Vertical travel: introduction

ABSTRACT

This introduction outlines the background of our special issue of Studies in Travel Writing, which emerged from reflections on travel and the travelogue in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It details the impact of this global public health crisis on questions of mobility and foregrounds the confinement to which travellers have been subject. The introduction argues that such changes should not be confined to the hypercontemporary moment but need also to be subject to active historicisation across a broad corpus of texts. The aim is to explore in this context the concept of “vertical travel”, tracking its elaboration in the work of scholars such as Kris Lackey, Michael Cronin and Alasdair Pettinger, and explaining the meanings it has acquired. The introduction then sets out the taxonomies of this practice and highlights the various forms it takes. It concludes with a brief summary of the selection of articles included in this issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Vertical travel
• microspection
• slow travel
• pedestrianism

This special issue of Studies in Travel Writing on vertical travel emerged from the events of, but is not exclusively linked to, the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. Amidst the pain and the loss experienced around the world, there was also a fundamental change being wrought in relation to the possibilities and opportunities for mobility: travel became restricted, and those restrictions were enforceable by law. The severity of such restrictions on movement, together with the time frames for closing communities down and opening them up again, has varied according to geographical location. Nevertheless, we all saw our movements demarcated within ever-tightening boundaries: countries’ borders were closed; movement between states, counties or districts was curtailed; we were told in various ways and in various languages to “stay local” and “stay at home”. Hopes that the environment might, at least, have benefited from the global slow-down via a reduction in pollution are being complicated by the news of “ghost flights” that have and will continue to take place in the skies of Europe; journeys are still made, even when travellers stay at home (Nelson 2022).

This forced reassessment of what it means to travel has stimulated a number of COVID lockdown travel writing projects. Ben Stubbs advised authors attempting to produce travel writing from home to utilise a form of multisensory micro-attention: “look intimately”, “smell deeply” and “look out your window” (2020). Acts of memory also emerged as central to the writings produced. Of the travelogues in Should We Have Stayed At Home?, a Granta special issue devoted to new travel writing, William Atkins says that the journeys his contributors wrote about “were by necessity journeys that had already been made” (2021, 7). Sinéad Gleeson writes, for instance, of having to abandon a trip to and account of Lourdes in favour of a return to earlier experiences of Brazil, “The journey could now only be taken in the mind, comprised of existing memories” (Gleeson 2021, 260). Attention therefore turns to the proximate and also to the past, in movements of return, either to places close-to-home, or to the travels of a pre-COVID era. Reflecting on Gary Snyder’s proposition that “the most radical thing you can do is stay at home”, Atkins highlights the dilemma posed to travel writers by this enforced moment of reassessment. Recognition of the environmental cost of travel reminds us that “[w]e’d all do well to learn to dwell better, to know and love our own patch more deeply”, yet it also sounds the alarm on “the peril we face as a species” in a way that will, at the first opportunity, compel travellers out again: “there remains value in venturing – carefully, reverently – beyond the horizon” (2021, 9).

The turn to past journeys and excursions of memory has also been accompanied by a revisiting of historical narratives. The authors within Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine (2021), like the contributors to the Granta volume, take inspiration from journeys already taken, yet set those “vicarious” travels in dialogue with historical accounts. Gary Fisher and David Robinson, the volume’s editors, state that they “asked contributors to ‘travel’ while subjected to epidemiologically mandated isolation. Yet, these travels are anything but isolated, as they are conducted in the company of an historical companion” (2021, 1). We pick up that historical thread in the current special issue but do so through works of travel writing criticism instead of the production of new travel narratives. The pandemic reminds us that travel writing is not, in fact cannot always be, exclusively a literature of mobility. The journeying it describes often exists in creative tension with experiences of slowness, immobility and even of confinement. In such cases we see an emphasis on travel as a vertical experience, rather than one primarily concerned with movement across a horizontal axis. The projects referred to above have used these conditions to create works that are experimental. They are not circumstances that are peculiar to the twenty-first century and the era of COVID-19, however, and this special issue looks to trace a tradition of vertical travel, of which our recent experience of lockdown might be seen as the most recent iteration. The history of travel writing is rich with examples of journeys that are restricted, either by external factors or individual choice. Some travelogues recount (self-)imposed sojourns (e.g. Maria Graham’s Three Months Passed in the Mountains East of Rome [1820]), or narratives of confinement (e.g. Eric Newby’s Love and War in the Apennines [1971]), while others, such as those narrating diplomatic journeys (e.g. the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu [1763]), may become accounts of “extended stays”. There is another tradition of travel texts that recount breakdown when the itinerary stalls and grinds to a halt, as travellers (like Victor Segalen, in the midst of his Equipée [1929]) are forced to refocus on their immediate surroundings. Other travel writers explore geographically limited lives and spaces, as is exemplified by Patrick Leigh Fermor’s focus on monasticism in A Time to Keep Silence (1953).

The focus on verticality, linked to such restriction, breakdown or those other moments when the journey’s horizontal movement is arrested, has broader implications for the study of the travelogue. Scholars of travel writing are used to exploring the genre in terms of the variables that shape the narration of the journey, a narration that takes place either in the field or in retrospect. Some of these are contextual, associated with the very different geographical frames and chronological niches in which travel occurs. Others are associated with travellers themselves, reflecting aspects such as gender, class, age and sexual orientation. Less attention is paid to those key vectors of the journey to which we allude above, despite the importance of these for understanding, in terms of the relationship to the cardinal points for instance, the direction from which a place is approached or in which it is left. Such aspects can have significant implications for the experience of travel, but at the same time, it is the axes of the journey, vertical and horizontal, that play an equally important role in determining the experience of the traveller and the nature of their attention to place and space. Thinking about travel in this way reveals the normativity of horizontalism, of long distances and of the expansiveness on which the practice customarily depends, all of which generate a set of assumptions that are often reflected in the travelogue itself.

As we have noted already, there has always been an alternative corpus of travel narratives that focus not on the horizontal, but on verticality, on limited distances and on spatial restriction. In his late eighteenth-century text, Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794), Xavier de Maistre turns a 42-day confinement to his house in Turin following a duel into a reason to explore the minutiae of domestic space. What is initially a parody of narratives of the Grand Tour becomes a reflection on the ways in which these traditionally horizontal axes of travel writing and the genre’s customary emphasis on expansive movement through open spaces may be replaced with a more decelerated or even sessile attention to the proximate and vertical. As such, as the panoramic yields to the more microscopic forms of engagement associated with a burrowing down into place, any spatial and kinetic shift they imply is simultaneously accompanied by a radical adjustment of scale. Scholarship on travel writing took some time to identify and analyse this phenomenon as a recurrent aspect of the genre rather than simply as an approach adopted sporadically and exceptionally by individual authors such as de Maistre. Alasdair Pettinger (2004-05) engaged with the concept in a review, entitled “Towards vertical travel”, of one of the inaugural studies of the genre, Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs’s Perspectives on Travel Writing. Author also of a contribution (2019) on “vertical travel” to the Anthem collection Keywords for Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary (2019) and contributor to this special issue, Pettinger focuses in his review on a “willingness to keep the borders of travel writing open”, notably in terms of the acceptance of an inclusive corpus that encompasses “fiction, autobiography, film, and sociological writings” (2004-05, 180). He goes on to suggest a further diversification not only in relation to form but also to practice:

This ecumenical approach could certainly be extended. The phenomenon of what has been called “vertical travel” (the minute descriptions of familiar surroundings, narratives of short local journeys, transcriptions of overheard conversations), on the one hand, and those works of science fiction that offer, in effect, imaginary ethnographies or alternative histories, on the other, raise the question of how far a writer needs to move at all in order to produce a heightened sense of place. If “travel writing” is something that emerges as soon as distinctions between “home” and “away”, however small, come into play, then we may begin to find it even harder to identify it with a delimitable corpus of texts. (180-181)

Pettinger draws here on the work of novelist and scholar Kris Lackey, who had first coined the term “vertical travel” in his book Roadframes: American Highway Narrative: The American Highway Narrative (1997) to describe an often unexpectedly close attention to topographical or chronological detail that permits new perspectives on the exotic as well as on the everyday. In the study, he contrasts “‘horizontal’ books” with “‘vertical’ travel books” (Dos Passos’s State of the Nation [1944] is cited as an example of the latter), stating that works in the second category “downplay the travel itself and dwell instead on the knotty particulars of some local conflict” (1996, 53). Lackey presents the horizontal and vertical here as mutually exclusive: “No road book I have read has emphasised a Romantic emphasis on highway experience with a painstaking enquiry into local economy. The emphases seem to be mutually unfriendly” (54).

The concept of vertical travel was broadened and popularised by Michael Cronin in his study of travel and translation, where he moves beyond Lackey’s focus on the highway narrative to explain a more general distinction between horizontalism and verticality:

Horizontal travel is the more conventional understanding of travel as a linear progression from place to place. Vertical travel is temporary dwelling in a location for a period of time where the traveller begins to travel down into the particulars of place either in space (botany, studies of micro-climate, exhaustive exploration of local landscape) or in time (local history, archaeology, folklore). (2000, 19)

Expanding the initial definition proposed by Lackey, Cronin and Pettinger each elaborate a concept that permits engagement with multiple manifestations of the phenomenon they describe. Vertical travellers can be out of place (e.g. Nicolas Bouvier in the Sri Lanka of Le Poisson-Scorpion [1981]) but may equally enhance a sense of denizenship and permit close engagement with their own locality in ways that encourage (in the poetry and prose of John Clare, Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals or the travel/nature writing of Jacques Lacarrière) re-enchantment of the ordinary. Vertical travel extends also to the contemporary practice of urban exploration (UrbEx), journeying to heights and depths to gain new perspectives on the cityscape. As such, the initial concept lends itself to diversification, in part in relation to understanding the relationship of “vertical travel” to cognate practices: William Least Heat–Moon coined the term “deep mapping” to designate his exploration of hidden cartographic detail in texts such as PrairyErth (1991); Jean-Didier Urbain describes the practice of “ethnologie de proximité” (proximate ethnography); and in texts such as Scarp (2012), Nick Papadimitriou performs what he calls a “deep topography” that links the practice to contemporary forms of psychogeography, in part in terms of elaborating more complex taxonomies.

In the articles that comprise this special issue, there are two principal factors that distinguish vertical travel from other sorts of travel writing. First, there is a sense of confinement or restriction, limiting either the scope or speed of travel; and secondly, and affected by such boundedness or restriction, there are a number of complementary and common methods that travellers adopt. A considerable range of affiliated terms and practices have emerged from both of these features of vertical travel which calls for some elucidation through a brief taxonomy of terms. For instance, in relation to the boundedness of vertical travel and the associated restrictions on mobility, methods of “slow travel” are a feature, including a rejection of technologies which enable efficient and speedy coverage of a horizontal plane. Authors of vertical travel texts make use of pedestrianism or pilgrimage in its various forms. In this special edition, Emma Bond argues for example for the connections between walking and thinking, and proposes a “paper-based pilgrimage” reflecting on works of art, themselves symbolic of mobility. Anna Dziok-Łazarecka likewise reflects on the effects of pedestrianism, a basis for Robert Macfarlane’s nature and place writing.

Vertical travel, as Charles Forsdick has noted, draws our attention to the geometries of travel, whether in its implicit contrast to established notions of horizontal mobility or through its foregrounding of the vectors of movement such as the predominance of downward trajectories (2020, 103). In her article on the writings of Genet, Joanne Brueton identifies both the physical movement down into the foundations of Chartres cathedral and a metaphorical dive back in time to the histories of empire and French colonialism. The metaphor of the palimpsest is helpful and often cited in attempts to encompass physical and cultural aspects of sites over time, allowing the writer a means by which to encapsulate the temporal heterogeneity of place.

The practices of observation and attention encouraged by stasis or restricted movement of the travel writer are diverse. There is an increased emphasis on close attention, usually an expansion of sensory impressions, sometimes in preference to otherwise over-looked or under-represented sensorial responses as seen in work on micro-audition and on kinaesthetic effects of landscape or environment. A common thread underlines these practices which we might associate with vertical travel in terms of their association with enrichment or a re-enchantment with the focus of study. Writers of vertical travel draw attention to a sense of looking again and anew at parts of the world and finding through their close attention novel and surprising elements. These particular ways of attending to place implemented by writers of vertical travel texts effect a re-consideration of the proximity of the generic boundaries between travel writing and its cognate areas, namely nature writing, place writing and creative non-fiction.

The results of such practices have rendered a number of key terms, most notably “microspection”, Michael Cronin’s term which draws together both the notion of focus on an extended stay in a limited geographical area, seen in his emphasis on “temporary dwelling”, and a close attention to the “particulars of place” (2000, 19; see also Cronin 2012). Cronin’s term has contributed a political dimension to our understanding of vertical travel, such that “microspection” for him suggests “the necessity of forms of democratic co-existence” of “the fractal, endotic immensity of the lives of human subjects”, and additionally perhaps, environments and species of plants and animals (2012, 100). In the attention to the small and previously overlooked, there is often a more democratic, less dominant voice highlighted. Following this logic, some authors of essays in this special issue note, as Juanjuan Wu does, a facility of vertical travel to “undermine and unpick structures of imperialism”.

In the article that opens the volume, Emma Bond offers an examination of verticality that operates in relation to the practice of both the author and her subjects. She argues that twenty-first-century works in text and image by Emily Jacir, Diana Matar and Hisham Matar facilitate a reassessment of Mediterranean slowness in relation to ideas of pilgrimage, cultural translation, and long histories of movement and displacement. In doing so, and in sympathy with a number of the travel writers in the Granta volume discussed above, she reflects on the ways in which her own plans for travel have been thwarted by the pandemic and lockdown: a sojourn in Italy by necessity becomes a textual excursion. By doing so, Bond invites us to think about the role that travel and movement play in the life of an academic scholar, and the ways in which the practice of critical research and writing might be transformed when it takes place in a space of confinement. Anna Dziok-Łazarecka’s essay shifts the focus from confinement to the peripatetic micro-attention manifest in Robert Macfarlane’s writing. It details the descriptions of sensorial encounter with the natural world, and highlights the “thick time” or temporal heterogeneity in the texts, which is facilitated by practices of slow travel, specifically pedestrianism, on walks in and around Britain. This is drawn into sharp relief later in the essay when Dziok-Łazarecka discusses Macfarlane’s account of the political and ideological limitations of mobility during his visit to Palestine.

The subject of Juanjuan Wu’s article is the Shanghai-based sinologist Florence Ayscough. Wu reveals the different forms of verticality at work in Ayscough’s A Chinese Mirror (1925), beginning with the immersive descriptions of home-life in Shanghai, from which the text descends into histories of language and culture, and moving to the journey along the Yangtze River which retraces the earlier movements of ancient poets. Wu argues that the travel book offers a challenge to dominant Euro-American imperialist thinking about China and shows the potential for microspection to serve as political discourse. Joanne Brueton shifts attention to the work of a travelling author rarely explored in the context of travel writing, Jean Genet. She argues that Genet can be positioned as a vertical travel writer who uses his microspection into the geometries of place – including France, Palestine, Japan and Vietnam – as a way to resist the political cartographies that divide up territory into what can be known, represented and dominated. Brueton expands our understandings of travel writing to reveal how Genet’s politically committed travelogues use vertical signifiers to expose the monolithic nature of a homeland, to uproot the flattening orthodoxies of a native soil and to unearth the exploitation of those without a home. In this way, and in Brueton’s account, vertical travel offers a microscopic lens into the hierarchies of oppressed peoples but also reveals that the page of travel writing is itself the site of a geometric process of what she calls “unearthing”.

Patrick Crowley continues this exploration of vertical travel in French literature by presenting an insightful study of the work of journalist and travel writer Jean-Paul Kauffmann. He sees in Kauffmann’s writings an oblique interrogation of the author’s long and difficult confinement as a hostage in Beirut from May 1985 to May 1988. His often highly personal texts engage with sites and traces of French imperialism, permitting a reflection on the tensions between confinement and freedom as well as on a self that is fragmented by past experience. The implicit verticality of his travel writing, focused on a very specific sense of place, demonstrates a personal form of microspection that ultimately shores up that self. Silvia Baage’s contribution to the special issue considers the intersections of vertical travel with the environmental humanities. Her focus is on the contemporary French author Frank Smith whose Katrina: Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiane deploys various modes of vertical travel, figurative and literal, to represent the environmental uncanny that he encounters in Louisiana when, in a small island community in the bayous, he meets America’s first climate refugees. Baage explores how Smith’s approach to vertical travel, dwelling and the fractal diversity of the everyday resonates with Ursula Heise’s descriptions of situated knowledge, sensory perception and physical immersion, with these seen as foundations for a sense of place addressed in the article through various fragments evident in the author’s work. The volume closes with Alasdair Pettinger’s consideration of a perspective often associated with stillness and immobility: people watching. His study of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century works by Alain de Botton, Roger Green, Sophie Calle, Annie Ernaux and Behrouz Boochani recalibrates our thinking about the relationship between traveller and travellee, observer and observed. It also offers new ways to think about persona and characterisation in non-fiction accounts of travel, by encouraging us to examine the ways in which moments of stillness in travel texts enable “minor” characters, and supposedly minor points of view, to come to the fore.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.