alex's blog

4.12.07
Looking out the window of the turbo prop we chartered from Rome to the small airport outside of Siena, we can see the red tile roofs of little Tuscan towns fly by. The wineries and red soil that make the area so famous stand out against the deep spring green of the Cyprus trees and hills of the Val de Chiana, the noise of the engines slowing as we approach the airport and land.
Terrafirma, terranova, new earth. We are here, starting something new. We walk down the few steps of the plane’s door. This is our first time here together, together to consummate what should be a long partnership, leaving the lavish ceremony in Manhattan far behind.
The car drives us down the winding roads, you looking out at the villages we pass, red roofs, red earth, desire. The towns have funny names: Poggibonsi, you say reminds you of a fat cat, Rosia, more red, Chuisdino, of closing. We arrive in Sovicille. Our lodging, Borgo Pretale, stands high on one of these rolling hills, a cluster of buildings constructed in the eleventh century as an outpost for traders of fur. No other human establishment is in sight, only these rough, stone buildings, the hills, the earth, you and me.
We check in, noticing several bows placed outside the reception-building door, set out for the archery range down bellow. The maître d'hôtel welcomes us and shows us up to our villa, situated highest on the complex, saying that our baggage would arrive shortly. He takes our passports for safekeeping.
Getting settled in, we admire the view from our terrace, nothingness spread out in front of us, all to be explored. A knock comes and I find our luggage placed there, a ragged looking man briskly walking away in some tweed blazer not of the hotel.
“That’s odd,” I say turning to you, “the bellman didn’t even wait for a tip.”

Condemmed pub on Hackney RoadAfter finishing the latest novel, I’m unsure as to whether I like it or not. I was mildly annoyed with the writing style while reading it, but in retrospect I think it adds an interesting element to the narrative especially when looking at it as a travel fiction. The broken English that Guo uses as Z’s speech throughout the book allows the reader to slip into the feeling of being completely lost and foreign in a new country. The way she describes things really lets the reader understand and remember what it is like to arrive in a new place. She depicts the atmosphere of not knowing any of a country’s customs, culture, or language incredibly well.

This is ongoing within her travels through the continent as well. Every time she moves on to a new place she is confronted with the same inept feeling as she was when she first arrived in London. However, I thought that there was an interesting progression in her travels. As she moved along more and more she seemed to be much more at ease with this clueless feeling than she was initially. I thought that this was an interesting depiction of the progression of a traveler, in the tourist/traveler spectrum we have been discussing throughout the semester. She starts off as the clueless tourist constantly holding a dictionary and, if she hadn’t met the “you” male character, a guidebook, yet as she progresses she becomes much more of a traveler. She feels comfortable meeting new people and letting them show her around their cities. She doesn’t feel the same sense of anxiety about differences and the unknown as she did in the beginning. She even says that she finally was able to be on her own, even though she doesn’t want to be necessarily.

TuscanyTravel is the main character in Shirley Hazzard’s The Evening of the Holiday. The setting of the Italian countryside dominates her narrative. She does an incredible job or description, especially of the season, using various sensory descriptions. Hazzard’s descriptions of Sophie and Tancredi seem only half there. She leaves them undeveloped. While I think this was on purpose, she wants the reader to question whether they are as shallow and one sided as she portrays them or if they have further, deeper motivations and feelings, it is interesting in contrast to the depth that she gives Italy. She doesn’t even give the reader an indication as to why Sophie feels compelled to leave the country and Tancredi at the end of the novel.

It seemed to me that the story itself was much more about the love that Hazzard had for Italy (she lived and worked there for a time in her younger career according to her biography) rather than the love that Sophie and Tancredi share. In fact, their love seems deeply dependent on the setting. I saw it much more as infatuation than the love she attempts to portray because it can’t exist outside of their current setting. Their existence in the Italian countryside, its season’s and routines allows for their obsession with one another that could not continue in the real world. Also, I find it significant that the novel takes place in summer. This season has long been used in literature to signify shallow affairs and lack of emotional investment.

Venitian Alleyway“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and you lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance....”

This second epigraph of The Comfort of Strangers really summed up the novella for me. Traveling in an unnamed city, Venice, and constantly getting lost in it’s winding streets, the couple is forced to rely on Robert to survive. They “lose sight” of normal precautions that they would have taken back home against strangers like Robert. In exchange they take the relative safety, if you can call it that, which he provides.
I think the parallels between the epigraph and the novella go further than the obvious one of Colin and Mary. One must remember that Caroline and Robert grew up outside of their respective homes. In effect their whole childhoods were one big trip. They were constantly off balance. If one takes the epigraph in this light as well, it is easy to draw the connections to their current behavioral patterns.

Robert, growing up fairly isolated in his families Knightsbridge home while his father was a diplomat, was only exposed to women in the light of them being subservient to the men of the household, he and his father. At an extremely young age, he was, at least symbolically, put in charge of his older sisters. He, out of necessity to trust his father’s judgment, believes all of his father’s semantics about him inheriting the power of the family. Thus, he becomes obsessed with this power and when he apparently fails to receive it his only recourse is to unleash it on a helpless being such as Caroline. Having only seen his father’s “power” exerted via blows to himself and his sisters, he too follows this sadistic path and takes it to the extreme.

Mann speaks about the two ways in which he has arrived in Venice as the opening to his experience in the mystical city. While this detail can be easily overlooked, it seemed of particular significance to me. I remember that coming to Venice by train you walk out of the station into a much less grand part of the city than if you had taken a boat there. Walking out of its doors you look out on the hulking, dirty vaporetti and a narrower portion of the Grand Canal. It is very much as he says, “entering the palace by the back door.”
Later in my stay in Venice we returned from an outing to one of the outer islands and came in on much the same path that Aschenbach takes on this trip to the city. I remember thinking, as he does, that this is the way Venice is meant to be approached. You see the Palace and basilica spread out in front of you, the rest of the skyline framing them. The colorful buildings pop against the black water with the fronts of Gondolas bobbing in the foreground.

In the JungleAllie Fox travels in order to form a utopian community abroad. However, in his attempt he destroys not only his utopia but also the primitive community in which he hoped to create it.
Allie tries to escape American capitalism by moving his family to the Honduran jungle. He does not believe in the American education system, dropping out of Harvard and keeping his children out of school. He instead believes in the intrinsic worth of common sense and life experience that explains his choice to move to a more primitive environment. Furthermore, Allie is fed up with people like Polski who exploit the American consumers by driving up prices. So, instead of making Polski the “Fat Boy” he builds a larger one for himself in Honduras. Ironically, however, the Fat Boy destroys his first attempt at his utopia and in effect the practical hopes of one at all.
Even after the failure of Fox’ first encampment he pushes on, going so far as to tell his family that the US has been destroyed. In his haste to create a second utopia, not that the first was one at all, he builds it too close to the river and upon the spring rains it is also destroyed. This second destruction leads to Allie’s mental break down and ultimately his demise.
I think that Allie is so desperate to find a center that he is at a lost as to what that might be. He’s not sure if he should be an American patriot, debasing foreign goods and living a truly American life of farming or if he should leave it all behind and create his own center. It is the destruction of his created center that leaves him inept.

Congo CanibalsI found Heart of Darkness very interesting in the context of the sociological articles we read for last week. Marlow, along with the rest of his lot really do not fit into any of the confines that the sociologist set out, at least not particularly well. They are not searching for authenticity at all. Instead their search is for money, a way to best make use of this land in another continent of which they have gained possession. It’s as if they’re looking at the Congo from their ship as if it were an aquarium, separated from them by a pane of glass.

No re-entrySociologists Erik Cohen and Donald Redfoot portray existential tourism, going native, as the pinnacle of all touristic experiences. In reading The Sheltering Sky and Daisy Miller one gets a very different feeling about the results of leaving ones past life behind and assimilating fully into a new culture. Franz Kafka said, and is quoted at the beginning of book three of The Sheltering Sky, the book where Kit truly does go native, “From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.” But is it really the point that must be reached? Are the consequences of going past the edge of everything you’ve previously known worth the new knowledge you may gain in doing so? The sociologists romanticize this notion; however, the novels seem to serve as cautionary tales about taking travel too far, stepping too far outside ones cultural bounds.

Route 6 MapJack Kerouac’s On the Road romanticizes the semi-nomadic lifestyle of cross-country trekking like no other book I have read. He makes a conscious choice to withhold the less glamorous aspects of hitchhiking and makes it sound as if anyone could undertake what he did. While there are moments of despair, such as his initial attempt at leaving New York for Denver in which he finds himself at Route 6 without any way of proceeding forward and ends up in tears having to return to his starting point, the vast majority of the novel focuses on all the good parts of traveling across the country with little means. He stresses the incredible conversations with various truck drivers rather than the lack of sleep that those conversations produced. The same is true of his time on the flat bed truck. They have to lie on a hard truck bed yet rather than talking about that and the biting wind he talks about the people with which he shares the experience. Drinking whiskey and huddling together under a tarp they offset these effects without really mentioning them. Even in his time working in Mexico he does not stress his hardships but the wealth of experience he is accumulating. I really enjoy this focus on the characters throughout the novel. No matter where he is along his journey, his discourse focuses on the people more so than the places themselves. I think this is very apt in terms of travel in general.

Bou Noura, AlgeriaI see the travel in Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky as not dissimilar to that of The Sun Also Rises. In both cases the characters are traveling as a means of escape, or at least in hope that things will be different in the new place. Port and Kit seem to think that as they go to each new place that their feelings towards each other will change, that they will regain the romance and love for one another that they have lost. This reminded me of Jake and his hope that in each new local things would be different between him and Brett. Even the dialogue between Port and Kit was reminiscent of Hemmingway’s in such places like p. 159 where Kit speaks of a cigarette as a metaphor for life and says “I’m always conscious of the unpleasant taste and of the end approaching.” I also found it interesting that like in The Sun Also Rises, when travel loses all ability to delude the couple from their issues they turn to drinking. Port, speaking of drinking, says, “I wanted to be with you. And besides, I always imagine that somehow I’ll be able to penetrate to the interior of somewhere. Usually I get just about to the suburbs and get lost,” (161). Port goes as far as to dispose of Tunner to rid himself and Kit of any distraction in settling things between them. Yet, shortly thereafter, comes down with a lethal malady that ends all hope of their feelings being restored, save for Kits slight rekindling in her husband’s time of need. I think this serves to further Bowles’ point that no amount of travel can put one far enough away from their troubles for them to be lost entirely.