Kai Mikkonen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki, Fin-land. His current research and teaching interests include travel writing, graphic novels and narrative theory.He is the author of Kuva ja sana [Image and Word] (Gaudeamus, 2005); The Plot Machine: the FrenchNovel and the Bachelor Machines in the Electric Years 1880–1914 (Rodopi, 2001) and The Writer’s Meta-morphosis: Tropes of Literary Reflection and Revision (Tampere University Press, 1997) as well as variousarticles in periodicals such as Style, Word & Image, Marvels & Tales, and European Review.

NARRATIVE, Vol. 15, No. 3 (October 2007)Copyright 2007 by The Ohio State University

The “Narrative is Travel”Metaphor: Between SpatialSequence and Open Consequence

The understanding of narratives is closely tied to the experience of travel. In nar-rative theory, the travel story features regularly as either the model narrative or themodel for narrative. In Vladimir Propp’s classic study of story grammar, for instance,the narrative functions are structured along a travel pattern between the hero’s depar-ture and return. In more recent narratology and literary history, and in certain interdis-ciplinary approaches to the study of narrative, the notion of travel may even function asa code or key revealing how the narrative works. In the history of the novel, travel writ-ing has helped to shape the genre. Narratives of travel to exotic lands have informed themodern novel with detailed foreign settings and a sense of authenticity in viewpoint.1

Since the time of the Greek epics different types of journey—the quest, the odyssey,and the adventure—have served as powerful masterplots in literary narratives. For in-stance, the chronotope of the road, and the metaphor of “the path of life” that it real-izes, is a central feature in Mikhail Bakhtin’s history of novelistic plot patterns andespecially important for what Bakhtin calls the adventure novel of everyday life (120).

The journey is universally recognized as a narrative in our culture. The narrativepotential of travel lies in the fact that we recognize in it temporal and spatial struc-tures that call for narration. The different stages of travel—departure, voyage, en-counters on the road, and return—provide any story with a temporal structure thatraises certain expectations of things to happen. Perhaps because of this pervasive-ness of the travel narrative, we have come to understand personal life and mental de-velopment as a voyage. The travel metaphor is therefore not only a way to thinkabout narrative; it also provides one with the means to think through narrative.

Kai Mikkonen

The question of the relation between travel and narrative is indeed large andcomplex. Here I will work from a narrower conception of narrative as travel (or astravel writing) so as to investigate the motivation behind the metaphor and to focusspecifically on the question of the relation between narrative consecutiveness andconsequence. I will develop the ideas of consecutiveness and consequence aroundtwo specific generic features and expectations of travel narratives. On the one hand,travel experience and travel writing presuppose the sense of a consecution of places,and events happening in particular places. The travel concept, and especially thejourney plot pattern, manifests a specific model of temporality and causality—travelentails the arrangement of points of actuality in temporal order. On the other hand,the notion of travel is prone to give identity and narrativity to a series of events sinceit “humanizes” the experience of time and space. A travel story is dependent on theprojection and experience of a world from a particular perspective, a person or agroup of people moving through space in a given time, enabling thus the treatment ofspace as a stage for possible narrative action. Narrative progress, therefore, is inti-mately related to, even if does not always equal, the representation of the traveler’sexperience of space and time.

My analysis has three goals: (1) to highlight the significance and some of thelimitations of the metaphor of travel in narrative theory and textual analysis; (2) torethink some of the identifying traits and expectations of travel writing through con-cepts of temporality, causality, and narrative experientiality as they are developed innarrative theory; (3) to extend cognitive-linguistic research on metaphors into thespecifics of narrative form, specifically the issue of the relation between consecu-tiveness and consequence in travel narratives. In order to illustrate these theoreticalpoints, I will toward the end of the essay offer an analysis of Graham Greene’s travelnarrative Journey Without Maps (1936). Greene’s narrative is particularly pertinentto the questions raised here since it foregrounds the relationship between consecu-tiveness and consequence by questioning the meaning of maps and by projecting anarrative voice concerned with the issue of how to narrativize the flow of travel ex-perience in the first place.

“NARRATIVE IS TRAVEL”

In narrative and literary studies, it is a kind of commonplace to suggest, withMichel de Certeau, that “every story is a travel story—a spatial practice” (115), orwith the French writer and literary scholar, Michel Chaillou that in some senseevery novel is a novel of adventure, “En un sens, tout roman est roman d’aventure”(62). Chaillou means that even in the least adventure-like literature, such as Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, we can find a notion of inward adventure. Similarstatements are common in narratology and in narrative theory generally. In her Nar-ratology, Mieke Bal stresses the dynamic function of space in narratives, space as apassage to be taken. For this reason, “a traveller in narrative is in a sense always anallegory of the travel that narrative is” (137). In his Towards a Postmodern Theoryof Narrative, Andrew Gibson aims to challenge what he sees as the all-pervasive

The Metaphor of Narrative as Travel 287

geometrical bias in narratology, or its “geometrisation of textual space” (3) by em-phasizing the travel aspect of narratives. Michel Serres’s notion of a traveling dis-course (discours parcours, 206), the idea of narrative as a voyage or “coursethrough” in mythical narratives like Oedipus and Odysseus, serves as Gibson’smain source of inspiration. Further, in Richard Gerrig and Victor Nell’s psychologyof reading, readers are being transported by a narrative by virtue of performing thatnarrative. Many other theories that have exploited the travel concept could be addedto this list.2

The travel metaphor, whether involving schemes like walking along a path,walking in the streets of a city or exploring space in a moving vehicle, functions inthese narrative theories as a description of and even a code for how narratives workin general. The metaphor plays two principal roles: it gives narrative identity to a se-ries of events and spaces; and in doing so it produces further narrative. The notion oftravel ascribes and also tends to increase narrativity3, that is, the connotations of voy-age indicate recognition of a certain logic and experience of narrative. In some of itsforms the metaphor is associated with a particular narrative’s self-reflexive narrativethematics and thus gains a more comprehensive theoretical meaning. For theoristslike Gibson and Serres, the description of narrative phenomena in terms of travelmetaphors internal to texts is a conscious effort to challenge prevalent notions of nar-rative invariants, including unitary forms of narrative space and discourse.

As already noted, my approach here is to take the metaphor as an object ofstudy in itself and to view it from the perspective offered by George Lakoff and MarkJohnson’s cognitive-linguistic research on metaphors, and the more recent work onconceptual blending that builds on it.

The basic assumptions in the cognitive study of metaphors are that our conceptsstructure what we perceive and that these concepts are fundamentally metaphorical.More precisely, the claim is that we conceptualize the world and our daily experi-ences around metaphorical concepts, such as the images and root metaphors of spa-tial orientation based on the oppositions of up-down, in-out, or deep-shallow, as in“knowledge is deep” and “learning is shallow.” In many languages, concepts oftravel and movement are common metaphors for describing an individual’s life andthe passing of time, as well as certain forms of thinking and mental processing (theexploration of ideas, the spiritual search). “Travel,” “movement,” and “journey” arecommon components also in Lakoff and Johnson’s “structural metaphors,” whereone concept is metaphorically structured in terms of another (42–45, 93–96). InMetaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson discuss travel-related metaphors such as“time is a moving object,” “love is a journey” and “an argument is a journey.” Tothese we could relate other overlapping metaphors like “life is a journey” and “timemoves” (these two are developed in Lakoff and Turner 1–56), or “life is a road,” “thepath of life,” “the path of discovery,” “thoughts travel,” and “time travels.” In a re-lated perspective, if we turn the metaphor around into “travel is narrative,” and un-derstand travel as something that enables places or a path through space to be “read”as a narrative, there emerges another rich series of metaphors in the vein of the“world is a book (or story).” For the sake of brevity, however, I will leave the latterconsiderations out of this discussion.

288 Kai Mikkonen

In narrative theory and literary studies, the “narrative is travel” metaphor be-longs, as a subcategory, to the same rich network of travel-related metaphors thatshare interrelated cognitive assumptions and experiential frames. The “narrative istravel” metaphor is basically a structural metaphor and a form of conceptual blend-ing, a notion developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner to define a basic men-tal operation. This is to say that the metaphor involves the creation of new meaningin a blend of inputs from the two conceptual domains of narrative and travel. In in-venting a scenario where the inputs of narrative and travel meet, this concept drawsfrom the analogues, thus making possible “a set of ‘matches’ that seem obvious tous,” but that also “ends up containing more” (Fauconnier & Turner 20). The experi-ential frame of journey and travel is marked, for instance, by the subjective, humanscale of space and time. This marking includes the way that events and movementsimpose a structure on space, the orientation provided by the traveling individual andhis or her experiencing point of view, and the structuring of time as a spatial surfacethat is covered and created by a path through it.

We may illustrate this claim with the help of the French writer Michel Butor’schiastic idea of “travel as writing and writing as travel,” outlined in his essay “Le voy-age et l’écriture” [trans. as “Travel and Writing”]. Butor explains in this widely-citedessay, that “to travel, at least in a certain manner, is to write (first of all because to travelis to read), and to write is to travel” (53) [“pour moi voyager, au moins voyager d’unecertain façon, c’est écrire (et d’abord parce que c’est lire), et qu’écrire c’est voyager”9–19]. Butor goes on to propose a new field of study called itérologie, “the science ofdisplacements,” that would have as its basis in the various types of travel and interac-tions between travel and writing. For Butor, the full meaning of the two-way equiva-lence “to travel is to write / to write is to travel” is first realized in a tradition of moderntravelogues stemming from the bookish, romantic Orient of writers like Gérard de Ner-val, Lamartine, Gautier, Chateaubriand, and Flaubert. The ultimate epitome of itérolo-gie, however, is the kind of travelogue Butor presents with his own five-volume travelseries, collectively titled Le Génie du lieu [The Genius of Place] (1958–1996). Herethe goal of travel is to write a travel journal—because travel is writing.4

The most developed metaphor in Butor’s essay is the idea of travel as reading,although the analogy is constantly on the verge of turning into its chiasmic opposite:reading as travel. Points of departure and arrival, or the sense of returning, play a for-mative role in both experiences. But more than this is at stake in Butor’s playfulessay. In a comprehensive commentary on this text, Philippe Dubois has suggestedthat Butor’s analogy between reading (or writing) and travel creates in effect ametaphorical matrix in which general equivalences are assumed in a triangle of writ-ing, travel and reading.5 Through the concept of travel, certain equivalences are alsoestablished between writing and reading—for the reason that both can be identifiedas travel (153). Further, Dubois argues that we can draw from this triangle of equiv-alences a kind of typology of relations between the three terms (involving analogiesbut also literal equivalences in terms of “traveling is writing,” “traveling is reading,”“writing is traveling,” and “reading is traveling”).

To develop further Dubois’s ideas on the four relations between the terms, Iwould like to argue that Butor’s essay entails in fact a multiple conceptual blend,

The Metaphor of Narrative as Travel 289

not only a chiastic analogy or two intertwined metaphors. This is because themetaphorical matrix involving the mutually connected concepts of travel, writing,and reading involves a conceptual, multidirectional “matching” of units that alsoimplies the metaphor “narrative is travel.” Butor does not discuss the notion of nar-rative explicitly in the essay but the idea is thoroughly present in it since the travelnarrative, the récit de voyage, serves as Butor’s principal example. The kind of writ-ing and reading Butor is concerned with involves, particularly, the writing and read-ing of narratives.

Butor’s multiblend travel metaphor, and his proposed study of displacements,fleshes out for us the cognitive assumption of conceptual blending in the metaphori-cal concept “narrative is travel.” The idea of a conceptual blend, unlike a simpleanalogy, may help us better investigate the function of the travel metaphor, since in aconceptual blend there is always the possibility of emergent structure and new mean-ings to be found in the blending of the units. This is to say that the blend includes notonly the types of possible comparison between the two conceptual domains, but alsothe motivation for the metaphor (what is included in and suggested by the set of“matches” that the conceptual blending makes possible for us). In what follows I willconcentrate on a specific question about conceptual blending in the travel/narrativelink: how does the travel concept organize the notion of narrative in terms of tempo-rality and causality, or more precisely, how does this concept help us think about therelation between narrative consecutiveness and consequence?

TRAVEL WRITING AND THE LIMITS OF NARRATIVE

A closer look at certain specific features of travel writing as a narrative genrecan offer us a more comprehensive and precise understanding of the cognitive foun-dations and communicative functions of the “narrative is travel” metaphor. In narra-tive theory, already the Russian formalists and some early structuralists like RomanJakobson realized the significance of what they saw as the transitional “extraliterary”genre of travel writing for the development of the novel, and mapped out some specific temporal and causal features of travel narratives. Their work can serve as oursecond point of departure for investigating the motivation of the metaphor. In morerecent narrative theory, however, where the “narrative is travel” concept is muchused, there has been relatively little work on the shared structural and experientialfeatures of travel stories.

The Russian formalist Boris Tomashevsky’s 1925 article, “Thematics”/“Sjuz̆etnoe postrojenije,” was among the first to point out the links between tempo-ral order, narrative causality and travel narrative. Tomashevsky argued that all narra-tives require causality in their organization, in addition to the temporal sequencing.Tomashevsky justified the claim with reference to travel accounts: “if the account isonly about the sights and not about the personal adventures of the travelers, we haveexposition without story. The weaker the causal connection, the stronger the purelychronological connection” (66). Without causal connection, therefore, there is nostory but a mere exposition, a list or a chronicle.

290 Kai Mikkonen

In Tomashevsky’s formalist definition of narrative, the travel account functionsas both the model narrative and as a kind of non-narrative text or “narration withouta story,” where causality is the distinguishing factor. On the one hand, as sheerchronicle or the simple listing of times, places and events, the travel account can dowithout causal organization. As such, however, it may no longer, or not yet, be a nar-rative. On the other hand, a travel account is a narrative, or becomes one, insofar asit relates the travelers’ personal adventures to the places moved through and thesights seen. In this respect, as Tomashevsky sees it, travel writing demonstrates theimportance of “indications of cause” for any narrative—though it is not clear fromhis argument how the traveler’s personal experience is necessarily causal in nature.6

Brian Richardson uses Tomashevsky’s insights in his powerful argument forcausality in Unlikely Stories (92, 106–107), insisting that the ability to infer causalrelations between events is a necessary condition of narrativity. For Richardson,Tomashevsky “carefully isolates a fundamental factor: human interaction and medi-ation, however multiform” (92). This means for Richardson that for any set of eventsto be a narrative, there must be some mediation of time at work, more precisely,(human) mediation of the temporal order of events in terms of indications of cause.Richardson also points out that temporal succession may not always be required ofnarratives as, he argues, we may imagine many simultaneous events that create a nar-rative once they are causally related (106). In this respect, however, Richardson ad-mits that such cases may only present a theoretical possibility (without, however,explicating why this would be so). It may be possible to imagine pure causality andlogical order even in fundamentally time-structured media like the short story andfilm, and the suspension of the sense of time in descriptive literary genres or in alawyer’s teleological discourse (see also Todorov 42), but in these cases we may notbe talking about narratives any more.

In the formalist vein of narrative theory, then, where much of the effort has beento think the minimum story, the travel concept has tended to function as a model forthe organization of a narrative, for the ordering of narrated events. The Russian for-malist conception of the genre of travel writing, and the journey plot in structuralisttheory of plot functions, point out the importance of both temporal and causal di-mensions in narrative. At the same time, they reveal that the constitutive forces ofconsecution and cause are often difficult to separate. These two overlap easily, alsobecause the reader/hearer is inclined to experience causality in temporal order.7 Ulti-mately, these investigations of travel writing and the journey plot also reveal that thecausal organization of the elements of a story may not be separated from the mediat-ing perspective of the traveler’s personal experience, whether in the form of a narra-tor or character, through which the sequence of the events is seen.

In this theoretical tradition, travel writing, occupying both the role of theepisodic tale that fails to possess a sense of causality, and so lacks narrativity, and therole of the simple story proper, a prototype of storytelling, plays out the rival con-ceptions of temporal succession and causal connection and has helped to establishthe approximate point of demarcation between the narrative and the non-narrative.This ambivalent positioning of travel writing in between narratives proper and theiroutside, the “not yet” narrative or the non-narrative, is related to two basic assump-

The Metaphor of Narrative as Travel 291

tions concerning the travel genre. On the one hand, a travel story is believed to pos-sess clear temporal order: the traveler’s itinerary and his or her physical journeythrough some space structures the experience of time, be it the first person narrativeof an eccentric journey around one’s room (Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour de machambre [Voyage around My Room]) or a third-person narrative on a Trans-Antarc-tic expedition (Alfred Lansing’s Endurance). In travel writing, consecutiveness andchange over time relate directly to a place or a geographic space; time can be, so tosay, compressed into space, into synchronous spatial representation, while space isalso translated into the temporality of writing and possibly also that of narrative. Onthe other hand, the causal connection between places, events and their meanings intravel, that is, the translation of space into the time of writing, may remain pro-foundly open and manipulable and, thus, so to say, non-narrative.

Therefore, one reason why the travel story, or travel writing in general, so eas-ily lends itself to be considered both the border and the nascent case of narratives isthat it foregrounds tension between consecutiveness and consequence. This is due tothe fact that despite the assumed clarity and concreteness of the temporal (and evenphysical) order of the story, which is one of the identifying traits of the genre, theorder of telling may be quite different from the order of travel experience.Anachronies, as Gérard Genette understands them, can be found in all literary narra-tives8 but in the case of travel writing the discrepancies between the two orders be-come particularly palpable. This potential for differences between order of eventsand the order of telling is also often in quite conventional narrative accounts of jour-neys such as Lansing’s Endurance which starts in the middle of the Antarctic expe-dition as Sir Ernest Shackleton’s men are leaving their boat.

The cultivated tension or “confusion” between sequence and consequence, fur-ther, is an indication of narrativity. Roland Barthes observed in his groundbreakingessay “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” that “Everything sug-gests, indeed, that the mainspring of narrative is precisely the confusion of consecu-tion and consequence, what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused by;in which case narrative would be a systematic application of the logical fallacy de-nounced by Scholasticism in the formula post hoc, ergo propter hoc—a good mottofor Destiny” (94). Barthes’s scheme of narrative units is based on the sharp distinc-tion between the purely chronological functionality of catalysers on the one handand the cardinal functions (or nuclei) on the other hand. The cardinal functions, thehinge-points of the narrative, are both consecutive and consequential functions thatcan be recognized as such when the action to which they refer “open (or continue, orclose) an alternative that is of direct consequence for the subsequent development ofthe story” (94). Within the conventions of travel writing there are various potential,often foregrounded conceptual matches for the cardinal narrative units: the “tele-scoping” of logic and temporality in travel experience is accomplished by the trav-eler’s moving perspective and points of attention; the direction of movement and thechoices at the crossroads open alternatives and close them; chance encounters in-volve risks that move the narrative forward and structure it; and the landmarks andthe description of places can be used to gauge progress in movement but also the un-folding of the travel narrative. All these conventions combine consecution with con-sequence, and can confuse them, and thus are potential nuclei of travel narratives.

292 Kai Mikkonen

At the same time, there is a sense of profound openness in travel writing as tothe causal mechanisms that motivate a traveling character or a narrator to issue re-ports about the aspects of his or her movement through space. This means that whatcomes after in the temporally ordered events in travel is not necessarily triggered bywhat went before. Xavier de Maistre’s famous mock travel story, the 42-day move-ment around his own room described in Voyage around My Room makes this evidentas the “journey” described in this book follows a clearly limited physical path arounda room while the narrator’s observations and the thematic structure of the text followthis movement only loosely, if at all. On the one hand, then, there is a clearly markeditinerary and a path around the room that has causal effects of its own (the narratorcannot leave this space; he has only a limited number of directions available for hismovements, etc.). On the other hand, the traveler’s observations, descriptions, andmeditations have their own causal mechanisms (motivated, for instance, by memo-ries). Only causal mediation and interaction, as Richardson suggests, can give mean-ing to the experience of time. Yet, also for this meaning-giving function, travelwriting serves as a model narrative, since it typically involves and draws attention tothe traveler’s mediating perspective. In de Maistre’s example, paradoxically as itseems, the concrete physical limitations given to the space of travel become subordi-nated to the narrator’s mental operations.

Contrary to what Richardson argues, even if we agree with him that causality isa central aspect in narrative experience, it is not always decisive for consideringsomething a narrative. The very example of the travel story, due to its ambivalent po-sition between temporal and causal order, suggests the contrary. We can think, for in-stance, of a travel, adventure or quest story that would include many events comingone after another without any other causal connection between the events than thatthey happen during the same journey, or that they happen to the same traveler(s).This is neither more nor less hypothetical than Richardson’s idea of a narrative basedon simultaneous events without a temporal structure. An adventure without causalconnection might be extremely simple, even poor, but it would be difficult to arguethat it is not a narrative at all. H. Porter Abbott gives one such example in the form of“First the knight sinks into a bog, then he is set upon by wild rodents, then his pantscatch on fire…” (38). The presence of the same individual, the knight, in a series ofevents suggests to us that this is a narrative. A set of causally unrelated events notbound together by the presence of the same individual(s) would prove to be a moredifficult challenge. This type of representation might not invite us to apply a narra-tive script at all but process the text in terms of some predominantly non-narrativegenre like the chronicle, the journal or the diary. The same question of simple tem-porality is often discussed with regard to E. M. Forster’s example, “The king diedand then the queen died,” which Forster understands as a simple story, meaning bythis a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence, lacking however the causalarrangement of a plot (the counterexample is the more explicitly marked causalstructure of “The king died, and then the queen died of grief”) (82).

It must be kept in mind that the distinction Forster makes here is not betweennarrative and non-narrative forms of verbal expression, since he sees both of thesesentences as constituting a story, but between different aspects of the novel and be-tween low and high forms of literary art (81–83). In the latter sentence, for Forster,

The Metaphor of Narrative as Travel 293

the sense of causality overshadows the time-sequence, but temporality is still a sem-inal component of the plot. The generic perspective in Forster’s argument should notbe neglected since it appears that what counts as temporal or causal organization in astory varies from one genre to another. Travel narratives have their own identifyingtraits and generic expectations that evoke quite specific questions of sequence andconsequence.

To better illustrate the payoffs of thinking about the narrative through the travelmetaphor, I turn now to discuss Graham Greene’s travel book Journey Without Maps.My interest in Greene’s West African travelogue is less in developing a detailedanalysis of the text than in showing, in terms of the travel concept, how this text in-vites us to pose questions of the relation between narrative sequence and conse-quence. Following the lead of Greene’s title, I start with some considerations aboutthe role of maps and itineraries in travel narratives.

THE ITINERARY AND THE MAP

One obvious means through which travel writing builds on the relationship be-tween consecutiveness and consequence are maps and itineraries. In consideringthem, however, we must move beyond narratology and narrative theory proper toquestions of referentiality and generic expectations so as to better understand thecognitive functions of the travel metaphor. One feature of graphic maps in travel nar-ratives is that they concreticize the fabula of a travel story; or at least the fabula canbe conceived of, with the help of the map, in terms of actual space, of geography. Incase the map is missing, travel stories often prompt their readers to provide a map:on the Web one can for instance find various competing maps of Odysseus’s travels.The fact that all these maps differ from each other, sometimes quite radically, is aproof of the seemingly inherent potential of, and impulse in, travel narrative to bethought as a concrete spatial configuration.9 Furthermore, the need to draw maps ofa narrative may be an indication of the inherent potential in graphic maps as mentalrepresentations for any narrative text.

In their function as potential narrative programs the map and the itinerary sug-gest further affinities between travel and narrative. In this analogy, the map indicatesboth the route followed and the trace that is interpreted as a story. Often the map, inits graphic form, also outlines possibilities of choice, possible lines of travel that arenot chosen. The map, therefore, is not only a model of a reference world, affirmingthe referential pact of travel writing, but may presuppose a narrative. The itinerary,the succession of traversed spaces in the map, is already a part of the transformationof travel into narrative. The map indicates the literal space of places and events but itis also realized and practiced by the traveler.10 The itinerary, whether in graphic formon the map, a written list of places and times, or implied in the reported events, me-diates between the possibilities of the space of the map and the transformation of theexperience of space in writing. The itinerary traces the order and the direction oftravel, its sequence.

However, if the itinerary in travel writing may function as a potential index ofnarrative structure, there remains the difficult question of the relation of the itinerary

294 Kai Mikkonen

to the process of travel. This difficulty is due to the fact that the order of a journey isoften only created in traveling (in its open-ended temporal process) or can be knownonly after the journey (as a retrospect product of the experience). Travel narrativedoes not have to follow the organization of the map nor even the diachronic logic ofmovement through time and space—even if such features are central expectations ofthe genre. It is, likewise, a common experience to have travel shatter the traveler’sexpectations and transgress his or her initial plans.

The question of open-ended travel is particularly pertinent to the reading ofmany modern literary travel books such as Journey Without Maps, which chroniclesGraham Greene’s travel to West Africa, from January to April 1935. The itinerary ofGreene’s and his cousin Barbara Greene’s travel serves as a basis for the book’s divi-sion into three parts and subchapters. The first section of the travelogue describes thejourney from England to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, and the train ride tothe Liberian border; the second part tells about events on the trek from the border tothe Liberian village of Ganta, including a passage in French Guinea; and the last partrelates the trip from Ganta to Grand Bassa on the coast and the return boat to Mon-rovia including a short note on the journey back from Freetown to Dover, England.The text, however, constantly diverts from the given chronological order of travel.The travel events, episodes and impressions are punctuated by descriptions of peopleand acts of reading; the text includes anticipatory passages, memories and reflectionson people and matters at home.

The title of Greene’s travel book is not literally true. It claims the absence ofmaps on a journey whose travelogue actually includes the route drawn on a small,sketchy map of Sierra Leone and Liberia.11 In fact, the bold but untrue title serves asa guide for multiple possible interpretations and calls for the reader’s response interms of the relation between travel and narrative. One of its meanings is nearly true:in 1935 Greene and his cousin entered a relatively unmapped area of Liberia. Themaps the Greenes were able to find for Sierra Leone and Liberia before their tripshowed whole areas left blank; they were inaccurate, useless and imaginary (seeGreen 45–46; Sherry 512, 528–529). For example, an American military map of thearea included empty spaces with remarks of the whereabouts of “cannibals.” Anotherthing the title indicates is practical knowledge about the travel conditions. During his journey in Sierra Leone and Liberia Greene realized that travel by time-table wasimpossible and that the only way to plan the journey was “to know the next town orvillage ahead and repeat it as you go” (47). Therefore, instead of using maps and itineraries, he gradually became used to “drifting with Africa” (66).

These practical meanings are inseparable from various metaphorical and ideo-logical connotations in a mapless West Africa. They include, for instance, a writer’ssearch for new, unexpected material;12 a means of self-analysis; or the colonial no-tion of African space as void of history and culture.13 Here, however, I will leavesuch implications aside and concentrate on one specific meaning, that is, the ques-tion of Greene’s cultivated resistance to maps and itinerary that bears significance interms of the problem of consecutiveness/consequence. Greene’s growing determina-tion to “drift” on unmapped paths reveals an excitement not only in unstructured ad-venture but also in travel writing that does not respect the structure given by mapsand itineraries. This drifting involves, further, a hesitation to use the conventional

The Metaphor of Narrative as Travel 295

“life is a journey” and “life is a story” metaphors, at least in the sense that therecould be a neat analogy between the experience of life, the order of travel and theorder of narratives. In this respect the book’s second epigraph, by the Americanphysician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, becomes important. In the beginning ofthe passage that Greene cites, Holmes claims that

[t]he life of an individual is in many respects like a child’s dissected map. If Icould live a hundred years, keeping my intelligence to the last, I feel as if Icould put the pieces together until they made a properly connected whole. As itis, I, like all others, find a certain number of connected fragments, and a largenumber of disjointed pieces, which I might in time place in their natural con-nection. Many of these pieces seem fragmentary, but would in time show them-selves as essential parts of the whole. What strikes me very forcibly is thearbitrary and as it were accidental way in which the lines of junction appear torun irregularly among the fragments. […]

The central metaphors of this passage, the problem of the “dissected map,” the “frag-mentary pieces” of life and the arbitrary “lines of junction,” link Greene’s travel nar-rative to the metaphorical notion that “life is a journey” in the form of a question: inwhat sense, if at all, can life (and travel as a microcosm of life) be experienced as aconnected whole like a narrative? Or can one, so to say, live out narratives? Themetaphor of a child’s dissected map in the Holmes epigraph evokes the dilemma thatcharacterizes Greene’s travel book and the meaning of travel as “drifting”: the con-tradiction between the promise of understanding one’s life as a connected whole—life has not only a spatialized temporal order like a map and an itinerary, but it is alsocausally organized like a narrative—and the distrust of that very same possibility(since life is an ongoing process without clear beginning or end).

Greene’s idea of a traveling that is not fully conscious—“it is not the fully con-scious mind which chooses West Africa in preference to Switzerland” (20)—or thatcannot be fully verbalized, and that no map can control, draws on the same ambigu-ous dynamic of plotting between a grasp of a connected whole and the sense of anopen-ended process. Journey Without Maps suggests that there is always potentialambiguity in the status of the itinerary as there is in the concept of the fabula. Itiner-ary is, on the one hand, the map that the traveler follows (temporal and spatial order),but, on the other hand, it is also a history of travels—the map as narrative (combin-ing temporal and causal orders in the told story). In the same way the narrative se-quence of the story may be thought to exist both before and after the discourse.

For more theoretical insight about the relation of the map and the itinerary totemporal and causal narrative structure, we can turn to two important points of refer-ence from the 1970s, Louis Marin’s study of utopian spaces and signifying practices,Utopiques. Jeux d’espace [Utopics: Spatial Play], and Michel de Certeau’s L’inven-tion du quotidian [The Practice of Everyday Life], a theory of everyday practices.Both Marin and de Certeau develop an analogy between the map-itinerary opposi-tion on the one hand and the distinction between fabula and sjuzhet, or story and dis-course, on the other. Moreover, their theories involve an interactional model of the

296 Kai Mikkonen

relation between the map and the itinerary, a sense of a meaning-making process be-tween the two. Marin argues, for instance, that the itinerary of travel narrative also“constitutes the map, which is, as representation, the product of the narrative” (44).For de Certeau, similarly, the spatial reference of the map implies the structure of thenarrative by pointing to the transformation of geographic inscription into discourse,space into time.14 In de Certeau’s model, the narrative nature of walking in a city canbe further distinguished as an interaction between place [lieu] and space [éspace].Place, for de Certeau, is “the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elementsare distributed in relationships of coexistence,” while space is composed of intersec-tions of mobile elements: space “occurs as the effect produced by the operations thatorient it.” A sense of space, in other words, is a practiced place.15

The title of Greene’s travel book, and the significance of drifting, relies on theanalogy between travel and narrative, but also on the dilemma between a conceptionof travel as a connected whole, in the form of a pre-understanding or retrospectiveknowledge, and the uncontrollable process of the disjointed experiences travelingoften includes. The emphasis on the importance of going astray involves an interrup-tion in the relation de Certeau describes as obtaining between place and space. Al-ready the very beginning of Journey Without Maps, the first subchapter, “HarvestFestival,” evolves around an experience of losing the sense of fixed points of direc-tion. The book starts with Greene entering, by accident, the harvest festival prepara-tions in the vestry of St. Dunstan’s Church while trying to find the Liberianconsulate.

Travel is always to some extent threatening to be multidirectional and even“non-narrative” because too much can recounted, even the boring and the uninterest-ing. The traveler’s description can interrupt the fabula, break down the temporalframe of representation. Traditionally, travel narrative is organized by the cumula-tive, observational enterprise of documenting geography, landscape, flora, fauna,people, and customs. We can easily recall the ocular obsessions of sightseeing guide-books. An important single event in this respect, building on this convention, isGreene’s description of the Liberian forest as lacking any interesting detail. Thewriter focuses here on the difficulty of description. Greene claims that the Liberianforest had a peculiar quality of deadness that was unknown to him from all previousdescriptions of nature: “The word ‘forest’ to me had always conveyed a sense ofwildness and beauty, of an active natural force, but this forest was simply a greenwilderness, and not even so very green” (156). What Greene registered in this forestwas acute boredom, associated for him with the “agonizing boredom of ‘apartness’”(158) that he knew from his childhood. This boredom, furthermore, he saw in starkcontrast with the happiness he had felt in Africa as he had been realizing his “desirefor an instinctive way of life,” the primal memory or the racial source (ibid.).

The fact that the itinerary can usually only be known after the end of travel ex-emplifies not only the backward logic of causal relation but also the importance ofthe crucial experiences of unresolved direction and shattered expectations duringtravel. Digression and chronological deviation, typical to odyssey and nomadism, in-crease the sense of narrativity by upsetting expectations as to the agents’ goal. Mostclassical, episodic travel stories, from Homer to Joyce, capitalize on detouring,

The Metaphor of Narrative as Travel 297

deterritorialisation and open time. They occlude causal relations, present examplesof the discontinuous, the amorphous, and the surprising; the path of travel, whilestructuring the time and space of narrative, suggests contingency and chance meet-ings. In some cases, travel narratives can make it difficult to discern chronology orcausal order at all, by emphasizing the traveler’s uncertainty, wandering or opennessto multiple stories and memories. An open-ended journey or deterritorialisation is atone end of the spectrum of travel experiences. Another ultimate metaphor for di-gressing narration is the experience of being stuck in a labyrinth or a maze, a senseof journey in which all possible itineraries are predetermined. A labyrinth has only asingle path but it is maximally circuitous. A maze is emblematic of narrative mecha-nisms that threaten reversible sequence with irreversible consequence and a closedup space. In a maze, every turn in direction is fatal not only since all sequences havedifferent consequences but since all points in space are part of a closure and confus-ingly similar.

In contrast, Greene’s description of being stuck in dull, dead jungle not onlybreaks down the temporal frame of the travel story but also shatters his previous un-derstanding based on a series of literary descriptions. Greene tries to match his expe-rience with descriptions of forests and nature in Louis-Ferdinand Céline, A.E.Housman, and Wordsworth. In Henri Michaux’s Ecuador (1929) and Un barbare enAsie (1945), similarly, travel is on the verge of ceasing to be an event. The exhausted,belated modern traveler’s immobility simultaneously questions the very idea of anarrative (event as the inspiration and justification of a narrative), suggesting thatmovement is nothing but closure or that there is no closure on the horizon of the al-ready seen. After three days on the sea on the way to South America, Michaux asksin his journal where the sense of travel is: “Mais où est-il donc, ce voyage?” [Butwhere is it now, the travel?] (16).

Greene’s and Michaux’s literary devices reveal that any travel narrative presup-poses the expectation that, at least upon return, the initial situation could be trans-gressed, mediated, and possibly solved. In Greene’s Liberian forest, theseexpectations are shattered to the extent that it is hard for the writer to restore thesense of travel except through intertextual filters that also seem lacking in their de-scriptive force.

The challenge to the order of travel is only provisional, however. In Greene’stravel book, the sense of (nearly) directionless drifting, as well as the experience ofacute boredom in the middle of it, are framed by the time of writing, the retrospec-tive frame of the narration that connects the various events together. The moment ofwriting, as different from the time of traveling, provides the text with connectionsbased on circularity between departure and return. Retrospective knowledge of thefinal shape of the itinerary is clearly present right from the book’s first lines: “latersitting before a hut in French Guinea, where I never meant to find myself, I remem-bered this first going astray, the buses passing at the corner and the pale autumn sun”(15). Different moments and memories of travel overlap and the time of writing con-stantly interrupts the time of travel. At the same time, a sense of consequence be-tween places and events becomes apparent, wholly different from the temporal orderof movement through space.

298 Kai Mikkonen

This does not mean, however, that the circular hermeneutics between departureand return should be thought as a simple retrospective form-giving to a series ofevents and experiences. Jean-Didier Urbain has argued that the relationship betweentravel and story (récit) in general is necessarily that of circularity, meaning that astory is a structure within travel and not merely an a posteriori frame of travel as inthe sense of a literary translation of travel experience. It is therefore also possible towrite about travel first and experience it later, or to experience travel while writingabout it, thus making the real journey a citation of the preceding narrative (la citationjouée d’un récit antérieur, 370). In Greene’s travel book the moments of travel andthe perspective of the time of writing inform one another reciprocally. For instance, inthe very beginning of the text the experience of sitting before a hut in French Guineais superimposed on another moment of seeing busses pass at a London street corner.

Over the course of the narrative, Journey Without Maps, wanderings withoutmaps gradually make more room for contingency, chance encounter, and the risks oftravel. The traveler begins to repeat the sense of the present (he could only know thename of the next village). At the same time, however, the hermeneutics of departureand return is always re-affirmed by the writer’s retrospective point of view, where thegoal of remembrance is to integrate events into a narrative. Greene’s travel bookmakes manifest to us the complexities and the rich possibilities in the relationshipbetween narrative sequence and consequence by evoking (but also questioning)travel metaphors like “life is a journey” and “narrative is travel.”

THE PERSONALIZING POINT OF VIEW

As earlier work in narrative theory has suggested the personalized point of view of the traveler typically provides the time of travel with a globalizing andcausally motivated grasp of the experience of travel. This is also to say that even iftravel writing is very flexible in its techniques of narration, it prefers a focalized nar-rative mode. In travel literature, typically, an individual or a group of people engagehere and now in an act of movement and perception. The traversed spaces are unifiedin the traveler’s experience and recounting, which is punctuated by episodes, namesof places and local descriptions. Similarly, I would like to suggest that the cognitivefoundations and communicative functions of the “narrative is travel” metaphor arebased, to a significant degree, on the representation of the human experience ofspace and movement. This involves, even when we are dealing with examples ofpure description of the place of travel, the portrayal of human consciousness en-gaged in goal-oriented activity. The centrality of the traveler’s viewpoint can furtherbe linked to recent cognitive-linguistic approaches in narratology that see the repre-sentation of experientiality (and embodiment) as an essential condition for narrative(see Fludernik 28–29). Recent approaches to the cognitive and experiential featuresof fiction have also shown how the understanding of fictional narratives is tied to theprojection of a world. For Marie-Laure Ryan, fictional narrative is an imaginative“recentering” in another possible world (103–105). In this regard, travel narrativesare prototypical cases of all narratives.

The Metaphor of Narrative as Travel 299

While travel literature conceptualizes space in terms of perpetual movement,travel is also an operational concept that elaborates a mental representation of aworld, whether it is in first-person or third-person discourse. As Tomashevsky sug-gested, travel writing’s personalizing, subjective point of view is a central means forcreating causal links between events. In a travel journal, perhaps the genre’s mostprototypical form, the speaker is expected to be constrained at some level to the im-mediate environment and to the objects available there for description. At the sametime, the mental processing of a world is also a means of engrossing the reader in thestoryworld. As with Journey Without Maps, the reader is witness to the mentalprocess by which the writer forms the representation of a world (a place, a destina-tion, home). The traveler’s movement and mental processing, therefore, realize thepotential of space as a practiced place.

Any travel story is a world-creating situation in itself and endowed with poten-tial actionality. Such an effect is created through a certain aesthetic of spontaneityand presence, or an illusion of the immediacy of the past event. Travel writingachieves this illusion by combining events into a sequence of adventures, based onthe displacement of one or more people. The traveler, according to Louis Marin, un-avoidably “anthropomorphizes the wanderings of the text,” by traversing a geo-graphic and textual network that is thus raised “from anonymity” (42–43).16

Therefore too, the journey pattern provides any story with what Adrien Pasquali callsthe globalizing grasp of the tale (112). Travel narratives, both fictional and non-fic-tional, project worlds in this way, in a tension between the immediacy of perceptionand meaningful consequence, each crafting a self-enclosed universe according towhich its propositions are read.

All this adds up to create an effect of human-scale space and of a humanized ex-perience of time. For Paul Ricoeur, famously, “time becomes human time to the ex-tent that it is organised after the manner of a narrative” (3). Similarly, for FrankKermode, “the clock’s tick-tock” is “a model of what we call a plot, an organizationthat humanizes time by giving it form” (45). Travel narratives provide us with a basicmodel for “viewing” space and events within time. At the same time, they offer us aspecial advantage in understanding time by enacting in time something that seemslike an inevitable pattern of events: a correlation between the structuring of the textand that of the world, or between the time of the text and the time of the world.

Travel writing evokes and creates the world, a world as possibility, as in therobinsonads and utopias that are models of a microcosm and its temporal organiza-tion. In modern travel writing, the categories of time and space, of temporal succes-sion and spatial configuration are superimposed on each other in an intensive, andoften intensified, manner. Several generic aspects of travel writing contribute to thiseffect. First of all, because the operations of the mental representation of a world areforegrounded in travel narratives—places are seen in relation to their perception—the reading mind is objectified within the text as its visible reflecting surface. There-fore too, the travel story enables a double reading of the same world: the world as itis seen and the world as it is narrated. The world as narrated involves the idea that theretelling of a journey is always a traveler’s translation of a space that could be revis-ited or of an experience that could be relived. It is a basic presupposition in travel lit-

300 Kai Mikkonen

erature that one is able to transfer through writing, with no loss of persuasive power,the force of experience, time and space. In more theoretical terms, Pasquali has ar-gued that the personalized point of view of travel writing is dependent on a doubledetermination between the perspectives of the travel process and the order of a final-ized text. This creates quite specific effects in between the prospective determinationof the unfolding experience of travel with its virtual dimension, that is, the sense oftravel in process, and the retrograde determination of a finalized story that orients the narration (112).

A travel narrative such as Greene’s provides us with a basic model for negotiat-ing the relationship between the process of experience and narrative order, the differ-ence between the shape of experience and the shape of narrative. What adds to thiscapacity is that to write about travel usually means to re-enact earlier journeys and tosuccumb to pre-existing literary models. Other travel accounts often function as theincitement and favorite companion to a voyage, and thus play a considerable role inthe making and mediation of an itinerary in the first place. Greene, for instance, usespre-existing texts as an intertextual filter to mediate the gap between the “open”order of traveling experience and the order of writing. Quotations from books anddescriptions of reading experiences punctuate the travel throughout Journey WithoutMaps and, as in the disturbing case of going through a dull, dead forest, the writer isengaged in re-evaluating earlier readings in regard to the travel experience.

The experience of distance and the foreignness of the described world also in-crease narrativity. The “exhausted discourse” of certain modern and postmoderntravel writing, even if it challenges the possibility of evoking a foreign world, isbased on the premise of constructing a world through negation (as a reaction againstthe others’ experience of the exotic, the strange and the marvelous). Greene’s “map-less” Africa is, at least partly, a personal and imaginary construct rather than astrictly real, geographic space. The literary references, the interspersed memories,and the juxtaposition of the time of travel and the time of writing help to impose aspatial-temporal method on the static, map-like structuring of space. Writing thus re-sists the notion of space as a static entity.

CONCLUSION

I have managed to take only a few tentative steps toward a theory of travel innarrative and narrative in travel, or toward what Michel Butor has playfully calleditérologie. I have investigated the motivation of the “narrative is travel” metaphorfrom the perspective of the relationship between consecutiveness and consequence.To summarize, the argument I have developed here is that the “narrative is travel”metaphor functions basically in two ways, by giving identity to a series of events andspaces, and by increasing narrativity. These effects are based, to a significant degree,on the experiential features that the travel metaphor activates (and blends together).For instance, the travel metaphor helps to raise the question of the process-versus-product aspect of narrative in a palpable way: how to represent freedom and contin-gency in a structure? Travel writing shows explicitly how causality and chronology,

The Metaphor of Narrative as Travel 301

narrative consequence and temporal sequence can fuse. But typically travel storiesalso tend to break this conjunction, at least provisionally, during the course of thenarrative. As regards the increase of narrativity, the travel metaphor suggests a wayto make sense of experience, relying on narrative competence and the culturally en-forced necessity to tell a story. The very suggestion of travel produces narrative, orincreases narrativity, since the idea of travel personalizes the experience of time andspace through the subjective perspective of movement and of perceiving a world.Greene’s travel narrative explores the ways in which time can be personalized as anarrative and how the traveler’s viewpoint introduces a sense of consequence to thesequence of places and events.

As we look ahead to future work, we can already anticipate that a better under-standing of the identifying traits and generic expectations of travel narratives canhelp us see certain narratological premises in somewhat different light, particularlythe importance of temporal sequence and causality as essential conditions for narra-tive. It is significant to note, furthermore, that many identifying markers of the mod-ern novel, such as detailed scenes and descriptions, the presentation of speechverbatim, shifts between observation and inner reflection, or metadiegetic interrup-tions between different narrative levels, are characteristics of much modern nonfic-tional travel writing. The referential nature of travel writing, however, requiresmodifications to the narratological analysis of such devices in narrative fiction. Theapproach that I have outlined here hopes to pave way for a more systematic under-standing of the specific narrative logic and experience of narrative in travel stories.

ENDNOTES

1. For Adams, both the literary travel story and the modern novel are based on an “imaginative reshapingof reality” (134) by which he means that the two genres were produced through “a conflict and an al-liance between realism and romance,” between truth claims and imagination (108–109). On the histor-ical relation between the novel and travel writing see also Chupeau.

2. In some literary theories the travel concept even functions as the precondition of all metaphoricalmeaning. For instance, Georges Van Den Abbeele argues in his Travel as Metaphor (1992) that travelis a mastertrope, the metaphor of a metaphor in the sense that any metaphor involves a transferal ofmeaning, a transportation of literal meaning out of its context. Thus “the structure of the metaphor be-comes the metaphor for the travel of meaning” (xxiii).

3. Narrativity is understood here in the way Gerald Prince and Monika Fludernik define the term: as a setof properties characterising narrative, or as the formal and contextual features that make a narrativemore or less narrative. See Fludernik 20.

4. In his essay “L’espace du roman” [The Space of the Novel], Butor also emphasizes the thematic affin-ity between the experience of distant places in travel and the literary imagination: “Toute fiction s’in-scrit donc en notre espace comme voyage, et l’on peut dire à cet égard que c’est là le thèmefondamental de toute littérature romanesque; tout roman qui nous raconte un voyage est donc plusclair, plus explicite que celui qui n’est pas capable d’exprimer métaphoriquement cette distance entrele lieu de la lecture et celui où nous emmène le récit” [All fiction thus inscribes itself in our space astravel, and we may say that this is the fundamental theme in all prose fiction; any novel that tells usabout a journey is clearer and more explicit than novels that cannot metaphorically express the distancebetween the place of reading and the place where the story takes us] (50).

302 Kai Mikkonen

5. Similar insights can be found in some recent French research on the genre of travel writing. Theanalogies between reading, writing, and travel literature are investigated for instance in Montalbetti(100–120).

6. Elsewhere also, the Russian formalists emphasized the importance of non-literary forms like travelnarratives in the evolution of the novel. Roman Jakobson argued, for instance, that travelogues, as akind of transitional genre, served an important function in the development of the modern novel (45).The travelogue for instance contributed to the novel the intimate point of view of a contemporary in-dividual that was absent in earlier conventional literary forms (as in Russian literature before the earlynineteenth century).

7. Todorov, for instance, sees that temporal order and causality are closely linked and easily confusedand further that “the logical series is in the reader’s eyes a much stronger relation than the temporalseries; if the two go together, he sees only the first” (42). For Rimmon-Kenan, in turn, temporal suc-cession is a sufficient condition for a narrative since “causality can often (always?) be projected ontotemporality” (18).

8. See Genette 80.

9. Gibson’s insights that the various spaces in The Odyssey are rigorously separated but “cannot be reducedto any homogeneous or global whole,” or that “the mythical adventure of Odysseus is nothing more orless than the connecting up of these incommensurable spaces,” are in line with the idea of the incompa-rable maps (17). On the complexities involved in charting a map of a fictional world, see Ryan 2003.

10. There are, naturally, great differences between maps in what comes to the way a map can be incorpo-rated in the verbal narrative, how text and image interact within the map, or how visible the map’s enun-ciation as narrative discourse may be. Such differences are discussed, for instance, by Jacob 247–251.

11. See Thacker for an analysis on the symbolic differences in the maps of the various editions of thebook (the editions of 1936, 1953 and 1978) (13–16).

12. This involves a desire to fill out the names and places on the map and a reversible equivalence be-tween the two processes: to travel is to write and to write is to travel—both are the objective and ef-fects of the other. Similarly, Philippe Dubois has suggested that for Michel Butor the map, as a formof an inscribed world, or the world as an open catalogue/dictionary, is an inexhaustible reserve ofreadable signs in which one can invest interest and meaning (151).

13. By “self-analysis” I mean that West Africa serves Greene in Journey Without Maps as scenery forposing moral questions about oneself and one’s culture. In the beginning of the book, the writerevokes the image of an unconscious Africa that represents “more than I could say” (20). Further, thelack of maps is also a religious-philosophical allegory—involving the intention to know “one’s placein time” (19)—for searching what has been lost in European culture (sense of seediness, brutality,childhood, primitive virtue). Among the cultural and ideological “maps” evoked by Greene’s com-mentary in the book is the lop-sided information about West Africa by British newspapers and Gov-ernment sources. In the same category we can count Greene’s own Africanism, meaning the frequentsuperimposition of notions of childhood and primitive virtue on African spaces—“a quality of dark-ness is needed, of the inexplicable” (20)—that recalls colonialist notions of Africa as void of historyand advanced human culture. The notion of the colonial discourse of “Africanism” is critically exam-ined and developed by Christopher L. Miller. For more on Greene’s “anti-cartographic discourse” andits relationship with imperialist views of Africa’s achronicity, see Thacker 19–20.

14. Franco Moretti is also principally in line with this argument as he suggests that the literary map en-joys a position between the pattern of experience, or chronotope, which is described in the story andthat may also structure the story, and narrative discourse (or “narrative flow” as he calls it). Morettiargues, more precisely, that even if the literary map may not be an explanation itself of the spatial andtemporal pattern of the story, it is a specific form of knowledge that shows to the reader “that there issomething that needs to be explained” (84). For a more extended “application” of de Certeau’s con-cepts to Greene’s book, see Thacker 21–25.

The Metaphor of Narrative as Travel 303

15. The idea equals Mieke Bal’s distinction between “frame-space” and “thematized space,” the firstmeaning the place of action and the latter meaning “acting place” or space transformed into a story(136).

16. For Germaine Brée, similarly, the protagonist of a travel narrative moves as a focal point for actionsand ideas thus realizing narrative as an index of digression. The episodes of travel “become unifiedonly through the voyager’s journeying, when seen by him in the light of his progress: it is thepanorama, in the last analysis, that acquires significance, and the voyager as such only through hispassage as traveller. Yet the panorama is only present in so far as the traveler moved through it andrecorded his experience” (89).

WORKS CITED

Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002.

Adams, Percy G. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel. Lexington: The Univ. Press of Ken-tucky, 1983.

Bal, Mieke. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997.

Barthes, Roland. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.” In Image—Music—Text, trans-lated by Stephen Heath, 79–124. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Brée, Germaine. “The Ambiguous Voyage: Mode or Genre.” Genre 1, no. 2 (April 1968): 87–96.

Butor, Michel. “Le voyage et l’écriture.” In Répertoire IV, 9–29. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1997.

———. “L’espace du roman” [The space of the novel]. In Essais sur le roman, 48–58. Paris: Gallimard,2000.

———. “Travel and Writing.” In Temperamental Journeys. Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel,edited by Michael Kowalewski, translated by John Powers and K. Lisker, 53–70. Athens: Univ. OfGeorgia Press, 1992.

Chaillou, Michel. “La mer, la route, la poussière.” In Pour une littérature voyageuse, edited by AlainBorer, Nicolas Bouvier, et al, 57–81. Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe, 1992.

Chupeau, Jacques. “Les récits de voyages aux lisières du roman.” Revue d’Histoire littéraire de laFrance 3–4 (1977): 536–553.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: Univ. ofCalifornia Press, 1984.

Dubois, Philippe. “Le voyage et le livre. Au voyageur oblique.” In Arts et Légendes d’espaces. Figuresdu voyage et rhétoriques du monde, edited by Christian Jacob and Frank Lestringant, 149–201.Paris: Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure, 1981.

Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s HiddenComplexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1927.

Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972.

Gerrig, Richard J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. NewHaven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993.

Gibson, Andrew. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1996.

304 Kai Mikkonen

Greene, Graham. Journey Without Maps. London: Vintage, 2002.

Jacob, Christian. L’Empire des cartes. Approche théorique de la cartographie à travers l’histoire. Paris:Albin Michel, 1992.

Jakobson, Roman. “The Dominant.” In Language in Literature, edited by Krystyna Pomorska andStephen Rudy, 41–46. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1987.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,1966.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980.

Lakoff, George and Mark Turner. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago:Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989.

Marin, Louis. Utopics: Spatial Play. Translated by Robert A. Vollrath. New Jersey: Humanities Press,1984.

Michaux, Henri. Ecuador. Journal de voyage. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.

Miller, Christopher L. Blank Darkness. Africanist Discourse in French. Chicago: Univ. of ChicagoPress, 1985.

Montalbetti, Christine. Le Voyage, le monde et la bibliothèque. Paris: PUF, 1997.

Moretti, Franco. “Graphs, Maps, Trees. Abstract Models for Literary History—2.” New Left Review(Mar-Apr 2004): 79–103.

Morson, Gary Saul. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994.

Pasquali, Adrien. Le tour des horizons. Critique et récits de voyages. Paris: Klincksieck, 1994.

Richardson, Brian. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative. Newark: Univ. ofDelaware Press, 1997.

Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol I. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer.Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984.

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen, 1983.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality. Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Elec-tronic Media. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001.

———. “Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space.” In Narrative Theory and the Cogni-tive Sciences, edited by David Herman, 214–242. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003.

Serres, Michel. Hermès IV. La distribution. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977.

Thacker, Andrew. “Journey without maps. Travel theory, geography and the syntax of space.” In CulturalEncounters: European Travel-Writing in the 1930s, edited by Charles Burdett and Derek Duncan,11–28. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002.

Tomashevsky, Boris. “Thematics.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by Lee T. Lemonand Marion J. Reis, 61–95. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965.

Urbain, Jean-Didier. Secrets de voyage. Menteurs, imposteurs et autres voyageurs invisibles. Paris: Édi-tions Payot & Rivages, 1998.

Van Den Abbeele, Georges. Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau. Minneapolis: Univ. ofMinnesota Press, 1992.

The Metaphor of Narrative as Travel 305