What We Talk About When We Talk About Travel Writing

I used to read quite a bit of travel writing. Once, years ago, after sailing from San Diego to Avalon and then back again, my travel companion, the ship's captain, handed over his ratty paperback of Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express and told me I needed to read it since it would inspire me to travel more. Skeptical about the value of travel writing—after all, you go somewhere, and either you die, in which case someone writes about you, or you come back and you get to be the storyteller—I humored my new friend and promised I’d give it a read. After all, I didn’t want to read about traveling, I just wanted to travel. Not sure the connection you’re trying to make there, friend…

I didn’t read it, not then or even soon afterward. I came across it again two years later as I dug through a closet looking for that windbreaker I wore that time I went sailing and that guy gave me a book to read, which I ignored and, oh there it is again. But this time, I not only read the back of the jacket but even made my way through the endorsement blurbs and a few sentences into the first chapter.

It actually looked appealing this time, probably because it was about Latin America, my new favorite place in all the world. Of course, it wasn’t Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I was a magical realist that week) or even John Reed (I thought I was a communist, too) but it was about Latin America.

Well, not really about Latin America, but going to Latin America. Or something to do with Latin America, at least. Then I read this line and recognized Theroux for what he was (and remains)—a poet and philosopher of the human condition who speaks travel the way Lou Reed once spoke heroin: “Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion." By the next page, Theroux was off and running, talking about the measliness of travel writing and the purposelessness of writing about it, and how these things drove him to do it differently, to do it backwards by ending his book where most travel books begin—at the far end of the journey. Well, now that’s an interesting way to view the world, I thought. Might make a nice approach to writing about travel writing someday.

So by now, it’s been many years since Paul Theroux introduced me to Bruce Chatwin, and Bruce introduced me to Peter Matthiessen, and Peter introduced me to all the rest of the party, many of whom I'll mention in coming weeks. As reading habits go, travel writing and British crime fiction constitute my list of go-to, not-sure-what-I’m-in-the-mood-to-read, sure things. It’s been awhile since I’ve read much travel narrative (there are lots of Inspector Rebus books, after all), but as a result of a class in the rhetoric of travel writing, I’m back in the travel writing mode—reading it and pondering who I’d be as a travel writer and answering questions that will make up the first few blog posts here. By the end of it all, I hope to be in Patagonia, or sailing to Avalon, or coming down from a U.S.A. World Cup 2014 victory (I also like fantasy sometimes) or somewhere else, not here necessarily. 

But blogging, always blogging.

Works Cited

Clark, Steve. "Introduction." Clark, Steve. Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. New York: Zed Books, 1999. 1-28. Print.

Clifford, James. "Traveling Cultures." Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. 17-46. Print.

Rubies, Joan Pau. "Travel writing and ethnography." The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 242-260. Print.

Next topic: Ethnography