Why Is There No Travel Writing?

Notes on the Monoculture

Paul Theroux next to a tree (photo by David Sandison)

I have this like ancient memory of being a teenager and finding nothing more interesting than travel writing — Paul Theroux, Ryszard Kapuściński, Robert Kaplan, people like that. I remember being very impressed when, in college, I discovered that a friend had actually brought a full bookshelf of Lonely Planets with him to campus and read them for pleasure.

Somehow, I can’t picture any college students doing that right now, and as far as I can tell, travel writing has almost completely disappeared as a genre. I can’t even think of a publication that puts out genuine travel pieces — Atlas Obscura is pretty much all lifestyle and its writers rarely leave their New York cubicles.

So what’s going on exactly? Travel would seem to be the most immutable, most endlessly-interesting kind of writing. I remember a teacher of mine saying once that “all writing is travel writing” — and I think that’s basically true. Meanwhile, the world is getting smaller, the cost of travel cheaper — it would seem the ideal moment for a fluorescence of travel writing.

I have three theories for what’s happening, one structural, one cultural, and one spiritual.

The structural theory is that what happened to travel writing is an extension of what happened to international reporting in general — it was just too expensive and not worth the sunk costs. A piece by a Paul Theroux-type writer likely costs a great deal when you add up the meals, hotel, and airfare — and isn’t a worthwhile investment when most journalism can happen from a writer at a laptop.

The cultural theory is that it’s not worth it as an investment because there’s no appetite for it. When travel writing has been a mega-phenomenon — in the traveler accounts of the 18th century that did so much to launch the modern publishing industry, in the dispatches from Victorian explorers that were regularly front page news in the 19th century, etc — there was the sense of danger and the sense of exploration, the real possibility of a writer bringing back some completely different way of thinking or of living in the world. Nobody thinks they’re going to get that now if they read a travel essay, so no one really reads travel essays — or at least not with the enthusiasm that would justify their costs.

And then the spiritual theory is that we have entered into the monoculture. People not only lack an appetite for the exploration of other parts of the world, but they actually don’t find it interesting. It’s assumed that everywhere, basically, is the same, or variations of the same. There’s more developed and less developed, with a few cultural distinctions thrown in. To focus on the less-developed is, increasingly, to run the risk of ‘exoticizing’ while the more developed is boring — basically just tips for where to shop and eat. It seems, judging by the paucity of travel writing, that we have never been closer and we have never been less interested in each other.

All of this is really unfortunate for many reasons. For one, I really love to travel — always find it interesting and, when I travel, enjoy being accompanied by a good traveler’s account, which can be surprisingly hard to find. For another, it’s not really true that a monoculture has taken hold. Yes, everybody has a cell phone and knows who Tom Cruise is, but mindsets, as I’m discovering, are very different in different parts of the world. What we have, I think, are competing modernities. The Russian modernity looks very different from the Chinese, looks very different from the African, looks very different from the American, etc. To tease out those very subtle differences in perspective, though, you would really need to be in a place for a long time — or, if you can’t go yourself, would really need access to a travel writer who can do that hard cultural work for you.

I would really love to see a resurgence of travel writing and I would like to see it on these terms — not about discovery or Herculean traveling feats but about immersion in different cultures and the teasing out of mindset. We are all right on top of each other. We owe it to ourselves to learn who other people are.

Sam Kahn writes

Castalia

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