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The first extensive survey of contemporary travel writing, Tourists with Typewriters offers a series of challenging and provocative critical insights into a wide range of travel narratives written in English after the Second World War. The book focuses in particular on contemporary travel writers such as Jan Morris, Peter Matthiessen, V. S. Naipaul, Barry Lopez, Mary Morris, Paul Theroux, Peter Mayle, and the late Bruce Chatwin. It examines some of the reasons for travel writing's enduring popularity, and for its particular appeal to readers--many of them also travelers--in the present.
The book maps new terrain in a growing area of critical study. Although critical of travel writing's complacency and its often unacknowledged ethnocentrism, the book recognizes its importance as both a literary and cultural form. While travel writing at its worst emerges as a crude expression of economic advantage, at its best it becomes a subtle instrument of cultural self-perception, a barometer for changing views of "other" (i.e., foreign, non-Western) cultures, and a trigger for the information circuits that tap us into the wider world.
Tourists with Typewriters gauges both the best and worst in contemporary travel writing, capturing the excitement of this most volatile--and at times infuriating--of literary genres. The book will appeal to general readers interested in a closer examination of travel writing and to academic readers in disciplines such as literary/cultural studies, geography, history, anthropology, and tourism studies.
"An eminently readable and informative study. It breathes tolerance and intelligence. It is critically perceptive and very au courant. It raises issues (coloniality, postmodernity, gender. . . ) and discusses books that readers of many different stripes will want to find out about." --Ross Chambers, University of Michigan
Patrick Holland, Associate Professor of English, University of Guelph, was born in New Zealand and educated in England, Australia, and Canada. Graham Huggan, Professor of English, University of Munich, was born in Hong Kong and educated in England and in British Columbia.
IMPERIALIST NOSTALGIA AND THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN TRAVELER
"As travelers and travel writers, the English are special," says Paul Fussell in his study of British literary traveling between the wars. For Fussell, the English traveler-writer is singled out from others by a particular brand of eccentric individualism. Fussell's (perhaps excessively) affectionate study is dedicated accordingly to the memory of such notorious "originals" as the irrepressible art historian Robert Byron and the more curmudgeonly, but scarcely less flamboyant, novelist Evelyn Waugh: larger-than-life figures both, but not untypical of English traveler-writers of the interwar period, who were frequently "outrageous, conducting [their] libertarian gesture against the predictable conformity, the dull 'internationalism,' of post-war social and political arrangements". Romantically, Fussell sees Byron and Waugh as representatives of the "final age of travel," which has since given way to modern commercial tourism. In pronouncing the age of travel dead, Fussell echoes the sentiments of Waughhimself, who believed that the end of the war also signaled the end of the golden age of travel writing; gone were the halcyon days when "Mr. Peter Fleming went to the Gobi desert, Mr. Graham Greene to the Liberian hinterland ... [and] Mr. Robert Byron ... to the ruins of Persia" (When the Going Was Good 11). But Waugh's threnody turned out to have been premature; for a decade later, we find him again-and in characteristically ebullient mood-writing a preface for the book of a newly discovered literary traveler: Eric Newby. Newby, for Waugh, is "the latest, but, I pray, not the last of a whimsical tradition." Waugh celebrates Newby's understatement,
self-ridicule, delight in the foreignness of foreigners, complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited ... [and] formal self-effacement in the presence of the specialist (with the essential reserve of unexpressed self-respect).
All of these qualities delight the heart of a man "whose travelling days are done and who sees, all too often, his countrymen represented abroad by other, new and (dammit) lower types" (Preface 12). It is precisely because he is not new that Newby is to be welcomed; for as the upholder of a tradition that is resolutely antimodern, Newby embodies in his work an antiquated, but still perfectly serviceable myth-that of the English gentleman abroad who "shuns the celebrated spectacles of the tourist and without any concern with science or politics or commerce ... ventures to set feet where few civilized feet have trod" (Preface 12).
Waugh is partly right in his judgment of Newby; and Newby himself, in the opening pages of his autobiography A Traveller's Life (1982), is certainly quick to agree with him. But it is important, at the same time, to see Newby's writing-like that of several of his old-school contemporaries (Thesiger, Lewis, Leigh Fermor)-as being situated both within and against the tradition of the English gentleman abroad. Newby associates this tradition more closely with the figure of the Victorian gentleman scholar: an avid student and consumer of other, mostly non-European cultures whose impressive erudition affords another reminder of the imagined superiority of his own imperial national culture. Waugh and, particularly, Byron retain some of these characteristics: self-consciously anachronistic figures both, they are-or perhaps better, they pose as-gentleman scholars out of their time. But for Newby, the sense of belatedness is that much more urgent. He has been born, he laments on more than one occasion in his travel writings, one hundred years too late; and not only in the sense that the forces of modern technology have conspired to spoil the pleasures of the ruin-seeking traveler-to ruin his ruins-but also because the myth of the English gentleman has lost its moral force. David Castronovo, in his historical study of the English gentleman, expresses the dilemma well. The English gentleman is no longer an ideal or model, but instead a popular entertainment; like the landed estate with which he is often associated, the gentleman can no longer be seen as "a force for social cohesion, but rather [as] a delightful aesthetic object". Newby's persistent nostalgia is a throwback to the lost glories of Empire-an age of unparalleled success for the idea of the gentleman-but Newby rarely loses sight of the fact that the English gentleman abroad, and the code of conduct for which he stands, do not cut much ice in the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. Simon Raven sums it up: "Gentlemen can only now behave as such, or be tolerated as such, in circumstances that are manifestly contrived or unreal". Perhaps Marx got it right after all: to replay the history of the English gentleman abroad, in an age no longer conducive to the ideals of gentlemanliness, is to play it out as farce.
Certainly, farce plays a role in several contemporary British travel narratives that self-consciously manipulate the imperialist myth of the gentleman abroad. Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), Thesiger's Arabian Sands (1959), and, more recently, O'Hanlon's Into the Heart of Borneo (1984) are all postwar travel narratives by quintessentially English writers that trade on, but also play on, what the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo calls "imperialist nostalgia." Imperialist nostalgia, according to Rosaldo, describes a prevalent, commodified mode of elegiac perception through which Western people are given to sentimentalize the former relationship between the Empire and its colonies. Such people, and the culture industries (film, TV, etc.) that foster their perceptions, contrive to mourn the passing of a world that they themselves have irrevocably altered. As Rosaldo puts it bluntly:
Imperialist nostalgia revolves around a paradox: A person kills somebody, and then mourns the victim. In more attenuated form, someone deliberately alters a form of life, and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to the intervention. At one more remove, people destroy their environment, and then they worship nature. In any of its versions, imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of "innocent yearning" both to capture people's imaginations and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination.
Imperialist nostalgia comes in handy for contemporary travel writers, who can deploy it to mystify their own economic motives, as well as to yearn for the "simpler" ways of life-often rural, premodern, preindustrial-that they, and their metropolitan readers, persuade themselves they need. Imperialist nostalgia, as Rosaldo sees it, does not have to depend on a vision of Empire; it describes a more generalized, pastoral mode of wistful reminiscence that seeks control over, but not responsibility for, a mythicized version of the past. In the work of several contemporary travel writers, however, this mythicized past actually pertains to Empire: it attempts the restoration of Empire's former (imagined) glories, and the resuscitation of Empire's erstwhile (imaginary) "subordinate" subjects.
Writers like these are aware, though, that their gestures are belated, and the result in their narratives is a turn to comedy-particularly farce. In O'Hanlon's Into the Heart of Borneo, the author and his sidekick, the poet James Fenton, embark on a madcap foray into the jungle that is also a journey back into a fondly reimagined past. (It is not surprising that one of O'Hanlon's favorite writers is Joseph Conrad, for his own travel narratives succumb all too easily to what Rob Nixon calls "Conradian atavism": the mechanism, displayed most clearly in the novella Heart of Darkness, by which a journey forward through space simultaneously moves backward through time.) As in Conrad's work, there is an evolutionary thread to O'Hanlon's jungle narrative; but he is equally interested in re-creating and imaginatively inhabiting the colonial atmosphere of Sarawak in the nineteenth century, at least a hundred years before his own visit. One of his models appears to be the "gentleman-adventurer" James Brooke, who arrived, like his literary namesake Lord Jim, in Sarawak in the mid-nineteenth century, promptly became embroiled in a local war, and ended up with his own private kingdom. Brooke was later succeeded by his nephew Charles, a forceful leader who "governed Sarawak for fifty years like a country gentleman managing his estates" (Borneo 14). And the line of Brookes was to continue until after the Second World War, when Vyner Brooke, under pressure to rebuild, finally ceded his estate to the British Crown (Moses). O'Hanlon sees the Brookes' history as having been one, by and large, of benevolent paternalism, an attitude he seeks to revive in his own much later expedition. But as he discovers, Sarawak is a much changed place since the days of Brooke and company. For one thing, the country-now a member of the Malaysian Federation-has only the slenderest of links to its colorful colonial history; and for another, O'Hanlon and Fenton, far from inspiring respect among the local people, are figures of fun, eccentric blunderers, the butt of many a private joke. O'Hanlon's pathetic efforts to remind some local children of his origins are rewarded unexpectedly:
I dislodged [a] sealed bag of picture-postcards of the Queen on horseback, Trooping the Colour.... "Look," I said, "this is for you. Here is our Tuai Rumah, our chief in England." "Inglang!" said the children. The cards were sheeny and metallic, the kind that change the position of their subjects as their own position is changed against the light.... I gave one to a little boy. He looked at it with amazed delight: he turned it this way and that; he scratched it and waited to see what would happen; he whipped it over, to catch a glimpse of Her Majesty from the back. Small hands thrust up like a clump of bamboo; the old woman, annoyed, wanted a pile for herself. If the children had one each, the men wanted more than one each. In five minutes, four hundred mementoes of the Empire disappeared.
In registering the unmitigated farce of such "cross-cultural" encounters, O'Hanlon deflates his self-appointed role as Great Conciliator, as well as showing the gap between his personal vision of the Empire and the realities of a present fashioned by the more impersonal forces of commercial tourism. O'Hanlon, as the locals know well, is a tourist and, as such, can be exploited; his mementos vanish, not so much because the Empire itself has ended, but because the trappings of an imperial past, now converted into touristic items, become the symbolic markers of a process of exploitative exchange.
O'Hanlon, it could be argued, is well acquainted with this process, well aware of his complicity with the tourist system he affects to despise. Yet it could also be argued that his propensity for self-deprecation and self-parody provide an alibi for his excesses: excesses arising both from his privileged status as a traveler and from his métier as travel writer, a métier that has brought him considerable financial success. It is no surprise, of course, that most travel writers are reluctant to discuss their own financial motives, and to reveal the means by which they can afford their lives of relative leisure. Travel narratives, in mystifying their own conditions of production, are not alone among literary works in hiding their face from their reading public. But this situation is made conspicuous by the "favored status" enjoyed by many traveler-writers, whose journeys may well be financed by rich corporate sponsors-or steady private income-but who are still given, like O'Hanlon, to capitalize on the manufactured "hardships" they experience without accounting for the genuine penury of some of the peoples they encounter.
Seen in this light, the figure of the gentleman abroad starts to look rather less endearing, and rather more like a strategy designed to protect the traveler-writer from further harm. The gentleman abroad, in a postimperial context, might well appear ridiculous; but ridicule, precisely, becomes his license to perform. Nowhere is this clearer than in the narratives of Eric Newby: a writer, like O'Hanlon, who seems to cater to an (upper) middle-class English reading public. Also like O'Hanlon, Newby is the product of England's elitist private-school system and is quite prepared to publicize the entitlements the system affords. One of these entitlements is an idealized, thoroughly class-bound idea of Englishness: "As British as a Bath bun," he wryly declares himself at the outset of one of his journeys, a ride on the Trans-Siberian Express-and who can quibble with a man who, only a day into his journey, is already dreaming of "crumpets and buttered toast, Gentleman's Relish in a jumbo-sized pot, buckets of common sweet, orange-coloured English tea and a paperback copy of P. G. Wodehouse?" (Big Red Train Ride 10, 89). Newby's popularity among British readers-he has published more than a dozen commercially successful travel narratives-owes to his skill as a writer working within the genre's accepted clichés. More particularly, it owes to his reversion via Waugh and Byron, his obvious models, to an ideal of the eccentric gentleman traveler that is mocked for being dated but that is ironically celebrated, for the same reason, precisely because it is out of date. The early work A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), for example-a minor classic in postwar Anglophone travel writing-chronicles the exploits of Newby and his companion, the pukka diplomat Hugh Carless, in the remote mountain country of Nuristan in Central Asia. It is probably Newby's best book; it also represents his most sustained examination of the (English) gentleman traveler. Three aspects of this figure, and the mythology that surrounds it, are worth exploring in more detail here: amateurism, anachronism, and imposture.
The French explorer Raymond Furon provides the epigraph for A Short Walk: "Il faudrait une expédition bien organisée et pourvue de moyens matériels puissants pour tenter l'étude de cette région de haute montagne," warns Furon in his book on the Hindu Kush and Kaboulistan. Newby's expedition, unfortunately, fulfills neither requirement. For one thing, Newby and Carless are both novices to mountain climbing: a truth brought painfully home to them during a brief but hilariously eventful "training session" in Wales, where their bumbling efforts are presided over by "a flock of mountain sheep ... making sounds suspiciously like laughter". Nor do they appear to know a great deal about the place they plan to visit: a lack of knowledge exacerbated by their reliance on outdated guidebooks, their uncertain command of the local languages, and their singular reluctance to take advice. Not that Newby sees any of this as a disadvantage; on the contrary, he seems to exult in his own and Carless's amateurism, taking the opportunity to set-and send-himself up as the latest in a long line of colorful European explorers, each equipped with grandiose imperial visions of adventure and conquest, but little else besides. Of course, Newby and Carless are better prepared than they would have us believe; but rather than lend his expedition an aura of gravitas or expertise, Newby chooses to depict it, along with himself, as foolishly, even dangerously, amateurish.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tourists with Typewriters by PATRICK HOLLAND GRAHAM HUGGAN Copyright © 1998 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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| Preface | ||
| Introduction. Travel Writing Today | 1 | |
| Ch. 1 | After Empire | 27 |
| Ch. 2 | Zones | 67 |
| Ch. 3 | Gender and Other Troubles | 111 |
| Ch. 4 | Postmodern Itineraries | 157 |
| Postscript. Travel Writing at the Millennium | 197 | |
| Notes | 219 | |
| Works Cited | 241 | |
| Index | 255 |
Overview
The first extensive survey of contemporary travel writing, Tourists with Typewriters offers a series of challenging and provocative critical insights into a wide range of travel narratives written in English after the Second World War. The book focuses in particular on contemporary travel writers such as Jan Morris, Peter Matthiessen, V. S. Naipaul, Barry Lopez, Mary Morris, Paul Theroux, Peter Mayle, and the late Bruce Chatwin. It examines some of the reasons for travel writing's enduring popularity, and for its...