We have tried to show the textual strategies used by French travellers describing the Turkish empire in the 15th - 16th centuries. After the French king Francis the First had signed the bilateral commercial treaty with the sultan Soliman in 1535, the French had recurring contacts with Turks : these contacts were characterized by a “dépaysement” towards the Ottoman otherness. Among the causes of this French attitude, the amazing silence that the Turks maintained in their own meetings is to understand not only as a reason of astonishment, but also as having a symbolic value : it has to be considered as the symbol of the European re-discovery of the “silence fondateur”, according to Eni ORLANDI’s expression, namely that silence founding every possibilities of meaning. In fact, the French travellers discovered an otherness which didn’t have a particular meaning to them yet, so they had to find the words to express it: they tried to describe the Turkish objects and people by some comparisons with the reality of their owns and in this effort they reduced the Turkish otherness to a mere difference. Moreover, travellers seemed to impose their sight on Ottoman empire and give Turk otherness an ideological meaning: the Turk was described as the infidel enemy of Christianity and this description was made credible by a marked intertextuality among travel reports. This situation turned with Guillaume POSTEL, a French visionary who had travelled since 1537. POSTEL esteemed the faculty of language more important than sight, so he let the Ottomans speak directly in his books: he gave the Turks the capacity of self-expression. So the Turk was no more a mere object the French could speak about, but he became an individuality able to take part in a dialogue (i.e. the RICŒUR’s ideas of ipséité and mêmeté ). In short, POSTEL broke the previous textual strategy of silenciement, according to ORLANDI’s word: after him, the Turk was no longer held into a type of discourse reiterating the preconstituted image of the cruel and barbaric infidel.
La prise de parole du Turc dans la littérature de voyage française aux XVe-XVIe siècles: du silence fondateur à la suppression des stratégies de silenciement
RAUS, RACHELE
2001-01-01
Abstract
We have tried to show the textual strategies used by French travellers describing the Turkish empire in the 15th - 16th centuries. After the French king Francis the First had signed the bilateral commercial treaty with the sultan Soliman in 1535, the French had recurring contacts with Turks : these contacts were characterized by a “dépaysement” towards the Ottoman otherness. Among the causes of this French attitude, the amazing silence that the Turks maintained in their own meetings is to understand not only as a reason of astonishment, but also as having a symbolic value : it has to be considered as the symbol of the European re-discovery of the “silence fondateur”, according to Eni ORLANDI’s expression, namely that silence founding every possibilities of meaning. In fact, the French travellers discovered an otherness which didn’t have a particular meaning to them yet, so they had to find the words to express it: they tried to describe the Turkish objects and people by some comparisons with the reality of their owns and in this effort they reduced the Turkish otherness to a mere difference. Moreover, travellers seemed to impose their sight on Ottoman empire and give Turk otherness an ideological meaning: the Turk was described as the infidel enemy of Christianity and this description was made credible by a marked intertextuality among travel reports. This situation turned with Guillaume POSTEL, a French visionary who had travelled since 1537. POSTEL esteemed the faculty of language more important than sight, so he let the Ottomans speak directly in his books: he gave the Turks the capacity of self-expression. So the Turk was no more a mere object the French could speak about, but he became an individuality able to take part in a dialogue (i.e. the RICŒUR’s ideas of ipséité and mêmeté ). In short, POSTEL broke the previous textual strategy of silenciement, according to ORLANDI’s word: after him, the Turk was no longer held into a type of discourse reiterating the preconstituted image of the cruel and barbaric infidel.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.