by Susan Sontag
Travel is a didactic fantasy in the discourse of the philosophes (the first intellectuals in the modern sense), who often invoke distant non-European societies, described as either more “natural” or more “rational,” in order to illuminate the evils of their own. Tales of physical anomaly attested to by voyagers to remote lands still circulate in the late eighteenth century—the nine-foot-tall giants of Patagonia, for example—but the sense of anomaly is increasingly the moral one. And “we” become the moral defectives. There is a large literature of journeys to exotic places whose fanciful virtues are recounted to point an instructive contrast with Europe. The journey was out of civilization—the present—to something better: the past or the future.
America was the beneficiary of many trips, real and fabricated, of this kind. “In the beginning,” said John Locke, “all the world was America.” Crèvecoeur and Chateaubriand found in the New World something better than, unspoiled by, civilization: health, vigor, moral integrity, a refreshing naïveté and directness. After such fantasies came the inevitable counter-literature, that of acerbic British travelers of the mid-nineteenth century like Fanny Trollope and Dickens, who found us simply not very civilized, in a word, vulgar; Harriet Martineau in the 1830s, sensing abolitionism and feminism on the march, had liked us rather better. Much of modern judgments about exotic places is reactive. Turks were one of the model races in the eighteenth century; in the 1850s the intrepid Martineau actually visited two examples of the “Turkish” harem and described its inmates as the most injured, depressed, and corrupted human beings she had ever seen.
Although these travel judgments—the idealizing of an exotic society , and the report on its barbarity—seem to alternate in cycles of hope and disillusionment, certain countries (following the mysterious laws of stereotyping) have proved more susceptible to idealizing than others. China has been a fantasy kingdom since Marco Polo’s visit; and in the eighteenth century it was widely believed that in China, a land of reason, there was no war, debauchery, ignorance, superstition, or widespread illness. America, too, for all its denigrators, keeps recurring as an object of idealization. In contrast, Russia is a land whose customs and energies have been perennially deplored. Since Ivan the Terrible, the first Muscovite monarch to capture the imagination of Europe, reports on the infamy of Russian society have constituted a flourishing branch of travel literature in the West. The only memorable counterreports—those made by some foreign visitors from the 1930s to the 1950s, precisely the period of the Greatest Terror, about the unprecedented heights of freedom and justice attained in the Soviet Union—have strengthened this tradition.
One cannot imagine anyone being exactly disillusioned by the Marquis de Custine’s account of the barbarism and despotism he found when he went to Russia in 1839, as many people were sharply disillusioned by Simon Leys’s account, in the mid-1970s, of the barbarism of China’s Cultural Revolution. And this centuries-old propensity to think the best of China and the worst of Russian society still has its echo today, when, though by many criteria Chinese communism is infinitely more repressive, more (literally) totalitarian than Soviet communism, the Chinese version still enjoys a far better press than the Soviet one. (Indeed, most self-righteous anti-communists at the highest reaches of the American foreign policy establishment behave as if they are not supposed to notice the tragically Stalinist character of current Chinese political life.) Some countries are perennial objects of fantasy.
THE PHILOSOPHES HAD ATTRIBUTED ideal virtues not only to a noble savage—the Hurons of Voltaire and Rousseau, Diderot’s wise old Tahitian—but also to existing non-European (“Eastern”) peoples such as Turks, Persians, and Chinese. The fantasies of succeeding generations of writers were not so easily disconfirmed. The only “ideal” civilization allowed by the Romantic poets was a thoroughly dead one: the Greek.
Once travel was itself an anomalous activity. The Romantics construe the self as essentially a traveler—a questing, homeless self whose true citizenship is of a place that does not exist at all, or yet, or no longer exists; one consciously understood as an ideal, opposed to something real. It is understood that the journey is unending, and the destination, therefore, negotiable. To travel becomes the very condition of modern consciousness, of a modern view of the world—the acting out of longing or dismay. On this view everyone is, potentially, a traveler.
The generalizing of travel results in a new genre of travel writing: the literature of disappointment, which from now on will rival the literature of idealization. Europeans visited America, prospecting the possibilities of a new, simpler life; cultivated Americans journeyed to Europe to appraise the Old World sources of civilizations—both often profess to be disappointed. From the early nineteenth century on, European letters resound with the sentiment of being Europamüde, tired of Europe. Travelers continue, in ever larger numbers, to make trips to exotic, non-Western lands, which seem to answer to some of the old stereotypes: that simpler society, where faith is pure, nature pristine, discontent (and its civilization) unknown. But paradise is always being lost. One of the recurrent themes of modern travel narratives is the depredations of the modern, the loss of the past—the report on a society’s decline. The nineteenth-century travelers are noting the inroads in the idyllic life in, say, the South Seas made by the modern moneyeconomy, for travelers who would never dream of living like the natives generally still want the natives to stay wholesome, rustic, sexy, and uncomfortable.
Another characteristic modern incitement to travel, what makes a country worth seeing, and describing, is that a revolution has taken place in it. That most unromantic and profound of travel writers, Alexis de Tocqueville, saw in America the vanguard of a radical process soon to transform Europe as well, irrevocably destroying the past; it was to examine that revolution, democracy, that Tocqueville traveled about the United States. Trips to countries to see how they have been transformed by a revolution, a revolution which claims to be about the enactment of ideals, have been one of the great subjects of modern travel literature. In the twentieth century these are trips to specific revolutions, seeking that ideal homeland, revolution-in-general. Much of the literature of travel from the “West” to communist countries reads as a late variant of the old genre, in which visitors from corrupt, oversophisticated Europe hail the healthy energies of a “new world”—now a self-designated “new man.”
In this version of the ideal destination, “revolutionary” has replaced “primitive” but still retains many of the attributes of what was once understood as primitive. “I have seen the future and it works,” notoriously declared Lincoln Steffens after his visit to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s—perhaps the high point of identifying communism with modernization. But as the Soviet model was discredited, and revolution became the fate of struggling agrarian societies more or less under siege, it seemed that what the travelers really felt was: I have seen the past and it is … moving.
Trips to those grievously poor countries are perceived as journeys backward in time: leaving affluent, doubt-stricken civilization for the simplicities, pieties, and materially spartan life of an earlier age. Writing of her visit to China in 1973, Barbara Wooten avowed: “To anyone coming from a world which threatens to strangle itself in its own complications it is the apparent simplicity of Chinese life which makes an irresistible appeal.” This reaction is not just fantasy. Communist revolutions tend not only to occur in peasant societies but, for all the energy devoted to bringing about a certain modernization, to preserve tenaciously much that is premodern in them, such as old-fashioned family life and the central role of a literary culture; and to abort or at least slow down—in part due to the intractable failures of the economy—the onset of the consumer society, with its affluence, its “permissive” values, and its degraded mass culture. Even the unfortunate countries of Central Europe (now paradigmatically relocated in the “East”), though hardly backward societies when they fell under Russian hegemony, are not exceptions to the rule of delayed a
dvance into the modern which communism enforces; and still visibly preserve more of Europe before World War II than do the countries of Western Europe. A good deal of the favorable reaction of foreign visitors has been precisely to this.
In almost all accounts of modern reflective travel, the master subject is alienation itself. The trip may support a skeptical, acutely sensuous, or speculative view of the world. Or the trip is an exercise in overcoming alienation in which travelers celebrate virtues—or liberties—found in a distant society that are lacking in their own. In another trip that has become common with the enlarging possibilities of travel to non-European countries, the affluent traveler, on vacation from bourgeois restraints, explores the “picturesque,” takes advantage of unlimited sexual opportunities. One celebrated nineteenth-century example is the trip that Flaubert, in the company of Maxime Du Camp, made to Egypt in 1850—1851. (In the twentieth century, homosexual writers have been specialists in this kind of libertine travel to colonies and ex-colonies.) In the trip to the revolution, another kind of picturesque is in evidence. Part of what is perceived in communist countries as old-fashioned is the sexual decorousness. Untrammeled sexuality is now associated not with the primitive but with decadence. The revolution represents itself as a kingdom of virtue, and visitors have been ready to believe that behavior in a revolutionary society really has been thus transformed. In the early 1970s many Western visitors accepted the solemn assurances of their Chinese hosts that there was no theft, no homosexuality, and no premarital sex in China.
Though travel for debauch is the opposite of the high-minded, edifying trip made to a poor country in the throes of a revolution, the latter trip often inspires similar condescensions and detachments. Sympathetic visitors who cannot even imagine the local hardships often have a high standard of revolutionary consciousness, and when, for example, the ghastly rigors and lethal zealotry of Chinese communism in the time of the Cultural Revolution were somewhat abated, starting in the mid-1970s, first-time visitors were known to commiserate with each other that they had missed the really good period, when the natives were pure, pious, uncorrupted by consumerism.
Many of the earlier travelers to the capitals of the revolution were, as in an old-fashioned literary journey, going to an exotic land in order to return home and write about it. Travelers to these countries were conscious of traversing a formidable barrier. (Beyond the Great Wall. Behind the Iron Curtain.) They came to write about an exotic country; what they actually wrote about was their itinerary, the strenuous program that is laid out for privileged visitors. Indeed, the common form of these books was the record of the trip, as in China Day by Day, the notably ingenuous account Simone de Beauvoir wrote of her trip to China in 1955. By the early 1970s, with an increasing volume of travel to China, travelers were reporting not only similar trips but identical ones: the same tea-growing commune near Hangchow, the same bicycle factory in Shanghai, the same “lane committee” in a Peking neighborhood—the sameness of the trip having not deterred a large number of them from coming back and writing virtually the same book.
Isolated, secretive, besieged—all communist countries have elaborate procedures for receiving foreign visitors, pampering them while putting them through some well-chosen paces, then dispatching them back, laden with trinkets and books, to the outside world. Like the most modern tourist venture in any remote land, the experience in which the traveler to the revolution is enrolled eliminates all risk, denies enigma. Mystery, risk and unpleasantness, isolation are traditional ingredients of travel to remote lands. Even the most independent lone observer needs help in deciphering an exotic country. Such an observer may take on a native cicerone, who will be the traveler’s principal interlocutor for part of the trip—as in V. S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers, about his travels in revolution-convulsed Islam. But the lone observer is unlikely to take at face value the attitudes of this native friend. Group travel to a communist revolution is designed to produce a different result. These are trips organized by travel officials to make the country seem intelligible. And many visitors to communist countries have been easily persuaded to consider the aspirations and needs of their inhabitants to be fundamentally different from ours, when they are all too similar, and institutions and practices to be comparable to our own, which are in fact radically different.
The voyage to be made to new worlds used to be arduous, hazardous—so arduous that travelers often skipped it. Many authors of travel books were fireside travelers, plagiarizing earlier travel accounts. That eventually travel to exotic places became altogether common, and more and more organized, has made the old kind of travel hoax virtually obsolete: people do take the trips they write about. In the modern period there are probably many fewer travel books that consciously intend to deceive, many more in which the author is deceived. The chances of being caught out, of course, have also mounted. No Natchez squaw arrived in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century to explain what Chateaubriand hadn’t seen or had misinterpreted in the course of his enthusiastic (and, in part, faked) travels to America in 1791. But someone—her name is Eleanor Lipper—who served eleven years in the Gulag and was a prisoner in that slave labor camp in Siberia that both Henry Wallace and Owen Lattimore visited in the early 1940s and pronounced a model workplace (a cross between the Hudson Bay Company and the Tennessee Valley Authority) did turn up a few years later, and wrote about the rage and contempt the prisoners felt for their visitors.
THE ACCOUNTS OF TRAVEL to exotic countries in the nineteenth century suppressed the servants, often a whole retinue, who accompanied the venturesome traveler. The modern traveler touring the revolution tended to suppress the group with which such a trip was accomplished. The sort of person who writes a book about travel to a communist country is, more often than not, the sort who gets invited. And this usually means being a member of a tour—an educational (that is, propaganda) tour sponsored and often paid for by the country being visited. As in all tours, one may not know some or even any of the other people with whom one is packaged. The group may be as small as three (as on my first trip to North Vietnam, in April 1968) or five (as when I went to Poland, in April 1980) or eight (the size of the group I joined to go to China in 1979). Groups of forty in general mean students; the eminent rarely travel in groups of more than five or six; those considered top-drawer celebrities will be invited to travel with a spouse or companion. And, if it is a first trip to a communist country, one will be surprised to learn that this group—however small, however ad hoc—is called a “delegation.” You may protest that your group represents nobody back home, that each member speaks only for herself or himself, but your smiling hosts will keep on referring to “your delegation.”
The custom is for all those taking part in the trip to rendezvous in a hotel mid-journey on the way “in,” the day before entering the country, to be instructed in the ground rules of delegation travel, and to elect a “chairman” (sometimes a vice chairman as well) for the trip, whose duty it will be to respond to official speeches and to sit at the head table at banquets and lead off the toasts. (Some delegations choose to rotate the chairmanship for different segments of the trip, to share the pompousness and the fun.) Wherever you go—at railway stations, where they meet your train; in factories; in schools; at the Writers’ Union—your delegation is meeting the representatives of their organization.
No invitation without an inviting—host—organization; no travel without a program. Led from museums to model kindergartens to the birthplace of the country’s most famous composer or poet, welcomed and given tea and phony statistics by dignitaries in factories and communes, shepherded from oversized meal to oversized meal, with time off for shopping sprees in stores reserved for foreigners, the travelers will complete the tightly scheduled trip having talked with hardly anyone except each other and the only natives they spend time with, upon whom they will base many a generalization: the inveterately amiable guides assigned to the delegation. These official companions—apart from a few he
ad hacks, they are often young, warmhearted, eager (they have worked hard to get the coveted, thrilling job that puts them in contact with foreigners), and scared (they know the price of a misstep, an indiscretion)—hover and fuss, at the constant disposal of their charges. One is always busy, accompanied by them. They are even busier. During an after-lunch break, they have to arrange tickets and accommodations; up late at night, they will be writing reports on the day’s activities and the visitors’ reactions, planning activities to come. The tourist’s role is, characteristically, a greedy one. But a delegation tour of a communist country tenders an explicit invitation to be selfish, greedy. The visitor has only to express a wish for some unscheduled excursion or entertainment, and more phone calls are made to the people working behind the scenes to conjure up the necessary tickets, a guide on the spot, another limousine.
Educational travel is by definition privileged travel—travel on a round-trip ticket. One model of travel to foreign countries for the sake of education was the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, in which a young gentleman, accompanied by his often ill-born and usually underpaid tutor, was exposed to a variety of customs, places, treasures adjacent to his own. Although these leisurely travels through the Continent were often no more than a rake’s progress, their educational point could not be altogether nullified. The graduate of the Grand Tour did return home contaminated in some sense by the foreign. At the least he had experienced that there are many models for being civilized—which is one beginning of true civilization, and civility.
In the Grand Tour offered to visitors to communist countries, travel is designed to make sure the visitor does not encounter anything contaminating. The precondition of such tours or field trips, the visitor’s intellectual and cultural distance, is reinforced by the mandatory luxuriousness of delegation travel. The Disneyland of revolution which the traveler will see has for its theme the country’s progress, the revolution’s benefits, as illustrated by an array of elementary performances, economic and cultural, to which visitors are taken in order to admire. But few visitors from very rich countries, including many who identify with the left, are able to evaluate these performances. If on their first trip to a communist country, it is probably the first time most of them will have been in a truck factory, on a breeding ranch, in a paper mill. Most visitors will know nothing about communism, about the country they are visiting (often they have not even taken the time to study a map and seem unaware of the most salient facts of its history), about peasant life and major industrial procedures.