Reading “Upstream!”: Implications of an Unconsidered Source Text to Julian Barnes’ Eighth Chapter of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

Abstract

Julian Barnes' postmodern novel A History of the World in 10V2 Chapters1 is an interrelated collection of ten short stories and an essay (the eponymous half chapter of the title). The author carefully traces historical sources in an author's note at the end of the book. He lists them chapter by chapter and ends with some additional, personal thanks. No source is listed for chapter eight, Upstream!, an epistolary narrative in which Charlie, a satirically two-dimensional London actor, writes to Pippa, his girlfriend, about his experiences filming a river journey in the jungles of Venezuela. In cinema verite fashion, the Hollywood crew has been brought to a nameless river where a native tribe has agreed to pole the two actors across white water in their re-enactment of a Jesuit mission. As Fred Botting sums it up, this journeydraws on the Bildungsroman and the colonial narrative, the river itself raising the spectre of Heart of Darkness, to present and dissolve character in a process of self-discovery and critical cultural reflection. [...] Commenting on modes of representation, moreover, the story's generic assemblage discloses a reflexive space which ironises and exposes the limits of western assumptions, language, projections and meanings.2Although this summary is to the point, Botting's reading ignores the issue of historiography3 crucial to Barnes' novel: the question of the native Americans' oral histories of the mission behind this river journey. What and whose history is the film going to reproduce? To use Charlie's less lofty phrases,Do they have ballads about transporting the two white men dressed as women up to the great watery Anaconda to the south, or however they might put it? Or did the white men vanish from the tribe's memory as completely as the tribe vanished for the white man? (201)Modes of representation are indeed pertinent to questions of historiography, yet they are a concern shared by the actors of historical drama. Keeping in mind Schiller's statement that dramatic forms make the past something present4 and function as translocations of events across time and space, Charlie's ample if somewhat confused reflections on acting, lying, and the opacity of semiotic signs across cultures acquire renewed urgency, as does his insistence on the blend of history and the present in his film crew's visit to the Venezuelan jungles. To address these questions, it will be necessary to read the Upstream! chapter against the background of its - as yet - unknown historical source-text, a Jesuit missionary account of an exploration of 1674 into the jungles of the Orinoco-Amazon basin. In turn, this method necessitates scrutiny of the generic features of tropical river journeys, which will be seen to illuminate larger issues pertinent to Barnes' chapter, particularly the binaries of historiography vs legend and science vs theology that provide the thematic unity to his novel. In the epistolary narrative of Charlie, these issues become embodied in the candiru fish (legend vs science) and its relation to the chapter title, which emerges as deliberately misleading. While the excessive diversity of form and content of the other chapters makes it impossible to consider Barnes' novel in its entirety, a few thoughts on the possible implications of the eighth chapter for the novel's rewriting of colonial history will conclude this essay.There is, to begin, the journal record of an historical expedition, in which two Jesuits, Jean Grillet and Francois Bechamel (John and Francis in the English edition of 1698), penetrate the Guiana hinterland too deeply for their own good. Setting out in Cayenne, Grillet and Bechamel appear to have crossed all of the Early Modern Guianas, judging by the length of their journey (thirty-six days on the move, using various rivers and overland, and thirty-three days for the return) and their claim to have reached Acoqua territory (the contemporary Achagua people live in eastern Columbia on the borders of Venezuela). …