An excerpt from “The Elasticity of Place”
In the Fall 2017 issue of The Chattahoochee Review
By Rolf Potts
First of all, what is travel writing? And why is travel writing important right now?
Travel writing is important because it humanizes distant places. Unlike standard journalism, it doesn’t pretend to detached objectivity, and it doesn’t follow the panic-driven war/disaster tropes of the twenty-four hour news cycle. Instead, it uses a personal lens to delve into the nuanced realities of daily life away from home, finding human commonalities as it explores cultural differences.
Much travel writing doesn’t live up to that ideal, of course. Some travel writing inevitably veers into self-absorption or dumb generalizations when it encounters other cultures. And much of what is characterized as “travel writing” these days is essentially consumer information for vacationers — where to go, how to get there, what to see and do and buy when you get there. That’s fine, I suppose — most travelers benefit from authoritative guidance and tips — but the best travel writing is a tentative inquiry into other places, one that seeks understanding and insight while being of aware of its own limited point-of-view. Like all good literature, its nuanced specifics speak to universal themes.
But backing up to the big-picture level for a moment, one could ask the question: What isn’t travel writing? Indeed, one of the most enduring human narratives — one that predates literacy — is the story of the wanderer who leaves home, encounters the challenges of the unknown, and returns to tell the tale. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to the imaginative fictions set in Oz, Narnia, or Westeros, travel has always been a literary mechanism that incites struggle and learning and change.
As for fact-based travel writing, many of the tropes we still associate with the genre go back at least to Herodotus’s Histories, which used on-the-ground inquiry and reportage in an effort to make (admittedly imperfect) sense of Near Eastern cultures for a Greek audience. For more than two thousand years — from Zhang Qian and Ibn Battuta to the far-flung wanderers of the British Empire — the implied task of travel writing was to describe the customs and idiosyncrasies of faraway people and places. Travel writing was a key source of information about the outside world, and it influenced not just exploration, science, and commerce — it also influenced the history of ideas and literature. It’s easy to see the influence of travel writing on Don Quixote or Robinson Crusoe, but its DNA can also be found in The Faerie Queene and The Tempest and the King James translation of the Bible (which contains evocations of Eden that mirror John Layfield’s descriptions of Dominica).
By the nineteenth century, as railroads and steamships and telegrams were shrinking the world and making it more knowable, the mission of travel writing slowly began to shift into a more personal direction. Over time, scientific description of distant cultures was less essential than the author’s first-person account of traveling within those cultures. Alexander Kinglake, Mark Twain, and Isabella Bird popularized this narrative approach near the end of the nineteenth century — and by the end of the twentieth century the most popular travel books blended first-person reportage with a memoiristic evocation of the traveler’s inner life.
Literary travel writing still resides in the overlap of reportage and memoir, and some of the most memorable travel writing (think Jan Morris, Pico Iyer, Orhan Pamuk) isn’t about the act of physical motion so much as the task of making sense of a single place, or reflecting on the complexity of human experience amid a world in flux. In a time when academic disciplines are hyper-specialized and foreign correspondents fixate on wars and crises, travel writers are allowed to digress, to take things slow, and use a variety of interpretive lenses. A good travel book doesn’t just mix reportage and memoir; it might blend geography with gastronomy, history with humor, sociology with spirituality. At its best, it’s about a perceptive author using a mix of narrative strategies to make sense of both a place and of herself as the person experiencing that place.
Travel writing used to be more of a colonizing genre: A representative of the dominant world culture would go off to a distant and exotic land, and then come back to report how fascination the place was for its difference. So even if its importance has slowly become more of a personal response to a place or culture, this response may still contain a strong element of cultural judgment. This may come across as a positive judgment, say, when a travel writer only has positive things to say about a culture they describe as charming, while they take a surface view of the people they describe. Have you ever worried in your own work that you were guilty of writing about a place before you knew it well enough? How do travel writers get around the fact that they are essentially visitors, but claim some kind of authority over a place by writing about it?
I think every travel writer worries about trying to depict a place without knowing it properly. I know I do — and I’d be suspicious of any travel writer who didn’t struggle with this process.
This issue has, in fact, become somewhat of an in-joke among travel writers over the years. When D.H. Lawrence visited Florence in 1921, Norman Douglas poked fun at him for the fact that he was “vehemently and exhaustively describing the temperament of the people” within a few days of arriving there. Two decades later, when George Orwell reviewed Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi, he quipped that it bore “all the normal stigmata of the travel book, the fake intensities, the tendency to discover the ‘soul’ of a town after spending two hours in it.” The best anecdote in this regard comes from nineteenth-century philosopher Herbert Spencer, who wrote about a French traveler who was ready to write a book about England three weeks into his visit. Three months later, the Frenchman decided he wasn’t ready yet — and after three years he determined that he had no authority whatsoever to write a book about England.
Of course nobody ever knows a place “well enough” to write about it with ironclad authority. This includes historians, anthropologists, and the people living there. Orhan Pamuk’s book about his hometown, Istanbul, has been hailed as a masterpiece, but I’d imagine his own neighbors might take issue with his sour, sentimental, cerebral take on their city. Pamuk, a novelist and academic, tends to view his city through the lens of art and literature, whereas a Turkish butcher or banker or beautician might view the city in a completely different way. My 1999 take on Istanbul, “Turkish Knockout,” which recounts getting drugged and robbed in the city’s well-visited Sultanahmet district, is inseparable from the fact that I was utterly ignorant of the city when I arrived there. On reading it, one doesn’t learn much about Istanbul in the socio-historical sense, but it does evoke what one part of the city was like for a certain overconfident American tourist.
A lot of my early travel writing explored the tentative, liminal space we occupy as travelers. “Turkish Knockout” appears in my 2008 book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, alongside more lighthearted tales like “Storming The Beach,” which is set in Thailand, and “Tantric Sex For Dilettantes,” which is set in India. These humor stories are less focused on the essential nature of Thailand or India than in unpacking the overwrought fantasies we project onto these places. Both stories end with a realization of my own boneheaded naiveté — and while other stories in the book go further to depict the local people I connected with as a traveler, I always tried to make it clear that my perspective was less than perfect. As a writer I am not speaking for these places so much as I am recounting the ephemeral experiences of one specific middle-class American male in certain corners of these places, visiting at certain times of the year, in a certain moment in history. I might bring in research — history, literature, reportage — to help make sense of my experiences (as most travel writers do), but I make no claim to be authoritative.
The implicit acknowledgment that a traveler is always operating from a specific personal-cultural point-of-view has always been central to travel writing. Herodotus’s Histories purport to describe other lands and cultures, for instance, but the author continually reminds the reader of his own reportorial doubts and limitations. Moreover, it’s clear that he is describing the customs and routines of non-Greek cultures (their gender relations, culinary practices, toilet protocols) with a Greek sensibility, for a Greek audience. In this way Histories reveals as much or more about ancient Greece as it does the places it describes. So, for as long as it has been around, travel writing invariably uses one cultural point-of-view to make sense of another, and any account (ancient or modern, colonial or postcolonial) that pretends to objectivity is clearly blind to the inevitability of its own biases and preconceptions.
It’s interesting to consider that the notion of “journalistic objectivity” arose in the nineteenth century, around the same time that (in countries like Britain) some forms of travel writing were being used as a literal pretext for colonizing other cultures. I don’t want to dismiss journalistic objectivity with too broad a brush — the idea was to promote more ethical, empirical reporting — but when you travel to distant lands and omit the “I” from the account of what you saw, it implies an objective authority that doesn’t exist in the real world. Part of the push to make foreign reportage more objective was pegged to the excesses of Romantic-era travel writing — which proved that impressionistic reverie could be just as unreliable as subjective fact-gathering when trying to depict other places. So that’s the tricky ground a travel writer must navigate — including enough of the “I” to orient the reader with her subjectivity, while being disciplined enough to move beyond the “I” and report meaningfully about people who in the places she is visiting.
In the twenty-first century we no longer need travel writing to teach us about other places — especially when the people who live in those places are documenting their lives in real-time, with videos, social-media posts, and personal essays of their own. But travel writing was never really about pure reportage; it has always existed in the vicarious tension of what a writer from one culture experiences (and attempts to comprehend) when visiting another. Admitting to confusion and discomfort and naïve excitement isn’t just what makes travel writing entertaining and relatable to the home audience; the very authority of a travel narrative (unlike the big-picture sweep of narrative history or social science) lies in the self-declared limitations of its own first-person perspective.
Aside from the issues we’ve already discussed, what should aspiring travel writers of the next generation keep in mind?
I think the core task of travel writing — going slow, experiencing, listening, seeking nuance, reflecting — hasn’t changed much, and won’t change all that much in the future. Often travel writing is a matter of getting past your preconceptions and being thoughtful and honest about what you experience. This naturally applies to getting past crude cultural stereotypes, but it also means avoiding performative sensitivity and the over-idealization of other cultures. And, as I’ve suggested before, narrative point-of-view counts: Remind the reader not just of what’s being experienced and reported, but also of who is experiencing and reporting it.
The full text of this literary round-table, which also includes insights from Eddy L. Harris and Alden Jones, can be found in the Fall 2017 issue of the Chattahoochee Review.
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