Conradian quest versus dubious adventure: Graham and Barbara Greene in West Africa

Abstract

Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps (1936) largely conforms to the masculine tradition of imperialist travel writing, where the male protagonist emerges as the (sometimes conflicted) hero of his own narrative. Much of Journey Without Maps explores Liberia and Greene's psyche, creating parallels between Africa, the narrator's childhood, and the childhood of the human race, and embodying these parallels in a dense web of tropes and allusions. By contrast, as a woman, Barbara Greene is much less implicated in the imperialist tradition of travel writing, and at times Too Late to Turn Back disrupts some of the assumptions of this tradition through the demystification of the trope of adventure and excitement, the sporadic mockery of self and others, the self-deprecation, and the greater emphasis on reciprocity than is to be found in Journey Without Maps.