Oriental rhapsodies Narrative arabesques and existential embroidery

This article, which compares Voyage en Orient with the preface letter to Les Filles du feu, questions the issues at stake in a certain way of writing typical of the nervalian narrative: narrative rhapsody, a poetic art inspired by the oriental tale, which plays on the effects of repetition and interruption. At the junction of the poetic, the ideological and the psychoanalytical, the subtle and diffuse dialectic that articulates the ethnological gaze of the traveller in the East to the veiled confession is analysed here.