the jubilation of the flâneur-reader
has since been intense. Another Italian journalist was going up the Avenida de
Libertade with Antonio Tabucchi. He noticed "on one of these walls of white plastic
freshly repainted a small black figure, a figure that someone must have stamped
with a rubber stamp or stamp". Tabucchi, author of Nocturne Indien , but also
seventy-third heteronym known Pessoa, had quickly elucidate the enigma:
Someone had drawn the silhouette of Nobody.

Geocritics, through literature, of course, but also venturing out and out of the
literary field, will isolate the part of the imaginary that explains humanity from
space. Then close to the mythocritic, but on another side, it will detect the
mythemes that surreptitiously slide the representation (or re-presentation) of
space in a setting where the real impregnates illusion. The inanity of a clear
division between the supposed reality of space and its imaginary dimension has
been sanctioned from the beginning. We will therefore give pride of place to the
founding myths of multiple human spaces. The cities and islands of the
Mediterranean are still imbued with the memory of Aeneas, Dido, Ulysses, Jason,
Medea, Theseus, Europe, and so many others; elsewhere, sometimes far away, the
reality is enriched by the same nuances. Geocritics will draw on the earliest
sources, the oldest representations of the archipelago.

2 . But geocritics, once again, will have to be dynamic. Human spaces can not be
considered as monoliths stuck once for all in history, or, if it exists, in the heart of
history. The site, even if it occupies the center of a system, will never be examined
as a self-referential whole, closed with respect to its environment (its periphery),
but like a germinal cell, provoking, as Julien Gracq would say, an "anarchic
proliferation [29]
". By the same token, he will escape dogmatism, a monochronous
temporal anchoring. Every space unfolds at the same time in the duration and in
the moment, and as it is rich in virtualities, it opens if not over several durations, at
least over a plurality of concomitant moments. This means that if the space is
moving, it is essentially in time. It is situated in its diachronic relations (its
temporal strata) and in synchronic section (the compossibility of the worlds that it
shelters). Thus the human space is constant emergence; he is seized in a
perpetual movement of reterritorialization. Geocritics will not pretend to freeze the
representation of space, which for it is not formalisable according to an axiomatic
method; it will be content - which is already ambitious - to apprehend a stage in
the process of deterritorialization. Its results will necessarily be transitory, because
the reterritorialization to which it proceeds will coincide with the beginning of a
new phase of deterritorialization. For geocritics, the human space, like the
activities to which it serves as a frame and sometimes a material, is
heterogeneous and combinatorial - in a word: heterotopic. In and with respect to
time, any representation of space is an interlude.

Each human space is in its relation to the text that represents it a Troy waiting for
its Schliemann. Each text is in its relations to the space that it represents the
freshest sucker of a more or less arborescent strain. The temporal stratification of
human space is partly determined by its intertextual valence [30]
. As long as
literary history is distinct from history - which, in one case at least, is doubtful
(both by means of cosmogonic narratives, sometimes anchored in the same
mythical substratum), we will closely monitor the impact of the decisive events of
history on the different diachronic levels of representation. If Lisbon is now marked
with the indelible seal of Pessoa, it was also - as we have seen - one of Ulysses'
prerogatives. But Lisbon has other treasures in its depths. City of sailors on the
departure, it is city which looks for a return. After the battle of Alcacer-Quibir,
which he lost in 1578, Dom Sebastian, King of Portugal, disappeared. A legend was
born at once: he would have taken refuge in the Fortunate Islands, to return a
morning of fog and free his country from the Spanish yoke. Since then, for many a
writer, Lisbon has become the place of a metaphysical expectation that is
sometimes brocarded, as in The Return of the Caravels (1988) by Antonio Lobo
Antunes. A city projecting overseas from Ulysses to Henry the Navigator and
Camoes, Lisbon then became a city of waiting, then of withdrawal under the
dictatorship of Salazar (despite a badly assumed colonial policy). The long history
of deaf places every time they are frequented; in Lisbon more than elsewhere, the
waiting horizon of the reader / visitor is impregnated. The surface of this city, as of
all cities, as of all human spaces, is itself and tributary of the strata which melt
it. The present is the last stage of the past. In the same way, the perceptible space
is the result of a sedimentation. Whenever it is human, space is a museum of rich
hours and even a museum of horrors. Depending on the variety that characterizes
its diachrony (historical, mythical, and more globally intertextual), the
representation of space will be complicated, the pace of its transformations will
increase. Literature shows that because it is human space is subject to accident,
to accident , to what is happening and so has already happened.

The writer in search of space evolves between two movements of

deterritorialization. He is in a state of chronic digressivity, because he realizes, if
he is lucid, that to frequent a connoted place, literally connoted, means to walk in
a temporal interlude. The present in which appear the human spaces participates,
as would say Eugen Fink, student of Husserl, of the "archi-impression", in other
words: "the present one occurs ( zeitigt sich ) in a multiplicity of impression
phases, and of such so that they base by dependence and reciprocity all of the
present [31]
". The reduction of the heteroclite that corresponds to the present is
therefore abusive, even if it is unavoidable. Moreover, if the present is an assembly
of moments - or points of strength - heterogeneous, these moments are
autonomous and, as this time Jauss says, inspired by Siegfried Kracauer, they "are
in reality situated on different curves, subject to the specific laws of their specific
history [32]
". Therefore, "simultaneity in time is only an appearance of
simultaneity" [33]
. As long as these observations are applied to the way in which
spaces are perceived, it will be noted that, in proportion to its degree of
heterogeneity, human space - like the instant - has several temporal
curves. Through geocritics, we will strive to highlight the fact that the actuality of
human spaces is disparate, that their present is subject to a set of asynchronous
rhythms that make any representation perfectly complex, or, if we ignore,
excessively reductive. The asynchrony that affects human spaces is not a vague
construction of the mind, an abstract postulate. It appears at the turn of the
streets, and mountain roads. The city is never one in its present. It is center and
periphery; in its social evolution, as a city (Fustel de Coulanges), it can be a space
for gentrification or a space for impoverishment. It is also neighborhoods, which do
not refer only to the idea of a fragmentation of space. They are the sign that a city
- like any space set by a human code - is never synchronous with itself. It is, as
Henri Lefebvre says, a "polyrhythmic body" [34]
. For example, the degree of acuity
of a representation of Barcelona will be estimated according to the capacity of the
looking to articulate, in its diversity (the singular possessive would have here a
plural valence that the syntax does not express), the image
different barrios . Barcelona is the Ensanche of Carmen Laforet or Eduardo
Mendoza, the Barrio Chino of Francis Carco, Jean Genet or André Pieyre of
Mandiargues, the Rambla of Claude Simon or Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, the
Grácia de Mercé Rodoreda or the Guinardó of Juan Marsé. These neighborhoods are
sometimes frequented simultaneously - or alternately! - by such character, such
author. As an undifferentiated whole (as a city), they will be compact in the
actuality of the visitor, but they themselves never participate in the same
present. To clarify this notion, we will borrow a nice astral metaphor to Jauss. "Just
as the apparent simultaneity of the stars in today's sky breaks down for the
astronomer in an immense diversity in the temporal distance [35]
", so, we will add,
the human space is unfolds falsely under the eyes of the visitor. What is peculiar to
the human space is also peculiar to every writer confronted with his
representation. Through the medium of memory, the observer, self-looking, is itself
present in several temporal registers. Its relation to space is not necessarily
monochronous. While attending the same place, it can evolve simultaneously in
two or more time strata (diachronic excursion): Nantes today and yesterday at
Gracq ( The Shape of a city , 1988), Sardinia today and yesterday at Carlo Levi
( Tutto he honeye è finito , 1964), etc. In addition, in synchronic section, it happens
regularly that evoking a place, it is projected off. These apostilles correspond to
authentic meta-phores. Istanbul is like Hamburg (Alain Robbe-Grillet), like Liverpool
(Michel Butor). Poitiers is like Istanbul (Nedim Gürsel). Istanbul is in Belgrade
(Milorad Pavic), Montenegro (Irmtraud Morgner), perhaps in Syria or Egypt (Orhan
Pamuk [36]
).

The space-time of the visitor is grafted on - or blends into - the space-time of the
place that is represented. Stratification proceeds each time an author invests a
place; this galloping multiplication opens many perspectives.

One would undoubtedly gain to think the human spaces according to the theory of
the compossibility of the worlds, which was developed by Wittgenstein, Lewis,
Deleuze and some others. The city, which in the twentieth century is undeniably
human space by virtue of its antonomasia, is a compossible of worlds that defines
their continuity. The city, like all human space, which it subsumes, is virtually this
archipelago together one and plural. Geocritics will have to probe the strata that
melt and bind it to history, give it its history; it will also be necessary, in a
synchronic section, to approach it in its non-simultaneity. One of the major issues
of geocritics will be to lead the viewer or the one who re-produces the space
according to the written testimony of others to consider what it looks or re-
produces in all its complexity. In other words, the human space will have to stop
appearing obvious to it; what he perceives will have to become an index of a
compossibility of which he will be responsible for defining continuity. But, in any
case, if continuity is symbolized by a line, this line will be a line of flight. Face and
time, the human space is a garden with paths that fork left, right, up, down.

In its intertextual dimension, space was squared; here it is raised to the cube.

3 . Imagology is entirely focused on the study of representations of the foreigner in

literature. Moreover, as Jean-Marc Moura points out, she "refuses to hold the
literary image for the presence of a stranger pre-existing in the text or for a double
of the foreign reality." She considers it rather as the index a fantasy, an ideology, a
utopia proper to a consciousness dreaming of otherness [37]
". In sum, the
imagological study ignores the referent to focus on how the writer reports. The
represented object disappears in favor of the subject who represents it. For Moura,
the assumption of the mirror-image, or of the image "distorting translation of the
real", is a "false problem" [38]
. This is certainly true if one only wants to give
importance to the point of view of the writer, of a writer in particular, if one fears
that by privileging the spatial reference one falls ipso facto into the through "the
wild interdisciplinarity and [or] nationalism or even [the] psychology of
unconfessed peoples [39]
". This is still true if one considers that the referent is
singular, stable and thus freed - as far as he has never been enslaved - of the
representations of which he is the object. Geocritics, for whom space is in its
polyphonic essence, a movement, should not expose itself to the risks legitimately
denounced by Jean-Marc Moura. She will examine a referent, whose literary
representation will no longer be considered deforming, but rather founding, or co-
founder (interdisciplinarity obliges). Given the premises that have been set out, it
seems to be accepted, in the context chosen, that the referent and his
representation are interdependent and even interactive. I will not tire of saying it:
the relationship is dynamic, and is part of a dialectic.

By this very fact, and for this purpose, geocritics will abstain from confining
themselves to the study of the representation of the Other, in the sense that this
otherness is understood in imagology. If the factual human space becomes an
acceptable referent, a relevant reference point , it will simply become a common
denominator for a set of writers.

A first extension of the field of imagological analysis then consists in associating

a series of representations of the Other, of an Other which would be examined in
its relation to the space in which it evolves. Even if the researcher continues to
focus primarily on "consciousnesses dreaming of otherness", there is no doubt that
if space is perceived and then represented by more than one writer, it will undergo
a refocusing. The object-space of individual, subjective representation can then
become the subject of study. Imagology has for a long time endorsed studies of
this type, which, before Jauss reinterpreted the term, belonged to "critical
reception". It will be noted in passing that in the title of these studies the order
subject (looking) - object (looked) is often indifferent. Thus will we read, and
profitably, travelers and writers in Egypt (1932, 1990) of Jean-Marie Carré
or Switzerland in the French letters in the course of ages (1956) of François
Jost. Obviously, the second title evokes the intersection between imagology and
geocritics.

But this intersection is small. Geocritics does not only target spaces perceived in
their "foreign" dimension, and if it did so, one can well imagine that it would relate
several cultures looking at the same space. What would become of Switzerland if it
were surveyed through representations of which it is the object at the same time in
the French letters and in the British letters, for example? If such a subject were to
provoke an interrogation, it would not concern a priori (and ex cathedra ) the
methodological merit of a burst of perspectives, the interest in itself of a double (or
triple, ... ) system of representation, but the consequences of this choice ... as long
as they are tangible, because that is not certain: it will be up to the author of the
study to determine it.

Geocritics continues to assign a preponderant role to the writer, but it places him
at the center of a universe of which he is only one of the engines. Space is torn
from the monology of the single gaze; it is transformed into focal plane, focus
(which makes it all the more human). Thus the bipolarity otherness / identity will
be more governed by a principle of injection, but by a bijection. The representation
of the space would be born of a return, and no longer of a single way, coinciding
with the direction of a glance carried from one point to another - always the same -
without the reciprocal being considered . The very principle of geo-critical analysis
lies in the confrontation of two perspectives: one indigenous, the other non-native,
which corrects, feeds and enriches each other (at least from the point of view of
the commentator, who will re-produce them). The writing of space will always be
singular; as for the geocritical representation, it will be born from a spectrum of
individual representations as varied as possible. At the end of the eighteenth
century, Sicily described by Goethe in Voyage en Italie or by Vivant Denon
in Voyage en Sicily was a virgin territory of modern literature: some hodeporic tales
had begun to register it; she herself, by an unfortunate accident, was since the
thirteenth century ( Scuola Siciliana ) deprived of great writers. For Goethe, and
even more for Vivant Denon, the news of Sicily was denied: the island seemed
forever anchored in antiquity. More recently, Sicily has been the subject of tales by
Albert t'Serstevens, Dominique Fernandez or Lawrence Durrell. It was no longer
open to these authors to challenge the present, and the literary production of the
island. Sicily has become a space overvalued by the prestigious works of Giovanni
Verga, Luigi Pirandello, Elio Vittorini, Vitaliano Brancati, Giuseppe Tomasi di
Lampedusa, Leonardo Sciascia, Gesualdo Bufalino, and so on (including a Nobel
Prize). Like Vivant Denon, Durrell has a predilection for antiquity; like him, he
quotes the classics, regretting in passing that Stendhal left Sicily for the benefit of
Rome or Naples; but unlike Vivant Denon, it is situated in relation to the local
literary context: "Another writer, Sicilian, that one, would have done, also, an
excellent guide but our ignorance of the literature of the island was properly
unfathomable. ] ". The imagological approach would record the confession, and
situate it in relation to the work of Durrell (who knew contemporary Greek writers,
on the other hand). The geocritical approach would locate Durrell's statement
within the network of literary representations of Sicily. It would soon follow that
Durrell's ignorance is hardly shared by his peers. Visitors no longer ignore the
contributions of Sicilian literature; Sicilians, as well as Sicilian writers, are often
discovered in the eyes and writing of others. From then on, the otherness ceases to
be the monopoly of the culture looked at, because the latter becomes itself
watching. Every representation is thereby assimilated into a dialectical process. By
adopting the geocritical point of view, one necessarily adopts a plural point of
view, which stands at the crossroads of indigenous and non-indigenous
representations [41]
. This would help to determine a common space, born at the
crossroads of different points of view. In this way, we would have a closer look at
the true identity essence of the studied space, but at the same time we would
obtain the confirmation that all cultural identity is only the result of an incessant
work of creation, -creation. Every identity is itself plural; all identity is
archipelago. The geocritical space is floating, and open to astonishment. It is only
because it is renewed; it is renewed because, stricto sensu , it gives rise to the
"unfolding of the astonishing question" [42]
. Another, which is the look of a gaze
that we look at, is, as Deleuze and Guattari say, "the expression of a possible world
in a perceptual field" [43]
because:

There is, at this moment, a calm and relaxing world. Suddenly comes a frightened face
looking out of the field. Others appear here neither as a subject nor as an object, but,
what is very different, as a possible world, as the possibility of a scary world. This
possible world is not real, or is not yet real, and yet none exists: it is an expression
that exists only in its expression, the face or a face equivalent [44] .
As soon as the geocritical approach is used, the accent will be placed more on the
space observed than on the observer grasped in its specificity. The fact remains
that by giving primacy to the human space, a space of astonishment necessary,
one will be able to better evaluate the originality or conformism of the different
representations it arouses. Geocritics can at least partially solve what is the
author's own sensitivity. The comparison of the work and a corpus articulated
around the same spatial referent makes it possible to better situate the
expectations, the reactions and the discursive strategies of each writer.

Examples abound. Thus, the way in which the space represented is inscribed in
time does not merely provide an indication of the space-time correlation inherent
in the site, but also of the author's perception of time and history. It is not essential
to rely on geocritics to obtain this type of information, but it seems undeniable
that, if the reference is reticular, the analysis will gain in precision. The definition of
the "temporal curve" - or "register", if one prefers Bakhtine to Jauss - to which
emerges the represented space (by such author) passes by the knowledge of (S)
various possible curves, even known and already explored by other writers. The
monological definition, as decided by the only author examined, is conceivable, but
it would reach a lesser degree of relevance, insofar as it makes less clear the
heterogeneous dimension of time. It is not the case that the study of human time
is likely to benefit from a geocritical supplement. At least since the publication of
the Fleurs du Mal , we know that "perfumes, colors and sounds meet each other". If
for Baudelaire, synesthesia concerned the perceptual field of the (individual)
subject, one could also imagine a collective synesthesia, or better:
intersubjective. Human space is a sensory space whose nuances are defined by
the group (and in particular the literary community). A city smells good; a city
smells bad. But it rarely happens that the whole city is perceived as a
homogeneous olfactory support. Take the example of Alexandria of Egypt, which, in
the colonial era, like all cities sharing its fate, was divided into European
neighborhoods and indigenous neighborhoods. In some, it was European
neighborhoods that were nauseating. Marco, protagonist of the novel Cortile a
Cleopatra (1936) by Fausta Cialente, walks in "the melancholy and smelly streets
of the old European city" [45]
. Darley, the hero-narrator of Lawrence Durrell's
famous Alexandria Quartet , wandering in an Arab neighborhood, breathes "the
familiar smells of filth and dried mud." As for Edwar al-Kharrat, one of the great
Alexandrian writers of the post-colonization, evoking his childhood spent in an Arab
district, notes: "The penetrating perfume of jasmine and the smell of the wet earth
spread in me [ 47]
". It goes without saying that the implicit / explicit reference to
the topoi of colonial (especially non-native) and post-colonial (particularly
indigenous) literature is instructive and allows the reader and / or researcher to
form his judgment; it also appears that inferring the particularities of the olfactory
perception of such a character, or even of such author, of a geocritical approach of
the place would bring some additional guarantees; in any case, it would be more
detailed, if only because one would have a better knowledge of the spatial
referent. It is not irrelevant that the represented district is Cleopatra (mixed),
Bacos (European) or Sidi Gaber (Arabic). Still need to have an idea of what
Alexandria was in the thirties. Sometimes geography usefully illuminates literary
study. Odors and perfumes are just one aspect of the sensory space. The colors of
Lisbon, quoted branca , white and solar, also deserve ample developments. On the
literary shores of the Tagus, the rainy season may have been rainy since Pessoa
blurred the climatic charts. The chromatic spectrum of the city is enriched
accordingly.

4 . The main issue of geocritics is not mediation towards a designated

work. Geocritics first allows to define the literary dimension of places, to draw up a
fictional cartography of human spaces. It is then possible to situate the work in
perspective of a spatial referent more or less widely exploited elsewhere [48]
. In
this, it is likely to bring valuable information in a monographic context.

To attempt a geocritical approach through the study of a single text, or of a single

author, would be perilous. In the absence of milestones, out of any network, one
risks to engage in the generalizations denounced by the specialists of the
imagology. But it is not a question of giving in "the psychology of peoples", nor of
feeding more or less tenacious ethnotypes; it would be rather to explain them.

Since one detaches oneself from the singular work to tend to a reticular vision, the
question of the corpus proves crucial, and the answer rich in virtualities. It will be
necessary first to set the threshold from which, ceasing to passively mingle
stereotypes, one acquires enough distance to apprehend them with
clairvoyance. The calculation of this threshold of "representativeness" is obviously
random; it does not come from objective mathematics. The principle is simple
however: a measure will be established between the prestige of the space
observed / represented and the number and variety of observers required to cross
the minimum threshold. In order to define the scope of the study, we can add a
more or less considerable temporal variable (like what was done in critical
reception studies, and now in imagology).

It would also be useful to question the generic nature of textual support. Is the
representation of a given human space in a work of pure fiction radically different
from that given in a travel story, for example, or in a report? The degree of
fictionality evolves, the modes of representation change, but the space
represented remains the same. The border between the different genres conveying
a spatial representation is, moreover, rather vague. As Daniel-Henri Pageaux says,
"the writer-traveler, by the very fact that he writes, is going to make a
statement" [49]
. Fables are coextensive with viaticum writing; it is coextensive with
all writing. The fabulation poses the space that the writing re-simulates. The
human space corresponds then to the versatile sum of the representations which
target it, construct it and reconstruct it. Julien Gracq noted that "there is no
coincidence between the plan of a city whose pamphlet we consult and the mental
image that arises in us, at the call of its name, from the sediment laid in our
memory by our daily wandering [50]
". The plan of the city is an abstract
representation; the concrete representation is delivered by the mental
image. Space exists only because it is perceived; every space, as soon as it is
represented, passes through the imaginary [51]
.

The human spaces represented are innumerable. Few hectares of our planet are
virgins of literature. It is, on the eastern coast of Sardinia, a small village called
Santa Lucia di Siniscola. Very few Italians know him; the Sardinians themselves
sometimes ignore its existence. However, in 1956, André Pieyre of Mandiargues
located the action of the Sea Lily , while in 1957 appeared in Sicily, Sardinia,
Aeolian Islands . Italian itineraries , the account of a stay that Albert t'Serstevens
did there in the company of Amandine Doré, the great-niece of the engraver. The
coincidence was not thin, as it was aimed at a tiny space and a short time. Lessons
from a comparison of the representation of the spatial framework in the two stories
are valuable. There is one (and only one) old tower in Santa Lucia; Here's what
she's getting at YouStevens:
On the bank, an old round tower, dismantled, in the middle of a desert of dazzling
sand, watches over a group of poor houses [52] ;

and here it is again in the version of Pieyre of Mandiargues:

And the girl, when she looked back, saw the tall square tower, crowned with
battlements, which marked the site of St. Lucia by its erection and grandiose red under
the beautiful moonlight [53] .

It is not only the tower: the pine forest, the beach, etc. are also re-presented by
both authors. In the present case, there can be no question of undertaking a
geocritic of Santa Lucia based on two textual supports (it would be necessary to
find, at least, a third occurrence, preferably Sardinian), but the fact remains that
the The interpretation of Pieyre's novel by Mandiargues will be facilitated by the
knowledge of the text of Terstevens, because the spatial referent, as modest as it
may be, will gain in importance.

The example of Santa Lucia is extreme ... or the encyclopedia of the unlimited
commentator! The size of the spaces shown varies. One can easily imagine the
geo-critical study of a neighborhood in its relations to the city (container / content,
center / periphery). Belleville or the Canebière appear in many stories. It will be
easier to imagine the study of a city: the transformation of Prague or Tangier into
literary places, for example. We will also design the geo-critical study of a
region. The European continent lends itself perfectly to the geocritical
approach. But will we consider the geocritics of a country? Yes and no. The answer
depends on the literary density of the places - and this is true of countries as of
certain cities. Since geocritics develop a system of cross-references and
interactions, it is not easy to master them if the space is overstretched. Nobody,
not even Borges, came to the end of Babel's library. This means that the study will
have to be thorough, scrupulous; failing this, a reduction would be made from a
stereotyped extra-textual reference point. It's about determining a threshold.

The prepotence of the ethnotype being most often proportional to the prestige of
the space which arouses it and of which it freezes the representation a little more,
it will be necessary to be guarded, each time one throngs (in the text) these places
to give in to ease. Nationalism and ethnotypicity often go together, because the
nationalist will (manifest or not) is the source of carefully sorted ethnotypes.The
ethnotype reinforces an identity dreamed up for oneself (improving ethnotype) and
/ or opposed ( agón ) to neighboring entities, considered as
irrevocably other (pejorative ethnotype) [54]
.It is therefore undeniable that the geo-
critical study extended to a national entity will entail a risk. It could no longer be
content to release a phase of the phenomenon of deterritorialization, but
deliberately seek to invest the long term. The stereotype is not limited to the story
we have before us; he also watches the commentator. To be truly safe, it should
live out of the world and rely on an extra-mundane meta-language (what a pro-
jection!). It would be necessary to transform itself into a machine to decode
without soul and without moods. The frenzied quest for objectivity would lead to
inexorable installation in the stereotype; that does not mean thatwe will avoid the
precautions that will limit the part of subjectivity (the use of a corpus provided and
varied is really essential). The semantics of the navicles that govern geocritics
would call long-term investment solecism pseudo-objectivity. The representation of
the archipelago has no other duration than the moment; beyond the moment, the
archi-impression, formulating itself, would become stereotype.

The stereotype, when it is an ethnotype, therefore has practical utility. Never

innocent, never harmless, he is fundamentally pragmatic. It serves to strengthen
the bonds of the couple Ordnung / Ortung (Carl Schmitt). Geocritics, on the other
hand, would aim, on the contrary, to constitute a laboratory of all Ent-ortung
phenomena . The question then would be whether it is conceivable to conceive
a Nomos [territory, which in its etymological sense was a conquered pasture to be
divided equitably] raumlos, "deterritorialized". Which for Schmitt, an intellectual
close to National Socialism (paroxystic diktat-eur of the spatial configuration of the
State, thereby denying the Etant), presented itself as the crisis of the European
State derived precisely from its total Mobilmachung ; but, for geo-criticism ,
the total Mobilmachung is both a condition and an issue [55]
.

In the factual world, everything is done to avoid the Ordnung / Ortung couple 's
divorce , or at least to hide it . Perhaps even the divorce has been / will never be
pronounced, insofar as the Entortung is consubstantial with the identity of the
human spaces, that it is in the duration and is not decreed in the moment that it is
not a simple step to take. In other words, a fundamental
and foundational aporia marks our destiny: we are condemned to live in a space
whose representation strives to be unique and static (identity of the stare [56]
)
whereas it should be inevitably changing, plural in the short term even (permanent
re-identification of the esse ). We live in one world at a time, whose image is given
to us. This is not the case in literature, and in all the other forms of art which have
a mimetic relationship with the world (any cleavage constituting a decoy: art is
articulation with the world). In that literature produces free, orgic and non-organic
representations (G. Deleuze), it is the guarantor of the compossibility of the worlds.
The world is so, and it could be other; the world is so, and at the same time it is
different. The world lives in and the otherness that is inherent to it. The Entortung ,
"deterritorialization" (or better: "deterritoriality") is in the world, but manifests
itself openly only through literature, film, photography, or the fine arts.

It will be up to the geocritic to constitute the place in tópos átopos , to integrate it

in "the flux of the imaginary variation of the possible transformations [57]
". It will
be up to geocritics to take advantage of the fleeting teachings of the mimetic arts
to better understand the world, to grasp - and to grasp, here is not to monopolize -
the human spaces in their movement, in their navicular status.

[article published in La Géocritique instructions for use , PULIM:

Limoges, coll. "Human Spaces", n ° 0, 2000, pp.9-40]

NOTES

 [1]
see Paul VIRILIO, Critical Space , Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984,
pp.27-28: "Thus the crisis of the notion of" narrative "appears as the
other side of the crisis of the notion of" dimension "As geometric
narrative, speech of the measurement of a real visibly offered to all".
 [2]
Roland BARTHES, The Empire of Signs , Paris: Flammarion,
coll.Champs, 1970, p.44.
 [3]
 Gaston BACHELARD, Poetics of Space , Paris: PUF, coll. Quadrige,
1989 (1957), p.20.
 [4]
Ibid ., P.17 .
 [5]
Pierre SANSOT, Poetics of the city , Paris: Klincksieck, 1973, p.387.
 [6]
Michel CADOT, in Myths, images, representations. Proceedings of the
XIVth Congress of the SFLGC, Jean-Marie Grassin (ed.), Limoges,
1977, Paris: Didier Erudition, 1981.
 [7]
Gilles DELEUZE, Félix GUATTARI, Thousand Plateaux , Paris: Midnight,
1980, p.635
 [8]
Ibid., p.398. It should be noted that at the same time - but in a
different context - Yuri Lotman made the same remark about the
space conceived as a semiosphere, or, more precisely, about the
spatial image, that " heterogeneous mixture functioning as a whole
"( The Semiosphere , ch.8-13 of the Universe of the Spirit , Moscow:
Ed.Université de Tartu, 1996, Limoges: PULIM, 1999, p.147). Would we
be dealing, as Bakhtin would say, with a chronotope of
deterritorialization?
 [9]
Gilles DELEUZE, Felix UATTARI, What is philosophy? , Paris: Midnight,
1991, p.82.
 [10]
Massimo CACCIARI, Geo-Filosofia dell'Europa , Milano: Adelphi,
1994; trad.fr: Declinings of Europe , Combas: Editions de l'Eclat,
1996. In a "notule for the French edition", Cacciari specifies however
that "this book was born from a conference for the Seminars on the
theme Geo-philosophy of Europe , held at the University of
Strasbourg in 1991 [...] It is for this "title" that I am indebted to its
 organizers, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, of the
momentum of this research "(p.14).
 [11]
Ibid ., P.
 [12]
Massimo CACCIARI, The Arcipelago , Milano: Adelphi, 1997, pp.19-20:
"[...] di kósmoi , strutture dotate of ordine e dialoganti tra loro".
 [13]
Hans Robert JAUSS, For a Aesthetics of the reception , Paris:
Gallimard, coll. TEL, 1990 (1975), p.290.
 [14]
Gilles DELEUZE, Félix GUATTARI , What is philosophy? , cit. ,
p.112; 113.

 [15]
In The Production of Space, Paris: Anthropos, 1974 (several times
reissued since then), p.412, Henri LEFEBVRE already wondered about
the usefulness of "a knowledge (science) of the use of spaces" -
question on the merits from which he replied: "Perhaps, but linked to
the analysis of rhythms, to the effective criticism of representative
and normative spaces. Could such knowledge be named, for example
"spatio-analysis" [then "spatio-logy", p.465]? No doubt, but why add a
specialty to an already long list? "Just and legitimate remark, to which
the geocritic attempts to provide an answer, here is the first element:
a quarter of a century has passed, and the rhythms are still
accelerated while multiplying. Four years after Lefebvre, Daniel BELL,
one of the promoters of American postmodernism,noted inThe
Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism , New York, 1978, that
reflections on the organization of space were now the main aesthetic
problem of Western culture, after the meditation on time (Bergson,
Proust, Joyce) occupied the spirits in the first decades of the century
 (even if the break seems to me a little radical: the thought of human
time and space are probably indissociable).
 [16]
Jean ROUDAUT, Imaginary Cities in French Literature , Paris: Hatier,
coll. Short, 1990, p.23.
 [17]
Ibid. , p.86.
 [18]
Ibid ., P.23.
 [19]
Ibid. , p.23.
 [20]
As such, this category was not retained in the Dictionary of imaginary
places , Arles: Actes Sud, 1998. Here is the comment of Alberto
MANGUEL and Gianni GUADALUPI, the authors: "We decided to
exclude places like Proust's Balbec, Hardy's Wessex, and Faulkner's
Yohnapatawpha, because they are actually disguises, or pseudonyms
for existing places, and part of the process that allows the author to
feel free when speaking of a city or country that would otherwise be
encumbered by the official landscape "(p.8). For all intents and
purposes, they add: "But this is where our definition of the word"
imaginary "(p.8) gets blurred.
 [21]
Elio VITTORINI, Conversation in Sicily, Paris: Gallimard, 1948, p.213.
 [22]
Postmodern Anglo-Saxon criticism has more than once analyzed the
relations between the factual world and imaginary worlds, the overlap
of which forms the "zone" (the term being borrowed from
Apollinaire). In Postmodernist Fiction , London & New York: Routledge,
1987, pp.45-47, Brian Mc HALE distinguishes four types of
relationships: juxtaposition (of non-contiguous familiar spaces),
interpolation (of a space other in a familiar space, or between two
contiguous familiar spaces), overprinting (from two familiar spaces,
 creating an imaginary third space), the erroneous attribution (of a
characteristic to a familiar space that is devoid of it: ex: a chartreuse
in Parma). Geocritics will have to explore these frontiers of the factual
world. It also happens that the relationship is reversed, and that the
loop is looped: sometimes it is the "imaginary" world that marks its
imprint the "real" world. The little village of Illiers lived a peaceful
existence in the shadow of the cathedral of Chartres until the day
when it was learned that Proust's aunt was living there, and that in
the search he had become Combray. The bud eclipsed the stump, and
Illiers became Illiers-Combray.
 [23]
Ibid. , p.39.
 [24]
Angelo ARA, Claudio MAGRIS, Trieste. An identity of the frontier ,
Torino: Einaudi, 1987 (1982), p.16: "Svevo, Saba, Slataper non sono
tanto scrittori che nascono in essa e da essa, quanto scrittori che
generano e la creano, che le danno un volto, he quale altrimenti, in
se, come tale forse non esisterebbe ".
 [25]
Ibid ., P.190.
 [26]
It is not necessary, however, for the city to have one father or one
mother in literature. The literary genealogy of large cities is lost in the
indistinct, drowning in the mass of all those who made them live on
paper. London or New York, Rome or Venice, Paris and others are also
filtered by the book. Italo CALVINO was well aware of this, who wrote:
"Prima che una città del mondo reale, Parigi, per me par per milioni
d'altre persone de ogni paese, è stata una città immaginata
attraverso i libri, una città di cui ci si appropria leggendo ", in Eremita
at Parigi , Milano: A.Mondadori, 1994, p.190.
 [27]
Gianfranco DIOGUARDI, "Lisbona fugge slab acque", in Il Corriere
della Sera , 24.01.1992: "[...] the città like a libro da sfogliare prima
ancora che da leggere".
 [28]
Stefano MALATESTA, "Lisbona: Benvenuta con i sogni di Pessoa",
in Panorama Mese , November 1985. These Italian-Lisboan anecdotes
are listed in my article: "The place where the reverse prevailed:
Literary perception of Lisbon in the twentieth century" ,
in Comparative Literature Review, April-June 1995, pp.203-214.
 [29]
Julien GRACQ, The Shape of a City , Paris: Corti, 1988, p.28.
 [30]
In The Production of Space , op.cit. , p.104, Henri LEFEVRE, while
distinguishing clearly representation of the space (conceived space)
and spaces of representation (lived space), considers that the social
space is marked by a multiplicity "comparable to a" laminated "(that
cake called "mille-feuilles") ". As long as the mille-feuilles evokes at
the same time the "texture" of the book (which Lefèbvre does not
seem to think of), we would obtain an astonishing chain of
equivalences: book = mille-feuilles = espace.
 [31]
Eugen FINK, Phenomenology , Paris: Midnight, 1974 (1930-39),
p.37. In fact, sich zeitigen could translate: "to temporize".
 [32]
Hans Robert JAUSS, op.cit. , p.76.
 [33]
Ibid. , p.76.
 [34]
Henri LEFEBVRE, op.cit , p.236.
 [35]
Hans Robert JAUSS, op.cit. , p.77.

 [36]
 Respectively in Jean RICARDOU, The New Roman , Paris: Seuil, 1978:
manuscript of Alain ROBBE-GRILLET, "Reflections on the camera",
p.172; Michel BUTOR, The Genius of Place , Paris: Grasset, 1958,
p.30; Nedim GURSEL, A Long Summer in Istanbul , Paris: Gallimard,
1980, p.149; Milorad PAVIC, L' envers du vent or the novel by Héro et
Léandre (unpublished in French); Irmtraud MORGNER, Noces at
Constantinople (unpublished in French); Orhan PAMUK, The Black
Book , Paris: Gallimard, 1994, p.280.
 [37]
Jean-Marc MOURA, Literary Europe and elsewhere , Paris: PUF, 1998,
p.41.
 [38]
Ibid. , p.40.
 [39]
Ibid ., P.36.
 [40]
Lawrence DURRELL, The Sicilian Carrousel , Paris: Folio / Gallimard,
1996 (1979), p.130.
 [41]
The different perspectives opened by the discourses staging the
Subject and the Other are notably studied in pyscho-linguistics. As an
illustration, here is the diagram presented by Michel METZELTIN
(University of Vienna), "The Romanian imaginary of the
West. Questions of method and application tests ", in Imagining
Europe , Danièle Chauvin (ed.), Grenoble: Iris, 1998, p.176:
 [42]
The taxonomy is attractive (especially if we appreciate Gérard
Genette), but it does not seem to me to be very operative in a
geocritical context. In addition to the fact that the literary narrative,
contrary to certain newspaper articles, is only incidentally a
"textuality with an identifying function" (p.176), the question of the
addressee arises here. If there was a presentation, she would have to
talk to someone, but to whom? The recipient of the book is not
known: the Model Reader (or Implicit) is an abstraction. Worse: to
 establish a catalog raisonné would imply that the author evolves
within certain limits. The inferential drive of the reader would be
guided, tagged to excess: we would evolve in a stereotypical
setting. Pluralism is not characteristic of a schema, which, so that
everything can be embraced at a single glance, removes the
singularity - and the originality - of each representation. Geocritics
must lead to a discourse on a discourse, and not to a schematization
(which Metzeltin reserves for the reading of very specific newspaper
articles: those that the Romanian press devotes to Romania's position
in the concert of a Europe become community). The archipelago is
mobile, or it sinks into a sea of boredom.
 [43]
Eugen FINK, op.cit. , .p.204.
 [44]
Gilles DELEUZE, Félix GUATTARI, What is philosophy? , cit. , p.24.
 [45]
Ibid. , p.22.
 [46]
Fausta CIALENTE, Cortile a Cleopatra , Milano: A.Mondadori, 1973
(1936), p.170: "[...] the malinconiche strand e maleodoranti delle
vecchia città europea".
 [47]
Lawrence DURRELL, Clea , Paris: UGE / The Pocketbook, 1992 (1960),
p.378.
 [48]
Edwar AL-KHARAT, Citty of Saffron , London: Quartet Books, 1989,
p.20: "The penetrating scent of native jasmine, and the smell of moist
earth, wafted in me".
 [49]
It is precisely to the extent that the imaginary referent, he, usually,
does not like, that the geocritical approach applies poorly to
"imaginary" spaces. But there are exceptions: one could very well
consider a Geocritic of Ruritanie / Poldévie, as it appears in the works
 of Anthony Hope ( The Prisoner of Zenda , 1894 - several times
brought to the screen), Raymond Queneau ( Pierrot my friend, 1945)
or Jacques Roubaud (trilogy of Hortense , 1985-1990).
 [50]
Daniel-Henri PAGEAUX, The General and Comparative Literature ,
Paris: A.Colin, 1994, p.31.
 [51]
Julien GRACQ, op.cit. , pp.2-3.
 [52]
cf Eugen FINK, op.cit ., p . 62: "Every world that is re-simulated is a
world from one part to another imagined, even if the imagination
would not be entirely productive and would take care of the already
existing world. This care modifies all the content of the world, which
then leaves the original temporality to enter a time of world of
imagination. Geocritics, in a sense, accompanies this support
throughout its implementation.
 [53]
Albert t'SERSTEVENS, Sicily, Sardinia, Aeolian Islands. Italian
itineraries , Paris: Arthaud, 1957, p.360.
 [54]
André PIEYRE OF MANDIARGUES, The Sea Lily , Paris: Folio /
Gallimard, 1972 (1956), p.123.
 [55]
The stereotype has been the subject of many studies. Among the
best, we can mention those of Daniel-Henri PAGEAUX, for whom the
stereotype is essentially a consensus factor aimed at monosemy,
calling for the establishment of a "report of conformity between a
society and a simplified cultural expression", and deriving from a
"confusion of the attribute and the essential", op.cit. , pp.62-67.

TO QUOTE THIS ARTICLE

Bertrand WESTPHAL, "For a Geocritical Approach to Texts", in La Géocritique
instructions for use , PULIM: Limoges, coll. "Human Spaces", n ° 0, 2000,
pp.9-40., URL: http://sflgc.org/bibliotheque/westphal-bertrand-for-a-geocritic-
gevel-of-texts/ , page consulted on October 08, 2019.