Mahesh Paudyal
Though travel writing is often classed with non-fiction, it incorporates elements of fiction by allowing the author’s subjective faculty of imagination to permeate through factual details he or see collects during a travel. The history of travel writing is as old as the history of traveling. There are a myriad of ancient texts which are accounts of travel, though they are not strictly labeled as travel writing. The genre is not like reporting the details of a journey, or telling a series of events. Rather, it is the outcome of stopping, thinking and reflecting upon an event, a place, people or cultures one comes upon during a travel, and giving it a poetic expression. If travel writing is mistaken for a report, we are likely to produce a banal piece of boring details. It is the writer’s responsibility to bind the readers with the magic of reflections and language. This is necessary because, travel writing is not just the purgation of writer’s emotions engendered, of course, by a sense of lack that necessitates the travel and its reporting; travel writing, rather, is for an audience and an audience is not always interested in banal details of the author’s itinerary. It therefore is quite imperative that travel writing involves imagination to some extent, and rescues the genre from being a repertoire of a diary entries and googleable details.
Journey, pre-history confirms, has always been man’s life-project. It will perhaps be never verified when man started or stopped travelling. Travel, as Jolanta Sztachelka claims, “has remained a passion of mankind since its dawn.” (2). She theorizes man’s instinctive nature of nomadism in the following way, linking the nature first with instinct, and later with temptation created by literature of travel:
Some talk about instinct, some about atavism that we inherited from our nomadic ancestors, for whom to wander meant to survive. Others point at the cultural heritage in the form of myths, legends and the oldest epics, the Bible and the Odyssey with its heroes: Gilgamesh, Theseus, the Wandering Jew, Moses and Odysseus. And at this point I would often add those belonging to slightly later periods: Herodotus and Dante, the former as the founding father of all types of reporters, the latter as the most famous—since Orpheus—traveler to impossible worlds. (2)
Be it to the possible or the impossible world, no travel is, perhaps, purposeless. A purposeless travel is but absolute madness. A writer, traveling with a pen, paper or a typewriter has a purpose in mind, namely producing a fine piece of writing. To take an example, let’s see Bhisma Upreti, an acclaimed travel writing of Nepal, who articulates a decided goal:
On attaining something, man has the illusion of fulfillment, but soon, other dreams take shape and desires persist for ever. Propelled by such cravings, man roves through many a dale and mountain in life. This sense of lack is the pivot that drives man to pine for something new. In fact, pushed by such a craving, I was desirous of leaving Kathmandu Valley for Pokhara in search of a newness against the sense of lack that had been tickling me for long. (“The Outset”)
This ‘search for newness’ instantly pushes Upreti into a Freudian terrain—especially the theory of lack— whose purgation, for Upreti, comes about through traveling down the experiences. This idea is however, not new. Many, including scientists have acknowledged that travel can fulfill a lack, and sharpen one’s mind. Porter cites evolutionist Charles Darwin as saying: “It appears that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist than a journey in distant countries. It both sharpens, and partly allays that want and craving, which, as Sir J. Herschel remarks, a man experiences, although every corporeal sense be fully satisfied.” (qtd. in Porter 157).
If the theory of lack initiates a journey, it is the need for purgation that forces a writing. Most travel writers write to purge their experiences, which, if left unused, might sublimate like camphor, and be of use to none. Some of the best travel writers of the world have acknowledge this strong urge to write for purgation, to thaw a gnawing impulse created by a travel or observation. One of them is Jon Krakauer, who wrote his account of climbing Mount Everest. He confesses this unsurpassable urge in his introduction to Into Thin Air:
Several authors and editors I respect counseled me not to write the book as quickly as I did; they urged me to wait two or three years and put some distance between me and the expedition in order to gain some crucial perspective. Their advice was sounds, but in the end I ignored it—mostly because what happened on the mountain was gnawing my guts out. I thought that writing the book might purge Everest from my life. (14)
Many travel writers in Nepal also notice similar gnawing of the sense of lack and need for purgation inside him. The idea of lack and purgation simultaneously asserts both strength and limitation of one’s writing; their strength being the fact that their travels have a strong need, namely purgation knotted to a purpose, while their limitation underscored by the fact that they should constantly invent ‘lacks’ that push them out of home if they were to produce any remarkable travel writing, and this is not always possible.
The question of strength and limitation, which is more of a theoretical nature, has always plagued travel writing across its long, historical terrain. The genre is more prone to scrutiny, because, a travel account has been, most often, associated with writing a guide book, and therefore, inferior to a serious literary writing. However, there are some critics, who place the genre midway between a guide book and a novel, thanks to its capacity to permeate between reality and fiction. For example, Debbie Lisle makes the following critical analysis of the genre: “[Travelogues] are understood as inferior to the novel, but more sophisticated than the travel guidebook. Travelogues will never achieve the status of the novel because the travel writer’s imagination is always handcuffed to the narration of brute facts.” Quoting Paul Fussell, she goes on to say:
This ‘non-fiction’ classification makes Fussell wonder how worthy travelogues are in terms of literary merit: ‘how serious artistically and intellectually can a travel book be? Is there not perhaps something in the genre that attracts second-rate talents?’ The specter of fiction looms large here; it is positioned as an ideal that the travelogue can never quite achieve (30).
However, the debate no longer persists today. Travel account has been ranked much higher than a guidebook; it is recognized as one of the serious genres of literature the world over. Lisle accredits this to the flexible nature of the genre: “However, it is precisely the freedom to translate ‘brute facts’ through the strategies of fiction that makes travelogues better than guidebooks” (3).
There are inherent reasons why travel accounts, more advantageously than other pure non-fictional genres like biography writing and guide books, can cut across the liminal space between fiction and non-fiction. It is quite a flexible genre that connects imagination with geography, ecology, anthropology, cultural study, history, and so on. In fact, it is a “cocktail of ingredients” as James O’Reilly, Larry Habegger, and Sean O’Reilly claim:
For the travel book remains a vessel into which a wonderfully varied cocktail of ingredients can be poured: politics, archaeology, history, philosophy, art, or magic. You can cross-fertilize the genre with other literary forms: biography, or anthropological writing; or, more perhaps interesting still, following in Chatwin’s footsteps and muddying the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction by crossing the travel book with some of the wilder forms of the novel. (xxiv )
This, partly novel-like make, and partial engagement with facts is the strongest claim of travel literature today. The debate ‘fact or fiction?’ no longer holds good, as it is a settled question. It is both, as it has been most categorically settled for all times by Jan Borm. He says that travel writing “is not a literary genre but a variety of texts both predominantly fictional and non-fictional whose main theme is travel” (13).
There, however, is a fundamental question plaguing the entire genre, ever since it claimed itself as a serious literary genre: how much is travel writing a fact, and how much fiction? If it is more fact and less fiction, can a government collector or enumerator, trained in numbers, figures and graphs, produce a travel account? Does that result into a sellable book classed under ‘literature’? Of course not. A chronic vacillation over this question has but led to the production of a series of weak travelogues in Nepali literature. In the type of travel writings I brand as ‘weak’, readers are forced to endure monotonous details in a news-like fashion, with nothing to fascinate at linguistic or imaginative level. The theory of travel writing today allows proliferation of the border between fact and fiction, and writers must utilize the license to produce palatable travel account.
This doubt—especially of the readers—about travel narratives, especially about its over-engagement with vulgar reality, is not a new one. There’s a section of Swift’s Gulliver Travel, where Gulliver airs this sense of monotony about travel books: “We were already overstocked with books of travels; that nothing could now pass which was not extraordinary; wherein I doubted some authors less consulted truth than their own vanity, or interest, or the diversion of ignorant readers” (161-62).
In order to scan how the most meritorious travel accounts have worked, it will be worthwhile to engage ourselves with a few touchstones of the history of this genre. The earliest travel accounts were accounts of war voyages like those of Odysseus, or religious trips like those described in Epic of Gilgamesh, the wanderings of Abraham in the Old Testament, and the journeyings of the Pandava in the Mahabharata and of the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Along with them were travels accounts of discovery like those of Samuel Purchas, account of Li Po, Marco Polo, Hiuen Tsang, Ibn Jubayr, and Ibn Battuta. Much of travel literature through the middle ages is strewed with colonial motif, especially those under the genre classed today as ‘Grand Trip’. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) outlines the colonial design in many of Europe’s travel literature across middle and early modern time.
However, in the post-colonization period—this is a theoretically debatable period, though we take it as period after Second World War for strategic essential purpose—travel literature no longer serves a colonial purpose. No much discovery and religious pilgrimage define our purposes of travel literature today. One of the biggest challenges at our hand, therefore, is to discover the ‘purpose’ of modern day travel writing. Modern travel writing, apparently has three thrusts: writing to discovers ways of life in a compare-and-contrast mode as done by people like Purchas and Huen Tsang, writing about nature, both apologetically from environmental perspective as done by Mary Austin and Terry Tempest Williams, and aesthetically as an advertisement, and writing to escape the mundane reality of modern life. First two thrusts give travel writing a cultural motif, and confirm the assertion that “travel is still popularly understood as the immersion in picturesque, distinct, colorful cultures” (Write of Passage 8).
The last mode, which is the most dominant one all over the world, can be termed “Don Juan Mode,” after Don Duan, the classic Byronian character, who traveled a lot to escape hardship, and to revitalize himself (Jolanta Sztachelska, 2010).
Whatever be the purpose of travel writing, it is imminent that the reader should be convinced about its merit. In fact, it is true for all genres, and with the advent of modern age where reader’s response is very vital, the case becomes even more important. Hans-Jurg Suter cites it as an interesting case for the importance of genre study as an academic tool: “The merits of a poem or a novel, the effectiveness of a news report or an instructional manual, will always be judged by their readers (or indeed analyzed by the literary scholar or the linguist) against a background of similar texts-the text type to which they belong” (31). The prime question, therefore, is not what the writer wants to say; it rather is what the reader is likely to gain from the writing.
What in fact is a reader likely to gain from a travel account? Like in case of fantasy, it is not enough to say, it is thrill. Nor is it enough to say, like in a book of geography or newspaper report, a reader gets ‘information’. But we are at extreme locations—of fiction and facts—when we are with a travel literature. About the utilitarian value of travel literature Debbie Lisle, has the following conviction:
The quasi-fictional genre of travel writing is at least as useful for understanding issues of international importance as the policy documents, government press releases, parliamentary debates and media stories that are usually privileged in this context. In fact, travelogues have a distinct advantage because they are read widely by a number of people, and thus provide valuable information about how artifacts of popular culture produce common assumptions about power relations at the international level. (1)
Debbie’s is, however, rather too-political an expectation. Travel writing has other functions, namely aesthetic and entertainment, as do other genres of literature. Andrew Had filed has a more comprehensive understanding of the role travel literature can play, in relation with readers:
Such representations increase our knowledge of other cultures, providing information which in some ways may prove useful, challenging, or, at worst diverting. Of course, undertaking the enterprise involves a series of reflections on one’s own identity and culture which will inevitably transform the writer concerned—and quite possibly the reader—and will call into question received assumptions, inducing a sense of wonder at the magnificence of the other, or reaffirming deeply felt differences with a vengeance.
The discussion confirms: travel writing is not like reporting the details of a journey, or telling a series of events. Rather, it is the outcome of stopping, thinking and reflecting upon an event, a place, people or cultures one comes upon during a travel, and giving it a poetic expression. If travel writing is mistaken for a report, we are likely to produce a banal piece of boring details. It is the writer’s responsibility to bind the readers with the magic of reflections and language.
References
Borm, Jan. “Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology.” Perspectives on Travel Writing. Ed. Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 13-26.
Duncan, James and Derek Gregory. Write of Passage. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Fussell, Paul, (Ed). Abroad: British Literary Travelling between the Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Hadfield, Andrew. Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Krakauer, Jon. Into Thin Air. New York: Anchor Books, , 1997.
Lisle, Debbie. The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
O’Reilly, James, Larry Habegger and Sean O’Reilly. The Best Travel Writings. Palo Alto: Solas House, Inc., 2010.
Porter, Demis. Hundred Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
Suter, Hans-Jurg. The Wedding Report. A Prototypical Approach to the Study of Traditional Text Type. Amsterdom and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1993.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travel. 1726. New York: Signet (reprint), 1960.
Sztachelska, Jolanta. “Introduction.” Metamorphoses of Travel Writing. Ed. Grzegorz Moroz and Jolanta Sztachelska. New Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2010.
Upreti, Bhisma. A Trip to Manasarovar (manuscript). Ed. Mahesh Paudyal.
[Poet and Critic Paudyal teaches at the Central Department of English, Tribhuvan University.]