Constructing the Self Between Worlds

Abstract

This chapter shifts the attention toward another point of entanglement, namely the construction of the travelers’ self as a changing narrative category within the travel narratives. Drawing on recent research around the complex development of the notion of the self in the seventeenth century, the argument is that the self is unstable and multiple; it mediates between the space of reception (France) and the space described (the Islands). The self thus becomes a site where the effect of otherness can be traced: it becomes a narrative locus of unsettlement where the impact of early island society and its people is visible on several levels. The first section is devoted to the conditions governing travel writing in order to understand how the travelers used this strategically in their representations of the islands in terms of both distance and embodiment. The second section centers on Labat’s travelogue in order to analyze how that embodiment led to the construction of an experimental self influenced by the islands: the individual traveler’s experience becomes a way to think through the social body’s experience. The third section examines how the self negotiates encounters with others. By interrogating the figure of the commentary, it questions the construction of a discourse of ambivalence, bordering on sentimentality, with regard to enslaved peoples and enslavement as an institution. The last section looks closer at engagements with Indigenous peoples in terms of an anxiety of influence: the narratives configure that influence through style. The travelers, it claims, both underscore and distance themselves to uphold an intermediary position.