The study discusses J.M.G. Le Clézio's (*1940) travel writings from the period 1985-1995 (»Le chercheur d'or«, »Voyage à Rodrigues«, »La quarantaine«) as a project geared to poetological self-enactment. Initiatory structure and écriture are analogous processes that bring the writing self to the limits of awareness and language. Taking its methodological bearings from the literary theories of C.G. Jung and Gaston Bachelard, and drawing upon dream discourses from Romanticism and Surrealism, the analysis of figures and imagery reveals that doppelgänger and elemental natural spaces are poetic projections of the origin of the text.