Alessandro Baricco's Seta : Travel, Ventriloquism and the Other

Abstract

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.

Alessandro Baricco: The Diction of Imagism

“…Without taking into consideration Master’s and Ph.D. students’ dissertations, the reception of Baricco’s work among relevant non‐Italian critics is somewhat neglected and dated. Robert Rushing (2003) channels Baricco’s Silk into the genre of travel literature in which the female Orient leads the narcissistic Western male back home. Inge Lanslots (1999) has analyzed the evocative narrative technique and its musicality produced by the intentional set of repetitions:

Baricco’s narrative is postmodern in an eclectic way…his narrative is non‐linear, that is complex, obeying musical principles.

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