Travelogues

One of the reasons why I like travel literature is because it offers a delectable tension beteen its supposedly "it really happened!" quality and the unique opportunity for the author to invent a story about far away lands out of whole cloth, with no one in the vincity to contradict him. The classic example in fiction would be Odysseus spinning his tale for the Phaeacians. Giant monobrowed sheperds? Insatiable sex goddesses? Yeah Ody, suuure. Whenever I read a travelogue, ancient or modern, I'm constantly second-guessing the author. This could have happened... this was for self-aggrandizement... this was inserted or altered to resonate with an earlier event... In pure fiction, that tension doesn't quite exist.

For example, in Paul Theroux's excellent The Great Railway Bazaar, there are two running gags. One about people who don't manage to catch the train in time ("duffilled" writes the author) and another a tale told by various travellers about spending a night with a beautiful woman only to discover with the morning that "she" was really a man. There's a story-like progression in those running gags, however simple. At the beginning, a companion of Theroux is duffilled, near the end, he is duffilled himself. He is told the story about the transvestite a first time, and then a second, this second time with the twist that the narrator admits he didn't mind at all.

To what degree the original facts were bent to adopt such a story-like quality? Maybe they weren't bent at all, at least intentionally. Maybe it's just that we tend to remember not simply unrelated factoids, but sequences of events that make sense for us, that seem to go somewhere. Maybe it's not just a tendency, but an absolute requisite for our past experience to become intelligible. See this article.

Another neat thing about travelogues is that the author usually ends up telling us as much about himself -however indirectly- than as about the places he visits, despite the pretense to the contrary. And I like that pretense. In your face "this is going to be about ME ME ME" works, á la Rousseau's Confessions, feel a little too blunt.