Travel Writing and

Travel Narratives
Tanutrushna Panigrahi
Fulbright Fellow
 What is Travel Writing?
“There is no foreign land; it is only the traveller that is foreign” (Robert Louis Stevenson)
“a genre in which I don’t believe.” By Jonathan Raban
Travel has recently emerged as a key theme for the humanities and social sciences, and the
amount of scholarly work on travel writing has reached unprecedented levels. The academic
disciplines of literature, history, geography, and anthropology have all overcome their
previous reluctance to take travel writing seriously and have begun to produce a body of
interdisciplinary criticism which will allow the full historical complexity of the genre to be
appreciated.

Travel writing, one may argue, is the most socially important of all literary genres. It records
our temporal and spatial progress. It throws light on how we define ourselves and on how
we identify others. Its construction of our sense of ‘me’ and ‘you’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, operates
on individual and national levels and in the realms of psychology, society and economics.
The processes of affiliation and differentiation at play within it can work to forge alliances,
precipitate crises and provoke wars. Travelling is something we all do, on different scales, in
one form or another. We all have stories of travel and they are of more than personal
consequence.
Writing and travel have always been intimately connected. The traveller’s tale
is as old as fiction itself: one of the very earliest extant stories, composed in
Egypt during the Twelfth Dynasty, a thousand years before the Odyssey, tells
of a shipwrecked sailor alone on a marvellous island. [Neil Rennie, Far-
Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of The South Seas
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).The biblical and classical traditions are both
rich in examples of travel writing, literal and symbolic – Exodus, the
punishment of Cain, the Argonauts, the Aeneid –which provide a corpus of
reference and intertext for modern writers. In particular, Homer’s Odysseus
gave his name to the word we still use to describe an epic journey, and his
episodic adventures offer a blueprint for the romance, indirection, and
danger of travel as well as the joy (and danger)of homecoming.
Societal attitudes to travel have always been ambivalent. Travel
broadens the mind, and knowledge of distant places and people often
confers status, but travellers sometimes return as different people or
do not come back at all. Pilgrimages are necessary for Christian
salvation, but must be carefully controlled. The Grand Tour (James
Buzard discusses in detail) can lead to education or to dissolution – just
like, more recently, backpacking in the ‘gap’ year between school and
university. So the ambiguous figure of Odysseus – adventurous,
powerful, unreliable – is perhaps the appropriate archetype for the
traveller, and by extension for the travel writer.
Within the Christian tradition, life itself has often been symbolised as a
journey, perhaps most famously in John Bunyan’s allegory, The Pilgrim’s
Progress (1678); and the centrality of the pilgrimage to Christianity produces
much medieval travel writing as well as the framing device for Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales. In many respects pilgrims were ancestors of modern
tourists: a catering industry grew up to look after them, they followed set
routes, and the sites they visited were packaged for them. Although today’s
travel writers will typically seek out the pre-modern, the simple, the
authentic, or the unspoilt, precisely off the beaten track, pilgrimage and its
associated writings continue to be influential, in part because their source
directed narratives fit so well with a number of the literary genres, such as
romance, which travel writers still adopt.
Many of the themes and problems associated with modern travel writing can be
found in two medieval texts which still provoke fascination and controversy. The
narratives of both Marco Polo and John Mandeville mark the beginnings of a new
impulse in the late Middle Ages which would transform the traditional paradigms of
pilgrimage and crusade into new forms attentive to observed experience and
curiosity towards other lifeways. Marco Polo travelled to Cathay (China) in the
second half of the thirteenth century. On his return to Venice his story was written
down by a writer of romances called Rustichello. By contrast nothing is known for
sure about Mandeville –even his nationality – but his Travels was widely read for
several centuries. Although Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to America in 1492
is usually seen as a new beginning for travel writing, Columbus was, as a writer,
deeply influenced by both Mandeville and Marco Polo: echoes of their words drift
through early descriptions of the Caribbean islands.
During the sixteenth century, writing became an essential part of travelling;
documentation an integral aspect of the activity. Political or commercial sponsors
wanted reports and maps, often kept secret, but the public interest aroused by
stories of faraway places was an important way of attracting investment and – once
colonies started – settlers. Rivalry between European nation-states meant that
publication of travel accounts was often a semi-official business in which the
beginnings of imperial histories were constructed. The greatest impact of the new
world of America on English writing in the early sixteenth century is seen in
Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), in which the fictional traveller, Raphael Hythloday, is
said to have journeyed with Amerigo Vespucci to the New World. Like a handful of
later fictional texts (particularly Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), Utopia then
became a foundation for subsequent travel writing, influencing the form of both
expectations and reports.
Against this background, the English editor of early travellers, Richard
Hakluyt, argued for a history of travel which relied on the testimony of
travellers themselves: in other words he looked mostly to eyewitness
accounts –even though his practice was inconsistent since in the
second edition of his Principal Navigations (1598–1600) Mandeville
was excluded as false but the Arthurian legends remained. So
distinguishing fact from fiction was important for at least some
sixteenth-century readers, even if the process was made much more
difficult by the topos of the claim to empirical truthfulness so crucial to
travel stories of all kinds, both factual and fictional.
Even within the construction of national epics such as Hakluyt’s, however,
it was recognised that the real power of travel writing lay in its
independence of perspective. The claim to have been there and to have
seen with one’s own eyes could defeat speculation. Samuel Purchas, the
second of the English collectors of travel texts and an enthusiastic
proponent of a national ideology, emphasised the power of this
individuality in the 1625 introduction to his Purchas His Pilgrimes:
“What a World of Travellers have by their owne eyes observed . . . is
here . ..delivered, not by one preferring Methodically to deliver the Historie of
Nature according to rules of Art, nor Philosophically to discusse and dispute;
but as in way of Discourse, by each Traveller relating what is the kind he hath
seen.”
For Purchas’s contemporary, Francis Bacon, the travellers of the
Renaissance had discovered a ‘new continent’ of truth, based on
experience and observation rather than the authority of the ancients;
and it was in effect travel writing which provided the vehicle for the
conveyance of the new information which laid the foundations for the
scientific and philosophical revolutions of the seventeenth century.
John Locke, a representative figure in these revolutions, owned a vast
collection of travel writing on which his philosophical texts regularly
drew.
Locke in fact features as a character in Richard Hurd’s 1763 dialogue
essay, ‘On the Uses of Foreign Travel’. Locke is made to be critical of the
limited value of ‘sauntering within the circle of the grand Tour’,
generally preferring what can be learned at home, although he ends
with a sudden vision of the world beyond Europe: ‘to study human
nature to purpose, a traveller must enlarge his circuit beyond the
bounds of Europe. He must go, and catch her undressed, nay quite
naked, in North America, and at the Cape of Good Hope.’
At the same moment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau – another enthusiastic
reader of travel writing – was calling in his Discourse on the Origins of
Inequality for observers of the calibre of Montesquieu, Buffon, and
Diderot to travel to the far-flung parts of the earth in order to enrich
our knowledge of human societies. Despite this enthusiasm, neither
Locke nor Rousseau travelled very widely, which meant that they had to
rely on information provided by others, usually less well-educated than
themselves.
As a result, all kinds of interested parties – including scientists,
philosophers, and sponsors – issued instructions to travellers about how to
observe and how to write down their observations, and the history of such
instructions runs unbroken into the early twentieth century and the
foundations of anthropology: Joan Pau Rubies’s essay explores these
connections. Alexander von Humboldt’s travels to the Americas right at the
beginning of the nineteenth century marked a turning point in travel
writing, setting an example that would be followed by major figures such as
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, also scientists whose travels
were fundamental to their research. Neil Whitehead touches on Humboldt
and Wallace in the Amazon, which was one of the great scientific
laboratories of the nineteenth century.
The idiosyncrasy that marks much modern travel writing has its early modern
precedents in books such as John Taylor’s The Pennyles Pilgrimage (1618) and Thomas
Coryate’s Crudities (1611). Taylor describes his walk to Edinburgh, dependent on his
guiles and the generosity of strangers for support. Waterways and stagecoaches were at
this time increasing the ease and reliability of travel within the kingdom, just as
improvements in ship technology and navigation had – more partially – increased those
to other shores. Coryate’s gastronomic title – prefiguring a long history of relating travel
to food – is made clear in the full version, which continues: Hastily gobled up in five
Monethes travels in France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia commonly called the Grisons country,
Helvetia alias Switzerland, some parts of high Germany and the Netherlands; Newly
digested in the hungry aire of Somerset, and now dispersed to the nourishment of the
travelling Members of this Kingdome, a title which hints at the combination of
extravagance, self-parody, and adventure still prevalent in much popular travel writing.
Two particular modes of writing – forgery and its respectable cousin, parody
– have specially close, even parasitic, relationships with travel writing, since
the lone traveller bearing far-fetched facts from remote climes offers the
perfect alibi for the forger and a tempting target for the parodist. Lucian’s
True History, written in the first century AD, was so supremely wrought that
most subsequent travel parodies are mere variations on its themes: Gulliver’s
Travels (1726) is perhaps the most significant modern version. Forgery’s
associations with fiction continue to pose pointed questions. Some texts,
such as Madagascar: or Robert Drury’s Journal, during Fifteen Years Captivity
on that Island (1729), still cause scholars problems about their authenticity;
others – even accepted as ‘forgeries’ – continue to exert fascination and to
cast light on their legitimate brethren.
Prose fiction in its modern forms built its house on this disputed territory, trafficking in travel and
its tales. Early modern European novels are full of traveller-protagonists such as Jack of Newberry,
Lazarillo de Tormes, Don Quixote, and Robinson Crusoe; and many of their authors – pre-eminent
among them Daniel Defoe – were skilled at exploiting the uncertain boundary between travel
writing and the fiction which copied its form. Travel writing and the novel, especially in its first-
person form, have often shared a focus on the centrality of the self, a concern with empirical detail,
and a movement through time and place which is simply sequential. Interestingly, though, while
Defoe was happy to exploit the ambiguities attendant upon writing about faraway places, his own
travel writing was cast in more conventional mode: A Tour through the Whole Island of Great
Britain (1726) offers a picture of the kingdom, a form of descriptive statistics which relates back to
the Elizabethan surveys and chorographies and forward to modern tours such as Jonathan Raban’s
Coasting (1987) and Paul Theroux’s The Kingdom By the Sea (1983). The relationship between the
genres remains close and often troubling. Many readers still hope for a literal truthfulness from
travel writing that they would not expect to find in the novel, though each form has long drawn on
the conventions of the other, an often cited example being Laurence Sterne’s difficult-to-categorise
A Sentimental Journey (1768).
Defoe was interested in commerce and civility, but by the end of the
eighteenth century many travellers, under the sway of Rousseau and
Romanticism, were in search of various forms of ‘the primitive’ which, it
had been realised, could also be located within Britain and its
neighbouring islands. Samuel Johnson accompanied Boswell on a trip
to the Scottish Highlands and Islands in the 1770s, within living memory
of the final defeat of the Stuart rebellion at the Battle of Culloden. But,
like many other travellers, Johnson and Boswell concluded that they
had arrived too late, that change and decline were already advanced: ‘A
longer journey than to the Highlands must be taken by him whose
curiosity pants for savage virtues and barbarous grandeur.’ Other
travellers, led by William Gilpin, journeyed to these kinds of places –
Scotland, South Wales, the Lake District – in search of types of scenery
that became known as ‘picturesque’ or ‘romantic’ or ‘sublime’.
Travel writing in English had started much later than its Spanish counterpart but
had soon produced all kinds of accounts – scientific travel, voyages of exploration
and discovery, descriptions of foreign manners – about almost all parts of the
world. By this time, also, the USA had become an independent country and had
realised the national imperative to extend its continental boundaries, including the
resonant journey westwards.
The twentieth century began with the race to the poles, and subsequent journeys
across the Arctic and, especially, the Antarctic caught the public imagination with
their stories of danger and endurance, of heroism and tragedy. Many participants
wrote about their experiences, but one book, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst
Journey in the World (1922) is often seen as consolidating the qualities of them all
in his remarkable elegy to a world-view that had been blown to pieces in the
trenches of the Great War. Polar writing reinforced travel writing’s growth in
popularity, already evident in the late nineteenth century. But whereas scientists
and explorers would inevitably put content before form, literary writers were also
beginning to travel and to write about their travels: Dickens, Trollope, Stendhal, and
Flaubert had done so earlier in the nineteenth century; but now writers such as
Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and D. H. Lawrence began to
commit large amounts of time to travelling and travel writing.
Travel writing was becoming travel literature and was therefore taken with a new
seriousness. Travel writing gained new prestige from the standing of its authors,
and was still immensely popular – Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure (1933) was
reprinted nine times in twelve months following its publication; but critical
attention was lacking, perhaps because literary modernism valued fictional
complexity over mimetic claims, however mediated. The culture of the
1930s,looking both outward to the world of politics and inward to the world of the
unconscious, was a rich decade for literary travel writing with works by Evelyn
Waugh, Graham Greene, and W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice; but the travel
books were still seen as adjuncts to and illuminations of the authors’ main craft of
prose or poetry, while political travel writing, such as George Orwell’s, was valued
and discussed but not considered appropriate for critical analysis as travel writing.
This state of affairs did not change until well after the Second World War.
Peter Hulme suggests that the last significant shift in travel writing can be
dated to the late 1970s : the best-known of which is Bruce Chatwin’s In
Patagonia (1977). In Patagonia appeared just a year before Edward Said’s
Orientalism, usually seen as the beginning text for postcolonial studies:
Chatwin interestingly contributes an early postcolonial speculation about
the origin of Shakespeare’s character Caliban, from The Tempest.
Orientalism was the first work of contemporary criticism to take travel
writing as a major part of its corpus, seeing it as a body of work which
offered particular insight into the operation of colonial discourses.
Scholars working in the wake of Orientalism have begun to scrutinise
relationships of culture and power found in the settings, encounters, and
representations of travel texts.
Another impulse behind recent work in travel studies has been provided by
feminism. Applying to travel writing principles developed in women’s literary studies
more generally, scholars have both rescued some women travel writers from
obscurity and investigated the reasons for the popularity of others. The relationship
between women as observers and as observed has come under a scrutiny that is
informed by critiques of ethnographic narratives, and the position of women
travellers vis-a-vis colonialism is vigorously debated. Both within and outside the
colonial context, the question of whether and how women travellers write
differently from men remains central. Sara Mills’s Discourses of Difference (1991)
took this as its major theme, helping to generate a dialogue about the relative
weight of textual and historical determinants and approaches. The huge number of
publications in the past few years on Mary Kingsley’s late nineteenth-century travels
in West Africa exemplifies the directions and energy of this scholarship. Biographies,
and critical studies produced by geographers and historians of science, have turned
Kingsley, with her confidently self-deprecating humour, into a symbolic figure, but
have also led to a genuine revision of male (travellers’and academics’) views of
African exploration.
The subjects of ‘race’, colonialism, and gender cut across any single discipline, and
within the academy evidence of the centrality of travel is the spread of its study
across several fields. Outside literary studies and women’s studies, the three
disciplines that have engaged most with travel writing are anthropology, history,
and geography, while sociologists have extended these concerns to the study of
tourism and of other travel practices and metaphors. Translation studies has
brought another dimension to travel, giving thought not only to translation
between languages but also to translation between cultures. Perhaps because of
its surface resemblances to travel writing, for most of the twentieth century
anthropology kept its distance, emphasising its seriousness of purpose, its
professional ethos, and its scientific method; although many of the key sites for
anthropology duplicated those for travel writing sometimes for the same reasons
of cultural isolation and distance from the centres of modernity.
However, anthropology’s theoretical turn in the 1980s opened it towards other disciplines, with the
idea of travel central to that dialogue, especially in the work of James Clifford, whose tellingly entitled
Routes takes a short travel account by Amitav Ghosh as its iconic text. At the same time, anthropology
discovered a more reflective and personal mode, which brought it closer to travel writing: Hugh
Brody’s Maps and Dreams (1981) is emblematic of this move. But it is not only new critical approaches
that have been responsible for the recent and increasing interest in travel writing. Since the late 1970s
travel texts have often reflected on contemporary issues while sometimes experimenting with the
conventions of the genre, drawing inspiration from the restless example of Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin’s
work was, for example, a prime exhibit in the first Granta magazine special issue on travel writing in
1984, which did much to bring the ‘new travel writing’ to a wider readership. Bill Buford, in his
Introduction, celebrated what he called travel writing’s ‘wonderful ambiguity, somewhere between
fact and fiction’. It is telling that Ian Jack, introducing a reprint of the same volume in 1998, could
suggest that none of the writers in the anthology would be very happy with Buford’s description.
‘[W]hen I first read writers such as Chatwin and Theroux’, Jack says, ‘I needed to believe that the
account was as honest a description of what had happened to the writer, of what he or she had seen
and
heard, as the writer could manage’. And he still does. He says that we need to
believe that the travel writer ‘did not make it up’ (p. xi). Much contemporary travel
writing has been written by journalists who have a deep investment in maintaining
their credibility: Colin Thubron admits the travel book to be ‘postmodern collage’,
but the mosaic of different pieces is still ‘prescribed by the traveller’s experience on
the ground’;25 Robyn Davidson complains in her Introduction to The Picador Book
of Journeys about the fibbing that goes on in travel writing – though she excuses
Chatwin as a consummate fibber who did not want to be labelled a travel writer.
But the experiences and impressions of travel are never easy to capture, and
contemporary travellers sometimes make the phenomenology of travel an aspect
of their work. Davidson’s Rajasthan travel book, Desert Places, begins with the
disconcerting words: ‘Memory is a capricious thing. The India I visited in 1978
consists of images of doubtful authenticity held together in a ground of
forgetfulness’. Stephen Muecke’s No Road (1997) reflects on cultural theories as
well as the experience of travel, its short chapters and jumps in subject making it a
Stefan Hertmans’s Intercities (2001) interweaves philosophical meditations on modern
identity with fragmented stories of his travel through cities of Australia and Europe. If
formal experimentalism is still unusual in travel writing, there can be no doubt that the
range and ethos of the genre are growing in exciting and vital ways. Like the post-colonial
novel, travel texts are demonstrating a ‘writing back’, from the example of Ham Mukasa’s
account of his travels with Ugandan Prime Minister Sir Apolo Kagwa to England in 1902,
through Caryl Phillips’s travels in white Europe, to Gary Younge’s journey to the American
South the better to understand, via the scenes and participants of the civil rights
movement, his identity as a young black man in Britain. In-voluntary movement from
Africa to the New World through the slave trade, as well as more recent journeys around
the Black Atlantic, are the subject of Alasdair Pettinger’s substantial collection Always
Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic (1999). Travels neither from nor to the imperial
‘centre’ include Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India
(1995) and Rehman Rashid’s A Malaysian Journey (1993).