ENGL6080 Travel Writing and Culture
Notes for Week 2
Writing the East: Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville
1. Marco Polo (1254 - 1324)
Author and Book Marco Polo is the most famous of medieval European travelers. His account of China in
his only written work, known in English as The Travels, inspired other Europeans,
including Columbus, to seek the ‘Cathay’ he so wonderfully describes. Yet he struggled
to persuade his contemporaries of the book’s authenticity, and more recently, scholars
have also questioned some of the content, especially its historical accounts. There is no
firm evidence to suggest that The Travels is a first-hand account of Polo's travels. No
convincing record of Polo’s presence in China has been found, and Chinese history does
not support the claim in his book that he spent 17 years there as envoy of the Kublai
Khan. This does not mean he did not go to China, but there is some evidence he might
have exaggerated some of his claims. Frances Wood has pointed out that much of Polo's
vocabulary is Persian rather than Chinese, indicating that he might have based at least
some of his account on Persian sources. Others have noted that he omits significant
aspects of Chinese life and culture which does seem remarkably remiss of him. There is
no mention of the Great Wall for instance, or the custom of foot-binding and tea
ceermonies [which were well established by the 13th century]. (See Frances Wood, Did
Marco Polo Go to China).
But claims and counter claims are difficult to prove. The idea of authorship in medieval
times was more fluid, and always more collaborative. There is no original manuscript and
the oldest copies, in medieval French and Latin, have been copied and edited many times.
About Polo himself, we know little, but he was a real character, and records still exist of
his birth and his final will. It seems he left little of great value to his family, and he may
well have spent his remaining years an embittered man, trying to publish his book. His
fame did not spread until after his death, when a version was produced by Ramusio
containing the Prologue which he probably wrote himself. According to this, Polo had
dictated his book a well-known writer of romances, Rusticello of Pisa, while they were
both confined in prison in Genoa. This adds another twist to the eventful production of
the text.
First Travel Book to Present a Realistic and Visitable East Whatever the doubts about authorship and authenticity, Polo's Travels undoubtedly
presents realistic details of a China never before written about so extensively in
a European language. Whether we are reading the experiences of Polo himself, or a
skillfully crafted accumulation of second-hand experiences, is perhaps not the point. As
literature, The Travels is still an important work, not least because it discloses European
attitudes to the East in the medieval period and because it was subsequently a major
shaping force on the European imagination. If it was subsequently amended and redrafted
to get the approval of the Church (which has been suggested), then this tells us more
about the European imagination and worldview.
To a modern eye, The Travels might seem tedious and repetitive. Repetition was a
literary mode at the time, so this is not surprising, but it also gives the text a greater sense
of realism – in other words, travel does often produce repetition rather than constant
variety. On this basis, Polo was the first to narrate a mundane and largely realistic
geographical East, with formulaic phrases designed to emphasise the frequency of
particular features. He is also careful not to dispel too many comforting illusions long
held by European Christians about the East, such as the myth of the Christian king,
Prester John. But The Travels radically changes the mapping of the East for Europeans
who had previously only seen the East through the heavily symbolic cartography of
mappae mundi. Polo produces a traceable ‘map’ of the East, turning into a place to be
visited, rather than simply written about and imagined. In the process, he also contested
the Euro-centric worldview, by introducing a ‘two-centred world’. He draws comparison
between these two centres, unsettling western supremacy, but also inciting European
exploration in search of the riches of China.
Polo's Travels was the first European book to offer practical information on places, routes
and people. Where it tries to fill in the history of the East, it is often inaccurate, and there
are some worrying 'slips' in his history of the Tartar Wars. But such 'slips' do not take
away from the book's realism. Polo's narrative gives the sense of places which are
visitable rather than present only as the material for fabulous and miraculous stories.
Polo's Travels is the first book to begin to impose a 'real' East on the mythical and
fabulous East that preceded it in the European imagination.
The Merchant's Eye The point of view in The Travels is, for the most part, clearly that of a merchant. This can
be seen from the language used and from the detail that relates to commercial interests,
such as products, prices, means of transport, currency, and laws and customs that the
merchant may need to be aware of.
In the most-cited passages, there is greed in that merchant's eye as it scans the wealth of
products and the superiority of Chinese civilisation. The one thing Polo does not mention,
is what China might want from Europe - this was always a bit of a stumbling block in
East-West trade, and one of the factors leading to the Opium Wars. As Polo (and others)
maintain, the Kublai Khan was always willing to entertain foreigners and listen to their
ideas and inventions, but there does not seem to have been much in terms of products that
China wanted or needed from the West at this time.
Realism or Romance? Given that The Travels was transcribed by Rusticello, a man famous for writing
Arthurian legends about knights, castles, dragons and quests for the holy grail, we might
wonder if this flavoured the text and compromised its realism. The passage that describes
Polo's first meeting with the Kublai Khan, for example, is very similar to a passage in
one of Rusticello's romances. There is an interesting traffic here between European
fantasy and Chinese reality which goes some way to explaining how the East was cast in
an exotic light by Europeans.
An Exotic East By presenting such a positive view of the East (especially China), Polo contributes to a
new (in medieval times) European attitude to the East. It was always exotic in the sense
of being different, strange, or unnatural, but in Polo's Travels, the East becomes highly
desirable to Europe. This new casting of the East also contains a degree of feminisation:
associated with the beautiful, the perfumed and the sensuous. In this there is also an
implication and veiled criticism that although rich, the East may be morally weak, and
pleasure-seeking.
The Text
The book first appeared in Europe in the early 14th century. There are a number of
manuscripts in different languages, but it is likely that the original was written in
Medieval French by Rusticello (French being the accepted language of romance).
Between Polo's actual travels and the modern edition of his Travels there may be many
alterations, embellishments, omissions and mistakes, introduced by copying, translation
and editors wishing to change the text for some reason. Specifically, it was necessary for
Polo to have the book accepted by the Christian establishment which censored
manuscripts diverging from the Scriptures in either way. In this atmosphere of Christian
fundamentalism, it would be naive to assume the text we read today in translation is a
verbatim account of what he told Rusticello, even if this was what he actually saw, and
even if this is what Rusticello wrote.
The book describes an epic journey of over twenty years duration (1271 - 1295) overland
from Western Europe, across the Middle East, central Europe and Asia to China, and
back again to Venice by sea (although the return journey is only described briefly in the
Prologue which was probably added much later by an editor) The book is set out as
follows:
Prologue 1. The Middle East 2. The Road to Cathay 3. Kublai Khan 4. From
Peking to Bengal 5. From Peking to Amoy 6. From China to India 7. India 8. The
Arabian Sea 9. The Northern Regions and Tartar Wars
The Prologue tells the story of an earlier journey made by Polo's father and uncle.
According to this story, the elder Polo's had already been to China, met the Kublai Khan
and returned to Italy with the intention of fulfilling the emperor’s request to bring 200
educated Christian men, a blessing from the Pope and oil from the lamp at Jerusalem to
his court at Khan-Balik (Peking). After some delay, the Polo's eventually returned to
China with the young Marco Polo, who at the age of seventeen, was presented to the
Khan. So the story goes, Kublai Khan was so impressed with the young Marco that he
sent him as a special envoy through his empire to gather information.
Discussion points for Polo’s The Travels.
Consider some of the following features of the text and discuss their effects and their
effectiveness in travel writing:
1. The mode of narration is revelation (art of revealing) rather than reported action - use
of 'continuous present tense'
e.g. "In this place, there are these wonderful things",
rather than "When I visited this place I saw these things..."
2. Presentation of 'wonders and marvels' - see emphasis on gold, spices, silk etc.
3. 'Armchair Travel' - text pulls us along a journey - address to reader as traveller e.g.
"Now let us move on to the next place ..."
4. Narrative time is the time of telling not the time of travelling
e.g. "I told you this,
now I am telling you this, and afterwards I will tell you about this"
5. Voice of narrator is more prominent than that of the traveler.
6. 'The traveller' as a detached figure - an everyman
- note that the impersonal 'traveller'
is usually, but not always the subject.
7. Exaggeration (hyperbole) and superlatives (Polo was nicknamed Il Milione)
8. The language and point of view of a merchant
9. Repetition
10.
Geographical completeness in the narrative
11.
A Western male gaze? Kinsai as feminine, exotic and desirable to male travellers.
2. "Sir John Mandeville"
Man, Persona and Book
Mandeville claims to be an English knight of the 14th century, but we know nothing of
this author outside the book he left. The 'Mandeville persona' who narrates Mandeville's
Travels, introduces himself as an aging English knight returning home after travelling
extensively in Arabia, Central Asia, North Africa, and the Far East. But this is a little like
the framing device found in fictions like Robinson Crusoe – it does not reflect reality so
much as produce the reality effect.
The book was written about 1357, and was destined to become the most popular book of
the Middle Ages. It was translated into most European languages and was used by
explorers such as Columbus, as well as medieval cartographers. While contemporary
interest was based on the book’s dual role of entertainment (the revelation and
confirmation of wonders) and information (on astronomy, science, religion and
philology), its interest today rests on its subtle representations of European attitudes to
‘otherness’ – specifically, Christian attitudes to Islam and other religions as a critical
reflection on Christendom and the (corrupt) institution of the Church.
The Poetics of Plagiarism
The book has multiple sources and it is often said that Mandeville or the 'Mandevilleauthor' (to be pedantic) never travelled further than the libraries of Europe, relying on
second-hand accounts from others. Some sections are clearly plagiarised from twenty or
so authenticated sources, including Oderic of Pordenone's Itinerarius, the letters of John
of Plano Carpini, and Alexander's letter to Aristotle. Mandeville was undoubtedly a
scholar who had studied widely, and possibly travelled to the Middle East during the
Crusades, or on pilgrimage, but probably never visited Asia. From a modern
perspective, Mandeville might be called a plagiarist or fabulist, but in the context of
medieval literature, his ‘crime’ is much less serious. It was common in his time to re-use
source material and to juxtapose familiar texts with commentary – this was a mode
followed by no less than Chaucer, a contemporary, and later Shakespeare. Both were
experts in what Chaucer called, ‘producing new corn from old fields’.
What Mandeville’s recycling reveals is the particular ‘spin’ he puts on already-circulating
travellers’ tales. He provides us with a compendium of diverse medieval texts (and some
of his own original material), re-presented through the filter of a distinctive liberal and
pluralist consciousness, not unlike what we now perceive as a ‘postmodern
consciousness’. One of his main devices is to introduce fictional dialogues to provide
‘reverse othering’. Here the travellee passes comment on the traveller and by extension
the society he represents. Such a device is later found in more sophisticated modern
travel writing, which is more conscious of the need to express the travellee’s point of
view. More straightforwardly, he embellishes the accounts of others with humour and
irony, frequently making political and philosophical points.
Reflection, Irony and Satire Mandeville reveals little about the East that was not already documented. Where Polo's
text is enthusiastic in promoting the East and promoting Polo himself as the hero of his
travels, Mandeville is self-deprecating and reflective. Mandeville's Travels may on the
surface look like poorly stitched together work using the words of others, but scholars
have recently found a subtle and intelligent mind at work here, one which uses travel
writing about the East to reflect on the errant ways of the West. It is very common in
later fictional travel writing to do this - see for example Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's
Travels and Thomas More's Utopia, where fictional places are used to explore alternative
societies or to satirise present society.
A Rambling and Digressive Traveller Unlike Polo, Mandeville is not a heroic traveller/narrator. He is not master of all he
surveys nor master of all he tells. He often confesses to omitting details, and seems intent
on not getting bogged down in long descriptive passages. There is always too much to
tell, and he turns his failure to organise and structure his material into a representative
mode – high on anecdote and tall tales, but short on facts and synthesis.
Mandeville's Travels has none of the careful mapping we get in Polo. For example,
"From this country men go through the Great Sea Ocean by way of many isles and
different countries, which would be tedious to relate." (127). Mandeville also breaks off
abruptly and introduces extraneous material through digression. Given the relative
popularity of Mandeville’s book, this might tell us something about European tastes at
the time.
Realism and Fantasy
Whereas Polo's mode is essentially realistic, Mandeville frequently wanders off into the
fantastic (e.g. the descriptions of assorted monsters). He deliberately doesn't signal the
switch from realistic to fantastic description, leaving it for his audience to distinguish the
real from the unreal, and also experience the delight of sometimes quite random
juxtaposition. This may seem odd to a modern audience accustomed to fact and fiction
being clearly divided (at least until postmodernism) but for a medieval audience, it was
very common to have different kinds of writing and different modes of expression bound
together in the same book. Before modern science, 'natural history' (see Pliny) was in the
realm of the fabulous, and medieval audiences treated scientific findings as wonders and
marvels, hardly differentiated from the miracles of the Scriptures.
Mandeville and the Church Polo, the merchant traveller, makes only formulaic references to Christianity (consider
this in Polo), but Mandeville expresses serious concerns about the state of the Christian
Church in the West. In his Prologue to the Travels he writes about the corruption of the
Church, and the unworthiness of Christians. This reaches a high point when he includes a
reported dialogue with the Sultan of Egypt, in which the Sultan (a Saracen (Muslim))
openly criticises the Christian Church for being corrupt and Christians who murder each
other and would sell their daughters. Significantly, Mandeville does not offer any
defence, but he does reaffirm his own faith in Christianity. His concern is that other faiths
such as Islam are more strictly adhered to and therefore superior in that respect.
Travel Abroad as a Mirror to Home
Polo rarely compares the East with the West, except to tell us how much more
wonderful and splendid are the cities of China. Mandeville constantly makes comparisons
between East and West, seeking likenesses as well as differences. Mandeville's East is
not just a land of opportunity and a potential competitor (as it was for Polo and later the
explorers and colonialists of Europe); his East contains alternatives and improvements to
the West, and he is especially concerned with how the East has lessons to teach the West
with respect to cultural, moral and religious matters and social organisation. Mandeville's
text seeks knowledge about the East not to dominate it, but to not learn through
comparison and self-reflection how things might be improved at home. Mandeville's partreal, part-fictional East becomes a 'mirror' to the West. In the East, the West sees
reflected its own values, customs and practices. Sometimes this reflection is postive: i.e.
we see the same in the East as in the West; sometimes the reflection is negative: i.e. we
see difference (maybe better, maybe not) in the East. We can say then that the East is
used as a 'negative mirror' .
Dialogue as Cultural Exchange
Unlike Polo, Mandeville includes a number of significant dialogues in his Travels in
which cultural exchange takes place. These are subtle examples of mirroring and are
almost certainly fictional. The purpose of these dialogues is generally to exchange ideas
on Eastern and Western values, morals and customs, especially with respect to different
religious faiths. See for example how the Buddhist faith is contrasted with Western
Christian ideas - he does not force his own (Christian) values on the Buddhist monk, or
argue with him. He even seems to accept the implicit criticism of Christianity here with
respect to the system of charity.
One World, One Nature, One God Mandeville's comments on East/West relations suggest the idea of mutual understanding,
and bring East and West together in a 'One Nature/One World' view. This is remarkable
in the Medieval period when the East was about as remote as Jupiter is to us today.
Hitherto, except in the accounts of Polo and Christian missionaries, the East was always
essentially different and conditioned by its exotic difference from the West. Exotically
different and sometimes monstrously different, Western thinking for hundreds of years
had considered the East as 'other', populated by monsters, plants and strange human
forms that belonged to a different system of Nature.
The long passage about circumnavigation (pp. 128-30) in Mandeville's Travels, although
ostensibly offering mathematical and astronomical proof of the size and shape of the
earth (quite accurately in fact), is at the same time suggesting a planetary consciousness –
it brings the East (and the South – the Antipodes or opposite feet) within the same
compass as Europe and the Holy Lands, centred on the Mediterranean. For Mandeville,
there are multiple kinds of people, plants, animals and customs all over the world, and
this gives great pleasure he says, but at a higher level, there is only One Nature, One
World, and One God which operate as a unified creative force.
Discussion points for Mandeville’s Travels (illustrate with at least one
example from the text)
1. Contrast Mandeville’s style with Polo’s.
2. Assess Mandeville’s ‘literariness’ and consider the advantages/disadvantages of
literary style in travel writing.
3. Does lying have a place in travel writing, and what exactly constitutes a ‘lie’ in
this context? (consider the difference between veracity and verisimilitude)
4. What are the effects of juxtaposition (of different kinds of information)?
5. Find one of Mandeville’s ‘jokes’ and try to explain how it works and what its
function might be in the text.
Paul Smethurst
5. 9. 2012