The Characteristics Of Travel Writing By H. Fussell

vii) Structurally, though most modern travel books reco unt an actual journey undertaken by the author, and organize their narrat ives according to the itinerary of this journey, some will not describe a ny actual travelling, but just a period spent residing in an unfamiliar place . There would be a different degree of prominence in the narrative. Th e extent to which the narrative focuses on, or reveals, the narratorial s elf may also vary greatly.

Fussell thus describes that such books with travel experiences can be considered as travel writing or at least ‘proper’ o r ‘real’ travel writing. In a way,

Fussell is trying to give the poetics of the travel writing by distinguishing travel writing from the similar other types which can conf use

Zweder von Martels suggests that the term ‘travel w riting’ can embrace material ranging ‘from guidebooks, itineraries and routes and perhaps also maps too

… accounts of journeys over land or water, or just descriptions of experiences abroad’

(Thompson 23). Thus he sees travel writing and guid ebooks not as starkly opposite but as two branches of the same genre. Jan Borm mak es distinction almost as Fussell does that ‘travel book’ has a first person, ostensi bly non-fictional narrative of travel.

Unlike Fussell, however, Borm does not insist that the travel book has to be ‘literary’ and to follow primarily an aesthetic agenda. Rather for Borm the ‘travel writing’ is ‘a

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collective term for a variety of texts both fiction al and non-fictional whose main theme is travel’ (Thompson 23). For the French theo rist, Michel de Certeau, ‘every story is a travel story’(Thompson 24), and he goes on to suggest that the act of writing is itself, fundamentally and intrinsically, a form of travel, and that travel conversely is always a form of writing. This definition of travel broadens the generic category of

‘travel writing’ to such an extent that it becomes meaningless and unhelpful. In