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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Travel, Identity, and the Spectacle of Modernity"


Stacy Burton
University of Nevada, Reno
sburton@unr.edu

Much has rightly been made of nostalgia in twentieth-century English-language travel narratives. Travel writers in our century have been preoccupied, even obsessed, with seeking the world before, the unchanged, the authentic. As numerous studies including those by Edward Said, Marianna Torgovnick, and Dennis Porter have demonstrated, they have sought the timeless as remedy for Western progress, the oceanic as a release from modern society, the primitive as a source of renewal, the dangerous as a means for making alienated life meaningful. Such writers have at times pointedly represented themselves as antimodern: Dervla Murphy, travelling by bicycle or biped, and travel writers who choose to walk across nations or continents come quickly to mind. It would be unwise, however, to allow nostalgia to become the default paradigm for reading twentieth-century travel narratives. For nostalgia co-exists with an equally strong preoccupation with modernity--indeed, as critics including Caren Kaplan have argued, nostalgia should be seen as a component of, a prerogative grounded in, modernity. It is also deeply gendered, and thus inadequate as a paradigm. More usefully, then, one might argue that in many travel narratives a nostalgic quest is the veneer, an interrogation of modern (and later postmodern) identity the substance. Underlying nostalgia, most obviously, is an implicit if not explicit consciousness that one is "modern," that one's identity occurs in and of, in untranscendable ways, the very spectacle of modernity. Indeed, travel narratives frequently begin with urban images or complaints about modern life: a jaded London literary editor's chance encounter with an armless veteran in the 1920s, a twentysomething woman dissatisfied with the empty lives of those in her Sydney social circle in the 1970s. Such narratives generally end with the traveller's coming to provisional terms with his or her own modernityor, rarely, failing to do so. In some instances this primarily involves resignation and return, in others, a more deliberate rethinking of modern identities and social structures.

Twentieth-century travel narratives recount journeys of travellers who are distinctly at ease with the privileges they assume as Westerners. They may seek to escape the strictures and tedium of home, but not at the price of the modernity that so clearly shapes their identities and allows them, women and men, to travel. Philosophically they may oppose imperialism and seek to be more than tourists, but they nonetheless expect a right to flanerie and a certain amount of deference (such as ease in crossing national boundaries, buying train tickets, driving wherever they may wish, and using technology). Their luggage includes cameras, and their perceptions en route reveal both a narrative sense and an eye for what makes a good photograph (cf. John Urry). They assume authority to represent themselves and others with seldom more than modest critical reflection. Perhaps most intriguingly, some travel precisely in order to reflect upon permutations of modernity elsewhere--for example, wars and revolutions in eastern Europe and China, or postmodern culture in the "not-so-far-East."

In this paper, part of a larger project, I will trace out several ways in which modernity as both condition of identity and spectacle is a primary preoccupation of twentieth-century travel narratives, with examples drawn from the work of several writers including Peter Fleming, Ella Maillart, Rebecca West, Mary Morris, and Pico Iyer.


Stacy Burton
sburton@unr.edu
Associate Professor & Director of Graduate Studies
Department of English
University of Nevada, Reno
Reno, Nevada 89557-0031
department office: 775.784.6689
fax: 775.784.6266

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Updated May 23, 1999