4 - Lost in Laos: Failure in Henri Mouhot’s and Stephen Greenblatt’s Travel Writing

Summary

Introduction

Failure in travel writing is a slippery term. Many travel texts are informed by the discrepancy between what was achieved or not achieved on a journey and the written account. Travels have, at least until the end of the nineteenth century, been almost always teleological, goal- and destination-oriented; the very notion of success is therefore germane to the discourse of travel writing. However, travellers have had to come to terms with the unexpected or at least unplanned-for. Adverse weather conditions, illness, stolen or lost luggage, lost or broken instruments, accidents, getting lost, running out of food and water, broken-down means of transportation, inadequate or false textual source material, lack of linguistic proficiency, the dependence on possibly unreliable local sources of knowledge – the list of pitfalls and impediments is endless, and the possibility of failure is certainly in some way or other written into almost every travelogue. The acknowledgement of failure, however, depends very much on the particular contexts of the journey and the ideologies and objectives of the traveller. Especially in the age of exploration and imperialism, British travel writing was tied up with a number of political, scientific, ideological and market interests, so that the notes jotted down in the jungle or the desert did not find their way to the readers directly but were framed, altered and adapted by their authors, editors and publishers. Actual travel failure – failing to reach the desired destination, explore foreign territories, gain knowledge, make contact with the native inhabitants or find what one had been looking for – is of necessity often camouflaged and rescripted in travel writing. When, for example, in 1595 Sir Walter Raleigh sailed to Guiana to find El Dorado, the legendary land of gold, to secure the alleged riches for the Crown, he found nothing. His travel account, published in 1596 under the title The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtifvl Empyre of Guiana is a textbook example of how to turn expeditionary failure into narrative success: to regain the queen's favour, Raleigh brushes aside the fact that he had never seen any gold and presents Guiana as an Edenic place and a desirable colonial possession which might yield gold on later expeditions.