Travel Writing

Revealing the Self

Bill Bryson’s bestselling travelogue The Lost Continent (1989) at one level recounts the author’s bemused peregrinations around small-town America. At another level, however, it records a different sort of journey, more subtle and more inward. As Bryson re-enacts the dreadful vacation trips of his 1950s childhood, he slowly works through some of his complex, conflicted feelings towards his recently deceased father. Both journey and narrative begin with Bryson harbouring some resentment towards the tedium of his Iowa upbringing, and towards his father for inflicting that upbringing on him. Yet as the journey progresses, he comes to feel that Iowa in the 1950s was not such a bad place to be brought up, certainly in comparison with many regions of the United States in the late 1980s. In the process, Bryson gradually revises his opinion of his father and ceases to regard him as a failure for settling in, and settling for, Iowa. In fact, Bryson senior had many virtues, and many accomplishments to his name, as his son’s narrative increasingly acknowledges. In this way The Lost Continent charts not only the literal travels of its author, but also an emotional and psychological journey within the author; or more precisely, an emotional and psychological evolution which is always likely, in our culture at least, to be construed metaphorically as a journey. And in the absence of any clear goal or destination for Bryson’s actual travels, it is principally this inner development that gives shape and aesthetic form to his narrative. It generates for the reader a pleasing sense of closure and completion; we finish Bryson’s travelogue feeling that this traveller has at least made some important self-discoveries, even if he has not made the great discoveries about the wider world that are perhaps more traditional in travel writing.

Bryson’s travelogue thus conforms to the guidelines laid out by an earlier travel writer, Norman Douglas, when he suggests that,

the reader of a good travel-book is entitled not only to an exterior voyage, to descriptions of scenery and so forth, but [also] to an interior, a sentimental or temperamental voyage, which takes place side by side with the outer one.

(Quoted in Fussell 1980: 203)

This directive is cited approvingly by literary critic Paul Fussell, for whom this marriage of interior and exterior journeys represents the aesthetic ideal in travel writing. Underpinning this literary-critical valuation, it should be noted, is a more general critical assumption that travel writing is usually, or properly, a highly autobiographical form and a genre that is typically just as concerned to explore and present the subjectivity of the traveller-narrator as it is to explore and report the world. Thus Fussell classifies travel writing, or at least the modern travel book, as a ‘sub-species of memoir’ (1980: 203), whilst for Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, more evocatively, ‘travel narratives articulate a poetics of the wandering subject’ and the ‘roving “I”’ (1998: 14).

As always, however, one must be wary of making over-broad generalisations about a vast and highly protean form. If we accept the larger, baggier conception of the travel writing genre outlined earlier in this volume, we must also accept that there have been historically, and continue to be today, modes of travel writing that do not exhibit any great interest in the subjectivity of a traveller-narrator: the modern guide-book, for example, or some of the scientific forms of travel writing discussed in the last chapter, in which emphasis increasingly falls on the presentation of quantitative data. Putting these exceptions aside, however, it is certainly the case that many modes of Western travel writing, from the late medieval era onwards, evince a growing interest in the autobiographical dimensions and potentialities of the travelogue form. That said, this growing concern with the traveller’s personal experience does not seem to have originated in any overtly autobiographical impulse on the part of travel writers, and in its earliest manifestations it seldom reflected a desire to trace in detail the inner world of the travelling self. Rather, it was a development closely bound up with the emergence, from the late medieval period onwards, of the observational and rhetorical protocols discussed in the last chapter; its starting point was a growing desire, and requirement, to emphasise the traveller’s eye-witness status, and so give greater credibility to their report. Yet insofar as these protocols brought about a new attentiveness to what travellers had seen and done themselves, and correspondingly an increasing readiness to admit first-person narration and subjective thoughts and feelings into the travel text, so in time they precipitated more autobiographical and inward-looking strains of travel writing.

At its most extreme, this tendency in the genre has led to travelogues that are almost wholly about the traveller-narrator, rather than the places visited, as the encounter with the wider world becomes merely a pretext or prompt to narratorial introspection and self-analysis. Such complete self-absorption, however, is uncharacteristic of the genre. More usual are narratives that seek to interweave the inner and outer worlds, mixing ostensibly factual, objective description of the people and places through which the traveller passes with a more openly subjective account of the traveller’s own thoughts and feelings over the course of the journey. Hence the combination of narratorial modes that Rob Nixon sees as characteristic of the modern travel book; namely, the oscillation between, on the one hand, a ‘semi-ethnographic, distanced, analytical mode’ and, on the other, ‘an autobiographical, emotionally tangled mode’ (1992: 15). Of course, the balance struck between these two modes can vary considerably. In different periods, and in different branches of the genre, travel writers may position themselves at various points along a spectrum that runs from, on the one hand, an extreme subjectivism that concerns itself chiefly with an inner terrain of thought and feeling, memory and imagination and, on the other, an extreme objectivism that seeks to present facts about the world with seemingly little or no narratorial mediation. Yet insofar as most forms of post-medieval travel writing do incorporate some elements of personal information and first-person narration, the genre may be regarded as an important branch of what is now often termed ‘life writing’. That is to say, travel writing has frequently provided a medium in which writers can conduct an autobiographical project, exploring questions of identity and selfhood whilst simultaneously presenting to others a self-authored and as it were ‘authorised’ account of themselves. Moreover, the generic requirement to include an element of personal detail ensures that travelogues will often offer interesting insights into what is sometimes termed an individual’s subject position, even when travel writers have not deliberately set out to write in such a self-reflective fashion.

The present chapter accordingly explores some of the ways in which travel writing has functioned as a form of ‘life writing’. To this end, the central section of the chapter addresses the growing tendency in the genre, from the late eighteenth century onwards, to foreground the narratorial self, so that the traveller becomes as much the object of the reader’s attention as the place travelled to. This is a development which makes travel writing more obviously a vehicle for autobiographical writing, and the section considers both the diverse ends to which the genre has been put in this regard, and the diverse strategies and rhetorical techniques that travel writers have employed to represent the self. As noted, however, travelogues need not be explicitly autobiographical in intent, nor do they have to adopt an overtly subjective register, in order to provide revealing insights into the personality of the traveller. Similarly, even travelogues that seem to modern eyes very impersonal and un-autobiographical can sometimes serve as a mode of self-fashioning, by which the writer seeks to project to the wider world a desired identity or persona. The first section of the chapter accordingly explores the extent to which even travelogues written before the ‘inward turn’ of the late eighteenth century constitute a form of writing about the self, and also a writing of the self, notwithstanding the apparent impersonality of many of these texts. And finally, the third section of the chapter addresses the ethical concerns that some critics have recently raised about the centrality of the narratorial self in many travel accounts; it discusses some of the personae most commonly fashioned by travel writers, and considers the rhetorical agendas implicit in these personae, and their larger cultural and ideological implications.

Grand Tourists, Pilgrims and Questing Knights: Self-Fashioning in Addison’s Remarks on Italy (1705) and Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596)

In Chapters 8 and 14 of his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), Joseph Addison discusses Rome, which he had visited in the course of a tour of France and Italy undertaken between 1701 and 1703. As the capital of the greatest empire in the ancient world, Rome was in many ways the focal point and climactic destination for well-to-do Britons embarking on what had become known as the Grand Tour. The ruling elite of Britain liked to style themselves the inheritors of ancient Rome’s power and prestige, and for their sons it was accordingly a rite of passage to visit the most celebrated landmarks of the Roman world, and to peruse the classical antiquities that had survived the passage of time. And nowhere, of course, did these landmark sites and acclaimed relics exist in more abundance than in Rome itself.

Given the importance of Rome in the itinerary of the Grand Tour, the modern reader might expect Addison’s account of the Eternal City to convey a sense of the pleasure and excitement he felt when finally he reached this key destination. We might even assume that the period spent in Rome will be rendered in his narrative as some sort of climax or conclusion to the whole journey. Yet this is not the case. There is no build-up, as it were, to Addison’s arrival in Rome, neither on the first occasion he arrives there, when he is only able to make a short stay before setting off for Naples, nor on the second occasion, when he returns from Naples and is at last able to make a more extended visit. Thereafter, Addison gives the reader little sense of what he felt as he viewed the various sites and antiquities of Rome; indeed, there is little direct narration of his personal experience at all. To modern readers, Addison’s description of Rome will seem very dry and scholarly, both in tone and tenor. For it consists chiefly of a series of disquisitions on issues such as the aesthetic merits and architectural technicalities of St Peter’s church; classical sculpture, and the insights it gives us into topics such as Roman clothing and the musical instruments of the ancient world; Roman funeral practices; and the coins and medals of both the Republican and Imperial eras. For example, Chapter 14 of Remarks, where Addison gives his extended account of Rome, begins as follows:

It is generally observed, that Modern Rome stands higher than the Ancient; some have computed it about fourteen or fifteen feet, taking one place with another. The reason given for it is, that the present city stands upon the ruins of the former; and indeed, I have often observed, that where any considerable pile of building stood anciently, one still finds a rising ground, or a little kind of hill, which was doubtless made up out of the fragments and rubbish of the ruined edifice. But besides this particular cause, we may assign another that has very much contributed to the raising the situation of several parts of Rome: it being certain the great quantities of earth, that have been washed off from the hills by the violence of showers have had no small share in it. This any one may be sensible of, who observes how far several buildings, that stand near the roots of mountains, are sunk deeper in the earth than those that have been on the tops of hills, or on open plains.

(Addison 1705: 300–301)

This passage is a good illustration of Addison’s style and narrative technique throughout his account of Rome, and throughout his narrative generally. And as this example will suggest, whilst Remarks is structured as a first-person narrative based to some degree on a journal kept by the traveller-narrator, it actually offers the reader comparatively little in the way of a personal narrative of the writer’s own experience. Instead, snippets of first-person narration serve simply to frame much longer passages of general observation and speculation, or else to support assertions made in the course of those observations. Thus the opening of Chapter 14, as cited above, was prefaced at the end of Chapter 13 by a single-sentence paragraph informing us that ‘half a day more brought us to Rome, thro’ a road that is commonly visited by travellers’ (Addison 1705: 299). The phrase ‘I have often observed’, meanwhile, is inserted into the passage above to remind us that Addison’s speculations have some empirical basis, yet Addison does not here recount any particular episode in which he personally witnessed the phenomenon he is describing.

It will be apparent that Addison is a far more reticent narrator than we are accustomed to seeing in modern travel books. Attention is firmly focused on the world beyond the self, with the result that Addison himself comes to seem a distinctly dispassionate, and even disembodied presence in his own travel narrative. The account makes little attempt to convey Addison’s lived travel experience, as it were, nor does it concern itself with the various sensations, ranging from anticipation and pleasure to discomfort, inconvenience and disappointment, which he must have felt in the course of his travels. A more personal and expressive register, interestingly, is evident in the private letters that Addison sent home from Italy. In one letter, for example, he informs a friend that,

I am just now arrived at Geneva by a very troublesome journey over the Alps where I have been for some days together shivering among the eternal snows. My head is still giddy with mountains and precipices and you can’t imagine how much I am pleased with the sight of a plain.

(Quoted in Batten 1978: 18)

Here we do get some sense of Addison’s personal travel experience, as the writing seeks to render how his circumstances impinged upon him both physically and emotionally. In Remarks, however, the same journey across the Alps is described thus:

I came directly from Turin to Geneva, and had a very easy journey over Mount Cenis, though about the beginning of December, the snows having not yet fallen. On the tip of this high mountain is a large plain, and in the midst of the plain a beautiful lake, which would be very extraordinary were there not several mountains in the neighbourhood rising over it.

(1705: 444)

There then follows a rather abstract discussion of Italian lakes in general, and the way they are described in Latin poetry. The comparatively emotive register utilised in the letter gives way, in the published account of the tour, to a far less personalised style and narrative focus. This narratorial reticence is typical of most travelogues before the latter part of the eighteenth century; or at least, of most travelogues designed for circulation beyond an immediate circle of family and friends. Travel writers generally strove to convey a sense of themselves as impassive, trustworthy observers of the external world; as ‘Cartesian’ selves, in the parlance discussed in the last chapter. And consequently, published travel accounts seldom included much personal detail or narratorial interiority, even when the account was presented to the public as a journal, diary or letter, narrative forms that we might assume to be inherently intimate and autobiographical.

This impersonal style does not necessarily indicate that the travellers of earlier eras felt things less keenly than we do today, or that they were configured emotionally and psychologically in some fundamentally different way to ourselves. There is of course plenty of historical and anthropological evidence to suggest that concepts of the ‘self’, and of human individuality, can vary greatly across different cultures and periods. However, one needs to exercise some caution before ascribing the impersonality of most pre-modern travelogues to the notion that earlier travellers possessed a sense of self radically different from that which operates in modern Western culture. The further one goes back in time, of course, the more plausible this claim becomes; an early medieval traveller such as Egeria, for example, emerged from a culture so very different from our own that it is likely she must also have had a profoundly different sense of her own selfhood and individuality (see Campbell 1988: 20–33). Yet the lack of focus upon the narratorial self we find in many pre-1750 travel accounts also derives, to some extent, from differences not so much in the travellers themselves as in the generic conventions associated with the travelogue form. The chief duty prescribed for almost all travel writers before the late eighteenth century was that they bring back useful knowledge. It was this utilitarian agenda alone that was felt to justify venturing into print and demanding public attention; and consequently, for a travel account to dwell too much on the traveller’s personal feelings and impressions smacked of presumption and vanity, and was likely to earn the writer a rebuke for being, in eighteenth-century parlance, too ‘egotistical’. Even Addison’s Remarks was censured in some quarters in this regard. As Charles Batten notes, at least one anonymous pamphlet of the day poked fun at Addison for including information about operas he had seen, and for recounting an incident in which he had from a distance mistaken linen spread out on the ground for a lake (see Batten 1978: 12–13). Such details, it seems, were felt to be too incidental and inconsequential for a published account of travels.

Given this impersonality of style, Addison’s Remarks will not seem very autobiographical to modern readers. Certainly, it is not concerned with what is generally felt today to be the key agenda that defines autobiographical writing; namely, a conscious attempt on the part of the writer to explore his or her selfhood and identity, to express the contours of their inner world of thought and feeling, and to reach an understanding of the influences and circumstances that shaped them. Yet it should also be remembered that autobiographical writing is usually a Janus-faced activity, which looks in two directions simultaneously. On the one hand, it requires an inward scrutiny, as the writer attempts to reach some sort of self-understanding; on the other hand, it is also often undertaken with at least one eye on the writer’s prospective audience, and with a constant awareness of the persona that the writer wishes to present to that audience. And in this latter sense at least, even seemingly impersonal travelogues such as Addison’s Remarks arguably constitute a form of autobiographical writing. For whilst Addison makes little explicit reference to himself in the course of his narrative, his narrative nevertheless implicitly serves to fashion a public persona for the author.

What Addison’s account signals most obviously, of course, is that the author has made the tour of Italy. As noted already, this was an important rite of passage amongst the political and cultural elite in the eighteenth century, since the tour was felt by many to play an important, formative role in the development of taste and good judgement. As Samuel Johnson remarked, ‘a man who has never been to Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from not having seen what it is supposed a man should see’ (Boswell 1791: vol. 2, 61). Addison’s Remarks demonstrates that he need feel no such inferiority, whilst simultaneously, his reticence as a narrator signals a traveller, and a writer, whose principal concern is not vainglorious self-promotion, but the acquisition of useful knowledge for the benefit of British society as a whole. Further to this, the persona that Addison projects is also a matter of the topics that he chooses to discuss. We might assume today that the topics addressed in Remarks simply reflect Addison’s personal interests, but again, this is perhaps anachronistic; as Batten has emphasised, it is more accurate to say that Addison engages with those subject-areas deemed appropriate for the travelogue in this period. For contemporary readers, moreover, some of these topics were subtly coded in ways that we may not recognise today. For example, Addison provides a detailed account of the political and economic affairs of most of the city-states he visits. In the eyes of most eighteenth-century reviewers and critics, however, it was not every writer who was licensed to pass comment in this way on political and economic matters. Women who ventured an opinion on these topics, for instance, were likely to be censured, or at best patronised. It was not every writer, equally, who could discuss classical poetry in as much detail as Addison does; for the most part, it was only the members of a very privileged, masculine elite, the recipients of what was termed a ‘liberal education’, who were well read in Latin literature. By discussing such topics in his narrative, accordingly, Addison simultaneously asserts and demonstrates his status as a well-educated, public-spirited gentleman, someone who is both equipped and entitled to discuss matters of public importance.

Even a comparatively impersonal travel account such as Addison’s Remarks, then, may function as a form of self-fashioning, enabling writers to craft and project a distinctive identity for themselves. There are occasions, moreover, when we can detect in travelogues produced before the late eighteenth century a more conspicuous element of overt self-fashioning, notwithstanding a similar reluctance to focus directly on the narratorial self. For example, the image of the author presented in Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596) seems carefully calculated to win back the favour of his monarch, Elizabeth I of England. Elizabeth had banished Ralegh from court when she discovered his illicit marriage to one of her ladies-in-waiting, and to redeem himself in the Queen’s eyes Ralegh led in 1595 an expedition to South America. His aim was discover the fabled city of Manoa, or as it has become known to posterity ‘El Dorado’, which was rumoured to possess spectacular wealth; and Ralegh’s ultimate goal was to annexe that wealth for England, in emulation and defiance of Spain’s colonial presence in the region. Unfortunately, however, the venture was a failure. Notwithstanding the title of his account, Ralegh did not ‘discover’ any ‘large, rich and bewtiful empyre’ in the region, he merely brought back hearsay reports that such a realm might exist further inland. Gifted with much greater literary skills than most travel writers of this period, however, Ralegh contrived ingeniously to turn this failure to his advantage when subsequently he wrote up the expedition.

Ralegh himself, in a prefatory letter, indicates the figure that he wishes to cut in the main narrative of his account. In this preface, he expresses the wish that his abortive venture will receive ‘the gracious construction of a paineful pilgrimage’ (Whitehead 1997: 121). This is a canny rhetorical manoeuvre, which attempts to shift readerly attention away from what the expedition achieved in terms of tangible, worldly goals. Instead, it implies that the journey was worthwhile insofar as it brought about a spiritual, existential transformation in the travellers; pilgrimages, after all, traditionally involve a renovation of faith, and also a shriving of past sins through the pilgrim’s readiness to countenance discomfort and pain in the course of their journey. That said, the pilgrimage motif is not invoked at any point in the main body of Ralegh’s narrative, nor does Ralegh ever concern himself with any sort of introspective analysis of how he was changed by his travel experiences. Like Addison’s Remarks, Ralegh’s Discoverie will strike modern readers as an outward-looking, comparatively objectivist text, which by today’s standards allots little narrative space to the subjectivity of the narrator. Although written in the first person, its first-person pronouns for the most part govern simple statements of movement and action; they chiefly relate where the party went, what they did and what they saw, rather than reflecting on what was thought and felt about these discoveries. Like Addison, moreover, Ralegh’s principal concern throughout his account is to relay the information that he has acquired, for example about the different indigenous tribes in the region, and about Spanish activities there.

At the same time, however, Ralegh’s failure to return with any really significant new discoveries about the region produces what Neil Whitehead terms a ‘drive to narrativity’ in his account of the expedition (1997: 63). That is to say, the progress of the journey, rather than simply the results of the expedition, had to be fore-grounded to a greater extent than was usual in this period. This in turn allowed, or required, Ralegh to recount something of the ordeal he and his men endured. We learn accordingly of how the party’s clothes ‘hung very wet & heavy on our shoulders’ because of the stifling heat (187), and of their exhaustion and fear as they navigated the labyrinthine waterways of the Orinoco basin:

When three more days were overgone, our companies began to despair, the weather being extreme hot, the river bordered with very high trees that kept away the air, and the current against us every day stronger than the last … The further we went on (our victual decreasing and the air breeding great faintness), we grew weaker and weaker when we had most need of strength.

(Whitehead 1997: 160–61)

Yet whilst Ralegh’s own mood and physical condition can be inferred from passages like this, he seldom describes himself directly. The way in which these distressing circumstances impinged on Ralegh personally, and indeed his private inner world of sensation, thought and feeling throughout the whole expedition, goes largely unrecorded in The Discoverie.

It is presumably passages such as the one cited above that are meant to evoke for the reader the notion of a suffering pilgrimage, in which a penance is made for past sins. Or alternatively, they may bring to mind the figure of a questing knight, the protagonist perhaps of one of the chivalric romances that were hugely popular at Elizabeth’s court, someone who undergoes discomfort and danger in pursuit of a noble goal. In the latter regard, it is perhaps significant that Ralegh also takes care to inform us that he imposed a strict rule of sexual abstinence on his men. By this detail, he both distinguishes the English from the allegedly more rapacious Spanish, and also signals his own ability to resist sexual temptation. Again, this is behaviour befitting a romance hero such as King Arthur or Sir Galahad, who were renowned for their chastity and honour; and it was also information calculated to appease Elizabeth, who had of course fallen out with Ralegh over a sexual misdemeanour, when he married without her permission. Yet it must be stressed once more that whilst Ralegh seems to want us to construe his journey as a pilgrimage or chivalric quest, it is for the most part left to the reader to make this interpretation of his South American experiences. Ralegh does not dramatise or articulate within his narrative any sort of transformation of the travelling self; this is merely implied by the brief reference to pilgrimage in the prefatory letter. As with Addison, the literary and cultural conventions of his day preclude such overt self-description, and self-fashioning, in the travelogue; to have used the form in this way would have seemed a significant breach of generic decorum. In time, of course, the generic expectations pertaining to travel writing would change significantly in this regard, and this is a development we shall now explore.

Writing the Self: Travel Writing’s Inward Turn

Early in his European travelogue, A Tramp Abroad (1880), Mark Twain describes the views available, by day and by night, from Heidelberg Castle in Germany:

Behind the Castle stands a great, dome-shaped hill, and beyond that a nobler and loftier one. The Castle looks down upon the compact brown-roofed town; and from the town two picturesque old bridges span the river. Now the view broadens; through the gateway of the sentinel headlands you gaze out over the wide Rhine plain, which stretches away, softy and richly tinted, grows gradually and dreamily indistinct, and finally melts imperceptibly into the remote horizon.

I have never enjoyed a view which had such a serene and satisfying charm about it as this one gives.

The first night we were there, we went to bed and to sleep early; but I awoke at the end of two or three hours, and lay a comfortable while listening to the soothing patter of the rain against the balcony windows. I took it to be rain, but it turned out to be only the murmur of the restless Neckar, tumbling over her dikes and dams far below, in the gorge. I got up and went into the west balcony and saw a wonderful sight. Away down on the level, under the black mass of the Castle, the town lay, stretched along the river, its intricate cobweb of streets jewelled with twinkling lights; there were rows of lights in the bridges; these flung lances of light upon the waters, in the black shadows of the arches; and away at the extremity of all this fairy spectacle blinked and glowed a massed multitude of gas jets which seemed to cover acres of ground; it was as if all the diamonds in the world had been spread out there. I did not know before, that a half mile of sextuple railway tracks could be made such an adornment.

(Twain 1997: 10)

Twain’s descriptive strategies here can be usefully compared with Addison’s account of Rome, as cited earlier. Addison, it should be noted, would probably not have commented on the views from the castle: a taste for such views, and an aesthetic appreciation of landscape, is seldom evident in travel writing prior to the late eighteenth-century vogue for the ‘picturesque’. Had he done so, however, it is likely that he would have simply informed the reader that Heidelberg has many fine views, both in the day and at night. This is of course very different to the register and narrative technique adopted in Twain’s account. The word ‘I’ becomes much more prominent than it ever is in Addison’s account, as Twain endeavours to give us not just a report of information gathered over the course of his journey, but also a rendering of his personal, lived experience during that journey. To enable this the narrative mode is one of showing rather than telling, according to the terminology often used in studies of prose fiction. That is to say, Twain does not simply relate retrospectively, and in a baldly summarising manner, what he feels are the key points to be made about the views from Heidelberg Castle; instead, he recreates or dramatises the act of taking those views, so that the reader to some extent shares the experience with him. Thus the first paragraph in the passage earlier is in the present tense, and tracks the movement of Twain’s eye as it pans out, so to speak, towards the horizon. The description of Heidelberg at night, meanwhile, is contextualised by an account of how Twain first came to see that view, after waking in the middle of the night. As with the description of the daytime view, moreover, the account of Heidelberg at night strives to recreate the view for the reader, itemising its key features in some detail, and in a metaphoric language that aims to convey vividly not so much objective facts about the external scene, as the subjective impressions created in the spectator. Thus the town appears to this spectator a twinkling ‘fairy spectacle’, whilst the gas-jets by the railway tracks resemble diamonds strewn across the ground.

Set against Addison’s Remarks or Ralegh’s Discoverie, A Tramp Abroad clearly constitutes a much more personalised, and in a loose sense of the term, a more obviously autobiographical type of travel writing. Twain foregrounds the narratorial self to a much greater extent than either Addison or Ralegh, and as he does so we encounter a mode of travel writing concerned not simply to present information about the wider world, but also to dramatise something of the complex and subtle interactions that necessarily occur between self and other, the traveller and the world, in the course of travel. As with Twain’s interest in landscape, this is a subjectivist agenda in travel writing, and a personalised style, that can be traced back to the latter part of the eighteenth century. More specifically, it is chiefly a product of those larger literary and cultural movements that we now call sentimentalism and Romanticism. Both of these movements, whose most famous proponents in English literature are, respectively, the novelist Laurence Sterne and the poet William Wordsworth, fostered a greater interest in the interior workings of consciousness and the self. They were also much concerned with the role played by feeling and emotion, as well as purely rational thought, in shaping an individual’s engagement with the world; and these sentimental and Romantic interests led in turn to the adoption of a more subjective and emotive register in many literary genres. Travel writing was no exception in this regard; indeed, in some branches of the genre, including most notably the literary form of travel writing that is the modern travel book, a degree of subjectivism soon became the norm, as writers increasingly felt licensed to inform readers of their subjective impressions, and their personal thoughts and feelings, as these arose during their journeys.

From the late eighteenth century, then, travel writing starts to look inwards as well as outwards. At the same time, however, this new concern with the travelling self could be pursued in several different ways, and it has since the eighteenth century encompassed a variety of styles and techniques for writing about the self. For example, the extent to which travel writers articulate their inner world of thought and feeling can vary considerably. In many travelogues, this inward scrutiny and subsequent self-expression does not go much further than a simple declaration of what the traveller thought and felt at various junctures. Thus the prospect from Heidelberg castle elicits from Twain the comment that he had ‘never enjoyed a view which had such a serene and satisfying charm about it’. In more extreme forms, however, this inward gaze may become an attempt to chart the flux of consciousness in the course of travel. An important early model in this regard was Laurence Sterne’s fictional travelogue A Sentimental Journey (1768). In passages such as the following, in which the traveller-narrator Yorick describes his reaction to a hotel-keeper who he fears is about to over-charge him, Sterne uses a disjointed syntax and snippets of soliloquy to track in detail the ebb and flow of his traveller’s moods.

I looked at Monsieur Dessein through and through – eyed him as he walked along in profile – then, en face – thought he looked like a Jew – then a Turk – disliked his wig – cursed him by my gods – wished him at the devil –

And is all this to be lighted up in the heart for a beggarly account of three or four louis-d’ors [a unit of French currency], which is the most I can be over-reached in? Base passion! said I, turning myself about, as a man naturally does upon a sudden reverse of sentiment – base, ungentle passion!

(Sterne 1987: 39)

Although a fiction, A Sentimental Journey introduced techniques for the representation of the self that greatly influenced many writers of genuine travel accounts, including explorers such as John Ledyard and Mungo Park. Sterne’s example also licensed a much more digressive, wide-ranging form of travelogue, in which the narrative focus often wanders far away from the actual scenes in front of the traveller. Again, this digressiveness in the form was to some extent a consequence of the new dispensation that permitted a more detailed portrayal of the interior world of the traveller. Consciousness, after all, is not bound by space and time in the same way as the body, and the traveller’s physical presence at a site will often be a spur for memories, reflections and imaginings that lead far away from their immediate surroundings. In A Tramp Abroad, for example, Twain records at one point how he took a walk through a forest in Germany. Whilst describing this walk, however, Twain recollects how he ‘fell into a dreamy train of thought about animals which talk, and kobolds, and enchanted folk, and the rest of the pleasant legendary stuff’ (1997: 11). This train of thought leads Twain to recall a story that he was told fifteen years previously, in California, about talking blue-jays; and as this story is recounted, over some six pages, so those woods in Germany disappear entirely from the reader’s view.

A striking example of this digressive tendency in the modern travel book occurs in W.G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn, 1995; English translation, 1998). Ostensibly an account of a walking trip through the landscapes of coastal East Anglia, The Rings of Saturn in fact uses the literal, exterior journey principally as a means of mapping an interior landscape. The description of his actual travel experiences comprises only a small portion of Sebald’s narrative; instead, it is chiefly given over to tracing the long and sometimes tangential train of associations, thoughts and memories that arise from those experiences. Thus we read of other journeys that the author has undertaken, in other parts of the world, and we encounter also a series of lengthy reflections on topics that often have very little direct connection with Sebald’s East Anglian surroundings: these include Rembrandt’s painting ‘The Anatomy Lesson’, intrigues at the Chinese imperial court in the late nineteenth century, and the Holocaust. These diverse narrative threads are woven together smoothly, and Sebald’s prose has a slow, meditative rhythm, eschewing the abrupt transitions of subject matter and mood that we find in Sterne. Clearly Sebald is not trying to convey, as Sterne often does in A Sentimental Journey, the raw flux of a consciousness caught up in the immediacy of the travel experience. But in a more indirect fashion, the meandering narrative of The Rings of Saturn also seems to mimic the drift of the traveller’s consciousness, both in the act of travel and also in the act of retrospection, at the moment when the journey is being recalled and recounted.

As well as including more information about how they thought and felt at various junctures of their travels, some modern travel writers also go to much greater lengths than was ever previously the case to situate their journeys in a larger personal history of the self. This self-historicising, or self-narrativising, project, it should be stressed, is not necessarily intrinsic to travel writing even in its more inward-looking form. Yorick and Sebald sometimes recall events prior to their journeys and they explore some of the memories stirred by their travel experiences, but these memories are fairly scattered and unrelated; they do not cohere over the course of the narrative to establish a strong sense of what the traveller was like at an earlier stage of their life. A travelogue like Jenni Diski’s Skating to Antarctica (1997), however, presents the narratorial self in a very different manner. Diski’s narrative is divided fairly equally between an account of a voyage to Antarctica, and an account of her traumatic upbringing and periods of mental illness. Diski’s fascination with Antarctica is traced back to an early yearning for some ‘place of safety, a white oblivion’ (2005: 2) which might offer an emotional respite from her unhappy relationship with her parents, and from the mental instability that ensued. The region’s endlessly blank terrain comes to signify the emotional emptiness which Diski feels she has cultivated in life as a coping strategy; and by interpolating this back-story, so to speak, into her travelogue, the voyage to Antarctica takes on immense emotional and psychological significance. The literal voyage, indeed, comes to seem a voyage into the self for this traveller; it constitutes both the culmination of a long-held fantasy and a coming-to-terms with a deeply troubled past.

This is travel writing being put to explicitly autobiographical use, becoming a medium which seemingly enables and articulates an overview of a whole life, or at least, a significant portion of a life, encompassing periods both before and after the journey itself. A similar form of self-historicising occurs in Graham Greene’s Journey without Maps (1936), an account of a four-week trek through the interior of Liberia. Like many Modernist writers, Greene was profoundly influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, which taught that the human psyche was fundamentally fissured and not wholly coherent to itself. As a result, Greene offers an account of his past self, and of his motivation for undertaking this African adventure, which is far more fragmentary than Diski’s comparatively coherent narrative of her earlier life. Short paragraphs juxtapose incidents from Greene’s childhood and more recent past, with Greene himself offering no interpretation or commentary on these images. Readers are left to form their own opinion as to the precise meaning they bear, and the exact narrative logic they create for Greene’s journey. Yet that journey is undoubtedly invested with an air of psychoanalytical self-enquiry; and so, like Diski’s voyage to Antarctica, Greene’s trek through West Africa comes to hold complex layers of emotional and psychological significance.

In some travelogues, then, the journey functions to some extent as a narrative device whereby the author’s whole life may be brought into focus. Many travelogues of this type also present the journey as a key stimulus to a new understanding of the traveller’s life. In this way, the travel account does not just offer a larger history of the self, it is also plotted as a developmental narrative of growing self-knowledge and self-realisation. It thus becomes a record not just of a literal journey, but also of a metaphorical interior ‘voyage’ that represents an important existential change in the traveller. This is an autobiographical narrative template that has its origins ultimately in the long Western tradition of spiritual autobiography which begins with Augustine’s Confessions in the fourth century, yet it seems to have become more prominent in travel writing as a consequence of Romanticism. Spiritual auto-biographies traditionally charted the author’s relationship with God, and culminated in episodes that described either conversion to Christianity or else a renewal of Christian faith. With Romanticism, however, this narrative pattern was increasingly secularised into one of self-discovery and self-realisation (see Abrams 1971). With Romanticism, moreover, there came an increasing valorisation of travel as a key means by which such epiphanic insights into the self might be achieved, and with them the greater degree of authenticity, autonomy and self-realisation that is usually assumed to follow on from such self-knowledge. Much of William Wordsworth’s poetry, for example, invests travel with this existential significance, repeatedly depicting the poet’s rambles and walking tours as journeys that culminate in moments of personal revelation and renovation (see Hartman 1964).

Travel writing in this mode presents the journeys being undertaken as an important rites of passage and as processes of self-realisation. Often, indeed, they are figured as some sort of pilgrimage or quest, since these are traditionally two types of travel that bring about a significant reinvention or renewal of the self. As the examples of pilgrimage and quest will suggest, travel was of course often regarded as an important rite of passage in periods prior to the late eighteenth century: we can assume that both Egeria’s fourth-century pilgrimage, as discussed in Chapter 3, and Addison’s Grand Tour, as discussed earlier in the present chapter, were undertaken in this spirit. Yet neither Egeria nor Addison organise their accounts so as to present a developmental narrative of personal growth; nor indeed, does Sir Walter Ralegh, although as we have seen he does seem to signal in his preface that his expedition brought about a degree of personal renovation and improvement. After Romanticism, however, there is an increasing tendency, in the more literary branches of travel writing at least, for the travel account to be plotted so that it progresses towards some sort of conclusive, climactic scene, in which the traveller seemingly gains an epiphanic insight into him- or herself.

Borrowing the terminology used by Aristotle to describe narrative structure, we may call these climactic scenes moments of anagnorisis, or recognition. One such moment occurs at the end of the penultimate chapter of Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica (2005). Diski isn’t actually able to reach Antarctica, because of thick pack ice that prevents the cruise ship from reaching the continent. But ultimately, this disappointment does not seem to matter very much, as Diski realises that she has in fact completed an interior voyage far more significant than the literal journey she is engaged in. The process of trying to reach the continent, and especially the introspection forced on Diski during the long periods spent in her cabin, enable her to resolve satisfactorily in her mind several key issues relating both to her past and her future. This sense of resolution in turn allows the reader to feel that by the conclusion of Skating to Antarctica, the bitter legacies of Diski’s past have to some extent been overcome and transcended.

This crafting of the travel account into a narrative of personal development and inner voyaging is today often the hallmark of the self-consciously ‘literary’ travelogue. Again, however, it is worth reiterating that the modern travel book, as defined earlier in this volume, is not representative of all forms of travel writing over the centuries, or even of all forms of travel writing in the last two centuries. Even in the Romantic period, most travel writers did not craft their accounts according to this developmental pattern. When it does occur, it is usually in a fictive rendering of the travel theme; for example, in poems like Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. A few examples of this narrative pattern may be found in non-fictional travelogues of the era, usually in texts that stand at the intersection of travel writing and spiritual autobiography: John Newton’s Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of ***** (1765), for instance, which recounts a dissolute life of seafaring and slave-trading, before describing Newton’s conversion back to Godly ways during a shipwreck. But it is not found in the majority of Romantic-era travelogues, even when they exhibit a pronounced concern with the narratorial self in the sentimental manner pioneered by Sterne. A Sentimental Journey itself, significantly, does not so much conclude as simply terminate, with the narrative breaking off mid-sentence. For all that Yorick has been exploring in great detail his responsiveness to the people and places he meets, there is little sense that he has grown in any significant way, or achieved any profound new insights. Similarly, most non-fictional travelogues in this period, even when ‘sentimentally’ inclined, do not incorporate any sort of climactic, conclusive scene; they simply proceed sequentially, with the traveller recording his or her observations at each stage of the journey. It is arguably not until the twentieth century that the developmental narrative pattern becomes a staple convention, or desired ideal, especially for travel writers who wish to position themselves as ‘literary’ authors.

In many studies of travel writing, the emergence of more subjectivist travelogues from the late eighteenth century onwards has been characterised as a radical shift from Enlightenment to Romantic values (see, inter alia, Parks 1964; Stafford 1984; Cardinal 1997). With this shift, it is suggested, a new ‘Romantic’ self begins to be articulated, and/or to be fashioned, in travel writing. The Romantic self, or as it is sometimes termed, Romantic ‘subjectivity’, is assumed to differ in a variety of ways from the Enlightenment self, and the Enlightenment ‘subjectivity’, that preceded it. Broadly speaking, the assumption is made that Enlightenment travellers prioritise fact-finding and empirical enquiry into the wider world, and that they accordingly fashion themselves on the page principally as observers, and as ‘Cartesian’ selves or subjectivities, detached from the scenes they survey. Romantic travellers, meanwhile, do not simply observe, they also react to the scenes around them, and record those reactions, and their reflections on them, in their accounts. In many cases, indeed, they seek out situations which arouse strong feelings and sensations of sublimity or spiritual intensity. And by allowing the scenes they observe to impinge upon them in this way, Romantic travellers are seemingly more open than Enlightenment travellers to being changed by their travel experiences and by the others that they encounter. Thus whilst the Enlightenment travelogue will typically present a Cartesian self that does not alter in the course of its travels, the Romantic travelogue ideally records not only a literal journey but also a metaphorical ‘inner’ journey of self-discovery and maturation.

As this chapter has demonstrated, this is a schema and a terminology that undoubtedly corresponds in some degree to broad changes both in the travel writing genre and in the selves or ‘subjectivities’ articulated in travel writing. Yet the binary opposition this schema implies between ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Romantic’ styles and sensibilities is perhaps too simplistic. As we have seen, the subjectivism that can be loosely labelled ‘Romantic’ comes in a variety of forms, which in turn give rise to varying degrees of preoccupation with the self. As a consequence, it is unhelpful to postulate too stark an opposition between Enlightenment and Romantic tendencies in travel writing. Many travel writers from the late eighteenth century onwards avail themselves of the new licence to admit personal thoughts and feelings into their accounts, but they do not all depict themselves as significantly changed by their experiences. Nor, in many cases, do they entirely relinquish travel writing’s traditional function of providing important, empirically acquired information about the wider world. Conversely, one also finds from the late eighteenth century onwards many explorers who adopt a more personal, subjectivist style, even as they remain principally committed to the Enlightenment project of data collection and empirical enquiry: conspicuous examples include Mungo Park, George Forster, David Livingstone, H.M. Stanley and Richard Burton. Thus a great many travel accounts, from the late eighteenth century down to the present day, actually sit somewhere between the two extremes conventionally denoted by the terms ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Romantic’. Or in an alternative critical idiom, many travelogues seek to combine Enlightenment and Romantic discourses, and so maintain an agenda that is both scientific/intellectual and literary/autobiographical, although the balance struck between these two poles may vary considerably.

The Imperious ‘I’?

Whether they tend more towards the Enlightenment or the Romantic paradigms outlined earlier, the selves articulated in travel writing usually have an aspirational aspect and perform a rhetorical function. Travel is often undertaken to enhance social status and to accumulate what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has termed ‘cultural capital’. When this is the case, any subsequent travelogue is an important part of the traveller’s larger bid for authority and social advancement. The image of the self presented in these accounts is usually intended, at some level, to persuade audiences not only that the traveller is a reliable eye-witness, but also that he or she possesses, or has acquired, a range of other desirable attributes and accomplishments, such as courage, taste, spiritual enlightenment or a more profound, ‘authentic’ self-knowledge. In this regard, moreover, the crafting of travel accounts may also serve an important psychological function for their authors: the travelogue is from one perspective a medium in which travellers can reconcile what is likely to have been a welter of disparate, sometimes contradictory experiences into a single coherent narrative, thereby persuading themselves of the essential coherence and integrity of their own identity.

Travelogues, then, usually offer a carefully staged presentation of the self. And for the desired image of the self to be maintained, the travelogue must usually exercise a similar discrimination with regard to everything that is ‘other’ to the narratorial self: the places that the traveller visits, the cultures that they encounter and the individuals with whom they interact. This is an aspect of travel writing that has prompted considerable ethical unease in many recent critics and theorists of the genre (see, inter alia, Pratt 2008; Holland and Huggan 1998; Lisle 2006). For in representing those others, the travel writer is in effect suborning or appropriating them for his or her own project of identity formation and self-advancement. To this way of thinking, much travel writing entails the traveller achieving a symbolic or psychological mastery over the people and places they describe. Moreover, the travel writer’s act of self-fashioning also often proceeds by a logic of differentiation, whereby the Other is constructed in some subtle or unsubtle way principally as foil or counterpoint to the supposedly heroic, civilised and/or cultured protagonist. Or as Debbie Lisle puts it, the selves or subjectivities on show in travelogues are usually ‘fashioned over and against a series of others who are denied the power of representing themselves’ (2006: 69). As this suggests, there is inherent in almost every travelogue a massive imbalance in the power of representation. And as Lisle and many other critics have emphasised and, as we shall see in more detail next chapter, this imbalance in representational power is often tied to, and helps to sustain, significant socio-economic and political inequalities between travellers and the others they describe.

The self-aggrandising agenda implicit in much travel and travel writing, and the fantasies of empowerment and social advancement that both activities often enable, frequently find expression in what Mary Louise Pratt has called the ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey’ scene (2008: 197–204). This recurrent trope in travel writing can be illustrated by a passage in Henry Morton Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent (1878). Climbing to the top of small hill on an island in Lake Victoria, in East Africa, the explorer surveys ‘hundreds of square miles of pastoral upland dotted thickly with villages[,] groves of bananas’ and ‘herds upon herds of cattle’ (Stanley 1988: vol. 1, 174). As he lovingly itemises the potentially profitable features of the landscape in this way, Stanley seems to take dominion, in his own mind at least, of the rich tracts of land laid out before him. At one point, indeed, he conceives of himself as sitting ‘secure on [a] lofty throne’ (vol. 1, 174) as he views the scene. Simultaneously, he elevates himself not only literally but also metaphorically over the local African population. Viewing their movements from a distance, for example, he professes to ‘laugh at the ferocity of the savage hearts which beat in those thin dark figures; for I am a part of Nature now, and for the present as invulnerable as itself’ (vol. 1, 174). Adopting an epic register, Stanley thus fashions for himself a sublime and transcendent persona. This is a traveller, it seems, whose soul can soar not only above the scenes it surveys, but also above its circumstances more generally; and this is also a traveller, we are clearly meant to infer, who possesses a mind and a sensibility vastly superior to that of the local population.

Stanley essays such an epic self-fashioning in the context of an exploration narrative, but this stylistic register is more usually found in what one can loosely designate the Romantic travelogue. In some cases, moreover, travelogues in this subjectivist vein will use a ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey’ scene to trigger the epiphanic, and frequently climactic, moments of anagnorisis or recognition discussed earlier in this chapter. Such moments further heighten the sense of transcendence, grandeur and/or emotional intensity attaching to the narratorial self; they imply a traveller who has attained a deeper understanding of themselves and of the forces that shaped their personal history. It should be noted, however, that the ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey’ scene itself may be found as frequently in travelogues that evince a more objectivist or Enlightenment sensibility. An earlier traveller like Ralegh, for example, may not rhapsodise explicitly about the emotions and fantasies that are stirred as he surveys the fertile landscapes of the Orinoco basin, but there are nevertheless several passages in The Discoverie in which Ralegh seems to take imaginative possession of the environment, whilst simultaneously encouraging his reader to do the same.

Travel writing’s tendency to empower and elevate the narratorial self at the expense of a denigrated Other is especially apparent in a text like Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent. In a travelogue like Greene’s Journey without Maps, however, the local population is arguably appropriated in a more subtle fashion to the travel writer’s self-dramatising, and self-aggrandising, project. As discussed earlier, Greene seems to regard his journey through Liberia almost as a form of psychoanalytic self-analysis. Although the fragmentary narrative never spells this out explicitly, the reader soon comes to understand that through visiting Africa Greene wishes to access, and to understand, some primal core of his own being, and to reach down to a layer of the self that supposedly sits below consciousness, rationality and civilisation. The narrative then charts an ordeal of exhaustion, discomfort and fever, which is ultimately productive of a moment of epiphanic insight in which Greene discovers in himself ‘a passionate interest in living’. Previously, he suggests, he had always assumed, ‘as a matter of course, that death was desirable’; the new self-knowledge therefore seems ‘like a conversion, and I had never experienced a conversion before’ (2006: 201).

Greene returns from Africa, then, with a heightened authority and mystique, since like a pilgrim he can claim that he has acquired a profound existential insight from his journey. Arguably, however, he achieves that existential authority only by subtly exploiting the Africans whom he describes. From one perspective, Greene’s is a surrogate pilgrimage that valorises many aspects of African culture, and of African lifeways, over their European equivalents; the account is generally scathing, for example, about European claims to be morally and culturally superior to the ‘uncivilised’ tribes of Liberia. At the same time, however, the Africans Greene meets are usually rendered more as emblems of the ‘primitive’ than as fully rounded human beings, and they often seem the embodiments of fears and fantasies that Green himself is projecting on to the region. For this reason, many of the accusations lodged by the Nigerian critic Chinua Achebe against Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1901) are equally pertinent to Journey without Maps. Conrad’s novella is clearly a major influence on Greene’s travelogue, and like his predecessor Greene is arguably guilty of using Africa simply ‘as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor’, reducing the continent and its native inhabitants ‘to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind’ (Achebe 1990: 124).

The ‘others’ that travellers use to define their difference, and implicitly their superiority, may also be drawn from their own culture. Even in the context of ‘home travels’, the traveller is by definition a more mobile figure than many of the ‘locals’ he or she encounters, and on the basis of that fundamental difference travel writers often claim for themselves a greater breadth of knowledge, or a greater degree of sophistication, open-mindedness and/or modernity. Another recurrent strategy for self-promotion in travel writing, meanwhile, is for travel writers to contrast themselves with the other travellers they encounter on their journeys. Often these fellow-travellers will be classified as mere ‘tourists’, whilst the writers ascribe to themselves the attributes and activities that are felt to characterise the true or proper ‘traveller’. As James Buzard (1993) has demonstrated, this ‘traveller’/’tourist’ distinction has underpinned many travel accounts since at least the late eighteenth century, when recreational travel began to become more common, although it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the actual words ‘tourist’ and ‘traveller’ acquired a pejorative and an honorific resonance respectively. To this way of thinking, the tourist represents the very worst aspects of modern travel and, indeed, of modernity generally. He or she is assumed to practise a lazy, timid, and superficial version of travel, in which everything is safely pre-arranged by the supervisory apparatus of the tourism industry. A genuine encounter with an alien culture or environment is thus replaced by a commodified, staged and inauthentic simulacrum of such encounters, with the result that tourists do not gain any significant insight into either the Other or themselves. And whilst tourism is generally assumed in this way to be an intrinsically pointless form of travel, it is also usually presented as being far from harmless. Tourists, it is frequently alleged, ultimately destroy the places and cultures they seek out; their laziness creates an infrastructure that spoils previously pristine landscapes, whilst their cultural insensitivity and boorishness works to vulgarise the traditional communities they visit.

Such, at least, is the standard litany of complaints levelled at the tourist, from the late eighteenth century down to the present day. Some influential commentators on travel writing, it should be noted, subscribe wholly to this bleak view of touristic travel, and also to its frequent corollary, the notion that clear and easily identifiable differences exist between deplorable ‘tourists’ and superior ‘travellers’ (see Fussell 1980 and 1987; Boorstin 1961). Other critics and theorists, however, suggest that it is necessary to take a more nuanced view both of the allegations customarily made about tourism and of the supposed ‘traveller’/’tourist’ antithesis. With regard to the latter, for example, it has been persuasively argued that this is a terminology which historically has often served simply as a vehicle for snobbery and class prejudice, allowing travellers and commentators to inveigh against the fact that they now share their customary travel destinations with travellers drawn from lower strata of society than themselves (see MacCannell 1999; Culler 1988; Buzard 1993). It has also been suggested that a strenuous insistence on one’s own status as ‘traveller’ rather than ‘tourist’ is sometimes a psychological defence mechanism against so-called ‘tourist angst’, which is the unsettling realisation that one is oneself merely engaged in a form of tourism. Or as Holland and Huggan put it, the pose of ‘traveller’ may function as ‘a strategy of self-exemption’ that enables travel writers ‘to displace their guilt for interfering with, and adversely changing, the cultures through which they travel’ (1998: 3).

Whatever its precise motivation, it is undoubtedly the case that the ‘traveller’/’tourist’ distinction underpins, either explicitly or implicitly, many of the self-fashionings performed in travel writing. Thus writers frequently adopt an anti-touristic rhetoric that lampoons and/or laments the activities of other travellers, thereby setting themselves apart from, and superior to, those others. On some occasions, moreover, the whole ethos, agenda and even itinerary of a trip can seem strongly driven by a travel writer’s desire to prove him- or herself a ‘traveller’ rather than a ‘tourist’. Thus some travellers will make a great show of the extent to which they journeyed ‘off the beaten track’, thereby avoiding tourists and the infrastructure that supports them. It is only by this means, it is frequently suggested, that one can access the authentically Other and visit places and cultures still untouched by modernity. Moreover, getting off the beaten track in this way often requires self-styled ‘travellers’ to endure discomfort and danger as they move beyond the security of established tourist itineraries. This element of misadventure may be from one perspective simply a regrettable necessity if travellers are to pursue the quests they have set themselves. Yet an air of conspicuous hardship and peril will also frequently serve a useful rhetorical purpose for travellers and travel writers. By this means, a journey may be presented as a genuine challenge, and so as a genuine learning experience, for the travelling self. This in turn allows the journey to be presented as a form of pilgrimage or exploration, rather than some sort of self-indulgent jaunt. One might suggest, therefore, that dangers and discomforts often function principally as the markers of the supposedly ‘authentic’ travel experience, and that they are therefore sometimes deliberately sought out so as to strengthen the traveller’s claim to have acquired a more authentic and insightful knowledge of both self and Other (see Thompson 2007a).

In a variety of ways, then, travelogues are often exercises in self-promotion and the accumulation of cultural capital; this is perhaps especially the case with the self-consciously literary modern travel book, which is frequently little more than a vehicle for the author to present his or her distinctive sensibility and unique outlook on the world. Noting this tendency in the form, Holland and Huggan have suggested that much travel writing is best regarded not as a genuinely autobiographical form, but rather as anti- or pseudo-autobiographical (17), insofar as many travel writers in fact avoid genuine introspection and self-enquiry, choosing instead to present the self through a series of stock postures and personae. And as we have seen, this exercise in subtle or not-so-subtle self-advancement often arguably exploits to some degree the other individuals and cultures depicted in the travel account. Yet whilst this is undoubtedly an important and problematic aspect of the genre, should we therefore condemn all travel writing as intrinsically or invariably exploitative and self-promoting? Some recent commentators certainly seemed disposed to dismiss the whole genre in this way (see Lisle 2006; Kaplan 1996). Yet as always with a form as protean and heterogeneous as travel writing, any blanket condemnation of the genre on these grounds needs to be tempered with some important qualifications and counter-arguments.

In the first place, it is worth noting that not every travel writer manages, or even seeks, to project the sort of assured, coherent selfhood implicit in both the Enlightenment and Romantic personae described earlier. Much recent scholarship on travel writing has productively mined the genre for moments of apparent contradiction, confusion and discontinuity in the narratorial self, gleaning from these aporetic passages interesting insights into the tensions that some travellers have clearly felt as they seek to fashion an identity for themselves (see Mills 1991; Morgan 1996). These tensions in turn may be read as indicative of larger pressures and constraints operating in the writer’s culture, pressures and constraints which dictate who is allowed to set themselves up in the public sphere as travellers, with all the authority this brings to make pronouncements on both other cultures and their own. Such tensions are perhaps especially apparent in women’s travel writing, and this is accordingly an aspect of the genre that will be discussed further in Chapter 7.

Thus there are travel writers who essay a coherent, authoritative selfhood on the page, yet who for some reason fail to fully achieve this assertive self-fashioning. Other travel writers, meanwhile, seem deliberately to disclaim and/or subvert the authoritative postures more customary in the genre. In the literary travel book especially, there is a long tradition of self-deprecation and playful self-ironising, in which writers mock their own belated or feeble travel efforts in comparison with those of more obviously accomplished or courageous travellers; examples include Sterne’s fictional travelogue A Sentimental Journey and the genuine travelogues produced by figures such as Peter Fleming and Eric Newby. This self-ironising tendency in the genre seems to have become more pronounced in recent years. Contemporary writers like Redmond O’Hanlon and Tim Cahill, for example, often present themselves principally as clowns and as cowards who have no desire whatsoever to get into perilous situations, rather than as heroic explorers. Others such as Bill Bryson, meanwhile, are happy to acknowledge that they are just as much tourists as their fellow travellers; superficially, at least, they disclaim the status of ‘traveller’, in the honorific sense of that term. The persona that many of these recent writers fashion for themselves is therefore better described as that of the ‘post-tourist’. As defined by Maxine Feifer (1986), the ‘post-tourist’ is someone who knows that notions of getting off the beaten track, and of being a ‘traveller’ rather than a ‘tourist’, are usually self-deluding fantasies and an illusion frequently manufactured by the tourist industry itself. The post-touristic travel writer will accordingly often reject and mock the rhetoric of authenticity that has been so conspicuous in travel writing in the past. Typically they will be far less disdainful of the alleged inauthenticity of mainstream tourist activities and, even when they engage in very different activities, they are often prepared to admit that these are just a variant form of tourism, rather than a radically different and superior type of travel.

In some cases, this ‘post-touristic’ attitude forms part of what one can more generally regard as a postmodern sensibility or tendency in travel writing. Postmodernism is notoriously hard to define, but in the present context it can be defined as a tendency to playfulness and parody, born of a desire to subvert both the conventions and the authority traditionally associated with many Western genres, disciplines and discourses. With regard to travel writing, this can involve writers playing against traditional narrative and stylistic expectations in a variety of ways. For example, some travelogues, such as Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977), fashion quests that seem never to come to a proper conclusion, or else terminate bathetically rather than triumphantly. Elsewhere, we encounter in Chatwin’s later travelogue The Songlines (1987) and in works like William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth (1991), texts which seem to undercut travel writing’s frequent tendency to a monologic imperiousness of vision by fashioning fragmented narratives, comprised in large part of extensive quotations from other authors. And by incorporating into the text other voices and other points of view, this dialogic or polyphonic narrative technique arguably works to ‘decentre’ the narratorial self.

Sebald’s highly digressive technique in The Rings of Saturn works a similar effect, and in Sebald’s case this decentring of the self seems to be bound up with an attempt to suggest that no ‘self’ is entirely a singular, bounded entity, wholly unique and private to one individual. A recurrent device that Sebald uses is to have other voices, other ‘I’s, enter his narrative, as he retells stories that he has heard or read. Often, however, it is not clearly signalled in the text when a new narrator has in this way been introduced, and there are thus many moments when readers are left unsure whether they are reading Sebald’s words, or someone else’s. As the boundaries of the narratorial self thus seem to dissolve, the intertextuality of Sebald’s narrative arguably figures an intertextuality, or intersubjectivity, in the self, as the narrator’s consciousness comes to seem a medium in which multiple other consciousnesses are mingled and distilled. Further to this, Sebald’s interweaving of experience, memory and reflection is not plotted towards any clear conclusions, or towards a climactic moment of anagnorisis. In this way, Sebald seems to fashion on the page neither an Enlightenment self, that seems detached from the scenes it surveys and remains unchanged through its travel experiences, nor a fully Romantic self, which achieves a significant and identifiable degree of self-knowledge and self-realisation over the course of its travels. Rather, The Rings of Saturn posits a more provisional, picaresque selfhood, conveying a sense that human identity is a fluid, contingent construct, forever being performatively constituted in response to events and circumstances. Here the self seems to have no fixed, stable essence unique to itself, but rather is always evolving dialogically, as it were, or relationally; that is to say, through its interactions with the wider environment and with others.

In such ways, then, some travel writers have sought to counter the pre-eminence habitually given to the narratorial self in the travelogue. At the same time, however, there are important caveats to be issued about many of these apparent strategies of self-deprecation and/or self-effacement. The comic, self-ironising personae developed by writers like O’Hanlon and Cahill, for example, seem from one perspective parodic of travel writing’s long history of self-aggrandising heroics, and also of the masculinist, imperialist and culturally supremacist attitudes which often accompanied such heroic accounts of the self. At the same time, however, to disclaim heroism and manliness when one is in fact putting oneself in positions of genuine danger, as O’Hanlon and Cahill often are, is to follow a well-established rhetorical strategy of modest understatement, which ultimately only heightens the heroism that attaches to the traveller. It has also been suggested, moreover, that the buffoonery of figures like O’Hanlon and Cahill is in part a way of disclaiming moral responsibilities and of evading awkward questions about the extent to which modern travel writers are still complicit with, and contributive to, the larger structures of power and discourse that maintain present-day global inequalities (see Holland and Huggan 1998: 30–31).