14 - Lisbon as Destination: Josep Pla's Iberianism through His Travels to Portugal

Summary

Some years ago, in a lecture on the exhaustion of national literary history, Universidade de Lisboa professor Miguel Tamen argued for the privileged view of outsiders on a nation's culture. “Don't trust the natives!” he warned, advising against drawing systemic conclusions from the identification between point of view and object of study. Tamen's skepticism about national literary histories led him to assert that a literature is best represented by its foreign authors. His proposition opens up intriguing modalities of analysis. One would study not the Paris of Baudelaire or Zola but that of Benjamin or Rilke. Not the London of Dickens or Woolf, but that of Henry James and T.S. Eliot. Not the Barcelona of Oller or Rodoreda but that of Orwell or Genet. And so on, with interesting possibilities of alternative membership by authors who contributed to more than one country's literature. Although modalities for expressing the exotic are multiple, Tamen implicitly placed the onus on travel literature. It is often while traveling that an author feels the urge to describe a foreign culture or, if desire precedes the experience, then a writer will travel for the sake of a book yet to be written. Indeed, whether in documentary form or in fictional disguise (or in a mixture of both), travel has always been at the root of literary expression.

Tamen's proposition is paradoxical. After all, some national literatures pivot around authors whose masterworks include travel abroad. Camões is a case in point, as are Cervantes and Dante, despite the fact that Italians are the chief tenants of his other world. Goethe is, of course, the founder of a genre that enjoyed great popularity among the Romantics: the Italian journey. And Catalan literature in its golden age (from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries) is a record of travel throughout the Mediterranean. This fact is perhaps not without relevance for the somewhat idiosyncratic detail that the indisputable shaper of modern Catalan prose and its most prolific representative was pre-eminently an author of travel books. Josep Pla's peculiar oscillation between the requirements of journalism and the ambition to leave behind a personal record of his experience confronts us with the question raised by Paul Fussell with regard to the nominal status of travel books, namely, what should we call them?