Book Chapter

Narrative

Culbert, John

2020

Overview

While travel writing is a non-fiction genre, travellers' accounts always involve aspects of narrative composition more commonly associated with imaginary fiction. Critical attention to a travel account's narrative strategies can thus illuminate the ways in which generic conventions of storytelling and more subtle strategies of narrative composition give verbal shape to a traveller's experience. In so doing, narrative analysis highlights the constructed, if not fictional, dimensions of the textual artefact and provides the means to query the reliability of travellers' representations and their connection to broader narrative aspects of discursive order, including politics and history. The narrative innovations of much modernist writing reflect the complex temporality of mental life in its relation to the newly discovered realms of the Freudian unconscious and phenomenological time as well as a modern world itself characterised by increasing speed and disjunctive temporalities. Bronislaw Malinowski's lone figure on the beach at the beginning of Argonauts can be understood as a narrative choice motivated by the politics of race, gender, and empire, and as such the scene is marked by numerous tensions and contradictions. The problem with the question of narrative beginnings is that they are marked by a violent historical rupture, such that Jamaica Kincaid's postcolonial memory can only uncover origins that are broken, split, and wounded. Modern writers may well set out to initiate something, to travel somewhere new, but they do so without fully believing in absolute originality or unique departures.

• Publisher: Routledge
• ISBN: 1472417925, 9781472417923