Orient salvateur et auto-pathographie dans le récit de voyage

Salvific Orient and Self-Pathography in the Travel Narrative

Abstract

This article aims to examine the dynamics of travel writing and its connection with self-narrative to demonstrate the relationship between the reality of narrative and its fictional and creative dimension. In this form of travel-related writing, truth can be read behind the myth. The author embarks on a quest for identity that combines other real and fabulous existences through a space that is at once exotic, mythical, and esoteric. Voyage en Orient by Gérard de Nerval is the emblematic work of a truth sought and found in lsewhere and otherness. It is also the expression of Orientalism and dark romanticism by a writer whose genuine bouts of madness have, strangely, fueled the writing of a shattered “self” finding uniqueness in gnosis, which constitutes a source of inspiration of great depth. This journey to the Orient, which is read under the auspices of a manifest pathology, is undertaken with the aim of rediscovering the integrity of the pirit. This experience of elsewhere, where personal expression, that of otherness, auto-pathography and Gnosticism are combined, remains the most significant work of the quest for self and meaning in travel literature