Pseudonymous Travel Accounts as Texts: A Case from Nineteenth Century Vienna

Abstract

In the pseudonymous travel account discussed in this article, a native poses as a traveler to write a description of native life. This form is distinctive because it gains its descriptive from the authenticity attributed to travelers' accounts by the intended readership. The work in question is Wien wie es ist, written by Gross-Hoffinger, a Viennese geographer and publicist, but published under the name of Hans Normann, purportedly a German, in Leipzig in 1833. The work is of interest ethnohistorically because of its comments on the texture of everyday life in Vienna during the early industrialization. This work permits me to discuss how pseudonymous travel accounts sometimes mimic the same rhetorical devices as realist ethnographic texts, thereby establishing the same sort of textual authority, even as it is applied to different ends. Travel literature has come under greater scrutiny in recent years as ethnographers try to understand how their efforts differ from other kinds of descriptions of social life. The tradition of ethnographic realism developed by Malinowski and others at the turn of the century was in part a rejection of the perceived weaknesses and unreliability of travelers' and administrators' accounts. In the present climate of experimentation in ethnographic writing, a climate Clifford has characterized as one of dispersion in ethnographic authority (1983: 120), it is important to reexamine the models of description that were previously rejected to learn more about the difficult task of cultural description. One conclusion of our efforts at re-examining travel literature is that the genre is multifaceted and actually contains a range of cultural distance between the traveler and the subject. The text I will discuss here represents one of the extremes in this corpus: the pseudonymous travel account in which a native poses as a traveler to write the description of native life. This peculiar stance is most often encountered in European travel literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This form is distinctive because it gains its descriptive from the authenticity attributed to travelers' accounts by its intended readership. Like a mockingbird, the pseudonymous account borrows the song of the real traveler. Thus camouflaged, the message of the writer can then read as the impressions of an outsider who cannily perceives the strengths and weaknesses of a strange land. The intention is not to lend further credibility to travel literature, since the pseudonymous version could not exist unless that were already well established. Instead, the intention is to boost the reputation of a particular society, criticize its foibles, or, as in the present instance, both boost and criticize at the same time.