A Call for Eco-Readings of Travel Narratives and the Powers of Diversion

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.