Plot features of the travelogue My Son on the Galley by J. Wallenberg

Abstract

The paper deals with the specific plot features of a popular Swedish travelogue My Son on the Galley (1781) in which Jacob Wallenberg describes his journey from Sweden to China in 1769–1771. The object of analysis is the general plot structure in travel novels (using Mikhail Bakhtin’s terminology) and travelogues. As a result, it is proved that My Son on the Galley is a travelogue with a linear, chronological plot structure. It includes not only description of the itself and documentary information (about the geographical and demographic position of the countries visited by the narrator, descriptions of local nature, traditions, etc.), but also there are adventurous episodes (for example, about old maids, frightened by the appearance of the Swedes; about the ship, which the sailors mistook for a pirate one, etc.) in the text. Digressions from the main theme — the journey — are interspersing as colorful illustrations of the thoughts of the narrator, and as natural-geographical, ethnographic, cultural content etc. which are so typical for travelogues, although they do not play significant role in this book. The main object for the narrator is not visit to one country or another, but secondary details of the surrounding reality, as well as author’s thoughts inspired by the journey. There are also chapters that deal with things that are not directly related to the journey (for example, domestic violence and infidelity of wives). The travelogue My Son on the Galley stands at the origins of Swedish sentimentalist prose, which was developed at the end of the 18th century.