The Scent of Things: Travel and the Traces of the Past

Abstract

Encounters with the historical and contemporary materiality of travel may occur objectively and/or imaginatively, as the traveller moves by air, land or water, passes streets, squares, buildings, enters rooms, museums, palaces, crosses bridges, mountains, canyons. Even other people can present as material entities, encapsulating the shock of difference, the flesh and odours of lived reality, the impossibility of possession. However prepared for a journey by reading, thinking, and research, in the end, for the writer as traveller, it is the act of travel while writing itself which becomes the heuristic enterprise, the experiment which leads to a solution, an understanding or a new question that may never be definitively solved. This discussion explores the representability of travel writing as material engagement and as a creative endeavour of scholarly inquiry. The presentation will take the form of a framed auto/narrative which follows a sequence of journeys undertaken by the author, in reverse order that speak to questions of authenticity and illusion across space and time.