Exit, no re-entry

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.

Going native can take several different forms. Many see it as a spiritual journey such as “the person who encounters in his visit to an Israeli kibbutz a full realization of his quest for human communion; the seeker who achieved enlightenment in and Indian asrama; the traveler who finds in the life of a remote Pacific atoll the fulfillment of his cravings for simplicity and closeness to nature” (Cohen, 190). One can see these three forms of spiritual enlightenment in Daisy, Port, and Kit respectively. Daisy finds communion with Giovanelli and the other Italians because of their less proper or cautious ways. Port, in the African desert, finds a new spiritual center, if not completely enlightened, in his last moments. And Kit finds her inner carnal and primitive being. Because of the supposed enlightenment that goes along with going native, it has been deemed by sociologists as the most profound of touristic experiences. Cohen suggests that the profundity emanates from “the quest for meaning,” that’s intrinsic to changing ones center (192).

While Daisy may not go native to the extreme of Kit, she certainly finds her center in the Italian culture, that of Giovanelli. On arriving in Rome she begins to go, “about alone with her foreigners,” (32). She immediately sees more of herself in the less formal culture of the Italians for this is more her nature to start off with. She represents an example of, as Cohen would put it, someone who has been alienated from their true center and discovers it upon traveling. She feels discontent with modern culture, the constraints of society. Redfoot explains her “type” of tourist, her version of going native, quite aptly in saying that, “These tourists are literally “engaged in saving their own souls” through an explicit rejection of modern culture,” (301).

This rejection of her proprietary culture has grave consequences for Daisy however. Daisy herself becomes completely carefree with regards to those consequences. After their confrontation at the Colosseum Daisy yells to Winterbourne, “I don’t care whether I have Roman fever or not!” (James, 61). This marks the full realization of her ‘center’ as Cohen would say in the native Roman culture. The existential tourism that the sociologists so glorify ends, for Daisy, in a not so glamorous way. She dies of fever without Giovanelli anywhere in sight. She was interred in Rome, her new center, but had to pay the ultimate price in order to be able to reach the point of existential tourism (James, 63). In James’ time it was perhaps more aimed at dissuading young women from pursuing a life of coquetry, but, in modern times, through the sociological lens with respect to tourism it shows that going native is perhaps not as romantic as it has been portrayed by scholars.

Port too, in The Sheltering Sky, shares a native experience ending similarly to that of Daisy, though his time as a native is more prolonged. For Port “Tourism is,” as Routledge says, “a kind of secular pilgrimage on a quest for authenticity.” Even that language in describing tourism so romanticizes the idea of going native. The words “pilgrimage” and “quest” allude to the profound nature that the sociologists associate with going native. There is nothing profound in Port’s experience.

Port begins his existential tour in a brothel. “He felt her soft arms slowly encircle his neck, and her lips on his forehead. Almost immediately a dog began to howl in the distance,” (Bowles, 32). This represents the first move towards the native in Ports quest. The howling dog, as it often does in literature represents a warning, a final sign to Port that there will be no turning back. Yet, what has he gained other than some cheap sex with a filthy prostitute? Of course he further comes to the realization that he is unhappy with Kit and with the trappings of modern life, but didn’t he already know that? Was that not the reason they came to Africa in the first place?

As the novel progresses Port becomes more and more obsessed with authenticity, with discovery. After yet another fight with Kit he returns to his room and thinks, “The rocks and the sky were everywhere, ready to absolve him…As he turned back into the room something bright drew his eye to the mirror on the open door of the wardrobe. It was the new moon shining in through the other window,” the window to the native, the window that he was already climbing through (162). In his obsession with authenticity, his grasping of the native, he still fails to really hold on to anything of profundity. Soon after his dive into the realm of the native he takes ill and his “commitment to getting behind the “veil of illusion” to absolute reality,” is unable to be fulfilled (Redfoot, 302). Port does have one final moment of clarity in which he envisions that, “A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky’s clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose,” (229). It could be said that this is the profundity that he is searching for. But really this vision could have taken place regardless of whether he was traveling existentially at all. It is the simple chemical reaction that happens when one dies.

Thus, nothing profound is reached. He loses his life in the pursuit of authenticity. His ‘native’ moments mostly take place in brothels and other establishments of ill repute. The sociologist may argue that his death and commitment are indeed romantic and make the experience profound, but it seems that this is a thin veiled attempt to preserve their argument.

Kit, out of anyone, has the most native of experiences. Hers “is a journey from chaos into another cosmos, from meaninglessness to authentic existence,” (Cohen, 191). She too loses herself in the process; she is rendered unable to function in the modern world. She is not, as the sociologists suggest in their articles, able to travel from one center to another and only feel exiled in the other. She is stuck in her new center. Her change into the native is marked by a literal dive into a pool of water, a figurative re-baptism. “She immersed herself completely [and thought]: “I shall never be hysterical again”;” “for the first time since her childhood she was seeing objects clearly. Life was suddenly there,” (241). Her native experience is one of the primitive. She reduces herself back to the most innocent of human beings, an infant.

After being raped for the first time, a primitive experience indeed, Kit explains that she feels “alone in a vast and unrecognizable world, but alone only for a moment… this friendly carnal presence was there with her,” (267). Becoming a native awakens her primitive desires and places out of her all her previous wants and trappings. After being “rescued” and brought back to civilization she is essentially inutile. Mrs. Ferry describes her as looking like a “partially Europeanized servant” that she had “really hit bottom” (309). What Mrs. Ferry does not realize is that there is no getting Kit back to who she was before. On being left alone for a moment Kit takes a streetcar to “the edge of the Arab quarter…the end of the line,” (313). She goes to get lost in the Casbah forever, having lost all sense of who she was before. While for Kit individually this escape from civilization is a romantic one, the larger consequences are vast. Even with these romantic notions, the fact that she is unable to return, to live between centers depending on where she is, seems to point towards a criticism by Bowles of her having taken it too far. He himself lives in Algiers but admits that he is more of the “experimental tourist”, still feeling like an outsider. Though he may wish to go native like his characters, he too has realized the consequence and is thus warning future travelers that the idea is not quite so romantic as the theorists would like one to believe.

The general issue comes down to theory versus the practical. While traveling existentially to a place and fully embodying their culture would seem in theory to be the ultimate goal of any traveler, the reality is that in practice it is unattainable. The practical implementation of such a theory leaves its executor either vastly unfulfilled in their quest or lost to the rest of the world, either in death or in spirit.