10 DIFFERENCE AND CONVENTION: BAKHTIN AND THE PRACTICE OF TRAVEL LITERATURE
Every voyage can be said to involve a re-siting of boundaries. The traveling self is here both the self that moves physically from one place to another, following “public routes and beaten tracks” within a mapped movement, and the self that embarks on an undetermined journeying practice, having constantly to negotiate between home and abroad, native culture and adopted culture, or more creatively speaking, between a here, a there, and an elsewhere.
Trinh T. Minh-ha
[I]n the most heteroglot eras, when the collision and interaction of languages is especially intense and powerful, when heteroglossia washes over literary language from all sides […] aspects of heteroglossia are canonized with great ease and rapidly pass from one language system to another. […] In this intense struggle, boundaries are drawn with new sharpness and simultaneously erased with new ease; it is sometimes impossible to establish precisely where they have been erased or where certain of the warring parties have already crossed over into alien territory.
Mikhail Bakhtin
POSTMODERN TRAVEL/TEXTUALITY
Travel literature raises many questions: by convention it deliberately traverses the ambiguous lines between fact and fiction and addresses both real-life experience and textuality, particularly the “textual attitude” toward reality described by Edward Said in Orientalism. An admixture of autobiography, essay, adventure novel, and amateur ethnography, the genre suggests much about the construction of identities, genders, cultures, and discourses. Travel texts also provide revealing demonstrations of imperial ideologies at work. In the context of contemporary literary and cultural theory, travel writing from Marco Polo to Bruce Chatwin appears as a complicated process of appropriation — for purposes political and personal — as well as of representation.1 Both the genre and the relatively naive practices of reading that long accompanied it have become rather suspect. In Ian Chambers' words, “Travel, in both its metaphorical and physical reaches, can no longer be considered as something that confirms the premises of our initial departure, and thus concludes in a confirmation, a domestication of the difference and the detour, a homecoming”. In a postmodern, postcolonial landscape, “critical journeys can no longer be assumed to have a common destination”, for “heterogeneous and hybrid elements have disturbed the passage” (1994, 245).
Said's influential book highlights the pervasiveness and power of the colonial discourses that are his subject, but it does so at the price of “deemphasiz[ing] the heterogeneity of different imperialisms and specific resistances” (Lowe 1991, 5). More recent work has persuasively challenged his construing of orientalism as a monolithic discourse and his inattention to gender.2 In Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, for instance, Lisa Lowe demonstrates the necessity of discussing European writing about “others” as a practice involving multiple, varied perspectives among those who write, those who are written about, and those who do critical analysis of such texts. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, Lowe articulates a critical approach toward “heterotopicality”: “a condition of multiple and interpenetrating positions and practices. […] the continual yet uneven overlappings, intersections, and collusions of discursive articulations” (1991, 14–15). For, she argues,
the theoretical problem facing cultural criticism is not how to fit slippage, instability, and multivalence into a conception of dominant ideology and counterideology or discourse and counterdiscourse. Rather, cultural critics might approach this question from the other direction: that is, that heterogeneities and ambivalences are givens in culture. These nonequivalences and noncorrespondences are not the objects to be reconciled or explained; they must constitute the beginning premise of any analysis. (28)
Mikhail Bakhtin's theories about language, “otherness”, and narrative are profoundly significant for the critical project of understanding travel literature in terms of heterogeneity that Lowe and others describe.3 His notion of heteroglossia offers crucial insight into the ways discourses collide, intersect, and refashion one another — often unevenly and ambiguously — and how this is represented (and occurs again, differently) in narrative. Rejecting neat binaries such as subject/object, inside/outside, European/Other, Bakhtin characterizes the world as fully heteroglot and understanding as dialogic: the peculiar juxtapositions, multiple discourses, and unexpected encounters that intrigue both travel writers and cultural critics are fundamental in both life and narrative.4 A Bakhtinian approach can thus, as Graham Pechey proposes, “break beyond this polarisation of monoglot options to the notion of a multilingual field where the languages of coloniser and colonised are indelibly inscribed within each other”, an understanding Pechey argues cultural critics and “oppositional initiatives should seek to exploit rather than escape” (1989, 63).
As Bakhtin explains in frequently-quoted lines from “Discourse in the Novel”,
language is heteroglot from top to bottom; it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present […] and so forth, all given a bodily form. […]
[…] all languages of heteroglossia […] are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values. As such they all may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement one another, contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically. As such they encounter one another and co-exist in the consciousness of real people. (DN, 291–292)
One understands other individuals, texts, and cultures through interacting with them dialogically. Against the monologic model of the exact sciences, in which “the intellect contemplates a thing and expounds upon it”, Bakhtin proposes a different notion of understanding: “a subject as such cannot be perceived and studied as a thing, for as a subject it cannot, while remaining a subject, become voiceless, and, consequently, cognition of it can only be dialogic” (MHS, 161). Such understanding is not an act of authoritative definition, but a “living” process, a “struggle […] that results in mutual change” in which “recognition of the repeated and discovery of the new […] should merge inseparably” (N70, 142).
Bakhtin finds the richest means of exploring heteroglossia in “prose art”, which “presumes a deliberate feeling for the historical and social concreteness of living discourse […] it deals with discourse that is still warm from [the] struggle” (DN, 331). Narrative interests Bakhtin because — in its more complex variations — it represents the process of developing and testing one's discourse in a heteroglot world where fixed identities, absolute languages, and complete comprehension are impossible. The genre of the novel “begins”, he writes, “by presuming a verbal and semantic decentering of the ideological world, a certain linguistic homelessness of literary consciousness, which no longer possesses a sacrosanct and unitary linguistic medium for containing ideological thought” (DN, 367). A particular language may claim “solitary embodiment of meaning and truth”, but in novelistic prose it “becomes merely one of many possible ways to hypothesize meaning”, always contested by and contesting others (DN, 370). A character's identity, discourse, and understanding take shape dialogically and provisionally, through experiences with others' languages that reveal, and sometimes overcome, the limits of his or her own.5 What Bakhtin highlights in discussing novelistic characters very aptly describes the experience of travelers: venturing across cultural boundaries into foreign terrain, finding familiar language inadequate, being surprised by unpredictable experiences, seeing one's identity differently through another's discourse.
While valuing heteroglossia and dialogue, however, Bakhtin also sees them always in conflict (often creatively) with the monologic impulse to control meaning, make sense, and tell a definite and compelling story. These conflicts operate at the heart of travel literature, which represents encounters between cultures in which the traveler/narrator attempts to “come to terms” with other, unfamiliar discourses in order for dialogue, self-understanding, and eventually narrative to occur. Bakhtin's notion of monologic or authoritative discourse offers a useful strategy for reading the limits of travel writing in which this coming-to-terms is an act of appropriation rather than negotiation. Discourse that claims to be authoritative, he writes, “permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions. […] one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it. It is indissolubly fused with its authority — with political power, an institution, a person — and it stands and falls together with that authority” (DN, 343). When this discursive impulse dominates, “others” represented in travel narratives remain exotic, interchangeable objects to be watched, governed, or consumed, rather than becoming real, heterogeneous subjects with their own voices. It is the traveler/narrator's impulse to achieve such authoritative vision, the theories of Bakhtin, Said, and Lowe suggest, that undermines his or her efforts to represent heteroglossia.
Bakhtin's theories raise numerous significant questions for contemporary readers of travel writing. How — and how fully — does discourse delimit experiences? How do identities change as a person's discourse is contested by the language and experience of others? In narrating one's experiences, is it possible to represent others as subjects, rather than as things? Is it possible to write about the foreign without colonizing what one wishes to represent?6 Can (post)modern travelers write about the experience of travel dialogically? Is postcolonial travel writing of necessity “postmodern”?7 How does one theorize “otherness”?8 While asking such questions will cast light on the concerns of any travel text, the critical possibilities that Bakhtin offers for reading travel literature as a heterogeneous cultural practice can be seen especially through the work of writers who challenge the conventions of travel literature both aesthetically and politically. In this article I draw upon two varieties of contemporary travel writing — travel narratives by women, and experimental travel texts by men — in light of Bakhtin's theories. In different ways, these texts work out uneasy representations of the (post)modern traveler in heteroglossia, walking the ambiguous borders between monologue and dialogue, colonizer and colonized, self and other.
WOMEN'S TRAVEL NARRATIVES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Only a handful of travel accounts by women were published before the middle of the nineteenth century; as Mary Louise Pratt observes, “[w]hile women writers were ‘authorized’ to produce novels, their access to travel writing seems to have remained even more limited than their access to travel itself” (1992, 106, 171). Travel narratives by women did appear more often during what has been termed the “great era” of travel and travel writing, which began with the widespread growth of overseas travel in the nineteenth century and ended with World War II and the triumph of mass tourism. Yet even the much-remarked resurgence of travel writing since the 1980s — evidenced in special editions of Granta, new and reprint series from several publishers in Britain and the United States, and anthologies such as Paul Fussell's Norton Book of Travel (1987) — includes surprisingly few texts by women. For myriad social and historical reasons, the practice of travel writing has largely belonged to men. Even contemporary travelers write in the context of literary conventions shaped almost entirely by men's texts, and critical and theoretical discussion of travel literature is only beginning to take the travel writing of women into account.9 While the genres differ in significant ways, readers of travel writing can learn in this respect from the last fifteen years of critical work on autobiography, much of which has delineated the ways in which women have challenged and been challenged by literary conventions for autobiographical writing.10
For travel writing, like (perhaps even more than) autobiography, is both deeply conventionalized and deeply marked by gender, marked in ways that have posed very real challenges to women writing about their travel experiences. Meaghan Morris describes the genre: “travel stories written as Voyages and Maps […] relentlessly generate models of the proper use of place and time — where to begin, where to go, what to become in between. Among the most prescriptive of genres in the canon of modern realism […], the travel story seems strongly resistant to […] effort[s] of transformation” (1988, 35). The prescription is highly gendered: travel literature, in Eric Leed's description, is with few exceptions “a male literature” “dominated by male activities” which reveals and reiterates the formation of conventionally gendered identities (1991, 220–221). The recurring tropes in travel writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are those of adventure, quest, freedom from convention, and domination; the traveler, unlike the tourist, perceives the authentic, understands it, and narrates it with a sophisticated mixture of admiration and condescension. (At his imperial worst, as Said illustrates, he claims to understand those about whom he writes better than they can understand themselves.) In the recurring imperial image traced by Pratt, he is rhetorically, ideologically, often sexually, often politically “master of all I survey” — including landscape, natives, women (1992, 201–227). “The speaker in any travel book”, Fussell writes, “exhibits himself as physically more free than the reader, and thus every such book, even when it depicts its speaker trapped in Boa Vista, is an implicit celebration of freedom” (1980, 203). For despite (mis)adventures along the way, the traveler has returned to narrate the spectacles he has seen.11 His discourse is presented as authoritative: the word of one who has “been there”, seen the authentic, and emerged better from the experience, one whose narrative — even when fantastic — is not open to question.
Women's travel narratives, however, occupy a much more complicated, ambiguous, uncertain space, one problematized in both ideological and literary-critical terms. As travelers, women find their existence questioned repeatedly, particularly if they travel alone, or if their form of travel is deemed particularly venturesome. Caroline Alexander, who retraced Victorian traveler Mary Kingsley's West African journeys in the 1980s, notes that “[t]he whereabouts of my husband was for me, as for Kingsley, the single most-asked question of my trip” (1991, 70). Dervla Murphy, riding a bicycle from Dunkirk to Delhi in 1963, comments while in Iran: “It's very funny — around here the idea of a woman traveling alone is so completely outside the experience and imagination of everyone that it's universally assumed I'm a man” (1986, 27). Both Murphy and Robyn Davidson, who travels by camel across the Australian outback in the late 1970s (1980), are questioned repeatedly about their purposes and themselves become spectacles. As writers, women who travel invoke, revoke, and subvert discourses about travel, exploration, and adventure that in their very conceptualization are closed to women's voices. They have experiences, create narratives, and fashion selves in a heteroglot world, but find that world filled with gendered discourses and authoritative conventions that are stubbornly resistant to reaccentuation. Bakhtin describes language as anything but neutral: words and forms have the “taste” of the “contexts in which [they have] lived”, discourses lie “on the borderline between oneself and the other”. To make words “one's own” requires traversing that border — not always an easy task. For “[l]anguage is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated — overpopulated — with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process” (DN, 293–294).
Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith detail how this process works for women writing autobiography; their description is acute, and worth quoting at length:
The autobiographical occasion (whether performance or text) becomes a site on which cultural ideologies intersect and dissect one another, in contradiction, consonance, and adjacency. Thus the site is rife with diverse potentials. […] On the one hand, the very taking-up-of-the-autobiographical transports the […] [marginalized] subject into the territory of the “universal” subject and thus promises a culturally empowered subjectivity. Participation in, through re/presentation of, privileged narratives can secure cultural recognition for the subject. On the other hand, entry into the territory of traditional autobiography implicates the speaker in a potentially recuperative performance, one that might reproduce and re/present the colonizer's figure in negation. For to write “autobiography” is partially to enter into the contractual and discursive domain of universal “Man”. […] Entering the terrain of autobiography, the colonized subject can get stuck in “his meaning”. The processes of self-colonization may get bogged down as the autobiographical subject reframes herself through neocolonizing metaphors.
Yet autobiographical practices can be productive in that process as the subject, articulating problems of identity and identification, struggles against coercive calls to a “universal humanity”. For the marginalized woman, autobiographical language may serve as a coinage that purchases entry into the social and discursive economy. […] Deploying autobiographical practices that go against the grain, she may constitute an “I” that becomes a place of creative and, by implication, political intervention. (1992, xix)12
To write about travel experiences, women must engage in discursive struggles alongside — and often far more challenging than — the usual battles with crocodiles, capricious local officials, and mismapped terrain. In Bakhtinian terms, they write consciously (and of necessity) from within heteroglossia rather than claiming a privileged vantage point above it.13 From the beginning, their journeys and texts take shape in constant dialogue — and conflict — with others' voices: those of explorers who have gone before and of the travel literature they have read; those of people skeptical about their journey and their fitness for journeying; those of the people they meet, speak with, and try to understand; and those of their past, present, and imagined future selves. While famous nineteenth-century traveler Richard Burton very confidently recounts heroic adventures and sexual conquests, for instance, his admirer Kingsley characterizes herself not as an adventurer but as “a mere ordinary person of a retiring nature”, one who responds practically when surrounded by crocodiles but wonders “why, after having reached this point of absurdity, you need have gone and painted the lily and adorned the rose, by being such a colossal ass as to come fooling about in mangrove swamps” (1988, 89; cf. 329–330). Kingsley, as Pratt explains, “Through irony and inversion […] builds her own meaning-making apparatus out of the raw materials of the monarchic male discourse of domination and intervention. The result […] is a monarchic female voice that asserts its own mastery even as it denies domination and parodies power” (1992, 213).14
Recent travel writing by women reveals several interesting, recurring tropes worth fuller consideration in a Bakhtinian light. Like most earlier travelers, Murphy, Alexander, Davidson and Mary Morris (1989) (who travels and learns to live alone in Mexico and Central America in the 1980s) begin with a textual attitude toward the people and places they visit: Bulgarian roads, West African landscapes, butterflies in the Yucatan, and Australian aborigines are all interpreted in view of what texts have promised. (The textual attitude is particularly literal in the case of Alexander, who travels with Mary Kingsley's book in hand, is often asked if the cover photo is of herself, and is accompanied part way by a boatman who “show[s the text] around as a kind of emblem of authority” (1991, 226)). Like traditional male travel writers, they desire, variously, to have adventures, to see things for themselves, to discover the unknown. Their intentions are plotted fairly conventionally: Murphy decided on her tenth birthday to cycle to India; Alexander is persuaded by Kingsley's promise that “if you go [to West Africa] you will find things as I have said” (1991, 6); Morris leaves New York in search of “a place where the land and the people and the time in which they lived were somehow connected” (1989, 4); Davidson “cons” herself into deciding to travel and resolving to stick with it in order to escape boredom and “the self-indulgent negativity […] of my generation, my sex and my class” (1980, 19, 50). The course of their narratives, however, serves to dismantle, reaccentuate, and revitalize the conventions of travel literature, and to question its “generic models of teleological drive” (Morris 1988, 35). In the interconnected processes of traveling, narrating, and constituting new, fuller, or more confident identities, these writers endeavor less to become “master of all they survey” than to participate in the heteroglossia about which they write.
Their travel narratives do not go about this in the same way: Muiphy's Full Tilt, published in the 1960s, is distinctly more ironic (in the vein of Kingsley) and less self-consciously concerned with travel as a process of transforming identity than Tracks, One Dry Season, and Nothing to Declare, all published in the 1980s.15 Yet Murphy, no less than Kingsley, of necessity narrates her adventures in a manner that both reinforces and contradicts the conventions of the genre. She often echoes very conventional European notions about others, but they almost always are inflected by the fact of her sex: it is not that Afghans have “a narrow hostility to emancipated women”, for instance, but that Dervla-on-bicycle is such a startling spectacle for “their simple minds” that “this situation throws the onus on the more flexible-minded Westerner” (1986, 66–67; cf. 94). Discourses about gender repeatedly alter both journey and narrative: Murphy's plans for independent travel are rearranged and refigured by Iranian mullahs “stirring up serious trouble about Women's Emancipation”, a Pakistani army colonel who brings her to lunch with his family yet objects to his daughter's desire to study medicine rather than be a “traditional wife”, household servants whose “sense of propriety” is outraged if “Memsahib goes to fetch her own cigarettes”, and men in the Himalayas who “are much addicted to murdering each other […] but they're amiable to me” (23, 110, 140, 185). Near the end of her narrative, Murphy comments on her contradictory subject position as she travels and engages others in dialogue: “It certainly is a curious experience to be a woman traveling alone in Muslim countries. Most of one's time is spent in the company of men only, being treated with the respect due to a woman, but being talked to man-to-man, so that in the end one begins to feel somewhat hermaphroditic” (213).
Davidson, Alexander, and Morris, traveling and writing fifteen or twenty years later, also emphasize their ambiguous positions as traveler-narrators, though in different ways — and more critically — than does Murphy. Davidson, whose trek by camel across the western Australian desert receives a great deal of press coverage, comments pointedly on the ways her journey is read through conventional gendered discourses about “adventure”:
The reaction was totally unexpected and it was very, very weird. I was now public property. I was now a feminist symbol. I was now an object of ridicule for small-minded sexists, and I was a crazy, irresponsible adventurer (though not as crazy as I would have been had I failed). But worse than all that, I was now a mythical being who had done something courageous and outside the possibilities that ordinary people could hope for. And that was the antithesis of what I wanted to share. That anyone could do anything. If I could bumble my way across a desert, then anyone could do anything. And that was true especially for women, who have used cowardice for so long to protect themselves that it has become a habit.
[…] And now a myth was being created where I would appear different, exceptional. Because society needed it to be so. Because if people started living out their fantasies, and refusing to accept the fruitless boredom that is offered them as normality, they would become hard to control. And that term “camel LADY”. Had I been a man, I'd be lucky to get a mention in the Wiluna Times, let alone international press coverage. Neither could I imagine them coining the phrase “camel gentleman”. “Camel lady” had that nice patronizing belittling ring to it. Labelling, pigeon-holing — what a splendid trick it is. (1980, 237–238)
Davidson's experience highlights more pointedly than most the contradictory situation — discursively, experientially — of the traveler-narrator who is a woman. How can she negotiate a way to write, given that the conventions of travel define her as an anomaly, a spectacle rather than a subject? How can she do otherwise, given the prominence of these conventions and voices in the heteroglot world in which she travels, shapes her identity, and contends for significance?16
In light of the ideological, practical, and narrative struggles travel/writing requires of them, it is unsurprising that these women materialize through their texts as strong personalities. However, each also reflects on the necessity of an adaptive, fluid identity, a subjectivity open to question and thus capable of being transformed through experience. Alexander writes:
Extended travel in countries very different from one's own demands an ongoing suspension of one's personality. […] a sustained attempt to cling to the same habits, the same outlook, the same tastes cultivated at home is to risk being driven slowly mad […] the resourceful traveler is the one who can adapt to whatever is thrown his way. (1991, 275)17
Davidson too comments on the “need to rattle the foundations of habit”:
We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. (1980, 222)
Perhaps the habits most challenged by travel — and by writing — are those of making plans and assuming that events and words can be ordered and controlled as one desires. In Mary Morris' childhood, travel is something one plans endlessly, but never does. Her mother “used to buy globes and maps and plan dream journeys she'd never take while her ‘real life’ was ensconced in the PTA, the Girl Scouts, suburban lawn parties and barbecues”. She goes to the “Suppressed Desire Ball” in costume as the world: “her skirts were the oceans, her body the land, and interlaced between all the layers of taffeta and fishnet were Paris, Tokyo, Istanbul, Tashkent” (1989, 21). Morris' childhood adventure fantasies have predictable matinee plotlines. They are about being “a woman hero”: “riding at full gallop, papoose strapped to my back, warrior husband waiting on a ridge”, or, “child at my breast as I led the wagon train across the Cheyenne” (76–77). Murphy, Davidson, and Alexander begin their journeys with travel mapped and plotted in advance, only to find that their plans and the identities that went with them are subject to change and challenge at every turn. “All I ever wanted was consistency, a kind of coherent life”, Morris writes. “What I have is flux” (175).
The “adaptive” traveler, Alexander and Moms write, learns gradually, dialogically, unexpectedly — not, as each had imagined, in an epiphanic moment that grants her authority over landscape, others, text, or self. Alexander confesses:
I had thought that some startling revelation, some unforeseen truth, might await me when I came to the end of the line, far beyond the territory [Kingsley] had claimed — as if fresh ideas can be won only on literally untrammeled soil. In fact, I did very little inquiring at Onga but found myself being absorbed passively into its rhythm of life. (1991, 211).
Morris recalls a predawn morning in the Caribbean:
I sat, waiting for the sunrise and for the woodpeckers to reveal themselves to me […]
I had thought to myself the whole time I had been away that there would be a moment when everything would become clear, when I would understand what I had not understood before. […] But now I knew that it would not happen this way.
As I sat out on that porch, I understood that. […] All along things had been changing inside of me, bit by bit, in small, imperceptible ways. It had been subtle, not sudden. It had been happening over time. (1989, 211)
In varied ways, Murphy, Davidson, Morris, and Alexander challenge the conventional traveler-narrator's impulse toward authority by recreating travel narratives open to alternate voices and uncertainty. In part, they do this of necessity, as a crucial step in the process of refiguring travel writing as their own. As this discussion outlines, they work — sometimes uneasily, sometimes successfully — to write as subjects living within heteroglossia rather than triumphing over it, to engage others' voices, to be open to, yet highly skeptical of, the male travel-writing tradition, and to subvert textual attitudes with the unpredictability of experience.
EXPERIMENTAL TRAVEL TEXTS BY MEN
Experimental travel texts by men challenge the traveler-narrator's monologic impulse in a very different way, by rejecting conventional narrative forms and expectations in order to open up the travel text as a space in which others' voices can be heard more directly. Their work offers a striking complement to that of the women discussed above, and can further suggest the value of Bakhtin's theories for reading travel writing.18
Michel Butor wrote about travel in novels and essays during the 1950s, but in the following decades his search for aesthetic forms for his travel experiences resulted in highly unconventional, fragmentary texts composed largely of juxtaposed quotations.19 Mobile (1962), Oŭ (1971), and Boomerang (1978), his major travel texts from the 1960s and 1970s, draw upon his experiences in the United States, Australia, and (chiefly in Boomerang) other parts of the globe. Bruce Chatwin embodies a similar trajectory from narrative to fragments in a single text about his experiences in Australia, The Songlines, published in 1987. Writing about travel in the United States and Australia poses particular challenges for Butor and Chatwin because of the complicated, multi-languaged history of each nation and each land. “America” and “Australia” are defined by many voices, including those of explorers, historians, government officials, and tourist guides: they are “wildly heterogeneous subject[s]” (Suther 1985, 55). In this process of definition, however, some voices, particularly those of native peoples, have been systematically excluded by the political and cultural authority of European-Americans and European-Australians. The language of being “master of all I survey” has a long history in the literature of both continents, one to which Chatwin and Butor could easily lay claim. Instead, they write experimental texts that work in differing ways to undermine these dominant discourses by returning them to heteroglossia.
In Mobile, Oŭ, and Boomerang Butor juxtaposes the discourses of native and tourist, colonized and colonizer, popularizer and scholar. Deliberately setting such representations against each other and against his own observations, he enables them to de-form and deconstruct each other, and illuminates their “truths” and “untruths”. The effect is a dialogic rewriting: each voice speaks for itself and in its own terms, but in a new context that challenges and revises it.20 In The Songlines, Chatwin begins with relatively conventional narrative and then shifts to fragments, interrupting them only occasionally with short sections connected to the earlier narrative. With “a presentiment that the ‘travelling’ phase of my life might be passing”, his traveler-narrator turns midway through the journey/text to the notebooks where he has collected quotations, encounters, and ideas (1987, 161). He hopes these “jottings” will “shed light on what is, for me, the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness”, “our need for distraction, our mania for the new” (162, 161). Chatwin's narrative purpose becomes not a completed plotline, but a literary approximation of a dreamer's nomadic songline.
Both experiments involve resituating the narrator and questioning his authority. Chatwin becomes a nomadic, restless reader, quoting Baudelaire, Kipling, an old lady from Doncaster on a ferry in Sydney harbor, Heidegger, and a Texas cowboy (163, 198, 167, 281, 199). In Butor's first experimental travel text, Mobile, he tries to efface his presence by juxtaposing fragments from books, advertising, and road signs in order to recreate an American polyphony untinged by a narrator's voice. In Oŭ and Boomerang, Butor's voice reappears, now — to use Bakhtin's terms — “in a new relationship with the represented world”, with his “depicting” discourse operating on the same plane as — and in dialogic relation with — the “depicted” discourses of his subjects, the “others” whom he meets. Here writer, texts, and reader coexist in “contact with the spontaneity of the inconclusive present” (EN, 27), challenging and transforming one another's views. By setting actual, contradictory discourses into play, Butor effectively reproduces something like heteroglossia: the “others” in these texts are more subjects than things. By juxtaposing his own discourse with those he quotes, he effectively reproduces something like the actual experience of a traveler. In a complementary move, Chatwin sets his own narrative voice aside for quotations drawn from notebooks, writing that the notebooks matter far more than his passport (the conventional sign of a traveler's identity) because they assemble “the ideas, quotations and encounters which have amused and obsessed me” (1987, 160–161).
Rather than authoritatively explaining their encounters with others, both Butor and Chatwin trace their experiences, fragmentary and unresolved, seeking to involve the reader in a similar dialogic process of his or her own. They trace out the diverse voices a traveler encounters and the ways these encounters dialogically form and transform identities. Though each began traveling with a desire to find some kind of univocal mythic center, each gradually comes to terms with the impossibility of any such thing in a multi-voiced, postmodern world. Eventually, in Boomerang, Butor combines exuberant polyphony with a traveler-narrator who no longer seeks a romanticized other to replace European culture, but rather reads heteroglossia as a rich corrective for European myopia, as something to celebrate rather than to resolve.
In Bakhtin's words, Butor's and Chatwin's experimental travel texts restructure narrative “in a zone of direct contact with developing reality” (EN, 39). In terms of literary history it is ironic, perhaps problematic, to argue that travel literature, which contributes to the making of the novel, might in turn be subject to what Bakhtin calls novelization.21 But Bakhtin characterizes the novel as “plasticity itself. […] a genre that is ever questing, ever […] subjecting its established forms to review” (EN, 39). Travel narrative in the twentieth century, constrained by its imperial history and rhetoric, surely resembles the kind of “already completed” genre that Bakhtin argues most needs novelistic innovation: “the novelization of other genres […] implies their liberation from all that serves as a brake on their unique development, from all that would change them along with the novel into some sort of stylization of forms that have outlived themselves” (EN, 39). In decentering the voice of the traveler-narrator, Butor and Chatwin work toward representing a world of “others' equally valid consciousnesses, just as infinite and open-ended” as their own (PDP, 68). Though their texts are much less realist, much more postmodern, than Bakhtin's favored narratives, they are clearly produced — and best understood — in the spirit of “novelization” that he celebrates.
The authoritative impulse to be master of all one surveys effectively circumscribes heteroglossia and historical change. Said proposes that narrative is too often defeated by vision in European texts about “others” (1978, 239). He writes:
Against this static system of “synchronic essentialism” I have called vision because it presumes that the whole Orient can be seen panoptically, there is a constant pressure. The source of pressure is narrative, in that if any Oriental detail can be shown to move, or to develop, diachrony is introduced into the system. What seemed stable […] now appears unstable. […] History and the narrative by which history is represented argue that vision is insufficient, that “the Orient” as an unconditional ontological category does an injustice to the potential of reality for change.
Moreover, narrative is the specific form taken by written history to counter the permanence of vision. […] Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change, the likelihood that modernity and contemporaneity will finally overtake “classical” civilizations; above all, it asserts that the domination of reality by vision is no more than a will to power, a will to truth and interpretation, and not an objective condition of history. Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision; it violates the serene Apollonian fictions asserted by vision. (240)
In differing ways, each of the writers I have discussed struggles with and against the panoptic impulse to proclaim a “unitary web of vision”, to write travel monologically. At the end of her text, Davidson observes how readily fact and fiction, incident and memory blur into a “quagmire” for the traveler-narrator: “I knew even then that, instead of remembering the truth of it, I would lapse into a useless nostalgia. Camel trips, as I suspected all along, and as I was about to have confirmed, do not begin or end, they merely change form” (1980, 254). Like Davidson, Alexander, and Moms, Butor and Chatwin recognize the impossibility (and hazard) of visions removed artificially from the historicity of experience. Instead, Butor produces a representation of heteroglossia, a multiple text that embodies the instability, historicity, and transience of its subjects. And Chatwin imagines a kind of postmodern songline, working his way through histories and prehistories, across territories familiar and unfamiliar. Ironically, to write what Said terms “narrative” instead of “vision”, to “novelize” travel writing, each finds it necessary to undermine, exceed, or shatter traditional narrative expectations.
BAKHTIN AND TRAVEL/WRITING: SOME CONCLUSIONS
Clearly, much remains to be said about the aesthetics and politics of contemporary travel writing. In 1991, Sara Mills noted that “most accounts of travel writing so far” have failed to address the ways “‘experience’ is channelled into and negotiates with pre-existent schemas which are discursive in nature” (1991, 38–39). That has begun to change, certainly, as the work of Mills, Lowe, Spurr, Trinh, and others evidences. Bakhtin adds significantly to this project: his understanding of heteroglossia and narrative provides a compelling, productive critical context for reading travel. His theories do not wholly explain these texts, however, and they in turn suggest avenues for rereading Bakhtin, notably in terms of gender. Particularly when he reads literature as a site for philosophical investigation, Bakhtin understands “others” as neither exotic items for consumption nor mere reflections of one's own desires and ideologies. Rather, he believes that other individuals and cultures provide necessary outside perspectives: it is only in dialogue with other, creative subjects that understanding one's own culture — the limits and possibilities of its discourses — occurs. Ideally, each culture serves as an “other” for those cultures with which it comes into contact, in mutually-enriching dialogic relations (RQNM, 7),22 In practice, however, as feminist and postcolonial thinkers rightly emphasize, cultures often elide, rewrite, and even destroy “others” in ways Bakhtin does not directly address.
For Chatwin and Butor, writing about travel necessarily entails opening space for voices suppressed in dominant cultural narratives. For Davidson, Morris, and other women — putative members of dominant cultures — subversion and cultural ambivalence are requisite for travel/writing to be possible. The kind of reciprocal, dialogical “othering” that Bakhtin emphasizes seldom appears in texts where convention predominates and plot is the driving force; indeed, his own descriptions of prose art emphasize language and character over teleology. These examples of contemporary travel writing suggest that the genuinely reciprocal “othering” that Bakhtin envisions may be found more often when predictable discourses are challenged, subverted, and engaged dialogically. The practice of Butor, Chatwin, Morris, and other travel writers thus raises questions about the premises and implications of Bakhtin's preference for realist over more experimental narratives. Their struggle with gendered discourses demonstrates the importance of investigating how the languages of heteroglossia are inflected, delimited, and made possible by notions about gender.
Bakhtin's work emphasizes that even opposing discourses do not exist in monologic polarity, but in contentious, rich heteroglossia. In postcolonial heteroglossia, in Anthony Appiah's words, “we are all already contaminated by each other” (1992, 155). Early in their narratives, travel writers sometimes recount naive efforts to escape their identities, to avoid gender, to erase distinctions between self and other, colonizer and colonized by “going native” (Murphy) or “becoming Egyptian” (Butor) themselves.23 In the course of traveling and writing, however, the traveler-narrators discussed here learn the impossibility of renouncing their own perspective for a purely “other” vantage point. Understanding, they discover, is what Donna Haraway (1991) describes as “situated”: partial, embodied, historically-located, culturally-specific, discursively-grounded, contradictory. Recognizing the falsity of the timeless visions they once desired, most of these writers work to represent identity and history as process, language as heteroglossia, knowledge as partial. Where they succeed in doing so, they highlight the heterogeneity of both dominant discourses and “other” discourses that historically have been co-opted or suppressed. The recent travel texts I have discussed attempt to acknowledge, address, and subvert the traditional limits of the genre in what may be unusually dialogic ways. They offer alternative, decentered visions, narratives that often emphasize their own provisional nature: embodiments of the world in words are not fixed or finished, but “brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads”. Provocatively, Davidson, Morris, Chatwin, and others limn the “elastic environment” that Bakhtin calls heteroglossia (DN, 276). It is into this transient, unbounded world that writers and readers of postmodern travel writing now venture.
NOTES
1. Recent critical work dealing with the culture and literature of travel includes books by Sara Mills (1991), Mary Louise Pratt (1992), David Spurr (1993); numerous articles and several anthologies (including Robertson el al. 1994); and special issues of several journals. The present essay is part of a larger project on travel literature; portions of the theoretical discussion and the analysis of Butor appear in somewhat different form in Burton 1995, and are included here with the permission of the University of Oklahoma.
2. See particularly Lowe 1991, Kabbani 1986, Miller 1991, Mills 1991, Lewis 1996, and Pathak, Sengupta and Purkayastha 1991. Said responds to his readers and critics in “Orientalism Reconsidered” (1985), “Representing the Colonized” (1989), and the introduction to Culture and Imperialism, where he mentions Lowe's work (1993, xxiv).
3. Bakhtin is mentioned occasionally in critical discussions of travel writing and postcolonial discourse, but seldom in any detail. This is striking particularly in comparison with Foucault, whose theories play a crucial role in the work of Said, Lowe, Mills, and Spurr.
4. Bakhtin's theories about discourse and narrative are well known, and do not require extensive explication here; they are developed most thoroughly in the essays collected in The Dialogic Imagination. The following discussion highlights aspects of these theories that are particularly important for reading travel literature.
5. The Bildungsroman — linked historically to the development of travel literature — plays a significant, even exemplary role in Bakhtin's understanding of narrative: see particularly DN, 388-396 and BSHR.
6. I use “colonizing” specifically to invoke not only the power involved in narrating “others”, but equally the ways in which doing so requires erasure or suppression of “the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question” (Mohanty 1984, 336, quoted in Watson and Smith 1992, xvi). For critical discussion of this usage, see Watson and Smith 1992, xiii–xvi.
7. For discussion of the relation between “postcolonial” and “postmodern”, see Appiah 1991 and 1992, 137–157.
8. Pechey writes. “It might seem that Bakhtin lines up behind Hegel and Marx and Lukacs in that easy elision whereby the epithet ‘world-historical’ can be made to suggest that history is the gift of Europe. Equally we could argue with a decisively countervailing force that his concepts are nothing if not precisely designed to theorise otherness, including their own: that they can theorise not only the metropolitan practice of ‘othering’ […] but also the answering practice of Europe's ‘others’ in which the ‘otherers’ are themselves othered” (1989, 62).
9. Though a number of critical essays on specific texts by women have appeared since 1980, Meaghan Morris (1988) and Sara Mills (1991) are among the very few critics whose theoretical discussion of travel as a literary and cultural practice is significantly influenced by women's writing. Critical histories of travel literature say little about texts by women, and address gender chiefly by describing literary conventions that assume that traveler and generally reader are both male: see Fussell 1980. Leed 1991, and Cocker 1992.
10. See, for example, the work of Sidonie Smith (1987, 1993) and the anthologies edited by Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (1988), and by Smith and Julia Watson (1992). With few alterations. Smith's assessment of autobiography criticism could serve as a gloss on studies of travel literature: “Thus, in critical theory and literary history, we recognize those recurrent themes traced elsewhere in studies of women and writing: the articulation of ‘normative’ generic definitions that in their very conceptualization preclude both aesthetic appreciation and sophisticated reading of works by women; the omission of neglect that follows from the devaluation of works by women; the impoverishment of a history of autobiography that silences women and their contribution to the genre; the facile and unexamined assumptions about gender-appropriate content, structure, style, and narrative perspective; the failure to consider gender a relevant factor in either the configuration of identity or the institution of literature itself; the unself-conscious ignorance of the relationship of ideologies of gender to ideologies of selfhood” (1987, 15).
11. Said discusses the Orient as “spectacle” and tableau vivant (1978, 158).
12. Mills discusses the theoretical problems involved in uncritically reading women's travel writing as transparently autobiographical; theorists of autobiography certainly share her concerns about the assumption that texts can be seen as “straightforward transcriptions of […] lives” (1991, 36–39).
13. Like most thinkers of his era, Bakhtin was largely uninterested in questions of gender. Many contemporary readers of Bakhtin, however, have found his ideas congenial toward, and useful for, feminist critical work. His understanding of heteroglossia offers a powerful critical context for reading the ways women's voices are represented in, or conceptualized by, literary and theoretical texts. His emphasis on the interrelationship between written texts and sociohistorical contexts is also very productive for readers interested in how gender functions both socially and textually. Scholars differ, not surprisingly, in how they assess the critical advantages and liabilities of bringing Bakhtin's ideas into conjunction with feminism. Their assessments are complicated by the abundance of feminist theories and Bakhtinian readings in current critical discussion. For differing views on this subject, see Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow's introduction to A Dialogue of Voices (1994) and Caryl Emerson's “Bakhtin and Women” (1993). The variety of ways Bakhtin and feminist theories have been brought together is suggested in the essays collected in Hohne and Wussow 1994, and in Bauer and McKinstry's earlier (1991) anthology.
14. Alexander discusses Kingsley's self-conscious wish not to “capitalize on her lady-explorer role”. At once resistant to being typecast and aware that her readers will without question read her narrative with gender in mind, Kingsley invents a narrative persona in which her reticence and sober-mindedness are muted by ironic banter. This self-characterization, Alexander explains, “allowed her to convey, uncompromisingly, the excitement and even daring of her adventures while making it clear that she did not presume to be taken altogether seriously” (1991, 278–279).
15. Thus Murphy, who has been swept off her bicycle by a “massive wave” from an overflowing river after ignoring warnings about flooding, describes her soggy arrival in a Yugoslav town as follows: “Reaching the safety of the bridge outside Cuprija I saw hundreds of people standing watching the threatening river in an atmosphere of tense excitement. My appearance proved almost too much for them in their already over-wrought state and I was accorded a singularly undeserved Hero's Welcome, when I should have been presented with a Dunce's Cap” (1986, 11).
16. Smith writes, “Dialogically engaging the laws of genre, autobiographical subjects often take up the old autobiographical forms, piece by piece. They turn them over, around, inside out, to tell another kind of story. In doing so they try to dematerialize the very cultural apparatus that would materialize them as specific kinds of subjects. And so these autobiographical occasions are rife with complex negotiations of and resistances to the very laws of genre that would provide cultural blueprints for the alignment of subjectivity, identity, and the body” (1993, 183).
17. Alexander's use of the gender-specific pronoun “his” in this sentence is perhaps telling: even in a narrative about her own travels in Kingsley's footsteps, when it comes to general assertions about travel the subject remains male.
18. The experimental texts described here are of course not representative of contemporary travel writing by men, which, to generalize broadly, is fairly conventional in narrative form and often ironically postmodern. They are of particular interest for their critical dismantling of the norms of travel literature, norms which contemporary travel narratives by women, as outlined earlier, challenge in different ways and for rather different reasons.
19. The following discussion of Butor is a much-abbreviated adaptation of arguments made in Burton 1992/1993 and 1995.
20. This is interesting in view of Bakhtin's argument that Rabelais destroys false representations sustained by official ideologies through “devis[ing] new matrices between objects and ideas that will answer to their real nature” (FTC, 169).
21. This point was noted by one of the reviewers of this article. The concept of “novelization” in Bakhtin's work is discussed in Morson and Emerson 1990, 300–305.
22. Bakhtin returns to the topics of “otherness” and “outsideness” throughout his career: see, for example, AH, 125–137; DN, 290–295; RQNM, 6–7; and N70, 141–147.
23. The latter reference is to Butor's Le Génie du lieu, a book of travel essays published in 1958, prior to the experimental travel texts discussed here. Trinh comments that the Western traveler “has to imitate the Other, to hide and disguise himself in an attempt to inscribe himself in a counter-exoticism that will allow him to be a nontourist” (1994, 22–23).
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