Verticality in the peripatetic genre: deceleration, microspection and confinement in Robert Macfarlane’s travel books

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article proposes a discussion of Robert Macfarlane’s travel series The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012) and Underland (2019), with a close focus on pedestrianism. The peripatetic aspect of these books can be understood as a mode of writing in which the rhythm of the walk settles into the rhythm of the text and a mode of locomotion, in which pedestrianism emerges as a vantage point of perceiving the world. At the same time, this interpretation draws upon the concept of verticality, with its key instruments of deceleration, microspection, multisensory engagement in the outer world, physical proximity and confinement. The unorthodox use of tactility, pedestrian senses and privileging of the tactile-kinaesthetic sustain the idea of a body–subject and disrupt the supremacy of sight and a growing sense of disembodiment in the travel genre. By and large, Macfarlane’s celebration of the metaphysics of place questions conventional horizontalism.