Travelling by Imagination

Its author, Adalbert von Chamisso, was both a novelist and a scientific explorer who accompanied the Romanzoff expedition from to in the role of scientist and botanical artist. Schlemihl sells his shadow to the devil in exchange for inexhaustible riches.

But wherever he goes, he has to conceal his shadowless existence because it betrays his radical difference from the rest of society. When the devil approaches him a second time and offers to return his shadow in exchange for his soul, Schlemihl rigorously turns him down. With his last money he buys a pair of boots which turn out to be 7-league boots and so he spends the rest of his life travelling round the earth.

While Schlemihl gives up the physical marker of social belonging, his shadow, he is adamant about keeping his soul or identity. And this turns him into a social outcast. Since the traveller or explorer can exist outside the norms of his society, becoming a traveller is the last resort available for him. Fired by almost boundless energies, he can go wherever he wants but he is unable to settle anywhere.

Schlemihl personifies the social outcast who is both too poor and too sensitive to be accepted by his native environment. On the other hand, he never experiences any doubt that the world is there to be appropriated. For him it is a matter of collecting scientific knowledge about even the remotest nooks and crannies of the earth. Gathering this knowledge is interesting and exciting but it is not quite satisfactory for the alienated intellectual.

However extraordinary his findings may be, they are only a substitute for his native environment.

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Interestingly enough, he is not looking for a home far away from the society that branded him an outcast. He may be amused and fascinated by awe-inspiring sights but he hardly interacts with the remote lands he travels through.

He essentially shows an attitude that is akin to that of the colonisers: In other words, the novel describes the kind of intellectual appropriation that prepares the ground for colonial ventures. In order to explain the role of the imagination in the history of colonisation, I would like to go back to an earlier period. Right from the early seventeenth century, there are complex entanglements between the call for factual information about the world at large and the desire to rule over it and possess its riveting, strange and alluring curiosities. There are interesting developments in the fraught coexistence of the desire to know and the desire to possess.

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• Les Épées de Haven: Darkwood, T2 (FANTASY) (French Edition).
• Windows On the World.
• Culture and Imagination!

Books published between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries show that the conflict between these two motives is long-standing. The schizophrenic dynamics, then, account for some extravagant curiosities in the cultural reception of travel and exploration.

Travel and Imagination

When we examine the changing shapes and aspirations of scientific projects undertaken during the main age of exploration — , we notice that they tried to achieve neutral scientific descriptions. Journeys of exploration, however, were the sensation of the period and we observe an immense demand for illustrated news about their discoveries. There was an enormous demand for authentic descriptions, pictures and dramatic performances about the mores and life-styles of the newly discovered exotic peoples. Needless to say, sometimes even the grossest distortions were claimed to be authentic renditions.

To some extent, the visual mismatches are due to the fact that most engravers worked with rough sketches without communicating with the artists who had drawn them. Another reason for these mismatches is that they are grist to the mill for the colonial usurpation of the New World. The reason for this is that the act of cutting a large amount of strange and extraordinary news down to size enabled Europe to obtain and maintain intellectual and political control. In order to explain the tensions between realism and fantasy, I now want to take a look at the first generation of illustrated publications about the four corners of the world.

Most European countries participated in the struggle over different slices of the New World. For a certain time, Holland took the lead in political and propagandist terms and supported its claims with richly illustrated publications, proudly showing off the most recent printing technologies.

Dutch atlases had demonstrated outstanding accuracy of detail since the late-sixteenth century. While the atlases by William and Joan de Blaeu — and Pieter Goos boasted frontispieces with elaborate allegorical scenes, their maps of individual parts of the earth were also decorated with indigenes in national costume.

These practices were copied almost immediately; the English atlas by John Speed, entitled The Theatre of the Empire of Great-Britain , for instance, is illustrated with maps featuring both male and female figures for each part of the world. The Dutch were not only pioneers in atlas and map making, but they also spearheaded the publication of lavishly illustrated travel accounts.

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The popularity of such works can be gauged by the large number of folio publications, many of which containing well over illustrations. The resemblance between numerous views of towns in China, Japan or Africa betrays the fact that the engravers in a workshop like that of Jacob de Meurs, in Amsterdam, had never seen these foreign places and worked in a veritable production line. In fact there was such a demand for illustrated books that there arose an extensive trade in copperplates as well as already printed sets of images from which books were sometimes put together in a different country.

In spite of this, the knowledge about Asia, America and Africa was extensive. Even while seventeenth-century travellers rarely managed to go far inland, they were able to give surprisingly detailed and accurate descriptions of the landscape, people, animals and plants they encountered.

Quote by Samuel Johnson : “The use of travelling is to regulate imaginatio”

Since their audience was potentially interested in investing in foreign trade or perhaps was considering travel to a far-off trade junction like Batavia, these works show a great deal of attention to ethnographic detail. Since the prime objective is that of finding out whether the beliefs, customs and conventions of a particular society would facilitate commercial negotiations with Europe, such publications expanded the knowledge about the sophistication of foreign cultures. But gaining more extensive knowledge also went hand in hand with a sense of admiration that fostered a spirit of equality.

Some striking early accounts of foreign peoples and places came out of the entrepreneurial workshop of John Ogilby. While he was an inferior writer, Ogilby was a businessman with immense vision. In the introduction to his beautifully illustrated folio volume Africa , he explains his objectives as follows:. Ogilby already includes a realistic image of the orang-outang and describes this curious animal as follows:.

This Beast in Shape so much resembles a Man, that some have held opinion, that it is the humane mixture with the Ape …; which fancy nevertheless the blacks themselves explode. Such a creature was some years ago brought from hence into Holland , and presented to Frederick Henry Prince of Aurange. It was as tall as a Child of three years old, neither fat nor slender, but square-set, and well-proportioned, very nimble and quick, with strong, and brawny Limbs ….

However, the fascination that radiates from his illustrations and descriptions suggests that his generation could imagine that there were non-European peoples that were as civilised as those of Europe. The craving for foreign material culture was to grow to immense dimensions during the eighteenth century. However, carved weapons and beautifully plaited headdresses brought back, for instance, from Pacific voyages became divorced from the idea of a thriving social context.

The Travelling Imagination: A Comparison of Real with Imaginary Journeys of Exploration

This development helped Europe to appropriate not only the land but also the cultural identity of their makers. So much so that in the same year, it appeared in both elegant quarto format, with the complete set of 42 plates, and in a cheaper smaller format containing only a couple of charts. It was also translated into German and Dutch in the same year and went through numerous reprints in the following years.

A small picture strip The five panels included on this strip of paper look like precursors of the comic strip. They are small renditions of the plates that illustrate the expensive edition. Economizing on space, however, produced a strange effect in the last panel. Here Anson is framed by a couple of seal-lions. The public appeal of these figures must have been sensed from the first. He was the master of the flock, and from his driving off the other males, and keeping a great number of females to himself, he was by the seamen ludicrously stiled the Bashaw.

These animals divide their time equally between the land and sea, continuing at sea all the summer, and coming on shore at the setting in of the winter, where they reside during that whole season. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre wrote an eloquent attack on slavery as part of the account of his travels to Isle de France now Mauritius in Some 15 years later he wrote his immensely popular sentimental vision about the tropics, Paul et Virginie In his introduction to this claustrophobic vision about an enclave of European civilization among the natives of the island, Bernadin de Saint-Pierre explains:.

I am aware that travellers of taste have given us enchanting descriptions of many islands in the South Sea, but the manners of the inhabitants, and still more of the Europeans who visit them, frequently belie the page. I am desirous to blend with the beauty of nature between the tropics, the moral beauty of a little society: It celebrates the natural environment as paradisiacal but projects European cultural traditions as a foil for unspoilt human behaviour. Paul and Virginie are the children of two white women living in neighbourly harmony on a tropical island after their husbands have deserted them.

The story about their innocent way of life was very popular and inspired numerous imitations. Their tropical island—modeled on Mauritius—is positioned both at a distance from the contamination of European civilisation and the colonial reality of the place. The only evidence of their environment consists of tropical vegetation. In this secluded place, they live a Rousseauvian idyll in the bosom of a maternal nature and, for some inconceivable reason, spend all their energies on preserving the moral standards of Europe, as they had been before civilisation corrupted them.

The story ends on an utterly perverse note when Virginie dies the death of a martyr because she refuses to take off her cumbersome petticoats so that she can be saved from a sinking ship. For Virginie, propriety is a categorical imperative, which means that the cultivation of sentiment has deteriorated into meaningless sentimentality.

Nevertheless, it is an essential condition for keeping at bay the threats of non-European modes of life. If the brutal energies of animal existence were not restrained, the novel argues, they would reduce civilisation to chaos. Not even the surface may be scratched, or the whole cultural edifice will crumble and decay. Through her death, Virginie saves the sense of propriety that had been threatened by reports about non-European peoples.

Her death, however, also confirms that the standards represented by her are not compatible with a living experience of a tropical island. During the nineteenth century, the bulk of publications about non-European lands and peoples grew to immense size. Scientific studies went to great lengths to classify the different varieties of Man and to rate their civilisations and intellectual capacities according to strictly Eurocentric standards. Many tourism student activities can also elevate the creativity in classes focusing on the travel industry and the imagination of the students.

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If you would like to replace it with a different purchasing option please remove the current eBook option from your cart. Travel and Imagination 1st Edition. Add to Wish List. Description Reviews Authors Subjects. Description The imagination has long been associated with travel and tourism; from the seventeenth century when the showman and his peepshow box would take the village crowd to places, cities and lands through the power of stories, to today when we rely on a different range of boxes to whisk us away on our imaginative travels: The Bookshelf application offers access: Online — Access your eBooks using the links emailed to you on your Routledge.

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