Burbank with a Baedeker: Modernism's Grand Tours

Abstract

Modernist literature shares many of the topoi of travel writing. On occasions, it intervenes directly in the genre. The tourist abroad, in Eliot's poem ‘Burbank with a Baedeker’, offers a paradigm of the Modernist impulse, constructing its texts out of the allusive plunder of a global culture—an operation theorised by André Malraux in the concept of the ‘Imaginary Museum’. It also offers a less positive image of what travel has meant for the majority of people in the twentieth century, exemplified by The Waste Land's vision of a world driven by the coercive agendas of mass migration, ethnic cleansing, exile and fight. Whereas the Romantic quest sought to recover a lost ‘home’, the Modernist, after Baudelaire, is an existential traveller, recognising that any attempt to ‘go native’ is likely to end in disaster. Explicitly Modernist travelogues by such writers as MacNeice, Auden and Isherwood seek, in a deliberate parody of the form, to deconstruct these earlier scenarios in serio-comic mode, while recognising the complementarity of privileged tourist and that representatively modern figure, the ‘displaced person’.