Defending Travel Writing (Against Other Writers): The Case of Joe McGinniss's Going to Extremes

When I went to Alaska in 1988 I found that everyone there seemed to come from somewhere else--and often came for bizarre reasons--so a typical conversation involved your own tangled story of how you allegedly got there. A few Alaskans made a point of asking me if I lived in America: I soon learned that it was better to smile and listen than to remind them of Alaska's statehood. At the time I was obsessed with two things--climbing Denali (Mount McKinley) and researching my Ph.D. on wilderness narratives in American literature--so a summer in Alaska seemed an ideal way to combine a passion and a profession. While there I picked up a paperback copy of Joe McGinniss's Going to Extremes, and since then the book has become a personal favorite. Actually, "favorite" is the wrong word, especially since there is so much about the book that I dislike. I keep going back to Going to Extremes and other nature/travel/ adventure books with a sense that I have been asked to serve as an expert witness in a very public trial. Some of the recent suspects are writers such as McGinniss, Peter Matthiessen, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Diane Ackerman, or Jon Krakauer. As for the prosecution, it isn't hard to come up with a list of literary critics, many of whom have focused on "travel writing" as a sort of unholy alliance between literature and leisure, as a series of texts written by generally well-fed and welleducated people who proceeded to voluntarily display all kinds of prejudice, rudeness, selfishness, and even cruelty. There is, of course, a long and growing list of such accusations. One might start with a few of the better-known texts: Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions, Edward Said's Orientalism, Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes, James Buzard's The Beaten Track, Martin Green's The Great American Adventure, Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land and The Land Before Her, William Cronon's edition Uncommon Ground, Jonathan Culler's "The Semiotics of Tourism," Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson's edition The Women's West. One should clearly understand that this prosecution has always been more than just an attack on travel writing; I think it's more helpful to note that these scholars have also helped to put travel writing "on the map," for they obviously think that travel writing deserves serious consideration, including sustained and detailed criticism. Also, if one judges by book contracts, reviews, teaching positions, and inclusions in various anthologies, nature/travel/ adventure writers don't seem to be suffering an onslaught of too much criticism. Texts such as The Snow Leopard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Desert Solitaire, Arctic Dreams, Coming into the Country, A Natural History of the Senses, or Into the Wild have become not only non-fiction best-sellers but required readings in a broad range of college-level classes. Yet this growing praise and publicity often rackets up the level of scrutiny that these texts receive, and this sort of attention is sure to intensify in the near future. All of the critical texts listed above have offered academics and advanced students more complex and rigorous ways of reading travel writing, yet this may also be their limitation, for most travel writers-and most certainly the readers of such texts-pay more attention to "reputations" earned outside of the world of conferences and journals and seminars and grants. (They read Outside and Conde Nast and Harper's and Lonely Planet guidebooks, not Diacritics and Representations.) Rather than focusing on more academically oriented texts, I will focus on three arguments made by three popular writers. I agree with Morris Dickstein's claim that canons--however one may define them--are shaped more by writers than literary critics, and for those of us who spend much of our classroom time among non-specialists, these arguments present both immediate and important contexts for judging travel writing. It isn't easy to categorize the criticisms aimed at nature/travel writings, but one can find at least three central points of conflict in the following essays: Sallie Tisdale's "Never Show the Locals Your Map (Why Most Travel Writers Should Stay Home)," the opening of Jamaica Kincaid's "A Small Place," and Joyce Carol Oates's "Against Nature. …