Beijing to the Bosphorus: notes on the travel account

To whom does the travel-account really belong ? The reader uneasily astride the twentieth and twenty-first centuries may be forgiven the presumption that such accounts are above all products of the Western pen, setting down what has been seen by the roving Western eye. The search through bookstores and even libraries of today confirms this primarily Occidental leaning of the popular travel-account. This is crystallised in the typical photograph of the author-traveller that accompanies the text: usually a man, dressed in rugged outdoor clothes, he stands squinting against the harsh sun of a distant land where he finds himself.2 In view of the association, moreover, of travel and anthropology that has become very nearly a cliche since Claude Levi-Strauss penned his Tristes Tropiques, the occidental vocation of even the erudite travel-account is neatly confirmed by author after author.3 Less academically, one can equally run the gamut from Blaise Cendrars whose celebrated and suggestively titled book Bourlinguer, with its implicit image of an errant sailing ship sums up the genre with elegance and multi-layered irony, to the hyper-occidental V.S. Naipaul, each casting his picaresque or jaundiced eye on people and places in various incarnations of both Occident and Orient.4