The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

16. Imaginary Journeys

WHAT IS STRIKING ABOUT MANY NARRATIVES of imaginary journeys is the great number written by actual travelers who know the world. In most cases such elaborate fictions are created by writers who have ranged widely. Samuel Butler sailed from Britain to New Zealand and back, Henri Michaux traveled through South America and extensively in Asia, Jan Morris has been practically everywhere on earth. Italo Calvino, born in Cuba, raised in Italy, traveled to the United States and returned to Cuba for a while, lived in Paris, and ended up in Italy. As travelers they were better able to invent journeys and create imaginary countries that were wholly credible, and their fictional travel is clearly based on their own travel.

"A Christian culture could more easily believe in the existence of the monstrous than of the perfect or near perfect," Susan Sontag wrote in "Questions of Travel," in the collection Where the Stress Falls. "Thus, while the kingdoms of freaks appear century after century on maps, exemplary races figure mostly in books of travel to utopia; that is, nowhere."

Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels are obvious choices for this chapter, since Crusoe's desert island was imagined by the widely read Daniel Defoe, who had traveled throughout Europe but never to the landscapes of his masterpiece — Brazil or the Caribbean. Jonathan Swift sailed back and forth from Ireland to England, and created Brobdignagian giants as well as tiny Lilliputians and Yahoos for Gulliver's various voyages. But these books are so well known I decided to omit them.

None of the fictions I've chosen are utopias. I find there is always something bloodless and unbelievable about a utopia. Its contrary, dystopian fiction, with its messy lives and its decaying buildings, more often has the ring of truth. What these books of imaginary places have in common is an element of satire — often a characteristic, or even the whole point, when the subject is an imaginary journey.

Samuel Butler: Erewhon: or, Over the Range

SAMUEL BUTLER, WELL educated, clear-thinking, oppressed by his father, had been heading for a career as a clergyman, but between his life at home and his work in a London parish after university, he lost his faith. Later, he was to write in his Notebooks, "As an instrument of warfare against vice, or as a tool for making virtue, Christianity is a mere flint implement."

And something of his attitude toward family life can be deduced from a notebook entry on the family: "I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other — I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so."

Not surprisingly, Butler fled from his family to New Zealand in 1859. His four-year spell running a sheep ranch there gave him time to read (Darwin among others) and think about the world he had left. When he returned to England in 1864 and wrote about his imagined world of Erewhon, he included details from the New Zealand he had seen: landscape, manners, aspects of the native population — the people of Erewhon are superficially reminiscent of the Maori.

One of the virtues of Erewhon is its evocation of landscape, its powerful and persuasive sense of place. It opens, and proceeds, like a classic Victorian travel book, describing a once empty land that although colonized still has a great unknown and mountainous hinterland, which exists as a temptation: "I could not help speculating upon what might be farther up the river and behind the second range." With the help of a native, Chowbok, the narrator, Higgs, sets off for the ranges, discovering a material culture and a dark-skinned population who he speculates might be part of the lost tribes of Israel. Before he can decide on anything concrete, he is brought before a magistrate and some others who are disturbed by the appearance of his pocket watch. Some broken machinery in the town's museum indicates that the people have a horror of anything mechanical. Higgs is put in prison.

The inhabitants seem to him no further advanced than "Europeans of the twelfth or thirteenth century." He learns the language. He makes friends. Later he mentions that he has a cold — a mistake: "illness of any sort was considered in Erewhon to be highly criminal and immoral," and he is punished.

After three months in prison Higgs is released, to visit the metropolis and its College of Unreason, where he learns that one of the professors has written a book warning of the possibility that "machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man." There also exists a class of men "trained in soul-craft." They are called "straighteners." But what Butler goes on to describe is a society much like that of the Victorian England he knew, yet without a tyrannizing religious sense.

"The Book of the Machines," which Higgs quotes extensively, warns against "the ultimate development of animal consciousness" — what we would call artificial intelligence. The rights of animals are also described: animal rights are protected.

At last Higgs escapes in a hot-air balloon, and we are left to reflect on the fact that his descriptions of machines, banks, criminality, and animals have echoes in Darwinism, the church, and Victorian law; that the "straighteners" have their counterparts in doctors and priests; that the seemingly distant place he has described is not so distant.

Henri Michaux: Voyage to Great Garaban

HENRI MICHAUX, WHO was born in Belgium in 1899 and lived most of his life in France, where he died in 1984, is an obscure figure at the fringes of surrealism, known for his poems, his odd short stories, his hectic journeys, his strange paintings and drawings, and most of all for his experiments with practically every drug known to man. He probably had more acid in his body than the average car battery. Hallucinatory experiences and drug dreams were his chosen recreation as well as his access to a higher consciousness and a heightening of his imagination.

Because of the intensity of his vision, and his humor, it is hard to sort out his actual travels from his drug trips. He spent a decade on the move, from 1927 to 1937. His travels in China, Japan, and Malaysia in the thirties resulted in A Barbarian in Asia, little more than a travel diary. Ecuador, which appeared in France in 1968, is also diaristic but more personal and relentless — angry, impatient, cranky, highly readable, and still relevant. Michaux's books are hard to find; he is obscure now as he was in his lifetime; in spite of his achievement, he never enjoyed any fame or material success, but he said he didn't care.

"There exists a banality of the visionary world," he wrote in The Major Ordeals of the Mind, and the Countless Minor Ones, first published in French in 1966. (Michaux's titles are superb.) This suggests to me that his imaginary travels are based more on his actual travels than on his drug trips. Even so, it is impossible to tell from some of his works whether he is describing a lived experience or a dream state.

In three books, gathered under the one title Ailleurs (Elsewhere), he wrote about three imaginary countries. The works are Voyage to Great Garaban, In the Land of Magic, and Here Is Poddema. One of the pieces in his book Spaced, Displaced is called "Journey That Keeps at a Distance," the sort of trip that is so full of frustrations, incomplete encounters, and half-baked impressions that it resembles that of the travel writer who arrives in a place and finds nothing to write about except frustration — one of the less readable sorts of travel books.

Voyage to Great Garaban, first published in 1936, illustrates another feature of imaginary travels: the detailed sociology and anthropology of such places; the politics, the history. When a traveler invents a place, he or she usually describes more of the place and its people than if it were real. So the land of the Hacs, in Garaban, is described as a set of brutal spectacles, each with a number, and growing in violence. There is hand-to-hand combat (vicious street fighting, families battling in muddy swamps), animals attacking humans (an entertainment), and animal fights ("caterpillars that were ferocious, and demon canaries"). Some Hacs make an attempt to kill their king for the sole purpose of being arrested and condemned to death, and for the splendor of being executed in style—"Spectacle Number 30 which is called 'Receiving one's death in the Palace courtyard.'"

Though the anonymous traveler doesn't condemn these outrages, he flees the Hacs and moves on to the Emanglons. He describes the Emanglons as an anthropologist would, even using the heading "Manners and Customs." We learn of their death rituals, the implications of sickness, their contempt for work and its danger ("After a few days of sustained labor an Emanglon will be unable to sleep"), their odor ("a complex perfume"), their tendency to weep for no reason, their aversion to flies: "Emanglons cannot endure living in the same room with a fly. In their eyes the cohabitation has something monstrous about it."

The Hivinizikis, the last group in Great Garaban, are manic, furiously rushing about, praying madly and prostrating themselves. Unbalanced, in a froth, they are "always outdoors. If you see someone inside, he doesn't live there. No doubt about it, he's visiting a friend." Everything about the Hivinizikis is hectic — religion, politics, the theater, all is rough-and-tumble.

Michaux had traveled fairly widely in the world before he wrote his imaginary travels, so these tales are both satires of actual travel and comic fantasies. As a surrealist Michaux is keenly aware of the necessity for satire to be absurd; even when a narrative is not understood, it must bring a smile to the reader's lips. In a scholarly introduction to Michaux's Selected Writings (1944), Richard Ellmann quotes André Gide, a supporter of Michaux, saying that Michaux "excels in making us feel intuitively both the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things."

Miguel de Unamuno: "Mecanópolis"

YOU COULD PUT this short story, written in 1913, down to science fiction or speculative fiction were it not for the fact that the author says he was directly inspired by the satire of Samuel Butler's Erewhon. Unamuno (1864–1936), who depicts the same horror of technology in this intense and compressed tale, was a distinguished philosopher and the author of a work on man's ambiguous relationship with God, The Tragic Sense ofLife.

"There sprang to mind the memory of a traveler's tale told me by an explorer friend who had been to Mechanopolis, the city of machines," begins Unamuno's story (translated by Patricia Hart).

Lost in the desert, dying from thirst and weakness, the traveler "began sucking at the nearly black blood that was oozing from his fingers raw from clawing about in the arid soil." He sees something in the distance. A mirage? No, an oasis. He recovers, sleeps, and when he wakes discovers a railway station with an empty train at the platform — no engineer, no other passengers. He gets in, the train departs, and later deposits him at a fabulous city. No people can been seen in the city, nor any life. "Not one dog crossed the street, nor one swallow the sky." But there are streetcars and automobiles, which stop at a given signal. He goes to a museum, which is full of paintings but sterile in mood, and then to a concert hall "where the instruments played themselves."

That he is the only person in the city is a news item in the Mechanopolis Echo: "Yesterday afternoon — and we do not know how it came about — a man arrived at our city, a man of the sort there used to be out there. We predict unhappy days for him."

Among the machines, without any human company, the traveler begins to go mad. This too is an item in the daily paper. "But all of a sudden a terrible idea struck me: what if those machines had souls, mechanical souls, and it were the machines themselves that felt sorry for me?"

In a panic, he attempts suicide by leaping in front of a streetcar, and he awakes at the oasis where he started out. He finds some Bedouins and celebrates his deliverance. "There was not one machine anywhere around us.

"And since then I have conceived a veritable hatred toward what we call progress, and even toward culture, and I am looking for a corner where I shall find a peer, a man like myself, who cries and laughs, as I cry and laugh, and where there is not a single machine and the days flow with the sweet, crystalline tameness of a street lost in a forest primeval."

This remarkable piece of fiction about an imaginary journey combines the rejection of technology that Samuel Butler satirized, the over-civilized life that Richard Burton deplored, the horror of a dehumanized urban world that Thoreau condemned, and the wish to find an unspoiled people in a remote place — an Edenic place of happy humans.

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

MOST OF CALVINO'S fictions could be included under the heading "Imaginary Journeys." But Invisible Cities is the most appropriate for an anthology of travel, since the narrator is Marco Polo — a variant Marco Polo, in an extended audience with a variant Kublai Khan — Khan in old age, impatient, combative, at the end of his rule. Marco Polo seems to be spinning out his description of the cities in the manner of Scheherezade, filling the time and diverting the fading emperor.

Dense, playful, paradoxical, and whimsical, the book has inspired a great deal of analysis and some pompous criticism. In general, Calvino's reputation suffers at the hands of his many well-wishers' special pleading. Much of his work is based on elaborate jokes, and the label of magical realism — which is often no more than whimsy writ large — is unhelpful. The structural flaw in the book is that it is a rather formless disquisition and a dialogue, not a narrative of discovery.

But as a set of imaginary journeys to strange cities, it is vastly enjoyable — and it must be enjoyed rather than analyzed or probed, or it will fall apart. The cities have themes — the cities representing memory, desire, signs, eyes; thin cities, trading cities, hidden cities; cities and the dead; continuous cities. Though the book is short, the 164 chapters keep repeating the cities' themes, with variations. Much could be made of the fact that all the cities, more than fifty of them, have women's names — Dorothea, Zenobia, Sophronia, Trude, and so forth. And perhaps these names stand for the siren song that the traveler hears, the romance of far-off places.

The wise observations, travelers' truths, relieve the repetitious narrative: "The more one lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth." Another: "Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places." This is ingenious and strikes me as true.

In another city, Adelma, Marco sees a vegetable vendor and recognizes his grandmother, and thinks: "You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask." That is an accurate expression of the traveler's imagination, and a polite way of illustrating Sir Richard Burton in Arabia seeing Maula Ali, "a burly savage, in whom I detected a ridiculous resemblance to the Rev. Charles Delafosse, an old and well-remembered schoolmaster."

It is misleading, I think, to look for echoes of Borges in Calvino's work. Borges creates new worlds, yet many of Calvino's cities, for all their exoticism, seem quite familiar. Here is the city of Chloe: "In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversation, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping." How is this city different from Chicago or Paris?

Other cities are purely satirical — cities where fashion is an obsession; cities that do not begin or end ("Only the name of the airport changes"); cities where memories are traded.

What does it add up to? Certainly it is a critique of travelers' tales and reminiscences about cities, litanies that are no more than variations on a theme. And perhaps these cities, apparently hermetic and separate and far-flung, are the same city, observed or remembered according to a particular mood.

The book — seeming more of a puzzle than it actually is — also tells us a great deal about how we live in cities, how we adapt to new cities, how even the most terrifying cities can be habitable. My own feeling (and it seems to be Calvino's too) is that city dwellers invent the cities they live in. The great cities are just too big to be comprehended as a whole, so they are invisible, or imaginary, existing mainly in the mind. A New Yorker lives in his or her version of New York, creating a city that is familiar and unthreatening, not the enormous, multilayered, and towering place but a particular set of friends, houses, shops, restaurants, theaters, and, crucially, a complex network of routes — streets, trains, and neighborhoods that are safe and supportive. In his book of apparently extravagant fables, Calvino shows us how we accommodate ourselves to the real world.

Jan Morris: Last Letters from Hav

HAVING TAKEN NUMEROUS journeys across the world — one of the most widely traveled of living writers — Jan Morris invented a country, gave it a history, art, religion, and literature, and was so scrupulous in her details that people earnestly asked her afterward where exactly it was and how they might visit.

The imaginary country of Hav seems to be in the eastern Mediterranean, and has not only a highly diverse population of Muslims and Christians, but also an ancient indigenous population, of troglodytes possibly of Celtic origin, who named Hav, their word (and the Welsh word) for summer. The troglodytes are called the Kretev, "thought to be etymologically related to the Welsh crwydwyr, wanderers."

One of the annual festivals is the Roof Race, where contestants leap from roof to roof across Hav.

Many distinguished visitors to Hav recorded their impressions: Chekhov, Lady Hester Stanhope, Ibn Battuta, and Marco Polo — the greatest and most literate of travelers. But also we learn that later visitors included Noël Coward, Coco Chanel, Thomas Mann, Winston Churchill, James Joyce, and Sir Richard Burton. Marco Polo remarked on Hav as "a place of strange buildings and rites, not like other places." The elaborate architecture is described, with quotations from Alexander Kinglake, Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, and others.

The narrator says, midway through the book, "The meaning of Hav is easy."

In terms of politics, art, war, and climate, Hav is the essence of the Mediterranean, a cultural confusion, layer upon layer, Greek, Turk, Italian, the great glittering talkative mass of conquerors and imperialists and evangelists — and writers: Edward Lear, James Joyce, Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence.

"But then the advantage of going native in Hav is that nobody knows what native is… you can take your choice!"

In this believable book, Jan Morris, the writer who has been everywhere, has created out of her travels and her reading a sunny, polyglot nation that is claimed by many nationalities, but in its very complexity is a fragility. It is, incidentally, also a way of showing how the somewhat despised Kretevs — those ancestors of the Welsh, of whose nation Jan Morris is a proud member — have been overwhelmed. Though the book is partly a satire on the multicultural Mediterranean, it is also a capriccio — one of the few successful ones I know in fiction — goodhearted, learned, and enlightening.

I asked Jan once what was going through her head as she was writing it. She said, "I wrote Last Letters from Hav because I had come to realize that I had never scratched more than the surface of any place or period I'd ever written about, and it was intended to be an allegory of civic and historical complexity — though nobody ever read it that way."