Becoming Strangers:

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Becoming Strangers

• Travel, Trust, and the Everyday.
• Day Eleven Travel Writing

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The Middle World Revisited

• When, like Mary Rowlandson, people find
  themselves thrown into the middle world they
  often try to make sense of it by
• Trying to match what you observe to your
  customary sense of place
• Trying to learn if where you are is organized
  according to a different logic of place
• Regardless, they have a tendency to attend much
  more closely to unfamiliar particulars, ones they
  cannot place.

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The Middle World Revisited, Contd

• Some peopleanthropologists, for exampleare
  particularly interested in mastering the new
  place they inhabit.
• Othersnatural scientists, for examplefind it
  useful to be unhoused. They record unfamiliar
  particularsand sometimes learn new ways of
  thinking about them, or even new ways to perceive
  them.
• Then there are tourists.

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Travel Writing

• Begins in 1st 2nd centuries CE, with writers
  such as Strabo Pausanius, who describe distant
  provinces of the Roman empire.
• Starts again in 13th century with Marco Polo and
  other travelers to Asia along spice routes.
• Picks up in 17th and 18th centuries tales of
  European voyages to Asia and New World.
  Coincides with expansion of European empires.
  Becomes serious art, written by Goethe
  others.
• 19th century classics include Charles Montagu
  Doughtys Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) and
  Lafcadio Hearns Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan
  (1894).

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Robert Byron (1905-1941)

• Educated at Eton and Oxford.
• One of the Bright Young Things along with
  Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Anthony Powell, and
  Nancy Mitford.
• Problem of education beyond his means
  prepared to be man of leisure yet no family
  money.
• Isnt Robert simply killing? He seems to hate
  everything which ordinary people like!

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• Byron at MOUNT ATHOS
• Eastern Orthodox monastic settlement that dates
  back to 963 CE.
• Isolated peninsula jutting into Aegean Sea. No
  women or female animals allowed down to today.
• Incredible trove of art books.

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Byzantine Mosaics from Hagia Sophia

• Early 6th Century CE, from during the reign of
  Justinian I
• Imperial church in Contantinople (today Istanbul)
• Flattened, stylized, geometric figures against
  gold backgrounds

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The Road to Oxiana (1937)

• Recounts Byrons travels to from Persia
  Afghanistan in 1933-34 in quest of the origins of
  Islamic architecture.
• What Ulysses is to the novel between the wars,
  and what The Waste Land is to poetry, The Road to
  Oxiana is to the travel book. (Paul Fussell).
• Very popular among later British travel writers,
  including Eric Newby, Colin Thubron and Bruce
  Chatwin.

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Ottoman Empire, Asian Possessions, Before World
War I
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The British Empire in the Middle East during the
1930s
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The Road to Oxiana (1937)

• Looks like a journalprovides dates places.
  Written, though, in the form of anecdotes,
  mini-dramas, rants, and short artsy effusions.
  A mosaic style.
• Casts himself others in roles, often
  stereotypical ones, sometimes contradictory ones.
  
• Desire for good story or punchline shapes the
  narrative.
• Like almost all travel writing, focus ends up
  being as much on him as on the things he
  describes.

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The Road to Oxiana (1937)

• Byron thoroughly aware of life-as-theater
  roles, setting, dialogue, action, etc.
• Road to Oxiana shows the British Empire
  (Marjoribanks) in action who behaves how,
  where, when, why.
• Attention especially to the imposition of one
  place on another, and on the struggles between
  competing visions of place.
• Byron implicates himself in the system that he
  describes. Highlights his own prejudices
  privileges even as he makes us think twice about
  British imperialism.

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King David Hotelor Dome of the Rock?
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The Buddhas of Bamiyan (4th-5th centuries CE)
Statues erected in pass in Afghanistan linking
Asia Minor to South Asia. In Oxiana, Robert
Byron called them ugly derivative. In 2002,
the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas. How would
Byron have responded why?