Have monogrammed trunk will travel
To consider travel writing is one thing: but to conceive of literature as travel is something else; something a bit more philosophically interesting, a bit more Deleuzean ...
For Deleuze understood that penser c'est voyager and that the true nomad doesn't need to traipse around the world or migrate here and there; that they move even when standing still and that the most vital trips are in intensity, not space.
Deleuze hinged his theory of travel upon observations from several writers, including:
(i) Fitzgerald, who insisted that travelling - even to remote islands or the darkest jungles - never amounts to a real break if one takes along one's old beliefs, memories, and habits of thought ...
(ii) Beckett, who described it as dumb to travel simply for the pleasure of travelling itself; there had to be a destination of some kind ...
(iii) Proust, who said that upon waking the true dreamer has to go and check things out in the world; i.e., what motivates their desire to travel is not to discover new lands, but to confirm the reality of their own nightmares and visions. [1]
Deleuze was also a serious reader of D. H. Lawrence - and Lawrence was both a great traveller and a great writer, frequently overtaken by the necessity to move, although, amusingly, his own savage pilgrimage ultimately brought him to the conclusion that travel is a splendid lesson in disillusion. [2]
Of course, that hasn't stopped Lawrence scholars packing their suitcases and floating from international conference to conference, in order to endlessly discuss Lawrence's world tour and talk about his uncanny ability to connect with the so-called spirit of place.
For as Deleuze once joked, that's how academics travel - by generating a lot of hot air ...
Notes
[1] Gilles Deleuze: 'Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel', Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 77-78.
[2] Readers interested in knowing more about Lawrence's thoughts on travel can click here for a related post to this one.
This post is for Adam Peter Lang.
The great Orcadian writer and poet, George Mackay Brown, suffered a form of agoraphobia and rarely travelled far (even when his novel, Beside the Ocean of Time, was short-listed for the Booker Prize, he stayed put in his council flat at Mayburn Court in Stromness), but his imagination allowed him to roam with great vitality and intensity through time and space, so that he knew what it was to be other people in other lands, throughout history, and could capture this creatively in his works.
ReplyDeleteHe happily spoke of having had some of the most powerful experiences of his life while sitting in his rocking chair at home.