Week 4: (Re)Presentation

The non-linear form and short chapters that characterize Chatwin's work, In Patagonia, certainly seem necessary for the both the ethos and logos of the author. While the short chapters including often arbitrary details provide the reader with the kind of evidence that a reader might need to believe in the truth of the stories themselves, Chatwin's form also seems to contribute to the truthfulness that a reader might feel about Chatwin himself.

Reading this work, a reader gets the feeling that Chatwin is very much a wanderer, moving from one place to another on a whim, rather than a meticulous planner of his next destination. With such an observation in mind, it is difficult to see Chatwin faithfully carrying around paper and pencil and/or somehow recording every minute detail of the conversations and knowledge he encountered during his journeys. It is not surprising, then, to notice that those stories which Chatwin did manage to record are short, perhaps including only those details he recalled from each instance, regardless of the individual facts' importance. Likewise, since it is clear that the information that the author gathered during his travels often covered a variety of unrelated subjects, a reader would not expect anything resembling a linear narrative. Rearranging his work so that it might be more comfortable to the western reader accustomed to a linear form would surely provoke questions for readers about whether or not Chatwin's wandering style could have really matched up with a non-wandering form. For these reasons, Chatwin's non-linear form and seemingly sporadic inclusions/exclusions within each individual (short) chapter are all imperative to the credibility of the author.

In this particular work I have to wonder if there is any value in trying to decipher fact from fiction. Since we know through Chatwin's narration that most of his information is obtained from mostly human sources, I don't know that it makes sense to worry about whether or not we can trust the author to properly represent the stories he has encountered. First of all, there is a fundamental problem in the use of the word stories, since little or no truth is implied with the use of this word. Second, are we, as readers, wasting our time considering whether Chatwin is "accurately" relaying these stories to his readers when we have no way of knowing for certain whether they were ever true even prior to Chatwin's obtaining them? The credibility of the author, then seems to lie only in the proof that Chatwin provides his reader with about the validity of the author's journey alone.

And even still, we find another layer of complication when we consider what our reactions would be if Chatwin's journey was, itself a figment of his authorial imagination. Since logic has lead me to become less concerned with the validity of the stories than with Chatwin's method of obtaining them, what is to be a reader's reaction when even the validity of the story explaining how stories were gathered is in question? I would argue that in a work like Arabian Sands, Thesiger's work is based on what he can represent for his reader, so that such a question of whether or not his travels were just as he represented them is essential to a reader's digestion of the work. However, In Patagonia presents its reader with a world of fact comingling with fiction, and Chatwin merely concerns himself with what he can present for his reader, so the validity of his travels (which I am not certain that I doubt anyway) becomes much less important for the work as a whole.

In short, I don't believe that it would be necessary for Chatwin to have truthfully completed the journeys he records, nor that it is paramount to his work that each story included be 100 percent retold as it was recorded because the matter Chatwin presents in his work are rarely (if ever) purported to be truth. On the contrary, Thesiger's Arabian Sands depends entirely on the concept of what is truth, and therefore would not be able to accomplish a comparable purpose if the reality of Thesiger's travel was called into question.