"Against Travel Writing"

By Robyn Davidson

Reviewer: Joanna Opaskar, Recorder: Sonia Hernandez

• Davidson didn’t intend to write a travel book.
  • After Tracks was published, the publishers wanted her to travel, describe holiday destinations, and produce another book similar to Tracks.  She went to India to do this, but didn’t succeed in the way she wanted, in part because the point of the first book was the uniqueness of the experience.
• Writer’s “aversion” to travel literature
  • Books about meaningful ideas and experiences are stranded in a genre catering to tourism – does this seem shallow?
  • “To the best of my knowledge, no other genre has suffered this weird allergy to itself.”   (That is, many travel writers don’t like the genre.)
  • A book’s ability “to escape standard classification is countered by a more powerful restraining force, as if ambivalence – the space in which we can make up our own minds – is antithetical to the laws of the marketplace.”  (That is, the marketplace forces books into genres.)
• “The genre is so capacious as to lack meaning…”
  • It’s usually defined as something like “a literature to accommodate a longing for the exotic, in an increasingly homogenized, commercialized and trivialized world...but the literature of movement covers a richer and more complex range of experiences.”
  • The genre includes too many kinds of books.
• Things that qualify as travel writing:
  • Maps, tourist guides, almanacs…
    • Versus
  • “Berlioz setting off in a stagecoach with his pistols in his lap…”
  • “Clara Schumann sledding her way through Russian snows to perform her husband’s music…”
  • “the Buddha setting out for that most elusive destination of all – this moment, here, now.”
• The second group (above) is different from the first group because they are as much sociology as literature, and far more than tourism.
• The peak of the genre was the 1800s to 1914, then it experienced decay.
  • Because World War I shattered confidence in Western civilization
    • Lack of nationalism and heroic ideals like Cherry-Garrard had
  • Because travelers begin lamenting “lost places, lost times”
  • Places previously regarded as “primitive” are now viewed as potential “sources of moral or spiritual regeneration” and “being threatened by the corruptions of the twentieth century, and there was an urgent need to record and preserve them before they all went down the drain of modernity.”
• “…tourism is a symptom, not the disease.”
  • modern tourism tends to be a “transferal of ‘here’ to ‘there’”
  • books on tourism are popular because “they create the illusion that there is still an uncontaminated Elsewhere to discover, a place located, indeed, somewhere between ‘fiction and fact.’”
• In the 19^th century, women enter the genre.
  • Their purpose was or is “usually an exultation in a new-found freedom.”
  • Is women’s travel writing different from men’s?
    • In a world “whose public domain is organized by and for men,” women have an added self-consciousness, possibly resulting in their travel writing being “concerned as much with inner states as outer objects.”
  • “Certainly as anthropologists, ethnographers and travelers, women have helped to reveal the hitherto half hidden half of human consciousness, but they have not been able radically to transform the genre, or to revivify it.”
• Writers or explorers tend to describe the Other, then the Other is influenced by the exploration or description, then the writers and explorers turn their attention back inward toward themselves and their own places.
  • “This about-face of the Other may well be the one social phenomenon powerful enough to revitalize a clapped-out genre.”

Discussion Questions  

• Is the genre of travel writing trivialized due to its scope (the blending of tourism with works such as The Worst Journey in the World or Tracks)?
• Should there be a new genre created for some of these works?  Like the literature of exploration?

DISCUSSION NOTES

Against Travel Writing

by Robyn Davidson

February 12,2002

Reviewer: Joanna Opaskar, Recorder: Sonia Hernandez  

     Joanna prepared a handout summarizing the main points of Davidson’s article and developed the following two discussion questions:

        Is the genre of travel of travel writing trivialized due to its scope      (the blending of tourism with works such as The Worst Journey        in the World or Tracks)?

        Should there be a new genre created for some of these works? Like the literature of exploration?

     Students made the following comments:

        Tara:

           Before taking this course, I didn’t know Ice fit into travel literature. I always considered it different.

         John E:

           Where are deep thoughtful books like Ice classified?

         Kelly:

            It is trivialized-Tracks is not purely travel literature. Women Warriors is listed under fiction. What does that mean? Some genres have larger readerships than others.       

          John G:

          Who defines genre?

        Aaron V:

          Tracks does not seem to like tourism.

        Joanna:

             Publishers classify books where they will sell best.

         John E.

           Why do we discuss where publisher put books, in which genre? It the subject matter which is of interest to me as a reader, not the classification.

        Samantha: (and several other contributors)

            It becomes is a matter of knowing where to find the books you are looking for.  At Barnes and Noble, Tracks is under psychology, Ice is under History and the History of Space Exploration is under Space and Astronomy.

        John E:

          Did we not distinguish between travel and exploration literature at the start of the course?

        Kelly:

            Yes, but there are similar books such as Persian Knight that are completely fiction. This trip was a fun trip for a tag-along-wife.

        Prof. White:

            Exploration could include experiences of those who must travel without choosing.

        Archana:

            Some times publications change. The Lonely Planet book series started out as a travel guide for young people traveling on the cheap. It was aimed at people who lacked money. Its main function was to tell people how to get from point A to point B within a certain price range. Now, it is moving into literary travel. The ideas the writers are putting forth are more interesting.

        Prof. White:

            The concept of genre will always have conflicts of this kind. That is why the issue is dodged in most classes. Genre is similar to taxonomy. It is a classification system while what is being classified is more a continuum. Genre-bending.