In the Footsteps of Baskets. A Creative Journey

Jean-Claude Charles’s travel narratives—collected in Baskets, published posthumously in March 2018 by the Montreal-based Mémoire d’encrier— are only the final stage of a project begun in the 1980s. Working as a journalist, Charles offered reflections on his many wide-ranging journeys in a column, “Le Monde sans visa,” which appeared in Le Monde between 1986 and 1993. Most of the material for Baskets is drawn from these commissioned pieces. Between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, Charles set about arranging this composite body of work into a single volume that bears witness to his work as both a journalist and a writer. Through a rigorous, reflective process of montage—a term that would no doubt appeal to Charles, an avid cinema fan—he aimed to integrate Baskets into the very core of his work, adding a crucial tile to a mosaic that, unfortunately, remains unfinished. This study deal with the genesis of Baskets. In this reconstruction, I foc I focus on two elements central to Charles’s process of thinking through the composition of the volume: the choice of title and the internal structure of the work.