Paysages picturaux et projections identitaires dans le Voyage en Orient de Lamartine

Résumé 0

This article explores the pictorial dimension present in Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient (1835). Far from being a product of facile exoticism, the Orient of Lamartine is the object of a double process of aestheticizing reality and projecting emotion. First must be examined how the describer becomes a painter in order to compose idealized, harmonious landscapes, on the model of Classical painters, allowing a spiritualization of space. Next must be examined how the narrator, by substituting himself for the Author of the creation designated as painter, symbolically brings back to life his daughter who died of tuberculosis during the voyage, celebrating the “wonders” of nature seen during the last walk he took with her in the Lebanese mountains. Finally comes the analysis of the double movement at work in the motif of the fires of light, simultaneously the projection of interior upheaval and an attempt to distance itself from a new aesthetic of Oriental landscape which, this time, rivals with the Romantic Orientalist painters. With Lamartine, a turning point took place. His use of pictorial comparisons for representing the Mediterranean Orient leads, at the same time, to a necessary interdisciplinarity where literature and art history complete each other.