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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Defining Disappointment: The Contentious Traveler"


David C. Judkins
Department of English
University of Houston

In her contribution to the popular book of travel accounts, Bad Trips, Jan Morris writes that she vowed many years ago to "never travel disagreeably." Further she notes that she has "for forty years or more made a professional specialty of the happy journey." That positive attitude, I believe, reflects the average traveler's expectations when departing on a new excursion. People do not, for the most part, leave the comfort and security of their homes, family, and friends to find misery, cold, and discomfort. All travel involves extra expense, commitment of time and additional energy. People expect a happy return for their efforts. To be sure, most travelers hope for some enlightenment to accompany their experience. They hope to learn something mildly profound and perhaps to be titillated by a brush with adventure. In some instances travelers are absolutely resolute to discover redeeming qualities to customs and practices that others have described as uncomfortable, highly inconvenient, or even humiliating.

Early in the Eighteenth Century, Lady Montague accompanying her husband to Turkey finds the Muslim custom of women wearing the veil or ferigee as liberating rather than confining as most westerners had reported. "It's impossible," Lady Montague writes, "for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her; and no man dare either touch or follow a woman in the street. This perpetual masquerade gives them entire liberty of following their inclination without danger of discovery." Such a positive attitude does not always find its way into travel literature. Indeed some writers are difficult if not impossible to please. Others put pen to paper to get even rather than inform their readers. I remember years ago when reading Gypsy Moth Circles the World how disappointed I was reading pages and pages of Chichester's complaints about the condition and construction of the new boat, Gypsy-Moth IV, built for his single handed circumnavigation. The chapter is entitled "Frustrations," but it is as frustrating to the reader to slog through a detailed catalog of quibbles than it was for Chichester to endure them. And, of course, there is no opportunity for the boat's builder to reply to the aging mariner's attack. Other writers come to mind who find much to complain about as soon as they leave home. Smollet in his Travels through France and Italy proceeds from one outrage to another. Fireplaces smoke, furniture is poorly made, and indelicate people besiege the author. Dickens years later also finds much to complain about along the same route, "Queer old towns, drawbridged and walled: with odd little towers at the angles, like grotesque faces, as if the wall had put a mask on, and were staring down into at the moat; other strange little towers, in gardens and fields, and down lanes, and in farmyards: all alone, and always round, with a peaked room, and never used for any purpose at all; ruinous building of all sorts. . . ."

This paper seeks to explore not just the critical travel writer or the writer who encounters genuine adversity, but the disappointed, slightly angry writer who hopes no one is fool enough to follow in his or her steps. The writer who wants to demonstrate his or her acid at the expense of the overworked hotel clerk, impatient waiter, or hurried taxi driver. The paper asks the questions: is the antitravel writer attempting to maintain a balance with the travel booster, the returning enthusiast who gushes on about the views, the weather, the cuisine, the service, not to mention the splendid antiquities? Is the anti-travel writer serious about staying at home? Does he/she believe that most travelers are escaping rather than seeking? Is he/she protesting the snobbery of travel? Or is the antitravel writer a puritan who believes our time and resources are better directed in more productive and less self-indulgent pursuits? What is the anti-travel writer a product of? Modern journalism? Social criticism? Or just indigestion?


David C. Judkins
Department of English
University of Houston
Houston, Texas

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