ABSTRACT
To witness without “bearing” (recounting) is a private act that poses a conundrum—can there be experience that is unshared, like the sound of the philosopher’s solitary falling tree? For present purposes there is no dilemma, since I plan to compare two classic twentieth-century texts within that quintessential witnessing genre known as the traveler’s tale—a literary form currently given considerable attention by the social sciences and humanities. 1 My subjects are Claude Lévi-Strauss and Theodore Roosevelt, authors of Tristes Tropiques (1973) and Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1919), respectively. Based upon expeditions into the same area of the Brazilian highlands, but a generation apart (Roosevelt in 1913–14 and Lévi-Strauss in 1935–37, 1938–39), the two witnesses produced accounts that differ profoundly even though they share certain common elements. I focus upon the writers as much as their texts in the spirit of Montaigne, who cited the Ancients to make the point that any traveler always takes himself on the journey and therefore perceives the world, no matter how exotic, through his own eyes. 2
