Victor Segalen

Victor Segalen was a French naval doctor who became one of the most unusual writers of early twentieth-century France. Born in Brest in 1878 and dying in Huelgoat in 1919, he wrote in French and moved between medicine, ethnography, archaeology and poetry. He is best remembered for his critique of exoticism and for his attempt to approach other cultures through the senses and with genuine respect.

He trained in naval medicine in Bordeaux, and a large part of his life was spent far from Europe. Between 1903 and 1917 he lived and travelled in Polynesia and China, where he carried out three archaeological expeditions. This fieldwork let him see at close range societies that the positivist thinking of the day tended to classify and, often, to destroy or silence. Against that habit, Segalen proposed a way of looking based on physical perception, without forcing foreign societies into borrowed categories.

His output resists easy labels. He wrote novels, stories, poems, essays and travel notes, and many of his texts blur the boundaries between genres. The Immemorials (1907) was admired by anthropologists and social historians, Stelae (1912) is an unusual sequence of poems, and Paintings (1916) collects poetic prose on art. After his death in an accident whose circumstances were never fully clarified, works such as René Leys (1921), a novel set in China, and his Odes (1926) were published.

His recognition came slowly. In France his writings reached a wide readership only from the 1960s, and he is now regarded as a central figure of French letters in Proust's era. English-language readers have had access to his work mainly through later translations. The University of Western Brittany, in Brest, honours him with the name of its faculty of arts and social sciences.