Abstract EN:

The nineteenth century author of traval narrative, hesitating between two contradictory ambitions, which he tries to reconcile, to be literal or to be literary, alternatively writes about the world and rewrites the library. Superimposed on the ideal of a direct narrative which is based on the model of the daguerreotype, the engraving or the copy of a painting, and which imitates the movement of the referential journey, immediately furnishing an order to the text, is the knowledge gained form secondary sources. Contrary to the explorer, the writer is faced with a space already stacked out by literature ; the narrator uses preexisting texts as models or as foils, unless he considers litterature as an economic system were nothing must be saind twice, which produces either a lacuna, a bibliographical reference or a quote. Fictional texts, because they construct homonymous setting, lead to phenomena of spatial confusion. The assimilation of true and fictional space and the reappropriation of fictional structures resolve the problem uncessantly posed by the narrator of the insufficiency of the actual voyage to constitute a literary object, but on the other hand the referential work is jeopradized. The voyage, an object paradoxical, ideal and impossible to narrate at the same time, invites the writer to rehink the traditional balance of the narrative and disrupts the hierarchy between description and narration, the structural assumptions and the relationship to quotation.