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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"'Circling the centre' - Jonathan Raban's Coasting and literary strategies of the contemporary British travel book"


Dr. Jan Borm
Lecturer in English literature
Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentinen-Yvelines
Jan.Borm@sudam.uvsq.fr

This paper purports to deal with some literary strategies based on the notion of "circling" that contemporary British travellers have used and are using to distance themselves both from the problematic inheritance of certain countries in the post-colonial age and a whole literature of travel books that are, to a varying degree, characterized by colonial discourse.

Moving from the particular to the general, the paper will be divided into three parts. The first section will analyze in some depth the notion of "circling" that lies at the heart of Jonathan Raban's Coasting, his voyage around Britain and one of the most experimental contemporary travel books.

It is present on various levels of his narrative and serves as a powerful metaphor to break with or set oneself up against the "linear" narrating of travel and an overwhelming domination of the metonymical. In its stead, Raban develops with verbal virtuosity the notion of "circling" : circling literally around subject matter (Britain - the narrator's home) and technically around the "linear tradition" by letting his narrative tend towards the metaphorical pole (D. Lodge) and by stressing the discontinuous in Roland Barthes"s sense of the term.

The second part will then show how this literary strategy of circling the centre characterizes a number of contemporary British travel books, starting with Bruce Chatwin's elliptical In Patagonia. It will also be argued that one of the most notable forerunners of this foregrounding of the discontinuous was Robert Byron and his Road to Oxiana, the modernist chef-d'oeuvre of the travel book according to Paul Fussell. The narrative brio of this text seems to have opened the way for a number of contemporary travellers who have subverted a certain number of the tropes of travel writing by using the discontinuous as one of their literary strategies.

Finally, we will wonder to what extent these authors succeed in setting themselves apart from the centre and in what way at least some of them may seem to be obsessed with the idea of doing so. The starting-point for our argument in this section will be a number of critical ideas developed by Tim Youngs in a recent essay published in Literature & History. These ideas will serve to draw some conclusions about the degree to which contemporary travellers have succeeded in loosening ties with the tradition that seems to have tied them down before they set out themselves.


Dr Jan Borm
Lecturer in English literature
Universit de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
France
Jan.Borm@sudam.uvsq.fr

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Updated May 23, 1999