‘The man who isn’t there’: André Gide as travel companion in Robert Dessaix’s Arabesques

Presented as part of the SLLL Literary Studies Seminar Series This paper looks at the characterisation of André Gide as travel companion in Robert Dessaix’s 2008 text Arabesques. The Australian writer journeys around North Africa and Europe in the footsteps of—but also, crucially, accompanied by—Gide, a seasoned traveller and a literary hero of Dessaix’s. Yet the attempted resurrection of Gide central to Arabesques does not mean that this figure can be easily pinned down; despite Dessaix’s concerted efforts to do so, Gide remains "the man who isn’t there", and "just when you think you’ve grasped his essence, his double appears behind you, smiling ironically, and you lose your hold on him". This slippery "presence", with its implication of haunting or shadowing, will be to the fore of my analysis. In his subtitle A Tale of Double Lives, Dessaix alludes to Gide’s influence as well as the possibility of a single person leading a dual existence, while also making the case for the travel journal itself to be "haunted" by its inspirations or points of reference. I therefore use this compelling connection between Gide and Dessaix to examine a key question about contemporary travel writing: in terrains divested of novelty, in what ways can the travel writer grapple with the shadow(s) of his predecessor(s) in order to produce a travel text? Dr Elizabeth Geary Keohane is a Lecturer in French at the University of Toronto, and a Senior Research Associate with the Department of French at the University of Johannesburg. She has published on Gide, Michaux, Magritte, Butor and Said, in journals such as French Studies, Voix plurielles and MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities.