Travel Literature "In Patagonia " Re-visited

-->

Travel Literature "In Patagonia " Re-visited

I am a lay reader and my writing is just as lay.

To top it, I am an uncomfortable traveller.

And this is my lay review of an unusual travel book by an unusual author.

Whenever I read classic travel books I am humbled by the profound detachment these authors seem to have had, travelling alone to places remote and uninviting. I am humbled by the fact that I am not made of that supreme stuff to attempt such feats.

One book that completely disorients me is "In Patagonia" by Bruce Chatwin. It was published in 1977 and it was instantly raved as a minor classic.

It seems Bruce Chatwin left a message, "Gone to Patagonia", and abruptly left his job at the London Museum. He took off on a ridiculous journey of quest and came back with a minor classic as his debut into the literary world.

"In Patagonia" defies any kind of genre classification. It could be called travel-writing. But this reveals only some part of what the book is. Bruce Chatwin was a writer who defied classification. He could be categorized as a travel writer. But this explains only some part of his work. In view of this inadequacy of available category I wonder, in my lay tradition, whether the terms "wander-writing" and "wander-writer" may be introduced since they are closer to what the book and writer are.

The mood and flow of the book is profoundly vagabondish. It is an act of wandering without any connective feeling, or space/time relevance at all. I had to read the book in slow and short takes, careful not to lose my bearings.

"In Patagonia" and its author Bruce Chatwin have become definitive elements in the area of literature that they occupy. They are both original and classic in what they are.

Patagonia had been beckoning Chatwin since his childhood. First it had beckoned him with the skin of a Prehistoric brontosaurus .But when the truth of the skin turned out to be less romantic and less historic, Patagonia offered itself as the last resort where he could hole-up with his favourite books when the rest of the world blew up in war. Again when Stalin died, it’s claim as a safe resort lost its meaning. But by then Patagonia had teased itself into Chatwin's imagination that he could hardly resist.

In Patagonia, Chatwin had found the most perfect place to wander and come to terms with his imagination. It was remote, still raw and untouched by civilization. A place, where curiosities were the way of life. Patagonia proved to be worthy of its' beckoning.

Patagonia is an outlaw country, at the outpost of civilization and Chatwin wandered through it in search of matching piece of 'prehistoric' skin which he inherits from his aunt. An extinct beast merges with a living beast and then gets mixed up with myth and reality.

In the course of sorting this out Chatwin encounters the legends of the land, the bank robbers, hold-up specialists, people in exile, out- of- work- anarchists whose stories he listens to. Chatwin informs of this and much more, of the stories and lives of the people, present and past, of this remote country.

Even the oddest of travel writing have a story to follow. At least there would be a beginning and a destination. ‘In Patagonia’ does not have any. It reads like the remains of a story when the main story-line has been taken away. They don’t hold together at all, for there is no story. Worse, there is no narrator at all. It is full of unconnected incidents. Bruce Chatwin held back the narrative thread, his story, to other places, to other times.

But Patagonia is not what it seems. It is not about what he has written. Patagonia's essence is revealed only passingly-- "desert wanderers discover in themselves a primeval calmness, I haven’t got any special religion this morning. My god is the god of walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other god." This is what "In Patagonia" is all about.

"Brontosaurus" - was just an excuse that he had to give, at the risk of being caught at the truth. The truth is that Bruce Chatwin was an oddity. He had a wandering tic in him. Bruce was not on somebody's errand. He was a wanderer seeking to become wandering. On losing his religion, his god, and seeking to become religion, seeking to become god. Patagonia was his exercise book, his spiritual gymnastics. The words don’t matter. It is about the discipline. And what a canvas of physical and historical landscape he has chosen to do that!!

Bruce Chatwin had an eye for oddities and he picked them up with a natural flair. He could immediately see the heart of these curiosities that he encountered and he sums it up with precision and economy that is original in its laconic brevity. Sample this: "A single man was walking up the street, his brown felt hat pulled low over his face. He was carrying a sack and walking into the clouds, out into the country. Some children sheltered in a doorway and tormented a lamb. From one hut came the noise of the radio and sizzling fat. A lumpy arm appeared and threw a dog a bone. The dog took it and slunk off."

From laconic brevity in descriptions to informing of odd facts of the country existing at the outpost of civilization: "The Indians were migrant workers from Southern Chile. They were Araucanian Indians. A hundred years ago the Araucanians were incredibly fierce and brave. They painted their bodies red and flayed their enemies alive and sucked at the hearts of the dead. Their boy’s education consisted of hockey, horsemanship, liquor, insolence and sexual athletics, and for three centuries they scared the Spaniards out of their wits.”

Bruce Chatwin gets an idea of Patagonia from the names he finds in its telephone directory, sometimes you are left to wonder whether he wrote his entire book from within the walls of a library.

He merely informed what he saw in a very subtle way. You are left to make your own meanings and you can’t help wondering at his. Bruce Chatwin wrote what he saw. He kept the inner experience to himself. But don’t get misled by "brontosauras", it is just BC's bluff, a rope-a-dope.

Patagonia’s tryst with its’ biological destiny was when Charles Darwin made a stop-over there while on his voyage of discovery of evolution. But Patagonia's tryst with its’ literary destiny would perhaps be through Chatwin's ‘wanderings’ immortalized by his writing.