The Tao of Travel

Michaux had traveled fairly widely in the world before he wrote his imaginary travels, so these tales are both satires of actual travel and comic fantasies. As a surrealist Michaux is keenly aware of the necessity for satire to be absurd; even when a narrative is not understood, it must bring a smile to the reader's lips. In a scholarly introduction to Michaux's Selected Writings (1944), Richard Ellmann quotes André Gide, a supporter of Michaux, saying that Michaux "excels in making us feel intuitively both the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things."

Miguel de Unamuno: "Mecanópolis"

YOU COULD PUT this short story, written in 1913, down to science fiction or speculative fiction were it not for the fact that the author says he was directly inspired by the satire of Samuel Butler's Erewhon. Unamuno (1864–1936), who depicts the same horror of technology in this intense and compressed tale, was a distinguished philosopher and the author of a work on man's ambiguous relationship with God, The Tragic Sense ofLife.

"There sprang to mind the memory of a traveler's tale told me by an explorer friend who had been to Mechanopolis, the city of machines," begins Unamuno's story (translated by Patricia Hart).

Lost in the desert, dying from thirst and weakness, the traveler "began sucking at the nearly black blood that was oozing from his fingers raw from clawing about in the arid soil." He sees something in the distance. A mirage? No, an oasis. He recovers, sleeps, and when he wakes discovers a railway station with an empty train at the platform—no engineer, no other passengers. He gets in, the train departs, and later deposits him at a fabulous city. No people can been seen in the city, nor any life. "Not one dog crossed the street, nor one swallow the sky." But there are streetcars and automobiles, which stop at a given signal. He goes to a museum, which is full of paintings but sterile in mood, and then to a concert hall "where the instruments played themselves."

That he is the only person in the city is a news item in the Mechanopolis Echo: "Yesterday afternoon—and we do not know how it came about—a man arrived at our city, a man of the sort there used to be out there. We predict unhappy days for him."

Among the machines, without any human company, the traveler begins to go mad. This too is an item in the daily paper. "But all of a sudden a terrible idea struck me: what if those machines had souls, mechanical souls, and it were the machines themselves that felt sorry for me?"

In a panic, he attempts suicide by leaping in front of a streetcar, and he awakes at the oasis where he started out. He finds some Bedouins and celebrates his deliverance. "There was not one machine anywhere around us.

"And since then I have conceived a veritable hatred toward what we call progress, and even toward culture, and I am looking for a corner where I shall find a peer, a man like myself, who cries and laughs, as I cry and laugh, and where there is not a single machine and the days flow with the sweet, crystalline tameness of a street lost in a forest primeval."

This remarkable piece of fiction about an imaginary journey combines the rejection of technology that Samuel Butler satirized, the over-civilized life that Richard Burton deplored, the horror of a dehumanized urban world that Thoreau condemned, and the wish to find an unspoiled people in a remote place—an Edenic place of happy humans.

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

MOST OF CALVINO'S fictions could be included under the heading "Imaginary Journeys." But Invisible Cities is the most appropriate for an anthology of travel, since the narrator is Marco Polo—a variant Marco Polo, in an extended audience with a variant Kublai Khan—Khan in old age, impatient, combative, at the end of his rule. Marco Polo seems to be spinning out his description of the cities in the manner of Scheherezade, filling the time and diverting the fading emperor.

Dense, playful, paradoxical, and whimsical, the book has inspired a great deal of analysis and some pompous criticism. In general, Calvino's reputation suffers at the hands of his many well-wishers' special pleading. Much of his work is based on elaborate jokes, and the label of magical realism—which is often no more than whimsy writ large—is unhelpful. The structural flaw in the book is that it is a rather formless disquisition and a dialogue, not a narrative of discovery.