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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Graham Greene and the Anxieties of Political Travel"


Bernard Schweizer University of Zurich
bschweiz@es.unizh.ch

Several critics have commented on the connection between travel and anxiety. Dennis Porter aptly entitles his study of European travel writing from the 18th century to the present Haunted Journeys (1991), thereby pointing out the uncanny nature of a desire for transgression which, although bound up with geographical displacement, transcends the contingencies of physical space. In Belated Journeys (1994), Ali Behdad investigates the anxiety caused by the traveler's awareness that he is following in somebody else's footsteps, always one step removed from the desired authenticity of unmediated experience. These anxieties are supplemented by the nostalgic craving for "real travel" as opposed to mere tourism, a distinction explored with particular gusto in Paul Fussell's Abroad (1980).

English travel writers of the 1930s experienced yet another form of anxiety, namely cultural and political anxiety. Although anxiety is primarily a psychological category of experience, my paper demonstrates that the kinds of anxiety manifested in 1930s travel writings are often triggered by a public and political order of experience. In fact, I will show how Sigmund Freud's essay "The Uncanny" (1919) can be harnessed for a coherent explanation of psychic phenomena that arise from a repression of ideological inclinations, from the return of such beliefs, and from an encounter with familiar cultural conditions in a strange context.

Although travelers such as Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, and Rebecca West were driven by a strong sense of political righteousness, they were often haunted by a feeling of ideological inadequacy, guilt, and ineffectiveness when confronted with foreign social and political contexts. In my talk, I will concentrate on Graham Greene's travel writing. In his African travel book Journey Without Maps (1936), the return of Greene's conservative political instincts in the jungle of Africa causes this declared leftist intellectual to experience intense feelings of anxiety. In the Mexican travel book, The Lawless Roads (1939), Greene deals not so much with the trauma of ideological anxiety as with the haunting awareness of collapsed cultural boundaries and a simultaneous religious estrangement in this arch-Catholic land. Moreover, The Lawless Roads gives expression to the uncanny realization that the conditions the traveler finds abroad only throw back an image of himself.


University of Zurich
Plattenstr. 47,
8032 Zurich, Switzerland
Tel: 01/634 36 81
Fax: 01/634 4908
bschweiz@es.unizh.ch

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Updated May 23, 1999