The Journey versus the Arrival
What writers do with the notion of travel
As it’s summer and people are on the move I thought it would be interesting to consider the ways writers use displacement, journeys or voyages in fiction. There’s no question that writers from the earliest records to the present day are fascinated with the imaginative possibilities of travel which, we are often told, broadens the mind. There are several types of fiction involving travel, from the journey, to the pilgrimage, the quest, the colonial adventure, exile and exploration.
Over the next few newsletters let’s take some of these apart and see where they take us to! Share your suggestions too for holiday reading and to beguile the time spent in dreary departure lounges.
Let’s begin with journeys. We’re all familiar with the phrase ‘the journey not the arrival matters’ which has become a self-help mantra in our time. The original quote is variously attributed to the sixteenth century French philosopher, Michel Montaigne, and the twentieth century American poet, T.S. Eliot. Situated between Montaigne and Eliot is the nineteenth century American philosopher, R.W. Emerson, who wrote that ‘life is a journey not a destination’.
The first quote provides the title for a memoir by Leonard Woolf covering the death of his wife Virginia and the post WWII years in England. Another of Emerson’s lines about travel provides the title of a novel by Mona Simpson, Anywhere but Here (1986) which was made into a film in 1999.
There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveler, who says anywhere but here.
But how have writers used this trope and has it changed over time? From Homer’s Odyssey to Joyce’s Ulysses, and from Kerouac’s On the Road to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the physical scale of the journeys undertaken may have narrowed but their psychological depth has not. Perhaps because of Homer the very concept of a journey has acquired a mythological dimension. And in each of these cases the myth centres on a father-son relationship. It’s maybe no coincidence then that John Mortimer entitled a play about his relationship with his father, A Voyage around my Father or that, on the distaff side, Mona Simpson’s novel, Anywhere but Here, features a mother-daughter relationship. Eugene O’Neill’s harrowing play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, portrays a family tearing itself apart in bitter recrimination.
I listened recently to an Audible version of On the Road, brilliantly read by Matt Dillon, and the word that rang out most clearly and frequently in the narration was “sad”. In the novel’s final scene Dean Moriarty disappears down a street into the New York night, endlessly pursuing his lost father. For all the extravagant wildness, lust and hilarity of Kerouac’s novel there is an undertow of grief, the pain of the exile. This note is constant too in McCarthy’s story of a father trudging with his son across a post-apocalyptic wasteland in search of salvation. McCarthy here reverses the motif in the Odyssey where Telemachus sets out to find his father and bring him home to the patient Penelope. The bulk of both works, however, is taken up with the adventures and misadventures of the wayfarers. These escapades are like a series of mirrors offering us different perspectives on the protagonists or heroes.
To make a journey is not, it seems, the same thing as to travel. The significance of the journey lies less in the experience of new places than in encounters with a diverse array of people. So whether it’s Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty crossing America or Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom crossing Dublin, the most memorable scenes are the ones where the characters engage with friends and strangers along the way. Dislocation rather than exploration is the key to the journey novel. Cast out of their homes or lodgings the characters are set adrift and have to in some measure reinvent or recreate themselves in the face of the people they meet, and from whom they often want money, comfort or shelter. There is the journey stripped to its essence: set off down the road and shift for yourself.
There, too, it might be said, is the core of the parent-child relationship from the negligent parent who abandons the young child, as in most of the works cited here (in Simpson’s novel the mother actually leaves the child on the side of the road and drives on, to test her) to the caring parent who nevertheless knows that one day their child must make his or her own way in the world. First, the child must find out who they are and to do that they ask who their parents were. So, paradoxically, while fleeing their families they connect with familial or parental figures on their journey. Telemachus is helped by Athena, Dedalus by Bloom (who is also seeking a surrogate son), Paradise and Moriarty by the various families they stay with, until they overstay their welcome, and the family who adopt the boy at the end of The Road. Finally, it is themselves or versions of themselves they flee.
What then of the arrival? Is it Ithaca, home, settling down with a life partner, or reconciliation with one’s broken self, dramatized by the gap between parent or child, like the prodigal son? If it is true that the journey matters more than the destination or arrival then why arrive at all? Surely the arrival makes sense of the journey? Odysseus, Telemachus and Bloom come home, Paradise makes a home, but Dedalus and Moriarty continue to wander. The father in The Road dies but hands his son to another (holy) family. At the end of Simpson’s novel the mother, Adele, agrees to help her daughter, Ann, go to college. At the end of the original Dedalus story the son dies when he flies too close to the sun on wings made by his father. Pride, arrogance and wilfulness all come before a fall to be sure. Parents and children can never fully escape one another.
The word journey has become loaded with a symbolic and usually spiritual significance, ‘our life’s journey’, that springs from its roots in the Latin word for day. Joyce understood that when he set his odyssey almost in the real time of one day. Thus, one day ends when a new one begins, and repeats itself, with variations. The journey is a closed circle. It must end to have meaning. And the writer must take us somewhere, show us something of ourselves, They can’t just leave us on the side of the road.
Or can they? What do you think?
You leave us with a big question... one that will require some mulling over...