zach's blog

1. Dressing up.

Despite the promise that this last book, finally, would have no violent or perverse overtones, I still found elements of something like masochism in A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. Perhaps, after all, the act of travelling really is about taking pleasure from pain. Zhuang Xiao Qiao didn’t come to London to torture herself; in fact she tries at every opportunity to avoid exposing herself to pain. It’s her boyfriend, at the other end of the cultural barrier, who pushes both himself and her to undergo the torment of self-alienation.

This idea comes out prominently after the boyfriend pushes Zhuang to take her several-month-long tour of Europe. She is immediately pessimistic about it, seeing no value in putting herself through the same ordeal of isolation that she had just gotten over in Britain. It’s only out of her obedience to him that she follows the trip through, experiencing constant anxiety in one city after another. Not purely sadistic, Zhuang’s boyfriend has also spent a lifetime drifting from one life to another, leaving himself with as few ties to any place as possible. His motivation seems to be to experience this pain for its own sake, to sacrifice the comfort of stabile relationships just to prove that he doesn’t need them.

As in Death in Venice and The Comfort of Strangers, the setting of Italy played a significant role in The Evening in Holiday. I thought, however, that the Italies of Mann and McEwan had more in common with each other than with Hazzard’s, both in tone and in purpose. Obviously, the setting of The Evening of the Holiday was a far happier, less oppressive environment. But I also think it played a slightly different role. It was less compact than the others, less laden with foreboding imagery. In Death in Venice, the setting was used as an outward expression of Aschenbach, where Mann could indirectly reveal the character by displaying the city he so uncannily resembled. In The Comfort of Strangers it was a piece of evidence, where every casual reference secretly gives away the gruesome ending. But in The Evening of the Holiday, the setting was used less for our benefit than for the characters’.

This book should not have left me as speechless as it did. After all, the thought of a tourist leaving Italy alive by this point in the semester just sounds unrealistic. The trend has already been clearly established: an innocent foreigner decides to spend a couple months relaxing on vacation in another country. The inevitable result ranges between insanity and death. Only the message is still a mystery to me.

For the first hundred pages, the novel progresses easily. A young couple, having grown overly comfortable in the closeness of their relationship, decides to spice things up with a casual getaway in Venice. They accomplish this through their encounter with the foreign, namely Robert and Caroline. The plot then takes an abrupt plummet, and twenty pages later there’s another dead tourist in a Venetian morgue. From what I can gather, the plot is a hyperbolic metaphor. Robert and Caroline, in their exoticness and eccentricity, must represent in some way the broader Venetian experience. In this way, they loosely parallel the physical city in Death in Venice. From the beginning, they are portrayed as a benign, albeit surreptitious escape from the protagonists’ norm. Then, slowly, familiarity strips away the gilded exterior and exposes their darker reality. By the end, Robert and Caroline, like Aschenbach’s Venice, are shown to be horrifyingly decayed, morally in the one case, and culturally in the other.

Although I feel like the connection between Robert, Caroline and Venice is fairly simple, I still have a difficult time figuring out what McEwan intended for us to get out of the story. I can’t figure out what the reason was behind the grisly climax was, and especially how it related to the theme of travel. Instead, it still comes off to me as nothing but an R-rated Shymalan-esque plot twist.

The physical Venice in Thomas Mann’s novel is important not only within the plot, but as a mirror of Gustav von Aschenbach’s character. Its aesthetic depiction is never coincidental: its bleakness and gradual degradation follow alongside Aschenbach’s own downward spiral.
From the beginning, Venice is significant geographically. In Aschenbach’s first seizure of wanderlust, he is struck with a vision of “a tropical quagmire beneath a steamy sky… a kind of primordial wilderness of islands, marshes, and alluvial channels…” The terrain he fantasizes is the antithesis of the one he inhabits: cold, rigid northern Europe versus dark and steaming tropical swamps. The contrast is seen in artistic terms, where the north is his restrained, and the south his passionate side. Venice is a physical middle ground between these two extremes. While it retains its essential European civility, there is also a pervasive element of the exotic, like the Sirocco that blows air into the city all the way from North Africa.
As Aschenbach progressively slides into emotional decadence, Venice itself is transformed. His mental illness is set against the backdrop of an actual epidemic, so that there is an atmosphere of sickness both internally and externally. Strawberries that were ripe at the beginning of the novel are soft and diseased by the end, and the same location visited at different points has become overgrown with weeds. By the time Aschenbach dies, the city is bleak, septic, and nearly empty.

By moving his family down to a place as remote as the Mosquito Coast of Honduras Allie Fox is trying to escape the shallow, materialistic culture of contemporary America. Instead, he unwittingly becomes the embodiment of the most significant archetype of the Westerner abroad: the colonist. His goal of establishing an anti-American paradise in the heart of the South American jungle is ironically a very American one. His journey mirrors that of the first pilgrims, who cleared away their own unspoiled territory to re-forge civilization from the ground up.

Even Allie’s profession suits him perfectly for the role of the colonist. As an inventor, he is the ideal representative of industrialism. The “fat boy” he takes with him into the jungle signifies something as destructive to that environment as it’s real-life counterpart; even in theory, the ice-making machine fundamentally undermines his goal of escaping American society. Its inherent function is to modify nature to make it better suited to human use, which is incompatible with his intention to revert back to a more primitive state of living. Conveniences like the icemaker are only the first step in producing the culture of excess and gluttony that Allie was so desperate to leave behind.

"Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look like that) I would put my finger on it and say: When I grow up I will go there… But there was one yet-the biggest-the most blank, so to speak-that I had a hankering after."

What drives Marlowe more than anything else to seek out the dark “heart” of Africa is the fulfillment of a fantasy that reaches far back into his childhood. From this point in his life, he is driven by a fascination with the “blank spaces” on the map that separate all he knows in the world from whole continents of unadulterated newness. When he takes the job as a steamboat captain he isn’t entirely unlike the colonists who surround him. Only while they go to extract Africa’s material resources to expand the European sphere of influence, Marlowe goes simply to expand his own experience, by internally lifting the veil on Africa’s mysterious physical wildness.

In A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences, sociologist Erik Cohen describes the concept of a cultural “center” that every society possesses. He assigns to this center everything that represents a society’s most fundamental values, coming from culture, religion and politics. According to Cohen, it is a person’s relationship with his own culture’s center that defines his experiences abroad. Whether a person is a “tourist” or a “traveler” depends not on how he travels or for what length of time, but how his attunement to or alienation from the cultural centre of his society shapes what he is prepared to achieve by traveling.

Of all the characters discussed in the class, Winterbourne falls the lowest on Cohen’s spectrum of “centeredness.” He is the diversionary tourist, who drifts into a foreign center out of simple boredom. In this case, his own cultural background is that of the upper class American expatriate, a small but established community of families wandering freely throughout Europe. This community’s center is defined significantly by its belief in the superiority of highbred European culture, and by its emulation of European societal norms. However, like the typical diversionary tourist of Cohen’s essay, Winterbourne doesn’t feel the pull of the community he was born into. His alienation from his own cultural center led him to lead a life of relative isolation from his family and peers. They know nothing of his life in Geneva except that he “studies,” and has a relationship with a “very clever foreign lady.” (64)

I wrote this blog entry in three weeks on a roll of tracing paper.In a large part, Sal Paradise’s reasons for going “on the road” can be explained in the same simple way as Hemingway’s move to Europe. Mainstream post-World War II America, like mainstream post-World War I America, was a bad place to be an artist. It was an era single-mindedly driven by the demand for material growth. Interstates went up, middle-class whites fled to the suburbs, and the majority of cultural progress consisted of the next new advancement in dishwashers. But rather than escape America’s glossy surface by going abroad, he flees into its wild depths.
Race and poverty play a significant role in Sal’s escape. Driven away from the white mainstream, he and his fellow beats find liberation in the “fellahin” of backwater America. He unfailingly gets mixed up with every oppressed “outsider” community he encounters. He idealizes the untamed energy of black American bop, and romanticizes the resigned complacency of black and Latino workers. He turns hobos into an icon of the American spirit, seeing their eternal restlessness as the ultimate commitment to “hipness.”

This Is not Port.It took me, somehow, until about halfway through the book to realize that Port and Kit were actually married. Up until then, I had been thinking their “marriage” was only a trick to avoid unpleasantness with Arab hotelkeepers. When I did finally learn this, it was a revelation. I began to see a very real purpose to their physical place. With their marriage clearly in trouble, they go to Africa to try to reconnect with each other. What they are going through is essentially a second honeymoon.
As in a traditional honeymoon, the physical act of traveling is vital to what they are trying to accomplish. And in just the same way most newlyweds go on vacation to “discover” each other, Port and Kit go on their own journey for the sake of rediscovery. In order to find the real essence of their relationship, they remove themselves as much as possible from their shared past. Getting lost together is a way of, at least temporarily, starting fresh. As he gets deeper into the journey, Port begins to realize this on a conscious level: “Only then did he understand that he really wanted to know nothing about El Ga’a beyond the fact that it was isolated and unfrequented, that it was precisely those things he had been trying to ascertain about it.” He even goes as far as to consider going there without a passport, for the thrill of losing himself even further.