94 - SEGALEN (VICTOR)

SEGALEN (VICTOR) A very fine autograph letter signed “Victor Segalen,” Brest, November 6, 1907, 4 pp., in-8, to his friend Émile Magne; a document of great interest for understanding the writer’s aesthetic development. Written in Brest, while Segalen was still a Navy doctor, it bears witness to a pivotal moment in his career, on the threshold of the full expression of his literary vision. “My dear friend, first of all, thank you for the kind words you have shared with me—about our friendship and about my book. Thank you also for the critiques, or rather, for the fundamental critique: it is invaluable because it forces me to fully justify myself to you and to myself—or at least to attempt to do so. / Admittedly, my cosmogonic legends in Part 2 stand out too much and have a distinctly different tone from the narrative that frames them—this is somewhat, if not entirely, intentional. Not for the sake of ethnographic didacticism! May God—or the Maori gods themselves—preserve me from that, my dear Friend! But simply because I wanted to imbue this second part with the detachment, the solemnity, and the somewhat conventional stiffness of the myths and traditions that have been passed down. Does this halt the drama and disrupt the narrative flow? So much the better; I need to gain twenty years in time and thousands of leagues across the sea; I need to separate the two acts—Old Tahiti, New Tahiti—with a sort of superphonic interlude in which the ancient Soul, before dying, reappears in its entirety. Hence the very transformation of the prose, which becomes rhythmic, laden with repetitions and deliberate cadences; as if, by dint of passing through its harsh memories, it retained their rough and unpolished contours. That is my entire defense. / As for my “Clinicians of Letters,” I am grateful for the memory you hold of them, but I would rather you forget them: they bear witness to a period of my intellectual life when I was able to dream of an alliance between scientific research and literature; I therefore disavow them, at this time when I no longer tolerate any compromise regarding the work of art, regarded as the only one that exists, the only real one, and entirely self-sufficient. / I will be in Paris for four days around the 15th of next month. I very much hope to see you, to offer my respectful regards to Madame Magne, and to immediately resume our pleasant conversations of old. Yours most warmly […] A very enthusiastic thank you for the news about Madame de La Suje[?] and her circle. I am certain it will be a great pleasure.” Here, Segalen responds with remarkable clarity to his correspondent’s remarks regarding his work, most likely *Les Immémoriaux*. In it, he defends a bold stylistic choice: that of introducing into the narrative mythical passages that are deliberately hieratic and detached from the story, in order to give voice to Maori traditions. This reflection sheds valuable light on his conception of exoticism—not merely as a backdrop, but as an attempt to recreate otherness. This letter also reveals a decisive stance: Segalen, through his rejection of the “literary clinicians,” asserts a demand for the absolute autonomy of the work of art. One can see in this the emergence of a demanding aesthetic that would find its full realization in his later works.