CXH's blog

I never really had a clear idea of what I wanted to do, but before the inheritance I wanted to become a writer. Writing sounded like the perfect bullshit job, and my parents were down for it. They sent me to all sorts of writing camps and shit, but in all honesty I never really wrote anything. I just never felt the urge to do it. Anyways, last time I talked to my parents I told them that I just wanted to live off my bank account and backpack around Europe. They didn’t seem too psyched on it. As I left, my mom said, “whatever you wanna do with your life is fine, just check in with us once in awhile, because your father gets worried sometimes”.

My parents were always worried. I think its because they both came from a family of alcoholics. I remember my parents giving me lectures about all of the horrible calamities suffered by my aunts and uncles. “It’s a disease you know,” they used to tell me all of the time and I would sit and nod silently. I always knew they were full of shit. I always maintain my composure. The bigger threat is all of those liver ailments that people get when they’re really old and about to die anyways. Besides, I don’t really plan on making it past forty.

It just so happened that yesterday I decided to call my parents for the first time since I left. Jan, the girl I’ve been staying with, was hosting some after party for her designer friend Rikke who had just graduated from Magretheskolen. The party was packed with “arty types”. They’re here too. The only real reason I was there was because of Andreas Hjort. Andreas was a real douche bag, but he was one of the only dudes in the EU with a legit hookup at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Last time I was at a party with Andreas, about three months ago, I tried to sell him on the novel and he gave a flippant “Well, I’ll look at it when I get back to the states”. I’m convinced he never looked at it because I’d been emailing him constantly and I even called FS&G a few times, but every time he was conveniently “out of the office”. Maybe it just wasn’t that great.

I was a few drinks in at this point, and I was certain that my life was a failure, so I figured it would be best just to hear the words from that asshole Andreas once and for all. First I needed another drink. Champagne perhaps? When I finished that shit off, I found Andreas in the corner, macking on Jan. What an asshole. I walked up to him, put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Where the fuck have you been? Did you even look at my shit?”

Andreas turned around, “Oh fuck, what’s up?” “I’ll tell you what the fuck is up,” I replied. Before I could start my rant, Andreas cut in, “I’m so sorry dude, I had to move out to Roanoke for a few weeks to sort things out with my parents. They’re getting old. Sorry for the wait man. I just heard back from the acquisitions editor yesterday, he really liked it and we want to go through with it. I was gonna call you yesterday, but I figured I’d tell you in person.”

I really couldn’t believe it. I popped off another bottle and danced in ecstasy out the front door and into the poorly lit cobblestone street. “First things first, I gotta call my mom. Just to prove I’m not a total fuck up.” I crossed the train tracks over Tietgensgade and made my way to my favorite telephone booth.

There was my phone, in a red booth designed in the classic British style right across the street from Tivoli Gardens. I could see the neon lights of the tilt-a-whirl glowing like the Christmas lights my mom used to hang up in my bedroom every year. I started to debate the best possible way to break the news.  I put in my coins and got connected. My dad answered the phone.

“Hello it’s your daughter.” “Which one?” he asked jokingly. “The one who just landed a book deal with a subsidiary of a major publishing house!” I said. The call cut off before “just”. “God fucking damn it!” There was no way that I could have fed the coins fast enough into the slot to keep the call going. All I needed was to say, “Hey mom, I made it, I’m OK, I got a major book deal”, then I would be satisfied. I checked my pockets. I left my calling card with my wallet back at home. I needed some coins.

I stepped out of the booth and looked around. The fountain! “Do people throw coins in here like they do in the states?” Indeed they do, and with seemingly greater enthusiasm. I reached in and made a grab for the shiniest ones I could find, but it was too deep. I needed those coins. I had to call my mom; I needed her approval. I carefully climbed over the edge, hanging on to the sides of the fountain, “Fuck it’s deep.”
I pushed off the edge towards the bottom of the pool.

The coins reflected off the lights and I grabbed at them, completely submerged. I had about five in my hands, but I needed one more krone, so I swam as close to the center as my leaden Carhartt work boots would allow. I couldn’t make it. I reached for the surface and gasped for air but got only frigid water. I started coughing, making pathetic little underwater bubbles. I was flailing, thrashing around in an oversized champagne bottle. Soon the bubbles stopped and the neon lights of the tilt-a-whirl were brought perfectly in focus as I looked up towards the surface of the water, “Matters are as clear as crystal.”

Q & A:

Q: Why did you use that quote from Sputnik Sweetheart to end your story?

A: Well, that specific quotation from Spunik Sweetheart, was from Sumire’s first document on the floppy disk and it’s the moment that she decides to make it clear to Miu what she wants. At that moment, the main character in the story has finally found an identity that she’s excited about and she wants to tell her family that she has made something of herself and is getting it together. Unfortunately, her crystal clear vision of the amusement park ride comes while she is drowning only a few inches beneath the surface of the water in the fountain outside the park.

Q: I thought that the main character reminded me of Sumire in many ways, right on down to her Kerouac-inspired work boots, was that intentional?

A: Well, I was actually trying to model the character more after Sal than Sumire. The narration is all in first person using colloquial language, just like in On the Road, and the character shares many of Sal’s mannerisms, including his contempt for the “arty types” and his desire to capture the “it” moment, which she seems to grasp at the end of the story. There were a couple of Sumire references, like the telephone booth where she makes her important calls and the anxiety surrounding her desire to become a writer, which is also in a couple of other books we read for this class, most notably A Concise Chinese English Dictionary, but the use of profanity, the sometimes comedic interior dialogue, and the use of the colloquial was intended to project more of a Sal vibe.

Q: I noticed that there was a lot of drinking, is there any significance behind the drinking, or perhaps the drinks themselves?

A: Well, drinking in this story is more straightforward when it comes to alcoholism than The Sun Also Rises, but in both drinking is associated with having a good time. Alcoholism ties the narrator in with her parents, who aren’t alcoholics, and creates a form of psychological guilt that layers atop her preexisting guilt for skipping off to Europe and living off her inheritance instead of going to college and going through the motions like her friends and her parents’ friends’ kids.

Q: Let’s talk sociological themes; Alienation from a place, search for a new center. Those are a few that pop into mind. How does that play into the story?

A: Well the main character, alienated from her home in the states, goes off to Europe in search of a new center and finds it in Copenhagen. While living the expatriate life for a few years, she embraces her new center, but she also finds that in many ways, like at her friend’s party, it’s just like her old one.

Q: One last thing, what’s up with the title?

A: Well, that’s a snippet of a quote from The Sheltering Sky right as Port sees it open up and take him. There’s this feeling of understanding, a kind of calm that takes over when Port sees the “blood and excrement” converge he reaches out towards the fabric of the sky to “take repose”. Like Port the main character sees a sort of “black star” in the sky in the form of the neon lights of a tilt-a-whirl and experiences a sort of repose similar to Port’s where she stops struggling against death and gives in. Her hands reach up from beneath the “fabric of the sky”, in this case, the surface of the water, and to try to pierce through only to come up short.
 

One of the main distinctions that the characters in Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart frequently have to make is the difference between what is real and what only seems real. For “K”, this distinction first arises after he experiences jet lag having traveled thousands of miles in a short period of time the morning after he arrives. One moment he’s sitting in a bar in Tokyo having a Canadian Club on the rocks reminiscing about his lost youth and the next he’s in a cottage on a Greek island sharing a meal with a beautiful older woman he’d met only the day before. K’s confusion, as well as the confusion of Miu and Sumire, between reality and unreality seems to be related to travel.

Miu’s experience on the Ferris wheel in a small town outside of Switzerland is one of the first examples of the magical disconnect from reality that can occur when traveling, which was hinted at by K’s jet-lag induced confusion, but not yet fully developed. On the wheel, through her binoculars, Miu saw herself in her apartment having a strange and undesirable sexual encounter with a man from the town even though she was not actually there. After reading the experience at first, I tried to make sense of it and put it in some type of psychological context instead of reading it literally, but the fact that she was found on the Ferris wheel the next morning seemed to point towards a literal interpretation. The main account of Miu’s transformation and the divide between the Miu “on this side” and the Miu “on the other side” is a key component of Sumire’s final floppy disk entry, which ends with the question, “Who in the world am I?”

Sumire’s disappearance is another mystery of travel, as she can’t be found anywhere on the island, which is not that big and the police, who know it well, can’t seem to find any clues as to where she might have disappeared to. When K gets up in the middle of the night to the Greek music coming from up in the hills, he experiences again the total dissociation of self, saying, “someone had rearranged my cells, untied the threads that held my mind together” (170). Earlier in the same thought sequence, K feels like somebody is taking his real life and stuffing it into a suitcase, which again hints at the travel theme, but the narrator never really gives us a firm understanding of why the blending of real life and the unreal occur and how they’re related to travel, but Sumire’s disappearance and her transcendental desire to “reach the other side” gives travel a bit more mystery in an age where science and technology have stripped the world of the last remnants of mystery. 

One of the biggest conflicts in A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is the conflict between the self and the group. Zhaung was taught throughout most of her life that the “self” is bad because it directly conflicts with collectivism, but in the West, people are surprised when she has little understanding of the concept. Of course it’s ironic that the most important relationship that she develops in the novel is with somebody who is fiercely independent with self-centered tendencies. The older English man that she falls for craves solitude and constantly comes into friction with societal conventions due to his bisexuality and vegetarianism.

Although the cultural divide between the self-centered West who favors individual freedom over the cohesion and community central to Chinese culture seems like a tired topic, Xiaolu Guo makes the subject interesting by exploring it from the perspective of “Z”, a young woman born and raised in China. For a Westerner who hears all about the various environmental and the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese government, I found it extremely interesting to hear a regular every-day person from China defend the oppression of the Tibetan people and denounce the BBC as a biased news source.

Looking at the story through the lens of “self discovery”, Z’s journey seems to be one more focused on sexual liberation than anything else. Her crowning realization is not exactly as glamorous as meditating like the Buddha under the instruction of a man of ancient wisdom in some Devalayam in India; instead, Z realizes that she can rely on herself after successfully masturbating in the rooftop garden of a budget hotel in Tavira. Of course the only reason why that moment was significant was because hitherto, Z thought that she needed a man to provide for her both monetarily and sexually. The assumption that the man is supposed to provide for the woman was shattered earlier when she had to split the bill with her English lover, but the underlying assumption that a man must provide for “his” woman and family instead of only for himself is a great example of the sort of self vs. community conflict that arises from the cultural exchange between China and the West.

One thing that kept bugging me about the cultural conflict between the self and the community was that I instinctively wanted to side with the West whenever Z spoke out against the progressive liberal values of the West or clung tightly to assumptions that we in the West consider morally objectionable, like the aforementioned idea that a woman needs a man to provide for her. Having taken a few courses on cultural relativism and the like in high school, I am always hesitant to place another culture’s values under moral scrutiny, but it’s almost like Guo is baiting the reader to cheer each and every time that Z becomes more westernized. In the books we have read previously for this class, the stories are usually about Westerners traveling in non-western cultures, but unlike Z, they are rarely incorporate the new cultures that they encounter into their lives. I know that much common ground exists between Western culture and Chinese culture, but I wish that Guo had explored the similarities more than the differences.

In both “The Gateway of India” and “The Elephant God”, the main characters struggle with their identities as Westerners in a foreign place. The stories read similarly to many of the other books we have read for this class where the main characters go abroad with the intention to define and/or redefine their identities and these two read almost like an existentialism-free Sheltering Sky, complete with the exploitation, romance, and mystery updated half a century later for the information age.

Globalization has become a growing force of social change since the post-war period of Bowles, and the information technology industry in India is a perfect example of how Western culture travels across great distances and leads to homogenization. Theroux incorporates this phenomenon into both novellas and explores how Western culture is somehow both attractive to the natives, such as in the case of Shah and Amitabh, while also being somewhat repulsive to Westerners like Dwight and Alice.

It would be too simplistic to argue that both sides experience a sort of “grass is greener on the other side” draw towards the new cultures that they are experiencing, but it seems to be the most convenient explanation available because it doesn’t involve looking into the historical origins and sociological implications of globalization.   

As a case study, Dwight seems to be a classic example of a Westerner looking to part with material possessions in order to experience some higher spiritual consciousness. Near the end of the story his gives up his cell phone, blackberry, and laptop to Shah for safe keeping and enters the Hindu temple to find the peace that he had been searching for in his life as a “skinny, sun-burned geek” clad in a turban and a loincloth. Dwight realizes how silly he looks, but he embraces his spiritual quest, all while Shah is embracing the Harvard account that he just secured and the material success that is sure to follow. While this may seem like a win-win situation along the lines of “different strokes for different folks”, it has a certain moralistic bent, as if Dwight knows the true value of Indian culture better than Shah who is abandoning it for material success in the West.

This paternalistic tone of “you don’t know what you’re giving up” is also evident in “The Elephant God” when Alice laments that Amitabh has switched out his original telephone greeting, “Can you please inform me, what is your good name, madam?” with the more Westernized  “So who am I talking to?” It’s almost as if Westerners believe that the Indians are foolish for abandoning what they perceive as a more authentic way of life, which leads them to oppose globalization and the spread of Western culture to protect non-Westerners from it when in reality they are really trying to preserve these non-Western cultures for what seem like sentimental and slightly selfish reasons.

The two key components of The Comfort of Strangers that struck me were gender and violence. Throughout the novel, gender is mentioned in a really modern way that is different from the way it has been addressed in the other books that we have read for class. One example that immediately comes to mind is the scenes in which Mary and Colin talk about the “far-left” feminist posters pasted on the wall of an old manor.

When Mary first sees the posters, she comments almost admiringly about how much more radical and better organized the feminist groups are in what we can assume is Venice as compared to the ones back at home. Colin, who seems to be all in favor of women’s struggle for equality, matter-of-factly remarks, “They’ve got more to fight for,” as if to suggest that back home, where the political climate is more modern and progressive, conditions for women are better, so feminism is not as attractive to women as it is in Venice.
 
Interestingly enough, at this point in the novel, there has been no mention of sexism or sexist attitudes in Venice, but there has been some mention of the discussion of sexual politics by Colin and Mary. Although both characters seem sympathetic towards the plight of women living in oppressive societies, they differ in the way that they approach the issue, which is highlighted when Mary mentions the Venetian feminists’ proclamation that convicted rapists should be castrated. One would expect that a woman would feel more passionately about feminism as women are the ones directly affected by sexism, but Mary’s fascination with the tactic of using castration as a punishment for rape to make people take rape more seriously marginalizes to some extent the sympathy that Colin feels towards what he would normally consider a noble cause.

After Mary brings to his attention the idea of castration, Colin sarcastically quips about cutting off the hands of thieves and reasonably concludes that the idea is silly and would only lead to feminists being taken less seriously, which leads Mary to comment, “people take hanging seriously enough,” before continuing on down the street. As Colin “uneasily” watches her go, the narrator leaves the cause of his uneasiness ambiguous, as he could as easily be upset by her fascination with violent feminist politics as he could be with the fact that she is leading him down a darkened street in a foreign place.

Later after they meet Robert, he sees Mary once again eying the feminist posters and dismisses them as the work of ugly women who cannot find a man and want to destroy “everything that is good between man and women”. Mary watches him as she would a face on television and Colin jokingly says, “meet the opposition,” but instead of arguing with Robert or making any sign of dissent known, she smiles sweetly at both Colin and Robert and suggests that they go get some food. Mary’s refusal to counter or even point out Robert’s obvious sexist remarks could be read as cowardice, but as we learn later in the novel when she visits Robert and Caroline’s home, she is not afraid to talk openly about her support of feminist politics, which makes this incident curious.

In Death in Venice, Aschenbach is taken by the “urge to flee”. Unlike some of the narrators from previous books that we have read for this class, Aschenbach views tourism as nothing more than a “hygienic precaution” to be taken “willy-nilly” from time to time and is quite content with his “view of the earth’s surface” that he has from his home.

At the start of the novel, Aschenbach sees his life in decline. His artistic goals are not being met and he’s worried that he won’t be able to produce any great works before he dies. Moreover, he feels a sense of duty, an “obligation to produce” that is averse to diversion, which sounds similar to Jake’s dutiful work as a writer in Paris in The Sun Also Rises but stands in stark contrast with Port’s restless wanderings in The Sheltering Sky and Sal’s cross-country ramblings in On the Road. Normally Aschenbach uses reason and self-discipline to suppress his “frivolous and disruptive” thoughts of “gallivanting around the world”, but he feels paralyzed by the demands of his project and feels the need for a change of scenery.

Aschenbach’s need for a change of scenery, unlike many of the narrator’s in the other novels we have read is full of purpose, and unlike these other narrators, he finds exactly what he has been searching for when he arrives. The purpose of Aschenbach’s journey is to make the summer bearable and productive, so his search becomes one for creative inspiration. Unlike Port, who travels to a foreign society in a remote region to find what he’s looking for, Aschenbach conscientiously avoids going “all the way to the tigers” and decides to settle for an internationally recognized holiday resort in the South where he can have four weeks of leisure time.

When he arrives in Venice, Aschenbach immediately finds what he has been searching for, creative inspiration in the form of a young boy named Tadzio. Aschenbach immediately recognizes the familiar experience of inspiration and feels an immediate desire to “let his style flow like the curves of his body that seemed to divine him,” by transferring Tadzio’s beauty into words. Although Aschenbach finds the artistic inspiration that he has been searching for relatively early on in the novel, he is soon overwhelmed by his search and like Port, succumbs to illness and eventually death.  

In the post-war world of the late 40’s and early fifties, many young people felt discontented and alienated from the savagery of Western civilization. In both On the Road and The Sheltering Sky, the main characters have been alienated from Western cultural values and set out to geographical regions that they consider to be less tainted by Western civilization in search of a romantic ideal of a more pure and primitive way of life, only to find that they cannot fully integrate themselves into these non-Western cultures.  
 
In The Sheltering Sky, Port makes his grievances towards Western civilization known during lunch with Kit and Port, saying, “Europe has destroyed the whole world. Should I feel thankful to it and sorry for it? I hope the whole place gets wiped off the map.” Not only does Port feel alienated from the European cultural values that led to the destruction and death that resulted from the second World War, but he feels resentful towards the Western culture as a whole and tries to distance himself from it. Similarly when Sal is deep in the Mexican jungle watching the natives beg by the side of the road, he imagines the possibility of a nuclear holocaust that could occur at any minute to wipe out Western civilization, saying of the natives, “They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way”. For Sal, the technology and sophistication associated with Western civilization that helps us to build the bridges and the roads that help us dominate the world is a double-edged sword with the power to wipe it all out instantaneously. Almost prophetically, Sal seems to anticipate and maybe even, like Port, hope for the destruction of Western civilization, saying, “For when destruction comes to the world of ‘history’ and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people will still stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know”. Disenfranchised from their cultural homeland, both Sal and Port harbor a great deal resentment towards the Western world and try to dissociate themselves from the West by gravitating towards remote geographical regions with cultures that they regard as more primitive and simple, which is a manifestation of their obsession with the romantic idealization of non-Western cultures.   
 
For Port, part of distancing himself from society and rejecting its cultural values is planning “impossible trips” to places far away from the reach of Westernization. When he gets to North Africa, Port finds that the deeper into the continent he gets, the further and further he gets away from the familiar cultural values of the West the more excited he becomes, saying, “the idea that each successive moment he was deeper into the Sahara than he had been the moment before, that he was leaving behind all familiar things, this constant consideration kept him in a state of pleasant agitation,” so it becomes his obsession. Part of the reason for Port’s journey further and further into the continent is the fallacy that the further one gets from all familiar things, which includes the West, the more authentic the lives of the people there will be. Port expresses his romantic idealization of non-western cultures more explicitly in the fourth chapter when he describes the North African natives who he sees on the streets, saying, “their faces are masks. They all look a thousand years old. What little energy they have is only the blind, mass desire to live.” His description of the North Africans sounds quite similar to Sal’s description of the “Fellahin Indians” that he encounters in Mexico, as for years it had been one of his superstitions that reality and true perception were to be found in the conversations of the laboring classes, saying, “he often found himself still in the act of waiting with the unreasoning belief that gems of wisdom might yet issue from their mouths”. The people and the culture that Port and Sal are in search of are best described by Sal who claims excited to learn from the imaginary “Fellahin people” who he views as the “essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity”. Sal romanticizes the Fellahin as simple and primitive, the type of people who have no history and have remained unchanged since ancient times, which is the source of their ancient wisdom.
 
The closest that Sal and Port get to actually experiencing the authentic culture that they have set out to find is when they go out to experience the places that they’re visiting, normally in search of sex or drugs. Ironically, in Mexico, Sal indulges in the same types of activities that he would have indulged in at home, he goes out in search of sex and drugs. In Gregoria at a gas station, Sal meets a young kid named Victor who Sal finds out can get him both. After he wakes up the rest of the crew, they go to Victors house to get some weed, and then to the whorehouse in search of sex. Interestingly enough, the Mexican whorehouse scenes in On the Road are actually quite similar to the sex scenes in The Sheltering Sky in that both Sal and Port are interested in prostitutes that they cannot have. At the one whorehouse that Port visits with Mohammed he is bored of the first two girls who he encounters, but becomes enamored with a blind girl who he somehow loses track of and never gets with. Similarly, in the whorehouse scene in Mexico, Sal is dissatisfied with the first two prostitutes who approach him and he falls for a sixteen-year-old colored girl who he is too ashamed to approach. These prostitutes embody some of the romantic sentiment that both Port and Sal feel towards these non-Western cultures. They are both fascinated by the exotic, yet they can never fully experience it either because they are afraid, or because the chance just passes them by.
 
Ultimately, neither protagonist seems to take away much from the authentic culture that they set out to learn from. Both Port and Sal fall ill at the end of their stay in the foreign lands that they are visiting, with Port experiencing the unveiling of the “sheltering sky” and Sal eventually gravitating back towards his old life in New York hanging out with the same friends. Although the sicknesses differ in both magnitude and outcome, they both reveal the spiritual failure of each character’s journey. At the time of his death, Port finds himself still waiting for the “gems of wisdom” that he might receive from the natives, but it is apparent that he no longer has the “unreasoning belief” in the native’s wisdom that he once possessed. As Port grows more and more ill, his outlook on life becomes increasingly existential. Earlier in the novel, his existentialist outlook on life becomes apparent while he and Kit are conversing about what lies beyond the sheltering sky, but it seems as if Port is still taken by the romantic idea that he can somehow find true wisdom by escaping Western civilization by going to some far flung romantic locale. Throughout the novel, when Port talks about existentialism, Kit shuts him down and tries to focus on just living life and all too often drinking heavily. Sal shares much in common with Kit in that he tends to cling to his romantic notions of that world and eschew the post-war existentialist sentiment of Port. While he is delirious and weakened from dysentery, Sal experiences the “dark swirl” of his mind and “all the dreams” that accompany a near-death sickness, but when he gets better, he remains unchanged and goes back to his old ways. Had Port only experienced a near-death experience rather than an actual death, he most likely would have continued on in search of the perceived romantic truths hidden in non-Western cultures for the rest of his life, or until he became bored of it like Sal or disenfranchised like Kit and then he would eventually head back home to New York. 

For Sal, his first glimpse of the "fabulous white city" of San Francisco is when he wakes up after falling asleep while Dean drives for hours trying to get money from the "Okie". His first glimpse is picturesque, with the "eleven mystic hills", "blue Pacific", and "potato-patch fog" that help to bring out the mid-afternoon "goldenness" of the city. As usual, the gang is excited to be in a new city, with Sal likening the experience to "getting on shore after a long voyage at sea".
 
The office buildings sparkle with the rest of the city, but right as Sal and Marylou are taking in the promise of a new city, they're out on the street, penniless again, as Dean drives off down the street in search of another adventure. While Dean goes off in search of Camille, Sal realizes that his dreams of Sam Spade and the glistening office buildings don’t fit with the real "lemon lot" of San Franciscans. As Sal looks out on the streets he sees the "broken-down movie extras", "midget auto-racers", "hustlers", "pimps", and "whores" who make Sal wonder, "how's a man going to make a living with a gang like that?"
 
The places in San Francisco that Sal encounters, the "flophouse on Mission Street", the "fish-'n-chips joint on Market Street", and the hotel room are all kind of transient places that Sal doesn't really experience because he is too exhausted. In a delirious state, he wanders the streets, picking up long cigarette butts so he can go back to the hotel room and smoke the tobacco, since he can't afford to buy food. While Sal is in his delirious state, Kerouac does what Taun talked about in his article, he "objectifies intimate feelings" that are provoked by the "special quality" of fragrance, taste, and touch. When Sal is at one of his lowest points in the novel, lying in his hotel paid with credit, completely broke smoking his pipe, he smells the promise of San Francisco: the "chow mien flavored air" from Chinatown, the spaghetti sauces from North Beach, the crabs of Fisherman's Wharf, the ribs of Fillmore, the beans of Market Street, the potatoes of Embarcadero, and the steamed clams from Sausalito, but he can’t taste any of it.
 
After Sal is finally “rescued” by Dean from the “hunger-making raw fog” and the “throb of neons in the soft night”, they quickly grow tired of Dean’s boring married life and decide to go have some fun at the jazz clubs. The jazz clubs are filled with “eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals” and the “mad” performers that make the clubs interesting. On the last night, Sal, Dean, and Marylou go down to the “jazz shacks” across the bay, presumably to find the more authentic clubs that are filled to the brim with “semi-intellectuals”. What they find there are people more beat and more hip then themselves. A guy pulls a chair out from under Marylou and both she and Sal get approached in the bathroom with “propositions”. The jazz shacks across the bay in the oil flats stand in stark contrast with the shimmering office buildings that make Sal think of Sam Spade when he first entered the city. Although Sal doesn’t know what he accomplished by coming to San Francisco, he seems to have gained the experience of living a more “beat” existence, specifically when he is penniless and hungry on the streets and when he visits the crazy jazz clubs than he normally is when he is in his comfort zone.

On the Road is different from the other novels that we’ve reading this class because the travels occur for the most part in the characters’ home country. After all of the talk in the past novels about whether or not the main characters were tourists or travelers, it’s hard not to look at On the Road through that same lens. 

One specific example is right after they leave Bull’s house for Texas and they find themselves lost in the swamps of Louisiana. Almost instantaneously they are transferred to another world, “We wanted to get out of this mansion of the snake, this mireful drooping dark, and zoom on back to familiar American ground and cowtowns.” What’s interesting about this passage is that this is one of the first times that Dean and Sal actually feel like they are foreigners, which is interesting because they are not really too far from Bull’s house. Obviously there is a racial component to their discomfort with their surroundings, but after all of their travel from coast to coast across the American heartland, they are used to the “familiar American ground” that they have encountered so many times and although they are sometimes perceived as tourists in the areas that they visit because of their beat clothes and general wildness, they still manage to seem comfortable with their surroundings.         

When they finally make it to the jungles of Mexico, Sal experiences the same feeling of foreignness when he sees the “strange Mexicans in tattered rags” and the “strange young girls, dark as the moon”, but instead of being scared of the foreigners, as he and Dean were before, Dean seems to have finally found “people like himself”. The interesting difference between these two scenarios is that the reason why they feel more comfortable here is because like Port, they are in search of “the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world”. In many ways it seems like On the Road is similar to The Sheltering Sky in that there is a focus on personal development, but different because the time frame in which this story happens is so stretched out.

According to Cohen’s essay, Port fits most closely into the category of “experiential” traveler. He fits the description of the type of “alienated individual” who recognizes the “meaninglessness and fatuity” of their daily life and seeks meaning in the lives of others via tourism.  Port’s alienation from society and others is apparent at the start of the book when he goes on a rant about the “hopelessly isolated self” and everything that is wrong with Europe while talking politics at the start of Chapter 12. He definitely recognizes the meaninglessness and futility of daily life, especially near the time of his death when he truly realizes the implications of existential meaninglessness that lays beyond the “sheltering sky”, “Slowly the split would occur, the sky draw back, and he would see what he never had doubted lay behind advance upon him with the speed of a million winds”.

Although there is never a direct discussion of the type of “meaning” that Port intends to find by traveling further into the remote areas of Northern Africa, we can assume that he hopes to “seek to experience vicariously the authentic participation in the centre of others, who are as yet less modern” to get away from the influence of Western civilization. Unfortunately, as close as he gets to the type of “authentic participation” that he desires with the locals, he never seems to be able to get over his position as an outsider. Cohen discusses this search for meaning by comparing it to a religious pilgrimage, which is interesting because Port makes a similar comparison when talking about his wanting to go deeper into the unknown, saying, “this state of affairs pleased him, it made him feel that he was pioneering – he felt more closely identified with his great-grandparents, when he was rolling along in the desert than he did sitting at home looking out over the reservoir in Central Park”. Port wants to feel like a pioneer, he wants to feel a real connection with his past and with the “centre” of the natives who he encounters.

Cohen recognizes the problem of being an outsider, saying, “in contrast to the pilgrim, the experience-oriented tourist, even if he observes the authentic life of others, remains aware of their otherness”. A good example of the “otherness” felt by Port is at the beginning of the novel as he walks through the streets at the start of Chapter 4 thinking about the people who he encounters and wondering various thoughts, like, “Would one of them help me if I were to have an accident?” As the novel progresses, Port does not seem to be able to transcend his otherness, his feelings of alimentation, or the existential meaninglessness that he feels right up until his death.

John W. Aldridge, in his essay “Paul Bowles: The Cancelled Sky”, talks about The Sheltering Sky as a “book-length metaphor of the modern world, particularly of the new postwar world” where morality is “grey” and destined to become “greyer”. When reading the book, I noticed right away the similarities between Bowles’s characters and those of writers after the First World War, mainly the isolation of the characters from each other.
One example of the post-war isolation mentioned by Aldridridge is when Port, Kit, and Tunner are eating lunch and talking about politics at the beginning of chapter 12. Port says, “Europe has destroyed the whole world,. Should I be thankful to it and sorry for it? I hope the whole place gets wiped off the map,” and although he says it in order to try to cut the conversation off so he can talk to Kit alone, his sentiment is clear. After Kit objects to his outburst, Port reveals his true isolation from others, saying, “Humanity? What is that? Who is humanity? I’ll tell you. Humanity is everyone but one’s self. So of what interest can it possibly be to anybody?”
When Tunner objects to this statement, Kit agrees with him, which is interesting because as the novel develops she seems increasingly torn between Tunner and Port, which is interesting becuase she had previously showed a “vague distaste” for Tunner and seemed earlier on the train to not at all be interested in his philosophy.
The lunchtime scene is not the first glimpse we get into Ports idea of the “hopelessly isolated self”, earlier incidents in the novel, like when Port walks into Kit’s room to find Tunner there, highlight the general distrust that he harbors towards people, even the ones with whom he is closest to. Port also shows his isolation though the way that he constantly crosses others and manipulates people.
 A good example of Port’s manipulative tendencies is when he arranges for Tunner to go to Messad with Lyles with the intention of abandoning him even though he promises to meet up with him at a later point. Part of the reason is because Port is paranoid about Tunner and Kit, which in actuality seems to make Kit more interested in Tunner and leads to a morally ambiguous personal crisis when Kit can’t decide whether or not to leave Tunner, which she eventually tries to decide using supernatural logic and "omens" instead of morality.

Jake is an American expatriate living in Paris and although he enjoys the city and is cultured enough to know all the hip bars to drink at, he is still a placeless character. He recognizes that “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another,” so instead of trying to get away from himself by traveling, as Cohn does, he stays Paris and drinks his problems away. While Cohn visits Budapest and Vienna, Jake puts in extra time at the office so he can “shove off to Spain” at the end of June, but one gets the impression from his anticipation of the trip that he is somehow “between places” in search of "a more authentic place", an idea mentioned in the article Freedom and Motion, Place and Placelessness.  

In many ways, Jake is cursed by his mobility, but his main curse is that he realizes that he can’t escape his problems and tries to anyways. Like a tourist, he always manages to find the comforts of home on the road. When he finally makes it to the inn in Burguete, he immediately settles in to his comfortable routine of drinking, dining, smoking, and reading. Of course, Jake never thinks of himself as a tourist, and rightly so because he thinks that he would have been content to partake in his favorite activities back home in Paris had he not been dragged to Burguete. Not until Bill tells him what he already knows, "You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés,"does he realize that he is indeed a placeless person with placeless problems that he can’t shake no matter where he currently calls his home.

One of the only times in the novel that Jake does not feel as if he is “between places” is when he is in Pamplona. He feels an authentic connection with Montoya and the bullfighting community. When he watches Romero kill his first bull during the fight, he and Montoya glance at each other and exchange knowing nods because they understand that Romero has just the sort of authenticity that they desire in a good matador, the sort of authenticity that Jake deeply desires, “This was a real one. There had not been a real one for a long time.” Early on, Jake mentions to Cohn that only bullfighters live their lives “all the way up”, and deep down he feels that he is not living his life to its fullest potential by wandering aimlessly or drinking his problems away, but he also knows that he can live his life no other way.

As he wanders home from the bullfight, he sees everything as “new and changed”, saying, “It was all different. I felt as I felt once coming home from an out-of-town football game. I was carrying a suitcase with my football things in it, and I walked up the street from the station in the town I had lived in all my life and it was all new.” Of course, nothing is new; he just feels the buzz of authenticity lingering after the fight. In this way above all others, Jake is cursed, because his search for an authentic place can only be satisfied for a short time. The authenticity that he desires is transient and fleeting, it only lasts until the fight is over and the stands empty, then he is back at his arbitrary “home” where he will have a drink or two, smoke a cigarette, read the paper, and then maybe take a hot bath.

According to Pico Iyer, "We travel, initially to lose ourselves; and we travel next, to find ourselves." One can only wonder if Daisy died in the process of losing herself or finding herself. Daisy appears to be on a quest to lose herself in high society with Winterbourne at Chillon Castle, but when Winterbourne leaves for Geneva and her newly moneyed family's "vulgarity" proves to be too much for Mrs. Costello, she heads to Rome to try again.

In Rome, she seems to abandon all ambitions of associating with Mrs. Walker and Roman high society when she becomes involved with Giovanelli, a gentlemanly Italian lawyer who is not seen by Winterbourne as worthy of her class even though his aunt thinks that she is not worthy of his own. She continues to lose herself in a series of romantic escapades with Giovanelli, first strolling through Pincio Gardens, then taking in the Villa Borghese from a park bench, and finally walking through St. Peter’s while flirting in public.

Her mannerisms, which seem modern and agreeable today, were not taken that way by Roman high society or the American expatriates who gossip about seeing her and Giovanelli sequestered in a small room at the Doria Palace, which leads to a confrontation in which Daisy accuses Winterbourne of not defending her honor against the gossip of high society, which could be one of the first time that Daisy finds within herself the agency to lash out against the dated social mores of Roman society. Winterbourne of course cares about Daisy's well being and may even care about her in a romantic way, but he is always too restrained to express his feelings for Daisy, even if they are for the most part repressed. On the fateful night when Daisy and Giovanelli go to the Coliseum, a known mosquito breeding ground where a deadly strain of malaria is known to exist, Winterbourne, after convincing himself that he is officially over Daisy, feels obligated to warn her of the dangers of Roman Fever.

If only she had been with Winterbourne instead of the lowly Giovanelli! However patronizing that may sound, Daisy is portrayed as an "uncultivated" and for the most part feckless character with no real sense of purpose, just the sort of tourist who would fall prey to the danger of the unknown. Ironically enough she is fatally bitten at one of the most well known tourist sites in the world as she sits beneath a cross, so one cannot help but wonder if she is a martyr, but a martyr for what? In the letter she wrote from her deathbed, it appeared that she really did care about Winterbourne, who was unnecessarily cold and callous towards her due to the social customs of Roman high society, so it appears that she was a martyr for the same dated social mores mentioned earlier and the way that they can be dehumanizing and unnecessarily cruel towards those who refuse to abide by them.

Two summers ago I spent a week visiting Zumaia, a coastal city in the Basque region of Northern Spain. We stayed in an old cottage about 500 yards from a gigantic lighthouse and about five miles outside of the nearest town. The cottage, situated on a bluff a few yards from the rocky coast, was constructed mainly of stone and seemed so rustic and unstable that it could plunge at any moment off the cliff and into the sea. The picturesque scenery was definitely a change from the flat midwestern landscapes that I had been used to at home, but I couldn't really enjoy the trip in full without an internet connection. Like food and water before it, the internet is now an essential survival tool, it's like an instantaneous plane ticket back home at any moment. Like Huxley, I agree that traveling is a vice, so I try to justify my excursions by always being connected to the internet, that way I can be as productive as I am at home all while enjoying whatever new and delightful experiences I can afford to indulge in. Traveling is an easy escape from daily reality and it makes me feel guilty. Like Huxley, I like to feel purposeful, but leisurely traveling is enticing because it's easier than tackling "programmes of useful serious reading" or "systematic tours through the history of art and civilization". Even if I were to travel with a purpose, my life would still seem vacuous and unfulfilled because to feel purposeful I need to be productive, which is hard to do while travelling, expecially in Zumaia without wi-fi.