Travel Lit Criticism: When Professors Stop Making Sense
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 06.03.08 | 12:24 PM ET
In the Wall Street Journal, genetics professor Steve Jones praises Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, arguing that, in contrast to Darwin’s other books, the travel memoir “sings.” Fine, but the professor loses me with this observation: “The joy of the journey was that it had a point. Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux have each written great travel books about South America—but why, in the end, did they bother? The smell of the agent, the contract and the advance hangs around their pages, but for Darwin (who was in no need of money) every paragraph exudes instead the heady scent of discovery.”
So let me get this straight: Chatwin’s and Theroux’s books were great, but they’re also tainted by commerce and the authors really shouldn’t have bothered to write them?
That logic exudes the heady scent of something else entirely.
Related on World Hum:
* Former Punk Paul Theroux in India
* No. 3: ‘The Great Railway Bazaar’ by Paul Theroux
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
Sophie 06.03.08 | 5:20 PM ET
C’mon. Everybody knows it’s only art if you do it for love. Money immediately devalues any creative endeavor. That’s why musicians and others are scumbags (can I say that here?) for insisting on payment for their product.
Eva Holland 06.04.08 | 3:27 PM ET
If I’m reading him right, not only shouldn’t have bothered to writethem, but shouldn’t have bothered to go on their pointless journeys, either?
“That logic exudes the heady scent of something else entirely.”
Ha. Indeed.
Jonathan Chatwin 06.06.08 | 6:20 AM ET
The irony of this perspective is that Chatwin travelled to Patagonia having had his last book rejected, and without any sort of contract or advance for another. Jonathan Cape, who were Chatwin’s publishers, were entirely taken by surprise by the delivery of In Patagonia.