My Cold Places

I never responded to Fur Coat's rash ruminations on the genre of travel writing. To me the only good reason for reading books is to expand the horizon of experience. Some people say the only justification is pleasure, or that there is a relationship between literary style and goodness tout court. Both are partly true. But I value experience most, and travel writing produces a kind of virtual geographic mobility parallel to what history does on the temporal axis.

By contrast, true crime, a genre my esteemed colleague loves, strikes me as pure repetition-compulsion. A great example is James Ellroy's My Dark Places, which Fur recommended in an earlier post. The details of Ellroy's mother's murder are repeated in masochistic detail a ludicrous number of times. Not only is this psychological stasis unhealthy, it is ultimately boring, and that's the worst crime of all.

If you want a real horror story, try George Kennan's Siberia and the Exile System. Kennan--cousin to the famous Cold War diplomat--was one of these 19th century travelers who tried to be both a gentleman and a tough guy. He weathers sleeplessness, cold weather, and bad food with his iron constitution, and manipulates dim provincial officials with his wit. His description of a mule carrying him down a sharply graded slope toward the Altai is unforgettable. But his aim was not just to survive a harsh environment (like another classic of the genre, Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands) but to investigate the Siberian prison system. What he finds is so appalling, both in terms of prison conditions and inmates' degree of guilt, that it challenges the novelty of the Gulag. Kennan brings us the thick stench of those cold, crowded places, the constrained fury and resentment of the inmates, and the overwhelming beauty and desolation of the landscape. All without leaving your La-Z-Boy.

Cosmonaut of Inner Space

I’ve recently critiqued travel writing as a literary genre. The critique reminded me that I ought to also say a word against another type of literary genre, one that I call intellectual fluff. Again, you’re saying: but this blog is precisely that: intellectual fluff. To that I can only reply, do as I say and not as I do. The intellectual fluff genre (and I’m open to another name if anybody wants to suggest one) is similar to travel writing in many ways. It’s free-flowing, unstructured, self-indulgent, and pretentious. For the most part, the author chooses a single Russian author to interrogate or, as is usually the case, celebrate.

Janet Malcolm’s Reading Chekhov: a Critical Journey is a good illustration of the principle. Not surprisingly, Malcolm deliberately chose a term of trade from travel writing by incorporating the word journey into the book’s subtitle. The conflation of physical journey and mental journey reminds me of a comical term used, I believe, by the Beatnik author, William Burroughs, who wanted to be a “cosmonaut of inner space.” The marketing strategy behind the words to the right of Malcolm’s title colon—a critical journey-- is clear enough: put Chekhov into the title and you’ll appear in library database searches and Google searches and ultimately sell books. The idea that you can offer people Chekhov without actually asking them to read Chekhov is probably also a sound marketing technique.

The endorsement quote on the cover of Reading Chekhov is revealing. According to the New York Review of Books, “One of the most gratifying things about Reading Chekhov is its quiet, vigorous defense against the imperial banality of biography.” Who knew the adjective “quiet” was something to advertize? Who knew criticism was under attack? Who knew biography didn’t employ criticism?

I have to admit that I can’t remember many specifics about the contents of the book. This is why I’m concentrating on the cover. I remember some seemingly random forays into specific Chekhov short stories and plays, compounded by the author’s intrepid attempts to visit the physical spaces associated with Chekhov’s memory, especially the Crimea. In fact, you get a strange blend of author biography, writer biography, generic literary criticism, hagiography, and travel writing. It’s not hard going. As I recall, the book was an easy read. But the downside is that nothing whatsoever remains of the book after you’re done reading it. All I remember, is the author’s not-very-vigorous attempts to scrutinize her Russian tour guides as they visited Chekhov tourist locations.

Journey to the Heart of Shabbiness

I’ve never been a fan of travel writing. It seems so self-indulgent, impressionistic, essentialist, and random. Travel writing is as annoying to me, as say, blogging is to other people. Apologies to all of you. I remember reading Paul Theroux’s musings as he worked his way across Mexico, down through Central America, across the Panamanian isthmus, across the Andes, and down to Patagonia, all by way of a train. I felt the journey to be as long and tedious as he must have felt it to be, despite his attempt to cover up the vicissitudes of South American train travel with literary allusion and cleverness.

Almost by definition, the travel writer feels unconstrained by organizational or thematic demands. He or she can write as much on any particular topic as seems necessary and then move on whenever necessary. It’s all a matter of whim and caprice. The writer isn’t even constrained by the reality of what one sees: he or she can refer to his or her own subjective perceptions of a place, or reach back into the past for previous iterations of the locale. You’re thinking that this blog is worse: it doesn’t even organize content into whole chapters. You’re also thinking that it’s not really possible to hate travel writing. It’s easy to digest, escapist, exotic, and colorful. Historians have even fallen in love with the genre, for in the context of history the travel writer’s biases, uninformed opinions, xenophobic ruminations, shallow attempts to sympathize with the “natives,” and misconceptions, become fodder for rich historical and textual analysis. Even so, I retain my position. Travel writing is solipsistic. The traveller seems to end up knowing less than the person who hasn't travelled. He certainly knows less than the people upon whom he bestows his passing appraisals.

It’s not surprising then that I didn’t warm up to Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Imperium, a record of his journeys through the disintegrating Soviet empire. The critics rave about the book. They love Kapuscinsky’s perspicacity, linguistic acumen, and cultural knowledge. And I must admit that the book has some merits. It takes you through a variety of Soviet republics and regions, reminding readers that the Soviet Union and Russia are not synonymous terms. One minute you’re in the Caucasus, the next in Ukraine, the next you’re in the Muslim South, the next in polar Siberia, the next in what used to be Poland. And you do learn something about the diversity of Soviet experience. You encounter separatism, memories of Beria’s arrest and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Khrushchev-inspired Virgin Lands ecological disaster, the disappearance of the Astral Sea, oil in Baku, Jewish life, and so much more.

If there is one unifying theme to Kapuscinsky’s travels, it is that of Soviet shabbiness. The planes don’t run on schedule, passengers wait for days on end at the airport, everybody can be bribed, housing stock is in poor condition and extremely limited, a low level fear of the authorities pervades every aspect of existence, resignation characterizes the dominate mood of the masses, etc. In this larger theme of a Soviet reality rooted in blandness and tediousness and creeping corruption, the author makes the best of a poor genre.