Pico Iyer on jet lag and travel writing
“I think to write about jetlag is a way of saying that if you write about travel you’re writing about displacement and shock and confusion, and “measure travel inwards”, as Thoreau said. And it’s a way of saying also that just as magic realism has so enlightened and emancipated our fiction, some of the mechanisms of magic realism can be brought into nonfiction as we push the envelope of consciousness and being to acknowledge to ourselves that much of what we describe — especially when we’re traveling, or surrounded by people from other cultures — come to us as hallucinations. To begin to do justice to it, you have to write in a prose that is not the linear prose of classical travel writing, but is taking in dream and illusion and uncertain vision.”
–Pico Iyer, from “A New Kind of Travel for a New Kind of World”, a speech given at the Key West Literary Seminar, January 5, 2006
April 17th, 2007 at 7:52 am
All writing reflects the way people see information at a given moment in history. Travel writing as well all the other kinds of writings are all going in that direction, the non-linear direction. Our generation sees information visually, non-verbally, as smaller units that can stand alone and work together as a whole, like Internet i.p. packets that come together to form a webpage. Great travel writers like Defoe won’t ever happen again, and neither will our generation’s eighty years from now. Some brand new way to look at information will replace everyone.
-Ethan
Backpacking on Little Money
April 17th, 2007 at 10:56 am
For Ethan:
Why “information”?It seems to me that part of travel is dissasociate myself from common, every day modes of receptivity. “Information” connotes distance,spectatorship, instrumentality, a void and an inability to experience as if you were doing more that passing through and collecting visuals, memories, stories, friends etc. for later “use”. Maybe the information approach is inevitable, tied up in the fact that we are all tourists, but nevertheless, I don’ think it should be embraced. Do you? Anyone?
April 17th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Hi Karen,
When I said the way we see “information” I meant the way we present things, like let’s say, in writing. Any account can be narrated in many different ways. In first, second, third person. In chronological order. In scattered order, using flashback techniques. In minimal language, visual language, verbal language. With great or little psychological distance. Etc.
I didn’t mean “information” to mean the actual traveling experiences, which is all about life and emotion and living, like you so clearly pointed out. I meant “information” as the actual coding of those experiences into a narrative format, like a book’s.
I think we agree. Cheers!
-Ethan
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