Alessandro Baricco's novel Seta (Silk) seems acutely aware
of the Orientalist tradition of travel literature that it belongs to.
Ultimately, Baricco seems to be critical of this model of identity and
travel (encountering the Other only to banish it and re-affirm the
Self) as narcissistic, a wholly imaginary encounter with difference.
The dissipation of the threat is not at all effortless in Seta, and
leaves deliberate and constant traces of its erasure, in particular,
the specter of difference within rather than difference between. The
novel suggests that it may be impossible to establish a secure bulwark
against 'otherness.' If travel literature aims ultimately at an
'arrest,' a soothing quiescence as the voyage comes to an end, as well
as an epistemic 'seizure,' a grasping of a final and stable knowledge
of Self and Other (a knowledge that re-affirms the greater importance
of the Self)Ñif that is the case, then the discovery of difference
within raises the possibility of a movement without end, of knowledge
that cannot be fully and totally apprehended, full of anxiety as well
as possibility.
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