Nature Walks

Chapter One Key Issues and Historical Perspective of Travel Writing Studies

Theoretical Context

In Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (1992), a critical analysis of early modern French philosophy, Georges Van Den Abbeele argues convincingly that travel not only complies with the rules of a narrative but is also found to be one of its canonical forms. For the idea of travel to be constructed, there need to exist fixed referents, such as an oikos (Greek for “home”) or domus: “Travel can only be conceptualized in terms of the points of departure and destination and of the (spatial and temporal) distance between them.”³⁴ Van Den Abbeele’s philosophical enquires into the metaphorical nature of travel coincided with debates in travel theory. Since their dynamic progress in the 1990s, Anglophone travel writing studies have sought to develop a conceptual framework. Drawing on the manifold directions of sociology, ethnography, cultural studies, and anthropology, there emerged the underlying ideas of travel (both as a theoretical concept and its practice)—mobility, spatiality, and temporality. At the time, the spatial categories of “home” and “away” reflected the 1990s struggle through the destabilizing realities of the postcolonial world. For example, in Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa (1994), Alison Blunt analysed the spatiality of “home” and “away”.³⁵ She described the construction of gendered subjectivity in women’s travel narratives according to the referents indicating place and movement—departure, journey, and return. By showing Kingsley’s identification of West Africa as “home”, Blunt demonstrated how the topoi of “home” and “away” can become destabilized.³⁶

The fact that theorizing about travel posits a number of challenges has been widely remarked upon by travel studies scholars. James Clifford, in his article “Notes on Travel and Theory” (2012), notes the “postcolonial confusion” of the later twentieth century and the repositioning of long-established points of reference. The deconstruction of the Eurocentric or even Anglocentric polarities which divided the world into the “home” and “abroad” became invalidated and turned ←11 | 12→into “someone else’s periphery or diaspora”.37 At the same time, the postcolonial and feminist approaches have destabilized, disrupted, and contested the omnipotent validity of the theory, which is “no longer ‘at home’ in the West”³⁸.

But these reservations exist alongside the calls for theory in travel writing studies, acknowledged, for instance, by Jean-Didier Urbain, a French sociologist, linguist, ethnologist, and specialist in tourist studies. In his article “I travel, therefore I am” (2012), Urbain argues that there pre-exists a collective imagery of travel, a model, a cultural concept prior to its practice. The idea of travel is “meta-physical” in that reading travel writing can already provide a means of distant transport whether in space or time.³⁹ Urbain replaces the classical notions of time and space with the concept of elsewhere and the consciousness of travel, the cogito. His ontology of travel on the interplay of the exiting “over-there”, which is projected onto a distant place, and the escapist desire to flee. But Urbain privileges the “in-between”, in which the act of wandering matters, and no other place which is distant is better than any other place one has already been to; “here” dissolves into “there”. The dialectic of the binary “here” and “there”, if extreme, can generate the “agoraphile cogito”, the obsessive search of even further, more outside places,⁴⁰ as illustrated in the works of Bruce Chatwin. To counter the temptation of reducing travel to agoraphile mode, Urbain proposes an experimental method of discovering places, “claustrophilia”—a diminutive journey for small-scale travellers, the here-and-now lurking round the corner. In the slow journey, the real nature of a traveller may emerge.⁴¹

Urbain’s proposal of a confounding and relativizing strategy has a long literary tradition. It draws on the formal literary technique described in the 1930s by Russian Formalists as ostranenje—defamiliarization. It uses the destabilizing method and changes the commonly accepted parameters into unfamiliar ones, imposing on the reader a pause in the mechanical perception of the world. In travel writing, the defamiliarizing technique was used as early as in the eighteenth century. Xavier de Maistre’s Journey around My Bedroom (1794), an account of imaginative “room travel”, was an interplay with Laurence Sterne’s influential writings. De Maistre parodied the grand travel literature of his time as well as the very idea of the distant journey when, locked in a single room and dressed in pink-and-blue pyjamas, ←12 | 13→he “ventured” around, making mock geographical discoveries and “exploring” the room’s furniture. Alain de Botton, in his book The Art of Travel (2008), encapsulates the technique in the idea of the “travelling mind-set” that relies on the special “receptivity” towards places and alertness to minute details. Following in de Maistrian’s footsteps in his own neighbourhood in Hammersmith, London, he attempts “to reverse the process of habituation”, “dissociate [the] surroundings from the uses [he] had previously found for them”.42 The Scottish writer and poet Kathleen Jamie, in her travel essays in Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012), deploys the new way of looking through synaesthetic textures. The reversal of “habituation” releases layers of value which are hidden as much in the surrounding material circumstances as in the imaginative mind.

Spatiality in Travel Writing Studies: Place, Its Representations and the Geocritical Approach

Besides the concepts of mobility and temporality, spatiality has remained central to travel writing. However, so far, many critical approaches have concentrated mostly on postcolonial contexts (home and abroad) or the narrative (travelling) self, bypassing the useful methodological perspective proposed within geocriticism and broadly understood spatial studies. The “spatial turn” within the humanities was substantially influenced by the works in human geography of a Chinese-American geographer, Yi Fu-Tuan. In his seminal work Space and Place (1977), Fu-Tuan defined the basic duality of abstract “space” and differentiated (endowed with values) “place”. But he did not develop the idea of movement or mobility as such, only touching upon the subject as an agent in defining place. “Place is a pause in movement”, through which human beings (as well as animals) satisfy biological needs, and this turns a locality into “a centre for felt value.”⁴³ Fu-Tuan sought a way to transcend cultural particularities and arrive at more universally applied conclusions which would reflect the general human condition. After the shattering of the positivist idealistic metatheory, there emerged a number of theories and microexplanations. In the wake of the postmodern collapse of “objective” theory which claimed the unity of representation, there have been attempts to redefine the new post-war spatiality and the subsequent globalization processes. The complexity of these ideas incited the emergence of spatial humanities which, in their multidisciplinary methodology, concentrate on place and the historical transformations in literary and cartographic practices to analyse spaces, both real and imagined. Geocriticism, with its heritage of postmodern sensibility, is understood now as a practice of reading literature through the filter of spatial references in a given ←13 | 14→text, distinct from narratology (studying of the story itself), textualism (the history of the text), or biographical criticism, and it has its closest affinity with geography, urban studies, cartography, topography, and deterioralization but is also methodologically connected with ecocriticism.44Géocritique, developed by a French author, Bertrand Westphal and introduced to Anglophone criticism by Robert Tally, aims for a highly interdisciplinary, diversifying approach, including various mimetic arts. In “geocentred” literature, the multi-layered depictions of places perform the function of cartography, however incomplete, which enter our understanding of these places and acknowledge the oscillation between fiction and the real world. At the same time, they alter the place itself. “In this sense geocriticism allows us to understand ‘real’ places by understanding their fundamental fictionality. And vice versa: we understand ‘fictional’ spaces by grasping their own levels of reality as they become part of our world.”⁴⁵

His geocentred approach should be understood as an effort to escape the egocentred analysis which prevails in literary criticism (“discourse on space is made to serve the discourse on the writer”⁴⁶), because “the interpretation of the work, not the place, motivates the critical effort”.⁴⁷ In Westphal’s concept of the multifocal representation of place, the senses often become the key instrument of focus. The category of polysensoriality is particularly relevant to the aims of this work, allowing the convergence of nature and peripatetic writing, as is demonstrated in the books by Robert Macfarlane. Geocriticism undertakes many attempts to investigate categories such as sensory landscape, soundscape, smellscape, or the tactile-kinetic characteristics of the environment even. Even subjectively presented sensory representation creates meanings that function collectively: “Human space is a sensory space whose nuances are defined by the group, and this group includes the literary community.”⁴⁸

In Topophilia (1974) Yi Fu-Tuan demonstrated the increasing dominance of the visual through historical transformations in the world view and explained its evolution towards the dominant aesthetic. As part of the secularizing trend between the sixteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century, covering the beginning of global exploration, the vertical cosmos as it was conceived of in the medieval era was gradually being replaced with the horizontal model. It brought the new understanding of infinity and distance (for a modern person the stars ←14 | 15→appear in the distance; for a medieval person they were at unreachable heights). As the medieval world of symbols and metaphors was gradually displaced by modern science, nature cast its complex symbolism and was gaining a new aesthetic dimension. This evidence of the horizontal vision of the world is most evident in European landscape painting.49 It opened the view, giving spatial depth and indicating a new way of looking at space and light. Dutch artists applied the convergent lines of perspective and shading, thus framing spaciousness. Modern landscapes, therefore, were primarily aesthetic, void of the rich symbolism of the pre-scientific age.⁵⁰ In travel writing, such a vision of the environment was reflected best by the eighteenth-century picturesque. Nature, landscape painting, gardening, and travel melded into the paradigm of landscape as art. Travels were undertaken, written, and read about, sometimes even exclusively for the visual impressions. While the reflections on what the picturesque traveller actually saw on the journey aimed at the visual at their centre, its presentations were highly subjective. The distinction between what was objectively seen (observation) and subjectively felt (reflection) was blurred. The scenery was becoming emotionally laden.⁵¹ But that only confirms the dominance of the visual: the idea of how to look extended far beyond the literal instructive discourse of guidebooks and into the Romantic exaltations of dramatic landscape descriptions. In consequence, descriptions relied on impressions showing how the travellers felt, the slow breaking away from the aesthetic reduction.

Paul Rodaway in Sensuos Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (1994) discusses this sensory reduction in Western culture to the visual that has pushed the auditory to a lower position.⁵² Rodaway proposes the idea of the auditory body—the ←15 | 16→listening/hearing subject situated in a particular “soundscape”. In travel writing, the auditory geographies have probably featured most strongly in descriptions of indigenous cultures in which the importance of the sonic exceeds the everyday experience of the urbanized Western world, such as in Chatwin’s creation myths of Aboriginal Australia, Lopez’s acoustics of the Inuit Arctic, or Mathiessen’s sonic descriptions of the Himalayas.

But in the context of peripatetic theory in walking narratives, it is the concept of “haptic” (tactile) geographies that is especially informative about how the environment is constructed in human cognition of geographical space and how it is presented in writing. Touch, the most intimate and reciprocal of the senses (to touch equals to be touched), is related to the body’s ability to manipulate objects but most importantly to move through space. As haptic sense is often perceived as an extension of other sensory perception, kinesthesis (locomotion of the body) is thus the most significant part of the haptic geography.53 The tactile connectivity establishes the most immediate physical-spatial orientation as well as more abstract sense of belonging. The tactility, apart from the reaction of fingers, is also affiliated to the bodily locomotion when the body explores the potential of movement, its own and through spatial terrain. Next to the global touch (the general contact with the environment, the physical reaching out), Rodaway also identifies an “imagined” touch, established through memory and expectation, and explicit in the evocation of personal experience or creative touch metaphors. It permits intimacy “in time and/or space, or which we have never actually experienced, such as the evocation of tactile experience in dreams or when reading.”⁵⁴ Next to cultural spaces which mainly concentrate on differentiation to demonstrate how tactile geographies are applied in various parts of the world, the concept of haptic geography affords an opportunity to study the connection between humans and the natural place that is traversed on foot.

As modern changed into postmodern, there emerged discourses of stratification and historic sedimentation—Henri Lefebvre with his critique of everyday life and the social production of space and urban life; Deleuze and Guattari with their examination of the stratifications of space. Within geocriticism, the approach to place and its temporality is termed “stratigraphic”. It assumes that the actuality of human space is heterogeneous—the places always consist of relationships of space and the past. Therefore, place has a diachronic identity as well as synchronic: “space elevated to the level of time.”⁵⁵ So temporal layers interrupt and ←16 | 17→crisscross spatial representation, turning it into a “polychronic system”, providing thickness and depth. The place never ceases to supply new memories, whether from its historical, geological, or archaeological past. Its identity can be written and read from the fragments, and it gives them “paradoxical continuity by rendering them labile”.56 But the reduction of representation of place to its temporality is bound to be stiffened and dated. In consequence, place representations are best if the place “is hidden indefinitely before the narrative” and the text only moves “towards” the place but is never “in” the place to which it only aspires.⁵⁷

Spatiality: Phenomenological Perspective

The intricate interaction of human consciousness with the physical environment gains more depth in the phenomenological perspective. The multiple aspects of pedestrian locomotion and the sensuous perception of the body were developed by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception (1945, first published in English in 1962). Merleau-Ponty expounded his original at the time phenomenological understanding of bodily subjectivity by interrogating Cartesian dualism of mind and body. His most important idea was that the body is “a form of consciousness”.⁵⁸ Merleau-Ponty rejected the conceptualizations of Empiricism (which held that consciousness results under casual laws from bodily actions) and Intellectualism (which questioned the causal relationship but held that consciousness is not the result of casual processes, hence consciousness was non-physical). He argued for conceiving of the body as a subject, endowed with consciousness. His notion of bodily subjectivity held that the body manifests itself in the processes considered mental (beliefs, desires, thinking). Merleau-Ponty also developed the idea of proprioception of the body, which unites the five senses, including the sense of balance and the kinaesthetic sense of movement. Proprioceptive awareness is an integral part of sensuous perception, especially of tactile awareness of things and one’s own body. For Merleau-Ponty, motor skills are the source of knowledge and they are necessary to build one’s practical knowledge of the environment, while there also exists a pre-conceived body of knowledge which is more abstract, which affirms that something exists. Motor skills constitute an understanding of the place in which they are exercised. The knowledge of the environment leads to self-knowledge, the understanding of one’s body.⁵⁹

From a broader perspective, phenomenology has provided a philosophical foundation and methodology in a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, psychology, ethology, and geography, where it provided a way of studying environment. Edward Relph in his book Place and Placelessness (Research in planning and design;1) (1976) combined phenomenological methods to study the effects geographical place has on human psychology. A place becomes an object of human relationship; without this emotional and psychological entanglement, much of our existence would be bereft of its meaning.60 Such notions as “homesickness” or “nostalgia” both recognize the human attachment to place and the pernicious consequences of its deprivation.⁶¹ The experience of place is essentially dialectical. It oscillates between the need to stay with a desire to escape. “When one of these needs is too radically satisfied we suffer either from nostalgia and a sense of being uprooted, or from a melancholia that accompanies a feeling of oppression and imprisonment in a place.”⁶² Relph applies the concepts of the unity of place, person and human activity to arrive at the general understanding of “identity of place”. One of its essential characteristics is the basic dualism of “insideness-outsideness”, a complex of variants if considered in mental, behavioural or existential contexts. It spans a range of states, from the absolute sense of belonging to “existential outsideness” which fascinated the Modernist movement so much. Such identities, whether experienced individually or as community, are informed by place images which are its intentional representations and participate in maintaining its identity.⁶³

But of likewise importance to identify and recognize the locality (e.g. orientation, survival, mobility) is a strong need to feel the continuity of place. That the place has endured and will endure helps preserve the sense of reality. This gains importance in the view of the fact that many places, including the natural environment, are diminished or eradicated. Such observations introduce the concept of “place writing”, which finds its perfect realization in the works of many nature narratives in the British literary tradition, in American classic texts of Thoreau, and in contemporary books, including Robert Macfarlane’s. The term “place writing” appears tentatively in some critical analyses of non-fiction narratives ←18 | 19→within travel writing studies but emerges more as a motif or style than generic conceptualization. I propose to treat it not as one more label in the already complex generic typologies but as a concept that bridges travel books, peripatetic writing, and nature writing.

As indicated earlier, for the past three decades, travel writing criticism has demonstrated a strong predilection for discussing spatiality from the postcolonial perspective. Travel writing has been at least partly held responsible for translating foreign zones into familiar cultural referents, and at the same time, it has been perceived as likely to create and mythologize places, “translating” other cultures and natures into present linguistic narration. But “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”64; at its worst “colonizing” or at its better “domesticating” or “reducing” other values onto the platform of familiarity.⁶⁵ At the same time, it thrives on the promise of the “immersion in alien states of consciousness”.⁶⁶ It follows that since travel writing is as likely to describe a real journey as create a fantasy, the real geographical zones emerge as strong cultural myths. In the past, two exemplary destinations among British travel writers generated such expectations: the African continent (in the imperial adventure travel narratives) and the region of Tibet. The mythology of Tibet started when the British nineteenth-century obsession with high altitudes coincided with their desire for wild landscapes and the quest into the uniqueness of Buddhism. An example of this seminal influence is found in the works of Francis Younghusband, whose expeditions helped to structure in the Western imagination the myth of inner transformation. The terra nullius became a formative influence for travel writers and explorers and positively encouraged cultural appropriations. Laurie Hovell McMillin, author of the article “Enlightenment Travels: The Making of Epiphany in Tibet” (2002), claims that the phenomenon of the “Tibetan epiphany” in Western civilization is an intertextual project, and grants the central position to religion. The transformational “myth-making” journeys to Tibet were irrevocably bound to the way in which British scholars and travellers conceptualized ←19 | 20→religion for themselves and the Tibetans.67 But, McMillin argues, because they applied colonial discourse to their experience, those British travellers in fact missed “the specificity of a place”. The nineteenth-century accounts of Tibet displayed all the signs of an Enlightenment project—studying and classifying other religions. It objectified Tibet in the eyes of Western scholars and was one of the vehicles for turning it into a trope.⁶⁸ Tibet continues to invade the Western imagination, as is shown, for instance, in Robert Macfarlane’s text “Ice” (The Old Ways). Since most travel writers who textualize their journeys remain secular in their views, they express Tibetan faith in a descriptive manner, characteristically deprived of spiritual involvement.

Holland and Huggan, in Tourists with Typewriters (2000), point out that the twentieth-century travel book followed the spatial division of the world’s geography later coated by thick strata of textualization. The genre cemented the topographical zones of the tropical (the Amazon), the Oriental (Japan), the exotic (the South Seas), and the liminal (the Arctic). Each of the zones is now determined or “overdetermined” in Anglophone travel books by a number of cultural projections which mediate the travelling subject’s complex attitudes towards the indigenous cultures and their own often ambivalent positions within the new cultural environments. The modern travel book continues to be haunted by the anthropological authority or “psychological deficits” of a Western inquirer.⁶⁹ Such a zonal partition is likely to produce similarities in literary representations of places, the relationship between the travelling self and the outer world and the function of mobility in the narrative. Holland and Huggan discover parallels in “Arctic Dreamers” such as Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams, 1986), Rudy Wiebe (Playing Dead, 1989), and John Moss (Enduring Dreams, 1994). Exceptional in a variety of ways, these narratives mobilize the reader’s attention towards the place by eradicating to varying degrees the traveller’s self and decentralizing the narrative persona. Also, rather than celebrate the practices of travel and mobility they meditate the motionlessness. The “temporal attribute of deferral” shapes the metaphysics of the region as well as dictates a surviving strategy in the treacherous physical landscape.⁷⁰ The icebound landscape invites postponement of the movement in contrast with the often hurried and fleeting travel experience. The place necessitates a non-Western way of ←20 | 21→looking, a re-orientation of traditional concepts of the dimensionality of objects, and at least reducing the distance, between the writer and the indigenous people. In Lopez, the ultimate reciprocity with the indigenous is hardly possible as it would require the traveller’s permanent presence in that place, annihilating the travelling persona.71

As shown earlier, certain types of topographies were in the past more likely than others to become the elementary ground for the aesthetic sublime, and as such preconditioned the imperialist imaginary. But in the twentieth century, a presupposed idea that Western hubris would be curtailed by the transient, unpredictable zone seems to prevail in the travel accounts of mountain or desert trekking. Characteristically, these topographies escape exact definition and the travelling self is most often eradicated to give way to place consciousness. It usually corresponds to a profound inner transition in the narrator’s persona. Travelling through the liminal zone can thus be seen as a way out of the topographical divide invented by colonial narratives. A fitting example of how the genre uses the in-betweenness of space is Wilfred Thesiger’s trek across the Arabian Desert with a party of Bedouin, described in Across The Empty Quarter (originally published as part of Arabian Sands in 1959). Thesiger crossed the fabled southern desert twice in 1946–1948 to establish his name as a traveller and undergo the utterly exhausting test of manliness in a life that he refers to as barely conceivable: “… I had been racked by the weariness of long marches through wind-whipped dunes, or across plains where monotony was emphasized by the mirages shimmering through the heat”.⁷² This very motivation as well as Thesiger’s reputation as an explorer and British military officer seem to substantiate rather than diminish the literary tradition of imperial masculine writing. True, the desert in Thesiger is an attribute of the traveller’s persona and corresponds to his desire to define himself as an intrepid adventurer. The desert has “a hold” upon him and invades his imagination as traveller and writer.⁷³ The topography, it could be claimed, may be perceived here as an effective instrument of the narrator’s self-fashioning. But a more careful reading proves that the Empty Quarter is also depicted as a liminal zone, and that Thesiger grants it, if only occasionally, the role of an active agent. He forsakes the claims to total knowledge and succumbs to the place’s transience. The desert rejects pre-conceptions and evades understanding. Now and then, the writer describes the dune climb upward “like a mountaineer through soft snow towards a pass”⁷⁴, seeking guidance in mountaineering discourse to narrate the experience. Another classical example of a journey through the liminal zone is Peter ←21 | 22→Matthiessen’s Zennish travel book Snow Leopard (1980).75 It narrates the arduous foot progress of a biological-spiritual expedition to the Himalayan region of the Inner Dolpo as well as the narrator’s mystic striving for the dissolution of the “I” into the universe, the merging of the self with the mountain: “I grow into these mountains like a moss.”⁷⁶ The synesthetic sound effects illuminate the motionless pauses, and in the mystic stillness thought turns towards the Eastern intuitive perception of reality. The mountains become more than a geological structure; they become an animated unrelenting force of existence. Matthiessen’s inability to verbally “domesticate” the place reflects the fleeting goal to establish a relationship between a travelling self and the traversed landscape.

As shown above, travel writing has a long tradition of determining and exploiting the myth-making potential of zonal topographies. In the eighteenth century the Home Tour narratives filled in the geographical void which emerged as an alternative to the elitist continental travel to southern Europe—the Grand Tour. Far from being merely its geographical opposite number, the Home Tour had a distinct literary lineage and was informed by the Scottish cultural revival, the Ossianic craze, the burgeoning fashion for home touring, and developing infrastructure. All this enabled travelling Britons to indulge their aesthetic ideas of otherness and exotic in the northern parts of the British Isles. At the same time, while the relatively undersized Scottish Cairngorms did not offer the challenges of altitude comparable to the Alps or the icy grip of the Arctic, the terrain, if coupled with bad weather, posed enough danger to satisfy the expectations of (mis)adventure seekers, in this way cementing in the popular imagination the idea of the north. By way of example, the late Romantic voice of Robert Louis Stevenson “re-invented” the region in his non-fiction travel essay “On the enjoyment of unpleasant places” (1874).⁷⁷ The essay secures the visions of the North as bleak, cold, and hostile in its extremes of elements. Its tree-less nakedness and relentless whip-like winds appeal directly to the Romantic seeker of discomfort and misadventure. The place has transformational power, too. The six weeks spent in the northern parts did more to “quicken and educate [Stevenson’s] sensibilities” than years in ←22 | 23→places of “superior loveliness” in the South.78 Apart from the Romantic script of hardship, the idea of the North emerged as a founding trope in nineteenth-century exploration narratives. These fuelled the British imagination, motivating explorers to find new trading routes, such as the once legendary Northwest Passage, and established the heroic myths of Arctic explorers.

Throughout the twentieth century, the North continued to invade the British imagination. The literary exodus of the 1920s sent many of the prominent travel writers south of the British Isles. The twenties, therefore, must be considered as the decade of the Mediterranean, with little artistic attention given to the harsh northern parts. The change came a decade later. Peter Davidson, in his book The Idea of North (2016), demonstrates how the 1930s brought a new interest both in literary circles and visual arts. Two distinguished names are noteworthy. The poet W.H. Auden developed his idiosyncratic “northern diction” with his northbound artistic imagination, intense interest in mining and northern geology, and private geographical mythology.⁷⁹ Another iconic artist was the modernist painter of English landscapes and later a war artist, Eric Ravillious. His life, work, and untimely death at the age of 39 on a plane mission off Iceland were inseparably connected to the austere North, real and imagined. For years before his military service, he nurtured his obsession with “the northern otherworld”.⁸⁰ The artist’s impulse for capturing on canvas the mythical northness found reflection in Robert Macfarlane’s text “Snow” in The Old Ways.

Travel writing has cemented the cultural projections creating the topographical universum with its own northern discourse, often exploiting the stock of metaphors—deprivation, authenticity, pastness, hardship, and endurance. Ultimately, in British travel books, North is a state of mind rather than a geographical location and the northern journey warrants a life’s formative experience. In The Kingdom by the Sea (1983), Paul Theroux, the American travel writer and novelist, describes his three-month clockwise journey around the British coast. Starting in Margate in 1982, in an enclosing gesture, Theroux continues along the coast looking inland and into the national identity of the British. As the journey, partly afoot, partly by train (both superior for Theroux’s aims of discovering the land and the natives), coincides with the onset of the Falklands War, he uses it as a yardstick of social and political critique. Often unsparingly sardonic, Theroux depicts the South as an overrated geological framework, a spectacle of marketable souvenirs and literary geo-portraits that merely re-establish the commonly accepted dogma of UK-based travel writing: nothing remains undescribed in England, it is merely ←23 | 24→“variously interpreted”.81 But as the northbound journey gradually demonstrates the pleasures of pedestrianism, the book captures conflicting dualities of national identity and complex histories of places. At Cape Wrath, the Norse-derived “turning-point”, where the coastline becomes “elemental, “ferocious”, “murderous”,⁸² or “stunningly empty”⁸³, indicating the self-reliance and toughness of the Scots, his progress and landscape became more visibly intertwined. The moment disrupts the pedestrian’s fantasy to walk away and gives the journey a sense of purpose. In Kathleen Jamie’s writing, the region can strain the mind with desolation and solitude as its darkness becomes rich in cultural and literary metaphors. In her travel essay “Darkness and Light” in Findings (2005), `she sets off to Maes Howe in Orkney, Scotland, situated near the mythical 60^th parallel north. Its Neolithic chambered cairn is famous for the last beam of midwinter solstice light which illuminates the tomb before darkness takes over. “Nowhere… is the drama of dark and light played out more starkly than in the north.”⁸⁴

Temporality in Travel Writing Studies: Slow Travel

The temporal frame is another, after spatiality, fundamental concept in travel writing studies. The ideas presented below pertain to the major interest of this study—peripatetic writing, in which mobility is halted or reduced to slow progress. Barbara Korte, in her article “Chrono-types: Notes on Forms of Time in the Travelogue” (2008), credits space, rather than time, as the more frequent thematic aspect in travel books. Temporality is usually suppressed into a “space-dominated” frame (topographies, people), and time-oriented narrative (time schedules, quest, or goal narratives) are less frequent.⁸⁵ Korte’s “chrono-typical” understanding of time includes its use as theme and as discursive category as in Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative (1983) and Gerald Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1979). She applies Ricoeur’s discussion of fiction to travel writing, arguing that there exists “the factuality contract under which travelogues are normally produced and read”⁸⁶. Under this process of “configuring” time (Ricoeur’s term), “the story of a journey that emerges from a travelogue is shaped to have greater significance than the original travel itself, including a specific contouring of narrated time.”⁸⁷←24 | 25→Pertaining to Genette’s discussion of time at the level of narrative discourse, Korte notes that the travel genre is dominated by chronological representation, and even with flashbacks its temporal progress favours linearity and avoids disorientation. In all, these various temporal categories (such as temporal distance between the real journey and the written account or the use of narrative tense which may bring the sense of immediacy) form the narrative’s rhythm. It determines its “speed”, or through “pauses” (e.g. descriptive pauses which provide discourse but no story), it may interrupt or slow the journey down.88 Paradoxically, while it might be stated that pre-modern travel was characterized by slow progress, the idea of “slow” travel emerges, argues Korte, in the nineteenth century as a response to time-oppressed tourism. Even titles such as Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) evoke the sense of speed and acceleration felt by Victorian travellers. Against this background of the increased awareness of time and speed, there emerged “a wave of travel along distinctly ‘unmodern’ schemes of time—a rediscovery of deliberately slow and unscheduled travel”.⁸⁹ Alexander Kinglake’s sentimental Eothen (1844) and Stevenson’s travel non-fiction narratives (to be presented later as part of the walking discourse) illustrate the invention of slowness in British travel writing.

But apart from its use as a thematic or discursive category, temporality is also proposed as a tool in postcolonial debate. One of the important contemporary directions of the travel genre, argues Bill Ashcroft in his article “Afterword: Travel and Power” (2009), is finding a way to emancipate travel writing from imperial burdens—“a way of transforming travel writing away from an aggressive form of knowledge-making to a mode of reflection”.⁹⁰ And at the same time, it opens up a possibility to answer the most pressing challenges of the process of fast globalization. A halted journey allows an unhurried contemplative dialogue with the place, which is constructed “as constantly new, unknowable, and dynamic” and yet “as the location of an intense strangeness—a representation that contests representation itself”, thus radicalizing the writer’s position into that of “an epistemological powerlessness”.⁹¹

A Slow journey preconditions the authenticity of representation and elevates the position of place in travel writing. The postponement of movement⁹² commands ←25 | 26→the radical change in locomotion—its reduction to walking. Peter Hulme, in his article “Deep Maps: Travelling on the Spot” (2009), notes this tension between mobility and place: “To stay and to get to know—to travel on the spot—is not to move; to move is to risk that impressions be superficial.”93 When the cogito of movement (Urbain) ceases to be the focal point, the reader’s attention is shifted to the locality. In Lopez’s Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986) the traveller is “icebound”, immobilized while the place becomes versatile and alive. In one sense, it dismisses the nineteenth-century stance of early explorers who looked upon the Arctic vastness as on empty wasteland, a tabula rasa to be traversed through or colonized.⁹⁴ In another, it marks a distinctive way of textualizing journeys through landscape which involves the shift of active–passive agents. The traveller’s movement is “frozen” and he or she becomes the receiver; the narrative persona merely sees and listens.

In this sense, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (first published in 1977) bears the stress marks of a traveller’s immobility. This narrative, although more modest in scope, shares many attributes with Matthiessen’s Snow Leopard (1980). Both are written in the Zennish spirit, and both show the intimacy between the travelling persona and the place. Shepherd reads the place holistically and weaves the sensory perception of the mountain’s life into the structure of the narrative. She also proposes the idea of the thinking body as the source of knowledge.⁹⁵ Since “one is essential body”, then through walking one gains access to all the knowledge of oneself and of the mountain. But this wisdom is not delivered as a ready-made product or imposed in the form of scientific idiom upon the lay readers. Instead, it is slowly revealed by reflecting on what the body encounters: “What more there ←26 | 27→is lies within the mountain. Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered. I cannot tell what this movement is except by recounting it.”96

In this sense, Shepherd’s short narrative is probably the first of the twentieth-century travel books which applies the haptic sensuous geographies. The consciousness of place arises out of tactile receptiveness—to touch the mountain is as important as to receive the touch. Moreover, Shepherd’s book transgresses the traditional points of reference, destination, and departure. She walks with no designed intention: “Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.”⁹⁷ She sees slowly, understanding that “haste can do nothing with these hills”⁹⁸. The book is a pensive record of human interconnectedness with nature rather than a traditional passage through topography. Finally, one more proposal underscores the slow travel and highlights the sense of place that comes with it. The deep mapping of the locality re-establishes the positive meaning of the term “parochial”, which, as Robert Macfarlane remarks on this in his introduction to the 2011 edition of Shepherd’s book, should be viewed in “the most expansive sense” without the negative connotations of “sectarianism, insularity, boundedeness”.⁹⁹

The Interdisciplinary and Generic Context of the Travel Book

Over two decades ago, interest in travelogues and the scholarly inquiries into their systematic classification marked the emergence of travel writing studies. This vigorous new discipline owed its fast development partly to the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies, initiated earlier by the fundamental work by Edward Said, Orientalism (1978). The book constituted a critical approach towards Western learning and uncovered the processes of bringing the Orient into the Western consciousness. Said’s contribution to the field of travel writing is manifold. First, he introduced discourse analysis in the reading of travelogues, a practice which proved so compelling that it launched postcolonial literary theory and imprinted its perspective for decades to come. Said used the Foulcauldian triad of knowledge—power—discourse to prove the existence of Orientalist prejudice in nineteenth-century Western thinking and demonstrated the falseness of cultural binarism (“us/Westerners”—“them/Orientals”). Second, Said’s work shook the traditional literary canon for it provided effective analytical tools for texts which had hitherto existed outside what had been considered central in traditional ←27 | 28→literary analysis. This shift extended the scope of criticism to include works previously neglected or underrated. Additionally, this non-canonical perspective foregrounded the hybridity of the travel genre. The new directions indicated by discourse analysis were further undertaken by Mary Louise Pratt, whose Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992) provided new tools in postcolonial analysis (“transculturation” (after Fernando Ortiz), “imperial eyes” and “contact zones”, as well as the introduction of discourse patterns in the field of travel studies—the “sentimental/scientific” dyad, the concepts of the “anti-conquest” and “monarch-of-all-I-survey”), which helped Pratt to debunk the imperial agenda of the eighteenth-century and Victorian exploration narratives. The power of postcolonial theory was so irresistible that for some time readings of travel narratives other than postcolonial seemed hardly desirable. It reveals a lot about the tenaciousness of postcolonial ideology, on the one hand, and about the discontent it arouses and the immense potential of the postcolonial project, on the other. As a consequence, there emerged a dynamic area of convergence between postcolonial studies and travel writing studies. David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration (1993) analysed the triad knowledge-power-objectification in, for example, the process of landscape appropriation in travel accounts by Henry Morton Stanley and demonstrated how colonial rhetoric cemented the hegemony of the visual (Stanley’s “the commanding view” over the landscape) to satisfy “the perpetual appetite” for ordering it for the Western world.100

Another influence came from tourism studies,¹⁰¹ which was a diverse inter-disciplinary field in the 1970s with the publication of Dean MacCannell’s founding text The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976). Following the assumption that leisure pursuits reflect social structure, MacCannell constructed the semiotic framework of a tourist—sight—marker triad which assists the tourist-seeking authenticity of experience. The core of tourist practice is seeking the real place, not the staged version of it, the whole practice being amply encouraged by adventure guidebooks.¹⁰² The drive for authenticity is reflected in the wish to be more like a traveller and less like a tourist. Jonathan Culler’s article “The Semiotics of Tourism” (1988)¹⁰³ analysed the tourist/traveller dichotomy. It was further ←28 | 29→addressed critically by James Buzard in The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture”, 1800–1918 (1993). Next to the trope of “the tourist”, the book introduced the concept of “the beaten track” as the place that designates the predictable and pre-designed. Buzard traced the origins of the British compulsion for “authenticity” of experience, which, as he found, is usually hidden beyond the tourism, in the special kind of “emotional-aesthetic sensitivity” rather than class membership. Through literary analysis, Buzard identified the urge for “anti-tourism” in the tourist as well as the masculine coding of the picturesque aesthetics.104 Another ground-breaking contribution within the field of tourist studies was John Urry’s The Tourist Gaze (1990). With the emphasis on tourist consumption as visual, Urry traced the historical developments and transformations of the tourist gaze and demonstrated its institutional construction into a “collection of signs”. The very concept of “the gaze” is inseparable from travel and travel writing as both must rely on textualization of the movement and space. In Urry’s terms, it is the difference, the out-of-the-ordinary, the spatial and psychological separateness from the everyday practices of daily routine that trigger the tourist gaze.¹⁰⁵ While tourism owes its fast escalation to photography, intensified by instant circulation of digital images, travel book potentially becomes an instrument in the themed nature of the gaze.

The diverse fields of sociology of travel, tourism, and mobility continue to intersect with travel writing. For instance, Greg Richards and Julie Wilson in the article “Backpacker Icons: Influential Literary ‘Nomads’ in the Formation of Backpacker Identity” (2004) analyse the performative function of travel writing and assert its transformative power over the backpacker identity as reading “on the road” is a common practice for backpacker culture as they draw on conspicuous attitudes in travel books (e.g. Chatwin’s nomadism). Most importantly, travel book authors themselves augment the appeal of travel literature by incorporating in their works intertextual network.¹⁰⁶ But the caution looms large about the negative ramifications of transforming power of literature (the “tourist angst”, “travel writer’s angst”)—“the admission of the correlation between the unsustainability of tourism and travel book”.¹⁰⁷ The critical acclaim for the challenging capacity of the travel book and its potential for subversion of Western complacence is challenged by the negative implications of the travel genre. On the one hand, travel writers, who see themselves as propelled by the intellectual inquisition and, who often form their travelling personas as adversary to “exploitative” mass tourism, in fact ←29 | 30→work in the service of the ever-growing tourist industry.108 These ramifications were acknowledged by Claude Levi-Strauss, the founder of structuralist theory in anthropology, in his account of the trip to Brazil Tristes Tropiques (1955). Naively seeking the fulfilment of exotic fantasies, the audiences lose their critical sense. As “exploration has become a profession”, in the collection of unimportant trivia of the “eye-witness account” there reside the ominous consequences. Modern travel and travellers threaten the very destinations they pursue by inevitably corrupting the cultures and turning them into a homogenous monoculture.¹⁰⁹

From its onset as a field of studies, travel writing faced the challenge of consolidation. It struggled towards a generic definition which would allow analytical tools on the one hand. On the other, it recognized and embraced the generic hybridity of travel texts. These two apparently contradictory directions, the attempt at classification and the contesting claim of generic disobedience, guaranteed the dynamic development of the new field.

Paul Fussell was the first scholar to approach the question of travel books as a literary genre in his book Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980). Fussell analysed what he considered at the time the best in travel writing: the inter-war travelogues, whose artistic value elevated them to the status of “Literature”. His work, though limited in its selection¹¹⁰ initiated the debate on the “canon” of travel books and, most importantly, the travel genre. Fussell demonstrated its proximity to “romance”, “quest”, “picaresque”, or “exotic”. Other complex connections between travel book and “war memoir, comic novel, quest romance, picaresque romance, pastoral romance”¹¹¹ and the essay (which, since it lost its appeal for publishers at the turn of the twentieth century, became incorporated into the travel book of the 1930s), thus rightly emphasizing the hybrid nature of these texts. Fussell’s work also drew critical attention to the non-fiction strand in the travel book, which “claims literal validity by constant reference to actuality”.¹¹² After Fussell, the non-fiction tenet of travel books was explored further by Holland and Huggan in their comprehensive survey of after-war travel writing Tourists with Typewriters (first published in 1999). The authors analysed the strategies which after-war travel writers employ to warrant the authenticity of travel, especially by making use of the factual and authentic. This subjectivity tips the balance towards authorial perception, but the travel book remains an intermediary ←30 | 31→between subjective inquiry and objective record of reality. Holland and Huggan saw travel books as “literary artefacts”113 and affirmed the hybridity of the genre and its straddling of categories and disciplines into a “pseudoethnographic” bricolage. Most importantly, the authors distanced themselves from privileging the travel theory with the potential theories of movement over the meanings bestowed upon physical places. They called for restoring due attention to the physicality of travel and the tangible aspect of place in which the textual mingles with the material.¹¹⁴

Travel books often have the ability to outmanoeuvre negative critical response, but it leaves many scholars distrustful of its commercial popularity. At the turn of the millennium, many critics saw travel writing as a vehicle which perpetuates “retrograde” and “nostalgic” middle-class values, at the same time sustaining the myth of superior ethnocentricity and “othering” cultures and destinations. Moreover, it capitalizes on the fact that Western travel writers often find themselves at an economic advantage and take advantage of refined rhetoric. Finally, travel books “interfere” with cultures and incite the “expansionist” aspirations of the contemporary tourist industry, and, therefore, a more detailed analysis of the appeal of the travel book and its potential readers’ response as well as their participation in the growing tourist consumerism will open up novel possibilities for research which goes beyond the literary project. At the turn of the century travel writing studies were still in need of critical thought and an analytical framework—theorizing attempts competed with scholarly declarations of generic immunity. Many academic texts which preceded and followed Jan Borm’s influential article “Defining Travel” (2004) demonstrated a typically anti-generic bias, including Mary Baine Campbell’s article “Travel Writing and its Theory” (2002) (the notion “travel literature” carried a “generic descriptor”, but she observed the lack of “relevant critical and theoretical materials”¹¹⁵). In his article “Travelling to Write” (2002), Peter Hulme outlined his non-normative perspective and gave priority to themes concurring with the subject of travel and the functions which travel discourse seeks to fulfil (e.g. the comic tradition of Bill Bryson, socio-political analysis of Rebecca Solnit or the search for the disappearing wilderness in Edward Marriot)¹¹⁶. In what he considered the departments of generic subversion and renewal in travel writing landmarks of the last three decades of the twentieth century, Hulme identified the shared ethnographic concern for the indigenous. They ←31 | 32→repeated Claude Levis-Strauss’s mourning for indigenous cultures and peoples, and in the late twentieth century, this elevated them to the level of novelty.

Jan Borm’s position in the article “Defining Travel: On the travel book, travel writing and terminology” (2004), which drew from German and French literary traditions, was later endorsed by other scholars. Borm redirected the generic discussion from the strict distinction into the fiction/non-fiction binaries into the field of “hybridity” and the “dominant aspect” of travel books. He identified the term “travel writing” as a supra-generic category based on the theme of travel, and not a genre, and the term “travel literature” as synonymous with “the literature of travel” and “travel writing” as they all rely on literariness; in all of these “the literary is at work”.117 It follows that drawing a clear-cut line between travel book and fiction may not be as easy a task. Travel books utilize myths, and, on the other hand, a discursive essay may be freely mixed with an autobiographical narrative.¹¹⁸As a consequence, the successful definition of the travel book may depend on identifying the dominant (non-fictional) aspect of the narrative. Despite the common use of fictional techniques, the travel book is “[a]ny narrative characterized by a non-fiction dominant that relates (almost always) in the first person a journey or journeys that the reader supposes to have taken place in reality while assuming or presupposing that author, narrator and principal character are but one or identical.”¹¹⁹

Borm’s tripartite definition of the travel book as exhibiting the theme of journey, the readers’ acceptance of its claimed authenticity, and the first-person narration had been proclaimed earlier by Barbara Korte in her definition of a “travelogue” in the introduction to English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (2000).¹²⁰ The beginning of the twenty-first century finally saw the consensus as to what aspects define the “travel book”/“travelogue”. The same classificatory features were repeated by David Chirico in “The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre” (2008) who, although agreeing in principle with Borm’s proposal, privileges the term “travel narrative” instead of “travel book”. Chirico also discusses the concept of “literariness” of travel narratives and polemically attempted to define the genre against the critique which considers the very concept as burdensome, oppressive or excluding. In Chirico’s view, a “travel narrative” is “A non-fictional first-person prose narrative describing a person’s travel(s) and the spaces passed through or visited [my emphasis, A.D-L.), which is ordered in ←32 | 33→accordance with, and whose plot is determined by, the order of the narrator’s act of travelling.”121