Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Travelling the Body: The Travel Poetry of Karen Connelly"

My interest in the work of Karen Connelly derives in part from the challenges involved in teaching travel writing to undergraduates: in particular, the need for teaching material which will both engage students' imaginations and allow the class to explore the metaphorical uses of travel and travel narratives. Thus, in my fourth-year travel-writing course, I teach the poetry of Karen Connelly, a young Canadian writer whose travel narrative, Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal, won the Canadian Governor-General's Award for non-fiction in 1993. Students respond well to the idea of exploring travel in other media -- film, music, photography -- and literary genres, including poetry. This Brighter Prison: A Book of Journeys (1993) is a collection of poems based on Connelly's experiences as a woman traveller in Spain and Paris. It is the focus of my own work on travel and the body.

"Places are fragmentary and inward turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, ... symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body. "I feel good here": the well-being underexpressed in the language it appears in ... is a spatial practice." (De Certeau 108)

In his essay, "Walking in the City," Michel de Certeau describes the movement of the body through city spaces as a kind of performance, through which the individual articulates a particular relationship to space and place. De Certeau's work on spatial practices suggests new possibilities for theorizing travel as performance, as the individual 'enunciation' or weaving together of cultural or geographical landscapes. This vision of the traveller is predicated on a solipsistic and perhaps ethically narrow view of travel, in that the subjectivity of the traveller is at issue, rather than his or her effect on landscape and culture. At the same time, as Nicolas Howe argues, travel as performance or practice is "a way of living and writing out one's own inner condition." Ethically suspect as Western travel may have become, it nonetheless provides a means for writers and travellers to map out their own subjectivities and to forge inner relations to places through the body and through narrative. For stories, de Certeau argues, "permit exits, ways of going out and coming back in, and thus habitable spaces" (106).

Using de Certeau's work on space and place as a starting point, this paper examines the body as trope in Karen Connelly's This Brighter Prison: A Book of Journeys. I focus on the speaker's relationship to spaces marked as foreign or personified as Other, from Old Man Rain whose "mouth tear[s] the roof tiles," and seeks to consume the speaker, to the various streetkids and other wanderers whom Connelly encounters in her travels. The body in these poems becomes a kind of contact zone where solitudes meet: "The price of a ride with a stranger," Connelly writes, "is skin, or words." The body of the lover in "A Grand Place: A Greeting" becomes a map the speaker cannot read; ice bites the tongue of the returning traveller who kneels to kiss the Canadian soil in winter, in an image which humorously underscores the pain of exile and difference. Through body imagery in the poems, Connelly explores an aspect of travel writing which has received limited critical attention: namely, the body of the traveller and responses to the travel experience which register viscerally and emotionally, through the body. At the same time, Connelly transforms travel into a metaphor for less tangible inner journeys mapped through memories, encounters with strangers, and with past selves.

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Updated May 23, 1999