In "The Songlines" (1987), selfhood is redefined both as a local cultural phenomenon dependent on accidents of birth and as a common human attribute traceable to a submerged ancient practice of naming elements in the environment while walking. This expanded sense of the contingency of selfhood is a function, not only of Chatwin's paleoanthropological ideas in the book, but of its several modes of discourse. The book is postmodern since Chatwin disperses the self into transcultural, global categories as well as the personal, with very little else between. The identity politics of the book strive to transcend their own material conditions by appealing to cultural and genetic commonality.
Chatwin constructs a fluid and inclusive self-image characterized by two activities, writing and walking, both of which lead him to the many others against whom he defines himself. The book is composed of three intertwining discourses: travel narrative, in which Chatwin goes to Australia to find out for himself all he can about the aboriginals' dreaming tracks or songlines; autobiography, through which Chatwin creates a portrait of the travel writer as a child and young man; and the discourse of the notebook, in which Chatwin arranges suggestive quotations from a wide range of writers, anecdotes of prior travels, and speculative paragraphs proposing a welter of ideas on early humans. Each mode of discourse presents a partial view of Chatwin; together they create a many-sided self-representation as narrator, protagonist, and theorist of human origins with a grand speculative explanation for many human behaviors. As narrator, Chatwin is a travel writer as well as an autobiographer of his childhood and young adulthood. As protagonist, he is a traveler and travel writer in Africa and Australia. Finally, as a theorist and synthesizer, he assembles disparate narrative and expository materials to make a suggestive case for his ideas.
Briefly summarized, Chatwin's theory holds that the earliest humans were migrators, that walking is thus deeply ingrained in the human psyche, that naming what one sees while walking was universal in early human cultures, and that aboriginal songlines are the vestiges of a once-universal human activity whose traces can be detected in many cultural artifacts, including the Old Testament. The exposition of this theory in the notebook sections of the book radically repositions our understanding of the travel narrative that threads its way through the notebooks to reemerge at the end. Before the notebook sections, that narrative is a straighforward personal account that slowly unfolds ever more intricate details about the songlines and confirms Chatwin's identity as a travel writer. During and after the notebook sections, that narrative does much more. It confirms Chatwin's theory, locates the source of his elected identity as a wanderer deep in our common past, and affirms our common human identity as migrators.
Opening out the implications of the travel narrative to encompass all of humanity makes the book's ending far more universalizing than it otherwise might have been. Readers may come to feel that the self at play in the book is not simply Chatwin's. By remote genetic inheritance and decayed cultural inheritance, it is everyone's, which means the aborigines and all other characters in the book, as well as all of its readers and nonreaders. Chatwin's encircling gestures of inclusiveness are justified finally by his theory of origins, from which viewpoint, customary markers of identity like nationality and language, including his own, are provisional.
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