Travel Writing and its Discontents: Culture, Tourism and the Dynamics of Narration in Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia and The Songlines

Abstract

It has become customary to consider the travel writing of Bruce Chatwin in terms of its postmodernity, as a mode of writing that disrupts the classical travelogue's literary conventions and reassembles them in terms of pastiche, petit histoire, and parody. In this article, it shall be argued that Chatwin's literary style in The Songlines and In Patagonia is not so much bound up with postmodern claims but with his view of travelling as an act of creating social coherence in a world divided by commercial tourism. Integrating new life-worlds into his writing, Chatwin exposes himself to an insoluble paradox: seizing a foreign culture by imaginary acts of ‘taking part’, he can never acquire the authenticity and originality he wishes for. Seeking consistent patterns underlying his experience, Chatwin constantly discovers new materialities of life which resist being accommodated to his imaginative geography; the ideal of experiential coherence he aims at thus becomes more elusive with each new attempt to validate it.