Traveling Writers or Writing Travelers

I'm back in the land of solemn strangers, great cheese, and tiny cars. I visited home for the break...the land of public drinking fountains, carpet on the floor so you can go barefoot, wide spaces, and quiet. I slept a lot and watched movies and went to an engagement party for someone who graduated high school with me (!) and saw all my high school teachers and my Yreka friends. I also played in the alumnae soccer game (and couldn't walk for two days afterward) and went cross-country skiing and spent quality, quality time with my mom and my bro. It was worth the long trip and the 24 hours in the cursed Belgian airport. Now I'm in turbo study mode (which of course means time for another blog entry). I have five exams between January 23 and February 22. Yikes.

I am taking a class about Italian travel literature around the turn of the century. It's not trashy travel lit, but novels and essays and ideas elaborated by well-respected writers of the 20th century: Guido Gozzano, Giovanni Pascoli, d'Annunzio, Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Manganelli and so on.

We have talked about the weird impressions that writers make of foreign places, more for their own benefit and self-discovery than with the "natives" in mind. Much of it is bonafide colonial propaganda but some authors have more complex perspectives, hard to define as racist, especially within their historical and social contexts, but hard to completely forgive either, because they've contributed to our perceptions of India, of Africa, of Asia in ways that have damaged those places, made them exotic, or created such a dense literary web around them that it's impossible to see through to something real. I wonder if it's possible at all though, to do justice to a place when writing about it without idealizing it or to notice things without judging or to write in a way that transcends one's own historical or social context. Maybe travel writing never does because it necessarily draws on differences, on personal (biased) perceptions, on intercultural relationships.

And those perceived differences are what draw me to write about Italy. It's the discomfort that I experience here, or the questions I ask that just don't occur to me at home (which by the way would be even harder to describe than Italy, since I'm inside it. Granted I'm not transmitting a clear picture of Italy or Italian culture in my writing, but writing from within a culture about it would seem impossible.) I've certainly done my share of criticizing since I've been writing about my experience so far in Italy. What I've learned from this class is that the travel writing unfailingly reveals more about the writer than the spotlighted country: his or her expectations, cultural ignorance, cultural upbringing.

Just as I know it will never be possible to speak Italian with native grace and speed, I suspect it will be impossible to render an unbiased picture of a country that isn't mine. Nor as I said above, really render an unbiased picture of the United States, a country that is, sort of, mine. I don't really have a satisfactory ending for this entry. It's just something I continue to think about. Until next time...