Reconciling old and new worlds: The dwelling—journey relationship as portrayed in Vilhelm Moberg’s “Emigrant” novels

Abstract

In an era when alienation, malaise and homelessness make their presence increasingly felt in the Western World, themes such as community, at-home- ness and sense of place take on renewed significance in both academic discussions and daily conversations.1 One way in which these themes can be considered is through a phenomenological perspective, which explores the underlying, taken-for-granted patterns of human experience and behavior.2 The rest-movement relationship and its associated polarities of home and reach, center and horizon, dwelling and journey, is one valuable phenomenological focus.3 Movement is associated with newness, un- familiarity, exploration and courage. It extends awareness of distance, place and experience. Movement is linked with journey, which over geographical distance or in the mind, carries the person away from a stable home base outward along a path toward confrontation with place, experience or ideas.4 Rest, the opposite of movement and journey, relates to a basic human need for spatial and environmental order and familiarity. Rest anchors the present and future in the past and maintains an experiential and historical continuity. From the vantage point of human experience, the deepest manifestation of rest is dwelling, which involves a lifestyle of regularity, repetition and cyclicity all grounded in an atmosphere of care and concern for places, things, and people.5 A pure form of dwelling is probably never possible in practice, but this fact does not dilute its significance for daily life. Dwelling can be seen as an aim to strive for, and one need is for people to become more self-consciously aware of their degree and mode of dwelling and to seek ways in which they might better dwell: “The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell". The process of dwelling is intricately associated with journey, especially if one happens to be journeying to a place different from the one that is ordinarily her home. The seven stages in this DWELLING- JOURNEY spiral show that there are different but overlapping stages in which one comes to generate a sense of at-homeness. Can this be a model to follow for your thesis? Should you begin with this spiral as a hypothesis - or should it be what you impute from the experiences on the ground?