A LITERARY APPROACH TO HEINRICH BARTH’S TRAVELS AND DISCOVERIES » Download Project Topics

Abstract:

This study presents a literary critical paradigm for the study of Heinrich Barth’s monumental exploration (or travel) narrative of the Western Sudan. The literary approach is intended to fill in a missing gap in the canonical historical approaches to Barth’s narrative. The study argues that Barth’s empirical – descriptive technique is, in the last analysis, a literary-aesthetic device for the expression of the unfamiliar, the exotic and the threatening Other. The study also demonstrates that Barth’s text, which has enjoyed great prestige within historical studies on account of its assumed factual reliability and logical and referential meaning, is an instance of aesthetic-rhetorical writing, and not historical biography. A close reading of Travels and Discoveries shows that Barth’s “historical” moments are paradigmatically and causally literary and rhetorical moments, because the text’s production of the real, such as the description of landscapes, mountains, rivers, and bodies inheres within the intersection of aesthetic, historical, metaphorical, geographical, and ecological discourses over which the writer-explorer has no absolute control. This study undermines the mainstream historical assumption of a distinct historical, as opposed to a “literary” Barth through the deployment of a problematic which conceptualizes Barth’s textual practice as the coherent yet unstable unfolding of a Baconian-Romantic literary tradition in which the objects of visual perception are apprehended within the spheres of “metonyrnic observation” and of “creative imagination”. The study thus contends that Barth’s “historicism” is a narrativizing and representational strategy which discloses the Other both as a plot structure within the aesthetic and narrativist rhetoric of 19th century ideology of the civilizing mission, and as a subject for the pleasure and marvel of the reading publics of the meaningmaking projects of mid-19th century European Imperial cultures. The study consists of seven chapters and an Appendix which contains Barth’s lithographic engravings of some Sudanese scenes. Chapter One explores, in broad strokes, Barth’s heritage within the rhetorical culture of Renaissance travel writing, and the universalizing will to absolute knowledge of the Post Enlightenment. It was this heritage that created the historical and discursive conditions of the modern European will to power, and which in turn produced the modern genre of exploration writing. The chapter also sets out the scope, delimitation, objectives, justification, and theoretical framework of the study. Chapter two contains a review of the historical literature on Barth and his book, such as biographies and scholarly books and articles by historians and anthropologists who have dominated, until recently, studies of exploration literature. The chapter also reviews recent works by literary critics and textualists on travelexploration literature in order to keep abreast with the state of research, the paradigmatic and new interest in this new and expanding research field. A select review of related literature on narrativity (narrative and narration), and historical and symbolic representation was also undertaken. The principal arguments of the chapter are that it is needless to insist that the literary critic and the historian should bridge the gap between literary and historical texts. This is because there is no such divide. Any “historicalization” is necessarily and inescapably a function, instance, and play of narrativization, a meaning production or narrativity. Chapter Three investigates the cultural and political rhetorics that have animated the reading and interpretation of Barth’s influential narrative of the Western Sudan. Its central arguments are that Barth’s Narrative was not, as the conventional academic wisdom assumes, written in the spirit of disinterested, scientific scholarship. Rather it is made to appear such by the rhetorical interpretive operations of its reading publics such as the Geographical Society, the leading periodicals, Lord Frederick Lugard, and academic historians such as Shultze, KirkGreene, Hodgkin, Ayandcle, Adeleye, and Usman, among a host of others. These reading publics or formations are themselves governed, like Barth’s text itself, by a specific set of more or less contradictory cultural and political rhetorics; and that these rhetorics still under-determinc the contemporary reception of Barth. The chapter substantiates the contention that Barth’s Narrative does not possess any intrinsic meaning-effects of its own, but those of its veritable reading or interpretive communities within a process of “productive activation”. Chapter Four examines Barth’s literary strategies of presence, his visualist and objectifying model of the gaze. It offers an analysis of Barth’s desire for plenitude in the form of his self-representation within arrival and departure scenes, and of gift-giving, linguistic and cultural appropriation of the indigenous life-ways. The subject of analysis in Chapter Five is the text’s strategies of the representation of the indigenous landscape and body. It shows that far from registering the immediate presence of the local space, Barth’s text only symbolizes it, that is, transfers or “translates” it from a concrete to a symbolic structure. Chapter Six is concerned with Barth’s deployment of narrativity, the configuration of the events into the plot structure of beginning, middle, and end, complete with a central subject and a narrativist consciousness; and how narrativity both configures and disconflgures Bath’s own textual-narrativisl appropriation of native space. Chapter Seven concludes the study and brings out the implications of Barth’s overall oeuvre. It argues that although Barth prepared the way for Christian missionaries and colonial adventurers in Travels and Discoveries, writing is at the centre of his text, and that beyond and behind his text is an infinite productivity of the sign. The implication is that those referents or presences that the text names have always existed, and can exist only, as traces, supplements, and substitute significations.

WRITING, REPRESENTATION, AND NARRATIVITY IN EXPLORATION LITERATURE: A LITERARY APPROACH TO HEINRICH BARTH’S TRAVELS AND DISCOVERIES