Romance Notes

Bernard Noël's Un trajet en hiver (2004) presents itself as a travel diary, recounting a series of thirty-four trips on the train and one very brief visit to the Buffet de la Gare, in Lausanne. That simple description is reductive, of course, and perhaps not entirely faithful to the purposes that animate the text. For Un trajet en hiver is not strictly speaking a diary: there is no question of a daily practice of writing, there are no temporal indications prefacing the entries, and there is no effort to seize events of personal life that may have occurred apart from those train trips. Yet Bernard Noël is on record as claiming that all of his books may be read like fragments of a diary, whatever other appearance they may offer,¹ and this particular text flirts with that genre quite openly, in provocative ways. As for travel, that is perhaps not the most crucial concern of this book. In other words, it is not travel as such that interests Noël here, but rather the ways in which we choose to furnish the curiously suspended time of a train ride.²

For his part, Noël boards the train with plenty of material to occupy his time (newspapers, magazines, books), and with the best of intentions. Though he reads in the train, and his readings are often interesting ones (Peter Handke, Julio Cortázar, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Francis Ponge, for instance), his mind quickly wanders. Sometimes, it's the physical landscape that distracts him, whizzing by at breakneck speed in contrast to his own immobility. More often still, it is the human landscape that grabs his attention, and more precisely the conversations of his fellow-travelers. Eavesdropping may be a guilty pleasure, but it is an undeniable pleasure nonetheless. It is difficult to resist in a confined, public space like that of a train, where one's own anonymity and that of others rub elbows. The temptation [End Page 39] is particularly imperious when one begins to suspect that each conversation constitutes a story … and when the listener himself is someone who makes his living telling stories: "Difficile de rester dans ton livre quand il n'y a qu'à prendre un récit en train de se faire" (29). That latter phrase, un récit en train de se faire, with its conspicuous paronomasia and its equally obvious metatextual intent, articulates efficiently what is at stake in this text, wherein Bernard Noël issues an invitation to the voyage recalibrated to suit the spirit of what passes, now, for our own moment in time.

In one of the conversations that Noël overhears, a woman speaks about what is, for her, the chief pleasure of travel: "Ce que j'aime en voyage, c'est de me dire en regardant le paysage: y'a des gens qui vivent ici, moi pas, et ces gens n'auront jamais la moindre idée de l'endroit où je vis" (91). If Noël chooses to put that utterance to use in the explicit of his text, rather than any other, it is perhaps because it encapsulates much of what Un trajet en hiver has to say about travel and its uses. In the first instance, the landscape that one observes … both outside the speeding train and inside, importantly … is fundamentally human, rather than merely geographic. Furthermore, one is free to look without being seen. In corollary, one may comment abundantly upon what one observes, without divulging any more than one may wish about oneself. "Je n'aime pas les confidences, ni exhiber directement mon intimité," Noël remarks in a conversation with Jean-Marie Le Sidaner ("La Vie l'écriture" 163); and Un trajet en hiver is a text that does not easily surrender its "intimacy," its "privacy." Or at least not directly. Take the example of the woman whom Noël overhears: what she says about how she travels tells us more than a little, if indirectly, about who she is. By the same token, the details that Bernard Noël chooses to note in the account of his...