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Lesley Graham

Victor Segalen University, Bordeaux 2

The Displaced Naturalist: W. F. Campbell's life of exile in Normandy Few would argue that the concept of home is not intimately linked with the notion of place. People are born into and evolve in attachments that are always based in a place and this natural environment is of quite fundamental importance in the formation of a sense of self. Attitudes to these places are socially constructed, and, to some extent, conditioned by a mental hierarchy associated with the movement of capital from place to place. This paper explores one textual example of what comes about when a person is forced for economic reasons from the area in which he has invested his sense of self and slips down the accepted hierarchy of places from home to away: in this case being displaced from the West Highlands of Scotland to Normandy in France.

The work in question is Life in Normandy, written by Walter Frederick Campbell (1798-1855). Campbell was the Laird of Islay from 1816 to 1848, the island estate having been in the hands of his family, the Campbells of Shawfield, for some 300 years. He was also the reformist MP for Argyll for most of this period (1822-1832 and 1835-1841). Campbell inherited Islay in 1816 and initiated one of the most revolutionary eras in the history of the island through a bold series of reforms, the effects of which are still evident today. 1 He created new villages, diversified economic activity, extended the internal and external communications network and imposed agricultural reform. When the price of cereal and cattle fell dramatically at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, confronted with overpopulation, depressed agricultural prices and substantial rent arrears among his tenants, Campbell sought to accelerate the transformation of his estate. He was largely successful in meeting his objective which was to "retain tenants on the estate without outright clearance or large-scale emigration." 2 Consequently, Campbell was generally perceived to be a "humane" and "liberal" proprietor.

By October 1847, however, Campbell's liabilities were colossal. In December of the same year one of the creditors petitioned for formal bankruptcy and the Islay estate was sequestered. In a "state of hopeless embarrassment" (Walker, p. 822), the destitute laird removed to Avranches in Normandy initially to recover his health. There, he spent the final years of his life as an economic exile, aided by an annuity from his friends. Like Boulogne and Dinan, Avranches was a financial haven for numerous Britons. Since the 1820s, many military families had been living on half-pay in the new period of peace with France and Normandy attracted a growing number of financial casualties who found the cost of living in Great Britain unaffordable. The town probably had what Pemble describes as "the threadbare look associated with bankrupts, officers on half pay, penurious spinsters, and families making do with cut price gentility" (p. 10).

Life in Normandy was published anonymously in 1863, eight years after Walter Frederick Campbell's death. His son, John Francis Campbell (1821-1885), the well-known folklorist, edited the two volumesa fictionalized account 3 of a short trip undertaken by the two main characters from Avranches to Granville further along the coast. Hope and Cross, the protagonists of the narrative, are clearly Campbell's alter egos, both characters being passionately interested in nature, fishing and shooting. Indeed, John Francis Campbell confirms in the preface to the third edition that "those who knew the author […] know that Hope and Cross think his thoughts and narrate many of his adventures" (vol. 1, p. vi). Cross is described as a man having a small independence who found himself the great man of the quiet little town where he lived, poverty in England being wealth in Normandy.

The fictionalization of the account eliminates the dreary description characteristic of so many nineteenth-century travel narratives while it also allows Campbell to present several subjectivities including that of the "West Highland gentleman", that of the Eton-educated older man, and that of the detached narrator, accommodating an interesting heteroglossia that entwines peasant and bourgeois voices from Scotland, France and England.

Given how much nineteenth-century travel writing on France was characterized by an urge to point out just how much better France could 3. Campbell may have been influenced in the literary recycling of life events by his mother Charlotte Campbell Bury (28 January 1775-1 April 1861) after whom he had named Port Charlotte on Islay. Following her second marriage and a period spent as lady-in-waiting in the household of the future Queen Caroline, she became the author of numerous works of light literature, part of a movement that came to be known as the Silver Fork School. Certain of her novels were once extremely popular, the most successful being Diary illustrative of the Times of George IV (1838).

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tHe DisPLaceD naturaList: w. f. camPbeLL's Life of exiLe in normanDY be if only it were a little more British, it is surprising to discover that the declared intention of these two volumes as set out in the preface is to suggest ways in which the poorest Scots might find new ways of catching and preparing food by adopting French ways.

It was suggested that various ingenious foreign devices and engines for ensnaring, growing and gathering food, and making it eatable, might be described as to benefit the poor at home, whose single dish of potatoes might easily be varied at small cost. It was argued that a good cheap dinner would tempt a poor man from bad dear drink abroad, and that a poor Scotchman's wife might be taught to do that which poor wives do elsewhere. (Vol. 1,p. v) This paternalistic effort to incite Highlanders to improve their way of life by learning from French example has to be understood in the context of the extreme poverty and devastating distress brought about on Islay by the potato blight just two years before Campbell's exile. The declaration echoes several of the very problems at the origin of Campbell's exiled state: the poverty of the people of Islay who could no longer pay him their rent; their dependence on the potato; and their penchant for alcohol. When the potato blight struck in 1846, it was reported that over 5,000 inhabitants of Islay were suffering "pressing wants and impending starvation" (Storrie, p. 133). At the end of October 1846 Campbell sought public assistance for the population on his estate claiming that ninety-five percent of the seventeen thousand individuals under his protection were in "great distress" (Walker, p. 821).

Campbell obliquely suggests that the people of Islay might have found the material resources to overcome this crisis but had neither knowledge nor skill enough to do so. His many propositions for improvements that might be adapted in Scotland range from decks on fishing boats (vol. 2, p. 241), a pulley system for baskets covering food (vol. 1, p. 123), the four de campagne (vol. 1, p. 126), an organized market for fish (vol. 1, pp. 218-9), and cooking techniques that might render seabirds edible. The character Hope claims:

[…] a Frenchman will live in luxury where our people would starve, merely from knowing how to make the most of what falls in his way. I confess I wish that our peasant women in Scotland knew something more of cookery than merely boiling a potato. Certainly our friend the Marquis errs quite as much in the one way as our Highland wives do in the other; still, if he can show us how to convert marrots into good food, the lesson is worth learning, for what myriads of them have I seen on the coasts of Scotland which might benefit our poor, instead of merely destroying the herring fry. So let us go and see how he gets on, and try to teach his method to some of the people at home. (Vol. 1,p. 57) Campbell's approach is an interesting variation on the customary traveller's prospective transformative project for new lands visited. Instead of considering that the host country is available for improvement, Campbell explicitly directs his suggestions northwards to home, and backwards in time to a catastrophic period for him personally. So that, far from looking forward to the glorious vision of improvement in the country in which he currently resides, the usual trope in 19th C travel narratives (Pratt,p. 61), his suggestions for improvement are sad reminders of lost opportunities at home, his own financial errors and catastrophic natural events.

In an effort to make his exile and this account of it meaningful, Campbell's principal strategy is that of exchange: the exchange of knowledge and experience between Highland Scotland and Normandy with himself as the textual intermediary. However, the exchange is ineffective since few of the potential beneficiaries will ever read his work. It is, rather, an assertion of Campbell's identity as a dignified subject, an expert in both Highland and Norman localities and a useful, if displaced, agent of enrichment through exchange. The account is shadowed by a rumination on the torment occasioned by the motivation for the author's presence in Normandyfinancial ruin. I would like to suggest, then, that given Walter Frederick Campbell's personal circumstances, more than merely being a self-help book for distressed islanders, the text can been approached as a reflection on the notion of home and the catharsis of exile, discursively concentrating the author's strategies for coping with an acute sense of both social and cultural dislocation.

As an amateur naturalist, Campbell's observations certainly centre more often than is usual in this type of work on questions of home in the natural environment and more precisely expulsion from home and return to that place of origin: thus as well as learning about flight patterns and plumage and reproduction, we find conjecture about the homing instinct of the salmon, descriptions of digging kingfishers out of their nests in river banks, ruminations on the migration patterns of various birds and comparison of their arrival dates in Scotland and in France, as well as observations on the excavation of the holes inhabited by giant squid and the process of hauling them out of their hiding place with hooks.

Campbell's precarious financial situation and his displacement also resonate in several long passages on natural dangers. The first of these episodes takes place when Hope and Cross are caught out by the tide and find a temporary, uncomfortable home on a rocky island. Fear mounts and a feeling of powerlessness overtakes them until they are saved by a heroic effort from one of the fisher girls who puts her own life in danger to do so. "I went through all the stages, from the cold perspiration of good honest fear to the quiet resignation of despair" admits Hope (vol. 2, | 123 tHe DisPLaceD naturaList: w. f. camPbeLL's Life of exiLe in normanDY p. 89). An earlier evocation of the sensation of being pulled under involves stories of a kraken dragging whole boats under the sea and an encounter with the minaur or giant squid: "How disgustingly ugly and revolting it is!" said Hope […] "How would you like, Cross, to have that brute clinging round you, sucking you in with all those leech-looking mouths?" (Vol. 1, p. 297) Fog and walking in circles are the dangers evoked in another pivotal episode that can be interpreted as allegory.

I felt that death was inevitable, and mine was the calmness of resignation to a certain fate which I could not avert. Fear is most painful while there remains any uncertainty; when doubt ceases, fear in a great measure ceases also, and resignation takes its place. (Vol. 2, p. 89)

A similar passage juxtaposes parallel incidents, one that took place on the sinking sands around the Mont Saint Michel and another on a strand in the West Highlands. "I felt myself slowly going down" (p. 100) writes Campbell, and even as he describes the terrible feeling experienced in Normandy, he harks back to Scotland, its bogs, trembling eyes and well-heads (p. 101). All of these brushes with deaththe rising tide; getting lost in thick fog; sea monsters; and sinking sandsare irresistible reminders of the helplessness Campbell must have experienced as he struggled to keep his head above water financially, slowly losing Islay and his livelihood.

The sensation to me was as if a slight crust had broken under my feet, through which they sank, and then something seemed to suck or drag me down, leaving me not the slightest power to assist myself. (p. 101) One of the ways that exiles play out the tension created by their displacement is by doing boundary work, that is consolidating the definition of what is "us" and what is "them". Avranches in the mid-nineteenth century surely qualifies as what Pratt in the colonial context has theorized as a contact zone, that is: a social space "where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination" (Pratt,p. 4). From the very outset of this narrative, Campbell goes about establishing his difference by creating the impression that Normandy is in many ways a hostile environment. The action in Normandy takes place against the background of rumblings from the 1848 Revolution in Paris with one insurgent taking refuge in the inn in which Hope and Cross are lodging in Granville, lending a whiff of ambient menace to the exiles' presence in an unpredictably turbulent foreign land.

In the very first chapter, Hope and Cross are harassed by a group of men from Granville who hurl stones at them and chant "Sur la France l'Anglais / ne régnera jamais" (vol. 1, p. 51). The local men in turn are described over the space of thirty-two pages as blackguards, scoundrels, rascals, persecutors, confounded French frogs, vermin, scum of the earth, scamps and tormentors (vol. 1, pp. 51, 53, 58, 59, 82, 83). The altercation comes to a head when a band of around fifty men marches down the road with pitchforks and scythes only to be settled by Cross asserting his economic power by proposing to palm them off with "a few fish hooks and a franc or two" (vol. 1, p. 82).

The jostling to assert social and cultural domination is played out throughout the travel narrative with multiple subtle examples of discourses that promote bourgeois authority and devalue French subsistence ways of life (Pratt,p. 10). In general, the Norman peasants are portrayed as being childlike and social order is reassuringly respected by the young fisher girls: in spite of "liberté, égalité", they were shy and respectful, and as soon as they had finished eating, they rose, curtseyed, and left the room. (p. 245)

The maintenance of these class barriers is all the more important in France, where social status less easily perceptible than in Great Britain. The Marquis, for example, sometimes dresses like a peasant and is portrayed as being somewhat limited intellectually and abnormally preoccupied by the preparation and consumption of food. Language is also used to reinforce stereotypes and anchor boundaries. The Marquis' French is transposed into the sort of deficient English that consolidates his portrayal as a somewhat ridiculous character.

Several aspects of Campbell's text reflect interactions based on domination and subordination and serve to remind the reader that although he may be exiled in terms of nation he maintains his social class. Despite reduced circumstances, Campbell seeks to convey his undisputable membership of the upper classes4 and the narrative dramatizes an unquestioned domination exerted over the peasant population of Normandy. However, he also clearly considers himself a benevolent benefactor and this quality is acted out in his account during an episode in which Cross and Hope use their financial resources to reward the young fisher-girl who had saved them from the rising tide, thereby simultaneously asserting their authority and their economic superiority.

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The following passage relating Hope's shock at coming upon a rather slovenly house in the Norman countryside serves to maintain several boundaries; that between social classes, that between Celts and everyone else, and that between France and Great Britain. "Talk of French civilisation", said Hope; "I will be hanged if this does not beat Celtic indolence. You may see the same sort of carelessness among the lowest orders of Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Highlanders, but not among the better class. The proprietor of this place, you told me, is rich, is in the employment of the government, and considers himself enough of a gentleman to call me out, if I told him what I think of his dirt and ignorance." (Vol. 1,p. 122) The passage also clearly illustrates the value of fictionalizing the account and including characters with different points of view. Only Hope, the old Etonian, can make such a remark since the character Cross represents West Highland wisdom and tolerance. Cross's response immediately re-establishes the objective voice of reason appropriate to a conspicuously impartial observer: "C'est la mode du pays", answered Cross; "and as we are not their schoolmasters, we must take them as we find them" (vol. 1, p. 122). "It is always more agreeable to praise than to censure" he adds.

Cross's innocent stance is typical of many naturalists writing about abroad. Indeed, the "natural" authority exerted by Campbell's protagonists over the local population is reinforced by their status as amateur naturalists. Going beyond the obvious contrast between the local people who live off the land and the exiles taking a dilettante scientific interest in it, Pratt has further examined the relationship between naturalists and locals in the colonial context and identified "an ideological drama essential to the authority of the naturalist, that of validating his way of knowing over others" (p. 55) often involving clashes between peasant knowledge and science. She further claims that the conspicuously innocent stance invariably taken by the naturalist reflects an assumed guilt of conquest and a great longing for a way of taking possession without subjugation and violence (p. 57).

The undeniable otherness of Normandy is typically illustrated by Campbell through descriptions of unfamiliar eating habits and exotic foodstuffs. The two volumes of Life in Normandy are peppered with these, notably with enumerations of the various courses in the gargantuan meals prepared by the French Marquis. The detailed descriptions serve to establish the fact that Normandy is decidedly not home but also suggest that the most savoury elements from it might be integratedindeed ingurgitatedinto Campbell's new identity as an exile. These possibilities, however, are counterbalanced by descriptions of unequivocally alien foodstuffs such as limpets (apparently eaten in Normandy while periwinkles are not) (vol. 1, p. 191), snails and even slugs (vol. 2, pp. 16-20), and guillemots (vol. 2, p. 47), as well as bacon that because of the gabelle has to be cured by burying it in the earth for six months in a modest amount of salt. This last practice provides the author with the opportunity to voice his rejection of this repugnant element in the Norman diet while at the same time affirming the superior discernment of his compatriots by declaring that it gives him "what the Scotch call a regular scunner" (vol. 2, p. 134).

The preoccupation with a possibly useful "otherness" available for appropriation is mirrored by a similar preoccupation with "sameness". For the exiled subject sameness provides stability and comfort. It is a discursive coping strategy. In this way, numerous parallels are drawn between Normandy and Scotland or more generally Great Britain: between the horses, the fields, the roads, the housewives and their collections of linen, girdles, drinking habits, and penny weddings. "The habits and superstitions which I observe resemble much more those of Scottish Highlanders than of the English" concludes Campbell (vol. 2, p. 304). Levi Strauss asks: "What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, an 'exploration of the deserted places of my memory', the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the 'discovery' of relics and legends" (quoted by de Certeau, p. 107). Accordingly, Norman otherness and sameness produces in Campbell a heightened awareness of the abandoned myths and legends of home and, at the same time, underlines the sameness of Highland Scotland and Normandy: original home and adopted home. A single example will suffice: that of magpies as birds of augury. Hope remarks that in England it is considered fortunate to see an even number of magpies and unfortunate to see an odd number.

One is sorrow, two is mirth, Three's a wedding, four's a birth. Ay, that is the English edition, and put together for the sake of the rhyme; but our Highland belief agrees with the Norman. We think that the uneven numbers are fortunate, and the even unfortunate. In the Highlands the lines are-One is joy, two is grief, Three a wedding, four a death. (Vol. 2,p. 221) Another of the discursive techniques used both to assert the traveller's authority and expertise, and to establish correspondences between | 127 tHe DisPLaceD naturaList: w. f. camPbeLL's Life of exiLe in normanDY home and here, is that of glossing unfamiliar terms. Glossing provides a way of re-establishing some semblance of order on the natural world since one of the sources of the alienation associated with exile is that the signifier has become severed from the signified, that words no longer stand for things in an unquestionable way. The mission for the expatriate, and to an even greater extent for the exiled naturalist, is thus to supply the "correct words" for foreign terms. Lexical correspondences must be found and pointed out, as in the following explanation provided by the Marquis:

Bouquets are what you call prawns; chevrettes are shrimps; in Paris and in most parts of France, prawns are called salicoques, and shrimps crevettes, but here they bear the names of bouquets and chevrettes. (vol. 1, p. 141) Glosses are provided by Campbell for many of the terms associated with the fauna and flora of Normandy although the process can be rather confusing given that the correct word may simply be considered the English word or more rarely the scientific word, but sometimes it may be the Scots word for a Norman term. Thus, in dialogue, familiar words are substituted for strange terms and the otherness is controlled, and sometimes even rendered homely with the substitution of that Scots word. On at least one occasion, Campbell is pleased to note that the Norman word is in fact the same as the Scots word:

[…] little Matilde held one of the poles with the iron hooks, which she called by the same name as the salmon-fisher in Scotland gives to his landinghook-namely, a clip. The one Matilde carried was exactly of the same form as those used by the northern salmon-fisher, but was six times as strong, looking more like a short boat-hook, without the spike, than a clip. But a clip it was called. (Vol. 1,p. 285) The narrative also unselfconsciously contains Scots words such as burn, caller, blether, and burthen that are not glossed, suggesting that both W. F. an J. F. Campbell used these terms naturally and expected their readers to understand them too. 5 Alas, Campbell was never able to take those words back to their natural habitat. There was to be no Scottish homecoming at the end of his life for he died and is buried in Avranches cemetery where the inscription on his gravestone reads: "Where your treasure is there will your heart be also." It is clear that despite a sincere effort to live a useful life in France, Walter Frederick Campbell's sense of self was never completely invested 5. Occasionally, however, Scots terms in dialogue are glossed, ostensibly for the benefit of the French Marquis: this is the case for the term "leister and blaze" for example (vol. 2, p. 51).

in his place of exile and that he never entirely came to terms with his displacement. So that even as he wrote about life in Normandy, he was constantly and obsessively reworking thoughts of his home, Islay, and of the circumstances of his expulsion from it. The clues in the text reveal a man as intrigued by similarities between Highland Scotland and Normandy as by differences between the two places and a benevolent individual intent on learning from this experience and transferring the knowledge acquired to those who might benefit from it at home. At the same time, they betray a mind endlessly ruminating on the meaning of home in the natural world, the helplessness that accompanies going under be it financially or literally, the dislocation of exile and the need to maintain and cultivate social barriers as well as cultural differences.

Indeed, he had even greater aspirations. The Campbell papers in the National Library of Scotland include a draft letter from W. F. Campbell to the Duke of Argyll concerning his desire for a peerage.


Lesley Graham

Kenneth White works in three literary forms: long and short poetry; prose travel narratives (which he refers to as waybooks) and essays. He compares this triple production to an arrow: the shaft of the arrow being the books, the point of the arrow being the poems, and the feathers representing the essays, giving direction. Using another metaphor, he describes the essays as cartography; the waybooks explorations of particular landscapes and the poems concentrated moments of illumination en route. 1 I would like to focus on this last image of the essay as cartography and on one of White's collections of essays: The Wanderer and his Charts: Exploring the Fields of Vagrant Thought and Vagabond Beauty. Essays on Cultural Renewal (2004). I will suggest that although the cartography drawn up by these essaysconsidered both individually and collectivelymaps out a rich textured criss-crossing of inluences, interests and perspectives, all tracks inevitably lead back to the writer himself.

While the earlier collections of essays initially appeared in French, these essays were irst published in English. By his own account, White writes his poems and prose narratives in English because this is the language in which he lives; a language that he can take liberties with. French is for him a tool and therefore more suited to the work of the essays. It is a language, he suggests, that doesn't like writers to take liberties with itit's more rigorous and more intellectual, but also more rigid and tends towards overperfection (On Scottish Ground,p. 127). Over the years, the distinction between the two languages and their elected uses has become less absolute in White's work although it generally still holds (Le Champ du grand travail, p. 109). The language switch to English for the most recent collections of essays therefore signals a shift in tenor and ambition, these short pieces being less rigorous and intellectual than the earlier French collections: La Figure du Dehors (1982), Une Apocalypse tranquille (1985), andL'Esprit nomade (1987). The effect is one of a deinite movement towards looser, more relaxed thinking and expression in the essays.

inluences

White deines his concept of the essay form in the preface to The Wanderer and his Charts. They are, he says:

[…] attempts at fast, clear cogent thinking. Live thought is erratic and erotic in its nature, full of tentative explanations and existential energy, and the essay-form proceeds by a series of intellectual sensations and logical leaps. (p. vii) He further speciies that "this thought is always connected to sensed space, a lived existence" (p. viii). Like all of White's writing, the essays contribute to his grand (some say grandiose) project of geopoetics, that is to say a way of writing that is in touch with the earth, that relects the lines of the world, and that rejects the mediocrity of contemporary culture.

White provides abundant references to his general inluences. Not all criticsespecially Scottish criticshave admired the wide-ranging enumerations of writers from whom he has drawn inspiration, judging the references didactic and monotonous. 2 However, the practice offers pointers towards some speciic inluences in the area of the essay. Indeed these essays occasionally centre leetingly on writers who have nourished his understanding and application of the form. White recognizes the excitement and stimulation generated in the eighteenth century by Hume's Essay on Human Understanding and Fabre's Essai sur la théorie des torrents. Qualifying theirs as live thought, he contrasts their essays with the novels that were to "encumber Europe in the two centuries following" (The Wanderer,p. 68). He also recognizes in passing the fashion the form enjoyed with certain nineteenth-century writers, notably Robert Louis Stevenson. However, although White has what he calls a great liking, even a fellow-feeling, for the Scottish writer, and although he greatly admires Stevenson's early essays, particularly the series of essays that developed a complete theory of walking, he concludes regretfully that Stevenson didn't maintain the course he had set out on but allowed him-2. James Kelman, for example, has lampooned this and other aspects of White's essay-writing style in an essay of his own entitled "There Is a First-Order Radical Thinker of European Standing Such That He Exists; or, Tantalising Twinkles", notably his use of obscure vocabulary alongside plain Scots words and his tendency to over-explore the etymology of certain terms ( J. Kelman, And the Judges Said…: Essays,.

self to make too much use of the "box-of-tricks" in his later writing (The Wanderer,p. 75).

Of course, even in the novels, there are traces of the other Stevenson, the "high line" Stevenson. Even in the more simplistic of them there will be lashes, phantasmagorical lourishes, pungent atmospheres, a sense of open space, gusts of vigour, strange emptiness, snatches of distant music, but none of the sustained high lying he himself evokes and of which we know he was capable. (The Wanderer,p. 84) Even the best of the nineteenth century essayists -Stevenson but also Lamb and Hazlittrarely reach for anything beyond charming chitchat and impressionistic rambling, he concludes. Only Emerson and Nietzsche receive unqualiied approval and he acknowledges Michel de Montaigne as the originator and master of the form (The Wanderer, p. 58). Montaigne's Essais accompanied White from Glasgow to Munich, Paris, the Auvergne, Pau and onwards; his appreciation of them heightened on discovering Nietzsche's endorsement. Montaigne is evoked at length in "Aquitainian Afinities" (The Wanderer, although this essay opens with a digression, an account of the life, travel and work of George Buchan, the French essayist's Latin teacher at the the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux. He makes this detour into the life of Buchan as a lead-in, he explains playfully, because "an essay by deinition has to be diverse and luctuating" and this, in general, is the way that White goes about building his essays: bringing diverse subjects and inluences together in luid and sometimes unexpected ways.

Meandering Thought

"Aquitanian Afinities" ends with the reminder that Montaigne invented the word essay "to designate a new type of literature, outside the established ruts and full of strangeness" (p. 58). This strangeness, central to the essay as practiced by Montaigne, implies, according to White, "leaving the harbour of a ixed identity in order to plunge into the loating life, following the transformations of the self and the meanderings of thought" (p. 58). In another, related, essay in this collection "Along the Atlantic Coast" (pp. 111-28), White quotes Montaigne's claim that he doesn't paint being, he paints passages ("Je ne peins pas l'être, je peins le passage") and continues:

It was in order to paint those passages (from state of mind to state of mind, from feeling to feeling, from attitude to attitude, from mind to place and thing), that Montaigne, master of the loating world, at ease in the relative (which implies a relationship), invented the essay, a form, a way of writing, that allowed him to follow all the meanders of his thought. (p. 115)

The meandering, diverse, swirling nature of White's dense reference system as deployed in his own essays may be suitably illustrated in the following account of the trail of names embedded in the essay "Along the Atlantic Coast" (pp. 111-28). The epigraph is borrowed from Conrad and then the essay itself opens with a long quote from Gustave Flaubert in Brittany before moving on to other writers who have lived in emptiness: Nietzsche in the Alps, Rimbaud in Abyssinia, Herman Melville by the Paciic and, more surprisingly, Lautréamont in Paris. The intellectual force of the historians Spengler and Toynbee is then acknowledged. The second part of the essay homes in on White's own itineraryhis experience of 1960s Britain, his decision to move out and away, to open up a new space for himself. His move to Pau is accompanied by a move into the third person and a list of the self-styled Hermit of the Tower's reading -Elie de Beaumont, Ramond de Carbonnière, Franz Schrader then Montaigne. "If I go now from Montaigne to Saint-John Perse, some will say I'm not only jumping centuries I'm jumping categories", he writes, adding that his intention is not to draw up a history of literature but to travel "from island to island in a ield of energy, according to a kind of quantic map" (p. 116). So he makes the leap and alights on Henry Russell, then Edward Seuss and Fernando Pessoa. In part three we return to Nietzsche before moving on to Walt Whitman and then very surprisingly Freudalbeit for one very carefully chosen passage on oceanic feeling. This incessant litting from name to title to place has attracted criticism with some qualifying the essays as over-heterogenous, unsystematic, inconsequential and not relecting a correspondingly rich collection of concepts. 3 White himself rationalises the inclusion of so many references by declaring that they are an attempt "to get away from the little-geniusin-the-corner idea and open up a world network" 4 . For much of the rest of his readership, it has to be said, the overall impression created by these essays is not one of overladen heterogeneity but of sometimes exhilarating, controlled "ingenious articulation" 5 co-ordinated by an overriding loyalty to one unifying idea.

Language

This achievement can be partly attributed to the language of the essay as practiced by White. Just as he sets out in various places and in various ways what he understands to be the role and function of the essay in his body of work, so he hints at the type of language he is trying to use, often by identifying what he likes or dislikes in others: "a clear and powerful language, able to say a presence and a clarity" (p. 156) avoiding "overreined rhetoric" (p. 157) or specious vocabulary. Clearly what White is after is a grounded writingthe very opposite of the "frothy discourse" (p. 136) that he so abhors: "Il faut trouver … trouver un langage qui ne soit pas seulement une communication inter-humaine, mais une communication entre soi et l'univers." (Le Champ du grand travail,p. 124) McManus believes that the writing is characterized by a breaking away from many accepted norms, "a free-swinging movement" but also great attention to precision and clarity and a love for great agglutinations of words and references (McManus,p. 162). Perhaps the most salient characteristic is that the writing rings of orality -White confesses to liking oral language almost as much as written language (Le Champ du grand 3. "He makes constant quasi-didactic reference to historical names, events and igures in an unsystematic and inconsequential style that is in fact deeply monotonous in precisely the same way Alain Badiou claims that Deleuze's deployment of a vast array of names is deeply monotonouswhich is to say, the constraining of a tremendous heterogeneity to a surprisingly limited reservoir of concepts." (I. Kennedy, p. 175.) See also Kelman,op. cit.,p. 188. 4. Kenneth White interviewed by Hugh Macpherson, Scottish Book Collector, vol. 2, n o 1, August/ September 1989, pp. 2-4.

5. The term is White's own. On the subject of the poetics of the essay, White claims that this is "a form that needs ingenious articulation, co-ordination: no heavy cause and effect sequences and yet no scrambled mess either" (The Wanderer, p. 58). travail, pp. 106-7) -and a certain roughness: "Il y a dans mon écriture une rudesse 'anglo-saxonne' et une sauvagerie 'scotique' " (p. 128). 6

Rootedness in self

As the essay "Aquitanian Afinities" closes, White homes in on himself: "And here I am now, in my Pyrenean study this April morning, after many an essay, essaying once again. Trying to keep the high line" (p. 58). This is a recurrent move in White's essaysthe alternation of passages focused on the outside world and historical contexts and passages describing his own past and present context.

Out on a limb in the new creative space that he has created for himself, Kenneth White does often refer to himself and his single-handed development of the individual way of thinking and writing he styles geopoetics, his resolute resistance to the mediocrity of ambient culture. The "me"s and "I"s and even "I myself "s (p. 206) accumulate in certain essays so that his approach might be construed as being overly egocentric, narcissistic 7 even. They induce the creeping impression that perhaps Kenneth White is geopoetics and that geopoetics is nothing more than Kenneth White. 8 Due, perhaps, to criticism of this sort, White appears to be increasingly inclined to acknowledge the dangers of the incessant self-reference present in his writing. In one of the essays in this collection, he apparently attempts to defuse the effect of self-centeredness by referring to himself in the third person as "the traveller poet and wandering scholar" (p. 137) [just as elsewhere he refers to himself as our "gallivanting Glaswegian", "our Scottish-born intellectual nomad", "our adamant author", and "our erratic author" (On Scottish Ground, pp. 120-1)]. The ruse is not entirely successful.

Innes Kennedy claims that, "Absolutely no other British writer is as prepared to risk being so embarrassingly pretentious as White. As he himself says, such pretension contravenes Anglo-British strictures on taste" (Kennedy, p. 177). In the interview transcribed in Le Champ du grand travail, Claude Fintz evokes the dangers of "gouriication" (p. 39), 6. But this too has been a source of criticism: his prose technique has been criticized as being overly naturalistic and downbeat: "the naturalism far too often descends into the dead language of clichés, obsolete sixties slang and dreary narcissistic digressions. No less alienating is the constant recurrence of the one-line paragraph, slightly rephrasing, in the form of a gesture, part of the point of the previous longer paragraph. The effect of this is usually bathos." (Kennedy,p. 174) 7. Pierre Jamet refers to "the sheer narcissistic tendency in his work" (p. 108). 8. Ian Bell voices the suspicion thus: "Geopoetics seems, at bottom, like a personal credo" (p. 18).

White responds vigorously, denying that he is or wants to be anyone's guru. He takes the subject up again in The Wanderer and his Charts (having just compared himself to Michael Angelo, as he had compared himself, albeit apologetically, to Dante some pages earlier) and counters: "there is no desire whatever for pedestalization, pantheonization, or any other phoney gloriication" (p. 123). White awareness of the perceived "hatefulness" of centering one's work on oneself is thus increasingly obviously and without being apologetic for it, he is moved to explain his overt and recurrent presence in his texts. He quotes Thoreau's phrase from the irst chapter of Walden "I know no one better than myself ", and adds "Talking about oneself isn't always such a hateful enterprise, so long as you go about it radically enough. It's the only way to go beyond lat sociology" (p. 18).

I had my companions behind me: Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, with Whitman and Thoreau before them. It's good to have companions, to believe in the possibility of a community. But at bottom you're all alone, and there comes a time when you know it. (p. 21) "Aquitainian Afinities" opens out reassuringly onto the outside world in the inal sentence. Having referred to himself seated at his desk in Pau, he appears to look up and points out that he is "In the constant company of the Vignemale, the Maldetta and the Pic du Midi d'Ossau" (p. 58).

The essay as cartography

White's self-reference has to be seen not as a preoccupation with his own person but as a relection of his belief that his own keeping to the high line has been exemplary. By his own judgement, his is one exemplary itinerary in a cartography of many real, imagined, possible itineraries in wordscapes and landscapes: "It's in this context that my own itinerary has to be read" (p. 235). This brings us back to White's image of the essay as cartography. He has described his work as a map with itineraries (paths, tracks, trails) and points of concentrationa few large dots and a multitude of smaller dots (Le Champ du grand travail, p. 102). The itineraries and the points represent references to important works and places and words that all come together to constitute a coherent overall project; a geopoetics that is rooted in territory. Elements that we might not expect to see together sit side by side in startling strangeness like snow capped mountains by paciic lagoons. Unexpected words from German, Greek and Gaelic stand out on the page like so many landmarks. There are, of course, great swathes of white in this cartography toospaces of emptiness and oceansand coastlines, lots of coastlines, and the certain knowledge that a monstrous motorway of mediocrity lies just off the map.

White is as we have seen painstaking in his description of the genesis and terrain of his own mindscape, what he has referred to elsewhere as the tributaries of his river, cataloguing the writers, the books, the places, the landscapes, the atmospheres and the encounters that have been important in shaping him and his work (Le Champ du grand travail,p. 64).

Maybe thought can be like a landscape-with ields and running waters (luid concepts). A landscape-mindscape. That's maybe what we could make our way towards. (p. 63)

We have also seen that Kenneth White inhabits his essays through recurrent self-reference, as a living igurethe only living igurein this cartography. The essays are strewn with elements of autobiography and indeed he considers that biography plays a central role in his approach.

On peut suivre une ligne biographique à travers tous mes écrits. À tel point fession. Plutôt de coniguration, de conjugaison. Voire d'auto-analyse (analyse en marche, en mouvement), d'auto-poétique. (Le Champ du grand travail, p. 67) He admits to currently thinking about writing a fully-ledged autobiography; of setting out the ups and downs of a personal itinerary. 9 That would certainly be a book worth reading, for irritating as the selfimportant grandiosity may occasionally be, it is dificult not to agree with White when he protests in an essay entitled "The White Bag of Books" (pp. 169-81):

My stance may seem highly individualistic. It is. I submit that it's with individuals (individuals who have concentrated in their work-ield the maximum of general energies and elements) that the really signiicant developments begin. It's the individual who has taken the time and the pains to develop his/her life and thought who has, in the long run, on the long view, in the last analysis, the most to offer society in general. (p. 178) 9. Le Champ du grand travail, pp. 67 and 108.

| 225

  The essay then returns to Nietzsche before touching on Heraclitus and Hokusaï, Marcuse, Bergson and Bachelard. Sandor Ferenczi leads to Dylan Thomas then Wilhelm Reich. Part four starts with the ancient geographers Strabo, Pomponius Mela and Ptolemy then alludes to Seneca and Festus Avienus before jumping to Elisée Reclus and Le Lannou. They are followed by Guillaume d'Aquitaine and Jeansans-Terre, Echaid, Sebastian El Canto and Champlain. In part ive, we return to Kenneth White himself and his movements up and down the Atlantic coast peppered with a few brief references to Jules Michelet, Cercamon, Rabelais, Nietzsche again, Ernest Fenellosa, and Michael Angelo. In part seven, White evokes Eliot and Pound, Dante, Yeats Gerard Manley Hopkins and Joyce then Leonardo da Vinci. We move back to Scotland with Martin Martin then quickly on to Clarence Glacken, William Robertson, Adam Smith and David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Dugald Stewart. Part seven introduces Sully and Colbert and John Law then Fernand Braudel and inally Leo Frobenius. All of this in seventeen pages. | 221 KennetH wHite's essays: cartoGraPHy GrounDeD in seLF


teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers.


Kaoutar Daoud Hiri

Johan Rollin

Sukhorukov Grigorii
email: grigorii.sukhorukov@u-bordeaux.fr

Macha Nikolski

Sébastien Massart

Tomaž Curk

Matjaž Hren

Nikolski Macha

Matjaž Hren G Presented

Grigorii Sukhorukov

INEXTVIR: High throughput sequencing of the virome of agricultural crops and ecosystems across Europe

Keywords: Political, economic, industrial, social and environmental

come

Pipeline design

Future consideration: Automated pipeline recommendation using a Machine Learning approach

Virus related tools benchmarking

Identify the most relevant HTS methods and tools 1) Identify relevant use-cases in the project consortium (e.g. virus detection, virus classification ...) 2) Identify the tools that seem relevant for the selected use-cases in our neutral study 3) Use Docker images of tools (either existing or created) for testing and results dissemination 4) Select datasets (artificial or natural) that meet test criteria 5) Share the benchmark result highlighting tools performance

Decision making

Propose the most appropriate pipeline depending on the use case for the user 1) Use performance comparison to make a recommendation a) Store relative performance metrics for each pipeline b) Access those metrics to be able to make a decision c) Update the performance metrics based on new tests and tools

2) Explain the recommendation to the users so that they make a final decision

Pipeline testing

Identify the most relevant combination of methods and tools 1) Identify relevant steps in HTS data analysis (e.g. reads cleaning, identification ...) 2) Create pipelines based on Docker images of the tools and test them 3) Compare the pipelines performance 4) The most suitable pipelines for each use case will be shared with project consortium in Docker images 5) Document the pipeline for users and developers

  Development and validation of innovative HTS tools for the fast and efficient detection of virus and virus-like agents in the selected crops, DNAVision, Belgium ESR 12: Bioinformatics pipelines development for virome classification, University of Bordeaux, France ESR 13: Development and integration of decision-making tools in data analysis procedures for HTS-based plant virus diagnostics BioSistemikaWater as an important indicator of circulating plant viruses, National Institute of Biology, Slovenia ESR 7: Ecological analysis of the plant virome structure and of reciprocal transfers between cultivated and wild host populations, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, France ESR 8: Effect of habitat biodiversity on the virome of wild plants and crops, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain ESR 9: Effect of habitat biodiversity on virus host range evolution, Universidad Politécnica de MadridInvestigating the European field vegetable virome, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom ESR 4: Characterisation of tomato virome, National Institute of Biology, Slovenia ESR 6: HTS-based viral indexing in Prunus species: virome characterization and validation of diagnostic approaches, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, France ESR 10: The cucurbits and lettuce viromes, Virome characterization of European germplasm resources of pome fruits for future breeding and risk analysis, University of Liege, Belgium ESR 3: Survey and evaluation of the cultural practices impact on the virome of vegetable production systems and effect on sustainability, University of Liege, Agronomic and socio-economic impact of virome, FERA Science Limited, United Kingdom ESR 15: Risk-benefit communication and Knowledge exchange platform, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom

INEXTVIR is implemented by a European Consortium of universities, research institutions and companies in Belgium, France, Spain, Slovenia and the UK.

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement n° 813542