Long walks, incredible journeys: popular fantasies of escape and returning home

Abstract

In 1956, Slawomir Rawicz published an account of his daring escape from a Soviet gulag in 1941 which led to a 6,500 kilometer trek across Siberia, Mongolia, Tibet and through the Himalayas to freedom eleven months later in British India. The Long Walk was translated into 25 languages and sold over half a million copies worldwide. This was a Cold War text for Reader’s Digest to get behind and behind it they got. In 2010, it was made into a film called The Way Back, directed by Peter Weir and produced and distributed by National Geographic. In 1961, Sheila Burnford published The Incredible Journey about the 400 kilometer trip across the Canadian wilderness of three animals, two dogs and a cat, to be reunited with their owners. The story was taken up by Disney in 1963 as a feature film and marketed confusingly as a “True-Life Fantasy.” It was remade by Disney in 1993 as Homeward Bound: the Incredible Journey. What these two books and three films have in common is that they are not true as told, perhaps not true in any useful sense. So what is it about such narratives that makes us want to believe in them? The film critic J. Hober-man recognized The Way Back in 2011 as part of a newly emerging genre, the drama of attrition, where comfortable audiences can enjoy the spectacle of protracted suffering providing it leads journey, also referencing Leon Uris’s Exodus, the novel (1958) and film version (1960) of which fell between Rawicz’s and Burnside’s books.
to some uplifting outcome. The Revenant (1915) for instance shows that the genre has finally been noticed and celebrated by the academy. This article looks at the appeal of the attritional epic