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Cairo: Medhat Safwat
Although travel literature is as old as travel and literature themselves, that is, since mankind has known that literary expression and travel go together, it is possible to talk about the period of prosperity and spread of this genre, especially every development related to the travel method, and here we can point to the 1960s and the thirty years that followed, which can be said to be the “most glorious era of travel literature” both in Arab and international terms.
In the Arab world, names such as Anis Mansour and his books are widely known, including “Around the World in 200 Days” and “The Kingdom of God … God’s Creation”, in which he visited many countries in different continents of the Arab world, proving that there is no difference between people. Every person in the world seeks peace of mind, psychological peace, tranquility. The figures before Mansour were Dr. Hussein Fawzi, an Egyptian doctor, writer and traveler known as “Sinbad”, and Moussa Sabry and his travel literature.
In the West, travel writing reached its highest level in the mid-eighties. Western libraries had globetrotting writers such as Bruce Chatwin, Jean Morris, Redmond O’Hanlon, Dervella Murphy, Norman Lewis and Jonathan Rabanne, legends who shipped books in full suitcases while readers devoured stories from around the world.
- Thrive and spread
Indeed, it was a bright and exciting phase for this kind of literature, as jet-setters opened horizons and literary-minded travelers set out with eyes wide open in search of adventure, encounter, and story, often in remote landscapes, “They set out in search of stories and return with moving tales, in the words of British writer Tom Cheshire.”
During this period, as sales of special issues on travel literature increased, the literary magazine Granta published an issue devoted to travel writing, featuring Gabriel García Márquez, Paul Theroux, Colin Tuburen, Saul Bellow, and others. It was edited by Bill Buford, one of the most famous critics of the time.
In his introduction to the aforementioned Granta issue, Buford tries to pinpoint why the public is so fascinated by travel writing by noting that in times of economic hardship, as was the case in the early 1980s, “weird stories can be seen to have the same value as books and films, for example, during the Great Depression: writing offers freedom from the armchair. This is exactly what readers are looking for, as there was no internet at the time, communicating with people was not easy, and the absolute joy of storytelling is a kind of narrative eloquence that allows them to be somewhere between fantasy and reality with a wonderful ambiguity.
At the same time, Buford considers travel writing to be a paranoid genre that “draws on memoir, reportage, and, most importantly, the novel. Travel literature, however, is primarily a narrative told in the first person and recorded through lived experience.” However, it is no longer useful to discuss genre issues because the barriers between literary types have disappeared, and instead, in the postmodern world, one can talk about the collapse of the separation between different arts and literatures.
Over time, travel literature has changed, and in a famous article on travel literature, British writer Tom Cheshire quotes Tim Hannigan, an academic who specializes in this type of writing, as saying that travel literature has declined because it no longer exists. Hannigan said that these types of books “had fallen three feet from the guidebooks and celebrity travelogues” before their exhibition space was reduced. At the same time, publications struggled to gain a place in the literary review sections of newspapers and were often overlooked, for example in the annual Christmas carousel.
It is not far from the evolution of travel methods that used to be expensive and difficult, to become “easy”, with tour and airline deals pouring in every day, just as planning a vacation at the beginning of this century required visiting a local travel agent. Or for the more adventurous travelers, armed with a travel guide, set your travel schedule based on the recommendations of those around you. Today, thanks to technological advances and high-speed Internet, travelers can book flights and private hotels in seconds and choose accommodation from a wide range of options.
What has happened? What do technological developments mean for travel writers around the world? In a world where anyone can pass on any documented knowledge they want, what expertise do readers still find some authors able to bring? These are not new questions. Since the beginning of this century, professional and academic centres have been discussing a literary genre that some consider to be threatened by technology, prompting the 2013 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali, Indonesia to ask this question. In 2016, the lecture led to the publication of her book Travel Writers in the Digital Age by the Tourism Section of Monash University in Australia. In 2013, in her encyclopedia The Cambridge History of Travel Literature, she conducted an independent study on the future of technology for the genre in light of the tremendous development of technology and the proliferation of travel and trip evaluation websites.
On the other hand, some in the literary establishment seem to despair about the growth of travel literature, including The Times columnist Ben McIntyre, who argues that there is “no point in writing about travel” as billions of people post photos of their cheap and cheerful trips on social media. As McIntyre points out, online reporting is almost ubiquitous, with Instagram stars with iPhones and thousands of followers replacing journalists in wrinkled sweaters with notebooks. Live webcams broadcast footage of mountain peaks, beaches and African plains. Who needs travel writers to tell you how things are going? This is the old and new question on McIntyre’s mind.
On the other hand, Granta magazine writer Colin Tubrun believes that the “death of travel literature” is to be expected, as writers such as Joseph Conrad, Evelyne Waugh, Claude Levi-Strauss and others have long decided: the “age of travel literature” is over, which is one of the oldest forms of writing from a literary perspective, saying: “The world has become so densely populated and so familiar through the convenience of air travel and computer screens.”
Tubulun, who writes primarily about Central Asia, Russia, and China, argues that travel writing is a “postcolonial assumption,” an idea that reduces all contact between “first world” and “third world” cultures to an act of hubris. “The travel mentioned here is not a way of understanding, self-education, or empathy,” he writes. “The idea that any encounter between unequal worlds is seen as domination threatens to turn any human contact into hubris.”
Against all these threats and pessimism, it can be said that travel literature could benefit from evolutionary technology, provided that travel writers change their view of their primary role in transportation. A travel writer insists on being the first to arrive somewhere… “It doesn’t work anyway. There is no virgin land that has not been touched by man.” Realize that this century can be said to be the era of transition from professional blogging to blogging as an open arena that anyone can enter.
Yet, on the fate of travel literature, veteran travel writer Paul Theroux tries to identify why the genre still appeals to him: “Reading and anxiety, dissatisfaction with home, sadness within, and the idea that the real world exists elsewhere.” You made me a traveler. If the internet were everything, we’d all stay home and enjoy great insights. Yet with so much conflicting information out there, there’s reason to travel more than ever: to look closely, to dig deep, to tell true from false; “to investigate, to smell, to touch, to taste, to listen, and sometimes, most importantly, to suffer the effects of this curiosity.”
Theroux’s vision offers hope for the genre. As is the case with McIntyre, he believes that the “illusion of absolute knowledge” offered by the internet makes visiting remote parts of the world more valuable than ever before.
In fact, the styles of travel writing are infinitely flexible and varied. Just as the world itself changes, so too do the priorities and sensibilities of those who write and travel in it. The old aristocratic emphasis on history and aesthetics, and the assumption of a shared culture between author and reader, is tempered by more personal writing.
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