Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), a sprawling, encyclopedic travel narrative about Yugoslavia, is usually considered Rebecca West's magnum opus. In this work, West claims that she tells "what a typical Englishwoman felt and thought in the late nineteen-thirties" when the second world war seemed inevitable; she investigates how the "past has made the present" in the southeast corner of Europe, and thus has affected the whole world. In this volume, the narrative follows the geographical pattern of a journey through Yugoslavia while leaping backward into Balkan history, and forward into present moments of political crisis. Its modernist-inspired narrative structure, in addition to the stories it tells, contributes to the status of this work as one of the great travel books of the century.
Few know that West began writing another such ambitious book in the late 1960s about her travels in Mexico. West wrote over 400 pages, but never completed the work, partly due to declining health, and partly due to the imaginative scope of the project. West transforms the metaphor of the journey typical of the structuring of travel narratives through a comparison of her husband's family to "a suicidal gypsy clan which always set up its tents and its cooking pots in the middle of the main highways of history." While this volume, tentatively titled Survivors in Mexico, was to incorporate descriptions of the contemporary Mexico she encountered in her travels, large sections of the book were to traverse those "main highways of history" to show, as she did in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, how the "past has made the present." The present she is interested in includes not only the state of Mexico in the late twentieth century, but also the state of her family and her husband's family, the state of the British and Spanish empires, the state of democracy around the globe, and the state of arts including painting, music, and murals.
The chunks of manuscript in the Rebecca West archive at the University of Tulsa tell stories and describe scenes vastly far from each other in geography, historical time, and status as public records. These include: the invasion of Mexico by Cortes and the Spaniards; the effect of this imperial venture on Mexico and on European nations; Aztec social structure and belief systems; the friendship between West's father's French tutors in the nineteenth century and an important Mexican muralist, Dr. Atl, who became a supporter of Diego Rivera; the story of West's husband's family in Scotland and Denmark during the time of Napoleon and his imperial ambitions; the effects of the industrial revolution on Europe and the Americas; the Russian Revolution and the killing of Trotsky in Mexico; the Mexican revolution; the current demographics and political climate of Mexico. As a travel book, these pieces are remarkable for their how little they are bounded by the literal roads of West's travel through Mexico. It's unclear exactly how West would have connected these pieces, but the drafts make suggestions. West's imagination leapt to find similarities between peoples and historical events across time and space. At the same time she details scenes with such specificity that the narrative balances cultural differences and human similarities. The public stories of empire, education, political struggle, and industrialization are merged beautifully with private tales of family, and anecdotes of ancestors; West uses the genre of travel narrative to undermine the public/private dichotomy of much traditional history. Ultimately, this travel book would have endeavored to show the interconnectedness of places and peoples across time including the power dynamics of shifting economic systems and empires. Speaking of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson suggests that the global systems that constitute our world are "beyond our present powers of imagination" (Tomlinson 177), and that we need new narrative forms to make those global realities understandable. Perhaps we can see West's unfinished work on Mexico as an attempt to forge a different type of travel book that would narrate global totalities in new ways.
Works Cited
Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism. Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
West, Rebecca. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. New York: Viking,
1941.
----. Survivors in Mexico. Manuscript fragments. McFarlin Library.
University of Tulsa.
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