“Travel, Travel Writing, and the Literature of Travel”
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 09.16.05 | 9:46 AM ET
A few weeks ago, Erin over at BellaOnline recommended to me “Travel, Travel Writing, and the Literature of Travel,” a piece by Michael Mewshaw in the Summer issue of the South Central Review. It’s actually a transcript of a paper Mewshaw gave at a Modern Language Association meeting in New Orleans in October 2004, and it’s a terrific defense of travel and travel writing against critics who dismiss the former as a frivolous diversion and the latter as the work of hacks.
Mewshaw references Sigmund Freud, Paul Fussell, Robert Byron, T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” Las Vegas and “doughty ladies and gents who sign up for Lindblad tours to Antarctica or the Galapagos,” and he offers substantial insights of his own. Here he is on the power of travel:
And the rest of us, whether or not we realize it consciously, also crave both what travel is and what it represents. Those who doubt this might do well to recall how many totalitarian regimes outlaw travel or restrict it to the privileged elite—all in an effort to control the citizenry, keep folks ignorant of what’s happening and what people are like in other parts of the world. Historically, by circumscribing freedom of movement, tyrants have sought to reinforce the belief that the homeland is holy ground, and foreign lands and people are beyond the pale, if not downright satanic.
And here he is on the significance of travel writing:
[T]here is a kind of travel writing which is really guide book writing which focuses on what the trade calls “service” and which consists mostly of recording whether the sheets in a hotel were crisp or the lettuce in a restaurant was limp. But that’s not the kind of travel or travel writing I’m talking about today. No, I am trying to make a case that travel in the classic mode still exists and that the best travel writing is a significant form or literature. What’s more, I’d like to suggest that travel is the basic underpinning or subtext of a lot of literature which we wouldn’t normally associate with travel.
The complete story, unfortunately, is only available online via password access through Project MUSE. Here’s the link. If you’re a university student, you’ll probably be able to access the site via a password supplied by your school’s library.