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“It began with fear, fear and desire and a dire curiosity about what was to come,”-Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (pg. 126).
 
They were leaving Florence tomorrow for the Amalfi Coast.  And for their last night in town, they had decided to go and see Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.  They watched a buxom blonde put a cat on her head and voyage into the Trevi Fountain.  “Gosh, she’s fantastic,” thought Alex.  Beforehand they had tried to be bold and edgy by going to a restaurant that was not plastered with ratings from him or this or that.  They ended up at a discotheque pizzeria hybrid near the Dome where one waiter was dressed as Sophia Loren and the lights were turned down so low you couldn’t even find the booths.  Anne, Alex’s mother, flustered by the darkness and not having her glasses, decided to go back to old faithful: the British restaurant near the hotel.  Shepherd’s pie again.
 
Earlier in the day at Brunelleschi’s Dome: skirting through passageways meant for one-way traffic, they felt with one misstep they would fall backwards into oblivion.  Reaching the top, with sea legs, they sat on opposite sides of the dome, building fantasy fortresses.  Anne wanted something to happen when they went to the coast.  She wanted something to enliven her.  Alex, her son, did too yet he could not quite figure out the form it would take, though he had a vague idea slowly morphing in his mind.
 
The suicidal curves of the road to Positano were like a rollercoaster laid flat. Alex took Dramamine, but the Looney Tunes-like rapidity of the ride made the need to vomit inevitable.
 
Like everything in Positano, the hotel fit into its requisite nook.  Anne rang the bell in the lobby.  From a door behind the counter, a man emerged wearing a suit tailored so well it cut like a knife.  His whole presence cut like a knife.  
 
“May I help you?” the knife asked.
 
“Yes, hello, Anne….um…Hanson, checking in,”
 
“Ah, yes, here you are,” the knife said, smiling at both of them, allowing his grin to linger on Alex for a second or maybe an hour.  Alex wasn’t sure and didn’t want it to end.
 
The Knife handed them a key with a vampy mermaid hanging from it. 
 
“Welcome to La Sirena Anne and…sir, your name?”
 
“Alexander…Alex” Alex replied feverishly.
 
“Alex and Anne, welcome.  I am Nerio.  Let me know if you need anything, anything at all,” 
 
 
The next morning, Alex and Anne came down for breakfast.  They walked into the room and were promptly blinded by the positively acute sun accurately stabbing through the floor to ceiling windows.  The only table left was in the zone where the sun mauled the worse, and they reluctantly sat down, secretly fearing sunburns.   Nerio blossomed out of nowhere with coffee in hand.
 
“Good morning, Anne and Alex.  Coffee this morning?  Or is the sun enough to wake you?”  He smiled again, the-chef’s-best-knife-used-for-special-occasions smile.
 
“I would love some coffee thank you…Nerio is it?”
 
“Yes, madam, that is it.  For you, Mr. Alex?”
 
“Um, yes, coffee is wonderful in the morning,” Alex blubbered.
 
“Why yes it is. It certainly is.”  Nerio responded and as he came around to fill Alex’s vacant mug, Alex felt him press against his chair and side with something that felt like intention.  It all lasted a moment too long to be just coffee related.  Nerio smiled and left them to be ingested by sunlight.
 
 
At five AM the next morning he took to the balcony.  He felt he should do something unexpected to make the day real.  The ocean seemed an appealing option.  He changed into an awkward swimsuit that he had had for longer than he would care to tell and walked to the water.  He dove in, feeling the water claim him.  Raw, cold, and angular.  Alex dunked a few times and as he came up the beach had a newcomer.  Carrying a suit on a hanger, wearing one of those European bathing suits, Nerio was approaching.  Alex looked about searching for a loophole to escape, but all he could do was dunk down.  And why?  He would have to come back up eventually.  He opened his eyes underwater and saw the impression of Nerio diving in.  All of the sudden, Nerio looked over, and they made strange eye contact.  He smiled and pointed upward.  Alex drifted to the surface obligingly.  Face to face, Alex wanted to dive back into the safety covers of the sea.
 
“Is your mother a good travelling companion?”
 
“Yeah, I guess.  We don’t really do anything too adventurous.  She likes calm,” Alex replied, surprised at his cognizance in the moment.
 
“Do you like calm?”  Nerio asked, insinuating the world.
 
“Yeah, sure.  But, I mean, I’m in Italy on vacation.  You know?”  Alex said, once again surprised he could form words in the knife’s presence.
 
“Well, to balance out this calm, why don’t you join me tonight?  There is a gathering going on.  It might perk you up,” Nerio trilled evocatively.
 
“Oh and try swimming like this,” Nerio dove down and remained there for a while.  When he returned to the surface, he had his bathing suit in his hands.  He stretched it above his head and turned around.
 
 “Meet me in the alleyway behind the hotel at nine. See you tonight, Alexander” he called slinking out of the water, grabbing his tailored suit.
 
Alex remained in the water, unable to move for the next half hour.  Anne stood on their balcony, looking on with confusion, curiosity, and a faint tinge of excitement for what it all implied.
 
After a day of scaling vertical streets and shopping with Anne in a little store near the tiptop of the town where she treated herself to clothes in a way she hadn’t in years, Alex could barely make it through dinner.  Nothing about the upcoming evening called for the risotto in front of him that he usually loved.  Anne noticed.
 
“So that concierge, Nerio, guy is kinda a card, huh?”
 
“What do you mean?” Alex asked, knowing completely what she meant.
 
“He is very smooth…it’s almost funny,”
 
“I guess he knows how to carry himself,”
 
“That’s always a good quality in a man,” Anne said laughing uncomfortably.
 
Alex half-smiled, “Yeah, sure.”  There was a pause filled with uneaten risotto.
 
“Honey, there is a dance in the town square tonight.  I think I’m going,” Anne said somewhat confidently.
 
“That would be good for you, Mom. You always liked dancing.  You can wear one of your new shirts or something,”
 
“That’s what I was thinking.  I’m quite excited for it,” she said confidingly.
 
“You should be.  I think I’ll just stay in,” Alex said very off-handedly.
 
Alex helped his mother get ready, offering opinions on which purchase of the day she should wear.   She looked beautiful and Alex told her so, sending her out the door with a long hug.  When she was out the door, he had to stumble about, figuring out what in the hell he could wear.  Scouring about he found a pair of jeans and a light blue dress shirt.  It wasn’t ideal. 
 
Nerio was there in the alley, wearing a gray t-shirt and jeans with vicious boots.
 
“Here.  We’ll take this car,” Nerio motioned to a fetus of a car.  “You look nice tonight,” he continued.
 
“Thanks, uh, so do you,” Alex replied, completely serious.
 
They drove through the rail thin streets and out of Positano.  Nerio started to speed up. 
 
“So where are we going?” Alex asked after a few moments of silence.
 
“A party that a few of my friends have put together,”
 
“Ah, I see,”
 
They came to a clearing filled with other cars.  Nerio got out and Alex followed. 
 
“When we get in there, open your eyes,” Nerio said in an addictively ambiguous way.
 
He grabbed Alex by the hand and started running.  And then, they were in a lemon grove, a never-ending grove filled with lights and club music.  Everyone was a shadow.  People were hidden behind trees doing who knows what. 
 
“Come over here.  You can have the best Limoncello in the country,” Nerio said.  Walking through the Dionysian masses, of which Nerio seemed to know every person, they reached a fountain that had luscious lemon heaven floating down from it.
 
“Just stick your head under it and drink or drown if you like” Nerio said.  And Alex did because he did not care.  He did not want to care anymore.  He let the Limoncello go in his mouth, on his face, in his hair, let it drip down his neck.  Nerio did the same and pulled Alex to one of the euphoric clusters.  The club music became tribal and tropical and everything dripped and oozed lemons.  Alex thought his body was pressed up against Nerio’s for eternity.  Alex was passed around or maybe others were passed around, but every face started to look like Nerio’s.  And then it rained and rained and rained.  Alex opened his eyes as wide as he ever had in his life.  And everyone slipped and fell in the mud and poured the Limoncello over each other.  Alex was by a tree, under the Christmas lights, and Nerio was there too, pressing all over and Alex pressed back.  Everything felt too tight, too contained, and the knife was reaching for and pulling at the lemons!
 
The knife soared gleefully, cleanly through Alex’s body and he grabbed voraciously at the lemon tree, squeezing and mashing lemons and leaves to bits, letting the juice meet his eyes. 
 
“…and goading one another on to dance and fling their limbs about they never let it fade,” (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, pg. 127).
 
 
 
 
 Interview:

Interview with the author-New York Magazine
 
NYMag: Mr. Bruce, who were your influences for this odd little tale?
 
Mr. Bruce: Well, I wanted to tell an ominous sort of travel story à la Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers.  The Nerio character is supposed to function as the Robert character of the story.  He is just this magnetic stranger.  I wanted to make Nerio be very forward.  If it were anybody else but him doing what he does, it would be awkward.  Another influence was Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice with the lemon grove rave scene in particular (pg. 126-129).  I wanted to have it echo the dream Aschenbach has about the Dionysian ritual near the end of the novel.  That type of hedonistic, primal, and guttural behavior is positively fascinating.  That’s why I quote Mann at the beginning and the end.  Alex desires more from the trip, from life and he gets it in the form of Nerio and Positano.  Also the difference between the Apollonian and the Dionysian functions as homage to Mann because Alex is torn between the two in a way (calm and predictability of travelling with his mother and the thrill of what Nerio promises and insinuates).  Also there is a reference to On the Road in the lemon grove scene because it is supposed to be a moment of bliss.  I tried to use the descriptive style of Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky), Kerouac, and Mann too.  The writing was also influenced by Nabokov’s Lolita, which I was reading for another class.  I just wanted the description to really pop.  I also wanted to reference Fellini’s La Dolce Vita in the beginning because that woman is so fancy free when she goes in the Trevi Fountain and puts the cat on her head.  That is why Alex is intrigued by her.  She’s a hint of the Dionysian.
 
NYMag: What is the back-story or context for Alex and Anne being in Italy?
 
Mr. Bruce: Well, it was supposed to be a family trip with Alex’s dad too that they had been planning it for months, but then the parents got divorced.   So Alex and Anne decided to go on their own.  They are very close.
 
NYMag:  Are any parts of the story autobiographical?
 
Mr. Bruce:  I did go to Positano with my mother on vacation when I was 11 after Christmas.  And our room key was a bodacious mermaid.  There is a hotel in Positano called Le Sirenuse, but we didn’t stay there.  My mom did buy some new clothes at a little store in the town, and the roads were very curvy, but I didn’t throw up.  Oh and a year and a half ago, I did go to the top of Brunelleschi’s Dome with my class.  And my mom and I went to an English restaurant in Rome, not Florence.
 
NYMag: What does Nerio translate to in English?
 
Mr. Bruce: According to 20000-Names.com (thank you!) it has a Greek origin (Nereus) and that means, “wet one”.  It’s supposed to be a blunt sexual reference, and it also fits in with the beach scene with the swimming and the mermaid theme.  Nerio is clearly a very blunt character.  But his actions wouldn’t be sexy or attractive (if the reader sees them as such), if he were anyone else.   I guess I could have named him the Italian word for knife, but that seemed a little heavy-handed, a bit of overkill, you know?
 
NYMag:  Why is Nerio called “the knife” anyway?
 
Mr. Bruce:  It has to do with the feeling he produces in Alex.  Seeing Nerio and engaging with him, sometimes feels like being stabbed with a knife.  It’s a very clean stab though.  It’s deliberate and precise.  Nerio is supposed to be sharp, slick, angular, and completely fascinating. 
 
NYMag:  What happens to Alex?
 
Mr. Bruce: I’m not quite sure.  I wanted it to be slightly Sputnik Sweetheart-like in the sense that Alex gets lost in this odd lemon grove rave.  I like to think it’s a moment of lucidity and self-discovery.  Nerio isn’t trying to hurt him.  He’s not like Robert in that regard.  I like that image of Alex in the grove in ecstasy as a closing shot of sorts. 

So now we have entered the heady zone of travel fictions with Murakami’s "Sputnik Sweetheart".  We are on another plane of travel where the antics of fanny-packing tourists don’t seem to even come into the picture (only in passing mentions to tourists and tour groups when K is in Greece).  None of our three main characters would ever consider strapping on a fanny pack.  Physical travel seems to come second to a sort of mental/psychological travelling.  Murakami is getting at a much deeper form of travel than just “leaving on a jet plane”. 

Yes, the places Sumire and Miu go to change them, but it’s not because of the feta and olives or the Swiss chocolate.  The places bring out the realities of their identities.  Like we’ve said since pretty much the beginning, travel makes us aware of facets of ourselves we had forgotten or didn’t know existed. Pico Iyer talks about it in the essay we read at the beginning of the semester, “Why We Travel”: “…it…shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty…in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to…hidden inward passages…we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit,” (Iyer, pg. 2).  Both Sumire and Miu get introduced to these new or “hidden” (Iyer, p. 2) parts of themselves in these foreign places, and they don’t really have a choice about it.  Murakami is really getting into what happens inside the human body during travel.  He cavorts in these “hidden inward passages”.  They can muck us up internally and throw us curveballs. We have to find some semblance of our original selves in all of it and like K did that night in Greece hold onto “a huge rock” (pg. 170) to stay sane. 

Yes, Greece as location was important to the story and to Sumire’s experience, but so were her previous experiences back home with Miu and K. The travel story is only sad because we have heard so much about the good relationships Sumire has with Miu and K which were established back home in Japan.  Without the back-story, her disappearance and the whole Grecian adventure wouldn’t have as much power and significance as they do.  Sumire’s travel experience isn’t as tragic as Miu’s though because we get a sense perhaps Sumire is better off on “the other side” (see pg. 178).  She isn't in, our favorite topic of discussion, the abyss.  "The other side" isn't the abyss. However, the sky, especially at night, does still retain the sense of foreboding that it did in "The Sheltering Sky".  Maybe all travel regardless of how adventurous it is, how far you stray from the prescribed path many, many before you have taken, is a trip to “the other side”.  Maybe some are too ignorant to reach “the other side” or even see it’s there, but others like Sumire, Miu, and K who have “curiosity” (p. 170) engage with it wholeheartedly (yet even K keeps a distance from it, not giving in to it completely on pgs. 170-171).  Travel is wherever we find that “other side” and decide how far we will go with it, how far into those “inward passages”.

As much as travel has a large presence in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, it didn’t really strike me as a flat-out piece of travel fiction for some reason.  It is the story of a woman going out and yup, “finding herself” in: “the country where I became an adult, where I grew into a woman, the country where I also got injured, the country where I had my most confused days and my greatest passion…” (pg. 282).  Z’s being “a foreigner” (pg. 196) is a key factor in her interactions with people when she travels, but maybe because she was in London for so long, living in a house with a man, it stopped becoming a travel novel after a point.  Even when she is on “the Continent” she isn’t really delving into the cities she visits in a typically touristic manner.  Many of the characters in the other novels we’ve read have been constantly on the move or “on the road”, name-dropping cities and towns at light speed, but Z really establishes a home, literally in London yet also “in” her lover: “So I always believed you are my only home here,” (pg. 258).  It’s refreshing to see this different rendering/representation of travel and travel fiction.  Her spontaneous dalliances or flights of fancy on “the Continent” have more to do with the men of those countries  (and the impact they have on Z) than the countries themselves (even though the countries do get described). 
 
Z’s interactions with humans left more of an impression on me than her descriptions of for example, Venice or London (most of the time).  The moment in particular that stands out for me is at the train station in Amsterdam: “…he [Peter] is running towards me…stops right in front of me, breathless…I hug him tightly and he hugs me tightly.  I bury my head into his arms,” (pg. 168).  It is a very romantic moment in a way: beyond the train station, beyond Amsterdam, beyond place, beyond location.  It’s timeless and transcendent.  Z’s travels are perhaps best summed up by this phrase: “I know I am on a journey to collect the bricks to build my life,” (pg. 168).  These “bricks” are the experiences she has with people: this array of European men in particular and of course, her lover yet also the bouncers outside the Venetian club.  This has always been a key reason people travel: to have experiences with others they wouldn’t normally have experiences with whether they interact with them for an instant or for a day or for two weeks.  Some travelers prioritize the physical space and place over the people that are in or around said place.  The traveler has to decide which one they will most actively pursue on their voyage.   I’m glad Z chose the people.  It makes it more interesting for her and the reader.

Once again I find myself reminded of Aschenbach from Death in Venice and even Kit from The Sheltering Sky with these words from Theroux’s second novella in The Elephanta Suite: “He left that night…a changed man.  Or was he changed?  Perhaps these impulses had always slumbered in him and now India had wakened them, allowing him to act,” (pg. 108).  Just as Tadzio (and Venice) brought out new sides of Aschenbach and Kit found a new, freer part of herself after the death of Port, Dwight is let loose by India for better or worse.  At least, he realizes he has to control himself before it’s too late (unlike Kit and Aschenbach).  On the Road is also brought to mind with this quotation: “…India could be bliss…” (pg. 110).  The characters in On the Road were always in search of blissful moments, and the scene of Dwight Theroux leaves us with at the end seems to be one of these blissful moments we seek in life: “…lying on a narrow cot in the tidy room freshened by the fizz of leaves and the morning air…he saw himself again, a skinny sunburned geek in a turban and loincloth…craving nothing except more life—happy, seeing things as they were,” (pg. 186).  Blissful moments are filled with extreme contentment and transcendence.  Dwight seems to be imagining himself in said state of contentment here.  This final image also reminds me of the final image we get of Kit in The Sheltering Sky when she runs off into the Casbah.  The reader doesn’t know where Dwight is going and whether he’ll ever go back to his American life.  He has cast of all his connections to the modern world and has gone into the Indian landscape as Kit went into the desert and into the crowds of the Casbah.  It’s simultaneously dangerous, exhilarating, and freeing.
 
Also, I was reminded of our sadomasochism-in-everyday-life conversation last week when Dwight reflects that: “…it all revealed to Dwight a culture of both punishment and sexual frustration, for the two always went together,” (pg. 134).   This only breeds dominant/submissive, master/servant, “exploiter” (pg. 147)/exploited relationships.  Dwight later refers to Indru, one of his liaisons as “…a Scheherazade of sadism,” (pg. 157).  Sublimation is dangerous in any society especially in a society of constant “want”.  At least for a while, India helps Dwight find himself sexually (pg. 159).  He comes off as a creeper sometimes though in his sexual dalliances.  In the end, he transcends that need, having had enough of it, and finds himself spiritually or starts on the road (I guess the pun might as well be intended) to find himself spiritually. 

What we learn from The Comfort of Strangers are the downsides of getting an “authentic experience”.  For much of this course we have been discussing the different forms of travelers, from those who want to go deep to those who just want to coast along the surface, not really seeing a place for what it truly is.  So is the authentic travel experience not safe in some way?  Of course, Colin and Mary’s case is an extreme one, but is it a call on McEwen’s part for fanny-packing travelling?  I wouldn’t think a writer would advocate for that.  It is either go big or go home with Venice.  As we saw in Death in Venice and now in The Comfort of Strangers, Venice leads to mental frenzy.  A visitor to Venice has to decide whether they will plunge into this frenzy or keep the reassuring distance of a tourist.  Aschenbach chose the mental frenzy or perhaps it chose him and Colin and Mary do as well.  Venice shows its first signs of ulterior motives when it gives Mary the strange bug bites after sleeping in the street the night they meet Robert.  Venice is literally and metaphorically infectious.  Perhaps submitting to the frenzy requires a sort of sullying process in which one has to confront and come to terms with the dirtiness (literal and metaphorical) of Venice.  Or maybe these bug bites are the first warning flags to Colin and Mary that Robert is definitely not who they think he is.  Maybe they function as a sign from the city to stop before it is too late.  If a traveler is in search of the authentic he or she has to be prepared for anything because in a foreign place the most bizarre things can be authentic.  Just because something is authentic does not necessarily mean it should be pursued when travelling.  A tourist may not fit into this authenticity as much as they want to.  And sometimes that is a good, safe thing.  The authentic seduces Colin and Mary, which is always the danger.  We think the authentic is innocent precisely because it is authentic, because it acts as place of potential profound, meaningful connection away from the surface level, mechanical travel that encompasses a city.

Reading Death in Venice, I was often reminded of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.  There is a lot of talk about “the abyss” in both novels and falling into it.  Everyone seems to fall into it in their own special way and it also seems you can’t avoid falling into it.  Aschenbach’s abyss is clearly the boy who he is obsessed with, but his environment (Venice) only further edges this abyss-directed mentality on.  Mann is telling us that travel can make you “drunk” and this drunkenness can lead you into the abyss like it does for Aschenbach.  The notion that a traveler somehow becomes the city they are in, in state of mind at least, is also brought up by Mann: “…the adventure of the outer world that merged darkly with the adventure of his heart and fed his passion with vague, illicit hopes,” (pg. 107).  Aschenbach and Venice are one, and they will go down with the ship together.
 
The reader also gets the sense that throughout the book, Aschenbach is travelling within himself: “…enmeshed as he was in so illicit an experience, involved in such exotic extravagances of emotion…” (pg. 105).  He is locating parts of himself that he never found before or never bothered to investigate.  Travel shows us sides of ourselves we have forgotten about or didn’t know existed.  Confronting reemerging aspects of oneself can be overwhelming and exhilarating: “Emotions from the past…were now reappearing in the strangest of permutations,” (pg. 91).  This can also be a bad thing though as evidenced by Aschenbach’s behavior.  The reader gets the sense that Aschenbach never really addressed or experienced these emotions correctly when he was younger so they are coming out now, at the wrong time, “in the strangest of permutations”.  They are the right emotions just aged and misdirected.
 
In the end, Aschenbach becomes the man in the beginning on the boat, in appearance at least, who was trying so hard to be young.  Aschenbach let himself fall into the abyss because all the elements fell into place around him and encouraged him to (Tadzio, Venice).  Anything loved too much, chased after too much, becomes the abyss because it leads to constant, unremitting action, constant whirring of the gears in the mind (“…knowledge…is in sympathy with the abyss; it is the abyss,” (pg. 137)) and the chase will never end.  Travel elevated this sublimated abyss within Aschenbach.

In Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the reader is presented with two kindred spirits: Kit and Dean.  Just as Kit gradually goes more and more native after Port’s death so do Sal and Dean in Mexico.  The real world does not seem to be an option for Port, Dean, and Kit.  Dean has always been in a state of the primitive for as long as the reader knows him.  It is an inherent part of his character that every surrounding he is in brings out.   With Port and Kit, there is the idea of the abyss that both fell into (Port’s abyss was death, Kit’s madness).  Dean is falling into an abyss throughout the course of the book too though he is not aware of it.  His is one of ignorance.  To demonstrate the power of the abyss, I will look at examples where Kit and Dean are in similar mental and/or physical situations.

The road functions as Sal and Dean’s desert.  Long durations of time spent driving and in the desert lead to introspection and realization. The desert and the road are ideal environments for living in the head.  When all you see is cornfields or sand dunes, the mind becomes the place to cavort.  What Port ends up realizing, thanks to the desert, is the meaningless of life.  Sal and Dean are trying to avoid coming to this realization.  Dean lives life as if it were a constant sugar rush, constantly feeding him.  They think if they keep going to bars, clubs, houses, cities, towns, diners, whorehouses, the realization won’t have time to catch up with them, but it manages to: “What difference does it make after all?—anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth?  All in the mind,” (233).  Sal’s musings from the Detroit movie theater mirror Port’s words to Kit in the desert: “‘But what is behind’… ‘Nothing. I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night,’” (94).  Port and Sal have come to the same conclusion thanks to their environments.  Port wouldn’t be able to relate to Dean because Port doesn’t see the value in life.  He wouldn’t see the need or the worth in Dean’s lust for life.  But Dean is never thinking that far ahead or really considering the big picture.   He does not need to.

After Port’s death, Kit realizes she has to see, use, and exist in the desert differently (in an On the Road-esque way) because the way Port interacted with it led to his demise.  But by trying to avoid Port’s abyss, Kit falls into another:  “Life was suddenly there, she was in it, not looking through the window at it,” (241).  That is the feeling, at once liberating and dangerous, Dean always has or is looking for.  It’s his philosophy in a way.  Kit starts acting like Dean. There isn’t a middle ground between these two abysses for these characters.  You either live in your head or live on the edges of your nerves, always ready to jump into a pool (like Kit).  We see the change in her and are shocked and thrilled whereas Dean is Dean right from the start and only heightens himself to further levels of incomprehensiveness.  Initially, we are entertained and excited by Dean and Kit’s adventures and audacity: “Even as she saw these two men she knew that she would accompany them, and the certainty gave her an unexpected sense of power: instead of feeling the omens, she now would make them, be them herself,” (263).  This scene is a bit of a “You go, girl!” moment because she is finally dictating her life.  Then we realize the danger of the spontaneity.  However, Dean and Kit don’t come to this realization.

Kit and Dean’s moments of “going native” are also surprisingly similar: both involving liberation through nudity: “We took off our T-shirts and roared through the jungle…No towns, nothing, lost jungle, miles and miles…‘I’d just like to get naked and roll and roll in that jungle,’ said Dean,” (280) and in the case of Kit: “Once in the garden she found herself pulling off her clothes…Each time she bent to get water between her cupped palms she uttered a burst of wordless song,” (240-1).  Kit’s moment is much more personal and private whereas Dean’s environment matches his personality.  Her liberation comes in going in the pool in the first place and then from the singing.  The singing is such an organic thing to do.  It just comes instinctually out of her being.  Her first step in liberation from a part of herself and the mental trappings of the desert that only encouraged her neurotic propensities needs to be a serene moment like this.  It couldn’t be frenzied like Dean’s experience in the jungle.  Kit isn’t ready for that kind of headfirst delving.  For her, that comes later after she has adjusted to her new mental state.  Whereas Dean is a monkey so the jungle is his where he was meant to be all along.  The jungle, like Dean, is almost too filled with life, too lush, too overgrown, too filled with possibilities and surprises.  It is dangerous when you are too much like your environment or your environment is too much like you because then: “the jungle takes you over and you become it,” (281).  At the pool, Bowles describes Kit’s state as: “She felt a strange intensity being born within her,” (240-1).  This seed of intensity, birthed poolside, is what is so inherent and strong about Dean’s character all along.  For the majority of The Sheltering Sky, Kit is very much like the people Sal and Dean drive with on the way to Denver:  “ ‘…they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false…their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry,’” (197).  Dean would like her because she breaks away from this persona.  Perhaps they might be too much for each other.  The Kit-esque woman in the car with Sal and Dean is described as using “a suppressed, hysterical whisper,” which echoes Kit’s poolside ultimatum to herself: “‘I shall never be hysterical again,”” (241).  This “worry” Dean talks about is a manifestation of hysteria and Kit manages to break herself from it, away from her state of existence where “‘Whenever I’m about to be happy I hang on instead of letting go,’” (240).  Unfortunately, this only leads her into the arms of another hysteria, Dean’s hysteria.  Dean is in constant search of climax, that’s his hysteria.  The jungle and Mexico are this huge climax.

Going south seems to be the equivalent to going deeper into the Sahara, but it could also be argued that all the voyaging East to West is going deeper into the Sahara as well. The Kit and Dean parallels only increase as she goes further into the desert. For example, both are described in similar manners: “At the moment her balance was perfect; stiff as a plank she lay poised on the brink…By the time it arrived at the rock…the balance would be broken…She let go” (293) and “If you touched him he would sway like a boulder suspended on a pebble on the precipice of a cliff.  He might come crashing down or just sway rock-like…the boulder exploded into a flower…and he looked around like a man waking up” (250).  These two are always ready to dive headfirst into a feeling, a type of existence.  In the end, the reader senses that Kit and Dean will continue to go deeper (Kit into the Casbah and Dean back West, or back and forth until the twelfth of never).  They want to go deeper and therefore, they will only get madder.  The way Kit learns to live in a Dean-esque manner is to block out certain thoughts and memories (the main one being her affair with Tunner).  Once she remembers that her old life comes roaring back.  Her go with the flow state allows her to just focus on the present and the immediately tangible.  Kit’s post-death-of-Port state is one of blissful ignorance.  She strips so many layers of herself through this so all that remains is the most basic, primal, raw depiction of a woman (not being able to control her bodily functions, biting her fellow wives—“The sensation was delicious” (282), existing “solely for those few fiery hours…beside Belqassim (278)).  Dean experiences a similar rewinding: “People were now beginning to look at Dean with maternal and paternal affection glowing in their faces…” (251).  His friends or now, acquaintances see him as a lost boy, a little child desperate for attention that they feel bad for, not the cool guy who showed them a good time.  His immaturity is now official.

Returning to the concept of the abyss, Dean’s abyss is madness due to constant search for climax, perhaps climax overdose.  Occasional climax is a side effect of Kit’s new mindset.  Her resituating of herself and her mind lead her into the abyss.  The desert and the road encourage and facilitate this.  Kit lets her mind be so vast (like the desert) and so open to experiences, but so closed off to her true self and true problems, that she can only try to escape herself by further delving into experiences (i.e. the Casbah).  Dean’s receptive nature leads him to obliviousness. He is not avoiding his mind; he is darting around his real life.  By never stopping to catch their breaths, Kit and Dean think they can avoid the abyss.  However, not stopping only leads them further down the rabbit hole.

Jack Kerouac does an amazing job of conveying scenes of exultant, twirling bliss so we feel as if we are right there with him and the gang.  One of said scenes that really made me feel as if I was there or at least wanted to be there was the New Year's Eve parties in New York and the concert at the club after.  Yes, these parties are taking place in New York but the reader gets the sense they extend beyond New York because: "Everything in life, all the faces of life, were piling into the same dank room" (pg. 117) and "Everything happened" (pg. 117).  When we are at these parties with Sal and the gang we are at home in manner of speaking, we are in New York, we are in the East, we are in America, and we are in the world or the world has come to us.  The reason I think the world is present is because of the "Everything in life, all the faces of life" quote.  These parties are like crazier versions of those Jay Gatsby throws.  On this night, New York or these parties have become the crossroads of the world.  This is New York turned up to 11, at its highest capacity, at its most extreme, at its most overstimulated and unbridled.  It's almost embodying the stereotype of New York or the city in general, the ultimate city: crowds filled with faces and no space to move.  These apartments and "cellar compartments near the furnace" (pg. 117) where these parties happen, enliven said environments because as Pocock says: "place is also people" (p. 342).  These party locales have "personality" (Pocock, 342, 343) because of the people in them.  And now that these parties have happened, these people will forever be in these apartments and cellar compartments (Pocock, 342-43).  Also, the fact that "there was a tremendous and wonderful snowstorm going on outside" (p. 117) adds more to the personality of the night, the city, this New York.  The weather matches our characters and the tone of the night.  The parties, the city on this night are a "snowstorm" of movement and energy.  It's exhilarating.

When Dean and Sal go to the George Shearing concert we get an example of Hardy's idea of "'permanent impression'" (Pocock, 344) as well as the people or in this case, a person and their music giving a space "personality".  Dean and Sal will decide to remember this club and how George Shearing personified it on that night because: "these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial," (pg. 119).  The club and George Shearing will never be the way they were that night again.  

Sal says the party was "not an orgy but just a New Year's Eve party with frantic screaming and wild radio music," (pg. 117).  It was an orgy though, an orgy of life (I know that sounds weird and cheesy).  Kerouac managed to experience so many places at once all while staying in New York, party-hopping.  He saw the world in a way.

Reading On the Road I found myself wondering, what is the authentic American experience?  It could be a multitude of things.  Is it eating apple pie in a diner?  Is it hitchhiking?  Is it journeying to the city of your dreams (in Sal's case, Denver)?  I know it is definitely not the Wild West festival Sal and Montana Slim end up at in Cheyenne.  The Wild West festival is the fabricated tourist experience Cohen talked about in the reading from last week.  The people participating in it know it is fake, that it is "mass-entertainment" (Cohen, 184) but they lap it up nevertheless.  The funny thing about America is that a citizen can be a tourist here if they go to another town, city, or state causing them to maybe feel not like Americans for a week or a few days.  It is strange.  Sal seems to be having an authentic American experience (not being a face-value tourist) by hitchhiking across the country.  It's interesting that he is taking the "Go west, young man" path because it seems like such a thing of the past, a dream from the 1800's.  It's also strange that he leaves New York and sees his dream city, his place of religious pilgrimmage (he does refer to himself as a Prophet of sorts on page 32) as Denver.  It is unexpected.  For many people, including myself, New York is the mecca, the pilgrimmage site, but not for Sal.  He is an idealist.  His giddy exclamations over seeing the country are exciting and relatable.  He is wide-eyed and ready for the West.  In my view, he has already had many an authentic American experience by just riding in that truck the two boys from Minnesota were driving.  Let us see what else awaits him. 

In our discussion of travel, the topic of authenticity has come up a lot.  It came up when we discussed The Sun Also Rises and now The Sheltering Sky.  We discussed where one finds authenticity: in sports, in living and working in Paris, hopefully in writing, and in the primitive, the primal.  
 
Port and Kit came from a society that instilled competition and success into its people because those were some "of its supreme, ultimate moral values,"  For Port, in particular, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, that center would not hold.  Port couldn't "'conform' with this society's ultimate values," (Cohen, p. 181).  I guess Port is in the "experimental mode" "of the touristic experience" (Cohen, p. 189) because he is trying to find, in the desert, "that form of life which elicits a resonance in himself...not...aware of what he seeks...needs...desires," (Cohen, p. 189).  What resonates for him in the end is death.  Port doesn't really believe life has a meaning so perhaps he's never looking for "authentic existence," (Cohen, p. 191), he's just looking for the clearest manifestation of said "meaninglessness" (p. 191) and that appears in the desert where you are forced to confront yourself and your life.  This isn't "the diversionary mode" (p. 186) because Port doesn't really take "pleasure" (Cohen, p.186) in his experiences.  His "centre" is "the tiny turning black point" (Sheltering Sky, p. 216) he sees in his hallucinations.  That "black point", that "centre" is something Port has to "pierce the fine fabric of" (Sheltering Sky, p.229).  This was his pilgrimage.  He has made it to the "centre".    Because "the centre...symbolises an ideal" (Cohen, p. 195) will it live up to his hopes and expectations?  Does that even matter at this point considering what his centre is?  
 
Arguably, I think Kit is the more interesting case study of "touristic experience" because she falls prey to "total disorientation, and ultimate alienation from all human society" that sometimes results from being an "experimental tourist" (Cohen, p. 195) upon returning from the desert, the abyss.  When Kit goes swimming in the pool one night, she has her rebirth scene, her baptism moment as if she were a "traditional pilgrim" (p. 184).  She runs the gamut of "touristic experiences” as the book goes on, but probably mainly experiences the last three on Cohen's list.  After the swim and the night spent sleeping under a tree, Kit's centre, perhaps "new...centre" (Cohen, p. 190) has been located: "Those most deeply committed to a new 'spiritual' centre may attach themselves permanently to it and start a new life there by 'submitting' themselves completely to the culture...they will desire to 'go native'" (Cohen, pg. 190).  Boy does Kit 'go native'!  She gets rid of her Western clothes, briefly loses her gender (ends up looking like an Arab boy), becomes one of a group of wives, reverts back to utilizing and requiring her most basic, primal, human needs: sex, hand signals, fighting, biting, and having no concept of time.  It's exhilarating in a way.  Her impulsiveness is freeing, but also dangerous.  Perhaps Kit's "centre" is found in the Arab culture, which is why she takes the streetcar to the Casbah.  Her new identity is one that can't work in Ms. Ferry's world or in America.  Because going back to those societies will force her to face her mind, her guilt that Ms. Ferry almost causes her to remember by mentioning Tunner.  Her new centre allows her to exist ignorant of a part of her mind, her past.  I'm just not sure if it's a healthy centre to have even though she goes "from meaninglessness to authentic existence," (Cohen, pg. 191) which would normally be considered healthy.

Port and Kit are just as much part of a Lost Generation as Jake and his gang were.  Except Port and Kit seem even more on their own than The Sun Also Rises' characters.  And they are also braver.  They are really getting out of their comfort zones with the places they travel to and I find that admirable.  The sad thing is: "...they both had made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent...Eventually everything would happen," (p. 127).  Port and Kit are so stagnant, moving through Africa in a constant dance of trying to read or decode each other.  

Port justifies and elaborates on his statement from the beginning of the novel that: "He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler," (p. 6) when he is en route to Ain Krorfa: "...it made him feel that he was pioneering--he felt more closely identified with his great-grandparents, when he was rolling along out here in the desert than he did sitting at home looking out over the resevoir in Central Park..." (p. 101).  This "pioneering" is what leads me to consider Port and Kit very brave, particularly Port.  Sure, they do a lot of the same type of things in each place they go to: visit the cafes, markets, eat meals etc. like Jake and Co. did in The Sun Also Rises, but Port and Kit's interactions with nature are much more powerful and frequent than Jake's.  Last week in class we discussed the importance of the pastoral experience/environment and even though Port and Kit's environment is that of a desert, similar vital experiences can be had.  Already we have been given many moment by Bowles of Port out on his walks in the desert or Kit and Port going on their bike ride.  The moments when the sheer scope and magnitude of the places they are in completely eats them whole are the ones that seem to lead to the most self-reflection, self-realization, self-analyzation whether Port and Kit like it or not.  However unlike the pastoral environment which we said was a return to "simplicity", these Technicolor, Cinemascope moments in the desert seem to be filled with complications and grappling, instead of "relief" and "innocence".  The reader has a yearning for Port and Kit to be on the same page, to stop bypassing each other and to get to the point.  Perhaps nature will not help them accomplish this because as Jack Collins says in his Bowles article: "Port and Kit Moresby...embark on an ultimate journey into the Sahara that draws Port into the infinity of death and Kit into the isolation of madness," (Approaching Paul Bowles).  It seems like nature could destroy them, not return them to a state of simplicity and innocence.

Why do I like the character of Brett so much?  It’s not just because the stunning Ava Gardner played her in the film version (though I think Katharine Hepburn would probably have been a better choice for the role).  Brett is a mess, but a magnetic mess.  It is funny that she has such an androgyny or masculinity to her with her pixie cut and use of the word “chap”.   It’s funny that she thinks “to grow” her “hair out” would make her “look so like hell” (all quotes from 246).  Her personality, her essence, the screwball-esque vibe she gives off are all utterly girly, vivacious, and bubbly.  She’s like champagne.  She is also very much Daisy Miller with Daisy’s flirting taken to the max or perhaps interpreted for a different era.  Brett isn’t a torrent of words and information like Daisy is though.  The very brevity and subtly of Brett’s dialogue is what draws men and the reader to her.   She is also very childish though, similar to Daisy, going from man to man as if there will never be a kickback from her conduct.  On the other hand though, Brett manages to be a picture of sublimation.
 
The fiesta is really, as Bill says, “like a wonderful nightmare,” (pg. 226).  It ultimately screws all the characters over.  Their crazy lifestyle finally catches up with them.  Fiesta heightens emotions and fills its participants with aficion.  For our expatriates, fiesta is, as we’ve been talking about in my Aesthetics on Trial class, something “beautiful and evil” (Mary Devereaux) and also something “so damned nice and…so awful,” (p. 247) a la Mike.
 
At the end of the novel, Brett’s wisdom is evident.  She tells Jake: “ ‘Don’t get drunk...You don’t have to,’” (p. 250).  They are simple words, but they are lovely in a way.  Brett is an adult woman in this moment.  Her head has departed the clouds; the fog of flirting has cleared.  When she says to Jake: “ ‘You’ll be all right,’” (pg. 250), they momentarily seem like the most comforting words in the universe.  None of them need to drink in order to be able to live their lives.  It is just a way to be numb because it is easier to be numb than to revel in the aimlessness, or the “it” (p. 20) that Cohn says needs to be fixed, of one’s life.  Brett has to face her life, as does Jake, but maybe she thinks that’s good.  Maybe she finally sees that there’s something more tangible and deeper than café-hopping and international jet setting out there. 

In Henry James’ Daisy Miller, we encounter someone who almost perfectly embodies the ideas expressed in the Iyer essay we read last week.  Our protagonist is constantly being “carried away” (p. 35) by Rome and by life in general.  But perhaps that is just an inherent part of her character.  Daisy is basically a child, living her life in a perpetual state of travel, at least the type of travel described by Iyer.  But it’s dangerous to live life always in the mode of travel.  One can’t be a child forever and Daisy learns that the hard way. 

Daisy’s nature is similar to that of a whirling dervish.  The reader never knows what’s going to come out of her mouth next.  When characters in the novel speak of “Roman Fever”, the modern reader is at first amused by it, thinking of it as some seductive symptom of being in Rome involving hunky men, leggy women, and overtly sexy stares across restaurants.  At first, “Roman Fever” seems like what Iyer is describing when he explains our reasons for travelling and how travelling can make us feel: “to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more,” (Iyer, p. 1).  Let’s just call it “Travel Fever”.  It’s a seduction of sorts that a place performs on the visitor.  But Daisy has been travelling for too long.  She has taken advantage of the gifts Iyer says travel gives, and that’s why the story ends on a tragic note.  Her existence constantly seemed fluffy and lighter than air at least in her eyes.  She rarely, truly faced conflict. 

Edith Wharton wrote similar stories about young women attempting to navigate societal dilemmas and dramas.  In her story, fittingly titled “Roman Fever”, a friendship is torn apart after past Roman indiscretions are revealed years later.  I’m also reminded of her novel The House of Mirth which though set in New York, conveys a similarly ruthless society of critical people.  Mirth ends tragically as well for its female lead.
In the long run, Daisy had no future really.  She would have just socialized until the end of time, travelling into oblivion. 

I’ve been the horrible tourist Huxley so accurately describes.  I cried through trips to Paris and Rome.  In Paris, outside of Sacre Coeur, I think I got one of my first travel wake up calls.  For most of our time there, I had been very rude to the Parisian pigeons.  As we walked in front of Sacre Coeur a dollop bounded down from the sky to land on my arm.  What could this strange object be?  It was straight up pigeon poop.  In retrospect, I see how this frankly disgusting occurrence was a sign.  I was not “alive” (Iyer, pg. 2) in Paris at age eight.  I wasn’t going through the “hardship” (Iyer, pg. 1) that is vital to travel.  My homesickness wasn’t “hardship”; it was just a severe case of ignorance.  I was crass and crude to Paris.

In Rome three years later I felt like I was in A Room with a View or another story where a young person is given “The Grand Tour” of Europe.  One night my mom and I went to a tearoom that was in business for the purpose of making British travelers feel more at home back in the olden days.  This tearoom was basically a “society of their fellow-tourists” (Huxley, pg. 10), “a little oasis of home in the foreign wilderness” (Huxley, pg.10). My mom and I were, and still are obsessed with England so this was a logical place for us to have dinner, but still something was off.  I feel like I had something along the lines of Welsh rarebit, a strange English delicacy.  I also have a feeling that it wasn’t very good.  After reading Huxley and Iyer, I’m starting to look back on this dinner in horror.  I wasn’t “alive” here either (Iyer, pg. 2).  I was an American who loves England, a country not known for its delicious food, eating in an English restaurant in Rome, crazy, weird Rome.  I was nuts.  Let’s not even get into the night we went to the Hard Rock Café.

I have since returned to both cities and both have respectively made me feel “alive” (Iyer, pg. 2).  Rome heralded its presence with the sight of the Pope, a woman angrily berating her dog, and trips to the grocery store across from the convent where we were staying.  Paris made me find everyone attractive and have a form of sensory overload.  I’m a sucker for cobblestone streets and classy looking apartment buildings.  Paris caused me to fall into a woman’s lap on the subway and gave me the courage to be able to laugh it off in the way Santayana says travel “’fosters humor’” (Iyer, Santayana, pg. 6).  I knew how to properly react to this moment when it happened.  This was no pigeon poop.  This was that “je ne sais quoi”.  I know knew how to treat Paris.