Page - 138 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

138 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert | On the (im)possibility of writing a travelogue Introduction Travel is a disturbing experience, which has multiple meanings and is largely incomprehensible. It is imbued with a breath of life that words cannot express. The journey I made across the Ethiopian central highlands and what I saw and heard there is an experience that cannot be shared, because the images locked into my words cannot be unlocked by those who listen to me. (Ramos 2018: 105)1 In Of Hairy Kings and Saintly Slaves: An Ethiopian Travelogue2, the Portuguese anthropol- ogist, essayist, and illustrator Manuel João Ramos reflects on what he describes as the impos- sibility of sharing travel experiences with others in words. Ramos’s way of dealing with the limitations of words in this regard is to combine them with sketches. Rather than functioning as illustrations of the text, these sketches ought to be understood as ‘texts’ of their own, which, I will argue, introduces an internal ‘polygraphic’ element to Ramos’s project. Briefly put, the term ‘polygraphy’ was coined to refer to the practice of ‘[…] those travel writers who write multiple accounts of a journey they have undertaken’ (Kennedy 2019: 199). Accordingly, the term ‘polygraph’ refers to ‘a writer who continuously re-textualizes his/ her journey, in different genres and in different forms’ (Kennedy 2019: 199). Thus far, the phrase ‘in different forms’ has commonly referred to different publications. In this contribution, I suggest that we extend the concept of polygraphy by introducing the notion of ‘internal polygraphy’: the practice of combining text and the visual within a single travelogue such that, while both forms represent the same journey, they do so quite independently of each other and without directly relating to each other. Sketches have a long history as travelogue illustrations. They were the medium of choice for travel writers from the early modern period up to the nineteenth century, a time when female travel writers in particular often added self-drawn sketches to their texts (cf. Walchester 2019: 128). As the media formats that travel writers use to document their impressions and encoun- ters have changed over time, however, sketching has lost its importance as a means of visually documenting a journey. In the age of digital photography, the use of sketches as a means of documenting travel experiences seems to be somewhat out of fashion.3 Ramos’s book thus first aroused my interest as a contemporary piece of travel writing that apparently uses an outdated mode of capturing impressions of a journey. And indeed, in the introduction to his book, Ramos regretfully observes that the role of the illustrator on the ‘great classical expeditions’ has been taken over by filmmakers and photographers, who are considered more objective and reflexive (Ramos 2018: 4). However, it would be far too simplistic to view Ramos’s book as a nostalgic imitation of a mode of travel writing that dominated at a time when no other technology was available. Quite the contrary, I propose that we view Ramos’s book as a contribution to contemporary debates on how the experience of travel can be conveyed in writing, a question that has special relevance in 1 Cf. Vlasta: 28 in this collection, who analyses Georg Forster’s observation that the letters of the alphabet do not suffice to express the experience of travel. 2 In this chapter, I will mostly refer to the book as An Ethiopian Travelogue, for the sake of brevity but also because my focus is on the first part of the book, which bears this title. 3 Of course, this observation does not apply to travelogues in the form of comics/graphic novels, which are not treated here (cf. Thomsen in this collection).