"Travel is one of the saddest pleasures in life," said the French writer Madame de Staël nearly 200 years ago. She was deeply depressed by crossing unknown countries, hearing countless unfamiliar faces speak languages she could not understand. Leaving home seemed like "solitude without repose and isolation without dignity." Aldous Huxley, who loved traveling and thought of it as an irresistible vice, also thought tourists were "a very gloomy-looking tribe." "I have seen much brighter faces at a funeral than at the Plaza of St. Mark's," he wrote in "Along the Road," his 1925 collection of essays about his voyages across Europe. "One wonders why they come abroad." So why do people travel? Can simple curiosity, the desire to see the other side of the hill, explain this massive phenomenon? And massive it truly is: tourism will soon be the world's largest industry, a bigger international money-spinner than petroleum or the arms trade. Some tentative answers to this difficult question can be found in a new book, "Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel," edited by Jas Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubies (Reaktion, 160F). Travel agents know that most people travel for two main reasons: culture or pleasure. Cultural tourists visit museums, cathedrals, pyramids and other worthy sites, usually for noble reasons to do with self-improvement. Recreational tourism, what Serge Gainsborough called "sea, sex, and sun,'" is unashamedly based around pleasure: snorkeling, skiing, Caribbean cruises and snoozing on the beach. It is a more recent invention, and in money terms, much more significant. Huxley had a rather cynical explanation for the desire to travel: he thought that most tourists left home through a kind of snobbery. They feel obliged to visit famous sites or exotic lands because everyone else has done it, and they all say it's marvelous. The tourist may be disappointed by the actual site, but he can still tick it off his list, and brag about how wonderful it is when he gets home. He has to continue the myth, because having been to Paris and climbed the Eiffel Tower makes him superior to his stay-at-home neighbor. Of course Huxley was talking about tourists, that despicable lot that buys package holidays and is herded about from monument to monument like so many sheep; he thought of himself as a traveler, one of a hardier and more admirable breed. According to Kasia Boddy, an English literature professor who lives in Paris and is one of the contributors to "Voyages and Visions," this distinction, already questionable in Huxley's time, is close to meaningless today. In the age of jet travel and globalization, real "journeying" is all but dead. She quotes the American historian Paul Fussell, who moans that "travel is now impossible; tourism is all we have left." It is not that people don't travel any more; it is just that the voyage is no longer a metaphysical experience. Medieval pilgrims (see box) spent months or even years on the road, enduring great hardships on a spiritual journey that they hoped would transform their lives. How can we expect to have a similar epiphany when a 747 can take us anywhere on the globe in less 24 hours, and we know that there will be a McDonald's near the Holiday Inn when we arrive? In her essay in "Voyages and Visions," Boddy points out another paradox: many people are more at home in another country than in the poor neighborhood on the other side of their home town. Crossing the tracks is another kind of journey, what she calls "slumming it." Jack London makes the comparison in "People of the Abyss," his book about his experiences living among tramps in darkest London; in the first chapter, he jokes that Thomas Cook could take him to Africa, but could never get him to the East End. One of the problems, Boddy explains, is that it's becoming harder and harder to encounter genuine strangeness, because we know so much about the rest of the world already. Genuine explorers, from Ulysses and Marco Polo through to Livingstone and 20th-century adventurers such as Captain Scott or Wilfred Thesinger, set forth into unknown lands and helped draw the maps. Travelers followed, filling in the details and beating down the tracks. Last of all come the tourists, who know what to expect and don't want to be disappointed. This is especially true of Americans in Europe. They have never been explorers, and usually come on pilgrimages to sites that many before them have visited and described. "Here in Naples I have at last found my Italy," wrote one early tourist; "ascended Vesuvius, and found all familiar." That was 1840; since then globalization has made Europe less and less foreign. In the famous scene from "Pulp Fiction," John Travolta talks about the "little things" that make Europe different, like the fact that the French call a Quarter Pounder with cheese a Royale with Cheese (though a Big Mac is still le Big Mac). Which begs the question, is it still possible to have an authentic traveling experience? Is Venice, home to a mere 70,000 Italians and visited by 10 million foreigners every year, any more real than Disneyland? Are we really all doomed to be tourists? The one certainty seems to be that people will travel more and more. Virtual travel, be it on the Internet or via cinematic or virtual-reality technology, is also growing at a crazy rate. And adventure stories for armchair travelers, are hugely popular for a discussion of this burgeoning genre, see another new book, "Tourist With Typewriters" by Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan (University of Michigan, 240F). Boddy points out that travel has always been "a double-edged sword;" people love the thrill of leaving home, but also like to feel at home wherever they are. And there are still adventures to be had. She quotes the American travel writer Paul Theroux. "The world is still large and strange," he wrote in "Stranger on a Train," his book on the pleasures of traveling by rail; "and thank God, full of empty places that are nothing like home." |
