“Mechanically I laid myself back in the sledge and let my horse run for safety. The wolf did not mind me in the least, but took a leap over me, and falling furiously on the horse, began to devour the hind-part of the poor animal, which ran the faster for his pain and terror. Thus unnoticed and safe myself, I lifted my head slyly up, and with horror I beheld that the wolf had ate his way into the horse’s body; it was not long before he had fairly forced himself into it, when I took my advantage, and fell upon him with the butt-end of my whip. This unexpected attack in his rear frightened him so much, that he leapt forward with all his might: the horse’s carcass dropped on the ground, but in his place the wolf was in the harness, and I on my part whipping him continually: we both arrived in full career safe to St. Petersburg, contrary to our respective expectations, and very much to the astonishment of the spectators.“
This extract from the Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, published in 1785, made me laugh because of its sheer preposterousness. The phenomena it contributed to however, namely the literary invention of a wild and retrogressive Eastern Europe in need of taming by the West, was a very serious one.
First thing to note: a wolf is a beast. The wolf represents Eastern Europe. Baron Munchausen’s choice to present a wild animal as characteristic of the East instead of a human being is significant. It implies that the territory he is exploring is an uncivilised, dangerous wilderness. The wolf is ferocious, but is eventually made to seem ridiculous by the sly baron, who uses his superior intelligence to trick the wolf into the harness. Read symbolically, the West has tamed the East by the end of the story, and even exploited its resources. The East has been put to the service of the West.
Second thing to notice: the explicitly sexualised imagery. ‘Hind-part’, ‘butt-end’, ‘forced himself in’; the crude analogy with anal rape is perhaps partly an attempt by the author to appeal to the low-humour of his readership. On the other hand, it is also an allusion to a violent, intimate form of domination. Eastern Europe is the victim, humiliated by the dominant West. It reflects both the deep-rooted inter-penetration between the East and the West (a transnationalism apparent in the sheer quantity of travel literature), and the power hierarchies that came with it. Echoing the thesis of Said’s Orientalism, Eastern Europe was imagined as representative of everything the West was not. The two were complementary and opposing.
Third thing to consider: the fantastical element. This extract is clearly fictional, the figment of an overcharged imagination. But it was swallowed up, regardless, by countless readers, shaping and colouring their mental maps of Eastern Europe in the process. Readers often don’t care if what they are reading is rooted in factual reality, and authors exploit this. Voltaire wrote extensively about Russia without ever having visited. Rousseau spoke on behalf of Poland, despite never having ventured further East than Switzerland. These two hugely influential Enlightenment authors exemplify the lack of concern about travel literature diverging from reality. It is why I use the words ‘invented’ and ‘imagined’. The West took control of the East through symbolic language.