ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Swiss writer Nicolas Bouvier’s 1990 travel narrative Journal d’Aran in the light of its invocation of J. M. Synge’s 1907 text, The Aran Islands (illustrated by Jack B. Yeats), and Robert J. Flaherty’s 1934 film, Man of Aran. I argue that Bouvier engages extensively with these previous takes on the islands in a bid to develop a heightened awareness of the visual in his writing. Using W. J. T. Mitchell’s stages of ekphrasis—ekphrastic indifference, ekphrastic hope, and ekphrastic fear—as a theoretical grounding, I aim to shed further light on Bouvier’s ambivalent relationship with these appropriations. When Bouvier writes of his various encounters with the islanders, insights into their culture and even the relentless weather conditions that envelop the islands, his observations are often refracted through and even draw on the ekphrastic urges of Synge (who often evokes paintings as a means of describing his time on the islands), as well as the filmic perspective of Flaherty (whose docufiction presents a careful aestheticization of the islands). Responding to what he sees as the potential shortcomings of these earlier representations of the islands, Bouvier (who is also a noted photographer) endeavours to amplify colour in the textualization of his journey, offering an account that carefully builds on and yet radically departs from his predecessors’ representations of the islands. Bouvier’s dedication to a heightened visuality is further shaded by the importance accorded by the islanders to the optical trickery of the fairy folk, and the text’s recurrent themes of blindness and fever. While Bouvier’s recourse to his precursors underlines that an extended engagement with previous narratives focusing on one’s destination evidently constitutes another way of seeing for the traveller, his multi-layered yet largely fragmentary approach also allows us to raise several vital new questions about both the limits and limitations of ekphrasis.
