Why travel?” asks Geoff Dyer in his new book, a collection of writings drawn from previously published work, but evidently so wholesomely reworked that you hesitate to return to the journals where the essays first appeared for fear that in their rawer form they may unpack the composite effect of White Sands . To readers familiar with the multiple ways in which Dyer uses the quality of tedium and, not necessarily connectedly, his uncommon genius to get the measure of a new place, the answer sort of presents itself in the first chapter: ‘Where? What? Where?’
Dyer is in Tahiti to write on Paul Gauguin on his death centenary, and finds right at the outset that during the double long-haul from London, he’s lost his copy of the artist’s biography that was to have been his trusted guide. It is a loss that leaves him so stranded that he devotes much time on the island writing down what he can recollect from the book and other sources he’d researched from. The upshot of this mishap is, of course, immensely Dyer-ish — he must navigate his way in the foreign location in a state of daze, dropping his original ambition (we don’t have a clear idea of what it is, but the failure to achieve which is a constant backdrop) to instead improvise by relying on the traveller’s instinct.
In the French Polynesian island, Dyer is left to figure out what’s authentic and therefore merits recounting, and what’s perhaps not. From the start, you get the feeling that Dyer is trying not to pinch himself and thereby snap out of his sometimes uncomprehending, sometimes profound daze.
The tourist experience seems to keep him at a remove from the real Tahiti: “I was in a huge and luxurious hotel, and even though the view was fantastic the ocean itself seemed manicured.”
As he finds traces of the artist, and gets a stubbornly incomplete measure of Gauguin in Tahiti, he submits to his default position of immense displeasure and mean observations, all of it saying less about the location and the people than about the human condition, especially his own in this age of easy travel. There is a difference, he argues, between the religious and secular pilgrimage: “The latter always has the potential disappoint.” And: “In the wake of this realisation there swiftly followed another: that my enormous capacity for disappointment was actually an achievement, a victory. The devastating scale and frequency of my disappointment… was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world, of what high hopes I still had of it. When I am no longer capable of disappointment the romance will be gone: I may as well be dead.”
Now, this is not cheesy Alain de Botton territory, and Dyer’s is a more complex body of work — it’s a mix of fact and fiction, there is both artifice and piercing truth, but we cannot disaggregate it. He tell us as much in the introductory note: like his Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It , it has “fiction and non-fiction”. He lets us know, for instance, that his wife’s name is Rebecca, but “the narrator’s wife is called Jessica”. And then: “But Jessica is there in the non-fiction too.” From a lesser writer, such notes would be chutzpah. But it’s Dyer’s genius that he pulls it all off, once again, with wit, self-deprecation and empathy — and in the catalogue of his disappointments and occasional, or indeed consequential, moments of awe, we get a philosophy of being.
Just how personally felt this mix of fiction and non-fiction is comes through in the last chapter, a recollection of a stroke he suffered in 2014. As his wife (“Jessica”) gets him to the hospital, picking up a coffee on the way, his observations are crystal clear. His peripheral vision is gone, but the narrator is in the moment, every moment is vividly felt, so that when, in between tests, he remembers his deadline for a column and dashes off notes for it “on the back of an envelope”, his writer’s manifesto suggests itself. As he says at the end, “Life is so interesting I’d like to stick around forever, just to see what happens, how it all turns out.” And to do so, he must travel and bend spacetime, so beautifully depicted on the cover, in the truest way that fact and fabrication allow.
White Sands: Experiences From the Outside World; Geoff Dyer, Canongate, £14.99.
mini.kapoor@thehindu.co.in
