Traveling in Place: A History of Armchair Travel by Bernd Stiegler & Peter Filkins

Author:Bernd Stiegler & Peter Filkins [Stiegler, Bernd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

EXCURSION AND STOPOVER

Around the World in 80 Days

The surprise and disappointment of traveling. The illusion of having overcome distance, of having erased time. To be far away.

Perec, 77

As for looking around the town, he never even gave it a moment’s thought, as he was the sort of Englishman who gets his servant to do the sights for him.

Verne, 33

Excursion

“All the ships in Jules Verne are perfect cubby-holes, and the vastness of their circumnavigation further increases the bliss of their closure,” observes Roland Barthes in his Mythologies (66). Also, Around the World in 80 Days is, despite the numerous means of transportation, only an apparent exception. For Verne’s Phileas Fogg, who in 1872 circles the world in eighty days, asks himself at the end what he actually has left from his trip. It’s true that he won his bet at the Eccentrics Club, but the entire sum that he won was eaten up by his having to handle the difficulties encountered in arranging transport—whether it involved purchasing elephants, or even entire ships, whose wood was later simply burned to achieve the necessary speed. In the end, there remains the heart of the woman in India who is saved right before she tries to throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre—and we as well come to realize that “isn’t this more than enough reward for going around the world?” “But “what had the journey brought him?” (Verne 230), meaning he who, as the text never tires of repeating, circles the world like a clock in order to win the bet at the last second and despite his own miscalculation, since the Earth has continued to spin eastward and thus allowed him to gain a day. “One ends up saving 24 hours, the last coup de théâtre, in order to make the last turn towards home possible, but at the cost of having to travel 24,000 miles” (Butcher 3).

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