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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines: Nomadic Theory, Nomadic Text"


Siobhan O'Flynn
University of Toronto
soflynn@chass.utoronto.ca

Speaking of his proposed book, The Nomadic Alternative, Bruce Chatwin posed the question, "Why do men wander rather than sit still?" (75), and this query is central to Chatwin's cross-genre travel memoir, The Songlines. Noting Chatwin's opposition of nomadic art and urban, civilized art ("portable, asymmetric, discordant, and restless" v.s."static, solid and symmetrical"), this paper critiques Chatwin's attempt to understand and represent an "other" mode of subjectivity, that of Australia's indigenous peoples. My analysis shows how The Songlines functions as the narrative valorization of Chatwin's own nomadic aspirations: to embody and produce that which disrupts the "static, solid and symmetrical" in both life and literary genre expectations.

This paper calls on a distinction made by Heidi Nast, between the terms "self-reflexivity" and "reflexivity." Writing as a cultural geographer who finds herself the object of study, Nast shifts a common usage of the term, "self-reflexivity," found within critical writings on the postmodern where it often denotes a high degree of self-critical commentary regarding the process and context of production within a work of art. Nast redefines "self-reflexivity" as a notion of subjectivity conceived of as the narrative of the observing scientific "eye" bound within a closed, binary system of subject/object. Nast uses an oppositional term, "reflexivity," to denote a more permeable understanding of the self and the narrating "I" within the context of others' perceptions and the altering effects of being in "other" places. Working from this distinction, I argue that Chatwin's subversive text is a "reflexive" text that attempts to counter the imperial and colonial ideologies implicit in much of traditional Euro-American travel writing. Following this, my paper also explores how Chatwin's construction of nomadism in art and life offers a counterpoint to the discourse and valorization of exile identified by Caren Kaplan in modernist literary criticism, fiction, and travel writing. In claiming nomadism as a productive discourse, I suggest that Chatwin's writing also articulates an alternative vantage to current critical debates concerned with the nexus of issues central to postcolonial studies surrounding the discourses and experiences of conditions of exile, displacement, tourism, and home.

This paper places The Songlines within the context of other contemporary cross-genre, meta-critical travel memoirs, and examines how Chatwin's text responds to concerns specific to the late-twentieth century: the interconnection of place and culture, place and history, and the mediating lens of one's own history and culture in the perception and depiction of place; and the anxiety of placelessness generated in the context of a dehumanized postmodernism.

In concluding, this paper focuses on the issue I argue to be central to The Songlines, the desire for immortality.

My reading connects the recent boom in cross-genre, meta-critical travel memoirs to a contemporary, critical awareness of a continuum that exists between the subject/narrator and the phenomenal world that is manifest in the spatial metaphors and depictions of place in any given representation. As place is read as text, so the text of the travel memoir becomes the place of immortality.


Siobhan O'Flynn
U of Toronto
1046A Davenport Road,
Toronto, ON CAN M6G 2B9
416-651-3576
soflynn@chass.utoronto.ca

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Updated May 23, 1999