Emily Klotz
Reading Response – Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt
I will admit, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to reading this book. Travel writing has never particularly caught my interest (or so I thought), and after having read a portion of this book in a previous class, I was expecting it to be dense and difficult to get through. However, I was pleasantly surprised by how much it managed to capture my interest. Pratt’s analysis of travel writing’s relationship to imperialism was truly insightful and fascinating.
A question that nagged at me throughout the book, however, was how her insights regarding travel writing could be reinterpreted in modern-day works, and whether the ideas and motivations behind the imperialistic travel writers still existed, albeit in an altered form due to globalization. While she addressed these questions somewhat in the last chapter of the book, I felt slightly dissatisfied with her conclusions. The idea that narratives of imperialism and colonization have transformed into narratives of the metropole and immigration was really interesting, but not explored as much as I would have liked. Granted, she acknowledged that this book is not actually about globalization, and she couldn’t really get into all the nuances of it in great detail, but I personally would have really liked to read something that explored the ways imperialism can still exist even in modern day travel writing. I thought of the popularity a few years back of the book Eat Pray Love (which I never actually read myself, but heard a lot about), and other narratives about urban Everypersons who, disillusioned with city life, leave home on a journey to “find” themselves (usually characters who are wealthy enough to suddenly drop everything and go on a big world tour, which is not exactly the norm). The idealization of Non-Home, existing so that the white, upper-middle-class traveler can have an adventure. I think that sort of narrative is still fairly prevalent and popular in our culture, and definitely a remnant of the sort of imperialism that Pratt discusses.
Oddly enough, while reading the first few chapters of this book, I also drew a strange correlation to an unexpected work of complete fantasy: the computer game Myst. So, as part of my response to this book (and because I love Myst), I’d like to see if I can explain why I drew this correlation, and whether it’s at all important. It seems to me that, while there are no real places left to “colonize” in the real world (at least, not in the same way), imperialistic narratives are still played out over and over again in fantasy and sci-fi. Why? I have no clue. But it’s extremely interesting.
In the game Myst, the player – a nameless non-character who acts merely as a “moving eye on which the sights/sites register” (pg. 58), much like many of the travel writers Pratt mentions early on in the book – finds him/herself unexpectedly thrown onto a strange and mysterious island, full of incredible visuals, but devoid of life. The game itself requires the Player to explore a variety of different visually-stunning and alien worlds, all completely empty of inhabitants. While this situation in itself parallels the kind of atmosphere many early travel narratives attempted to achieve (minimizing the human element within the scenery), as Pratt describes in Ch.2, the game itself asks the Player to specifically study the remnants of humanity left in these landscapes, to piece together a history, but not to collect anything. So, in the sense of what the Player’s purpose in the game is, it isn’t one of conquest or even anti-conquest in quite the way that Pratt describes in the book.
In a more significant sense, though, Myst and its sequel games all have themes and ethical dilemmas very strongly related to imperialism. The main non-player character is a man named Atrus, who comes from a race of people that have the power to write books that “link” to different worlds. Atrus himself, while the protagonist of the story and a relatively good guy (especially compared to most of the other characters in the games), fits the profile of the innocent, scientific traveler that Pratt describes in the first few chapters almost exactly. He travels to a great variety of different worlds, some inhabited, some not. While in these worlds, he keeps journals (which you can read in the games) documenting both the natural features of the worlds themselves, but also his interactions with the indigenous peoples of those worlds. In his journals, Atrus often comes off as benevolent and also rather patronizing, often constructing elaborate projects or altering the worlds themselves in order to improve the lives of those living there. This is especially significant considering Atrus’s history: he is descended from a race of extremely elitist people who are the result of imperialistic attitudes taken to the extreme. Not only can they travel to new worlds: they can write new worlds, in an act that is not truly creation, but can easily seem as if it was. Atrus’s father Gehn (the main villain of the second game, Riven) represents the worst attitudes of imperialism: he sees himself as instantly superior to all the inhabitants of the worlds he travels to, even forcing many of them to treat him as a deity. He is focused on profit and conquest, and imposes his own cultural symbols and rituals onto those of the native peoples. Atrus, in contrast, rebels against his father’s ways and refuses to treat the worlds he writes as places to be “conquered.” Much like the travel writers Pratt discusses, though – particularly the naturalists who invokes the guilt of conquest “if only to distance himself from it” (pg. 56) – Atrus becomes a consumer of knowledge, traveling to a variety of worlds not to conquer but simply for the joy of discovery and learning. He records his findings in literally hundreds of journals (most of which are destroyed by the time the Player arrives in the game), and seems often to regard the inhabitants of these worlds as no different than the other elements, such as the geography, plant life, minerals in the soil, weather, etc. All are merely effects of his writing, in one way or another, and he's most interested in the causes.
As I said, though, Myst is a very subtle game, and Atrus’s imperialistic tendencies are less than obvious. He is the protagonist, and clearly a decent person in the game. In fact, he and his wife Catherine (a native woman of one of his father’s worlds, Riven, whose true name, Katran, was anglicized because Atrus could not pronounce it correctly), are the most decent and sympathetic characters in the games. Atrus is fascinating in that he loathes his father’s imperialistic attitudes, yet he can’t seem to help but have remnants of those attitudes himself. He marries an indigenous woman, and while their relationship is presented generally as equal and genuine, she still alters her own name and adopts many of the customs of his culture, while he adopts few or none of her own traditions. Interestingly enough, the basis of the entire conflict in the first game (and the reason why most of the worlds are uninhabited) is that Atrus and Katran’s two sons, Sirrus and Achenar, both became greedy and imperialistic monsters, plundering the worlds for treasure and killing off the natives. It is clear in the first game, and more so in the third and fourth games of the series, that Sirrus and Achenar’s devolution into such extreme imperialistic behavior was a direct result of Atrus himself – though the details of how Atrus’s own benevolent, idealistic behavior resulted in two such violent and greedy sons is left up to the player’s speculation.
Anyway, that’s what I started to think of when reading this book, and I was surprised myself that my brain ended up wandering to computer games while reading about white British men exploring central Africa. As I said, I thought it was a really interesting correlation. The importance of it, I’m not entirely sure – or why colonial and imperialistic themes are so prevalent in fantasy and sci-fi stories in general. But it’s something I’d definitely be interested in studying more.
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