ABSTRACT
Using an important distinction made by Foucault in Les Mots et les choses,2 this chapter sets out to analyse the jungle experience of Henri Michaux’s travel text Ecuador (1929)—in terms both of semiotics (the sum of knowledge and techniques that enable signs to be apprehended) and hermeneutics (the sum of knowledge and techniques that enable signs to speak and reveal their meaning). The aim of this approach is to show how signs in the work of a travel writer like Michaux tend both to represent and to mediatise jungle experience, underlining the indissociable nature of hermeneutics and semiology in the signifying process. In the tension between hermeneutics and semiology, it is the problems associated with the latter that tend to loom largest. Where and what are the signs of the jungle? Can they be distinguished from the amorphous phenomenological mass that is equatorial forest? If so, what disciplinary tools-anthropological, botanical, geographical, and zoological-are best suited to a concerted analysis of them? What is the status of the travel document in the light of these different possibilities? And how can such hermeneutic preoccupations as do arise be reconciled with the primary semiological challenge of the jungle?
