Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey 9781442689671

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Writing Travel
Theoretical Overture
2. Chrono-Types: Notes on Forms of Time in the Travelogue
Enlightenment to Modernism
3. On Site: Pilgrimage and Authorship in Goethe’s ‘Third Pilgrimage’ and Italian Journey
4. ‘Trouver du nouveau?’ Baudelaire’s Voyages
5. Seafaring Jews, World History, and the Zionist Imaginary
6. Ruins Travel: Orphic Journeys through 1940s Germany
Postmodernism
7. Walking through Thought: Thomas Bernhard’s Walking and Peter Rosei’s Who Was Edgar Allan?
8. Charming the Carnivore: Bruce Chatwin’s Australian Odyssey
9. Touching the Real: Alternative Travel and Landscapes of Fear
10. Virtual Travellers: Cyberspace and Global Networks
Epilogue
11. ‘Tears at the End of the Road’: The Impasse of Travel and the Walls at Angel Island
Contributors
Index
German and European Studies

Citation preview

WRITING TRAVEL: THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF THE MODERN JOURNEY

G E R M A N A N D E U R O PE A N S T U D I E S General Editor: Jennifer Jenkins

Edited by JOHN ZILCOSKY

Writing Travel The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TO R ON TO P RE S S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-08020-9806-1

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Writing travel : the poetics and politics of the modern journey / edited by John Zilcosky. (German and European studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9806-1 1. Travelers’ writings – History and criticism. 2. Travel writing – History. 3. Travel writers. I. Zilcosky, John II. Series. PN56.T7W75 2008

809c.9332

C2008-903312-4

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

To the memory of Bianca Theisen (1960–2004)

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1 Writing Travel 3 john zilcosky Theoretical Overture 2 Chrono-Types: Notes on Forms of Time in the Travelogue barbara korte

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Enlightenment to Modernism 3 On Site: Pilgrimage and Authorship in Goethe’s ‘Third Pilgrimage’ and Italian Journey 57 kelly barry 4 ‘Trouver du nouveau?’ Baudelaire’s Voyages jonathan culler

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5 Seafaring Jews, World History, and the Zionist Imaginary 98 todd presner 6 Ruins Travel: Orphic Journeys through 1940s Germany julia hell

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viii Contents

Postmodernism 7 Walking through Thought: Thomas Bernhard’s Walking and Peter Rosei’s Who Was Edgar Allan? 163 bianca theisen 8 Charming the Carnivore: Bruce Chatwin’s Australian Odyssey 173 kenneth s. calhoon 9 Touching the Real: Alternative Travel and Landscapes of Fear gabriela nouzeilles 10 Virtual Travellers: Cyberspace and Global Networks ursula k. heise

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Epilogue 11 ‘Tears at the End of the Road’: The Impasse of Travel and the Walls at Angel Island 239 georges van den abbeele Contributors Index

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Acknowledgments

The idea for this volume came from a conversation I had with Bianca Theisen in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2002. Although Bianca passed away two years later, her critical, generous spirit pervades this book, which features work by some of her friends and colleagues. Writing Travel is dedicated to her memory. I’d like also to thank those who read parts of this book and offered enriching critiques: the two anonymous readers, Jim Retallack (erstwhile series editor at the University of Toronto Press), John Noyes, and, especially, David Clark. My research assistants, Simran Karir and Maria Euchner, worked tirelessly to whip the manuscript into shape, and my editors, Len Husband and Frances Mundy, helped me with savvy advice all along the way. As ever, Rebecca Wittmann read and reread the introduction, and was there for everything else; and our Charlie came just in time.

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INTRODUCTION

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1 Writing Travel john zilcosky

It is often said that travellers have stories to tell. Critics repeatedly point out how – from Herodotus to Odysseus to Marco Polo – travellers have returned home and started talking: spinning elaborate tales about their adventures, speaking of monsters, beauties, treasures, and harrowing escapes from danger.1 Storytelling perhaps even began with travel. One of the world’s earliest extant tales, from Egypt’s Twelfth Dynasty, describes a sailor shipwrecked on a marvellous island.2 Biblical and classical narrations – Gilgamesh, Exodus, the banishment of Cain, the Aeneid, the Odyssey – all tell of journeys. In Homeric Greece, storytelling was the traveller’s duty: Odysseus received hospitality (Xenía) from the Phaeaceans in exchange for his entertaining tales of travel. These ancient connections between journeys and narration brought Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay on the ‘Storyteller,’ to cite an old German proverb: ‘Wenn einer eine Reise tut, so kann er was erzählen’ (When we go travelling, we have stories to tell).3 Travellers are, for Benjamin, paradigmatic raconteurs. Contemporary critics take this one step further, claiming that all narration is a form of travel, exemplified by metaphor’s etymological root in ‘change of place’ (even today, Greek buses bear the sign ‘metaphor’).4 I. Travel/Writing But Benjamin is talking here about story telling – not story writing. And writing, as Benjamin insists later, differs radically from telling: telling demanded orality and community while writing – in the form of the modern novel, disseminated through the printing press – required silence and isolation.5 Vital to the development of the bourgeois subject,

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writing’s independence created – as our present volume emphasizes – a more ambivalent relation to travel. Whereas communal storytelling was part of the journey and enriched the plot, writing down narratives often implied the voyage’s end. Odysseus’ entertaining stories told to King Alcinous helped ensure the former’s safe further journey towards Ithaca, but whoever finally recorded The Odyssey did so only after the adventures – the Trojan War and the homecoming – were long in the past. Writing, as Benjamin insisted, demands solitude. It also calls for stillness, both mental (calm reflection on the events) and material (the immobility of the writing surface). Friedrich Nicolai had fashioned already by 1781 a rudimentary ‘portable quill with ink’ (the precursor to contemporary fountain pens) that allowed him to write while travelling in a shaky stagecoach without spilling ink.6 In 1907 Kafka described a traveller who had trouble even holding a notebook, much less writing in one, on a train that ‘beat on the rails like a hammer.’7 Goethe had discovered already in 1786 Italy that, even when not moving, travel writing was impeded: by ‘bad inns’ that were cold, without inkwells, and so cramped that the traveller could not even find space to ‘spread out a sheet of paper.’8 As Johannes Fabian reveals in his study of latenineteenth-century ethnographic expeditions through Africa, physical movement even affected literary style: notes made on the road were necessarily sketchy, documenting only the journey’s ‘narrative’; during days of rest, the writing became more detailed, allowing for ‘monographic accounts of peoples and customs.’9 This tension between travel and writing also appeared in the use of books as travel substitutes: when you have a book and are nestled in the bourgeois isolation against which Benjamin warned, there’s no need to go on the road at all. Unlike communal storytelling, the book allowed one to journey while remaining solitary and static in the comfort of one’s own home. This self-isolation gained critical mass during the birth pangs of the modern bourgeoisie – the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution – when readers and authors began preferring texts over trips. Sentenced to house arrest for duelling in 1790, the French soldier Xavier de Maistre created his insular Voyage autour de ma chambre. Preferring the ‘enchanting land of the imagination,’ Maistre claimed that he need never leave home again because his own room was that ‘delightful country’ that held ‘all the riches of life within its realm.’10 Immanuel Kant similarly declared eight years later in his Anthropologie that he had no need for travel since real anthropological work consisted primarily of learning about one’s own ‘home.’11 If we only pay attention to our

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homes, Kant suggests, we (enlightened cosmopolitans) are ‘always already travelled.’12 Note, too, that Kant, who never left Prussia, probably quenched his private, unscientific longings for foreignness through the travel books he devoured.13 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari theorized almost two centuries later that writing/reading could in fact take the place of travel: writing was an ‘immobile voyage that stays in one place,’ a magical supplement for the stay-at-home.14 The English travel writer Philip Glazebrook made a similar claim in his 1984 account of his journey to Turkey. Reading Victorian travelogues while on the road, Glazebrook sometimes lost himself in the books, going so far as to ignore the events of his own trip. When the books became more fascinating than the physical journey, Glazebrook concluded that he need not have left home at all, ‘except to travel to the London library.’15 Unlike storytelling, story writing competes here with travel. But travel and writing are not always in conflict. Beginning in the sixteenth century, writing became a necessary part of the voyage.16 Stephen Greenblatt describes how early modern European travellers conquered the Americas both politically and imaginatively: in a deluge of texts eventually circulated by the printing press, these ‘servants of the great representational machine’ delivered the ‘New World to the Old.’17 In more practical terms, the travellers’ political and commercial sponsors demanded maps and accounts, which eventually enticed investors and, later, settlers.18 Such settlers were also attracted by popular adventure stories: the boys books’ that created the ‘energizing myth’ of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imperialism.19 Furthermore, the late-nineteenth-century elite counterparts to these adventure stories – bourgeois travelogues – gave way seamlessly to early ethnography, which eventually prepared the way for modern colonization.20 Leopold II’s 1876 Geographical Conference, for example, assembled eminent travellers, presidents of important geographical societies, and major financiers in order to ‘facilitate the opening of routes along which civilization can penetrate the interior of the African continent.’21 The early ethnographic studies that followed laid the foundation for the exploration and domination of what would become the Belgian Congo.22 As the travel book industry boomed in the late eighteenth century, texts often served as goads not only for settlers but also for travel writers.23 Spurred on by descriptions of foreign lands, readers became travellers in the making, and when these travellers eventually started writing, they referred to – and competed with – their predecessors:

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Tobias Smollett with the prescriptive early writers of the Grand Tour; Goethe with his father (and Johann Winckelmann); Flaubert with Nerval.24 Nineteenth-century ethnographic expeditions were likewise intertwined with reading and writing. Often inspired by the ‘extraordinary adventures’ remembered from reading travelogues – so one African explorer put it – these journeys invariably led to more writing, especially to the obligatory ethnographic diary.25 Travel writing’s intertextuality, already present in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, became more explicit and playful in the twentieth. Goethe, the apprenticing late-eighteenth-century classicist, competed oedipally with his forebears; later, Kafka, the anonymous modern tourist, ironically traced the great man’s Italian footsteps; still later,26 W.G. Sebald repeated this story at a postmodern remove, deliberately following Kafka following Goethe.27 Such textual play appears also in the recent writings of Bruce Chatwin and Jonathan Raban, who quote liberally from earlier descriptions of Patagonia and Great Britain, respectively.28 Travel is always literary, they insist: we inevitably experience foreign lands in terms of the books we read, and these lands eventually become the texts we write about them. Chatwin intensifies travel’s connection to writing in his 1987 The Songlines, claiming that he travels only in order to write: ‘To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries; to lose a notebook was a catastrophe.’29 Sebald similarly views travel as part of the writing process, and thus insists on always travelling alone.30 Whereas story telling was part of the tale in ancient Greece, story writing enters the modern plot only through the immobile, isolated traveller: Goethe tears himself away from St Mark’s Square in 1786 in order to get back to his hotel and write; Glazebrook and Raban end their 1980s travelogues describing themselves writing; and Sebald depicts ‘Sebald’ scribbling at an Italian hotel terrace in 1990.31 For such authors, as for Michel Butor, ‘to travel (at least in a certain manner) is to write,’ and ‘to write is to travel.’32 Charles Grivel likewise claims that writing is travelling: ‘not keeping still, going where one isn’t.’33 This ‘going where one isn’t’ suggests – in both writing and travelling – the openness of the unimaginable and, what is more, points out the connections between travel theory and modern concepts of subjectivity: the self becomes itself only in another place, as in Freud’s description of the ego, ‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden’ (‘where it [id] was, I [ego] shall come to be’).34 Like the poet planning his journey in Baudelaire’s 1869 ‘N’importe où hors du monde,’ the traveller and the modern sub-

Writing Travel 7

ject are whole only elsewhere: in the utopian ‘no place’ (ou + topos) of creative writing, where ‘je ne suis pas.’35 And writing proposes this same tension within utopia, promising a wondrous place that is only present incompletely. Travel thus adds a new twist to the poststructuralist claim that writing is always about writing: it is also always about travel, at least in the sense that travellers, too, never finally arrive at their destinations. A vehicle of différance, travel stages desire’s continual temporal deferral and spatial difference.36 From the picaresque to the bildungsroman to the Beat novels, modernity grasps at travel’s mirages, repeatedly setting out for suspended utopias, where the self attempts to find itself through displacement.37 II. Travel Writing? If travel is writing and writing is travel, then what is ‘travel writing’? Modern travellers’ references to earlier travelogues suggest the existence of a tradition: from Goethe to Chatwin, travel writers refer to their predecessors, willy-nilly creating a canon. But can we speak of a genre? For centuries the literary profession ignored this question, denigrating travel writing as low-brow entertainment or, in the case of a ‘great writer’s’ travelogues, an insignificant appendix to the ‘collected works.’ As Grivel says, travel writing is ‘neglected literature.’ Compared to the ‘canonical genres,’ it can ‘hardly offer something like “works”’; the travel report is ‘exiled’ to the last volume of a writer’s oeuvre, as a kind of ‘leftover.’38 Only in the past two decades have critics begun asking the generic question: What is travel writing? Attempts to define it have immediately run up against the problem of travel writing’s heterogeneous form and content: written in prose, poetry, and dialogue, it appears as diaries, letters, tour guides, scientific writing, commercial reports, and ‘literary’ accounts. Furthermore, travel writing’s style is notoriously hybrid, ranging from the sober and scientific to the poetic and rhetorical. Barbara Korte, who has offered the most sustained and convincing poetics of travel writing, sees precisely this ‘hybridity’ of ‘modes and styles’ as a genre marker.39 For Korte, the prime example is Charles Darwin’s 1839 Voyage of the Beagle, which combines at least two distinct styles in one book: dry, scientific typology of, for example, the Galapagos finches (‘a group of finches, of which Mr. Gould considers there are thirteen species; and these he has distributed into four new sub-genera’), and highly subjective, Romantic lyric imagery (‘The entangled

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mass of the thriving and the fallen reminded me of the forests within the tropics; – yet there was a difference; for in these still solitudes, Death, instead of Life, seemed the predominant spirit’).40 This amalgamation of the scientific with the poetic – Darwin referred to Voyage as his ‘first literary child’ – marks the book, for Korte, as exemplary travel writing.41 But doesn’t such hybridity ultimately subvert Korte’s very attempt at delimitation? According to Mary Pratt, travel writing is simply too heterogeneous to be ‘circumscribed.’42 Dennis Porter similarly argues that we can refer only loosely to travel writing as a genre, in the Foucauldian sense of an ‘ignoble genre’: a group of disunified works – often products of mass culture – that resist hierarchies.43 Critics agree only at the most basic level: that travel writing is a narrated account of a voyage (generally told in the first person) based on ‘actual travels undertaken.’44 But even here, disagreements appear. How do we know which travels are real? Who supplies the evidence? The first ever Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge, 2002) wrestles awkwardly with these questions: in their canon-defining appendix, the editors place ‘travel writing’ (based on ‘actual travels’) in one column and ‘travel-related texts’ in the other. This typology relegates one of the foundational texts of modern travel writing – the mid-fourteenth-century Mandeville’s Travels – to the latter, non-canonical category. Now viewed as bogus (Mandeville never existed), Mandeville’s Travels toured late medieval and early modern Europe as an authentic text, apparently based on real adventures. It maintained an unquestioned authority – and smashing popularity – through the sixteenth century. Columbus carried a well-thumbed copy with him to the New World, and Mandeville’s Travels served as a stylistic model for him and many other sixteenth-century explorer-writers.45 Despite its ‘falseness,’ then, Mandeville’s Travels was the single most influential piece of modern travel writing, authored by its undisputed ‘father.’46 Similar classificatory problems abound in the Companion’s ‘canon’: Why, for example, is Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) ‘travel writing’ while Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) is not? Is Sterne’s alter ego, Yorick, somehow ‘realer’ than Kerouac’s Sal Paradise? I do not want to contest the endless border cases, but rather to argue that these categorizing tensions constitute travel writing’s central generic attribute.47 Debates over ‘travel liars’ are as old as travel writing itself: after describing his journey through Mesopotamia, Herodotus earned the moniker ‘father of lies’; Marco Polo has long been chastised for inventing details about the East; and Mandeville was finally

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unveiled, in the nineteenth century, as a thoroughgoing ‘liar.’ Mandeville’s most famous modern successor is Karl May, the fabulously popular fin de siècle German writer of Wild West stories, who until the end of his life never travelled to America.48 Postmodern travel writers such as Sebald deliberately incorporate this fact/fiction anxiety into their works by including photographs of train tickets, passports, and people, as if to prove that their journeys ‘really’ happened, only later to report that they found some of these artefacts in flea markets (without telling us which ones). This tension between truth and fiction is at the heart of travel writing, which has more pronounced authenticity problems than do other autobiographical writings because it often depicts solitary journeys to far-flung lands. Who could possibly corroborate these? What stay-at-home could protest a traveller’s account of, say, Patagonia? This built-in anxiety distinguishes travel writing as a genre: it exists not through its truth claims (its relation to ‘actual travels’) but through the very precariousness of these claims. This instability likely explains Mandeville’s Travels’s staying power at the origins of the modern genre. Early readers regarded it as ‘fact,’ and, just as wrongly, many late-twentieth-century critics viewed it as ‘fiction.’ This latter, more sophisticated reading asserted that Mandeville’s Travels was a brilliant work of the creative imagination, as in Mary Campbell’s claim that Mandeville’s Travels produced a salutary ‘imaginative’ ‘truth.’49 But even Campbell’s argument – despite its careful philosophical delineation of ‘two kinds of truth’ – ultimately defuses the radical power of Mandeville’s Travels, which inheres in its betrayal of its sincere pledge to its reader.50 The text’s energy flows out of this broken promise about a real world, and this violation cannot ultimately be smoothed over by an ‘imaginative’ truth.51 Mandeville’s Travels’s duplicity produces the modern genre’s electricity, and it catalyses the compelling travel writing that follows. Such ‘lies’ and ‘truths’ lead us to the larger, historical-political question surrounding travel. I hold on to the term ‘travel,’ as does James Clifford, despite – even because of – its historical ‘taintedness.’ ‘Travel’ invariably carries with it connotations of race, gender, and class, but precisely these implications make the term more critically explosive. Because it carries more historical baggage than, say, the relatively neutral ‘displacement,’ ‘travel’ demands a politically aware, self-critical exploration.52 In addition to examining the genre, the goal of this book therefore is to investigate how travel writing – created mainly by upperclass white men – has ‘produced “the rest of the world”’: how it has

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invented ‘others’ – women, people of colour, and the poor – in order to craft a certain image of ‘Europe.’53 More precisely, we consider how travel writing circulates ‘mimetic capital’ about others. I mean ‘capital,’ here, in the doubled economic/cultural sense. Requiring new resources and markets, capital encourages travel to far-flung places, and these travels produce representations that in turn become commodities (souvenirs) and cultural capital (knowledge).54 Because this cultural knowledge often appears as literature, its ‘investment’ is both political/ economic and aesthetic: this knowledge becomes a ‘style’ for dominating others.55 I say ‘others’ here, not ‘Orient,’ to avoid Edward Said’s overly rigid notion of centre (‘Occident’) and periphery (‘Orient’).56 Travel writing has no regard for such conventional centre/fringe models, as we see in nineteenth-century British and German descriptions of Ireland and Poland, respectively, and in bourgeois depictions of the urban slums.57 Despite these concerns, our contributors do not present travel writing primarily as an ideological tool of empire (although it is often that). As Porter contends in his criticism of discourse theory, travel writing – like all forms of ‘strong’ writing – often resists the ‘exercise of power coded within it.’58 Because such resistances are inseparable from formal particularities, this book combines critical-historical with structural analyses. And because travel writing’s politics and aesthetics are necessarily global, this book – unlike the others in this burgeoning field – moves beyond national boundaries, tracking modern (post-Enlightenment) ‘travel’ as it moves across political and linguistic borders.59 This transgression (literally, ‘stepping across’) allows us to theorize travel as it presents itself: in motion, crossing frontiers, ultimately uncontainable despite inevitable blockages. In the end, we consider how ‘theory’ itself travels and ask whether such theorizing might itself be a form of travel or tourism.60 III. Writing Travel in the Modern Era This book begins with Korte’s latest attempt to understand the genre: she investigates travel as a journey through time (not space!) and develops a structural ‘chrono-type’ for travel writing. This chrono-type sets the stage for this book’s own temporal journey. We begin with the late eighteenth century, even though, as discussed above, travel writing begins well before this: with the Biblical and classical narratives; with Marco Polo and ‘Mandeville’; with pilgrimage accounts, which pre-

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scribed thousands of journeys to the Holy Land in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and with the paradigmatic early modern stories of exploration and conquest by Columbus and Cortés.61 But travel writing underwent a swift change during the Enlightenment, which produced an unheard-of confidence in European civilization – reflected in the writing about the ‘rest of the world’ and Europe. In Europe, the Grand Tours to the centre of the continent – Boswell’s, Smollet’s, Diderot’s – reaffirmed ‘our’ common ‘civilized heritage.’ Beyond Europe, the unprecedented voyages of global navigation – Bougainville’s, Cook’s, Humboldt’s – described strange lands and peoples that eventually became objectified as European knowledge.62 Both the Grand Tourists and the great explorers reflected self-consciously on themselves as travel writers: The former drew on Addison and the medieval pilgrims, the latter referred back to Columbus and Cortés. By ruminating about itself as a tradition, travel writing began to gain the confidence and consolidation of a genre, however loosely defined. Writing Travel’s journey begins in this era – following Korte’s theoretical overture – with Goethe’s 1775 ‘Third Pilgrimage to Erwin’s Grave.’ According to Kelly Barry, Goethe, like the British Grand Tourists, knowingly reworked the typical pilgrimage account; but Goethe uniquely and deliberately disrupted its conventions, creating in its place a highly subjective, distinctly modern text. While in Venice in 1786, Goethe had already complained about the masses of travellers threatening original expression, and it would not be long before the modern tourist industry exploded. Karl Baedeker produced his first guides in the 1830s, Thomas Cook organized his first tour in 1841, and the word ‘tourist’ – in its contemporary derogatory form – entered regular parlance.63 Just as economic modernity and the burgeoning middle class supported tourism, aesthetic modernity resisted it. Baudelaire first theorized the term ‘modernité’ in 1863 as more than simply a restaging of the seventeenthcentury querelle des Anciens et des Modernes: he claimed that modernity allowed one to internalize travel, over and against tourism, through the highly individualized urban stroller – the flâneur.64 Not surprisingly, as Jonathan Culler points out, Baudelaire’s actual exotic travels disappointed him, but precisely this disappointment became the catalyst for his body of travel poetry: his antitravel oeuvre par excellence. The heyday of nineteenth-century tourism coincided with the era of high imperialism, featuring the 1870s scramble for Africa, the 1877 proclamation of Queen Victoria as ‘Empress of India,’ and the 1884–5 Berlin conference to partition the ‘dark continent.’ Buttressed philo-

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sophically by academic ‘Orientalism’ as well as by Hegel’s theory of ‘world-historical’ nations, imperial discourse also influenced fin de siècle European Zionism. As Todd Presner argues, Zionists used the literary-philosophical trope of seafaring to transform Jews into extensions of ‘European Universalism,’ and Zionists later employed this colonial rhetoric in their conquest of Palestine. The devastation of the Second World War redefined how people got from place to place. Europe’s transportation system was in ruins. In many German cities, human motion reverted to prehistoric conditions: not even horses were available to relieve pedestrians from hours-long walks through Berlin.65 The masses of refugees across the continent – from Stalingrad to Paris – caused Evelyn Waugh to remark in 1945 that there was ‘no room for tourists in a world of “displaced persons.”’ 66 With everyone on the road, and home unrecognizable, a new kind of travel developed – ‘ruins travel’ – that led to a revolution in writing. Julia Hell describes this postapocalyptic travel through the eyes of Hans Erich Nossack, a celebrated postwar author whom Sebald returned to the spotlight with his 1997 lectures on Air War and Literature. In Nossack’s journeys through 1940s Germany, he attempted to describe the details of the invisible: the destroyed cities. Nossack’s Downfall apparently returns modernism to nineteenth-century ‘realist’ description – but only of a world that is always in the process of disintegration. There and not there at the same time, Nossack’s realist world paradoxically resists representation. The disorientations of ruins travel – Albert Speer could no longer find his way through the 1945 Nuremberg that he had designed – set the stage for travel writing’s epistemological subversions in the 1970s. Their centres and infrastructures destroyed, European cities became unnavigable postmodern extensions into space. Thomas Bernhard and Peter Rosei turn this trope of disorientation into a playful poetics of walking, as Bianca Theisen describes. Consciously borrowing from the eighteenth-century Rousseauian nature walker and the nineteenth-century Baudelairean flâneur, Bernhard and Rosei construct wanderers who, even more so than the flâneur, lose themselves in the mazes of their own perceptions. Bruce Chatwin, likewise, was fascinated with mapping and (dis)orientation, attempting in The Songlines to retrace the ritual walkabouts of indigenous Australians. A dazzling intertext, The Songlines reconfigures the vulnerable ancient travellers, Odysseus and Cain, and demonstrates what Kenneth Calhoon calls the traveller’s innate fragility, his ‘human-ness.’ Chatwin’s landmark In Patagonia

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forms the background for Gabriela Nouzeilles’s study of extreme ‘alternative travel’: the attempt to get even more off the beaten path than Chatwin, often by risking one’s life. Like nineteenth-century antitourism, these twenty-first-century masculinist efforts to ‘touch the real’ often inadvertently reproduce the tourism they long to undermine – not least through the Lonely Planet guidebooks, which bring masses of Westerners precisely to the spots supposedly absent of them. These adventurous journeys towards the geographic ‘real’ coincide with the burgeoning of simulated voyages. As Jean Baudrillard remarked already in 1981, the relation between reality and sign seems to have reversed itself: ‘The territory no longer precedes the map‘; instead, the map ‘precedes the territory.’67 Baudrillard’s work foreshadows the computer mapping that will eventually determine the territory of the internet, a terrain open to the ‘post-geographic’ journeys described by Ursula Heise. The ‘cyberspaces,’ ‘metaverses,’ and ‘data lines’ documented by today’s cyberpunk novelists destruct the geographic distinction between ‘home’ and ‘away,’ allowing us to go everywhere precisely by going nowhere. We are now virtually back with Kant, who crossed philosophical borders by never crossing a border. For the Enlightened cosmopolitan and today’s Web surfer,68 the same adage applies: home is so complex that we are always travelling even when we are dwelling.69 This unravelling of the distinction between ‘home’ and ‘away’ leads to the ‘impasse of travel’ in this book’s epilogue. Georges Van Den Abbeele recalls the early-twentieth-century Chinese immigrants who carved poems on the walls of California’s Angel Island while they waited – indefinitely – for admission into the United States. As Van Den Abbeele points out, these travellers’ detainments – and their anonymous wall etchings – articulated a theoretical stalemate at the heart of modern travel and travel writing, at least in the post-Enlightenment sense of bourgeois subject formation through mobility. Over and against the louder voices celebrating the post-1980s ‘new world citizens,’ whose travel writing produced a ‘new kind of international society’ (I think of Granta’s championing of Chatwin, Theroux, Fenton, etc.),70 these earlier writings sketched the track of a quieter new world citizen: a subject who is disempowered (the Chinese writers never signed their poems out of fear of reprisal) and immobile (these ‘travellers’ could not move). The historical ends of European travel – the creation of the largest ‘democratic’ land in the world through immigration – led here to travel’s end. The United States’ racist anti-Asian legislation

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fashioned subjects who were ‘on the road’ yet sedentary. They remained categorically undefineable, not even ‘immigrants’ because they had not yet arrived. Is this writing of detainment a subset of travel writing, or vice versa? And how can we talk today about a writing of detainment without considering the many contemporary impasses of travel, most obviously that of the unclassifiable ‘enemy combatants’ still incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay? Some of these, as Michael Winterbottom documents in The Road to Guantánamo, are travellers in the strictest sense: Pakistani Englishmen journeying from their homes in Tipton (England) to Pakistan for a wedding, heading haphazardly into Afghanistan just as the Americans started their 2001 attack, landing in American captivity, and finally flying towards Camp X-Ray. Might there be, unknown to us, a travel writing of Guantánamo Bay?71 Probably yes, if we consider the ingenuity of Angel Island’s wall writers and, more recently, the prose of ‘illegal’ aliens held in Australia’s detention camps. One such refugee, Rhaman Shiri, sat in his cell in Port Hedland Detention Centre and stared at the wall scratchings of his predecessors: ‘the graffiti on the walls written in various tongues; Arabic, Persian, English and Sri Lankan or Bangladeshi.’72 Shiri’s own writings describe the torments of indeterminate arrest and, more specifically, his mourning for the life he once thought he might live, a life marked by travel, mobility, and progress. Instead, after being held for two years, Shiri was finally deported. His present whereabouts, like his present writings, are unknown. Shiri’s sorrowful prose and its temporary disappearance exemplify travel writing’s contemporary crux: the end of travel through detainment creates a different kind of travel writing, written by an immobilized ‘new world’ citizenry, living as far off the beaten track as we can imagine.

N OTE S 1 To cite just a few: Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 1–7; Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of The South Seas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 3; Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2–3. 2 ‘The Shipwrecked Sailor,’ in Egyptian Tales Translated from the Papyri: Volume

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1: IVth to XIIth Dynasty, trans. William Matthew Flinders Petrie (Boston: Adamant Media, 2001), 75–88. See Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts, 3. Walter Benjamin, ‘Der Erzähler,’ in Illuminationen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 386. My translation. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. See Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 2. Benjamin, ‘Der Erzähler,’ 389. Although a form of reservoir pen existed already in tenth century, these ‘pens’ remained unreliable for the next nine hundred years, not taking their modern form – and becoming patented and widely used – until the nineteenth century. Nicolai’s ‘portable quill’ was thus probably not flawless, but it revolutionized his travels so much that he included a detailed description and sketch of it in his appendices. Michael Finlay, Western Writing Implements in the Age of the Quill Pen (Wetheral, Carlisle, Cumbria: Plain Books, 1990), 40–50; Nicolai, Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781 (Berlin, 1783), 1:21–2; see also Nicolai’s Appendix I.2 and Plate IV (fig. 1). I thank John Noyes for the reference to Nicolai. Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, vol. 1 (Text), ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1993), 31; for the English translation, see Wedding Preparations in the Country, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), 22. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Tagebuch der italienischen Reise 1786 (Frankfurt: Insel, 1976), 153. Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 246. Xavier de Maistre, A Journey around My Room, trans. Andrew Brown (London: Hesperus, 2004), 66, 67. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Practical Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4. David L. Clark, ‘The Man Who Mistook an Aunt for a Duck: Kant’s Freakery,’ unpublished Plenary Lecture, International Conference on Romanticism, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (15 November 2003). See also Clark’s Bodies and Pleasures in Late Kant, forthcoming with Stanford University Press. According to Thomas de Quincey’s polemic, Kant read only travel books and was even addicted to them (The Works of Thomas de Quincey [Cambridge, 1877], 9:450). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 35. See John Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 5.

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15 Philip Glazebrook, Journey to Kars (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [1984]), 240. See Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, trans. Catherine Matthias (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 147. 16 Philip Edwards claims that, in the sixteenth century, the ‘act of writing’ became an ‘indispensable part of making voyages’ (Last Voyages: Cavendish, Hudson, Ralegh [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988], 8). Mary C. Fuller further argues that three major technologies spread through early modern Europe and necessitated the travel/writing confluence: the sailor’s compass, gunpowder, and the printing press. ‘The compass got you there, the gun protected you and functioned as a kind of cultural magic, and printing allowed you to reproduce and disseminate what you had learned, in the form of maps, vocabularies, histories, and so on.’ Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1. 17 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 145. 18 See Hulme and Youngs, Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, 3. 19 Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York: Basic Books, 1979), xi. For the influence of such boys’ books on Kafka’s ‘colonial visions,’ see Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, esp. chs. 4 and 5. 20 This is a main argument from Fabian’s Out of Our Minds (see esp. 7, 279). 21 Exploration: Journal des conquêtes de la civilization sur tous les points du globe, 18 vol. (Paris, 1876–84), vol. 1 (1876), 4–5. Quoted in Fabian, Out of Our Minds, 14. 22 See Fabian, Out of Our Minds, esp. 14, 48, 277. 23 Korte, English Travel Writing, 86. 24 For Smollet’s literary response to the Grand Tour, see Korte, English Travel Writing, 53–5. 25 Jérôme Becker, La vie en Afrique; ou trois ans dans l’Afrique centrale (Brussels: J. Lebègue, 1887), vol. 2, 352. Cf. Fabian, Out of Our Minds, 255. For the ubiquity of the ethnographic diary, see Fabian, 248. 26 While in Malcesine in September 1913, Kafka mentions Goethe’s Italian Journey, telling his sister that he and an Italian official disagreed comically about the exact spot where Goethe had nearly been arrested as an ‘Austrian spy’ in 1786. Kafka, Briefe an Ottla und die Familie (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1974), 20. See Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 44, 216n13. 27 W.G. Sebald, ‘Dr. K.s Badereise nach Riva,’ in Schwindel. Gefühle (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002 [1990]), 157–83. See Zilcosky, ‘Sebald’s Uncanny Travels,’ in J.J. Long and Anne Whitehead, eds., W.G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 102–20 (esp. 106).

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28 Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia (London: Picador, 1979 [1977]); Jonathan Raban, Coasting (London: Picador, 1987 [1986]). 29 Chatwin, The Songlines (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), 160. See Korte, English Travel Writing, 146. 30 ‘You can’t see anything as a pair; you have to be by yourself.’ Maya Jaggi, ‘Recovered Memories,’ interview with W.G. Sebald, The Guardian, 22 September 2001. 31 Goethe, Tagebuch der italienischen Reise 1786, 100 (for similar scenes, see 107, 121, 126, 127, 142); Glazebrook, Journey to Kars, 237–40; Raban, Coasting, 296–301; Sebald, Schwindel. Gefühle, 107–9 (for a similar scene, see 118). 32 Michel Butor, ‘Travel and Writing,’ Mosaic 8, no. 1 (1974): 1–16 (here, 2). See Korte, English Travel Writing, 146. 33 Charles Grivel, ‘Travel Writing,’ in Materialities of Communication, ed. HansUlbricht Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 242–57 (here, 254; Grivel’s emphasis). 34 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,’ lecture 31 in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (London and New York: Penguin, 1991), 112. 35 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Anywhere out of the world – N’importe où hors du monde,’ Petits Poèmes en Prose (Le Spleen de Paris) (Paris: Garnier, 1958), 211– 13 (here, 211). 36 See Jacques Derrida’s definition of différance as both deferral (temporal) and difference (spatial), in Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance,’ in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1–27 (here, 7–8). 37 Cf. Derrida’s complementary description of différance’s disruption of the utopian desire for self-presence (albeit only in terms of writing, not travel): the subject desires ‘silent and intuitive consciousness’ but can never fulfil this desire, never ‘be present to itself, as speaking or signifying, without the play of linguistic or semiological différance.’ Derrida, ‘Différance,’ 16. 38 Grivel, ‘Travel Writing,’ 256. 39 Korte, English Travel Writing, 15. 40 Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 276, 175. 41 Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (New York: Dover, 1958), 40; Korte, English Travel Writing, 15–16. 42 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11. 43 Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 19. 44 Hulme and Youngs, Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, 279.

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45 Cf. Greenblatt’s chapters on Mandeville and Columbus in Marvelous Possessions, 26–118. 46 Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 149. 47 For similar claims, see Korte, English Travel Writing, 10–12, and Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 147 (travel writing ‘hovers at the brink of the fictional abyss’). 48 Consider also the Austrian writer Robert Müller, who claimed to have travelled to North and South America to gain information for his books, but most likely was never there. See Thomas Schwarz, ‘Die kolonialen Obsessionen des Nervösen. 1915: Freilandphantasien in Robert Müllers Tropen,’ in Mit Deutschland um die Welt: Eine Kulturgeschichte des Fremden in der Kolonialzeit, eds. Alexander Honold and Klaus R. Scherpe (Stuttgart: Metzler 2004), 457–63. On ‘travel liars’ in general, see Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars 1660–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); and Zweder von Martels, ed., Travel Fact and Travel Fiction: Studies on Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly Discovery, and Observation in Travel Writing (Leiden: Brill, 1994). 49 Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 159. For earlier, less subtle categorizations of Mandeville’s Travels as ‘fiction,’ see Josephine Waters Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville (New York: Modern Language Association, 1954); Donald R. Howard, ‘The World of Mandeville’s Travels,’ Yearbook of English Studies 1 (1971): 1–17, and Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Christian K. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), ch. 6; and C.W.R.D. Moseley, Introduction to The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). 50 Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 161. 51 Greenblatt similarly criticizes Campbell’s ‘imaginative truth’ as ‘misleading because it detaches the work from its truth claims and from the history of its reception, a history based not upon a willing suspension of disbelief but upon trust’ (Marvelous Possessions, 33; see also 160n22). In fairness to Campbell, she does note that late medieval readers unquestionably expected Mandeville to be telling the truth: Mandeville made use of a ‘traditionally documentary form’ devised to ‘transmit facts and never previously used with any antifactual intent’ (The Witness and the Other World, 147, 139). 52 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 39. 53 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 5. See also Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 5–6.

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54 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 6. 55 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), xxi, and Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 3. 56 For an early critique of Said in this regard, see James Clifford, ‘On Orientalism,’ in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 255–76. 57 On English travellers to Ireland, see Glenn Hooper, Travel Writing and Ireland, 1760–1860: Culture, History, Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2005). On German descriptions of Poland, see Kristin Kopp, Contesting Borders: German Colonial Discourse and the Polish Eastern Territories, PhD. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2001. On middle-class touristic accounts of nineteenth-century urban poerty in London, New York, and Pittsburgh, respectively, see F.S. Schwarzenbach, ‘“Terra Incognita” – An Image of the City in English Literature, 1820–1855,’ in The Art of Travel, ed. Philip Dodd (London: Frank Cass, 1982), 61–84; Carrie Bramen Tirado, ‘The Urban Picturesque and the Spectacle of Americanization,’ American Quarterly 52, no. 3 (September 2000): 444–77; and Edward Slavishak, Bodies of Work: Civic Displayy and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 58 Porter, Haunted Journeys, 6. 59 In addition to the Cambridge Companion, The Art of Travel, and Korte’s English Travel Writing, which discuss only British writers, see Peter J. Brenner’s two volumes analysing German-language writers: Der Reisebericht: Die Entwicklung einer Gattung in der deutschen Literatur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), and Der Reisebericht in der deutschen Literatur: Ein Forschungsüberblick als Vorstudie zu einer Gattungsgeschichte (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990). On the other extreme, Anne Fuchs and Theo Harden’s edited volume, Reisen im Diskurs: Modelle der literarischen Fremderfahrung von den Pilgerberichten bis zur Postmoderne (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1995), discusses international travel from the medieval period through today, and thus cannot produce the concentrated historical analysis (of post-Enlightenment modernity) for which we aim. 60 On travelling theory, see Edward Said, ‘Traveling Theory,’ Raritan 1, no. 3 (Winter 1982): 41–67. For a criticism of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘nomadism’ as ‘theoretical tourism,’ see Dean MacCannell’s sociological classic, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1989), xvii (originally published in 1976). See also Georges Van Den Abbeele’s review of MacCannell (‘Sightseers: The Tourist as Theorist,’ diacritics 10 [December 1980]: 2–14); and Caren Kaplan’s ‘Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of

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62 63

64

65 66 67 68

69 70

John Zilcosky Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,’ Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987): 187–98, and Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 93. For a detailed account of early travel writing (ad 400–1600), see Campbell, who begins with what is arguably the earliest travelogue proper – Egeria’s late-fourth-century pilgrimage, Peregrinato ad terram sanctam – and ends with Columbus and Ralegh. She describes the pilgrimage guidebooks from the Late Middle Ages as ‘foreshadowing the degradation of eighteenthcentury Grand Tour accounts into nineteenth-century Baedekers’ (The Witness and the Other World, 127). Korte discusses these pilgrimage guidebooks within the history of the travel-writing genre in her English Travel Writing, 23–8. Porter, Haunted Journeys, 19. See James Buzard’s discussion of how, in the nineteenth century, selfanointed ‘good’ travellers coined the term ‘tourist’ to distinguish themselves from their ‘bad’ counterparts. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1–79. I refer here to Baudelaire’s essay on Constantin Guys, ‘Le peintre de la vie moderne’ (written in 1859–60 and published in 1863). Walter Benjamin emphasizes the critical aspects of Baudelaire’s flânerie, including its opposition to tourism, in his various works on Baudelaire, best collected in English in Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006), and in The Arcades Project (Das Passagenwerk). For an explication of the paradoxes constitutive of Baudelaire’s concept of modernité, including his discovery of ‘the impossibility of being modern,’ see Paul de Man, ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity,’ in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 142–65 (here, 144). See Eine Frau in Berlin (Frankfurt: Eichborn, 2003). 6 Evelyn Waugh, When the Going Was Good (London: Duckworth, 1946), 11 (preface written in 1945). Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation (Paris: Galilée, 1981), 10. As David Clark writes of Kant, ‘the being-cosmopolitan of the cosmopolitan is to be found in the expectation that one is always already travelled’ (Clark, ‘The Man Who Mistook an Aunt for a Duck: Kant’s Freakery’). On the narrowing distinction between ‘travelling’ and ‘dwelling,’ see Clifford, Routes, 17–46. For a celebration of Granta’s celebration, see Jim Philip, ‘Reading Travel Writing,’ in Recasting the World: Writing after Colonialism, ed. Jonathan White

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(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 241–55 (quotations from 253 and 251). See also Granta 10 (1984), 20 (1986), 26 (1989). 71 After completing this essay, I discovered the story of the Pakistani poet, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, who scratched poetry onto Styrofoam cups with his fingernails during his three-year imprisonment in Guantánamo, where pens and paper were initially forbidden. When they finally received pens, he and his brother, Badr Zaman Badr, composed about 25,000 lines of verse, the best of which were memorized by the other inmates. Badr relates this story in ‘Habeas, Schmabeas,’ the Peabody Award–winning 10 March 2006 edition of This American Life, produced by Chicago Public Radio (an updated version was aired on 27 April 2007). 72 Rhaman Shiri, ‘Romeo & Juliet Deserted,’ Southerly 64, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 69–74. For a discussion of Shiri and other Australian immigrant detainees in the context of Levinasian ethics, see Claire Loughnan, ‘On Being at Home with Oneself: On Dwelling and the Refuge in Levinas,’ unpublished lecture presented at ‘My “Place in the Sun”: Levinas Today Centenary Conference,’ University of Queensland, 30 July 2006. I thank David Clark for the reference to Loughnan.

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THEORETICAL OVERTURE

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2 Chrono-Types: Notes on Forms of Time in the Travelogue barbara korte

1. The Temporalities of Travel, Travel Writing, and Reading Travel is a spatio-temporal experience since space and time are the fundamental – in Kantian terms, ‘apriorical’ – categories through which we always perceive, make sense of, and act in reality. Actually, during travel one often tends to be more aware than in everyday life of a dayby-day organization and progress; thus, one has to observe a precise scheduling by hours and minutes. Many travellers keep daily records in the form of logs and journals, and more formal travel writing sometimes retains such a journal structure, with precise dating for the individual sections – for example, James Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1786), or a modern classic of English travel writing, Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937). Byron frequently refers not only to coordinates in space, but also to points and phases in time: ‘Mazar-iSherif (1200 ft, 122 miles from Andkhoi), 26 May. I must confess that for me our arrival here this evening was a solemn occasion. I left England in August with two hopes: one, to see the monuments of Persia; the other to reach this town. Neither was very formidable, but they have taken some time to fulfill.’1 The title of another well-known piece of English travel writing, Evelyn Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days: A Journey in Guiana and Brazil (1934), even gives precedence to time over place, and the text later suggests that the very time spent on the trip should engage some of the reader’s interest: ‘An experience which for me was worth six months of my time, a fair amount of money and a great deal of exertion may be worth a few hours’ reading to others.’2 Waugh’s book does not preserve a diary structure, but here, too, reference to place is often combined with precise indications of travelled time: ‘We left camp at

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6.45 and, taking an hour and a half’s rest between 11 and 12.30, reached Karto [...] at 4.45. The last few hours were very painful, first climbing a hillside of sharp pebbles in the full glare of the afternoon sun, and then crossing a dead flat tableland of hot, iron-hard earth’ (135). Most travelogues give dates at least for the beginning and end as well as significant laps of a journey (the beginning of Waugh’s trip to Guiana, for example, is dated December 1932), mention how long it took the traveller to cover certain distances and whether there were delays or how long one stayed in a certain place, and so forth. To Waugh, an impression of the time that passed, and was felt to pass, during a trip – an impression of travel’s ‘checks and hesitations’ – is essential to convey to the reader the ‘genuine flavour’ of the trip: ‘Were one to be levitated on a magic carpet and whisked overnight from place to place, one would see all that was remarkable but it would be a very superficial acquaintance’ (151). Time reference in the travelogue contributes to a text’s reality effect, supporting the genre expectation that travelogues are based on actual journeys, but it also plays a role in determining the impression(s) a reader will form of a depicted journey on the basis of this journey’s narrative. Yet, despite this obvious relevance of temporality, criticism has discussed travel and the travelogue primarily in terms of space.3 This is not quite unexpected, since at first thought one tends to conceive of travel as an activity taking one through and to certain locations; accordingly, many travelogues are illustrated with pictures and maps. And though every piece of travel writing constructs a specific world and thus implies a ‘chronotope’ or ‘time-space,’ the genre’s general understanding appears to privilege space over time: armchair travellers would find a travelogue without place description more unusual than one that makes only a minimal reference to travelled time. Topos apparently needs to be a theme in travel writing, if a piece of writing is to be identified as such; whereas chronos can, but does not need to be, thematic. A discussion of the treatment of time in travel writing cannot be restricted to time and time experience as theme, however. It intersects with the temporality of the (narrative) text as such. Writing and reading are sequential processes and hence temporal per se. On top of that, narrative texts require at least a minimal sequence of events, or story. A travelogue as text thus has a time dimension whether time experience is thematic in this text or not,4 and some travelogues mention the temporalities of writing and reading explicitly. In the excerpt already quoted, Waugh shows an awareness of the (few) hours

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it will take readers to read his book, and he is even more aware of the time that composing the text will consume. In fact, Ninety-Two Days begins not with Waugh setting out on his journey, but with Waugh embarking on the process of writing – after a longish period of hesitation – on 12 October 1933: ‘At last, relentlessly, inevitably, the lugubrious morning has dawned; day of wrath which I have been postponing week by week for five months.’ The time calculated for writing and ‘reliving’ the journey is given as ‘the next month or two’ (7, 11). We find similar references to the temporality of writing and reading in the travel books of Charles Dickens, who, as writer of serialized fiction and editor of the periodical press, may well have developed a particular sensitivity for text and reading time. Thus, when Dickens reaches the end of a chapter in American Notes (1842), his account of a tour through the United States and Canada, we read that ‘I am not aware that I have any occasion to prolong this chapter,’5 and a few pages later, the reader is asked to ‘pause and reflect upon the difference between this town and those great haunts of desperate misery.’ In Pictures from Italy (1846), the reader is imagined as a travelling companion who is issued a passport in the book’s preface and, at the end of one lap in the journey, is expected to be just as exhausted as the traveller himself: ‘At present, let us breathe after this long-winded journey’ (283). Analysing time in the travelogue, then, involves a complex set of questions directed, on the one hand, at the temporality of travel as a thematic element. On the other hand, the text’s discursive formation – its linguistic and narrative elements and structures – has its own impact on how readers construct a sense of time for the trip they are reading about. It is the aim of the following sections to sketch basic criteria, ‘chrono-typical’ distinctions, for the analysis and description of these complexes. This involves parameters discussed in a wide range of disciplines: the nature and the experience of time as such (for example, in philosophy, physics, psychology, cognitive science, ethnology, and social and cultural history),6 as well as the linguistic and narrative means of rendering time in (narrative) texts (as discussed in grammar, stylistics, and narratology). What I wish to propose in this essay, therefore, is that textual and, above all, narratological categories be integrated into the discussion of time in travel writing – not as a complement to a more narrowly understood anthropological approach, but as an integral part of such an approach. For it is to a large extent through constructing narratives that human subjects make sense of the world, and the study of narrative – especially in the emerging field of a

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context-sensitive and culturally orientated narratology – has begun to take a major share in the disciplines now referred to as literary and/or cultural anthropology.7 A narratological analysis of the different ways in which time is textualized and narrated in travel writing permits one, as the final section will illustrate, to gain a detailed and complex impression of the mental frames of time experience under which travel has been conducted over the ages and out of different cultural environments. 2. Time as Theme: The Temporality of the Travelled World and the Traveller’s Experience 2.1. Selective Temporality The impression of travelled time that a travelogue – or part of a travelogue – imparts varies from minimal to highly developed. This variation can be explained with artistic choice and ideological underpinnings of travel in certain contexts (see 4.1 below), but also, quite simply, with the more practical reason that keeping a regular diary or log during a trip may be cumbersome for the traveller. As Johannes Fabian points out, not even explorers, with their strong interest in a precise record of their observations, have always been able to keep their journals conscientiously: ‘There can be no doubt that most of them wrote against, not with, the flow of time; in order to record what happened daily, they had to take “time out” from the quotidian.’8 How much of a journey’s temporal progress and/or traveller’s experience of time are remembered when a travelogue is composed may thus be influenced by how extensive a record was taken in these respects during the actual trip. It seems fair to speculate that for many travellers, taking note(s) of the existents of the travelled world was of greater importance than recording a more fleeting personal experience of time. So the very fact that the temporality of travel and its experience is made thematic in a text qualifies as a first chrono-typical distinction. Note, however, that even where a sense of time is prominent, it is always already a highly selective construct. Travel writers strive not to bore their readers, and their texts therefore leave out or summarize certain stretches of a journey. Thus Waugh notes in Ninety-Two Days that ‘it would be tedious to record the daily details of the journey to Kurupukari’ and that ‘it would be tedious to describe the next two days in detail’ (40, 107). As we will see, however, travel writers may find it worthwhile to convey the tedium and monot-

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ony during a journey itself as a memorable and hence readable travel experience. 2.2. The Chronotope The travelogue’s selective rendering of a journey’s temporality implies a second chrono-typical category: What kind of time-space is implied for a journey, and to what extent does a text encourage its readers to form a mental image of a chronotope in which the axis of chronos plays a more than nominal role? Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope refers to ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.’ Through his discussion of the chronotopes found in certain types of prose fiction, Bakhtin intended to contribute to a ‘historical poetics,’ postulating that ‘the chronotope in literature has an intrinsic generic significance. It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions.’9 In its most fundamental generic understanding, the travelogue is defined by the chronotope of a route covered in a certain amount of time during a specific trip. But within this basic chronotope, a wide range of variation is possible, and a great part of that variation is a consequence of how strongly (or weakly) the time axis of the chronotope is ‘staged’ or not. Narratives of travel that pay attention primarily to ‘objective’ experience – to seeing and making inventories of places, people, and customs – typically focus more on existents in certain locations (and therefore have a space-dominated chronotope) than on what happens and is experienced temporally ‘along the way’ (see 4.1). But in other cases, a travelogue’s chronotope emphasizes the journey’s dynamic, as in Eric Newby’s The Big Red Train Ride (1978). In this account of a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway through the former Soviet Union, much travel time is spent in the moving train, and the journey’s chronotope emerges as one in which space is traversed from station to station, according to the train’s timetable: The next station of any consequence would be Kotelnich, the junction for the line to Gorkiy, formerly Nizhny Novgorod, now a city of over a million people, the seventh largest in the USSR. At 11.36 the train stole, ghost-like, into Kotelnich ... At the end of the statutory three minutes stopping time the train left as quietly as it had arrived, without so much as a hoot or a whistle; so quietly that I wondered if the driver and his mate had got down to stretch their

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Barbara Korte legs, having forgotten to put the brakes on and we were now off on a down-gradient, heading for a spectacular disaster ... However it was not to be. As our car drew abreast of the station entrance I saw the station-master standing rigidly at attention in full uniform and pointing a baton at the train, rather in the manner of an imperious monarch banishing a subject to Siberia, which in a sense was what he was doing.10

When a journey is of the quest type, that is, when one travels with the fulfilment of a specific goal or expectation in mind, the chronotope can also gain a strong temporal dynamic – especially when reaching the goal becomes difficult and/or the traveller is running out of time because the journey’s time-space reaches a predetermined temporal limit.11 This happens in William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu (1989), where the traveller and his companion barely manage to fulfil the ultimate aim of their journey, depositing a phial of holy oil in the ruins of the palace of Kubla Khan. Before embarking on the final lap of their trip, they have booked their flight back to England: ‘We had a very tight schedule. We calculated that it would take two days of nonstop travelling to get to Duolon, the nearest town to the ruins, and two further days to return. Our charter flight, the only one we could afford for a fortnight, left in six days. This left only one day spare in which to get to the ruins from Duolon, a distance of about twenty-five miles ... Whether or not we succeeded in finding Xanadu in that one day left to us, we would have to return to Peking or else miss our flight.’12 They manage to reach Duolon, with ‘twelve hours to find Xanadu,’ but are then detained by Mongol security guards for many hours: ‘Time was running out’ (Xanadu, 297). Eventually, however, the police help them reach Xanadu at the last minute. A chronotope with a time limit here permits the writer to build up suspense. But the sense of time at the end of In Xanadu is acute not simply because of the journey’s special chronotope. Throughout, this travelogue conveys a high degree of the traveller’s personal experience of time. 2.3. The Experience of Time To reconstruct the time experience conveyed by a piece of travel writing, a reader activates his or her own everyday experience with and knowledge about time, and when reader and traveller/writer do not share the same cultural context, their frames for experiencing time may

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deviate from each other to a certain extent. There is no time (nor space) here to address the complexities of time experience. It must suffice to note that the average traveller – as well as the reader – will have a normal adult’s awareness that time ‘passes,’ that, in ordinary real-life experience, time passes in only one direction and is continuous, and that time can be organized into present, past, and future. The notion of psychological (or ‘subjective’) time refers to the sense of time that an individual experiences during a certain situation; it is constructed on the basis of general dispositions for time perception (determined by brain structure and acquired frames, including cultural ones), a person’s memory and momentary sense input, and rational assessment, as well as emotional components. During travel, the extent to which a subjective experience of time is noted as ‘remarkable’ will vary considerably, and consequently so does the extent to which subjective experience of time enters a piece of travel writing. In order to become remarkable, an experience of time does not have to be extraordinary. One becomes aware of time during travel, for instance, when a mode of transport appears to accelerate or slow down one’s accustomed perception of space, or when travel becomes boring (because normally, one travels to have an extraordinary experience). Thus Byron’s The Road to Oxiana often draws attention to the tedium of his journey; entries for consecutive days start with: ‘To increase the tedium ...’; ‘Still here’; ‘Stuck again’ (132, 133, 134). ‘Objective’ time refers to time that is measured empirically, according to certain defined standards and with instruments such as clocks. Standardized time is vital in navigation and hence for the travel of exploration; but in most cases, modern travellers are affected by objective time that has been subjected to social norms and social purposes (for example, to enforce punctuality or efficiency), that is, by social time. In An Inland Voyage (1878), Robert Louis Stevenson depicts a trip conducted in deliberate contrast to tourist travel, that is, a highly scheduled form of travel (see 4.2 below). When he describes the traveller’s loss of his usual sense of time while paddling leisurely along the French canals (‘I was about as near Nirvana as would be convenient in practical life’),13 this state is also diagnosed in explicit contrast to a socially timed ‘practical life’ – a life rooted in the time sense of the industrial age and hence a sense of time with a specific cultural significance. Notions of social and cultural time overlap, the latter referring to frames for making sense of and experiencing time in a specific society, including the scholarly and scientific interest in time at a given period: Is time

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approached in empirical or mythical terms? Is it envisaged as linear or circular? And so on.14 In Mornings in Mexico (1927), for example, D.H. Lawrence draws a systematic contrast between the Mexican Indian and the European (the ‘white monkey’s’) sense of time: The white monkey has curious tricks. He knows, for example, the time. Now to a Mexican, and an Indian, time is a vague, foggy reality. There are only three times: en la mañana, en la tarde, en la noche: in the morning, in the afternoon, in the night. There is even no midday, and no evening. But to the white monkey, horrible to relate, there are exact spots of time, such as five o’clock, half past nine. The day is a horrible puzzle of exact spots of time.15

Such remarks on ‘alternative’ cultural notions of time are made frequently by travel writers who seek to escape modern life, like Stevenson, Lawrence, and also Wilfred Thesiger. In Arabian Sands (1959), Thesiger observes the different sense of time and rhythm of life of the Bedu, in whose company he travelled through the desert,16 and mentions how he took particular pleasure in the ‘unmodern’ slowness of locomotion of a nomadic tribe (so that in this case, we have an overlap of cultural and subjective time): ‘In this way there was time to notice things ... There was time to collect a plant or to look at a rock. The very slowness of our march diminished its monotony. I thought how terribly boring it would be to rush about this country in a car.’17 This passage expresses a high degree of time reflexivity, and the attention given to time is mirrored in the discursive feature that the text takes time – almost half a page in the original – to articulate the sense that ‘there was time to notice things.’ 3. Discursive Time: The Temporality of Travel Writing Scholarly discussion of the treatment of time in narrative literature has been productive in recent years, but two seminal publications of the 1970s and 1980s are still of major significance: Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, and Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse. For Ricoeur, there exists a necessary correlation ‘between the activity of narrating a story and the temporal character of human experience,’18 and he thus states that three levels of mimesis (or a ‘threefold mimesis’) are involved when readers reconstruct a sense of time from a narrative text. Any sense of time rendered in the text is prefigured by ‘a preunderstanding of the

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world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character’ (Time, 1:54), that is, by cognitive prerequisites of time experience, a general everyday knowledge about time in a certain culture at a certain time (mimesis1). It is configured in the fictional narrative itself (mimesis2) and eventually refigured in the act of reading (mimesis3), again on the basis of extratextual prefigurations (Time, 1:52– 87). Ricoeur has been criticized for this integration of real-life experience into a model for the explication of time in fiction,19 but for a discussion of travel writing, an analogy between real and narrated time is part of the factuality contract under which travelogues are normally produced and read. Nevertheless, when travel becomes travelogue, it undergoes significant configuration, so that its time scheme is closely modelled on though never completely identical with that of the actual journey – if only for the fact that certain events of a trip are simply not deemed ‘worth’ narrating (see above). The story of a journey that emerges from a travelogue is shaped to have greater significance than the original travel itself, including a specific contouring of narrated time. The configuration of time in the narrative text involves linguistic (lexical and grammatical) elements and structures, as well as narrative strategies that can be analysed with the tools provided by structuralist narratology. Prominent among the latter are the categories differentiated by Gérard Genette for the relationship between time at the level of story and time at the level of narrative discourse: order, duration and speed, and frequency.20 Frequency is relevant for a discussion of travel writing, among other reasons, because travel as such involves a lot of repetition, of iterative events, which may be boring to read about. Faced with this problem, Dickens resorted to iterative narration, ‘where a single narrative utterance takes upon itself several occurrences together of the same event,’21 for example, in the following passage from Pictures from Italy: ‘Once clear of the never-to-be-forgotten-or-forgiven pavement which surrounds Paris, the first three days of travelling towards Marseilles are quiet and monotonous enough. To Sens. To Avallon. To Challons. A sketch of one day’s proceedings is a sketch of all three; and here it is’ (263). As far as order is concerned, travelogues tend strongly towards chronological narration, that is, a presentation in discourse that follows the assumed sequence of events in the story. In the case of travel writing, this sequence is, in turn, assumed to reflect the sequence of the actual journey from departure to arrival back home. Generally, as Meir Sternberg has observed, chronological narrative dominates in ‘the entire

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range and tradition of history-telling in the largest sense, contrasted with fiction-telling by its drive to factuality and governed by the arrow of time. Chronicle, historiography proper, biography, autobiography, diaries, news items, documentaries, travelogues, official and scholarly reporting, perhaps half of the narrative corpus in all.’22 Manipulation of a journey’s time line in a travelogue thus has limits, and the linear progress of the actual journey is rarely ‘anachronized’ in a travelogue in a dramatic way. Analepses and, more rarely, prolepses are possible, but they are unlikely to cause confusion as to the journey’s temporal progress. At the beginning of Dickens’s American Notes, for example, the traveller’s first entry into his ship’s cabin is followed by a flashback to the planning stage of the journey that explains why he is so astonished by the cabin’s diminutive size. This kind of analepsis causes no temporal disorientation on the part of the reader; neither does a prolepsis in Dalrymple’s In Xanadu that flashes forward to the time after the journey’s end. While during the journey, the traveller was unable to find the tombs of the Three Wise Men, he is able to take up the search back home: ‘This was not in fact the end of the search. One day after I returned to Cambridge I found myself in the University Library with nothing to do, so I set about researching the early historical references to Saveh’ (Xanadu,144). Indeed, where major anachronies occur in a travelogue, they frequently lead out of the journey’s own time line (that is, travel’s ‘present’) to events that precede or follow the journey itself. Analepses, then, often consist of a traveller’s personal memories, whereas prolepses project from the time of travel to the time of writing the journey, as in Jonathan Raban’s Coasting (1986), where the account of the traveller, who is asked during his voyage along the coast of Britain to look out for a missing ship, briefly digresses into the time of writing: ‘I never heard anyone mention the South Stack again – until last week. While I was beginning this chapter and describing the arrival of the Nimrod search aircraft, I wrote a letter to the Holyhead Coastguard asking if there’d been any further news.’23 The travel writer has greater liberty in configuring his narrative’s speed through his handling of duration. Of course, this category relates, first and foremost, to the (metaphorical) speed of the narrative discourse as such, but the impression of faster or slower discourse will have an effect on how the reader refigures a traveller’s time experience. According to Genette, the speed of a narrative can be defined as ‘the relationship between a duration (that of the story, measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years) and a length (that of the text,

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measured in lines and pages).’24 The following relational types, combined in various ways in a given text, determine a narrative’s rhythm. In a pause, we are presented with discourse but no story; the most usual case is the descriptive pause. In ellipsis, discourse skips story events. A scene presents events in an approximate 1:1 relationship of story and discourse time. Summary presents story elements in considerably less discourse time than the events would take up in real life. A rarely used possibility is the effect of slow motion (or stretch25), where discourse takes up more time than a story event would in real life. All of these speeds – even slow motion26 – are found in travel writing. As has already been noted, travelogues typically skip or summarize certain legs of a journey, while they may render other episodes in scenic mode, thus giving them particular prominence, as in a passage from Dalrymple’s In Xanadu, where dialogue helps dramatize the traveller’s frustration when he has spent many hours waiting for a train at a Turkish station. In fact, the vivid scenic presentation here turns something into a narrative event, which, in terms of travel experience, is rather a nonevent: ‘Look, is this bloody train going to come or not?’ ‘Oh yes. Train he comes. No problem,’ said the station master. ‘When?’ ‘Soon.’ ‘How soon?’ ‘Soon.’ ‘how soon?’ ‘Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow.’ ... The train did come, but not for another hour. Humbled and exhausted, I followed Laura into one of the carriages. (Xanadu, 108)

The most characteristic element in the rhythm of a travelogue, however, is the frequent use of the pause, by which a travelogue’s story is almost systematically interrupted. This is owing to the large amount of descriptive and informative passages that are part of the travelogue’s genre definition. Another category for the analysis of a narrative’s time structure concerns the distance between the time of the story, in our case the ‘present’ of the journey, and the time level on which the narrating or writing of the journey takes place. Even when a travelogue itself or its paratext (for example, a preface) are not explicit about the time of writing, it is usually

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possible, if only on the basis of biographical information, to estimate the distance between the time of travelling and the time of travel writing. Like most ‘unmarked’ narratives, the majority of travelogues are told in retrospection, that is, they suggest that the telling takes place after the journey has ended. For the reader, this means that the journey he or she is refiguring automatically assumes a certain teleology: one infers from the narrative’s retrospectivity that the trip has come to its end, and since it is a genre convention of travel writing that the text is autobiographical, one knows that at least the teller of the tale has returned safely (unless the journal of a traveller is published posthumously). Retrospective narration also potentially permits a higher degree of configuration than the writing ‘to the moment’ of the journal-style travelogue, such as Byron’s The Road to Oxiana. This is that book’s first ‘entry,’ in which the distance between travel experience and writing is one of only a few hours. Time reference thus retains the deictics of immediacy (‘this morning’): Venice, 20 August 1933. Here as a joy-hog: a pleasant change after that pension on the Giudecca two years ago. We went to the Lido this morning, and the Doge’s palace looked more beautiful from a speed-boat than it ever did from a gondola. The bathing, on a calm day, must be the worst in Europe: water like hot saliva, cigar-ends floating into one’s mouth, and shoals of jellyfish. Lifar came to dinner. Bertie mentioned that all whales have syphilis. (Oxiana, 21)

The beginning of Dickens’s retrospective American Notes appears considerably more distanced, although the book came out the same year as the trip was conducted. It contains no markers of temporal immediacy, but instead an explicit reference to remembering: ‘I shall never forget the one-fourth serious and three-fourths comical astonishment, with which, on the morning of the third of January eighteen-hundred-and forty-two, I opened the door of, and put my head into, a “state-room” on board the “Britannia” steam-packet, twelve hundred tons burthen per register, bound for Halifax and Boston, and carrying Her Majesty’s mails’ (Notes, 1). In exceptional cases, retrospective travelogues are composed a long time after the depicted journey was completed. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (1977) recounts, as the text repeatedly emphasizes, a walking tour that took place in the 1930s, during Fer-

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mor’s youth, and the author stresses that the travelogue – finished in 1977, as the preface makes clear – is not identical to the journal that he kept during his trip. When this diary is quoted in a few places, this even enhances the sense of temporal distance between travelling and the composition of the travelogue proper: ‘There were some discrepancies of time and place between the diary and what I had already written but they didn’t matter as they could be put right.’27 This passage draws attention to the effect on recollection that great temporal distance may entail, so that, to the reader, Fermor’s reliability emerges somewhat dented (though not destroyed). A reader’s sense of distance from the experience of travel can also be manipulated through the use of narrative tense. The unmarked form for retrospective narration is the past tense; the use of the present tense may, at least temporarily, bring about a sense of immediacy. In Byron’s journal-style account, switches between past and present tense narration come less as a surprise (because of the generally small distance between experience and narration) than in classically retrospective texts such as Dickens’s travel books. Here, as in his novels, Dickens frequently switches from past to present tense, thus drawing the reader into the traveller’s experiential present – for example, when, in American Notes, the departure of the steamer Britannia is imminent but then delayed because one still has to wait for a post boat. The present tense underlines the traveller’s excitement and impatience: To and fro, to and fro, to and fro again a hundred times! This waiting for the latest mail-bags is worse than all. If we could have gone off in the midst of that last burst, we should have started triumphantly: but to lie here, two hours and more in the damp fog, neither staying at home nor going abroad, is letting one gradually down into the very depths of dullness and low spirits. A speck in the mist, at last! That’s something. It is the boat we wait for! That’s more to the purpose. The captain appears on the paddle-box with his speaking trumpet; the officers take their stations; all hands are on the alert; the flagging hopes of the passengers revive; the cooks pause in their savory work, and look out with faces full of interest. (Notes, 8–9)

A sense of time is here made vivid for the reader at a moment when a sense of time is meant to be perceived as acute during the journey itself. The passage thus exemplifies Ruth Ronen’s view that ‘the narrative present is part of the narrative configuration in which certain events

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and states are selected to form the primary ontological level, the level of immediately presented and actual narrative segments.’28 Ronen makes this statement for the use of the present tense in fiction. For the travelogue as a piece of writing grounded in factuality, one might speculate whether this kind of writing has a special propensity for shifting into the present tense in narrative passages because the present tense is generally so prominent: with a high amount of descriptions, observations, and guidebook-style advice in the present tense, this tense seems to be somewhat more naturalized in the story of actual travel than in fiction. For Ricoeur, it is the ultimate aim of a critical analysis of narrative time to bring two levels of analysis together: ‘On the first level, our interest is concentrated on the work’s configuration. On the second level, our interest lies in the worldview and the temporal experience that this configuration projects outside of itself.’ Ultimately, a text’s temporal configuration serves ‘to bring about the sharing of a temporal experience by the narrator and the reader,’ and ‘to refigure time itself in our reading’ (2:101–2, 105). In this light, the following section presents three case studies in which different varieties of English travel writing are analysed for the way in which they use the chrono-typical categories sketched above and thus induce readers to refigure the temporality of a journey in a certain way. 4. Case Studies: Forms of Time in Some Historical Varieties of the Travelogue 4.1. The Elizabethan Report of Discovery and Exploration I have shown elsewhere that the early-modern account of exploration exemplifies the kind of travel writing whose primary interest is located in the object world of travel rather than the traveller’s subjective experience.29 This is reflected in the accounts of English voyages to the New World from Richard Hakluyt’s monumental collection, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (enlarged 2nd ed., 1598–1600), from which the following examples are taken. In terms of cultural embedding and more specifically ideology, the primary purpose of discovery and exploration lay in claiming possession of the travelled world and hence, in chronotopical terms, on the axis of space rather than time. Space had to be crossed in order to reach ‘new’

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worlds, and the new space had to be mapped, described, and inventoried in order to legitimize the voyage’s official aims. A focus on space and materiality may also have served the interest of some of the reports’ contemporary readers, for whom the accounts were a source of information on the new world and the conditions of travel to that world. In accordance with the cultural framing of exploration, the Elizabethan report of discovery is usually a piece of sober, straightforward, linear, and retrospective narration, composed after a voyager’s return, in which the report of the journey’s progress is subordinated to description. The narrative rhythm is thus characterized by a particularly great amount of the pause and has a fairly static quality. The story of travel as such, the record of movement through space, is often presented in summary and with many ellipses, so that text and readers are hurried through those stretches of the voyage which precede and succeed its primary region of interest. Nevertheless, although the crossing of the Atlantic is awarded little discourse time, it is typically delivered with precise dates for the beginning of the journey and the arrival at important stations on the way to the Americas, which makes it possible to chart the advance and efficiency of the enterprise. The next excerpt is from the report of ‘The Voyage Made by Mr John Hawkins to the Coast of Guinea and the Indies of Nova Hispania’ (1564), where the quick account of progress is interrupted by descriptions of the merchantable riches and the inhabitants of places along the way: Master John Hawkins with the Jesus of Lubeck ... departed out of Plymouth the 18th day of October, in the year of our Lord 1564 with a prosperous wind. The fourth of November they had sight of the island of Madeira, and the sixth day of Tenerife, which they thought to have been the Canary. To speak somewhat of these islands being called in old time insulae fortunatae, by the means of the flourishing thereof, the fruitfulness of them doth surely exceed far all other ... The 25 he came to Cabo Blanco, which is upon the coast of Africa, and a place where the Portuguese do ride, that fish there in the month of November especially ... The 29 we came to Cap Verde. These people are all black, and are called negroes, without any apparel, saving before their privities: of stature goodly men. The two and twentieth [of December] the captain went into the river,

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What follows is a slightly less hurried (though not quite scenic) report of the slave-capturing expedition, which is highlighted through this extension of narrative time as a remarkable ‘event.’ Despite the meticulous recording of dates, this text conveys nothing about the traveller’s subjective experience of time. An attitude towards time that one can generally refigure from Elizabethan accounts of discovery is that, if these voyagers had had a choice to let themselves be ‘whisked overnight’ – to borrow Waugh’s expression – to the New World, they would have done so. The chronotope one constructs for the journeys from the texts is patchy: the voyagers appear to hop from location to location, while the space in between seems a geographical and temporal void. Of course, this need not have been the experience of the individual voyagers; but of their personal experience of time, most texts offer next to nothing, unless an unusual circumstance or a particular hardship is depicted. We find a rare reference to the voyagers’ whiling away their time during weeks at sea in an account of the ‘Second Voyage of Master Martin Frobisher’ (1577), where this reference seems to be motivated primarily by the remarkable geographical conditions in which this killing of time takes place: ‘We departed hence [the Orkneys] the 8th of June and followed our course until the 4th of July: all which time we had no night, but that easily, and without any impediment we had when we were so disposed, the fruition of our books, and other pleasures to pass away time. This benefit endureth in those parts not 6 weeks, while the sun is near the Tropic of Cancer’ (Hakluyt, 189). Sir Walter Ralegh’s ‘The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana’ (1595) includes another rare passage in which the handling of time helps build a suspense that permits readers to refigure the emotional experience of time of the men involved in the situation. Starved and thirsty on a branch of the Orinoco River, Ralegh and his crew are at the mercy of a native guide whom they mistrust (although most probably this Indian merely has a different cultural notion of measuring time than early-modern Englishmen). As a result, time seems to stretch most unpleasantly and disconcertingly. In the text, this drawn-out experience of time is dramatized in a discourse that literally counts the hours and becomes increasingly plastic and almost scenic as the episode is developed:

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When we had rowed three hours, we marveled we saw no sign of any dwelling, and asked the pilot where the town was: he told us a little further. After three hours more, the sun being almost set, we began to suspect that he led us that way to betray us. When it grew towards night; and we demanded where the place was; he told us but four reaches more. When we had rowed four and four; we saw no sign; and our poor water-men, even heart-broken, and tired, were ready to give up the ghost: for we had now come from the galley near forty miles. At last we determined to hang the pilot; and if we had well known the way back again by night, he had surely gone; but our own necessities pleaded sufficiently for his safety: for it was dark as pitch, and the river began so to narrow itself, and the trees to hang over from side to side, as we were driven with arming swords to cut a passage through those branches that covered the water ... It was now eight o’clock at night, and our stomachs began to gnaw apace: but whether it was best to return or go on, we began to doubt, suspecting treason in the pilot more and more; but the poor old Indian ever assured us that it was but a little further: at the last about one a clock after midnight we saw a light; and rowing towards it, we heard the dogs of the village. (Hakluyt, 394)

Normally, once the New World is reached, Elizabethan reports of discovery tend to register time and dates less meticulously than during the passage there. Charting progress seems to be less urgent as the explorer’s ‘true,’ space-orientated, mission begins and the text switches into the predominantly descriptive mode. Unless experiences are exceptional (as in the example above), locomotion per se becomes less interesting and is presented, if at all, in summary. This evokes the impression that the traveller hastens from one promising destination to the next. In Ralegh’s account, this haste is even explicitly addressed: ‘We then hastened away towards our purposed discovery’ (388). The typical Elizabethan account of the voyage to the New World, then, suggests a chronotope that focuses on space and tends to highlight only interesting spots in that space; temporality is relevant in this time-space predominantly as a measure for efficient progress or for its opposite, hardship and delay. Similar patterns are found in other types of travel writing in which the primary focus is on the travelled world rather than the traveller, such as early accounts of domestic travel (see Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain 1724–6) and the early account of the Grand Tour, such as Joseph Addison’s Remarks on

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Several Parts of Italy (1705). With the later Grand Tour, however, the truly educational journey that emphasizes the shaping of the traveller’s personality, the temporality of travel gains a new significance since the awareness of one’s self means that one is aware of one’s existence in time – that is, one’s sense of identity from past through present to future, but also one’s ability to change. Typically, the subject of educational travel in the eighteenth century had time at his disposal, and accounts of that type of travel characteristically suggest that it was essential to experience the tour in its temporal as well as its spatial dimension. I will not dwell here on the Bildungsreise except to state that it was essential in introducing subjective experience as a significant element of the travelogue’s generic pattern. There it has remained since – even in accounts of travel conducted under the conditions of timetables and modern, speedy transport. 4.2. Travel and Travel Writing in the Age of Steam The Victorian period is most famous for its explorer-adventurers, such as Richard Burton, Mary Kingsley, and Isabella Bird. But for many Victorians, travel meant tourist travel or at least travel for which a new infrastructure of accommodation and transport had been established. A rapidly modernizing world was governed, in material production as well as means of transport, by a new sense of speed.31 Tourism is often considered a form of travel in which the traveller is harassed by time, even to the point where space seems to shrink and distances seem to collapse, where the journey is subjected to the temporality of a capitalist society that values efficiency and punctuality and hence promotes a strict social management of time.32 The new mode of travelling has a (fictional) prototype in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), in which the hero – characteristically an Englishman, a member of the first industrial nation and the nation that invented modern tourism – rushes from place to place, eventually even gaining a day by crossing the dateline. Even where Victorians write about trips that are not touristic in the narrow sense, their travelogues manifest a particular sensitivity to the temporality of travel in terms of both theme and form. Dickens, for instance, is highly observant in American Notes regarding the speed of travel (for example, the breathtaking speed of a train) and its regular timing: ‘The journey from New York to Philadelphia is made by railroad, and two ferries; and usually occupies between five and six

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hours.’33 But although Dickens often travelled in a socially timed environment, his text always foregrounds the traveller’s subjective experience of that time. In Pictures from Italy, for instance, he at one point depicts – in his characteristic use of the present tense – first, the tedium at the end of a day of travel, and then the sense of acceleration and excitement when the destination finally draws near: You have been traveling along, stupidly enough, as you generally do in the last stage of the day; and the ninety-six bells upon the horses – twentyfour apiece – have been ringing sleepily in your ears for half an hour or so; and it has become a very jog-trot, monotonous, tiresome sort of business; and you have been thinking deeply about the dinner you will have at the next stage; when, down at the end of the long avenue of trees through which you are traveling, the first indication of a town appears, in the shape of some straggling cottages: and the carriage begins to rattle and roll over a horribly uneven pavement ... Whip, wheels, driver, stones, beggars, children, crack, crack, crack; helo! hola! charité pour l’amour de Dieu! crick-crack-crick-crack; crick, crick, crick; bump, jolt, crack, bump, crickcrack; round the corner, up the narrow street, down the paved hill on the other side; in the gutter; bump, bump. ... (Pictures, 265)

In terms of discursive figuration, an impression of the coach’s gaining of speed is here transmitted through the increasingly fragmentary syntax that reflects the way in which the traveller’s perception grows more and more fragmented during the quick and bumpy ride. Dickens’s sensitivity to subjective time is also exemplified in the ‘Italian Dream’ chapter of Pictures from Italy. Here, the traveller is shown wandering through a Venice that is so dream-like that his whole experience there seems to become a dream itself and is therefore affected by the loss of the normal sense of time that characterizes dream-states: ‘In the luxurious wonder of so rare a dream, I took but little heed of time, and had but little understanding of its flight’ (Pictures, 335). This chapter also contains a reflection on how travel may more generally distort the traveller’s everyday sense of time. Since so many extraordinary sights and experiences impress themselves on his mind in so short a span of time, the brain reacts with flashbacks to earlier stages of the trip that have not yet been properly processed, causing a kind of temporal overlay: ‘The rapid and unbroken succession of novelties that had passed before me, came back like half-formed dreams; and a crowd of objects wandered in the greatest confusion through my mind, as I traveled on, by a solitary road’ (Pictures, 329).

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Apart from the range of time experiences he depicts, Dickens is remarkable for the differentiated manner in which time is actually performed in his discourse: the narrative is rhythmically far more varied than, for example, the Elizabethan account of exploration. This has already emerged from the coach passage cited above; and during the crossing of the Atlantic in the second chapter of American Notes, readers are gratified with an extensive rendering of the traveller’s seasickness, which can be refigured as an unpleasantly long experience exactly because so much discursive time is devoted to its representation. Generally, the ocean passage emerges as a ‘filled’ slot of time in that Dickens depicts the rhythm of sleeping and waking, the succession of events and non-events. Nevertheless, such passages form only a selection from the whole time span that the actual journey takes up. As we have seen, Dickens avoids pointless repetition, and there are passages in both American Notes and Pictures from Italy where a sense of time is not dramatized at all, so that the very change between strongly timed and untimed sections contributes to the sense of rhythm in the text. The conditions of modern travel caused more than a heightened awareness of time on the part of travellers and travel writers. They also gave rise to a wave of travel along distinctly ‘unmodern’ schemes of time – a rediscovery of deliberately slow and unscheduled travel. Between the mid- and late Victorian period, a significant number of travelogues focused on precisely such alternative forms of travel. Alexander Kinglake, for instance, travelled the Orient at about the same time that Dickens toured America and Italy. Kinglake’s Eothen (1844) records a deliberately individualistic, non-social mode of travelling whose prime purpose is subjective experience; the text announces that it will ‘sing a sadly long strain about Self.’34 Kinglake proves highly aware of the relationship between identity and the sense of time, and he considers travel in the East – a cultural space with a different sense of time – as ideal for developing the sense of self because it demands a lot of time. Edward Said rejects the clearly orientalist stance of this project of self-fashioning, identifying the text’s ‘pathetic catalogue of pompous ethnocentrisms and tiringly nondescript accounts of the Englishman’s East.’35 This Orientalism notwithstanding, however, the Western traveller is obliged to reconfigure his accustomed ways of experiencing and processing time in a manner impossible in the modern West, where a traveller is still conscious of being in a provisional state, and his mind is for ever recurring to the expected end of his journey; his ordinary ways of thought

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have been interrupted, and before any new mental habits can be formed he is quietly fixed in his hotel. It will be otherwise with you when you journey in the East. Day after day, perhaps week after week, and month after month, your foot is in the stirrup ... If you are wise, you will not look upon the long period of time thus occupied in actual movement, as the mere gulf dividing you from the end of your journey, but rather as one of those rare and plastic seasons of your life, from which, perhaps, in aftertimes, you may love to date the moulding of your character – that is, your very identity. (Kinglake, 24–5)

Since time is so constitutive of his main travel experience, Kinglake devotes long stretches of discourse to representing the traveller’s sense of time. In the following depiction of travel in the desert, syntactic parallelism underlines the monotony of a long day’s travel that is clearly not organized according to social time, but rather to the natural cycle of the sun: Time labors on – your skin glows, your shoulders ache, your Arabs moan, your camels sigh, and you see the same pattern in the silk, and the same glare of light beyond; but conquering Time marches on, and by and by the descending sun has compassed the heaven, and now softly touches your right arm, and throws your lank shadow over the sand right along on the way for Persia. (172–3)

Out of a comparable attitude, Robert Louis Stevenson chose deliberately ‘slow,’ non-technological ways of travel for two of his journeys during the late 1870s: a canoe trip in An Inland Voyage and pedestrian travel in Travels with a Donkey (1879). Both texts build the impression of a chronotope in which the time axis is as important as the spatial dimension. Again, subjective time is accentuated, and as has already been indicated above (2.3), the traveller takes particular pleasure in his – temporary – freedom from social time, knowing that ‘his journey is no more than a siesta by the way on the real march of life,’36 as he writes in An Inland Voyage. Stevenson makes the slowness of his travel thematic, and the configuration of time in the text helps the reader refigure this special sense of time, particularly in a passage from Travels with a Donkey, where the extremely slow progress during the first lap of the tour, caused by the stubborn donkey, is rendered in slow motion, to be almost physically relived by the reader: ‘It was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run; it kept me hanging on each foot for an incredible length of time; in five minutes it exhausted

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the spirit and set up a fever in all the muscles of the leg’ (106). In taking their own time for travelling – and in taking time for recording their time experience – Kinglake and Stevenson anticipate some of the famous travel writers of the twentieth century, whose program Mark Cocker has identified as: ‘True travellers ... take their time.’37 4.3. Travel Writing during High and Post-Modernism Modernist and postmodernist fiction has been identified with a special attention to and reflexivity of time, and also with the development of experimental techniques for representing time experience. This is commonly regarded as a reaction to changes in cultural perceptions of time caused by the further acceleration and temporal regulation of everyday life (at least in urban areas). Another factor here has been fresh insights into the nature of time in the new physics (the theory of relativity as well as quantum mechanics), which have initiated and in turn intensified reflection on perceptions of time and on memory in psychology and philosophy (for example, William James, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger). For the techniques developed by the modernist avant-garde, Joseph Frank coined the term spatial form, since the techniques in question serve to undermine chronology; instead, they emphasize the copresence of different experiential levels of time (such as present experience and memory) and focus on the significance of the isolated moment rather than continuity.38 According to Ursula Heise, postmodernism has further radicalized these positions and aesthetic strategies under the impact of philosophical positions that posit a veritable crisis of time, a perceptual collapse of time and space sparked by late-twentieth-century developments in transportation, communication, and information technologies.39 The late twentieth century developed a culture of simultaneity, a hyperpresence that outfaced past and future and that expected the instant availability of everything. Furthermore, as Heise contends, ‘we are now aware that events which may be perfectly continuous and coherent at one time scale may not appear so at ours. Hence the multiplication of time scales available to the postmodern imagination contributes to the experience of temporal discontinuity in the individual and social domains, and to the uncertainty regarding any relevant description of past and future’ (46). Postmodernist fiction thus tends to violate notions of time that are familiar from everyday experience (and from so-called realist fiction):40 it structures time in modes that are circular, contradictory, antinomic (moving back-

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wards in time), differential (operating at a different time rate), conflated, dual or multiple; and in some cases the difference between story and discourse time is entirely contested.41 In the words of Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, postmodernist literature ‘subvert[s] the privilege of historical time and bind[s] temporality in language.’42 When we turn to the travelogue of the twentieth century, however, this genre appears less radical in its reaction to changed cultural perceptions of time (although it is, of course, otherwise aware of the modern and postmodern conditions).43 One reason is that travelogues are prototypically autobiographical and thus mono-perspectival, so that the possibility for constructing experiential temporal overlays and copresences is limited in the first place. Taking Byron’s The Road to Oxiana and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977) as paradigmatic travelogues of the modernist and postmodernist decades, one finds that neither abandons chronological narration and story-ness as drastically as the classical examples of high modernist and postmodernist fiction. In both instances, readers are able to build mental images of mimetic chronotopes and follow the stages of the respective journeys in a sequence that never lets one suspect that the actual travel perhaps occurred in a different order. In the journal-style Road to Oxiana, the individual sections are even precisely dated. And in both cases, long trips are described – that is, the story time is fairly extensive, in contrast to the tendency of (some) modernist novels to focus on a narrative present of only a few hours’ duration (as, for example, in the one-day actions of Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses). Nevertheless, the journal structure also permits Byron to display certain modernist elements: the ‘entries’ for individual days highlight significant moments and leave many of these momentary impressions unconnected, in terms of both theme and (minor) temporal jumps. Within chronological narration, Byron in this way achieves an effect of momentariness and temporal fragmentedness. This is supported by Byron’s variations of discursive rhythm: his dialogue scenes and summary narration are juxtaposed with descriptive and other pauses, including regular bits of historical information for the places visited. This makes for an effect of collage44 but does not cause temporal disorientation because the basic time line of the journey remains prominent throughout. The Road to Oxiana influenced Bruce Chatwin,45 and indeed Chatwin’s In Patagonia does not seem far more radical in its treatment of time. The time line of the trip appears slightly more fragmented than in Byron’s book, though, because Chatwin’s short sections about places

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and people are not dated, and there is also comparatively little sense of the traveller actually moving from place to place. The effect is one of ‘hard cuts’ between locations (as in the early-modern accounts of discovery). There are also more detours in Chatwin’s book into time lines different from that of the actual journey’s present. In The Road to Oxiana, other levels of time are usually introduced through Byron’s information on the history of places and buildings. In Chatwin’s In Patagonia, such information takes up a considerable part of the discourse and often dominates entire sections, for instance, when only one sentence on the progress of the journey is followed by a long story about early migration to Patagonia: ‘I left the Río Negro and went on south to Port Madryn. A hundred and fifty-three Welsh colonists landed here off the brig Mimosa in 1865.’46 Furthermore, In Patagonia contains many analepses from the journey’s present into earlier phases of Chatwin’s life, and in fact famously starts with a flashback into a time long before the start of the journey: the future traveller’s interest in Patagonia is explained by a childhood memory that involves a piece of skin from a much earlier, even ancient, period of time. But although we are here reminded of the time scale of natural history (see Heise’s comment above), alongside a personal scale that involves the traveller’s past and present as well as the time level of writing, a dramatic sense of temporal disorientation and discontinuity does not arise. Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987) is somewhat more radical in this respect; here, we follow not just one, but competing time lines of travel when Chatwin, while narrating a trip through Australia, quotes extensively from notebooks made during earlier journeys. That travelogues, with respect to their time scheme – and one might add space scheme as well – seem more conservative than high modernist and postmodernist fiction, does not come unexpected. After all, travelogues recount actual travel, and actual travel – even in the speediest means of transport – is subject to time’s arrow, to mimetic time. If a piece of travel writing is to be identified as such, it will have to convey a chronotope that still bears a strong resemblance to what people know actual time spaces for travel to be. Paradoxical as that may sound, the travelogue therefore does not lend itself easily to spatialization (in Joseph Frank’s understanding), and the collapse of time and space that some postmodernist fiction evokes is a construct in which actual travel would be impossible. Even though jet travel contributes to a sense of temporal disorientation – physically experienced when we suffer from jet lag – an experience of the hyperpresent is not normally that of a real

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traveller (in contrast to virtual travel through TV and computers). The postmodernist traveller still moves in real time spaces and encounters these in a manner that contradicts some of postmodernism’s radical ontological assumptions. The anthropocentric tie of this kind of travel to established notions of human time space and human time experience may explain some of the popularity that the travelogue in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries enjoys on the part of both writers and readers. And the very fact that the writing and reading of a piece of travel writing today happens at the same speed as hundreds of years ago may further explain this popularity. 5. Concluding Remarks These notes have shown that the dimension of time in travel writing is essential for the way in which readers refigure, through a travelogue’s discursive configuration, a mental image of an actual journey. Depending on a traveller’s individual experience and more general cultural frames, travelogues differ in the extent to which they make travel time explicit at all, and they differ in the kinds of temporalities and time experiences they depict. Chrono-typical categories are needed for the manifestations of temporality at a travelogue’s thematic level, but one also needs categories for the way in which a travelogue’s discourse articulates this temporality in its own temporal structures. Analysing a travelogue’s forms of time thus leads one into an area where the links among travelling, writing, and reading are particularly intimate; this provides insight into the genre’s poetics and will also always be a contribution to cultural narratology.

N OTE S 1 Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana (London: Picador, 1981), 237. Further citations will be documented parenthetically. 2 Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days: A Journey in Guiana and Brazil (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 10. Further citations will be documented parenthetically. 3 For an exception, see the anthropologist Johannes Fabian on time in the exploration account. Fabian, ‘Time, Narration, and the Exploration of Central Africa,’ Narrative 9 (2003): 3–20. Fabian’s study, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)

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4

5

6

7

8 9

10 11

Barbara Korte provides a critique of how time has been used to construct the object of anthropology – the ‘other’ – in dominant paradigms of this discipline. The book is relevant for the study of travel writing because it draws attention to different cultural notions of time. See Meir Sternberg on time as the sine qua non for verbal storytelling and, more basically, all literary and other discourse: ‘Whatever the grouping of their signs at any given moment, it cannot so much as freeze, let alone develop or regroup, except from moment to moment along the communicative process. Nor is this because they signify a narrative – which they usually do – but rather because, like narrative, their signifiers follow a line even in their least narrative moments, as when describing a place or state of affairs.’ Sternberg, ‘Telling in Time (I): Chronology and Narrative Theory,’ Poetics Today 11, no. 4 (1990): 901–48, 901. Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 60 and 70 resp. Further citations will be documented parenthetically as Notes and Pictures respectively. Relevant titles include, for example, Jeremy Butterfield, ed., The Arguments of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath, eds., The Philosophy of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Peter K. McInerney, Time and Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); as well as Walther Ch. Zimmerli and Mike Sandbothe, eds., Klassiker der modernen Zeitphilosophie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993). For a comprehensive and multidisciplinary bibliography, see Samuel L. Macey, Time: A Bibliographic Guide (New York: Garland, 1991). See Mieke Bal, who demands ‘a narratological analysis of culture’ and ‘a cultural analysis of narratives.’ Bal, ‘Close Reading Today: From Narratology to Cultural Analysis,’ in Grenzüberschreitungen. Narratologie im Kontext/ Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, ed. Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Narr, 1999) 19–40, 39. For examples of the new context-sensitive narratology, see also the contributions in David Herman, ed., Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999). Fabian, ‘Time, Narration, and the Exploration of Central Africa,’ 9. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,’ in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258, 84 and 84–5. Eric Newby, The Big Red Train Ride (London: Picador, 1989), 59–60. Incidentally, this is a typical device of all fictional and non-fictional texts that present travel as an adventure. For a prototypical example, see Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days.

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12 William Dalrymple, In Xanadu: A Quest (London: Flamingo, 1990), 288–9. Further citations will be documented parenthetically as Xanadu. 13 Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey – An Inland Voyage – The Silverado Squatters (London: Dent, 1984), 78. 14 For a cultural history of time in Europe, see Rudolf Wendorff, Zeit und Kultur: Geschichte des Zeitbewußtseins in Europa, 3rd ed. (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1985 [1980]). 15 D.H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 32. 16 Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 54. 17 Ibid., 60. 18 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols., trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–5 [original: Temps et Récit, 1983]), vol. 1, 52. Further citations will be documented parenthetically. 19 See, for example, Ruth Ronen, who claims that fictional time ought to be ‘thought of as a system of relations unique to the fictional world. I shall assume that once a world is distinctly projected as fictional, this property implies a specific logic of fiction, a logic of indeterminacy, or restricted inference from fictional to extrafictional states of affairs, and vice versa.’ Ronen, ‘The Semiotics of Fictional Time: Three Metaphors in the Study of Temporality in Fiction,’ Style 24, no. 1 (1990): 22–44, 22. 20 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980 [original: ‘Discours du récit’ from Figures III, 1972]). Genette’s distinction overlaps with Günther Müller’s distinction between erzählte Zeit and Erzählzeit. Müller, ‘Erzählzeit und erzählte Zeit,’ in Morphologische Poetik: Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Elena Müller and Helga Egner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968 [article first publ. 1948]), 269–86. Genette and other structuralist narratologists have been criticized for their models’ inability to accommodate the violations of conventional time structures in postmodernist literature. See Brian Richardson, ‘Narrative Poetics and Postmodern Transgression: Theorizing the Collapse of Time, Voice, and Frame,’ Narrative 8, no. 1 (2000): 23–42. However, since non-fictional travel narrative is rarely experimental in a radically postmodernist fashion (see below, 4.3), the established structuralist models retain their basic validity. 21 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 116. 22 Sternberg, ‘Telling in Time (I),’ 909. 23 Jonathan Raban, Coasting (London: Picador, 1987), 90. 24 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 87–8. 25 This is the term introduced by Chatman. Seymour Chatman, Story and Dis-

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26 27 28

29 30

31 32

33 34 35

Barbara Korte course: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). See the example from Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in 4.2 below. Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 261. Ronen, ‘The Semiotics of Fictional Time,’ 33. It is Ronen’s general point that ‘in fiction the use of grammatical tense is not only relative to a point of narration but is mainly correlated with the segmentation of fictional time into present and nonpresent. The temporal meaning of tenses is determined relative to that narrative segment that is being actualized as the foreground of the story, as its fictive present’ (ibid., 39). The examples examined here show that this ‘modal’ aspect of tense holds not only for fictional, but also non-fictional narratives. On tense in narration, especially the use of the present rather than the unmarked retrospective past tense, see also, among others, Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996), 249–66; and Uri Margolin, ‘Of What Is Past, Is Passing, or to Come: Temporality, Aspectuality, Modality, and the Nature of Literary Narrative,’ in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 142–66. Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), ch. 2, esp. 30–5. Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries: The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 105–6. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railroad Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986). See, among others, Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), and John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990). Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy, 97. For his comment on the speed of the train, see 64–5. Alexander Kinglake, Eothen: Or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 4. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 [1978]), 193. Said also characterizes the narrative of Eothen as ‘rigidly chronological and dutifully linear’ (ibid.), that is, as composed with a time structure suited to a mind preoccupied with its ‘orientalist’ preoccupations and aims. At closer inspection, however, Kinglake’s handling of time, although chronological, is more complex and varied than Said’s indictment lets one suspect.

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36 Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey ..., 81. 37 Mark Cocker, Loneliness and Time: British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1992), 4. 38 Joseph Frank, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature,’ Sewanee Review 53 (1945): 221–40, 433–56. 39 Ursula K. Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), esp. ch. 17; and Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), esp. ch. 1. 40 The convergence between postmodernism and science fiction (see, for instance, the work of J.G. Ballard) is not coincidental. On the treatment of time in science fiction, see, for example, George Slusser and Danièle Chatelain, ‘Spacetime Geometries: Time Travel and the Modern Geometrical Narrative,’ Science Fiction Studies 22 (1995): 161–86. 41 See Richardson, ‘Narrative Poetics and Postmodern Transgression.’ 42 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 11. 43 See above on the modernists’ awareness of alternative cultural notions of time. For the general traces of modernist and postmodernist elements in travel writing, see also Korte, English Travel Writing, ch. 7. 44 Because of this effect of collage, Paul Fussell refers to The Road to Oxiana as ‘the Ulysses ... of modern travel books.’ Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling between the Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 108. 45 See Chatwin’s introduction to the edition of The Road to Oxiana used in this essay. 46 Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia (London: Picador, 1979), 23.

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ENLIGHTENMENT TO MODERNISM

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3 On Site: Pilgrimage and Authorship in Goethe’s ‘Third Pilgrimage’ and Italian Journey kelly barry

The relation between pilgrim and travel literatures is often framed in terms of continuities – as considerations of how the modern travel guide emerges from the medieval Christian itinerarium, how the characteristic hybridity of pilgrim writings anticipates the notoriously open rubric of ‘travel writing,’ how deep the resemblance between pilgrim testimonials and autobiographical travelogues runs.1 Whether analysed as direct influence or a more loosely perceived affinity, such continuities in the generic and narrative conventions of these two literary traditions are generally seen as reflecting a process of secularization. The degree to which a travel narrative depicts the exotica of a place foreign to the traveller offers a familiar example. It depends, broadly speaking, on whether curiosity is considered theologically suspect or an approved spur to empirical observation. What characterizes the transpositions of pilgrim literature into distinctly modern – that is, secular, highly subjective – modes of writing in the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, by contrast, is a disruptive questioning about the pragmatic contexts in which they are produced and received. This article considers how a pair of texts by Goethe, the early ‘Dritte Wallfahrt nach Erwins Grabe im Juli 1775’ (‘Third Pilgrimage to Erwin’s Grave in July 1775’) and the late Zweiter Römischer Aufenthalt (Second Sojourn in Rome, 1829), the final volume of the Italian Journey, appropriate the conventions of pilgrim literature. In distinction to the many thematic treatments of pilgrimage in Goethe’s corpus, these two works mobilize figures of the pilgrim and pilgrimage along with the textual forms that codified and regulated the pilgrimage experience. My thesis is that Goethe finds in the conventions of pilgrim books two defining elements for the ongoing and changing conceptualization of literary

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authorship that unfolds across his entire corpus. The first is a developed idiom about the link between imitation and authenticity, and the second a reflection on what I will term the contingency of expression. The implicit and explicit transformation of pilgrim writing in these works is of interest for how they provoke reflection on the conventions of reading. How does the ‘use’ of a guidebook compare to the ‘reading’ of a narrative? How does the evocation of pilgrimage guides in ‘Third Pilgrimage’ challenge the assumption that reading constitutes a substitute for actual experience? And how, in the Second Sojourn in Rome, does it illuminate the conventions by which we read that work as autobiography and travel memoir but not as a travel guide? Moreover, I will analyse Goethe’s use of place as a frame of reference for conceiving of literary production and reception. Place here is not understood as an external referent depicted under an analysable set of variables (fictional/non-fictional, subjective/objective, etc.).2 Rather, a comparison of these two works makes visible how the meaning of a text depends less on who is speaking than on where something is said. This in turn has implications beyond the sphere of travel writing, for the suggestion that place constitutes a strategy of textual authorization runs counter to the supposedly dominant, and decidedly secular, feature of modern literary discourse – its organization around the category of the speaking and writing subject. ‘Pages of veiled fervor’: The Miraculous Truth in Writing Goethe’s title ‘Third Pilgrimage to Erwin’s Grave in July 1775’ is a signal that his earlier essay ‘On German Architecture’ be regarded as depicting a ‘first’ pilgrimage to the same site. Both works belong to Goethe’s writings from the first half of the 1770s, including lyric poems and prose reflections on artistic production, that are preoccupied with artistic genius. Within this cluster of writings, the two ‘pilgrimage’ pieces show a particular overlap in content, argument, and tone: the subject of both texts is the Gothic cathedral at Strasbourg and its architect, Erwin von Steinbach; contemplation of the cathedral serves to articulate a statement about artistic creativity in which radical originality is the supereminent aesthetic value; rhetoric and argument rest heavily on linking the semantic field of religious devotion with that of reverence for natural and artistic objects. The very title ‘Third Pilgrimage’ disposes us to read these similarities as a repetition. It immediately heightens the idea of pilgrimage as iterative, accenting Goethe’s return to the same material.

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The return to the pilgrimage trope comes with two distinct emphases. While it supplies a loose dramatic scaffold through which Goethe’s argument unfolds in ‘On German Architecture,’ it becomes a dominating and formal schema in ‘Third Pilgrimage’ through the text’s mimicry of a pilgrim guidebook. And whereas the aesthetic and art-historical pronouncements in ‘On German Architecture’ keep to matters of architectural form and style, ‘Third Pilgrimage’ redirects the question of artistic creativity to writing. In fact, the later text aligns the trope of pilgrimage – and hence the concern with physical presence and location – with the act of writing in an explicit and performative fashion. The speaker executes his pilgrimage as the production of a text, a gesture made clear with his decree ‘I want to write’ and self-designation as a ‘writer.’3 Foregrounding textual production in this way clearly enacts aspects of the overarching statement about artistic production in ‘Third Pilgrimage.’ Yet the performative dimension is not limited to how the piece draws attention to its written character. My claim is that this short work presents the act of writing as an act of authoring. What it performs is a specific conception of authorship. Various lines of historical and literary scholarship have identified the new legal, medial, and aesthetic criteria of authorship in the historical period to which Goethe’s early works belong. For my purposes here, I will name a set of interlocking conditions for literary authorship emerging in the last third of the eighteenth century. Authorship rested, first of all, on the distinction between composition and publication. To quote Roger Chartier: ‘The term “author” presupposed printed circulation of works and, in return, recourse to the press distinguished the “author” from the “writer.”’4 At the same time, circulation in print was bound up with the attribution of a text to a definite historical figure, what Foucault designated the ‘author-function’ in the narrower sense of that term.5 The proper name could endow a work with authority in this way because it reinforced a broader reorganization of literary discourse around the ideal of spontaneous, emotional expression. On this view, the coherence of a literary work, the meaning and authenticity of its statements, was no longer determined by the relationship it bore to antecedent texts or literary traditions. It was instead held to be anchored in the subjectivity, in the desires and lived experiences, of its author. It is this last aspect of literary authorship, a perceived authenticity arising from emphatic individuality, that Goethe’s writings in the early 1770s associate in programmatic fashion with genius. Creativity, conceived as a radically original power, secures the ‘truth’ and ‘vital unity’ of an artwork.6

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Self-consciously authentic expression characterizes Goethe’s texts about the Strasbourg cathedral. In ‘Third Pilgrimage,’ Goethe alludes to the earlier ‘On German Architecture’ as ‘pages of veiled fervour’ (ein Blatt verhüllter Innigkeit), a phrase that both constitutes the direct intertextual reference linking the two works and names their underlying model of expressive writing. Borrowed from a Pietist vocabulary, the term ‘fervour’ suggests affective intensity as well as its source in the writer’s interiority, and reflects the tendency of Goethe’s ‘pilgrimage’ texts to reduce religious devotion to pure emotionality.7 If the two works are presented as equally authentic, deeply felt offerings to the reader, they are distinguished by the other criteria briefly outlined above. While details of ‘Third Pilgrimage’ in its original published form encouraged the reader to regard the experience depicted in the text as a datum of Goethe’s personal history,8 the earlier ‘On German Architecture’ lacked the secure attribution through which the speaker’s statements might be referred to the author’s own experience. In the apt phrase of Goethe’s later text, his earlier essay was ‘veiled,’ published twice and both times anonymously.9 The difference between the two ‘pilgrimage’ texts, and thus what is negotiated in Goethe’s return to this material, can now be respecified. Vis-à-vis the earlier text, ‘Third Pilgrimage’ gives considerably more weight to the speaker’s role. The fictional persona of the speaker-pilgrim explicitly becomes the dramatic centre of the text and, positioned there, also claims for itself the identity of a writer. These emphases go hand in hand. Granting a certain kind of priority to the speaker position is required by the model of authorship that Goethe’s text evokes. In ‘Third Pilgrimage,’ however, the specific accentuation of the speaker’s role follows directly from how the conventions of the pilgrim guidebook are appropriated. Goethe’s text mimics not a particular pilgrim guidebook, but the typical hybridity of such books in the form they assumed in the late medieval through early-modern period and generally retained through Goethe’s day.10 The ‘Third Pilgrimage’ evokes two distinct elements in this textual tradition. The first two sections of Goethe’s text, ‘Preparation’ and ‘Prayer,’ suggest devotional material, the texts of prayers and songs to be recited en route to or at the pilgrimage site that are meant both to articulate and to shape the pilgrim’s spiritual state. The following three sections of Goethe’s text consist in three successive, numbered ‘Stations.’ These suggest instructional material for the pilgrim’s circuit, indications of what the pilgrim is supposed to do, what external act of veneration is to be performed, at particular points leading to or within

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the central pilgrimage site. In the guidebook tradition, devotional and instructional materials are conventionally combined to a specific end. They provide an imaginary coordination of an inward feeling and a particular place. Or more precisely: they imagine the dynamic coordination of a series of inner states and a series of physical locations as they change together in the course of pilgrimage. The guide functions not primarily to represent the spiritual and the topographical but to key them to each other, linking them in a measured advance towards a single goal, to a final station where the pilgrim’s highest or truest feeling of devotion is achieved. ‘Third Pilgrimage’ seems to reproduce this conventional parallel of a textual, experiential, and topographical progression towards a goal. The series of textual segments trace out a circuit for the speaker, a gradual ascent from the front of the Strasbourg cathedral to various points on the galleries and platform within the cathedral tower. Yet Goethe’s text does not coordinate the speaker’s imagined topographical and experiential progress in the expected way. Completion of the circuit is presented as an afterthought, announced cursorily and indirectly in the text’s concluding coda. Nor does arrival at the final station coincide with the pilgrim’s experiential goal. With his opening words the speaker proclaims a recovery of the capacity for true feeling and penetrating vision, a state suggesting the revivification and purification of faith that typically mark the culmination of pilgrimage, not the preliminary stage designated by the ‘Preparation.’11 The textual disjunction of the speaker’s devotional and topographical destinations – the former realized precipitously at the beginning and the latter left, but undramatically so, for the end – indicates the degree to which the pilgrim’s ‘goal’ here no longer supplies a unifying focus as it does for the heterogeneous materials comprising a pilgrim’s guidebook. What confers unity on Goethe’s text is the speaking subject itself. In casting his pilgrim’s guide in the first person, Goethe rewrites the genre as a series of spontaneously emotional statements issuing from an individual, the organization of which is determined foremost by the speaker’s own experience rather than prescripted progress towards a goal. Reorienting the pilgrim’s guide around a subjective voice is as fundamental a change to the borrowed form as the functional change that Goethe’s text imagines – its performative conceit that this guide is being written by the pilgrim, not read. The imposition of a first-person voice here might be understood as a conflation of elements usually kept distinct in pilgrim literature (the

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neutral itinerarium and the writer’s own commentary), or as generally falling in line with an autobiographical variant of pilgrim writings. Yet the dominating presence of an individualized speaking subject has a more immediate explanation in how Goethe’s text borrows from its chosen template. ‘Third Pilgrimage’ isolates one element from the devotional material included in the pilgrim’s guide and extends it to the entire text. Far from being restricted to the subsection titled ‘Prayer’ with its explicit mimicry of ‘worship of the Creating One’ (Schriften, 181), prayer supplies the communicative schema for the entire main text. It underlies the work’s self-presentation as intimate speech and extended apostrophe, its rhetorical patterns of confession, praise, and supplication, its alternately ardent and resigned tone. This selective emphasis in Goethe’s text requires consideration. Why isolate, among the conventions associated with the pilgrim’s guide, a specific speech genre for a work so invested in questions of textual production and reception? The prayer here clearly supplies a trope for authentic utterance, for the quality of ‘fervour’ so important to the model of literary authorship that ‘Third Pilgrimage’ names, dramatizes, and reflects on. Yet it is not prayer as a generic communicative schema that ‘Third Pilgrimage’ activates. It is prayer in pilgrimage. This is a point where Goethe’s text, far from employing the pilgrim’s guide simply as a dramatic scaffold, deeply engages its template. Prayer in pilgrimage contains an important processual moment, it offers a model of coming to authenticity or what I will term ‘intensification.’ Following the general trend of ‘Third Pilgrimage,’ this model is vigorously transformed from spoken to written utterance. The speaker-pilgrim’s ‘worship’ (Anbetung) becomes ‘the devotion of the writer’ (die Andacht des Schreibers) (Schriften, 183). Indeed, the redefinition of devotion as writing is the very work of the section titled ‘Prayer.’ In Goethe’s text, intensification functions as the production of authenticity in the medium of writing. To show this, and how it contributes to the performance of authorship in ‘Third Pilgrimage,’ I will first identify two qualities of prayer in pilgrimage that I have gathered under the term intensification. The intensification of prayer is a response to place. A premise of pilgrimage is that the practice of faith must be delocalized and relocalized, that is, removed from the pilgrim’s familiar milieu to a special and distant site, in order to be experienced in its pure form.12 A central, and specifically semiotic, consequence of this idea is that the meaning of actions belonging to routine observance opens up and becomes contingent on location understood as both geographical setting and physical

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circumstance.13 The change in meaning sought by the pilgrim is described in terms of a purity and heightening of inward feeling, but it has a perceptual correlate and metaphorics. Feeling deepens, vision clarifies; the immaterial becomes palpable. This is the rhetoric used by the speaker of Goethe’s text, who stands before the cathedral and declares that ‘the mist has fallen from my eyes’ (Schriften, 181). The place-contingent renewal of spiritual meaning is specified, in prayer, to the speaker–utterance relation. En route to and then again at the pilgrimage site, prayer should – to use the steady metaphor that appears in pilgrim literature – once again glow and burn within the pilgrim.14 Such affective intensity regained, the recitation of fixed formularies becomes deeply felt as a passionate petition to God. Restoring to ritualized prayer the quality of a spontaneous cry from the heart marks an apparently paradoxical aspect of pilgrimage. While the encompassing aim of pilgrimage is to return spiritual feeling to its original, authentic form, this occurs only within a paradigm of imitation. Pilgrimage is defined by emulation. The route and sacred site(s) associated with a particular pilgrimage mark the significant scenes of a holy figure’s life and works. By visiting these sites, the pilgrim replicates literally and in spirit actions of the founding figure. Even the official purpose of pilgrimage to saints’ shrines is understood as imitation. In the words of one historian of pilgrimage, who invokes the fourthcentury church father St Chrysostom as his authority: ‘Hence the Church declares to the faithful: you show respect and veneration to the martyrs when you imitate their conduct, their virtues: as St Chrysostom says: “Veneration of the martyrs is imitation of the martyrs.”’15 The pilgrim’s actions resonate as imitative in still other senses, as repeated visits to one site and as a fellowship with pilgrims present and past who have made the same journey. In all this, the pilgrim’s aim is to emulate with sincerity. Intensification is thus the means by which authenticity is achieved within an essentially imitative experience. Again, this general aspect of pilgrimage is rendered in prayer at the level of expression. The pilgrim is not expected to find a new language for his veneration, but to speak familiar words with heightened, truer force. The object is not novelty, but intensity. The striking effect of the disjunction in ‘Third Pilgrimage’ – assigning the speaker’s ultimate devotional aim to his initial response to the cathedral – is to accentuate the idea of authenticity through imitation. The opening words establish the speaker as a pilgrim retracing his own steps to a holy site. ‘Once again at your grave,’ he declares, apostro-

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phizing both the Strasbourg cathedral and its architect, ‘again at the memorial to eternal life in you above your grave, Saint Erwin!’16 It is within this marked repetition that the speaker declares himself again moved truly, and more than ever, by a feeling for truth: ‘I am as I was, still so vigorous, so moved by what is great, and o rapture, even more than before I am moved solely and exclusively by what is true’ (Schriften, 181). The force of his feeling rests on recovering and reproducing a past state. The ‘Preparation’ thus cites an idea fully opposed to the text’s poetological argument about artistic originality, which is defined vehemently against imitation and continuity with the past. The rest of the text can be read as reacting to this contradiction by progressively reconfiguring the relation between authenticity and imitation for the sphere of aesthetic experience. Unfolding with and as the speaker’s self-designation as a writer, this reconfiguration begins in the movement from the first to the second station: First Station. I want to write, for I am well, and whenever I wrote the others who read it also grew well [wohl worden], blood running freely through their veins and their eyes growing bright. May you also be well [Mög es euch wohl sein], my friends, as am I on this circuit [Umgange] with the morning air wafting toward me above all the twisted rooftops below. Second Station. Higher still in the air, gazing down, surveying the magnificent plain, toward the fatherland, toward love, and yet filled with an enduring feeling of the present moment. I once wrote pages of veiled fervor [ein Blatt verhüllter Innigkeit], read by few and letter-by-letter not understood [buchstabenweise nicht verstanden], pages in which good souls saw only sparks of what makes them unspeakably and inexpressibly happy. It was peculiar to speak mysteriously of a building, to veil facts in riddles, and to babble on poetically about proportions! And yet now I do no better. (Schriften, 181)

What dominates these passages is an increasing attention to the relations among the speaker, his statements, and his addressees. This comes with two distinct inflections, one concerning the effect of writing and the other its temporal dimension. Having presented himself as a writer, the speaker’s characterization

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of his addressees as readers is no surprise, but the details introduced are noteworthy. The series of designations (‘others,’ ‘friends,’ ‘good souls’) suggests increasing intimacy, as does the qualification of this readership as exclusive and sympathetic. This select group of readers inflects the sincerity of the speaker’s statements in a distinct way. His words are true not because they enjoy universal recognition, but because they are heard by a responsive few – or rather, felt by a few, given that the readers’ reaction seems less cognitive (‘letter-by-letter not understood’) than physical and affective. The salutary influence attributed to his writing further underscores this sympathetic bond. The benefit bestowed on readers mirrors the writer’s own state of wellbeing, a symmetry that holds for the speaker’s past writings as well as his present offering (‘May you also be well, my friends, as I am here ...’). The repeated use of the term ‘well’ (wohl), which sustains emotional and somatic connotations, nudges the speaker’s proclaimed effect on his readers towards the idea of a benediction or blessing (Wohltat), as do the images of renewed life and vision (‘blood running freely’ and ‘eyes growing bright’). The speaker’s own physical-affective experience described in the ‘Preparation’ is here reproduced and transmitted, via his writings, to his readers. A certain kind of reception thus also bears witness to the speaker’s authenticity. His statements are sincere not only because they emerge from true feeling, but also by reason of their power to produce a desired effect in readers. The effect, to follow the cumulative implication of these passages, is nothing short of a miracle. Throughout ‘Third Pilgrimage’ the speaker’s statements are saturated by a sense of immediacy, offered as a true response to his present feeling and to his changing present circumstances (as recorded, for example, in the shift from ‘in the air’ to ‘higher still in the air’). In the first and second stations, this emphatic presentness is increasingly balanced by references to the speaker’s past and particularly to writing: the present act (the actualized ‘I want to write’) is linked to activity in the past (‘whenever I wrote’) and then connected to a single previous work (‘I once wrote pages of veiled fervour’). The allusion to ‘On German Architecture’ thus constitutes the most specific reference to the speaker’s past and must be assessed according to its temporalizing function and the way it offsets the act of textual production staged in ‘Third Pilgrimage.’ If we recall the publication histories of the two texts mentioned above, one effect of the intertextual allusion is to extend a secure attribution back to ‘On German Architecture.’ Yet the allusion reciprocally alters the status of ‘Third Pilgrimage’ as well by drawing

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attention to the text not only as a manuscript in feverish production but also as a work circulating in print (a consideration made explicit by the speaker in the text’s text third station). Into a work focused on dramatizing writing as authentic expression, the reference to ‘On German Architecture’ thus introduces with surprising efficiency the concerns of attribution and publication.17 The performance of writing as authoring carried out in these passages can also be described in simpler terms. What occurs in the transition from the first to the second station is nothing more than allowing the speaker’s biography and psychology to enter into the act of writing. His motivations and wishes and aspects of his personal history are woven into statements that register with equal attention his present circumstances. ‘Third Pilgrimage’ stages the transformation of lived experience into a text. And hence in sharp distinction to its purpose in pilgrimage, the process of intensification in Goethe’s text is bound up with a model of authorial production to serve the emergence and expression of individuality. A single circumstantial factor in the speaker’s spoken/written production receives unwavering emphasis through the form of ‘Third Pilgrimage.’ The text’s advance from station to station is a reminder that his statements are tied to particular sites. The third station gives this idea a peculiar touch. It begins with the speaker calling out to his faithful readers, actual and prospective, who are now characterized as ‘artists’ and ‘connoisseurs’ and thus even more tightly identified with the speaker as an author and the self-appointed true judge of Erwin von Steinbach’s architectural achievement: Third Station. If I had you with me, creative artists, empathetic connoisseurs, of whom I have found so many on my brief wanderings, and you as well, whom I have not found and yet who are. When these pages reach you, let them fortify you against the shallow, ceaseless tide of trivial mediocrity, and should you visit this place, remember me with love. (Schriften, 182)

In imagining his readers at ‘this place,’ as emulating his own actions by visiting the same site, the speaker follows through on the tacit proposition in the earlier stations. His readers are recast as pilgrims while the speaker implicitly installs himself as St Goethe in St Erwin’s shrine.18 With this reshuffling of identities comes an important specification of how textual reception is conceived. If earlier the experience of reading

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was presented as symmetrical to that of writing, it is now redefined as imitative: to read is to emulate with sincerity. But is reading in this text portrayed as imaginative reenactment? This assumption is subtly challenged in the last station quoted above. Does the faithful reception of a text mean reading it, or does it require (in this case) that Goethe’s readers travel to Strasbourg? Does ‘Third Pilgrimage’ fully convert the scheme of literal-spiritual imitation in pilgrimage to purely imaginative imitation in the aesthetic realm, or does it teasingly encourage a confusion of the two? The question opened up here about whether a text is experienced in merely imaginative or startlingly literal terms – or, put differently, whether place is a contingent and simultaneously constitutive factor in the production and reception of texts – can be explained in a number of ways. It may be an ambiguity inherent in making a cathedral the occasion to reflect on literary production and reception, for an architectural monument must be experienced on site and in person in a way that texts typically do not. It might also be seen as an ironic comment on the popular veneration of literary works, a phenomenon that Goethe’s own Sorrows of Young Werther contributed to only shortly before ‘Third Pilgrimage’ was published. The literalizing misreading, that is, the misreading of reading, imagined at the end of ‘Third Pilgrimage,’ befell one of Goethe’s later works. In one wayward strain of its reception, the Italian Journey, the chief example of Goethe’s travel writings and formally designated part of his autobiography, was taken as a travel guide.19 It is to that work, which evokes the conventions of pilgrim writing in a less obvious way and with a more complex effect, that I will turn next. When in Rome ... The Second Sojourn in Rome was published in 1829 as the third and final volume of the Italian Journey. It continues the account of Goethe’s years in Italy from the previous two volumes (published in 1816–17), but does so with a distinct shift in style and organization. Retaining as much as possible the air of the diary notes and letters on which they are based, the earlier volumes present intimate, even urgent descriptions of his travels that frequently register the press of circumstance under which they were written. These volumes of the Italian Journey are fashioned under the poetological priorities articulated in ‘Third Pilgrimage’ – authentic utterance derived from lived experience – and practise them in the form of autobiography. In the final volume, composed four decades after the

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experience it depicts, we find the model of authorship as emphatic individuality proclaimed valid for all of Goethe’s literary production. It is during Goethe’s second stay in Rome in 1787 that the first edition of his collected works, having chased the author throughout his travels, finally arrives. ‘I can truly say,’ he comments approvingly on the first four volumes, ‘there is not a letter of them that I did not live, feel, enjoy, suffer, or think, and now they all have that much stronger an appeal for me.’20 Yet like much of Goethe’s late work, the Second Sojourn in Rome itself registers a break with the idea of writing as the transparent immediacy of an author’s experience. In contrast to the previous volumes of the Italian Journey, it presents Goethe’s letters organized by month under the rubric ‘Correspondence’ and supplemented with a ‘Report.’ Frequently longer than the correspondence itself, the report sections amplify the letters in various ways (with repetitive summaries or additional material) but always from a retrospective view that makes the letters appear, by contrast, as ‘true’ records of the original experience. This formal schema for distinguishing authentic documents from quasi-editorial commentary recalls the terms in which Goethe positions the Italian Journey within the traditions of travel writing. At the end of the second volume, Goethe acknowledges that readers should supplement his text, which reflects only the ‘innermost goals’ of his travels, with works by writers who have pursued ‘external goals’ (Italian, 274). This distinction refers to a broader differentiation of the subjective travelogue, with which Goethe aligns his enterprise, from the various object-centred modes of travel writing in which he was well read, including guidebooks and older, information-oriented travel narratives.21 The altered style of the Second Sojourn in Rome cannot be read simply as Goethe’s revision of this view. The work does not play the subjective and objective modes of travel writing off against each other in the manner of Goethe’s earlier Letters from Switzerland (1796/1808). While the report sections frame and thus lessen the priority given to subjective experience, they hardly function only as objectifying commentary. Apart from elaborating on material in the correspondence, the reports include letters and texts by other writers as well as other, often previously published texts by Goethe. Far from providing an explanatory, stabilizing context for details of the letters, the reports introduce a heterogeneity of materials without always making clear what holds them together. Among the freestanding texts that Goethe included in the report sec-

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tion is an essay on St Filippo Neri, the Catholic reformer who lived in Rome in the sixteenth century. The manner of its insertion exemplifies how the work’s distinctive organization alters the interpretive strategy solicited from the reader. Apart from the essay on Neri, the topic of Neri’s life and deeds is taken up two other times in the Italian Journey, in a letter from the first volume, where it reads like a draft of the completed essay, and towards the end of the final volume to illuminate an anecdote. In both instances, the discussion of Neri is presented as arising directly from Goethe’s personal experience, from a proclaimed affinity for this figure and from the sight of pilgrims processing through Rome (Italian, 258–9 and 429–30). The essay ‘Filippo Neri, the Humorous Saint’ that appears in the December report has no such obvious motivation in the author’s own experience. It is presented with no explanation of its origin and with no transition from the chatty anecdote that precedes it. The one feature that identified Goethe as its author was removed from the published version.22 Nothing readily or securely identifies the essay’s neutral narrative voice with the first-person speaker of the report. It is an example of writing apparently decoupled from the criteria of authorship validated in ‘Third Pilgrimage.’ The essay pushes to the extreme a general tendency of the report sections: they test the relations among author, speaker, and text established in the first two volumes of the Italian Journey and operative in the correspondence sections of the Second Sojourn in Rome. The effect is to redirect the reader’s attention from the letters to the report itself as an explanatory referential frame. The December report that contains the Neri essay opens with, and is dominated by, the account of a pastime Goethe devises with his companions, all foreigners residing in Rome. It is a game of pretending to be tourists: ‘We said, namely: “Let us imagine we had just arrived in Rome, and, as hurried foreign visitors, had to become informed quickly about the major sights. Let us begin a tour [Umgang] with this in mind, so that what we already know will become new again in our minds and senses”’ (Italian, 360). The passage is notable for voicing Goethe’s willingness to inhabit a persona, the northern tourist moving at speed along the Grand Tour, consistently critiqued in the Italian Journey. More striking is the fact that this game produces Goethe’s clearest perception (and one of the work’s most often quota dicta) that he is in the ‘presence of classical soil,’ a detail unnoticed in the traditional reading of the Italian Journey as a record of the formation of Goethe’s classical aesthetics

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and, by extension, of the aesthetic program for an entire epoch of German letters.23 Into this apparently trivial episode is also embedded a reflection on the conventions of viewing and evaluating art. The mock tour consists in visits to the city’s principle architectural monuments during which the participants discuss the works before them. Playing at tourism is specified to playing at the art appreciation that was a staple activity in Goethe’s day for real tourists to Italy. In this context Goethe comments on a style of ‘empirical judgment’ associated with English and French travellers, by which he means the false and self-satisfied empiricism of a purely subjective response to an artwork: ‘a spontaneous, impromptu judgment is expressed without consideration of the fact that every artist is conditioned in multiple ways, by his special talent, by his predecessors and teachers, by place and time, by patrons and clients.’24 The remark is followed by an explanation of how this mode of art-critical judgment became so tenaciously popular. Goethe turns to his own travel guide to cite from it the mistaken ‘empirical’ assessment of Raphael’s frescos in the church of Maria della Pace, in order then to explicate how Raphael’s painting is realized perfectly ‘within the narrowest limits’ (Italian, 366) imposed on the artist. Goethe’s comment on habits of aesthetic observation belongs to an engagement with the visual arts that preoccupies the Italian Journey, particularly the final volume. As an alternative to subjective ‘empirical’ judgment, Goethe outlines and endorses an evaluative stance that accounts for the historical, social, and immediate spatio-temporal contexts in which an artwork is produced, an alternative that implies a reflection on the conditions of viewing itself. While this episode can be read as an example of the interest in techniques of observation characteristic of Goethe’s work,25 I would stress how it functions in the Second Sojourn in Rome as a reflection on the hermeneutic assumptions of reading. The interpretive stance solicited from the reader of Goethe’s text follows closely the model of non-‘empirical’ observation he proposes. The effect of the report sections is to remove the easy certainty of subjective experience (in this case, the author’s autobiography) in evaluating the text. The reader must instead mobilize a different interpretive framework by attending to the contingent, constitutive limits under which the text is presented. This demand is precisely what the ‘Neri’ essay exemplifies. It cannot be understood as deriving from the autobiographical record, yet because of its inclusion in a larger work nor can it be considered a self-contained independent text. It must be evaluated

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according to the immediate context in which it appears, the framing narrative of the December report. Goethe’s essay is a humanist’s portrait of Neri that values above all the irreverent pragmatism – this is essentially what the attribute ‘humorous’ in the essay’s title designates – of his actions. His depiction of Neri does not disagree with the full-length biographies available at the time, but the essay’s reduced scale of roughly a dozen pages introduces a distinct emphasis.26 Neri is presented as the anti-institutional hero of natural religious feeling; his reputation rests not on miracles but on the everyday, extraliturgical practice of his faith in the turbulent air of Counter-Reformation papal Rome. Evidence of Neri’s piety is found in his heated enthusiasm for prayer and ‘incessant visiting of churches’ (Italian, 371), a reference to the daily processions through the city that Neri instituted as well as his revival of the one-day pilgrimage to Rome’s seven principle churches. It is further manifest in Neri’s ability to discern true piety in others. Goethe includes several anecdotes demonstrating Neri’s skill at testing those ‘in the odor of sanctity’ (Italian, 376) and unsettling ‘any intellectual self-satisfaction a person might feel’ (Italian, 375). The essay presents Neri not just as a figure of fervent spirituality, but as one who achieves ever-deepening faith even within the official role of priest. Taking holy orders in fact produces ‘a remarkably intensifying effect [steigernden Einfluß] on his inner self’ (Italian, 373). Fervour becomes ecstasy, and from his actions flow even greater ‘benefit and a beatific feeling’ (Italian, 378). The aspects of Neri’s life emphasized in the essay correspond to features of Goethe’s own undertaking in the December report. Neri’s ministry is directed towards realizing God’s word in deeds, Goethe’s game towards realizing Rome’s history and grandeur. Just as Neri’s ‘humour’ is not a whimsical trait but rather designates a stance in the world, Goethe’s invented pastime is not merely entertainment. The game is a technique for reviving, from within the worn-out role of the tourist, the viewer’s impressions of Rome. Touring the city under strict time limits – an enterprise referred to, like the one-day circuit of Rome’s seven churches revived by Neri, as an Umgang27 – should lead the viewer to a vivid sense that in Rome ‘the history of art and mankind stood synchronically before our eyes’ (Italian, 366). Testing others’ responsiveness to this sight, or at least to the particular works of art that belong to it, is what underlies Goethe’s challenge to the self-complacency of ‘empirical’ judgments of art. As a reminder of the shared topography of classical and papal Rome, Goethe’s tour even begins at the site identified in

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the essay as key in keeping Neri, who contemplated missionary work abroad, in the city.28 Finally, the ‘Neri’ essay resonates with the report’s own form. The depiction of Neri’s life concludes with an exchange of letters between Neri and Pope Clement VIII, similar to how Goethe’s expository report sections often cite his own letters and letters from others. The resonance between the December report and the ‘Neri’ essay it includes suggests more than a set of thematic parallels. They present Goethe depicting his own experience in imitation of Neri’s life, and thus implicitly assuming the persona of a pilgrim vis-à-vis his chosen saint.29 The pastime of touring Rome finds him retracing Neri’s footsteps and, in the idiom of modern secular tourism, imitating his actions. Goethe’s assumption of the pilgrim’s emulative stance reflects a general shift in the Italian Journey away from characterizing his experience as maximally unique and subjective. In particular, it corresponds to a broader affirmation of imitation as an aesthetic value. Not relegated to the reception of art as in ‘Third Pilgrimage,’ imitation here supplies the artist with a guiding ideal of beauty and is increasingly aligned with artistic production. This of course is nothing other than a premise of classicism, one that finds lapidary articulation within the Second Sojourn in Rome. Without imitation – to paraphrase Goethe’s retrospective formulation in 1829 while recounting the origins of his classical phase during his travels through Italy in the mid-1780s – art is impossible (Italian, 290). The tacit alignment of the author and pilgrim personas in the Second Sojourn in Rome provokes reconsideration of how we read this work on its own terms, and not just as an autobiographical record of Goethe’s artistic development. The Second Sojourn in Rome identifies the author as a pilgrim not by directly citing conventions of pilgrim writing, as in ‘Third Pilgrimage,’ but by evoking the form and function of pilgrim books. The ‘Neri’ essay is simultaneously the vita of a local saint and the most sustained depiction of a period in Rome’s past within the Italian Journey. As such, it suggests both the hagiographic and historical materials that typically appear in pilgrim guides. Moreover, the manner of the essay’s integration into the text recalls the coordinating function associated with the devotional and instructional material for the pilgrim’s circuit. There is no direct interreference – no representational link – between Neri’s vita and the autobiographical record in the December report. They are merely keyed to the same topography, to particular sites in Rome. The evocation of pilgrim writing that occurs

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through the ‘Neri’ essay resonates most deeply as a description of the overall formal arrangement of the Second Sojourn in Rome. The omniumgatherum quality of pilgrim books and their characteristically heavy borrowing from earlier texts30 have a strong parallel in the most distinctive textual features of the Second Sojourn in Rome, features that in fact define much of Goethe’s late writing: the inclusion of heterogeneous materials and the citation of pre-existing texts. Viewed in this way, the pilgrim guidebook constitutes an addition to the other textual models, such as montage, archive, and collection, which critics have identified in Goethe’s late work as alternatives to an author-centred view of textual production.31 What follows from the suggestion that the Second Sojourn in Rome presents itself, however subtly, as a pilgrim guidebook? It makes the reception of the Italian Journey as a travel guide if not more plausible then perhaps less laughable. To stress the broader implication, it draws attention to the characteristic openness with regard to pragmatic status and function that distinguishes literary texts from forms of non-literary writing. More significantly, Goethe’s evocation of pilgrim literature in this late work points to how he uses the trope and textual conventions of pilgrimage to reconceptualize literary authorship. The early ‘Third Pilgrimage’ isolates one feature of pilgrimage, the escalation of affective intensity, as the basis for an expressive model of authorship. It stresses the idea of pilgrimage itself as an extraliturgical, spontaneous phenomenon, as ‘a free, poetic expression’ of faith.32 The Second Sojourn in Rome evokes pilgrimage not to inscribe authorial presence into a text, but to relinquish an emphatic conception of author as individual creator and to detach writing from individual expression. Here the stress is on pilgrimage as a spiritual exercitium, on the routinized, communal aspects and iterability of the pilgrim’s experience. Important in this shift of emphasis is the alternative it proposes to subjectivity as the paramount feature in shaping modern literary discourse. It locates the contingency of expression – the constitutive limits under which a statement assumes meaning and gathers force – not from a unique standpoint, but instead in the contexts and sites where it is produced.

N OTE S 1 For a critical take on the tendency to interpret pilgrim literature of the late medieval and early modern periods according to the literary values and

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Kelly Barry standards of modern travel writing, see as Gerhard Wolf, ‘Die deutschsprachigen Reiseberichte des Spätmittelalters’ in Der Reisebericht, ed. Peter J. Brenner (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 81–116. On the ‘referential pact’ between text and reader in travel writing, see Jan Borm, ‘Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing, and Terminology,’ in Perspectives on Travel Writing, ed. Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 13–26. My focus on the function of place as a strategy of textual authorization also offers a possible link of Goethe’s travel writings to recent discussions of autoethnography; see e.g. James Buzzard ‘On Auto-Ethnographic Authority’ in the Yale Journal of Criticism 16 (2003): 61–91. ‘Ich will schreiben’ and ‘Schreiber.’ Quoted from Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1805 (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), vol. 18, 181 and 183. All translations from this text are my own. Henceforth documented parenthetically as Schriften. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 40; my emphasis. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Boucard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38. Goethe, Ästhetische Schriften, 181 (in ‘Third Pilgrimage’) and 116 (in ‘On German Architecture’). The figure of genius in Goethe’s early work has been analysed by David Wellbery in The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), ch. 5. Wellbery argues that for Goethe, genius ‘comes to designate the auto-production of poetic subjectivity’ (122). My focus is not on the poetological dimension of ‘Third Pilgrimage’ (which indeed identifies it tightly with Goethe’s other writings on genius) but instead on the text’s performative dimension and how it dramatizes its relation to the earlier ‘On German Architecture.’ On Goethe’s relation to Pietist thought, see Rolf Christian Zimmermann, Das Weltbild des jungen Goethe (Munich: Fink, 1969), vol. 1, 57–74. For a broader assessment of the relation between religiosity and the German literary tradition, see Heinz Schlaffer’s recent Die kurze Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (Munich: Hanser, 2002), esp. 54–64. The reader is prompted to see ‘Third Pilgrimage’ in terms of the author’s biographical experience by the date in the title, the opening rubric (in the originally published form), and the concluding coda. There is evidence for the text’s performative claim to being written on site and in real time as Goethe walked around the Strasbourg cathedral; cf. the commentary in

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Goethe, Ästhetische Schriften, 1128–9 (there is also commentary on this text in vol. 8, 1093–5, of the same edition). The essay was first published as an anonymous pamphlet in November 1772. It was reprinted, again without an attribution, in May 1773 in Herder’s collection of Sturm und Drang writings, Von deutscher Art und Kunst. The literary-critical literature on pilgrim writing remains somewhat scant. See Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 24–6; and Donald Howard, Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), ch. 1. Though the pilgrim guide had emerged as a distinct genre by the end of the sixteenth century, its content and structure remained somewhat fluid. It typically comprised in some combination the following types of materials: historical (background about the site, vitas of the key figures associated with it, testimonials to miraculous events); devotional (the texts of prayers and songs to be recited en route and on site); instructional (descriptions of the what, when, and where of ritual activities performed at the ancillary and central sites, lists of indulgences); practical (information about the journey itself, itinerary, accommodations, money, etc.); and personal (the writer’s own commentary or observations). On the merely ‘heuristic’ value of such categorizations, see Wolf, ‘Die deutschsprachigen Reiseberichte des Spätmittelalters,’ esp. 86–106. I read the ‘Preparation’ as reflecting what Victor Turner and Edith Turner, in their anthropological study of Christian pilgrimage, have termed the experiential aim of receiving ‘the pure imprint of a paradigmatic structure.’ See Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 11. On this point see Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 15. Peter Brown has shown how the tension between proximity and distance characterizes both pilgrimage and the translation of relics in The Cult of Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), ch. 5. The place-contingent renewal of spiritual meaning, and particularly of prayer, during pilgrimage belongs to a sympathetic view of pilgrimage. It is articulated clearly in the pilgrim guides and chronicles of the first half of the nineteenth century that defended the renewed pilgrimage practice in Catholic Europe during this period. See, for example, Joseph Tschudi, Einsiedlische Chronik oder Geschichte des Stiftes und der Wallfahrt zu Maria Einsiedeln (Benziger: Einsiedeln, 1823), esp. 287–304; Jakob Marx, Das

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Kelly Barry Wallfahrten in der katholischen Kirche. Historisch-kritisch dargestellt nach den Schriften der Kirchenväter und den Concilien von den ersten christlichen Jahrhunderten bis auf die neuere Zeit (Trier: Fr. Linz’sche Buchhandlung, 1842), esp. 128–65; and Justus Landolt, Ursprung und erste Gestaltung des Stiftes MariaEinsiedeln, nebst einem Anhange über die Engelweihe und die Wallfahrt (Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1845), esp. 149. The polemical counterargument to the idea that physical contingencies are important in achieving true prayer was articulated in an earlier period of widespread Christian pilgrimage. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, opponents proposed an ‘interiorization’ of pilgrimage, or pilgrimage only ‘in spirit,’ an argument that emphasizes pilgrimage as a spiritual exercitium, like prayer itself, and that hence considers the pilgrim’s spiritual aims realizable through prayer alone at home. On this, see Klaus Herbers and Robert Plotz, eds., Spiritualität des Pilgerns: Kontinuität und Wandel (Tübingen: Narr, 1993), esp. 56–64. On this, see Marx, Das Wallfahrten, 62, 64, 104; and Landolt, Ursprung,144, 146. From Marx, Das Wallfahrten, 60–1. The translation is mine. Goethe, Ästhetische Schriften, 180. My translation of ‘heiliger Erwin’ as ‘Saint Erwin’ requires explanation. The phrase ‘heiliger Erwin’ appears in both of Goethe’s ‘pilgrimage’ texts to characterize the architect as a divine figure. While in the earlier ‘On German Architecture’ the figure of Erwin is clearly identified with God, in ‘Third Pilgrimage’ he has the status of a saint. The distinction implies a shift in models of authority and function, from absolute Creator to a figure in a chain of intercessors to divinity. There is a further significance to how ‘Third Pilgrimage’ assembles the new criteria of authorship as, or out of, the relation between two texts. It defines the authenticity of the speaker’s statements as a consistent, recognizable voice over time and across a series of publications. The ‘author’ understood as a principle of unity for a set of works is another aspect of what Foucault considers the ‘author-function.’ The artist’s usurpation of the divine figure in ‘Third Pilgrimage’ is characteristic of the logic of genius as Wellbery analyses it (see note 6 above). See Julius Haarhaus, Auf Goethes Spuren in Italien (Leipzig: Naumann, 1896– 7); and Georg von Graevenitz, Goethe unser Reisebegleiter in Italien (Berlin: Mittler und Sohn, 1904). Quoted from Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. Robert R. Heitner (New York: Suhrkamp, 1989), 319. All quotations will be from this translation. References to the original are from Goethe, Italienische Reise (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), vol. 15, 1–2. On Goethe’s construction of his own history as an author in the Italian Journey, see Gerhard Schulz, ‘Wann

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und wo ensteht ein klassischer Nationalautor? Zu Goethes “Italienische Reise,”’ in Geschichtlichkeit und Aktualität, ed. Klaus-Detlef Müller et al. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988), 51–68. On the differentiation of object-centred and subject-centred travel writing in this period, see Korte, English Travel Writing, chs. 1–3. For a recent intepretation of the Italian Journey that situates the work within the various modes and traditions of travel writing that Goethe drew on, see Achim Aurnhammer, ‘Goethes Italienische Reise im Kontext der deutschen Italienreisen,’ in Goethe-Jahrbuch 120 (2003): 72–86. Aurnhammer’s essay reflects what I consider the limits of the objective/subjective schema for a close interpretation of the Italian Journey: it does not offer a strong account of the Second Sojourn in Rome, which through its altered formal arrangement scrambles subjective and objective perspectives to such a degree that the distinction is of little interpretive profit. The formal complexity (and strangeness) of the Second Sojourn in Rome goes all too often unremarked. It was registered by W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, who, less pious than most Goethe scholars, explained it as an unexpected stylistic sloppiness that they attempted to improve with their translation; cf. their introduction to Goethe, Italian Journey (London: Penguin, 1962), 18. When completing the ‘Neri’ essay in 1829, Goethe wrote a coda titled ‘General Observation’ in which the narrative voice is readily identifiable with that of the speaker of the report sections. The coda was not included in the Second Sojourn in Rome, and hence the clear link between the narrative voices of the ‘Neri’ essay and the surrounding report section is lost. On this, see the commentary in Goethe, Italienische Reise, vol. 15/2, 1149–50. Italian Journey, 366. This passage ends with an echo of Revelation 1:4, which also appears at the end of the ‘Prayer’ section in ‘Third Pilgrimage.’ Ibid., 365. The touristic mode of judgment described here, a putatively individual response to art that devolves to mediocrity, resonates with a critique of the superficiality of popular judgment in ‘Third Pilgrimage’ (see Schriften, 182). I refer to Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). On the likely sources for Goethe’s essay, see the commentary in Goethe, Italienische Reise, vol. 15/2, 1420. The analogy between pilgrimage and tourism that Goethe activates in the December report is also developed elsewhere in the Italian Journey, particularly in the Assisi episode in vol. 1 and the passages on visiting Raphael’s skull in vol. 3. These episodes register an awareness of the functional and symbolic affinities between pilgrimage and tourism that have been analy-

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Kelly Barry sed in recent years from various disciplinary perspectives. To list only a few works in this area: MacCannell, The Tourist; Hermann Bausinger and Klaus Beyrer, eds., Reisekultur: von der Pilgerschaft zum Tourismus (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1991); Nelson Graburn, ‘Tourism: The Sacred Journey,’ in Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, ed. Valeria Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); and John Eade and Michael Sallnow, eds., Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). The church of ‘the three little fountains.’ See Goethe, Italian Journey, 360 and 378. See also the commentary in Italienische Reise, vol. 15/2, 1414 and 1422. It is with a reflection on choosing one’s own saint that Goethe introduces the discussion of Neri in the letter dated 26 May 1787. See Korte, English Travel Writing, 26; and Wolf, ‘Die deutschsprachigen Reiseberichte des Spätmittelalters,’ esp. 90–106. Of interest, too, is Dietrich Huschenbrett’s account of how pilgrim guides were composed in ‘Die Literatur der deutschen Pilgerreisen nach Jerusalem im späten Mittelalter,’ in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 59, no. 1 (1985), 29–46, esp. 41–5. Recently in this vein is Gert Theile, ed., Das Archiv der Goethezeit. Ordnung – Macht – Matrix (Munich: Fink, 2001). That such textual models coexist as alternatives to (rather than to the exclusion of) an author-centred conception of textual production is particularly clear in the Italian Journey, a work that both promotes and marks a critical distance to the model of authorship as emphatic individuality. Marx, Das Wallfahrten, 190.

4 ‘Trouver du nouveau?’ Baudelaire’s Voyages1 jonathan culler

In 1988, Gilbert Trigano, the founder of Club Med and a man whose understanding of the possibilities of travel and tourism has been tested in the marketplace, published an anthology, Les plus beaux poèmes du voyage. One hundred thirty-five poets from twenty-eight countries appear in alphabetical order, except for Charles Baudelaire, who is given more space than any other and whom Trigano places first, deeming him the ‘indispensable poet of travel.’2 But Baudelaire was an extraordinarily reluctant traveller. His only voyage was taken under duress and broken off halfway. In 1841, when the young reprobate, who had been suspended from the Collège Louis le Grand, where he was preparing the baccalauréat, proceeded to live a dissolute life in the Quartier Latin, in the company of Sara la Louchette and other prostitutes, frittering away his inheritance, piling up debts, and declaring that he would devote himself to literature, his stepfather, the General Aupick, convinced the other relatives that a long trip abroad would be just the thing. He wrote to Charles’s older brother, Alphonse, that ‘the moment has come where something must be done to prevent the absolute ruin of your brother ... It is urgent to remove him from the slippery slope of Paris. People advise me to have him take a long sea voyage, to the Indies and India, in the hope that thus removed from his familiar surroundings and from the detestable company he keeps, and in the presence of so many things to study, he might find the right path [‘rentrer dans le vrai’].’3 The true way or right path, need it be said, was not that of literature. Charles had already disappointed his stepfather by his refusal to consider a career in civil or military service, and had abandoned the study of law, which had been a way of deferring choice. His mother remarked, ‘How stupefied we were when Charles resisted

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everything we tried to do for him, wanted to fly on his own wings and be an author.’4 Foreign travel it was to be. Baudelaire was placed in the charge of Captain Saliz, skipper of Le Paquebot-des-Mers-du-Sud, a ship sailing from Bordeaux to Calcutta, with stops in Mauritius and the Île de la Réunion. The captain undertook to help turn Charles’s mind away from literature, but as he reported to General Aupick, Charles’s ‘peremptory’ responses on this subject convinced him that he had ‘no chance of succeeding where his parents had failed’ and led him to renounce the topic of vocation as a subject of conversation.5 ‘As soon as we left France,’ he wrote, ‘all of us on board were able to see that it was too late to hope to make Mr. Beaudelaire [sic] abandon his exclusive taste for literature as it is understood today or his determination not to give himself over to any other occupation. This narrow taste of his made all conversations that did not relate to it foreign to him and distanced him from the most frequent topics of conversation among our sailors and the other military and commercial passengers.’6 Baudelaire’s consequent isolation, concluded the captain, ‘only intensified his literary tastes and pursuits’ [‘n’a fait qu’augmenter ses gouts et ses poursuites littéraires’]. After three months at sea, during which they encountered a storm that demasted the ship – ‘an accident at sea such as I have never experienced in my long career as a sailor,’ said the captain7 – the ship reached Mauritius. This island had fallen under English rule, and the French colonists, clinging to French culture, embraced travellers from France. Here, in the quartier des Pamplemousses, where Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had set the action of Paul et Virginie, Baudelaire was well received by a magistrate and planter, Autard de Bragard, and his wife, Emmelina de Bragard, known for her beauty. Baudelaire spent several weeks as their guest until his ship proceeded on to l’Île de la Réunion, then known as l’Île Bourbon, where he insisted on disembarking rather than continue on to India. The situation here was very different from that in Mauritius. A French colony that had refused to abolish slavery, l’Île Bourbon’s planters were suspicious of French visitors, especially intellectuals and bohemians, and Baudelaire was left to his own devices among the natives.8 After fortyfive days’ wait he was able to catch another boat back to France, via Cape Town. On l’Île Bourbon, Baudelaire wrote ‘A une dame créole,’ about Emmelina de Bragard, which he sent her through her husband.

‘Trouver du nouveau?’ Baudelaire’s Voyages a une dame créole Au pays parfumé que le soleil caresse, J’ai connu, sous un dais d’arbres tout empourprés Et de palmiers d’où pleut sur les yeux la paresse, Une dame créole aux charmes ignorés. Son teint est pâle et chaud; la brune enchanteresse A dans le cou des airs noblement maniérés; Grande et svelte en marchant comme une chasseresse, Son sourire est tranquille et ses yeux assurés. Si vous alliez, Madame, au vrai pays de gloire, Sur les bords de la Seine ou de la verte Loire, Belle digne d’orner les antiques manoirs, Vous feriez, à l’abri des ombreuses retraites Germer mille sonnets dans le coeur des poètes, Que vos grands yeux rendraient plus soumis que vos noirs.9 for a creole lady Off in a perfumed land bathed gently by the sun, Under a palm tree’s shade tinged with a crimson trace, A place where indolence drops on the eyes like rain, I met a Creole lady of unstudied grace. This brown enchantress’ skin is warm and light in tone; Her neck is noble, proud, her manner dignified; Slender and tall, she goes with huntress’ easy stride; Her smile is tranquil, and her eyes assured. Madame, if you should come to the place of pride and praise, On the banks of the Seine or of the verdant Loire, Adorning ancient mansions with your stately ways, There in the shelter of the shady groves, you’d start A thousand sonnets blooming in the poets’ hearts, Whom your great eyes would make more servile than your Blacks.10

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The original that he sent her included a more specifically local image in its second line: ‘J’ai vu dans un retrait de tamarins imbrés’ (I saw in a grove of amber tamarind trees), rather than ‘sous un dais d’arbres tout empourprés’ (beneath a canopy of red-tinged trees). In this poem we find the imagery of exotic climes – sun, smells, palm trees, and ease – an imagery that reappears in Les Fleurs du Mal even when the context is not one of travel. But the last line provides a nice twist: the liberation of the slaves on Mauritius only six years before and the contested continuation of slavery on l’Île Bourbon add piquancy to the figure of the dame créole enslaving poets by her gaze: ‘Que vos grands yeux rendraient plus soumis que des noirs’ (more submissive than Blacks), as the original sent to her read (for she didn’t have slaves); ‘plus soumis que vos noirs’ (more submissive than your Blacks; with the implication that they are slaves), in the subsequent, published version. The latter elided a historical reality for a more telling poetic turn: her poets would be more submissive than ‘her slaves,’ as her interpreters and translators render the words ‘vos noirs.’11 These two months in the Mascarene Islands are thought to have marked Baudelaire’s verse. Joanna Richardson observes that themes or images suggested by the voyage were to fill ten times the space of all the memories of his first twenty years, and provide almost the only source of the open air, of light and happiness.12 Baudelaire’s contemporaries also detected an investment in the tropics. Swinburne, for instance, wrote of Baudelaire’s ‘tropical homesickness.’13 But most of the tropical imagery could have been obtained more easily by reading. Indeed, Captain Saliz, in reporting to Charles’s father, remarked that in Mauritius, ‘nothing in a country, in a society, entirely new to him attracted his attention or awakened the faculty of observation that he possesses.’ 14 Baudelaire’s tropical texts do contain, though, along with the pointed reference to slavery that I have mentioned, some distinctive notes. The prose poem ‘La Belle Dorothée,’ which we can link with l’Îsle Bourbon, begins with what is certainly more realistic imagery of tropical heat than the ‘caressing’ sun of ‘A une dame créole’: ‘Le soleil accable la ville de sa lumière droite et terrible; le sable est éblouissant et la mer miroite. Le monde stupifié s’affaise lâchement et fait la sieste’ (The sun overwhelms the city with its direct and fearsome light; the sand is dazzling and the sea shimmers. Stunned people slackly collapse and take a siesta).15 Françoise Lionnet, in an important article, argues that this prose poem reports an authentic bit of native speech, when Dorothée speaks of the dancing of ‘les vieilles Cafrines’ – a word not found in

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nineteenth-century dictionaries but distinctive of the speech of women of this island, who still use it today about themselves.16 And once again, slavery provides a final twist: Dorothée is free and would be perfectly happy, we are told, if she weren’t struggling to buy out of slavery ‘sa petite soeur, qui a bien onze ans, et qui est déjà mûre, et si belle!’ (her little sister, who is indeed eleven, and already ripe, and so beautiful). The exclamation seems to mark free indirect speech, momentarily giving Dorothée a voice – unlike most female figures in Baudelaire. Though this conclusion may play to the voyeurism of a male audience, one might still conjecture that Baudelaire, rejected by the planters of l’Île Bourbon, may here be identifying with a black woman, as he shortly thereafter identified with lesbians.17 Lionnet also notes that the original name for Mauritius was ‘Ihla do Cirne’ (l’Île des Cygnes), given by Portuguese explorers, who identified the flightless dodo they discovered there as a swan. The name stuck, insofar as the main newspaper of the island in Baudelaire’s day and even into the twentieth century was Le Cernéen, from ‘Cirne,’ and had a picture of a swan on its front page above the title. It is quite possible, then, that Baudelaire’s great poem ‘Le Cygne’ encompasses a subterranean reference to the false swan of the Portuguese, the dodo, who is land-bound, like ‘mon grand cygne, avec ses gestes fous’ (my great swan with his crazed gestures).18 Baudelaire’s poem aligns a number of figures who have suffered loss, and the connection between the poet, the swan, the negress searching for her ‘cocotiers absents’ (missing palm trees), and the ‘matelots oubliés dans une île’ (sailors forgotten on an island), as Baudelaire must have felt himself to have been, may be closer and more anecdotally realistic than we have hitherto imagined. It is interesting that Baudelaire did not refer in print to his voyage afterwards or even speak of it to his friends: ‘He never spoke to us of these trips’ reported Ernest Prarond,19 and Baudelaire even claimed to Leconte de Lisle, a native of La Réunion, ‘Je n’ai jamais mis les pieds dans votre cage à moustiques, votre perchoir à perroquets. J’ai vu de loin des palmes, du bleu, du bleu, du bleu.’ (‘I never set foot in your mosquito cage, your parrots’ perch; I saw from afar palm trees, and blue, blue, blue).’20 On the contrary, Baudelaire lent himself to the creation of a legend that he had been to India. His friend Asselineau declared that from his trip to India Baudelaire had brought back a very adequate knowledge of English.21 Another friend, Maxime du Camp, claimed that Baudelaire had gone all the way to India and ‘supplied cattle for the British army. His mother secretly sent money to her son,

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who rode on elephants and wrote poetry.’22 Théophile Gautier, the older poet to whom Les Fleurs du Mal is dedicated, even maintained, amazingly, that Baudelaire had been born in India and that recurring thoughts often took him back there, to his youthful paradise.23 Is it just that the obscure islands he had visited provided scant cultural capital, whereas India, the exotic East, did? Or is it that for Baudelaire only imagined travel was worthwhile, so that the real voyage was repressed in favour of an imagined one? Certainly Baudelaire’s imagined voyages have been productive for others, from Swinburne forward. The most fascinating version of a Baudelairian Indian sojourn comes from the early-twentieth-century Urdu poet Miraji, who, drawing misinformation from Arthur Symonds, imagines a Baudelaire who broke away from a hated stepfather to reach Calcutta and spend a year there, where he imbibed the richest resources of his poetry: The dark savory beauty of the sea of Bengal had a striking effect on his unformed mind. He must have seen a temple dedicated to Kali, the goddess of darkness. And the story of the devimata [goddess-mother], that philosophical rumination on injury long concealed in it, with the fullness of its seductive enchanted secrets, stole into his heart like a magical figure, giving its years of suppressed lonely personhood a gift of natural darkness that revitalized and awoke those suppressions in a fresh, untouched mode ... In close proximity with Kali Devi and her stories, what desires might he have felt? In that dark, seductive, spicy beauty what enticements was he shown?24

Miraji, who translated and constructed a Baudelaire, much as Baudelaire had translated and imagined an Edgar Allan Poe, finds in Baudelaire’s eastern journey, and his experience of the dense, spicy, hot, dark, contrary world of India, the sources of poetic experience that led to the modernist break with the European tradition and to the production of Jeanne Duval, his life-long mulatto mistress and tormenter, as fetish of a disruptive desire. His sexual defenses had not yet been completely formed. And they could not repel different forms of air and water. He had to stay in the sort of country that was not merely not cold, but whose humid warmth and hot wet wind drove the being of a person bred in Europe to extreme disgust and displeasure. The sharp excessive heat of places like India and Africa doesn’t just turn such people towards bodily dis-ease, but also troubles

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and disturbs them to such an extent that their souls are utterly tormented. This acute feeling matures from the world and causes them to turn away in revolt from the immortality of life, but also gives them new avenues to explore in their social universe, such that they begin a search for the enticements of an excited, wailing lament.25

For Miraji, understanding European modernist verse, taking up a relation to it, thus involves imagining a colonization of Europe by dark, disjunctive forces of the colony. If Miraji’s inferences from false premises are valid, imagined tropics would have been central to Baudelaire’s poetry of self-reflexive despair and desire. Several of the poems based on his actual travels, including ‘A une Malabaraise’ and ‘Bien loin d’ici,’ Baudelaire did not think worthy of inclusion in Les Fleurs du Mal. And most of the poems that do involve imagery of exotic tropical climes are not about actual travel – ‘La Vie antérieure’ and ‘La Chevelure,’ for instance. In the prose poems, alternative versions of the verse poems, there is even a certain mockery of this exotic imagery: the title of the prose poem linked with ‘La Chevelure,’ ‘Un Hémisphère dans une chevelure,’ is already ironic – the whole Eastern Hemisphere can be found in the beloved’s hair. The hair evokes memories – ‘sur les rivages duvetés de ta chevelure je m’enivre des odeurs combinés du goudron, du musc, et de l’huile de coco’ (on the downy shores of your tresses, I become intoxicated with the mingled smells of tar, musk, and coconut oil) — but there is a literalization that seems to involve a certain mockery: ‘Quand je mordille des cheveux élastiques et rebelles il me semble que je mange des souvenirs’ (When I nibble at your elastic and unruly hair, I seem to be eating memories).26 What is the status of memories that can be eaten when one chews a woman’s hair? And in the prose poem ‘L’Invitation au voyage,’ the evocation of a ‘superbe pays de Cocagne,’ ‘où tout est riche, propre et luisant,’ – like what? – ‘comme une magnifique batterie de cuisine’ (rich, tidy and glossy, like a magnificent array of kitchen utensils) – yields to the explicit claim that this imagined land is a projection of the beloved.27 There is a fundamental paradox in Baudelaire. On the one hand, he makes strong claims for the fundamentally transformative effects of foreign travel. The opening section of his text on the art in the Exposition Universelle of 1855 contrasts aesthetic theorists or ‘professeurs-jurés d’aesthétique’ (self-appointed aesthetic pedants) with an intelligent ‘homme du monde’ transported to a distant land. For the latter, ‘je suis

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sur que, si les étonnements du débarquement sont grands [...] la sympathie sera tôt ou tard si vive, si pénétrante, qu’elle créera en lui un monde nouveau d’idées [...] et qui l’accompagnera, sous la forme de souvenirs, jusqu’à la mort’ (I am sure that though his surprises on disembarking would be great ... his sympathy will sooner or later become so keen, so penetrating, that it will create in him a new world of ideas ... which will accompany him as memories till his death).28 This has the air of personal testimony more than of abstract reflection, and there follows a long list of the sorts of new things this man of the world would experience: new smells, fruits, shapes of boats, mysterious flowers, even ‘végetaux inquiétants’ (disturbing vegetables), all of which ‘enrichiront sa dictionnaire de mortelle’ (will enrich his mortal’s dictionary). What more explicit claim for the transformative power of foreign travel could one find? But a moment earlier, when asking who is capable of appreciating an exotic art work – ‘un produit chinois,’ for instance – Baudelaire’s answer is, ‘Les mieux doués à cet égard sont ces voyageurs solitaires qui ont vécu pendant des années au fond des bois, au milieu des vertigineuses prairies, sans autre compagnon que leur fusil, contemplant, disséquant, écrivant’ (the most gifted in this respect are the solitary travellers who have lived for years in the depths of the forests, in the midst of dizzying prairies, their gun as sole companion, contemplating, analyzing, writing). The voyageur who is best able to appreciate the bizarre and exotic is a solitary traveller who, it turns out, hasn’t travelled at all! This is consonant with, for instance, the image of travel in ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ (both the verse and prose versions), where what is desirable is not a land to which one might actually travel but rather the imagined country, the figuration of a desire.29 The few poems that do purport to recount actual voyages, notably ‘Le Voyage’ and ‘Un Voyage à Cythère,’ maintain that foreign travel is extraordinarily disillusioning and unproductive, though of course articulation of the disillusions of travel produces these magnificent poems. ‘Le Voyage’ is the poem chosen to conclude Les Fleurs du Mal, and its argument is well known: we find everywhere what we had already known at home; we see ourselves reflected everywhere, ‘une oasis d’horreur dans un désert d’ennui’ (an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom). The structure of the poem seems to ensure that earthly travel cannot serve as a source of hope, since, with multiple shifts in perspective, it repeatedly announces the impossibility of fulfilment by contrasting the finitude of the world with the infinitude of human desires. The poem begins by comparing the vastness of our appetite with the tinyness of the world: only the

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child who knows nothing of the world can imagine it adequate to his insatiable appetite. Pour l’enfant, amoureux de cartes et d’estampes, L’univers est égal à son vaste appétit. Ah! que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes! Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit!30 The wide-eyed child in love with maps and plans Finds the world equal to his appetite. How grand the universe by light of lamps, How petty in the memory’s clear sight.

Thus, true travel is travel without an earthly destination: ‘Nous nous embarquerons sur la mer des Ténèbres’ (We shall embark on the sea of Darkness) or ‘Plonger au fond du gouffre [...] Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!’ (plunge into the abyss ... to the depths of the Unknown to find the new).31 The semiotics of tourism, as discussed by Dean MacCannell and others, yields the paradox that what tourists want to see is what they already know: they want to experience the original Eiffel Tower, or St Peter’s, or Niagara Falls, of which they have already seen reproductions; and at a level of more quotidian experience, they want to see what is typically French, or German, or Japanese – objects and behaviours that correspond to what they expect of the French or the Germans or the Japanese. The quest for authenticity, for getting off the beaten track to see the ‘real’ France or Germany or Japan, may appear ethically superior but shares the same semiotic structure, the comparison of a sight with its marker.32 Baudelaire’s account of foreign travel does deal with the question of the signifying structures of expectations, but in a different vein. ‘Un Voyage à Cythère’ is his best exploration of a nascent tourism, but it applies a distinctively Baudelairian turn: the contrast between expectations generated by travellers’ tales and the reality the traveller confronts morphs into a meditation on the horrors of self-consciousness, where travel drops out, as mere occasion. un voyage à cythère Mon coeur, comme un oiseau, voltigeait tout joyeux Et planait librement à l’entour des cordages;

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Jonathan Culler Le navire roulait sous un ciel sans nuages, Comme un ange enivré d’un soleil radieux. Quelle est cette île triste et noire? – C’est Cythère, Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons. Regardez, après tout, c’est une pauvre terre. – Île des doux secrets et des fêtes du coeur! De l’antique Vénus le superbe fantôme Au-dessus de tes mers plane comme un arôme Et charge les esprits d’amour et de langueur. Belle île aux myrtes verts, pleine de fleurs écloses, Vénérée à jamais par toute nation, Où les soupirs des coeurs en adoration Roulent comme l’encens sur un jardin de roses Ou le roucoulement éternel d’un ramier! – Cythère n’était plus qu’un terrain des plus maigres, Un désert rocailleux troublé par des cris aigres. J’entrevoyais pourtant un objet singulier! Ce n’était pas un temple aux ombres bocagères, Où la jeune prêtresse, amoureuse des fleurs, Allait, le corps brûlé de secrètes chaleurs, Entre-bâillant sa robe aux brises passagères; Mais voilà qu’en rasant la côte d’assez près Pour troubler les oiseaux avec nos voiles blanches, Nous vîmes que c’était un gibet à trois branches, Du ciel se détachant en noir, comme un cyprès. De féroces oiseaux perchés sur leur pâture Détruisaient avec rage un pendu déjà mûr, Chacun plantant, comme un outil, son bec impur Dans tous les coins saignants de cette pourriture; Les yeux étaient deux trous, et du ventre effondré Les intestins pesants lui coulaient sur les cuisses,

‘Trouver du nouveau?’ Baudelaire’s Voyages Et ses bourreaux, gorgés de hideuses délices, L’avaient à coups de bec absolument châtré. Sous les pieds, un troupeau de jaloux quadrupèdes, Le museau relevé, tournoyait et rôdait; Une plus grande bête au milieu s’agitait Comme un exécuteur entouré de ses aides. Habitant de Cythère, enfant d’un ciel si beau, Silencieusement tu souffrais ces insultes En expiation de tes infâmes cultes Et des péchés qui t’ont interdit le tombeau. Ridicule pendu, tes douleurs sont les miennes! Je sentis, à l’aspect de tes membres flottants, Comme un vomissement, remonter vers mes dents Le long fleuve de fiel des douleurs anciennes; Devant toi, pauvre diable au souvenir si cher, J’ai senti tous les becs et toutes les mâchoires Des corbeaux lancinants et des panthères noires Qui jadis aimaient tant à triturer ma chair. – Le ciel était charmant, la mer était unie; Pour moi tout était noir et sanglant désormais, Hélas! et j’avais, comme en un suaire épais, Le coeur enseveli dans cette allégorie. Dans ton île, ô Vénus! je n’ai trouvé debout Qu’un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image... – Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!33 My heart was like a bird that fluttered joyously And glided free among the tackle and the lines! The vessel rolled along under a cloudless sky – An angel, tipsy, gay, full of the radiant sun. What is that sad black isle? I asked as we approached –

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Jonathan Culler They call it Cythera, land to write songs about, Banal utopia of veterans of love; But look, it seems a poor land after all. – Island of sweet intrigues, and feastings of the heart! The ghost of ancient Venus the magnificent Glides like a haunting scent above your swelling seas, Enrapturing the soul in languishing and love. Sweet isle of greenery, myrtle and blooming flowers, Perpetual delight of those in every land, Where sighs of adoration from the hearts of lovers Rose as incense does over a rosy bower, Or like the constant crooning of a turtle-dove! – Cythera was an island barren in terrain, A mere deserted rock, disturbed by piercing cries. But on it I could glimpse a curious device! No, it was not a temple, amid the woodland shades, Where the young priestess, the flowers’ devotee, Would tarry, body burning, hot with secret lusts, Her robe half-open to the fleeting wisps of breeze; But as we skimmed the shore, fairly near enough To agitate the birds with swelling of our sails, What we saw was a gibbet, made of three great stakes. It reared against the sky, black, as a cypress stands. Ferocious birds were gathered, snatching at their food, Raging around a hanging shape already ripe; Each creature worked his tool, his dripping filthy beak, Into the bleeding corners of this rottenness. The eyes were two blank gaps, and from the hollow paunch Its tangled guts let loose, spilling over the thighs, And those tormentors, gorged with hideous delights, Had castrated the corpse with snapping of their beaks. Under the feet, a troupe of jealous quadrupeds,

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The muzzle lifted high, eddied and prowled about; One larger, bolder beast was restless all the more, The leader of the pack, surrounded by his aides. Dweller in Cythera, child of a sky so clear, In silence you endure these desecrations – In expiation for your infamous beliefs And crimes which have denied you proper burial. Hanged man, ridiculous, your sorrows are my own! I feel, in blinding view of your loose-hanging limbs, A rising to the teeth, a building in my throat Of a choking spew of gall, and all my ancient griefs; Along with you, poor devil, dear to memory, I suffered all the stabs of all the killer crows And felt the grinding jaws of panthers, cruel and black, Who once took such delight in feasting on my flesh. The sky was ravishing, the sea a very glass; For me the world was black, and bloody it would be. Alas! And as within a heavy shroud, I have Entombed my heart in the perverse allegory. Venus, in your black isle not one thing was erect But the symbolic tree on which my image hung. Ah, Lord! I beg of you the courage and the strength To take without disgust my body and my heart.

Baudelaire here draws upon travel writing by Gérard de Nerval, who had published in 1844 two articles discussing Cythère (though he had not himself set foot on the island).34 He later incorporated these pieces in his Voyage en Orient (1851). Nerval describes his excitement at approaching Greece at last, seeing the rosy-fingered dawn arrive, like the forehead of a goddess ‘whose open arms lift the veil of night sparkling with stars.’ But before us, yonder, on the horizon, can be glimpsed the island of Venus, only ‘today it is called Cerigo and belongs to the English ... The land is dead beneath the hand of man and the gods have fled.’ Not a tree, not a rose, and looking for the shepherds and shepherdesses of Watteau, he sees only a ‘gentleman’ shooting partridge

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and some blond Scottish soldiers.35 Relying principally on a Renaissance text of admittedly dubious authority, Nerval devotes several pages to an austere cult of Venus in antiquity. He also recounts, in the passage that particularly inspired Baudelaire, that what looked at first like a surviving statue of some protective divinity turned out to be a gallows: ‘un gibet à trois branches, dont une seule était garnie. Le premier gibet réel que j’ai vu encore, c’est sur le sol de Cythère, possession anglaise, qu’il m’a été donné de l’apercevoir’ (a three-branched gibbet of which only one was occupied. The first real gallows I have ever seen – it was on Cythera, English possession, that it was given me to see it).36 A prosaic, barren, northern present has eclipsed the rich, Mediterranean, poetic past. Nerval’s editors note that ‘he did not disembark on Cythera-Cerigo; he owes what he writes to the didactic Voyage of Dimo and Nicolo Stephanopoli.’37 It is striking that Baudelaire’s most detailed, circumstantial poem about a voyage is an adaptation of Nerval’s account, which was itself borrowed to fill in what he had not himself been able to see. Is there a lesson here about the literature of travel? In taking up Nerval’s touristic anecdote, Baudelaire creates a structure to maximize the discrepancy between desire and reality, identifying desire with a poetic discourse that places the signifying structures of myths into circulation and reality with a hyperbolic operation of selftorment. Though the poem begins with a superb setting and exhilarating foreign travel – ‘Le navire roulait sous un ciel sans nuages’ – the island perceived is ‘triste et noir’ and becomes interesting only once the markers of touristic/mythical discourse are applied to it: ‘this is Cythère.’ (It was Baudelaire’s contemporary, Prosper Merimée, who tellingly observed that ‘rien de plus ennuyeux qu’un paysage anonyme’ (nothing is more boring than anonymous countryside).38 Thus in airplanes we ignore the landscape beneath our windows until the pilot announces that we are passing over Des Moines, at which point, the anonymity dispelled, everyone leans over to look.) While the poem recites the erotic myths that have attached to the island, it emphasizes the ‘désert rocailleux’ and, for seven stanzas, a corpse on a gibbet being ripped apart by fierce birds, while animals below eagerly await bits that might fall. ‘Dans ton île, O Vénus! je n’ai trouvé debout / Qu’un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image,’ the speaker concludes. ‘J’avais, comme en un suaire épais, le coeur enseveli dans cette allégorie’: trapped in his own allegorization. The move here is characteristic of Baudelaire: from a stimulus to a thought, to reflec-

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tion on why one might think such thoughts, so that a poem ostensibly about something else comes to focus on the operation of the imagination itself as a form of self-torment. Here, the self-torment provoked by the speaker’s reflection on the operations of imagination prevents travel from being a source of instruction or delight. While taking up Nerval’s traveller’s tale, Baudelaire complicates the oppositions so crucial to Nerval’s account (poetry/prose, dream/reality, past/present, south/north, presence of the gods/absence of the gods). The past in Baudelaire’s poem takes the form above all of unattributed dialogue, citation that parodies romantic commonplaces (‘de l’antique Vénus le superbe fantôme’) or modern salacious discourse about Greece and priestesses in the work of contemporary poets whom Baudelaire calls ‘the pagan school’ or in the popular songs of Béranger.39 When the speaker tells us that the ‘singular object’ sighted was not ‘un temple [...] où la jeune prêtresse [...] allait, le corps brulé de secrètes chaleurs,’ he highlights the assumptions promoted by such mythifying discourses.40 Cythère, the discursive Cythère, is the ‘Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons.’ And the barren present is swiftly rendered macabre by the hyperbolic intensification of the image of the tortured corpse on the gibbet. The external scene, Baudelaire stresses, is idyllic – ‘le ciel était charmant; la mer était unie’ – but eclipsed by the perverse, self-tormenting operations of the poetic imagination, which transform this sight into a process of self-torture. Poetic consciousness, Baudelaire tells us elsewhere, ‘change l’or en fer / et le paradis en enfer’ [changes gold to iron and paradise into hell].41 ‘Un Voyage à Cythère’ echoes the claim of ‘Le Voyage,’ the concluding poem of Baudelaire’s great collection: Amer savoir, celui qu’on tire du voyage! Le monde, monotone et petit, aujourd’hui, Hier, demain, toujours, nous fait voir notre image: Une oasis d’horreur dans un désert d’ennui. (Fleurs, 133) How bitter, what we learn from voyaging! The small and tedious world gives us to see Today, tomorrow, always, our own image, Oasis of horror in a desert of ennui.42

But while ‘Le Voyage’ treats this horror as a property of the world –

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the travellers have seen people behaving wickedly, selfishly, stupidly wherever they have gone – ‘Un Voyage à Cythère’ makes the perception of horror the creation of the poetic imagination.43 In such poems, travel seems above all an efficacious metaphor, a mode of spacialization of the dialectic of expectation and disappointment that the functioning of the imagination generates. Is Baudelaire a poet of travel, then? These three poems with ‘Voyage’ in the title – ‘L’Invitation au Voyage,’ ‘Un Voyage à Cythère,’ and ‘Le Voyage’ – generate a structure of reflection where the traveller finds only self-reflection – and need not leave home to do so. The wellknown quotation that enjoins us to set out ‘pour trouver du nouveau’ in fact invokes death as the only travel worthy of the name. I mentioned that Gilbert Trigano includes in his anthology six poems by Baudelaire, more than he takes from any other poet. These are: ‘L’Invitation au voyage,’ of course, and ‘Le Voyage,’ but also ‘Moesta et Errabunda,’ ‘La Vie antérieure,’ ‘Bohémiens en voyage,’ and ‘l’Homme et la mer,’ but not, I stress, ‘Un Voyage à Cythère,’ although I would maintain that this is Baudelaire’s most exemplary engagement with the structure of travel and that it illustrates the sense in which Baudelaire might plausibly be deemed a great poet of travel.

N OTE S 1 A brief preliminary version of this paper was delivered at a conference on literary travel, ‘Da Ulisse a ... Il viaggio nelle terre d’oltremare,’ University of Genoa, Imperia, Italy, 10 October 2003. I am grateful to John Zilcosky for comments on this paper and my later draft. 2 Gilbert Trigano, Les plus beaux poèmes du voyage (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 1988), 2. 3 Quoted in Eugène et Jacques Crépet, Baudelaire (Paris: Messien, 1906), 255. 4 Reported by Charles Asselineau, quoted in Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler, Baudelaire (Paris: Julliard, 1987), 146. Henceforth cited as PZ. 5 The captain wrote, ‘I had to renounce any hope that by gaining his confidence I might contribute to making him take a route where he might honorably employ the gifts that nature had given him.’ PZ, 148. 6 PZ, 150–1. 7 PZ, 151. 8 See Françoise Lionnet, ‘Reframing Baudelaire: Literary History, Biography,

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10

11 12

13 14 15

16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

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Postcolonial Theory, and Vernacular Languages,’ Diacritics 28, no. 3 (Fall 1998), 68, 71. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, no. 61 [1861], in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 62–3. Henceforth cited as Fleurs followed by poem and page number. Translation, James McGowan, The Flowers of Evil, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 129. I have modified the translation of line 14 from ‘Whom your great eyes would turn to sycophants and slaves.’ I am grateful to Françoise Lionnet for comments on these points. See Lionnet, ‘Baudelaire’s Colonial World,’ PMLA 123:3 (May 2008). Joanna Richardson, Baudelaire (London: J. Murray, 1994), 69. Emmanuel Richon and Vimala Rungasamy, in a strange work, Les poèmes mascarins de Charles Baudelaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), translate a number of Baudelaire’s poems and prose fragments into Creole and contend that the influences of this journey on Baudelaire were ‘numerous, profound, underlying, and sometimes even unconscious’ (200). Arthur Symons, Charles Baudelaire, a Study (New York: Dutton, 1920), 11. PZ, 148. Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris, no. 25, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 316–17. The Parisian Prowler, trans. Edward Kaplan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 57. English translations of Le Spleen de Paris are taken from this dubiously titled version. Lionnet, ‘Reframing Baudelaire,’ 73–6. Cf. ‘Lesbos,’ Fleurs, 151: ‘Since I am Lesbos’ choice from all on earth / To sing the secrets of her flowering maids.’ The argument for identification with a black woman is proposed by Ed Ahern, ‘Black Woman, White Poet,’ French Review 51 (1977), 212–20. Gayatri Spivak objects to suggestions that a black woman is somehow Baudelaire’s dark double. A Critique of Colonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 155. Lionnet, ‘Reframing Baudelaire,’ 79–82. PZ, 147. Quoted by Lionnet, ‘Reframing Baudelaire,’ 68. Asselineau papers, Institut de France, undated, Louvenal C 491 ff 124–5, quoted by Richardson, ‘Baudelaire,’ 69. Maxime du Camp, Souvenirs littéraires, vol. 2 (Paris: Hachette, 1892), 81. Théophile Gautier, Histoire du romantisme (Paris: Charpentier, 1887), 302. Richon and Rungasamy, Les poèmes mascarius, 139, maintain that since there were many Indians in the Mascarine Islands, Baudelaire was only ‘simplifying’ if he claimed a trip ‘aux Indes.’

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24 Miraji, ‘Carls Baudela’re,’ in Mashriq o magrhrib ke naghmen [Songs from the East and from the West], quoted in Geeta Patel, Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: On Gender, Colonialism, and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 163–4. 25 Ibid., 164. 26 Le Spleen de Paris, no. 17, 300–1. Henceforth quoted as Spleen. For discussion, see Barbara Johnson, Défigurations du langage poétique (Paris: Flammarion, 1979). 27 Le Spleen de Paris, no. 18, 301–3. 28 ‘L’Exposition Universelle, 1855,’ vol. 2, Oeuvres complètes, 576. Trans. P. Charvet, in Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 116. 29 The notion of writing as travel without travelling has been explored in various places, from Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre (Lausanne: privately published, 1794) to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 35, which speaks of writing as an ‘immobile voyage that stays in one place.’ See also John Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (London: Palgrave, 2003), 5: Writing possesses, for Kafka, an ‘endless promise that supersedes – and even opposes – actual travel’s necessary disappointments. Writing clings to utopia in a way that travel, which eventually leads somewhere, cannot.’ Much the same might be said of Baudelaire. I am grateful to John Zilcosky for these references. 30 Fleurs, no. 126, 129. 31 Ibid., no. 126, 133, 134. 32 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist (New York: Schocken, 1976), 110 and passim. Also Jonathan Culler, ‘The Semiotics of Tourism,’ in Framing the Sign (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 153–67. 33 Fleurs, no. 116, 117–19. 34 The articles first appeared in L’Artiste of 30 June and 11 August 1844. See Gérard de Nerval, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 233–48 (devoted to Cythère). 35 Nerval, ‘Voyage en Orient,’ Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, 233–4. Henceforth quoted as Voyage. 36 Ibid., 240. 37 Nerval, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, 1379. The full title of the source is Voyage de Dimo et Nicolo Stephanopoli en Grèce, pendant les années V et VI, (1797 et 1798 v. st.), d’après deux missions, dont l’une du gouvernement français, et l’autre du général en chef Buonaparte (Paris, 1800).

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38 Prosper Mérimée, ‘Colomba,’ Romans et nouvelles, vol. 2 (Paris: Garnier, 1967), 149. 39 In an article titled ‘L’école paienne’ Baudelaire makes fun of some contemporaries’ obsession with classical figures, such as ‘la brûlante Sapho’ (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, 46), though Baudelaire himself participated in the evocation of erotic cults of ancient Lesbos. Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780– 1857), whose poems Baudelaire despised, was a very successful writer of popular songs, many of them salacious. When Baudelaire was prosecuted for obscenity, one strategy adopted by the defence was to quote poems of Béranger’s, which were at least as licentious and had not been prosecuted. 40 See, for example, Béranger’s ‘La Bacchante,’ whose female speaker declares, ‘Baise ma gorge brûlante ... Romps ces noeuds, oui, romps pour toujours! / Ma pudeur ne connait plus d’alarmes / Presse en tes bras mes charmes nus’ [Kiss my burning breast ... Break these knots, yes, break them for ever! My modesty is no longer alarmed. / Take in your arms my naked charms]. P.-J. de Béranger, Oeuvres, vol. 1 (Paris: Perrotin, 1876), 3–4. 41 ‘Alchimie de la douleur,’ Fleurs no. 81, 77. 42 Translation modified. 43 It is worth noting that a third text on this subject, Victor Hugo’s ‘Cerigo,’ from Les Contemplations, answers Baudelaire in enjoining him (and us) not to bemoan the disappearance of Venus but to look up to the heavens, where astral Venus is unchanging, a beacon of divine love. Hugo’s incipit, ‘Tout homme qui vieillit est ce roc solitaire, / Cerigo, qui fut jadis Cythère’ [Every aging man is this lonely rock, Cerigo, that once was Cythera], inaugurating a different allegory, appears to chide Baudelaire’s hyperbolic selfdramatization of deeming himself special and especially maudit. Hugo, Poésie, vol. 1 (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 729.

5 Seafaring Jews, World History, and the Zionist Imaginary1 todd presner

‘The Jewish people were never a seafaring nation.’ David Ben-Gurion2 All the years that those boys and girls have dwelt in the midst of the sea they have constantly awaited salvation, and there is no ship sailing to the Land of Israel which these boys and girls do not follow. For when they see a ship at sea, one says to the other, the time has come for the Gathering of the Exiles. Thereupon, each of them takes one of the great sea waves and mounts it as a rider mounts his horse and rides until he comes near the ship. S.Y. Agnon3

Judging by their absence in Helmut Pemsel’s recently published Weltgeschichte der Seefahrt (World History of Seafaring), a monumental seven-volume study of seafaring from antiquity to the present, Jews – as Ben-Gurion’s statement seems to also attest – have played little or no part in the history of seafaring.4 Of the 400 or so most important mariners, the greatest number come from England (107), followed by Germany (45), the United States (38), Italy and the Holy Roman Empire (35), and France (35). The formerly great colonial powers of Spain, Greece, and the Netherlands emerge with less than 20 each, followed by a spattering of other representatives across the world, ranging from Russia and China to Chile and Peru.5 The vast majority of these mariners were commanders of fleets or flotillas, followed by explorers and researchers, tradesmen, shipbuilders, and U-boat commanders. The Seeherrschaft (rule of the sea) was determined by these sea captains, admirals, sailors,

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cartographers, explorers, anchormen, engineers, and politicians who set sail across the seemingly boundless oceans to reconnoitre new lands, discover new trade routes, expand the colonial holdings of the motherland, and establish military dominance across the world. For better or worse, Jews, it seems, did not partake in this history, for Jews are not a seafaring people. Of course, this might be easily explained by pointing to the fate of the Jews in the Diaspora: without a homeland, Jews wandered from nation to nation, where they were occasionally tolerated but more often than not restricted or expelled. Without the support and stability of a nationstate with ports along the sea, the social, economic, political, military, and geographic conditions of possibility for seafaring were denied to the Jews. But as Raphael Patai has shown in an extraordinary history of Jewish seafaring in antiquity, Jews played – at least at one time – a significant role in all aspects of seafaring up and down the Mediterranean coast.6 As Patai tells us: ‘Despite the paucity of biblical references, once their control extended to the Mediterranean coastline, the Hebrews engaged in shipping and fishing to no less an extent than the other peoples whose towns and villages bordered the Great Sea’ (Patai, 19). Jews not only engaged in extensive maritime trade throughout the region, especially with the Romans and the Greeks, but also engaged in naval warfare, mustering many a fleet of vessels to fight the Romans. They constructed ships, set sail across the region, penned seafaring lore, and developed an extensive network of port cities from Akhzibh in the north to Rhinokorura in the south (Patai, 138). Not only did Jews lose their seafaring position during the Diaspora, but it seems that they also lost this once great history. It should thus come as no surprise that the greatest seafaring nations correspond, more or less, to the greatest world-historical empires in terms of geographic reach, historical duration, and sheer brutality. As Hegel argued in his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History), world-historical people are intimately connected to the sea and seafaring: ‘In Europe, precisely the relationship to the sea is important ... [because] only through a connection to the sea can a European state become great.’7 Nations only become great colonial powers and, hence, world-historical when they undertake voyages of discovery and conquest, something that is certainly confirmed by Pemsel’s study. My purpose here is not to question Pemsel’s findings, nor is it – strictly speaking – to write a ‘missing’ chapter in the history of seafar-

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ing.8 I am much more interested in the culturally specific ways in which seafaring became both a critical discourse and a trope of the Zionist imaginary in the first part of the twentieth century. The discourse of seafaring, I argue, did not simply emerge from the material reality of waves of European Jews immigrating to Palestine (although this was certainly its real, historical backdrop); rather, it stemmed from the desire to elevate Jews into world-historical people capable of founding a model European nation-state. First-generation German Zionist Jews such as Max Grunwald, Theodor Herzl, and Davis Trietsch attempted to imaginatively turn the ‘Greek’ trope of seafaring into a Jewish national-colonial destiny. They did so by simultaneously embracing and rewriting Hegel’s philosophy of world history: if Jews set sail, then they had a claim to be not only world-historical people but also national subjects able to extend the universality of the European idea of civil society. Elevating Jews to world history meant endowing them with a seafaring tradition precisely because the concept of world history emerged through the trope and reality of travel by sea. The Philosophy of World History as ‘Writing Travel’ According to Hegel, world history is divided into four stages, based on geography: the ‘Oriental world,’ the ‘Greek world,’ the ‘Roman world,’ and the ‘Germanic world.’9 The final stage corresponds to the highest development of the family, civil society, and the state, having emerged progressively from abstract rights and mere law-based morality. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1822–3), this quadripartite formulation provides the geographical basis of the direction and movement of Weltgeist (World Spirit). Weltgeist proceeds in a single direction towards a specific, predetermined goal, ‘from East to West, from southeast to northwest, from sunrise to sunset’ (W, 106) until universal knowledge is attained. In this formulation, Hegel’s most important geographic observation about the direction of history concerns the relation between worldhistorical people and the sea.10 World-historical people have a fundamental connection to seafaring and ship travel, whereas non-historical people are essentially landlocked and condemned to wander aimlessly on the ground. Here, he celebrates the enterprise and craft of seafaring: ‘The sea is not only the means for satisfying one’s needs; it also carries the risk of property and life ... something brave and noble ... Bravery is at the core of a sea journey [and] ... the ship, this swan, so graceful in its

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movement, is an instrument which brings the boldness of reason to the highest level’ (W, 112). In his discussion of the history of the Greek and Roman worlds of antiquity, Hegel argues that the Mediterranean played a critical role in the development of these civilizations by facilitating the emergence of a national identity and civil society and, more expansively, by spreading the Universal outwards. In Hegel’s words: ‘The middle point of the ancient world is the Mediterranean Sea ... If the middle of the ancient world was not the sea, world history would be impotent ... Just as Rome and Athens would be unimaginable without forums and streets, the ancient world would be nothing without the sea’ (W, 106). The geographic and material prerequisites of colonialism and imperialism – closeness to the sea and ships – are crucial for the direction of world history and the universal expansion of Geist: ‘The Roman Empire could not have existed in a landlocked place; the Roman domination of the world could only come about by the sea – in fact, the Mediterranean Sea, the middle point of the antique world’ (W, 113). Several decades before Hegel delivered his lectures on the philosophy of world history, Johann Gottfried Herder published his magnum opus, a multivolume book titled Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Reflections on a Philosophy of the History of Humankind) (1784–91). In this book, Herder set out to map the general direction of humankind by presenting the characteristics of various peoples in a manner that anticipates much of Hegel’s organization of world history. As Hegel would later do, Herder starts his account of world history with the African peoples before moving from the Far East to the Western world, ending up in Europe with the Greek and Germanic peoples. Midway through this movement, he dedicates several chapters to the Near East, including one on the ‘Hebrew peoples.’ In this chapter he argues that one of their most prominent features was that they were not a seafaring people: Although they possessed for some time the ports of the Red Sea, and dwelt so near the shores of the Mediterranean, they never became a seafaring people ... Like the Egyptians, they dreaded the sea, and from times immemorial preferred to live among other nations, a feature of their national character against which Moses strenuously fought. In short, they are a people spoiled by their education, because they never attained political maturity on their own soil, and consequently never attained a genuine awareness of honor and freedom ... The people of God, whose country was once given to them by heaven itself, have been for thousands of years, yes,

102 Todd Presner virtually from their inception, a parasitical plant upon the trunks of other nations; a tribe of cunning brokers throughout almost the whole world who, in spite of all oppression, nowhere long for their own honor and habitation, for a country of their own.11

Although they once dwelt close to the sea, the Jewish people are not seafarers; but more than that, they are merely a ‘parasitical’ people who prefer to live stealthily among other peoples rather than in a country of their own. More than a century later, Houston Stewart Chamberlain would make the same argument in his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), claiming that the Judeans ‘were so unwarlike, such unreliable soldiers that their king had to trust his protection and the protection of their land to foreign troops; that they were so unwilling to undertake any endeavors that just looking at the ocean ... horrified them.’12 Instead, they preferred to parasitically inhabit and thereby undermine the strength of world-historical nations. Indeed, it was precisely the great theoreticians of world history – Herder, Hegel, and Chamberlain – who solidified the claim that Jews by definition are not a seafaring people and hence are anything but world-historical. Hegel spends very little time discussing the insignificance of Jews in Christian world history; nevertheless, his terse remarks are telling and in complete accordance with his notoriously antiSemitic description of Judaism in ‘Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal’ (The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate). In Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Jews are confined to the first, ‘Oriental’ stage of world history. ‘The Jews,’ Hegel writes, ‘are caught in rigid individuality, incapable of reconciling themselves with universal thoughts and laws’ (W, 259). This is because the Jewish religion cannot realize ‘universality’; instead, it is ‘bound to locality,’ unable to progress beyond ‘abstract thought’ (W, 268). Hegel’s verdict is articulated even more strongly in the standard edition of the Philosophy of World History: ‘The [Jewish] subject never realizes freedom for himself ... [and] the State is not consonant with Jewish principles and is alien to the legislation of Moses.’13 As he argues in ‘Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal,’ the first Jewish act was an act of Trennung (severance), in which ‘Abraham, the progenitor of a nation, completely tore himself from his family ... severing the bonds of community and love.’14 Unlike Kierkegaard, who praises Abraham as a ‘knight of faith’ who transcended the universal laws of the ‘ethical,’15 Hegel sees Abraham as a selfish stranger who refused to enter into familial ties and instead tore himself

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away from the rootedness of place. In Hegel’s words, ‘Abraham wandered here and there over a boundless territory, without bringing parts of it any nearer to him by cultivating or improving them ... He was a stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and men alike.’16 Even though the notion was not conceived until the Middle Ages, Hegel anachronistically suggests that Abraham was already the first ‘wandering Jew.’ Because Abraham, as the leader of the Israelites, refused to enter into any kind of familial, property, or national ties, Jews were condemned to ‘their original fate’ – namely, to remain forever at the first stage of world history, ‘in the mean, abject, wretched circumstances in which they still are today.’17 Here, Hegel considers Abraham’s ‘original’ severance (as an Israelite) to be a transgenerational ‘Jewish’ trait that explains the situation of Jews in Hegel’s Europe. The Jew is a perpetually negative moment in the progress of world history because the ‘Jewish spirit’ is characterized by a ‘severance,’ which contradicts the formation of a civil society, polis, community of reason, or political subjectivity. By contrast, ‘Christian spirit’ is characterized by a ‘union’ of familial love and freedom wherein the slavish laws of Jewish morality have been ‘sublated ... by something higher than obedience to law,’ namely, the love of Jesus and the ethical community.18 This forms the basis of the ‘Germanic world,’ the manifestation of the highest level of development of Spirit. Reckoning with the ocean, travelling by ship, conquering faraway places, and, ultimately, returning to the motherland are world-historical achievements that are crucial for the spread of the ‘Germanic’ universal.19 For Hegel, not only do they ensure colonial claims to national greatness, but they also confirm the truth of the European, Christian state. In the philosophy of world history, this manifestation of the state is the culmination of a movement that began with the Greek polis, moved to the Roman ideal of citizenship, and ended in Europe with the development of civil society, from where the Christian ideal of the Universal radiated outward. In this respect, the writing of world history is, in its essential form, the writing of travel: world-historical people – according to the great philosophers of history – travel by sea, and furthermore, world history is fundamentally a narrative of sea travel. With the development of the Zionist imaginary at the beginning of the twentieth century, Hegel’s philosophy of world history – particularly his emphasis on the importance of seafaring – would be embraced and imaginatively rewritten in order to elevate Jews to the status of worldhistorical people. Far from satirizing the grand, Hegelian historical nar-

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rative with its systematic claims of national belonging and teleological development, as the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine did so incisively in his contemporaneous Reisebilder (Pictures of Travel) (1826–31),20 the Zionist imaginary would attempt to secure a place for Jews in the history of seafaring and, thus, in the ranks of world-historical peoples. Seafaring Jews and the European Universal In 1902, Max Grunwald, a well-known Hamburg rabbi who later took up the incipient Zionist cause in Vienna, published a strange article in the Jewish cultural periodical Ost und West in which he insisted that Jews, notwithstanding popular opinion and ostensible historical evidence to the contrary, are in fact a seafaring people.21 Far from being condemned to wander the earth on foot (as in the ‘wandering Jew’ myth), Jews, he maintained, actually have a long and rich tradition of setting sail and, because of this, can claim to be great, world-historical people. He begins this essay, ‘Jews as Anchormen and Seafarers,’ by quoting a conversation between an eighteenth-century provost of the Catholic Church and a Jew, in which the provost asks the Jew who prefers to travel from Königsberg to Amsterdam via land: ‘Why do Jews not like to travel by sea?’ (JR, 479). In a tone of regret, Grunwald responds to this stereotype by saying: ‘In fact, even to this day, very little is known about the activities of Jews who were seafarers or even anchormen’ (JR, 479). Citing sources from the Talmud, antiquity, and the Middle Ages, Grunwald shows that Jews are far from averse to travelling by sea or somehow constitutionally incapable of undertaking sea journeys; indeed, they have always engaged in seafaring, including voyages of discovery, trade, adventure, and even conquest. Moreover, he argues, during the Age of Exploration, Jewish adventurers travelled right alongside their non-Jewish counterparts, sailing with Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and the East India Company. He tells his presumably astonished readership that there were even Jewish pirates, and Jewish sea captains at this time. In so arguing, Grunwald is trying to debunk the prevalent idea that Jews – owing to certain historical, social, and political circumstances – are restricted to travelling (more precisely, wandering) on land. Jews are not condemned to wander the earth; they also set sail, like great explorers and pioneers. Thematically speaking, the legend of the Wandering Jew can be traced back to the Middle Ages, where it is the Jew’s longevity – the fact that he is condemned not to die – that is at issue, not the fact that he

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wanders.22 But with the publication of a German chapbook in 1602, Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzehlung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahasuerus (Short Description and Story of a Jew by the Name of Ahasverus), the myth of the ‘eternal Jew’ was transformed in such a way that the Jew now wanders on land from country to country without a home, until his redemption at the end of time. Virtually all of the cultural representations of the myth of the wandering Jew emphasize that the Jew is wandering on foot across the world. The Wandering Jew visits village upon village as he travels the world, carrying nothing but a walking cane and a small bag. He may walk across land and sea, such as in Gustave Doré’s famous series of woodcuts, but he almost never sets sail, certainly not as a self-determined pioneer or explorer.23 He is the object of perplexed curiosity, never becoming more than a spectator on the world: he never creates anything, he never changes anything, and he never leaves anything behind. He is condemned to wander the earth until he confesses his faith in Christianity on Judgment Day. In this regard, the modern myth’s inherent anti-Semitism blends together with the Jew’s ostensible rejection of the Greco-Roman world of seafaring. This is certainly the history on which Hegel based his judgment of the Jews in both his early theological writings and in his later lectures on world history. At first sight, the myth of the Flying Dutchman, most famously appropriated by Richard Wagner in his opera, Der Fliegende Holländer, appears to be an important counter-example to this tradition since the protagonist is, in fact, a Jewish sea captain. Indeed, the immense popularity of Wagner’s opera around 1900 indicates that there was an image of the seafaring Jew in the cultural imaginary of the period prior to the Zionist reworking of this myth and trope. However, the opera is essentially a recitation – not a repudiation – of the myth of the Wandering Jew, who in this case is condemned to sail the seas until the end of time and, hence, remains far from a self-determined pioneer on a voyage of discovery or conquest.24 In Grunwald’s revision of the myth of the landlocked, wandering Jew, he argues that Jews have always participated in seafaring, arguably the greatest – and most horrific – enterprise and institution of Western civilization. After all, travel by ship is not only a classically Greek mode of transportation, but also one of the most persistent and specific metaphors of existence in the Western cultural tradition, connoting, among other things, knowledge, education, heroism, bravery, freedom, and statehood.25 The ship journey, as both an actuality and an

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image, calls up a long history stretching back to antiquity with Homer and Virgil and, in various permutations and valuations, up through Dante, Goethe, Defoe, Melville, DuBois, and Conrad. As Georges Van Den Abbeele writes: ‘The dearest notions of the West nearly all appeal to the motif of the voyage: progress, the quest for knowledge, freedom as freedom to move, self-awareness as an Odyssean enterprise, salvation as a destination to be attained by following a prescribed pathway (typically straight and narrow).’26 It is no wonder that Hegel considered the ship to be the central vehicle of history and seafaring to be the critical prerequisite of a world-historical people. But what Hegel downplays is the dialectical complexity of the seafaring topos: side by side with the stock metaphors of self-discovery, progress, enlightenment, education, and statehood, one need only think of historical events such as colonial voyages of conquest and the horror of the Middle Passage.27 In this respect, then, the history of Jewish seafaring is a testament to Jewish participation in and extension of both the noble and the dubious ideals of Western civilization: discovery and conquest, knowledge and colonialism, progress and enslavement. Without differentiation, Grunwald includes all of this in his attempt to resuscitate the continuous history of Jewish seafaring. In his article he cites references to seafaring among the ancient Israelites, particularly concerning trade with the Phoenicians and other seafaring peoples; and he notes references to Jewish seafaring throughout the New Testament, in the books of Matthew, John, and Luke. He cites regulations concerning sailing in the Talmud, and he points out that Jews were active in sea trade throughout the Mediterranean during the early Middle Ages, especially in the region of southern France (JR, 481). He enthusiastically writes: ‘Countless Jews undertook faraway journeys by sea on the model of Benjamin von Tudela, the [Jewish] world traveler in the twelfth century. Some pursued business interests, others the longing to see the land of their forefathers and its consecrated places, and still others sought the ten lost tribes of Israel about which adventure tales have been written. For many, it was also simply the desire to see something new and experience adventure’ (ibid.). He continues by emphasizing the fact that both Jewish and non-Jewish sailors encountered Jews in faraway lands, hence proving that Jews did, in fact, travel by ship. And perhaps more significantly, he is eager to write Jews back into the political and economic history of colonialism. I quote Grunwald again:

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In the voyages of discovery and conquest undertaken by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the English, Jews played a not unimportant role as seamen and pilots. The ship’s doctor on Christopher Columbus’s expedition was a Jew, and it is said to have been a Jew that first discovered land; a Jew was the first to found a settlement on the newly discovered land ... Vasco da Gama made use of Jewish seafarers, and his constant companion, Alfonsos d’Albuquerque, was a Jew. In 1334, Jayme IV, the last King of Mallorca testified that the Jew, Juceff Faquin of Barcelona, had sailed around what was then the known world. There were many Jews on the Portuguese expedition of 1415 which accepted Mauritanians. A linguistically gifted Jew accompanied Captain James Lancaster on the first enterprise of the EastIndia Company in 1601 and was in charge of the negotiations with Sultan von Atschin of Sumatra. (JR, 482)

Far from being condemned to aimlessly wander the earth, Jews consistently set sail with their non-Jewish, national counterparts during the Age of Exploration. They helped to extend European knowledge, European economic opportunity, and, ultimately, European dominance. Without any embarrassment, criticism, or irony, Grunwald claims that Jews not only engaged in seafaring but – like the great powers of Europe – also engaged in conquest and colonization. He concludes his article with an overview of the history of autonomous Jewish sea trade, something that originated in northern Europe in the seventeenth century and continued right up to the beginning of the twentieth century, when Grunwald penned his piece. Jewish shipping companies, with Jewish sailors, engaged in trade throughout Europe, China, and the West and East Indies, while Jewish shipbuilding companies had offices in Hamburg and New York and manufactured cargo ships used around the world. Though Jewish sea trade flourished during this period, it was never free from the spectre of anti-Semitism and the dangerous dialectic of emancipation and assimilation.28 Here, Grunwald cites a senate decision from the Hamburg state government of 1801 in which the members of a Jewish shipping company, having been denied their passports because of their Jewish heritage, won an appeal to sail their ship under the flag of Hamburg. The senate decision, quoted in its entirety by Grunwald, argued that ‘seafaring is the first and foremost means of trade for this state. The more individual ships we have, the easier it is for merchants to sell their goods and the less we have to depend on foreign states and their ships ... Seafaring covers the widest scope and there is space for Christians and Jews here’

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(JR, 484–5). The senate concluded by granting the Jews the necessary passports and papers to continue their business – a decision that, as Grunwald remarks, predated the civic emancipation of the Jews. The state’s recognition of Jewish seafaring marks – at least in this single case – the elevation of the Jews into useful citizens for the state and, hence, their entrance into the ‘Germanic’ stage of world history in which Spirit moves ‘outward’ to the ‘universal’ (W, 490). It is thus no wonder that Grunwald highlights this isolated decision: in 1902 the Zionist program was explicitly predicated on the transformation of Jews into useful citizens who would extend the idea of the European Universal to the creation of a Jewish state. What makes Grunwald’s essay so important for our purposes here is that it represents a significant counterhistory to both the myth of the Wandering Jew and the strictly Hegelian concept of world history. He was the first Zionist thinker to reclaim the historical significance of Jewish seafaring vis-à-vis nation building and colonialism, and this, in turn, meant sublating Jewish particularity into the universality of the state. Moreover, his essay was published – not fortuitously – at a time when the Zionist imaginary was beginning to conceive of Palestine as a Jewish-European, colonial territory. Indeed, Grunwald’s ultimate point is that Jews – even though they may not have always been national subjects sailing under the flag of a nation-state – have always engaged in seafaring and, for better or for worse, thus have an incontestable, historically substantiated claim to be a world-historical people. Zionists would simply be continuing the Jewish tradition of seafaring by journeying to and resettling in Palestine. The Jewish state would, then, belong to the ‘Germanic’ stage of world history. When Grunwald published his essay, Zionist voyages to Palestine were already becoming commonplace for wealthy, European Jews, many of whom later published travelogues and photo documentaries of their travels through the land of their forefathers.29 Four years earlier, Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, had made his own highly publicized sea voyage to Palestine to meet the German kaiser, Wilhelm II, in the hope of convincing him to create a ‘German protectorate’ for world Jewry in Turkish-controlled Palestine. In a letter he wrote to the kaiser on 18 October 1898, several weeks before their historic meeting in Jerusalem, Herzl argued that Zionism was a universally ‘regenerative’ project that would not only remake Palestine in the image of the European state but also help save the insolvent Turkish empire: ‘Even if his Majesty the Sultan does not immediately realize what aid the

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Zionists would bring to his impoverished, decaying state [verarmte, verfallende Staate], he will accept your Imperial Majesty’s advice in a personal discussion as to how his administration and finances could be regenerated [regeneriren].’30 He concluded his letter with a vaguely Hegelian description of world history: ‘God’s secrets hover over us in these world-historical hours. There is nothing to fear, if he is with us’ (T, 2: 655). The kaiser, however, opted not to do anything and left it to Herzl to fantasize about the regenerated Jewish state in his novel, Altneuland (Old-New Land). The Zionist idea of the modern Jewish state received its critical formulation from Herzl – most notably, in 1896 with the publication of his short tract Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), and in 1902 with the publication of Altneuland. That said, the Jewish concept of state regeneration as a response to Hegel’s philosophy of world history goes back to Moses Hess’s 1862 book, Rome and Jerusalem. In this text, Hess contended that France would ‘restore [the Jewish] people to [their] place in world history [Weltgeschichte]’ by helping them ‘found colonies that could extend from Suez to Jerusalem, and from the banks of the Jordan to the coast of the Mediterranean.’31 In the preface to his letters, Hess was even more emphatic in his attempt to rewrite Hegel’s philosophy of world history: ‘Among the peoples thought to be dead who after becoming conscious of their historic tasks will assert their rights to nationality are indisputably the Jews; they have defied the storms of world history for two thousand years and despite being carried to the ends of the world by the floods of history have always looked and continued to look to Jerusalem.’32 The Jews were far from being a dead race condemned to the first stage of world history; their indestructibility as a people represented the precondition of their national regeneration. For Hess, the reevaluation of the myth of the ‘eternal’ Jew was the very means by which the Wandering Jew might be transformed into an agent of the Universal. From its very beginnings, then, the modern Zionist idea sought to overturn Hegel’s verdict by bringing Jews into the ‘Germanic world’ of the present. When Herzl famously declared in Der Judenstaat that Palestine ‘would form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization opposed to barbarism,’33 he, like both Hess and Grunwald, was imagining the Jewish state as part of an expansive European frontier, one that would spread European culture to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. In so doing, the Jewish state would at the same time be regenerating the Jewish people, the Arab inhabitants, and the

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native land. Echoing the thoughts of a speech he composed for the kaiser, Herzl noted in his diaries that the Jewish people have the right to return to their ancient homeland in order to colonize, improve, and cultivate it. He wrote that even though ‘many generations have come and gone since this earth was Jewish,’ this is the land of our fathers, a land suitable for colonization and cultivation [Colonisirung u. Cultivirung]. Your Majesty has seen the country. It cries out for people to build it up. And we have among our brothers a frightful proletariat. These people cry out for a land to cultivate ... Energies and material resources will be brought to the country; a magnificent fructification of desolate areas may easily be foreseen, and from this, more happiness and civility will grow for all human beings ... Our idea threatens no one’s rights or religious feelings; it breathes a long-desired reconciliation. We understand and respect the devotion of all faiths on this soil, upon which the beliefs of our fathers also arose. (T, 2: 657–68)

Although couched in terms that emphasize religious tolerance, Herzl’s plan for national regeneration also involved a marginalization and displacement of the existing population. He noted several days later in his diary: The musty deposits of two thousand years of inhumanity, intolerance, and uncleanliness lie in the foul-smelling streets ... If we ever get Jerusalem back and if I’m able to still do something, the first thing I would do is clean it up. I would get rid of everything that is not sacred, set up homes for workers outside the city, empty out and tear down the nests of filth, burn the secular ruins, and move the bazaars elsewhere. Then, retaining the old architecture as much as possible, I would build a comfortable, well-ventilated, well-organized, new city around the Holy places. (T, 2: 680–1)

The Zionists would cleanse the foul-smelling streets, tear down the secular buildings, and get rid of the means of sustenance for the Arab people, while ‘cultivating’ and bringing ‘fructification’ to the impoverished land. Here, Herzl’s articulation of the Zionist idea was not only an answer to the ‘Jewish question’ in Europe but also, somewhat paradoxically, an extension of the violence of the European Universal – the nation-state, the colonial power, the idea of civilization, and the concept of world history. This becomes even more explicit in Herzl’s Altneuland, a novel con-

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ceived immediately after his meeting with the German kaiser in 1898 and published four years later. Generically, the novel is a work of travel literature depicting a journey through space and time: by way of a seafaring journey, the novel moves from the hopelessness of Herzl’s contemporary Europe to the regeneration of Palestine in the year 1923. Using the basic form of the Bildungsroman – a structure intimately connected to travel, education, development, and return – Herzl imagines the transformation of Palestine from a barren wasteland into a fantastic, colonial wonderland modelled on the cosmopolitanism of the European Universal. For Herzl and many of his Zionist contemporaries, the idea of return meant reclaiming the Holy Land and populating it with strong, cultivated, German-speaking Jews and polite, clean, wellbehaved, German-speaking Arabs, as he depicted in his novel. Through the processes of ‘Bildung,’ the decaying land would be regenerated and both Jew and Arab would be raised up into the ranks of the European and, hence, into the fourth stage of world history. I will summarize a few of the salient features of the plot: The novel begins with a disillusioned Jewish man by the name of Friedrich Loewenberg in fin de siècle Vienna, a city riven with anti-Semitism. Loewenberg meets a German-American misanthrope named Kingscourt who persuades him to abandon Europe and sail around the world to his personal island in the South Seas. Loewenberg (as a Jew) is ‘not familiar’ with seafaring and ‘life on a yacht’ (A, 155); nevertheless, he decides to accompany Kingscourt to his island and to live in seclusion from the world with no one but their two servants, ‘a dumb Negro and a Tahitian’ (A, 156). Kingscourt explains to Loewenberg that he needs a ‘companion’ so that he ‘does not unlearn human speech’ (A, 156) in this uncivilized colonial territory. They depart from Trieste, but before heading to the South Seas, they decide to stop in Palestine so that Loewenberg can see his ‘fatherland’ (A, 163). This is how the city looks: Jaffa made a very unpleasant impression on them. Although situated by the wonderful blue sea, everything was in a state of extreme decay. Landing in the miserable harbor was difficult. The alleys were filled with the worst possible stenches; everything was unsanitary, dilapidated, and draped with colorful Oriental misery. Impoverished Turks, dirty Arabs, and timid Jews lounged around – indolent, beggarly, and hopeless ... The train to Jerusalem revealed pictures of the deepest degeneracy. The flat land is almost all sand and swamp; the meager fields looked burned. The Arab towns were black; the inhabitants looked like bandits. Naked chil-

112 Todd Presner dren played in the dirty alleys ... with few traces of a present or former culture. (A, 166)

After witnessing such degeneration, they sail away together and spend the next twenty years in their colonial enclave in the South Seas. The second chapter of the novel skips ahead to 1923, with Loewenberg and Kingscourt returning to the Red Sea on their yacht. On meeting other mariners, they quickly learn that shipping traffic between Europe and Asia no longer moves through the Suez Canal but now via Palestine; its port cities of Jaffa and Haifa have in the intervening twenty years become the centres of world trade: ‘A marvelous city had been built on the deep blue Mediterranean. Magnificent stone dams rested on the water and, at the same time, revealed what the wide harbor really was to the foreign gaze: the most convenient and safest harbor on the Mediterranean Sea. Ships of all sizes, all kinds, and all nationalities docked in this sanctuary’ (A, 183). Noticing the inhabitants’ clean, cosmopolitan clothing, Loewenberg and Kingscourt remark that the people ‘look more civilized [zivilisierter] than we do’ (A, 183). Although the city ‘seemed entirely European,’ it was actually ‘more modern and cleaner’ (A, 185–6). In the twenty years that they were away, Palestine had become more European than Europe. On shore, Loewenberg is reunited with a young man named David Littwak, whom he had known in Vienna as a poor, dirty, Yiddishspeaking beggar child from Galicia. He and his family immigrated to Palestine shortly after Loewenberg left on his voyage and, in the intervening twenty years, Littwak had become a well-respected, wealthy, German-speaking leader of the Zionist movement. He takes the two travellers on a tour of the new cities, showing them the impressive technology, culture, and social structures, all of these modelled on their European antecedents but more refined, dignified, and, most of all, cosmopolitan. Both Jews and Arabs have given up their formerly ‘Oriental’ qualities, evolving – in a mere twenty years – from the first stage of world history to the final stage. Reschid Bey, the single Arab character in the book, explains the regeneration of Palestine after the arrival of the Jewish settlers: ‘Nothing could have been more poor and wretched than an Arab village at the end of the nineteenth century. The peasants’ clay hovels were unfit for animals. The children lay naked and neglected in the streets like dumb beasts. Now everything is different ... When the swamps were drained, the canals built, the eucalyptus trees planted ... the ground became healthy ... The Jews have enriched us,

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why should we be angry with them? They dwell among us like brothers. Why should we not love them?’ (A, 247–8). Both Jew and Arab have been regenerated in the image of the European Universal. After countless paeans to technology, universal freedom, and socialist economics, the novel concludes with Loewenberg and Kingscourt deciding to become citizens of the ‘new society.’ Loewenberg marries Littwak’s sister, and Kingscourt becomes the caretaker of Littwak’s son. As would be played out innumerable times over the course of the century, the Zionist seafaring voyage ends with the decision to dwell as citizens in the new state.34 A celebration of all the things that made Zionism possible follows, as Littwak, who has just been elected president of Palestine, joins with a diverse group of people – Jewish and Christian, European and Arabic, old and young – in celebrating the ‘new and happy form of human society’ (A, 419). With reference to Hegel, we might organize Herzl’s concept of world history into four stages, which mark the Zionist idea of progressive regeneration. Condemned to the first stage, we find Kingscourt’s ‘dumb Negro’ and Tahitian, neither of whom presumably has the capacity for human speech or culture; in the next stage we find the masses of ‘timid,’ Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe and the hordes of ‘dirty Arabs’ in Palestine before the arrival of the Zionist settlers; in the third stage, we find Loewenberg and Kingscourt, who by returning to Palestine redeem their original, Abrahamic Trennung by reconnecting with the ‘new’ Europe; and, finally, in the Palestine of 1923, we find the highest development of the Jewish-European state, represented by ‘the new society’ and the likes of David Littwak and Reschid Bey. As Herzl writes in the novel, this is because ‘Jewish settlers who streamed into the country brought with them the experiences of the whole cultured world [Kulturvölker]’ (A, 251). On a civilizing mission for all, Jews supposedly imported the universalizing education, culture, and political ideals of Europe without the divisive anti-Semitism, racism, classism, and colonialism associated with these ideals. In effect, Herzl’s Zionist imaginary is a radically non-dialectical vision of the ‘Germanic’ stage of world history. Grunwald and Herzl were attempting to elevate Jews into world history by rewriting Hegel and reworking the trope of seafaring. Similarly, Davis Trietsch, the foremost expert and proponent of Jewish colonialism during the first decades of the twentieth century, also recognized the importance of the sea for the development of the Jewish state.35 While Grunwald sought to recover a lost past by writing the history of

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Jewish seafaring and Herzl used the trope of seafaring to imagine the regenerated state of the future, Trietsch focused on the pragmatics of the present, arguing for the centrality of the Mediterranean Sea for the realization of the Jewish state in world history. Although Trietsch does not cite Hegel directly, it is hard not to hear an echo of the Hegelian philosophy of world history in which a European state can only become great through a connection to the sea. As Trietsch explains in his chapter ‘Jewish Mediterranean Sea Positions,’ Jewish entry into world history is bound to the sea: The increasing closeness to the sea of the Jewish population in the Mediterranean regions eases transportation between Jews living in different lands of this area in an extraordinary way and may soon bring significant consequences. This development favors the participation of Jews in trade and transportation; it helps their ‘Europeanization;’ and, above all else, is crucial for fulfilling the role of culture mediator between the Orient and the Occident, for which Jews are well-suited ... Jewish seafaring in the Mediterranean would result in the establishment of businesses in the most important port cities; this would lead to the foundation of an entire network of Jewish banking and trading institutions with branches and so forth; the Jews of the Mediterranean would have an increasing importance, analogous to that of the Greeks, the Maltese, and others.36

The cultural, political, and economic conditions of possibility of the Jewish state are determined by its geographic proximity to and worldhistorical reliance on the sea. In effect, the Greco-German trope of seafaring has been reimagined as a Jewish national-colonial destiny. And just as significantly, this destiny depends on spreading the universality of the European ideals of civilization to Jew and Arab alike. It was precisely this civilizing process that also undergirded the organization of Trietsch’s widely distributed book, Bilder aus Palaestina (Pictures of Palestine; 1911), one of the first Zionist photo-documentaries of Palestine. The book was intended to disseminate knowledge about Palestine within German-speaking countries and to thereby galvanize enthusiasm for the Zionist project of cultivating and modernizing the land and its people. It consisted of more than one hundred photographs as well as several sketches, ranging from pictures of architecture, landscapes, and seascapes to portraits of Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land. Complemented by short thematic essays, the photographs were meant to render visible the colonial territory and the ongoing process of its cultivation and regeneration.

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In much the same way that Herzl represents Reschid Bey as a ‘European’ Arab, Trietsch points out that the ‘sleeping Orient’ has undergone revolutionary changes in light of modern technologies and the importation of European culture: ‘The Bedouin on the train, the Syrian farmer who uses a Thuringian milk separator to make butter, the Arab widow who goes to the city and buys a Singer sewing machine on credit, the brown lad who shines the bright yellow shoes of an Arab dandy in the Jaffa market with the newest American shiner – these are all images that do not correspond with the biblical stories nor the tales of a thousand and one nights’ (BP, 10). Strangely, however, these are precisely not the kinds of pictures that Trietsch reproduces in his Bilder aus Palaestina. There are no photographs of Bedouins on trains or Arab widows sewing clothes using a Singer machine. In fact, when either Arabs or Arab lands are represented in the book, they are consistently shown in dilapidated and downright ramshackle settings that are completely lacking in all modern amenities. ‘A typical large Arab town,’ Trietsch shows, has no provisions whatsoever for electricity, railway transportation, international postage, or banking. Far from the model of European cultivation, the inhabitants merely appear to be mulling about or standing around, perhaps waiting, in Reschid Bey’s words, for the Zionist Jews to ‘enrich’ them. The Jewish colonists, on the other hand, are depicted hard at work, cultivating the arid land and harvesting its crops. It is they who have brought the European cultural enterprises, the international banking institutions, the German language, and modern agricultural technology to Palestine. In this respect, the photo-documentary accords in many ways with Herzl’s colonial Bildungsroman: Zionists first ‘civilize’ other Jews and then civilize the native Arabs so that in the end, everyone returns home improved and enriched. In Daniel Boyarin’s words: ‘Herzlian Zionism is thus itself the civilizing mission, first and foremost directed by Jews at other Jews and then at whatever natives happen to be there, if indeed, they are noticed at all.’37 In the final pages of Bilder aus Palaestina, Trietsch articulates ‘the Europeanization of Palestine’ vis-à-vis technological developments such as the expansion of the international railway system, the building of streets for automobiles, and the modernization of the major harbours in Jaffa and Haifa, as well as cultural developments, such as the adoption of European educational ideals (BP, 138–41). Once again, this process of cultivation as Europeanization involves both Jews and Arabs shedding their ‘Oriental’ qualities and ‘Europeanizing themselves [europäisiert sich]’ (BP, 143). Trietsch suggests that ‘the German language

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can serve as the conveyor of European Bildung,’ something that he also recognizes – given the prevalence of European and particularly German anti-Semitism – is ‘an irony of fate’ (BP, 146). This notwithstanding, he augments this idea in Juedische Emigration und Kolonisation in the chapter ‘The Jewish Cultural Mission in the Orient.’ He argues that Jews will bring to Palestine European educational practices, the German cultural tradition, their extensive knowledge of hygiene and medicine, and general economic flourishing as the ‘cultural mediator’ between Europe and Islam.38 Here the Zionist imaginary has constructed Palestine as a colonial territory for extending European civilization and turning Jews into a world-historical people. For Zionist thinkers such as Grunwald, Herzl, and Trietsch, world history is configured as a voyage in which the central trope is travel by ship. Writing Jews into the history of seafaring thus meant writing Jews into the ranks of the European Universal. In this regard, ‘writing travel’ bears witness to the narrative and historical transformation of Jews into world-historical agents of the Universal. Concluding Remarks In a recently published article, ‘We Have Not Arrived from the Sea: A Mizrahi Literary Geography,’ Hannan Hever argues that the culturally hegemonic Zionist narratives of immigration have been written by Ashkenazi Jews from Europe who arrived on the shores of Israel via the sea. These travel narratives are constituted by what he calls a ‘normative crossing’ of the Mediterranean in order to symbolically and geographically reterritorialize the Diaspora in the future state of Israel.39 By contrast, he sees the immigration stories of the Mizrahi (Jews from Arab countries), published during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, as ‘sealess’ stories that have been excluded from the customary Zionist narratives precisely because they depict Arab-Jewish geographies of ‘continuity’ and thereby offer a different story of Jewish immigration.40 In effect, Jewish seafaring is a testament to the racial exclusivity of both the Zionist immigration narrative and the Israeli state. Hever further points out that in these standard immigration narratives, the sea is something that has to be overcome and that therefore assumes a subservient status vis-à-vis the territory: ‘The Zionist story is one of Ashkenazi immigration from Diaspora to Redemption, and the journey to Zion is a journey to a territory – a journey by sea, although the sea serves only as a means of passage, as a necessary stage to be

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crossed.’41 I find Hever’s argument about the ‘sea-less’ Mizrahi literary geography to be a compelling and defiant challenge to the European Ashkenazi hegemony in Israel; however, he does not recognize the extent to which the seafaring discourse also constituted the very hegemony he seeks to displace and, for this reason, is more than just a means of passage. As I have argued here, writing travel by sea entailed extending the reach of the European Universal, and this is something that first-generation Zionist Jews such as Grunwald, Herzl, and Trietsch articulated precisely in order to gain the recognition of the great European powers. Seafaring was not simply a means of leaving the old Europe behind; it was also a means of extending – by way of the imaginary – the idea of Europe to the shores of Palestine. In his novel Only Yesterday, S.Y. Agnon describes, for example, how the protagonist, an Eastern European Jew named Isaac Kumer, catches his first sight of the sea on a train journey to Trieste: ‘People who were in the train with Isaac stood up and called out happily, That’s the sea. That’s our sea. Isaac stood up and looked at the sea. That is the sea which is a branch of the sea of the Land of Israel.’42 Not unlike Herzl’s ‘rampart of Europe,’ Palestine is a new territory, one both different from and still fundamentally connected to Europe by virtue of the same sea and many of the same civic ideals. In this regard, the early Zionist imaginary employed the discourse of seafaring in order to elevate Jews into world history and place them in line with the European Universal. This meant creating narratives of travel in which Jews were endowed with a long-standing seafaring tradition that, in no apologetic terms, coincided with the history of European colonial expansion, even if Jews hardly played a role in this actual history. At the same time, it also meant rewriting the myth of the Wandering Jew and thereby allowing Jews to make a claim to the ‘Germanic’ stage of world history. And finally, it meant spreading the European Universal to Palestine by refining, at a higher level, the European concepts of cosmopolitanism and civil society. As the crown jewel on the shores of the Mediterranean, the future Jewish state would bring Bildung – both civilization and culture – to Jew and Arab alike and thereby become an outpost of a new Europe. The Zionist seafaring narrative is, therefore, doubly a record of racial and cultural hegemony. In seeking legitimacy in the eyes of the European powers, the Zionist imaginary not only bought into the Hegelian account of world history but also established an uncomfortably close alliance between Zionist ideals and those of the great apologists for empire and expansion.

118 Todd Presner N OTE S 1 This essay represents a substantially condensed version of arguments about Zionism and travel that appear in various chapters in my two books: Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), particularly ch. 5, ‘The Land of Regeneration: Seafaring Jews and the Zionist Colonial Imaginary.’ 2 David Ben-Gurion, ‘Israel and the Sea: Army and Security’ (1950), in Israel and the Sea, ed. Newman, Z. Eshel, M. Pomruk, and S. Raviv (Haifa: Newman and Hevel Yamo LeIsrael) [in Hebrew]. Quoted in Hannan Hever, ‘We Have Not Arrived from the Sea: A Mizrahi Literary Geography,’ Social Identities 10, no. 1 (2004): 31–51. Here, 36. 3 S.Y. Agnon, In the Heart of the Seas, trans. I.M. Lask (New York: Schocken, 1948), 66–7. 4 Helmut Pemsel, Weltgeschichte der Seefahrt, 7 vols. (Vienna: Neuer wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2003). All translations are mine unless otherwise stated. 5 Ibid., vol. 4, 10. 6 Raphael Patai, The Children of Noah: Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Further citations will be documented parenthetically as Patai, followed by the page number. 7 G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (1822–3), ed. Karl Heinz Ilting, Karl Brehmer, and Hoo Nam Seelmann, vol. 12 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1996), 111. All further citations to this text will be documented parenthetically as W, followed by the page number. 8 There were, in fact, a number of significant Jewish sailors in the history of seafaring, most notably the twelfth-century explorer Benjamin von Tudela, and Petachja von Regensburg. For an account of their world travels, see Jüdische Reisen im Mittelalter: Benjamin von Tudela und Petachja von Regensburg, trans. and intro. by Stefan Schreiner (Cologne: Parkland, 1998). 9 Africa is actually the first geographical space that Hegel analyses, but because the land is ‘impenetrable’ and filled with ‘the worst savageness and barbarism,’ the African people ‘have not placed a foot in history’ (W, 99). Hence they are quickly dispensed with by Hegel. For more on his views of Africa, see Robert Bernasconi, ‘Hegel at the Court of Ashanti,’ in Hegel after Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London: Routledge, 1998), 41–63. 10 For a more thorough discussion of this paradigm, see my Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains, esp. ch. 4. 11 Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘The Hebrews,’ in On World History: An Anthology, ed. Hans Adler and Ernest A. Menze, trans. Ernest A. Menze with Michael Palma (Armonk: Sharpe, 1997), 263.

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12 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Munich: Bruckmann, 1904) (original 1899). Here, vol. 1, 454. 13 Hegel, Werke, vol. 12 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 243. 14 Hegel, ‘Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal’ (1798–1800), in Werke, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 277. 15 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). Kierkegaard does not deprecate Abraham’s willingness to transcend the law but rather praises his radically individual commitment to faith. For Hegel, however, Jews represent a kind of slave mentality because their laws are enforced by a rigidly abstract code of morality, with no connection to the formation of civil society, family, or state. 16 Hegel, ‘Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal,’ 278. 17 Ibid., 292. 18 Ibid., 324. 19 According to Charles Taylor, ‘the Germanic universal’ and ‘the Germanic world’ do not refer to Germany per se (a nation with a remarkably scant seafaring tradition) but rather to the Germanic peoples who gave rise to the modern European nations of Western Europe, of which Germany is just one example. Taylor explains: ‘The German nations Hegel means are the barbarians who swarmed over the Roman Empire at its end and founded the new nations of Western Europe. There is no particular chauvinism in this use of the word German. Montesquieu and others also recognized that modern European polities had issued out of these Germanic barbarian kingdoms.’ Taylor, Hegel (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 398. 20 By turning the ‘Greco-German’ seafaring voyage into a Jewish undertaking, Heine, I argue, subverts the absolutism of Hegel’s philosophy of history and exposes the very metaphors on which its progressive development relies. See my article, ‘Jews on Ships; or How Heine’s Reisebilder Deconstruct Hegel’s Philosophy of World History,’ Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 118, no. 3 (May 2003), 521–38. 21 Max Grunwald, ‘Juden als Rheder und Seefahrer,’ Ost und West 7 (July 1902): 479–86. The article was also published as a small pamphlet under the same title in 1902. Further citations will be documented parenthetically as JR, followed by the page number. 22 For a thorough discussion of the tradition, in its many cross-cultural variants, see Galit Hasan-Rokem and Alan Dundes, eds., The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). In particular, the essay by R. Edelman, ‘Ahasuerus, The Wandering Jew: Origin and Background,’ 1–10. My discussion is informed by Edelman’s essay.

120 Todd Presner 23 In 1856, Doré produced a series of twelve woodcuts that depicted the history of the Wandering Jew. The first woodcut grounds the myth in the New Testament, with Jesus punishing Ahasverus, the Jewish cobbler, to wander until Judgment Day. In the last woodcut, the Wandering Jew is saved when he confesses his belief in Christ. In Doré’s representation, the Wandering Jew not only walks on land but also walks across the oceans. 24 Following Heinrich Heine’s description of the Flying Dutchman as ‘the eternal Jew of the ocean,’ Wagner described his creation as ‘a particular mixing of the character of the eternal Jew with that of Odysseus.’ He emphasizes the figure’s desire to return home and the possibility of redemption through the love of a woman and even sublates the ‘Jewish’ features into universal characteristics of human longing. Both quotes come from Dieter David Scholz, Richard Wagners Antisemitismus (Würzberg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1993), 105–6. 25 Cf. Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 26 Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xv. It should be noted that Van Den Abbeele does not limit the concept of the ‘voyage’ to seafaring; instead, it refers to a much broader notion of travel in which a person is transported from one place to another. 27 Paul Gilroy’s important work, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, shows how the ship, as both historical reality and literary metaphor, structures the dialectical underside of modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 28 For an assessment of this dialectic, see David Sorkin, ‘Emancipation and Assimilation: Two Concepts and Their Application to German-Jewish History,’ Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 35 (1990): 17–33; and Amos Funkenstein, ‘Dialectics of Assimilation,’ Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 1– 14. 29 Willy Bambus, for example, published his travelogue, Palästina: Land und Leute, in 1898 (Berlin), and Adolf Friedeman published his ‘pictures of travel’ (which included a number of etchings by Hermann Struck) in 1904: Reisebilder aus Palästina (Berlin). By the end of the first decade, scores of travel guides to Palestine had been published, the most famous being Davis Trietsch’s Bilder aus Palaestina, which I will discuss below. For a good study of the genre of German-Jewish travel writing about Palestine, see Wolf Kaiser, Palästina – Erez Israel: Deutschspachige Reisebeschreibungen jüdischer Autoren von der Jahrhundertwende bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1992).

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30 Theodor Herzl, Briefe und Tagebücher: Zionistisches Tagebuch, 1895–1899, ed. Alex Bein et al., vols. 2–3 (Berlin: 1983). Here, vol. 2, 655. All further references to Herzl’s letters and diaries will be documented parenthetically as T, followed by the volume and page number. 31 Moses Hess, Rom und Jerusalem: Die letzte Nationalitätsfrage. Briefe und Noten (Leipzig: Kaufmann, 1899). Here, 77 and 79. 32 Ibid., xiv. 33 Herzl, Der Judenstaat, in Zionistische Schriften, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Hozaah Ivrith, 1934). 34 The Zionist Jew arriving from the sea or even being born from the sea is a critical part of Israeli self-fashioning. The pioneer arrives from the sea and proceeds to regenerate the desolate land. In so doing he is turned into a new ‘Sabra’ Jew. This recursivity of building and being rebuilt is captured in the opening line of S.Y. Agnon’s novel, Only Yesterday (1945): ‘Like all our brethren of the Second Aliya, the bearers of our Salvation, Isaac Kumer left his country and his homeland and his city and ascended to the Land of Israel to build it from its destruction and to be rebuilt by it.’ Trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3. For a fascinating discussion of this process, see Eric Zakim, To Build and Be Built: Landscape, Literature, and the Construction of Zionist Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). The trope of the pioneer arriving from the sea appears in countless works of literature and film, perhaps most emblematically articulated by Moshe Shamir, who declares that his hero, Elik, ‘was born from the sea.’ For a discussion of the seafaring Zionist Jew in Israeli cinema, see Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). For a timely reassessment of this trope, see Hannan Hever, ‘We Have Not Arrived from the Sea: A Mizrahi Literary Geography.’ 35 Davis Trietsch, Bilder aus Palaestina (Berlin: Orient-Verlag, 1911), abbreviated hereafter as BP. See also Trietsch, Juedische Emigration und Kolonisation (Berlin: Orient-Verlag, 1917). Although not published until 1917, the latter book was written, according to Trietsch’s preface, five years earlier, in 1912. 36 Trietsch, Juedische Emigration und Kolonisation, 37–8 and 41. 37 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 303. 38 Davis Trietsch, Juedische Emigration und Kolonisation, 45. 39 Hever, ‘We Have Not Arrived from the Sea,’ 34. 40 Ibid., 41. 41 Ibid., 36.

122 Todd Presner 42 Agnon, Only Yesterday, 21. Hever, however, reads this passage as an example of the sea as a means of passage to the territory. It is certainly that, but it is also a reference back to the idea of Europe and, hence, contributes to the very hegemony that he sees in contemporary Israel.

6 Ruins Travel: Orphic Journeys through 1940s Germany julia hell

Jetzt ist Sehenszeit! Max Frisch (1946)1 There wasn’t much for the eyes to see. Hans Erich Nossack (1945)2

Ruins of Empire: Confronting the In/Visible When the Nazi Empire finally collapsed, leaving nothing but mass graves, rubble, and ruins across Europe, legions of non-German journalists started travelling through these devastated landscapes. For years, these ruin travellers scrutinized Germany’s rubble landscapes with ‘a foreigner’s gaze,’ searching for explanations for Germany’s ‘physical, moral and political ruin.’3 In their texts, these ‘specialists in perception’ tried to capture things as precisely as possible, making acts of seeing, looking, scrutinizing, and watching central to their writing.4 At the heart of the present study are issues dealing with this focus on vision and the (in)visible. In particular, I will explore the descriptive prose characteristic of these texts about ruin travel, the scopic scenarios and acts of looking this prose inscribes, and the subject of vision that it attempts – and ultimately fails – to (re)constitute. The exploration of this failure to reconstitute – and relegitimize – the authorial subject for a postfascist world will lay bare the complex entanglement of the epistemological and political, or ethical, dimensions that lie at the heart of this aesthetic project to recreate the very conditions of possibility for realist description.

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Two returning exiles, Alfred Döblin and Hannah Arendt, touched on these issues in their ruin travel texts reporting on their visits to Germany. Döblin, the German-Jewish author and American officer, observed in 1945 that Stuttgart’s citizens walked through the city’s ‘atrocious ruins’ as if the streets had always looked this way.5 Based on his dispiriting observations, Döblin began to doubt the Allied wisdom that ruins have the power to re-educate: it was a mistake to think that the sight of such annihilation would prompt people to think.6 Germans merely pointed out sites of bombing raids and their dates: ‘That is all’ – no further information, no reflections.7 Hannah Arendt evaluated this basic gesture very differently. Arendt, too, reflected on the Germans’ refusal to acknowledge the destruction they had caused. All over Germany, people failed to register the ruins as ‘they walk[ed] through the rubble’; instead, they were sending one another picture postcards showing cityscapes that no longer existed (Arendt, 249). Only in Berlin did she encounter Germans willing to look. There, people took the time ‘to show one around the ruins,’ describing in great detail what remained and what was no longer there (255). While Döblin dismissed this basic act of registration and description, Arendt made it an essential part of her report’s empiricist epistemology: ‘reality,’ she stated, is the ‘sum total of hard inescapable facts’ (252). And hard facts are visible facts. She wanted Germans to see what was real – and ‘real are the ruins’ (254). Reconstruction required taking stock and facing the ‘realities of Nazi crimes’ that ‘still visibly dominate the whole fabric of German life’ (Arendt, 250). What else was visible? Unlike Döblin, Arendt juxtaposed two sites/sights: the sight of the ruins, signs of ‘war and defeat,’ and the sight of posters displaying photographs from the liberated concentration camps (250). Arendt criticized the Allies’ displays as self-defeating, arguing that their accusing gesture – the posters pointed a finger at the spectator, declaring him guilty – distracted Germans from the sight of the camp photographs (260). Arendt, too, pointed a finger, but she directed it at the ruins and the dead bodies. The dominant gesture of Arendt’s essay was thus a most literal appeal to German readers to open their eyes. For Arendt, this act of looking was the indispensable precondition for understanding the ‘nightmare of Germany.’8 During the war, Germans were already recording their ruin walks in diaries and letters, while authors were starting to write novels about the bombing raids, which they revised and published after 1945. Many

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of these literary texts are saturated with the traces of particular acts of looking; in their modes of writing, the texts move away from what Adorno will reassert once again in the 1950s as the hallmark of high modernism – that is, its ‘emancipation from the object’ – and instead move toward ‘the empirical realm.’9 Faced with a world in ruins, literature turns towards the visible and not so visible traces of destruction. In this study, I follow a particular journey through Germany’s ruins and the vestiges left by what I call the scenario of confrontation with the images from the camps in texts written by Hans Erich Nossack, a ruin traveller whom W.G. Sebald’s controversial Zurich lectures brought back into the limelight in 1997.10 Nossack was one of West Germany’s most celebrated authors in the 1950s and early 1960s. Active in the Communist Party until the early 1930s, he withdrew into his father’s company after the Gestapo searched his apartment.11 He met Hermann Kasack, one of the more conservative authors of Nazi Germany’s so-called inner emigration, but distanced himself from this group after the war.12 As I will argue later, Nossack’s writings changed in the mid-1940s after the air raids on Hamburg: the cause of a radical break between past and present, these attacks produced an authorial position defined by a searching backward gaze. As the Cold War began to heat up, Nossack gradually assumed the position of an anti-ideological outsider: burnt by experience, the author maintained his distance from all contemporary ideologies. In 1967 Nossack again revised his world view analysing his own biography in generational terms. Reaffirming his opposition to Hitler, he now located the decisive break as the First World War, which he referred as a ‘rupture of historical dimensions’ that produced a generation of ‘renegades’ who lived this radical break with ‘yesterday’s world’ as the ‘onset of [their] exile.’13 Nossack thus clearly equated his own position during the Nazi years with that of Germany’s exile authors. Yet when he discussed the postwar era he switched to another term, that of the partisan. In contrast to the backward glance that defined his earlier writing, Nossack’s ‘partisan existence’ came with an ‘illegal gaze’ that expressed the partisan’s ‘restless vigilance.’14 I will embed my reading of Nossack’s texts in a broader discussion of the confrontational scenario in contemporary literary, journalistic, and theoretical texts. In particular, I will juxtapose Nossack’s texts to Die Stadt hinter dem Strom, on the one hand, and Peter de Mendelssohn’s Die Kathedrale, on the other hand. Kasack began writing his novel between

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1942 and 1944 and finished it in 1945. Published in 1946, the novel was an enormous success, but like Nossack’s texts it was then forgotten. Mendelssohn’s Die Kathedrale was published posthumously in 1983; written by an author returning from British exile, this text remained unknown until Sebald subjected it to rather withering criticism.15 Like Döblin, Mendelssohn worked for the allied military administration and travelled extensively through postwar Germany, publishing his travel reports in the German press.16 What do we learn from a close reading of these literary texts reporting on their narrators’ journeys through Europe’s mountains of rubble? These ruin texts emphasize detailed descriptions of the phenomenal world and its visible objects, but they do not simply participate in Arendt’s performative gesture signalling: here is a bombed-out house. Nor do they simply engage in a project of ‘seeing’ things. For ‘seeing things’ is no longer that simple. Instead, these authors ask, ‘What am I still able to see?’ ‘What is still visible?’ or ‘Is this a bombed-out house?’ These texts are written by German authors, who think of themselves as specialists of perception in a ruined world – they want to see, to perceive a world, whose contours have been erased if not obliterated. With their scrutinizing gaze, these (post)war travel narratives engage in the reconstruction of the real. However, we are not talking about a realism that merely registers or reproduces the world – if such a project were possible. What we are dealing with is an aesthetic project that creates its readings of the world in close proximity to this world, by closely adhering to visible details. The meaning of this opaque new world cannot be grasped except through attention to the things that have remained. Writing with their eyes wide open is merely a first step – albeit an indispensable one. Literary ruin texts are thus not in rebellion against the ‘façade’ of the real, to use Adorno’s expression (‘Narrator,’ 32); rather, they are confronted with the loss of the phenomenal world, with a ruined world that is sliding into rubble – into what is no longer visible, into invisibility. However, what is so fascinating about artistic production at this moment is not only the newly emerging tension between description and narration and the authors’ return to the visually oriented empiricism of realism, but the subject of vision that informs this writing, its acts of looking and the anxieties that accompany these acts.17 Scrutinizing the texture of the empirical world, describing the rubble left by the war – and in the process transforming debris into ruins – is a way to resolve the fundamental destabilization of the subject of visual perception that is so central to all forms of realism.

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This aesthetic project is also a way of relegitimizing an authorial subject for a new, postfascist culture. That is, we encounter in this reconstruction of the descriptive mode of writing both an epistemological and an ethical, or political, project: the endeavour to reinvent realist description and to legitimate the authorship of writers who had chosen to remain in Nazi Germany. In contrast to Arendt, these German authors do not maintain the double focus on both ruins and camps. However, images of the camps and, in particular, scenarios of confrontation shadow their texts, ultimately subverting both the texts’ aesthetic of realist description and the legitimatory reconstruction of the authorial subject as subject of vision. This refoundation of authorship in ruins is thus of a rather fragile nature, and I will argue that we can trace this fragility ultimately to the inescapable presence of the camp images displayed on posters and projected in courtrooms. More precisely, these texts are haunted by this scenario, which repeats the moment of confrontation with the victims of Nazi genocide in the courtrooms, in the streets, in the movie theatres – again and again. Wartime and postwar German authorship thus revolves around a labour of reconstruction, the reconstruction of the phenomenal world and of the subject of vision. This aesthetic reconstruction is inextricably tied to two very particular objects of sight and representation: urban Trümmerlandschaften (rubble landscapes), and the camp photographs that Arendt pointed to. What these visual objects share is their dialectic of, first, past and present, and second, the visible and the invisible – of what exists now and what existed then, of what is visible now and what was visible then.18 They force the subject into a hermeneutic activity, a kind of scopic rush that emphasizes visual perception; moreover, this interpretive activity by its very logic involves the subject’s own history, its own discontinuity, which is at once ontological and historically determined: the past – that which determines the subject’s present – is as invisible, as absent, as out of reach for the subject in terms of its individual history as it is in terms of a collective history. What is and why it is this way – this puzzle, I argue, generates both an urgent desire to see what exists and what was, what is still visible and what is not; and it produces forms of writing that revolve around visibility and particularly in/visible objects: rubble landscapes, ruins, photographs.19 This empiricist prose about a world in ruins reinvents the authorial subject as the subject of visual perception. Like other inner émigrés, Nossack takes recourse to classical antiquity and myth, writing about this subject as Pliny, the Elder observing the eruption of Mount Vesu-

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vius, and as Orpheus, the poet with the backward stare who is familiar with the world of the dead. Like the model of the classical geographer and historian with its searching, empiricist gaze, the Orphic myth legitimates Nossack’s authorship by founding it in the experience of deadly danger, if not death itself. I will argue that it is the poet’s backward gaze that points us to the fissures in Nossack’s scopic (re)foundations. For this gaze carries the memory traces of another gaze – the gaze that encountered the camp photographs – that will ultimately kill the empiricist subject’s gaze, arrest its scopo-manic rush. I thus propose to revisit the postwar debates about representation from a particular angle, not asking whether realism is an appropriate mode of representation, but rather inquiring into this new subject of the realist gaze and the very nature of this gaze. My wager is that this line of inquiry will shed new light on the complex entanglement of epistemology and ethics at work in postwar German culture on the one hand, and the visual dimension of realist modes of writing – or rather the historically specific reinvention of realist description within modernism – on the other.20 Specular Traces I: The Bystander in the Courtroom, the Bourgeois Novel’s ‘Aesthetic After-Image,’ and the Survivor’s Embarrassed Look The early 1960s brought back the Nazi past and its visual archive with trials in Jerusalem and Frankfurt.21 These trials also brought back a scopic scenario born in the courtrooms of the Nuremberg trials – that is, the confrontation with the films taken during the liberation of the concentration camps. W.E. Suesskind, a journalist and member of the inner emigration, for instance, focused his 1945 article about Nuremberg almost exclusively on the screening of the film Nazi Concentration Camps. In Suesskind’s account, there is no ‘mediator’ between image and reader, no one who is pointing to the image and making it ‘visible’ to the reader; the paragraph that focuses on the film about BergenBelsen lacks an ‘I,’ that is, an explicit ekphrastic speaker.22 In this report, the act of watching the film’s unbearable pictures has become invisible and the subject of this particular act of looking has vanished. This lack of a personalized ekphrastic mode hints at a disavowal of the very act of looking itself. Bilderverbot, or iconoclasm, does indeed often involve a disavowal, if not a prohibition, of looking. Suesskind’s report reveals that this Sehverbot, or scopoclasm, is produced by anxi-

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eties about this particular act of looking that are related to the courtroom situation and its prehistory: the vanishing spectator in the courtroom is the vanishing after-image of the bystander, of the member of the inner emigration, who averted his gaze from the scenes of persecution that were visible to anyone who cared to look. The scopic scenario that Suesskind creates in his report – a scenario in which the spectator’s gaze recalls the gaze of the bystander – was bound to resurface in the context of the Nazi trials in the early 1960s. Peter Weiss structured an entire play, his Dantean Investigation, around this scenario of confrontation.23 Together with the trials, the simultaneous performance of this play on more than twenty East and West German stages on 10 October 1965 once more ignited a heated debate about Adorno’s famous question: Does writing poetry after Auschwitz constitute an act of barbarism?24 Adorno’s reflections thus took on their particular urgency at a moment when debates over forms of (realist) representation and their limits coincided with the re-formation of postwar Germany’s visual archive in the wake of a renewed confrontation with images from the camps. As I will argue, Adorno’s essays are themselves permeated with traces of this scenario of confrontation, with memories of certain acts of looking and certain visual topoi: the topos of the bystanders’ ‘looking away’ when they were faced with the humiliation, deportation, or murder of German Jews, or the memory of the survivor’s ‘shame’ when looking at films, or photographs, documenting these scenes – variations on the scopic scenario we found in Suesskind’s reports. In particular, Adorno’s discussion (of realist versus modernist representation, of the misleading positivism of photography and the selfconscious negativity of the avant-garde) thematizes the spectator’s/ reader’s contemplative distance in the traditional novel and the confrontation with scenes of Nazi brutality on the stage. Adorno’s reformulations of his Auschwitz dictum are relatively well known, less so his 1954 essay ‘The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel.’25 Yet Adorno’s suggestion that we understand the reader’s/spectator’s contemplative gaze in the traditional novel as an (obsolete) ‘aesthetic after-image’ is as central to an understanding of his post-Holocaust aesthetics as are his reflections on the spectators’ ‘shame’ in ‘Commitment’ (1959).26 These scopic structures become readable in Adorno’s discussion of Schönberg’s Survivor of Warsaw, a work marked by the paradox that characterizes all art after 1945. What Adorno objects to is that the vic-

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tims ‘are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of the world which destroyed them.’ Adorno locates the problem in the spectator’s look and its effect: this is a spectator who experiences embarrassment and shame when under his gaze the victims’ suffering is reproduced – an experience sharpened by the aesthetic pleasure that is derived from the re-enactment of that suffering. In Adorno’s essay on the contemporary novel, the reader’s/spectator’s look again emerges as a central concern. A close reading of his essay reveals the symptomatic status of the recent past in this text. For it is this past that forces to the foreground the topos of ‘seeing’ and its related aesthetic category, the mode of description. More significantly, we also find this symptomatic irruption in Adorno’s concern with the visual structures underlying the traditional novel, specifically in the ‘aesthetic after-image’ of the contemplative observer/bystander that is, Adorno argues, part of the traditional realist novel’s Guckkastenbühne, that is, the traditional stage with its illusory fourth wall.27 Adorno thus links the modern novel to the Nazi past by connecting the act of seeing that characterizes the stance of the narrator (and reader) in the traditional realist novel with the stance of the majority of non-Jewish Germans during the Nazi period; in this new context, the distanced view of the realist narrator becomes the ‘detached watching’ of the German bystander. Like bourgeois theatre with its transparent fourth wall, Adorno explains, the traditional novel uses a technique of illusion: the narrator raises the curtain and the reader is asked to participate in the events ‘as though he were physically present’ (‘Narrator,’ 33). This illusion of distanced participation, Adorno argues, was destroyed by the recent catastrophe. In the modernist text, ‘seeing’ now functions differently. The author no longer lifts the curtain to make the reader see the ‘this is how it was’ of the traditional novel, and she no longer keeps a safe distance from this illusory world (‘Narrator,’ 33). Through variations in viewpoint, the contemplative position that is part of the traditional novel experiences a series of shocks that destroy ‘the reader’s contemplative security in the face of what he reads’ (‘Narrator,’ 34). Kafka already anticipated this ‘world in which the contemplative attitude has become a mockery because the permanent threat of catastrophe no longer permits any human being to be an uninvolved spectator; nor does it permit the aesthetic after-image of that stance’ (‘Narrator,’ 34).28 This after-image of the realist novel’s particular historical moment and its aesthetic tradition, Adorno argues, is now obsolete.

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In this essay from 1954, Adorno thus thematizes, albeit obliquely, the wounds left by a fascist practice of looking. In Adorno’s 1959 discussion of Schönberg, the issue at stake is ethics and affect (the shame and embarrassment of the specator), while in his 1954 essay on the narrator, the epistemological comes to the fore. But the affect of the survivor thematized with respect to Schönberg’s spectator/onlooker might well be the symptom of the problematic raised in the earlier essay. In ‘Commitment,’ Adorno discusses the excess of aesthetic pleasure. But as we have seen, there is more at stake, for the contemplation of his ‘image’ is saturated with the ‘shame’ of the spectator precisely because it reproduces the position of the bystander, the contemplative viewer, the neutral spectator. This is one of the moments when Adorno’s own survivor guilt enters the discussion of the representation of the Holocaust by leaving specific specular traces. On the one hand, Adorno thus reflects on the moment of confrontation when he discusses Schönberg’s oratorio and the spectator’s shame; on the other, the presence of the scenario of confrontation in his meditations on the novel points towards an unacknowledged problematic, that is, the survivor’s guilt and its role in Adorno’s post-Holocaust aesthetics, with its assault on both the image and the look, iconoclasm and scopoclasm. In Nossack’s texts the after-image of the contemplative onlooker – this residue of the original scenario of confrontation – persists as both a visual topos that helps the author think through the reality of the Nazi period and an unarticulated problematic that will leave its traces in his literary texts.29 The Jewish exile and the non-Jewish inner émigré prove to be haunted by a scopic scenario – the author’s confrontation with scenes of persecution – and a gaze: that of the bystander in Nossack’s case and of the survivor in Adorno’s case.30 Their projects for a postHolocaust aesthetic being as divergent as they are (on the one hand, Adorno’s radical antirealist modernism; on the other, Nossack’s fierce empiricist modernism) thus revolve around similar scenarios and their acts of looking. To make my case I will start with a reading of Nossack’s Der Untergang. Der Untergang: Unrecognizable Territory, the Traveller’s Searching Gaze, and the Modernist’s Empiricist Desire In an essay on daily life under totalitarian conditions written in 1967, Nossack retrospectively justifies the use of mythical narratives as the appropriate non-realist strategy to represent that which lacked reality,

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or rather that which was experienced as lacking reality.31 Nossack’s Nekyia. Bericht eines Ueberlebenden narrates this ‘un-reality,’ while Der Untergang reports the attacks on Hamburg.32 The combination of these texts (Nossack started writing them in 1942 and 1943 respectively and then completed both in 1945) makes his writing an uneasy articulation of mythical narrative and the tenacious registration of the empirical world. With Nekyia and Der Untergang, his writing splits into an allegorical narrative about a city of the dead, whose non-realist essence, as we learned above, does not permit realist representation, and a form of travel narrative that reports what the narrator has seen. This is of course the most basic, most skeletal form of any travel narrative: the account of a journey into the unknown that records the traveller’s (visual) impressions.33 Yet the unknown territory that we enter with Nossack is of a particular nature: Hamburg after the air raids. Broadly speaking, Nossack’s Der Untergang consists of two parts: in the first, the narrator relates a sojourn in the countryside interrupted by the attack on Hamburg, which he witnesses from afar. Nossack’s account of the journey to the house in the countryside where he and his wife intend to spend their vacation is shot through with the knowledge of what happended later, it is told from a position ‘after the catastrophe’ (End, 5). Nossack spends much time describing what he calls their ‘idyll on the other side of the abyss,’ establishing two central themes: the radical rupture with and loss of the past and the need for the utmost precision in the description of the events and their aftermath (6). Nossack sets in with an emphatic ‘I’/Eye: ‘I experienced the destruction of Hamburg as a spectator’ (1). With this spectatorial position the narrator claims a privileged position, a view of the event in its totality that escapes those who lived through the firestorm, mere actors too close to the event whose perspectives can be but partial. But in this act of looking, danger is involved, a danger that ‘consisted in being overwhelmed by the city’s fate.’34 In Nossack’s account, the attack produces a fully embodied spectator straining to grasp the events around him, a subject frantically trying to perceive what is happening. At the end of this first part the text slides from perceptual observation of empirical phenomena to an allegorical mode. ‘Everything was submerged in the milky light of the netherworld,’ Nossack writes, and in the glare of the searchlights, trees turn into wolves (11). Nossack thus introduces a new layer to his text – a journey into the world of the dead – and mobilizes a familiar visual trope, the Orphic poet’s backward gaze: ‘And [he] didn’t dare to look back, for behind [him] there was nothing but fire’ (23).

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In the second part of Der Untergang, we accompany the narrator on his trip into the ruined city. Nossack narrates this encounter with Hamburg’s ruins as the journey of a subject at full alert. As the travelogues of his contemporaries confirm, ruins (or what Arendt called ‘hard inescapable facts’) did provoke a peculiar kind of scopic desire. When Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and later armaments minister, drove through Nuremberg in 1945, he was stunned: there were no classical ruins, only a ‘giant pile of debris.’35 The journalist Wilhelm Hausenstein recorded similar impressions. A modern city, Hausenstein writes, ‘doesn’t seem to produce noble ruins: in many places it looks like a garbage heap.’36 Stephen Spender, a British journalist, registers a similar shock to his perception: ‘Nothing which I knew existed any longer.’37 Reading these texts, one is struck by their authors’ relentless emphasis on the unfamiliar nature of these urban vistas. What is so unfamiliar, so strangely new about these sights? Classical ruins let us imagine what was once there, they function as fragments of a lost whole that can be visualized. This is not the case here: these are not skeletal ruins, exposing the raw structure of what existed before the disaster. The cities’ ‘new appearance’ opens a gap between the image of the past and of the present:38 ‘Now it requires a real effort of the imagination to think back to that Cologne which I knew well ten years ago,’ Spender writes.39 ‘Ruins are ideal,’ Robert Harbison writes, ‘the perceiver’s attitudes count so heavily that one is tempted to say ruins are a way of seeing.’40 We ought to take this literally: the texts that deal with Germany’s ruined cities do foreground this sustained, intense act of looking. Contemplating ruins involves a ‘straining of the imagination,’ an intense hermeneutic process: ‘Is it perhaps that we are reconstructing them, replacing, mentally, all the fallen pieces, trying to undo or re-experience the history of how they got that way?’ (Harbison, 112). What texts about ruins thematize relentlessly is this visual work. For the dialectic of presence and absence, of what remains and what was once there, is also a dialectic of the visible and the invisible – of what can still be seen and what needs to be deciphered, imagined, made visible again.41 And like ruins, description has a particular affinity to visuality, because it is a mode of writing deeply invested in acts of looking – intense, concentrated acts of looking. In the second part of his travel narrative, the narrator’s return to the ‘dead city’ (End, 35), Nossack provides us with one of the strongest passages about the shock caused by the confrontation with an utterly unrecognizable, utterly unfamiliar new world; this is also one of the strongest observations about the tense, sustained nature of the gaze

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that this ruined landscape provokes. When the narrator re-enters the bombed city in Der Untergang, he reflects on how each journey to the city leaves the traveller ‘depleted,’ because he encountered something he has never seen before (End, 37). This experience is not comparable to the ‘grief and fright’ on discovering one single destroyed house among ten that were undamaged, because then it was possible to mourn this house (End, 37). But how can he mourn now, now ‘when nothing is left,’ not ‘the corpse of the city, not something known’ (End, 37). There is nothing familiar left: ‘What surrounded us did not remind us in any way of what was lost.’ What he sees here is ‘strangeness itself,’ ‘the essentially not possible’ (End, 37). This utterly ruined and therefore utterly unfamiliar terrain no longer has the power to ‘fix the mind in a contemplation of the use it was applied to.’ What it does is reinforce a visual scrutinizing that is part of all ruin gazing. Ruins capture the gaze, they challenge it to a hermeneutic activity, a heightened degree of visual scrutiny. The complete destruction that the narrators encounter, the obliteration of the city into rubble, intensifies this anxious scopo-mania. In everyone’s eyes, Nossack writes, he saw this ‘intent watchful scanning of the outer landscape and an unavailing search for comparisons within’ (End, 38–9). It was, these travellers thought, imperative not to overlook something somewhere that might explain the riddle before their eyes. The travellers’ gaze is thus split: it attentively scrutinizes an exterior reality registering minute details that it fixes on, but errs aimlessly in an inner space without ever finding an image to behold. While travellers might find that the objects they discover do not correspond to their expectations, these ruin travellers discover that in this foreign country there are no interior images left that correspond to the objects they find. ‘So there are unknown continents after all?’ is the question this trip raises (End, 38). Nossack vividly renders this experience of scopic disorientation and constant guessing. There is one particular scopic scenario that returns again and again: the gaze that does not encounter the hindrance it expected. Zwischen gestern und morgen (Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, 1947), one of the so-called Trümmerfilme, makes the viewer participate in this vertiginous gaze when the protagonist opens the door to his former hotel room: there is no room left behind this door, only a panoramic view across a landscape of rubble and debris into which the protagonist’s/viewer’s gaze falls. Nossack captures a similar ‘fall’ – ‘Where once one’s gaze had hit upon the walls of houses, a silent plane stretched into infinity’ – that precipitates a series of questions:

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Was this a graveyeard? Were these the remains of an ancient Roman aqueduct? This passage repeats a perceptual activity that races across this ‘mute plane’ from detail to detail. Because this gaze cannot ‘contrast its present to its former state,’ because it yields nothing but a ‘vergebliches Vergleichen nach innen’ when it searches for the image of the thing’s former state, it begins to compare it to what is known: the empty façade that hangs across the odd brush ‘like a triumphal arc’ (End, 38). The narrator’s gaze ranging across the unfamiliar debris of the empty plane comes to rest when the travellers start counting the city’s towers. Nossack narrates the entry into the city as an entry into Hades, conveying what he sees from the truck in great detail. No longer unencumbered, the traveller’s regard now constantly runs up against walls: ‘only rarely an open view through the blackness of an arched window’ (End, 40). Everything is quiet as if they are penetrating hostile territory. They observe their ‘alien surroundings with a kind of alert hostiliy’ (End, 42). This wary gaze notices that something is missing – that the rubble does not function like ruins: only later does a sense emerge for what is missing, later when streets are streets again, not paths through glass and rubble. It is the ‘cynical desire’ to walk and live on these streets ‘as in the past’ that makes the narrator ‘conscious of what is missing’ (End, 49). Turning Rubble into Ruins, or the Subject’s Scopic Rush In 1945, the present is a foreign country, and the rubble covering its surface needs to be sorted into what is visible and what is not. In other words, Europe in 1945 is a landscape of debris that will only slowly become one of ruins.42 In this context, Nossack’s text represents a labour of reconstruction: of the alert, sensual subject of visual perception and of the world of objects. It is not the visual disorientation per se that counts; rather, it is the permanent state of visual alert that functions as the new foundation for Nossack’s authorship. At stake are thus the very conditions of possibility of representation. This mode of writing that foregrounds questions of vision is the response of a particular literary tradition, that of realism, to the sight of ruined landscapes and their dialectic of visibility and invisibility.43 Nossack’s text attests to a realist problematic under the particular conditions of total annihilation: of having to wrest a visible world from invisibility, from the constant threat of sliding back into the realm of the barely visible, the no longer

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visible, the invisible. The topos of the crisis of representation that we are so familiar with from the discussions of postwar literature and art here appears as a crisis on a more elementary level: a crisis of the phenomenal world that also concerns the subject of vision. The problem is not that the means of representation are no longer adequate, the problem is that there is no longer a world to capture the artist’s gaze.44 This obsession with the act of seeing also permeates Nossack’s nonliterary writing in the mid-1940s. The notion of authorship that emerges from his letters and diaries is explicitly based on a link between description and sense perception. According to Nossack, to describe means to render the world perceptible – and to be an author requires visual perception: ‘Until 1933,’ he writes in his diaries, ‘I was able to describe everything and make it perceptible, but then there is suddenly a pause that lacks sensual quality [Sinnenhaftigkeit].’45 Nossack concedes that even in those years ‘animated, lively moments’ must have existed, but they were not ‘experienced’ (Tagebücher, 1: 450). This life in a ‘realm of the dead’ thus lacked the density of sense perception: nothing was felt, nothing seen (450). In ‘Jahrgang 1901,’ an essay written in 1965, Nossack narrates a dramatic transformation: the allied attacks on Hamburg restore the narrator’s vision, waking him from this state of ‘being dead’ that characterized his life under the National Socialism.46 At this moment of danger, ‘precise memories’ return and representation in the realist mode becomes once again possible (‘Jahrgang,’ 128). Reflecting on the writing of Der Untergang, Nossack writes to his friend and fellow writer, Herman Kasack, in December 1943: ‘As I follow the same path again, I look into myself like into a concave mirror that captures images’ (Briefwechsel, 1: 19). Travelling through Hamburg’s ruins, the subject of vision comes back to life; like a mirror, it captures pictures, preserving them in all their haunting clarity. In Nossack’s account, the realist gaze is bombed into existence. Two authorial models appear at this moment, two models based on famous travellers, one mythic, the other historical: Orpheus and Pliny the Elder. In February 1945, Nossack praises Pliny, the ancient traveller and historian, for his stoic attitude at the eruption of Mount Vesuvius: ‘Watching til the very end’ (Tagebücher, 1: 43). In a letter to his friend and fellow writer Hermann Kasack, Nossack invokes Orpheus’ fateful backward glance, associating the ruin traveller’s realist gaze with the story of the mythic poet’s journey to the Underworld. In this letter dated 12 December 1943, Nossack condenses survival, the ‘symbolic’

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loss of his manuscripts, and the issues of transformation and identity in the Orphic plot. The most incomprehensible thing, he writes, is that his manuscripts no longer exist, adding the Orphic trope: ‘I keep turning around toward this vacuum behind me’ (Briefwechsel, 1: 24). What exactly, then, are the qualities of this ruin traveller’s backward gaze? Is it the poet’s longing, murderous gaze at his beloved, or the historian’s gaze fixed in an urgent if not obsessive desire on the unfolding catastrophe? In his letters it is the sober gaze he emphasizes: he tells Kasack that he feels compelled to take stock ‘with sober eyes’ in order to decide what really vanished and what can still be used (Briefwechsel, 1: 23). At the end of 1943 he connects this sober look at things to the trope of travel, describing Der Untergang as a re-enactment of his ‘path with open eyes.’47 Yet like the poet’s backward glance, the ancient historian’s act of watching till the very end is tied to mortal danger. For, Nossack writes not without a certain bravura, how many times did fate try to annihilate this house, in whose basement he was hiding? (Tagebücher, 1: 43). It is with this moment of ruination in mind, with this image of collapsing houses, that Nossack formulates his artistic project in terms of description: his goal is ‘to describe things literally’ (Tagebücher, 1: 43). Moments of collapse create sharp, sensory experience – in those moments the authorial subject awakens from its deathlike existence, dead eyes come back to life, and art again becomes possible.48 At the core of Nossack’s authorship we find a ‘hungry,’ alert subject that manically pursues its desire to see;49 intent on the scopic mastery of an unknown territory, it turns rubble into ruins. Given this subject’s relentless quest for the visible, we should thus not be surprised to find traces of the Orphic gaze, traces of a journey into the ultimate unknown territory, the realm of the dead. This is after all a gaze that tries to capture an object, or rather, its image. For of all of those familiar, visible objects, ‘woman’ is the most conventional.50 The Orphic Gaze I: The Artist’s Backward Glance and the Object of Representation We usually think of the Orphic myth as a story about the artist’s deadly gaze and the power of his art, about love and its fatal moment of madness.51 But what happens if we do not focus on the gaze itself, but on the object of the gaze? We can then also read the Orphic myth as a story about the artist facing the vanishing object of representation. Eurydice is the artist’s object of desire, woman as the artist’s most conventional

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object of representation. Woman as the beautiful object of representation vanishes, and what survives is a beautiful story – a story about a world of objects glimpsed by the artist and laid out for our eyes. Thus when Orpheus turns around to look at Eurydice, he looks at the artist’s most conventional object, woman; when he loses her, he will turn her loss, the loss of her beautiful image, into song.52 In the realist tradition, writing needs a world of objects that can be ‘seen.’ Let me make this point through a brief discussion of Peter de Mendelssohn’s Die Kathedrale, which recreates the world of objects in a melodramatic mode. His purple prose actually serves a specific function: to create vivid images among the ‘shades’ – to take a world that has disappeared (the sudden collapse of the Third Reich), or is in the process of disappearing (ruins), back into the realm of the visible.53 In Kathedrale, the Orpheus plot works by substitution: the artist loses Karena/ Eurydice/Germany, but regains his object of representation, Aphrodite/Eurydice. Unlike Orpheus, Mendelssohn’s architect actually never meets his beloved in the realm of the shades – Karena is indeed dead. Instead, he meets a Jewish survivor. Mendelssohn describes his protagonist’s encounter with the survivor by foregounding a process of sensual perception that moves from the fascinated but distant sight of the woman to touching and a close view of her; the artist’s object is reconstituted in the most unmediated way through sense perception. At the end the reader watches the Jewish survivor wearing a dark red dress walking leisurely through the novel’s urban ruins with her young lover – an odd Poussinian scene. Nowhere is this empiricist notion of representation with its emphasis on perception more strongly present than in this story of the other Eurydice, the Jewish survivor Aphrodite Homeriades, whom Mendelssohn renders so glaringly visible in her vermilion dress – the famous red dress of Dante’s beloved in Vita Nuova. This colourful marker reconstitutes the artist’s object, woman, for everyone to see, replacing Eurydice/Karena, who has become invisible, with Beatrice. This vermilion image signals the moment when the very precondition for representation in ruins is re-established – that moment when Mendelssohn’s realist project has overcome the threat of invisibility represented by a world in ruins. As if his protagonist’s Orphic gaze had been wrest from blindness, as if nothing but a photographic film were left of the world that needed to be developed by melodramatic, eroticizing strategies of visualization. In Mendelssohn’s melodramatic reconstitution of the world, the subject of vision is stabilized. But what about Nossack’s Der Untergang, this

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exercise in empiricist modernism? As I mentioned above, in this text we find at first nothing but fragments of the Orphic story. Only later does Nossack add to this allusive structure of his journey into the underworld the visual trope of the Orphic gaze. When the narrator searches through the rubble for the objects lost in the bombing, he writes: ‘And when we walked we left a vacuum behind us’ (End, 53). Yet this backward gaze encounters not the image of the beloved woman, but a void. In Nossack’s ‘Orpheus und ...,’ on the other hand, the Orphic gaze seems to function like the narrator’s gaze in Mendelssohn’s Kathedrale. The Orphic Gaze II: The Artist’s Backward Glance, or Orpheus as Bystander While we found traces of Orpheus and his gaze in Der Untergang and in Nossack’s diaries, we did not encounter Eurydice. Eurydice is part of Nossack’s brief ‘Orpheus und ...’ (‘Orpheus and ...’), written while he was revising Der Untergang for publication in 1945. In this two-page text, Nossack radically rewrites the fatal moment when the poet turns around to cast a look at his beloved. In Nossack’s story, the poet meets the eyes of Persephoneia, the goddess of the Underworld and ‘goddess of death,’ not the eyes of his beloved Euridyce (‘Orpheus,’ 257). The Orpheus myth deals with the power of art and the tragedy of love, or of the madness of love. It tells the story of the artist as the one who sees and the story of his beloved as the one who is lost – and whose loss is transformed into art. In Nossack’s text, the artist/poet who returns to the city of the dead to rescue his lover falls in love with death. What Nossack’s Orpheus finds is not a living woman who is granted a second life thanks to the poet’s artistry and his passionate love, but a woman who is the very incarnation of death – yet one who is no less alluring. Nossack also remotivates this fatal moment – as has been done so often. Orpheus does not turn around, Nossack writes, because he started doubting that Eurydice was following him. He turned because he felt he had left something behind, something that was holding him back. Orpheus is triumphant, acts in a moment of hybris: ‘I conquered the realm of the dead, he said to himself, and he kept walking animated by his own song’ (‘Orpheus,’ 257). As he tries to tear himself from the realm of the dead, something forces him to stop. Regretfully thinking that he will never again sing as beautifully as he did on that day, the poet turns to cast a glance at his beloved. What his eyes fall upon is the

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goddess of death, whose face was ‘gently lit’ by the ‘rosy dawn’ (‘Orpheus,’ 257–8). That is, on his journey to into the ultimate unknown territory, the realm of the dead, Nossack’s poet’s gaze captures the image of a beautiful woman. What happens then is left vague: ‘Eternal night descended upon him’ (‘Orpheus,’ 258). Is Orpheus, the artist, fainting because, like Dante, the sight of death and suffering overwhelms him?54 Is he blinded by his encounter with a beautiful image of death? We don’t know. Nossack chose to leave the question open, chose to leave us with a moment of uncertainty – a constitutive uncertainty. I propose that we read this lacuna at the core of Nossack’s story about the artist’s look at death symptomatically. For ‘Orpheus und ...‘ follows a contradictory logic: like Mendelssohn’s Orpheus, Nossack’s poet seems to retrieve his beautiful image; however, at closer inspection it turns out that like the protagonist’s gaze in Der Untergang, the backward Orphic gaze encounters yet another void. In this text, Orpheus does not bring Eurydice back to life, he returns with one of the shades – one who for a brief moment seems to be alive, but whose lovely rosy glow is merely dawn’s reflection. Nossack’s Orpheus thus does not retrieve the object of representation, he does not reconstitute the solidity of objects – and whether he dies or goes blind, he does not emerge from Hades as a sovereign subject of vision. ‘Orpheus und ...’ tells us that the process of restabilization of the subject of visual perception so central to Der Untergang (and to Nossack’s diaries) is a process that remains incomplete, unstable – a process that threatens to kill the poet’s eyes. The question I want to address now is: Is there yet another way to account for this fragility, another way to read the blind spot that taints the (post)war artist’s sight? My reading of this insistent blind spot takes us back to Suesskind, and Adorno – to the bystander and what he did and did not see. What is striking about Nossack’s texts – literary and non-literary – is the utter absence of a scene that we find in many other texts from this period, that is, the confrontation with the Nazi genocide on film; this scenario is absent in Der Untergang, it never caught the narrator’s inquisitive eye. But Nossack’s ‘Orpheus und ...’ tells us a different story. This brief text is structured by a visual confrontation and a substitution, the replacement of Eurydice by the goddess of death. When Nossack’s Orpheus turns back, he encounters the face not of a new life, but of death.55 How, then, should we read this particular scenario of confrontation and Eurydice’s replacement by the goddess of death?

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Orpheus, the Bystander, or Hermann Kasack’s Vision of Hell To answer this question we need to take a detour through another ruin text, Herman Kasack’s Die Stadt hinter dem Strom (1946). As I mentioned earlier, like Mendelssohn, Kasack works explicitly with the Dante/ Orpheus motif. Yet in comparison to Nossack’s Der Untergang – and even to Mendelssohn’s Kathedrale – Kasack’s Stadt hinter dem Strom almost collapses under the excess of its intertextual references. Lindhoff, the protagonist, is not only Dante, not only Orpheus, but also Norbert Hanold, Wilhelm Jensen’s famous archeologist, and Aeneas, Virgil’s Trojan Roman. In Kasack’s novel Lindhoff, the archivist, does not enter the city in search of his beloved – in search of Beatrice, of Eurydice, or of Gradiva/Zoe; on the contrary, he is surprised to find her upon his arrival in a city whose authorities hired him to take care of the city’s archives. And in a truly Gothic scene, he then discovers that the woman he loves so passionately is dead – what he holds in his arms is not a being of flesh and blood, but a ghost, a ‘shade.’56 This shock, Kasack writes, renders him both blind and knowing: it tears the veil from his eyes so that he now recognizes the ‘naked uncanniness of the truth: he was living in the city of the dead’ (Stadt, 257). This is not the only moment in which Kasack’s Orpheus/Dante/ Hanold encounters an image of death. Like other ruin travellers, the archivist intends to describe his (first) impressions as precisely as possible. He will, however, soon develop a particular obsession: to record the ‘Schreckssekunde’ (Stadt, 233), the terrifying second of one’s own death. The novel’s most controversial section – a mass meeting of people wearing green masks, permeated by the smell of gas – will reveal what this peculiar obsession is truly about: to render visible the moment of dying in the gas chambers. In Kasack’s novel, travelling through ruins thus takes his protagonist into the underworld of the not yet dead and from there into the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Set in the lower city’s catacombs, the meeting reminds Sebald of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis; Kasack himself refers implicitly to Dante, explicitly to Brueghel. What the archivist sees and the narrator describes is, however, from a more recent time, though in the same medium as Metropolis – film. Lindhoff, the ‘historiographer’ (Stadt, 234), observes the meeting standing on a plateau high above the crowd. From there he sees men and women sitting on stone tiles, some of them so weak that they seem unable to stand upright and instead come crawling forward on their hands and knees. ‘Most of them were without any clothes,’ Kasack

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writes, ‘some wore rags’ (Stadt, 233). Their emaciated flesh shows their ribs and shines with a phosphorizing glow. These barely human figures then start to move soundlessly, ‘their hands like greedy claws as they advance on their knees, their heads ever closer together; and from the hallways ever new crowds keep moving in’ (Stadt, 233). This image of emaciated, weakened, skeletal human beings barely able to walk is clearly of more recent provenance; it is a textual evocation of the iconic photographs from Bergen-Belsen and other camps – it is the (aesthetic) after-image of the scene that Suesskind found so difficult to reproduce. But it is more than that: it is the uncanny superimposition of these photographs onto an image that does not exist, the image of mass death inside the gas chambers.57 Kasack takes us inside the gas chambers describing events from the point of view of the victims. What becomes ‘visible’ at this moment and in this ‘place’ is ‘the last moment, eternity’s terrifying second.’58 Nossack closely followed the writing of Kasack’s novel. He knew about the scene that Lindhoff witnessed and was probably fully aware of its specific specular traces: Kasack’s archivist decides to speak up because he feels the pressure of the committee’s collective gaze ‘as if he had for too long occupied the passive role of the silent spectator’ (Stadt, 241). The scopic scenario in the catacombs thus thematizes acts of looking that are politically and ethically highly charged. Kasack tells us what Lindhoff sees from his privileged position above the crowd; he tells us that Lindhoff himself is aware that he is the object of the leaders’ gaze; and, finally, he tells us what the victims ‘see’ in the gas chambers. While the latter scenario is part of an appalling narrative of redemption through catastrophe, the scopic scenario of Lindhoff looking while being looked at is the quintessential situation of the perpetrator/ bystander in the courtroom watching documentary evidence under the gaze of the Allied victors. In this scene, Lindhoff’s sight is disturbed, an effect of the gas that permeates the hall. Whether this is the effect of being confronted with images of atrocities or of being subjected to the other’s gaze must remain an open question. What we find at the core of Kasack’s novel is thus an ekphrastic rendition of the iconic filmic and photographic images of concentration camp victims and survivors; and, more significantly, we find again the trace of an act of looking that is by now familiar to us, that of the bystander. If we follow Nossack’s Orpheus into the realm of the dead, we encounter Kasack’s Dante at Auschwitz – and with him, we rediscover the problematic enacted by Suesskind: the dissolution of the sub-

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ject in the confrontation with the ‘horrifying images.’ As soon as he completed ‘Orpheus und ...,’ Nossack dismissed it as kitsch, and kitsch is the word that sums up Nossack’s scathing critique of Kasack’s novel. But Nossack did appropriate Kasack’s Orphic story; that he does so belatedly – that is, after 1945, after the Nuremberg trials – only supports my point. Like Kasack’s Orphic historiographer, Nossack’s Orpheus embraces a dead woman, and like the historiographer, the artist faces images that blind him. For in ‘Orpheus und ...,’ I would argue, the objects of the artist’s backward glance are the indelible after-images of the Nazi empire; and Orpheus, the artist haunted by the goddess of death, embodies the contemplative spectator from Suesskind’s report – and Adorno’s essay, and Kasack’s novel. Nossack’s ruin texts are thus driven by the destabilization of the subject of vision, whose cause is never named: the confrontation with the images shown at Nuremberg and then again at the Frankfurt trials. And this destabilization – Suesskind’s dissolving gaze as Orpheus’ moment of blindness – generates a visual counterlogic: the narrator’s scopic drive, his obsessive specular hunt for the objects of the visible world.59 Nossack’s Der Untergang is about the ‘genesis of the visible’ and thus about the phenomenological project at the heart of (post)war modernism. Specular Traces II: Hans Erich Nossack’s ‘Lebenloses Leben,’ or ‘Life without life.’ In Der Untergang, the scenario of confrontation is absent; in ‘Orpheus und ...’ we found its specular traces, the residue of the bystander’s gaze. In the early 1960s, in the context of the Auschwitz trials, Nossack then writes his own version of the scenario. I am referring to a famous selfportrait by Nossack, which strongly resonates with Suesskind’s performance of and Adorno’s thoughts about the uninvolved, or contemplative, onlooker. Part of Nossack’s autobiographical ‘Jahrgang 1901,’ this portrait describes Nossack’s existence under National Socialism as empty time, time spent staring out of an apartment’s window. The text opens with a question: ‘How was I able to survive the years from 1935 to 1939?’ (127). To think back fills the author with dread ‘because there is a lacuna’ in which he doesn’t find himself (127). ‘I know,’ Nossack continues, ‘where I lived,’ but there is a gap between old photographs and his memories. He is certain that a few photos still exist that show antique furniture and some beautiful objects, but he can no longer

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imagine how he existed in these rooms. What he does remember is an image of himself standing at the window for hours staring down at the street without moving. What does he see? Nothing but people walking up and down the street pushing strollers. What does he do? ‘I stand there and wait,’ he writes, not knowing what he is waiting for (128). With this scopic scenario, Nossack captures the desolate condition of the marginalized intellectual by drawing our attention to an act of looking. Staring out of his window, Nossack witnesses but a banal scene; what is not seen emerges only when we read ‘Jahrgang 1901’ together with a later essay, ‘Dies lebenlose Leben’ (1968). As I already mentioned above, this essay proposes an analysis of daily life under National Socialism and frames the scene at the window in a way that sheds a different light on the banality of the subject’s memories, turning the onlooker into a bystander. For in this essay, Nossack remembers the 1938 pogroms and his neighbour’s reaction to the departure of a Jewish family, that is, he remembers himself as bystander, as a participant in the reality of everyday anti-Semitism. Moreover, the essay’s particular framing is significant: ‘Dies lebenlose Leben’ begins with an anecdote about a young acquaintance of his who killed himself in 1933, leaving a note that read: ‘I am ashamed that I am not a Jew,’ and he ends it with a poem that narrates the refusal to act on a plea for help.60 In analysing the specular traces that the bystander’s act of looking leaves in Nossack’s reflections on life under Nazism and the question of its representation, we need to keep in mind specific contexts of his reflections: as I mentioned earlier, Nossack wrote ‘Jahrgang 1901’ at the height of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, that is, in 1965, showing us a figure standing at the window watching a banal scene of everyday life under the Nazis. Surrounded by photographs and films about the Nazi genocide, Nossack presents himself in 1965 as someone who has no visual memories of the reality of anti-Semitism – someone who wasn’t able to see. But what he does not see surfaces in ‘Dies lebenlose Leben,’ a text from 1968. ‘Jahrgang 1901’ turns the narrator’s gaze – and the reader’s – back onto the one who is looking but who doesn’t see what the Auschwitz trial is documenting with films and photographs, whereas ‘Dies lebenlose Leben’ struggles with the confrontation with that which was seen – in 1938 and in 1965. Like Suesskind’s bystander in the courtroom, Nossack’s contemplative onlooker is confronted with photographs. Nossack notes that ‘perfect documents’ exist for what he calls ‘the great misdeeds’ (‘Lebenlose,’ 73). But, he then asks, why is it that someone who experienced

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this era is always ‘dissatisfied’ when he encounters these ‘historically absolutely crucial documents’ (‘Lebenlose,’ 73)? As an avid reader of Arendt, Nossack explains the gap between documented knowledge and experiential reality structurally. Totalitarianism, Nossack argues, created a lacuna in everyone’s existence by ‘derealizing’ everyday life (‘Lebenlose,’ 74). Under these conditions, memories become ever more ‘devoid of blood,’ a process of derealization that ultimately renders representation impossible.61 The past cannot be represented, because the one who could do so, the one who survived this Totenreich, simply has no visual memory – only photographs.62 ‘Dies lebenlose Leben’ thus represents a retroactive attempt to explain what was not seen and why, and through its framing and the memory of deportation, it rewrites the figure at the window as one who was not blind, who had indeed seen. While the first essay, ‘Jahrgang 1901,’ presents us with a subject without images, that is, a subject without history, the second essay, ‘Dies lebenlose Leben’ transforms the onlooker into the bystander. It does so by opposing visual memories to photographs; indeed, Nossack expresses a strong aversion to photographs: ‘I abhor photographs,’ he exclaims. Photographs do not serve as ‘memory support’; on the contrary, they falsify still-living memories by rendering them ‘irreal.’63 Nossack thus reacts to the Auschwitz trials and their redeployment of genocidal images by denigrating photographic images while simultaneously creating ‘his’ images of racial persecution, his own visual memories from the Nazis’ realm of the dead. These are retroactive memories and as such screen memories that are politically just as problematic as much of this account of the everyday of totalitarianism. More to the point, he writes these visual memories into his own scenario of confrontation, counters the scopic scenario enacted in the Frankfurt courtrooms day after day with his own version: the bystander at the window who sees and doesn’t see. Conclusion: The Author’s Maniacal Eye ‘We lived at a time when the houses crumbled,’ Nossack writes in 1962 (Tagebücher, 1: 559). In 1959, Adorno agitated against the empiricist aesthetic of the realist novel that so lovingly described the banality of bourgeois interiors declaring the novel’s central scopic scenario and its contemplative spectator obsolete. In 1945, Albert Speer traces the objects of his world in his prison cell, while the protagonist in Zwischen

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gestern und morgen opens the door to a room that no longer exists; this door, now nothing but a window frame, opens onto a vista of urban rubble, debris, and fragments of ruins. It is this stony, war-ravaged landscape that Nossack’s protagonist explores in Der Untergang, recording what can be seen, and only what can be seen. In ‘Orpheus und ...,’ the artist’s gaze no longer clings to the objects of the empirical world; in this text, the artist’s gaze encounters the shadows of what was once seen on screen, and we discern the specular traces of the one who was looking. It is the tension between this project of reconstruction and its gaze – a gaze driven by the desire to seize hold of the world of objects – and the shadowy persistence of a deeply unsettling act of looking – never overtly thematized, but always present – that characterizes Nossack’s (post)war writing. Both Adorno and Nossack reflect on how representational forms need to be changed, and both agree that the traditional novel is dead. Yet their solutions to this crisis of representation are radically different, and the nature of their differences tells us about the issue at the core of this present study, that is, Nossack’s reconstitution of authorship around what is visible, what can be seen and recorded – and the blind spot that interferes with that reconstitution. While Adorno polemicizes against what he calls the epic form’s commitment to ‘material concreteness’ (‘Narrator,’ 30), that is, the world as a world of objects, Nossack makes that world of objects – shattered, ruined objects – the very subject matter of the text that will become his most famous and to which his poetics remains most strongly committed (i.e., Der Untergang). This subject matter, a world in ruins, unfolds under the searching eyes of a narrator set on discovering its unfamiliar shapes. In the process, Nossack restabilizes what is at the very centre of this mode of reapprehending, the subject of visual perception. What precisely is at stake in a reconstruction of a sovereign subject of vision, and why there is a need for reconstruction in the first place, has to do, I argued, with the blind spot in Orpheus’ field of vision. The differences between Adorno’s thoughts on the contemporary novel and Nossack’s reflections on writing after ‘the deluge’ are striking (Tagebücher, 1: 42). With the ‘turning point’ of 1943, Nossack founds his writing on this act of ‘watching til the end.’ In Adorno’s analysis, the activities of looking at the world, of watching and observing it, belong to an outdated mode of apprehending the world, to the nineteenth-century novel with its trust in the transparency of the empirical world and the nexus of vision and knowledge. Adorno vehemently

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attacks the ‘novelistic precept “this is how it is,”’ seeing in the traditional novel’s ‘suggestion of reality’ nothing but the reproduction of the façade of a disenchanted, reified world, nothing but representation’s lie (‘Narrator,’ 35, 30, 32, 34). Nossack shares Adorno’s consciousness of a fundamental rupture, but in 1943 his concern is not the ‘façade’ of a reified world. For in 1943, the façades have crumbled and the world of things has become unrecognizable. Adorno wrote his essay on the novel at the height of Germany’s so-called Wiederaufbauperiode, or era of reconstruction, when the bourgeois world of things had literally been reconsolidated; Nossack began to rethink the foundations of his writing at a time when this world was in ruins, or rather had been reduced to rubble, to an unrecognizable mass of detritus.64 Thus what Adorno calls ‘the gesture that says: “this is how it was”’ (‘Narrator,’ 33) represents the very foundation of Nossack’s authorship: ‘to describe most literally.’ And when Adorno celebrates the contemporary novel’s liquidation of the subject, Nossack reconstructs a sovereign subject of vision: the one who perceives the world and then renders it ‘perceptible.’ But, as I have argued, that subject’s vision is troubled by a blind spot, by an after-image that keeps returning. In April 1949, Sartre published Nossack’s Der Untergang in Temps modernes. A year later, Temps modernes published an essay by Nathalie Sarraute announcing the nouveau roman. Titled ‘The Age of Suspicion,’ Sarraute’s essay famously bids farewell to the traditional novel with its central elements, character and plot, arguing for a poetics of description and what she calls the ‘obsessed,’ ‘maniacal,’ and ‘visionary eye’ of the narrating ‘I.’65 Unlike Adorno, Sarraute does not attack description; on the contrary, she argues for description and against narration. The traditional novel is dead, Sarraute writes in 1950: ‘Where is the invented story that would compete with ... those of the concentration camps, or the battle of Stalingrad?’ (64). Sarraute then adds an afterthought that is crucial for our context, that is, the traces left by confrontation with the after-images of the Holocaust in literature and art. Cinema, Sarraute writes, has taken over the narrative functions of the novel, the same way that photography now works in areas abandoned by painting. That is, film cedes its traditional function of rendering the world visible to the novel and its new aesthetics of description. For the novelist’s ‘deepest obligation’ is ‘that of discovering the new’ (74). Filmic narration belongs to the old world, Sarraute argues; the novel, however, will now begin to describe the new world produced by the Second World

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War and the Holocaust, a new world of ruins that is not yet understood and that demands the ‘obsessional,’ ‘maniacal’ eye of the novelist turned narrator.66 Sarraute’s analysis of the postwar break with traditional aesthetics appeared in the same year as Arendt’s call for description, her plea that we open our eyes – but it precedes Adorno’s antidescriptive dictum. The latter’s iconoclastic statements not only banned the representation of Auschwitz, not only prohibited textual or visual images of Auschwitz, but also problematized and censored, if not prohibited the very act of looking (and we now know which particular act of looking is at stake). Sarraute’s essay on the nouveau roman did not – on the contrary, it devised a poetics of description, whose driving force is a sharply focused, relentlessly searching gaze. This is, I have argued, the empiricist desire at the heart of (post)war modernism, a desire to write with eyes wide open, eyes ripped wide open – to use a literal translation of the term Adorno used to capture the enigmatic eyes of Benjamin’s angel.67 While Sarraute emphasizes the different functions of film and novel, I have been arguing that we can trace the death of the ‘obsessed’ and ‘maniacal’ I/Eye and its concern with the visible world to the intrusion of film and photography into fiction. Or, to put this more precisely, we can trace it to the erratic presence of the after-images of Nazi genocide and persecution in the subject’s field of vision. Sarraute’s ‘The Age of Suspicion’ is a manifesto for the nouveau roman and Sarraute herself one of its most accomplished practitioners. What I analysed in Nossack’s text is different from what happens in the nouveau roman, that is the disintegration of the world into meaningless objects and the dissolution of the subject and her gaze into these objects. In Nossack’s text there is a subject whose visual perceptions are poised between the desire of discovery (and mastery) and the failure of that project. And the failure of reconstruction – not of the world, but of a sovereign subject of vision – has causes that are historically specific; it is the result of the unsettling effect of the after-image of the bystander – of the bystander in the courtroom, in the theatre, at the window. Or of the bystander as artist, as Orpheus who on the threshold of the visible world turns his maniacal, his frenzied gaze back onto the world of shades. Between 1943 and 1946 we thus find a form of travel writing in Germany in which the traveller’s gaze carries peculiar specular traces; this gaze is shadowed by the memory of previous acts of looking. Here the

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‘specialist in perception’ that is so central to all travel narratives operates between past and present. In the ruin travellers’ texts the creation of new (textual) images clashes with already existing filmic images, and the subject position created in the process of ‘rediscovering’ the world collides with the subject position produced by the scenario of confrontation. In Nossack’s texts the story of Orpheus’s journey into the Underworld, the story of his dying eyes, signifies the limits of his phenomenological project. These are limits that Adorno relentlessly thematized: if you represent the world as it is – intact, or in ruins – you run the danger of reproducing nothing but its façade – be it intact or in ruins. Nossack, or Nossack’s texts, know this, and that is why his mode of writing deserves to be called phenomenological modernism. Documentary literature, or reportage, simply does not do justice to this ruin traveller’s unique aesthetic production and the insights it yields.

N OTE S 1 Max Frisch, Jetzt ist Sehenszeit, Briefe, Notate, Dokumente 1943–1963, ed. Julian Schuett (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), 33. The title translates as ‘Now Is the Time for Looking!’ 2 Hans Erich Nossack, The End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 10. 3 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘Europa in Ruinen: Ein Prospekt,‘ in Europa in Ruinen. Augenzeugenberichte aus den Jahren 1944 bis 1948, ed. Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Frankfurt: Eichborn, 1990), 12; and Hannah Arendt, ‘The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report From Germany,’ in her Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (New York: Schocken, 2005), 249. Further citations from Arendt will be documented parenthetically. 4 Enzensberger, Europa in Ruinen, 4. 5 Quoted in ibid., 20. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Arendt, Essays, 249; it is, Arendt continues, an act that allows us to penetrate the ‘cloud of melancholy’ that ‘the sight of Germany’s destroyed cities and the knowledge of German concentration and extermination camps’ has spread over Europe (248). 9 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel,‘ in his Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Webber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 31 and 33.

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Further citations will be documented parenthetically as ‘Narrator’ followed by the page number. I will discuss Hans Erich Nossack’s Der Untergang together with ‘Orpheus und ...’ (1946). Both texts are in his Interview mit dem Tode (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966); I will work with the recent translation: Nossack, The End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Further citations will be documented parenthetically as End followed by the page number. Written in 1943, Der Untergang was published in 1946. In 1943, Nossack wrote, ‘This [i.e. Der Untergang] has to be done first, otherwise it will be too late.’ (Nossack, Geben Sie bald wieder ein Lebenszeichen: Briefwechsel 1943–1956, ed. Gabriele Söhling, vol. 1 [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001], 19). Der Untergang interrupted Nossack’s work on Nekyia (Hamburg: Wolfgang Krueger, 1947), a novel that depicts the Nazi period as the realm of the dead. Nossack was close to Herman Kasack, another ruin traveller; Kasack’s Die Stadt hinter dem Strom (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996; originally published in 1947) also narrates the descent into the city of the dead. (Further citations will be documented parenthetically as Stadt followed by the page number). Both texts have recently attracted attention because of W.G. Sebald’s ‘Air War and Literature: The Zürich Lectures,’ in his Natural History of Destruction (New York: Random House, 2003). He calls this an ‘escape ... into silence’; Nossack, Die Tagebücher 1943–1977, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 451. Nossack’s political trajectory was troubled: from the right-wing militia, the Freikorps, to the Communist Party to the position of ‘anti-ideological outsider’ in postwar Germany – a stance complicit with and critical of Adenauer Germany, which was, for Nossack’s taste, too preoccupied with reconstruction; see his Tagebücher: 1943–1977, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 705. In the early 1930s, Nossack agitated for a civil war, to be fought by an alliance of Freikorps and the Communist Party, a rather unusual project. Nossack, ‘Dies lebenlose Leben,’ in his Pseudo-autobiographische Glossen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 74. Nossack, ‘Jahrgang 1901,’ in Pseudo-autobiographische Glossen, 122, 130, 131, 130, 122. Ibid., 147 and 139. We can trace this term – widely used in the 1960s among liberal or left-leaning authors (see also Peter Weiss) – to Sartre, but also to the publication of Carl Schmitt’s Der Partisan in 1965. Peter de Mendelssohn, Die Kathedrale. Ein Sommernachtmahr (Hamburg: Albrecht Knauss, 1983). Between 1945 and 1949, Peter de Mendelssohn was in charge of rebuilding the German press. I will discuss one of these reports: Mendelssohn, ‘Nürn-

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berg. Dezember 1945,’ in In Deutschland unterwegs, ed. Klaus R. Scherpe (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982). On the connection between empiricism, its privileging of visual ‘evidence,’ and realism, see Peter Brooks, ‘Realism and Representation,’ in his Realist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 1–20; for a more thorough account, see Wolfgang Klein, ‘Problems of Description in Art,’ in Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century, ed. John Bender and Michael Marrinan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 79–94. More on ruins, ruin gazing, and ruin aesthetics later; on photography as a medium of the visible/invisible, see especially John Berger, ‘Understanding a Photograph,’ in his Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer (New York: Vintage, 2001), 215–18; and Andre Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image,’ in his What Is Cinema, ed. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 9–16. In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), Roland Barthes approaches the dialectic of presence and absence from a different perspective, the relationship of photography to death. This labour of reconstruction is eminently political in nature. What characterizes many texts from the so-called inner emigration is a concept of history as catastrophe, a pronounced apocalyptic discourse fuelled by guilt and despair. See, for instance, Gottfried Benn’s deeply pessimistic 1943 essay ‘Zum Thema: Geschichte,’ in his Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4, (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989), 288–304; for historiography in the narrow sense, see Friedrich Meinecke’s national-liberal and Christian Die deutsche Katastrophe (Zurich: Aero, 1946). Or, put differently, a study of the scopic problematic at work in Nossack’s reinvention of realist description sheds a new light on the conditions of possibility of Adorno’s post-Holocaust aesthetics. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem appeared in Germany in 1964, and Bernd Naumann’s reports on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials were published daily in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. See Bernd Naumann, Auschwitz, trans. Jean Steinberg, intro. Arendt (New York: Praeger, 1966). The trials took place in Frankfurt from 20 December 1963, to 19 August 1965; see ‘Gerichtstag halten über uns selbst...’ Geschichte und Wirkung des ersten Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesses, ed. Fritz Bauer Institut (Frankfurt: Fritz Bauer Institut, 2001). On the display of visual materials in the context of the trials, see Cornelia Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998), 130ff; for an excellent discussion of the rules that govern what can be said and shown (Sagbarkeits- und Zeigbarkeitsregeln) of these visiogra-

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phies of crime, see Habbo Knoch, Die Tat als Bild (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001). On the ekphrastic speaker, see W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other,’ in his Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 151–81. Peter Weiss’s Dantean journey through Auschwitz took the audience ever closer to the sites of industrial killings (see title of last canto: ‘The Fire Ovens’). The Investigation, in Weiss, Marat/Sade, The Investigation, The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman, ed. Robert Cohen (New York: Continuum, 1998). Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society,’ in his Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 34; he published this essay in 1949, but his so-called dictum did not receive much attention until the publication in 1963 of ‘Commitment,’ which contained a revised version of the earlier statement. ‘Commitment’ was originally published in 1954, but only widely read with the publication of Adorno’s Prismen in 1963. The original statement from 1949 reads as follows: ‘Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism.’ Adorno added: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarisch’ (‘Cultural Criticism and Society,’ in his Prisms, 34). To understand his sentence as a ‘prohibition’ against art after Auschwitz is simply wrong. In a Germany constantly vascillating between memory and forgetting, the suffering of the victims finds refuge in the arts, but only, Adorno cautions, if aesthetic production reflects on what it means to create works of art after Auschwitz, that is, is conscious of this civilizational break. In ‘Commitment,’ Adorno concedes Enzensberger’s point that art ought not to ‘surrender to cynicism’ after Auschwitz (188). The literature on Adorno’s dictum is of course vast; for one of the most thorough studies, see Peter Stein, ‘“Darum mag falsch gewesen sein, nach Auschwitz ließe kein Gedicht mehr sich schreiben.” (Adorno). Widerruf eines Verdikts? Ein Zitat und seine Verkürzung,’ Weimarer Beiträge 42 (1996), 4: as verdict, it was directed against postwar attempts to celebrate the power of Kultur, the apologetic and escapist aestheticism that informs, for instance, Benno von Wiese’s reading of Celan’s Todesfuge (see Stein, ‘Darum,’ 490). Adorno, ‘The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel,’ 34, translation modified; idem, ‘Commitment,’ in Fredric Jameson, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980), 189. Adorno, ‘Der Standpunkt des Erzählers im zeitgenössischen Roman,’ in his Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 45. I refer here to the German original, because the English translation does not convey the theatrical model accurately.

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28 Translation is modified; italics are mine. 29 We also find this scopic scenario in Weiss’s autobiographical novel Fluchtpunkt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982; originally published in 1962) and in Gerhard Richter’s controversial montage of concentration camp photographs in his Atlas (New York: DAP, 1997). 30 However, it is imperative that we remember that the difference between these scenarios and their gazes thematizes the essential difference between Jewish survivor and non-Jewish German author who chose to remain in Germany. 31 Nossack, ‘Dies lebenlose Leben,’ in his Pseudoautobiographische Glossen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 70ff. Nossack takes the title from a poem by Andreas Gryphius, the poet of the Thirty-Year War, who characterizes his everyday life as a time both devoid of life and full of ‘hot fear’ (72). According to Nossack, because of this mixture the National Socialist everyday was not experienced: it constituted a ‘lacuna in the existence of the individual,’ a form of ‘Vergangenheitslosigkeit,’ or lack of the past, and it was ‘historyless’ (73, 71). 32 Nossack, Nekyia. Bericht eines Überlebenden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974); first published in 1946. 33 See, for instance, Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge,1992); for the German context, see Klaus R. Scherpe, ‘Die Ordnung der Dinge als Exzess. Ueberlegungen zu einer Poetik der Beschreibung in ethnographischen Texten,’ Zeitschrift für Germanistik, vol. 2 (1999), special issue on Das Fremde. Reiseerfahrungen, Schreibformen und kulturelles Wissen, 13–44. While Pratt focuses on the link between the imperial gaze and power, Scherpe focuses on the ethnographic gaze as a ‘distancing while seeking the closest possible proximity’ and reflects on the risks of excess in a mode of writing that is mimetically organized. While both aspects are implicated in these ruin texts, I will foreground the labour of reconstruction and the author’s (re)legitimation in the face of the unknown through the use of the Orphic myth. My analysis is thus closer to Klaus Theweleit’s reading of Gottfried Benn. See Theweleit, Buch der Könige, vol. 1: Orpheus und Eurydike (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 1988). See also the English translation: ‘The Politics of Orpheus,‘ New German Critique 36 (Fall 1985): 133–56. Benn/Orpheus, Theweleit argues, needs Eurydice to die in order to become the elegiac poet par excellence. My reading of the Orpheus trope differs from Theweleit’s. Moreover, unlike Theweleit, I am interested in a particular artistic-ideological project and its aesthetics, that is, the problematic of description and its gaze(s). 34 Nossack, The End, 1; idem, Der Untergang, 200; translation modified.

154 Julia Hell 35 Albert Speer, Spandauer Tagebücher (Frankfurt: Propyläen, 1975), 92. Translations are mine. 36 Wilhelm Hausenstein, Licht unter dem Horizont (Munich: Bruckmann, 1967), 164, italics are mine (the entry is dated 5 October 1943); in December, he notes that Munich was now ‘absolutely devastated,’ existing merely ‘as rubble’ (287); Hausenstein, a journalist, was a friend of W.E. Suesskind and considered himself a member of the inner emigration. See also Wolfgang Schivelbusch, ‘mit plötzlicher allmählichkeit gestört durch die fliegerangriffe. Tagebuchnotizen,’ in Geschichtsgefühl, special issue of Ästhetik und Kommunikation (Winter 2003): 17. Schivelbusch distinguishes the slow, gradual process that produces ruins from quick destruction in war. Ruins need time to come into being: ‘One may of course object that the noble ruin has always been the result of a no-longer-fresh destruction, a destruction that weather, moss, grass and patina brought close to natural beauty [Naturschönheit]’ (17). But it is not only the difference between gradual erosion and immediate destruction that denies these German cityscapes their ‘noblesse’ (17). It is also the ‘cheaper industrial manufacture’ whose material resists becoming aesthetic ‘form’ (17), that is, what Georg Simmel, from his Hegelian perspective, understood as the perfect balance between nature and man’s work. (See Simmel, ‘The Ruin,’ in his Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H. Wolf [New York: Harper and Row, 1959], 259–66). Schivelbusch draws a line from Ernst Jünger’s impassioned gaze at the destruction wrought by the First World War in his Storm of Steel (1916) to Hausenstein’s equally neutral registration of the ‘eruption of war into a peaceful world,’ subsuming their writing under the category of ‘literature of description’ (18; translations are mine). This distinction between rubble and ruin, the peculiar quality of these ruins of modernity, shapes Nossack’s project of reconstruction. I would like to thank Rick Rentschler for alerting me to Schivelbusch’s essay. 37 Stephen Spender, European Witness (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946), 14. Spender’s narrative takes him into ever greater destruction through ‘corpse-towns’ no longer recognizable as cities. Entering Cologne, he begins to grasp what ‘total destruction’ truly means. There simply were, he writes, no houses left. What he sees instead are ‘plenty of walls but these walls are a thin mask in front of the damp, hollow, stinking emptyness of gutted interiors’ (14). Spender, European Witness, 239. Spender wants his travel report to be as precise as possible, ‘simply a collection of impressions, with a view to building up a general picture of what I saw in Germany in 1945’ (no page nr). Like other ruin travellers, he compares Germany’s urban ruins to English, Polish, and Russian cities. On the

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destruction of Warsaw, see W.E.B. DuBois: ‘Some streets had been so obliterated that only by using photographs of the past could they tell where the street was.’ ‘Discovery of Jewish Question,’ in The Oxford W.E.B. DuBois Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 471. Peter de Mendelssohn calls it the ‘formless homogeneity of annihilation.’ More than other authors, he thematizes the obsessive act of looking and the horror and delight associated with his journey. He traverses the ‘ruins’ of the old city twice, fascinated by the ‘agony and death’; the visitor simply can’t stop staring at the dead city ‘with all of his eyes’ (Mendelssohn, ‘Nürnberg. Dezember 1945,’ 303, 302; translations are mine). See also Adorno: ‘At first the city didn’t seem too bad ... but the old part of the city is a desolate dream,’ in his Briefe an die Eltern 1939–1951 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003), 530. Spender, European Witness, 14. Robert Harbison, ‘Ruins,’ in his The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 99. See Thomas Whateley’s 1770 remarks on the nature of ruin gazing, that is, on the ways in which ruins initiate an intense visual hermeneutics, quoted in Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 29. This is different from the sudden becoming-visible of ruins as traces of a German past that Peter Fritzsche analyses in ‘Chateaubriands Ruinen – Vergessen und Erinnern nach der französischen Revolution,’ in Ruinenbilder, ed. Aleida Assmann, Monika Gomille, and Gabriele Rippl (Munich: W. Fink, 2002), 47–60. Realism here not in the literary-historical sense, but in the epistemological sense, that is, the assumption that a world exists independent of the subject’s construction of it and that it is the task of art to represent this world – in whatever form. To approach these texts with this particular problematic in mind throws a different light on the questions of ethics raised in these texts. See, for instance, Max Frisch: ‘Although shame naturally resists, again and again there are ruins of macabre magic, beautiful, especially in their colors.’ In his Jetzt ist Sehenszeit, 30. Nossack, Die Tagebücher 1943–1977, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 450. Nossack, ‘Jahrgang 1901,’ 127. He writes this in a letter to the editor Suhrkamp. Briefwechsel, 1: 41. Not surprisingly, this metaphor appears in other texts of the period, too; see, for instance, Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe: ‘Our houses are destroyed’ (164).

156 Julia Hell 49 Nossack, Tagebücher, vol. 1, 54. In this post-1943 diary, Nossack founds the authenticity of his writing authorship on having lived through the experience of dying; he discusses this in terms of passivity and activity and eroticizes the first. This erotization of passivity also plays a crucial role in his distinction between ‘Schauen’ and ‘Sehen,’ or gazing and looking: Sehen is active, Schauen passive – and though perhaps ‘not masculine,’ it does enable an artist to represent: being an artist requires ‘an intensified loss of will’ (25). Sight, Nossack writes, is the least reliable of our senses, because it mainly speaks to our rational self and only serves the individual. We distance ourselves from the things we see, he continues, and this prevents us from complete abandon. That is, he writes, not always the case: there were moments when ‘a landscape enjoyed him’ (55). This, then, is not Sehen, but Schauen – the act of gazing as a kind of suffering, not a desire (17–18). The context of this passage are reflections on love and beauty: love belongs to ‘hunger’ and ‘desire,’ that is, to Sehen, destroying beauty; artistic beauty belongs to Schauen, a passive act that preserves beauty, affirming the object merely through gazing at it (17, 20). What is implied here is that Schauen involves a special kind of proximity in distance, a ‘being taken’ initiated by the object. We thus find a tension in these diaries between an active and a passive subject of perception, a subject that captures the object and a subject overtaken by the object, a tension between Dyonisian dissolution and scopic mastery. This Dyonisian rapture precedes Nossack’s journey through Hamburg. When Nossack describes the attack on Hamburg from a distance, he represents the act as a moment when the artistic subject is overtaken by the spectacle it is witnessing. This act of watching threatening the boundaries between subject and object resembles erotic experience, an experience that Nossack defines in his diaries as a genuine aesthetic experience at the brink of death. 50 See, for instance, Baudelaire’s praise of this ‘object of the keenest admiration’ in his ‘The Painter of Modern Life’; see also Griselda Pollock’s discussion in her ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,’ in her Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1999), 50–90. 51 In Virgil’s Georgics, Eurydice fades from view when, seized by ‘sudden madness,’ Orpheus turns to look back at her. Virgil represents the fateful moment from the perspective of Eurydice, who laments the lovers’ ruin and articulates her (second) death as a failing of her sight: ‘See, once again,’ she addresses Orpheus. ‘The cruel fates are calling me back and darkness / Falls on my swimming eyes.’ The perspective then changes to Orpheus’: ‘She finished, and suddenly / Out of his sight, like smoke into thin air, /

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Vanished away.’ The verse continues: ‘unable any more / to see him as he vainly grasped at shadows / With so much more to say.’ Virgil, The Georgics, translated by L.P. Wilkinson (London: Penguin, 1982), 141. This structure also informs Dante’s Vita Nuova: the creation of Beatrice, a dead, beautiful woman who will then be the poet’s object of representation. See Theweleit, Buch der Könige, 856–924. While Sebald privileges Nossack’s report, he discusses Mendelssohn’s novel as the worst example of melodramatic obfuscation. Sebald runs the danger of actually missing the work that these melodramatic strategies accomplish. Mendelssohn does indeed tell us a Gothic version of Orpheus and Eurydice / Dante and Beatrice – a story of repressed desires and transgressive fantasies. That is, however, only one level on which we ought to understand the function of this particular mode of writing. The other level pertains to the conditions of representation itself. As he turns around, Orpheus goes blind – that we know. But, Nossack explains, the story really ought to be called Orpheus and Persephoneia: ‘That would explain better why the blind poet was ripped apart by Thracian women. For they realized that he no longer sang for an earthly woman, but for the goddess of death’ (‘Orpheus,’ 257). By replacing Eurydice with the goddess of death, Nossack gives Rilke’s version of the myth a further twist. For it is Rilke, who identifies Eurydice with death and thus as source of the poet’s creativity. See Maurice Blanchot, ‘Orpheus’s Gaze,’ in his The Spaces of Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 171–6; see also Joseph Metz, ‘Exhuming Rilke’s Orphic Body: Gender and Poetic Voice in “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes” and “Hetaeren-Graeber,”’ Germanic Review 79, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 247–72. I thank Yopie Prins for telling me about Blanchot’s essay. Zwischen gestern und morgen operates a similar substitution: while initially focusing on its protagonist, an artist, who, forced into exile, returns to the city to find his former lover, the film begins to tell a second story, of the search by an actor for his Jewish wife, whom he betrayed for his career. On the aesthetic of the rubble film, see Rick Rentschler, ‘The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfilm,’ forthcoming in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schoenle (Durham: Duke University Press). Kasack, Die Stadt hinter dem Strom, 257. This is a reference not only to Jensen’s Gradiva. Ein Pompejanisches Phantasiestück (1903), but also to Theophile Gautier’s earlier Pompeian story, ‘Arria Marcella. Souvenir de Pompei’ (1852), in which the protagonist falls in love with a woman who disintegrates into dust when they are about to make love. On the literary context of Gradiva, see Christiane Zintzen, ‘Wilhelm Jensens Gradiva im

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Kontext. Archäologische, touristische und populäre Pompejana im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,’ in Freuds pompejanische Muse. Beiträge zu Wilhelm Jensens Novelle Gradiva, ed. Michael Rohrwasser, Gisela Steinlechner, Juliane Vogel, and Christiane Zintzen (Wien: Sonderzahl, 1996), 43–90. This is thus the after-image of the scene that Suesskind found so hard to describe: ‘By themselves the images in which the disfigured but still living human beings were shown would have the effect of horrendous anatomic reproductions. The piles of corpses on the other hand, the wave of ... limp and stiff bodies, which in the camp of Belsen had to be pushed by the hundreds into the grave by a heavy earthmoving vehicle invoked Goya’s visions’ (quoted in Cornelia Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung, 117). In Kasack, the representation of the survivors takes on uncanny if not threatening undertones – yet one more example of the postfascist Gothic. The death metaphysics underlying the novel’s apocalyptic philosophy becomes most explicit in this scene, in which Lindhoff defines life as ‘the natural path toward death’ (Stadt, 242). Discussing Paul Klee’s reflections on the painterly line, Maurice MerleauPonty observes that far from imitating the visible, this line ‘renders visible’; Klee’s lines are the ‘blueprint of a genesis of things.’ Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind,’ in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 143. ‘Dies lebenlose Leben,’ in his Pseudoautobiographische Glossen, 62. A benign reading would interpret this poem as an admission of guilt mixed with shame. A less generous reading would fix on the essay’s resentful mixture of guilt, shame, and apology. Nossack clearly wavers between an attempt to understand life under a totalitarian regime and the indignant self-pity of the inner exile. While he turns against the notion of ‘inner emigration,’ he nevertheless holds on to a crucial paradigm of the inner emigration, that is, the distinction between the unthinking masses and the intellectual elite that should have known better (‘Dies lebenlose Leben,’ 74). Nossack was active in the Communist Party until the early 1930s, when he withdrew into his father’s company, an ‘escape ... into silence,’ after the Gestapo searched his apartment; Tagebücher, 1: 451. ‘Lebenlose,’ 74. It was not some literary fashion, Nossack writes, when authors tried to represent this hopeless condition as a sojourn in the realm of the dead as he did himself with his Nekyia. Bericht eines Überlebenden. Any realist representation of this non-realist condition would not have done justice to the facts (74–5). In his diaries, Nossack spends much time describing this particular state of being between 1933 and 1939, giving his portrait of the despairing onlooker

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two slightly divergent readings. He speaks in 1962 of an ‘anticipation of being dead’; in a different account he speculates about his psychic disposition, his longing for death. Nossack, Tagebücher, vol. 1: 507, 451. 63 Nossack, ‘Jahrgang 1901,’ 129. Nossack’s thoughts resonate with Siegfried Kracauer’s thesis that photography destroys genuine personal memories; see his ‘Photography,‘ in his The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 47–63. 64 In ‘Jahrgang 1901,’ Nossack retrospectively defines a poetics that resonates with the language of the so-called ‘Trümmerliteratur,’ or rubble literature. Truth has to be voiced in a sparse, sober language. Surrounded by Europe’s ‘rubble wasteland,’ iambic metre and beautiful adjectives seem out of place (151). 65 Natalie Sarraute, ‘The Age of Suspicion,’ in The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel by Natalie Sarraute, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Braziller, 1963), 72. Sarraute’s poetics are developed for a ‘character’ familiar to us, for he has lost everything, ‘his ancestors,’ and ‘his carefully built house, filled from cellar to garrett with a variety of objects’ (Sarraute, ‘The Age of Suspicion,’ 55). Sarraute’s description of the traditional novel’s protagonist and his setting resonate oddly with Nossack’s self-portrait as the artist standing at the window – and with Andre Breton’s ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924). Breton published his manifesto against the traditional novel and its obsession with the banal details of the world of things in the wake of the First World War. In this antiempiricist manifesto from 1924, Breton rails against description – ‘the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism.’ Breton’s example for the vacuity of description is a familiar scene, the description of ‘a small room.’ Nothing, he exclaims, surpasses descriptions in their banality: when an author describes the world he does nothing but superimpose pictures from catalogues, asking the reader to agree to his ‘clichés.’ Breton then gives us an example of this clichéd writing, the minute description of a small room ‘covered with yellow wallpaper’ and ‘muslin curtains in the windows.’ The theorist of surrealism obstinately resists these lieux communs: unlike the novel’s young male protagonist, he refuses to enter this room. He finds this mode of writing committed to what Adorno elsewhere calls the ‘conventions of representation’ appalling, because it fixes the ‘insignificant moments of my life’ instead of capturing moments of ‘the unknown.’ Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism,’ in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 6, 224, 7, 7, 8; translation modified. Breton directs his antipositivist rant against the ‘reign of logic,’ arguing that the realist attitude is part of the ‘incurable mania to make the unknown known, classifiable’ (9).

160 Julia Hell Breton thus revives and revises Baudelaire’s idea that modern art seeks to capture ‘the passing moment.’ See his ‘The Painter of Modern Life,’ in Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), 5. Sarraute, Nossack, and Adorno face another ‘unknown’ – the destruction of the everyday in the Second World War. 66 Sarraute later modifies her asessment of film: not all films tell stories – new films are emerging that are organized around a witnessing ‘I’ (Sarraute, ‘The Age of Suspicion,’ 72–3). In all likelihood, Sarraute was referring to both neorealism’s explorations of life in ruins and the documentary films about concentration camps that circulated in the immediate postwar era. The French context of Sarraute’s essay is Bazin’s ontology of the cinema as the phenomenological medium par excellence, the medium of the visible. 67 Adorno, ‘Commitment,’ 194.

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7 Walking through Thought: Thomas Bernhard’s Walking and Peter Rosei’s Who Was Edgar Allan? bianca theisen

In the late eighteenth century, the solitary walk of the bourgeois subject displaces the old topos of life as travel and pilgrimage. Walking is no longer goal oriented, as the pilgrim’s progress on the way to salvation, nor is it bound by a social purpose such as the public promenade. Walking becomes an activity as ‘purposeless’ and autonomous as modern art itself. With the literature of sentimentalism and Romanticism, the solitary walker strolling through nature becomes the token figure of self-reflexive subjectivity. Consider, for instance, Karl Philip Moritz’s protagonist Anton Reiser, who, made abject by the misery of his social circumstances, takes to strolls through nature that ‘elevate his self-confidence, broaden his horizon, and provide him with a vivid idea of his own, true, isolated existence, temporarily decoupled from all circumstances and extant only in and for itself.’1 The solitary walk not only offers relief from the ever failing attempts to communicate to others what cannot be communicated – the authenticity and singularity of the individual – but typically also leads to panoramas and overviews that indulge the speculative abstraction of the particular and that allow survey of the general. The nineteenth-century flâneur, by contrast, cruises through a modern Iliad of urban space riddled by a confusing array of collateral detail. Disinterested in the sublime overview sought out in eighteenth-century walks, the flâneur pays attention to insignificant detail, traversing a surface tapestry of the accidental and singular. While the literary strides both through the landscape of nature and through urban space encourage metapoetic reflections, they differ starkly in the kinds of concepts or images attained in and through movement. The sentimental walk in nature lends itself to generalized abstractions of the particular; the flânerie in the city records the inciden-

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tal detail. Contemporary literary texts overturn this poetic topos of the literary walk, carrying its historically varying focus on the general and the singular to its extreme. Thomas Bernhard’s protagonists are driven to deflate the dynamics of the conceptual carried by the topos of the walk. Peter Rosei’s nomadic characters pace labyrinthine cities like the nineteenth-century flâneur, only to get lost in the maze of their own distorted perceptions. Most of Bernhard’s characters take to walks and strolls, indefatigably pacing the monotonous terrain of their distraught thoughts. In Bernhard’s first novel Frost (1963), the mad painter Strauch trudges the woods and the mountains, his insane monologues disintegrating into ‘shreds of thought’ that ‘associate everything with everything else.’2 Strauch’s manic endeavour to endlessly dissolve all concepts recurs in the narrative Walking (Gehen, 1971), which again aligns ‘the science of walking’ with ‘the science of thinking’ in an account of madness.3 The minimalist narrative plot is already contained in the first sentence: ‘Before Karrer was insane, I took my walks with Oehler only on Wednesdays, now that Karrer has turned insane, I take my walks with Oehler also on Mondays’ (Gehen, 7). The two protagonists, Oehler and a first-person narrator, tread the streets of Vienna, wandering eastward on Wednesdays, westward on Mondays. Narrative digressions on the flatness of life, the insipid thoughtlessness of procreation, the dismal fate of intellectuals in Austria, and the incompetence of psychiatrists frame the narrative’s central event, the sudden onset of Karrer’s madness. Karrer and Oehler have been walking too far and too fast, exerting themselves in a discussion of Wittgenstein, Oehler reports, when they enter a clothing store, where Karrer, already high-strung, flares up about an issue of denomination. The salesperson and the store owner insist that their pants are made from top-quality British cloth, even if they are not marked as such in order to save on import duties. Karrer, who has no intention of buying holds each and every pair of pants up to the light, pointing out the fabric’s thinness and declaring it a substandard product from Czechoslovakia. Whether the cloth is marked as top-quality British cloth or not, the storeowner claims, is of no consequence to the customer who wears it, implicitly entertaining the notion that the same referent can have different designators. Karrer untiringly subjects this claim to what linguistics calls counterfactual exercises: Would the pants still be the pants if they were not marked as top-quality British cloth? For Karrer, the designator determines the referent: things are what they are by virtue of

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their designation – they can only ever be ‘so-called’ things (Gehen, 75). Karren is incensed by the fact that the storeowner keeps marking his pants with labels during their discussion on labelling; his stubborn insistence on the term ‘substandard Czech fabric’ ends in mad laughter, his thought process fatally arrested through his repetition of the phrase ‘these thin spots’ (Gehen, 73). This dissolution of concepts and linguistic designators subliminally suggests a thinning out of poetic texture. The terms ‘top-quality British cloth’ and ‘substandard Czech fabric’ function like the ‘sensitivity words’ that are so characteristic of Bernhard’s earlier narratives: isolated concepts similar to the singularization of words in the constellations and montages of the Vienna Group.4 In their literary experiments, the members of the Vienna Group not only dissociated concepts from their usual horizon of signification, thereby decontextualizing them, but also cut them out from any causal nexus of designation by deliberately undoing grammatical and semantic structures. Those structures were then replaced with modes of permutation arbitrarily generating new sequences of linguistic material, singularized words, and disconnected concepts and images. Bernhard adopts this technique when he isolates ‘sensitivity words’ so as to generate mininarratives that often capture a traumatic moment, or, as in Walking, point to the transgression of a limit. In Bernhard’s earlier narratives, such disturbing words still function as motors of narrative movement; in Walking, however, they maintain a rigidity that brings narrative to a halt. Published in 1971, Walking ostensibly veers from the immobility foregrounded in the dramatic works that Bernhard was beginning to write at the time, from the wheelchair-bound protagonist in A Party for Boris (1970) to the disabled characters deprived of all space of action in Immanuel Kant (1978), Before Retirement (1979), and Elisabeth II (1987). Bernhard’s interest in a kinetics of thought, his employment of concepts set in motion only to be transfixed and immobilized, was also preceded by the dramatic performances of the Vienna Group. Gerhard Rühm’s play walking (gehen, 1962) discards dramatic plot for an open model – or, as he calls it, a ‘landscape’ – that outlines only the very basic functions of action.5 The dramatic performance maps out five points marked by chairs on the stage, and the actors walk from point to point throughout the performance, reciting a text of singularized words mostly consisting of verbs. Commands given by a loudspeaker prompt the actors to stop walking, stand still, sit down, be silent, or to resume walking. With this performance, Rühm wants theatre to become ‘the aesthetic experi-

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ence of constantly changing correlations (movement), of spontaneous or determined intersections (constellations)’ (gehen, 182). With its highly stylized dialogic character, Bernhard’s prose piece takes on the new dramatic quality inspired by Rühm’s performance. The protagonists in Walking similarly walk through a ‘landscape’ of concepts that change subtly in their seemingly endless repetition, always pacing the same routes from point to point (the Obenaus inn, Rustenschacher’s clothing store, the Friedensbrücke, the Franzjosefsbahnhof). Dissociated from the poetics of the literary walk with its contemplative mediation between inside and outside, walking here comes to function within a conceptual landscape of terms altered in ever-changing constellations: ‘The designators with which we designate are altogether different from the actual designators. Because all designators are false, Oehler says. But when we have such thoughts, he says, we soon realize that we are lost in these thoughts. In every thought we are lost, when we subject ourselves to that thought, if we really subject ourselves to only one thought, we are lost. When I walk, Oehler says, I think and I claim I walk, and suddenly I think and claim that I walk and think because I think that, while I am walking’ (Gehen, 87–8).6 Walking and thinking themselves are what they are only because, like the British cloth and the Czech fabric, they are designated as such. Bernhard radically decouples the literary topos of the walk from the contemplative act of self-reflection it was for late eighteenth-century writers, and reframes it as a problem of designation contingent on observation. Already in Amras (1964),7 Bernhard transforms the Romantic belief in self-cognition and its respective figures of thought – such as Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘poesy of poesy’8 – into comic absurdity when he has his narrator imagine ‘a walk of a walk’: ‘I had dealt with myself in me as if with myself in a bad novel ... for a pretended walk is no walk, while it is a walk nevertheless ... only appears to be a walk, as a walk of a walk ... thus I acted out my walk to myself, namely, the counterfeited walk of a walk which was no walk, sitting next to Walter in the waiting area of the internist’s office’ (Amras, 48).9 Self-reflection is here subjected to the fictional frame of an ‘as-if’ that recalibrates the ‘Romantic’ figure of a ‘walk of a walk’: feigned in a mental play, the walk is a walk and is at the same time not the walk it is. In Walking, Oehler plainly maintains that the concept of self-observation is false: as soon as we ask ourselves how we walk, we have already altered our gait and walk differently, and our way of walking can no longer be assessed; the same holds for self-cognition (Gehen, 87). In his earlier narrative Ungenach (1968),10

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Bernhard crosscuts the Romantic topos with Robert Walser’s Gedankenspaziergang (walk in thought)11 to characterize those who stroll as ‘sensitive anachronists’ (Ungenach, 25). Like Oehler and Karrer’s walk through Vienna, the protagonists’ walk through the mountains in Ungenach ends in a catastrophic exhaustion that obliterates all thought. Oehler ultimately differentiates between walking and thinking – we cannot walk and think with the same intensity, and while we may walk with high speed, thinking is not subject to speed (Gehen, 90). Walking and thinking differ conceptually: ‘When we walk, Oehler says, so-called auxiliary concepts [Gebrauchsbegriffe] are at stake (so Karrer), when we think, what is at stake are simply concepts ... We advance through the world of concepts in use or of auxiliary concepts, and not through the world of concepts’ (Gehen, 91). To entertain conceptual thought means to get stuck; despite his walking, Karrer is unable to ‘walk away’ from his routines and the monomanic circularity of his thoughts. To entertain conceptual thought or to engage in the hunt for images, as Goethe described the purposeless purpose of the walk, highlights the inability to walk away from a literary and philosophical tradition that ranges from Aristotle’s peripatetic philosophy to Montaigne’s belief in mental mobility, from the self-assessment of the solitary walker in Rousseau, Karl Philip Moritz, and Goethe, from Nietzsche’s assertion that only thoughts procured in strolls have any value, to the idle flâneur described by Charles Baudelaire, Victor Fournel, and Franz Hessel, from Poe’s anonymous man in the crowd to the nomadic protagonists of contemporary literature who travel through the dysfunctional semiosis of their own thoughts. In Peter Rosei’s narrative Who Was Edgar Allan? (Wer war Edgar Allan?, 1977),12 the narrow, labyrinthine alleys of a desolate Venice offer the map for a frightening foray into the dark territory of a consciousness increasingly confused and corrupted by narcotics. A young drug addict tries to pin down the mysterious identity of a stranger who seems to be involved in several murders and linked to a drug ring. Like the flâneur, whom Walter Benjamin associated with the detective, Rosei’s nameless narrator leads a spurious existence at the fringes of society. On his endless strolls through Venice he observes a reality of crime, deceit, and power that soon begins to radiate with hallucinogenic effects. At a café the narrator meets Edgar Allan, an American who immediately draws the narrator into a conversation about a drugrelated murder discussed in the newspapers. Increasingly obsessed with what he believes to be Allan’s clandestine involvement in the case,

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and in drug trafficking, he fancies himself in the role of detective, pacing the mean streets for traces he can never quite fathom. The uncertainty of the narrator’s muddled observations and projections never allows the reader to identify the clearly delimited roles of detective, criminal, and victim. In Who Was Edgar Allan? an inquiry into identity and self-constitution is duped by a literary and linguistic hoax.13 The narrative’s title already plays on the omission of the name ‘Poe.’ Only if we entertain the nostalgic assumption that proper names are immediately linked to their referents, thereby indicating an ‘identity,’ can we read the title as the question about someone named ‘Edgar Allan.’ But a name can refer to more than one object (Poe) – it can correspond to other objects with similar general characteristics (a male who, moreover, shares most of the characteristics of Poe). As if the proper name were a mirror image, protagonist, narrator, and reader always seem to be recognizing themselves in the partially given, partially omitted name that gives the narrative its title. The semantics of the mirror image, Umberto Eco has argued, corresponds to the assumption of an ‘absolute proper name,’14 a rigid designator as Saul Kripke defined it. Rigid designators indicate the same object in every possible world.15 They exclude definite descriptions of the kind ‘Edgar Allan (Poe) is the man who authored x and fathered the detective story’ as well as counterfactual operations such as, ‘Would Edgar Allan (Poe) still be Edgar Allan (Poe) had he not authored x and fathered the detective story?’ Eco claims that ‘mirror images alone cannot be questioned by counterfactuals,’ whereas linguistic terms, including proper names, quickly become what Eco calls ‘soft or slack designator[s]’ (225). The dispersion of the author’s name in Rosei’s novel plays on this sort of difference between rigid and slack designators, on the imaginary world of mirrors and the symbolic realm of linguistic markers. Just as the name Poe is omitted from the title, the narrator’s name is withheld, even ‘erased’ (ausgelöscht) in the narrative, only to blend into the ‘author’s’ name: ‘Someone called my name. It was on the ferry to San Pietro. I definitely heard that someone called out. San Pietro in Volta: was I going there just because of the name? Perhaps’ (Edgar Allan, 58, 73). ‘Pietro’ calls up the author’s first name (Peter Rosei), inscribing it in its Italian counterpart into a more generally employed textual operation that no longer differentiates between the discourse of the Other and the discourse of the ‘I.’ In his lecture on poetics, Rosei states: ‘I made full use of montage and integrated diverse materials into my textures; the dif-

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ference between foreign and own became relative and muddled.’16 In contrast to the polyphony of different voices analysed by Bakhtin,17 Rosei’s montage of different discourses and of contrasting images is no longer anchored in an emphatic notion of the subject.18 For Rosei, consciousness is not a medium refracting the narrated events, but a ‘dynamic structure.’19 In Who Was Edgar Allan? Rosei asserts in an interview, he tried to ‘montage consciousness from within’ (ein Bewußtsein von innen montiert) (‘Das Leben,’ 24). The Venice transversed by Rosei’s flâneur-detective provides more than the literary background of aestheticized decay;20 as a city without foundations, cut through by a labyrinth of alleys, a multitude of canals and ditches, and associated with the fantastic urban space of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Venice sets the scene for a consciousness that increasingly loses itself in rhizomatic divarication: ‘To be sun and system; field fitted into other fields without tension; intuition of the force at the margins where, in turbulence, one field mingles with the other; ... But then again I was suddenly overcome by the fear of losing myself, of being scattered like a heap of dust’ (Edgar Allan, 70, 47).21 The intoxicated visions of the narrator seem to transpose Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s analysis of rhizomatic structure with its circulation of intensities and explosion of heterogeneous series into poetic images. As for Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizomatic calls forth a nomadic thought process that also affects the structure of language. Delirious sentences diverge along different lines to create transversal relationships, and a concatenation of utterances is meant to construct, rather than unearth, the unconscious as a surface structure. In Rosei’s novel, the literary topos of the flâneur becomes the foil for the deflection of narrative selfconstitution in a schizoid multiplicity of voices. For Rosei, the self becomes a mere ‘effect of recognition’ (‘Das Leben,’ 12), a template that, like the topoi and schemata of fiction, enables us to perceive complex structures where we would otherwise lose ourselves in unrelated detail, as his narrator loses himself walking down the streets of Venice.

N OTE S Bianca Theisen left this essay as a (remarkably polished) draft when she died in November 2004. Small corrections were made by the editor, with the assistance of Maria Euchner and Simran Karir.

170 Bianca Theisen 1 Karl Philip Moritz, Anton Reiser. Ein psychologischer Roman (Frankfurt: Insel, 1959), 242. All translations from German into English are the author’s. 2 Thomas Bernhard, Frost (Frankfurt: Insel, 1963), 153, 133. 3 Bernhard, Frost, 59; Gehen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 86. Further citations will be documented parenthetically as Gehen followed by the page number. 4 The Vienna Group existed roughly in the period 1954 to 1964. Its diverse members at one time or another included the poet H.C. Artmann and the composer Gerhard Rühm as well as an architect and a jazz musician. It worked at creating literature and art that was anti-literary, -artistic, -monetary, and -authoritarian. The group tried to overcome the limits of literature, art, and life by incorporating different media such as sculpture, film and photography, and by creating new art forms like ‘the action, the happening, and conceptual art.’ Hard economic realities and ideological reasons prevented the group’s work from being adequately published in Austria in the 1950s and 1960s. Time has shown its political and aesthetic significance, though, as many international tendencies of the 1960s to 1980s were anticipated by the group. See Peter Weibel, ed., The Vienna Group: A Moment of Modernity 1954–1964 (Springer: Vienna, New York, 1997), 15. 5 Gerhard Rühm, gehen, in Die Wiener Gruppe, ed. Gerhard Rühm (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1985). Further citations will be documented parenthetically as gehen followed by the page number. 6 ‘Wir können aber auch einem anderen (einen anderen Gegenstand) nicht erklären, wie er ist, weil wir ihm nur erklären können, wie wir ihn sehen, was wahrscheinlich dem entspricht, das er ist, das wir aber nicht so erklären können, daß wir sagen können, so ist er. So ist alles immer etwas ganz anderes, als es für uns ist, sagt Oehler. Und immer etwas ganz anderes, als es für alles andere ist. Ganz abgesehen davon, daß auch noch die Bezeichnungen, mit welchen wir bezeichnen, ganz andere als die tatsächlichen, sind. Insoferne alle Bezeichnungen gar nicht stimmen, sagt Oehler. Aber wenn wir solche Gedanken haben, sagt er, sehen wir bald, daß wir in diesen Gedanken verloren sind. In jedem Gedanken sind wir verloren, wenn wir uns diesem Gedanken ausliefern, liefern wir uns nur einem einzigen Gedanken wirklich aus, sind wir verloren. Wenn ich gehe, sagt Oehler, denke ich und behaupte ich, ich gehe und auf einmal denke ich und behaupte ich, ich gehe und denke, weil ich das denke, während ich gehe.’ 7 Thomas Bernhard, Amras, in Die Erzählungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), 7–79. Further citations will be documented parenthetically as Amras followed by the page number. 8 Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Fragmente. Athenäum,’ in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-

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10 11 12 13

14

15 16 17 18

19

20

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Ausgabe, vol. 2, Charakteristiken und Kritiken I, ed. Hans Eichner (Munich: Schöningh, 1967), 204 (Nr 238); 182 (Nr 116). ‘Ich war in mir selbst mit mir wie mit mir wie in einem schlechten Roman vorgegangen ... denn ein vorgetäuschter Spaziergang ist kein Spaziergang, während er doch ein Spaziergang ist ... erscheint nur als ein Spaziergang, als der Spaziergang eines Spaziergangs ... ich spielte mir also diesen meinen Spaziergang, und zwar den vorgetäuschten Spaziergang eines Spaziergangs, der kein Spaziergang war, neben Walter, im Wartezimmer des Internisten, vor.’ Thomas Bernhard, Ungenach (Frankfurt: Insel, 1968). Robert Walser, ‘Der Herbst,’ in Das Gesamtwerk (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 10: 492–502, here 495. Peter Rosei, Wer war Edgar Allan? (Salzburg: Residenz, 1977). Henceforth quoted as Edgar Allan. Kathleen Thorpe, ‘Peter Rosei – a Case Study,’ Trans. Internet Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 7 (September 1999), http:www/inst.at/trans/7Nr/ thorpe7.htm, suggests that Rosei takes up Poe’s liking for the literary hoax, but she does not show how it is implemented in Rosei’s text. Umberto Eco, ‘Mirrors,’ in Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture, ed. Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld, and Roland Posner (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1986), 215–38, here 224. Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 48. Peter Rosei, Beiträge zu einer Poesie der Zukunft (Graz: Droschl, 1995), 67. Mikhail Bakhtin, Probleme der Poetik Dostojewskis (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1985), 13. Martin Kubaczek, ‘Literarische Polyphonie. Zum Textverfahren Peter Roseis,’ in Basic Rosei, ed. Walter Vogl (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2000), 91–121, analyses the polyphony in Rosei’s texts as an optical, ‘stereoscopic’ strategy of offering dual descriptions. Günter Eichberger, ‘Das Leben – Ein Energiefluss. Gespräch mit Peter Rosei,’ in Peter Rosei, ed. Gerhard Fuchs and Günther A. Höfler (Graz: Droschl, 1994), 9–29, here 12. Henceforth quoted as ‘Das Leben.’ Geoffrey Howes interprets this dynamic of the ‘I’ in Rosei as systemic, and reads Wer war Edgar Allan? in light of Gregory Bateson’s analysis of the alcoholic. See Geoffrey C. Howes, ‘Rosei’s I’s: The (De)Composition of the Self in Peter Rosei’s Fiction,’ in The Fiction of the I: Contemporary Austrian Writers and Autobiography, ed. Nicholas Meyerhofer (Riverside: Ariadne, 1999), 210–41. Kathleen E. Thorpe, ‘Poe in Venedig oder das Erzählen einer literarischen Halluzination. “Wer war Edgar Allan?” von Peter Rosei,’ in Basic Rosei, 62–

172 Bianca Theisen 79, here 63. Although Thorpe gestures towards the rhizomatic structure of the novel, she reads it as rife with hints to ‘deeper, hidden meaning’ (65). For a more thorough analysis of Rosei’s interest in a topography of the outside, see Daniela Bartens, ‘Anmerkungen zu einer Poetik des Raums. Peter Roseis Städtebilder und Reiseaufzeichnungen,’ in Basic Rosei, 133–71. 21 ‘Sonne sein und System; Feld, spannungslos in andere Felder eingepaßt; Ahnung der Kraft an den Rändern, wo sich, in Wirbeln, das Feld mit dem nächsten mischt; ... Mit einem Mal aber überkam mich die Furcht, ich könnte mich verlieren, ich könnte zerweht werden wie eine Ansammlung von Staub.’

8 Charming the Carnivore: Bruce Chatwin’s Australian Odyssey kenneth s. calhoon

Of course, we are meat. We are all potential carcasses. Francis Bacon1

Somewhere along the way, the culture of Anglo-American public television acquired the habit of instituting the ‘personal view’ as the product of arduous, individualized travel. Michael Wood’s In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great is a fairly recent example, as is Henry Louis Gates’s thoroughly maligned Wonders of the African World. As a counter-inspiration to his trek through the cradle of the African slave trade, Gates invokes Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, the series that, for part of 1969, treated my generation to a weekly diet of the very synonyms of culture – Giotto, Chartres, Gregorian chants, Botticelli, Watteau. Remarkable now for its sustained distinction between civilization and heroism, Clark’s series differs from Gates’s not only in its focus on Europe but also in the absence of an energetically self-propelled subject. Clark’s affections are reserved for the likes of Erasmus, whose ‘delicate digestion’ placed him squarely opposite the noble savages of the earth, and of Montaigne, labouring alone in his tower, the ceiling timbers of which were inscribed with his favourite Latin aphorisms. One of these, from Terence, Clark translates as follows: ‘I am a man, and I think that nothing human is foreign to me.’2 There is poignancy in Clark’s citation, and one feels pressed to search his gracefully understated manner for signs of the studied compromise that produces what Freud termed the ‘excessively civilized’ individual. Along with the implicit understanding that friendship between men is essential to that perfection of social relations which is civilization itself, Clark’s narrative is punctuated by obliquely personal observations that plead quietly for recognition.

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With respect to the Reformation and its aftermath, for example, he declares that ‘the North was full of bully boys who rampaged about the country and took any excuse to beat people up.’3 Clark is referring specifically to the iconoclasts, though his insistence that they were ‘enraged’ by the very existence of certain ‘incomparable values’ is closer than one might suppose to the account of anti-Semitism offered by Horkheimer and Adorno. Their invocation of a certain Zerstörungslust der Zivilisierten, that is, an appetite for destruction on the part of civilized people, indicates a further affinity to Clark, who also is concerned with self-destructive impulses within European society.4 The effect of true civilization, he argues, is to temper human passions, yet the forces required to regenerate civilization and keep it from petrifying are by nature intemperate. The ‘heroism’ he ascribes to personalities such as Michelangelo and Martin Luther – the defiance, a ‘contempt for convenience,’ and especially a privileging of the spirit that would ultimately militate against visual pleasure – represents both a pinnacle of human achievement and a potential, at times realized, for violence and hysteria (158). This hysteria, of which the storming of the images was an expression, is for Clark a native German trait. He even identifies signs of atavism in Luther’s physiognomy (as painted by Cranach), in which he discerns ‘an earthy, animal hostility to reason and decorum that Nordic man seems to have retained from his days in the primeval forest’ (158). Clark’s brief and libellous disquisition on primeval man is consistent with his eventual dismissal of Rousseau; he aligns himself rather with Voltaire, who, in response to the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, berated Rousseau for marshalling the resources of human reason for the purpose of persuading people ‘to walk on all fours’ (274). To refute this is beside the point. Rousseau no more advocated a return to nature than the eighteenth-century pastoralists believed that shepherds led the charmed existence found in Theocritus. Clark nonetheless grants Rousseau a ‘dialectical triumph,’ small as that triumph might be. But his own view that civilization cannot sit still – that periodic disruption is essential to its survival – is itself dialectical. ‘Survival’ is to be taken seriously here, for Clark believes he has seen the Beast at close quarters. His grudging acceptance of the necessity of evil (a Faustian as well as Lutheran avowal) leaves him susceptible to more palatable dualisms. Heuristically, he cites H.G. Wells’s distinction between communities of obedience and communities of will, the latter of which ‘produced the restless nomads of the north’ (159).

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The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin’s ‘fragmentary postmodern travelogue’5 from 1987, pivots on a similar distinction between restlessness and stability – between the nomadic impulse and the settled comfort of agrarian societies. Like Clark, Chatwin was once a curator of paintings, employed by Sotheby’s as an expert on the Impressionists.6 This background may help explain the sensibility that enables him, for example, to describe a fossilized skull as ‘patinated treacly brown.’7 A sensuous and physically precise vocabulary combines with an unadorned style consistent with a landscape in which even sacred landmarks are nondescript: ‘a lump of reddish sandstone’ or ‘a featureless stretch of gravel’ (14). Far as he may be from Clark’s world, he shares a pleasure with his compatriot, who identifies emphatically with ‘those who love what they see’ (Clark, 159).8 Chatwin’s entry into the wide world is the product of what might be described as a Faustian fatigue with the museum: after awakening one day with severely impaired vision, Chatwin heeded the advice of a doctor who suggested he exchange his pictures for some ‘long horizons’ (17).9 He struck out for the Sudan and to experiences that return, embedded in The Songlines, as seminal reflections. An apparent aggregate of repeated trips undertaken in the mid1980s, Chatwin’s book recounts a single journey through central Australia. His purpose is to learn first-hand about the ritual walkabouts whereby the indigenous peoples retrace the paths of their ancestral dreaming. He travels in the company of an anthropologist named Arkady Volchok, the Australian-born son of a Russian Cossack. A specialist in Aboriginal customs, Arkady has been hired by the national railway to map a new, three-hundred–mile stretch of track whose construction would leave sacred sites undisturbed. An understanding of Aboriginal practices will, Chatwin hopes, lend credence to a hypothesis he has long harboured about the human-ness of travel. Rousseauean in spirit, and with minimal pretence to originality, his theory holds that humans are in their essence nomadic; the violence and hysteria ascribed by Clark (and conservatives generally) to life in the primeval forest is instead derived from the period in prehistory when humans, under duress, became sedentary. The practice of rocking an infant to sleep, by simulating the rhythm of walking, activates the memory of an era of human existence in which wandering was a condition of safety. The restlessness that drove this erstwhile connoisseur of fine paintings to become an inveterate traveller is, so he believes, a matter of both phylogeny and family destiny. He recalls an Aunt Ruth who would hug him ‘as if to forestall my following in [the] footsteps’ of those uncles

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and cousins ‘who had scattered their bones in every corner of the earth ... Yet, from the way she lingered over such words as “Xanadu” or “Samarkand” or the “wine-dark sea,” I think she also felt the trouble of the “wanderer in her soul”’ (6). The specifics of Chatwin’s thesis on the migratory impulse are laid out at a point in his journey when the traveller, hampered by heavy rains that turn the roads to mud, becomes sedentary himself. Holed up at a remote station in a ramshackle ‘caravan,’ he breaks out a stack of notebooks in which, over the years, he has collected materials germane to his hypothesis. Included are passages from sacred texts, Moorish proverbs, literary excerpts, personal encounters, interviews, isolated meditations, extensive sketches from an earlier sojourn in Mauritania, and ‘jottings taken in South Africa’ (162). These fragmentary notes are introduced into the text as such (‘From the Notebooks’), largely supplanting the narrative for as long as Chatwin is grounded, and gradually coalescing to compose an argument. Chatwin is intent on refuting theories of human violence advanced by the likes of Raymond Dart and Konrad Lorenz, who believed to find evidence of innate human aggressiveness in the fossil record and animal behaviour respectively. Excavating caves in the South African Transvaal, Dart had uncovered masses of skeletal remains, both animal and hominid, and concluded that humans – to whom he ascribes a ‘bloodlust’ indicative of the ‘mark of Cain’ – had used the large bones of antelopes to bash in the heads of their fellow humans (237). How else could one explain the shattered skulls? Sensing the tendentiousness of Dart’s research and, like Chatwin, bristling at the Hobbesian ramifications of his conclusions, the South African naturalist Robert Brain spent years trying to determine the provenance of those fossil remains and resolved that the bones, human and animal alike, were the remnants of a predatory meal. These humans had not died at the hands of other humans but in the jaws of a large cat that lived in these caves. Brain’s findings corroborate a persistent intuition of Chatwin’s own: It does not take too much imagination to suppose that man, as a species, has suffered some tremendous ordeal in his evolutionary past: the fact that he scraped through so brilliantly is a measure of the magnitude of the threat. To prove this is another matter. Yet, already twenty years ago, I felt that far too much attention was being paid to our supposedly ‘fratricidal’ ten-

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dencies and too little to the role of the Carnivore in shaping our character and our history. (219)10

Chatwin draws anecdotal support for this idea from the fact that both Gypsies and Aboriginals use the word ‘meat’ to designate settlers, in the sense that people who settle permanently are ‘sitting game’ (56). In order to explain the process whereby humans, as a species, became such easy prey, Chatwin proposes the following scenario: On the eve of the First Northern Glaciation, certain of our human ancestors found themselves migrating northward from the tip of Africa. Forced by the cold to take refuge in caves already inhabited by a less adroit relative of the sabre-toothed tiger, the Dinofelis, these early humans became intimate with a predator to which they presented a specialized prey. While these early humans offered their new enemy the renewed prospect of survival, it in turn presented them with the threat not simply of attrition but of outright extinction. Chatwin summons a potent image: humans huddled in these limestone caverns, ‘night blind, yet forced to share their quarters with a glitter-eyed cat’ that periodically emerged from the darker recesses ‘to grab a straggler’ (253). Prototypical of the experience of any child afraid to sleep in the dark, this scene likewise suggests the emergence of the devil as darkness personified – the ‘Prince of Darkness in all his sinister magnificence’ (254). Could it be ... that Dinofelis was Our Beast? A Beast set aside from all the other Avatars of Hell? The Arch-Enemy who stalked us, stealthily and cunningly, wherever we went? But whom, in the end, we got the better of? ... What is so beguiling about a specialist predator is the idea of an intimacy with the Beast! For if, originally, there was one particular Beast, would we not want to fascinate him as he fascinated us? Would we not want to charm him, as the angels charmed the lions in Daniel’s cell? (253)

There are echoes here of Heart of Darkness and of that ‘fascination of the abomination’ by means of which Conrad’s Marlow construes the attraction that implicates him within a terrible but irresistible spectacle.11 ‘The snake,’ by which Marlow means the river coiling its way into an as yet uncharted interior, ‘had charmed [him].’ The formulation, with its implied inversion of charmed and charmer, suggests the potential for the same reciprocal fascination of which Chatwin speaks. It reminds us, too, that those monsters that filled the empty spaces of old

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maps were part of a protective magic – a device compatible with the essentially homeopathic practice of extracting remedies from poisons, antiserum out of venom, not to mention figures out of a murky void. The severed heads on poles surrounding Kurtz’s jungle dwelling appear similarly apotropaic. They ‘turn away,’ in the sense of ‘warding off,’ but with the exception of one they face inward, as if Kurtz were admonishing himself for lacking ‘restraint in the gratification of his various lusts.’ At first sight, Marlow mistakes these heads for carved ornaments, only to recoil when a spyglass reveals them to be, as he says, ‘food for thought and also for the vultures’ (57). The expression neatly isolates the figural from the literal and links the immanence of the latter to the prospect of being eaten. It is a corrosive gesture that undercuts the appearance of art with a figure of death and decay – the quintessential allegory and thus the ultimate food for thought. One thinks of those many discussions of Holbein’s Ambassadors and of the viewer’s supposedly sudden and surprised recognition that the mysterious shape in the painting’s lower foreground is a distorted skull. Captivated, the subject is drawn into the image as if into a lair, ‘trapped’ as it were.12 Much as dawning awareness causes Marlow ‘to throw [his] head back as if before a blow’ (57), the viewer before the painting has dropped his guard. He sees but sees too late, as if the canvas were an elaborate camouflage designed to fascinate the subject, to charm him, to hold him in silent thrall. It is analogous to the natural mimicry whereby an organism foils death by feigning it, accommodating itself to the dead stillness of its surroundings. This death-in-life is consistent with the vampiric state of being ‘undead’ and suggests an ascetic existence – a regimen of work, discipline, and sleep-deprivation that leaves one, like Dracula, drained. The vampire’s pale and depleted visage caricatures the deformations that define Jonathan Harker, the estate agent whose greatest passion appears to be for the punctuality of trains. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, who is also known to pore over train schedules, not only gives new shape to this deformation but also illustrates the inversion whereby cunning displaces physical prowess as the basis of self-preservation. Horkheimer and Adorno found in Odysseus the ratio that underwrites survival by attenuating the claim that dreams have on life; if Harker’s sojourn in Dracula’s castle recalls Odysseus in the Cyclops’ cave, Harker’s encounter exemplifies a more complete incorporation – the Einverleibung of which cannibalism is the more phylogenic and literal counterpart. And much as Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice restores the rituals

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of commercial venture to their agonic origins, so Dracula’s entreaty to Harker, as the latter is poised to cross the former’s threshold, suggests a contractual arrangement, intoning the voluntarism of the sacrifice so ominously implied: ‘Enter freely and of your own will ... and leave something of the happiness you bring!’13 Equally ominous is the Count’s statement that a city dweller like Harker cannot ‘enter into the feelings of the hunter’ (19). Like the ritual exchange of gifts, Dracula’s fastidious hospitality – to paraphrase Lorenz in a conversation with Chatwin – ‘fixes the frontier.’ His castle, with its labyrinthine passages and windowless chambers, recalls the setting of Chatwin’s primal scene and conforms closely to Lorenz’s understanding of ‘territory’ as the place ‘where you know every nook and cranny ... where you know by heart every refuge’ (113). In Dracula we see the hunter and recognize further that the aforementioned mimicry, by which the organism adapts to the inanimate stillness of its surroundings, is not exclusively a means of eluding capture. It is also a mode of predation. Chatwin speculates that Dinofelis, being heavy and cumbersome, relied on stealth (52). Littering the floor of its cave with the bones of early humans, Dinofelis recalls Polyphemus, feeding on Odysseus’ crewmen two at a time. Chatwin, whose references to Homer are few and sporadic, does not draw this connection. Yet the parallel between his hypothetical scenario and the Homeric episode helps identify the latter as a similar conjectural history of origins. Implicit in Book IX of The Odyssey is a theory of civilization, and Chatwin’s prehistoric drama, which occasions explicit theorizing on his part, amplifies the explanatory force inherent in Homer’s account of Odysseus’ struggle with the Cyclops. Homer’s narrative confirms Chatwin’s suspicion regarding ‘the role of the Carnivore in shaping our character and our history’ (219) and echoes as well his sense of a mutual enchantment that spurs imitation and causes predator and prey to assimilate to each other. Like those early humans in Dinofelis’ cave, Odysseus not only (to apply Chatwin’s formulation) ‘scrapes through’ but does so ‘brilliantly’ (219). His escape from Polyphemus’ cave is a prototype of comparably close calls, such as when Antonio wriggles free of Shylock’s trap, or when Harker slips out of Dracula’s castle. These last two examples place man and wolf in close proximity. Stoker’s Dracula does this quite literally, though Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is rife with figures of predation and cannibalism, the notorious ‘pound of flesh’ a literal counterpart to the symbolic meal that would dispel the ‘ancient grudge’ that Shylock vows to ‘feed fat.’14 Food for vultures, or in this case, fish.15

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The sacrificial feast with which Odysseus celebrates his escape is a nod to the fate he has narrowly avoided. Freud theorized broadly about the cultural legacies of a primal act of cannibalism, and he also commented specifically on the apparent reluctance of early humans to adorn their caves with images of their natural predators: merely depicting Dinofelis could cause him to materialize.16 The anecdote would seem to support Chatwin’s hypothesis about a prehistoric ordeal involving large cats, though his resistance to the excess attention paid to ‘our supposedly “fratricidal” tendencies’ (219) implicates Freud, whose own speculative forays into prehistory serve the idea of a congenital human wolfishness. Again, shades of Hobbes prompt a Rousseauean response; Chatwin’s narrative conforms to Rousseau’s explanation of the traumatic circumstances that produced conditions favourable to aggression, in particular the forced proximity of naturally solitary and mobile creatures. The Cyclops’ cave presents an image of this claustrophobia, whose afterimage is found in such seemingly dissimilar texts as Goethe’s Faust and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (the former being part of the tradition that reverberates through Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, mentioned above). The references only multiply. If the foregoing presents a haphazard assembly of historically and culturally disparate moments, this is true to Chatwin’s own version of the aboriginal struggle, which is itself a composite, drawn from a vast repertoire of myth, legend, religion, folklore, literature, anthropology, ethnology, even epidemiology. In the spirit of Lévi-Strauss’s bricolage, it is a ‘project’ derived from materials left over from previous projects, a way of pressing and processing thoughts through images.17 Like Freud’s Urszene, Chatwin’s primal scene is back-engineered from traces and corroborated by the numerous stories, anecdotes, proverbs, adages, testimonials, observations, and mental snapshots recorded in the Notebooks. Deliberate or not, the similarity to Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops marks Chatwin’s reconstruction as one of multiple (and potentially contradictory) iterations of the same myth and places him in the company of Freud and Clark, each of whom, in his own way, derives civilization from a universal dance of death. Odysseus performs this dance, the Cyclops’ lair a stage on which the primeval ‘ordeal of civility’ is rehearsed.18 At the very heart of the Odyssey is the issue of hospitality. On whichever shore he washes up, Odysseus is quick to invoke the rights of strangers and demand an appropriate ‘guest-gift.’ His enjoinder to the Cyclops is one of several such speeches in which he implores his host to uphold sacred tradition:

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... we’re at your knees in hopes of a warm welcome, and a guest gift, the sort that hosts give strangers. That’s the custom. Respect the gods, my friend. We’re suppliants – at your mercy! Zeus of the Strangers guards all guests and suppliants: strangers are sacred – Zeus will avenge their rights! (9.300–5)19

The Cyclops responds with scorn for the gods, killing and dismembering two of Odysseus’ men and ‘[bolting] them down like a mountainlion’ (329). The one-eyed giant is otherwise a careful shepherd and maker of cheeses, and there is nothing in the text to indicate that he feeds on human flesh habitually. This may be his first time, though it is not the only time in The Odyssey that the Achaeans become ironic figures of their own gluttony, and we may perhaps regard the Cyclops as the monstrous and as such ominous projection of the uncurbed appetite that perennially interposes itself between Odysseus and his goal. Back in Ithaca, meanwhile, Penelope’s suitors, who exploit the laws of hospitality to their own advantage, are eating Odysseus out of house and home. Polyphemus’ literal cannibalism is not simply the absence of hospitality but its perversion, exposing as it does the threat that manners preserve in the very act of warding off. The joke at the end of The Silence of the Lambs – ‘I’m having an old friend for dinner’20 – turns on the ambiguity that makes of every host a potential predator and helps derive ‘hospitality’ and ‘hostility’ from a common root (hostis = stranger). Words divide like cells to produce contradictory meanings and reveal the potential of any affect to ‘collapse into its antithesis.’21 The fact that the word gift, distributed between two languages, can mean both ‘offering’ (English) and ‘poison’ (German) is generally indicative of this potential and specifically of the power of duplicity.22 The wine with which Odysseus immobilizes the Cyclops straddles this ambiguity: a gift from Maron, whose life Odysseus saved, it becomes an instrument of deceit. The ultimate ‘gift horse’ – the Trojan Horse – is the brainchild of Odysseus, whom we now find escaping the cave of the Cyclops much in the way he slipped through the gates of Troy, here clinging to the underside of a bellwether ram. Unwitting midwife to Odysseus’ escape, Polyphemus strokes the animal gently and addresses it with affecting tenderness: ‘Dear old ram, why the last of the flock to quit the cave? / ... Sick at heart for your master’s eye?’ (498, 505). Odysseus will soon sacrifice the ram to Zeus and make a solemn meal of the animal that is the ambiguous metonym both of himself and of the ogre. Following Walter Burkert, this ritual ‘sheds light on the curious detail of the escape from

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the cave; in many parallels this is done by putting on sheepskins, and this masquerade may well be original. To gain the edible animals, man has to assimilate himself to them. To be eaten, or not to be eaten but to eat, these are the two sides of the basic process of life. Man eats animals ... disturbing the balance of life; to make up for this, myth introduces an agent who preserves the flocks and eats men.’23 To this gloss Burkert adds an additional ‘historical clue,’ namely, the wooden spear with which Odysseus blinds Polyphemus. Odysseus could easily have put out the Cyclops’ eye with his sword; instead, he uses that very sword to hack off a piece of the giant’s wooden club, which his men then sharpen and harden by fire. When they plunge the white-hot point into the sleeping giant’s eye, the hissing sound is likened to that made when ‘a blacksmith plunges a glowing ax or adze / in an ice-cold bath and the metal screeches steam’ (438–9). Metallurgy furnishes the simile for describing a more rudimentary, even Paleolithic technology. The Achaeans vanquish the Cyclops not simply with a weapon but with the first weapon, its invention coeval with the demise of a pastoral existence. Odysseus has ‘scraped through brilliantly’; his delivery from the cave is a difficult and traumatic birth, catalysed by a struggle of mutual assimilation between host and guest. Burkert writes: ‘Rescued from a dead end by the use of violent technology ... man has triumphantly survived, but remains endangered by the curse of violated nature’ (34). Conflating metallurgy with violence, Homer’s imagery echoes a Biblical synonymy. The name ‘Cain,’ Chatwin notes, is derived from a verb meaning ‘acquire’ or ‘own property,’ though ‘Cain’ also means ‘metal smith.’ Condensed into the name of the first murderer are metallurgy and agriculture – the two inventions that, according to Rousseau, cast man into an age of misery and bondage. Agriculture represents a settled and pointedly territorial way of life and entails the transformation of ‘vast forests’ into ‘pleasant fields that had to be watered with the sweat of men.’24 Rousseau alludes here to the austere consequences of the Biblical fall (‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’ [Genesis 3: 19]). He insists that feral man, his ‘modest needs’ being ‘readily supplied’ by nature, lacked not only knowledge and foresight but also a sense of wonder at the surrounding world. His characterization evokes the plenitude and innocence of Eden, of which the State of Nature seems an anthropological counterpart. Rousseau’s assertion that ‘we should look in vain to [the savage] for that philosophy which a man needs if he is to notice once what he has seen every day’ (90) distinguishes him sharply

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from Chatwin, who holds that in order to survive, the desert dweller ‘must develop a prodigious sense of orientation ... must forever be naming, sifting, comparing a thousand different “signs”’ (199). This divergence reflects a larger distinction and points to the mythogeographical crux of Chatwin’s hypothesis. The Garden presents the image of an oasis. Its antipode is not the forest but the steppe, the savannah, the unbroken expanse of shifting sand. Those ‘vast forests,’ for Rousseau the original habitat of natural man, were not clear-cut by newly forged tools but desiccated by catastrophic changes in climate – changes that gave rise to the thorny wilderness where the first humans made their home (Chatwin, 245). Man did not create the desert; it created him. The songlines were themselves meticulous musical maps, committed to memory, enabling the aboriginal to find his way across endless reaches of innocuous, scrub-filled terrain. The verbal kinship of ‘travel’ and ‘travail’ links wandering to the pain of expulsion from a place where needs are ‘readily supplied.’ The harsh natural setting of Cain’s crime, like the crime itself, is Adam’s legacy. In this ancient rivalry Chatwin discerns a struggle between agricultural and nomadic careers: Cain tills the land while Abel, a shepherd, follows his flock as it migrates between winter and summer pastures. Chatwin’s vivid and characteristically spare synopsis of the murder is worth reproducing in full: Cain is a painstaking fellow, bent double from constant digging. The day is hot and cloudless. Eagles are floating high above in the blue. The last of the snowmelt still cascades down the valley, but the hillsides are already brown and parched. Flies cluster at the corners of his eyes. He wipes the sweat from his forehead, and resumes his work. His hoe has a wooden handle, with a stone blade hafted on to it. Somewhere, higher up the slope, Abel is resting in the cool of a rock. He trills at his flute: again and again, the same insistent trills. Cain pauses to listen. Stiffly, he straightens his back. Then, raising his hand against the glare, he peers at his fields along the stream. The sheep have trampled his morning’s work. Without having time to think, he breaks into a run ... (193)

René Girard has argued that Cain, lacking the sacrificial outlet that a store of livestock would have provided, kills his brother in place of, say, a lamb. Girard elaborates his theory of sacrifice with respect to another fraternal rivalry, also from Genesis, namely that between Jacob and

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Esau. Their father, the blind and decrepit Isaac, intends to bestow his blessing on Esau and bids the elder brother to kill some venison for the solemn occasion. Jacob overhears and reports the conversation to his mother, Rebekkah. Wishing Jacob to receive the blessing instead, she slaughters two young goats and prepares the feast. She then fastens the goatskins to Jacob’s back and forearms in order that he might pass for his ‘hairier’ brother. When the blind Isaac runs his hands over Jacob he indeed mistakes him for Esau. Girard points out the parallel to The Odyssey, noting that the blinded Cyclops, like Isaac, runs his hands over his favourite ram, confusing Odysseus for the animal to which he has assimilated. In both episodes the ruse works but in the process establishes a contiguity that makes human and animal victims interchangeable. Polyphemus’ explicit brutality draws attention to the menace that underlies the gentler Isaac’s blessing: The animal is killed in Esau’s (or Jacob’s) place. The sacrificial rite both prevents the father from killing his son and keeps the possibility alive (and reminds us that Isaac, himself once spared, is also a potential victim).25 Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, incidentally, employs a similar tactic to escape the brutal tyranny of his father (not blind, just ‘blind drunk’). As a means of counterfeiting his own murder, Huck kills a wild pig, bleeding it into the dirt floor of their remote cabin. He affixes some of his own hair to the bloodied axe and then carries off the carcass, pressed against his breast with his jacket (‘so he couldn’t drip’).26 What better example of the nomad than Huck! He chafes at his new clothes and renounces wealth and ‘sivilized’ comfort in favour of barefoot mobility and what Arkady, Chatwin’s guide, deems a defining Aboriginal right – ‘the liberty to remain poor’ (3). Huck’s possessions subject him to the rage of his father, with whom, in a manner reminiscent of The Odyssey, he is compelled to share close quarters, crouching warily in the dark while Pap sleeps. He defuses the tension between himself and his father by killing an animal that symbolizes both. The pig, otherwise unsuitable for sacrifice, aptly projects his father’s lack of couth as well as his own relapse into a state of nature (‘hogs soon went wild in them bottoms after they had got away from the prairie farms’ [37]). The pig’s holier cousin is the first-born lamb with whose offering Abel pleases God but makes his brother jealous. These sacrificial rites, following both Girard and Lorenz, use violence to stem violence, deflecting aggression in ways that fortify the community (Girard) or that distribute the species across territory (Lorenz). In an extended conversation with Lorenz, Chatwin takes issue with the

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notion of an aggressive instinct and proposes that Lorenz has confused the concepts of aggression and defence. What Lorenz, courting controversy, calls ‘military enthusiasm’ is not an expression of spontaneous aggression but the vestige of a need on the part of humans to fend off carnivores. Whereas rituals that channel aggression occur between members of the same species, defence mechanisms evolved in response to the constant threat posed by predators: ‘All war propaganda, I went on, proceeded on the assumption that you must degrade the enemy into something bestial, infidel, cancerous, and so on. Or, alternatively, your fighters must transform themselves into surrogate beasts – in which case men became their legitimate prey’ (221). The dissimulation that Chatwin describes is also a factor in sacrifice, which, again following Girard, reduces the potential for violence between members of a community by displacing it onto an animal (or animal-like) substitute. The often-frenzied process of dehumanizing the enemy, moreover, is compatible with the idea, shared by Girard and Burkert, that a degree of confusion must exist between the surrogate and the true victim. In being both similar to and different from the actual culprit, the scapegoat is always, to put it blandly, a representation, or less blandly, ‘food for thought’ as well as ‘for the vultures.’ Freud’s famous assertion that ‘man is a wolf to man’ (homo homini lupus) implies a similar short-circuit in the regimen of the same. Violence between humans must be routed through the non-human. Freud cites Plautus’s adage at the very point in Civilization and Its Discontents where he anticipates Lorenz: ‘men are not gentle creatures ... who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked [but] creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.’27 In this same context Freud quotes those lines from Goethe’s Faust paraphrased by Lorenz in the title of his most famous work, Das sogenannte Böse (So-called Evil).28 This is the speech in which Mephistopheles, the ‘spirit of negation,’ allies himself with destructive forces and asserts that everything created is of value only insofar as it comes to ruin (ist wert daß es zu Grunde geht).29 Lorenz, for whom Mephisto embodies a productive adversity commensurate with the aggressive instinct, distils his title from the Devil’s summation: ‘Thus everything which you call sin, / Destruction, in short evil [kurz das Böse nennt], / Is my proper element’ (1342–4).30 In approximate parallel to Chatwin’s musings about the Beast, Freud introduces the Devil as a cultural ‘excuse’ for the destructive instinct, which he finds incarnated in

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Mephisto (Freud, 80–1). The site of Faust’s encounter with the Devil, a ‘vault’ whose dark and narrow confines leave him longing for the ‘wide world,’ resembles the cave in which the first humans came face to face with ‘the Prince of Darkness in all his sinister magnificence’ (Chatwin, 254). Replete with animal and human bones (Tiergeripp’ und Totenbein [417]), Faust’s chamber is likewise a place of difficult egress. Once inside, Mephisto cannot leave thanks to a pentagram painted on the threshold. Only a flaw in its execution allowed him to enter. This is a devil bound by technicalities, and Faust is suddenly bolstered by the thought that Mephisto might be his prisoner. Mephisto soon sets him straight, singing him to sleep and declaring disdainfully, ‘You are not yet the man to hold the devil captive!’ (Du bist noch nicht der Mann den Teufel fest zu halten! [1509]). Mephisto’s subsequent reference to ‘this threshold’s spell’ (dieser Schwelle Zauber [1512]) has a general application to boundaries and to the kind of figuration that occurs when borders are encountered. Like the castle that Dracula invites Harker to ‘enter freely,’ Faust’s gothic study is the spatial equivalent of a contract. Similarly, the ‘bond’ that entitles Shakespeare’s Shylock to a pound of his debtor’s flesh is the legally binding vehicle of the bloodlust that Dracula personifies.31 Put differently, Dracula’s literal thirst for blood caricatures the strict adherence to the letter of the bond. In these liminal spaces – Dracula’s castle, Faust’s chamber, the ethnic and economic interstices of Venice, as well as Dinofelis’ cave – there is always the potential for an intensified figurality.32 Noting that Troy was repeatedly devastated by a succession of earthquakes, Michael Wood (mentioned earlier with respect to public television) ventures that the Trojan horse was but a narrative extrapolation on the figure of the horse, icon of Poseidon, god of the earthquake.33 Mephisto crosses Faust’s threshold in the form of a poodle, a domestic and obsequious variant on the Trojan horse, itself an illustration of Chatwin’s insistence, vis-à-vis Lorenz, that the exchange of gifts is ‘aggression ritualized’ (113). That Faust is to sign his pact with Mephisto in blood is one more reminder of the proximity of ritual to violence. In defeating the Cyclops, Odysseus freezes the number of crewmen devoured at six, the same toll exacted by Scylla at each of two passes, and the difference between Scylla and Charybdis comes to resemble that between measured attrition and sheer extinction. Odysseus again ‘scrapes through,’ hugging the cliff and thus circumnavigating one more figure of indiscriminate appetite. The Cyclops and Charybdis are both seen to vomit up what they gulp down. Avoiding them is a matter

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of superior affect-control, as exemplified by the ability of the Greeks to discipline their drinking while they ply their host with wine. Steering a careful course is consistent with an economic disposition that reckons with calculated sacrifice. This same disposition entails holding back – something Odysseus can do for only so long. At first identifying himself to the Cyclops as ‘Nobody,’ he soon bridles at the anonymity that is the antonym of glory. Once free of the cave, he erupts with a brash litany of taunts and reveals himself boldly as ‘Odysseus, / raider of cities’ (560–1). Later, disguised as a beggar, he complains bitterly of the dissimulation to which he has again been reduced: ‘I hate that man like the very Gates of Death who, / ground down by poverty, stoops to peddling lies’ (14.182–3). Jean Starobinski has remarked that Odysseus’ gesture of self-directed scorn duplicates lines spoken in the Iliad by Achilles, whose rage targets Agamemnon: ‘For as I detest the doorways of Death, I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another’ (9.312–13).34 What Starobinski characterizes as ‘one of the first poetic denunciations of duplicity’ is unique in that it marks out an interior space – ‘the depths of the heart’ – in which the unspoken is actively concealed. The very possibility of hiding a thought is predicated on the existence of an interior, ‘a secret place of intentionality.’ Guarded within the confines of the heart, the secret is nothing other than retention itself, ‘an elementary ... form of control exercised at the boundary where a person’s interior and exterior meet.’35 Agamemnon has presented Achilles with a list of gifts – of ‘splendid objects and privileges’ – a promise Achilles knows to be false: Thus the opposition between ‘hiding one thing in the heart’ and ‘saying something else’ ... concerns the substantiality of the gift ... That being that hides behind flattering appearances in the heart of the other is ... defined by stubborn greed ... When the other cannot be taken at his word, the rhetoric of suspicion ... divides the enemy into two distinct ‘regions’: idle words outside, wicked heart within. This schema underlies the whole tradition of images of evil in our culture ... The ‘doorways of Death,’ [named by both Achilles and Odysseus as] the most detestable of all things, not only mark the entry to another world ... but also define a greedy power that forever keeps what it takes. (198–9)

Dinofelis, for Chatwin the prototype of these ‘images of evil,’ is an apt expression of this ‘greedy power that forever keeps what it takes.’ Starobinski adds that the essence of Hades is to ‘retain that which is ... no

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longer entitled to the light of the sun.’ Dinofelis and the Cyclops are both figures of truly obstinate refusal, their caves emblematic of a darkness akin to death. So it is, too, with Dracula’s castle, not only a kind of ghetto but also a Hades in its own right. (Harker will eventually scrape through more or less brilliantly, squeezing out of a high window with some of the Count’s gold, ‘lest [he] want it later’ [54]). In an effort to avoid not the sun but the moon – for the moon inflames his imagination – Harker flees to the windowless bowels of the vampire’s fortress. A locus of cannibalism, these innermost recesses also contain a store of recently disinterred treasure. A combination of national currencies analogous to the cocktail that circulates within Dracula himself, this repository is the archaeological equivalent of Dinofelis’ cave. Note the familiar association of money and dirt and with it the psycho-physical implications of hoarding: ‘The only thing I found was a great heap of gold in one corner – gold of all kinds, Roman, and British, and Austrian, and Hungarian, and Greek and Turkish money, covered with a film of dust, as though it had lain long in the ground’ (48). Harker’s find is closely contemporaneous with Schliemann’s unearthing of ‘Troy’ and the large cache of gold thought to be Priam’s treasure. News of this discovery prompted Freud to remark that money cannot make us happy, as it does not fulfil a wish from childhood.36 In a related context, Freud used an apposite metaphor to explain how an essentially meaningless element could come to the fore of consciousness ‘not because it is itself gold, but because it has lain next to gold’ (weil es bei Gold gelegen ist).37 By way of contrast, consider Chatwin’s description of a Quashgai woman travelling on horseback: She was also suckling a baby. Her breasts were festooned with necklaces of gold coins and amulets. Like most nomad women, she wore her wealth. What, then, are a nomad baby’s first impressions of this world? A swaying nipple and a shower of gold. (182)

Portable wealth defines the security of ‘home’ in the most archaic, maternal sense. Survival is a matter of travelling light. There are echoes here of the Biblical insight that those who keep moving are less vulnerable to siege.38 Chatwin, following Max Weber, discerns in the idea of ‘wealth on the hoof’ the origins of modern capital, as attested to by a range of etymologies linking monetary terms (‘pecuniary’) to livestock (pecu). The Christian custom that restricted Shylock to the profession of usury also denied his tribe the right to own property or even grow veg-

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etables, imposing on Jews the very nomadism that favoured Abel but also stigmatized them, in the twentieth century, as the antithesis of national grounding.39 Dracula, who lives among nomads, is in the process of liquidating his long-buried gold for the sake of the mobility that comes with disembodied wealth. In the end he becomes the quarry, hunted back to his native soil and annihilated by city dwellers. Dracula’s demise constitutes a regression that runs contrary to his stated desire to assimilate to modern (postfeudal) society. He enjoins Harker to help him perfect his English so that no Londoner hearing him speak would take him for a stranger (21). Chatwin cites P.J. Hamilton Grierson: ‘The Middle Latin wargus – i.e., “expulsus” or “stranger,” is also the same as the wolf; and thus the two conceptions – that of the wild beast to be hunted down, and that of the man to be treated as a wild beast – are intimately associated’ (218). Commenting on the tradition that derives ‘werewolf’ from wargus, Giorgio Agamben describes a liminal status that Stoker’s vampire might also represent: ‘What had to remain in the collective unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city – the werewolf – is, therefore, in its origin the figure of the man who has been banned from the city.’40 On the matter of marginal social (and national) standing, Dracula is explicit: ‘a stranger in a strange land, he is no one’ (21). The Count’s ability to metamorphose into a wolf is at once part of an assimilatory strategy and a sign that marks him indelibly for murder. Odysseus, described as crafty, cunning, deft, tactful, ‘man of twists and turns,’ is master of dissimulation, a chameleon whose appearance seems infinitely malleable. He is a distant forerunner of the courtier, capable of adapting to a situation through the mastery of minutely elaborated social rituals. Odysseus is even capable of grovelling if grovelling is what survival requires. ‘The belly’s a shameless dog,’ he declares bitterly, revealing the full measure of debasement to which the hungry beggar is subject (7.251). When he tells the Cyclops that his name is ‘Nobody,’ he adopts the tools of the flatterer, building up the other through self-degradation. This ‘Nobody’ is a verbal blind spot, which Odysseus recreates literally with the sharpened club – an act that illustrates what is at stake when hospitality falters. Observing that the verb ‘to flatter’ is derived from the Frankish flat, meaning, yes, ‘flat,’ Starobinski ventures that the ‘original, intrinsic sense of flatter was “to caress with the flat of the hand,”’ as one might do to calm or reassure an animal (47). This resembles, by the way, something that Burkert says about the ancient appeasement ritual of touching the hollows of an

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adversary’s knees, as if to say, ‘Sit down, please, and relax’ (44–5). The flatterer, Starobinski writes, is able to emulate in language the hand’s ability to explore the body; to arouse pleasure that reveals a body to itself. In passing from literal, direct action ... to figurative action, however, flattery transfers pleasure from the body itself to a new domain, that of the image that appears in the mirror of language: the ‘ego,’ always in search of its identity, must find all or part of that identity in the words of the other. The flatteree discovers his image as he discovered his body, through the caress of the other ... If flattery-ascaress reveals to the body that it can be its own ‘object,’ flattery-as-discourse ... displaces the object into the glory of a name. (47)

In a very rudimentary sense, this helps clarify the scene in the Cyclops’ cave, in which ‘Nobody,’ the antipode to the renown due this epic hero, is the bait on which the enemy feeds. The flatterer proper offers up an exalted image to the other in exchange for food; Book IX of the Odyssey reveals that the flatterer is always a potential meal. Odysseus’ tactics regress from the figurative to the literal, where the blinding of the actual cannibal creates the conditions under which Odysseus can be known by the glory of his true name, which he calls out to a hearing but no longer seeing Polyphemus. The blinding is a bloody revenge for the narcissistic injury that Odysseus temporarily endures, and which he redresses when he finally identifies himself, again, as ‘raider of cities.’ He sings his own praises, as he will later hear them sung at the court of Alcinous, at which point he may be said to have found his ‘identity in the words of the other.’ Rousseauean sympathies might incline one to focus here on the selfesteem that, following Rousseau, comes to be prized above everything else when social groups form. The ‘first duties of courtesy,’ he argues, emerge to forestall the violence that may result when an individual’s vanity is wounded: ‘as everyone punished the contempt shown him by another in a manner proportionate to the esteem he accorded himself, revenge became terrible, and men became bloodthirsty and cruel’ (114). Accordingly, we might conclude that Odysseus’ ultimate revenge is proportionate to the degradation he has suffered.41 And just as he, a guest, defeated the one-eyed giant, so now he slaughters to a man the suitors who for years have been depleting his food stores. Once more, it is a matter of eat or be eaten; indeed, the very need to eat forces one into supplication. What distinguishes Odysseus’ actions from the unctuous

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self-deprecation of the flatterer is the primitive force of the unmasking that is the telos of Odysseus’ deceit. Raider of cities, he is not unlike those ‘bully boys’ decried by Kenneth Clark, who relays Erasmus’s complaint about ‘surly Protestants’ failing to remove their hats at the door of the church. Tantamount to a maximum of defiance, the heroism that for Clark is the enemy of civilization finds its antidote in an excess of submission. A young Freud judged his own father unheroic (nicht heldenhaft) when the latter recalled having ceded the sidewalk to an anti-Semitic bully, who struck his hat to the ground and ordered him out of the way.42 The hat, a new fur cap that proclaimed budding prosperity and social self-confidence, is yet another example of the animal skin by which one simulates prey. In this context, one need only remember the prisoners in Theresienstadt, performing music for their captors, to grasp the full ramifications of Chatwin’s musings about ‘the Beast’: ‘Would we not want to charm him, as the angels charmed the lions in Daniel’s cell?’ (253). Freud would later acknowledge his father’s compliance as a cultural achievement, a means of ‘scraping through’ – of appeasing the beast that threatened not simply attrition, but extinction.

N OTE S 1 See David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987). 2 This citation appears in the video program but not in the companion volume. 3 Kenneth Clark, Civilization: A Personal View (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 161–2. 4 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1985), 155. 5 Marie Williams, ‘Escaping a Dystopian Present: Compensatory and Anticipatory Utopias in Bruce Chatwin’s The Viceroy of Ouidah and The Songlines,’ Utopian Studies 14 (2003): 107. Williams’s view that ‘Chatwin’s position as a white, middle-class male ... proves a problematic element in his utopian theorizing’ (108) gives a fair idea of the limitations involved here. 6 Clark (1903–1983), who served as director of the British National Gallery, produced books on Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Piero della Francesca, landscape painting, the nude, and more. 7 Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (New York: Viking, 1987), 252. 8 Responding to those who fault Chatwin for being an aesthete, Roberto

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9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Calasso observes: ‘The charge of aestheticism is leveled first and foremost at those who know how to see.’ ‘Chette-Wynde,’ trans. Avril Bardoni, Winding Paths: Photographs by Bruce Chatwin, ed. and intro. by Roberto Calasso (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), 13. This sounds apocryphal and has a familiar ring. Richard Henry Dana, Jr, a student at Harvard, embarked on a two-year voyage (1834–6) around Cape Horn to California, an adventure undertaken in order ‘to cure, if possible, by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from books of study, a weakness of the eyes.’ Two Years before the Mast (New York: Penguin, 1981), 40. Chatwin’s notes are always printed in italics. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Norton, 1988), 10. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 92. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Signet, 1992), 16. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1955), Act I, sc. 2, line 43. See also Antonio’s resigned expression: ‘You may as well use question with the wolf / Why he hath made the ewe bleak for the lamb’ (IV, 1, 73–4). ‘To bait fish withal.’ Thus Shylock responds to Salerio’s question as to what the pound of flesh is good for (III, 1, 47). Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Totem und Tabu, ed. Anna Freud (London: Imago, 1952), 111. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). See John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York: Basic, 1974). Homer, The Odyssey, trans. John Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1996). The line numbers in Fagles’s translation do not conform to those in the original. The Silence of the Lambs, directed by Jonathan Demme. Orion Pictures, 1990. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 111. See Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 35–6. Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 33. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin, 1984), 116. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 4, 61.

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26 Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Penguin, 1986), 37. 27 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton: 1993), 68–9. 28 Published in English as On Aggression, trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966). 29 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, ed. Albrecht Schöne (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), line 1340. 30 In the original German edition of Lorenz’s work, lines from Faust routinely appear as epigraphs, including Mephisto’s statement that he is ‘a part of that power that, always desiring evil, does good’ (Ein Teil von jener Kraft, / die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft). Lorenz, Das sogenannte Böse: Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (s.a.), 1983), 30. These epigraphs are absent from the English edition. 31 On the vicissitudes of guilt/debt (Schuld) with respect to violence and sacrifice see Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 5, Zur Genealogie der Moral, ed. Giorgo Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 300–2. 32 See Kenneth S. Calhoon, ‘The Moon, the Mail, and the Province of German Literature,’ in Jürgen Fohrmann and Helmut Schneider, eds., 1848 und das Versprechen der Moderne (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2003), 129–46. 33 Michael Wood, In Search of the Trojan War (London: BBC, 1985). 34 The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). 35 Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise; or, The Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 201. 36 Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fließ 1887–1904, ed. Jeffrey M. Masson and Michael Schröter (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1986), 387. 37 Freud, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, Werke aus den Jahren 1892–1899, ed. Anna Freud (London: Imago, 1952), 536–7. 38 By the same token, nomads are not good at holding territory. For this reason, Germans were recruited to settle Transylvania and establish a bulwark against Ottoman invasion. 39 Simon Schama reports that the Cambridge historian Isaac Deutscher, responding to a student who had inquired as to the professor’s ‘roots,’ declared testily: ‘Trees have roots, Jews have legs.’ Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1995), 29. 40 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 105.

194 Kenneth S. Calhoon 41 Chatwin, who has little to say about The Odyssey, comments on Odysseus’ revenge, the cold-bloodedness of which he distinguishes from the ‘wolfish rage’ exhibited by Hector on the battlefield in The Iliad (218). 42 Freud, Gesammelte Werke, vols. 2 and 3, Die Traumdeutung; Über den Traum, ed. Anna Freud (London: Imago, 1952), 203.

9 Touching the Real: Alternative Travel and Landscapes of Fear gabriela nouzeilles

Paradoxically it is the real that has become our true utopia. Jean Braudillard, Simulacra and Simulation Everything is drawn into travel; which at its furthest extension seems to subsume all cultures and all spaces, things, and times, into its consumptive logics. Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk, Travel Worlds

I ‘An eternity,’ – that is how the Argentine newspaper Clarín described in 2004 the temporal limbo in which two international tourists found themselves for thirty-two days while lost in the wooded mountains of Tierra del Fuego, the uttermost end of Patagonia. Guy Gabay, a thirtyone-year-old Israeli, and Michael Frike, a twenty-nine-year-old Austrian, had travelled to the region in search of adventure and close encounters with untamed nature. During a trekking excursion, they lost their way. Unable to retrace their steps back to civilization, they barely managed to survive by staying close to water and eating wild berries. They lost twelve pounds each. Two months later, the same newspaper reported the disappearance of two middle-class Argentine tourists in the Amazon. Lucas Ulanovsky Ricombene, nineteen, and Pablo Bandura, twenty-four, had gone backpacking to northeastern Brazil, also seeking adventure. When finally located, they were broke, without money to return home, and severely weakened by tropical diseases. Back in Argentina, Ulanovsky related to the press the high points of their unusual trip, how they had stayed with indigenous communi-

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ties, worked with gold prospectors, and encountered all sorts of dangers, from swelling rivers to violence and malaria. Although still recovering from his illness, the newspaper noted, Lucas was obviously thrilled by his adventures in the wild.1 These two cases of travel gone sour raise similar questions. What makes middle-class, educated youths travel to remote, inhospitable places for a taste of nature and danger? What was the origin of Ulanovsky’s perplexing delight in recalling his ordeals? And why does no one seem surprised by their apparently irrational and risky behaviour? Both incidents illustrate the rapid spread and increasing popularity of tourism off the beaten track. Especially ubiquitous are backpackers in search of unmediated experiences of nature and cultural difference. From a marginal practice limited to countercultural drifters in the 1960s and 1970s, backpacking has evolved into a mass phenomenon that has profoundly transformed modern travel. Backpackers have materialized in every corner of the world, carrying with them not only the emblematic piece of baggage that gives them their name but also their cultural baggage, condensed in their guiding bible, the Lonely Planet series of travel books.2 Even though most of them come from developed Western countries, the rebellious aura of the independent traveller has seduced urban youths everywhere.3 Notwithstanding the differences in their national and cultural backgrounds, Gabay, Frike, Ulanovsky, and Bandura were all eagerly in pursuit of the same elusive object, to the point of risking their lives for a taste of the real. In modern times, reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere, in other eras and other cultures. For backpackers the nomad not only is the indigenous Other to be visited, but represents as well an idealized form of travel that brings liberation from the constraints of modern society and its artificial hollowness. The ability to organize one’s own itinerary, to change travel plans at will, and to travel for as long as possible without the burden of physical and cultural baggage is an important feature of nomadic travel.4 The backpacker has turned the urge to ‘get away from it all’ – one of the driving forces of tourism – into the core of his or her travel ideology. The search for extreme solitude, away from urban centres and their noisy masses, is related to the idea of natural paradise, a place for regenerating and revitalizing body and mind. Paradise, usually an underpopulated and underdeveloped region, ‘serves as the antithesis of modern civilization (i.e., to its negative excesses) and, in this way it is a projection of our own romantic yearning for purity and originality.’5 From this perspective, the backpacker’s return to nature can be read as a vicarious return to the origins of mankind

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through the exploration of unsullied landscapes, free of the signs of modernity. In a perplexing act of disavowal, the nomadic traveller defines himself in obstinate opposition to other tourists. He abhors the traditional ‘tourist,’ whom he sees as naive and superficial, caught in the prison of the modern tourist industry. Backpacking’s travel flexibility contrasts strongly with tourists’ orderly travel, consisting of package tours and organized visits to famous sites. The alternative traveller also differs from the tourist in that he usually embraces a post-Fordist conservationist ethos, with its call to preserve natural spaces, and an almost celebratory anti-imperialistic attitude towards non-Western cultures.6 Likewise, an attachment to the real puts the nomadic traveller at odds with the postmodern tourist, who has abandoned the authentic and instead enjoys gliding over the surface of cultural simulacra.7 In his unyielding desire to collect authentic experiences, at least in theory, the nomadic traveller anxiously seeks to avoid touristic patterns of behaviour. To not be a tourist is one of the most powerful drives behind unconventional travel. Tourists, however, always catch up. Paradoxically, more often than not backpackers end up being the vanguard of commercial tourism; it is they who discover and identify new sites of differentiation for those who come after. Slightly modifying Kaur and Hutnyk’s observation that in our days ‘everything is drawn into travel,’8 I suggest that in postmodernity, everything is drawn into tourism, which relentlessly subsumes all cultures and all spaces, things, and times into its consumer logic. This explains the frustration that many backpackers express in the blogs they use to share their stories of adventure in the Third World with other travellers. No matter how hard they try, always spoiling the view is a Coke can, a radio, a modernized local asking to be paid for playing native in front of the camera. An entry by Mitchell Stephens on the Lonely Planet website exposes the tourist conundrum as inescapable: ‘I didn’t want this. Yes, I am just a couple of tributaries upstream from the Amazon River. Yes, I am seeing something that is not easy to see in this part of the world in our days; Indians, indigenous peoples, wearing a traditional dress ... But there is a big problem ... I feel, there’s no way around it, like a tourist.’9 The search for authenticity pushes the alternative traveller deeper and deeper into the wild, into extreme landscapes in which nature’s overwhelming power is on full display. These landscapes are then used as sites of experimentation, in which the traveller can experience emotional and physical excess. Deserts, jungles, and high mountains serve

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as testing grounds to separate the real traveller from the mere tourist. They embody what the geographer Yi-fu Tuan calls ‘landscapes of fear,’ in the sense that they are radical manifestations of the chaotic forces of nature, whose extraordinary power threatens the imminent collapse of the world and signals the approach of death.10 These are extreme landscapes constantly repel the work of modernity, making human habitation difficult, even impossible. The scarcity of water or air, the devastating violence of dust and tropical storms, and the perils presented by extreme altitude, disease, and predators conspire against survival. By placing himself in these landscapes of fear, the alternative traveller intentionally engages in risk creation – positioning himself in a dangerous situation in a challenging environment – as a certain way to access unique and, more importantly, real experiences. There is a displacement from drifting travel to adventure and physical prowess. Travel then becomes a series of solitary confrontations with nature in which the traveller tests his strength and will by enduring hardship and overcoming danger. Travel as survival.11 Living dangerously in the midst of nature is associated with the primitive as a marker of the real. By traversing rivers and deserts, climbing mountains, and surviving on a minimal diet for long periods, the traveller not only visits the habitats associated with the vanishing Other, pushed to extinction or irreversibly transformed by modern civilization, but also experiences primitiveness by getting in touch with his own dormant, primal Other through physical exertion. Here we see yet another paradox of alternative tourism’s thirst for authenticity. By playing at being the primitive Other, the nomadic tourist comes full circle, ending up much closer to the postmodern tourist and his fondness for simulacra of reality. Tourist nomadism is a paradigmatic case of what Coco Fusco calls ‘performative primitivism,’ where the Western subject appropriates and wears the mask of Otherness as a source of self-discovery and creativity. Far from being a reversal of imperial stereotyping, Fusco argues, the affinity with the Other invoked by performative primitivism reinforces colonialism’s power relations: ‘the threatening reminder of difference is that the original body, or the physical and visual presence of the cultural Other, must be fetishized, silenced, subjugated, or otherwise controlled to be “appreciated.”’12 Performative primitivism is yet another symptom of modernity’s paradoxical nostalgia for the natural environments and ancient traditions that imperial capitalism destroyed in its steady expansion. The politics behind mimetic performativity in alternative tourism are highly ambiv-

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alent. Besides a nostalgia for the primitive, there is a clear nostalgia for imperial travel styles. As pseudo-adventurers, many travellers combine a desire to explore the primitive with a desire to imitate the figure of the heroic explorer who ventured into the non-Western world to discover and conquer.13 In the past twenty years, mountaineering has emerged as one of the last resorts of alternative travel. With its mix of sport and adventure, masculinity and technical skill, mountain climbing seems an ideal means to fuse performative primitivism with nostalgia for imperial heroism. Another reason for climbing’s appeal is that, even though all the blank spots signalling unexplored territories have one by one disappeared from the maps, there are still mountains with virgin summits or difficult climbing routes that remain unchallenged. Moreover, even if they have been climbed many times, the unfeasibility of human habitation owing to brutal natural conditions makes these peaks, together with the poles of the earth, irrevocably empty spaces. But once again, the tourist’s resilience has proven to be unlimited. Mountains have also become commodities in the tourist trade, as well as a favoured fetish of affluent tourists who, lacking proper training, pay extraordinary sums of money to be taken to the top of the highest peaks.14 The arrival of tourists has added yet another distinction in the never-ending ranking of travellers between real mountaineers and fake climbers, or adventure tourists. Travel writing, photography, and fiction and non-fiction film have all contributed to the nomadic imagination, providing travellers with narrative configurations and landscape conventions as well as visual patterns of representation through which they can shape their own experiences of displacement and difference. Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, and Michael Palin appear to be high in backpacking’s literary canon and are seen by many as icons of alternative travel.15 These names, however, constitute just one branch in a much larger narrative machine. Travel fiction has become so popular and ubiquitous that it is hard to make a final list of influential works and authors.16 Authors from Homer and Virgil to Herman Melville, Jules Verne, and Joseph Conrad continue to feed the fantasies of adventure travel. And professional writers are not the only ones infusing travel culture with narrative fictions. Regular travellers have themselves become the authors of an enormous mass of stories in the form of journals, blogs, and postcards. Writing continues to be a fundamental part of travel. Some of the pleasure derived from going to remote places

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arises from being able to talk about one’s adventures and experiences after returning home. Writing constitutes a way of making experience intelligible to oneself and to others through the use of narrative conventions and cultural decoding. By exchanging stories, and by defining themselves through travel, alternative tourists endow space with meaning and engage in identity production. In the remaining pages of this essay I present a reading of the bestselling book Enduring Patagonia (2001) by American mountaineer and writer Gregory Crouch as a compelling example of how high and low culture, primitivist performativity and imperial nostalgia, sport and tribal rituals of masculinity, come together in the postmodern culture of alternative travel, with its longing for the real. But before doing that, in order to locate Crouch’s tale of adventure within a broader cultural genealogy, I briefly illustrate how the geographical and tourist imagination has constructed Patagonia as an extraordinary place, ideal for pursuing fantasies of going wild through body-based experimentation. II Since the late nineteenth century, Patagonia has figured in the Western geographical imagination as an emblematic landscape of fear in which travellers have the opportunity to encounter undeniable proof of nature’s overwhelming metaphysical presence. Because of its deserted expanses, the fury of the storms that constantly strike its shores, and its barren, towering mountains squeezed by enormous glaciers, Patagonia came to represent an extraordinary place, a radical outside, beyond history. Its temporal dynamics were those of glacial time – a time frozen in an endless present of cyclical destruction. Because the region was the last refuge for southern Amerindian nomads who for centuries were able to avoid first the Spanish empire and later the modern republics that followed, by fleeing into the Patagonian desert, Patagonia became strongly associated with indigenous nomadism. As an exceptional place, Patagonia shares many of the features of a heterotopia, as defined by Michel Foucault in one of the few essays he devoted to the function of space in modern times. According to Foucault, heterotopias, or ‘countersites,’ are ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which real sites, all the other sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.’ These countersites are outside all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. The idea of Patagonia as an

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eccentric place corresponds to Foucault’s heterotopias of deviation – that is, spaces in which an individual’s behaviour deviates from the societal norm.17 In Foucault’s version, the notion of heterotopia is not related to any particular form of landscape or geography. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, a heterotopia – which for them means a space outside the logics of the modern state – has a defined geographical orientation and is related to a specific landscape. In their view, deserts like Patagonia are heterotopic regions that help rechannel what they call the vital, primitive energy suppressed by modernity. William H. Hudson, in Idle Days in Patagonia (1893), presented one of most enduring definitions of Patagonia as an antimodern, primitivist heterotopia.18 His ideas contrasted sharply with those of Charles Darwin, who decades earlier had attributed the fascination generated by Patagonia’s vast expanses to the interest they awakened in the imagination. In his book, Hudson explains Patagonia’s exceptionality by the opposite phenomenon. Far from encouraging the work of the intellect, he argues, exposure to the Patagonian landscape banishes it, to the point that, left to his deepest instincts, man becomes one with nature: ‘Such changes in us, however brief in duration they may be, and in most cases they are very brief, but which so long as they last seem to affect us down to the very roots of our being, and come as a great surprise – a revelation of an unfamiliar and unsuspected nature hidden under the nature we are conscious of – can only be attributed to an instantaneous reversion to the primitive and wholly savage mental conditions’ (210). Through the obliteration of thought that comes from the fusion with nature, man temporarily returns to a previous stage of human development, one that existed prior to the foundational divide between culture and nature. Hudson identifies the return to this virtual space-time with the action of ‘going home,’ back to an old harmony between man and environment infinitely more perfect than and radically different from the asphyxiating artificiality of ‘civilization.’ The exceptionality of the Patagonian landscape, Hudson suggests, comes from the fact that it is the only one capable of activating man’s biological memory, of opening a window onto the past of the species. It is its look of antiquity, of desolation, of eternal peace, ‘of a desert that has been a desert from old and will continue a desert forever,’ that opens the mind to receive an impression of visible nature as a whole. Hudson compared the elation he felt in Patagonia to the excitement that overcomes men before battle or when hunting, and most of all to the delight children experience on entering woods and other wild places (220–1).

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Many others have seen Patagonia as a heterotopic space whose geography provides those who take the trouble to go there with a glimpse of another time, before or beyond history. It was precisely the perception of Patagonia as a radical outside and as the last refuge of the primitive that gained the attention of the first alternative tourists who emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In a manner reminiscent of that of today’s backpackers, Jules Beerbohm, Florence Dixie, and Hesketh Prichart, among others, travelled to Patagonia in search of adventure and authenticity. Their travel books helped replace the representation of Patagonia as a land of death and subhuman abjection, spread by colonial travellers and sailors for centuries, with the image of Patagonia as a site of liberation, where the civilized subject could reinvent himself by going wild. The close encounter with Patagonia’s primordial nature, they claimed, had the effect of a reinvigorating shock that awakened the dormant forces of the body, and with these, the ‘savage within’ repressed by civilization. In Wandering in Patagonia, Beerbohm equates his entering the Patagonian desert with a rite of passage through which he frees himself from the expectations and demands of modern civilization: I seemed to be leaving the old world I had hither-to known behind me, with its turmoils and cares and weary sameness, and to be riding merrily into some new sphere of free, fresh existence, I felt without a pang I could break with old associations, renounce old ties, the pomp and the pleasures, the comforts, the bothers, the annoyances of civilization, and become as those with whom I was now traveling, – beings with no thought for the morrow, and therefore with no easiness for it either –, living the life of our nomadic ancestors, in continual and intimate contact with nature, – an unchequered, untroubled existence as wild, simple, and free as that of the deer that browse on the plains19

Many decades later, other sophisticated travellers would celebrate the pleasures of Patagonian wandering, associating it with the elemental and a human desire for freedom. In In Patagonia (1977), Bruce Chatwin sees the entire region as a land of drifters and exiles, a permanent countersite of cultural and political resistance, a place where one could hide when the rest of the world finally blew up. In Chatwin, performative primitivism is confined to travel nomadism rather than corporal exertion. He avoids towns, sleeps under the sky, and whenever he can, walks, even if it means staying alone, next to an empty, dusty road

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for two days in the middle of nowhere. In The Patagonian Express (1979), his friend Paul Theroux portrays Patagonia as the ultimate destination of the alternative traveller, whose final reward is to stand, finally, alone in front of absolute nature and absolute silence, nothingness itself: ‘It’s perfect. If one of the objects of travel was to give yourself the explorer’s thrill that you were alone, that after fifteen or twenty thousand miles you had outrun everyone else and were embarked on a solitary mission of discovery in a remote place, then I had accomplished the traveler’s dream ... Alone, alone: it was like proof of my success. I had had to travel very far to arrive at this solitary condition.’20 In Theroux, it is the Patagonian landscape that remains elemental, while the traveller sees himself as a re-enactment of the imperial explorer. In all these cases the desert is the landscape that prompts transformation and experimentation. Patagonian mountains are largely absent from these travellers’ ruminations on meaning and space. When they do appear, they function as markers of achievement when the traveller has finally completed his journey through the desert. They interrupt the sameness of the vast and desolate Patagonian expanses with the massive presence of high walls of rock and snow crowding the horizon. For those who reached the Andes, the spectacular view of the towering mountains, and the overwhelming feelings of awe and wonder produced by the sight, triggered the final surrender to the sublime power of nature.21 III Achieving the summit of a mountain was tangible, immutable, concrete. Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air

Throughout the twentieth century the mountains of western Patagonia moved slowly from the background to the foreground of the Patagonian landscape, competing for attention with the desert. In the 1920s and 1930 they became the destination of Argentine mass tourism, which advertised them as replicas of the European Alps, with their pristine lakes and ancient forests. In the late 1950s some of Patagonia’s most remote and challenging mountains, the southern range crowned by Cerro Fitzroy, began to attract the attention of professional mountaineers from around the world. The difficulties looked insurmountable. The combination of savage storms and vertical walls of ice and rock kept most of the peaks out of reach for decades. Only in the 1970s,

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after many failed attempts, did the first stories of success begin to emerge. Beginning in the 1980s the mountains of Patagonia and their spectacular views entered the visual imagination of adventure tourism, thanks to travellers such as Yvon Chouillard, the founder of the famous Patagonia brand of outdoor clothing, a climber himself as well as an enthusiastic supporter of alternative travel. Chouillard’s Climbing on Ice (1982) inspired Gregory Crouch to go to Patagonia. Crouch’s Enduring Patagonia (2001) was the first travel narrative about experiencing Patagonian space that presented itself exclusively from the awkward perspective of mountain climbing and its philosophy of space.22 Unlike books such as Chouillard’s, Alan Kerney’s Mountaineering in Patagonia (1998), and the unavoidable Lonely Planet Trekking in the Patagonian Andes (2003), Crouch’s book is neither a travel guide nor a manual for ambitious sportsmen and audacious tourists. Rather, it is an adventure tale in which climbing constitutes a form of subversive walking and antimodern liberation. In this tale, the Patagonian mountains are the site of a universal and ancient war between man and nature. In his confrontation with brutal and unforgiving nature, the climber’s body and mind are completely devoted to the task of survival and the will to live. Crouch combines performative primitivism with nomadic drifting, which allows him to get in touch with his unconscious, authentic self, with modern nostalgia for adventure and heroic masculinity. In a world in which all sorts of spurious agendas are polluting ‘pure’ travel, Crouch makes a point of painfully distinguishing himself from inauthentic climbers and travellers. In this, he gets help from the Patagonian landscape itself. While more prestigious mountains such as the Everest have been repeatedly ‘desecrated’ by technology and professional guides, he says, ‘the enormous walls of Patagonia demand fast, efficient, and expert practice of every climbing technique. Wealthy dilettantes cannot buy their way onto these exclusive summits.’23 Only years of training and dedication to mountaineering earn a climber the right to claim a Patagonian summit. Crouch also scrutinizes the motives of certain mountaineers, questioning those mainly engaged in a competitive race for glory and prestige, as well as those who have sold out to corporate power by turning their sport into advertising campaigns for multinationals such as Pepsi. What remains is the core of alpine and mountaineering philosophy. According to Jon Krakauer, to become a climber means to join a self-contained, radically idealistic tribal commu-

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nity, one that is largely unnoticed and surprisingly uncorrupted by the world at large. Getting to the top of any given mountain is much less relevant than how one gets there: prestige must be gained by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment.24 A certain part of the climber resents the summit. If there is a spiritual revelation in climbing, it does not come from reaching the top but in the struggle of the ascent, ‘the wild, insecure moments when the fear has the bile up in [one’s] throat, when desire sits like a lead weight in [one’s] gut, and when the summit is maybe, just maybe within reach’ (Crouch, 50). What matters is the capacity to ‘endure’ Patagonia, to survive its mountains’ deadly forces. Accordingly, Crouch’s adventure narrative is organized around episodes of sequential failure and endless struggle. Each episode is a minor battle within a larger war against the overwhelming power of a particular mountain. Chapter 2, ‘The Cerro Torre Campaign,’ describes in detail half of Crouch’s thirteen attempts to climb the mountain. In a narrative rhythm reminiscent of a Sysiphian curse, there is a succession of interrupted ascents, followed by the dead time of frustrating waits. When describing difficult climbing, the text mimics the slow progress of ascension by adopting exasperatingly detailed descriptions of movement: ‘Jim takes the lead, and Stephan belays him. Stephan pays out slack through his belay plate, a simple metal device that will help him hold the rope should Jim fall, while Jim climbs a beautiful vertical crack in the granite. Jim skillfully avoids a few patches of ice that cling to the stone, and every ten or twenty feet he fits a camming device or a stopper into the cracks and clips it to the rope behind him with a caribiner at either end of a nylon string’ (23). Such a degree of detail contrasts sharply with the description of the summit, which barely fills two paragraphs. As in other campaigns included in the book, there is hardly any time to enjoy the spectacular views of the mountains and the hidden ice cap, since the desire to look is quickly terminated by the sight of a violent storm approaching, or impending darkness. In his narrative, Crouch rearranges chronology and presents his ascents and travels to Patagonia in the order given by memory’s free associations and by the alternation of two subversive types of walking: mountaineering, or vertical walking, and nomadic backpacking, or horizontal walking. In between the chapters focused on the titanic task of ascents, he interposes chapters that introduce ‘horizontal interludes,’ when he wanders through the Patagonian desert. As in Hudson, the vision of the desert’s boundless sameness awakens in him feelings of

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primordial loneliness, followed by the elation of a child when he enters the magic of the wild. The dynamics of visual perception in mountaineering narratives are very different from the visual logics of travel narratives with a panoramic perspective. From the flat surfaces of the Patagonian desert, the Andes are a natural focal point of the landscape. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuities – culminating high points, natural barriers. On mountains, latitude’s imperceptible changes are accompanied by striking transformations. Ecology and climate change rapidly from temperate foothills to glacial heights.25 Most of the time, the climber is blind. Either because he is face-to-face with the rock, clinging to life, or because of the stormy weather, he cannot see. Partial vision prevents the formation of defined, enduring landscapes, which tend to disappear rapidly before the climber’s eyes. In contrast to the tourist, whose experiences are based mainly on sight and sightseeing, climbing as travel implies a different kind of physical engagement and the use of many senses (tactile, kinesthetic, etc.). At the same time, when he does see, the climber has access to unique perspectives, to astonishing views unavailable to those who remain fixed in the world below: ‘From no point in the settled world can one get a true impression of the ice cap, for the Andes block the view of it from the inhabited desert to the east. There are places from which we can observe glaciers that drain the ice cap through breaks in the mountain chain ... but the ice cap itself exists almost in myth, in a world beyond men’ (Crouch, 5). By seeing what is hidden behind the Patagonian mountains, the climber becomes the discoverer of lost worlds, frozen in time for eternity. The emphasis on pain separates the climber from the superficial experiences of mass tourism. Climbing is a perfect case of extreme physical exertion through risk creation for the purpose of collecting authentic experiences. In her analyses of the uses of pain in Victorian times, Elaine Freedgood suggests that masochism is the driving force behind mountaineering’s masculine erotics. The masochist voluntarily engages with pain by creating landscapes of suffering. In mountaineering, men design unnecessarily dangerous situations so that they can test their will and masculine prowess. According to Freedgood, masochism is constitutive of heroic masculinity.26 What she does not say is that the engagement with pain and danger also connects the figure of the climber with the primitive savage through terror. Terror results from the perception of nature as a living force that seeks the destruction of those

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who dare invade its space. It is not surprising, then, that prosopopeia is one of Crouch’s favourite ways of picturing mountains: the alpine monoliths stand like teeth set in a dragon’s jaw; Cerro Torre emerges from the storm like an enraged angel, sheathed from head to toe in an armour of shimmering rime ice; she (Cerro Torre) looks evil and malignant while Crouch and his partners await an opportunity to assault the mountain again. A desirable effect of primitivist regression is the re-enchantment of a world that modernity has stripped of all magic. As in ancient traditions, when men were afraid of the wilderness surrounding the cities, Crouch’s mountains are full of intangible but nonetheless disturbing mirages, populated by monsters, dragons, and titans. His desire for magic does not contradict his equally strong longing for authenticity. In Crouch, the real does not correspond to the modern notion of the empirical or to common sense, but rather to the idea of that which cannot be represented – the Thing that exceeds all thought. In the literary tradition, the closest thing to such an extraordinary being is Moby Dick, the white whale that obsesses Captain Ahab in Melville’s novel, which Crouch and his partner Charlie read voraciously during one of many failed attempts at Cerro Torre’s summit (35). In many cultures, mountains are seen as thresholds, as sacred places that give access to worlds beyond the reach of most humans. In Enduring Patagonia, the Patagonian range of perfect mountains accessible only to real travellers is seen as a heterotopic space of deviation, one where men can play masculine roles unavailable in modern society and have the opportunity to create alternative communities. Crouch, who early in life gave up the privileges and opportunities that came with his family’s social background and his West Point education, has tasted alienation first-hand, taking meaningless jobs, working for endless hours building a sewer lift station in Colorado and then installing play structures in MacDonald’s restaurants. For Crouch, touching the void or claiming a particular summit is a way of establishing a maximum distance between the idealistic climber and capitalist alienation. Down in the normal world, man seldom has life under control. The details escape him; he muddles in confusion. In the elemental landscape of the Patagonian mountains, Crouch and his climbing partners ride the limits of human potential in more or less controlled simulacra of danger. They are the fragile heroes of adventure tourism in the disenchanted world of late capitalism.

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IV Enduring Patagonia is the most recent manifestation of a culture of alternative travel that since the late nineteenth century has chosen Patagonia as a suitable site for staging simulacra of liberation and performative differentiation. Crouch’s portrayal of mountaineering as a spiritual and physical re-encounter with the real represents yet another effort to identify a radical outside, untouched by the consumptive logics of mass tourism and modernity’s hollowness. By physically and mentally enduring Patagonia, Crouch is able to withdraw totally from society. But he is traveller, and travellers return home to share their stories of escape and adventure. By writing Enduring Patagonia, Crouch has reinforced the commodification of mountains as the last refuge of the real for the tourists to come. And they will come.

N OTE S 1 www.old.clarin.com/diario/2004/02/05/s-03402.htm, www.clarin.com/ diario/2004/04/01/s-03615.htm, and www.clarin.com/diario/2004/04/ 04/s-03815.htm. 2 Lonely Planet published its first guide in 1973. Today there are more than 120 Lonely Planet titles in print. All these books have the same adventure approach, with an emphasis on independent travellers who wish to avoid the main tourist itineraries. Approximately fifty authors, including founders Maureen and Tony Wheeler, research (mainly by travelling) and write the guides. 3 It is not clear, though, whether the motivations behind backpacking are the same everywhere. According to Cohen, contemporary backpacking as a massive movement of Western youths to the less developed regions of the world began in close association with the major social and political upheavals of the 1960s: the student revolution and the Vietnam War. In its beginnings it had a strong critical edge and a defiant attitude towards capitalism and imperialism. Today the politics of backpacking are more diverse and less oppositional, and its practitioners come not only from metropolitan regions but also from developing countries such as India, Vietnam, Argentina, and Brazil. See Erik Cohen, ‘Backpacking: Diversity and Change,’ in The Global Nomad: Backpacker Travel in Theory and Practice, ed. Greg Richards and Julie Wilson (Clevedon: Channel View, 2004), 55–8.

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4 Richards and Wilson, ‘Introduction,’ in Richards and Wilson, The Global Nomad, 5. 5 Peter Welks, ‘The Beaten Track: Anti-Tourism as an Element of Backpacker Identity Construction,’ in Richards and Wilson, The Global Nomad, 82. 6 For a detailed comparison between Fordist and post-Fordist tourists and their attitudes towards non-Western communities and nature conservationism, see Martin Mowforth and Ian Munt, Tourism and Sustainability: New Tourism in the Third World (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), ch. 3. 7 About post-tourism, see C. Rojec, Ways of Escape: Modern Transformations of Leisure and Travel (London: Macmillan, 1993). 8 Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk, ‘Introduction,’ in Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics, ed. Kaur and Hutnyk (London and New York: Zed, 1999), 11. 9 www.lonelyplanet.com/newsletters/lost–adventure. 10 Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (New York: Pantheon, 1979), 6–7. 11 Risk creation is at the core of adventure tourism, a direct offspring of backpacking travel, and one of the most popular (and lucrative) branches of tourism today in Western countries. The Adventure Travel Society reports that adventure tourism is growing at an annual rate of 10 to 15 per cent, with most of its growth in Latin America. According to a 1998 study conducted by TIA, one-half of Americans said they were adventure travellers. See Simon Hudson, Sport and Adventure Tourism (New York: Haworth Hospitality Press, 2003), 14–15. 12 Coco Fusco, English Is Broken Here (New York: New Press, 1995), 45. 13 Nomadic tourism’s political ambivalence also characterizes the narratives that alternative travellers produce in the way of blogs, journals, electronic messages, and postcards, as well as those by the traveller–writers whose travelogues they admire and consume. 14 For a more detailed analysis of nineteenth-century alternative tourists and the narratives they wrote on returning to England, see my ‘Tourist Nomadism and Modern Malaise,’ in Images of Power: Icography, Culture, and the State in Latin America, ed. Jens Anderman and William Rowe (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 255–70. 15 For an analysis of backpacking’s literary archive, see Wilson and Richards, ‘Backpacker Icons: Influential Literary “Nomads” in the Formation of Backpacker Identities,’ in Richards and Wilson, The Global Nomad, 123–48. 16 A quick search in Amazon.com lists 9,178 travel books available for sale. 17 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ in Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986), 24– 7. 18 William Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia (New York: Dutton, 1917).

210 Gabriela Nouzeilles 19 Jules Beerbohm, Wandering in Patagonia (London: Richard Hentley, 1879), 15. 20 Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 391. 21 See, for example, Florence Dixie, Across Patagonia (New York: Worthington, 1981), 198. 22 Mischief in Patagonia (1956) by H.W. Tilman includes a section about the crossing of the Patagonian icecap, which stretches across the top of the southern Patagonian mountain range, but Tilman’s focus is on sailing along the Patagonian coast. 23 Gregory Crouch, Enduring Patagonia (New York: Random House, 2001), 4. ‘Wealthy dilettantes’ probably refers to tourists such as Dick Bass, an affluent fifty-five-year-old Texan with limited climbing experience, who in 1985 was ushered to the top of the Everest by professional climber David Breashears. Further citations will be documented parenthetically. 24 Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air (New York: Anchor, 1997), 23. 25 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2000), 135. 26 Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 111–12.

10 Virtual Travellers: Cyberspace and Global Networks ursula k. heise

1. The Afterlife of Cyberpunk Cyberpunk novelist William Gibson’s recent novel Pattern Recognition starts with a rather lyrical evocation of jet lag as his protagonist, Cayce Pollard, arrives in London after a flight from New York: It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now ... She knows ... hearing the white noise that is London, that [her friend] Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical cord down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.1

If there is a certain elegiac beauty in the comparison of the travelling soul to lost luggage, the metaphor also comes as a bit of a surprise. After all, Gibson is the science fiction author whose narrative explorations of cyberspace – models for a whole wave of films and texts in the 1980s and 1990s – were always based on the premise that the mind is detachable from the body and able to travel much more swiftly and flexibly without its physical baggage: one of the hallmarks of ‘console cowboys,’ the hackers and software designers in Gibson’s early novels, was their disdain for the limited mobility of ‘meat.’ Pattern Recognition, by contrast, portrays a more ordinary world in which the technological acceleration and global mobility of human bodies outpace the adaptation capabilities of the mind, at least in the short term.

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As a cognitive and cultural predicament, this gap between technologies that propel the body into a global zone while the mind clings stubbornly to its habitual times and places is of course far from new. In different ways, it was addressed from the 1960s onwards in a wide range of theoretical frameworks from McLuhan’s ‘global village’ to Toffler’s ‘future shock,’ Harvey’s ‘time-space compression’ and Cairncross’s ‘death of distance,’ and it was often conceptually associated with the sense of a period break, the advent of a new era in modernization processes.2 One of the most influential formulations of the difficulties to which this encounter with the global gives rise is Fredric Jameson’s by now classical reflection on postmodernist architecture. Focusing on John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, Jameson argues that the internal structure of its enormous lobby, with its emptiness, symmetry, and camouflaging of spatial boundaries, creates a ‘postmodern hyperspace’ that defies orientation, spatial recognition, and memory.3 ‘This latest mutation of space,’ Jameson suggests, ‘has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world ... This alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment ... can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.’4 Many novels of the past twenty years that portray travel around the globe – whether in the form of tourism, migration, political or economic displacement, exile, or diaspora – address precisely this dilemma through the narrative universes they construct. Cyberpunk, with its emphasis on the way in which new information and communications technologies are altering the experience of space, provides one possible response to the problem that Jameson raises; it does so by juxtaposing the protagonists’ geographical travels around the globe with their experience of various types of virtual, media-generated spaces. Indeed, the term ‘cyberspace,’ popularized by William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, quickly made its way into ordinary language at just the same time as Jameson’s theory of postmodern hyperspace.5 ‘Cyberspaces,’ ‘metaverses,’ ‘data-lines’ and other partly real, partly imaginary information networks that span the globe in these novels give rise to new sensations of rootedness and displacement as well as to new perceptions of place, home, and travel.6 These alternative spaces

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and ways of travelling arise, in the reading I would like to propose here, less from an obsession with new technologies than from a concern – conscious or unconscious on the part of the writers – to grapple with the problem of locating oneself in the global webs alluded to in Jameson’s analysis. Andrew Ross, and many other critics after him, have reproached cyberpunk for its juxtaposition of virtual and real spaces, arguing that it unduly romanticizes a sphere of electronic networks in the midst of dystopian social conditions and decayed urban spaces.7 While this is a fair enough criticism if one takes the distinction between real and virtual space on the cyberpunkers’ own terms, it loses some of its force when one re-envisions cyberspace as a narrative metaphor for the globalized space that frames and counterbalances the varied geographical locations that cyberpunk protagonists typically visit. The greatest significance of cyberspatial connectedness lies less in its grasp of the implications of new technologies for conceptualizations of the human body and mind, as has often been argued,8 than in its attempt to provide imaginative templates for envisioning individuals and communities in their interaction with a thoroughly globalized space of political, economic, and cultural exchanges. Many texts that have portrayed new digital technologies over the past twenty years picture electronic networks both as the main manifestation of globalization processes and as an at least potential resource for resisting them: in many depictions of the near future, cyberspace is dominated by the corporate forces that also run the real world but at the same time holds out a hope for pleasures beyond convention, for subversive lifestyles and for ‘interstitial communities,’ as one character in Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties calls them. It is this perception of virtual space as a global network run by the dominant powers and as the potential site of alternative homes that links classic cyberpunk to certain more recent novels about digital technologies – novels that are not usually classified as belonging to the same genre, for example, Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark (2000) and Gibson’s own Pattern Recognition (2003). At first sight, these novels seem to share little with the fast pace, technological exuberance, maledominated perspectives, and social dystopianism that characterize most cyberpunk narratives. The ‘consensus hallucinations’ of visually stunning virtual data landscapes that must be accessed by means of neural interfaces, surgical alterations, and psychopharmaceuticals are replaced, in these more recent narratives, by more commonplace tools: cell phones, e-mail, websurfing, and painstaking software design. But

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these texts continue to be deeply engaged with questions about how lives lived in the ordinariness of the physical world mesh and clash with lives that play themselves out in the spaces created by computer technologies; specifically, they are concerned with how the placeboundness of everyday routines in combination with the metaphorical spatiality of communications and information media create a partly real and partly virtual global space that in its turn generates new forms of inhabitation and mobility. As a consequence of this reconfigured spatiality, travelling partially loses its association with geographical displacement and becomes imbricated even into practices carried out in one place alone. This shift has been widely discussed across different disciplines over the past two decades and has been approached from somewhat divergent theoretical perspectives. In the first place, geographers such as David Harvey and Doreen Massey and anthropologists such as James Clifford have emphasized the ways in which even the most local cultures are now embedded in networks of spatial connectedness that make it impossible to describe such cultures simply in terms of their ties to one specific place. Clifford’s notion of ‘traveling cultures’ in particular has drawn attention to this aspect.9 Second, sociological studies of the impact of media have foregrounded the extent to which ordinary people around the world now have access to media such as film, television, and the Internet, which allow them to ‘travel’ to faraway places and participate in public events without ever leaving their living rooms: Maxine Feifer’s notion of ‘post-tourism’ is in part designed to allude to this phenomenon, as is Joshua Meyrowitz’s classic study of television, No Sense of Place.10 Third, a wide range of anthropologists and sociologists from Arjun Appadurai to Néstor García Canclini have invoked the notion of ‘deterritorialization’ to describe, broadly speaking, the detachment of cultural practices from their rootedness in place.11 Summarizing a large body of this work, sociologist John Tomlinson has concluded that deterritorialization understood in this sense is one of the most striking consequences of globalization: Globalization promotes much more physical mobility than before, but the key to its cultural impact is in the transformation of localities themselves ... complex connectivity weakens the ties of culture to place. This is in many ways a troubling phenomenon, involving the simultaneous penetration of local worlds by distant forces, and the dislodging of everyday meanings from their ‘anchors’ in the local environment. Embodiment and the forces

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of material circumstance keep most of us, most of the time, situated, but in places that are changing around us and gradually, subtly, losing their power to define the terms of our existence. This is undoubtedly an uneven and often contradictory business, felt more forcibly in some places than others, and sometimes met by countervailing tendencies to re-establish the power of locality. Nevertheless deterritorialization is, I believe, the major cultural impact of global connectivity.12

Understood as a whole set of transformations in the connections between culture and place – whether they involve physical displacement or not – deterritorialization is the counterpart to Jameson’s discussion of hyperspace. While Jameson emphasizes the difficulties of mapping global space and understanding one’s own position in it, deterritorialization as discussed by García Canclini and Tomlinson foregrounds the remapping of the local that takes place as a consequence of its being resituated within a global framework.13 Before discussing how some of the geographical configurations and dominant motifs of Pattern Recognition and Plowing the Dark engage with such concerns about globalization and its representations, I would like to foray briefly into one of the lesser-known ‘classical’ cyberpunk novels, Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net (1988).14 Many cyberpunk fictions juxtapose their protagonists’ far-flung geographical journeys – from the United States to Japan, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, or Africa, to name a few – with their excursions into virtual worlds as far-flung as Neal Stephenson’s Manhattan-style ‘Downtown’ or Alexander Besher’s game-world Himalayas.15 Islands in the Net is more explicit than most classical cyberpunk novels regarding what is at stake in these juxtaposed travels through partly geographical and partly simulated spaces. Many other cyberpunk texts simply take it for granted that the technologized world society of the future will be ruled by corporations that take over many of the functions carried out by nation-states today; Islands, by contrast, questions this assumption by portraying a world connected through a global information network in which the social and political structures to match this connectedness are still in the process of formation. In this context, the question of how individuals and local communities should relate to the emergent global space and the extent to which they are able and willing to help shape it becomes a central issue of contention. Nation-states continue to exist in Sterling’s novel, as do international treaty organizations such as the Vienna Pact (a contract whose signato-

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ries have abolished all nuclear weapons, among other things) and multinational corporations seeking to define their political role in the new global landscape. The principal enemies of nation-states as well as corporations are ‘data havens’ such as Grenada, Singapore, and Luxembourg, in essence hacker nations that steal private information and pirate software and other technologies, to the point where corporations fear they might become genuine competitors. Two employees of the multinational Rizome, Laura and David Webster, become entangled in the conflict over how to address the threat of these hacker territories, whose conflicts with one another and the world community endanger political stability. Once these conflicts turn into brutal military confrontations, David withdraws from any further engagement, preferring to maintain a stable home for his family rather than harbour any in his view foolhardy illusions about changing the world; his wife Laura, by contrast, feels it would be irresponsible not to try to create a safer world for their daughter. She takes on a dangerous mission to Singapore and in the process learns not only that some corporations are contemplating a takeover of the Vienna Treaty law enforcement mechanisms, but also that multinationals have for years been financing a secret army based in Mali to counteract what they perceive to be weaknesses of the Vienna agencies. This army, which possesses nuclear weapons, is now on the point of going out of control, and Laura’s journey around the globe turns into a mind-boggling series of discoveries about power structures and struggles. Eventually she lands in a prison in Bamako for several years; once she is freed, she announces her findings to the world. But the fame she attains through her revelations is mitigated by the breakup of her marriage to David, who has long believed her dead. Sterling’s novel stands out in part because it describes corporations as much more benign than most cyberpunkers, and hackers as much nastier, though neither side is portrayed in black-and-white terms. It also differs from other cyberpunk novels in that the technology Sterling includes is not very far ahead of what was possible in 1988, and seems entirely contemporary – even, in some details, dated – in the early twenty-first century: ‘Every year of her life, Laura thought, the Net had been growing more expansive and seamless. Computers did it. Computers melted other machines, fusing them together. Television-telephone-telex. Tape recorder–VCR–laser disk. Broadcast tower linked to microwave dish linked to satellite. Phone line, cable TV, fiber-optic cords hissing out words and pictures in torrents of pure light. All netted together in a web over the world, a global nervous system, an octopus

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of data’ (17). This is all, really, that cyberspace means in this novel, in contrast to the splendidly visual and inventive virtual universes of Gibson or Stephenson. But much more than either of these two authors, Sterling is interested in what such a global information network implies for political, social, and economic structures. At the same time, he asks more insistently than other cyberpunk writers what role the individual might play in the evolution of national and international organizations that are all connected with one another in a shared data network; this question dominates two conversations between the Websters, one toward the beginning of the novel, the other toward the end. After their trip to the data haven of Grenada has turned into a bloody massacre perpetrated by the Malian army that almost gets the Webster family killed, Laura believes they have an obligation to continue their mission while David insists they must think of their own and their child’s safety: ‘We have to do something. It’s coming to a head – this proves it.[‘] ‘Then it should be the U.S. State Department,’ David said. ‘Or the Vienna heat – somebody global. Not our company.’ ‘Rizome is global! ... Besides, Feds don’t have any clout.’ ‘This is a war. Governments run wars. Not corporations.’ ‘That’s premillennium talk,’ Laura said. ‘The world’s different now ... I know my long-term goals ...’ She touched the baby’s cheek. ‘What kind of world will she live in? That’s what’s at stake.’ ‘That sounds really noble,’ he said. ‘And just a hair away from megalomania. The world’s bigger than the two of us. We don’t live in the “globe,” Laura. We live with each other. And our child.’ (173)

This difference of opinion is never resolved, and after Laura returns at the end of several years’ confinement in Africa, David reaffirms, ‘We don’t “live in the world” – the world lives in us now. We went out to fight for the Net and the Net just stretched us to pieces ... you won the battle – but for the Net, not for you and me ... I can’t see on that scale, I’m small, I can only see you and me’‘ (376–7). This reaffirmation of very different ways of relating to the global – a sense of living in the global hyperspace and taking part in shaping it, however partially or unsuccessfully, versus a sense of the global as a deterritorializing force that pervades and undermines the local and the private – seals the end of their life together.16 With this preliminary exploration in mind, I would like to turn to two

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much more recent literary engagements with digital technology and its reshaping of the global sphere: Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Though both these novels place much more explicit emphasis on the individual’s entanglements with technology than on technology’s broader political ramifications, I would argue that in the end, they have more in common with Sterling’s Islands in the Net than with a perhaps more ‘typical’ cyberpunk novel such as Gibson’s Neuromancer. In both texts, the question that frames the protagonists’ travels in real and virtual space is less that of the adaptation of the human body to an altered technological environment – the issue that has been discussed most often with regard to cyberpunk – than that of the human mind’s adaptation to a global space that most conventional strategies of cognition and representation do not prepare it to cope with. The journeys and places around which the two novels revolve are designed to address this issue. 2. Imaginary Maps: Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark At first sight, Plowing the Dark might seem like an odd choice for an exploration of the global.17 Even though each of its two protagonists travels to a new place of residence at the beginning of the book, the plot focuses less on their subsequent exploration of the local than on the sublocal: for different reasons, the major characters do not have a chance to get to know what one would normally consider their local environments – the cities they live in and the surrounding landscapes. Both of them are confined to much narrower spaces that constrain their ability to explore their new habitats. In the case of Adie Klarpol, an artist who has been hired by the Seattle-based computer company TeraSys to work on a virtual-reality project, this confinement occurs for professional reasons: along with a team of programmers, she spends most of her time in a room everyone refers to as the ‘Cavern,’ a dual allusion to prehistoric cave paintings and Plato’s allegorical Cave. In this room, each programmer can try out his or her latest models of virtual reality, and Klarpol’s immense workload and deadline pressures keep her so chained to her workplace that eventually ‘shame gripped her ... private and local. She’d lived here for the better part of a year and had not yet learned the first thing about this town [Seattle]. It was as if she’d had room in her for only one exploration at a go’ (154). This confinement takes an even more extreme form in the case of the other protagonist, an

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Iranian American named Taimur Martin, who goes to Beirut in the mid1980s to work as an English teacher for eight months. Instead, he is kidnapped and held hostage for five years. In the short time before his capture, Beirut leaves him bewildered: ‘They say that you know more about this place on the day you first touch your foot to it than you will ever know about it again. And they’re right. Each day that passes leaves you more confused’ (46). Once he is in captivity, Martin spends his five years in solitary confinement, with little but his imagination to remind him of the world beyond the narrowly enclosed rooms where his captors keep him. Precisely this experience of extreme confinement interests Powers as a basic condition for access to imaginary spaces that open onto the global. During his captivity, Martin is cut off not only from the outside space of Beirut, Lebanon, and the world, but also from the media that might give him at least indirect access to other spaces. The Qur’an and, ironically, Great Escapes are his only reading materials, and only towards the end of his time as a prisoner does another hostage establish contact with him through knocking signals on the wall to tell him that his name has often been mentioned in the media around the globe. For almost all of five years, then, Martin has only his imagination to re-create the outer world for him. Some of this re-creation takes the form of memories of his troubled relationship with his partner Gwen, and of imagined walks through places he knows, his hometown Chicago among them. Two scenes stand out from this account of imagination as the principal basis for the experience of place. The first of these occurs towards the beginning of Martin’s imprisonment, when he considers what the outside world’s reaction to his disappearance is likely to be. ‘By now you’ve made the world papers. “Yet another American,” like the reports you used to read and file away, unimaginable. Chicago now knows the name of those who captured you, while you as yet do not’ (101)18: And along with it, you summon up the whole front section of today’s Tribune – World’s Greatest Newspaper – the first image of any resolution to grace your private screening room. The blue banner and hedging headlines. The weather for Chicago and vicinity. Metroland meanderings, carping columns, gridiron second-guessers: pages scroll across your field of view on microfiche of your own devising. And tucked away, make it page 12, safe where the news will spare Des Moines and hurt only those whom hurt will benefit, you put a black-and-white reduction of your college

220 Ursula K. Heise yearbook photo, a face so saddled with goofy impatience for the future that even you no longer recognize it. (101)

At first sight, this might well appear as an instantiation of what John Tomlinson means by deterritorialization, in that Martin has access to information about his own local situation only via the global media – a newspaper that is published and read thousands of miles away. The availability of Chicago-area weather forecasts and opinion columns to someone in Beirut, and the fact that Chicago weather might even be of interest to him, illustrate some of the potentialities of global connectedness. But this particular newspaper exists only in Martin’s imagination, and what is more, he imagines it in the end as presenting an image of himself that he is unable to recognize; the mix of information and disinformation, knowledge and alienation, is aptly captured in the scene’s media metaphors, an imaginary newspaper ‘screened’ like a kind of movie, even including such details as image resolution, but also reproduced on microfiche rather than in the actual paper version. The fact that all of the information media alluded to in this scene are conjured up as figments of Martin’s imagination already points to one of the novel’s major concerns – the way in which all media, from cave painting to computer software, function as tools of inhabitation, as means whereby humans create and recreate the spaces in which they live and travel. The second scene features a similar layering of media in Martin’s imagination, but occurs at a much later point in his captivity, when what were longing evocations of home have turned into near hallucinations, and his partner Gwen seems to visit him as often as his captors Ali and Sayid. The place he sees himself living in is still Chicago, and they take long walks together through their neighbourhood. But one day, subsequent to an imagined fight of the kind they regularly had in real life, she disappears while he continues the walks, systematically ‘refus[ing] to step down the street until every fuzzed foot fills out with casements and moldings ... You move through this staggering set, a denser network than your eye ever made out when you actually lived there. Half a residential block lays out a universe so nauseatingly profuse that you need the safety of your cell even to consider it’ (349–50). Again and again, his hallucinatorily vivid evocations of Chicago merge with perceptions of the cityscape around him, to the point where mortars seem to be falling near Lake Michigan that are in reality exploding around his building in Beirut. As his imaginary walks through Chicago

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extend farther and farther, he visits the Art Institute and visualizes in equally supernatural detail the paintings on its walls. One of his as well as Gwen’s favourite paintings, Vincent van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles, becomes the fulcrum for many of these visits. He often imagines himself entering this room and looking at his face in the painted mirror. But in a climactic scene, when he thinks he sees a note on the washstand from Gwen that obviously does not feature in van Gogh’s real painting, the room crumbles during a particularly violent attack that fuses it with the cell where he is being held captive: You cross to the crooked shutters and throw them open. You lean all the way out into the light, as it has never before occurred to you to do. You turn to look for her in the sea-salt air at the precise instant that a rocket levels the building across the way. A shock wave rips through your room, bringing down the plaster ceiling and toppling the radiator ... The azure walls atomize. Wood disintegrates. Plaster crashes against you. You turn to run, but falling stone blocks the way ... The air clouds with debris. Shouted orders collide with each other in the mobilized chaos – all the city’s muezzins crying at once. (354)

The superimposition of two places here suggests that when Martin opens the window shutters of a room in a painting in an art museum in Chicago that he has only imagined, what he sees is an actual rocket hitting an actual building in real Beirut – an event he could not possibly have witnessed with his own eyes, as his room has no opening onto the outside. The blue walls and perhaps also the wood are those of van Gogh’s painting, yet the plaster and debris are those of his Beirut cell. Again, the point of this scene is not so much the blurring of fantasy and reality, which is after all quite common in literary texts. If Martin imagined a newspaper in the earlier scene, here it is a painting that constitutes the substance of the fantasy, rather than any real room he has ever lived in. It seems that what his imagination produces at moments of particular vividness is representations of places, but even more so representations of representations of places that mingle with his real experience. Whether places are real, imagined, or mediated in some fashion in Powers’s novel, they are inhabited, always, by means of the imagination. Martin, a hostage in 1980s Beirut, in other words, makes a home in his cell through a city and an art museum half a world away, and by means of a painting created in France a hundred years earlier. That this deterritorialized form of inhabitation is not just the outcome

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of an exceptional and in some sense pathological situation becomes clear through the novel’s other plot, which focuses on Adie Klarpol and her virtual-reality lab. Given her former career as an artist, Klarpol is assigned the task of creating virtual spaces on the basis of well-known paintings. One of the first is Rousseau’s jungle landscape from his painting Dream, which causes vivid speculations among Klarpol’s engineering colleagues as to whether the woman in the picture is a jungle spirit, why she might be in the nude, and why there would be a sofa amidst the trees, until one of them points out the obvious: ‘Idiots. The woman is not in the jungle. The jungle is in the woman’s living room. It grows in through her window, while she dreams’ (66; original italics). A dream landscape that has made its way into a painting is, in this scene, converted into a virtual-reality environment that can be visited and experienced as a threedimensional space by Klarpol and her colleagues. Just as Martin’s imagination in crucial moments seizes on places he has experienced as well as on places he has only seen represented, Klarpol’s initial virtual-reality projects revolve around the translation of represented landscapes into the new medium of digital technology. As her skills develop, she works on a painting that has meant much to her ever since her childhood – none other than van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles, which she converts into an environment seemingly fit to live in, including even the paintings-within-the-painting that adorn its walls. Her interest in this particular work of art dates back to a time of her childhood when she and her sister were surrounded by reproductions of art. As Adie Klarpol reveals to one of her colleagues, her imagination engaged so deeply with this art that she was able to make the frames move by the mere power of her will;19 what is more, she entered the picture and made it behave like an actual physical room: The painted shutters are deeply wrong. They’re way too big. Too much wood to close over the casement. There in the dark, I couldn’t decide whether they floated in front of the window frame or behind it, folding into the bedroom or fanning outside. I had to find a way to close them, make them fit the frame.[...] Time to oil the hinges. Each night that I exercised the shutters, they got a little easier to open. I got ... too good. Too skilled at animation. Each of the objects in that painted room wanted its turn. I made gusts of southern wind twist the towel and slap the cyan shaving mirror against the wall [...] I got so I didn’t even need breezes. I made the drawer in that crippled little bed table slide open unsponsored [...] the bed began creaking, from the weight of invisible bodies. (176–7; original italics; ellipses in brackets mine)

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As Klarpol recreates this partially exhilarating, partially traumatic childhood game by means of digital technology, her activity clearly runs parallel to Taimur Martin’s, who comes to inhabit the same painted room by means of his imagination only, just as Klarpol did in her childhood. In Powers’s novel, electronic media, rather than being extensions of the human body or its nervous system, as Marshall McLuhan and quite a few cyberpunkers had portrayed them, come to figure as extensions of the imagination in general and of the human ‘sense of place’ in particular. But while van Gogh’s painting portrays an interior and domestic space, it is consistently deployed in the novel in contexts that make it part of a global landscape. That Klarpol’s and Martin’s imaginations settle on the same represented space even though they find themselves in different countries and never physically meet in the course of the novel is itself evidence that the bedroom’s shutters – a detail both characters note – open out not onto van Gogh’s Provence, but onto the planet as a whole. And in both cases, the imagination of the domestic space takes place in a socio-political context that is deeply entangled with global media and geopolitics. Martin’s capture as part of the confrontation between the Arab world and the United States triggers his forays into van Gogh’s virtual space, at the same time that Klarpol’s computer lab, for all its physical seclusion from the surrounding landscape, is constantly connected to global events in a variety of ways. The engineers she works with come from around the globe; they include the Italian American Jack Acquerelli, the Korean ‘Spider’ Lim, the Sri Lankan Rajasundaran, the half-German Michael Vulgamott, the Armenian Ari Kaladjian (who ‘had fled the globe’s chaos for the safety of mathematics’; 34), and the Irishman Ronan O’Reilly, whose occasional allusions to conflicts and terrorism in his home country highlight how facets of Martin’s experience are echoed in other regions. These immigrants are connected to places around the globe not only by virtue of their varied places of origin and cultural backgrounds, but also through the professional tasks they carry out, some of which are directly aimed at the modelling of global processes. Ronan O’Reilly’s virtual-reality project, for example, is a simulation of global economic processes that ‘can zoom from the neighborhood fruit stand all the way up through the G7 annual deficits’ (86): This room is deeper than its interface makes out. Bigger than will fit into the space that houses it. All the world’s predictors, running flat out, fall

224 Ursula K. Heise back surprised by their own outcomes. Fresh winds mix, mistral on sirocco, chinook against levanter, khamsin with bise. Cusps touch off one another. Trends compound, too quick to name. Yugoslavian prices rise three thousand percent. Drought and war destroy East Africa. Argentina heads into free fall. China comes alive, threatening to swamp the continental balance of trade. Sweeping liberalizations cascade. The median keeps to a holding pattern. Vested interests bitterly dig in ... Five billion parallel processors, each a world economy, update, revise, negate one another, capsize the simulation, pumping their dissatisfied gross national product beyond the reach of number. This sea defeats all navigation. (86–8)

Just like yet another global project such as the Weather Room, O’Reilly’s economics simulation struggles dynamically to represent the complexity of real-world processes, even as the narrative idiom here seeks to model the complexity of the simulation by referring to geographic metaphors from the realm of winds and oceans. Indeed, even the commercials that TeraSys broadcasts on television foreground this attempt at imaging the world: ‘Synched to the sound track with Balanchinean brilliance, a spinning globe mutated in dizzying succession into the rose window at Chartres, an exploding jigsaw puzzle, the condensing chains of a long polymer, inked ideograph characters on an unfurling scroll, tessellated Iznik tile, solar cells on a space satellite, and finally, back to old Pangea doing its slow, stately breakup into Laurasia, Gondwanaland, and all the rest of the continental separatists, special interest groups, and irredentist movements’ (83). In other words, even as banal a detail as a corporate television commercial seems almost inevitably to gravitate towards the question of representations of the global, and of heterogeneity and unity. The question of how rapidly changing global configurations might fit into individuals’ representational models – whether they are based on ordinary cognition processes or digital computation – also arises during the onslaught of international news events that reaches the group of secluded programmers via radio and television. One of them, Michael Vulgamott, is so addicted to constant news updates that he interrupts even a serious philosophical discussion about the computational nature of the real world with a request for at least a few minutes of attention to the television, where ‘in quick cavalcade, the patchwork world morphed through a parade of protean shapes in front of their eyes, more fluid than any digital map could hope to mimic’ (85). And even

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Adie Klarpol feels at times overwhelmed by the rapid political developments around the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the media hit her on a daily basis with news such as the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the massacre at Tiananmen Square, the human chain across the Baltics, the opening of the Hungarian borders, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the first Gulf War, to name only a few. Again and again, in their professional pursuits as well as in their private conversations, the programmers grapple with the difficulties of mapping global realities of different sorts, and with the nature and properties of this global space in comparison to the representations they create. Through this recurring concern, the Cavern turns into a point of departure for ever renewed journeys into the planet’s data structure. Ronan O’Reilly sums up these forays into an information space that all too often turns out to be visualizable only by way of geographic metaphor: ‘All the Earth’s land masses lay prostrate, mapped out to nauseatingly fine detail. We’d filled the map with knowledge. Now we had a tool with which to look inside. Now the real exploration could begin (80).’ Powers does not represent this exploration as an innocent pursuit. After many months of work, Adie Klarpol does begin to wonder for whose benefit all these experiments in simulation are being undertaken, and finds out, in confronting her manager, that TeraSys counts media and entertainment corporations among its clients, but also military institutions. This discovery so dismays Klarpol that she destroys all her projects and vanishes from the company shortly before a major presentation. But just prior to her disappearance, the novel’s exploration of modes of dwelling and travelling in real and simulated spaces reaches its climax with Klarpol’s last project, a virtual-reality replica of the Hagia Sophia. With its physical interior made up of architecture, painting, mosaics, and writing, this project calls on the most advanced skills of many of the programmers, even as its function as a historical, geographic, and cultural hinge between East and West, Islam and Christianity, seems a suitable expression of the project’s global aspirations. In the beautifully detailed interior space of the simulated Hagia Sophia, Klarpol, moving about like ‘an astronaut repairing failed equipment far off in the infinite vacuum’ (399), undergoes an experience that explodes the novel’s realism: She let herself rise into the hemisphere apse, then farther up, all the way into the uppermost dome, now inscribed with its flowing surah from the Qur’an ... She twisted and looked into the breach below. The God’s-eye

226 Ursula K. Heise view: in the simulation, but not of it. And deep beneath her, where there should have been stillness, something moved. She dropped her finger, shocked. The winch of code unthreaded. She fell like a startled fledgling, back into the world’s snare. The mad thing swam into focus: a man, staring up at her fall, his face an awed bitmap no artist could have imagined. (399)

The man she perceives is Taimur Martin, who after a lapse into deep depression and despair has, by way of his habitual strolls through imagined geographies, gained access to her simulation. How this could have happened is not explained in the novel. Neither do Martin and Klarpol ever exchange more than this one glance or meet again either in real or in virtual space: the novel ends shortly afterwards with Martin’s release and Klarpol’s disappearance. Impossible in the world such as the novel has set it up, this moment stands as a metaphor for global connectedness; as Martin’s imagined spaces in Beirut and Klarpol’s in Seattle link up and enable travel from one to the other, the confined places that both protagonists inhabit open up onto a utopian alternative space that is global, technological, and rooted in the human ability to create and inhabit places outside geography. This moment of utopian connectedness links Plowing the Dark to earlier portrayals of cyberspace, whereas detailed explorations of philosophy, art history, programming technology, and contemporary world politics otherwise distinguish it quite sharply from most of them. Even though virtual reality is a commodity that is produced by and sold to business corporations, even though it can and will be put to military uses, Powers seems unwilling to renege completely on its utopian potential. One might object that the existential encounter his virtual cathedral enables remains weak in its geopolitical implications, since it is after all two Americans who end up looking at each other from different parts of the globe, rather than the truly crosscultural encounter an environment such as the Hagia Sophia would seem to call for. But the fact that the narrative often portrays the spatial imagination as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon indicates that the climactic virtual meeting of Martin and Klarpol is, at least in its aspiration, universalist. Powers’s portrayals of physical confinement and deterritorialized domestic spaces that are variously grounded in painting, virtual reality, and sheer imagination come to a head in this depiction of a shared virtual space that, even though it may be as spatially disorient-

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ing as Jameson’s Bonaventure Hotel, offers a new point of departure for communication and encounter. 3. Virtual Jet Lag: William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition As the beginning of this essay already showed, the question of how to locate one’s body and cognition in a global space is also central to William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Each of the novel’s major thematic threads evolves in an insistently foregrounded context of global connectedness. The American Cayce Pollard comes to London for a consultation with Blue Ant, a ‘globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational’ advertising agency (6) that has asked her to evaluate the newly designed logo for ‘one of the world’s two largest manufacturers of athletic footwear’ (9). Pollard has an intuitive data-processing capability that allows her to determine with certainty whether such a logo will work or not as a marketing device; but this extraordinary ability is correlated with a disability, an allergy to trademarks and logos that at best makes her feel uncomfortable and at worst induces panic attacks. Through Pollard’s encounters with trademarks across places and cultures – Tommy Hilfiger in London, Burberry and Mont Blanc in Tokyo, Prada in Moscow – the novel traces a global commodity culture that the protagonist cannot escape from, and that she helps expand even as it makes her physically ill. Yet it is not her professional duties that prompt most of her global travel in this novel, but rather a private agreement with the founder of Blue Ant, Hubertus Bigend. Pollard is what the novel calls a ‘footagehead,’ a member of a thoroughly international online subculture that has emerged around film fragments of unknown origin that have captivated the fans’ imagination. In their Web-based forum, these fans endlessly discuss the enigmatic film’s sources, sets, and characters and develop varying theories as to whether the disjointed sequences should be understood as parts of a narrative whole. Bigend charges her with investigating the origin of these film fragments, though his interest seems to be less aesthetic than business oriented: in his view, the excitement around the footage is a phenomenon of trend formation that is of inherent interest to a marketing specialist. In pursuit of this mission, Pollard travels to France, Japan, and Russia, where she indeed succeeds in locating the creator of the film fragments: Nora Volkova, a Russian woman who suffered brain injury in a bomb attack

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that also killed both her parents and injured her sister, Stella, who now takes care of her. This scenario of loss clearly parallels Cayce Pollard’s own recent experience, since her father vanished the day of the World Trade Center attacks in New York. Risk, loss, mourning, and the international scope of terrorism – themes that form the background for the novel’s events – are highlighted through this juxtaposition. In this context of various forms of globalization, the jet lag that Cayce Pollard succumbs to, first in London and later during her stays in Tokyo and Moscow, turns into a complex metaphor for different kinds of disorientation and alienation. Most obviously, the temporal syncopation that occurs during her travel to different time zones reflects, at the level of ordinary experience, a time disruption that several of the novel’s characters perceive as a general historical condition. The fast pace of unexpected political events – most centrally, the rise of international terrorism and the attack on the World Trade Center – seems to be the main trigger for the characters’ sense of radical temporal discontinuity, as well as, more subtly, for a generalized cultural inability to envision the future as anything beyond ‘risk management,’ as Bigend phrases it at one point (57). While it is possible to read much of the novel as a lyrical and somewhat elegiac response to 9/11, such an approach would overemphasize its topical aspects; after all, almost all of Gibson’s novels from the 1980s and 1990s foreground a sense that a historical turning point has either just been passed (in the Sprawl Trilogy, with the characters’ reiterated assertion that ‘something changed’) or is just about to be reached (in the second trilogy, consisting of Virtual Light [1993], Idoru [1996] and All Tomorrow’s Parties [1999]). The real historical events that Gibson alludes to in this novel merely provide a new context for concerns about temporality and historicity that already prevailed in his earlier works. While Pattern Recognition’s jet lag motif is clearly designed to convey a sense of temporal and historical disorientation, it also points to questions of geographic and systemic mapping and mismapping. Cayce Pollard perceives her visits to Britain as an entry into what she calls a ‘mirror world’ – a phrase that indicates both similarity and difference, the world in the mirror and the world on the other side of the mirror. As an anglophone Western country, Britain seems just enough like the United States that it suggests similarity, even as Pollard constantly notices differences – from electric plugs to clothing styles to linguistic expressions – that might just make it the completely other world that Lewis Carroll’s Alice reaches by stepping through the mirror. To varying

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degrees, this eerie vacillation between similarity and difference also affects Pollard’s travels to cultures much more remote from her own, precisely because all of them are now subject to the homogenizing force of global markets. On her way from Narita Airport to downtown Tokyo, for example, she notices that the advertisements of familiar brands affect her differently in Japan because of the foreign context in which they materialize. And throughout the novel, she and other characters are keenly aware of the possibility that cultural difference itself might become more and more attenuated as the global commodity culture tightens its grip on even the most remote regions. Boone Chu, Pollard’s partner in the hunt for the creator of the film footage, points this out when she comments on the traditionally insular manufacturing traditions of both Britain and Japan: ‘I don’t think it’s going to be that way much longer. Not if the world’s Bigends keep at it: no borders, pretty soon there’s no mirror to be on the other side of. Not in terms of the bits and pieces, anyway’ (106). Much later, similar thoughts surge up in Pollard in the course of a dinner with her hosts in Russia, at a moment when she is ‘so tired ... [that] jet lag seems like a luxury of those who don’t travel much’ (333): ‘But perhaps, she thinks, this isn’t a Russian meal. Perhaps it’s a meal in that country without borders that Bigend strives to hail from, a meal in a world where there are no mirrors to find yourself on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations of the same thing’ (341). Jet lag, in this world ruled by a latter-day version of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand,’ is a symptom triggered not just by the mobility of individual bodies but by the mobility of capital, which leaps across borders to create a landscape of endlessly repeated products and signs against backgrounds that are different enough to give rise to eerie mixtures of the familiar and the alien. But if the prospect of a homogenized global culture is viewed with unease or resistance by the characters the reader is most likely to sympathize with, these characters seem to welcome the idea of a realm without borders where cyberspace is concerned. Indeed, it is precisely this removal of cultural and geographic difference and the impossibility of either literal or metaphorical jet lag that makes the online discussion forum around the mysterious film footage more of a home for Cayce Pollard than any of the physical locations the reader sees her visit over the course of the novel. ‘When she returns to the forum page, her post is there. It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a

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familiar café that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones’ (4). With this rootedness in the virtual rather than the real, Pollard joins a long line of Gibson protagonists who similarly find their true homes in the non-spatial reaches of digital networks.20 Perhaps not coincidentally, her first name is pronounced (though not spelled) identically to that of the protagonist of Gibson’s classic Neuromancer, the hacker Case, who experiences his logging onto the global data matrix as ‘the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity’ (52), even as his physical home, the urban sprawl reaching from Boston to Atlanta in the United States, is ‘a long strange way home over the Pacific’ (5). In a somewhat different way, Colin Laney, a data analyst in Gibson’s second trilogy, whose eerie intuitive ability to identify ‘nodal points’ of significance in the global information stream has clear parallels to Pollard’s own intuitive talent, finds his home at the moment of his physical death in a virtual scenario. As his body dies in a makeshift cardboard-box shelter in a homeless community below the Tokyo subway, his mind, still travelling in virtual space, encounters a replica of the orphanage he grew up in: ‘And the cold is everywhere, now, somewhere, but he is home at last.’21 Neither is Gibson alone in foregrounding the motif of the virtual home. In Snow Crash, Stephenson’s aptly named Hiro Protagonist shares a twenty-bythirty U-Stor-It locker with a roommate as his primary residence, but, since he was an early inhabitant of the Metaverse, Stephenson’s analogue to Gibson’s cyberspace, he was able to build a ‘nice big house’ there: ‘Real estate acumen does not always extend across universes,’ the narrator comments dryly.22 And, of course, the recurrence of the domestic space in van Gogh’s painting Bedroom at Arles in the virtual spaces portrayed in Plowing the Dark reflects a similar idea. The motif of characters who are uprooted and far away from anything like a physical home finding an alternative kind of spatial anchorage somewhere in virtual networks of information, therefore, has a long history in Gibson’s and other cyberpunk novelists’ writings and ties their more futuristic explorations of technology to the more contemporary ones of Plowing the Dark and Pattern Recognition.23 The fact that the online community in Gibson’s novel has emerged around film fragments of unquestionable aesthetic appeal provides a further parallel with Powers’s description of the deterritorialized homes of Adie Klarpol and Taimur Martin. As I mentioned earlier, one of the most striking aspects of Powers’s narrative is that these homes are based not on the virtual recreation of real places so much as on the

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virtual recreation of places already represented in another medium. Similarly, the virtual community that Pollard considers home has crystallized around film footage of uncertain geographical origin whose physical settings cannot be definitively associated with any known location: ‘Nothing [has surfaced] since that beach pan, and she does not subscribe to the theory that it is Cannes in winter. French footageheads have been unable to match it, in spite of countless hours recording pans across approximately similar scenery’ (4). Place, once again, is represented, but just what it is a representation of can no longer be determined with certainty. Yet it is precisely the ability to find a point of anchorage in an aesthetic medium, no matter how indeterminate its overall shape, temporality, spatiality, meaning, and context of creation might be, that serves as the foundation for community in Gibson’s virtual universe. If the discontinuity, indeterminacy, and anonymous authorship of the footage are the foundation of the virtual community Gibson describes, so is the fact that the film images are uncommodified, freely available on the Internet. As an aesthetically compelling work of pure art that can be accessed without economic exchange other than that of accessing a computer, the footage functions as the symbolic counterweight to the utterly commodified visual designs that Pollard is called on to evaluate for their effectiveness as trademark logos. But just as Pollard’s aptitude in such evaluations leads to the perpetuation of a market culture that makes her physically ill, her search for the creator of authentic, uncommodified art threatens at any moment to become the instrument by means of which this art will be integrated into the market. Hubertus Bigend obviously wants Pollard to find the filmmaker for reasons of professional advantage: he sees the popularity of the film footage as the result of a spectacularly successful if unintentional marketing strategy that might in the future be deployed for specific advertising purposes. That such ‘guerilla marketing’ strategies, in Bigend’s words (64), are already being systematically tried out becomes clear when Pollard’s London acquaintance Magda reveals that she gets paid to drop the names of certain products in seemingly casual bar and restaurant conversations. Pollard herself realizes this danger and warns Nora’s sister Stella of the marketing agents who will attempt to reach out to them, even as she promises not to reveal the Volkovas’ identity – too late, as it turns out, for she herself has been followed and surveilled all along. The ending leaves it open whether the film footage will be drawn into the machinations of global advertising or whether it will be able,

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owing to Nora Volkova’s unawareness of the world and her Mafia-boss uncle’s political and economic clout, to retain its independent existence among the online community of fans. But the overall tone of Gibson’s last chapter, much of which consists simply of the text of e-mail messages sent to Pollard from family, friends, and several of the people whom she met during her quest, is redemptive: Pollard has apparently been cured from her allergy to brand logos, the details of her father’s last days in Manhattan have been cleared up, she has become romantically involved with one of her long-time virtual friends from the footage community, and Stella Volkova promises that another segment of Nora’s film project will be released on the Web soon. Even the jet lag that marked the beginning of Pollard’s confrontation with global space has abated: ‘And now it’s late, close to the wolfing hour of soul-lack. But she knows, lying curled there, behind [her partner], in the darkness of this small room, with the somehow liquid background sounds of Paris, that hers has returned, at least for the meantime, reeled entirely in on its silver thread and warmly socketed’ (356). The accommodation to the dislocations of the global that Pollard has reached at this point seems to have been achieved in no small measure through the way in which her cyberspace experiences have connected her with actual places and people that previously were ghosts, of sorts, on the Web: not only her new lover Peter but also ‘the maker’ Nora Volkova and her sister Stella. In addition, she receives e-mails from many of the new friends whom she first met in actual space but now remains connected with electronically. Though Pattern Recognition shows in detail how deeply Internet culture is entangled with economic and corporate interests, just as Plowing the Dark pointed to the connections of virtual reality to military projects, it does deliberately continue to hold out the idea – perhaps the hope – that it will continue to serve as a point of encounter and aesthetic achievement that is not subsumed by the logic of global markets. Gibson’s and Powers’s novels, then, suggest that even as virtual space is clearly situated within the terrain of geopolitical confrontations and international market exchanges, it might become (or continue to be) a deterritorialized home, a post-geographical way of inhabiting the global that enables social connections not dominated by political oppression or economic exploitation: the online fan community, the encounter in the virtual cathedral, and the friendships established through the Internet suggest the possibility of such connections. More specifically, both Powers and Gibson gesture towards a space that tran-

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scends – in however metaphorical a fashion – the violence that characterizes the geopolitical context in both their novels, in which American imperialism, the Middle East crisis, and the attacks of 9/11 feature prominently. And in both their texts, art – be it painting, architecture, or film – plays a crucial role in shaping the contours of post-geographical homes and communities. But both narratives also remain ambivalent about how compatible such communities ultimately are with the normal functioning of markets and politics: towards the end of Plowing the Dark, Adie Klarpol abandons the work that made possible her cyberspatial encounter with Taimur Martin out of despair over its military links; and the disappearance of Cayce Pollard’s brand phobia at the end of Pattern Recognition leaves it uncertain whether her professional talent at predicting the effectiveness of such brands has also vanished and thereby left her without a career. But this scepticism seems to be swept aside or at least suspended in the redemptive endings of both novels – Taimur Martin’s release and reunion with his partner and daughter, in one case, and Cayce Pollard’s accomplishment of her mission and new romance with her cyberfriend. All this amounts, to be sure, to no more than a rather modest utopian vision, and one that can be accused – as cyberpunk often was in the 1990s – of eschewing any genuine social criticism, or even of glamorizing an otherwise dismal national and international state of affairs. But in response it has to be pointed out that Gibson’s most recent work actually engages current politics to a degree unprecedented in any of his earlier work, and Powers never has indulged in visions of technology detached from contemporary social contexts in the first place. Neither Plowing the Dark nor Pattern Recognition are primarily designed as textual platforms for the formulation of an alternative social vision, but rather as inquiries into the way in which new technologies shape our ways of travelling through and inhabiting spaces from the local and regional to the national and global. As I showed in the first part of this essay, such remappings of actual space through the virtual spaces of arts and media do not constitute a break with earlier concerns in the literature that has emerged around digital technology, but rather a continuation of one of its central themes. Islands in the Net demonstrates explicitly what is only implicit in many other cyberpunk works – namely, the effort to understand how individuals and communities might situate themselves in a global framework of reference, and what forms of inhabitation, deterritorialization, displacement and travel this resituating might generate. While new (and sometimes old) technologies and

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media are important tools in this process, it is the relation between older ways of inhabiting geographical space and emergent forms of travel and inhabitation integrating both actual and virtual spaces that cyberpunk most centrally addresses. Like Plowing the Dark and Pattern Recognition, what past and future literary works about digital technologies offer us are provisional maps for travel in postgeography.

N OTE S 1 William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (New York: Berkley, 2004), 1. All subsequent page references to this novel will be given parenthetically. 2 See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), originally published in 1964; Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); and Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Is Changing Our Lives, new ed. (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001). 3 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 44. 4 Ibid., 44. 5 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984); subsequent page references to this novel will be given parenthetically. Neuromancer is often credited as the first published source for the term. In fact, Gibson had already used it in his short story ‘Burning Chrome,’ which appeared in Omni magazine two years earlier (1982). It became the title story of a short story collection that appeared in 1986. For an exploration of the term ‘cyberspace’ in its varied cultural and technical applications, see Michael Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 6 ‘Cyberspace’ and ‘metaverse’ are William Gibson’s and Neal Stephenson’s terms for the realm of digital networks; ‘data-line’ is the corresponding term in Pat Cadigan’s Synners (London: HarperCollins, 1991). 7 Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991): 145–56; cf. Claire Sponsler, ‘Beyond the Ruins: The Geopolitics of Urban Decay and Cybernetic Play,’ Science-Fiction Studies 20 (1993): 261–3. 8 See, for example, Anne Balsamo, ‘Forms of Technological Embodiment: Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture,’ Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (New York: Routledge, 1999), 278–89; Bronwen Calvert, ‘Speaking the Body: The Embodiment of

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9

10

11

12 13

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“Feminist” Cyberpunk,’ in Speaking Science Fiction: Dialogues and Interpretations, ed. Andy Sawyer and David Seed (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 96–108; Tomás David, ‘The Technophilic Body: On Technicity in William Gibson’s Cyborg Culture,’ in The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (London: Routledge, 2000), 175–89; Katherine Hayles, ‘How Cyberspace Signifies: Taking Immortality Literally,’ in Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. George Slusser, Gary Westfahl, and Eric Rabkin (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 111–21; and Veronica Hollinger, ‘The Technobody and Its Discontentents,’ Science-Fiction Studies 24 (March 1997): 124–32. David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Doreen Massey, ‘Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,’ in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird et al. (London: Routledge, 1993), 59–69; James Clifford, ‘Traveling Cultures,’ in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 17–46. Maxine Feifer, Going Places (London: Macmillan, 1985); Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). See also John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2002), 90–2 and 141–61; in general, though, Urry continues to focus on physical mobility over its virtual counterparts. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad, updated ed. (Buenos Aires: Paidós), 2001. There is a fourth body of work that builds on metaphors of nomadism and deterritorialization in the work of French poststructuralists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Their terminology overlaps in part with the sociological work I am referring to, but the complexity of their uses of the term ‘deterritorialization’ and its multiple metaphorical applications make it difficult to use in the context I am exploring here. Caren Kaplan’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary as unreflective of its anchoring in European colonial discourses does not, I believe, apply to the theorists I have mentioned, who do not connect the concept of deterritorialization with any mythical image of nomadism and deserts in the way she foregrounds (Questions of Travel [Durham: Duke University Press, 1996], 85–100). John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 29–30. In his essay ‘Cyberspace and the Globalization of Culture,’ Jon Stratton connects Gibson’s concept of ‘cyberspace’ with that of ‘deterritorialization’ as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Pla-

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14 15 16

17 18

19 20

21 22 23

teaus when he argues that ‘the opening up of cyberspace begins a new movement of hyper-deterritorialization, this time within the exchange system of capitalism’ (724). Stratton is concerned with the realm of digitally supported global market exchanges, not their cultural representation. Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net (New York: Ace, 1989). All subsequent page references to this novel will be given parenthetically. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam, 1992); Alexander Besher, Rim: A Novel of Virtual Reality (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). Andrew Ross’s and Darko Suvin’s brief readings of Islands in the Net, both dismissive in tone, grossly understate the complexity of Sterling’s engagement with the question of globalization in this novel (Ross, Strange Weather, 157; Darko Suvin, ‘On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF,’ in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, ed. Larry McCaffery [Durham: Duke University Press, 1991]: 361–2). Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000). All subsequent page references to this novel will be given parenthetically. The plot strand involving Taimur Martin is consistently narrated in the second person singular throughout the novel, a narrative strategy that is meant to echo early textual computer games whose interface with the user was based on second-person address. Or imagined she did – it is not clear from Klarpol’s account whether she lays claim to actual telekinesis or merely to an intense hallucination. The phenomenon of ‘virtual communities’ on the Internet has been analysed by Howard Rheingold in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (New York: HarperCollins, 1994); in his more recent discussion of one such community, the MIT-based ‘FutureCulture,’ P. Shawn Wilbur mentions that ‘people still talk about FC using words like “home,” which is startling’ – an observation that precisely corresponds to Gibson’s formulation. Wilbur, ‘An Archaeology of Cyberspaces: Virtuality, Community, Identity,’ in The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (London: Routledge, 2000), 54. Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties (New York: Berkley, 1999), 317. Stephenson, Snow Crash, 26. For a discussion of how media programs and websites can come to function as important locales for individuals, see David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity (London: Routledge, 1995); Caren Kaplan alludes to this phenomenon when she argues that ‘the “local” is not really about a specific intrinsic territory but about the construction of bundles or clusters of identities in and through the cultures of transnational capitalism’ (Questions of Travel, 159).

EPILOGUE

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11 ‘Tears at the End of the Road’: The Impasse of Travel and the Walls at Angel Island georges van den abbeele

In the middle of San Francisco Bay there is an island – Angel Island – by far the largest island there. On its shores, nestled in an overgrown ravine opening onto a pebbly beach known as China Cove, stand the dilapidated remains of what once was the primary immigration station for entry into the United States via the Pacific route, the West Coast equivalent, it has often been said, of New York’s Ellis Island Immigration Station.1 That East Coast point of entry, painstakingly and expensively restored in recent years for modern-day visitors, has become synonymous with patriotic pride and the welcome embrace of a nation built by immigrants, a nation beckoning abroad, in Emma Lazarus’s famous words, to those ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ The West Coast counterpart to Ellis Island has been rather forgotten, however, steeped as it is in the shame and prejudice of refusing entry to those huddled masses whose home happened to be Asia rather than Europe. Built to enforce racist legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ severely limiting immigration from Japan (1908), and the 1924 Immigration Act barring entry to all Asians as ‘aliens ineligible for citizenship,’2 Angel Island became less an immigration processing centre than an interrogation and detention facility where at any given time hundreds of Chinese and other immigrants were held for weeks, months, sometimes even years while officials deliberated over whether they should be admitted to the United States or deported back over the Pacific Ocean. Inside the surviving barracks, one can still see today scores of poems in Chinese characters literally carved into the walls, carefully composed in accordance with the rules of classical Chinese prosody, and lyrically expressing the dismay of travellers whose voyage had been cut short literally within sight of

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their destination.3 What can the texts at Angel Island – place bound and anonymous as they are – tell us about the writing of travel in general? Travel writing is preeminently a recuperative genre. Its exemplary form is the private journal, diary, or logbook onto whose pages are dutifully recorded everything of consequence that happens, along with much of no consequence or interest at all. Just as the logbook takes its place among the baggage, accompanying the traveller along the way, hence becoming a metonym of the itinerary as it is carried from place to place, so its entries mime the journey’s narrative, sequenced as they are by the post hoc propter hoc rule of calendar dates and locatable place names. Brought back home, the sequence of entries can be published tel quel, forgotten in some attic, mined for material to be used in unrelated writings, or obsessively edited and re-edited, sometimes for years or even decades.4 The claims of authenticity in such texts are validated by the eyewitness testimony gotten from first-hand observations written down, temporally as well as spatially, on the spot (at least in their primordial iterations). Such authenticity in the inscription of events in turn bolsters our sense of the author’s identity and authority as a cognizant observer, trustworthy narrator, and experientially wizened wayfarer. There are, of course, alternative forms of travel writing. Some travelogues exist, for example, as collections of letters, each composed at a succeeding location/date and mailed to some addressee back home who thus receives the narrative in piecemeal, serial fashion. Goethe initially composed his Italienische Reise as such a series of letters to Charlotte von Stein, and similarly, his contemporary Madame du Boccage wrote to her sister back home.5 The result, except for the effects of serialization and the foregrounding of an addressee, is not appreciably different from the standard journal narrative in terms of its claims to objective authenticity or subjective identity. Are there forms of travel writing, though, that are not primarily about asserting the traveller’s identity and claim to knowledge? Admittedly, this is the model that holds for much of what we colloquially like to think of as travel literature – namely, that written by explorers, adventurers, or even tourists, all of whom set out on a journey in search of new experiences with the expectation that they will return home to tell all about what happened to them. The production of that experiential and empowering narrative is a telos of such travel (among others), one that, as the old German saying goes, ‘Wenn einer eine Reise tut, dann kann er viel erzählen,’ empowers the returning traveller from Odysseus to Andrew X. Pham as a subject of remarkable knowledge, identity, or experience who accord-

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ingly has much to tell.6 The fact that the text of the narrative has travelled along with and been brought back home – relatio – by the traveller corroborates the value of the journey, at least in this conventional Western model, which was first shaped by the ritual of Christian pilgrimage, then by that of the secularized but aristocratic ‘Grand Tour,’ before its commodification under the conditions of modern mass tourism. Where once the traveller returned with a written relation, nowadays the tourist brings back an array of snapshots, video footage, and postcards, along with that special, fetishized commodity form known as ‘souvenirs.’ The poems carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station do not move. They certainly do not accompany the traveller back to the comfort of a home where the story of the voyage can be told. The poems remain, but the poets have long passed on, where we do not know. Were they allowed entry or were they deported? We do not know. Until very recently, not a single author had been identified; and to date, very little significant information has been gathered about why or how the writing occurred. Many former detainees admit that they saw text on the walls, but none claim any of the poems as their own. In the spring of 2003, an elderly gentleman from Salinas, California, admitted to having written a poem, but before anyone could interview him to find out which poem, or why or how, he sadly passed away, taking those secrets to the grave, as has apparently happened with the countless other poets. No empowering narrative here. The writer’s identity is lost and cannot be recuperated from the texts left in situ, even when some signature has been apposed: a proper name (Ruan, ‘One named Xu’) but more commonly a location (‘By One from Xiangshan,’ ‘Written by a Taoist from the Town of Iron’), or very rarely both: ‘By Li Jingbo of Taishan District.’ Is the literature of immigration a genre of travel literature, or vice versa? Or, is it something completely different? Immigrant stories typically include travel, indeed the journey to a new home is the very prerequisite of immigration, its enabling condition, and many immigration narratives begin quite logically with the event of the trip. But the story of immigration, its pathos and substance, is not about the movement from place to place but rather about the struggle with the imperatives of cultural adaptation and assimilation. The immigrant is someone who succeeds in finding a place within a new society, even if that ‘place’ is less than satisfactory, if it involves less than full admission into the host culture, or alternatively, if the price paid for that acceptance is the hollowed loss of one’s own sense of differentiated identity. Changing one’s habits, one’s clothing, diet, profession, religion, language, even chang-

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ing one’s name, is the very grist of the immigrant narrative, at the end of which a new home and identity exists in lieu of the old. Trinh T. Minh-ha eloquently depicts the immigrant’s predicament: ‘It is through the politics of denationalizing the refugee and the emigré, that a person-who-leaves becomes normalized, being systematically compelled to undergo the process of giving up their home, their country, their languages, their identity, their proper name. In order to be accepted, one has to abandon one’s unwanted self. In order to belong anew, one has to take the oath of loyalty, which entails dis-loyalty to one’s home nation and identity. Hardly have the newcomers reached the host territory than they’re made to experience the mutilation of their name which, if not entirely changed, can only survive in fragments – shortened, misspelled, mispronounced, or replaced by an equivalent.’7 This does not mean, of course, that the old simply disappears. For some immigrants, everything associated with the ‘old country’ is aggressively forgotten and repressed to the extent possible (often resurfacing in a subsequent generation eager to retrace its ‘roots’); for others, the old remains a profound subject of nostalgia, even longing or mourning, something to keep ‘alive’ precisely by maintaining the old language, traditions, diet, and so on. If travel narrative typically tells the story of leaving home and coming back again, the literature of immigration has more precisely to reconcile the difficult transition between old and new homes. Detainees at Angel Island were travellers but not yet immigrants, since they had still to set foot on the shores of the continent where they sought their new home. If they were deported, they returned to a home they had chosen to abandon, and that would not be the triumphant arrival of the prodigal grand tourist empowered by the tale of sights seen. Instead, it would be the humiliating failure at immigration coupled with the financial distress of having to pay back money borrowed on the chance of making it rich on the other side of the ocean, in the land known in China as Gam Saan, the Gold Mountain: Barred from landing, I really am to be pitied. My heart trembles at being deported back to China. I cannot face the elders east of the river. I came to seek wealth but instead reaped poverty.8 If I do not get to this city, I will be unhappy. If I return home, my parents would be extremely grief-torn. (#68, 132)

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Not only is the possibility of assimilation barred, but the very movement of travel is blocked by the literal incarceration within what the poets refer to only as muk uk, ‘the wooden building,’ in a place they also simply call ‘island.’9 This figure of speech, by which a common noun substitutes for a proper noun (antonomasis in classical Western rhetoric), not only flies in the face of the obsession with place and place names that marks both travel and immigrant literature (and defines their claim to realism and authenticity) but also, more obliquely, hints at a much more distressing fate that befalls the properness of names at Angel Island. Islands are, of course, a primary topos of travel narrative, whether as the sequenced ports of call in a maritime itinerary like Rabelais’s Quart Livre, or as fantastic worlds unto themselves as in More’s Utopia. As if striving to bridge these two defining moments, the sixteenth-century cosmographer, André Thevet, wrote a book describing the entire world – a cosmo-graphy – as a catalogue of islands (including, notoriously, one named after himself).10 Islands can be idyllic places of repose (Bougainville or Gaugin’s Tahiti) or enclosed spaces with no escape. The castaway motif indelibly linked to the name of Robinson Crusoe also steers us straight towards the very concept of island as prison: St Helena, Devil’s Island, or Alcatraz (Angel Island’s tinier but far betterknown sibling). La Isla de los Angeles was christened by the Spanish Captain Juan Manual de Ayala in August 1775, six years to the day after the Portola expedition reached and named Los Angeles, both following the Spanish cartographical custom of naming newly discovered places by the corresponding date in the liturgical calendar.11 But the feast of Our Lady of the Angels is more than a coincidental date for the Franciscan friars who led the Spanish settling of California, for that feast also marks the day in 1208 when St Francis of Assisi founded the order named after him. California’s two major cities and its most historic island are thus linked by a forgotten Franciscan nomenclature that retains the traces of its founding colonial trajectories. Curiously, though, Ayala’s journal cites his entry into San Francisco as 5 August, even though according to the liturgical calendar, the feast day for Our Lady of the Angels is 2 August. Was he simply confused about the date he marked in his journal or was he unclear with regard to the liturgical calendar? Perhaps he considered the stated discovery date close enough to the feast day to apply the name of the one to the name of the other. This is another of Angel Island’s many mysteries, and one that

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goes to the very legitimacy of its name, just as so many who passed through there did so at the cost of their own name’s legitimacy. But when the Angel Island poets reduce a contrario the toponym to a generic landmark, when Angel Island becomes simply ‘island’ and the immigration station ‘this wooden house,’ other things are happening. Perhaps there was a fear of censorship or reprisals for more direct expression, encouraging a reluctance not only to sign one’s name but also to name the proximate reference of the poetry, – that is, the Immigration Station itself and everything it represented. We know that immigration officials repeatedly painted over the walls, and that when writers carved rather than simply inked their work, station staff applied putty. Ironically, the putty has actually worked to preserve many of the poems while others have come into view as layers of paint slowly peel off over time. The remains of the immigration station have thus become a gigantic palimpsest of texts upon texts, an archaeological tapestry whose ‘restoration’ is of almost unimaginable difficulty and complexity. The obliteration of proper nouns has another, more troubling parallel: for many an immigrant, their passport through ‘island’ required nothing less than the suppression of their own name. I refer not merely to the anonymity of the writers (whose signatures, when they so rarely appear, leave us little if any means to recover individual identities), but to the claims to a false identity that for many immigrants was their only hope of entry to the land of Gold Mountain. There are no laws without loopholes, strategic or casual, and the laws decreeing Chinese exclusion from entry to the United States were no exception. Merchants, diplomats, and some other professionals were exempt and were allowed entry, as were family members of American citizens (and for Asian Americans prior to the 1943 passage of the Magnuson Act, citizenship could only be by birth). In 1906 the great earthquake destroyed the San Francisco Customs House and its records, thus opening the door to a unique opportunity to circumvent the exclusion laws. Without records to verify the claims of family identity, a market arose in southern China that sold ‘paper’ identities to would-be immigrants. The American response was to construct the Immigration Station on Angel Island as a secure and isolated detention facility where officials could interrogate these ‘paper sons’ and ‘paper daughters’ at length, to see if their stories matched those independently elicited from their supposed American relatives. The Chinese-American community responded in turn by producing coaching books in which the paper relative could learn about his or her

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claimed family (these were diligently memorized during the passage over, then tossed overboard before American shores were reached), and by elaborate systems of notes sent to detainees via the kitchen staff, who were allowed to travel between the island and San Francisco.12 We have no idea how many of the approximately 175,000 Chinese immigrants who came through Angel Island were paper relations, but the interrogation practices of the Immigration Service were often unable to distinguish between them and real relatives, who sometimes found themselves barred from entering the United States after failing to answer interrogators’ questions to their satisfaction. In at least one case, a paper brother was interviewed before his supposed sibling, who was travelling with him, thus obliging the real brother to tally his answers according to the references provided by his paper relation: So my paper brother got the upper bunk, and I got the lower bunk. He would sleep in the upper and I would sleep in the lower. So we stayed there for about two weeks. And, when it came to interrogation, you know, by the examiner, they called me first, and the examiner asked me questions, you know: ‘Where did I live?’ ‘How my house was built?’ and to give him an idea of what it looks like, and how many rooms, and so forth, you see. And whether there were any alleys around or not, and so forth. So, I described it according to my house! [Laughter] So anyway, I told the examiner about my factual house! So, what I told him, my paper brother would not know that! Because he is from a different family, different names, I mean really! But on the paper, it was the same name! So, during the lunch break, very quickly, I went to inform my paper brother about the facts I told the examiner! I said: That, and that, and that! So when the examiner asks you, you answer, that, that, that! Otherwise, you will be inconsistent, you will say the wrong thing, you know! You couldn’t be brothers, if you say different things! But he said exactly what I said. I think that’s why the examiner believed we were brothers [Laughter].’13

Thus, the ‘wrong’ answer could indeed turn out to be the ‘right’ one, and vice versa. As for those paper sons and daughters who were able to enter the United States, they were obliged to continue the façade of an assumed identity for years, if not the rest of their lives, out of fear they would be discovered and deported. Continuing INS raids on Chinese-American communities further heightened fear and suspicion, even in recent years this abetted a general reluctance among immigrants to come for-

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ward to tell their stories. The first published oral histories of former Angel Island detainees, in the 1980s, were only obtained by the assigning of assumed names, which meant that in many cases a third name covered over a paper name that covered over a birth name.14 We cannot be certain whether the poets on Angel Island were using false identities or not. But clearly, the place they called ‘island’ put them in a world of shifting identities, suppression of names, and fictive narration. And we can say that, contrary to the stereotype of the Chinese immigrant as illiterate peasant or ‘coolie,’ the people who wrote poems on the station walls were literate and well educated, judging by the classical characters in which they wrote and by their extensive literary and historical allusions. Imagine the walls at Ellis Island inscribed with perfect Shakespearian sonnets full of references to Greek and Roman heroes, and the social/educational status of these immigrants becomes increasingly clear. And given the difficulty of memorizing an entire booklet of facts about someone else’s life and family and the intellectual ability required to recall such trivia under prolonged and repeated interrogation, those who sought to immigrate as paper sons or daughters had to have been unusually smart, if not among China’s best and brightest. Most Chinese immigrants to the United States before 1950 were of Cantonese origin, especially from the Pearl River delta, which in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suffered from tremendous poverty and deprivation. Yet historically, this area has been among China’s most productive and prosperous areas.15 Today, of course, Guangdong province is the heart of China’s booming industrial economy. Does writing take place while travelling or during respites along the way? When does the conventional traveller write if not at the end of the day, in the quiet of one’s lodging, when the day’s journey can be recounted at ease? Is not the sedentary work of composition and inscription fundamentally at odds with the experience of motion, a dialectical opposition sublated and confounded today by our modern, mechanized, and industrialized forms of transportation, which allow the traveller to move while remaining seated in a comfortable recliner disturbed only by the occasional ‘turbulence’ and calls to fasten one’s seatbelt? Do we need in some way not to be travelling in order to write about our travels? Or is it that being sedentary is the condition for that other kind of motion we call writing, itself almost universally metaphorized as a special kind of travel?16 If the writing does not move with the traveller as in our ‘conventional

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model,’ can writing move the sedentarized traveller? Marco Polo’s grand excursion to China is a good example of an account that was not written on the spot in a journal brought along for the journey; he wrote it well after the fact while he was wasting away in a Genoese prison, where he told ‘what little he was able to remember’ to another inmate, Rustichello of Pisa, considered the true author of the Travels.17 Between the belated and admittedly ‘partial’ reconstruction of the itinerary and its transmission via an authorial intermediary, suspicions were cast right from the beginning on the marvels described by the itinerant Venetian and placing his relatively realist travelogue (given the times) in the same category as Sir John Mandeville’s utterly fanciful adventures.18 Polo’s nickname, ‘Il Milione’ (i.e., big talker), whether factual or inspired by his travel accounts, certainly did not help. Of more direct interest here is the framing of his travel story in a context of incarceration, as if being forcibly deprived of travel by dint of confinement promoted its discursive re-enactment. Is the prison a privileged locus of writing travel? ‘Alas, this wooden building disrupts my traveling schedule,’ reads a line from one of the Angel Island poems (#33, 70). The writing on the wall happens because travel has been blocked and movement has come to a stop. At best an inconvenient detour, the wooden building on the island is for many something far worse: a sudden and unanticipated end of the road. The barrack wall is both writing surface and the literalization of this impasse: ‘Curled up in an enclosure, my movements are dictated by others, / Enduring a hundred humiliations, I can only cry in vain’ (#24, 60). Tears at the end of the road? The image recurs in a number of poems, and its meaning is glossed, as so many others are, by reference to an ancient hero or scholar, which is also where we encounter a dramatic resurfacing of proper names. Indeed, a number of poems list the names of ancient heroes and cite their deeds as encouragement for those currently undergoing the ordeal of detainment: On a long voyage, I traveled across the sea. Feeding on wind and sleeping on dew, I tasted hardships. Even though Su Wu was detained among the barbarians, he would one day return home. When he encountered a snow storm, Wengong sighed, thinking of bygone years. In days of old, heroes underwent many ordeals.

248 Georges Van Den Abbeele I am, in the end, a man whose goal is unfulfilled. (#57, 122) I leave word for my compatriots not to worry too much. They mistreat us but we need not grieve. Han Xin was straddled by a bully’s trousers yet became a general. Goujian endured humiliation and ultimately avenged his wrong. King Wen was imprisoned at Youli and yet destroyed King Zhou. Even though fate was perverse to Jiang Taigong, still he was appointed marquis. Since days of old, such has been the fate of heroes. With extreme misfortune comes the composure to await the opportunity for revenge. (#59, 124)

The names of the heroes open up the possibility of new horizons, of renewed travel via the spatio-temporal displacement implied in the rhetoric of allusion. By recalling a distant past in a now distant homeland, heroic allusion bridges the distress of the traveller’s predicament with the comfort of the familiar, while offering an encouraging example of hardship overcome. Poetic language here becomes an alternative (to) transportation and an expression of triumph in travel corroborated by the seal of a proper name, whose signature persists over time as an inspirational point of reference. But what of that specific reference we mentioned, that of the defeat of reaching the end of the road and having nothing to show for it but tears? An exemplary name appears in conjunction with this theme, though a name less clearly heroic or triumphant: When Ruan Ji reached the end of the road, he shed futile tears. (#30, 66) Who would have known I would be imprisoned on Island? I beat my breast when I think of China and cry bitterly like Ruan Ji. (#43, 92) When Ruan Ji reached the end of the road, who took pity on his weeping? (#62, 126) As we depart from the native village, we shed tears again and again, as if we had reached the end of the road.19

Who was Ruan Ji, and what is the meaning of his tears? According to the gloss provided by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung in

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their edition of Angel Island poetry, Ruan Ji (or Juan Chi, as his name is sometimes spelled) was ‘a scholar during the period of the Three Kingdoms (ad 220–280)’ and ‘a person who enjoyed drinking and visiting mountains and streams. Often when he reached the end of the road, he would cry bitterly before turning back.’20 While many ancient Chinese heroes are mentioned in the Angel Island poems as edifying examples of how to overcome hardship and exile, Ruan Ji initially seems to have been the consummate antihero, a bon vivant and a sentimental poet of ‘the heart.’ One of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (a favourite topic of Chinese and Japanese painters), he rejected the Confucian ethic of public service in favour of a Daoist-inspired reclusive life of drink, philosophical conversation, and aesthetic expression. Nature walks and travel formed part of this aestheticism, and Ruan Ji’s tears at coming to the end of a trail would seem to speak more to the passing of a simple pleasure than to the hardship of an incarceration that prevents one from ever reaching the intended destination. The tears of the Angel Island poets are spilled because their trip has been interrupted at the very last moment, and the sense of ‘futility’ comes from the individual’s inability to cross the physical and symbolic barrier that is the immigration station. Ruan Ji’s tears, by contrast, appear to be shed from the sadness of a destination reached, from the mourning over the closure of adventure and consequent return to a less eventful normality. Thus viewed, Ruan Ji’s tears seem a most unlikely, even incongruous, allusion to express the dismay and frustration of detention on Angel Island. But perhaps what matters most is that these are the tears of a traveller and a poet; this makes Ruan Ji less an exemplary hero like Su Wu or Wu Yuan, whose courageous actions serve as emblems of determination in the face of adversity, than a metaphor for those very poet/ travellers who suddenly discover themselves at the end of a road they had hoped would continue just a little farther. The tears are an expression of emotion felt at the abrupt end of a motion that had been understood as the exhilarating possibility of horizons constantly opening up, and at its replacement by an impassible barrier or wall. Bitterness and futility arise from the consequent necessity of retracing one’s steps back to a home one wanted to leave behind. Thus, ‘I beat my breast when I think of China and cry bitterly like Ruan Ji,’ writes one poet. All of these tears are, of course, to no avail, and the lack of response and pity is a common theme: ‘When Ruan Ji reached the end of the road, who took pity on his weeping?’ Yet another poet reads, ‘This person’s tears fall, but what can the blue heavens do?’ (#24, 60). Two others: ‘The poet at

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the end of the road can only ascend a tower’ (#38, 88); ‘Leaving behind my writing brush and removing my sword, I came to America. Who was to know two streams of tears would flow upon arriving here?’ (#35, 84). This emotional outpouring knows no bounds for the poet/traveller detained within the boundaries of the station walls. The response to the end of all travel is an endless amount of writing: ‘My belly brims with discontent, too numerous to inscribe on bamboo slips’ (#20, 56); ‘Even if we scraped the surfaces of all the bamboo on the Zhongnan Mountains, we could not write all our words of discontent’ (140). There is not enough inscribable space (paper, traditional bamboo slips, barrack walls) to write all that must be written by the traveller frustrated in the goal of reaching his end. Indeed, no amount of writing or tears in the style of Ruan Ji can overcome the barrier to travel literalized by the barrack walls and institutionalized by the Immigration Service proceedings. I say ‘his’ here because all the extant poetry is taken from the walls of the men’s barracks. Women were lodged in a wing of the main administration building, which burned to the ground in 1940, forcing the closure of the entire immigration station. We know that women detainees also wrote poetry, but material evidence of it vanished in the fire. Interestingly, in the absence of that material evidence, we here do have testimony from someone who not only describes seeing the poetry on the walls but also cites a poem she herself wrote at the time of her detention: ‘The bathroom was filled with poems expressing sadness and bitterness. They were about how hard the stay at Angel Island was, how sad and depressed the women were, not knowing when they would be allowed to leave the island. During one of my more painful moments, I wrote this poem: From across the Pacific Ocean to America I left my village and all my loved ones. Who would have thought I would be imprisoned in this wooden barrack? I do not know when I will ever be set free.21

If the proverbial journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, the detainee experience on Angel Island was rather that a single step began with a journey of a thousand miles – the single step being the one

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onto American soil, by which Gold Mountain would be attained. Taking that step, though, was far from assured and was utterly dependent on the whims of the immigration authorities. In many cases, the time spent on Angel Island waiting to know whether one would be allowed to take that final step far outweighed the time it took to cross the ocean by steamship, and that final step was often denied. Accordingly, detention on Angel Island should be understood as constituting a distinct phase of the journey and not merely an appendix. The travelling that began on the western edge of the Pacific included the detention experience as its decisive event, a moment of arrested travel whose outcome defined the meaning of the journey as a whole. For many, the experience on board the steamship was already that of a voyage denied – of living in a cramped, crowded enclosure with almost no freedom of movement. Conditions in steerage were especially restricted and unpleasant, as one former detainee described: ‘Me and my paper brother stayed in steerage, in the rear part of the ship. So they had a whole bunch of bunks and a whole bunch of people. So I stayed in there. We weren’t permitted to go anywhere except that area. So we could only go up above on the deck, and we couldn’t look around. It was real hard from the stern of the ship; you see the ocean, miles and miles away.’22 No matter how the voyage was experienced, however, arrival on Angel Island meant not the end of a difficult itinerary but its awful prolongation, another kind of travelling in place, but this time without even the comfort of making measurable progress towards one’s destination: The waves are happy, laughing ‘Ha-ha!’ When I arrived on Island, I heard I was forbidden to land. I could do nothing but frown and feel angry at heaven. (#2, 34) Everyone says traveling to North America is a pleasure. I suffered misery on the ship and sadness in the wooden building. After several interrogations, still I am not done. (#6, 38) It was on the day that the Weaver Maiden met the Cowherd That I took passage on the President Lincoln. I ate wind and tasted waves for more than twenty days. Fortunately, I arrived safely on the American continent. I thought I could land in a few days. How was I to know I would become a

252 Georges Van Den Abbeele prisoner suffering in the wooden building? (#7, 38) For over a month, I have experienced enough winds and waves. Now on an extended sojourn in jail, I am subject to the ordeals of prison life. (#9, 40)

The tribulations of the voyage are thus continued by the internment: The months and years are wasted and still it has not ended. Up to now, I am still trapped on a lonely island. (#11, 42)

For some, the end of the road becomes indistinguishable from the beginning: Four days before the Qiqiao Festival, I boarded the steamship for America. Time flew like a shooting arrow. Already, a cool autumn has passed. Counting on my fingers, several months have elapsed. Still I am at the beginning of the road. I have yet to be interrogated. My heart is nervous with anticipation. (#5, 36)

If, as one poet writes, ‘this wooden building disrupts my traveling schedule’ (#33, 70), it is because the stop on Angel Island disrupts the very meaning of travel, indecidably altering beginning and end, departure and destination, even the primal difference between seascape and landscape: The seascape resembles lichen twisting and turning for a thousand li. There is no shore to land and it is difficult to walk. With a gentle breeze I arrived at the city thinking all would be so. At ease, how was one to know he was to live in a wooden building? (#1, 34) I have infinite feelings that the ocean has changed into a mulberry grove. My body is detained in this building. I cannot fly from this grassy hill, And green waters block the hero. Impetuously, I threw away my writing brush. My efforts have all been in vain.

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It is up to me to answer carefully. I have no words to murmur against the east wind. (#25, 60)

This last poem, signed by one ‘Ruan,’ remarkably condenses many of the themes prevalent throughout other Angel Island poems while proposing its own alternative phrasing of them. The first line recalls poem #1 with the transformation of the ocean waves into a field of overgrown plant life (whether lichens or mulberry); but whereas the earlier poem signifies the essential indistinguishability of earth and sea, the latter one more ambitiously develops that sign of transformation into the very meaning of imprisonment and the loss of the freedom to move.23 The poet’s ‘feelings’ of such a reversal having occurred are a conscious expression of the predicament of being ‘detained in this building.’ The freedom and possibility symbolized by the open sea – the anticipation of travel – are shut down by its transformation into an impassible thicket, an endless bramble, indecidably wave and vegetation: ‘green waters block the hero.’ Other poems indicate that the wooden building was painted green and that its surroundings were grassy, but #25 further adduces the greenness of the sea as completing the traveller’s imprisonment: ‘I cannot fly from this grassy hill, and green waters block the hero.’24 Other poems, as we have seen, allude to the courageous will of the ancient heroes as inspiration to overcome the harshness of the detention setting, but this one dramatically underscores the futility of their example: the generic ‘hero’ is inevitably trapped in an inextricable web of green (vegetation, waters, walls) that defeats all attempts at escape or resistance or even the attempt to make some sense of this situation: ‘My efforts have all been in vain.’ Writing generally appears in this poetry as a supplement to travel, as something that can take the place of movement, the motion of an inscription that makes up for the lack of motion; in this poem, writing itself is revealed in its futility: ‘Impetuously, I threw away my writing brush.’ But what is discarded in this action is not just the instrument for writing but the professional identity of the one who wields that instrument – that is, the scholar and poet. Even though this is a rare ‘signed’ poem (‘By Ruan’) the text is all about the loss of that identity that typically comes from signing one’s name, it is about the futility and vanity of being either a hero or a scholar, the impossibility of action to define oneself in a world where oceans trade places with mulberry groves. Instead, the poet resigns himself to the tragedy of verbal passivity in the ordeal of interrogation and possible deportation: ‘It is up to me to answer care-

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fully. I have no words to murmur against the East wind.’ This amounts to a supreme gesture of defeat: the poet par excellence, the maker of words, can only be someone who responds to the words of others and who has ‘no words’ that can answer effectively the demands of the East wind. For someone on the west coast of North America, the east wind is the force that blows you back across the Pacific to the place Westerners call the Far East, even though it is the West of the West.25 Poem #25 is powerful and poignant in its expression of the futility of tears at the end of the road. It is also remarkable for the sheer sweep of its rejection of any consolation. That inconsolability is ironically underscored by the reverse semiotics of signing the poem (with a signature that nonetheless tells us little about its signatory) while leaving the ‘hero’ referent nameless, in pointed contrast to the surrounding poems, which though unsigned find inspiration in naming the heroes. For the poet of #25, even the compensatory rhetoric of heroic allusion is ‘blocked,’ leading to the ‘impetuous’ rejection of the writer’s own identity in the act of throwing away his writing brush. A name is signed (whether ‘real’ or ‘paper’) even though there is no more safety in words, ‘no words to murmur against the East wind.’ The poem eloquently bears witness to an extraordinary sense of individual isolation and personalized loss that remains as inconsolable as its author’s identity is irretrievable. It is no longer the ‘who’ that matters but the ‘what’ and ‘where,’ in a place where meanings and names turn into their opposites: sea and land, birth name and paper name, and so on. It is, in other words, the specificity of the Angel Island experience itself that motivates and explicates the meaning of the poem, the fact of the place rather than the being of the traveller, in a bitter reversal of conventional travel literature. Today, the visitor enters the grounds of the Immigration Station backwards as it were, approaching the facility overland after hiking from an adjacent cove, then slowly spiralling down into the ravine, past where once stood the staff cottages,26 out into the broadening canyon bracketed by the Chinese men’s barracks to the left and the hospital to the right, before emerging into a bright open space dotted with palm trees and picnic tables set out along the bay. For all the idyllic trappings of an island paradise, that open space still bears, for the attentive observer, the architectural footprint of the great three-storey administration building – the ‘wooden’ building – that was the station’s massive core, including processing facilities, interrogation rooms, the women’s bar-

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racks, and so on. Here, in 1940, a fire consumed the building as well as the wharf where boats bearing immigrants would dock. That damage – which precipitated the station’s official closing – and the subsequent decades of neglect mean that we can no longer retrace the footsteps of those who disembarked after an anxious sea voyage and who were immediately subjected to the gamut of xenophobic suspicion. We can only try to imagine what they underwent after we ourselves have come down to that place ‘from the other side,’ literally and figuratively. The remaining buildings were slated for demolition and would have been razed too, save for the alertness and determination of park ranger Alexander Weiss, who brought the wall writing to the attention of Chinese-American scholars and activists in San Francisco, beginning the long process of preservation (culminating in the station’s 1997 designation as a National Historic Landmark) and restoration/commemoration (still very much in progress). Ultimately, it is the place itself that retains the memory of travel through the nameless work of those who wrote on its walls in the hope of travelling farther rather than staying there to write. If travel writing has typically meant the signed recordings of travellers whose writing of travel powerfully supports their subjectivity as writing travellers/travelling writers, the poems on Angel Island bear the trace of anonymous travellers in transit, about whom we know all too little before or after that momentous stopping place on their journey. At the end of the road, in the very impasse of travel, we find not the affirmation of the traveller’s identity but rather what remains of his tears, traced on the wall of a wooden building on a lonely island, where the names have all gone astray.

N OTE S 1 The designation seems to be about as old as the Immigration Station itself. Cf. Mary Bamford, Angel Island: The Ellis Island of the West (Chicago: Woman’s American Baptist Home Mission Society, 1917). Very good general information on the exclusion legislation and on the history of the Immigration Station at Angel Island can be found on the website of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation: www.aiisf.org. On the general history of the island itself, see John Soennichsen, Miwoks to Missiles: A History of Angel Island (Tiburon: Angel Island Association, 2001). I have also benefited in this study from personal contact with a number of the lead

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2

3

4

5

6

scholars and personnel associated with the AIISF, including Erika Gee, Katherine Toy, Judy Yung, and Him Mark Lai, whom I thank here while avowing that any mistakes or misunderstandings are rigorously my own. I also thank my research assistant, Aaron DiFranco, and the students who studied the Immigration Station and undertook related oral history projects with me at UC Davis in the fall of 2004 and spring of 2005. There is an increasingly voluminous and theoretically savvy literature on the history of Asian-American immigration to the United States and on the legal and cultural consequences of the exclusion laws. I am indebted in particular to the groundbreaking work of Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); and Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850–1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), and Defining America through Immigration Policy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004). That the writings at Angel Island are poems in the strict sense and not merely graffiti whose spatial organization resembles poetry is explicitly addressed by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung in the introduction to their critical anthology, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980): ‘All of the poems are written in the classical style. Of these, about half are written with four lines per poem and seven characters per line. About a fifth have eight lines per poem and seven characters per line. The remainder consist of verses with six or more than eight lines and five or seven characters per line’ (25). It should also be remembered that the specific identification of the wall writings as classical Chinese poetry in 1970 by state park ranger Alexander Weiss and Asian-American activists such as Paul Chow triggered the drive to preserve the Immigration Station from its planned demolition. Such is most famously the case of Goethe’s Italienische Reise, originally a series of letters he wrote during his travels of 1786 to 1788. Recast as a diary, the first two parts were only published in 1816, with the remainder only appearing after the writer’s death in 1832, nearly half a century after the actual voyage. See Kelly Barry’s contribution to this book (ch. 3) See my ‘Goodbye Columbus: Madame Du Boccage and the Migration of Identity, or not exactly La Vie de Marie-Anne,’ Annali d’Italianistica 14 (1996): 409–24. Rpt. Bolletino del Centro di Viaggio nella Italia (1997). See Walter Benjamin’s gloss of this dictum in ‘Der Erzähler,’ in Illuminationen, ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1955), 410. Odysseus ‘polytropein,’ as Homer likes to call him, the man of

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9

10

11 12

13

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many tropes, increasingly parlays his traveller’s tale into food, shelter, and eventually the repossession of his home. Contrapuntally, Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1999), while also a narrative empowered by the narrator’s bicycle journey around the Pacific Rim, further teaches the value of what not to say, as in the narrator’s culminating encounter with an old Vietnamese woman on the beach in the town of his birth: ‘I smile at her from my anonymity, refusing to answer in our common tongue. I don’t want her to leave. I don’t want to disappoint her with my commonality, to remind her of our shared history. So, I let her interpret my half-truths. At this I am good, for I am a mover of betweens’ (338–9). For some contemporary critical reflections on the relation between travel experience and social/intellectual empowerment, see Claude LéviStrauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1956), 9–44; Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976); Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xiii–xxx; and Caren Kaplan, ‘Transporting the Subject: Technologies of Mobility and Location in an Era of Globalization,’ in Uprootings/Regroupings: Questions of Home and Migration, ed. Sara Ahmed, Claudia Casteneda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 207–24. Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Scent, Sound, and Cinema,’ interview with Mary Zournazi, in Cinema Interval (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 264. ‘Island,’ poem #61, 126. Further references to the Angel Island poems gathered together in this volume will be indicated by poem and page number only. A rare exception is poem #23, which ironically glosses on the reality behind such an enchanting name: ‘This place is called an island of immortals, / When, in fact, this mountain wilderness is a prison’ (23, 60). André Thevet, Le grand insulaire (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale. Ms. fr. 15452–15453). Written in 1586–87, this richly illustrated geographical compendium has never been published as a printed book. John Galvin, ed., The First Spanish Entry into San Francisco Bay, 1775 (San Francisco: John Howell, 1971), 78. On the general history of the exclusion laws and the history of the Immigration Station, see the editors’ introduction to Island (8–28). In addition to the poetry, the book also contains much information from oral histories. On the use of coaching manuals, see page 45, for the role of the kitchen staff, see pages 77–8. Interview with Benjamin Choy, by Caitlin Fischer, 2 and 9 December, 2004,

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14 15

16

17

18

19

20 21

22 23

San Jose, California; Study #AIOHP-001, Archives of the Pacific Regional Humanities Center, University of California at Davis. Personal communication by Judy Yung. On the Pearl River delta as home to late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese immigrants to California, see Jeff Gillenkirk and James Motlow, Bitter Melon: Inside America’s Last Rural Chinese Town (Berkeley: Heyday, 1997), 13, 22–3, 139–40. Michel Butor, ‘Le voyage et l’écriture,’ in Répertoires IV (Paris: Minuit, 1974), 9–29. See also Charles Grivel, ‘Travel Writing,’ in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Lewis Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 242–57. ‘Non notavit nisi pauca aliqua que adhuc in mente retinebat.’ Marco Polo, Milione: Le divisament dou monde, ed. Gabriella Ronchi (Milan: Mondadori, 1982), 4n. Two very different, recent appraisals of Marco Polo’s ‘realism’ can be found in Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo Go to China? (London: Secker and Warburg, 1995); and John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). This last citation is not from one of the barrack wall poems but from the anonymously published long poem, ‘Imprisonment in the Wooden Building,’ which appeared in the 16 March 1910 issue of Chinese World, and which offers an early published though still anonymous response to the treatment of Chinese immigrants at Angel Island while also providing a striking compendium of the major themes and references found in the wall poems themselves. The entire poem, along with an English translation, has been republished in Island (138–46), from which I cite these lines. Island, 66. Also see Songs of My Heart: The Chinese Lyric Poetry of Ruan Ji, trans. Graham Hartill and Wu Fusheng (London: Wellsweep, 1988). Cited in Judy Yung, ‘“A Bowlful of Tears”: Lee Puey You’s Immigration Experience at Angel Island,’ in Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology, ed. Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 130. On the general condition of women detainees at Angel Island, see Jennifer Gee, ‘Housewives, Men’s Villages, and Sexual Responsibility: Gender and the Interpretation of Asian Women at the Angel island Immigration Station,’ in Hune and Nomura, 90–105. Benjamin Choy interview. The powerful image of the ocean changed into a mulberry grove is an old Daoist symbol of the earth’s long-term mutation, an image of geological change that points to the wisdom/longevity of the one who perceives such change, such as the transcendent figure of Ma Gu or Maid Ma in Ge Hong’s

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fourth-century Traditions of Divine Transcendents: ‘Since I entered your service, I have seen the Eastern Sea turn to mulberry fields three times.’ To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents, ed. Robert Ford Campany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 259–70. The expression persists not only in Chinese literature and popular speech, but in other Asian traditions as well. Near the beginning of Akira Kurosawa’s film Yojimbo (1961), for example, the samurai ‘with no name,’ played by the great Toshiro Mifune, answers when asked who he is, with the expression, ‘sanjuro kuwabatake’ or ‘thirty years old mulberry field,’ while looking out at such a field waving in the wind. The image is also prominent in Vietnamese culture, dating back to Nguyen Du’s monumental epic poem The Tale of Kieu, written in the very early nineteenth century but so popularly received as to become a fundamental text in Vietnam, with uses as varied as teaching schoolchildren how to read on the one hand, and as a source of aleatory divination and fortune telling, on the other. (On the title of Nguyên Du’s poem as well as useful considerations on the poem’s cultural significance in Vietnamese culture, see Tran Van Dinh, ‘The Tale of Kieu: Joy and Sadness in the Life of Vietnamese in the United States,’ in Unwinding the Vietnam War, ed. Reese Williams [Seattle: Real Comet, 1987]). Selecting a passage au hasard from the Kiêu is a common way to tell one’s fortune, one that turns the poem into an oracular text. On this and other popular Vietnamese customs, much information can be found in Nguyen Du and Vu Van Huan, Mémoire du fleuve rouge (Lyon: Jacques André, n.d.), 34 and passim. Some practical ways in which the text is put to use in popular culture can be found in Kim Lefèvre, Retour à la saison des pluies (Paris: Aube, 1995), 84, 89, 102. It is a text many Vietnamese can cite from memory, including its opening verses: A hundred years – in this lifespan on earth talent and destiny are apt to feud. You must go through a play of ebb and flow and watch such things as make you sick at heart. What Huynh Sanh Thong, in his definitive translation of the Kieu, renders by ‘a play of ebb and flow,’ as he himself notes, is again the idea of ‘an event [in which] the sea [becomes] mulberry [fields].’ Noting the Chinese origin of the expression, he goes on to note: ‘Hence, the Vietnamese phrase ‘sea and mulberry’ (be-dau) refers to some upheaval or profound change either in nature or in the affairs of men’ (Nguyen Du, The Tale of Kiêu, ed. and trans. Huynh Sanh Thông [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983], 169n3).

260 Georges Van Den Abbeele This phrase not only recurs in the poem but also appears in other works. And in recent years, it has come to signify the brutal history of wars and deprivation that marked twentieth-century Vietnamese history, as in Xuân Phuc’s magnificent poem, ‘Champs de mûriers sur la mer,’ in L’Interculturel et l’Eurasien, ed. Le Huu Khoa (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), 161. See my ‘“Champs de mûriers sur la mer”: Gender, Exile, and Return in Viêt-Kiêu Literature,’ in Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, ed. Hafid Gafaiti, David Troyansky, and Patrica Lorcin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming). 24 Though not mentioned in this poem, the colour green also applies to the uniform of immigration officials, whence the Chinatown expression, luk yi, later applied to designate the police. See Island, 12, 49. 25 For an eloquent reflection on this conundrum, see James D. Houston, In the Ring of Fire: A Pacific Basin Journey (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1997). 26 Designed by California’s premier woman architect, Julia Morgan, before her better-known works in the Oakland hills and on the Hearst castle, the entire row of staff cottages was carelessly and deliberately burned down in 1971 as backdrop to the filming of The Candidate, directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Robert Redford. While several documentaries have been made there (notably, Felicia Lowe’s 1988 Carved in Silence), to my knowledge The Candidate is the only feature film to include any footage actually shot on the island.

Contributors

Editor: John Zilcosky is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (winner of the MLA’s 2004 Scaglione Prize) and also of articles on modernism, travel writing, and psychoanalysis. Authors: Kelly Barry is Associate Professor of German at Columbia University. She is completing a book titled The Instance: Aesthetic Play in German Literature around 1800, and is working on a study of poetics and homiletics in the context of Enlightenment practices and models of communication. Kenneth S. Calhoon is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon. His current project, entitled “Affecting Grace,” is concerned with the emergence of anti-Baroque sensibilities in German culture and criticism of the eighteenth century. Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He has published many books on literary theory but also works on nineteenth-century French literature. His most recent book is The Literary in Theory (Stanford UP, 2006). Ursula K. Heise is Associate Professor of English at Stanford University, where she specializes in contemporary literature, ecocriticism, and theories of modernization, postmodernization, and globalization. She is the author of Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge UP, 1997), Sense of

262 Contributors Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford UP, 2008) and a work in progress entitled The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature. Julia Hell is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan. Hell has published on the literature, visual arts, and politics of the post– Second World War period. She is the author of Post-Fascist Fantasies: History, Psychoanalysis and East German Literature (Duke UP, 1997), winner of the MLA’s 1998 Scaglione Prize. Barbara Korte is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Recent publications include work on travel writing, Black and Asian British literature and film, and the cultural reception of the First World War in Britain. Gabriela Nouzeilles is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. She is the author of Nepantla: Views from South (Duke UP, 2000), La naturaleza en disputa: Retóricas del cuerpo y el paisaje en América latina (Paidós, 2002), and The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke UP, 2003). Todd Presner is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Jewish Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. He is the author of two books: Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia UP, 2007) and Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (Routledge, 2007). Bianca Theisen (1960–2004) was Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Bogen-Schluß. Kleists Formalisierung des Lesens (Rombach, 1996), Silenced Facts: Media Montages in Contemporary Austrian Literature (Rodopi, 2003), and articles on Kleist, German Romanticism, Nietzsche, Rilke, Bernhard, and genre/media studies. Georges Van Den Abbeele is the author of Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau, co-editor with Tyler Stovall of French Civilization and Its Discontents and of numerous articles on travel narrative, tourism and philosophical literature. He is completing two books, on ‘The Retreat of the French Intellectual’ and ‘The Children of Belgium.’ He is currently Dean of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Index

acts of looking/seeing: bystander’s gaze, 129–31, 140, 142, 144–5, 148, 153n30, 158n62; in modernist text, 130–1; in mountaineering narratives, 206; as political, 142; as precondition to understanding, 124, 149n8; and project of reconstruction, 146; and reconstructing the real, 126–7; in ruins travel texts, 123, 133, 155n38. See also confrontational scenario; description (realist) Addison, Joseph, 11, 41 Adorno, Theodor W., 151n20, 159–60n65, 178; anti-Semitism, 174; ‘Commitment’ (1954), 129, 152nn24–5; ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ (1949), 129, 152nn24–5; ‘Der Standpunkt des Erzählers im zeitgenössischen Roman,’ 152n27; ‘The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel’ (1954), 125– 6, 129–31, 140, 143, 145, 146–7, 148– 9 Agamben, Giorgio, 189 Agnon, S.Y., 98; Only Yesterday (1945), 117, 121n34

alternative travel, 13, 44–5. See also tourist/tourism analepsis/prolepsis, 34, 48 Angel Island, California, 13, 243–4, 260n26. See also immigration; poetry of Angel Island detainees anthropology, literary and cultural: Chatwin’s use of, 180; and cyberspace, 214; Kant on, 4–5; and notions of time, 49–50n3; and study of narrative, 27–8 anti-Semitism, 102, 105, 107, 111, 113, 116, 144, 174, 191 Appadurai, Arjun, 214 Arendt, Hannah, 124, 126–7, 133, 145, 148, 149n8; Eichmann in Jerusalem, 151n21 art: appreciating, 86; commodification of, 231; role in home and community, 233; subjectivity as response to, 70–2, 77n24; as virtual space, 221–3, 225–6, 230 Asselineau, Charles, 83 authenticity: in art, 231; as authorfunction (Goethe), 76n17; and imitation (Goethe), 58, 63–4, 67, 72; as issue in travel writing, 9, 243; and

264 Index journal structure, 240; and journal structure (Goethe), 67–9; and magic, 207; in poem vocabulary, 82–3; as self-conscious (Goethe), 60, 65, 74n8; tourist/traveller quest for, 87, 196–8, 202, 204, 208; of travel diaries, 240; use of pain for, 206; use of prayer (Goethe), 62–3. See also imaginative truth authorship: and act of seeing, 135–6, 137, 146–7, 156n49; as anonymous, 231, 241, 244; in Goethe’s Italian Journey, 78n31; in Goethe’s pilgrimage texts, 69, 73, 76n17; and imitation, authenticity, and place (Goethe), 59–63; and individuality (Goethe), 66–8; reconstruction and postwar Germany, 127–8, 133, 147–8, 150n11; speaker as writer (Goethe), 64–5, 77n22 autobiography, 9; in Goethe’s Second Sojourn in Rome, 67–8, 70–2; narrative time of, 34, 35–6, 74n8; of Nossack, 143; of P. Weiss, 153n29; in pilgrim writing, 57, 62, 66, 67; travel writing as, 47 Ayala, Juan Manual de, 243 Bacon, Francis, 173 Badr, Badr Zaman, 21n71 Baedeker, Karl, 11 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 29, 169 Bambus, Willy, 120n29 Barthes, Roland, 151n18 Baudelaire, Charles, 6, 11, 20n64, 159–60n65; appreciating art, 86; borrowed travel, 92; contradictory claims in, 85–6; Exposition universelle (1855), 85–6; female figures, 83, 95n17; imagery from

Mascarene Islands, 82–3, 95n12, 95n23; and the imagination, 92–4; an imagined Edgar Allan Poe, 84; imagined travel, 83–5, 87; Jeanne Duval, 84; and Nerval, 91–2, 93; poems about actual voyages, 86– 91; as a poet of travel, 79, 94; slavery, 82–3; on tourism, 87; as a traveller, 79–80 – Poetry: ‘La Belle Dorothée,’ 82–3; ‘Bien loin d’ici,’ 85; ‘Bohémiens en voyage,’ 94; ‘La Chevelure,’ 85; ‘A une dame créole,’ 80–2; ‘L’école paienne,’ 97n39; Les Fleurs du Mal, 82, 84, 86; ‘Un Hémisphère dans une chevelure,’ 85; ‘L’Homme et la mer,’ 94; ‘L’Invitation au voyage,’ 85, 86, 94; ‘A une Malabaraise,’ 85; ‘Moesta et Errabunda,’ 94; ‘La Vie antérieure,’ 85, 94; ‘Le Voyage,’ 86– 7, 93–4; ‘Un Voyage à Cythère,’ 86, 87–93, 93–4, 97n43 Baudrillard, Jean, 13, 195 Beerbohm, Jules: Wandering in Patagonia, 202 Belgian Congo, 5 Ben-Gurion, David, 98 Benjamin, Walter, 3–4, 20n64, 167 Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, 93, 97nn39– 40 Bernhard, Thomas, 12; Amras (1964), 166; Before Retirement (1979), 165; Elisabeth (1987), 165; Frost (1963), 164; Immanuel Kant (1978), 165; A Party for Boris (1970), 165; Ungenach (1968), 167; Walking (1971), 164–7 Besher, Alexander, 215 Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1947) (film), 134

Index Bilderverbot/Sehverbot. See iconoclasm/scopoclasm Bildungsreise, 42 Bildungsroman, 111, 115–17 books as travel substitutes, 4–7 Boswell, James: The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1786), 25 bourgeoisie: and Germany’s reconstruction, 147; and self-isolation, 3– 5, 6, 17n30; subject formation, 13; theatre, 130; and urban slums, 10; walk of the, 163. See also class Boyarin, Daniel, 115 Brain, Robert, 176–7 Breton, Andre, 159n65 bricolage, 180 Brueghel, Pieter, 141 Burkert, Walter, 181–2, 185, 189–90 Butor, Michel, 6, 258n16 Byron, Robert, 37; The Road to Oxiana (1937), 25, 31, 36, 47 bystander’s gaze. See acts of looking/seeing Calasso, Roberto, 191–2n8 Campbell, Mary, 9, 18n51 cannibalism, 178–81, 188, 190 canon, defining travel writing, 7–10 capitalism and sense of speed, 42 Carroll, Lewis, 228 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart: Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), 102 Chartier, Roger, 59 Chatman, Seymour, 51n25 Chatwin, Bruce: intertextual allusion in, 6, 194n41 – In Patagonia (1977), 12–13, 47–8, 202–3 – The Songlines (1987), 6, 12; on

265

‘Cain,’ 182–3; the Dinofelis, 177, 179–80, 186–8; and the migratory impulse, 175–6; and the role of the carnivore, 176–7; on violence, 184– 6, 191 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 239. See also poetry of Angel Island detainees Chouillard, Yvon: Climbing on Ice (1982), 204 Chow, Paul, 256n3 Choy, Benjamin, 257n13 chronotope: as defining genre, 29; in Elizabethan report of discovery, 40, 41; implied in travel writing, 26; in modernist travel writing, 47; with time and space equal, 45. See also time/temporality chrono-type for travel writing, 10–11; and categories for analysis, 33–6, 49; in Elizabethan report of discovery, 38–42 civilization: from dance of death, 180; as effect of travel, 5, 101, 105–6, 115; as effect of travel writing, 11, 109– 11; and heroism, 173–4, 191; as imagined in travel writing, 113–15; paradise as antithesis of, 196; Patagonian landscape and, 201–2; and performative primitivism, 198–9, 202–3, 204, 207 Clark, David, 20n68 Clark, Kenneth: Civilization (film), 173–5, 191 class: and alternate travel, 195–6; connotations in term ‘travel,’ 9–10; middle-class tourism, 11; in utopian thinking, 191n5. See also bourgeoisie Clifford, James, 9, 214

266 Index Cocker, Mark, 46 Cohen, Erik, 208n3 collage, 47, 53n44 colonialism: and nineteenth-century tourism, 11–12; role of Jews in, 107; role of travel writing in, 5, 16n20; sea as essential to, 101; and seafaring nations, 99–100; voyages of conquest, 106; and Zionism, 12, 109–11, 113–16, 117 Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge 2002), 8 confrontational scenario: in Adorno’s text, 131; and concentration camp images, 125, 127, 142–3, 144–5, 158n57; and Hamburg’s ruins, 133–5, 140; and writing poetry, 129, 137 Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness, 177–8, 180 Cook, Thomas, 11 Crary, Jonathan, 77n25 critical-historical analyses, 10 Crouch, Gregory: prosopopeia, 207; Enduring Patagonia (2001), 200, 204–8, 210n23 Culler, Jonathan, 11 cultural knowledge: and mimetic capital, 10; of time, 31–2, 40–1, 49– 50n3. See also ideology Dalrymple, William: In Xanadu (1989), 30, 34, 35 Dante, Alighieri, 141, 152n23; Vita Nuova, 138, 157n52 Dart, Raymond, 176 Darwin, Charles, 201; Voyage of the Beagle (1839), 7–8 death as travel, 94 de Bragard, Emmelina, 80

Defoe, Daniel: Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6), 41 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 5, 96n29, 169, 201, 235n11, 235n13 Derrida, Jacques, 17n36 description (realist): against, 159n65; and acts of looking, 133, 147; in cyberspace, 222–3, 225–6; and dialectic of visibility and invisibility, 135–7, 155n43; as ethical and political project, 127, 142, 148, 158n61; in melodramatic mode, 138–9, 157n53; nature of gaze in, 128, 151n20; and use of classic myth, 132–5 deterritorialization. See under globalization dialectics, 93 diary/journal structure: authenticity of, 67–9, 240; and documentation of time, 25–6, 47; in Goethe’s texts, 67–9; practicality of, 28. See also travelogues Dickens, Charles: American Notes (1842), 27, 34, 36, 37, 42, 44; Pictures from Italy (1846), 27, 33, 43–4 différance, 7, 17n36 discourse theory, 10 discovery and exploration narratives: Columbus, 8; inclusion of Jews in, 107, 109–10; and object world of travel, 38 Döblin, Alfred, 124, 126 domestic travel writing, 41 Doré, Gustave, 105, 120n23 Dost, Abdul Rahim Muslim, 21n71 du Camp, Maxine, 83–4 Eco, Umberto, 168

Index educational travel: prevented by imagination, 93; time and space in, 42; touring war ruins, 124; travel as transformative, 85–6, 111–16 Edwards, Philip, 16n16 Elizabethan report of discovery, 39– 42 empiricism: Goethe’s empirical judgment, 70–1; and modernism, 131, 139, 148; and privileging of visual evidence, 124, 125–6, 138, 151n17; and the realist novel, 145–6; and treatment of time, 31–2 Enlightenment, 4–5, 11 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 149nn3–4, 152n25 Erasmus, 173, 191 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds, 47 ethnography, 5–6. See also socio-political contexts European Universal, 12, 101, 104, 108–11, 113, 116–17; and ‘Germanic universal,’ 119n19 experience: and authenticity in text, 60, 67; edited for narrative, 28–9, 44; and imitation (Goethe), 72; of reader and narrative speaker, 65; reading as substitute for, 58; and seeing and making inventories, 29; of time, 30–2, 33, 50n11; writing as amplification of, 68 exploration narratives. See discovery and exploration narratives Exposition universelle (1855), 85–6 Fabian, Johannes, 4, 16n20, 28 Feifer, Maxine, 214 Fermor, Patrick Leigh: A Time of Gifts (1977), 36–7 fiction: tension between fact and, 9;

267

time in modernist and postmodernist, 46–7, 53n40; use of present tense in, 38. See also narrative and narrative texts Fitzroy, Cerro, 203 flâneur, 11, 12, 20n64, 163–4; detective, 167–9. See also walking Flaubert, Gustave, 6 Foucault, Michel, 59, 76n17, 200–1 fourth wall, 130 Frank, Joseph, 46, 48 Freedgood, Elaine, 206 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 173, 180; on heroism, 191; and metaphor of gold, 188; Civilization and Its Discontents, 185–6 Friedeman, Adolf, 120n29 Frike, Michael, 195–6 Frisch, Max, 123, 155n44 Fuller, Mary C., 16n16 Fusco, Coco, 198 Gabay, Guy, 195–6 García Canclini, Néstor, 214–15 Gates, Henry Louis: Wonders of the African World (film), 173 Gautier, Théophile, 84, 157n56 Gedankenspaziergang, 167. See also walking Genesis, 182 Genette, Gérard, 51n19; Narrative Discourse, 32, 33–5 genre of travel writing: as autobiographical, 36, 47; as based on actual journeys, 26; chronological narrative in, 33–4; and the chronotope, 29; definitions of, 7–10, 11; and pilgrim literature, 60, 75n10; reversal of conventions of, 254; treatment of time in, 47

268 Index geography and mapping: and ArabJewish geographies, 116; computer, 13; and cyberspace, 212, 214–15; in discovery narratives, 39; Hegel’s world history and, 100; inventories, 39, 86; of islands, 243–4; Patagonia as landscape of fear, 198, 200 Gibson, William: All Tomorrow's Parties (1999), 213, 228; Idoru (1996), 228; Neuromancer (1984), 212, 230, 234n5; Pattern Recognition (2004), 211, 213, 218, 227–34; Virtual Light (1993), 228 Gilroy, Paul, 120n27 Girard, René, 183–5 Glazebrook, Philip, 5, 6 globalization: and a borderless world, 229–30; of corporations in cyberpunk, 227, 229–31; cyberpunk as resisting, 213; and deterritorialization, 214–15, 217, 220–2, 230, 232–3, 235n11, 235n13; and imaginary space, 219; and living in hyperspace, 217; and universalism in cyberpunk, 226–7; and virtual domestic space, 223, 230–1, 236n20, 236n23. See also socio-political contexts Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 6; about artistic creativity, 58; and aesthetic criteria of authorship, 59– 60, 69; on ‘bad inns,’ 4; figure of genius, 58, 59, 74n6, 76n18; individuality as model for authorship, 68; and letters in texts, 72; on walking, 167 – December report and ‘Filippo Neri, the Humorous Saint,’ 69–73, 77n22, 78n29

– Faust, 180, 185–6, 193n30 – Italian Journey (Italienische Reise), 16n26, 240, 256n4; aesthetic observation in, 70, 71; classical aesthetics in, 69–70; conceptions of authorship in, 78n31; as diary notes, 67–8; as pilgrim guidebook, 73; St Filippo Neri’s life, 69 – Letters from Switzerland (1796/ 1808), 68 – ‘On German Architecture,’ 58, 59, 60, 65–6, 74n9, 76n16 – Second Sojourn in Rome, 1829 (Zweiter Römischer Aufenthalt): altered style of, 68–9, 76–7n21; as amplification of experience, 68; and conventions of authorship, 73; and conventions of reading, 58; intertextual allusion in, 65–6, 73; relationship to pilgrim writing, 57– 8 – Sorrows of Young Werther, 67 – ‘Third Pilgrimage to Erwin’s Grave’ (1775) (‘Dritte Wallfahrt nach Erwins Grabe im Juli 1775’), 76n16; imitation and authenticity in, 60, 63–4, 72, 76n17; individuality in, 66–7; misreading of reading in, 67; pilgrimage as iterative, 58; prayer and authenticity in, 62–3; relationship to pilgrim writing, 11, 57–8, 59, 60–1; speaker as writer in, 64–5; tourism in, 69–72, 77n27; use of first person, 61–2; viewing and evaluating art in, 70, 77n24 Grand Tour travelogues, 11, 41–2, 241 Granta, 13 Greenblatt, Stephen, 5, 18n51, 192n21 Grierson, P.J. Hamilton, 189

Index Grivel, Charles, 6, 7 Grunwald, Max, 100, 109, 113–14, 117; ‘Jews as Anchormen and Seafarers,’ 104, 105–8 Guantánamo Bay, 14, 21n71 Guckkastenbühne, 130 guidebooks: conventions of pilgrim, 60–1, 75n10; and conventions of reading, 58; Goethe’s Italian Journey pilgrim, 73; Lonely Planet series, 13, 196–7, 204, 208n2; of Palestine, 114–16, 120n29 Hakluyt, Richard: The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (15981600), 38; ‘Second Voyage of Master Martin Frobisher’ (1577), 40; ‘The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana’ (Ralegh, 1595), 40–1; ‘The Voyage Made by Mr John Hawkins’ (1564), 39–40 Harbison, Robert, 133 Harvey, David, 212, 214 Hausenstein, Wilhelm, 133, 154n36 Hegel, G.W.F., 12, 99; on Africa, 118n9; seafaring in world history, 106; stages of world history, 100–3, 108–9, 113, 114, 117; and ‘the Germanic universal,’ 119n19; ‘Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal,’ 102–3; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1822– 3), 100, 102 Heine, Heinrich, 119n20, 120n23; Reisebilder (1826–31), 104 Heise, Ursula, 46 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 101, 102; Ideen zu einer Philosophie der

269

Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91), 101 Herodotus, 8 heroism, 173–4, 191; masculine, 206– 7; in poetry of Angel Island detainees, 247–8, 253–4 Herzl, Theodor, 100, 108–9, 110, 117; Altneuland (1902), 109, 110–13; Der Judenstaat (1896), 109 Hess, Moses: Rome and Jerusalem (1862), 109 Hever, Hannan, 122n42 Hever, Hannan (ref), 116–17 history: Hegel’s stages of world, 100– 4; Jews as peoples of world, 104, 108–9 Hobbes, Thomas, 176, 180 Holbein: Ambassadors, 178 Homer: Iliad, 187, 194n41; Odyssey, 4, 178–82, 184, 186–91, 194n41 Horkheimer, Max, 174, 178 hospitality, 3, 179–81, 189 Howes, Geoffrey, 171n19 Hudson, William H.: Idle Days in Patagonia (1893), 201, 205 Hugo, Victor, 97n43 Hutnyk, John, 195, 197 hybridity, 7–8, 60 iconoclasm/scopoclasm, 128–30 identity: and alternative travel, 200; and anonymity, 240–2, 244; authorship and, 60, 66, 168; change through travel, 42; in globalization, 236n23; in myth of Orpheus, 137; relationship to time, 44; world history and national, 101 (see also Zionism) ideology: and alternative travel, 196; description and, 153n33; in explo-

270 Index ration narratives, 38–9; Nossack and, 125, 150n11; and travelled time, 28; in travel writing, 10. See also socio-political contexts imagination: contemplating ruins, 133; of dream landscapes, 222; electronic media as extensions of, 212–13, 216–17, 223, 226–7; and experiencing place, 219–21; and the guidebook, 61; and mirrors, 168; operation of (Baudelaire), 92– 4; and oral histories, 245–6; and reenactment, 67; time and, 46; writing influencing the, 199, 200–1, 204 imaginative truth, 9, 18n51. See also authenticity imagined travel, 4, 96n29; Baudelaire, 85–6, 92, 96n29; Gérard de Nerval, 91–2; and Jewish Palestine, 100, 103–4, 116–17; Mandeville, 9 immigration, 13–14; literature of, 241–2, 256n2; and ‘paper’ identities, 244–6; Zionist narratives of, 116–17. See also poetry of Angel Island detainees imperialism. See colonialism intertextual allusion, 6, 65, 141, 180 inventories, 39, 86. See also geography and mapping isolation of writing, 3–4, 6, 17n30 Jameson, Fredric, 212, 215 Jensen, Wilhelm, 141, 157n56 Jews: and confrontational scenario, 131, 153n30; and imposed nomadism, 188–9, 193n39; as not seafaring, 102–3; role in colonialism of, 107; as seafaring, 98–9, 118n8; and sea trade, 107–8. See also under acts

of looking/seeing, bystander’s gaze; Zionism Kafka, Franz, 4, 6, 16n26, 130, 178 Kant, Immanuel, 4–5, 13, 15n13, 20n68, 25 Kaplan, Caren, 236n23 Kasack, Hermann, 125, 136–7, 158n57; Die Stadt hinter dem Strom (1947), 125–6, 141–3, 150n10 Kaur, Raminder, 195, 197 Kerney, Alan: Mountaineering in Patagonia (1998), 204 Kerouac, Jack: On the Road (1957), 8 Kierkegaard, Søren, 119n15 Kinglake, Alexander: Eothen (1844), 44–5, 52n35 Korte, Barbara, 7–8 Krakauer, Jon, 203, 204–5 Kripke, Saul, 168 Kubaczek, Martin, 171n17 Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzehlung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahasuerus (1602), 105 Lai, Him Mark, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, 248–9, 256n3 Lang, Fritz: Metropolis, 141, 169 Lawrence, D.H.: Mornings in Mexico, 32 Lazarus, Emma, 239 Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie René, 83 Leopold II: 1876 Geographical Conference, 5 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 180 Lionnet, Françoise, 82–3 literary hoax, 168, 171n13 Lonely Planet guidebooks. See under guidebooks

Index Lorenz, Konrad, 176, 179, 184–5; Das sogenannte Böse, 185, 193n30 MacCannell, Dean, 87, 19n60 Magnuson Act, 244 Maistre, Xavier de, 4, 96n29 Mandeville, Sir John, 18n51, 247; Mandeville's Travels, 8–9 mapping. See geography and mapping Marco Polo, 8, 247 mariners. See seafaring Massey, Doreen, 214 May, Karl, 9 McLuhan, Marshall, 212, 223 Mendelssohn, Peter de, 150n16, 155n38; Die Kathedrale (1983), 125– 6, 138–9, 157n53 Merimée, Prosper, 92 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 158n59 metaphor, 3; of an information space, 225; of collapsing houses, 137, 155n48; of cyberspace, 213; of gold by Freud, 188; in pilgrim writing, 63; of seafaring, 105–6, 119n20; of the ship, 120n27; of ‘tears at the end of the road,’ 249; travel as, 94; of travelling soul to lost luggage, 211; of writing, 246 Meyrowitz, Joshua: No Sense of Place, 214 middle class. See class Middle Passage, 106 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 242 Miraji, 84–5 mirror image, 168, 228–9 mobility and immobility: in cyberpunk novels, 211; and detainment, 13–14, 21n71. See also nomadism; poetry of Angel Island detainees

271

modernist travel writing: and acts of looking, 131, 143, 147; and Orphic gaze, 139; and realist description, 128, 151n20; and ruins travel, 125. See also postmodernist travel writing montage, 73, 153n29, 165, 168–9 More, Thomas: Utopia, 243 Morgan, Julia, 260n26 Moritz, Karl Philip, 163 mountaineers. See under tourist/ tourism Müller, Robert, 18n48 myth: from adventure stories, 5; of Cain, 182–4; and desire, 92–3; of Eden, 182–3, 196–7; of the ‘eternal Jew,’ 105, 109, 120n23; of the Flying Dutchman, 105, 120n23; of Orpheus, 128, 136–7, 153n33, 156– 7nn51–54; of Orpheus and facing the vanishing object, 137–9; of Orpheus as bystander, 139–40, 141–3; of the Wandering Jew, 103, 104–5, 108, 109, 117, 120n23 narrative and narrative texts: and Bernhard’s ‘sensitivity words,’ 165; categories for analysis of time structure, 33–6; chronology and time in, 26–7, 33–4, 38, 47; Elizabethan report of discovery, 39–42; iterative narration, 33, 58; and the modern novel, 129–30, 147–8; and multiplicity of voices, 169; and nonnarrative texts (‘landscapes’), 165– 6; as retrospective, 36–7; and role of film, 147–8, 160n66; selection in, 28–9, 33; study of, 28, 32; and the visual in mountaineering, 206. See also description (realist); metaphor

272 Index narrator: in the modern novel, 129– 30, 147–8; as realist in non-realist representation, 132–5 Naumann, Bernd, 151n21 Nazi concentration camps. See confrontational scenario Nazi Concentration Camps (film), 128 Nerval, Gérard de: Voyage en Orient (1851), 91–4 Newby, Eric: The Big Red Train Ride (1978), 29–30 Nicolai, Friedrich, 4, 15n6 nomadism, 193nn38–9; associated with Patagonia, 200; and Huckleberry Finn, 184; as human, 175, 183; imposed on Jews, 188–9; in modern tourism, 197, 209n13 (see also tourist/tourism); of urban walkers, 164, 167. See also mobility and immobility Nossack, Hans Erich, 123; on acts of seeing, 136; and the contemplative onlooker, 131; as exile and partisan, 125, 150n14; limits to phenomenological project, 149; politics of, 150n11; use of classic myth, 127–8, 131–2, 135, 153n31; on writing Der Untergang, 136–7, 156n49 – Der Untergang [Downfall] (1946), 12, 132–5, 138–9, 139–40, 143, 146– 7, 150n10; ‘Dies lebenlose Leben’ (1968), 144–5, 158n60; ‘Jahrgang 1901,’ 143–5, 159nn63–4; Nekyia (1942/1945), 132, 150n10, 158n61; ‘Orpheus und ...’, 139–40, 143, 146, 157n54; Tagebücher (1962), 145, 156n49, 158n62 nostalgia: for adventure and masculinity, 204; of the immigrant, 242; for natural environments, 198–9

Orientalism, 12, 44, 52n35 Orpheus, 128 Patai, Raphael, 99 Pemsel, Helmut, 98 photographic images, 145, 151n18, 159n63. See also confrontational scenario Pietist thought, 60, 74n7 pilgrim literature: conventions of, 60–1, 75nn10–11, 241; Goethe’s reworking of, 11, 72–3 (see also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von); as guide and narrative, 58; and modern travel guide, 57, 73n1; performative dimension in, 59; prayer in, 62–3, 71, 75–6n13; relationship to travel writing, 57; and tourism, 69– 72, 77n27; use of first person in, 61 place: electronic media and sense of, 223; islands in travel writing, 243– 4; made anonymous, 243–4; and prayer, 75–6n13; as strategy of textual authorization, 58, 59–60, 62–3, 66–7 Pliny, the elder, 127–8 poetic imagination (Baudelaire), 93–4 poetic writing and science, 7–8 poetry of Angel Island detainees: anonymity of, 241, 244; as expressing failure, 242; format of, 256n3; ‘Imprisonment in the Wooden Building,’ 258n19; as a result of incarceration, 14, 239–40, 247; literary and historical allusions in, 246, 258–60n23; preservation of, 255; and use and substitution of proper nouns, 243–4, 247–50, 253–5, 257n9; of the voyage, 251–3; of women, 250

Index politics. See socio-political contexts polyphony, 169, 171n17 Porter, Dennis, 8 Portman, John: Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, 212 postmodernist travel writing: and architecture, 212; intertextual allusion and, 6; perceptions of time in, 46–9; and tourism, 197; and travel liars, 9. See also modernist travel writing poststructuralism, 7 Powers, Richard: Plowing the Dark (2000), 213, 218–26, 230, 232–4 Prarond, Ernest, 83 Pratt, Mary, 8, 153n33 psychological time, 31 quest-type journey, 30, 50n11 Raban, Jonathan, 6; Coasting (1986), 34 Rabelais, François: Quart Livre, 243 Ralegh, Walter, 20n61; ‘The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana’ (1595), 40–1 reading: of guidebooks, 58; reflections of Goethe, 70–1; in relationship to time, 27, 34–5, 49 realism. See description (realist) reality. See authenticity reconstruction: and acts of looking, 146; authorship as labour of, 127, 133, 135, 147–8, 150n11, 153n33, 154n36; as political, 151n19; of the real, 126; and taking stock, 124; of time, 30, 32 refugees, 12, 14. See also immigration repetition, 33, 44, 58, 64, 68, 165, 166

273

rhythm in depiction of time, 32, 35, 39, 44, 47, 205 Richards, Greg and Julie Wilson (ref), 209n4 Richardson, Joanna, 82 Richon, Emmanuel and Vimala Rungasamy (ref), 95n12, 95n23 Richter, Gerhard, 153n29 Ricoeur, Paul, 38; Time and Narrative, 32–3 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 157n54 Ronen, Ruth, 37–8, 51n19, 52n28 Rosei, Peter, 12, 164; Who Was Edgar Allan?, 167–9, 171n13, 171nn19–20 Ross, Andrew, 213, 236n16 Rousseau, Henri: Dream, 222 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: on aggression, 180; on civilization, 174–5; on courtesy, 190; on the State of Nature, 182; on walking, 12, 167 Rühm, Gerhard: walking (1962), 165– 6, 170n4 ruins travel texts, 12; backward gaze in, 137, 139–40; classical and modern ruins, 133, 135; from debris into ruins, 135–7; dialectics in, 127, 133; and Holocaust gas chambers, 141– 2, 158n57; as phenomenological modernism, 149; as reconstruction of the real, 126–7; registration and description in, 124, 154n37; rubble literature, 159n64. See also confrontational scenario; Nossack, Hans Erich Said, Edward, 10, 44, 52n35 Saliz, Captain, 80, 82, 94n5 Sarraute, Nathalie: ‘The Age of Suspicion’ (1950), 147–8, 159–60nn65– 6

274 Index Sartre, Jean-Paul: Temps modernes, 147 Scherpe, Klaus R., 153n33 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 154n36 Schlegel, Friedrich, 166 Schönberg, Arnold: Survivor of Warsaw, 129–31 Scholz, Dieter David, 120n23 science writing as hybrid with poetics, 7–8 seafaring, 118n8; arguments for Jews as, 104, 105–8, 113–14, 116–17, 119n20; as essential to empire, 101; mariners by country, 98–9; and world-historical people, 100–3 Sebald, W.G., 6, 17n30, 125, 126, 141, 157n53; Air War and Literature, 12, 150n10 Second World War and transportation systems, 12 Shakespeare, William: Merchant of Venice, 178–9, 186 Shamir, Moshe, 121n34 Shiri, Rhaman, 14 Silence of the Lambs, The (film), 181 simulated voyages, 13 slavery, 82–3 Smollett, Tobias, 6 social time, 31 socio-political contexts: of cyberpunk texts, 215–16, 223–6, 227–8, 232–3; in Nossack’s life, 125, 150n11; and realist description, 127, 142, 148, 158n61; of reconstruction, 151n19. See also globalization Solnit, Rebecca, 210n26 space: and cyberspace, 212–13, 234n6, 235n13; as electronic and inhabited, 220, 221–3, 233–4; and electronic media, 213–14, 217, 231; heterotopias, 200–2 (see also under

utopia); imaginary and global, 219; and mountain climbing, 204; and narrative tense, 37; in postmodern architecture, 212; in postmodernist travel writing, 48–9; as privileged over time, 26, 38–9, 41; and running out of time, 30, 50n11; without borders, 229–30, 236n20, 236n23. See also chronotope spatial form, 46 spectator’s gaze: shame and embarrassment of, 129–31, 155n44. See also acts of looking/seeing Speer, Albert, 12, 133, 145 Spender, Stephen, 133, 154n37 Spivak, Gayatri, 95n17 Starobinski, Jean, 187–8, 189–90 Steinbach, Erwin von. See under Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Stephens, Mitchell, 197 Stephenson, Neal, 215 Sterling, Bruce: Islands in the Net (1988), 215–18, 233, 236n16 Sternberg, Meir, 33–4, 50n4 Sterne, Laurence: A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), 8 Stevenson, Robert Louis: An Inland Voyage (1878), 31, 45; Travels with a Donkey (1879), 45 Stoker, Bram: Dracula, 178–9, 186, 188–9 story telling, 3; versus story writing, 3-4 Stratton, Jon, 235n13 structuralism and analysis of time in narrative, 33, 51n19 subjectivity: connections to travel theory, 6–7; and conventions of pilgrim guidebooks, 61–2; in experi-

Index ence of time, 31, 40, 42, 43, 45; in Goethe’s texts, 73, 76–7n21; in journal structure in Goethe’s texts, 68; as response to art, 70, 71, 72, 77n24 sublime, 203 Suesskind, W.E., 128–9, 140, 142–3, 144–5, 158n57 suffering and aesthetic pleasure, 130– 1, 155n38, 156n49 Suvin, Darko, 236n16 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 82 Symonds, Arthur, 84 Taylor, Charles, 119n19 television: in cyberpunk text, 224–5; ‘personal view’ travel series, 173–4 temporality. See time/temporality theory: use of, 10. See also critical-historical analyses Theroux, Paul: The Patagonian Express (1979), 203 Thesiger, Wilfred: Arabian Sands (1959), 32 Thevet, André, 243 Thorpe, Kathleen, 171n13, 171n20 thresholds: mountains as, 207 Tilman, H.W., 210n22 time/temporality: analogy between real and narrated, 33; and categories of narrative strategies, 33–5, 51n19; changes in perceptions of, 46; and chronological narrative, 33–4; cultural perceptions of, 49– 50n3; as documented in travel writing, 25–6; in Elizabethan reports of discovery, 39–42; encounter with the global, 212; in postmodernist writing, 46–9, 53n40; and reliability of narrator, 37; as selective in writing, 28–9, 33,

275

44; in storytelling, 50n4, 51n19; subjective/objective, 31, 40, 42, 45; as subject of analysis, 27–8; as theme in travel writing, 28–32; travel as journey through, 10; use of tenses, 37–8, 52n28; in Victorian travel writing, 42–6; of writing, 32– 8; of writing and reading, 27. See also chronotope Tomlinson, John, 214–15, 220 totalitarianism, 131–2, 145, 153n31, 158n60 tourist/tourism: alternative/backpacking, 195–7, 199, 202, 205, 208, 208n3, 209n11, 209n13; antitourism, 13; as derogatory term, 11–12, 20n63; in Goethe’s texts, 11, 69–72, 77n24, 77n27; literature for the, 79, 240–1; and the mountaineer, 199– 200, 206–7, 210n23; and performative primitivism, 198–9, 202–3, 204; and post-tourism, 214; semiotics of, 87; theory as, 10; in Victorian period, 42; and writing imagined travel, 92 transformative effects of travel and travel writing: Baudelaire, 85–6; and Zionism, 111–16. See also educational travel travel as literary, 6, 248 travel liars, 8–9; Robert Müller, 18n48 travelogues, 240; authenticity of, 8-9, 247. See also diary/journal structure travel writing: importance of the story, 33, 240–1, 256–7n6; as inventing others, 6, 9–10; as a recuperative genre, 240; as sedentary, 4-5, 246–7; writing imagined travel, 96n29

276 Index Trietsch, Davis, 100, 113–16, 117; Bilder aus Palaestina (1911), 114–16, 120n29; ‘Jewish Mediterranean Sea Positions,’ 114; Juedische Emigration und Kolonisation, 116 Trigano, Gilbert: Les plus beaux poèmes du voyage (1988), 79, 94 Trojan Horse, 181, 186 Tuan, Yi-fu, 198 Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 180, 184 Ulanovsky Ricombene, Lucas, 195–6 utopia: and creative writing, 6-7, 17n37; in cyberpunk texts, 226, 233; and dystopian spaces, 213; or heterotopia, 200–2, 207 Van Den Abbeele, Georges, 19n60, 106, 120n26 van Gogh, Vincent: Bedroom in Arles, 221, 222–3, 230 Verne, Jules: Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), 42 Vienna Group, 165, 170n4 Virgil: Georgics, 156n51 Voltaire, 174 Voyage of Dimo and Nicolo Stephanopoli (Paris 1800), 92 Wagner, Richard: Der Fliegende Holländer, 105 walking, 12; bourgeois subject’s solitary, 163–4; climbing as subversive, 204–5; imaginary, 220–1, 226; not as thinking, 166–7; as thinking, 164–6. See also flâneur

Walser, Robert, 167 Waugh, Evelyn, 12; Ninety-Two Days (1934), 25–7, 28 Weber, Max, 188 Weiss, Alexander, 255, 256n3 Weiss, Peter, 152n23, 153n29; Investigation (play), 129 Welks, Peter, 209n5 Wells, H.G., 174 Wild West stories, 9 Williams, Marie, 191n5 Winterbottom, Michael: The Road to Guantánamo Bay, 14 Wood, Michael, 186; In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great (film), 173 writing: as an act of authoring, 59, 254; devotion as, 62; as opposed to travel, 3-5; as part of travel, 5–6, 16n16, 199–200, 251–4, 253–4; at voyage’s end, 3–4, 250 writing instruments, 4, 15n6 writing of detainment, 14 Yung, Judy, 258n21 Zilcosky, John, 96n29 Zionism: and colonialism, 12, 100; and imaginary construction of Palestine, 116–17, 122n42; and Jews as world-historical peoples, 104, 108; and pioneers arriving from the sea, 121n34; travel writing and Palestine, 108–11, 114–16, 120n29 Zwischen gestern und morgen (film 1947), 134, 145–6, 157n55

GERMAN AND EUROPEAN STUDIES General Editor: Jennifer Jenkins 1 Emanuel Adler, Beverly Crawford, Federica Bicchi, and Rafaella Del Sarto, The Convergence of Civilizations: Constructing a Mediterranean Region 2 James Retallack, The German Right, 1860–1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination 3 Silvija Jestrovic, Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology 4 Susan Gross Solomon, ed., Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russia between the Wars 5 Laurence McFalls, ed., Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Revisited 6 Robin Ostow, ed., (Re)Visualizing National History: Museums and National Identities in Europe in the New Millennium 7 David Blackbourn and James Retallack, eds., Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860–1930 8 John Zilcosky, ed., Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey