Travel and Literature

The kind of travel that Fussell celebrates is immortalized by writers like Orwell, Twain, and Swift, each of whom created narratives of their experiences abroad that were partly factual, partly visionary and that were always replete with the details of the experience. The overwhelming impression that we have as readers when we experience a work like Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier is the richness of the sensory experience. Fussell argues that to the real traveler (as opposed to the mere tourists that we have become) travel makes one supremely aware of the way in which the world looks, of new sights and sounds and tastes and smells. Travel is essentially sensory, Fussell argues (p. 41),

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maintain when one is in an unfamiliar place, for the newness of that world compels us to notice it and so to renew ourselves, to become that Romantic ideal of the child within the man or woman. This is the child in Twain speaking in Chapter 45 of The Innocents Abroad: From these old towers we looked down upon a broad, far-reaching green plain, glittering with the pools and rivulets which are the sources of the sacred river Jordan. It was a grateful vision, after so much desert. And as the evening drew near, we clambered down the mountain, through groves of the Biblical oaks of Bashan, (for we were just stepping over the border and entering the long-sought Holy Land,) and at its extreme foot, toward the wide valley, we entered this little execrable village of Banias and camped in a great grove of olive trees near a torrent of sparkling water whose banks are arrayed in fig-trees, pomegranates and oleanders in full leaf. Barring the proximity of the village, it is a sort of paradise. By subtitling this work as a "pilgrim's progress", Twain pretends that there is a specifically Christian aspect to his travel. But this in fact seems to be far from the truth: Twain becomes more and more a pagan as he travels, understanding (as did
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Approximate Word count = 1618
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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