Like many other readers, before visiting a new place I like to immerse myself in the fiction and reportage out of there. But occasionally, something disorienting happens. I return home with a bunch of impressions that do not cohere, and there’s a niggling anxiety that I am not recollecting an important detail. The thought will not go away till I don’t, variously, talk others through their impressions of the city/country, or read more travelogues, crime fiction, or watch films shot there. It invariably works — and leaves me with another panic attack. Now that I have a grip on my travel impressions, have I acquired false memories? Could I have appropriated experiences that are not my own? A reordering of thoughts soon enough puts things right, and I hope I am all the more informed for my troubles. If you too are of this bent of mind, Pierre Bayard’s new book will bring both welcome reassurance and unsettling questions.
Ways of seeingTranslated from the French original, How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been: On the Importance of Armchair Travel (Bloomsbury) is Pierre Bayard’s twin volume to his wildly popular How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read . His introduction is not entirely convincing. Making it clear that he’s genuinely interested in other countries and cultures, and has found himself to be greatly enriched by exposure to them, he says his point is a little different: “The question is not what we can gain from a knowledge of foreign places — acquaintance with which can only be beneficial to anyone with an open mind — it is to know whether this acquaintance should take place directly or whether it isn’t wiser to practice it through means other than physical travel.”
That question apart, Bayard’s inquiry into different accounts of travels that may never have been is fascinating. There’s Marco Polo’s fantastic account of his travels in Asia, failing to mention any sighting of the Great Wall or the bound feet of Chinese women, leading to suspicion that the great traveller may in fact have, well, fibbed. Historians speculate how far he may have ventured in the direction of Asia, and what he may have been doing for those 20 years he was away from home. Bayard has his own theory, that Marco Polo retreated to solitude near Venice itself for the love of a woman. His larger point is: “The fact that, centuries after the tribulations of one of the most famous explorers of history, medieval specialists are incapable of coming to an agreement about whether he actually made it to the Far East or whether he wisely remained at home speaks volumes about the difficulty of separating travel from nontravel, and in so doing, the complexity to grasp the notion of travel with any rigour.”
There is a chapter on Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days , with Phileas Fogg’s “practice of accelerated travel”, it turns out, being an illustrative tip about avoiding the pitfalls of unnecessary trivia, and more such. But it’s when Bayard gets to more recent events that the book gets edgy, especially his accounts of Jayson Blair and Rosie Ruiz.
In 2003, Blair, then a reporter with TheNew York Times , was exposed for plagiarism in a highly public scandal that also led to an appraisal of existing newsroom oversight. Blair, it turned out, had never been to the outstation locations he said he’d been reporting from. Says Bayard: “If we leave aside the moral dimension of journalistic trickery, Jayson Blair’s story does pose the almost philosophical question, already latent in our previous examples, of knowing what it actually means to be in a place.” While Blair may have been driven by whatever reason into a state where he could not leave his apartment, he did conduct “authentic documentary research” and had “a real concern for accuracy”. Bayard invites the reader to judge Blair not only by journalistic standards (which he obviously, and rightly, fails) but by those of “stay-at-home” writers.
But was she there?But if Blair could describe places he’d not been to with a richness of detail that stunned even those he’d been writing about, what do you say of an athlete who broke a record at the Boston Marathon in 1980, and then was disqualified for her failure to describe key buildings on the route? The description had been demanded after Ruiz’s feat invited immediate suspicion as her spectacular time did not tally with her earlier statistics, and as she recovered too quickly after the race. Inquiry suggested she had taken a metro for part of the route, but Ruiz held she had in fact run the entire race.
Moral: recce the scene, in person or through research, whether you intend to cheat or not.
mini.kapoor@thehindu.co.in
