Uma leitura das viagens contemporâneas: a questão do testemunho nas narrativas de viagem

Abstract

Traveling is a wide subject that refers to human movement, the history of civilizations and also to a contemporary activity that has been conquering a rising number of practitioners: tourism. The understanding of traveling as geographical displacement is often exacerbated in the most conventional readings about the subject, creating pejorative misinterpretations about waywardness and nomadism when it does not acknowledge the symbolism inherent to the act of traveling. The spatial movements of a traveler, the constant expression of a desire for change, impose transformations such as those underwent by the hero Ulysses, of Homers Odyssey archetype of the western traveler. Since the Odyssey, it has been possible to identify the creation of a discourse that associates the traveler to a witness that is authorized to narrate. Innumerable writers, authors and adventurers that self represented themselves as authentic witnesses have contributed to and strengthened a discourse about traveling that reinforces it as a means for creating a testimonial about places, but does not acknowledge its counterpart the travelers interior transformation. Historically constituted, testimonial traveling discourse that defines and values the travelers activities as a way to see for oneself and narrate with ones own hands was triggered by the publishing tendencies related to travel literature and passed over through centuries; it still seems to resonate in the present. The traveler-witness of contemporaneous times has become a type of consumer to whom traveling works as a social rite that resembles a trick of mirrors: the other is but a reflection of ones own image. The understanding of the creation, diffusion, reach and limits of the testimonial traveling speech, as well as the discussion of the relations between traveling and writing/reading, experience and narrative, and science and literature, enable a wider and more generous reading about traveling and its contemporaneous shades.