ABSTRACT
Few French writers have as playfully investigated the interdependency of ethnology and literature, of the shares of “fact” and “fiction” in each, as the poet, travel writer, and essayist Jacques Meunier (1941–2004). A self-described “defrocked ethnologist,” Meunier delights in elucidating the common denominator in both disciplines: the observer. His insistence on applying the tools of one trade to the other makes his articles and book reviews particularly “worth the detour” (as one says in French), not to mention his own evocative works of ethnological writing, Le Chant du Silbaco (1969) and Les Gamins de Bogata (1976), which were followed by a volume of ethnologically informed literary criticism, Le Monocle de Joseph Conrad (1987), and then by two collections of lively travel pieces, Voyages sans abri (1994) and On dirait des îles (1999). Meunier possesses that rare poetic gift of isolating just those particulars—Pierre Mac Orlan’s accordion, Blaise Cendrars’ beret—which are revelatory of the universal. (One could certainly add Meunier’s own omnipresent pipe to the collection.) His essays are prisms of reflection and self-reflection; the author observes and at the same time observes himself: observes himself observing. To his alert mischievousness, to his skepticism about both “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” should be added the skills of an engaging raconteur. Some texts revive that rare, but notable, tradition of short fiction in which an essay turns into a short story, or vice versa.
