For this blog post I want to think
about a couple of issues that came up while reading Andrew Hadfield’s Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in
the English Renaissance 1545-1625.
Hadfield begins his introduction by posing the question: “What is the
purpose of writing about other lands or recounting one’s experiences of foreign
travel?” (1). He responds by saying, “The
obvious answer is that such representations increase our knowledge of other
cultures, providing information which in some ways may prove useful,
challenging, or, at worst diverting. Of
course, undertaking the enterprise involves a series of reflections on one’s
own identity and culture which will inevitably transform the writer concerned—and
quite possibly the reader—and will call into question received assumptions,
inducing a sense of wonder at the magnificence of the other, or reaffirming
deeply felt differences with a vengeance” (1).
I take umbrage with Hadfield’s qualification of “diverting” and with his assumption that the
purpose of writing about other lands or recounting one’s experiences of foreign
travel is primarily for cultural analysis.
Now I understand I am turning Hadfield into a bit of a straw-man here,
and I don’t mean to say that his arguments throughout the book are not lucid
and engaging, but the assumptions made in the introduction are ones that seem
to plague criticism of travel writing and romance literature in general.
First the
question of “diverting”—Hadfield states that “at worst” the knowledge of other
cultures may be diverting. To me this
seems like a slippery-slope assumption that ultimately denigrates literary
pleasure. The travel narrative, as
Hadfield himself later states, is highly caught up in the world of fiction as
well as true account. The most famous
travel narratives, The Travels of Sir
John Mandeville and Thomas More’s Utopia
are both works of fiction (Mandeville’s claims to truth were mostly debunked by
the early modern period but his narrative was still widely enjoyed). Hadfield also points out that Thomas Nashe’s
mock narrative The Unfortunate Traveller
was a cynical attack on travel writing while John Lyly’s Euphues romances
support the use of the travel narrative as a mode of political critique. It would be a hard case to prove that these
fictional travel narratives were always read as political or philosophical
treatises and not sometimes merely for pleasure, and equally hard to prove that
this readerly pleasure didn’t have its own uses, or didn’t inspire a deeper or
more lasting contemplation of the material presented. The “diverting” pleasure of reading travel
narratives, either true or fictional (or somewhere in-between) should not be
dismissed as the “worst” possible outcome.
I would argue that the real answer to Hadfield’s question, “What is the
purpose of writing about other lands or recounting one’s experiences of foreign
travel” is firstly to inspire pleasure.
Anyone who has kept a travel diary knows the unique delight of capturing
your experiences on the page and rereading and re-remembering them later. For readers and writers of early modern
travel narratives the first impulse may well have been delight and curiosity
about new lands and peoples—a delight not unlike the experience of reading or
writing about fantasy worlds and cultures.
To answer Hadfield’s initial question we may also want to answer the
question, “what is the purpose of writing about other lands or recounting a
knight errant’s exploits?”
Hadfield’s
two other reasons for travel narratives are certainly valid—they were used to
glean useful geographical and anthropological information and they did evoke
productive challenges to a writer or reader’s assumptions about the world
around them. Travel narratives in the
early modern period were also often commissioned by empires to serve as
advertisements for colonial support and exploration. Yet even these aspects seem to further the
usefulness of pleasure—these empirical powers relied on the reader’s enjoyment
and curiosity as they engaged with travel narratives.
My second
objection is to Hadfield’s reduction of travel writing to cultural
writing. While it is understandable that
he would do so, as his book is about the ways in which early modern travel
narratives often reflected problems within the contemporary English body
politic, I find it too easy for critics of travel narratives to make this leap,
particularly critics working in the late nineties and early 2000s. Hadfield’s book, published in 1998, reflects
the preoccupations of the New Historicists and the adherents of Cultural
Materialism. These are primarily
anthrocentric as they focus on political systems and human machination of power
and rebellion. Hadfield reduces “writing
about other lands” and “recounting one’s experiences of foreign travel” to “increase[ing]
our knowledge of other cultures” (1). Placing
knowledge of other cultures as the purpose of travel writing elides the
importance of the land itself or the personal experiences of the
traveller. The relatively new fields of
ecocriticism and ecomaterialism add a richness to the study of travel
narratives that is often ignored by projects such as Hadfield’s book. The definition of ecocriticism from the
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) is “the
study of the relationship between literary and cultural artifacts and the
natural environment.” The often lovingly
and excruciatingly detailed accounts of flora, fauna, and geological elements
to be found in travel narratives make them a prime candidate for this kind of
study. An ecomaterialist focus differs from
a traditional ecocritical mode that interrogates the connections between the
human and the landscape and instead, as the most recent edition of the journal postmedieval expresses, is “interested
in reconceiving ecomaterial spaces and objects as a web of co-constitutive and
hybrid actants.” The enormous impact
travellers had on the environments they encountered, and the impact travelling
through those environments had on them cannot be dismissed. Travel narratives, instead of being merely a
tool for cultural critique, were also firmly connected to the land and to the
unique experiences of the traveller.
