| Monday, April 30, 2007 10:17AM | | | | The Art of Travel Writing | Posted By: Aaron Hamburger
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| Tags: Voyage and Voyeur, de Botton, Trojanow, Jian | My final panel! But what a great way to end the festival. In a discussion titled Voyage and Voyeur: Travel and Travel Writing, authors Alain de Botton (England), Ma Jian (China), and Ilja Trojanow (Bulgaria/Germany/South Africa) brilliantly deconstructed the notion of travel.
Among the highlights:
From Trojanow: That the label “travel writer” is a troubled one with the rather specious connotation of a white male from the West traveling somewhere exotic for a week, looking out his hotel window, and then returning home to report on what he’s seen and thereby captured the Other. Two examples of this kind of work he brought up were Paul Thoreaux and Gunter Grass, whose travel book on India featured “shit” over six hundred times. For that, Trojanow said, Grass didn’t have to go all the way to India. He could have stayed home and described his own latrine.
From de Botton: That the promise of travel is that for a moment you can escape your self by immersing yourself in another place that’s free of you. But the disappointment of travel is that you have to bring your self with you when you travel, and that your self necessarily infects your experience.
De Botton actually didn’t mind reading travel books that highlighted the personal lens through which we’re viewing the place being described. Otherwise you get into questions of objectivity, and really, who’s objective?
From Jian: For Jian, (speaking through a translator) travel is a kind of exile that reveals the self, so it doesn’t matter where you go. It’s a spiritual departure that is not so much about what you see as what you feel. If someone has a direction in his life, he will not travel at all. Travelers are people looking for a direction. He cited as an example the novel Lost Horizon, in which the hero visits the lost paradise of Shangri-La. “I’ve been there,” Jian said. “There’s nothing there. It was merely a dream of that traveler.”
The most amusing part of the panel occurred when the translator explained that Jian was saying “Civilization is…” she paused, “so damned boring.”
At which point, Jian interjected in heavily-accented English, “Not damned. Fucking!”
And so the translator was obliged to repeat, “Civilization is so fucking boring.”
As to Trojanow’s objection about biased authors, Jian said, “Readers aren’t stupid. They are not confined by the view of the author. When a reader reads a book, he or she will get something that he wants from it.”
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1 Comment | Add a Comment |
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| 5-11-07 4:19PM: Brian Stein said...
Nothing beats being there yourself, for me. Sometimes a writer has such a discerning eye that there is a lot of joy in reading him/her. Interesting someone mentioned Theroux who is so kvetchy on his travels this reader finally screams uncle. He clearly should have stayed at home/
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