Writing the Journey: June 1999 | Department of English

"Travels with Charon: Travel Narrative's Side Trip to Hell"

Kent H. Dixon
Wittenberg University
kdixon@wittenberg.EDU

What I want to know, with help from your weblike broad and diverse areas of expertise, is, what of the unconscious? Is "travel"a going there, doing (seeing) that, and reporting on it a necessary ritualization of the monomyth of life/death, or birth/death/ resurrection? Are we tapping such unconscious roots as separation from the mother, or from the womb? From body to spirit, innocence to experience and so on. I intend to articulate and explore these and related questions, pursuing implications for various levels of consciousness, and for pedagogy from genre requirements to one's own dark night of the soul.

Is this the case? If one pegs travel narratives to the archetypal "hero's adventure," using the standard Jung and Campbell and other derivative mythographers, and taking The Odyssey as perhaps the Uhr travel pattern, do all travel narratives then partake of, if not directly, than at least by making some sort of obeisance to, harboring some dim pentimento of, the hero's side journey to the underworld? Since I am teaching my On the Road course this way, I'm beginning to believe such is the case. Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Sal Paradise, Don Quixote in Montecino's cave, Redmond O'Hanlon, whether blaming it up with the Yanomammi in the Amazon or having his own dark night of the soul in the heart of the Congo (No Mercy), or indeed any "bad trip," or even just brief and arbitrary collections of short travel narratives in a journal like Grand Tour (now defunct, after some 8 or 9 issues) -- all these questing heros or the first person travelling narrators of these journeys seem to make obligatory trips to hell or to a metaphor thereof.

Many of these excursions are conscious of course. Kerouac actually mentions Homer and I think attempts to model on the epic for a while, till he forgets; O'Hanlon is too smart and too good a writer not to be aware of the heroic patterns he's both ironizing and relying on. Gilgamesh bleeds through the two milennia between him and The Odyssey in fascinatingly dreamlike ways. Is this pattern active for the Old Testament literary culture? Both Moses and Jesus visit hell. And of course, the literary epics--Virgil, Appollonius Rhodes, Milton, Spenser, Saul Bellow's Augie March. Gilgamesh has to lose the magic plant of immortality; travel--we need it then to teach us we're mortal? Or perhaps just to salve that buffered yet mordant awareness, of mortality?

Really, I mean to set myself up to be taken down. I don't even like archetypal theory; I don't much believe in Platonic forms; I don't think consciousness is terribly original or free. For theory, I'll take diffusion over archetype any day. One shouldn't speculate in an abstract, but it's all part of Preparation for the Trip. Hoping you'll join me in a Descent.

Kent H. Dixon
Wittenberg University
kdixon@wittenberg.EDU

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Updated May 23, 1999