Writing the Journey: June 1999

REMARKS FOR "WRITING THE JOURNEY" CONFERENCE
 
 

We like to speculate on when the current renaissance in travel writing started—perhaps with the success of Paul Theroux,’s The Great Railway Bazaar? (1975) (Theroux was an ex-Peace Corps volunteer, and by the way, if you missed the Peace Corps writers panel this afternoon, you missed a great discussion!) There has always been a market for travel writing, but publishers seemed to have forgotten. They quickly remembered. In the 15 years after 1975, four times as many travel books were published as in a similar period before, and the increase continues.

In the realm of travel writing criticism, Paul Fussell’s Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980), may hold a similar position. Searching under the critical category, "Literature of Travel," I found only 14 books between 1935 and 1980. Since 1980, there have been 133 full-length studies of travel writing, not to mention a multitude of journal articles.

Today, the word "travel" can mean all sorts of things to critics: diaspora, border crossing, immigration, migrancy, tourism, pilgrimmage, exile. Race, class, and gender count stongly in any study of travel writing; even theory travels, and the word "travel" itself becomes a figure for reading and for the very nature of metaphor.

Abroad helped make travel writing both a respectable and a compelling subject for literary scholarship, and it continues to provoke creative response to the many questions it raised. Here are a few:

What is the difference between travel and tourism?

Is travel writing primarily the preserve of English men?

What about Americans, Canadians, and all those writers in the lands of the late British Empire?

What influence does the travel business—agencies, guidebooks, advertising, journalism, hotel development—have upon travel writing?

What is the relation of travel writing to fiction, modernism, the pastoral, primitivism, authenticity, national or ethnic identity, place, home?

What do the anthropologists and other social scientists have to tell us about travel writing?

What about women?

Just what is a travel book?

And finally—is travel dead?

Last weekend, as I was composing these remarks, I took a break to look at the New York Times. The whole Sunday magazine was devoted to travel. Even William Safire wrote on the word "adventure" in his language column. "How timely for our conference," I said. Then I glanced at the Book Review section, and under a piece on new travel books, this lead hit my eye: "It has been almost 20 years since Paul Fussell, in a curmudgeonly book called "Abroad," declared that travel writing was a genre on its last legs, ready to go the way of courtship novels and pastoral ecologues. It had had to, for the world had shrunk and the adventure of travel itself had been replaced everywhere by its degraded facsimile, tourism…"

"I’ve been scooped," I thought. Then I realized I had Exhibit A for my list of critics who, whether they argue with Fussell or agree with him, start with his book.

"Travel is dead, long live travel." It is common for journalists to declare that Fussell wrote a premature obituary for travel.

Here’s a lead for a travel book review from the London Times last year: "In Abroad, Paul Fussell argues that mass travel has killed the travel book as a literary form. To judge by 1998’s best of the crop, however, nothing could be further from the truth…"

The travel writer Jonathan Raban had a more perceptive comment when he reviewed Abroad just after it came out: "Abroad is an exemplary piece of criticism. It is immensely readable. It bristles with ideas. It admits a whole area of writing—at last!—to its proper place in literary history. Its general thesis is, I think,wrongheaded…; but Mr. Fussell argues it with such force and clarity that he makes it a pleasure to quarrel with him."

One of the first to take issue with Abroad was Jonathan Culler, who fumed in 1981 about Fussell’s distinction between travel and tourism. Even though he concedes that Fussell is "a reputable and intelligent literary critic," he accuses him of "hysterical smugness" for denigrating tourism.

(As I was shaving this morning, I was trying to mime "hysterical smugness." It’s impossible. The phrase is an oxymoron.)

Culler was doing was doing what many subsequent critics have done—subject Fussell’s judgments, categories and distinctions about travel and travel writing to scrutiny. From the different critical perspectives that have arisen in the last two decades—feminism and women’s studies, new historicism, multi-culturalism, post-colonialism, cultural studies, Fussell’s categories and judgments have been, to use the current critical term—"interrogated."

Some take up subjects he neglected: Here’s Sara Mills: "Paul Fussell explicitly refuses to consider women travel writers within his account of literary travel, as he states that they are not sufficiently concerned either with travel or with writing itself." Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (1992) (3)

Since 1980, literary criticism of travel writing has become a great field for women! (Note that well over half our presenters are women). Many of our best recent scholars—not to mention travel writers themselves—have been women: Mary Louise Pratt, Mary Suzanne Schriber, Caren Kaplan, to name a few—and you can sense that they have been creatively provoked by Fussell.

In her book Questions of Travel (1996), Kaplan admits that despite slighting women, Fussell’s book has "cross-over appeal."

I love that phrase! Let’s linger on it for a moment. For me, "cross-over appeal" refers primarily to black entertainers who could appeal to a white audience. Nat King Cole had crossover appeal, like Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, or Oprah. But in Kaplan’s phrase, who is crossing over, and to what? She implies (quite correctly) that literary criticism does not cross over to the general educated reading public—let along the academic public. (Sometimes it doesn’t cross over the English Department corridor!)

I find travel writing enjoyable partly because it is easy reading. And "easy reading is hard writing." Focussing exclusively on travel for the last three days, I tend to see travel metaphors everywhere--including "cross-over appeal." Kaplan’s is not a flattering comment on the language of literary criticism of recent years, as we have invented terms or borrowed them from European theory. Travel writing has great popularity because it is clear and interesting. Is it not too much to ask that literary criticism of travel writing share those qualities? Ask the travel writers and journalists here how they react to one of our sessions.

"Do they talk like that all the time?" one writer asked me. Perhaps we all need another dose of "Politics and the English Language."

(Note: There was applause here, led by Fussell.)

Many subsequent critics have looked to Abroad as a point of departure. Michael Kowaleski, in Temperamental Journeys (1992) states that no definitive study of 20th-century travel has yet appeared, but that "Paul Fussell’s exemplary study of British travelers between the wars sets a high standard for subsequent criticism." (7)

Some openly acknowledge their debt: "Perhaps the most carefully considered examination of what the term [travel book} might mean is in Paul Fussell’s lucid and original study." (Mark Cocker, Loneliness and Time : The Story of British Travel Writing (1992)

One result of our renewed interest in travel writing has been the rediscovery and republication of neglected or forgotten travel works. Fussell’s praise of Robert Byron led, for example, to the reissue of Byron’s classic,The Road to Oxiana. In Tourists With Typewriters (1998), Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan note that Abroad "has been instrumental in suggesting not only criteria for a serious canon, but also individual ‘landmark’ works."

I like to think of those travelers in that slim volume Abroad, fleeing the memories of one world war, then having their travel interrupted after only a few years by the second. War restricts travel, or makes it simply impossible, and yet it also spurs travel. Recently I was comparing American war memoirs of Vietnam to American travel writing on Vietnam. I bet Fussell has something to say about this, I thought, so I looked through Abroad once more. Sure enough, I found the perfect quote: "The memorable war memoirs of the late 20's and early 30's, by Graves and Blunden and Sassoon, are very like travel books..ironic or parodic or nightmare travels....At the end of the Second World War, the war book has something of the same "travel" element attached to it, the same obsession with topography and the mystery of place..." (206-207)

Two of Fussell’s most formative experiences for his writing have been war and travel. (The Norton Book of War; The Norton Book of Travel). You might say that he combined them both by spending his junior year abroad on the European front in World War II, and he almost got the bonus of a senior year in Japan. (You know what happened if you read the essay about the bomb!)

"Travel is work," says Fussell, and of course travel writers agree. But travel is play as well—a kind of play indulged in by the British travelers of Abroad as soon as the work of war was over.

There is a playful quality to many of those travelers —they are eccentric, whimsical, witty, comic. The book itself picks up this spirit—that’s one of the reasons it is enjoyable to read. It has the quality of a travel book itself—and Fussell occasionally takes the opportunity to mix in one of his own travel stories as well. My favorite—like my undergraduates I am perhaps too fond of this anecdote—is when he loses his wallet and passport in a Turkish toilet. "…although I have been both traveler and tourist, it was as a traveler, not a tourist, that I once watched my wallet and passport slither down a Turkish toilet at Bodrum, and it was the arm of a traveler that reached deep, deep into that cloaca to retrieve them." (In a course on travel writing, one of my students stumbled into class late one morning, having stayed up all night to do his paper. "This is the arm of a travel writer," he proclaimed as he held up his essay.)

There is something inherently comic in travel, and the way travel writing relies on misadventure. That is the spirit in which I want to end.

We are not really an organization yet—no dues, no budget, no journal—not even a name! We are just a fledgling group of people interested in travel writing, so it is premature for us to start performing official acts like giving out prizes. But if we do achieve some kind of professional status as an organization one day, perhaps we could give an award. Considering the origins of travel writing among English gentlemen, we could give the award a rather artistocratic name. How about "The Order of the Traveler’s Arm", with an appropriate crest of arms to match? (I already imagine the graphic, a beckoning hand silhouetted against the horizon).
 
 

For such an award, I think, there would be no better candidate than Paul Fussell. Let’s thank him for being here, and for all he has done for the field of travel writing.