Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"The Implied Reader in the travel writing of James Richardson: the negotiation between sub-text and pre-text"
Ahmed Alami
Dept. of Comparative Literature
Indiana University
aidrissi@indiana.edu
Most discussions of reader-response theory or of the aesthetics of reading focus on the analysis of fictional texts. However, outside the genre of fictive narratives, in 'hybrid ' genres such as travel literature, the relations between author and reader become positioned differently. Confronted by a text that draws from distinct narrative strategies developed throughout the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, the reader is expected to take into account historical and rhetorical elements often of marginal importance in fiction. To test the applicability of reader-response theory as articulated by Jauss (1982) to travel literature, I will analyze James Richardson's Travels in Morocco (1860). More specifically, I will provide a detailed analysis of the relationship between text and readers, to suggest how the work must be understood in terms that the writer utilizes to construct a type of implied reader. The author often negotiates between conflicting interests that derive from the specific historical moment in which the journey is undertaken--the mid-nineteenth century, during a period of increasing foreign interest, both economic and political, in North Africa and the Middle East. Richardson writes his travel narrative in order to fulfill an explicitly moral project; to do so, he must alter the horizon of expectations of his nineteenth- century readers who were familiar with the genre of travel writing and its tropes and rhetorical moves. Travel to the Orient involved images of the exotic and the barbaric which were already common to these works, but these readers had not yet encountered the rhetoric of missionary zeal, thinly veiled by the tropes of travel writing, which were at the service of Richardson's religious project. His complex narrative strategy appears in the tension created between the implied reader as inscribed in the text and both Richardson's moral pretext and the political subtext. Between the two, Morocco stands as the interface--described, examined, and increasingly evaluated in moral terms. One of his primary targets is the slave trade as it was still practiced in North Africa; Richardson invokes the Abolitionist rhetoric as institutionalized by Europe at the beginning of the century in order to combat the slave trade. Richardson inscribes his text within a discourse of enfranchisement that is given impetus and legitimacy through the ostensibly disinterested goals readily associated with the religious mission of its author. I will end this discussion by placing this text within parameters of nineteenth-century colonial discourse.
Ahmed Alami
Dept. of Comparative Literature
914 Ballantine Hall
Indiana University
Bloomington IN 47408
(812) 857-7921 (home)
aidrissi@indiana.edu
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Updated May 23, 1999