Writes of Passage

Reading Travel Writing

James Duncan, Derek Gregory

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134721245
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Writes of Passage explores the interplay between a system of "othering" which travelers bring to a place, and the "real" geographical difference they discover upon arrival. Exposing the tensions between the imaginary and real, Duncan and Gregory and a team of leading internationa contributors focus primarily upon travelers from the 18th and 19th Centuries to pin down the imaginary within the context of imperial power. The contributors focus on travel to three main regions: Africa, South Asia, and Europe - wit the European examples being drawn from Britain, France and Greece.

1 Introduction

James Duncan and Derek Gregory

FIELDS OF INTEREST

The closing decades of the twentieth century have witnessed a double explosion of interest in travel writing. On the one side, bookstores whose travel shelves were once confined to atlases, guidebooks and maps—to nominally ‘factual’ and ‘objective’ accounts—now include sections devoted to personal, avowedly imaginative accounts of travel. The style varies dramatically (even in the same book): from lush and lyrical to comic and picaresque, evoking a nineteenth-century tradition of exploration, enacting the ironic stance of late twentieth-century postmodernism. Many critics agree that the work of Bruce Chatwin, Pico Iyer or Redmond O’Hanlon—to name just three prominent authors—maps not only new landscapes in a still markedly various world but also new spaces within contemporary literature. They have driven travel writing beyond itself—some reviewers claim that they have even re-invented travel writing, giving it both a new popularity and a new critical respectability—by their determination to press new possibilities of finding the terms for—of coming to terms with—other cultures and other natures.

This sense of re-imagining the world through its re-presentation, describing spiralling circles between home and away, here and there, and reworking the connective between ‘travel’ and ‘writing’ gives much of this work a decidedly critical edge. At its very best, it raises urgent questions about the politics of representation and spaces of transculturation, about the continuities between a colonial past and a supposedly post-colonial present, and about the ecological, economic and cultural implications of globalizing projects of modernity. It is in this spirit, for example, that Appiah (1997) draws attention to the radically unsettling quality of O’Hanlon’s account of his journey with James Fenton, Into the Heart of Borneo (1984):

The real secret of O’Hanlon’s success is that he subverts the conventions of this [natural-history] genre of imperial travel-writing by refusing utterly to take himself seriously. The imperial travellers—the explorers and naturalists—announced the difficulties of their journeys in order to record their triumphs over them. What they saw with their omnivorous eyes, they named ‘properly’ for the first time, in the grand Linnaean manner. And the human indigenes of the forests—the native fauna of the genus Homo Sapiens—could be interesting, loyal, helpful, brave, even noble (as well, of course, as savage and stupid). But they were not likely to find the bwana-sahib ridiculous; and if they did, it was clear that this was further evidence of the error of their ways. In O’Hanlon’s world, however, the natives are always amused.

(Appiah 1997, 20)

Similarly, in his epic Congo Journey (1996) O’Hanlon sets out what Appiah takes to be ‘some of the starker complexities that confront anyone from the richer world who enters a place of such intense material deprivation’. Much of this is familar ground, but it is worked over in a different way by O’Hanlon’s travelling companions, Larry Shaffer (an American professor of psychology) and Marcellin Agnaga (a Congolese biologist). Appiah remarks on the chronic struggle between Shaffer’s anti-relativism and Agnaga’s insistence on the ineradicable specificity of Africa, and the brooding tension between Agnaga’s modern, rationalist intellect and his anger at O’Hanlon ‘for drawing him back into the ambit of his grandfather and his sorcery’. O’Hanlon offers no easy answers to these predicaments, still less to the troubling question posed by Appiah himself: ‘What about the moral muddles of those of us who can only have access to this world through the accounts of travellers like O’Hanlon?’

What indeed? On the other side, then, and paralleling these literary sensibilities, has emerged a new academic interest in travel writing which often poses similarly disconcerting questions in its return to this decidedly nineteenth- century tradition of exploration and travel. This was hardly a terra incognita to traditional histories of geographical knowledge, to be sure, but travel writing that was not conducted under the sign of ‘Science’ was virtually ignored by such studies. What remained was read as an unproblematic record of heroism and triumphant discovery in which other cultures and other natures were shown to have surrendered their secrets before the powerful gaze of Western ‘Reason’. In effect, these studies mapped the production of a space of knowledge but not the concomitant production of a space of power.

More recently, however, scholars have started to cast their nets into two much wider streams of work. In the first place, drawing on the thematics of Raymond Williams and others, travel and its cultural practices have been located within larger formations in which the inscriptions of power and privilege are made clearly visible. We are thus beginning to understand much more about the cultures of natural history, for example, and the complex dialectic between scientific expeditions in the field and the circulation of their knowledges through metropolitan and colonial centres of calculation (Jardine, Secord and Spary 1996; Miller and Reill 1996). Considerable attention has been paid to the ways in which extra-scientific travel entered into ideologies of nationalism, to take another example, and contributed to the consolidation of bourgeois cultures through the refinement of ‘landscape tastes’ (Andrews 1989; Buzard 1993; Ousby 1990; Pemble 1987). In the second place, in an approach usually more self-consciously theoretical in its inclinations and drawing on both poststructuralism and postcolonialism, travel writing has been analysed as an ensemble of textual practices that can be made to disclose the characteristic gestures of an ‘imperial stylistics’ (Pratt 1992; see also Spurr 1993). There is a sense in which all travel writing, as a process of inscription and appropriation, spins webs of colonizing power, but to locate travel writing within this discursive formation also involves plotting the play of fantasy and desire, and the possibility of transgression (Aldrich 1993; Barrell 1991; Porter 1991). Particular attention has been paid to the articulations of travel, gender and sexuality and the routes by which travel writings modulated and registered the changing constitution of travelling subjects; and here the masculinism of traditional histories of’exploration’ has yielded to a principled recovery of the complex subject-positions of both men and women travellers (Blunt 1995; Fawley 1994; Lawrence 1994; Melman 1992; Mills 1991).

We welcome these developments—and the connections between them—but we want to make several cautionary observations.

SPACES OF REPRESENTATION

We think it important to register the physicality of representation itself. This involves attending to the multiple sites at which travel writing takes place and hence to the spatiality of representation. We know, for example, that the published record of Captain Cook’s third voyage is a composite account. The ‘official’ version, prepared for public circulation by the Admiralty, was the fourth and final stage of a sequence that began with the original entries in the ship’s log, passed through Cook’s own journal, and these observations then fed into a manuscript that was revised and edited by John Douglas. As the sequence proceeds so the writing is progressively distanced from the events and scenes it purports to convey (MacClaren 1992). More than this: in a brilliant re-reading of Cook’s arrival at Nootka Sound, Clayton (1998a; 1998b) shows that even when his ships were stationary, Cook’s journal ‘was still on the move’. He constantly reworked his observations in the light of subsequent encounters, so that his path across the Pacific to the west coast of North America produced not only a space of observation but a space of comparison, in which each journal entry was mediated and modified by its shifting articulations with other entries in the series (cf. Carter 1987). Besides, Cook’s officers kept their own journals, and they often saw different things from different positions and had different encounters with native peoples. These journals were collected by the Admiralty and incorporated into the official account so that, as Clayton says, ‘truth and objectivity became still more decentred’. There can be no question of Douglas’s authorized version capturing any presumptive immediacy and transparency of the event: it is a composite, fractured and spatialized construction. When Flaubert travelled up the Nile in 1849–50, to take an example from a different cultural register, he kept a journal which he used not only as an aide-mémoire but also as the basis for letters to his mother and to his male friends at home in France (so that there are often different constructions of the same event or place). On his return Flaubert collected the letters and used them, in conjunction with his own journal, to compose yet another account of his Voyage en Egypte (Gregory 1995). Here too the text is a composite, and it folds into itself a series of different spatialities that entered into its own construction.

More than the movements of the pen, it is also necessary to attend to the different means by which travellers recorded their experiences. Thus Cook was accompanied on his first Pacific voyage by both draftsmen and artists, and Smith (1985) has shown that there was a complex dialogue between the contrasting traditions that they brought to bear on their work. It is not simply that they brought with them to the South Seas the cultural baggage of late eighteenth- century Europe: it is a question of recognizing the different integrities and conventions of the various media that were available to explorers and travellers, and hence of triangulating the space of representation (see also Stafford 1984). Or again, to return to our second example, Flaubert was accompanied up the Nile by Maxime Du Camp, who took with him one of the first photographic apparatuses to be used in Egypt. We know from their writings that the two friends had different preoccupations: that du Camp was obsessed by photographing the temples and tombs of ancient Egypt whereas Flaubert was frankly bored by the whole business and much more interested in the physicality and sensuality of nineteenth-century Egypt (Gregory 1995). But when du Camp’s photographic record is inserted into these textual compositions it maps no simple ‘ground truth’ but, once again, a complex and foliated space of representation whose critical interpretation has much to tell us about the material production of imaginative geographies (MacClaren 1992). All of this suggests a second sense in which the travel archive is fractured. Too often, we think, journals, letters and published writings are assigned to literary scholars and historians; sketches, watercolours and paintings to art historians; and photographs and postcards to historians of photography. We suggest that the alternative strategy of attending to the physicality of representation imposes the obligation to read these different media together and, in so doing, to attend to their different valences and silences.

There is yet a third sense in which we want to accentuate the spatiality of representation: travel writing as an act of translation that constantly works to produce a tense ‘space in-between’. Defined literally, ‘translation’ means to be transported from one place to another, so that it is caught up in a complex dialectic between the recognition and recuperation of difference (Miller 1996). Memory, especially collective or social memory, is also a form of translation ‘marked by a boundary crossing and by a realignment of what has become different’ (Iser 1996, 297; see also Motzkin 1996, 265–81). But, as Maurice Halbwachs’s study of the cultural construction of ‘the Holy Land’ and its pilgrimage routes reminds us, social memory is often sedimented through circuits in space. In re-presenting other cultures and other natures, then, travel writers ‘translate’ one place into another, and in doing so constantly rub against the hubris that their own language- game contains the concepts necessary to represent another language-game (Dingwaney 1995, 5; Asad and Dixon 1973; 1985). Just as textual translation cannot capture all of the symbolic connotations of language or the alliterative sound of words, the translation of one place into the cultural idiom of another loses some of the symbolic loading of the place for its inhabitants and replaces it with other symbolic values. This means that translation entails both losses and gains, and as descriptions move from one place to another so they circulate in what we have called ‘a space in-between’. This space of translation is not a neutral surface and it is never innocent: it is shot through with relations of power and of desire. In general, and as Venuti (1993, 210) points out, translation is either a ‘domesticating method, an ethnographic reduction of the foreign text to target language cultural values, bringing the author back home’ or a ‘foreignizing method, an ethnographic pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad’. Travel writing is often inherently domesticating, in something like Venuti’s sense, and we have noted how many critics have emphasized its complicity with the play of colonizing power. But even in its most imperial gestures, by virtue of its occupation of that ‘space in-between’—the space of transculturation (Pratt 1992)—travel writing can also disclose an ambivalence, a sense of its own authorities and assumptions being called into question.

SPACES OF TRAVEL

It may seem strange to emphasize the spatiality of travel, but we fear that some critical readings fail to register the production of travel writings by corporeal subjects moving through material landscapes. Such critiques are vulnerable to the accusation of textualism: they tell us much about the constitution of authors as subjects through the process of writing, and about the relations between their own strategies of representation and the wider cultural formations of which they were a part, but they often say very little about the places these travellers encountered or the physical means through which they engaged them. This is not to call for any comparison between ‘imaginative’ geographies and ‘real’ geographies, as persistent misreadings of Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism would have us believe, because all geographies are imaginative geographies—fabrications in the literal sense of ‘something made’—and our access to the world is always made through particular technologies of representation.

Our focus in this collection is on European and American travellers writing between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. It was during this period that travel assumed a characteristically modern form. By this, we mean that travel and travel writing entered into the Euro-American project of modernity in at least three ways.

First, travel and travel writing meshed with secularization: sacralized frames of reference yielded to a much more complex taxonomy of cultural difference and natural history. Within the geographical imaginary of post-Enlightenment Europe, ‘Asia’, ‘Africa’, ‘America’ and ‘Australia’ were each discursively constituted by relations of contradiction and opposition that not only confirmed ‘Europe’ as sovereign subject but also marked out a differentiated and often agonistic space of alterity (Gregory 1998). And while there was a systematicity, a labile coherence, to this imaginary, it was constituted as a comparative matrix at several different levels and there was no single space of representation to be occupied by unitary descriptions of, say, ‘India’, or ‘the Orient’, or even ‘Africa’ (Teltscher 1995; Lowe 1991; Youngs 1994).

Second, travel became more than a necessary evil, a burden to be borne by, for example, pilgrims, merchants and explorers, but rather came to be constructed as an end in itself, as a form of pure pleasure. To be sure, the aristocratic Grand Tour had been an uneasy enterprise since its inception in the sixteenth century (Black 1992): there was a decided ambiguity about the exposure of impressionable young men to cultural difference even within Europe (Warneke 1995), and young women were widely...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Contributors
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Limited Visions of Africa: Geographies of savagery and civility in early eighteenth- century narratives
• 3: Enlightenment Travels: The making of epiphany in Tibet
• 4: Writing Travel and Mapping Sexuality: Richard Burton’s Sotadic Zone
• 5: The Flight from Lucknow: British women travelling and writing home, 1857–8
• 6: Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the cultures of travel
• 7: Dis-Orientation: On the shock of the familiar in a far-away place
• 8: The Exoticism of the Familiar and the Familiarity of the Exotic: Fin-de-siècle travellers to Greece
• 9: Travelling through the Closet
• 10: Writing over the Map of Provence: The touristic therapy of A Year in Provence