Suspended ingenuity: A Reinterpretation of Ecuador by Henri Michaux

Abstract

This article revisits Ecuador. A Travel Journal (1929) by Henri Michaux (1899-1984) and argues that unfamiliar or uncanny writing techniques, techniques that should not be in the text due to them being useless to travel, and which cannot be valued for their mimetic imprecision, are key to understanding the text by means of their witty status. The tools used for analysis include theory of emotion, in addition to the theory of the “witty writer,” as Giordano understands it, without ignoring a certain critical tradition of travel literature such as Van den Abbeele (1992), Said (1978) and Musgrove (1999). The central idea proposes that “wittiness” in this travel journal is the best key to experiencing the text as opposed to mimetic theory.