My paper situates Greene at the point in history -- the years immediately before and after WW II --when air travel was displacing travel by ship, with important consequences for the concept of voyaging in general and for travel writing as a genre in particular. As Paul Fussell, Eric Leed, and others have pointed out, the ocean voyage, with its ancient history and its integral role in our cultural memory, has, like most land journeys, a beginning (departure), a middle (the transit) and an end (arrival), each with its own literary and emotive associations. Travel by air -- and especially travel by jet -- conflates these three stages into a few hours. It has also brought with it the emergence of a network of nearly identical -- and sterile -- airport complexes which replace the sites of arrival and departure so central to travelling -- and travel writing -- in the past.
Using Greene's observations on ship and air travel, my paper inquires about the consequences of this conflation on the travel narrative and its limits. Of Greene's two major travel narratives, Journey Without Maps (1936) and Another Mexico/The Lawless Roads (1939), the first begins with an ocean voyage and the second ends with one. Greene's third "travel book," In Search of a Character (1961), also has an ocean voyage as a major component. Despite his fascination with travel by ship and the rhythms of shipboard life, readers know that Greene had an intense and lifelong fascination with the airplane as well, and has some striking passages, especially in his autobiographical writings, about the experience of flying. Yet even though Greene's literary career bridges the age of the ship and the age of the jet airplane, his travel writing remains anchored in the ocean voyage, with its historical, cultural and even mythic associations and resonances. In an age when that kind of voyaging -- and its literary analog, a story of leaving, journeying and arriving --is no longer possible, his narratives may well be among the last of their kind.
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