SOURCE: Youngs, Tim. “Punctuating Travel: Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin.” Literature and History, Special Issue: Placing Travel 6, no. 2 (autumn 1997): 73-88.

In the following essay, Youngs contends that Paul Theroux's self-presentation in his travel narratives is an embodiment of a “powerful contemporary myth about the nature of travel in the modern world.”

In her book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt has identified in modern travel accounts the phenomenon she labels ‘The White Man's Lament’. Illustrating her argument with references to Alberto Moravia's West African travelogue, Which Tribe Do You Belong To? (1972) and Paul Theroux's representation of Latin America in The Old Patagonian Express (1978), Pratt chastises these ‘postcolonial metropolitan writers’ for what she complains is their ‘impulse … to condemn what they see, trivialize it, and dissociate themselves utterly from it’.¹ This urge she attributes largely to the ‘postcolonial era of “underdevelopment” and decolonization. ‘Few pristine worlds...