Back in the Victorian age travel writing was a relatively straightforward proposition–at least intellectually. The travel itself could kill you. A glance through the titles of some typical Victorian travelogues–In Darkest Africa, First Footsteps in East Africa, No Passport to Tibet–evokes precarious voyages through unfamiliar and (by Western standards) uncharted lands, filled with strange animals and insects and nefarious diseases, through dangerous extremes of climate. Travel writers in those days were a hardy lot, yet most of them died young.
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This is a distinctly imperial style of writing–omnivorous, acquisitive, oblivious to the meanings of local custom–and it’s obviously no coincidence that the flowering of the Victorian travel narrative coincided with the Western clamor for empire. “Just as European economic and military superiority had enabled a handful of nations to reshape the earth according to their own design, so did a European system of knowledge take precedence over other modes of perception and understanding,” Cocker writes. “Giving expression to this intellectual colonialism, Bailey wrote of his second journey that ‘Each new place, each new bird or flower or animal, each trigonometrical point or hyposometer reading was an addition to the sum total of human knowledge.’” Clearly Bailey didn’t care, as Cocker notes, that much of the “new” knowledge he brought back was already well-known to others with darker skin than his, that “the white-eared pheasant he had sought, and which had previously only been known to the Western world as a boxful of feathers in the British Museum, had probably been recognized and trapped by local hunters for centuries.”
Iyer has a sharp eye and a sometimes wicked tongue. In Argentina he finds himself at the mercy of a manic tour guide (“a Joel Grey look-alike”) who insists on informing his charges again and again that “Jujuy is the capital of the province of Jujuy!” Tedium sets in, punctuated by an occasional absurdity, all of which Iyer describes with typical grace. After one stop, “the van started up again, and the guide returned to outlining the relationship between Jujuy and the province of Jujuy, in French, Spanish, and English, none of which could be told apart. . . . After fourteen hours of this . . . I began to feel I knew Jujuy pretty well.”
While the Victorians and their latter-day followers are concerned with exterior details, most travel writers today are more concerned with interior dramas. It’s not of course that Victorians and neo-Victorians have no inner life; it’s that they don’t write about it. Indeed, it’s hard not to look upon neo-Victorian Wilfred Thesiger’s cravings for “barbaric splendour . . . savagery and colour and the throb of drums” without wondering a bit about the state of his unconscious. In many contemporary travel accounts our guides do the wondering for us. For them travel offers less an opportunity for discovery than for self-discovery, with the world providing an exotic set of backdrops. To the extent that these travelers connect with the cultures they pass through, it’s as voyeurs, watching, fascinated or bored, as the sights pass by.
