Travelling Without Moving: Navigating the Liminal Space between Memoir and Fiction

Abstract

Contemporary travel literature provides many examples of the ways in which writers navigate the liminal space between memoir and fiction. Damon Galgut's Man Booker Prize-shortlisted In a Strange Room: Three Journeys, Robert Dessaix's Arabesques: A Tale of Double Lives and Gao Xingjian's Nobel Prize-winning Soul Mountain challenge readers to question the boundaries of genre and reassess the importance placed on the separation of fact from fiction. In this paper, I examine the process of creating my own autobiographically-inspired travel narrative, Travelling Without Moving, which is poised in this same complex, delicate and problematic space. I consider narratology and the portrayal of emotional truth, the rhetorical shift from reportage to lyricism, and the paradoxical protecting and exposing of oneself. As a component of my practice-based PhD thesis, my creative work explores the primal psychological trauma of travel and questions whether travel can affectively transform us, which remains a point of contention between Emerson, Thoreau and their contemporaries.