Paul Theroux - The Tao of Travel - Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

Because of the intensity of his vision, and his humor, it is hard to sort out his actual travels from his drug trips. He spent a decade on the move, from 1927 to 1937. His travels in China, Japan, and Malaysia in the thirties resulted in A Barbarian in Asia, little more than a travel diary. Ecuador, which appeared in France in 1968, is also diaristic but more personal and relentless — angry, impatient, cranky, highly readable, and still relevant. Michaux's books are hard to find; he is obscure now as he was in his lifetime; in spite of his achievement, he never enjoyed any fame or material success, but he said he didn't care.

"There exists a banality of the visionary world," he wrote in The Major Ordeals of the Mind, and the Countless Minor Ones, first published in French in 1966. (Michaux's titles are superb.) This suggests to me that his imaginary travels are based more on his actual travels than on his drug trips. Even so, it is impossible to tell from some of his works whether he is describing a lived experience or a dream state.

In three books, gathered under the one title Ailleurs (Elsewhere), he wrote about three imaginary countries. The works are Voyage to Great Garaban, In the Land of Magic, and Here Is Poddema. One of the pieces in his book Spaced, Displaced is called "Journey That Keeps at a Distance," the sort of trip that is so full of frustrations, incomplete encounters, and half-baked impressions that it resembles that of the travel writer who arrives in a place and finds nothing to write about except frustration — one of the less readable sorts of travel books.

Voyage to Great Garaban, first published in 1936, illustrates another feature of imaginary travels: the detailed sociology and anthropology of such places; the politics, the history. When a traveler invents a place, he or she usually describes more of the place and its people than if it were real. So the land of the Hacs, in Garaban, is described as a set of brutal spectacles, each with a number, and growing in violence. There is hand-to-hand combat (vicious street fighting, families battling in muddy swamps), animals attacking humans (an entertainment), and animal fights ("caterpillars that were ferocious, and demon canaries"). Some Hacs make an attempt to kill their king for the sole purpose of being arrested and condemned to death, and for the splendor of being executed in style—"Spectacle Number 30 which is called 'Receiving one's death in the Palace courtyard.'"

Though the anonymous traveler doesn't condemn these outrages, he flees the Hacs and moves on to the Emanglons. He describes the Emanglons as an anthropologist would, even using the heading "Manners and Customs." We learn of their death rituals, the implications of sickness, their contempt for work and its danger ("After a few days of sustained labor an Emanglon will be unable to sleep"), their odor ("a complex perfume"), their tendency to weep for no reason, their aversion to flies: "Emanglons cannot endure living in the same room with a fly. In their eyes the cohabitation has something monstrous about it."

The Hivinizikis, the last group in Great Garaban, are manic, furiously rushing about, praying madly and prostrating themselves. Unbalanced, in a froth, they are "always outdoors. If you see someone inside, he doesn't live there. No doubt about it, he's visiting a friend." Everything about the Hivinizikis is hectic — religion, politics, the theater, all is rough-and-tumble.

Michaux had traveled fairly widely in the world before he wrote his imaginary travels, so these tales are both satires of actual travel and comic fantasies. As a surrealist Michaux is keenly aware of the necessity for satire to be absurd; even when a narrative is not understood, it must bring a smile to the reader's lips. In a scholarly introduction to Michaux's Selected Writings (1944), Richard Ellmann quotes André Gide, a supporter of Michaux, saying that Michaux "excels in making us feel intuitively both the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things."

Miguel de Unamuno: "Mecanópolis"

YOU COULD PUT this short story, written in 1913, down to science fiction or speculative fiction were it not for the fact that the author says he was directly inspired by the satire of Samuel Butler's Erewhon. Unamuno (1864–1936), who depicts the same horror of technology in this intense and compressed tale, was a distinguished philosopher and the author of a work on man's ambiguous relationship with God, The Tragic Sense ofLife.

"There sprang to mind the memory of a traveler's tale told me by an explorer friend who had been to Mechanopolis, the city of machines," begins Unamuno's story (translated by Patricia Hart).

Lost in the desert, dying from thirst and weakness, the traveler "began sucking at the nearly black blood that was oozing from his fingers raw from clawing about in the arid soil." He sees something in the distance. A mirage? No, an oasis. He recovers, sleeps, and when he wakes discovers a railway station with an empty train at the platform — no engineer, no other passengers. He gets in, the train departs, and later deposits him at a fabulous city. No people can been seen in the city, nor any life. "Not one dog crossed the street, nor one swallow the sky." But there are streetcars and automobiles, which stop at a given signal. He goes to a museum, which is full of paintings but sterile in mood, and then to a concert hall "where the instruments played themselves."

That he is the only person in the city is a news item in the Mechanopolis Echo: "Yesterday afternoon — and we do not know how it came about — a man arrived at our city, a man of the sort there used to be out there. We predict unhappy days for him."

Among the machines, without any human company, the traveler begins to go mad. This too is an item in the daily paper. "But all of a sudden a terrible idea struck me: what if those machines had souls, mechanical souls, and it were the machines themselves that felt sorry for me?"

In a panic, he attempts suicide by leaping in front of a streetcar, and he awakes at the oasis where he started out. He finds some Bedouins and celebrates his deliverance. "There was not one machine anywhere around us.

"And since then I have conceived a veritable hatred toward what we call progress, and even toward culture, and I am looking for a corner where I shall find a peer, a man like myself, who cries and laughs, as I cry and laugh, and where there is not a single machine and the days flow with the sweet, crystalline tameness of a street lost in a forest primeval."

This remarkable piece of fiction about an imaginary journey combines the rejection of technology that Samuel Butler satirized, the over-civilized life that Richard Burton deplored, the horror of a dehumanized urban world that Thoreau condemned, and the wish to find an unspoiled people in a remote place — an Edenic place of happy humans.

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

MOST OF CALVINO'S fictions could be included under the heading "Imaginary Journeys." But Invisible Cities is the most appropriate for an anthology of travel, since the narrator is Marco Polo — a variant Marco Polo, in an extended audience with a variant Kublai Khan — Khan in old age, impatient, combative, at the end of his rule. Marco Polo seems to be spinning out his description of the cities in the manner of Scheherezade, filling the time and diverting the fading emperor.

Dense, playful, paradoxical, and whimsical, the book has inspired a great deal of analysis and some pompous criticism. In general, Calvino's reputation suffers at the hands of his many well-wishers' special pleading. Much of his work is based on elaborate jokes, and the label of magical realism — which is often no more than whimsy writ large — is unhelpful. The structural flaw in the book is that it is a rather formless disquisition and a dialogue, not a narrative of discovery.