The Wanderer and his Charts

Following on from the same author’s On Scottish Ground, this book shows Kenneth White on his tracks outside Scotland, before zooming in on his return. A first part, ‘The Intellectual Nomad’, lays out the practice of intellectual nomadism, based on White’s first explorations and researches in Glasgow, as a reader, or companion rather, of Nietzsche and Rimbaud. A second part, ‘Place and Space’, gathers together essays written in the environment of a mountain and frontier country (the Pyrenees), then in that of an exposed marine area (the north coast of Brittany). In the third part, ‘A Cultural Project’, White comes back to Scotland, not only with a collection of works, but with a cultural project subsumed under the name ‘geopoetics’. In White’s hands, the essay is no mere literary chit-chat or impressionistic rambling, it’s a method of fast thinking, mental cartography. The sheer scope of the information, the clarity and cogency of the argumentation, is hard to find anywhere else.