Word: chatwin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Chatwin took the advice and hit the road. He traveled to Asia, the Soviet Union, Africa, South America and the U.S. The results were In Patagonia (1977) and The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980), two remarkable books that demonstrated enviable gifts for observation, description and narrative invention. The Songlines brings these qualities to high relief, combining the conventions of travel writing, the patterns of the philosophical essay and the strategies of fiction. The work is obviously based on fact and personal experience, although Chatwin declares that much of it is literary concoction. In short, The Songlines is a book whose resistance...
...narrator is a tall, thin ascetic named Bruce Chatwin, a migratory writer fascinated by nomadic peoples and the origins of human nature. His curiosity takes him to Australia, where he has heard that the continent is entwined by songlines, invisible paths that the aboriginals can read like sheet music. According to their creation myths, Australia was literally sung into existence by ancestral creatures. They wandered over the vast land mass during the dreamtime, giving names to animals, plants, hills and depressions. Re- enactments of these legends are the walkabouts, aboriginal cross-country amblings that not only strengthen ties...
Indeed, much of what the author finds in Central Australia is Greek to him. Descendants of the Lizard Man, the Bandicoot Man and the Perenty Man relinquish their secrets grudgingly. Strangers are usually given incomplete or false "dreamings." To sort them out, Chatwin attaches himself to an Australian-born son of Soviet immigrants who maps songlines in an attempt to preserve them from obliteration by mining companies and railroads. Arkady Volchok earned honors in history and philosophy from Adelaide University. He plays Bach on the harpsichord, speaks several aboriginal languages and holds the provocative opinion that his Slavic forebears make...
...Chatwin contributes his own controversial assessments. The network of harmonious songlines convinces him that Homo sapiens is not hopelessly belligerent. He reconstructs a conversation he had with Konrad Lorenz, ethnologist and author of the influential On Aggression; he ransacks his notebooks and ponders anthropological and philosophical teachings. His hesitant conclusion is that humans are fundamentally restless and, like the aboriginal, the species needs to wander...
Could all this be simply a projection of Chatwin's own footloose urgings, a legacy from generations of talented Englishmen who sought regular escape from their restrictive little island? From Cain and Abel to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, there is ample sign of conflict between homing and nomadic instincts. Chatwin is not unmindful of the persistent ambivalence. He quotes Pascal's morosely amusing thought that all human misery is the result of our inability to remain quietly in a room...