“I was the world in which I walked, and what I heard came not but from myself”

The ‘Soundscape’ for the construction of Jan Morris and her Trieste in Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001)

Abstract

Jan Morris’s book Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001) is a travel book whose content spans several decades of traveling in a place which was particularly important for the author. Because Jan Morris’s life is one marked with numerous changes, Trieste for her represents a mirror of her kaleidoscopic identity as this city she describes is one where past and present collide, and multiculturalism thrives. In Travel Writing, the sensorial experience of a traveller is integral to their perception of the place they are writing about, as well as to the integration of the reader in that journey. In a travel book that follows the genre in such an unconventional way, it is interesting to see how the sensorial experience conveys the confrontation between both Jan Morris’s internal and external worlds. This essay argues that through this sensorial experience, the author creates a middle ground between reality and memory that marks the singularity and autobiographical essence of this book. To examine this, there will be a focus on the ‘soundscape’ in particular, as the second most prevalent sense in the work.