Abstract
This study seeks to establish the extent to which In Wonderland is a cultural hybridity discourse and a writing-back to Euro-American travelogues. In this ‘different’ travelogue, Hamsun’s voice cuts through the borderlands of the Russian colonized Caucasus region to reveal contempt for acquired culture and a rejection of global uniform identities in a manner that accords with Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘hybridity.’ While keeping in mind Hamsun’s undisputed parodic style, this postcolonial reading claims that mimicry, as applied by Hamsun, is a practical demonstration of Bhabha’s theory that reflects his propensity to destabilize the West’s monolithic stance as regards the Orient. It therefore reveals the manner in which his supposedly colonial discourse exposes the discriminatory nature of colonial dominance. Within this context, Hamsun has become a cultural hybrid who refuses to imitate conventional European travel narratives or follow in their differentiating paths. On the whole, the basic argument is that Hamsun’s travelogue which invariably asserts, subverts and removes boundaries, does not endorse Orientalism neither in its romantic nor in its subservient form.
Highlights
This study seeks to establish the extent to which In Wonderland is a cultural hybridity discourse and a writing-back to Euro-American travelogues
Cultural hybridity emerges from the “interstitial passage between fixed identifications ... [and] entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha, 1994, 4)
In Wonderland demonstrates how mimicry and its accompanying strategies of resistance were introduced by Hamsun even before Bhabha presented his theoretical concepts
Summary
Hamsun’s preference for travel literature is expressed in his 1895 letter to Bolette and Ole Johan Larsen in which he requests a history book “... about far-off things and. In this vein Oxfeldt has affirmed that readers realize they “are given a highly ambivalent travel account – the truth value of which we can never be certain” (Oxfeldt 2010, 69) while Camilla Storskog effectively remarked that “The phrasing of title and subtitle quite reflects the possibility in the hands of any travel writer of stretching the narration between the genre’s two opposite poles: the factual ... An early popularizer of eugenic principles [was] an acquaintance of Knut Hamsun” (Žagar 2009, 22) Such a discriminatory atmosphere which was supported by the ratified circulation of discriminatory knowledge illustrates Michel Foucault’s belief that power, in each particular time and place, operates on the basis of repression, censorship, and prohibition (Foucault 1978, 12). The fundamental consequence of the play of similarities and differences initiated by the travelogue’s parody and mimicry is an overall atmosphere of ambivalence which is the basic defining feature of a counter-discourse
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