Paths to the Real World

Abstract

The emergence of empirically ‘true’ accounts manifests itself most conspicuously in texts about travel to ‘foreign’ worlds. Travel writing naturally represents a wide range of encounters with the foreign; in fact the literature of travel has been pre-eminent in the European construction of the ‘other’ or ‘exotic’ worlds.¹ Thus it exemplifies how complex any notion of foreignness or ‘other’ness actually is — not only in our present, globalized world in which cultural interference and interaction have become a commodity of everyday existence. Recent research in anthropology, cultural studies, psychoanalysis and other disciplines has established that all concepts of the ‘other’ are projections of the ‘self and thus essentially slippery, relational and relative.² The foreignness of a travelled country is always the result of an act of construction on the part of the perceiver, who defines the country’s otherness against his or her own sense of identity, his or her own familiar contexts.

[1] There are many different kinds of people in these isles. In one, there is a race of great stature, like giants, foul and horrible to look at; they have one eye only, in the middle of their foreheads. They eat raw flesh and raw fish. In another part, there are ugly folk without heads, who have eyes in each shoulder; their mouths are round, like a horseshoe, in the middle of their chest. In yet another part there are headless men whose eyes and mouths are on their backs. And there are in another place folk with flat faces, without noses or eyes; but they have two small holes instead of eyes, and a flat lipless mouth. In another isle there are ugly fellows whose upper lip is so big that when they sleep in the sun they cover all their faces with it … In another, people have feet like horses, and run so swiftly on them that they overtake wild beasts and kill them for their food. In another isle there are people who walk on their hands and their feet like four-footed beasts; they are hairy and climb up trees as readily as apes. … There is still another isle where the people have only one foot, which is so broad that it will cover all the body and shade it from the sun. They will run so fast on this one foot that it is a marvel to see them. There is also another isle where the people live just on the smell of a kind of apple; and if they lost that smell, they would die forthwith. Many other kinds of folk there are in other isles about there, which are too numerous to relate.

(The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, mid-fourteenth century, p. 137)

[2] It rests I speak a word or two of the natural inhabitants, their natures and manners …

They are a people clothed with loose mantles made of deer skins, and aprons of the same round about their middles, all else naked; of such a difference of statures only as we in England; having no edge tools or weapons of iron or steel to offend us with, neither know they how to make any. Those weapons that they have are only bows made of witch-hazel and arrows of reeds; flat-edged truncheons also of wood about a yard long. Neither have they anything to defend themselves but shields made of barks, and some armours made of sticks wickered together with thread.

Their towns are but small, and near the sea coast but few, some containing but ten or twelve houses; some twenty. The greatest that we have seen has been but of thirty houses….

Their houses are made of small poles, made fast at the tops in round form after the manner as is used in many arbours in our gardens of England; in most towns covered with barks, and in some with mats made of long rushes, from the tops of the houses down to the ground. The length of them is commonly double the breadth, in some places they are but twelve and sixteen yards long, and in others we have seen twenty-four.

(‘Hariot’s Brief and True Report’, 1588, pp. 126–7)