Mod C

Representations of landscapes through their differing forms and language

choices reflect cultural nuances that empower individuals and groups through
the associated wisdom and knowledge that is attached to man’s unique and
complex relationship with their environment. Landscape can become a form of
cultural memory that encodes people’s experiences and relationships with real,
remembered and imagined landscapes. In Alain de Botton’s multimodal 2002
text ‘Art of Travel’ and Robert Grays 1983 poem ‘Walking in an American Wood’,
both represent the psychodynamic nature of an individuals’ relationship with
their experience of travel and foreign landscapes.

Physical landscapes become catalysts for reflections on the complex nature of

human identity and the disorienting/challenging nature of travel. De Botton
explores the liminal nature of an individual’s relationship with the world of
travel and represents it as a way of being “alive to the power of… place”.
Individuals can experience travel as an initial or transitional stage in a process as
revealed by de Botton’s discussion of French philosophical writer Charles
Baudelaire’s journey to India that was interrupted for boat repairs. This
interruption acts as a source of existential angst that causes a “feeling of lethargy
and sadness” leading Baudelaire to feel “that India would be no better” and
resulting in “a lifelong ambivalence towards travel.” De Botton extends his
existential discussion in his personal depiction of the symbolic significance of
“the plane” as “carrying a trace of all the lands it has crossed; its eternal mobility”
being a “counterweight to feelings of stagnation and confinement”. By
contrasting different contexts of travel De Botton demonstrates the way travel
and man’s relationship with his world is represented as a psychological
experience of liminal moments that provide either a sense of lethargy, sadness,
stagnation or an “eternal counterweight”. It offers moments of reflection
represented through the motif of imagination in statements about the “power…
to imagine… to imagine that we too might… surge above [all that] looms over us”.
De Botton’s deliberate choice of collective pronouns and emotive verbs
emphasizes the transcendent potential in an individual’s relationship with the
world.

The relationship between an individual and their landscape is culturally

meditated. The persona in ‘Walking in an American Wood’ initially represents
the emblematic tourist in a foreign landscape. His perceptions are predominantly
illustrated through similes, comparing commonplace objects from his Australian
perspective in an unfamiliar setting, such as “Cars, long as crocodiles” and
“television aerials are packed together like waiting cattle-prods”. These similes
convey how many tourists travel with preconceived notions. Since each country
has its own cultural identity the persona through comparison of cultures is
making connections to the new landscape in terms of his own. Throughout the
opening stanzas of the poem the persona is critical of the way the American
people dismissively treat their landscape, observing “a stack of dead cars” and
“cardboard boxes flung into the branches”. The only sense of cultural identity
present in the landscape is one that has a disregard for the environment and the
materialism that pervades this culture such as long cars and a changed attitude.
An individual’s relationships with landscape can reflect a deep existential
longing. De Botton represents this relationship as a desire for the exotic through
his reflection on the way travel “provokes such pleasure”. De Botton
incorporates an image of an Amsterdam airport sign to represent the “delight”
the exotic font evokes. He blends this with a biographical reflection on the life
and travels of French philosopher Gustave Flaubert who reacted to the “sterile,
banal and laborious” life of his civilized European. Contemporaries, his desire for
the exotic is a reflection of his longing for a new landscape, which found
expression in the Orient of Egypt, its camel drivers and harems. De Botton
compares this to his own fascination with an Amsterdam “red front door” and
represents this fascination through rhetorical questions – “Why be seduced by
something as small… Why fall in love with a place?” The strangeness of this
fascination is conveyed through incorporation of a stark black and white
photograph of an Amsterdam street devoid of any sense of the exotic. De Botton
personifies the cityscape in explaining his psychodynamic response to it – “there
was an honesty in its design” and reveals the cultural myopia and nuances that
shape his “enthusiasms” towards Amsterdam as being “connected to my
dissatisfactions with my own country”. De Botton’s reflection reveals the
complex nature of human identity in referring to his desire for “aesthetic
simplicity” and indicates the way modern sensibilities long for an escape from
the familiar aesthetic experiences that excite their longings and needs as
represented through the gustatory metaphor – “What we find exotic abroad may
be what we hunger for in vain at home”.

In the 5th stanza the persona travels further into the American landscape and
starts to see the landscape for what it is rather than cross examining it with the
Australian. As the poem goes on the languages is altering as his view is changing
to a more Indigenous American interpretation, this is “upright volley of spears
landed together” “seem abandoned teepee poles”. The persona starts to leave his
country behind and take in the landscape in the view of the Indigenous.
Landscapes reflect cultural advances that empower individuals and groups
through the associated wisdom and knowledge attached to man’s unique
relationship to their topography. In the last stanza the Persona has a realization
that he has to view the landscape differently to home, “but it feels now as if
something that’s in me will have to keep onward in this way”. Once the persona
starts to view the landscape differently he observes and connects to the
landscape.