CHRONO-TYPES: NOTES ON FORMS OF TIME IN THE TRAVELOGUE1

1. The Temporalities of Travel, Travel Writing, and Reading Travel is a spatio-temporal experience since space and time are the fundamental – in Kantian terms, „apriorical“ – categories through which we always perceive, make sense of, and act in reality. Actually, during travel one often tends to be more aware than in everyday life of a day-by-day organization and progress; thus, one has to observe a precise scheduling by hours and minutes. Many travellers keep daily records in the form of logs and journals, and more formal travel writing sometimes retains such a journal structure, with precise dating for the individual sections – for example, James Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1786), or a modern classic of English travel writing, Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937). Byron frequently refers not only to coordinates in space, but also to points and phases in time: „Mazar-i-Sherif (1200 ft, 122 miles from Andkhoi), 26 May. I must confess that for me our arrival here this evening was a solemn occasion. I left England in August with two hopes: one, to see the monuments of Persia; the other to reach this town. Neither was very formidable, but they have taken some time to fulfill.“ 1 The title of another well-known piece of English travel writing, Evelyn Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days: A Journey in Guiana and Brazil (1934), even gives precedence to time over place, and the text later suggests that the very time spent on the trip should engage some of the reader’s interest: „An experience, which for me was worth six months of my time, a fair amount of money and a great deal of exertion may be worth a few hours’ reading to others.“2 Waugh’s book does not preserve a diary structure, but here, too, reference to place is often combined with precise indications of travelled time [p. 25]: „We left camp at 6.45 and [p. 25-26], taking an hour and a half’s rest between 11 and 12.30, reached Karto […] at 4.45. The last few hours were painful, first climbing a hillside of sharp pebbles in the full glare of the afternoon sun, and then crossing a dead flat tableland of hot, iron-hard earth“ (135). Most travelogues give dates at least for the beginning and end as well as significant laps of journey (the beginning of Waugh’s trip to Guiana, for example, is dated December 1932), mention how long it took the traveler to cover certain distances and whether there were delays of how long one stayed in a certain place, and so forth. To Waugh, an impression of the time that passed, and was felt to pas, during a trip – a impression of the travel’s „checks and hesitations“ – is essential to convey to the reader the „genuine flavor“ of the trip: „Were one to be levitated on a magic carpet and whisked overnight from place to place, one would see all that was remarkable but it would be a very superficial acquaintance“ (151). Time reference in the travelogue contributes to a text’s reality effect, supporting the genre expectation that travelogues are based on actual journeys, but it also plays a role in determining the impression(s) a reader will form of a depicted journey on the basis of this journey’s narrative.

Yet, despite this obvious relevance of temporality, criticism has discussed travel and the travelogue primarily in terms of space.3 This is not quite unexpected, since at first thought one tends to conceive of travel as an activity taking one through and to certain locations; accordingly many travelogues are illustrated with pictures and maps. And though every piece of travel writing constructs a specific world and thus implies a „chronotope“ or „time-space“, the genre’s general understanding appears to privilege space over time: armchair travellers would find a travelogue without place description more unusual than one that makes only a

1 Barbara Korte, „Chrono-Types: Notes on Forms of Time in the Travelogue“, pp. 25-53. In: Writing Travel. Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey, ed. Johh Zilcosky, University of Toronto Press, 2008.

minimal reference to travelled time. Topos apparently needs to be a theme in travel writing, if a piece of writing is to be identified as such; whereas chronos can, but does not need to be, thematic. A discussion of the treatment of time in travel writing cannot be restricted to time and time experience as theme, however. It intersects with the temporality of the (narrative) text as such.

Writing and reading are sequential processes and hence temporal per se. On top of that, narrative texts require at least a minimal sequence of events, or story. A travelogue as text thus has a time dimension whether time experience is thematic in this text or not,4 and some travelogues mention the temporalities of writing and reading explicitly. In the excerpt already quoted [p. 26], Waugh shows an awareness of the (few) hours it will take readers to read his book [p. 26-27], and he is even more aware of the time that composing the text will consume. In fact, Ninety-Two Days begins not with Waugh setting out on his journey, but with Waugh embarking on the process of writing – after a longish period of hesitation – on 12 October 1933: „At last, relentlessly, inevitably, the lugubrious morning has dawned; day of wrath which I have been postponing week by week for five months.“ The time calculated for writing and „reliving“ the journey is given as „the next month or two“ (7, 11). We find similar references to the temporality of writing and reading in the travel books of Charles Dickens, who, as writer of serialized fiction and editor of the periodical press, may well have developed a particular sensitivity for text and reading time. Thus, when Dickens reaches the end of a chapter in American Notes (1842), his account of a tour through the United States and Canada, we read that „I am not aware that I have any occasion to prolong this chapter“,5 and a few pages later, the reader is asked to „pause and reflect upon the difference between this town and those great haunts of desperate misery.“ In Pictures from Italy (1846), the reader is imagined as a travelling companion who is issued a passport in the book’s preface and, at the end of one lap in the journey, is expected to be just as exhausted as the traveler himself: „At present, let us breathe after this long-winded journey“ (283).

Analysing time in the travelogue, then, involves a complex set of questions directed, on the one hand, at the temporality of travel as a thematic element. On the other hand, the text’s discursive formation – its linguistic and narrative elements and structures – has its own impact on how readers construct a sense of time for the trip they are reading about. It is the aim of the following sections to sketch basic criteria, „chrono-typical“ distinctions, for the analysis and description of these complexes. This involves parameters discussed in a wide range of disciplines: the nature and the experience of time as such (for example, in philosophy, physics, psychology, cognitive science, ethnology, and social and cultural history),6 as well as the linguistic and narrative means of rendering time in (narrative) texts (as discussed in grammar, stylistics, and narratology). What I wich to propose in this essay, therefore, is that textual and, above all, narratological categories be integrated into the discussion of time in travel writing – not as a complement to a more narrowly understood anthropological approach, but as an integral part of such an approach. For it is to a large extent through constructing narratives that human subjects make sense of the world [p. 27], and the study of narrative – especially in the emerging field of a context-sensitive and culturally oriented narratology – has begun to take major share in the disciplines now referred to as literary and/or cultural anthropology [p. 27-28].7 A narratological analysis of the different ways in which time is textualized and narrated in travel writing permits one, as the final section will illustrate, to gain a detailed and complex impression of the mental frames of time experience under which travel has been conducted over the ages and out of different cultural environments.

2. Time as Theme: The Temporality of the Travelled World and The Traveller’s Experience

2.1 Selective Temporality

The impression of travelled time that a travelogue – or part of a travelogue – imparts

varies from minimal to highly developed. This variation can be explained with artistic choice and ideological underpinnings of travel in certain contexts (see 4.1 below), but also, quite simply, with the more practical reason that keeping a regular diary or log during a trip may be cumbersome for the traveler. As Johannes Fabian points out, not even explorers, with their strong interest in precise record of their observations, have always been able to keep their journals conscientiously: „There can be no doubt that most of them wrote against, not with, the flow of time; in order to record what happened daily, they had to take ’time out‘ from quotidian.“8 How much of a journey’s temporal progress and/or traveller’s experience of time are remembered when a travelogue is composed may thus be influenced by how extensive a record was taken in these respects during the actual trip. It seems fair to speculate that for many travelers, taking note(s) of the existents of the travelled was of greater importance than recording a more fleeting personal experience of time. So the very fact that the temporality of travel and its experience is made thematic in a text qualifies as a first chrono-typical distinction. Note, however, that even where a sense of time is prominent, it is always already a highly selective construct. Travel writers strive not to bore their readers, and their texts therefore leave out or summarize certain stretches of a journey. Thus Waugh notes in Ninety-Two Days that „it would be tedious to record the daily details of the journey to Kurupukari“ and that „it would be tedious to describe the next two days in detail“ (40, 107). As we will see, however [p. 28], travel writers may find it worthwhile to convey the tedium and monotony during a journey itself as memorable and hence readable travel experience [p. 28-29].

2.2 The Chronotope

The travelogue’s selective rendering of a journey’s temporality implies a second chrono-typical category: What kind of time-space is implied for a journey, and to what extent does a text encourage its readers to form a mental image of a chronotope in which the axis of chronos plays a more than nominal role? Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope refers to „the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature“. Through his discussion of the chronotopes found in certain types of prose fiction, Bakhtin intended to contribute to a „historical poetics“, postulating that „the chronotope in literature has an intrinsic generic significance. It can even be said that it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions“.9

In its most fundamental generic understanding, the travelogue is defined by the chronotope of a route covered in a certain amount of time during a specific trip. But within this this basic chronotope, a wide range of variation is possible, and a great part of that variation is consequence of how strongly (or weakly) the time axis of chronotope is „staged“ or not. Narratives of travel that pay attention primarily to „objective“ experience – to seeing and making inventories of places, people, and customs – typically focus more on existents in certain locations (and therefore have a space-dominated chronotope) than on what happens and is experienced temporally „along the way“ (see 4.1). But in other cases, a travelogue’s chronotope emphasizes the journey’ dynamic, as in Eric Newby’s The Big Red Train Ride (1978). In this account of journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway through the former Soviet

Union, much travel time is spent in the moving train, and the journey’s chronotope emerges as one in which space is traversed from station to station, according to the train’s timetable:

The next station of any consequence would be Kotelnich, the junction for the line to Gorkiy, formerly Nizhny Novgorod, now a city of over million people, the seventh largest in the USSR. At 11.36 the train stole, ghost-like, into Kotelnich…

At the end of statutory three minutes stopping time the train left as quietly as it had arrived, without so much as a hoot or a whistle [p. 29]; so quietly that I wondered if the driver and his mate had got down to stretch their legs [p. 29-30], having forgotten to put the brakes on and we were now off on a down-gradient, heading for a spectacular disaster…

However it was not to be. As our car drew abreast of the station entrance I saw the station-master standing rigidly at attention in full uniform and pointing a baton at the train, rather in the manner of an imperious monarch banishing a subject to Siberia, which in a sense was what he was doing.10

When a journey is of the quest type, that is, when one travels with the fulfillment of a specific goal or expectation in mind, the chronotope can also gain a strong temporal dynamic – especially when reaching the goal becomes difficult and/or the traveler is running out of time because the journey’s time-space reaches a predetermined temporal limit.11 This happens in William Dalrymple’s in Xanadu (1989), where the traveler and his companion barely manage to fulfill the ultimate aim of their journey, depositing a phial of holy oil in the ruins of the palace of Kubla Khan. Before embarking on the final lap of their trip, they have booked their flight back to England: „We had a very tight schedule. We calculated that it would take two days of nonstop travelling to get to Duolon, the nearest town to the ruins, and two further days to return. Our charter flight, the only one we could afford for a fortnight, left in six days. This left only one day spare in which to get to the ruins from Duolon, a distance of about twenty-five miles… Whether or not we succeeded in finding Xanadu in that one day left to us, we would have to return to Peking or else miss our flight.“12

They manage to reach Duolon, with „twelve hours to find Xanadu“, but are then detained by Mongol security guards for many hours: „Time was running out“ (Xanadu, 297). Eventually, however, the police help them reach Xanadu at the last minute. A chronotope with a time limit here permits the writer to build up suspense. But the sense of time at the end of In Xanadu is acute not simply because of the journey’s special chronotope. Throughout, this travelogue conveys a high degree of the traveller’s personal experience of time.

2.3 The Experience of Time

To reconstruct the time experience conveyed by a piece of travel writing, a reader activates his or her own everyday experience with and knowledge about time, and when reader and traveller/writer do not share same cultural context [p. 30], their frames for experiencing time may deviate from each other to a certain extent [p. 30-31]. There is no time (nor space) here to address the complexities of time experience. It must suffice to note that the average traveller – as well as the reader – will have a normal adult’s awareness that time „passes“, that, in ordinary real-life experience, time passes in only one direction and is continuous, and that time can be organized into present, past, and future. The notion of psychological (or „subjective“) time refers to the sense of time that an individual experiences during a certain situation; it is constructed on the basis of general dispositions for time perception (determined by brain structure and acquired frames, including cultural ones), a person’s memory and momentary sense input, and rational assessment, as well as emotional components. During travel, the extent to which a subjective experience of time is noted as

„remarkable“ will vary considerably, and consequently so does the extent to which subjective experience of time enters a piece of travel writing. In order to become remarkable, an experience of time does not have to be extraordinary. One becomes aware of time during travel, for instance, when a mode of transport appears to accelerate or slow down one’s accustomed perception of space, or when travel becomes boring (because normally, one travels to have an extraordinary experience). Thus Byron’s The Road to Oxiana often draws attention to the tedium of his journey; entries for consecutive day start with: „To increase the tedium…“; „Still here“; „Stuck again“ (132, 133, 134).

„Objective“ time refers to time that is measured empirically, according to certain defined standards and with instruments such as clocks. Standardized time is vital in navigation and hence for the travel of exploration; but in most cases, modern travelers are affected by objective time that has been subjected to social norms and social purposes (for example, to enforce punctuality or efficiency), that is, by social time. In An Inlad Voyage (1878), Robert Louis Stevenson depicts a trip conducted in deliberate contras to tourist travel, that is, a highly scheduled form of travel (see 4.2 below). When we describes the traveller’s loss of his usual sense of time while paddling leisurely along the French canals („I was about as near Nirvana as would be convenient in practical life“),13 this state is also diagnosed in explicit contras to a socially timed „practical life“ – a life rooted in the time sense of the industrial age and hence a sense of time with a specific cultural significance. Notions of social and cultural time overlap, the latter referring to frames for making sense of and experiencing time in a specific society, including the scholarly and scientific interest in time at a given period [p. 31]: Is time approached in empirical or mythical terms [p. 31-32]? Is it envisaged as linear or circular. And so on.14 In Mornings in Mexico (1927), for example, D. H. Lawrence draws a systematic contrast between the Mexican Indian and the European (the „white monkey’s“) sense of time:

The white monkey has curious tricks. He knows, for example, the time. Now to a Mexican, and an Indian, time is a vague, foggy reality. There are only three times: en la maňana, en la tarde, en la noche: in the morning, in the afternoon, in the night. There is even no midday, and no evening.

But to the white monkey, horrible to relate, there are exact spots of time, such as five o’clock, half past nine. The day is a horrible puzzle of exact spots of time.15

Such remarks on „alternative“ cultural notions of time are made frequently by travel writers who seek to escape modern life, like Stevenson, Lawrence, and also Wilfred Thesiger. In Arabian Sands (1959), Thesiger observes the different sense of time and rhythm of life of the Bedu, in whose company he travelled through the desert,16 and mentions how he took particular pleasure in the „unmodern“ slowness of locomotion of a nomadic tribe (so that in this case, we have an overlap of cultural and subjective time): „In this way there was time to notice things… There was time to collect a plant or to look a rock. The very slowness of our march diminished its monotony. I thought how terribly boring it would be to rush about this country in a car.“17 This passage express a high degree of time reflexivity, and the attention given to time is mirrored in the discursive feature that the text takes time – almost half a page in the original – to articulate the sense that „there was time to notice things.“

3. Discursive Time: The Temporality of Travel Writing Scholarly discussion of the treatment of time in narrative literature has been productive in recent years, but two seminal publications of the 1970s and 1980s are still of major significance: Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, and Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse. For Ricoeur, there exists a necessary correlation „between the activity of narrating a story and the temporal character of human experience“,18 and he thus states that three levels of mimesis (or a „threefold mimesis“) are involved when readers reconstruct a sense of time from a narrative text [p. 32]. Any sense of time rendered in the text is prefigured by „a preunderstanding of the world of action [p. 32-33], its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character“ (Time, 1:54), that is, by cognitive prerequisites of time experience, a general everyday knowledge about time in a certain culture at a certain time (mimesis1). It is configured in the fictional narrative itself (mimesis2), and eventually refigured in the act of reading (mimesis3), again on the basis of extratextual prefigurations (Time, 1:52-87). Ricoeur has been criticized for this integration of real-life experience into a model for the explication of time in fiction,19 but for a discussion of travel writing, an analogy between real and narrated time is part of the factuality contract under which travelogues are normally produced and read. Nevertheless, when travel becomes travelogue, it undergoes significant configuration, so that its time scheme is closely modeled on though never completely identical with that of the actual journey – if only for the fact that certain events of a trip are simply not deemed „worth“ narrating (see above). The story of journey that emerges from a travelogue is shaped to have greater significance than the original travel itself, including a specific contouring of narrated time.

The configuration of time in the narrative text involves linguistic (lexical and grammatical) elements and structures, as well as narrative strategies that can be analysed with the tools provided by structuralist narratology. Prominent among the latter are the categories differentiated by Gérard Genette for the relationship between time at the level of story and time at the level of narrative discourse: order, duration and speed, and frequency.20 Frequency is relevant for a discussion of travel writing, among other reasons, because travel as such involves a lot of repetition, of iterative events, which may be boring to read about. Faced with this problem, Dickens resorted to iterative narration, „where a single narrative utterance takes upon itself several occurrences together of the same event“,21 for example, in the following passage from Pictures from Italy: „Once clear of the never-to-be-forgotten-or-forgiven pavement which surrounds Paris, the first three days of travelling towards Marseilles are quiet and monotonous enough. To Sens. To Avallon. To Challons. A sketch of one day’s proceedings is a sketch of all three; and here it is“ (263).

As far as order is concerned, travelogues tend strongly toward chronological narration, that is, a presentation in discourse that follows the assumed sequence of events in the story. In the case of travel writing, this sequence is, in turn, assumed to reflect the sequence of the actual journey from departure to arrival back home. Generally, as Meir Sternberg has observed [p. 33], chronological narrative dominates in „the entire range and tradition of history-telling in the largest sense [p. 33-34], contrasted with fiction-telling by its drive to factuality and governed by the arrow of time. Chronicle, historiography proper, biography, autobiography, diaries, news items, documentaries, travelogues, official and scholarly reporting, perhaps half of the narrative corpus in all.“22 Manipulation of a journey’s time line in a travelogue thus has limits, and the linear progress of the actual journey is rarely „anachronized“ in a travelogue in a dramatic way. Analepses and, more rarely, prolepses are possible, but they are unlikely to cause confusion as to the journey’s temporal progress. At the beginning of Dickens American Notes, for example, the traveller’s first entry into his ship’s cabin is followed by a flashback to the planning stage of the journey that explains why he is

so astonished by the cabin’s diminutive size. This kind of analepsis causes no temporal disorientation on the part of the reader; neither does a prolepsis in Dalrymple’s In Xanadu that flashes forward to the time after the journey’s end. While during the journey, the traveller was unable to find the tombs of the Three Wise Men, he is able to take up the search back home: „This was not in fact the end of the search. One day after I returned to Cambridge I found myself in the University Library with nothing to do, so I set about researching the early historical references to Saveh“ (Xanadu, 144). Indeed, where major anachronies occur in a travelogue, they frequently lead out of the journey’s own time line (that is, travel’s „present“) to events that precede or follow the journey itself. Analepses, then, often consist of a traveller’s personal memories, whereas prolepses project from the time of travel to the time of writing the journey, as in Jonathan Raban’s Coasting (1986), where the account of the traveller, who is asked during his voyage along the coast of Britain to look out for a missing ship, briefly digresses into the time of writing: „I never heard anyone mention the South Stack again – until last week. While I was beginning this chapter and describing the arrival of the Nimrod search aircraft, I wrote a letter to the Holyhead Coastguard asking if there’d been any further news.“23

The travel writer has greater liberty in configuring his narrative’s speed through his handling of duration. Of course, this category relates, first and foremost, to the (metaphorical) speed of the narrative discourse as such, but the impression of faster or slower discourse will have an effect on how the reader refigures a traveller’s time experience. According to Genette, the speed of narrative can be defined as „the relationship between a duration (that of the story, measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years) and a length (that of the text [p. 34], measured in lines and pages) [p. 34-35].“24 The following relational types, combined in various ways in a given text, determine a narrative’s rhythm. In a pause, we are presented with discourse but no story; the most usual case is the descriptive pause. In ellipsis, discourse skips story events. A scene presents events in an approximate 1:1 relationship of story and discourse time. Summary presents story element in considerably less discourse time than the events would take up in real life. A rarely used possibility is the effect of slow motion (or stretch25), where discourse takes up more time than a story event would in real life. All of these speeds – even slow motion26 – are found in travel writing. As has already been noted, travelogues typically skip or summarize certain legs of a journey, while they may render other episodes in scenic mode, thus giving them particular prominence, as in a passage from Dalrymple’s In Xanadu, where dialogue helps dramatize the traveller’s frustration when he has spent many hours waiting for a train at a Turkish station. In fact, the vivid scenic presentation here turns something into a narrative event, which, in terms of travel experience, is rather a nonevent:

„Look, is this bloody train going to come or not?“ „Oh yes. Train he comes. No problem“, said the station master. „When?“ „Soon.“ „How soon?“ „Soon.“ „How soon?“ „Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow.“… The train did come, but not for another hour. Humbled and exhausted, I followed Laura into one of the carriage. (Xanadu, 108)

The most characteristic element in the rhythm of a travelogue, however, is the frequent use of the pause, by which a travelogue’s story is almost systematically interrupted. This is owing to

the large amount of descriptive and informative passages that are part of the travelogue’s genre definition.

Another category for the analysis of narrative’s time structure concerns the distance between the time of the story, in our case the „present“ of the journey, and the time level on which the narrating or writing of the journey takes place. Even when a travelogue itself or its paratext (for example, a preface) are not explicit about the time of writing [p. 35], it is usually possible [p. 35-36], if only on the basis of biographical information, to estimate the distance between the time of travelling and the time of travel writing. Like most „unmarked“ narratives, the majority of travelogues are told in retrospection, that is, they suggest that the telling takes place after the journey has ended. For the reader, this means that the journey he or she is refiguring automatically assumes a certain teleology: one infers from the narrative’s retrospectivity that the trip has come to ist end, and since it is a genre convention of travel writing that the text is autobiographical, one knows that at least the teller of the tale has returned safely (unless the journal of a traveller is published posthumously). Retrospective narration also potentially permits a higher degree of configuration than the writing „to the moment“ of the journal-style travelogue, such as Byron’s The Road to Oxiana. This is that book’s first „entry“, in which the distance between travel experience and writing is one of only a few hours. Time reference thus retains the deictics of immediacy („this morning“):

Venice, 20 August 1933. Here as a joy-hog: a pleasant change after that pension on the Giudecca two years ago. We went to the Lido this morning, and the Doge’s palace looked more beautiful from a speed-boat than it ever did from a gondola. The bathing, on a calm day, must be the worst in Europe: water like hot saliva, cigar-ends floating into one’s mouth, and shoals of jellyfish.

Lifar came to dinner. Bertie mentioned that all whales have syphilis. (Oxiana, 21) The beginning of Dickens’s retrospective American Notes appears considerably more distanced, although the book came out the same year as the trip was conducted. It contains no markers of temporal immediacy, but instead an explicit reference to remembering: „I shall never forget which, on the morning of the third of January eighteen-hundred-and-forty-two, I opened the door of, and put my head into, a ’state-room‘ on board the ’Britannia‘ steam-packet, twelve hundred tons burthen per register, bound for Halifax and Boston, and carrying Her Majesty’s mails‘ (Notes, 1). In exceptional cases, retrospective travelogues are are composed a long time after depicted journey was completed. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (1977) recounts, as the text repeatedly emphasizes, a walking tour that took place in the 1930s [p. 36], during Fermor’s youth [p. 36-37], and the author stresses that the travelogue – finished in 1977, as the preface makes clear – is not identical to the journal that he kept during his trip. When this diary is quoted in a few places, this even enhances the sense of temporal distance between travelling and the composition of the travelogue proper: „There were some discrepancies of time and place between the diary and what I had already written but they didn’t matter as they could be put right.“27 This passage draws attention to the effect on recollection that great temporal distance may entail, so that, to the reader, Fermor’s reliability emerges somewhat dented (though not destroyed).

A reader’s sense of distance from the experience of travel can also be manipulated through the use of narrative tense. The unmarked form for retrospective narration is the past tense; the use of the present tense may, at least temporality, bring about a sense of immediacy. In Byron’s journal-style account, switches between past and present tense narration come less as a surprise (because of the generally small distance between experience and narration) than in classically retrospective texts such as Dickens’s travel books. Here, as in his novels, Dickens frequently switches from past to present tense, thus drawing the reader into the traveller’s experiential present – for example, when, in American Notes, the departure of the

steamer Britannia is imminent but then delayed because one still has to wait for a post boat. The present tense underlines the traveller’s excitement and impatience:

To and fro, to and fro, to and fro again a hundred times! This waiting for the latest mail-bags is worse than all. If we could have gone off in the midst of that last burst, we should have started triumphantly: but to lie here, two hours and more in the damp fog, neither staying at home nor going abroad, is letting one gradually down into the very depths of dullness and low spirits. A speck in the mist, at last! That’s something. It is the boat we wait for! That’s more to the purpose. The captain appears on the paddle-box with his speaking trumpet; the officers take their stations; all hands are on the alert; the flagging hopes of the passengers revive; the cooks pause in their savory work, and look out with faces full of interest. (Notes, 8-9)

A sense of time is here made vivid for the reader at a moment when a sense of time is meant to be perceived as acute during the journey itself [p. 37]. The passage thus exemplifies Ruth Ronen’s view that „the narrative present is part of the narrative configuration in which certain events and states are selected to form the primary ontological level [p. 37-38], the level of immediately presented and actual narrative segments.“28 Ronen makes this statement for the use of the present tense in fiction. For the travelogue as a piece of writing grounded in factuality, one might speculate whether this kind of writing has a special propensity for shifting into the present tense in narrative passages because the present tense is generally so prominent: with a high amount of descriptions, observations, and guidebooks-style advice in the present tense, this tense seems to be somewhat more naturalized in the story of actual travel than in fiction.

For Ricouer, it is the ultimate aim of a critical analysis of narrative time to bring two levels of analysis together: „On the first level, our interest is concentrated on the work’s configuration. On the second level, our interest lies in the worldview and the temporal experience that this configuration projects outside of itself.“ Ultimately, a text’s temporal configuration serves „to bring about the sharing of a temporal experience by the narrator and the reader“, and „to refigure time itself in our reading“ (2: 101-2, 105). In this light, the following section presents three case studies in which different varieties of English travel writing are analysed for the way in which they use the chrono-typical categories sketched above thus induce readers to refigure the temporality of a journey in a certain way.

4. Case studies: Forms of Time in Some Historical Varieties of the Travelogue

4.1 The Elizabethan Report of Discovery and Exploration

I have shown elsewhere that the early-modern account of exploration exemplifies the kind of travel writing whose primary interest is located in the object world of travel rather than the traveller’s subjective experience.29

This is reflected in the accounts of English voyages to the New World from Richard Hakluyt’s monumental collection, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (enlarged 2nd ed., 1598-1600), from which the following examples are taken. In terms of cultural embedding and more specifically ideology, the primary purpose of discovery and exploration lay in claiming possession of the travelled world and hence, in chronotopical terms, on the axis of space rather than time. Space had to be crossed in order to reach „new“ worlds [p. 38-39], and the new space had to be mapped, described, and inventoried in order to legitimize the voyage’s official aims. A focus on space and materiality may also have served the interest of some of the report’s contemporary readers, for whom the accounts were a source of information on the new world and the conditions of travel to that world.

In accordance with the cultural framing of exploration, the Elizabethan report of discovery is usually a piece of sober, straightforward, linear, and retrospective narration, composed after a voyager’s return, in which the report of the journey’s progress is subordinated to description. The narrative rhythm is thus characterized by a particularly great amount of the pause and has a fairly static quality. The story of travel as such, the record of movement through space, is often presented in summary and with many ellipses, so that text and readers are hurried through those stretches of the voyage which precede and succeed its primary region of interest. Nevertheless, although the crossing of the Atlantic is awarded little discourse time, it is typically delivered with precise dates for the beginning of the journey and the arrival at important stations on the way to the Americas, which makes it possible to chart the advance and efficiency of the enterprise. The next excerpt is from the report of „The Voyage Made by Mr John Hawkins to the Coast of Guinea and the Indies of Nova Hispania“ (1564), where the quick account of progress is interrupted by descriptions of the merchantable riches and the inhabitants of places along the way:

Master John Hawkins with the Jesus of Lubeck … departed out of Plymouth the 18th day of October, in the year of our Lord 1564 with a prosperous wind.

The fourth of November they had sight of the island of Madeira, and the sixth day of Tenerife, which they thought to have been the Canary. To speak somewhat of these islands being called in old time insulae fortunatae, by the means of the flourishing thereof, the fruitfulness of them doth surely exceed far all other…

The 25 he came to Cabo Blanco, which is upon the coast of Africa, and a place where the Portuguese do ride, that fish there in the month of November especially…

The 29 we came to Cap Verde. These people are all black, and are called negroes, without any apparel, saving before their privities: of stature goodly men.

The two and twentieth [of December] the captain went into the river [p. 39], called Callowsa … and dispatched his business [p. 39-40], and so returned with two caravels, laden with negroes.30

What follows is a slightly less hurried (though not quite scenic) report of the slave-capturing expedition, which is highlighted through this extension of narrative time as a remarkable „event“.

Despite the meticulous recording of dates, this text conveys nothing about the traveller’s subjective experience of time. An attitude towards time that one can generally refigure from Elizabethan accounts of discovery is that, if these voyagers had had a choice to to let themselves be „whisked overnight“ – to borrow Waugh’s expression – to the New World, they would have done so. The chronotope one constructs for the journeys from the texts is patchy: the voyagers appear to hop from location to location, while the space in between seems a geographical and temporal void. Of course, this need not have been the experience of the individual voyagers; but of their personal experience of time, most texts offer next to nothing, unless an unusual circumstance or a particular hardship is depicted. We find a rate reference to the voyagers’ whiling away their time during weeks at sea in an account of the „Second Voyage of Master Martin Frobisher“ (1577), where this reference seems to be motivated primarily by the remarkable geographical conditions in which this kills of time takes place: „We departed hence [the Orkneys] the 8th of June and followed our course until the 4th of impediment we had when we were so disposed, the fruition of our books, and other pleasures to pass away time. This benefit endureth in those part not 6 weeks, while the sun is near the Tropic of Cancer“ (Hakluyt, 189). Sir Walter Ralegh’s „The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana“ (1595) includes another rare passage in which the handling of time helps build a suspense that permits readers to refigure the emotional experience of time of the men involved in the situation. Starved and thirsty on a branch of the Orinoco River, Ralegh and his crew are at the mercy of a native guide whom the mistrust (although most probably this Indian merely has a different cultural notion of measuring time than early-modern Englishmen). As a result, time seem to stretch most unpleasantly and disconcertingly. In the text, this drawn-out experience of time is dramatized in a discourse that literally counts the hours and becomes increasingly plastic and almost scenic as the episode is developed [p. 40]:

When we had rowed three hours, we marveled we saw no sign of any dwelling, and asked the pilot where the town was: he told us a little further. After three hours more, the sun being almost set, we began to suspect that he led us that way to betray us. When it grew towards night; and we demanded where the place was; he told us but four reaches more. When we had rowed four and four; we saw no sign; and our poor water-men, even heart-broken, and tired, were ready to give up the ghost: for we had now come from the gallery near forty miles.

At last we determined to hang the pilot; and if we had well known the way back again by night, he had surely gone; but our own necessities pleaded sufficiently for his safety: for it was dark as pitch, and the river began so to narrow itself, and the trees to hang over from side to side, as we were driven with arming swords to cut a passage through those branches that covered the water… It was now eight o’clock at night, and our stomachs began to gnaw apace: but whether it was best to return or go on, we began to doubt, suspecting treason in the pilot more and more; but the poor old Indian ever assured us that it was but a little further: at the last about one a clock after midnight we saw a light; and rowing towards it, we heard the dogs of the village. (Hakluyt, 394)

Normally, once the New World is reached, Elizabethan reports of discovery tend to register time and dates less meticulously than during the passage there. Charting progress seems to be less urgent as the explorer’s „true“, space-orientated, mission begins and the text switches into the predominantly descriptive mode. Unless experiences are exceptional (as in the example above), locomotion per se becomes less interesting and is presented, if at all, in summary. This evokes the impression that the traveller hastens from one promising destination to the next. In Ralegh’s account, this hast is even explicitly addressed: „We then hastened away towards our purposed discovery.“ (338)

The typical Elizabethan account of the voyage to the New World, then, suggests a chronotope that focuses on space and tends to highlight only interesting spots in that space; temporality is relevant in this time-space predominantly as a measure for efficient progress or for its opposite, hardship and delay. Similar patterns are found in other types of travel writing in which the primary focus is on the travelled world rather than the traveller, such as early accounts of domestic travel (see Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 1724-6) and the early account of the Grand Tour [p. 41], such as Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705) [p. 41-42]. With the later Grand Tour, however, the truly educational journey that emphasizes the shaping of the traveller’s personality, the temporality of travel gains a new significance since the awareness of one’s self means that one is aware of one’s existence in time – that is, one’s sense of identity from past through present to future, but also one’s ability to change. Typically, the subject of educational travel in the eighteenth century had time at his disposal, and accounts of that type of travel characteristically suggest that it was essential to experience the tour in its temporal as well as its spatial dimension. I will not dwell here on the Bildungsreise except to state that it was essential in introducing subjective experience as a significant element of the travelogue’s generic pattern. There it has remained since – even in accounts of travel conducted under conditions of timetables and modern, speedy transport.

4.2 Travel and Travel Writing in the Age of Steam The Victorian period is most famous for its explorer-adventurers, such as Richard Burton, Mary Kingsley, and Isabella Bird. But for many Victorians, travel meant tourist travel or at least travel for which a new infrastructure of accommodation and transport had been established. A rapidly modernizing world was governed, in material production as well as means of transport, by a new sense of speed.31

Tourism is often considered a form of travel in which the traveller is harassed by time, even to the point where space seems to shrink and distances seem to collapse, where the journey is subjected to the temporality of a capitalist society that values efficiency and punctuality and hence promotes a strict social management of time.32 The new mode of travelling has a (fictional) prototype in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), in which the hero – characteristically an Englishman, a member of the first industrial nation and the nation that invented modern tourism – rushes from place to place, eventually even gaining a day by crossing the dateline.

Even where Victorians write about trips that are not touristic in the narrow sense, their travelogues manifest a particular sensitivity to the temporality of travel in terms of both theme and form. Dickens, for instance, is highly, observant in American Notes regarding the speed of travel (for example, the breathtaking speed of a train) and its regular timing: „The journey from New York to Philadelphia is made by railroad, and two ferries [p. 42]; and usually occupies between five and six hours [p. 42-43].“33 But although Dickens often travelled in a socially often travelled in a socially timed environment, his text always foregrounds the taveller’s subjective experience of that time. In Pictures from Italy, for instance, he at one point depicts – in his characteristic use of the present tense – first, the tedium at the end of a day of travel, and then the sense of acceleration and excitement when the destination finally draws near:

You have been traveling along, stupidly enough, as you generally do in the last stage of the day; and the ninety-six bells upon the horses – twenty-four apiece – have been ringing sleepily in your ears for half an hour or so; and it has become a very jog-trot, monotonous, tiresome sort of business; and you have been thinking deeply about the dinner you will have at the next stage; when, down at the end of the long avenue of trees

through which you are traveling, the first indication of a town appears, in the shape of some straggling cottages: and the carriage begins to rattle and roll over a horribly uneven pavement… Whip, wheels, driver, stones, beggars, children, crack, crack, crack; hola! charité pour l’amour de Dieu! crick-crack-crick-crack; crick, crick, crick; bump, jolt, crack, bump, crick-crack; round the corner, up the narrow street, down the paved hill on the other side; in the gutter; bump, bump… (Pictures, 265)

In terms of discursive figuration, an impression of the coach’s gaining of speed is here transmitted through the increasingly fragmentary syntax that reflects the way in which the traveller’s perception grows more and more fragmented during the quick and bumpy ride. Dickens’s sensitivity to subjective time is also exemplified in the „Italian Dream“ chapter of Pictures from Italy. Here, the taveller is shown wandering through a Venice that is so dream-like that his whole experience there seems to become a dream itself and is therefore affected by the loss of the normal sense of time that characterizes dream-states: „In the luxurious wonder of so rare a dream, I took but little heed of time, and had but little understanding of its flight“ (Pictures, 335). This chapter also contains a reflection on how travel may more generally distort the traveller’s everyday sense of time. Since so many extraordinary sights and experiences impress themselves on his mind in so short a span of time, the brain reacts with flashbacks to earlier stages of the trip that have not yet been properly processed, causing a kind of temporal overlay: „The rapid and unbroken succession of novelties that had passed before me, came back like half-formed dreams; and a crowd of objects wandered in the greatest confusion through my mind, as I traveled on „by a solitary road“ (Pictures, 329) [p. 43].

Apart from the range of time experience he depicts, Dickens is remarkable for the differentiated manner in which time is actually performed in his discourse: the narrative is rhythmically far more varied than, for example, the Elizabethan account of exploration. This has already emerged from the coach passage cited above; and during the crossing of the Atlantic in the second chapter of American Notes, readers are gratified with an extensive rendering of the traveller’s seasickness, which can be refigured as an unpleasantly long experience exactly because so much discursive time is devoted to its representation. Generally, the ocean passage emerges as a „filled“ slot of time in that Dickens depicts the rhythm of sleeping and waking, the succession of events and non-events. Nevertheless, such passages form only a selection from the whole time span that the actual journey takes up. As we have seen, Dickens avoids pointless repetition, and there are passages in both American Notes and Pictures from Italy where a sense of time is not dramatized at all, so that the very change between strongly timed and untimed sections contributes to the sense of rhythm in the text.

The conditions of modern travel caused more than a heightened awareness of time on the part of travelers and travel writers. They also gave rise to a wave of travel along distinctly „unmodern“ schemes of time – a rediscovery of deliberately slow and unscheduled travel. Between the mid- and late Victorian period, a significant number of travelogues focused on precisely such alternative forms of travel. Alexander Kinglake, for instance, travelled the Orient at about the same time that Dickens toured America and Italy. Kinglake’s Eothen (1844) records a deliberately individualistic, non-social mode of travelling whose prime purpose is subjective experience; the text announces that it will „sing a sadly long strain about Self“34. Kinglake proves highly aware of the relationship between identity and the sense of time, and he considers travels in the East – a cultural space with a different sense of time – as ideal for developing the sense of self because it demands a lot of time. Edward Said rejects the clearly orientalist stance of this project of self-fashioning, identifying the text’s pathetic catalogue of pompous ethnocentrisms and tiringly nondescript accounts of the Englishman’s East.“35 This Orientalism notwithstanding, however, the Western traveller is obliged to

reconfigure his accustomed ways of experiencing and processing time in a manner impossible in the modern West, where a traveller

is still conscious of being in a provisional state, and his mind is for ever recurring to the expected end of his journey [p. 44]; his ordinary ways of thought have been interrupted [p. 44-45], and before any new mental habits can be formed he is quietly fixed in his hotel. It will be otherwise with you when you journey in the East. Day after day, perhaps week after week, and month after month, your foot is in the stirrup… If you are wise, you will not look upon the long period of time thus occupied in actual movement, as the mere gulf dividing you from the end of your journey, but rather as one of those rare and plastic seasons of your life, from which, perhaps, in aftertimes, you may love to date the moulding of your character – that is, your very identity. (Kinglake, 24-5)

Since time is co constitutive of his main travel experience, Kinglake devotes long

stretches of discourse to representing the traveller’s sense of time. In the following depiction of travel in the desert, syntactic parallelism underlines the monotony of a long day’s travel that is clearly not organized according to social time, but rather to the natural cycle of the sun:

Time labors on – your skin glows, your shoulders ache, your Arabs moan, your camels sigh, and you see the same pattern in the silk, and the same glare of light beyond; but conquering Time marches on, and by and by the descending sun has compassed the heaven, and now softly touches your right arm, and throws your lank shadow over the sand rigt along on the way for Persia. (172-3)

Out of comparable attitude, Robert Louis Stevenson chose deliberately „slow“, non-technological ways of travel for two of his journeys during the late 1870s: a canoe trip in An Inland Voyage and pedestrian travel in Travels with a Donkey (1879). Both texts build the impression of a chronotope in which the time axis is as important as the spatial dimension. Again, subjective time is accentuated, and as has already been indicated above (2.3), the traveller takes particular pleasure in his – temporary – freedom from social time, knowing that „his journey is no more than a siesta by the way on the real march of life“,36 as he writes in An Inland Voyage. Stevenson makes the slowness of his travel thematic, and the configuration of time in the text helps the reader refigure this special sense of time, particularly in a passage from Travels with a Donkey, where the extremely slow progress during the first lap of the tour, caused by the stubborn donkey, is rendered in slow motion, to be almos physically relived by the reader: „It was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run; it kept me hanging on each foot for an incredible length of time [p. 45]; in five minutes it exhausted the spirit and set up a fever in all the muscles of the leg“ (106) [p. 45-46]. In taking their own time for travelling – and in taking time for recording their time experience – Kinglake and Stevenson anticipate some of the famous travel writers of the twentieth century, whose program Mark Cocker has identified as: „True travelers … take their time.“37

4.3 Travel Writing during High and Post-Modernism Modernist and postmodernist fiction has been identified with a special attention to and reflexivity of time, and also the development of experimental techniques for representing time experience. This is commonly regarded as a reaction to changes in cultural perceptions of time caused by the further acceleration and temporal regulation of everyday life (at least in urban areas). Another factor here has been fresh insights into the nature of time in the new physics (the theory of relativity as well as quantum mechanics), which have initiated and in turn intensified reflection on perceptions of time and on memory in psychology and philosophy (for example, William James, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger). For the techniques developed by the modernist avant-garde, Joseph Frank coined

the term spatial form, since the techniques in question serve to undermine chronology; instead, they emphasize the copresence of different experiential levels of time (such as present experience and memory) and focus on the significance of the isolated moment rather than continuity.38 According to Ursula Heise, postmodernism has further radicalized these positions and aesthetic strategies under the impact of philosophical positions that posit a veritable crisis of time, a perceptual collapse of time and space sparked by late-twentieth-century developments in transportation, communication, and information technologies.39 The late twentieth century developed a culture of simultaneity, a hyperpresence that that outfaced past and future and that expected the instant availability of everything. Furthermore, as Heise contends, „we are now aware that events which may be perfectly continuous and coherent at one time scale may not appear so at ours. Hence the multiplication of time scales available to the postmodern imagination contributes to the experience of temporal discontinuity in the individual and social domains, and to the uncertainty regarding any relevant description of past and future“ (46). Postmodernist fiction thus tends to violate notions of time that are familiar from everyday experience (and from so-called realist fiction):40 it structures time in modes that are circular, contradictory [p. 46], antinomic (movig backwards in time) [p. 46-47], differential (operating at a different time rate), conflated, dual or multiple; and in same cases the difference between story and discourse time is entirely contested.41 In the words of Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, postmodernist literature „subvert[s] the privilege of historical time and bind[s] temporality in language“.42

When we turn to the travelogue of the twentieth century, however, this genre appears less radical in its reaction to changed cultural perceptions of time (although it is, of course, otherwise aware of the modern and postmodern conditions).43 One reason is that travelogues are prototypically autobiographical and thus mono-perspectival, so that the possibility for constructing experiental temporal overlays and copresens is limited in the first place. Taking Byron’s The Road to Oxiana and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977) as paradigmatic travelogues of the modernist and postmodernist decades, one finds that neither abandons chronological narration and story-ness as drastically as the classical examples of high modernist and postmodernist fiction. In both instances, readers are able to build mental images of mimetic chronotopes and follow the stages of the respective journeys in a sequence that never lets one suspect that the actual travel perhaps occurred in a different order. In the journal-style Road to Oxiana, the individual sections are even precisely dated. And in both cases, long trips are described – that is, the story time is fairly extensive, in contrast to the tendency of (some) modernist novels to focus on a narrative present of only a few hours’ duration (as, for example, in the one-day actions of Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses). Nevertheless, the journal structure also permits Byron to display certain modernist elements: the „entries“ for individual days highlight significant moments and leave many of these momentary impressions unconnected, in terms of both theme and (minor) temporal jumps. Within chronological narration, Byron in this way achieves an effect of momentariness and temporal fragmentedness. This is supported by Byron’s variations of discursive rhythm: his dialogue scenes and summary narration are juxtaposed with descriptive and other pauses, including regular bits of historical information for the places visited. This makes for an effect of collage44 but does not cause temporal disorientation because the basic time line of the journey remains prominent thoughout.

The Road to Oxiana influenced Bruce Chatwin,45 and indeed Chatwin’s In Patagonia does not seem far more fragmented than in Byron’s book, though [p. 47], because Chatwin’s short sections about places and people are not dated, and there is also comparatively little sense of the traveller actually moving from place to place. The effect is one of „hard cuts“ between locations (as in the early-modern accounts of discovery). There are also more detours in Chatwin’s book into time lines different from that of the actual journey’s present. In The

Road to Oxiana, other levels of time are usually introduced through Byron’s information on the history of places and buildings In Chatwin’s In Patagonia, such information takes up a considerable part of the discourse and often dominates entire sections, for instance, when only one sentence on the progress of the journey is followed by a long story about early migration to Patagonia: „I left the Rio Negro and went on south to Port Madryn. A hundred and fifty-three Welsh colonists landed here off the brig Mimosa in 1865.“46 Furthermore, In Patagonia contains many analepses from the journey’s present into earlier phases of Chatwin’s life, and in fact famously starts with a flashback into a time long before the start of the journey: the future traveller’s interes in Patagonia is explained by a childhood memory that involves a piece of skin from much earlier, even ancient, period of time. But although we are here reminded of the time scale of natural history (see Heise’s comment above), alongside a personal scale that involves the traveller’s past and present as well as the time level of writing, a dramatic sense of temporal disorientation and discontinuity does not arise. Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987) is somewhat more radical in this respect; here, we follow not just one, but competing time lines of travel when Chatwin, while narrating a trip through Australia, quotes extensively from notebooks made during earlier journeys.

That travelogues, with respect to their time scheme – and one might add space scheme as well – seem more conservative than high modernist and postmodernist fiction, does not come unexpected. After all, travelogues recount actual travel, and actual travel – even in the speediest means of transport – is subject to time’s arrow, to mimetic time. If a piece of travel writing is to identified as such, it will have to convey a chronotope that still bears a strong resemblance to what people know actual time spaces for travel to be. Paradoxical as that may sound, the travelogue therefore does not lend itself easily to spatialization (in Joseph Frank’s understanding), and the collapse of time and space that some postmodernist fiction evokes is a construct in which actual travel would be impossible [p. 48]. Even though jet travel contributes to a sense of temporal disorientation – physically experienced when we suffer from jet lag – an experience of the hyperpresent is not normally that of a real traveller (in contrast to virtual travel through TV and computers) [p. 48-49]. The postmodernist traveller still moves in real time spaces and encounters these in a manner that contradicts some of postmodernism’s radical ontological assumptions. The anthropocentric tie of this kind of travel to established notions of human time space and human time experience may explain some of the popularity that the travelogue in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries enjoys on the part of both writers and readers. And the very fact that the writing and reading of a piece of travel writing today happens at the same speed as hundreds of years ago may further explain this popularity.

5. Concluding Remarks These notes have shown that the dimension of time in travel writing is essential for the way in which readers refigure, through a travelogue’s discursive configuration, a mental image of an actual journey. Depending on a traveller’s individual experience and more general cultural frames, travelogues differ in the extent to which they make travel time explicit at all, and they differ in the kinds of temporalities and time experiences they depict. Chrono-typical categories are needed for the manifestations of temporality at a travelogue’s thematic level, but one also needs categories for the way in which a travelogue’s discourse articulates this temporality in its own temporal structures. Analysing a travelogue’s form of time thus leads one into an area where the links among travelling, writing, and reading are particularly intimate; thus provides insights into the genre’s poetics and will also always be a contribution to cultural narratology. 1 Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana (London: Picador, 1981), 237. Further citations will be documented parenthetically. 2 Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days: A Journey in Guiana and Brazil (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 10. Further citations will be documented parenthetically. 3 For an exception, see the anthropologist Johannes Fabian on time in the exploration account. Fabian, „Time, Narration, and the Exploration of Central Africa“, Narrative 9 (2003): 3-20. Fabian’s study, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press [p. 49], 1983) provides a critique of how time has been used to construct the object of anthropology – the „other“ – in dominant paradigms of this discipline [p. 49-50]. The book is relevant for the study of travel writing because id draws attention to different cultural notions of time. 4 See Meir Sternberg on time as the sine qua non for verbal storytelling and more basically, all literary and other discourse: „Whatever the grouping of their signs at any given moment, it cannot so much as freeze, let alone develop or regroup, except from moment to moment along the communicative process. Nor is this because they signify a narrative – which they usually do – but rather because, like narrative, their signifiers follow a line even in their least narrative moments, as when describing a place or state of affairs.“ Sternberg, „Telling in Time (I): Chronology and Narrative Theory“, Poetics Today 11, no. 4 (1990): 901-48, 901. 5 Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 60 and 70 resp. Further citations will be documented parenthetically as Notes and Pictures respectively. 6 Relevant titles include, for example, Jeremy Butterfield, ed., The Arguments of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath, eds., The Philosophy of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Peter K. McInerney, Time and Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); as well as Walther Ch. Zimmerli and Mike Sandbothe, eds., Klassiker der modernen Zeitphilosophie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993). For a comprehensive and multidisciplinary bibliography, see Samuel L. Macey, Time: A Bibliographic Guide (New York: Garland, 1991). 7 See Mieke Bal, who demands „a narratological analysis of culture“ and „a cultural analysis of narratives“. Bal, „Close Reading Today: From Narratology to Cultural Analysis“, in Grenzüberschreitungen. Narratologie im Kontext/Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, ed. Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Narr, 1999) 19-40, 39. For examples of the new context-sensitive narratology, see also the contributions in David Herman, ed., Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999). 8 Fabian, „Time, Narration, and the Exploration of Central Africa“, 9. 9 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, „Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel“, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84-258, 84 and 84-5. 10 Eric Newby, The Big Red Train Ride (London: Picador, 1989), 59-60. 11 Incidentally, this is a typical device of all fictional and non-fictional texts that present travel as an adventure. For a prototypical example, see Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days [p. 50]. 12 William Dalrymple, In Xanadu: A Quest (London: Flamingo, 1990), 288-9. 13 Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey – An Inland Voyage – The Silverado Squatters (London: Dent, 1984), 78. 14 For a cultural history of time in Europe, see Rudolf Wendorff, Zeit und Kultur: Geschichte des Zeitbewußtseins in Europa, 3rd ed. (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1985 [1980]). 15 D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 32. 16 Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1991), 54. 17 Ibid., 60.

18 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols., trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984-5 [original: Temps et Récit, 1983]), vol. 1, 52. Further citations will be documented parenthetically. 19 See, for example, Ruth Ronen, who claims that fictional time ought to be „thought of as a system of relations unique to the fictional world. I shall assume that once a world is distinctly projected as fictional, this property implies a specific logic of fiction, a logic of indeterminacy, or restricted inference from fictional to extrafictional states of affairs, and vice versa.“ Ronen, „The Semiotics of Fictional Time: Three Metaphors in the Study of Temporality in Fiction“, Style 24, no. 1 (1990): 22-44, 22. 20 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discource: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980 [original: „Discours du récit“ from Figures III, 1972]). Genette’s distinction overlaps with Günter Müller’s distinction between erzählte Zeit and Erzählzeit. Müller, „Erzählzeit und erzählte Zeit“, in Morphologische Poetik: Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Elena Müller and Helga Egner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968 [article first publ. 1948], 269-86. Genette and other structuralist narratologists have been criticized for their models’ inability to accommodate the violations of conventional time structures in postmodernist literature. See Brian Richardson, „Narrative Poetics and Postmodern Transgression: Theorizing the Collapse of Time, Voice, and Frame“, Narrative 8, no. 1 (2000): 23-42. However, since non-fictional travel narrative is rarely experimental in a radically postmodernist fachion (see below, 4.3), the established structuralist models retain basic validity. 21 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 116. 22 Sternberg, „Telling in Time (I)“, 909. 23 Jonathan Raban, Coasting (London: Picador, 1987), 90. 24 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 87-88. 25 This is the term introduced by Chatman, Seymour Chatman [p. 51], Story and Discourse [p. 51-52]: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). 26 See the example from Stevenson’s Travel with a Donkey in 4.2 below. 27 Patrick Leigh Fermor, A time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 261. 28 Ronen, „The Semiotics of Fictional Time“, 33. It is Ronen’s general point that „in fiction the use of grammatical tense is not only relative to a point of narration but is mainly correlated with the segmentation of fictional time into present and nonpresent. The temporal meaning of tenses is determined relative to that narrative segment that is being actualized as the foreground of the story, as its fictive present“ (ibid., 39). The examples examined here show that this „modal“ aspect of tense holds not only for fictional, but also non-fictional narratives. On tense in narration, especially the use of the present rather than the unmarked retrospective past tense, see also, among others, Monika Fludernik, Towards a „Natural“ Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996), 249-66; and Uri Margolin, „Of What is Past, Is Passing, or to Come: Temporality, Acpectuality, Modality, and the Naturre of Literary Narrative“, in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 142-66. 29 Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), ch. 2, esp. 30-5. 30 Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries: The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 105-6. 31 See Wolfgang Shivelbush, The Railroad Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986). 32 See, among others, Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), and John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societes (London: Sage, 1990). 33 Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy, 97. For his comment on the speed of the train, see 64-5. 34 Alexander Kinglake, Eothen: Or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 4. 35 Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 [1978]), 193. Said also characterizes the narrative of Eothen as „rigidly chronological and dutifully linear“ (ibid.), that is, as composed with a time structure suited to a mind preoccupied with its „orientalist“ preoccupations and aims. At closer inspection, however, Kinglake’s handling of time, although chronological, is more complex and varied than Said’s indictment lets one suspect [p. 52]. 36 Stevenson [p. 53], Travels with a Donkey…, 81. 37 Mark Cocker, Loneliness and Time: British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1992), 4. 38 Joseph Frank, „Spatial Form in Modern Literature“, Sewanee Review 53 (1945): 221-40, 433-56. 39 Ursula K. Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); David

Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origing of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), esp, ch. 17; and Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), esp. ch. 1. 40 The convergence between postmodernism and science fiction (see, for instance, the work of J. G. Ballard) is not coincidental. On the treatment of time in science fiction, see, for example, Geogre Slusser and Danièle Chatelain, „Spacetime Geometries: Time Travel and the Modern Geometrical Narrative“, Science Fiction Studies 22 (1995): 161-86. 41 See Richardson, „Narrative Poetics and Postmodern Transgression“. 42 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 11. 43 See above on the modernists’ awareness of alternative cultural notions of time. For the general traces of modernist and postmodernist elements in travel writing, see also Korte, English Travel Writing, ch. 7. 44 Because of this effect of colage, Paul Fussel refers to The Road to Oxiana as „the Ulysses… of modern travel books“. Fussel, Abroad: British Literary Travelling between the Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 108. 45 See Chatwin’s introduction to the edition of The Road to Oxiana used in this essay. 46 Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia (London: Picador, 1979), 23.