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To travel is to make a journey, a movement through space. Possibly this journey is epic in scale, taking the traveller to the other side of the world or across a continent, or up a mountain; possibly it is more modest in scope, and takes place within the limits of the traveller’s own country or region, or even just their immediate locality. Either way, to begin any journey or, indeed, simply to set foot beyond one’s own front door, is quickly to encounter difference and otherness. All journeys are in this way a confrontation with, or more optimistically a negotiation of, what is sometimes termed alterity. Or, more precisely, since there are no foreign peoples with whom we do not share a common humanity, and probably no environment on the planet for which we do not have some sort of prior reference point, all travel requires us to negotiate a complex and sometimes unsettling interplay between alterity and identity, difference and similarity.
One definition that we can give of travel, accordingly, is that it is the negotiation between self and other that is brought about by movement in space. Like all such definitions, of course, this is inevitably somewhat reductive, and begs innumerable further questions. For example, are all forms of movement through space really to be regarded as travel? What of a trip to the local shops? Or a quick visit to one’s neighbours? And if some journeys are not to be classified as ‘travel’, at what point, and according to what criteria, does that label become appropriate? Equally, do we need to distinguish between various types of travel, and between different sorts of traveller? How do the journeys undertaken by a tourist differ from those made by an explorer or a refugee? Are some forms of travel more praiseworthy or more valuable than others? These are all valid questions. For the time being, however, I shall set them aside so as to offer, on the basis of the minimal definition of travel just outlined, an equally minimal definition of travel writing.
If all travel involves an encounter between self and other that is brought about by movement through space, all travel writing is at some level a record or product of this encounter, and of the negotiation between similarity and difference that it entailed. Sometimes the encounter will be described directly in the writing, which will accordingly offer a narration of the events that occurred during the writer’s travels. In other instances, the encounter itself will only be implicit in the writing, as it offers an account not of the actual travelling but of just the new perspectives or the new information acquired through travel. In certain extreme forms, indeed, the writing might consist of nothing more than a simple list or catalogue of new data gathered on the journey. Even travel writing in this sparse, non-narrative mode, however, is underpinned by, and emerges from, an encounter between self and other precipitated by movement. Consequently, all travel writing has a two-fold aspect. It is most obviously, of course, a report on the wider world, an account of an unfamiliar people or place. Yet it is also revelatory to a greater or lesser degree of the traveller who produced that report, and of his or her values, preoccupations and assumptions. And, by extension, it also reveals something of the culture from which that writer emerged, and/or the culture for which their text is intended.
Again, this is obviously a definition which begs many questions. For example, are all the forms of writing that can emerge from the travel experience to be classified as travel writing? Some readers will not be inclined to class a mere list or catalogue of data as travel writing, and a similar hesitation will probably be felt towards many other texts that undoubtedly have their origins in, and to some extent report back on, a traveller’s negotiation of otherness. What of highly specialised academic treatises in fields like geography and anthropology? What of bulletins and articles sent back to newspapers and magazines by foreign correspondents? What of a novel such as Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case (1961), which is based on Greene’s own visits to leper colonies in the Congo? Or even Henry James’s novels, which one might not immediately associate with travel but which all reflect James’s exposure to the cultural differences between America and Europe? Are all of these texts to be regarded as travel writing in some form, or should they be seen as distinct from travel writing? And if we take the latter course, by what criteria do we exclude these texts from the travel writing genre?
As these questions will suggest, it is no easy matter to provide a neat and unproblematic definition, or delimitation, of what counts as travel writing. The term is a very loose generic label, and has always embraced a bewilderingly diverse range of material. This is especially the case as one moves back in time, to consider travel writing in its earlier manifestations. Simultaneously, and partly as a result of this intrinsic heterogeneity, travel writing has always maintained a complex and confusing relationship with any number of closely related (indeed, often overlapping) genres. As Jonathan Raban notes,
travel writing is a notoriously raffish open house where different genres are likely to end up in the same bed. It accommodates the private diary, the essay, the short story, the prose poem, the rough note and polished table talk with indiscriminate hospitality.
(1988: 253–54)
Other commentators emphasise not only the genre’s formal diversity, but also its thematic and tonal range. Thus Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, surveying travel writing in the late twentieth century, stress that the form can embrace everything ‘from picaresque adventure to philosophical treatise, political commentary, ecological parable, and spiritual quest’, whilst simultaneously ‘borrow[ing] freely from history, geography, anthropology and social science’. The result, they suggest, is a ‘hybrid genre that straddles categories and disciplines’ (1998: 8–9).
One consequence of this heterogeneity and hybridity is that it is often hard to define where ‘travel writing’ ends and other genres begin, such as autobiography, ethnography, nature writing and fiction. The boundaries of the travel writing genre are in this way fuzzy, rather than firmly fixed: what we class as travel writing, and what we exclude from the genre, are perennially matters of debate, and may vary according to the questions we bring to bear on the genre. Accordingly, the present chapter does not seek to identify any universal or essential features supposedly possessed by all forms of travel writing, beyond the minimal definition given earlier. Nor does it lay down any rules as to what is ‘really’ or ‘properly’ travel writing, and what is not. Instead, it begins by discussing the taxonomic debates that have surrounded the genre in recent academic discourse, and the various ways in which the term ‘travel writing’ has been defined by scholars. Thereafter, it explores two key areas of ambiguity and dispute that have always been attendant on the form, so much so that they are almost constitutive of the generic category ‘travel writing’. These are, first, the relationship between fact and fiction in travel writing, and, second, the question of the literary value and intellectual status of travel writing; and by mapping these debates, the chapter seeks not so much to define ‘travel writing’, as to convey a sense of the diverse forms and modes that the genre has taken historically.
Exclusive and Inclusive Definitions of ‘Travel Writing’
In my local bookshop, there is a whole floor designated as ‘Travel’. It stocks, at a rough estimate, several thousand publications, the majority of which are guidebooks: Lonely Planets, Rough Guides and the like. The guidebooks occupy approximately two-thirds of the available space on the floor, with the rest being given over to three sub-sections entitled ‘Maps’, ‘Travel Photography’ and ‘Travel Literature’. ‘Maps’ is self-explanatory, whilst ‘Travel Photography’ consists chiefly of beautiful images of exotic locations, reproduced in an expensive, ‘coffee-table’ format. In ‘Travel Literature’, meanwhile, we find book-length accounts of journeys that have already been made, and the personal narratives of famous and not-so-famous travellers ranging from Marco Polo and Columbus through to contemporary figures such as Bruce Chatwin, Dervla Murphy, Bill Bryson and Michael Palin.
Clearly, there is a wealth of travel-related material available in the shop. Yet it is equally clear that these different sorts of publication relate to travel, or are about travel, in very different ways. So are they all to be regarded as ‘travel writing’? Unfortunately, there is little scholarly consensus on the matter. Some commentators take the term ‘travel writing’ to mean just the material that tends to be classified in bookshops as ‘Travel Literature’; this is perhaps especially the case in studies concerned principally with modern travel writing, and with travel accounts produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Other critics, meanwhile, use the label ‘travel writing’ in a much more expansive and inclusive sense, so as to include not only all the travel-related publications outlined earlier, but also many other forms of travel-related document or cultural artefact.
An influential advocate of the more narrow and exclusive conceptualisation of the term ‘travel writing’ is the critic Paul Fussell. Fussell’s Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980) was a seminal study of travel writing which did much to focus critical attention on a genre often previously dismissed as insignificant and sub-literary. At the same time, Abroad, along with Fussell’s subsequent Norton Anthology of Travel (1987), introduced into the scholarly discussion of both travel and travel writing a set of taxonomical distinctions and categories that are still widely used today, although there are also many scholars who find them deeply problematic. For Fussell, the term ‘travel writing’ implicitly equates with the literary form he prefers to call the ‘travel book’, although he acknowledges that other terms such as ‘travelogue’ are also sometimes used. Whatever name one uses, however, Fussell insists that the proper travel book needs to be sharply distinguished from other forms of travel-related text, such as the exploration account and especially, the guidebook. Hence his magisterial declaration that ‘just as tourism is not travel, the guidebook is not the travel book’ (1987: 15); and as we shall see, Fussell is a critic much given to emphatic pronouncements as to what counts as ‘real’ travel and ‘real’ travel writing.
So what formal and/or thematic features define, for Fussell, the proper ‘travel book’? Essentially what he means by this term is the material classified in many bookshops as ‘travel literature’. These publications are almost invariably extended prose narratives, often broken up into chapters, and in this way they generally resemble novels, visually and formally, far more than they resemble guidebooks (or at least, modern guidebooks). In the latter, there may be sections of prose narrative, but these are usually kept short, and interspersed with maps, tables, lists, symbols and other non-narrative modes of presenting information. Travel books, meanwhile, may include illustrative material, such as maps or pictures, but usually these elements are secondary to the main prose narrative, and a much smaller proportion of the text is given over to them.
Further to this, the narrative offered by a travel book will almost invariably be a retrospective, first-person account of the author’s own experience of a journey, or of an unfamiliar place or people. What is more, the personal or subjective aspect of that narrative is often very pronounced, as we are made keenly aware not just of the places being visited, but also of the author’s response to that place, and his or her impressions, thoughts and feelings. For this reason, Paul Fussell suggests that the form is best regarded as
a sub-species of memoir in which the autobiographical narrative arises from the speaker’s encounter with distant or unfamiliar data, and in which the narrative – unlike that in a novel or a romance – claims literal validity by constant reference to actuality.
(1980: 203)
This emphasis on an autobiographical narrative, and the author’s personal experience of another people or place, again distinguishes travel books from guidebooks, since in the latter the writer (or quite possibly, the team of writers) usually dispenses with any direct account of the research trips required to produce the text. It is the practical information gathered on these trips that is of paramount importance in a guidebook, not the personal experiences of the author(s). In most travel books, however, it is evidently assumed that we will find the author, and his or her distinctive sensibility and style, as interesting as the place they are visiting. This contrasts not only with the modern guidebook, in which authors are usually more self-effacing, but also with many forms of travel document or text in which the emphasis is overwhelmingly on presenting information about the place being described. The latter tend to be classified by Fussell as accounts of ‘exploration’ or ‘discovery’, and to be seen accordingly as a genre distinct from the true or proper travel book.
Closely entwined with Fussell’s insistence that the true travel book has a pronounced personal or subjective element is the understanding that the agenda in the travel book is not merely functional or practical. Rather, the emphasis in these texts upon foregrounding the author’s distinctive sensibility and style is felt to confer upon the travel book a literary dimension. The travel book, accordingly, is for Fussell usually a first-person account of travel that may be read for pleasure, and for its aesthetic merits, as much as for the useful information it provides. Style is thus as important as content in these texts. Again, this is an emphasis that sets them apart from guidebooks and other more functional forms of travel account or document, in which questions of style and aesthetic pleasure are subordinated to the main imperative of relaying information efficiently and accurately.
Finally, in the definition cited earlier, Fussell suggests that the travel book may be contrasted with a novel or romance by its claim to ‘literal validity’ and its ‘constant reference to actuality’. By this, Fussell means that travel books profess to be a representation of a journey, and of events on that journey, that really took place. Thus they are, in short, a non-fictional rather than fictional form. Or as Mary Campbell puts it, ‘the travel book is a kind of witness: it is generically aimed at the truth’ (1988: 2–3). According to this criterion, fictive depictions of travel in novels such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) or Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768) are not to be classed as travel books. Clearly they are closely mimicking or borrowing from the form by providing a first-person narration of the protagonist’s journey, yet as Fussell and other critics have pointed out, the generic ‘contract’ that exists between the authors and readers of novels is usually significantly different to that which operates between the authors and readers of travel books. Whilst fiction may indeed describe real-life events, the reader understands that the writer is not obliged to recount those events accurately. They may be embellished or adapted or used selectively; interwoven with them, more often than not, will be scenes that are wholly the product of the writer’s imagination. In the travel book, however, such embellishments and outright inventions are more problematic. Generally speaking, travel writers do not have the same licence as novelists simply to make things up; to do so is to risk one’s narrative being classed as fiction, or worse, as fraudulent.
That said, this seemingly clear distinction between the non-fictional travel book and the fictional novel about travel is actually a lot more problematic than one might initially assume. It is also highly problematic to suggest, as Fussell often seems to, that it is only travel books of the sort he describes which can be considered travel writing, or at least ‘proper’ or ‘real’ travel writing. Setting both these issues aside for the time being, however, the ‘travel book’ as defined by Fussell undoubtedly corresponds to one very important and prominent branch of the travel writing genre, in modern times at least. And Fussell has further useful insights to offer as to the appeal of these travel books. Obviously they will usually be educative to some degree, offering their readers interesting observations about the peoples or places visited by the author. At the same time, however, as Fussell astutely notes, the modern travel book also offers its reader something akin to the narrative pleasure of a novel or romance, notwithstanding its claim to be a non-fictional genre. Often, for example, these accounts are underpinned, either explicitly or implicitly, by the mythic motif of the quest. Thus the travel book typically begins with the narrator setting out from his or her home, either in search of some specific goal or else generally seeking adventures, new experiences and interesting stories. On the road, and occupying the liminal position of traveller, the narrator undergoes important, possibly life-changing experiences, before returning home to be reintegrated into his or her own society. Usually, moreover, he or she returns enriched, either literally or metaphorically, by the journey; after all, the very fact that a narrative is subsequently produced is implicitly a statement that these adventures had some significance. Thus for Fussell, borrowing his terminology from the critic Northrop Frye, the travel book can be understood as a form of ‘displaced quest romance’ (1980: 209). ‘Displaced’, because the quest elements are translated from the fantastical realm of pure romance or myth into a reality that is usually more mundane than the world we encounter in romance. He further suggests that these ‘displaced romances’ come in two main modes: a ‘picaresque’ mode, in which the emphasis is simply on relating a sequence of adventures and misadventures, and an ‘elegiac’ or ‘pastoral’ mode, in which the emphasis is on seeking out the last vestiges of a vanishing way of life, or a culture perceived as less complex and less stressful than the traveller’s own.
These, then, are some of the key features of the genre that Paul Fussell labels the ‘travel book’, but that I would want to call more precisely the modern or literary travel book. Before explaining why I make this qualification, however, it should be noted that this is a form of writing that admits of enormous diversity, even as it conforms, more or less, to the definition just given of it. In the first place, and most obviously, travel books may vary greatly in the destinations they describe and the itineraries they recount; and in this regard, it is worth noting that whilst many travel writers set off for far-flung regions, there is also a well-established literature of ‘home travels’, in which writers variously celebrate, lament or poke fun at their compatriots, and at the state of their own nation (see Moir 1964; Kinsley 2008). More significantly, however, modern travel books also exhibit a remarkable range in terms of style and tone, form and structure, the personae adopted, the degree of ‘literary’ aspiration, and in much else besides. The genre admits of both very serious and very humorous writing, and tonally can encompass everything from earnest polemic to inconsequential whimsy, from poetic lyricism to crude farce. It also spans the complete spectrum of what one might term ‘high-brow’, ‘middle-brow’ and ‘low-brow’ writing. That is to say, some travel books clearly aspire to the status of ‘literature’, through the gravity of the topics they discuss or the sophistication of their writing, whilst others make no such cultural claim, being unashamedly exercises in easy reading and/or sensationalism.
Structurally, there can be a similar degree of variation. Although most modern travel books will recount an actual journey undertaken by the author, and organise their narratives according to the itinerary of this journey, this is not always the case. Some will not describe any actual travelling, but just a period spent residing in an unfamiliar place: William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns (1993), for example, which recounts a year spent in Delhi, India. In travel books that do narrate a journey, meanwhile, that journey can be given a very different degree of prominence in the narrative. Sometimes it will figure greatly, and be the object of significant and sustained attention in the text. On other occasions, however, it will seem largely incidental, as the writer uses the travel theme as little more than a peg on which to hang a series of essays or reflections, which may well be largely unrelated to the journey being undertaken. The extent to which the narrative focuses on, or reveals, the narratorial self may also vary greatly. For Fussell, as we have seen, the travel book is a ‘sub-species’ of memoir, and as we shall see in Chapter 5 there are indeed many travel books which seem principally concerned to narrate a journey into the self. Yet the genre also includes accounts like Jan Morris’s Venice (1960), in which the author is highly self-effacing, so that personal information is only revealed occasionally, and usually indirectly, as a by-product of the observations being made about the destination.
Finally, while many modern travel writers are clearly chiefly concerned to afford their readers entertainment and aesthetic pleasure, be it in the form of broad comedy or fine, elegant writing, there are also some whose concerns are more urgent and pragmatic. Some modern travel books seem closer in spirit to investigative journalism than to memoir or fiction: Norman Lewis’s The Missionaries (1988), for example, or George Monbiot’s Poisoned Arrows (1989). In these accounts, any desire to entertain the reader is arguably secondary to the more important aim of reporting the dubious practices of US missionaries in Latin America (in Lewis’s case), or the extent of environmental devastation in Indonesia (in Monbiot’s case). As this suggests, different travelogues can strike a very different balance between informing and entertaining the reader. Some are much more literary in aspiration, or entertainment-oriented; others, meanwhile, lean more towards reportage and journalism.
It will be apparent that the modern travel book is a flexible genre encompassing some highly diverse material. Its variant forms, indeed, arguably begin to stretch and problematise the definition of the genre advanced by Fussell. And as one looks back at the travel writing produced in earlier eras, further difficulties arise with Fussell’s definition of the travel book; or alternatively, with any suggestion that we can equate travel writing in its entirety with the form Fussell calls the travel book. Prior to 1900, in the English-speaking world at least, contemporaries usually talked of a genre called ‘voyages and travels’, rather than ‘travel writing’ or the ‘travel book’. The term ‘voyages and travels’ embraced an enormous diversity of travel-related texts, that took a variety of different forms and served many functions: ships’ logs; travellers’ journals and letters; the reports of merchants or spies or diplomats; accounts of exploration, pilgrimage, and colonial conquest and administration; narratives of shipwreck; accounts of captivity amongst foreign peoples and much else besides. Some of these texts can be understood as travel books, if by travel books we simply mean first-person, non-fictional accounts of travel. But in many other regards, they are often not much like the travel books we are used to today, or the travel book as defined by Paul Fussell.
Fussell, it will be recalled, defines the travel book as a ‘sub-species of memoir’, a definition justified by the pronounced emphasis on the narratorial self that characterises most modern travel books. Surveying material from the ‘voyages and travels’ era, however, this tenet about the form is swiftly confounded, or at least, complicated. Most travel books written before the late eighteenth century will strike modern readers as remarkably impersonal and un-autobiographical, even when they are written in the first person. Typically, the emphasis falls not on the subjective thoughts and feelings of the writer, but on the information gathered during the journey: the topography of foreign countries, for example, or details of their customs, military capabilities, and principal trading commodities. In some cases, it is still appropriate to regard these narratives as a form of memoir, although we potentially misread them if we approach them with expectations formed by modern travel books, and so fail to recognise the very different rhetorical conventions governing the literary presentation of the self in earlier eras. In other cases, however, it would seem to make little sense to consider these travel books as memoirs. There are accounts of voyages and travels, for example, in which the first-person narrative is just the flimsiest of frameworks, perhaps no more than a few sentences at the beginning and end of a text, between which the writer inserts the data accumulated during travel. The generic label also embraced many accounts which offer no personal narrative of a journey at all, just information relative to travel or to foreign places. Thus Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589; 2nd edition, 1598–1600), generally regarded as the first great compendium of travel writing in English, includes a document which is simply a list of all the items needed to undertake a successful whaling expedition.
Other distinctions and definitions central to Fussell’s conceptualisation of the ‘travel book’ are also confounded when one goes back to the ‘voyages and travels’ era. The clear distinction between travel book and guidebook, for example, often breaks down in travel accounts published before 1800, as writers include passages of highly practical advice to prospective travellers within a more personal and ‘literary’ narrative. Many of these accounts also blur Fussell’s strict demarcation between, on the one hand, texts arising from travel that principally follow a functional agenda, and on the other, more aesthetically oriented travel books. Broadly speaking, most ‘voyages and travels’ texts were far more concerned to disseminate useful data than the modern travel book – hence the comparative impersonality of tone noted earlier. At the same time, however, this emphasis did not necessarily preclude them from being received with great pleasure by many readers. In this regard, the opposition that Fussell seeks to establish between the aesthetic and the functional is both simplistic and anachronistic. We may see works that are principally concerned to give us information as outside the domain of proper ‘literature’, but earlier eras seem to have defined this category more expansively, embracing as ‘literary’ many texts that today strike us as very dry and factual.
Hence the importance of prefixing an adjective such as ‘modern’ or ‘literary’ to Fussell’s notion of the travel book. There were plenty of publications concerned with travel or about travel, not to mention an abundance of unpublished travel-related material such as letters and journals, prior to the nineteenth century, but many of them do not conform with Fussell’s definition of the form. But what then should we call all these earlier accounts of travel, if they are not travel books in the sense defined by Fussell? And even if they are not exactly ‘travel books’, should we still classify them as ‘travel writing’?
For Fussell, and for other critics who adopt his taxonomic categories, these texts are regarded as emerging from an era, and an activity, that is designated ‘pre-travel’ (see Fussell 1987: 21; Blanton 2002: 4–5). Or alternatively, they describe them as emerging from an era not of ‘travel’ but of ‘exploration’ (see Fussell 1980: 37–39). This is understood to be an age in which the information gathered by the traveller was still very much at a premium. This agenda, it is suggested, makes the travel writing of this era an essentially utilitarian and functional form, which is unconcerned with any presentation of the authorial self in the text, or with any self-conscious crafting of the text as an aesthetic artefact. Yet this is a far from satisfactory schema, for many reasons. Most notably, it frequently leads Fussell to the somewhat absurd proposition that there was no travel writing, and indeed, no ‘proper’ travel, before about 1750. For Fussell, we should note, the term ‘travel’ is rightfully applied to just some forms and expressions of human mobility, and it is not every human being who has made a journey who qualifies, in Fussell’s eyes, for the honorific title of ‘traveller’. At various points, accordingly, his definitions of real travel deny this status to, inter alia, the Spanish conquistadors, and to refugees, exiles and other forms of displaced people. Elsewhere, espousing a distinction frequently made by modern commentators on travel, he also suggests that modern tourists are not to be classed as true travellers. Whole epochs are similarly dismissed by Fussell. Thus he asks of the Ancient period, ‘there is plenty of movement from place to place, but is there really travel?’ (1987: 21). He answers in the negative, producing a rather circular rationale to justify this assessment. As we shall see in the next chapter, classical writers such as Herodotus and Pausanias certainly produced texts that are in diverse ways either the product of travel, or about travel. Yet none of these texts meet Fussell’s criteria for the travel book, and from this apparent absence of ‘proper’ travel books Fussell deduces that there were no genuine travellers in the Ancient world.
In part, Fussell is here engaged in a very useful discrimination between different sorts of human mobility. But to refuse to categorise explorers, conquistadors, refugees, tourists and so forth as types of traveller arguably flies in the face of common sense and the customary usage of the terms ‘travel’ and ‘traveller’. What is more, Fussell’s rather rarefied notion of what constitutes ‘real’ or ‘proper’ travel is frequently shot through with personal prejudices that smack of elitism and sexism. For Fussell, it seems, there was only a tiny epoch of human history when anyone travelled in the ‘proper’ sense: roughly, the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, when people began to have the leisure to undertake travel simply for travel’s sake, but before a modern, mass-touristic infrastructure emerged to excessively stage-manage the journey. Proper travel, Fussell repeatedly insists, is no longer possible: the best we can hope for now is what he terms ‘post-tourism’ (1987: 753–57). Even when it was possible, moreover, proper travel was seemingly a male rather than a female accomplishment. Or so one might infer from Fussell’s writings, which generally pay little attention to women travellers and travel writers.
Fussell, then, defines ‘proper’ travel in a decidedly narrow and exclusive fashion, and he derives from this definition of proper travel an equally narrow definition of the proper ‘travel book’, one that excludes many types of writing that have certainly been regarded in earlier eras as ‘travel writing’, or at least, as ‘voyages and travels’. Unsurprisingly, therefore, some critics have found Fussell’s definitions of ‘travel’, ‘traveller’ and ‘travel book’ too simplistic to adequately account for or describe what has always been a highly protean genre. Many critics accordingly define the genre in a broader, more inclusive fashion, especially when they are dealing with the travel writing of earlier periods. Zweder von Martels, for example, suggests that the term ‘travel writing’ can embrace material ranging ‘from guidebooks, itineraries and routes and perhaps also maps to … accounts of journeys over land or water, or just descriptions of experiences abroad’ (1994: xi). In this way von Martels sees guidebooks and travel books not as starkly opposed genres, as Fussell does, but as two branches of the same genre, and this seems historically justified when one takes a longer view of the form. One might add here that a historical perspective similarly problematises any sense of a sharp and intrinsic distinction between travel writing and ethnography. Critics such as Fussell who equate the term ‘travel writing’ with the form I have labelled the modern travel book generally assume that these are two different genres, with travel writing being characterised by a more personal and idiosyncratic approach to the topic in hand, and ethnography by a more scientific methodology and mode of discourse. Prior to the nineteenth century, however, this scientific methodology and style did not exist. Instead, ethnographic information often circulated, and ethnographic enquiry and debate were often conducted, in forms of writing more akin to the modern travel book than the modern ethnographic study.
These historical complexities, and the highly diverse forms of travel-related writing that exist both in our own time and in earlier eras, have led Jan Borm to make a very useful distinction between the ‘travel book’ and ‘travel writing’. The former he defines in more or less the same way as Fussell, as a first-person, ostensibly non-fictional narrative of travel. Unlike Fussell, however, Borm does not insist that the travel book has to be ‘literary’ and to follow primarily an aesthetic agenda. Borm’s notion of the ‘travel book’ is thus more straightforwardly a formal description than Fussell’s. And crucially, Borm does not equate the ‘travel book’ with ‘travel writing’ in its entirety. Rather, the latter is understood to be ‘a collective term for a variety of texts both fictional and non-fictional whose main theme is travel’ (2004: 13). This seems an eminently sensible suggestion, although it risks expanding the category ‘travel writing’ to such an extent that the term loses any explanatory or descriptive usefulness. After all, movement is one of the most fundamental of human activities, and there is consequently, as Peter Hulme has pointed out, very little ‘statuesque literature’ (Hulme and Youngs 2007: 3). That is to say, there are few literary texts that do not make some reference to travel, and/or offer some representation of movement through space. For the French theorist Michel de Certeau, indeed, ‘every story is a travel story’, and he goes on to suggest that the act of writing is itself, fundamentally and intrinsically, a form of travel, and that travel conversely is always a form of writing (2001: 89).
For de Certeau, then, all writing is travel writing. This is a definition that broadens the generic category of ‘travel writing’ to such an extent that it becomes meaningless and unhelpful. Yet Borm’s essentially thematic definition, which insists only that travel form the ‘main theme’ of a text, arguably takes us some distance in the same direction. Borm’s definition, for example, embraces both fictional and non-fictional texts, and so allows Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey to be classed as forms of travel writing. This expansion of the genre can perhaps be justified on the grounds that a novel just as much as a non-fictional travelogue may present a highly informative account, born of the author’s firsthand experience, of an unfamiliar people or place. Moreover, fictional as well as non-fictional accounts can shape powerfully our perceptions of other peoples and places. Heart of Darkness, for example, is arguably the seminal modern account of the Congo; for good and for bad, it has influenced profoundly the West’s image of the region, and the attitudes of most subsequent travellers there. For a variety of reasons, then, it may make sense in some discursive contexts to regard both fictional and non-fictional accounts of journeys, and/or of places, as closely related sub-species of travel writing.
Yet if we accept that novels may be a form of travel writing, where do we draw the line? Given that almost all novels will feature journeys of some description, how prominent does the travel dimension in a novel have to be for it to constitute a main theme? Must the journeys described have been made by the novelists themselves for their fictions to count as travel writing, or can the genre also include fictional journeys that are wholly imagined by the author? And what of fictions that are clearly born from the author’s own travel experiences, but which do not address the travel theme directly, such as some of Henry James’s novels? Furthermore, if one accepts fictional texts as a form of travel writing, what of poetry? Von Martels, interestingly, suggests that poetic as well as prose works can legitimately be considered travel writing (1994: xi). Again, this has some justification on historical grounds, given that Hakluyt includes in Principall Navigations ‘Letters in verse, written by Master George Turberville, out of Muscovy 1568’. Yet it potentially expands the genre vastly, opening up whole new areas of debate as to what does and does not count as travel writing. Turberville’s poem is essentially a versified list of observations about the Russian people, and insofar as its agenda is principally ethnographic rather than aesthetic, it seems easily assimilable to the travel writing genre. But what of more overtly literary poems such as Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), or Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel (1956)? Or even Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’? Poems such as these give us first-hand accounts of journeys that we assume to have some basis in reality, and to be rooted in the experience of the ‘I’ of the poem. So can we categorise them as travel writing?
It should also be noted that von Martels tentatively classifies maps as a form of travel writing. One might protest that maps cannot be classed as a form of writing, since they principally employ visual modes of representation. But they can of course be construed as ‘texts’, insofar as they are artfully constructed representations of the world that are often ideologically charged and laden with larger cultural meanings. In this respect, accordingly, one might plausibly include maps in the travel writing genre. Yet if one includes maps one presumably also has to include other visual media such as paintings and sketches, photographs, television programmes and films; and so not only Heart of Darkness, but also Francis Ford Coppola’s filmic reworking of Conrad’s novella, Apocalypse Now (1979), arguably becomes a form of travel writing. Many readers, no doubt, will baulk at defining the genre so broadly. Yet it is worth noting that academic conferences on travel writing, and specialist journals such as Studies in Travel Writing and Journeys, will sometimes include papers focusing on depictions of travel, or of other peoples and places, in film, art and other visual media. Their inclusion reflects the fact that the representations offered in these media often work in similar ways, and with similar effects, to the representations offered in more obviously literary forms of travelogue; and for this reason it is in some contexts both useful and appropriate to subsume film, photography and so forth into the broader category ‘travel writing’.
As this will suggest, it is possible to define ‘travel writing’ very broadly indeed. As a consequence, and given the range of material that has historically been classified as ‘travel writing’ or ‘voyages and travels’, there is probably no neat and all-encompassing definition of the form that one can give. The genre is perhaps better understood as a constellation of many different types of writing and/or text, these differing forms being connected not by conformity to a single, prescriptive pattern, but rather by a set of what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would call ‘family resemblances’. That is to say, there are a variety of features or attributes that can make us classify a text as travel writing, and each individual text will manifest a different selection and combination of these attributes. Central to the genre, undoubtedly, is the form that both Fussell and Borm label the ‘travel book’: that is to say, the first-person, ostensibly non-fictional narrative of travel. But as we have seen, this is a branch of travel writing that in itself encompasses enormous variety, and so comes in more forms than some critics (notably Fussell) will acknowledge. Around the central form of the travel book, meanwhile, there circulates a still greater range of texts that can all potentially be understood either as branches and sub-genres of travel writing, or else as separate genres closely cognate with travel writing, and indeed sometimes merging into it: guidebooks, itineraries, novels with a pronounced travel theme, memoirs, writings of place, descriptions of the natural world, maps, road movies and much else besides.
Thus the boundaries of the travel writing genre are fuzzy, and there is little point in policing them too rigidly. But within this larger, looser generic label, one may certainly talk with greater precision of specific modes and sub-genres of travel writing: the medieval peregrinatio (‘pilgrimage narrative’), for example, or the early modern ‘relation’, or the eighteenth-century exploration narrative, or the guidebooks of different eras, or indeed the modern travel book, which often draws upon and adapts all these different precursors and companion forms. Each of these sub-genres of travel writing, at each moment of its development, has its own history, its own rhetorical conventions, and its own role in the larger culture of which it is a part. And often it is important that we are attentive to these specific, sub-generic traditions and agendas, if we are not to read the various forms of travel writing inappropriately or anachronistically.
Travellers’ Tales: Fact And Fiction in Travel Writing
However expansively one wants to define the category ‘travel writing’, a central branch of the genre is certainly the ‘travel book’, the first-person narrative of travel which claims to be a true record of the author’s own experiences. Yet as so often with this protean and slippery genre, there are ambiguities and complexities attendant even on the seemingly straightforward statement that the travel book is a non-fictional form. For all travel writers find themselves having to negotiate two subtly different, and potentially conflicting, roles: that of reporter, as they seek to relay accurately the information acquired through travel, and that of story-teller, as they seek to maintain the reader’s interest in that information, and to present it in an enjoyable, or at least easily digestible way. And the necessary negotiation of these two roles ensures that the distinction between ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ in travel writing is not as clear-cut as one might initially assume.
All examples of travel writing are by definition textual artefacts, that have been constructed by their writers and publishers. As Peter Hulme puts it, in a useful formulation, they have at the very least to be ‘made’, even if they are not supposed to be ‘made up’ (Hulme and Youngs 2007: 3). One cannot simply record the continuous flow of sensory experience that occurs as one travels; the sheer quantity of data would be overwhelming, as would the utter insignificance of most of it. Even in a form with the apparent immediacy of a travel journal or diary, a writer necessarily picks out significant recent events, and organises those events, and his or her reflections on them, into some sort of narrative, however brief. Travel experience is thus crafted into travel text, and this crafting process must inevitably introduce into the text, to a greater or lesser degree, a fictive dimension. At the very least, the inevitable filtering of the original travel experience gives a writer considerable scope to be, if not exactly deceitful, certainly eco-nomical with the truth. Thus there have been many travel writers over the years who have not deemed it necessary to inform readers that their journey was made with a companion, or companions, or possibly even a whole support team. In some cases, this information was suppressed so as to make the journey seem a more heroic undertaking; and here the careful tailoring of the travel account clearly pushes the text in the direction of fiction, even if the writer does not perpetrate any outright inventions or falsehoods.
In such ways, then, travel writing will often commit significant sins of omission that problematise its status as a wholly factual, truth-telling genre. At the same time, it is often guilty of sins of commission, and of subtle or not-so-subtle elements of fabrication in the telling of the travel tale. In the modern travel book especially, most episodes are clearly written up retrospectively by the writer, rather than being written on the spot. The writer may well have a good memory of the original events; quite possibly, indeed, he or she will also draw upon notes taken at the time. But obviously, there is again considerable scope for such recreated episodes to take on a fictive colouring. In some cases, the writer will opt for a narrative mode of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’, electing not just to report an encounter retrospectively, but rather to reconstruct it on the page in a more vivid and novelistic fashion. Atmosphere will be created through description and imagery; thoughts, feelings and motives may be imputed to other participants in the scene, possibly through devices such as free indirect discourse. Dialogue, meanwhile, will sometimes be rendered directly, as if the writer remembered the exact words spoken in a conversation, although this is of course highly unlikely unless the traveller was simultaneously taking notes, or in more recent times using some sort of audio or video device. Insofar as they utilise such literary devices, travel writers are arguably not so much reconstructing as constructing their experiences; inevitably what they offer their readers is a somewhat fictionalised rendering of their journeys.
A degree of fictionality is thus inherent in all travel accounts. Yet the extent to which travel writers weave fictional elements into their texts can of course vary greatly. At one end of the spectrum there are those writers who broadly seek to record faithfully their experiences, but who must necessarily edit, reconstruct, and so subtly distort, those experiences in the process of fashioning their narrative. At the other end of the spectrum, meanwhile, there are many writers who have more wilfully invented details and anecdotes. There is a long history of hoax travel narratives, for example, and these fake accounts in turn span a spectrum from playful literary experiments such as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), which were always meant to be recognised as fictions, to more deliberate deceptions and frauds such as George Psalmanazar’s Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (1704). Even when travel writers recount journeys that did genuinely take place, moreover, there have been many authors who have fabricated some incidents and encounters, or exaggerated them, so as to capitalise on the reading public’s perennial hunger for wonders, exotic curiosities and sensational titbits.
This is the further sense in which travel writers are often as much story-tellers as reporters. It is not just that they always have necessarily to construct their narratives; it is also that, historically, they have often had a pronounced propensity for tall tales and intriguing or amusing anecdotes. In Ancient Greek culture, revealingly, Hermes was the god of both travellers and liars. As this will suggest, travel writing has often been the focus of profound epistemological anxieties, as both writers and readers confront the difficult problem of distinguishing fact from fiction in the written text. Wrestling with this problem, and concerned to dissociate themselves from more fanciful or excessively subjective travel accounts, some modes of travel writing have developed protocols and stylistic conventions intended to reassure readers as to the reliability of the information they purvey. These will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. For other travel writers, meanwhile, this blurring of the boundary of fact and fiction, and the freedom to interweave story-telling and reportage, is arguably part of the attraction of the form. Thus recent decades have witnessed, at the more literary end of the genre, a wave of travel writing that one might broadly characterise as postmodern in outlook and expression. In travelogues of this type, the most famous examples being perhaps Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977) and The Songlines (1987), the traveller-narrators often seem to cast themselves in the role of trickster-figures. Self-consciously aligning themselves with travel writing’s long tradition of tall tales and hoaxes, they playfully confound our conventional categories of fiction and non-fiction, in order to explore the competing claims of imagination, reason and moral responsibility in our engagement with the world.
It will be apparent that the label ‘non-fiction’, when applied to travel writing at least, is somewhat simplistic, and often in need of considerable qualification. For this reason, Paul Fussell would rather understand the genre as offering a ‘“creative” mediation between fact and fiction’ (1980: 214). Or as Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan would have it, drawing upon the theoretical work of Hayden White (1976), most travel narratives should be regarded as ‘fictions of factual representation’ (Holland and Huggan 1998: 10), texts that for the most part offer us only the illusion of being faithful representations of the world, when in fact they are inevitably selective and fictive to some degree. Recognition of this fact should not lead us to assume that everything in a travelogue is made up, nor does it necessarily discredit the information that travelogues provide about the wider world. Yet clearly we always need to keep in mind that the apparent truthfulness and factuality of a travelogue is always to some degree a rhetorical effect; and we must remember also that any form of travel text is always a constructed, crafted artefact, which should never be read naively as just a transparent window on the world.
The Cultural and Intellectual Status of Travel Writing
‘Experience sought for the sake of writing about it may produce reporting, or travel books, but it is not likely to produce literature.’ This comment by the American novelist Wallace Stegner (quoted in Kowaleswki 1992: 2) reflects a widespread attitude to travel writing in our culture today. The genre may well be popular, but more often than not it is often viewed dismissively by critics, possibly because of that very popularity. In our contemporary hierarchy of genres, travel writing sits significantly below more esteemed genres such as the novel. Hence, perhaps, the unease that some travel writers feel about being identified with the form. Jenni Diski, for example, admits that ‘something about the idea of being a travel writer distresses me’ (2006: 1). Bruce Chatwin was similarly uncomfortable with the label ‘travel writer’; he fought a long and ultimately unsuccessful battle with his publishers to have The Songlines classified as fiction rather than travel writing. Even Paul Fussell feels compelled to ask, ‘is there not perhaps something in the genre that attracts second-rate talents?’ (1980: 212). He insists, however, that the genre has produced some literary masterpieces, instancing works such as Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937).
If modern travel writing in this way generally seems to fall short of full literary status, so too is it usually denied much credibility or authority as a scientific or intellectual discourse. As we have seen, the form straddles many generic boundaries, often moving into territory also covered by a broad range of academic disciplines, such as natural history, geography or anthropology. When this happens, however, modern travel books can usually be distinguished from more formal academic treatises by virtue of their more personal and more idiosyncratic approach. The result will often be a somewhat anecdotal account, pitched at the general reader, which eschews the arcane technical jargon and the more rigorous and systematic methodologies found in academic literature. Nigel Barley’s The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut (1983) neatly illustrates this aspect of the genre. Barley is a professional anthropologist, and his narrative is an account of a period spent doing fieldwork amongst a West African tribe, the Dowayo. But his anthropological findings were presented more formally in Symbolic Structures: An Exploration of the Culture of the Dowayo (1983). This is a daunting structuralist ethnography, pitched at academic professionals, which keeps its focus very much on the object of academic enquiry, the Dowayo themselves. The Innocent Anthropologist, meanwhile, focuses in equal measure on the Dowayo and on Barley’s experience of doing fieldwork amongst them. A far more accessible account of his fieldwork, it consists chiefly of a series of funny stories about Barley’s time with the tribe; few serious anthropological conclusions are offered. For this reason it sits in the ‘Travel’ section of bookshops, not in the ‘Anthropology’ section.
Travel writing’s relationship with ethnography is replicated in its relationship with most other academic disciplines. The genre has a resolutely amateur or dilettante aspect, or at least, it does in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: as we shall see, this was not always the case in earlier periods. As a consequence, travel writing is generally perceived as not being at the cutting edge in terms of the factual information it provides. It is probably fair to say that if we were seriously concerned with science, or political debate, or the latest news from around the world, travel writing would not be the forum in which we would do our research or conduct our discussions. It is as if it is too ‘literary’ to qualify as a serious contribution in these areas, whilst simultaneously, and a little paradoxically, it is too factual and not literary enough for those readers and writers who prefer more obviously imaginative works such as novels. On both sides of its twin agenda of informing and entertaining, therefore, travel writing seems a rather second-order exercise; and consequently, it is very much a minor literary form in the eyes of many critics and commentators.
It must be stressed, however, that the dismissive attitude outlined earlier is principally directed towards travel writing in its modern, literary form; that is to say, towards the (sub-)genre defined earlier as the modern travel book. As we have seen, it is possible to take a more expansive view of the genre, whereby modern ethnography becomes simply one mode of travel writing, rather than a separate genre to be sharply distinguished from it. The same may be said for many other scientific texts which recount various types of fieldwork and travel. Further to this, it should also be noted that travel writing has not always been regarded as such a minor, inconsequential form. In this regard, as in many others, there are significant differences between what we now label ‘travel writing’ and the earlier, more eclectic genre known to contemporaries as ‘voyages and travels’. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, ‘voyages and travels’ were central to the canon of respectable, desirable reading. The genre of course included many accounts that were regarded as superficial, or luridly sensational, yet at its best the form was felt to provide a wholly satisfactory blend of literary pleasure and useful knowledge. In part, this was because many travelogues of this period were at the forefront of scientific and intellectual enquiry, with explorers like James Cook, Mungo Park and Charles Darwin making important new geographical, zoological and ethnographical discoveries, and domestic travellers like Arthur Young making compelling interventions in contemporary social and economic debates. And in part, this different attitude to the genre derived from subtle differences in taste and aesthetic expectation. Eighteenth-century writers and readers do not seem to have perceived the same schism between imaginative and factual modes of writing as their modern counterparts, and so felt less anxiety about classing travel narratives as ‘literature’. Some reasons why this attitude to travel writing evolved into our modern attitude to the genre will emerge over the course of this volume; for now, however, it will suffice to stress that the genre has not always held the somewhat minor, marginal status that it holds today.