Journeys from Scandinavia: Travelogues of Africa, Asia, and South America, 1840—2000

Part II: Modern Primitive Travel

part ii MODERN PRIMITIVE TRAVEL This page intentionally left blank 81 Modern Primitive Travel In contrast to the nondeveloping subject of the late-romanticist travelogues , the postromanticist, modern twentieth-century literary travelogues portray a subject in search of self-understanding. His journey is structured as a quest in the sense that it focuses on one particular object rather than an accumulation of impressions. The ultimate aim is greater insight into human nature in general and into one’s Self in particular. The cultural Other no longer serves merely as exoticist material to stimulate curiosity and wonder at home, but as a source to understanding human evolution, the world, and the European’s place within it. As the travelers seek out the primitive, their travel destinations change. The Orient is replaced with Africa and the Far East as these sites become available through modern technological and political development. Colonialism facilitates traveling or settling outside Europe—also in the case of Danes and Norwegians who travel to the colonies of other European nations. Darwinism and a new critical view of European modernization—what Freud calls “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur” (civilization and its discontents )—lead to an interest in premodern stages of humanity, with modern primitivism largely replacing romantic Orientalism. The travelogues discussed in Part II are increasingly structured as linear narratives in order to represent Africa and the Far East as offering an outer and inner journey towards the primitive Other as well as the primitive Self. In the romanticist travelogues of Part I, the physical progression over a landscape in time provided sufficient narrative continuity. In the modern travelogues of Part II, this narrative is supplemented by a linear tale of the traveling hero’s mental development and maturation. As the subject position changes so does the genre, with the travelogue increasingly resembling 82 MODERN PRIMITIVE TRAVEL the novel. According to Percy Adams’s study of travel literature and novels , the travelogues are no longer “just a set of notes jotted down each day or whenever the traveler has time . . . Far, far more often the account has been reworked . . . , polished, edited . . . In fact, nearly every récit de voyage published in the author’s lifetime is not a pristine journal or set of notes, a fact that for the twentieth century is perhaps even more true.”1 The Travelogue versus the Novel The fact that the travelogue, at the turn of the twentieth century, is increasingly presented as a novel—thus blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction—leads us to consider the nature of the novel. In “Epic and Novel,” Mikhail Bakhtin defines the novel as the critical genre par excellence. Constantly relativizing, problematizing, and “novelizing” its own and all other genres, it points outside itself, raising epistemological rather than ontological questions: “When the novel becomes the dominant genre, epistemology becomes the dominant discipline.”2 At this point, the author loses his authoritative position vis-à-vis the presented material, and rather treats it dialogically. One might also turn the situation around and say that once a modern person enters into an epistemological crisis, the novel is the available form that allows him or her to depict this uncertainty. If we look back at the travelogues in Part I, we see that Hans Christian Andersen, Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, and Knut Hamsun tend to represent identity—their own as well as that of foreigners—as static, ontological facts. Admittedly, Andersen does so to a greater extent than Hamsun. The travelers of the twentieth century, on the other hand, increasingly tend to describe their own dialogic involvement with the cultural Other as they admit to uncertainty, confusion, and revised points of view. What Bakhtin notes is that genres depicting events occurring within our own lifetime are dialogical and inconclusive. Their inner openness, however, is accompanied by a stricter plot: “The absence of internal conclusiveness and exhaustiveness creates a sharp increase in demands for an external and formal completedness and exhaustiveness, especially in regard to plot-line. The problems of a beginning, an end, and ‘fullness’ of MODERN PRIMITIVE TRAVEL 83 plot are posed anew” (31). Thus, in a period when other genres—in our case the travelogue—are novelized, we may expect that a strict plotline is superimposed upon the experiences gathered during travel as a form of compensation for the inconclusiveness one finds at the level of...