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in Homer's The Odyssey (800 B.C.E.), which shows Odysseus moving through both geographical and non-geographical space and into the underworld. In the inward voyage, the pilgrimage archetype, and the heroic quest, characters travel to places formerly unknown to them in order to make a connection with something outside of the self—something which gives meaning and direction and orders experience.
This study introduces the out-and-in motif in the platonic quest as a new unifying thread that links each of the four primary works I discuss to my argument that identity and claims to knowledge may be tested, recovered, or created in movement to and/or within New Mexico. The platonic journey has mostly been understood as an intellectual journey toward truth. However, I expand upon the platonic journey to show that it may also, like the quest, be played out in geographical space. The platonic quest requires both physical and psychological movement toward a truth that appears to be “out there.” In order to find this truth and bring it “home,” the traveler must, as pilgrims and heroes must, set off on a quest. In the platonic quest, protagonists leave the cave of subjective experience (home) and move toward an outward or objective truth (the place traveled to) that brings them to understand that they had been blinded to their relationship with the world by their former subjectivity. They then move back into the place where others (readers or characters) are still trapped in subjective experience, and the protagonists attempt to lead these people out of their subjectivity. The platonic quest, as a travel trope, has not yet been discussed in travel literature, much less in mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century literature of Euro-American and European travel to New Mexico. Further, the platonic quest has not been applied to Native American literature of place.
Platonism is defined as a philosophy that “asserts ideal forms as an absolute reality of which the phenomena of the world are an imperfect and transitory reflection” (American 1048). In Plato's “Allegory of the Cave,” we see people living in the world of appearances—the dark cave of pure subjectivity—experiencing only shadows of forms projected onto the cave wall (Republic 205–206). Plato describes this false consciousness in his allegory: