Incidents of
my own experience which are illustrative of the general principle here may be
found inter alia in the following posts: “Hitchhiking in Algeria”
(September 2010), “A Reading in Kathmandu” (November 2009), “Vignettes of Sunny
Nigeria” (March 2011), “Festival in Ogwa” [Nigeria](January 2011), “Sacred
Space as Sideshow” [Prague] (February 2010).
The fine savor of
travel often involves the pleasant acquisition of new knowledge. Away from home one cannot avoid learning
about other people’s history, art, cuisine, politics, and taste, in short, the
wide variety of ways to be human. All
travel encourages receptive senses, even a stroll around the town next door,
but the further afield one wanders, the wider one’s eyes are likely to open,
and the more new data the traveler will process.
There is no
smooth transition from naivete to cosmopolitan sophistication. The traveler is in the position of a small
child and feels a similar exhilaration and frustration born of occupying a
world largely mysterious, learning daily, but with codes only sketchily known, A
necessary concomitant of spending time in such realms of half-knowledge, of
speculation and outright mystery, is that a good share of one’s conclusions
prove more or less wrong, while others can never be satisfactorily tested and
must remain hypothetical, and a good share of the world remains cryptic.
With or without
guides and translators, the strangeness of being in strange places is enhanced
by confusion over customs and values and most of all by imperfect mastery of
other languages on the part of both foreigner and native. This lack of understanding magnifies the irreducible
distance between one consciousness and another.
The tolerance and acceptance a drifter must adopt when stranded in a
tropical village where the road ends are perhaps the basis for the only
workable attitude toward life, considering that everyone is always dealing with
insufficient information. Submission is
sometimes all that one has.
Whereas earlier
travel writers had emphasized the picturesque or the sublime in landscape or dramatic
history or exotic in folkways, the great twentieth century English travel
writers – Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron, and Bruce Chatwin – excelled at capturing
the absurd, the accidental, the inexplicable in the center of the
everyday. Each presents the persona of a
well-meaning innocent, cast about by circumstances, observing unstable chains
of cause and effect which seem puzzling, inscrutable, and generally faintly
hostile. One ordinarily thinks of
traveler’s enlightenment arising due to new information, the acquisition of
which allows new insights about both others and one’s own habitual attitudes. It not uncommonly happens that a
complementary view will not supplant one’s preconception, but rather will come
to seem equally true or will simply cast an experience as inexplicable.
A few examples may
clarify this distinctly modern vision which focuses specifically on what is not
seen, what is unknown. Evelyn Waugh’s Labels
(1930) describes a show he attended in Port Said, Egypt.
Attendants were going about selling
nuts, mineral waters, coffee, and hubble-bubbles . . . the doctor warned me
that if I smoked one of these I would be bound to catch some frightful disease;
I did so, however, without ill effects . . . we found ourselves in the middle
of a hugely popular comic turn: two Egyptians in European costume were doing
cross-talk . . . It was, of course, wholly unintelligible to us; now and then
they smacked each other, so I have no doubt it was very much the same as an
English music hall turn . . . their place was taken by a very pretty little
white girl in a ballet dress: she cannot have been more than ten or twelve
years old; she danced a Charleston . . . Then there were some Japanese
jugglers, and then an interminable comic turn done by the whole company . . .
After this a Negro of magnificent physique appeared. First he thrust a dozen or so
knitting-needles through his cheeks . . . It was while he was doing this that a
fight began . . . The man on my right, a grave Egyptian with a knowledge of
English, with whom I had had some conversation, suddenly stood up, and leaning
across all three of us, struck down with his umbrella a resounding blow on top
of one of the fighting heads . . . “What is the fight about –” I asked
him. “Fight?” he said, “Who has been
fighting?”
The opening act of Egyptians mimicking Europeans suggests an
unbridged cultural divide, yet the rest of the vaudeville seems ambitiously
transnational, the sort of broad entertainment that might amuse anyone
anywhere. But just as the spectacle
seems intelligible, the fight and then its resolution both occur without the
slightest cause. Then the “grave
Egyptian” denies that it occurred at all.
Waugh (and his reader) can only look on in bemusement, murmuring perhaps
with Puck “What fools these mortals be!”
There are
multifarious trail-heads through the semantic field of unknowing in this
incident. Waugh, for instance, mentions
his use of a public water-pipe in spite of being warned by a doctor. He does not apparently even consider if the
advice may be sound, or what the threatened disease may be, except that it is
likely to be “frightful.” Here the
foreign setting allows Waugh to express the feeling many have, even in a
semi-scientific society, that health is a matter of fate. One hazards on forward until felled. And by surviving unharmed to tell his story,
the author becomes a sort of comic hero, turning the tragic emotions of pity
and fear on their heads as all is well for the moment at any rate. The reader feels blessed like the impetuous
traveler and can reflect with some composure on that strange scene, the
ever-varied procession of humanity.
In The Road to
Oxiana Robert Byron describes a Turkoman encampment in northern
Afghanistan. As the men are working
somewhere else, the women all flee, while their dogs attack. Once the dogs are subdued, the following
scene occurs.
I approached a mother and two children. They fled into a kibitka, and I turned to a
younger woman of magnificent carriage who was clasping a baby. Placing it behind a wattle screen, she
grabbed a pole, traced a circle in the dust in front of it, and came at me like
a mediaeval knight. Her face was screwed
up with anger, and there was something in the tone of her denunciations that
made me uncomfortable, as if I had been meanly taking advantage of her man’s
absence. The two old witches chuckled at
the scene. But our guard, a new one who
had joined us at Andkhoi, was ashamed, and said that Afghanistan was like
that. He had on a sophisticated Western
mackintosh, and was always taking snuff from a silver-mounted gourd with a ruby
on its lip.
The reader
relishes Byron’s image of the lady of stately mien delicately setting her
infant “behind a wattle screen” that she might free her limbs to express
herself, undeterred by the fact that she is not understood. He reacts with the lovely understatement of
the faux innocent observer, saying he senses a subtle “something” in her “tone’
that made him “uncomfortable” when she is charging like a knight, apparently
raging and hopping in hostility.
The guide
introduces another twist. In contrast to
the woman’s wary defensiveness before an outsider he is a slavish adherent of
his partial and distorted notion of European ways. One would, I think, have to look a long time
in London before spotting another such rubied snuff-box even among the dandies. He is like the cartoon savage in a loincloth
and a top hat. If this individual is not
as world-wise as he may fancy himself, the reader may naturally turn to
questioning the admittedly shaky authority of the writer, perhaps even of his
own vision.
In Byron’s
anecdote the narrator, his guide, and most of the women in the camp are uneasy,
cautious and defensive, unsure what their encounter may. One might well understand Byron’s uncertainty
about how to behave in an unfamiliar situation, the general anxiety about the
sudden appearance of a mysterious stranger, and Andkhoi’s distress at seeing
his employers treated disrespectfully.
The most unaccountable actions are performed by the “woman with
magnificent carriage” who is as well the only decisive individual on the
scene. Here is figured the unbridgeable
gap that separates each consciousness from all others, regardless of culture. Just why does Byron feel the discomfort he attributes
to his in some sense “meanly taking advantage of her man’s absence”? Is it in any way related to his appreciation
of her figure?
Bruce Chatwin‘s
experience during a coup in Benin was nothing short of Kafkaesque. After being swept off the street “for your
own proper protection,” he is denounced as a mercenary by a corporal with bad
breath.
He held up my
fountain pen. “What?”
“A pen,” I said.
What for?”
“To write with.”
“A gun?”
“Not a gun.”
“Yes, a gun!”
His bad cop interrogator is then
replaced by a comparatively urbane functionary who seeks to reassure his
prisoner, saying “Calm yourself, monsieur.
You do not understand. In his
country one understands nothing,” before marching him back to his cell. Eventually a sort of hearing on his case is
held.
A young zealot started mouthing anti-capitalist formulae
until he was silenced by the colonel in charge.
The colonel then asked a few perfunctory questions, wearily apologized
for the inconvenience, signed my pass, and hoped I would continue to enjoy my
holiday in the People’s Republic.
Chatwin’s story may be read as a
cautionary warning against the blindness induced by ideology. The willful unknowing produced by the desire
to toe the government line allows a man to see a fountain pen yet call it a
gun. Yet the man who releases hum seems
to subscribe to the exact same way of thinking and yet casually releases him. The reader is willing to believe that the
writer might have been arbitrarily killed.
Why did things turn out as they did?
No one knows. Would there be any
difference at all between the putative Marxism of this ruling party and a
Western-allied dictator, or a third who cultivates a simple cult of
personality?
In each of these incidents the
observer is European and the scene before him is distinctly Other (though the
pattern occurs as well, of course, in the observations of cultivated
non-European writers) [2]. This sets in
motion a peculiar dialectic in which on the one hand the writer implies the
ethnocentric notion that other cultures are inscrutable, ridiculous, or
childish. At the same time the attitude
confesses parochial ignorance since every custom must have a reason. The implications spread from that point
indefinitely: one side is more rich and powerful, yet the other may possess
some greater wisdom, the one is on home ground and thus secure, the visitor at
a loss, and so on into the speculative night.
All this from some unexceptional not-knowing.
But
in the most general terms, the author in each of these scenes does not know
what to make of the spectacle before his eyes, so what is the reader to think? Chatwin’s persecutor perhaps could see a
weapon in a fountain pen, but why did Waughs’s interlocutor say he saw no
fight? In order to more placidly enjoy
his evening out? In Byron’s story the
same events cause the “old witches” to laugh, the young woman to rage in fury,
and the writer to scratch his head. Does
a “real” meaning exist?
The Pyrrhonic skeptics of late antiquity
felt that they could make use of such uncertainty and achieve peace of mind
through acknowledging their ignorance, leading first to silence, but then to
serenity and perhaps even to pleasure. [1]
Followers of the meditative via negativa such as the
pseudo-Dionysius and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing have conjured
deity out of purest no-thought. And
Bloom would make mis-reading a source of creative change.
The twentieth century offered new
renditions of this paradoxical enlightening darkness. In Sartre’s Nausea (1938) Roquentin reflects
on the roots of a chestnut tree. His
experience is confined to the present moment, and he concludes “faced with this
great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of
explanations and reasons is not the world of existence . . . That root with its
color, shape, its congealed movement, was beneath all explanation.” A few years later in The Myth of Sisyphus,
Camus provided another memorable illumination sparked by ignorance.
At certain moments of lucidity,
the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes
silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind
a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb
show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man' s own
inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this
"nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. Likewise
the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar
and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd.
This metaphysical
occlusion of meaning is only the broadest initial reading of such misunderstandings
of travel. Whether such reflections are recorded
in a journal or a book or whether they simply vanish like sparkles of sunlight
on a stream, the trip will eventually end.
The traveler may then return with a livelier sense of the extent to
which we all are finding our way about the darkness whether in our own home or
in Timbuktu. With the right spirit we
can enjoy our bumbling as a kind of sport or gallant act in defiance of the
unknown and make as much of our not-knowing as our knowing. What more is there to travel? What more to reading? To life?
1.
1. See Eusebius Praeparatio Evangelica, Book
14.
2.
2. Recognizing the utility of the outside
perspective, in the eighteenth century a series of books by Europeans in the
pose of non-Europeans were published including Montesquieu’s Lettres
persanes (1721), Poullain de Saint-Foix’s Lettres d’une Turque à Paris (1730),
d'Argens’ Lettres chinoises (1741), Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres
d’une Péruvienne (1747), Beckford’s Vathek, and Johnson’s Rasselas
(1759).
