Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce

4 Tenuous Itineraries

4 Tenuous Itineraries Modernism and exile. To pronounce these two words in one breath is to acknowledge the importance of displacement and fragmentation in literary and cultural production of the first half of the twentieth century. Is movement possible within and across the rigid boundaries constructed by hegemonic establishments? Are modernist characters and narrators capable of transgressing the preexisting limitations and definitions? Are only the subaltern characters entrapped, or does the fabricated binarism of colonial culture prevent also the privileged from independent decision making? Is traditional pilgrimage a sure method of progress, or does modernity necessitate a polysemous character of the quest? This chapter provides a theoretical overview of several assumptions about pilgrimage toward the center and a preliminary discussion of the (im)possibility of arriving at a set destination. In chapter 1, I analyze the dangerously tenacious relationship between imperialism and the drive toward the sacred, and I argue that the colonial endeavor to chart sociopolitical spaces of power and oppression is often inscribed within mythical boundaries of chaos and cosmos. This mythical construct assumes that cosmos is the center, the realm of being and meaning , whereas chaos is a non-place ready to be conquered and formed, a nebula with no epistemological and ontological significance. The desire of those inhabiting the center to conquer and convert that space of nonbeing in mythological accounts sometimes stands in reverse relationship to another kind of desire, one to move from chaos toward the sacred center, to embark on a pilgrimage toward it, and therefore to acquire meaning and to reach self-identification. Two terms, the center and telos, appear in many texts on pilgrimage in relation to the search for the sacred and the need to escape the profane. Although the first term is often associated with stasis, a focal point in 88 · Part II. Pilgrimage space, and the second with movement, both center and telos are often described as fixed points toward which pilgrims, adventurers, or thinkers progress. The polarization of the world into self and other fabricates the center as the permanent place of being, while the margin remains a place of nonbeing. In traditional pilgrimage, the progress, or the quest to reach self-recognition, occurs from the margin toward the center. The telos of this progress is, then, the center, unless the social and colonial hierarchies are abolished. Traditional Pilgrimage A traditional pilgrim, in Mircea Eliade’s words, is a suffering ascetic who always seeks a path toward himself or toward “the ‘centre’ of his being” (Patterns 382). To reach the center, he says, “is to achieve a consecration, an initiation” (382). The desire to escape the profane space is underlined, to a certain extent, by the fact that the center is synonymous with power and knowledge, including self-knowledge. Connected with fall into experience , the quest in the archaic world was an endeavor to find the self by either uniting the conscious with the unconscious or by entering the sacred realm that bestows meaning and revelation upon the seeker. This journey often involved a search for the father or the father figure that also commonly preconditioned identity building. Obstacles and unintentional , perilous detours in the passage toward the center were and still are requisite elements in the process of self-definition—a passage that originates , in part, from “the nostalgia for Paradise” or from desire to be “at the heart of the world, of reality, of the sacred, and, briefly, to transcend . . . the human condition and regain a divine state of affairs: what a Christian would call the state of man before the Fall” (383). Victor Turner’s theory of pilgrimage also accentuates the pilgrim’s attempt at liberation from mundane, earthly social structures.1 It is a process of self-identification, as well as assertion of one’s “solidified” self, inasmuch as it could be compared to rites of passage, especially the archaic rite of initiation (Image 8). Turner’s explanation of two crucial terms, the liminal and communitas, elucidates the parallels between the rite of passage and pilgrimage and sheds light onto the atavistic search for the sacred in general, in all its forms, including the attempts to turn chaos into cosmos, whether through appropriation of the other, through naming, or entering Tenuous Itineraries · 89 cyclical (nonchronological) time. Turner employs Arnold van Gennep’s distinction of three phases in a rite of passage: separation, transition, and incorporation. The stage of separation delineates a...