Life requires an irregular journey. We certainly understand the literal and symbolic meaning of such words: we don't want to be stuck in the same place, we need to change our environment even if it's just a short period of a week. But as we enter the journey, we tend to forget that the journey — whether it's a geographic journey or a life journey — may not be the most important part of the journey.
As everyday experience tells us, there are times when the process and anticipation of the journey is far more exciting than the excitement of arriving at the end, and just as the perfect destination cannot save us from the unpleasant experience that bad travelers bring us on the road. So, there are times when one would rather choose a fictional or even metaphysical thing as one's travel companion, such as books, such as philosophies, such as the lingering spirit of adventure and a distant place that does not require empirical evidence.
That's what Travelogue can offer us. The incessant introduction of attractions and guidebooks is not of much value (such a practical guide can be bought anywhere out of the station), and the significance of the travelogue is how it presents the experience of being a stranger and the process of encountering unfamiliar environments. Especially in the context of the epidemic lockdown in various countries this year, the reason why we need to read travel notes that we cannot travel at will is not to replace our eyes with them to watch other cities and jungles, but to replace our feet with them, so that we can recall the process of contact with people, the acceptance of strange things and even the process of conflict, so as to awaken the meaning of the state of life of "on the road" - constantly expanding the limited life experience and the boundaries of the distance. In this regard, the travelogue Paul Soru is arguably the most representative writer of the moment, rejecting airplanes or high-speed rail in favor of slow-moving old-fashioned trains, talking to passengers or reading quietly during the journey. The process is greater than the conclusion, and it is the spiritual inspiration that he and more travel writers have left us in the process of exploration. (Introduction: Miyako)
January 22, Beijing News Book Review Weekly
B01 edition ~ B04 edition
"Theme" B01 | Travel and destination
"Theme" B02丨 Freedom and restraint of travelogue
"Theme" B03丨The philosophy of travel pioneered on the train
Theme B04 | Paul Soru's literary trajectory
Written by 丨 Miyako
Why we need to read travelogues – especially when we can view the cultural landscape of a place more quickly and intuitively through video – and what criteria should be used to judge the merits of a travelogue are difficult questions to answer, because in terms of stylistic characteristics, travelogues are like novels, each with a completely different way of writing.
19th-century British illustrator Thomas Arom depicts a scene of paddy field farming in Suzhou, China. The mystery of this painting is that although Arom is famous in the Western world for his prints depicting Chinese landscapes, he himself has never set foot on Chinese soil, and his paintings are all based on the sketches and travelogues of returnees in China, plus his own imagination. But for Westerners at the time, Arom's Chinese landscape was exotic, like a fascinating travelogue, leading people to a land that the painter himself had never seen before.
Travelogue writing that has the best of both worlds
What's even more serious than fiction is that readers' expectations when reading travelogues are also different, and if you just want to plan for an upcoming trip, if you want to know which attractions to go to first, and what risks to avoid, these contents can help us solve by Lonely Planet magazine. On the contrary, there is another group of readers who will read the travelogue with historical and anthropological expectations, in their view, going to the local specialty restaurant to eat is completely insignificant, even detrimental to the seriousness of the content, they are more concerned about what historical faults a travelogue finds in the peeling wall skin after arriving in the local area.
"Please, where is the toilet", by Lonely Planet, edition: China Map Press, February 2017 edition. It's a "bad taste" travel guide dedicated to how curious tourists can find the world's most bizarre toilets, from the alien worm egg toilet at Sketch Restaurant in London, England, to the open-air toilet on the -80-degree Arctic tundra. Even as a pit book, this travel guide allows readers to feel the brain hole of a human being comparable to London's sewers when they are in close contact with the hips and toilet.
The Russian writer Chekhov used this method when he wrote his travels to Sakhalin Island. In order to make his views reliable, Chekhov used the method of questionnaires and conducted a census of some questions on the local population. However, this may seem less like a purely travelogue and more like a reportage – so should the travelogue itself be a reportistic text? Whether it is to satisfy our concept of knowledge, or should it meet the reader's requirements for broadening horizons and enjoying fun.
If it is the former, the depth of historical and social science works is almost insurmountable in travelogues; if it is the latter, then Calvino's "The Invisible City" can also be regarded as a very interesting travelogue; if we demand authenticity in the process of reading and exclude fiction, then how can we prove the attribution of authenticity when we see different travel writers leaving diametrically opposite descriptions of the same place?
The Invisible City, by Italo Calvino, translated by Zhang Mi, edition: Yilin Press, August 2019. In the royal garden, Kublai Khan, the conqueror of the world, was tired of repeating everything about the self of the known world, so the traveler Marco Polo, who sat before him, told him about the invisible cities floating on the web of fate, desire, memory and dreams. That is a place that can only be reached by words, and the imagination is transformed into a paper truth because of writing.
In the end, judgments about this seem to return only to a more closed point of origin, using their original impressions to verify the authenticity of those travelogue descriptions, which one is closer to one's original impression, which is closer to the truth (for example, a travelogue describing how black Africans were oppressed by white rulers must be much more reliable than a travelogue describing how black people lived a better life)—or there is the opposite, that a work that can overturn all of his views is more valuable, in short, the basic mode of judgment is the same.
It is not difficult to understand, therefore, why the travelogues of V.S. Naipaul and Peter Handke suffered the result of public condemnation, after a trip to Africa that even if the rulers of African countries were changed from white to black, the social situation of the African people did not improve, and the oppression of East Africa was no different from that of South Africa; Handke traced along the river the marginal situation of the Serbs as victims. The veracity of what they describe depends entirely on the prevailing views of the international community.
"The Masquerade Drama of Africa", by V. By S. Naipaul, translated by Zheng Yun, Edition: New Classic Culture | South Seas Publishing Company, July 2013 edition. This book is the story of Naipaul's travels in Africa, Uganda and other countries between 2009 and 2010. Like Naipaul's other works, it is an inexhaustible travelogue in which the author occasionally reveals the irony of the same incurable plague, as if the white man in the black mask and the black man in the white mask were infected with the same incurable plague, and after exhausting their own methods of diagnosis and struggle, they could only choose to continue to survive with the disease, and the name of this plague is "modern civilization".
A cultural journey or a spiritual journey
To some extent, the "superficiality" and "untrustworthiness" of travelogue are the result of its own nature. Serious and objective historical writings require long-term study – but even then we can doubt the veracity of a work of history. The writing of travelogues is a completely instantaneous generalization compared to humanistic studies. A writer cannot travel to a certain region for more than a few months, otherwise he will no longer travel but migrate. In most cases, it is necessarily the pleasure of supporting the writer to travel and write a travelogue, perhaps the pleasure of searching for the meaning of life, the pleasure of wandering, the interest in paying attention to historical and social issues, and so on. Balancing one's rational observation with the private pleasures of traveling has become a problem that travel writers need to solve. If it can really be solved.
The only thing that can provide shelter and buffer for this is reason. Abandon your own personal emotions, reduce the proportion of emotional comments as much as possible, and use historical and cultural research to replace travel records with heavy binding. However, the monotonous criterion seems to have forgotten one of the most important things in literature, travel literature opens the door of a certain region to unfamiliar readers, but travel literature does not mean public writing, and many writers embark on the journey out of purely personal inner needs. It is not even necessarily determined by spiritual needs.
Henry James's reason for his trip to Europe was simply the need for hot springs to treat the stubborn disease of constipation. William Burroughs searched for hallucinogenic agents in North and South America. Jeffrey Mulhouse chose the Sahara Desert to overcome his fear of the emptiness of life, where he faced the most dizzying environment, "The Sahara Desert fully meets the required conditions." The dangers of the desert not only represent everything I fear, but I have little experience of traveling in the desert." There are also many travel writers who accomplish a feat through travel, such as Gérard de Boville's solo paddle crossing the Pacific.
Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs, translated by Ma Ainon, Edition: Writers Press, May 2013. Burroughs's book, described by one critic as "stewing the brain and marijuana in a pot," is a graphic portrayal of his work.
When travel shifts from humanistic significance to the author's inner realization, its significance on the psychological level is much higher than that of the local humanistic observation. However, the psychological changes of the author himself during the trip have been ignored by the relevant research, or rather, many readers do not care how a strange writer heals his own mind through travel. It doesn't matter. It can be said that there is a vague boundary between the Twin Islands of Travel Literature, with a cultural journey on one side and a spiritual journey on the other. This difference also creates the freedom and non-freedom of travel literature.
Why we set out
The greatest significance of travel literature is actually to provide us with a kind of openness. As far as textual results are concerned, the diversity of the world and life experiences cannot be included in a single criterion, just as we cannot describe New York from the perspective of Yugoslavia and the water city of Venice with the brushstrokes of the Antarctic adventure. When reading the travelogue with a certain psychological presupposition, we seem to forget that the author himself set foot in a foreign land for what reason and became a stranger there. Whether it's Rebecca West, who is partial to historical travelogue writing, or Sylvan Tysson, who searches for the mind in the Siberian forest, different travel writers (even fantasy writers) find resonance in this regard.
Rebecca West (1892-1983). As Black Sheep and Grey Eagle, the Representative travelled to the Yugoslav region on the eve of the Second World War and was keenly aware of the social conditions of the countries, irreconcilable ethnic hatred and the political influence that the Western European world had exerted on the region.
The Italian travelogue Claudio Magris defined travel in the Danube Journey as follows: "Travel is always a rescue operation, recording and collecting something that is about to disappear or disappear, the last landing place of an island that is about to be submerged in the waves." This is a vague and accurate description, the so-called rescue operation, which can point to both objective history and humanities and one's own soul.
Claudio Magris (1939-), Italian travelist and one of the popular candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He had a background in the history of the Habsburg Dynasty, and his travelogue style was also biased towards cultural and historical narratives. Represented as "Journey to the Danube".
As long as there is enough reason to support the question of why to start and why to become a stranger, then a good travelogue realizes its textual value. Many times, we seem to be catching a flight, too hasty to read the travelogue, eager to find the annotation of knowledge from the author's experience, or to find the interpretation and conclusion that supports cultural research, we want to use objective and prejudice, whether to wear colored glasses and other criteria to judge the merits of a travelogue, but ignore the most important feature of a good travelogue, that is, it never lets us stay where we are.
If you want to take a counter-example, the best-selling American travelogue author Robert Kaplan may be one who travels with the concept of geopolitics and political think tank, trying to dissect the social problems he sees, but there is almost no writing that deviates from the essence of travelogue. Pinpoint speculative conclusions can be found in any type of book, while travelogues themselves are unstable genres, a reflection of the short and unusual course of life. The process is greater than the end point is its charm. This is the reason why travelogue works seem to be in decline today, and why we need to read travelogues, because many times, our demand for destinations has completely obliterated the inner impulse to embark on a journey, we are anxious to shape life, to ensure that the itinerary is foolproof, and the reading of travelogues can just slow down this process in the text and reawaken our enthusiasm for distant countries or distant hearts.
Two Thousand Years in the Balkans: Ghosts Through History, by Robert Kaplan and translated by Zhao Xiufu, Peking University Press, September 2018. As a geopolitical analyst, Kaplan's travelogue is not so much a travelogue as a geopolitical expedition report, but more literary.
Black Sheep and Grey Eagle: Six Hundred Years in the Balkans, A Journey of Exploration of Suffering and Hope, by Rebecca West, translated by Hong Quan, Fengxia, Chen Danjie, Sanhui Books | CITIC Publishing Group, April 2019. It is also about writing about the Balkans, and it is also about integrating history and culture into travelogues. Perhaps the biggest difference between Robert Kaplan and Rebecca West is that the former is about solving problems while the latter is about finding answers.
"What is a travel book?" In my opinion, a travel book tells the story of a person's encounters in a particular place, nothing more; it does not contain information about hotels and roads, does not list everyday language, statistics or precautions, or points out how to dress up for tourists who intend to go there. Such travel books may be a type of book that is destined to become extinct. I hope they won't, because my greatest pleasure is reading a quick-witted author who recounts what happened to him while he was away from home.
In terms of themes, the most splendid travel literature is about the conflict between the author and the place. As long as the process of conflict is recorded truthfully, it does not matter which side wins. To do this successfully requires an author who is good at situational depiction, and perhaps because of this, many of the travel books that remain in memory are written by skilled novelists. —Paul Bowles, The Challenge of Identity
Written by | Miyako
Editor| Li Yang, Zhang Jin, Li Yongbo
Proofreading | Xue Jingning