stella's blog

Tres Cruces, Peru.

Away

I am on a plane to Peru. I look down at Miami at night, and it looks like a giant constellation creature with lights pulsing through its veins. I convince myself that that is what it really is. I feel like something is about to happen to me.

Six hours later, I am on a quiet smaller plane, flying from Lima to Cusco. I am looking out the window at some suspended otherworld of a sunrise, the cloud line below thick and stretching out in all directions like it’s solid ground. A few mountains come above it, snow-capped. Everything is glowing soft sunrise colors dulled by the dusty window. The flight attendants give us tiny sweet muffins with chocolate chips. I am deliriously tired. I think, I am going to see the sunrise from a mountaintop above the clouds before I leave.

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The other characters we’ve read about have for the most part been educated, middle-class people who knew exactly what they were getting into when traveling and what to do when they got there. Z is a peasant, and her limited education in China makes her destination initially incomprehensible to her. Guo connects her with a lover who is a product of his time, his culture, who is totally foreign to her, with his past of homosexuality, his postmodern art, his drifter personality, his rejection of intellectualism. Z doesn’t understand what makes her lover who he is, and vice versa. There is a chasm between East and West that love can’t breach, because neither of them understands love’s place in the context of the other’s life and the larger culture they are part of.

 Guo communicates this through Z’s confusion with language. She not only has to translate words from Chinese to English, but translate what the concepts mean to the society, like the meaning of home. Even the sentence structures imply different ways of thinking, different ways of understanding the world and the self. It’s almost impossible for someone so young and naïve as Z to understand English culture because of these barriers, and the miscommunication with her older, well-travelled lover suggest that more life experience doesn’t make it much easier to break them down. Their arguments where they say to each other “you Chinese” and “you English” are evidence of that.

Once Tancredi and Sophie fall in love, her time in Italy is always overshadowed by its looming end. Her awareness of the transience of her happiness gives it a sharp edge. They both know where it will lead: eventually, she will have to go home.

Sophie approaches leaving as if there were no alternative. Then Luisa points out to her that she could stay with Tancredi forever, or at least a long time. It becomes clear that this is no longer just a vacation - Sophie is confronted with a choice between two lives. She has avoided dealing with the idea of going home until now, and suddenly, almost frantically tells Luisa she is going right away.

Maybe her choice comes from the mindset that she came temporarily; this life can never belong to her, because she lives in England, and Tancredi lives in Italy. It was never something that was supposed to happen. At one point Luisa wonders about how different things would be if she had another life in another place. It all comes down to circumstance. Tancredi has a wife and children, and Sophie has another life at home. She also feels that who Tancredi loves is her "on holiday" self - someone without things like bills to pay and daily routines. Sophie loses herself in emotion for a while, but eventually she feels she has to withdraw and go home, exhibiting the prudence of her mother. But the choice to reject a life elsewhere, "less lonely but harder, more imperfect but bearable" will always haunt her. In dealing with rough emotions, seems like the only way to stay sane is to pretend that what you decided was the only possible choice.

Venice alley

"Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends."

This second epigraph plays out in the Comfort of Strangers in an extremely disturbing way. Colin and Mary continually get lost in Venice with or without their street maps, preoccupied with their relationship and disoriented by unfamiliarity. They have trouble fulfilling even their most basic needs, like hunger, when they are not in the hotel. After the first night they spend with Robert, they can't find their way back to the hotel so they sleep on the street, and can't even find a glass of water in the morning. In this context Robert invites them back to his house: they are comforted by beds and water and intrigued by the couple's mysteriousness. They seem to lose their intuition in this scene. They are still totally submissive and don't begin to distrust Robert and Caroline even when they see the razors and whips, when Robert punches Colin in the stomach, when Caroline admits to watching them while they slept.

Aschenbach's trip to Venice is a dark one. His impulse to travel comes in a wave of youthful emotion that he hasn't felt in a long time. He reigns it in completely at first, being a man of discipline, but then decides he will go on a short vacation. His self-imposed order is suffocating him and he needs to be revitalized. He seeks the lust for life that he's lost - he seeks youth. He wants to relax by the seaside somewhere familiar but exotic. When he arrives in Venice he adorns it with grand Greek mythological imagery. But the tone is also ominous with the gondolier who won't let him off where he asks, and with the smell of disinfectant and other references to the disease plaguing the city.

When Aschenbach sees Tadzio, the physical ebodiment of classical form, a person replaces a place as his center. The city becomes just a backdrop. When his suitcase is sent to the wrong place, he elatedly takes the excuse to stay because he knows that his pain at leaving Venice was really pain at leaving Tadzio. The luggage seals his fate. After this point he is changed, he becomes obsessed with the 14-year-old to the point that he stalks he and his family around the streets of Venice. Part of why he allows himself to act the way he does is because he's in a foreign country, a stranger. He gives in completely to eros and idle pleasures; he becomes the Dionysian flipside of his previous self. His life in the mountains was ordered, disciplined, and aescetic. Passion degrades him because he has repressed it for so long that he can't control it. The disease in the city mirrors Aschenbach's internal fall. Venice's physical beauty, and the facade of the authorities that everything is fine, barely veils the corruption that lies underneath.

Allie Fox leaves America to escape the "I just work here" attitude, market manipulation by people like Polski, outsourcing and the exploitation of foreign workforces, the popular acceptance that things falls apart, the production and consumption of goods that are poorly made and overpriced, et cetera. At the same time, he views a "savage" as anyone who looks at the world and does not believe that they can change it. So why does he go to Honduras when the problems are in America? His real motivation is to create his own world, where he can control everything, not change the world as it is. And it isn't as easy as he thought.

By contrast, Charlie isn't old enough to be sick of his own society. He feels the same culture shock as his father in Honduras, but has no fantasies about the wilderness and "starting from scratch" waiting to be fulfilled by it. Unlike Allie he can differentiate between America's comforts and downsides, and doesn't understand why they had to leave. Charlie's struggle calls into question Allie's decision to bring his family to a strange new world. He searches for familiarity abroad, not difference and exoticism like the central characters in most travel novels. "The Acre" that he builds with the other children, where they use stones as money and talk on coconut telephones, fulfills his longing for home.

"But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know..."

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness inverts the core principle of European imperialism: that civilization conquers barbarity. Conrad characterizes the natives as savages, but blurs the distinction between civilization and barbarity when he describes "civilized" people as equally primitive. Kurtz, the ultimate expression of the evils of imperialism, is unrecognizably transformed by the irresistable frenzy and dark heartbeat of the jungle. He is the Company's master of exploitation; he comes to take and let the natives die like flies, but the more he takes, the more the Congo infects him. The wilderness awakens forgotten and brutal human instincts in him; he comes to embody the primitivity that he came to conquer.

Sunset over the SaharaSociologist Eric Cohen points out alienation as a key factor in motivating travel. The novels On the Road and The Sheltering Sky substantiate this claim: the characters in each are disconnected from their own societies and search for meaning elsewhere. Sal Paradise and Port are both drifters and travel without specific time frames or destinations. The questions remain of what they wish to escape, what it is they think they can find "out there", and why authentic experiences come so easily to them.

People usually turn their minds off on buses and planes with magazines or headphones or sleeping pills. Kerouac makes the road something mythic. On the Road is the antithesis of shutting out life just because you're waiting to get somewhere. As a hitchhiker Sal sees the physical and cultural landscapes of the mammoth American nation shifting before him, forever building up the romance of his destination the closer he gets to it. He travels through the states whooping in the night, not just to Frisco and Denver and LA but through the expanses of desert, rolling fields of wheat, tiny towns, glowing hills, and wild characters that lay in between. The gradual progression gives Kerouac a grasp of the geography and people of different regions in America, and he has the ability to draw out their souls with language.

People play a vital role in the experience of place in The Sun Also Rises. With his friends Barnes is an expat and a writer. When mobs of tourists are around he and his circle resent the flood of foreigners into France, because they ruin the naturality of places. A place loses emotional value when it's too commercialized, when it is overflowing with people who did not stumble upon it and decide to "utitilize it" but who came for a superficially authentic experience. It is the way you treat the places you visit that makes the distinction between tourist and traveler.

Alone, i.e. when absorbed in though and not socializing, Jake is a traveler. He continually describes the scenery and the weather and the people on the trip to Spain. Similarly in Paris he talks about what he sees in the cafes and on the streets. He has lived in the city for some time but he is still not quite a local. He is an expat. He works in Paris, drinks there, has friends there, but he describes his lifestyle as a traveler.