Travel Writing

The extreme variety of writings produced after travel experiences, which started from classical antiquity to the current day, forces us to focus on the textual framing of travel writing, a hybrid genre “notoriously refractory to definition” (Youngs, 2013: 1) and on the themes that range from geography to history, sociology to philosophy, and anthropology to cultural studies.

The root of the complexity of “travel writing” lies in the concept of travel and its link with narration (Cardona, 1988; Villani, 2022). There have always been accounts of travels, so much so that, in some languages, the term “voyage” holds the meaning of “travel experience” and “travel narration”: “voyages are said to be descriptions of places, customs, etc., carried out by travellers, and published for the instruction of others” (Tommaseo & Bellini, 1865-1879. Our translation). Suppose the traveller and the writer were born together. In that case, it is also true that the motivations that drive man to travel have always been multiple and have naturally found in the multiplicity of forms, styles and themes adequate solutions, responding to the stimuli and needs of an equally varied typology of travellers: from the pilgrim and merchant of the Middle Ages to the explorer and naturalist of the Modern Age, from the Grand-tourist of the 17th and 18th centuries to the romantic Wanderer, from the contemporary travel reporter to the mass tourist. Given this extreme variability of its components, “Travel writing could [therefore] be imagined as a field of interactive forces with three vanishing points: referential reality, the traveller's subjectivity and the genre's expressive conventions. Three mutually functional instances configure variable balances from a typological and a historical perspective” (Clerici, 1999: XI. Our translation). Each individual odeporic writing thus occupies its own position within travel writing in a particular historical-cultural context. The eminently protean character of this disciplinary field can be seen in the variety of textual typologies, which comprises: guidebooks, itineraries, accounts, descriptions, memoirs, letters, mission reports, logbooks, private notes, narratives of shipwrecks, conquests and explorations, travel books, travel novels and imaginary journeys, poetry, ethnographic, geographical and anthropological treatises, even road movies, maps and photographs. A catalogue that varies according to the choices of individual scholars or research groups and that we hope will be consolidated outside linguistic-national borders.

A shared need concerns the identification, within this “constellation of many different types of writing and/or text” (Thompson, 2011: 26), of a more circumscribed and coherent field of research, of a more uniform and representative textual corpus of travel writing, which, while preserving its complexity, favours its approach and disciplinary recognisability. This central core contains texts that share specific minimum requirements: a “narrative [referring] to a real journey, which took place, however much it may be reworked and even partly «reinvented» in the author's account”, i.e. of “a real figure, who recounts an experience he or she has had in the first person” (Ricorda, 2012: 15-16, 17-18. Our translation). In other words: “Central to the genre [i.e. Travel Writing], undoubtedly, is the form that both Fussell [1980] and Borm [2004] label the ‘travel book’: that is to say, the first-person, ostensibly non-fictional narrative of travel.” (Thompson, 2011: 26).

“Travel literature” is thus distinguished from fictional literature, even when its central structuring theme is the journey. Universal masterpieces such as the Odyssey (9th century B.C.), the Divine Comedy (1306/7-1321), Gulliver's Travels (1726), Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours (1872) and Heart of Darkness (1899) are therefore excluded, as it applies a different narrative pact than that of the reader of odeporic literature. On this point, too, there are divergent opinions. Odile Gannier agrees with the definitions quoted above, but distances herself from them by admitting the imitation in travel literature: “la littérature de voyage propose, dans le cadre d'une écriture subjective, souvent postérieure au retour, le compte rendu d'un voyage presenté en principe comme réel” (Gannier, 2022: 5. My italics). Whether or not the literature of fiction belongs to the travel literature constitutes a vexata quaestio, from which emerges Peter Hulme's economic and balanced proposal, which convincingly supports the distinction of the two types of literature but does not disavow that they share many aspects, narrative techniques and rhetorical devices. Hulme starts by considering that “all writing is fiction: all writing is made of language. But not all writing is fictional” (Hulme & Youngs, 2007: 3). According to Hulme, travel literature is not and cannot be “fictional”; otherwise, it would lose its very essence, which ethically compromises the writers who “claim to have been in the places they describe” (Hulme & Youngs, 2007: 3). Fictionality in travel literature, unlike in fictional literature, would thus entail the fraudulent breaking of the narrative pact signed with the reader and the disqualification of the status of the work. This necessary link between the writing and the reality of a journey personally undertaken by the author-traveller is one of the few criteria that distinguish travel literature from fictional literature and, according to Hulme, cannot be applied in the definition of a genre such as the odeporic, notoriously resistant to classification.

The nexus between reality and fiction, or rather, between truth and falsehood, remains at the heart of the study of travel literature, which finds favourable ground for its development in genres that accommodate fact and fiction, such as autobiography, memoirism and the novel. The revolution that the latter represents on the side of fiction would correspond to the revolution that travel literature proposes on the side of non-fiction, “and this would help to better explain the synergetic relationship that these two genres historically have since the eighteenth century” (Clerici, 2008: LXVI). However, in the transition from the experience of the journey to its writing, the author has always had to integrate authentication procedures, which are convincing to the recipients of the work (readers or patrons of the exploration), consistent with the adopted genres (diary, memoir, description, report, etc.) and suitable for representing the otherness of the cultures and places accounted for.

The development of travel literature can be outlined by following its continuous adaptation to the demands of credibility: the epistemological paradigms of the Middle Ages, based on the Bible, the Church and ancient philosophers and naturalists (Aristotle and Pliny), the direct observation of the world, based on the empirical method developed by intellectuals such as Galileo, Francis Bacon and John Locke, and the directives issued by the Royal Society, regarding exploratory travel, up to the reality effects present in the “travel book” of the 20th and 21st centuries. In its complex development, drastically reduced in this dictionary entry, travel literature has developed functional solutions to represent its own veracity. The “epistemological decorum” (Thompson, 2011: 72), which the reader of odeporic literature needs, translates into a type of writing that, mutatis mutandis, must make the reality of the journey evident. This effect is primarily guaranteed by the figure of the author, who manages all aspects of the odeporic tale, moving between the evocation of a personal experience and the account of an objective fact, between autobiography and science (“le récit de voyage vit de l'interpénétration des deux”, Todorov, 1991, cit. in Gannier, 2022: 91).

Adopting the first person singular, the author underlines his eyewitness status and the story's autograph. It is not rare that the authorial discourse also includes information related to the history of the text that the reader has in hand, with reference to the writing of a diary, to its successive reworking, to the choice of a style, other references to the material reality of the journey, understood as experienced and as a story. The simplicity of the style can be interpreted by the reader or explicitly justified by the author as a direct consequence of a physically demanding journey and, in any case, by the prevalence of documentary interest. The use of technical-scientific lexicons can achieve a similar result, together with the presence of precise and recurring space-time coordinates, the production of drawings, maps, tables or realia taken directly from the field (flora, fauna, habits and customs, xenisms, means of transport, curiosities, etc.). The rhetorical-formal solutions capable of restoring to the report of a real journey that capital of truthfulness that the narrative necessarily places in dialogue with the fictional dimension (Villani, 2022), are in fact, inexhaustible and sometimes contradictory to each other (from the subjectivity of the travelling poet to the objectivity of the exploring scientist), so much so that we could speak of “fictions of factual representations” (Thompson, 2011: 30).

Translation: R. Baleiro

How to cite this dictionary entry: Pedroni, M. (2023). Travel Writing. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.). E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia.