Reader in the guise of traveller

By : Poul Erik Tøjner

The first person one thinks of is Bruce Chatwin ...
    "The thing that is so liberating about reading Chatwin – by whom my book was, of course, in part inspired - is that he knew that within the bounds of travel writing anything is permissible. You can jump from pure storytelling to philosophy, collage, montage and back to the story. While Chatwin is the melancholy dreamer, in Malraux you have the conqueror of Asia. At heart, Malraux sees the continent as a woman – whom he possesses; there is an incredibly hard, raw masculinity about the way he describes his encounter with Asia. With Chatwin, it’s not the conquest that counts. It’s a fascination with human lives. Something which I can honestly say that I share with him. The lives of the people whom I met on my travels, the became the keystone of my book. And my own curiosity has grown greater."
    "The first books I wrote had to do with how I related to the world around me. On my travels – and in this travel biography – I found that many of these ideas were put to the test. And not all of them held water. Af en astmatisk kritikers bekendelser (From the Confessions of an Asthmatic Critic) contains certain reflections on the link between creativity and melancholia, but the journey I made proved also to be a journey out of melancholia. Suddenly I recognized the melancholia for what it was: a pose I had adopted; something that had set and was no longer open to making sense of the world, but instead shut it out."
    "There are, however, other things which I have had confirmed. For me, one of the basic tenets has been that, when one writes, one does so to an unknown friend; that the voice by which a writer’s work is conveyed is the voice of friendship. And I rediscovered this voice of friendship in the encounters with strangers which my journey afforded me. A great many of the people I have spoken to turned out to be well-read individuals with an interest in literature and in the same writers as myself. In that sense, there truly is such a thing as a global literature. An unexpected sort of familiarity."
    "This prompted me to consider the relationship between reading and travelling. When we read, we are looking for ourselves in something foreign, and what we find is something foreign within ourselves. Literature opens the doors to unknown rooms inside us. And this, so I’ve discovered, is what travel does; out there I was still a reader, but in the guise of a traveller. My love of books had provided me with an excellent grounding as a traveller."

"The form I chose for Jeg har set verden begynde (I Have Seen the World Begin) was that of fiction – and certain passages are quite definitely written in essay form. But it was very important to me that it should not be regarded as a novel. For the simple reason that everything I write about did actually happen. What I wanted to do was to tell people about a world that was utterly and overwhelmingly rich and diverse, and I think that the impact would have been seriously weakened, had I started making things up as I went along."
    "Nonetheless, this book does fit in quite naturally alongside my other work, inasmuch as I regard it as the third volume of a trilogy of which From the Confessions of an Asthmatic Critic is the first and The Book of Omissions the second. I Have Seen The World Begin puts into practice things reflected on in the others. It realizes some of the more contemplative observations made in the two earlier books, and expands upon them in a stream of stories and experiences. In that way it is both a continuation and a conclusion."

This interview first appeared in its full length in Weekendavisen, 1 November 1996

Translated by Barbara Haveland