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Sometimes you just have to go. I wouldn’t say I learned this from Jack Kerouac or his literary stand-in Sal Paradise, but it didn’t hurt to see that notion reflected in someone else’s experience, no matter how different. For me, that idea had been gestating for a little more than eighteen years of life in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The name makes the place sound worse than it is. Even when I wanted nothing more than to leave, I would never say that it had treated me poorly. But just as turtles will grow to fit their tanks and then cease growing, I felt stunted in my environment. I was a big fish in a small pond (or a big turtle in a small tank, to perpetuate the metaphor) and I had to leave Ypsilanti if I was going to make anything out of myself. I think the plan came into something of its final form when I was in 8th grade and becoming a zoologist specializing in big cats became less and less glamorous. Looking back, I don’t know what really gave me the journalism bug, but I decided then and there that I would write for big name magazines one day. In this Internet age, it didn’t take me long to figure out what USNews.com considered the best journalism schools in the country. So that’s when I made up my mind about my undergraduate education as an 8th grader: Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Chinese Character for "Love"On a quick note before I begin, I found A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers to be a perfect airport novel: short chapters, simple but effective language, and engaging plot, and a sympathetic protagonist. While I thought I would be out for the hour and a half that it takes to fly from LaGuardia to Detroit Metro at six in the morning, I found myself keeping my seat-neighbors awake with the overhead reading light because I didn’t want to stop reading the novel.

My own enjoyment aside, I found that A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers had one of the best insights into travel of any novel we have tackled. While The Evening of the Holiday handled a relationship birthed out of the temporality of travel, Dictionary gives us a view into the ways human beings seek out connections (both physical and not) when in a new land. Z may be getting better at English everyday, but her body speaks the same language that every human body does. Severed from real verbal exchanges, Z and her English beau cling together in a form of physical communication that bonds them together without having to know whatever the other is saying all of the time.

Italian FrescoI need to start by saying that I relapsed a bit into the Daisy Miller Syndrome with this novella. I blazed through The Comfort of Strangers and I really, really enjoyed it. The plot was very compelling and I was interested (and/or horrified) to see where the characters were headed. With The Evening of the Holiday I never felt that compulsion. I could appreciate the text, but the story stagnated for me and Shirley Hazzard’s rich writing left me a little wanting for content, not form. It didn’t help that Tancredi didn’t seem sympathetic at all and Sophie became downright unpleasant to me. I didn’t buy the hesitancy, the unwillingness, the leap into love,” and the novella’s eventual close. As with James’ similarly short work, I found myself appreciating but not enjoying.

This isn’t to say that The Evening of the Holiday doesn’t have some great things to say about travel. I was struck early on when Tordini says, “And then this Italian says to his friend: ‘Why are you always with foreign girls? What is it they do that’s so special, these foreign girls?’ […] And the friend replies: ‘They leave.’” Not long ago I read an article (which I can’t find now) about how cross-cultural relationships often begin with sexual encounters and that isn’t necessarily a bad or shallow thing. It is an example of the unspoken language of the body overcoming the spoken language barriers. It’s also a comment on the brevity of travel, whether extended or not. Travel often implies a return, or tourism does at least. This can make what happens on a holiday seem very impermanent and inconsequential – “What happens in Italy stays in Italy.”

Robert & Colin: I was SO much more creeped out when I realized that Christopher Walken was in this film.There is NOTHING comforting about the strangers in Ian McEwan’s novel The Comfort of Strangers. Quite the opposite is true for Caroline and, in the end, for Colin as well. McEwan’s novel is really a thriller, or it was for me at least. I finished this novel more quickly than any other we’ve tackled in class. Yes, it’s short, but I’ll say I was quite a bit more interested in finishing this than I was Death in Venice or, dare I say, Daisy Miller. In fact, I jumped on this short work before we had finished talking about To Catch a Predator, Venice Edition.

What I found so thrilling wasn’t the promise of sadomasochism that didn’t manifest until the novel’s close, but the constant, nagging “why” of it all. Colin and Mary are on a positively exhausted trip until a stranger comes into their lives and reinvigorates them, flipping their boring vacation into an exercise in passion. Why does this shady Robert character so affect the non-couple?

The biggest question of the novel is “why return?” Robert’s attention soon turns sinister and menacing but, sure enough, this doesn’t scare Colin or Mary away and Colin pays for it. Personally, this is where the travel connection came in. Forget the hazy Venice setting or the fact that they are on vacation; the real travel theme is buried in the allure of Robert and Caroline.

Creeper Alert!: Don't talk to strangers, kids.

    Well, that was a weird one. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is an odd short piece of fiction that was inspired by some true events, which only adds to the unsettling aspects of the novella. A well-respected author, Gustav von Aschenbach, begins to feel uneasy about the repetition of his pattern and so he departs for an island in Venice to vacation and refresh himself. Instead of being refreshed, he instead develops decidedly impure feelings and the city mirrors his decent into corruption.

    Once Aschenbach reaches the Grand Hôtel des Bains on Lido Island he immediately is enraptured by a striking Polish youth whose name he learns is Tadzio. What starts as an artistic appreciation of the youth’s features and poise is soon revealed as a more erotic and unchaste attraction, and Aschenbach comes into the role of the pederast many centuries after is has gone out of style and social acceptance.

    Even though the novella presents this attraction in vivid prose, Mann doesn’t let it become a positive outlook on the pederasty. Aschenbach notes at several points in the novella that he feels less than healthy, and that he is suffering from the weather of Venice. When the news becomes more open that Venice is suffering from a health risk, Aschenbach seeks to know more to warn Tadzio’s family. The discovery that the epidemic is really cholera parallels Aschenbach’s continually more open admiration of the youth, as if the city is mirroring his growing corruption. Aschenbach finally succumbs to his ill health after he fails to fall Tadzio out into the surf.

Allie Fox: No lie, this came up when I searched "Temple of the Self" - what a coincidence that it happened to be Harrison Ford!Right off the bat, let it be said that one cannot push Allie into one of Cohen’s categories. The man, the character, is too multifaceted to shoehorn into one of five groups. Allie’s relationship to a center both within America and abroad is complex. While in America he mouths off about the country and distrusts its educational system. But in the same breath he might complain about outsourced goods and services and refuse to buy anything not made in the good old US of A. Some say that dissent is the highest form of patriotism, and Allie has dissent boiled into his blood. Does this make the man a patriot to America because he has such lofty goals for American values? Or does this make him a sort of hypocritical critic because he expresses his values but leaves rather than fighting to implement them on a grander scale than his own domain? As far as a spiritual center, Allie can quote verse as well as a preacher and turn right around and dismiss God’s ability to intervene or even to exist.

Framed Narrative

How often have you started telling a story, failed, and had to excuse yourself with, “You had to be there”? How often have you heard this? If not a story, how about a picture that “doesn’t do it justice”? People often fail to express themselves in words or images, especially when traveling. Travel is seen as an experience, which, by definition, is experienced. The recollection of an experience can only go so far in imparting the benefits (or detriments) of actually living it. But if a picture or photograph is worth a thousand words and these works of art are often framed, why not apply the frame to the thousand or more words that make up the worth of the image?

Joseph Conrad uses the frame tale method to tell the true narrative of his novella Heart of Darkness. Conrad lets the tale unfold from Marlow to the narrator and this allows the narrator’s views and opinions to change with the telling of the tale, just as the reader’s does. Through this framing format the reader is allowed to experience the telling of the tale firsthand in a secondhand manner because it is through the evolving view of the narrator. And like the person who is unable to articulate an event or a photo that doesn’t capture a subject’s grandeur and presence, Marlow’s description sometimes fails to put the experience into words.

The Coliseum: A Center for Recreation, Past and Present.As a reader, the short duration of Henry James’s novella Daisy Miller is spent seeing Daisy through the eyes of Winterbourne, questioning her morals and her knowledge (or lack thereof) of societal customs. In the context of travel, one wonders where a tiresome flirt like Daisy fits on the spectrum between tourist and traveler, and how that distinction is made when a character seems so intrinsically shallow and intentionally not fleshed out. But it is not just Daisy whose status as an American abroad comes into question, but the cold expatriate Winterbourne as well. While Daisy’s position as a tourist or traveler is suspect because of her apparently complete ignorance of societal norms both at home and abroad and her disinterest in gaining anything substantial from her trip, Winterbourne’s place on a touristic spectrum is questionable because of the manner in which he has fully embraced European society and bears little connection to his birthplace of America. In his article “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences,” Erik Cohen seeks to argue that breaking down one’s status as a tourist or traveler (henceforth referred to only as a tourist) into either a superficial trip-taker or a pilgrim on a quest for true authenticity is not adequate.

Route 6: Wanderlust-inducing.

It didn’t take me long to connect with some of the themes of On The Road. I can’t lie and say that the previous novels felt relatable to me at all -- they didn’t. I have never left this country (Canada for five minutes does not count when you live in Michigan) and I don’t have a strong desire to. Since this massive journey takes place in our own sprawling country and Kerouac hitches through so many places I have visited myself, a wall has fallen between the text and my ability to relate to it.

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest time of all, when I didn’t know who I was -- I was far from home, haunted and tired with travel [...] and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.”

TangierIn his review of the Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky, playwright Tennessee Williams said of the lead character Port that “he is a member of the New York intelligentsia who became weary of being such a member and set out to escape it in remote places. Escape it he certainly does. He escapes practically all the appurtenances of civilized modern life. Balanced between fascination and dread, he goes deeper and deeper into this dreamlike ‘awayness.’”
Williams was comparing Port to Bowles himself. Bowles spent a deal of time in Gertrude Stein’s artistic circle of friends in France before going to Tangier in 1931 on her advice. When he moved permanently 16 years later, he said, “I came here because I wanted to write a novel.”
And write one he did. The terse prose, the unfortunate fate of the two main characters, and the lively and varied supporting cast all bolster The Sheltering Sky. And though Bowles didn’t actually meet the end that his literary stand-in Port did, there is still plenty to be garnered about travel fiction and reality from the parallel between author and subject.
Port, and by extension Bowles, says that, “he did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time.” If we deem one who spends a small amount of time in another area and then returning to an area of comfort then Bowles has no chance of being mistaken for a tourist. His was essentially a relocation if anything.