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Reading such a broad range of authors was enlightening in that it revealed implicitly what some of those authors, such as Cortazar, de Maistre, Chatwin and Phillips, explicitly stated within their work: our identities have a direct bearing on our perception of reality. In fact, identity was central to the narrative of practically every author author we read, whether it was Orwell's struggle to reconcile his bourgeois background with his radical politics, Kincaid decrying first-world tourists as assaulting and exploiting her own identity, or Phililps' and Chatwin's rootless wanderings in search of a home. Travel and identity inform one another; after all, if we travel to "find ourselves," to expose ourselves to new and frightening situations in order to exercise long-unused experiential muscles, so to speak, then we are simultaneously gaining new experiences, augmenting and changing our identities as well as uncovering that which was already there, but dormant.

In other words, to travel is a great privilege; we all know this, but it took the readings of this course to make me realize the extent to which travel allows you both to redefine yourself and to inhabit your self-selected identity all the more thoroughly. And as we saw in the case of De Maistre and Cortazar, two master travelers, the more one travels, the easier it is to apply the receptivity of the traveler to one's own banal life as a native. Despite the individual benefits of travel, however, I remain deeply troubled by Kincaid's essential point. Is the tolerance and open-mindedness gained by a single person worth the inherent exploitation and subjugation that travel seems to necessarily entail? While Cortazar and De Maistre's experiments offer intriguing solutions to this problem, would they have arrived at such conclusions without having first traveled extensively across the world?

Finally, what about the increasingly common type of individual that has two or three places they consider home, or no place at all? I certainly feel that splitting my childhood between Saint Louis and Warsaw, two wildly different places, has helped me keep an open mind, and I consider myself extremely lucky to have had the experience. Yet like Chatwin, I'm never content in one place for long. Every time I go back to either Saint Louis or Warsaw, I am struck by how much has changed. The desire to be constantly on the move is amplified by the realization that, no matter what meaning they might hold for me, these places are far from static.

As always with Professor Hutkins, the readings were diverse, entertaining, and insightful. I greatly enjoyed discussing so many different perspectives on travel, and I have to say that it was impressive how much everyone brought to the table, both in previous experience and insight. Thanks to everyone for a great class! I hope you all have exciting travels planned soon.

Much of our recent class discussion, especially within the context of Kincaid and Phillips, have focused on the selfish behavior and reductive thinking apparently intrinsic to travel. Whether explicitly conceded, as in the case of Theroux, condemned, in the case of Kincaid and to a lesser extent, Twain, or implicitly expressed through the stories of self-realization narrated by Phillips, Mahoney, Davidson, Morris, Chatwin, Orwell and Flaubert, traveling to a foreign place necessitates an exploitation of the otherness of said place in the service of personal introspection. This exploitation occurs through the imposition of the often-discussed traveler’s gaze, reductive in its imposition of otherness upon what, as Kincaid would point out, is a banal and quotidian existence for many.

Yet, reductive though it is, the traveler’s gaze is simultaneously more receptive to the qualities and atmosphere of a given locale than that of a native: as de Boton writes, “What, then is a travelling mind-set? Receptivity might be said to be its chief characteristic. Receptive, we approach new places with humility.” In the light of this quote, it is possible to analyze Kincaid’s rage as directed more at the lack of humility with which most travelers carry themselves than the idea of travel itself (although, angry as she is, I’m not sure she would ever endorse travel in even its most benign forms.) Kincaid’s skewering of the overworked tourist on vacation, who she addresses menacingly as “you” in her piece, rests heavily on the hypothetical tourist’s bending of actual experience to fit their preconceived notions of a place—rather than ask where the food comes from, or where the waste goes, her derided traveler glosses over these nagging questions so that Antigua retains its image as a place to relax and escape banal existence.

The delight that Cortazar, Boton and de Maistre would all take in visiting an Antiguan market might be read by Kincaid as condescension, but the fact that these authors would be equally exuberant while exploring their own corner groceries reveals them as possessing the aformentioned humility of receptivity. Cortazar opens his saga of highway travels with the confession, or perhaps declaration, that he has “almost never accepeted the names or labels things arrive with.” “I don’t see why we should invariably tolerate what comes before and from outside,” he writes, explaining that even the names he himself conceives of are subject to change based on his continuing and evolving experience.

In short, Cortazar never allows images of places or people to ossify within his mind. Thus, although his tone is obviously and delightfully humorous, when Cortazar compares himself to Magellan or Columbus, he is simultaneously joking and deadly serious.
Cortazar believes that, if traversed with care, love and an open mind, the highway between Paris and Marseille  can be a source of experience and epiphany as rich as the open sea or a new continent. By choosing to view the structures and rhythms of his own banal existence through the lens of the epic, Cortazar turns the traveler’s receptive gaze on his own native land and succeeds in escaping the same “demons” Kincaid’s vacationer seeks to avoid without succumbing to the exploitation that angers her so much.

Beyond this compelling expession of travel philosophy, it is noteworthy that Cortazar’s narrative synthesizes many of the writing techniques we have encountered thus far. The account is rife with allusions to other texts, and like Flaubert and Chatwin is characterized by a mingling of different media—letters, lists of provisions, maps, photographs, drawings, and the aforementioned quotations. Cortazar’s frequent oscillation between the third and first person, as well as his self-confessed penchant for using multiple, shifting names, underscores the importance and multiplicity of perception—not only do different places hold different meanings for us, but we too hold multiple and sometimes disparate meanings for different people, or even multiple meanings for the same person. Retaining a flexibilty of thought, a willingness to reconsider as Cortazar does, is thus essential in maintaining humility and receptivity.

Lastly, I found it interesting that both Cortazar and de Maistre traveled extensively before embarking on their parallel conceptual journeys. Perhaps it is only through travelling far and often first that one can then develop the ability to practice travelling at home in such a skilled manner.

I found Phillips to be a perceptive and engaging author, especially given Europe's current economic and political situation. Writing in the 1980s, Phillips points out that although the idea of Fascism re-emerging as a political idea within European consciousness is often dismissed by Europeans themselves, extreme right-wing activity was actually increasing in England at the time. Some thirty years later, Phillips appears even more prescient. Looking at the elections currently taking place in France, many have remarked on the disturbing popularity of Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front party; although she is trailing in third place, the popularity of her nationalist, xenophobic message has caused Sarkozy to align himself with her supporters in an attempt to defeat Socialist candidate Francois Hollande. Given the deportation of Roma people from France in 2010, widely condemned by the UN, this appears to be a disturbing trend of xenophobia.  

In England, too, the activity of the far-right British National Party and the emergence of the English Defense League in 2009 points to a similar rise in the prevalence of nationalist ideology. Phillips analyses Europe as a complicated amalgamation of various tribes, and points to the simultaneously cohesive and fractured European identity as the root cause for demonization and persecution of the "other" throughout the continent. The frequent re-drawing of borders, the rapid rise and fall of empires, and the roller-coaster economies that have characterized twentieth-century Europe have led to an identity crisis.  "Like all people," he writes, "in order to assert and affirm who they are, they are quick to identify who they are not. The people who are most easily identifiable as the "other" are those of a different race, religion, or both." This desire for a solidification of identity leads to strange paradoxes.

Since my mom is from Poland, I found Phillips' description of his trip there accurate, if depressing. His assessment of the Poles' resentment of Western tourists, who could live luxuriously in their country while they themselves starved due to food shortages, as well as the attitude that America can do no wrong (as evidenced by his taxi driver's assertion that the US did Grenada a favor by invading), is a spot-on depiction of the country during the 1980s. So is the oppressive sense of censorship and government control he manages to convey. Living under Soviet control, the Poles had to create a national identity actively denied them by their own government, as we see in Phillips' conversations with Peter. (My own mother, a gifted language student, suffered temporary but vicious social exile for passing the state-mandated Russian class in high school. Invited to participate in a national competition, she redeemed herself by failing spectacularly and was welcomed back into the Polish fold.) Yet this identity ended up drawing on pre-war, 18th and 19th century ideals of Poland as well as the Polish conception of the US, which Phillips reveals as wildly inaccurate and hopelessly idealized.

Lacking a coherent identity of our own, we often oversimplify or simply ignore the complexities of the culture or nationality we attempt to assume. This is evidenced in Phillips' own disturbing and disillusioning trip to the US; while he goes there attracted by the notion of a strong black identity, it quickly becomes clear that Emile was so assertive about his blackness because he had to be or else submit to the prejudices, insults and affronts that dogged Phillips throughout his trip. In a sense, both examples reveal the fallacy inherent in national identity-- can a coherent, accurate representation of any country truly be extracted from what is necessarily a vast and heterogeneous community? As Richard Sennet argues, the very concept of a coherent community identity is antithetical to the existence of a real, active community, in which differences are expressed and not quashed or ignored.

 Poles and other Eastern European immigrants have recently been the subjects of racial violence and propaganda by British politicians capitalizing on the usual host of fears that a large wave of immigrants incites in the native population. Despite this, the second largest Polish political party is itself fraught with anti-Semitism and xenophobia. These weird contradictions, prejudice built upon prejudice, make more sense when Europe is viewed through the tribal lens Phillips proposes. I agree with Debbie that it is a rather limiting perspective, but if considered as one of many models with which to analyze the incredible complexity of European identity, it can be useful.

Jamaica Kincaid puts her rage at both tourists and the colonialist antecedents she feels they represent front and center in A Small Place. The opening scene reveals a hostility directed not only towards the characters represented within Kincaid's prose but indeed towards her readers themselves. The steps Kincaid takes to get inside our heads--the appeals to the universal boredom we all feel with our routines, or the revelation she imposes on the reader that a tourist is an "ugly human being" for example-- reveals she has no mercy for self-conscious tourists, nor aficionados of both travel and travel literature. Perhaps with good reason; after all, travel writing is inherently escapist, something only the relatively privileged enjoy at their leisure. Kincaid argues as much in A Small Place saying, "some natives--most natives in the world-- cannot go anywhere. They are too poor…to escape the reality of their lives." Kincaid considers travel writing inherently exploitative, commercial packaging of a firsthand experience that is already voyeuristic. And even refugees can be racists, as demonstrated by the Czechoslovakian doctor Kincaid describes.

The absurd level of prejudice Kincaid has endured has, ironically enough, caused her to leverage her own broad generalizations against both tourists and her own readers. Yet this must be a conscious choice on Kincaid's part. As a rhetorical device, her angry delivery functions beautifully; this essay left me with a host of nagging thoughts, and Kincaid's goal is most assuredly to make us think. But the effect is wearing after more than ten pages of this shouting in prose. Simultaneously, the incredible amount of detail she devotes to the tourist's-eye view of Antigua perhaps indicates she herself has lived such an experience, wondering if the lavatory's contents would brush against her leg, or where the supposedly locally grown dinner really came from. She lives in the US now-- is Antigua still home?

I want to attribute this level of self-reflection to Kincaid, but part of me thinks she would reject it. She even says it within the text: "I am filled with rage," and, "Do you ever wonder why people blow things up?" This is the beginning and end of her point. Sometimes we contemplate notions of authenticity and experience while traveling to assuage guilt, to better ignore the resentment we sense emanating from the natives of wherever we are. A Small Place is the reason that Kincaid is not dead and the Barclay's bank is not a smoking pile of rubble. Perhaps to jolt us out of our hazy ruminations on authenticity, Kincaid wraps her bomb in the trappings of travel literature only to explode the idea of traveling guilt-free, even vicariously. This is a powerful and important message made all the more so through its forceful delivery.

Nevertheless, Kincaid's merciless approach to ordinary tourists on vacation, armchair travelers and others who travel for pleasure's sake is understandable but excessive. I'm curious as to why she didn't dissect anthropologists, immigrants and pilgrims in a similar manner, or at least acknowledge there are always different reasons to visit any place besides the stresses of a banal existence. All of these people enjoy the privilege of travel, and on what scale are we to measure the validity of their reasons?

To document and study a culture is certainly voyeuristic; to move to another country to find work means exploiting the capital of a land not your own; we need look only as far as our own pilgrims of the Mayflower, and their dealings with Native Americans, to see how that can be equally exploitative. This is not to say that pilgrims, immigrants and anthropologists do not have perfectly valid reasons to travel. I am merely asking why Kincaid chooses not to acknowledge them at all, neither condoning nor condemning them, when she so bitterly criticizes what we generally think of as first-order tourists.

I found Mahoney's Down the Nile to be an excellent and compelling read. Although the majority of her account recalls her personal experience while traveling through Egypt, Mahoney manages to convey a sense of the place that transcends her subjective encounters. She is certainly unafraid to make generalizations and note certain quirks of Egyptian culture, but any such generalization is always corroborated with multiple examples. Her depiction of the Egyptians further circumvents the usual pitfalls of stereotyping by giving careful consideration to the contradictions and conflicting desires inherent to any human being.

The most obvious and frequent example of this is Mahoney's examination of Egyptian male sexuality. Although she finds herself accosted with the phrase "you are beautiful" at least ten times a day, compared with all manner of flora and fauna, and constantly  engaged in the same "surreal conversation" with young Egyptian men, Mahoney rises above her self-admitted exasperation and  is careful to both listen to what they have to say and explain her own position. While her persistence and tolerance in this regard is usually rewarded with resentment and confusion, her encounter with Adel finally provides her with an epiphany.

In this scene, Mahoney finally recognizes the contradictory forces at play within Egyptian men; in a relatively repressed culture, they see her as both a chance to finally get some action with a carefree foreign woman, and as a valuable source of information as to what sex is actually like. Egyptian men, according to Mahoney, are simultaneously "interesting" and "vexing" because "They were skillful liars but also gullible. They were emotional…but could easily be mollified. They were greedy, yet they could be very generous. The Egyptian men I had encountered, because they worked with tourists, knew that foreigners had money and sex and freedom; their reaction to all that fell just short of resentment and contained a great deal of curiosity."

As Adel ultimately explains to Mahoney, she is subject to sexual banter that would be considered outrageously inappropriate if directed towards an Egyptian woman precisely because she is "free" and they are not. Even before this revelation, however, Mahoney recognizes the sexism of Egyptian men as not specific to their culture, but rather, the manifestation of a "universal age-old contradiction: women were calculating temptresses whose sexuality needed to be stifled at any cost, and yet they were the object of constant speculation, interest, and discussion." Such an attitude can be found within practically all cultures at one point or another; misogyny is, unfortunately, a universal problem.

This sensitivity to particularly human contradictions emerges throughout Mahoney's account; in one instance, she marvels at how Florence Nightingale could be such a caring, brave and remarkable woman and simultaneously be capable of incredibly racist sentiment. Indeed, Mahoney is careful to turn both her consideration and her sense of humor on Western culture as well as Egyptian, as she recounts the extravagant voyages of Flaubert and his ilk and the wizened Egyptian cooks' assessment of US politics with equal amusement. Nor does she spare herself; when trading her camera, jewelry and nine hundred pounds for a boat, she does not fail to recognize the parallels between her own bargain and "a manifestly destined Massachusetts Pilgrim sneakily tricking the American Indians with trinkets and booze." Even in the opening scene, wherein Mahoney marvels at the simultaneous sexual repression and high occurrence of public nudity and masturbation within Egypt, she is careful to linger on the Egyptian men enthralled by an American Civil War movie on television; as bizarre and savage as the other may appear to us, we are always others too.

Both Morris and Davidson manage to convey specific cultural and sensory details pertinent to the places they visit while extrapolating these details towards larger truths about traveling. Morris ruminates in-depth about the search for self within the other that travel necessarily entails, and repeats verbatim what is by now our favorite Camus quote regarding the essential factor of danger within travel. Davidson broaches the inverse of this notion, which we have not examined in as much depth-- while new and jarring settings will certainly expose us to new aspects of ourselves, "sometimes it is the person passing through at remove that has the clearest view." Looking at a given place and its culture from the outside in grants the traveler a unique and enlightening perspective that may not be available to that place's native inhabitants.

Whenever I meet someone not from the United States, I make it a point to ask them what strikes them as the most bizarre about my country. The results are often enlightening; for example, my former roommate happens to be from Japan, and she told me that for the first few months that she lived in New York City, the sheer size of meals, drinks, and even household goods was a continual source of shock. Of course, we hear everyday how obese Americans are, so I wasn't too surprise to hear that American food portions are ludicrously large, but I hadn't considered that this obsession with supersizing extended to laundry detergent or paper plates.

These revelations come with a cost-- as Davidson shows us in excruciating detail, intersections of different cultures are almost accompanied by awkwardness and embarrassment at best. At worst, the combination of confounded expectations and the surprising, discomfiting aspects of a traveller's reality can lead to the frustration, paranoia and depression that Morris seems to struggle with throughout her travels in Mexico. While I acknowledge that Morris often displays courage in the face of various obstacles she encounters, her lack of research and preparation renders her less sympathetic-- she takes up residence in a rather seedy slum seemingly on a whim, and then manages to be genuinely shocked when the power fails after a huge rainstorm.  Morris seems to be searching for what Worrell calls "a spiritual reawakening in the land of the Other," consistent with Said's analysis of the Orient as a place of pilgrimage and self-discovery. Worrell contends that despite imposing certain prejudices of colonialism upon Mexico as a place, Morris redeems herself by attempting to relate with the people she encounters, such as Lupe.

Though I agree with this assessment, I still find Davidson a far more compelling author than Morris. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Davidson considers the give-and-take of travel far more than Morris does-- she asks herself what revelations she can bring to the Japanese even as she finds herself examined as a curiosity, a spectacle in and of herself. Morris seems far more self-absorbed, bent on using the setting of Mexico to solve her own problems, to fulfill her own unrealistic expectations, without considering what she insights or gifts she can bring to the land she is traveling through. I am reminded of Theroux' comparing himself to a conquistador, pillaging the land for impressions, but Morris lacks Theroux' self awareness. While she catalogues the items she purchases and the sights she sees, she brings little in return within the passages we read for class. However, it must be said that as a teacher, Davidson enjoys greater agency and a greater support network than does Morris, who despite her naivete certainly engages in a far riskier and lonelier form of travel. Perhaps Morris' narrative is more self-centered because

Much like the Dreaming of the aboriginal tribes he so admires, Chatwin's narrative meanders freely across time and space. Although he lacks the mythic structure of the Songlines to direct his own story, Chatwin's fragmentary recollections achieve a similar unity through his certainty that the Australian aboriginals' nomadic desert life is the one humans were intended to live. After explicitly stating his theory that humans evolved "for a career of seasonal journeys on foot through a blistering land of scrub or desert," Chatwin goes on to point to this evolutionary evidence as the basis for human existential malaise; our familiar possessions and comfortable surroundings become restrictive and confining, and we seek the new and the extraordinary.

This is, of course, a basic and universal motivation for travel itself, and why seasoned travelers like Bowles sneer at the tourist who returns home after a few weeks; for most of us, a few weeks is more than enough freedom from the shackles of the quotidian. But Chatwin clearly belonged to that second breed, who shun the sedentary lifestyle-- even if he did not himself confess this in the course of Songlines, as much is evidenced by the way he haphazardly retraces the journey of his own life, stringing together scenes and settings that are decades and oceans apart.

As in the case of Flaubert, I found the short, observational notes and quotes section of the narrative to be the most enjoyable and also the most evocative. Pondering why this could be, I took a lesson from the Australian aboriginals. Chatwin describes the vast secrecy that surrounds the "true" image and nature of each Dreaming; for children, tourists, and the uninitiated, abbreviated dances and drawings in the sand must suffice. To have full knowledge of a given stretch of desert and its corresponding song and dream, in other words, a person must live there for years, fully inhabiting their surroundings. Only then do they stand a chance of seeing or understanding the secret nature of that place.

Yet the drawings in the sand have their own value-- while they represent the limits of a child's (or tourist's) knowledge, their simplicity leaves more to the imagination. Imagination appears an integral part of the notion of Dreamtime-- Chatwin describes how tribesmen sing their world into being, how they see all creatures, Land Rovers and wallabies, as formed underneath the earth. The sketches aboriginal mothers draw for their children, therefore, engage the children's imaginations in the act of dreaming and creation; Dreamtime practice. When in the thicket of Chatwin's full-sentence prose, I cannot always get a glimpse of the "true" image he is trying to evoke, the entirety of the message he is attempting to convey. However, when my own imagination is given greater freedom, as in the case of the notes section, I gain a better sense of the worlds he is passing through.

Theroux rather explicitly states his reasons for traveling, and simultaneously reveals his own criteria for authenticity: "I craved a little risk, some danger, an untoward event, a vivid discomfort, an experience of my own company, and in a modest way the romance of solitude." (169) By now, this appears familiar territory, almost a truism; of course we travel to jolt ourselves out of ourselves, to cast ourselves in new light. Theroux, however, is much too cynical to take even his own declarations entirely to heart.

There is no question that Theroux finds some notion of authenticity important, as revealed by his insistence on taking the train throughout most of Latin America, precisely because he knows it is the method of transport used by the continent's poorest inhabitants. Rather than pick up girls by a swimming pool, he craves the sensory overload of an El Salvadorean soccer match. We sense Theroux's disdain for Mr. Thornberry, a classic first-order tourist, and his resentment of the latter's incursions on his own role of a keen and objective observer. Such disdain and misanthropy  characterizes a large portion of the narrative, whether it is Theroux rolling his eyes at the antics of a budding "Buddhist" vegetarian, his snickering at Luis Alvarado's all-consuming passion for Oregon, or the mixture of fear and amusement with which he regards the hulking Dibbs.

Theroux takes care to state that he is not a tourist; we therefore gain the impression he holds a special contempt for people like Thornberry. The squeamishness he exhibits in repines to the grimy hotels and trash-ridden streets he encounters exposes him as a hypocrite; wasn't this the very authenticity he set out to find? And doesn't he also display the same "curmudgeonly snobbery" he accuses an 1886 Bostonian of showing towards the then-new railways in his own choice of traveling by train instead of flying? In truth, though Theroux is guilty of both first-order tourist prissiness and second-through-fourth order tourist snobbery, his admission to both within the narrative reveals a subtle self-awareness that renders him more likable. Though he feels entirely liberated after parting ways with Thornberry, and sneers at the painter's choice of the most expensive hotel in Limon, a scarce three hours of wandering the city streets has Theroux regarding the same man as his consummate savior. In Ecuador, he realizes that the plutocrats he has witnessed and disparaged throughout his travels could in fact be his relatives; even if not connected by virtue of blood, he acknowledges that he too is "profiteering in the New World….plundering the place with my eyes and hoping to export a few impressions."

Throughout the narrative, Theroux also interjects the opinions of many of the people he encounters on his travels, even if they are clearly wrong or in opposition to his own views. While he takes no pains to balance this viewpoints, thus forsaking any ideal of objectivity, Theroux' writing style underscores the fact that travel results in the bundling of myriad and often disparate, if not directly contradictory, impressions. Left with small instances of sensory experience, snippets of conversation and a few hastily sketched scenes, his readers are left to connect the dots for themselves. In this way, he simulates the experience of travel itself; it is usually long after our journey is over that we are at all able to derive any coherent meaning from it.

Theroux rather explicitly states his reasons for traveling, and simultaneously reveals his own criteria for authenticity: "I craved a little risk, some danger, an untoward event, a vivid discomfort, an experience of my own company, and in a modest way the romance of solitude." (169) By now, this appears familiar territory, almost a truism; of course we travel to jolt ourselves out of ourselves, to cast ourselves in new light. Theroux, however, is much too cynical to take even his own declarations entirely to heart.

There is no question that Theroux finds some notion of authenticity important, as revealed by his insistence on taking the train throughout most of Latin America, precisely because he knows it is the method of transport used by the continent's poorest inhabitants. Rather than pick up girls by a swimming pool, he craves the sensory overload of an El Salvadorean soccer match. We sense Theroux's disdain for Mr. Thornberry, a classic first-order tourist, and his resentment of the latter's incursions on his own role of a keen and objective observer. Such disdain and misanthropy  characterizes a large portion of the narrative, whether it is Theroux rolling his eyes at the antics of a budding "Buddhist" vegetarian, his snickering at Luis Alvarado's all-consuming passion for Oregon, or the mixture of fear and amusement with which he regards the hulking Dibbs.

Theroux takes care to state that he is not a tourist; we therefore gain the impression he holds a special contempt for people like Thornberry. The squeamishness he exhibits in repines to the grimy hotels and trash-ridden streets he encounters exposes him as a hypocrite; wasn't this the very authenticity he set out to find? And doesn't he also display the same "curmudgeonly snobbery" he accuses an 1886 Bostonian of showing towards the then-new railways in his own choice of traveling by train instead of flying? In truth, though Theroux is guilty of both first-order tourist prissiness and second-through-fourth order tourist snobbery, his admission to both within the narrative reveal a subtle self-awareness that renders him more likable. Though he feels entirely liberated after parting ways with Thornberry, and sneers at the painter's choice of the most expensive hotel in Limon, a scarce three hours of wandering the city streets has Theroux regarding the same man as his consummate savior. In Ecuador, he realizes that the plutocrats he has witnessed and disparaged throughout his travels could in fact be his relatives; even if not connected by virtue of blood, he acknowledges that he too is "profiteering in the New World….plundering the place with my eyes and hoping to export a few impressions."

Throughout the narrative, Theroux also interjects the opinions of many of the people he encounters on his travels, even if they are clearly wrong or in opposition to his own views. While he takes no pains to balance this viewpoints, thus forsaking any ideal of objectivity, Theroux' writing style underscores the fact that travel results in the bundling of myriad and often disparate, if not directly contradictory, impressions. Left with small instances of sensory experience, snippets of conversation and a few hastily sketched scenes, his readers are left to connect the dots for themselves. In this way, he simulates the experience of travel itself; it is usually long after our journey is over that we are at all able to derive any coherent meaning from it.

The travel accounts we read before Bowles all essentially document a highly subjective, personal experience. Whether it was Twain's excursion to Europe, Flaubert's extended spring break in Egypt, or Orwell's exploration of society's underbelly on both sides of the English Channel, all these authors use the conversational and flexible medium of the first person.

This is, of course, a natural method of speaking about travel; as we've discussed in class, though we all search for some sort of authenticity when traveling, our notions of what comprises this authenticity are highly personal. Using the first person in travel writing allows an author to share what he or she found most "real" about a trip and omit that which was boring or disappointing (or complain about the latter at length, a la Twain.) Use of the first person, with its allowance for sensory detail, also places us directly in a travel writer's shoes.

Yet our picture of the place remains limited; again, we will all notice, enjoy, ignore and detest different and disparate aspects of a given location. In "No More Djinns," Bowles attempts to grant his narrative greater scope while retaining the familiarity and directness of the first person. He accomplishes this by granting the inhabitants of Tangiers not only one, but many voices within the account. Bowles reveals the complexity of Tangiers to us by showing us the diversity of its people, in their origins, their behavior, their religions and their political views.

This characterizes the entire narrative. The excellent opening section details conflicting theories concerning the existence--or rather, the prevalence, as existence is never called into question-- of the djinn, while Bowle's description of Morocco packs it full of Communists, whether they are Muslims capitalizing on an opportunity or French, Corsican and Spanish radicals, Nationalists, Berbers, or American "nihilist mystics". If you were to ask any two of these groups what "real" Morocco was, you would get very different replies. Indeed, even within a single group, these replies would differ-- the final story of the savage sultan is disputed by one native only to be affirmed by another days later. 

To emphasize the fact that places hold vastly different meanings for different people, Bowles incorporates the contrasting opinions of tourists as well as natives. Whereas for Europeans, southern Morocco is the "Zone of Insecurity," according to Bowles, Americans see it as more of an "exotic Utah." In all cases, Bowles juxtaposes different and often conflicting opinions or accounts to reveal the impossibility of knowing everything about a place. In this way he simulates the effect of travel itself by retaining the essential element of the unexpected.

Down and Out In Paris and London has always been one of my favorite books by Orwell, despite the difficulty of choosing among so many great works. What makes Down and Out so fascinating, in my mind, is that it grants us a glimpse into how Orwell, as an Eton-educated, bourgeois youth, became transfixed with the ideas of social revolution espoused by the Communist party. Of course, we all know that Communism's shift towards totalitarianism prompted Orwell to write his two most famous novels, both of which decried its hypocrisy. The sense of social justice that initially drew Orwell to Communism also resulted in his eventual denunciation thereof, most famously in Animal Farm and 1984. Interestingly, the contrast between Orwell's accounts of Paris and London also reveal a potential source of his mistrust for institutions in general. As Ligaya Mishan points out, from Orwell's descriptions of living in destitution in both Paris and London, "It’s hard not to conclude that it’s better to be poor in Paris than in London." While there exists no safety net for the Parisian poor analogous to the British "spike," they have instead created a subterranean world that parallels, if often in grotesque fashion, that of the middle- and upper- class. Indeed, as Orwell points out, the class system at work in the bowels of the hotel is far more strict and vicious than any class discrimination he encounters "aboveground" so to speak. Orwell's description of poverty in Paris features an incredibly diverse cast of characters and occupations, as well as the correspondent ingenious if unscrupulous ways these men and women have devised to beat the system. Whether it is the pawn shop, the pseudo-pornographic postcard, Boris' tricks to disguise the shabbiness of a suit, or the enormous and complex swindle that is the fine dining industry in Paris, the sheer creativity of Paris' poor delights Orwell to no end. In contrast, the spikes house a homogenous mass of men, all within the same age group and essentially the same social class.  While flashes of resourcefulness emerge in the London narrative as well, as in the case of the men who scrounge for cigarette butts or the unfortunate, if talented, pavement artist, the halfhearted institutional "managing" of the poor has left them stuck in limbo. The spikes clearly function as mere band-aids for poverty, which, judging by Orwell's descriptions of poverty in both Paris and London, is worse than doing nothing at all. Lacking the spikes to fall back on, the Parisians are forced to exercise their creativity and their diligence far more often than the English tramps, and thus have more to show for it. While I don't want this to be misinterpreted as decrying welfare and government aid to the poor, I do think that Orwell's portrayal of the spikes shows the dangers of treating the poor as problems to be solved or managed, rather than people with ideas and ingenuity of their own.

One can certainly say that Flaubert falls prey to one of the many pitfalls of Orientalism Said describes-- he portrays both Egyptian men and women as extremely casual about nudity and sex. This goes beyond his accounts of the various whores he sleeps with. The postscript of Flaubert's first letter to Bouilhet, which he notes is for Bouilhet's eyes alone, contains descriptions of several highly improbable obscene encounters. The first time I read the postscript, I actually thought the entire passage was tongue-in-cheek, an instance of Flaubert telling jokes to his friend, as it were. Since the entirety of the postscript consists of secondhand information, however, it seems more likely that Flaubert, as a gullible tourist, was duped by the tall tales of a particularly creative and dirty-minded local. The fact that Flaubert believes these stories does reveal a certain underlying prejudice, as does his comparison of the monks who crowd his boat in search of alms to the river birds that also cluster round in search of food. He takes care to note that the captain of his own boat employs both "prick and are, pretending to shit on their heads" in repelling these monks, underscoring his general perception of the Egyptians as more savage than he.
    As a couple of posts have already mentioned, however, Flaubert comes across as almost inevitably likable despite these instances of close-mindedness. I would argue that this stems from his keen awareness of tourism as a production, as a performance. It is both the absurdity of the performance and the aplomb with which it is pulled off that delights him in many instances; for example, the small children performing in the mountebank-- the boy who says "if you'll give me five paras I'll bring you my mother to fuck" is "excellent" in Flaubert's eyes not because he would actually do such a thing, but because he is pandering to an exaggerated touristic expectations  of rampant Egyptian sexuality while simultaneously mocking these expectations as the ludicrous notions they are. As a connoisseur of performance, Flaubert takes great care to describe the dance that each dancing girl (each of whom, as the footnotes inform us, is also a prostitute) performs for him. In many cases, far more detail is lavished on this performance than that most obvious of staged productions, the bedroom encounter itself. Again, Flaubert's descriptions of the prostitutes he sleeps with are problematic by our 21st-century standards, as he objectifies their bodies to a great degree. But he also quite unreservedly falls in love with Kuchuk, while simultaneously realizing that to her, he is only a customer. "How flattering it would be to one's pride," he writes wistfully, "if at the moment of leaving you were sure that you left a memory behind, that she would think of you more than of the others who have been there, that you would remain in her heart!"
     We like Flaubert because he is willing to play the game of tourism. He knows what an absurd figure he appears in his approximation of Egyptian costume, his head shaven, wearing two layers in most places to stave off the cold of the desert night. It's ambiguous as to whether or not this is why he refuses to be photographed, but certainly his meticulous and enthusiastic descriptions of the costumes he and Maxime are wearing reveal his delight in being able to take part in the performance itself, while simultaneously underscoring the ridiculousness of the whole affair. If Flaubert did not expect to encounter the grotesque in Egypt, he nonetheless knows that he himself appears as grotesque in the desert landscape. While the prejudices of 19th-century Europe do pervade Flaubert's writing, he redeems himself by virtue of the sheer joy he finds in both what defies and what reifies his expectations. Like Twain noting the gondolier's skill, as a performer himself, he recognizes and appreciates a good production when he sees one.

    As we discussed in class, despite Twain's amusement at the naive expectations of his fellow American tourists, a sense of disillusionment or disappointment emerges from his own attempts to reconcile his preconceived notions of a given place and the gritty reality he encounters upon arriving there. Certainly, Twain's complaints regarding the run-down state of present Venice, or Greece's barren landscape, can be read as the barbed insults of an American with an inferiority complex, all too conscious of where "his" culture really comes from. Yet Jeffrey Melton argues in Keeping the Faith in Innocents Abroad that "although such a reading of Twain's narrative helps us understand his dominant theme of disappointment, perhaps we should also consider that his reactions are tied more accurately to touristic expectations than any national braggadocio or yankee self-reliance." I myself am inclined to agree with this second interpretation, as a reading that privileged American sensibilities and culture above European ones would not devote the same time and energy in lampooning Americans themselves, as Innocents Abroad does consistently. To paraphrase a common T-shirt slogan, Twain is not prejudiced-- he hates everyone equally. Or rather, he hates no one, but finds equally rich sources of satire and amusement both in the foibles of his fellow traveling companions and in the overly theatrical "productions" of tourism that surround and subsume the majority of the attractions he visits.

    For Melton, Innocents Abroad documents Twain's struggle to confront a basic truth of travel we touched on in class-- the basic impossibility of discovery, when someone, or thousands of someones, have been there before you. Yet there are moments where Twain is truly surprised, truly astounded. While discovering the shocking contortions the average Parisian is capable of while in the throes of a can-can is not, perhaps, on par with gazing upon the North American continent for the first time, it is nonetheless a prime example of the essential thrill of travel we all seek. To render travel significant when one is the latest of a thousand pilgrims requires, as Melton writes, a suspension of disbelief, an engagement in the theater of tourism. If everything is, essentially, a touristic production, then the search for the "authentic" or the thrilling on our journey becomes a highly subjective and personal one-- confronted with touristic production, we ourselves choose what we want to believe.

    As Ayer and Redfoot argue, we travel to discover new aspects of ourselves as much as to discover new aspects of the world. Innocents Abroad is therefore a document of internal, as well as external, discovery-- faced with a reality entirely unlike what he imagined, Twain must confront the same naivete and idealism he mocks so mercilessly within himself. Yet some small part of this idealism survives; the small jolts of strangeness Twain encounters in his day-to-day existence as a traveler prevent him from dismissing the entire touristic reality as a sham, and the rarity of these instances of delight make them all the more enjoyable to read. 

    As Ayer writes,  "travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty." The unpredictability of travel reveals unpredictable aspects of our own character--after all the only way to discover if we like kiviak (an Inuit delicacy, local to Greenland, that consists of seagulls fermented within seal pelts under ice for six months) is to try it. Perhaps we will discover an unforeseen affinity for hunting with blowguns, riding elephants, bartering at spice markets, or consuming vast quantities of vodka. And beyond these visceral sensations and magnificent feats, to merely experience how others perceive us as strangers in their land is itself extremely revelatory. Such revelations do not require particularly long or laborious journeys-- as Ayer points out, walking through Jackson Heights, Brighton Beach, Flushing or Greenpoint provides both new sensory experiences and a heightened self-consciousness. If we perceive the setting we are in to be strange, it also serves to reveal what exactly about ourselves stands out against the background, what marks us as different.

    It is this revelatory aspect of travel that underlies the deep anxiety surrounding authenticity in travel. Redfoot analyzes different manifestations of this anxiety in his characterization of the latter three orders of tourism delineated within "Touristic Authenticity,Touristic Angst, and Modern Reality." The second-, third- and fourth- order tourists are all shown to exhibit a certain amount of disdain for the first- order tourist, the family on vacation, who retain the most aspects of their home life in order to maintain a certain level of insulation from new and jarring experience. Yet the authenticity that the savvy traveler, the anthropologist and the spiritual pilgrim crave is really an intensity of experience that each hopes will reveal, as travel tends to do, an important and unknown facet of their own respective selves. Despite this, in their desperate search for this authenticity through intensity of experience, they in turn insulate themselves from the equally necessary experience of being obviously and consciously foreign. Redfoot finds value in first-order tourists because they make no attempt to disguise their otherness.

    Just as travel divulges new facets of the self, Redfoot points out that exposure to a new setting also serves to further develop personal relationships. Yet ideally, the members of the traveling family would gain perspective not only regarding each other, but their new surroundings, and use the insight gained back home. Ayer has clearly absorbed this lesson about the dual nature of travel-- while wryly self-aware of his own foreigner status, he uses the innocence of ignorance to both gain knowledge and to forge personal bonds in strange locales. Beyond this, he realizes that any foreigner is also an ambassador, a small piece of the country from which he came, and he thus has great power in shaping people's expectations and preconceptions of that country. Thus he also has power in shaping the revelations they will experience, should they ever travel to his own home-- will they be pleasantly surprised, dreadfully disappointed, or will it manage to be exactly how they imagined? Perhaps this is why cultures throughout the ages have placed a premium on the basic rules of hospitality-- if you encounter a visitor from a strange land, who knows what wild tales brought them here? It is best to try and ensure that they are not disappointed. And perhaps you will discover a new lifelong friend, a long lost brother, a piece of yourself you did not know existed.

I found it intriguing to learn that Prospero's speech renouncing his magic was almost directly copied from a similar monologue by Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Although Medea would at first appear closer to Sycorax than Prospero in origin and intention, her drive for revenge informs her witchery  much in the way that Prospero's thirst for vengeance leads him to create the tempest. It's also interesting to go back to the Odyssey and think of Circe, who actually happens to be Medea's aunt. Sycorax, Medea and Circe all seem to be part of an ancient travel archetype of the island sorceress. While a direct correlation to such an archetype doesn't exist today, in thinking of the evolution of Circe and Medea to Prospero and Sycorax, I found parallels between these castaway practitioners of magic and certain modern-day Bond villains. It is now essentially a stereotype for the evil villain of a given movie to have a gigantic island filled with all sorts of wondrous creations, although in our own era these are usually of a technological rather than magical nature. The Incredibles spoofed these archetypes to great effect. Unlike their antecedents, however, these modern-day island wizards do not engage themselves with visiting travelers with such keen interest, preferring instead to take them directly to the shark tank/volcano/other means of horrible death. This perhaps speaks to the death of  xenia over time; while Circe cannot be called truly hospitable, she did feed and clothe her visitors before turning them into pigs. Prospero recalls a Bond villain in his masterful manipulation of everyone on his island, but in the end he reveals himself to be a basically good man. I wonder where all the witches went?