Why Do Human Beings Create Narratives?

As funny as the book is however, it is also a serious social commentary

Bryson found a continent that was doubly lost, lost to itself because of it being blighted by it’s greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he is a foreigner in his own country – heightening his own role of tourist.

His real goal was to find the America of his youth and the perfect small town. All he really does find, however, are a series of sentimental throwbacks to the fifties, such as soda fountains, old billboards and downtown movie theatres, but the perfect small town eludes him, of course, because it only exists in his own mind as a mix of his memory and imagination.

At the end of the book you get the sense that Bryson feels that America is a worse place today than it was in his youth. A reason for this conflicts Bryson as the cause is probably due to the decline of small town living, which he berates all the way through his travels – and the dominance of the fast-food joints and strip malls.

American commercial culture is constantly satirised by him and he uses this combined with a certain irony and sarcasm to achieve a comic effect. However his writing is highly opinionated in such a way that in the first five chapters he certainly doesn’t say anything that praises American society, culture or any other aspect for what it is, which would be quite unusual for the run-of-the-mill travelogue. One has, in fact, heard the run of many of Bryson's observations about late-20th-century civilisation from one's older relatives such as ‘Catalogues sell the strangest things’. ‘Why don't human beings answer telephones anymore?’ or ‘why don’t people walk anywhere anymore?’  But the reader appreciates them and the use allows a bridge of similarity between writer and audience.

In the first chapter he sets the scene for his journey by recalling the events of his childhood –particularly thinking about places visited with his family. He introduces a few characters, notably Mr.Piper, who epitomises Bryson disdain of small town life by staying in the same town all his life, being a dangerous alcoholic and eventually marrying someone called Bobbi, Bryson claims that if you stay in any small town long enough you will eventually marry someone called Bobbi. Perhaps the character of Piper reinforces and typifies the small town mentality that Bryson hates. Bryson is an expert at making his travelogue into a novel. He uses rich characterisations for both people and the places he encounters.  This way the reader becomes even more of a spectator of Bryson’s ‘visual activity’ all the way through his travels you feel as if you could be sat in the passenger seat of his car, tucked into his backpack or sat on his shoulder. Something that is vital for the participation of armchair travellers. Bryson makes each character memorable and able to stand on it’s own and yet capable of amalgamating with the other ‘players’ to create a flowing piece of literature.

He also introduces us to typical characters – the Iowan farmer, the large built women and their daughters who will soon develop into carbon copies of their mothers.

During Bill Bryson’s journey across America, he often stops and uses the various services alone the way. These are restaurants, service stations, and of course motels. These may seem very uninteresting at first thought but he characterises them and you soon notice a pattern that none of these services are in anything less than strange.  He comments on what the service stations were like when his parents used to take him, his brother and sister on holiday when he was younger. From the stories we are told nothing about them seems to have changed, since ‘we’ met the hotel guest on the cracked leatherette settee, who had only one leg, a caved in forehead and yet could talk to you even though he had no tongue.

The exaggeration is effective and amusing but also shows Bryson’s darker side of comedy. Throughout the book Bryson characterises the places he stays in as much as the other residents in the town. There is a continuous feeling that the characters that appear in the novel are somewhat subhuman in their actions and you can’t help but think that this description is even slightly hyperbolic, or is it a true reality.

Through all the ‘crappy’ places he passes on the way Bryson claims that they are all the kind of place that he thought his Dad would have liked, this hints towards a spiritual journey as well as a geographic one as it was his dads sudden death a few years prior to the trip that provided the impetus for this spatial journey, by this I mean the geographic, and temporal, by this I mean the journey that Bryson takes through his past.

He also comments on the fact that Americas heritage areas, such as the house of Mark Twain and Colonial Williamsburg, have been completely commercialised he refers to it as a disappointment. He suggests that this museum is nothing more than interested in making money and not geared towards informing you with interesting historical or biographic pieces of information. He introduces us to a characters who claims that he had visited this “shrine” of Twin’s house as he calls it twenty or thirty times, just to buy things from the several gift shops although he has never read any novels by the man himself. Bryson comments, with some disgust, at America’s seemingly ever-growing need to make something marketable.

On commentating on the crudeness of America’s obsession with the big sell. He invents a lovely company called Zwindle – the place where gullible Americans can buy all those essentials they never had, like the musical shoe trees and the electric nail buffer. The irony of the name Zwindle – (a real Swindle) is not lost on the reader.  Yet more social commentary on America and civilisation on a whole. Commenting on the excesses of the world.

Bryson uses names to great effect. Sometimes he often makes up names to typify places he is visiting. Are there really places called Urinal and Spigot? I think they would be hard to find in another travel guide.

Likewise he ridicules ‘foodies’ for ever I search of a new taste flavour, yet their taste buds have long sine been dulled by their over indulgence at food. Bryson seems to be commentating on the shallowness of the average American consumer and his apparent lack of intelligence. Are they all shallow, gullible and looking only for the next new fad to purchase? He launches a vicious attack on the gluttony and greed, through comedy and characterisations. Even though we know that Bryson is actually telling us some home truths, his comedy makes the whole travel experience an easier pill to swallow.

It seems that Bryson is searching through his travels for something that has never really existed. He seems to be looking for a Pleasantville of the 1950’s but all the time gets harsh reminders of his youth and just why he was so keen to leave America the first place.

However, his writing is so skilled and humour is used to such effect that you want to follow in his footsteps and visit these places to see if they are just as awful as he describes.

As well as supplying us with the typical travel genre dialogue such as landscape, Bryson supplies the reader with a diverse range of interesting factoids. Whether political, financial, literary (particularly his disdain at the current face of Playboy magazine) or to the cause of the mysterious Melungeon race of the Appalachian Mountains.

What Bryson seems to aim for in his travel writing is the four Ps: sense of place, person, passion and perspective. Great travel writing has to transport you to wherever the writer is, has to bring it to life all around you -- its sounds, tastes, textures and scents as well as its appearance. Often it will bring some of the people in that place to life too, with dialogue and description.

But beyond these, great travel writing must also be informed with passion and perspective, must get beneath the surface of the place to touch and reveal its spirit and soul. Such writing must intimately and profoundly involve the writer, must record the writer's own engagement with a place. The writer must grapple with it, get inside it and then reflect on that encounter, put it all in some kind of larger perspective -- so that we come away from the work with an enhanced sense of both who we are and what our planet is really all about.

Bryson has a lot to offer the ‘armchair traveller’, those of us who would love to travel the globe if it weren’t for such things as money and family ties. Reading travel books allow the tied down traveller to escape from this geographical position, and social situation. In this way the travel writing narrative conforms to the theories of people such as Alisdaire MacIntyre is his work After Virtue that narrative exists for mankind to communicate some implicit moral commentary and his need for pure escapism. The primordial need for mankind to have some kind of life evaliuating stories.

For one person to fill the role as leader, holder of knowledge allows the other to assume the position of pupil, consumer, perhaps allowing us all to conduct another primordial need for humanity to search for knowledge in just about anything. Narrative allows mankind to pursue his search of truth, knowledge, respect and order and importantly trust.

This is why travel writing is a highly powerful tool. We the readers allow ourselves to be wooed and captivated with a travel writer’s colourful language and amusing anecdotes in the hope that we will learn something new about strange places and ourselves. We trust them implacably to tell them the truth and yet don’t mind if they embellish and exaggerate people and places.

Travel narratives are representations of a travel experience. But the images, myths, and stereotypes that are so much a part of travel accounts construct knowledge about people and places termed "foreign" or "different." While they purport to describe and explain other peoples and cultures, travel accounts often distort those realities. The travellers use the impact of their own home culture to interpret the "other."

Travel Writing is a literary form with a threefold character-aesthetic, political, scientific. It depicts the culture in the source, admiring works of art, comparing society at home and abroad and observing the nature of many processes taking place in the society.

Travel Writing can serve as a raw material out of which illustrations of indigenous peoples; developments, traditions and events emerge. It is a means of on-the-spot recording. A historical look on Travel Writing discovers strains of literality that can enrich our own conception of cultural encounters. It might even encourage reflection on whether we have left behind the older methods or might better think of ourselves as historical tourists following the paths lay down by previous generations of Travel Writing.

With its juxtaposition of scientific and fictional, Travel Writing departs from the conventions of purely scientific. In contrast to science it narrates the story of immediate contact between cultures and can use the resources of literature to invoke the ironies, gaps and misunderstanding in our knowledge. Neither is it a purely literary travel account; rather the genre is considered as something intermediate between scientific and literary, between logical and emotional, between fact and fiction.

---