“‘Black flight-feathers spread like tight-rope-walkers’ fingers’: Walking, Flying, and Reading the Sonorous World with Patrick Leigh Fermor”
Résumé
This paper explores Patrick Leigh Fermor’s unfinished trilogy—A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and The Broken Road—from the viewpoint of the “crowds of rooks” and “flights of waterfowl” (A Time of Gifts 341) that invite us to consider travelled space not only as an objective geographic reality but also as an inner, signifying experience that connects us to the world. Birds have always been read as signs and ambassadors foretelling the future or the coming seasons, yet they play a much larger role throughout Patrick Leigh Fermor’s crossing of Mitteleuropa on the verge of World War II: they point at a new decentred, (post)humanist reading that both highlights man’s connectedness with the non-human and prompts us to “rethink[ing] the question of what knowledge is, how it is limited by the overdeterminations and partialities of our ‘species-being’” (Wolfe, 571).We shall see how Patrick Leigh Fermor invites us to descry in the changing and elusive flights the impalpable and fleeting enjoyment of the world while sharpening our awareness of its imminent disappearance and of the wanderer’s vulnerability and dispossession. Singing the world without attempting to appropriate the territory, Leigh Fermor’s birds transform the landscape into “a matter of expression” (Deleuze, Mille Plateaux, 109-11), a rhythmical, melodious entity that spurs a new reading of shapes and forms of life, heralding what Marielle Macé calls “a politics of description” (Une pluie d’oiseaux, 101).