Carmen Sandiego's blog

“France?” She exclaimed, her eyes so wide they made her look a little dumb, “Why would you want to go there?”

“Dunno” I shrugged, picking up a sugar cube and dipping it into my coffee mindlessly. “Why not?” The sugar was slowly disintegrating until I had to drop it in or get my fingers wet. “I mean, anywhere’s better than staying here. Right?”

She looked at me incredulously. Man, I hated being American. Everywhere else people didn’t mind strangers. Here it was like being strangled, slowly. Nobody cared about the rest of the world. I mean here they wouldn’t even listen to music in different languages! Man, I hated America.

Her hand brushed mine away from the sugar bowl. It bothered her when I wasted sugar, something about calories. She could be so obnoxious at times.

“You know, going somewhere else isn’t going to solve anything. You can’t run from who you are. Remember Cohn?” There was the Hemmingway again. The only thing she knew about travel she had read in books. That’s another thing about being American, we read books about other places and believed them immediately. Why couldn’t I have been Italian or French? They aren’t nearly as ignorant.

“Yeah, Cohn was an idiot- Look, I’m going to France. It’s no use arguing with me, I already have a ticket. When I come back early because I’m still depressed, then you can look at me and tell ‘I told you so’. Can we talk about something else?”

She drank her coffee with a spoon, slurping loudly with every sip. After a few minutes, she got up and brought both of our cups to the sink.

“Lilly, are you at least going to talk to him before you leave?”

“Talk to who?”

It is interesting that until now, our class hasn’t been presented with the idea of “culture shock”. A traveler, moving to a country even slightly different than one’s own, is always confronted with the same question: How do I behave in this country? Z’s experiences in Europe can all be explained by this sense of floundering, being lost in a place where everything is foreign. Somehow, in the other books we have read (except maybe heart of darkness) the main character has never quite needed help navigating their way around a new place; they have seemed to slip into the culture easily, or not even questioned the differences. What I liked about this book, was the clear sense that Z was lost. There are many ways that the reader can tell she is out of place, first because she states it herself. But even if we were not told outright, the author does a beautiful job of translating Z’s state of confusion.

Because I’m “handing” this blog in late, I had the chance to sit in class and think about travel with regards to The Evening of the Holiday. What occurred to me was the strange proposition of Sophie’s that Tancredi doesn’t know her because she is on holiday, and that she isn’t the same person when she is on holiday. For some reason, this sits oddly with me, because somehow, it’s true. We travel, knowing that our journey will only be for a short amount of time, and that we will be returning. Those who travel, as Sophie says, are not fully themselves while they do so, because they are relaxed, not worrying, or simply putting on a different “façade”. Not that people are fake when they travel, they just simply act differently in unfamiliar surroundings than they would in their everyday routines. This is the reason for which Sophie says Tancredi cannot know her fully.
One of the first questions that we covered in this class was: “why do we travel?” One of the reasons people travel, among many others, is to find a change for themselves. We go to other places to look for this change, this epiphany, which will turn us around and let us figure out who we are, and what will make our lives better. Yet, taking into perspective the idea that we are not ourselves when we travel, how can we change? If we go into a different place with a different outlook on things, then we can’t truly adapt what we’ve learned back into our own daily routines, because when we return home, we leave the “traveler” in us behind. If Sophie cannot go away to a different country and fall in love, truly know somebody, then how can any traveler come to know themselves?

“The Comfort of Strangers” has many of the common “Travel Fictions” built into it. Like many couples, Mary and Colin have gone to Venice (if I can call it that) in order to reignite a dying flame. They have the expectation that travel in foreign places will rekindle their love. What is uncommon about the plot of the book, is what begins to happen to them in this foreign place. The beginning of the story takes place as one would expect. The two have not found anything new in their lives, despite the strange new surroundings, and instead have established a routine as they might have back in America. It is not the new place which incites their newfound love, but instead, it is a new person. Somebody who scares them both, and with whom they both seek to avoid encounters. It is not clear at first what makes them uneasy around Robert but one can assume that his mannerisms impede their “personal bubbles”. Especially once it becomes apparent that his definition of love is dying for or killing someone else. He shares too much information, too soon.

I’m going to admit it: I liked this book. While the subject matter in itself is uncomfortable, the book is well written and does a good job of conveying tragedy and satire on Aschenbach. The physical descriptions allowed me to see everything vividly, and the quality of the writing was good (of course it was, if it’s a classic). I began reading the book with utter disdain for Aschenbach because of the way he was talked about. He seemed to me to be pompous, well written, and just a little too stiff. But as the book carried on and Tadzio was introduced, the reader, (or, me, at least), is compelled to feel pain and pity for this man who once had such great morals and has now taken a fall from grace. The book makes many references back to itself, and the one which I found the most moving, or effective, was at the very end. In fact, the very last scene is when I decided that I enjoyed the book.

I don’t think I am alone in saying that I find Mr. Fox to be an incredibly annoying person. He reminds me of an idea that Jake presents in “The Sun Also Rises”: you can’t run from your problems. Allie Fox seems to be trying to create a new world by moving out into what he considers “savage” land. But he has forgotten that there is a population there already, and that however primitive they may be, he will still face his same problems. The problem with Allie Fox is that he is too cynical about everything. Changing locations will not change who he is, or the fact that what he stands for is very hard for other people to drop their daily lives and accept. He is going into Honduras and bringing all of his problems with him. He does not listen to others, nor accept that they might be right at times. He cannot adapt to anybody else’s culture, and does not seem to see that these people live the way they do perhaps for a reason. According to himself, he is always right, and he feels the need to prove that to others. It is as if he wants to fit in somewhere and the way he thinks he can do this is by impressing people. What he doesn’t do is see that in order to be fully relatable or accepted he must also accept and relate to others.

“…and yet it was not altogether depressing that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on- which is exactly what you wanted it to do.” As a child Marlow was attracted to the empty places on a map. They drew him towards something glamorous and new. He seems to be pulled towards the unknown, with nothing but the goal of keeping on and watching people. This is the type of traveler introduced in Heart of Darkness, the wanderer and the one that I feel I can identify with the most, although this is a bold statement. True there are others, men who are searching for ivory, power, and control, but there is prevalence of searchers and observers. These are men who are always on the move. There is no final destination in mind, simply a small series of goals which, added up, lead to nothing but the next goal, the next place. Marlow moves on. In Heart of Darkness he is moving towards Kurtz but the travel itself is just as important. Disregarding what he finds when he finally gets to Kurtz, Marlow’s overall search is one of glamour and movement. This is reflected in the “harlequin” whom he meets before Kurtz. “I went a little farther,’ he said ‘then still a little farther- till I had gone so far that I don’t know how I’ll ever get back. Never mind. Plenty time. I can manage.” “He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through.” Marlow is awestruck, as am I.

A reoccurring theme in travel is that of authenticity. People going abroad do not wish to be perceived as “Daisy Miller” types, innocent and ignorant Americans. Instead, the overall goal is to have an authentic journey with authentic experiences in authentic places. With such a focus on the word itself, the search for the goal can become more important than its achievement. Erik Cohen has defined several levels of tourism beginning at the first, or recreational level, to the fifth, or existential level (Cohen, 183). The generally accepted way of thinking is that one should strive for the highest level of travel, because in it lays the most authentic experience. It is the reason for which people wish to be seen as “travelers” and not “tourists”, they believe that one is more genuine than the other. This thinking, however, is flawed and too simplistic. This can be seen by taking the examples of Daisy Miller, from Daisy Miller by Henry James, and Port, Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. These two important characters are polar opposites of one another. Yet we can observe that while Port reaches a higher level of travel, this does not make his experience any more authentic than that of Daisy. The achievement of authenticity in travel is not necessarily directly proportional to ones “status” as a traveler or tourist.

Burroughs and BowieIs Sal really trying to get anywhere? What I find so appealing about the characters and feel of this novel, and the entire Beat Generation, is that there is no destination. There is a sense of wanderlust. He seems to be searching for something, but it is unclear as to what this something is. He moves from place to place, exploring, living, barley getting by, and then getting antsy, moving on. The fact that Sal hitchhikes for the first section of the book also adds greatly to the feeling of wanderlust. How much of a plan can you really have when your real travel is in the hands of somebody you have never met? Although Kerouac found great inspiration in his travels, and most of the beats did form their ideas around these travels, there is no real sense of purpose, or destination. This is what is amazing about the so-called “three man generation” and On The Road, the lack of reasoning. It is as if they have found the extreme side of escapism, constant motion, heavy use of drugs, never settling, never making connections with people that could potentially tie them to one specific place. Are they disillusioned with the world? In a sense, they were the “Lost Generation” of their own times, but they didn’t have the same approach. The Beats managed to expatriate themselves while staying mainly in the United States. Instead of settling in a foreign country, they didn’t settle in their own country.

I wanted to juxtapose the Lyles and the main three characters. While one can write off the Lyle’s as being character examples of the “typical tourists” I do not think they are as simple as that. The Lyles are introduced as loud, interesting, and always bickering, attracting much attention. Mrs. Lyle’s inability to speak any language, and her refusal to admit this (such as when she is yelling “in French” at the boys who are looking at her car), makes her the perfect, stereotypical rich tourist. When Eric is introduced personally for the first time, when we see him with Port, Port makes the observation that Eric Lyle seems to want to be the only traveler in the area. The way in which Port notes this conveys the feeling that Port knows just as much as Eric Lyle, or at least believes that Lyle is being childish in his way of acting. Port, Kit, and Tunner seem to be more relaxed about their travels and get along better with those in the cultures around them. Or at least, that is the assumption that one can make if they don’t look too deeply into the story.