In some cases, the writer will opt for a narrative mode of ‘showing’ r ather than ‘telling’, electing not just to report an encounter retrospectively, but rather to reconstruct in a novelistic fashion.
A degree of fictionality is thus inherent in all tr avel writers.
The genre of travel writing and fiction intersect e ach other sharing many complexities of the form. Travel writing, however, remains a loosely defined body of literature. One’s ready assumption, probably, would be that travel writing is a factual, first person account of a journey undertaken by the author. One of the most persistent observations regarding travel writing, then, is its absorption of differing narrative genres, styles of composition, manner in which it e ffortlessly shape-shifts and blends
diverse …show more content…
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The experience of travel is translated, in the text , into a travel plot. As a result, reports of one and the same journey by various authors can be very different without one being more ‘true’ than the other. Evelyn Waugh, at the opening of Ninety Two Days
(1934), stresses his role as re-creator and transla tor of the original experience:
Just as a carpenter, I suppose, a piece of rough ti mber an inclination to plane it and square it and put it in to shape, so a writer is not really content to leave any experienc e in the amorphous, haphazard condition in which life presen ts it; and putting an experience into shape means, for a write r, putting it into communicable form… for myself and many better than me, there is a fascination in distant and barbarous places… It is there that I find the experiences vivid enough to d emand translation into literary form.
The actual experience of a journey is reconstructed , and therefore fictionalized in the moment of being told. This is even the case with accounts in the form of (more or less private) diaries and letters written during a journey, in which the
A degree of fictionality is thus inherent in all tr avel writers.
The genre of travel writing and fiction intersect e ach other sharing many complexities of the form. Travel writing, however, remains a loosely defined body of literature. One’s ready assumption, probably, would be that travel writing is a factual, first person account of a journey undertaken by the author. One of the most persistent observations regarding travel writing, then, is its absorption of differing narrative genres, styles of composition, manner in which it e ffortlessly shape-shifts and blends
diverse …show more content…
30
The experience of travel is translated, in the text , into a travel plot. As a result, reports of one and the same journey by various authors can be very different without one being more ‘true’ than the other. Evelyn Waugh, at the opening of Ninety Two Days
(1934), stresses his role as re-creator and transla tor of the original experience:
Just as a carpenter, I suppose, a piece of rough ti mber an inclination to plane it and square it and put it in to shape, so a writer is not really content to leave any experienc e in the amorphous, haphazard condition in which life presen ts it; and putting an experience into shape means, for a write r, putting it into communicable form… for myself and many better than me, there is a fascination in distant and barbarous places… It is there that I find the experiences vivid enough to d emand translation into literary form.
The actual experience of a journey is reconstructed , and therefore fictionalized in the moment of being told. This is even the case with accounts in the form of (more or less private) diaries and letters written during a journey, in which the