Imprinted Life discussion
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Journey Without Maps
Graham Greene
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Pre-Reading of Journey w/o Maps
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Asma, that is the best blog I've seen in a long time! Thank you so much for posting it! Now I don't have to constantly google locations for books, I can just look them up here. Specially in classic books, when they travel, I'm curious about distances since they didn't have cars back then.
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Reading this interpretive article about Graham Greene's "Journey without Maps", I feel a bit more informed about the imminent reading of Greene's travelogue, which is apparently not without its share of horrific acts, some of its "abominations" being sometimes repressed into mere "transgressions". Journey without Maps opens with the British government's publication "Blue Book" of Liberia. No direct moral stand is taken in that guide's listing, but it might be written between the lines of its descriptions of public health, rampant diseases, war crimes, and social "sins", those primitive conditions, supposedly prior to belief in Christian ideals.
There's also comparisons to Greene's hypotexts--Freud's theory of the id and Conrad's story The Heart of Darkness. Greene apparently chose uncomfortable, unmapped Liberia for a journey as a metaphor of his curiosity to explore his subconsciousness, if he can look face-to-face at reality without turning away from it or disguising it, like a simultaneously fascinating and repelling "gangster movie". His curiosity to explore the subconscious is in addition to another metaphor to interpret the "text" of the country.
Greene's narrative might ultimately depict a subjective, "falsified reality", the "plurality of raw material" not being neatly pigeonholed:
"...the attempt to impose order on original chaos is the point at which "we went astray". Cerebration could therefore be defined as thought based on the delusion or the wish to believe that order can justifiably, in terms of truth and not expediency, be imposed on experience."For example, in his taking in all of the physical impressions about Colonel Davis, the narrator Greene does not unreservedly see someone who would commit atrocities but Greene does communicate more of the truth than the Blue Book's description does, to "give voice to what the Blue Book refuses to say".
Source: John AIREY, « Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps and the Fascination of the Abomination », E-rea [En ligne], 7.1 | 2009, mis en ligne le 15 juillet 2009, consulté le 12 septembre 2012. URL : http://erea.revues.org/849
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Source: Susan L. Blake, "Research in African Literatures", Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer, 1991), pp. 191-203. Similar titles about Warner's African experience are "New Song in a Strange Land" (1948), a phrase she uses in "Seven Days...", and "The Crossing Fee" (1968). There also is "You Cannot Unsneeze a Sneeze & Other Tales from Liberia" (1995).
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LUCKY! i want to see photographs. i will have to check the collection at work next week to see what i can dig up. the copy i'm reading does not have photos.
Books mentioned in this topic
The Human Factor (other topics)The Power and the Glory (other topics)
The Heart of the Matter (other topics)
Journey Without Maps (other topics)
Journey Without Maps (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Graham Greene (other topics)W.H. Auden (other topics)
The opening epigraphs come from W.H. Auden's second stanza of a poem "O Where Are You Going?" and from "Life and letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes", Volume 1, chapter 2.