The Brooklyn Rail

Travel writing is a curious genre. At its most utilitarian, prosaic, it provides actionable advice on how to visit a place (information on hotels, restaurants, sights, and so on). At its most elevated, it is complex and difficult to pin down: rigorously reportorial, yet awash in imprecision, uncertainty. It blooms in the face of the unknown. It wilts in the face of the familiar—I struggled to find the right narrative voice for a recent article on Warsaw, my native city. As Paul Theroux, one of our great contemporary practitioners of the genre, once explained (alluding to Thomas Wolfe’s 1929 novel, Look Homeward, Angel): “Travel writing is about being a stranger in a strange land. It’s about what you notice when you don’t belong.” When you don’t know whereof you write—or at least, you are not sure, not yet.

You do the reporting, of course—the reading, the careful on-the-ground observation, the interviewing. But there comes a point in the writing when, sooner or later, you allow—you must allow—un-fact-checkable personal reactions to seep in, even if they might be at odds with the cultural context being observed. Subjectivity, the multiplicitous “I” in travel writing, with its always imperfect relationship to an ultimately inaccessible truth is, in the right hands, what makes the story—what gives it tension, narrative drive, readability. Ryszard Kapuściński, Poland’s late, visionary foreign correspondent and international literary cult figure, whom John le Carré once called “the conjurer extraordinary of modern reportage,” and whose inspiration was always the marvelously mundane, the world over, once said that plain, unopinionated fact “is exactly what I avoid. … If those are the questions you want answered, you can visit your local library.”

It is no wonder that inspired tales of travel were among humankind’s first forms of literary expression. Millennia ago, the unknown was everywhere proximate, and it must have been profoundly moving—in both senses of that word. Our ancestors looked at Homer’s mysterious “wine-dark” sea, toward mountains faintly visible on the horizon, at seemingly endless deserts, and a combination of wonder, curiosity, and the survival instinct propelled some to set forth and to report back.

“Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents his research,” is how the fifth-century BCE Greek geographer and ethnographer, dubbed the “Father of History” and also the world’s first travel writer, starts off his magnum opus, The Histories. Between 460 BCE and 430 BCE, he set off from what today is Bodrum, Turkey, on a mission of “inquiry,” as he calls it, into the roots of the conflict between the Greeks and the Persians, traipsing around the Greek world, Egypt, the Near East, the Persian Empire, the Black Sea region, and Thrace and the Balkans. He traveled and obsessively observed, but also, at times, just gathered what second-hand information he could. His work is rife with first-person interjections confessing to the limits of his knowledge, his uncertainty: “I could learn nothing from anyone else. However, I did learn as much as I could by traveling to the city of Elephantine and seeing it for myself.” “Since I wished to know something definite about all this from any source I could find, I sailed to Tyre in Phoenicia.” “That at least is what I heard from the priests in Thebes.” “But I have my own opinions about these claims.”

Of course he does. Welcome to the shifting sands of travel writing, where honest, vividly rendered disorientation about the strangeness in which one is immersed might be the only achievable summit. The journey is all.