The Tao of Travel

WHAT IS STRIKING ABOUT MANY NARRATIVES of imaginary journeys is the great number written by actual travelers who know the world. In most cases such elaborate fictions are created by writers who have ranged widely. Samuel Butler sailed from Britain to New Zealand and back, Henri Michaux traveled through South America and extensively in Asia, Jan Morris has been practically everywhere on earth. Italo Calvino, born in Cuba, raised in Italy, traveled to the United States and returned to Cuba for a while, lived in Paris, and ended up in Italy. As travelers they were better able to invent journeys and create imaginary countries that were wholly credible, and their fictional travel is clearly based on their own travel.

"A Christian culture could more easily believe in the existence of the monstrous than of the perfect or near perfect," Susan Sontag wrote in "Questions of Travel," in the collection Where the Stress Falls. "Thus, while the kingdoms of freaks appear century after century on maps, exemplary races figure mostly in books of travel to utopia; that is, nowhere."

Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels are obvious choices for this chapter, since Crusoe's desert island was imagined by the widely read Daniel Defoe, who had traveled throughout Europe but never to the landscapes of his masterpiece—Brazil or the Caribbean. Jonathan Swift sailed back and forth from Ireland to England, and created Brobdignagian giants as well as tiny Lilliputians and Yahoos for Gulliver's various voyages. But these books are so well known I decided to omit them.

None of the fictions I've chosen are utopias. I find there is always something bloodless and unbelievable about a utopia. Its contrary, dystopian fiction, with its messy lives and its decaying buildings, more often has the ring of truth. What these books of imaginary places have in common is an element of satire—often a characteristic, or even the whole point, when the subject is an imaginary journey.

Samuel Butler: Erewhon: or, Over the Range

SAMUEL BUTLER, WELL educated, clear-thinking, oppressed by his father, had been heading for a career as a clergyman, but between his life at home and his work in a London parish after university, he lost his faith. Later, he was to write in his Notebooks, "As an instrument of warfare against vice, or as a tool for making virtue, Christianity is a mere flint implement."

And something of his attitude toward family life can be deduced from a notebook entry on the family: "I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other—I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so."

Not surprisingly, Butler fled from his family to New Zealand in 1859. His four-year spell running a sheep ranch there gave him time to read (Darwin among others) and think about the world he had left. When he returned to England in 1864 and wrote about his imagined world of Erewhon, he included details from the New Zealand he had seen: landscape, manners, aspects of the native population—the people of Erewhon are superficially reminiscent of the Maori.

One of the virtues of Erewhon is its evocation of landscape, its powerful and persuasive sense of place. It opens, and proceeds, like a classic Victorian travel book, describing a once empty land that although colonized still has a great unknown and mountainous hinterland, which exists as a temptation: "I could not help speculating upon what might be farther up the river and behind the second range." With the help of a native, Chowbok, the narrator, Higgs, sets off for the ranges, discovering a material culture and a dark-skinned population who he speculates might be part of the lost tribes of Israel. Before he can decide on anything concrete, he is brought before a magistrate and some others who are disturbed by the appearance of his pocket watch. Some broken machinery in the town's museum indicates that the people have a horror of anything mechanical. Higgs is put in prison.

The inhabitants seem to him no further advanced than "Europeans of the twelfth or thirteenth century." He learns the language. He makes friends. Later he mentions that he has a cold—a mistake: "illness of any sort was considered in Erewhon to be highly criminal and immoral," and he is punished.

After three months in prison Higgs is released, to visit the metropolis and its College of Unreason, where he learns that one of the professors has written a book warning of the possibility that "machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man." There also exists a class of men "trained in soul-craft." They are called "straighteners." But what Butler goes on to describe is a society much like that of the Victorian England he knew, yet without a tyrannizing religious sense.