ABSTRACT
In his essay “Travel and Writing,” Michel Butor writes that the explorer “seizes with his language the land he crosses” (13). According to Butor, “voyages of exploration” follow a different logic than voyages of pilgrimage. Whereas voyages of exploration seek to plant flags and redraw maps to signify an annexation of territory, pilgrimage is undertaken to engraft a sense of membership into a larger tradition. Neither of these models fully captures the dynamic motivations of the obsessional traveler, for whom the seizure of territory dramatizes an effort to gain exclusive possession of language. Like Crusoe, who conquers his island primarily by naming it, the obsessional wishes to separate from the intersubjective field of shared language. As with other modern travelers, the “blank” quality of a geographical space attracts the obsessional traveler much more than the unique attributes of the space itself. The contemporary adventurer seeks not a specific territory, but raw material that may be suffused with his own authentic imaginings. If the subject associates the homeland with an overwhelming bureaucratic rationality-one that denies the self-gratification of creation and discovery-then adventure travel may provide the option of exercising the will of one’s subjectivity overseas. Again, it must be acknowledged at the outset that this will to submit alien territory to a representational schema of the “discoverer’s” own design is constitutive of colonial and post-colonial forms of exploitation. Yet my purpose is not so much to assess the conduct of the obsessional traveler according to principles of cross-cultural sensitivity or tendencies toward xenophobia, but rather to underscore how deeply the legacy of colonialism informs popular narratives of travel and discovery, even when this legacy is a subject of critique.
