The sightseers
By Editor on February 19, 2009 9:49 pm
Everywhere man has gone, a travel writer has followed. And after two millennia of travel writing, it is fair to ask: “What is left to say?” Dan Hogan wanders through the works of some backpacking heroes to understand what makes them special.
TRAVEL WRITING LOOKS so easy. Instead of being stuck in some dreary paper-pushing job you get to go somewhere different every day. All you have to do is walk around a bit, chat to a few people, drink lots of sangria, then share your experiences with the folks back home — all expenses paid. What a deceptively easy life.
It is an ancient art too — about 2,500-years-old. In Dark Star Safari the American travel writer Paul Theroux, describes Herodotus, who was born around 280BC, as the “first methodical sightseer”. After over two millennia of travel writing you might be forgiven for thinking: “Where on earth is there left to see?”
Everywhere man has gone, a travel writer has literally been in his footsteps— almost to the moon and back. Even the Apollo astronauts had journalist Andrew Smith stalking them — albeit in a pilgrimage across the United States, for his book Moon Dust. Some of the greatest writers composed tales on their travels, including Dickens, Twain, and Steinbeck. You might ask: “Doesn’t everyone travel these days — what’s left to say?”
Yet travel writers can still provide valuable insights to the folks “back home.”
A A Gill, who declares his intention is to “interview” places, says: “Abroad is as foreign funny and strange and shocking as it ever was and our need to know our neighbours is every bit as great.” (See A A Gill is Away, pX)
Despite this enthusiasm, Theroux warns that travel writing is often poor and predictable. In his epic South American expedition, chronicled in The Old Patagonian Express, Theroux complained:
The literature of travel has become measly, the standard opening that farcial nose-against-the porthole view from the train’s tilted fuselage. (p12)
Theroux explains why this problem has arisen:
There is not much to say about most aeroplane journeys…for the aeroplane passenger is a time-traveller. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. (p13)
He felt “cheated” by travel books. So in the Old Patagonian Express he pledged “to end my book where travel books begin”. So he took the original step of getting on a subway in Boston and then crawling his way towards Southern Argentina on a series of ramshackle often frustrating train rides. Theroux’s tale is filled with anecdotes and snippets from people’s lives. He avoids the tourist attractions, museums, and fancy hotels, and instead endures cold, misery, and discomfort — all on our behalf.
Jay Parini calls such writing “the heroic journey:” In the traditional myth, a hero — whoever he might be — abandons his safe haven and pushes forward into the wilderness (or depths) in order to test himself to against the odds. In the course of testing he either discovers his own rich resources, or comes into contact with higher powers that assist him (see Travels with Charley, xii-xiii).
Parini describes how Steinbeck used this narrative structure in the book Travels with Charley. In this travelogue Steinbeck sets out across America, with his poodle Charley, and a specially converted truck — what appears to be the first-ever camper van, or RV– charmingly called “Rocinante” in honor of Don Quixote’s horse.
Parini adds:
The story inevitably involves a returning, which completes the cycle; the point being that, upon returning, the hero has been immeasurably strengthened by the knowledge gained in the course of his difficult journey. (Ibid)
As Steinbeck humbly puts it: “We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip — the trip takes us.” And the trip seems to dominate the writing — which invariably in travelogues is in chronological order.
Steinbeck concentrates on people almost trapped within the landscape he is travelling through. There is poignancy about the static characters he meets along the road at motels and diners. They are almost like the shadowy people portrayed in the melancholic paintings of Edward Hopper.
Alan de Botton shows that such small insights into humanity are rare. He concludes his book, the Art of Travel, with a quote from Nietzsche:
We are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much
Why in an age of mass tourism do the majority apparently gain so little from their experience? To find out it is useful to consider the British travel writer Tim Moore. His comical recreation of a European grand tour, Continental Drifter, includes Lord Chesterfield’s lament about the first European tourists:
They go abroad…but in truth they stay at home all that while…not speaking the languages, they go into no foreign company…but dine and sup with one another only at the tavern. (p338)
This is key to understanding the main allure of travel writing and why it is still as vibrant and necessary as ever. Great travel writing highlights the things the tourist has become anesthetised too — because of home comforts. For proof of this Theroux offers an account of his hardships travelling across Africa in Dark Star Safari, which included:
…fungal infections, petty extortion, mocking lepers, dreary bedrooms, bad food, exploding bowels, fleeing animals, rotting schoolrooms, meaningless delays and blunt threats… (p426)
He contrasts this with the pampered five-star tourist treatment provided for “over-privileged fatheads.”
In an age of mass tourism it is possible to be “transported” somewhere else by great travel writing - even more than your package tour. As Gill says: “Nothing alters your perception of who you are and where you belong to as fundamentally, radically, and permanently as being somewhere else.” (pX)
And the best advice of the travel writer is to travel light — leave your prejudices and snobbery at home. This is best illustrated again by Gill, who shows that travel writers endorse places that are considered beneath the consideration of worthy tourists — such as the Taj Mahal:
It is the most complete thing ever built by man and nothing can diminish it; not the queues; not the crowds; not the kitsch of endless reproduction and familiarity; not the sneers of Noël Coward or the epicurean India snobs; not the clicking lines of newlyweds waiting to be photographed on Princess Diana’s bench…if you go to just one place abroad in your life, it should be the Taj. (p124)
Finally, A C Grayling distinguishes between the traveller, who goes to understand and sympathise, and the tourist.
The tourist is not an active being, he is passive, he expects to be carried abroad, conveyed from the airport to his hotel, provided with entertainments and protected from foreign annoyance (p193).
So the deceptively easy part of great travelling, and travel writing, is to understand the world and ourselves better. This is far from an easy task. As Grayling concludes: “…Seneca was right in remarking that however far we go, it is only to meet ourselves at the journey’s end.” (p194)
Dan Hogan is a UK-based journalist and journalism lecturer, currently researching literary journalism. Read his earlier piece, The truth about non-fiction.
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