audience?
In the editors’ introduction to the first-person accounts, they say that Marco Polo may have employed a bit of “exaggeration and self-aggrandizing.” I think that this is pretty true for all the accounts we read, which makes we wonder what the intended forum and audience for these writings were.
For example, Polo says of Kin-sai that its bridges are high enough for boats with masts can pass under them but that they are attached to the streets with such a shallow slope that foot traffic and carriages can still pass over them. This seems like an engineering feat predicated on obscenely wide streets, which I can’t quite imagine and don’t really see buttressed by the rest of his text.
Ibn Battuta opens his piece by saying that the church gongs made “the very skies shake,” and only a sentence later says that the palace is guarded by one hundred men. His use of fantastic language juxtaposed with plainly spoken fact makes me feel like it would be hard to take any facts he’s reporting difficult to take at face value. Maybe I’m just more cynical than his contemporaries.
My point is I wonder whether these men were commissioned to write what we’ve read, or if they were personal accounts that just happened into the public sphere. And, if they were commissioned, where they more aimed toward a sort of history textbook context with accurate facts, or more toward and US Weekly situation with delightfully over-the-top imagery and fantastical stories?
Comments
I agree that all of the stories exaggerated to a certain extent, but Polo’s description of Kin-Sai seemed almost imaginary to me. The way that he spoke seemed to flow with the intent to entertain people with the history and knowledge of Kin-Sai whether the information is true or false. I believe that this presentation of history, even though it is embellished, allows some facts in a way that could attract a more populous audience and gain interest in the subject.
Posted by: AbbyS | January 24, 2007 10:37 PM