Travel Writing
This is part of the syllabus for a graduate course I last taught winter quarter 2020, a course I taught maybe 20 times over the years.
TEXTS: Alphonso Lingis, Trust; Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land; Peter Hessler, The Buried: Life, Death and Revolution in Egypt; M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me; Julia Child, My Life in France; Noo Saro-Wiwa, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels through Nigeria; Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt
WRITING ASSIGNMENTS: You will write one travel piece (around 1500 words), which will be discussed February 4 and 11 in a workshop format. You will also write a final paper, which should be around 3000 words. The final paper will include a revised version of this travel piece, scattered throughout a critical essay on the subjects raised by the travel piece. We will spend much of the first six weeks discussing what this paper should accomplish. Between the travel piece and the final paper, you will come to class with a bibliography of texts that may play a significant part in your final paper—I will give you a few examples of readings when we discuss your travel piece. These texts can be books, essays, films, paintings, or photographs. They will be the critical backbone of your final paper. The final paper may attempt to do something like what Amitav Ghosh has done with In an Antique Land, part travel-writing (revised from the workshop piece), part literary essay, and part history—or what Alphonso Lingis has done in Trust, part travel-writing, part philosophy. The final paper should NOT BE ONLY an expansion or revision of the first travel piece. It should be an entirely new essay, built out of the shards and parts of the original travel essay. The dimensions of the parts are up to you, but each must seriously contribute to the whole. This final essay should be a mix of narrative and critical writing.
Travel books are about process—the process of movement and of understanding, too. They tell the tale of the journey toward knowledge and play up the delights of discovery, and the voyage matters more than any one destination. In this, they have long anticipated the attempts of some postmodern forms of scholarship to foreground the search for understanding, to shift our attention to the quest for knowledge and away from its final fruits.
—Michael Gorra, The Bells in Their Silence
Running at night: it was madness. I was courting death, or at least a kidnapping. The capital [Baghdad, during the early years of 2003 Iraq war] was a free-for-all; it was a state of nature. Three was no law anymore, no courts, nothing—there was nothing at all. They kidnapped children now, they killed them and dumped them in the street. The kidnapping gangs bought and sold people; it was like its own terrible ecosystem. One of the kidnapping gangs could have driven up in a car and beat me and gagged me and I could have screamed like a crazy person, but I doubt anyone would have done anything. Not even the guards. They weren’t bad people, the guards, but who in Baghdad was going to step in the middle of a kidnapping? The kidnappers had more power than anyone. I had been in Iraq too long. Going on four years. I’d lived through everything, shootings and bomb blasts and death, and I’d never gotten so much as a scratch. I guess I was numb. I guess I felt invincible. The danger seemed notional to me now, not entirely real, something I wrote about, something that killed other people [the italics are mine].
—Dexter Filkins, The Forever War
What is travel writing? Journalism, long-form essay writing, fiction, historiography, archaeology, ethnography, or all of these? Journalists, conquerors, missionaries, soldiers, runaways, historians, anthropologists, philosophers, poets, and novelists have done it. This course will take a look at prose written after travel. It is a genre as old as the epic. Napoleon took 150 scholars with him when he invaded Egypt in 1798 in his failed attempt to make it a French colony. He was also intent on a comprehensive literary, archeological, architectural, geographical, and pictorial record of the country—for what purpose: to freeze it in time, to organize (and colonize) its history, or perhaps to differentiate it from France and Europe? It was a routine of travel writers to take along one or two unnamed and often unmentioned extras, though rarely as many as Napoleon did. The course will study travel and food, the uneasy relations between anthropology field writing and travel writing, and the idea at the heart of much travel writing, travel through human and family history.
An Arab proverb says, “Conceal thy tenets, thy wealth, and thy traveling.” The last is related to the first—by concealing the fact that you have traveled a great deal, you are concealing your wisdom (and your tenets)—play dumb until you know who you’re dealing with. The wealthy young men of England in the eighteenth century spent several years traveling abroad (in Europe) to finish—or sometimes start—their educations. At the heart of Islam is the request that all Muslims travel once in their lifetime to Mecca. We are where we’ve been. The Arab proverb above comes from a Bedouin culture—a traveling culture. All Arabs traveled, but some traveled further and more intelligently than others. Americans are travelers—the German playwright Bertholt Brecht, who lived in Los Angeles during the Second World War, complained (and marveled) that Americans seemed to carry their houses on their backs like turtles. We move constantly, restlessly. Patrick Leigh Fermor said, “Solvitur ambulando”—it is solved by walking.
James Clifford, the anthropologist, sees travel as a part of all human life and history. He asks, in Routes, “What would happen if travel … were untethered, seen as a complex and pervasive spectrum of human experience?” Early twentieth century anthropologists were always on the lookout for untainted, untouched civilizations or cultures, groups of people who had no contact with the West, certainly, or even near neighbors. In The Predicament of Culture, Clifford describes this idea in detail:
In New Guinea Margaret Mead ... chose not to study groups that were “badly missionized”; and it had been self-evident to Malinowski in the Trobriands that what most deserved scientific attention was the circumscribed “culture” threatened by a host of modern “outside” influences. The experience of Melanesians becoming Christians for their own reasons—learning to play, and play with, the outsiders’ games—did not seem worth salvaging.
Later in the century anthropologists rejected this idea, and Clifford himself urges us to think of humanity as always traveling. There is no culture that hasn’t been affected (or infected) by near and surprisingly very distant cultures. We can trace nearly all of the world’s ancestry back to about a thousand Ethiopians who walked out of Africa 50,000 years ago and then kept walking until every continent was populated.
Edward Said, a permanent exile and restless traveler, tells us (in Culture and Imperialism) to
Regard experiences as if they were about to disappear: what is it about them that anchors or roots them in reality? What would you save of them, what would you give up, what would you recover? To answer such questions you must have the independence and detachment of someone whose homeland is “sweet,” but whose actual condition makes it impossible to recapture that sweetness… Seeing “the entire world as a foreign land” makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that is… contrapuntal.
Clifford Geertz, in his 1985 book Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, talks about the way all forms of discourse seemed to be blurring and morphing genres at the time:
A number of things, I think, are true. One is that there has been an enormous amount of genre mixing in intellectual life in recent years, and it is, such blurring of kinds, continuing apace. Another is that many social scientists have turned away from a laws-and-instances ideal of explanation toward a cases-and-interpretations one, looking less for the sort of thing that connects planets and pendulums and more for the sort that connects chrysanthemums and swords. Yet another is that analogies drawn from the humanities are coming to play the kind of role in sociological understanding that analogies drawn from the crafts and technology have long played in physical understanding. Further, I not only think these things are true, I think they are true together; and it is the culture shift that makes them so that is my subject: the refiguration of social thought.
This genre blurring is more than just a matter of Harry Houdini or Richard Nixon turning up as characters in novels or of midwestern murder sprees described as though a gothic romancer had imagined them. It is philosophical inquiries looking like literary criticism (think of Stanley Cavell on Beckett or Thoreau, Sartre on Flaubert), scientific discussions looking like belles lettres morceaux (Lewis Thomas, Loren Eiseley), baroque fantasies presented as deadpan empirical observations (Borges, Barthelme), histories that consist of equations and tables or law court testimony (Fogel and Engerman, Le Roi Ladurie), documentaries that read like true confessions (Mailer), parables posing as ethnographies (Castenada), theoretical treatises set out as travelogues (Lévi-Strauss), ideological arguments cast as historiographical inquiries (Edward Said), epistemological studies constructed like political tracts (Paul Feyerabend), methodological polemics got up as personal memoirs (James Watson). Nabokov’s Pale Fire, that impossible object made of poetry and fiction, footnotes and images from the clinic, seems very much of the time; one waits only for quantum theory in verse or biography in algebra.
Of course, to a certain extent this sort of thing has always gone on—Lucretius, Mandeville, and Erasmus Darwin all made their theories rhyme. But the present jumbling of varieties of discourse has grown to the point where it is becoming difficult either to label authors (What is Foucault—historian, philosopher, political theorist? What is Thomas Kuhn—historian, philosopher, sociologist of knowledge?) or to classify works (What is George Steiner’s After Babel—linguistics, criticism, culture history? What is William Gass’s On Being Blue—treatise, causerie, apologetic?). And thus it is more than a matter of odd sports and occasional curiosities, or of the admitted fact that the innovative is, by definition, hard to categorize. It is a phenomenon general enough and distinctive enough to suggest that what we are seeing is not just another redrawing of the cultural map—the moving of a few disputed borders, the marking of some more picturesque mountain lakes—but an alteration of the principles of mapping. Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think.
I think travel writing has always blurred genres. In fact, travel writing predates most genres. But what we will examine in this course are a handful of particularly unusual approaches to the process of describing travel after the fact.
A writer I’ll be referring to a lot, Rebecca Solnit, in an interview in The Believer, says:
In Wanderlust, I wrote, “This history of walking is an amateur history, just as walking is an amateur act. To use a walking metaphor, it trespasses through everybody else’s field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn’t stop in any of them on its long route. For if a field of expertise can be imagined as a real field—a nice rectangular confine carefully tilled and yielding a specific crop—then the subject of walking resembles walking itself in its lack of confines.” I have a very clear sense of what I am here to do and what its internal coherence is, but it doesn’t fit into the way that ideas and continuities are chopped up into fields or labeled. Sometimes I say I’m an essayist, because that’s an elegant, historically grounded—if sometimes trivialized—mode of literature, while nonfiction is just a term for the leftovers when fiction is considered to be paramount, and creative nonfiction is even more abject a term.
And this is what David Kortava (in Bar Tab in The New Yorker) says Ernest Hemingway ordered with lunch at his usual Paris café: a café au lait, two servings of Martinique rum, and a half carafe of dry white wine.