alison's blog

Actual Police Station, Actual Steps

At 3 o’clock in the morning, while people everywhere were going about their daily business, I sat on the steps outside of a Parisian police station. As I sat staring up at the starless night, I reflected upon the events that had led to this day’s peculiar end. The tense silence of my classmates filled my ears, broken only by the soft sobs of a girl sitting a few steps behind me. I know I probably should have been a bit more sensitive, but I couldn’t help it. I broke into spontaneous laughter. The sobbing behind me came to an abrupt finish. I turned around trying my hardest to stifle my giggles, but upon seeing the horrified look on the girl’s tear-streaked face, I broke into an even more intense guffaw. All of a sudden, my aggrieved classmate joined in my laughter. Soon, all twelve of us were crying the good kind of tears. It had been a long day, with a bit of a scary ending, but we all knew that it was going to become one hell of a good story someday.

The last two weeks had culminated into one of the most surreal and unexpected adventures of my entire life. I must explain something about this situation before proceeding. My sophomore year of high school, I felt a divide growing between my friends and I. It was a long time coming, but for the first time, I saw their behavior as immature rather than funny. So, on a whim, I signed up to go on a trip to Europe with my AP European History class. I knew of the other people going, but I couldn’t claim to really know them. Although we’d been classmates for years, I couldn’t count one among them as a friend. That’s why I did it. I guess I just wanted something new; I wanted different places and different faces. Most of all, I wanted an adventure; I wanted an escape. So I did. I ran away to Europe for two weeks with strangers, but came home with a better understanding of myself.

I wound up with some amazing stories, ranging from a snowball fight on a Swiss mountaintop to a midnight roller-skate race in Paris. It even provided me with the basis of this story: the night a bunch of AP students ended up at a foreign police station after a drunk Parisian man head-butted one particularly macho boy for “taking” his Harry Potter book. That summer, I came to know my classmates, but, better still, I came to know myself. The moment that I first broke into laughter, I realized that I had gone out into the world alone and survived. I had stuck myself into a situation that terrified me, but I made the best of it and came out stronger. For years, I had been fearful of what would happen if I chose to end friendships that had hurt me. After the trip, I knew that not only could I leave behind these harmful friendships, but I must if I ever wanted to be my own person.

That was the moment that I grew up. That was the second that I realized my independence. I didn’t want to live my life hating my friends, so I would just have to go out on my own and find some new ones that fit me better. It was the moment I realized that I didn’t have to live under the influence of my frenemies. I was in control of my life, not them. Although that night was one of much anxiety and fear for my fellow classmates, it sticks in my head as one of the best of my life. Every time I think of it, I can’t help but smile.

Sinking KeyK, the narrator and protagonist of Sputnik Sweetheart, experiences a final epiphany when he drops the stolen storage room key into the river as he and his student, Carrot, stand and watch it sink. He describes holding the key and feeling “the weight of the countless people that had seeped into it” (196). So he drops it. The epiphany he has at this moment is not explicitly stated, but rather left open for interpretation by the reader, which I will now proceed to do.

The entire story is filled with K’s sense of alienation from his culture, his family, and his various lovers. The only person he has ever really connected with is gone, and he doesn’t want to feel the pain of loss anymore. As he stands with the key in his hand, he recalls all of the stories he has been told by Sumire and Mui and puts the weight of it all into the tiny key. Towards the beginning of the story, Murakami makes a clear distinction between a sign and a symbol: A sign makes something equivalent to another whereas a symbol simply represents another thing without being the same as it. As a sign, the key functions as the key to his heart, and he knows as he drops it, that no one will ever possess it now that Sumire is gone. Symbolically, however, it represents the understanding of the world he has gained over the course of the story. At this point, the knowledge he has of Sumire and Mui has simply become too much for him to handle, and he longs for the bliss that came with his ignorance. So he does the only thing he can think of to regain this ignorance. He throws away the knowledge and tries to forget that he ever knew it in the first place. His epiphany comes in the form of the realization that he would rather live in ignorant bliss than enlightened pain.

Haruki Murakami’s novel may not have obvious religious epiphanies, but that is due to the religious culture of Japan, the story’s country of origin. One travel guide website states that “religion does not perform a great role in the daily life of the Japanese,” which accounts for the book’s lack of religious symbolism. It also partially explains the alienation and distance that the three main characters experience. Many people with strong religious convictions claim to feel more connected to their communities, and I count myself among them. Personally, I have felt the least alienated from others at times when my faith has been the strongest, but in times that I drift from it, I have felt more distant. I suppose you could say that my center is a religious one, and that I think that these characters might not feel quite so alienated if they had a strong sense of conviction. It is my belief that a strong sense of faith helps a person to feel less uncertain about life than those who lack it. Possibly, if K or his two lady friends had experienced a religious epiphany, they may have felt less divided between two worlds.

K’s epiphany is definitely not the type that travelers hope to experience. No one goes on a trip thinking, “Gee, I really hope that I come back wishing to forget what happened on this trip.” Most travelers hope to find something better than they have at home, but K just wishes that he could let the past go and move on with his life. Even if it means letting go of his only chance to connect on a deep level with another human being, he still wants to let go of Sumire.

Elementary School Children in Uniform

I realize that there are dozens of topics related to traveling that I could write about in this post (ranging from the physical to the metaphysical), but what I found most interesting was the culture that K experiences at home in Japan. K is a native to Japan, so he overlooks aspects of his culture that mystified me at first. To be more specific, I am referring to the scene in which his married lover calls him to a supermarket to help her out of a sticky situation. I was horrified when he entered the security room to discover not only the lover, but her son as well. I thought that everyone would assume that the two were having an affair, because that is what I would have assumed. I was even more perplexed when none of the characters saw the oddity of the situation in the slightest. Why didn’t anyone else think it was weird that a teacher was called to a store to discuss a student’s shoplifting? Didn’t anyone find it odd that the mother called his teacher for help instead of her husband? How was it any of his business?

With a bit of research, I discovered that it is not uncommon in Japan for teachers to intervene in disciplinary actions outside of the classroom. Teachers are, according to a website on Japanese school culture, “particularly concerned about developing the holistic child” and even monitor their students’ “personal hygiene, nutrition, and sleep”. It is the Japanese belief that a whole village should be involved in the raising of a child, a belief that stems from the society’s group-conscious culture. Each Japanese citizen takes it upon himself to teach morals to a misbehaving child. For example, it is customary for each school to have a different uniform, not to promote school pride, but instead for easy identification in case a student is caught misbehaving. In the event that a child decides to skip school, ordinary people will take it upon themselves to notify the school of the infraction. The Japanese take child rearing very seriously and personally, so it wasn’t unusual for a teacher to be called in to punish a child after an incident like shoplifting.

This seems bizarre to me, but it broaches an interesting topic involving cultural differences and the traveler: how bizarre is my culture? Are there aspects of my own life that I accept as normal, but might be construed by a visitor to be peculiar? I could probably list off a hundred things that might seem odd to foreigners, but I feel as if that topic was adequately addressed in A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary. I will, however, say that I think societal differences are my own personal reason for traveling. I find it refreshing to see other cultures, note differences, and consider how an outsider might view my world. I feel as if I am not so much alienated from my own culture as simply curious about the cultures of others. Maybe I’m not as deep as the people we have read about this past semester, but I could just be more content with my life. And that is something I think a lot of people never get. People can spend so much time searching for the elusive “good life” that they forget to spend time appreciating what they already have. As a general rule, I never want to become blasé about my own culture; it’s a lot more fun to look at ordinary things and see the extraordinary than it is to see nothing at all.

Concise DictionaryWhen the book A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers opened with the line “Sorry of my English” I made an audible groan that prompted my roommate to ask if I was all right. I replied, “I’m fine, it’s just that this book is going to cause me nothing but annoyance. It’s all done in this weird Chinese-English dialect. I am going to get so frustrated with it.” What I found, however, was that by about the twentieth page, I was fascinated. I still found the dialect a bit vexing, but the main character, Zhuang or simply “Z”, was incredibly charming and a traveler with a pure desire to learn about a new culture. Where the rest of the books we have read this semester have featured characters either running or searching, Zhuang had a genuine interest to learn. That is not something you see everyday. She also had a humorous way of pointing out absurdities of Western society that I had always simply overlooked as normal. But some of the things she points out make us seem quite bizarre.

She is the only character thus far who hasn’t travelled because of a sense of alienation. In fact, she doesn’t feel alienated from her own culture until her return at the end of the novel. Z’s interest in travel and learning is what gives the story it’s life. She has such an unusual take on everything she experiences and is funny while doing so (even if she does insist that humor is not an Asian tendency). The humor derives from her innate ability as a foreigner to comment on the peculiarities of Western culture. She points out oddities that we wouldn’t necessarily notice about our own culture. I even came to really like the straight forwardness that the Chinese culture possesses. Zhuang never kept her thoughts to herself and asked questions, even if she thought she might sound ignorant. She wasn’t afraid of the judgments of others; only that she would not learn enough.

We have a tendency to think of traveling as a Western concept. When I think of a traveler or tourist, I think of a Westerner in a foreign land. It is a little odd to think of how an Eastern traveler would perceive Western traditions. Things that we take for granted, like the complexity of the English language and the idea of intimacy coexisting with privacy, seem alien to foreigners from other cultures. Each society holds different values and traditions, and it is difficult at times for Westerners to think that their culture must seem odd to others. But I suppose that is probably true of any culture. No one really considers how their culture might seem odd to others, but it is true. Societies are inherently complex and confusing to foreigners and should remember that when dealing with them.

Live Happy

The title character of Naguib Mahfouz’s book The Journey of Ibn Fattuma is a man who is on a perpetual search for the utopian society. Unfortunately for him, it is not to be found in the contents of the book. It is left to the readers of the book to decide for themselves if Ibn Fattuma eventually made it to the mythical land of Gebel, but, as in most fictions regarding travel, the destination is overshadowed by the journey. A hero’s quest isn’t about the end result, but the events that led to the conclusion. Ibn Fattuma goes from land to land in order to find a place of enlightenment, but as a result of his travels he comes to a deeper meaning all on his own.

Qindil Muhammad al-Innabi sees a progression of societies and examines their relative merits and shortcomings. He sees a primitive pagan society, a divine right monarchy, a democracy, and a communist culture during the course of his travels, but never feels completely at home in any of them. It is his self-proclaimed mission to find a society that he can use to remodel the values of his homeland. He is unsuccessful in this quest because he never finds a place that he prefers. He lives his life with the hope that he will eventually find something better somewhere else in the world but just can’t seem to find it.

I think that far too many travelers go in search of that “something better” just to find disappointment. This is especially common in our modern world where the media is constantly projecting the message that traveling is the only way to find happiness. People are often presented in the media as unhappy in their day-to-day lives, further perpetuating the idea that the average person is unhappy. Our society tells us that we are unhappy and we believe it. Maybe, if the media didn’t tell us that we are so miserable, we would be happier.

Qindil discovers along the way to Gebel the enlightenment he thinks he will find there. He learned to accept life as it happened to him and to be fine with the results. His acceptance of himself is the kind of higher meaning he was searching for, and by so doing, he created his own perfect reality. It just goes to show that anyone can be happy as long as they set their mind to it. Happiness can seem elusive sometimes, but that could simply be yet another propagandist idea from a culture that creates discontent in order to sell products. By rejecting these ideas, one can learn to be happy at home, without a lifetime of searching. I don’t think that Gebel is necessarily a physical place as much as it is a state of mind.

Climbing Towards Enlightenment

Although Erik Cohen writes in his article “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experience” that his “modes [of tourism] were separated for analytical purposes” and that “any individual tourist may experience several modes on a single trip,” it is my belief that most tourists identify with one of the modes more than any other. Each of the protagonists of which we have read so far this semester has been complex, but mainly fits the characteristics of a particular mode. Each of the five modes that Cohen describes is exemplified in various books from our syllabus.

Daisy Miller is the obvious example of the Recreational Tourist. Although she does not go for the expressed purpose of reinvigorating herself, she does not attempt to learn anything from her experience abroad and seems to simply want to enjoy herself. As Cohen notes, “forms of mass-entertainment, recreational tourism appears from the perspective of ‘high’ culture as shallow, superficial, trivial and often frivolous activity, and is ridiculed” (Cohen 184). Daisy Miller is indeed ridiculed by other members of the American tourists for not being more sophisticated and restrained. She was, however, just trying to have a good vacation that would result in her happiness, regardless of what others thought of her.

Mary and Colin from The Comfort of Strangers are a good example of Diversionary Tourists. The main reason they went on the trip was out of sheer boredom with everyday life. They wanted to escape normal existence for a little bit. This fits perfectly with Cohen’s description of a Diversionary Tourist as someone looking for “a mere escape from the boredom and meaninglessness of routine…into the forgetfulness of a vacation” (Cohen 185). This type of tourist simply wants to get away from his or her life and avoid their problems, even if only temporarily. Mary and Colin seem to go one their vacation just because they had nothing better to do. They accept that modern couples are expected to take vacations and go because they can’t find a good reason not to go. But the problem that stems from this is that they don’t care to do anything. They are completely apathetic and indifferent towards their vacation.

Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness, is a traveler who wants to experience a completely alien culture, but consciously keeps his distance and remains an outsider, which is what makes him such a perfect example of an Experiential Tourist. He wishes to experience a culture, but recognizes that he is not a part of it and keeps his distance. Cohen describes the Experiential traveler as someone who has been alienated from their own society and “look[s] for meaning in the life of others” (Cohen 185). For Marlow, reading about Africa in a book was not good enough, he had to see and experience it first hand. The Experiential tourist is best at observing, something that Marlow demonstrates time and again through his detached narrative style. He seeks to learn about, but not participate in the local culture. He feels satisfied that even though his society is not “authentic”, authenticity does exit elsewhere in the world.

A character that can be considered an Experimental Tourist is Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises. He throws himself into his travels abroad and takes up an indefinite residence in Europe. As an expatriate, he takes the Experimental tourist creed seriously and makes it his goal to experience the authenticity of European society himself. He prefers to hang out with the locals and integrate himself into their company. Jake derives the most happiness and authenticity when he is able to partake in manly pursuits such as fishing and fighting. He feels that life must be experienced first hand by experimenting with new ways of doing things. The “eternal seeker” that Cohen describes as the Experimental Tourist is seen in Jake’s quest to find fulfillment in his meaningless life.

Although we have not technically reached it in our syllabus, I have decided that Qindil Muhammad al-Innabi from The Journey of Ibn Fattouma is by far the most Existential tourist I have encountered. He completely immerses himself in the local culture; even living as a member of most of the places he visits. Over the course of his journey, he sets up permanent residences in three towns and families in two. Although he does insist on keeping his former religious center, he does fully become a part of most of the societies he visits and actively studies the ways of life in each place. He is very curious and genuinely interested in learning about the places he travels and the reasons behind the customs. His values and perceptions are visibly altered by the way that his beliefs interact with those around him. His mind is expanded and opened, just as the Experimental Tourist hopes it will. It is in this way that Qindil demonstrates the deepest mode of travel.

The Essential ThingsThe novel The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan begins with a quotation on traveling by Cesare Pavese, a 20th century Italian poet and author. It goes, ”Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things-air, sleep, dreams, the sun, the sky-all things tending toward the eternal or what we imagine of it.” This statement sums up the experience of Colin and Mary on their vacation. In the end, they find travel to be unbearably brutal, but I think that they lose control of everything along the way, including the “essential things”. They control no aspect of their lives and do not seem to even care.

Mary and Colin seem to go on this trip to escape from their daily lives. They do not seem particularly interested in doing anything, nor do they appear to enjoy themselves. They simply let time pass them by and wait until the end of their trip. They probably took the vacation hoping to find a way to have fun, but they can’t seem to find the energy to do anything. The reason for the trip is never explicitly stated, but I got the feeling that they went on it because they either wanted to fix their troubled relationship (just like Kit and Port in The Sheltering Sky) or because they had nothing better to do.

If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that they both suffer from depression. They do nothing but eat, sleep, and smoke, and have lost interest in the things they used to enjoy (like each other’s company). Even though they are comfortable with one another, they begin the story essentially ignoring each other. Once they meet Robert, they begin to change. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell if they were coming out of their funk or just digging themselves in deeper. They begin, to put it politely, to enjoy one another’s company once more, but only enough to interact physically. They do not seem to reconnect much emotionally. They do nothing but stay in bed all day. This is one failing of the modern traveler.

I think far too many travelers today find travel exhausting and dull. These people travel simply for the sake of doing something new or for bragging rights. Mostly, however, these people follow the example demonstrated by our protagonists and just lay around a bunch. I have found, upon occasion, that traveling can be tiring and not entirely pleasurable. Sometimes all I want to do is hide under my covers for the first couple of days, but I try my hardest not to. I so rarely get the opportunity to travel that I try to take advantage of my time abroad while I can. I suppose it is in this way that I maintain my control over the “essential things”. I take advantage of the air, sun, and sky while controlling my sleep patterns and allowing myself a little time to dream.

Pravese suggests that in travel one must “trust strangers”. This is absolutely true. Whenever we travel, we are entrusting our safety to our pilot, our valuables to the hotel staff, and our selves to those around us. Travel is remarkably dangerous and we do unconsciously trust strangers with more than we realize. It is not something I think most people are comfortable with, and for this reason some prefer to simply stay at home. Too bad Mary and Colin didn’t just stay home.

If only Gustav had seen this

One of the most popular themes that our Travel Fictions course has covered so far has been the omnipresent search for meaning that all travelling protagonists seem to be searching for. In Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, however, the protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, seems not so much to be searching for meaning or depth in his life, but using his travels as an avoidance technique in which he literally engulfs himself in a fantasy in order to escape from reality. We have seen other characters use travel as a way to run away from a problem like in The Sheltering Sky, but what sets these two books apart is the intentions behind the escape. Port and Kit run away from their responsibilities, but this is done in order to save their relationship and find deeper meaning in an uncertain world. Gustav von Aschenbach is simply avoiding the end of his life.

No one wants to die, but Gustav feels death coming. He does not know how long it will be until he dies, but he does know that he will never again make it back to Venice and that he is currently living out his last vacation. I think this is possibly the most depressing thought ever. Vacations are usually relaxing times that one looks forward to and uses to mark the passing of time. So what happens when you know that you will never again make it outside of your own little world? It is symbolic of losing all hope. To never again be able to look forward to something is equally as horrifying as death itself. It is this feeling of imminent death and the loss of hope in one’s life that Gustav feels he must escape from.

Gustav is pretty old at the beginning of the novel. He has had many years in which to search for the meaning of life, and one gets the sense that meaning is not something with which he is particularly interested. His obsession is apparent, however, in his attempts to immerse himself in his worship of young Tadzio. Gustav chooses to lose himself and reality in his fantasies of Tadzio, and life loses any meaning it may have previously had when all his energies are refocused on the boy. By channeling all of his energy into stalking his “love”, Gustav completely loses all sense of self. He is no longer an old man, but simply the lover of a young one. Gustav loses touch with reality.  Many have debated the age old question of "what is reality?", but I think most of us will agree that Gustav has little grasp on the concept.  However, reality is a theme that is played with in Death until it is unclear to even the reader what is true and what is in Gustav's head.  Multiple times, Gustav believes that Tadzio understands his longings and feels the same, but it is never determined if these are real or figments of imagination in the mind of a crazy old manHe dyes his hair and wears make-up in order to make himself feel younger and in so doing, creates a false self in which he can further escape reality. It is as if the deeper he immerses himself in the fantasy, the less his real life resembles reality. He becomes unrecognizable, even to himself. Gustav von Aschenbach is the foil of most of the protagonists of whom we have read thus far because his life loses meaning the more he travels rather than gaining it.

3000 Miles to Find Yourself

I first read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road this summer on something of a whim. On a pretty regular basis I would find myself wandering the aisles of my local Barnes and Noble in search of yet another “chick lit” summer novel. On this particular occasion, I happened to pick up On The Road and I bought it for rather self-serving purposes. The media, many times in fact, had told me that On The Road was an essential read for anyone worth their weight in Pop Culture. The allusions to On The Road in literature, films, and television are simply too numerous to name, and I felt compelled to read it if I were ever to be considered one of the intellectual elite. After reading the book, I feel that Mr. Kerouac would have greatly disapproved of my superficial motivations for reading his work; to him, life was about living in the moment, not doing things for future rewards or societal recognition. Indeed, Kerouac rarely thought more than a few hours ahead. Sal Paradise, Kerouac’s literary alter ego, longs to live a spontaneous life free of responsibilities, so he ventures into the world without a plan to do just that.

Sal avoids growing up and taking on responsibilities by running away. As a recent college graduate, his fear of the future is one shared by twenty-somethings everywhere. The percentage of these young people who literally run away from their newfound responsibilities is very small, and in the 1940’s I’m willing to bet it was even less. But I suppose that being radical is what one must do when defining a new generation. The Beat Generation was similar to the Lost Generation in that they were both groups of post-war youths looking for a way to go on living after meaning had disappeared. They wanted to redefine what it meant to live a happy life and challenge the meaning of “normal”. Beatniks adventured without purpose and travelled without destination.

The travel in which they partook was both physical and spiritual. Some, like Kerouac, actually took pilgrimages across the country to such Beat meccas as San Francisco and New York, but most simply travelled within their own bodies. Experimenting by pushing limits, they tried out new spiritual ideas, sexual practices, and pharmaceutical usages. No limit was left on stretched. Sal Paradise threw everything he had ever known away in order to explore a world about which he knew so little. The Beats founded a new way of living that cared less about the places you’d been physically, and more about where you’d been emotionally.

Now you, too, can be a typical "American Tourist" for Halloween!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American travelling in a foreign land must be in want of a brain. It is extremely unfortunate that most foreigners consider Americans to be vulgar and unintelligent, and in Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky we see a prime example of such prejudiced feelings. Before meeting Port Moresby, Lieutenant d’Armagnac presumes that he will have difficulties communicating with someone as lacking in pedigree as an American. He thinks inwardly, “An American! Already he could see him: a gorilla-like brute with a fierce frown on his face, a cigar in the corner of his mouth, and probably an automatic in his hip pocket. Doubtless no complete sentences would pass between them because neither would be able to understand enough of the other’s language...then he remembered having heard that Americans did not speak English in any case, that they had a patois which only they could understand among themselves.” It’s a good thing that d’Armagnac is pleasantly surprised by Port’s true character, but his original bias makes one wonder what caused such thoughts to begin with.

By the time that The Sheltering Sky was published in 1949, Americans already had a bad rap in foreign countries. I had always assumed that foreigners had not begun to discriminate against Americans until more recently, i.e. not until the War in Iraq caused increased resentment towards Americans. I myself have even pretended to be Canadian when asked my nationality while abroad, because I did not want to be counted among such a hated group. It may seem silly now, but in the immediate wake of the War in Iraq I felt the need to distance myself from my nationality while abroad. The foreign perception of Americans is that of the uneducated, loud, rude tourist who lacks respect for the country that hosts them. For the most part, Port and Kit do not fit this mold, but, ironically, it is the Englishman Eric Lyle who actually does.

So then why are Americans the ones who get blamed for such ignorance? To be honest, it’s probably because we kind of deserve it. American expatriates in the 1920’s ran around Europe without a care in the world drinking themselves to death (for examples, see The Sun Also Rises). After the Second World War, American soldiers came in to defeated countries like Japan and Germany and used them like their own private amusement parks. They did whatever they wanted because they felt like they had earned the right. Vulgar Americans then became the standard in literature and films both in earnest and in jest. We are not blameless in this situation, but not all of us deserve to be hated. I suppose this could be said of any prejudice though. It is prejudices and biases that have given Americans a bad name, and we should all remember that assumptions and generalizations go both ways. In his essay “Paul Bowles: The Canceled Sky,” John W. Aldridge makes a generalization about the setting of the novel by writing, “The Arab world with its filth, disease, and poverty is an innately destructive world dominated by an ancient spirit of evil”. We must stop our preconceived judgments about foreigners just as they must stop prejudging us. Unfortunately, it’s a sad fact of life that everyone is prejudiced to some degree. In the truly international world of today, people are much more alike than I think we realize.