The Map and the Road

From the age of sixteen onwards, Serge Daney travelled. He went to London with friends from high school, crossed Spain in a 2CV, hitchhiked to Scandinavia, took a turn as a journalist in Eastern Europe, visited Dublin and the Guinness factory there…He’d already spent fifteen months on the road — by his own reckoning — when, following May ’68, he completed what he would consider to be his first real trip. He’d just turned 24. Four months in India: never had he gone so far, for so long, and alone. The young man would have stayed longer if he hadn’t — quite literally — run out of breath and needed to be urgently repatriated. The diagnosis was tuberculosis. As soon as he was well, Daney left again, 1968 to 1971 marking his so-called “exotomaniac” years; besides India, he explored the Maghreb, West Africa and notably undertook a journey from Egypt to Yemen.

A dizzying survey and, even then, but a sample. It’s well known that Daney was a seasoned traveller; what’s less known is quite the extent of his travels. Listing all the places where he went would be impossible. It would be quicker to name the countries that he didn’t visit: Argentina, for instance. Those were the ones, so it’s said, that he liked to point out to friends on the map hanging on his living room wall. 

It’s necessary to break things down, so as not to lose our bearings. Until 1975, Daney travelled for himself. From 1975 on — and even more so after leaving Cahiers for Libération — he began to travel for work. But this division remains superficial. Daney would continue to travel for the love of it, happily extending an article or a festival with a week-long hike. The experiences of travel and of writing would remain deeply entwined. Before setting off, Daney would tell his friends where he would soon be heading — and too bad if he didn’t go, or not this time, anyway. Once on site, he would send daily postcards and note his impressions at length: half a dozen notebooks filled in 1970 alone. Finally back home, Daney would share his stories — for he never hid the fact that travelling also served as a way to construct around himself the myth, as enigmatic as it was flattering, of the “Stevensonian wanderer”. 

The game of travel and of writing is none other than that of the map and the territory. A game which, fascinating as it may be, must guard against shortcuts or romanticism. We only ever travel among the names of cities or countries. Another schema, this time rather well-known. Proust knew it, just like Rimbaud and that line ceaselessly quoted in the notebooks: “Let us set out once more on our native roads”, preceded by other famous words, still clearer: “No one leaves.” 

There is, however, one question that belongs to Daney more intimately: that of the relationship between travel and criticism. This time we must distinguish between the general and the particular. The general is a similarity between cinema and travel — as between cinema and childhood — which is often stated, but rarely elucidated. “Watching films, travelling. It’s the same thing…Travelling is knowing that you need a destination in mind to have a chance to enjoy the journey itself — which is all about being ‘in-between’, namely protected. The same goes for films: the shots are the jolts of carriages.” 

The particular is cinema that speaks of travel. No film, as it happens, can compare to the way that Moonfleet or The Night of the Hunter captured childhood. Is this because travel is an experience that is less universal, more ambiguous? Daney often seems ill at ease: reticent to judge a film a success or a failure based on his own travel nous; severe — sometimes overly so — the second he detects remnants of colonial or orientalist views; wary of this becoming-cinema of the world, in which he recognises only a victory for television — which is to say, for tourism. 

Cinema in general, then, but few films in particular. One, however, celebrated amongst other reasons for having captured the “mortiferous charm” of the desert. A film Daney often invoked but always in passing: no articles, just a few words slipped in here and there…a film somewhat removed from the cinephilic tradition to which Daney belonged, and a reference whose unexpected, even “exotic”, nature is in itself significant — namely David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. 

Travel is barely a theme, then. In any case, Daney rarely thematises. His thought proceeds by leitmotifs — or even through personal obsessions that are unafraid to remain so. It’s hardly surprising then that, of the many articles he published — around two thousand — only one includes the word “travel” in its title. Nor that, in that article, the one thing that is never discussed is travel. 

‘The Absolute Voyage’ (‘Le voyage absolu’) is a late text — from 1991 — and little known; its inclusion in the collected volume Écrits, images et sons dans la Bibliothèque de France escaped the notice of P.O.L. when the publisher released the four-volume La Maison Cinéma et le monde [The Cinema House and the World]. It’s also a difficult text, Daney reflecting on what will become of cinema in the era of generalised archiving — an era that was then nascent but has since become our own. The connection to travel is therefore non-existent — and yet, in a way, absolute, if only by contrast. For Daney, indeed, cinema was the very opposite of an archive: it was a promise. Not what preserves the world, but what makes it desirable and always to come.