The writer as nomad?: The art of getting lost

Abstract

Critical of the European travel writer’s proclivity for self-location and self-affirmation, postmodern voyagers have attempted to lose their way while traveling. Roland Barthes, for example, describes Tokyo in Empire of Signs (1982 [1970]) as a city with ‘no addresses’: a place where he cannot read the map; where he cannot adequately direct his taxi driver; finally, where he must ask the taxi driver to pull over and phone the people he is trying to reach. But getting lost is not, for Barthes, a bad thing. It corresponds to a larger project of unsettling European travel writing’s purported psychological and political mastery: when a person wanders astray, he or she is subject to what Barthes calls ‘a certain disturbance’ that unsettles the constructs of ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’. Barthes’ theoretical descendants have pushed these claims even further, claiming that losing one’s way – literally and philosophically – leads to a deterritorialization of knowledge: literary wandering subverts the ‘arrogance’ of discourse and resists the systematization of the world. In light of such claims, I investigate here the discursive history of getting lost and ask: does getting lost really subvert discursivity and systematization? If yes, then why did even eighteenth-century European travelers decide – long before Barthes – to get lost on purpose? Does the late twentieth-century desire to get lost undermine this Romantic model (visible in Goethe and, later, Flaubert)? Or does the postmodern travelogue in fact replicate this earlier narrative, in which lostness presupposes its own recuperation? And does modernism – as I argue here – present an ‘unheimlich’ counter-narrative?