Travel and Literature: The Great Replacement [ABO]

… Since antiquity up to Hergé and Corto Maltese, passing through Marco Polo or Ibn Battuta, literature and comic books offer a wealth of narratives inviting readers to drift toward real destinations or partly fictional ones.

 
For many of us, Tintin stands as the prototype of the globe-trotting reporter, detective, and avenger that Joseph Kessel, for example, embodied in reality.

 
As for the immense Cervantes and his hero Don Quixote, he never stops embodying those adventurers who throughout history have hoped to discover in distant lands an ideal world.

 
Don Quixote is akin to Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus or Jacques Cartier… and Tartarin de Tarascon, in Alphonse Daudet’s pen, is a satirical novel interwoven with a travel narrative in Africa, completely imagined by the hero.

 
… Apparently invented from scratch, these characters actually draw their roots from the reality of the era that was theirs. An era when books circulated among the educated elites and carried their flood of narratives.

In fact, the story of the world as it has been understood since antiquity gave rise to a widely circulated and still vibrant body of literature, drawing its originality from personal experiences.

 
For evidence:

 
– The Festival “Etonnants voyageurs” in Saint-Malo has existed for 36 years and continues to draw crowds: 50,000 visitors over a few days. An achievement that each year welcomes regulars and newcomers to an event defined as that of “world literature.”

 
– The success of nineteenth-century great writers such as Lamartine, Flaubert, Nerval, Chateaubriand… who still populate bookshelves and recount their voyages in the East or in Italy, is another proof of the genre’s vitality.

 
– As for Sylvain Tesson and his superhuman journeys, he achieves exceptional sales, up to 500,000 copies for “La Panthère des neiges” or “Dans les forêts de Sibérie”… while Jack London’s “Martin Eden” remains a bestseller. Yet, alas, pamphlets against tourism are multiplying.

Overtourism and its heavy media coverage have left their mark, doing real damage to the world of essays and pamphlets: Leave Before It’s Too Late, The Anti-Tourist Handbook, Travel Was It Better Before?… and long before: Murielle Cerf’s The Anti-Travel, which chronicles the adventures of a young woman in Asia.

 
But above all: Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, which opens with the profoundly unsettling line: I hate travel and explorers. While Paul Morand, Georges Simenon, Henry Miller and many others tempered their moments of ecstasy with sharp criticisms.

 
To read on TourMaG: The traveling writers.

Attention, however: while this observation about the harmony between literature and travel is well known and remains as firm as ever, let us not overlook the function of travel being replaced by the book.

 
Despite its decline, the book remains an extraordinary instrument of escape. Our entire collective imagery is built from the numerous reading experiences lived by children who retreat from the outside world to devour novels such as Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain), Harry Potter, through Little Nicholas or The Hobbit by Tolkien, or The Little Prince…

 
It opens to a non-material “elsewhere”; the book has the ability to become travel insofar as it absorbs both attention, and also the time and the imagination of readers young and old.

 
It is all the more capable of “replacing” a journey as it offers the reader several advantages:

 
– The immense freedom to interpret characters and settings with one’s imagination and personal culture.

– it can be read and reread and can transform itself depending on when it is read and especially the setting in which it is read.

 
– It provides a way to create insulating bubbles allowing the reader to flee others and focus on themselves.

 
– It is also a tool for well-being insofar as it provides mobility to a traveler who can stay “immobile.”

 
– It is finally a tool of knowledge on par with travel.

 
… Far from airports, train stations, the constant changes from one hotel to another, from one museum to another, literature offers an extraordinary means of leaping into another universe without leaving one’s couch.

 
An advantage that could, in the short term, threaten mobility. Especially when the reader becomes compulsive, as in Alan Bennett’s novel The Queen of the Bookworms, which depicts a Queen Elizabeth utterly passionate about her reading to the point of forgetting to govern her kingdom.

 
With her head perpetually elsewhere, the queen travels in her books and feels so at home there that she sees the world differently.

 
The emotion that can strike a reader during and after reading certain novels can indeed transform a person. Especially among young readers? And transform a life. Who doesn’t remember a cult book that enchanted or moved their existence?

 
One more push…

Josette Sicsic, a journalist, consultant, and speaker, has been observing the world’s changes for more than 25 years to analyse their consequences for the tourism sector.

 
After having developed Touriscopie for over 20 years, she remains at the frontline of current events where she decodes the present to forecast the future. On the site www.tourmag.com, in the Futuroscopie section, she publishes several times per week forward-looking and analytical articles.

 
Contact: 06 14 47 99 04

Email: [email protected]