- 1 In her 2000 study, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, Barbara Ko (...)
1Some two decades ago, when travel writing was developing as a new field of research in France, the first obstacle many critics encountered was that of alighting on a precise and cohesive definition for this often-discredited genre, which appeared particularly hybrid and elusive1. Jean-Didier Urbain’s definition of travel is the starting point of the reflection in the introduction to the collection Seuils et traverses edited by Jan Borm (2002). Urbain explains that even before choosing a destination the traveller has the idea of going somewhere, “le voyage, avant d’élire un lieu, est d’abord une idée” (9). In order to turn this abstract idea into actuality, the traveller will usually plan and organise their journey, which, according to Carl Thompson, consists in deciding to go from a point of departure to a point of arrival:
To travel is to make a journey, a movement through space. Possibly this journey is epic in scale, taking the traveller to the other side of the world or across a continent, or up a mountain; possibly it is more modest in scope, and takes place within the limits of the traveller’s own country or region, or even just their immediate locality. (9)
- 2 See for instance Charles Darwin’s Journal of the Beagle, James Cook’s Three Voyages or Bougainville (...)
2Such spatial projections tend to ignore the possible hindrances and interruptions which may occur along the way, since planning or charting an itinerary typically entails considering an unknown reality, which is as likely to be disorderly as orderly. Indeed, travellers often expect the journey to follow a seemingly linear spatio-temporal structure, that is to say, as the entry for “linear” in the Oxford English Dictionary suggests: “progressing in a single direction by regular steps or stages”. The journey’s projected spatial linearity is sometimes materialised visually when the traveller “plots a course” before setting off, drawing lines and trajectories on a map and marking expected stops or stages along the way. In addition, travelogues are typically expected to chronicle the traveller’s spatial trajectory in a chronologically linear manner, as is exemplified by the daily journal or logbook entries which serve as a basis for many sea voyage narratives2. This is what John Culbert notes in his chapter on travel writing and narrative, remarking that “a trustworthy account of events is generally expected to be as objective and logical as possible, following the reliable ordering principles of causality and linear chronology” (153). In his Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux moreover identifies this regular “shape” or narrative structure as precisely what distinguishes travel writing from fiction:
[T]he difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy—how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction. It would have had […] such a pleasing shape if I had artfully distributed light and shadow and played with the grammar of delay [...]. It did not happen that way [...]. I had worked every day, bent over my rocking notebook like Trollope scribbling between postal assignments, remembering to put it all in the past tense. (342)
- 3 The map is entitled “By Train Through Asia” and is featured immediately after the table of contents
3The smooth lines connecting the spatial landmarks on the paratextual map outlining the traveller’s course on the threshold of Theroux’s travel narrative3 are particularly illustrative of this regular spatio-temporal form, seemingly inherent to travel writing.
4However, in many travel narratives this purported linearity is in fact repeatedly checked by various obstacles, ruptures and bifurcations that disrupt the continuity of the spatial and narrative trajectories. For instance, when Robert Louis Stevenson and his friend Walter Simpson set off on a canoeing trip through Belgium and France in 1876, they expect their voyage to follow the course of the Willebroek Canal from Boom all the way down to the Sambre and then the Oise, as delineated on the map below.
Image from page 264 of Stevenson’s Inland Voyage, and Travels with a Donkey. Holt, 1911. Library of Congress (Archive.org). <https://archive.org/details/stevensonsinland00ste/page/264/mode/1up>
- 4 “Partly from the terror we had of our good friends the Royal Nauticals, partly from the fact that t (...)
- 5 “A little out of the village, Modestine, filled with the demon, set her heart upon a by-road, and p (...)
5Yet when they reach Laeken an unexpected hurdle derails their plans as they realise that, despite the apparent smoothness of the line on the map, they will in fact have to cross fifty-five locks to go from Brussels to Charleroi. This prompts them to steer away from the canal and eventually leave it altogether when they decide to load their canoes onto a train to cross the frontier by rail, as Stevenson humorously recounts in An Inland Voyage4. Similarly, when Stevenson goes on his Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, he expects the first stage of his journey to take him to the Lac du Bouchet by sundown and attempts to head straight in this direction. However, these efforts are repeatedly thwarted not only by his donkey’s tendency to stray away from the charted itinerary5, but also by his own inability to keep a straight course due to the realities of the terrain: “I could see my destination overhead, or rather the peak that dominates it; but choose as I pleased, the roads always ended by turning away from it, and sneaking back towards the valley, or northward along the margin of the hills” (150, emphasis ours). The antagonism between the traveller’s “choice” or desire to head straight on as he projects himself visually towards his “destination”, and the reality of the personified winding roads that seem to actively lead him astray, is particularly telling here. Stevenson eventually asks two passers-by for directions, but they divert him even further from his course as they point him in the wrong direction, so that he is unable to reach his destination before sundown: “Thither, about a mile south of my destination, and on the other side of a respectable summit, had these confused roads and treacherous peasantry conducted me” (152). In these two instances, the travellers’ projected course is thus hampered and diverted by various obstacles, as they are confronted with the reality of the territory and also with the people who actually inhabit it, endowing the “flat projection” (Stevenson, “My First Book” 118) of the map with life, relief and depth.
6This is also particularly evident in the texts selected for this issue of e-Rea, where the line of the projected journey through space, which might initially have been imagined as smooth and regular, is set against various types of disruptive geographical or geological lines: these can be horizontal, with tangential or perpendicular lines such as borders and rivers which the traveller must find a way to cross or to shift in order to continue the journey, but also vertical, as in the case of rifts and fault lines revealing the stratigraphic depths beneath the earth’s surface, or in that of relief and salience, which may range from the simple bump in the road to the vertical obstacle of the cliff.
- 6 See for instance chapter 7 of Tim Youngs’s introduction to the Cambridge History of Travel Writing.
7On a more symbolical level, travel narratives are traditionally associated with a more or less linear progression towards a form of growth or initiation, as travellers attempt to define their identity and find a form of truth6. Indeed, according to Carl Thompson the spatial movement implied by the journey is paralleled by a more psychological evolution since the traveller grows by negotiating with otherness as they progress, suggesting “the negotiation between self and other that is brought about by movement in space” (9). However, in this collection of essays scholars are interested in exploring how this forward movement is sometimes hindered by more retrogressive or vertical tendencies, when the journey leads travellers to explore the depths of their own psyche, or when the buried strata of past memories resurface and reveal underlying faults or cracks that disrupt their psychological evolution as well as their spatial progression. Such discontinuities may also be the consequence of failures or ruptures in the supposedly smooth and linear transmission of cultural, social and family legacy, sometimes brought about by a more experienced and more mature figure who is typically featured as a helper in initiatory journeys, making their trajectories much more random, irregular and even multi-linear. In this special issue, we therefore aim to assess how spatial progress is challenged by temporal depth and verticality, which underlines the spatio-temporal complexity of these travel narratives, as well as the weight of cultural and personal backgrounds which may resurface through memories and prejudice.
- 7 “And as for the hills, ‘capped with eternal snow’, Mr Coxe’s description led me to look for them; b (...)
- 8 See for instance Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1800 (New York: Dover Publication (...)
8On a structural and narratological level, the geographical, geological or psychological hurdles encountered by the traveller tend to disrupt the linear chronology of travel writing, which may then become fraught with blanks and silences, simultaneously undermining the narrative’s structural foundations and shedding light on the complex depths beneath its apparently smooth and regular surface. This “smooth” surface could be likened to Emile Zola’s ideal of the text as a transparent “maison de verre” or “glasshouse”, through which reality could be seen in a straightforward and immediate way (118). Indeed, travellers sometimes insist on the accuracy of what they say and sometimes even correct what previous travellers asserted, which conveys an impression of truth and objectivity as it suggests that their perspective is not influenced by their own judgment and background and that it is therefore objective. For instance, when Theroux defines travel writing as “recording what the eye sees” in the passage quoted above (342), and likens the genre to a form of objective documentary which he presents as unfiltered by the seer’s subjectivity and giving the reader straightforward access to the reality encountered by the traveller, much as a camera would. Similarly, in her Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Mary Wollstonecraft contradicts the well-known northern traveller William Coxe7 and, in the advertisement accompanying her travelogue, states that she will “make a just description of what [she] saw” (63). With the use of the adjective “just”, the author posits that she will report what she sees and strive to be as true to reality as possible, while the adjective’s moral connotation heightens the sense of her commitment to truth and objectivity. This aspect was inherent in the quite normative genre of 18th-century travel writing which traditionally required truthfulness or at least honesty, as Charles Batten points out in Pleasurable Instruction; Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (1978): “A properly handled narrative therefore not only provides entertainment but also certifies the truthfulness of the book. While some travel writers, especially toward the end of the century, willingly sacrifice truthfulness for increased entertainment, they ideally give readers a judicious mixture of honesty and pleasure.” (63) Travellers thus often sought, or even claimed, objectivity, which is a controversial dimension of the genre8. In the Cambridge History of Travel Writing Tim Youngs and Nandini Das provide two views on the issue: for some critics and readers, travel writing when informational or scientific can be thought of as objective if there is “a compact of truthfulness between author and reader” (15); for others, there is no possible objectivity because a travelogue “is always written from a perspective that reveals something of the traveller’s culture and ideology” (16).
- 9 Such subjectivity is notably evident in early modern Anglophone travelogues, which are often quite (...)
9This collection of essays takes up this discussion and examines how the purported straightforwardness of communication in travel writing is sometimes checked by the various representations that are projected onto the space and local culture: any (apparent) claim to immediacy is bound to be thwarted by the subjectivity projected by the viewer and travel writer9, but also by the various layers of history, myths and narratives superimposed upon them. This phenomenon endows spaces with what Bertrand Westphal defines as “stratigraphic” depth, making geocriticism a vertical, archeological plunge, as the critic diachronically drills down through these strata and strives to disentangle the space’s manifold layers. Westphal moreover suggests that stratigraphy may also be understood in aesthetic terms, as a palimpsestuous millefeuille informed by intertextual or “intericonic” lineage (199). In geology, strata can be more or less plastic, which means that movements under the earth’s surface may result in perpendicular breaks in their structure, or horizontal and vertical movement along fault lines if the strata are made of excessively rigid material: this, in our view, constitutes an apt metaphor for the way some travel writers deviate from the norm and thus shift generic lines or lineage by undermining their literary foundations.
10Several articles in the present volume therefore adopt a geocritical approach, to analyse how this stratigraphic process of subversion can result in the reconfiguration or redirection of an existing tradition if it is flexible enough to accommodate these changes, but also in a cleaner break away from it when the norm is too rigid. They explore how hypertexts can deviate sharply from the line of the hypotextual tradition and create profound rifts within the apparently linear literary continuum of travel writing. Such disruptions may, for instance, involve shifting the seemingly clear line between fiction and non-fiction in travel writing, despite the fact that the one generic trait most critics usually agree upon is its non-fictionality, if we are to believe for instance Pettinger and Youngs’s introduction to the genre and the research field devoted to it: “travel writing consists of the narrative of an actual journey told by the person or persons who undertook it” (4). This special issue, however, stems from recent attempts at moving beyond this definition, including a forthcoming Routledge volume edited by Emmanuelle Peraldo, Anne-Florence Quaireau and Samia Ounoughi, to include other types of narratives within this highly “plastic” or “shapeshifting” genre (Viviès, Lignes de fuite 8; Lignes d’horizon 8). The form, which was formerly discredited because of its indeterminacy, has now come to be praised for its malleability and ability to constantly shift and renew itself, so much so that Tim Youngs and Nandini Das conclude their introduction to their History of Travel Writing on this positive (yet very open) note: “It is fitting that the future shape of this fluid genre is impossible to predict with any confidence other than that as long as there is life there will be travel and writing.” (16) This special issue therefore proposes to step further along the tentative “perspective lines” and “horizon lines” initially opened in France by Jean Viviès two decades ago in his two seminal collective volumes, Lignes d’horizon (2002) and Lignes de fuite (2003), which paved the way for the development of French scholarship on Anglophone travel writing, and it is to be hoped that we may in turn shift some of these lines along the way.
11Given its overarching aim, this collection is organised along thematic as well as geographical and temporal lines, a structure informed by individual essays rather than imposed beforehand.
The first section, “Through the Traveller’s Eye: Distorting Perspectives and Straightening Lines”, considers how travel writing can be influenced by the traveller’s vision, to the point of changing reality and turning disrupted trajectories into linear progress. In “Lisser l’avenir : le ‘journal’ de Patrick Gass et le déferlement vers l’Ouest,” Florent Atem demonstrates how Gass’s travel narrative answers a political purpose. The expedition of the “Corps of Discovery” led by Lewis and Clark, which Thomas Jefferson commissioned in 1803 to inquire about a potential transcontinental fluvial passage, was meant to achieve the President’s “vision of a nation’s future”. The fluvial passage was the symbol of a united nation which crossed the country from East to West in a smooth straight line. Among the various reports on the mission, the voice of the skilful and respected carpenter Patrick Gass fulfilled Jefferson’s expectations by portraying the wilderness as an enticing place for future settlers. The “rifts,” or abuses, which dissident voices have since echoed, reveal a passage from East to West which was more irregular and less linear than planned. Yet Gass’s text still contributes to the “polished,” apparently straightforward vision of a harmonious nation conjured up by recent commemorations.
12More than a century later, her mind full of mythical images of the Middle East, Vita Sackville-West similarly distorts reality when faced with what she considers seemingly unpalatable aspects of the country she discovers. In “Reinventing and shifting lines in Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran (1926)”, Leïla Haghshenas shows that Sackville-West’s representation of Persia epitomises what Edward Said calls “imaginative geography,” that is to say envisioning a foreign country through stereotypes before actually visiting it and picturing it afterwards in an Orientalist narrative. Such an approach offers a consistent, constructed representation of the unknown based on a linear progress, but negates the twists and turns which a confrontation with the reality of travel would impose. Instead of trying to make sense of the “rifts” she observed in the country, including political and social unrest partly due to foreign presence, Sackville-West kept to the exotic images of an enchanted yet despotic Eastern world. She depicted a people who, she suggested, needed to be civilized, and she thus served the purposes of imperialist Britain.
13The second section, “Shifting Aesthetic Lines at the Turn of the 19th Century,” moves to more stylistic and narratological questions. It examines the way some authors shifted the aesthetic lines of travel writing at the turn of the 19th century through their specific treatment of space, blending geographical and subjective lines, and disrupting the horizontal trajectory of travel with more vertical, stratigraphic explorations. The first two articles both analyse Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900): in “Shifting Geological and Literary Lines in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim: A Geoliterary Approach”, Julie Gay first compares Lord Jim with H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) from a geoliterary perspective, showing how these two fin de siècle works feature actual geological fault lines that check the travellers’ linear journeys and reveal splits or cracks within their identities. Crossing these chasms also led to generic as well as narrative shifts that shed light on the innovative nature of these texts, their plasticity mirroring the changing nature of the transitional turn-of-the-century era. The article works toward a definition of the two authors’ geopoetics of the fault line, exploring how they revel in gaps and contradiction and toy with linearity and discontinuity, depth and surface to create a new, more hybrid and fluid literary form.
14Isabelle Loréal digs in a slightly different direction in “Shifting the lines of the British travel writing tradition: Marlow's vertical travel in Lord Jim,” which focuses more specifically on Lord Jim and on its narrator Marlow’s “vertical travel” into the fictional region of Patusan, which she argues exemplifies Conrad’s particular approach to space. She uses Forsdick’s theory of vertical travel to show how this slower type of voyage opens new, downwards routes for British imperial travel writing at the turn of the century, when uncharted territories were becoming increasingly scarce, as the world had been almost entirely mapped out. Authors thus had to drill deeper into these fictional spaces to explore their historical and temporal strata and uncover the subject’s psychological depths along the way, heralding a shift from exploration to excavation in travel writing.
15Dealing with another, more European turn-of-the-century traveller, the last article in the section, “Vernon Lee’s travel essays and the ‘confusion’ of optical and temporal lines”, also studies the layering of temporal and spatial strata in travel writing. It delves into a number of travel essays by Violet Paget, alias Vernon Lee, who praised the merits of what she called “confusion” in Impressionist art. Claire McKeown builds on this aesthetic interest to explore how the term metatextually applies to Vernon Lee’s own writing, making it a guiding line of her travel writing aesthetics and, in particular, her treatment of space. The article shows how, in response to what she sees as Impressionist paintings’ lack of “soul,” Lee uses confusion as a way to blur spatial, temporal and optical lines and bring out what she calls the “lie of the land”, that is the landscape’s subjective feel, endowing it with its ineffable beauty. Travel writing thus takes on a spiritual quality, as the “sentimental traveller” explores the interplay of past, present and even imaginary strata in her perception of space, to create an intimately layered geography (or geology) of the places she visits. This intermedial approach goes as far as synesthetically blurring the line between visual and auditory sensations, as Lee associates music with place to travel through the uncharted depths of her own subjectivity and achieve a transcendent form of empathic merging with her surroundings.
16The third section, “Across Geological and Geometrical lines: Travel Writing and Identity Quests,” takes up the question of subjectivity and identity, in relation to geological and geometrical lines. Tim Gupwell’s article, “Shifting lines in D. H. Lawrence’s travel writing,” ties in neatly with the previous section, as it deals with another early 20th-century travel writer, D. H. Lawrence, and considers his philosophy of the (straight) line. Like Conrad, Lawrence strove to move away from linear, excessively causal and geometric horizontal lines, shifting to a more vertical axis in his travel writing. The article aims to identify what Lawrence meant when he claimed that all lines, even straight ones, inevitably curve in towards the centre, and concludes that the centre represents “being” itself, so that in Lawrence’s view linear spatial journeys inevitably lead, as in Vernon Lee’s travel writing, to transcendental revelations and spiritual explorations into the depths of subjectivity. Crossing dividing lines or gulfs entails a transformation of the soul through the encounter with other spaces and people, leading the traveller to dig deeper into their own psyche.
17For Pauline Boisgerault in “‘Retracing our steps’ : Failles géologiques et défaillances familiales dans Goat Mountain de David Vann”, the rifts of the Californian soil, where David Vann’s Goat Mountain (2013) takes place, echo the flaws of the family dynamic which is structured around the North American tradition of hunting, and the national myth of the wilderness. The family tradition is followed by the narrator and main character, a young boy, like a smooth straight track from which he cannot deviate because it is part of his identity construction. But the line of the track shifts and trembles like the San Andreas fault when hunting dooms the family to tragedy through the shooting of a poacher. The killer, who is the young boy, revisits the scene and realises that the family’s history made the act unavoidable and irredeemable.
18We remain on US ground in the last section, “On the Shifting American Road: From Personal Story to National History”, further exploring questions of personal and national identity, and examining the intricate link between individual road narratives and American history and culture. Rooting travel writing in a literary tradition that includes Jack Kerouac’s cult novel On the Road may give the illusion of a reassuring linear itinerary, but it may also prove an impediment. Indeed, the travel writer’s identity and creativity could collide with a looming familiar figure or set literary forms, leading to a deconstruction of existing landmarks and to the invention of new ways of relating to personal or historical legacy, by way of new forms of writing. In “On the Messy Road. Shifting lines in Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver. A Story about Myself (1981)”, Catherine Morgan-Proux shows how Jan Kerouac is both inspired by her famous father’s free and haphazard travelling and led to deviate from it as a result of his absence and their disconnected relationship. Jan Kerouac reappropriates the road narrative by writing about her travelling experience as a woman, notably through the “satisfa[ction] of her sexual desires” and the “disenfranchised grief” following the loss of a child, which she somehow manages to articulate.
19The final article takes us further on the road as it explores another, more postmodern type of road journey, featured in contemporary US post-apocalyptic literature and film. Relying on Bakhtinian theory to define the road chronotope as a more or less linear metaphorical timeline in “A Guiding Line? Rethinking the Road in American Post-Apocalyptic Narratives”, Cécile Do Huu contends that the rise of post-apocalyptic road journeys signals a shift in this timeline and thus in the whole genre of the road narrative, in the context of technological advances, environmental crisis and the threat of global catastrophe. In contrast with road narratives such as that analysed by Catherine Morgan-Proux in the previous article, post-apocalyptic road novels and films like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), John Hillcoat’s adaptation (2009), Dave Eggers’s Heroes of the Frontier (2016), and Casey Affleck’s Light of my Life (2019) deconstruct the underlying ideology of the road narrative and open up new pathways for the genre. Indeed, these works redefine the ethics of road narratives by inventing alternative ways of telling stories and transmitting collective and intimate memory, using storytelling to restore hope and envision a possible, post-apocalyptic future.
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