New Ways of Seeing and Storytelling: Narration and Visualisation in the Work of Bruce Chatwin. Pilar Escriche Riera PhD Dissertation Supervised by Dr. Andrew Monnickendam. Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Germanística Facultat de Lletres i Filosofia Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona November 2009 New Ways of Seeing and Storytelling: Narration and Visualisation in the Work of Bruce Chatwin. By Pilar Escriche Riera Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Bellaterra, November 2009 To the memory of my parents and my sister. Acknowledgements I heartily thank my supervisor Dr.Andrew Monickendam, whose commitment to my work has been unfailing. He has been my travel companion during the hard time of research both for my MA and for my PhD. I wish to thank him for his concern about my work, led by trust and affection. Mrs Elizabeth Chatwin’s immediate kindness as well as her hospitality have given me much needed support and will to continue researching on her husband’s work. She gave me unrestricted access to her husband’s papers at the Bodleian and spoke personally to Mike Trevillion, the curator of Bruce Chatwin’s photographic archive at the Trevillion Library in Brighton, so that I could look at Chatwin’s original photographs. Thanks are due to her for permission to reprint Chatwin’s photographs in my unpublished thesis. Matthew Graves’s role in the development of my thesis has been essential. I daresay that without his acquaintance I wouldn’t have been able to meet Mrs Elizabeth Chatwin in the same way that without his guidance I wouldn’t have the insight into travel literature that I have now. It was at his suggestion that I attended a conference on Travel Literature in the Sorbone in Paris where I first met him and I could overview the varied panorama of literature about journeys of all kinds and get familiar with both the basics of classical travel writing and the latest trends in the genre. My friend Beatriz Papaseit, being a PhD scholar herself - therefore the perfect accomplice of my state- has provided me with empathy and support and has never failed during the “blank” moments we have both lived as scholars. I would not have been able to walk the uphill tracks of my research without her helping hand. I wish to record my immense gratitude to Lola Barranco Cascón for letting me stay in her flat in London generously whenever I needed it during my research years. With her sincere hospitality my visits to the British Library in London and to the Bodleian Library in Oxford were less burdensome. I would like to thank Sarah Davies for all her help in proof-reading, Montserrat Juhera Ferrer, a good friend and work colleague, for her steady and reliable support, Alex Pérez and Dorotea Dane for their unfailing encouragement, both moral and academic. My friend Mònica Carbó who has always spurred me on to continue enjoying the itch of researching and savouring those big and small findings in the academic world. Enric Soler Raspall, traveller and travel writer, follower of Chatwin’s traces in Patagonia. My cousin and friend Josep Vall-llosera Riera has been, and I hope he will be, one of the strongest references to seafaring in my life. With him and his crew friends I have lived all kinds of travelling experiences at sea, some of them more dangerous than the others, and I have learned to be more observant. My friends Xavi Casadesús and Pablo Paz for the design of the cover and the formatting of Bruce Chatwin’s photographs in my thesis. For access to collections of Bruce Chatwin’s papers and related material, I would like to thank Collin Harris, supervisor of the Modern Papers and John Johnson Reading Room at the Bodleian Library. I am also grateful to the staff of the British Library at the Humanities Reading Room at St Pancras. I would like to thank Mrs Georgina Jones from the Reader Service Enquiries in particular. I thank my family and friends who have all had a role in the completion of my work. Abbreviations, formatting and photographic images. For Chatwin’s books I have used the following abbreviations: In Patagonia, IP The Viceroy of Ouidah, TVOO On the Black Hill, OTBH The Songlines, TS What Am I Doing Here, WAIDH Anatomy of Restlessness, Anatomy For John Berger’s work, mostly in chapter three: Ways of Seeing, WOS About Looking, AL Pig Earth, PE In chapter four: How our Lives Become Stories, HOL by Jean Paul Eakin The Stories We Live By, The Stories by Dan P. McAdams I have followed the conventions of the MLA Formatting and Style Guide. As far as notes are concerned I am using notes at the end of each chapter. Next to each of the photographs by Chatwin which I chose to illustrate the front page of each chapter, I have added a comment in italics. My comments attempt to anticipate some of the main ideas I develop in the chapter and aim to strengthen my conviction that Chatwin’s storytelling style is tightly connected to his particular way of seeing. Mrs. Elizabeth Chatwin has given me permission to reprint her husband’s photographs. The cover design shows one of Chatwin’s drawings found in his moleskins. It represents one of the various archaeological findings he was so fascinated by. This one was on a Greek vase and is taken from one of the two notebooks (probably one of the notebooks kept in Box 32 in The Bodleian Library in Oxford) which were exhibited in New College Oxford during a Symposium on Bruce Chatwin held on Saturday 1 July 2008. Contents Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………..3 Notes to Introduction ………………………………………………………………16 Chapter 1.Wanderlust in Chatwin’s Work: Writing About Journeys or Travel Writing? Towards a New Taxonomy of Travel Writing……………………………...19 1.1. Chatwin’s New Taxonomy of Travel Writing: Adventure, Quest, Escape, Nationality, Home and Belonging…………………………………………..23 1.2. Chronotopes: Reading Space and Time in Chatwin’s Travel Texts and Fiction ……………………………………………………………………….64 1.3. Chatwin’s New Perspective of Travel Writing: Overcoming Globalisation and Traditional Narrative Forms…………………………………………….83 Notes to Chapter One ……………………………………………………………….93 Chapter 2.Chatwin’s Narrative Style (I): A New Way of Telling/Storytelling based on the Anthropological Concept of Liminality. A Search for a Reader and a Listener……………………………………………………………………..101 2.1. An Anthropological Approach to Chatwin’s Writing. Liminality and communitas………………………………………………………………...102 2.1.1. Communitas…………………………………………………............126 2.2. Chatwin’s Obsessions and Liminality (I): Collecting and Creating…………..144 2.3. Chatwin’s Obsessions and Liminality (II): Storytelling. The Narrator. Style and Content…………………………………………………………………154 Notes to Chapter Two………………………………………………………………169 Chapter 3. Chatwin’s Narrative Style (II): A New Way of Seeing/Storytelling based on the Eye and the Gaze. A Search for a Reader and a Beholder.…………..173 3.1. Chatwin and the Eye. Photography as a Way of Telling Life and a Way of Capturing Personality…………………………………………………….174 3.2. The Peripheral and the Marginal: Bruce Chatwin, Diane Arbus and Walter Benjamin. The Uncanny in Chatwin. ………………………….………....206 3.3. Chatwin the Flâneur, the Voyeur, the Visual Traveller and the Eye-twister. Exploring Chatwin’s Idea of Gaze as a Personal and Cultural Perception…………………………………………………………………220 Notes to Chapter Three…………………………………………………………….251 Chapter 4. Bruce Chatwin: Either the Tusitalia or the Teller of His Own Story………….259 4.1. Gathering the Stories of Others and the Story of Bruce Chatwin……………..260 4.2. Childhood Memories, Pathologies and Ethics within Chatwin’s Construction of a Life Story. W.G.Sebald’s Ideas in “The Mystery of the Red-brown Skin. An Approach to Bruce Chatwin.”………………………………………….289 4.3. Taking and Finding One’s Bearings Rather than Writing in Autobiographical Terms. ……………………………………………………………………..309 Notes to Chapter Four……………………………………………………………...325 Conclusions………………………………………………………………………………...333 Suggestions for further research……………………………………………………353 Notes to Conclusions ………………………………………………………………360 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………...361 Introduction Bruce Chatwin photographed by James Ivory in 1972. Escriche-Riera 3 Introduction Ah! Sunflower, weary of time, Who countest the steps of the sun, Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the traveller’s journey is done; Where the youth pined away with desire, And the pale virgin shrouded in snow, Arise from their graves and aspire; Where my sunflower wishes to go. (Ah! Sunflower William Blake, 1793) 1 In this introduction first I will present my research questions. Next, I will describe the chapters that structure the thesis. In order to develop my arguments this thesis examines all of Chatwin’s full-length texts. These are his five books: In Patagonia (1977), The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980), On the Black Hill (1982), The Songlines (1987) and Utz (1988), as well as the posthumous What Am I Doing Here (1989) and finally Anatomy of Restlessness (1996), edited by Jan Borm and Matthew Graves. For the study of his photographic work, I focus on Winding Paths (1999), a collection of Chatwin’s photographs edited and introduced by Roberto Calasso, Chatwin’s photographic archive at the Trevillion Library in Brighton and accessible on the website: www. Trevillion.com, and the photographs included in the English edition of In Patagonia . I have also examined what remains of Chatwin’s archives: Chatwin’s 85 notebooks, manuscripts and other material are deposited in the Department of Escriche-Riera 4 Special Collections and Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The material is kept in 41 boxes. Boxes 31 to 35 contain the 85 notebooks, dating from 1968 to 1988. Chapter Two is a continuation of my MA dissertation, defended in 2002. It draws upon and expands the ideas first raised within it and opens up new research questions. Research questions “He was interested in borders, where things were always changing, not one thing nor another,” says Elizabeth.