La resilienza del viaggiatore: Esplorare l’immobilità

From a room in La Rochelle during the 2020 pandemic lockdown, the author reflects on past epidemics and previous confinements, looking for the art of journeying through immobility. The mind goes to the author’s faraway and now unreachable home in Turin, to the plague that ravaged this city in the 1630s, but also to Xavier de Maistre who, confined in the citadel of Turin in 1790, wrote the Voyage autour de ma chambre, perhaps the first example of modern “anodeporics”, a neologism to designate immobility travelogues. The essay then explores other pandemics and subsequent attempts at imitating De Maistre: Wilkie Collins, the author of the 1852 short story “A Terribly Strange Bed”, stranded with his father William, the painter, at the frontier of the Kingdom of Piedmont because of the cholera that broke out there in 1836; but also Almeida Garrett, who resisted the siege of typhus-struck Oporto in 1832-3 and, ten years later, penned another classic of “anodeporics”, Viagens na Minha Terra, also inspired by De Maistre. After semiotic consideration of what is needed to “journeying throughout immobility”, the essay ends with a study of the most famous anodeporic tale in world literature, also containing ironic quotes by De Maistre: Jorge Luis Borges’ El Aleph, named after a fictional device for mystical travel confined in a basement of 1940s Buenos Aires. The conclusion of this semiotic exploration through pandemics, lockdowns, and immobility travelogues is simple: no journey really makes sense without nostalgia.