[Im]mobility and First-Person Narrative in Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage

• In Event: Perpetuum Mobile: Movement and Mobility in French Renaissance Literature

Abstract

Mobility shapes every aspect of Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage (1578), from the premise of founding a Protestant colony in Brazil to the harrowing voyage itself to the 20-year hiatus before the Histoire’s publication. Léry’s peripatetic life, the loss of the manuscript, and the intervening violence of the Wars of Religion subsequently inflect Léry’s observations of cannibalism and other native Brazilian practices. What is the relationship between the paradoxically immobile state of the passengers (“exilez,” as Léry describes them) and the moving world around them? How do the liminal events shed light on the voyager’s observations and interpretations? These interdependent mobilities open up a textual space for the representation of persecution, trauma, and polemic, and Léry’s récit de voyage becomes part ethnography, part “essai.” I conclude by questioning whether geographical mobility (imagined or real) constitutes a precondition for the kind of early modern first-person narrative initiated by both Léry and Montaigne.

Author

• Cathy Yandell, Carleton College