Around the World in 80 Days
By Jules Verne, Barnes & Noble Books, 2005

      Who would have thought that a trip around the world could be such an adventure? In the last quarter of the 19th century, Jules Verne was able to make an entire book out of a story about a man who simply leaves London, heads east and doesn’t stop until he’s back in London. It seems incredible today that such a journey, without any fantastic embellishment, could be so thrilling that it would become a classic; here at the head of the 21st century a trip around the world might be the stuff of a magazine article or a newspaper travel section, but it would hardly keep lovers of adventure glued to the pages of a novel to the end. We’ve come a long way in just over a hundred years. Or have we?

      Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days is one of the French adventure writer’s best-known novels. In the extremely straightforward story, Phileas T. Fogg, a sophisticated and upright Londoner, undertakes a race-against-the-clock circumnavigation as a bet. The mysterious Fogg is wealthy and respected, although none of his colleagues know how he came to be rich, what his business is or much at all about his background. Fogg belongs to a gentleman’s club, and in the course of an evening at the club Fogg bets the other members – with a stake of 20,000 pounds – that he can travel entirely around the world in a mere 80 days. The other members – and eventually all of London – are skeptical, and Fogg sets out the very same evening to prove them wrong.

      Joining Fogg on his journey is Passepartout, a French expatriate who that very day had accepted a position as Fogg’s servant; now, before he has a chance to settle into his new job in London, he finds himself dragged farther east than he ever imagined he’d go. Fogg and Passepartout are shadowed on their trip by a detective who is convinced that Fogg has come about his fortune by illegal means; the detective, too, is astounded that he is forced into becoming a world traveler.

      Fogg and his entourage encounter the kind of mysteries and wonders that no doubt filled the imaginings of Europeans in 1872. They ride an elephant in India, observe strange religious rites and run afoul of the local authorities. They stumble through Hong Kong and strike deals with salty sea captains. They land in the incredible boom town of San Francisco, and they survive a terrifying ride through the American Wild West. Theirs is anything but a boring trip.

      The subtext of Verne’s story, though, is the encroaching ordinariness of world travel. The very fact that Fogg’s proposition is possible, that one can travel all the way around the globe in a reasonable time via scheduled trains and ocean steamers, is a revolution. Gone are the dark lands that could swallow travelers for months – or perhaps forever – replaced by rail lines and efficiently operating ports. A circumnavigation is no longer a feat worthy of an iron-willed adventure; it can be accomplished by a reserved gentleman and his hapless servant.

      Verne argues for conservation of the wonder of travel. Fogg himself is devoid of awe on his journey; he is focused entirely on winning the bet, and he has no interest in sightseeing or absorption of local cultures. Passepartout, on the other hand, wants to take some time to look around; his journey is an unexpected opportunity. It’s a losing battle, however, his struggle against complacency. Europe itself is already a lost cause; Verne begins the story of the journey in the Middle East, after Fogg and Passepartout have already made their way all the way across the continent. There is nothing of interest, apparently, anywhere in Europe.

      Now, in our century, we have completed the process. One can travel around the world in less than a week and not even have to set foot in very many foreign lands. World travel is no longer the province of the adventurer, or even of the very wealthy. Country music fans vacation in Mexico and the Caribbean, sports and music fans travel to Europe to attend an event, and almost anyone can go almost anywhere with ease. Earth’s mysterious lands have vanished; the once forbidden countries of the East – the lands behind the Iron Curtain, the far reaches of Asia – are now just one more stop on the global transit line. And forget looking for adventure in our own backyard; America is an open book, one we’ve read too many times. The Grand Canyon? Forget it; it’s boring.

      The real casualty of the shrinking world is not so much the loss of a traveler’s wonder, but the broader loss of our narratives. We’ve run out of stories to tell, and we’re not interested in listening. We’ve been everywhere, and we’ve seen everything, and the only thing left for us is irony and parody and postmodernism. Our tools for understanding the world no longer include awe or curiosity, and simply experiencing and imagining are no longer enough for us. Compare Around the World in 80 Days or Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, in which the fun of travel is merely the going, with Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity! or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, in which jaded young travelers discover cultures by accident, without really looking. We know everything – or we think we do – and it’s the rare occasion on which we learn something new.

      If we’re looking for stories of the world these days, we have to look in different places. We have to hope that our country’s political intrigues continue to close places that were once open to us. We can read The Kite Runner with new interest because now we know we can’t go to Afghanistan, even if we wanted to. Or we can let wonder come to us; we can read the raft of immigrant fiction that piles up on our library shelves, the stories of people who still find something interesting about America. We can travel vicariously through them.

      What we can’t do is lose ourselves in the simple joy of going from one place to another. Travel fiction is done – who needs another book about a middle-aged American woman finding love and pasta in Tuscany? – and travel journalism is wrapped in sensationalism; if no one is shooting at the writer, the story belongs in the Sunday paper, a suggestion for a trip we might like to take with the kids. We’re all Phileas Fogg now, able to go wherever we want but unable to remember why we wanted to travel in the first place.

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