This book could not have come for a better time for me. I teach creative nonfiction at a small university in New York state. This summer, I had intended to teach travel writing as I took students through Spain and France. A couple of logistical issues, mostly having to do with university bureaucracy, has delayed the class for at least six months. Which turned out to be a good thing.
On the application for the class, students were asked why they wanted to learn travel writing? Almost without exception, they wanted to travel; they had no interest in writing about it, which means most of them would have been miserable when they realized that they had signed up for a six-credit course where the instructor intended for them to earn those six credits.
This was the context in which I asked to read this book. And I like it so much that I am thinking of assigning it next semester in the creative nonfiction (on-campus) course that I will be teaching on the subject of traveling.
Most travelers are happy to be tourists. They pile on to cruise ships or tour buses, happy to have someone keep them safe by arranging all of their accommodations, getting them menus in their native language, making sure the wait staff that are waiting on them speak their language, and getting to believe that the countries where they are being tourists are delighted to have visitors walking around and looking at things as if they were at the zoo. Or worse, a zoo where everyone is deaf, so tourists don't think about the fact that just because they're speaking in their native language, doesn't mean that no one else can understand their language. You would not believe what people speaking English on board a TGV will talk about, with their assumption that no one can understand them.
These are among the dozen or so issues to consider about the travel experience. Why do people travel? What do they expect to see? What are they hoping to gain? Why, if they are traveling to a foreign land, do they search out the places where they can find people just like them?
After a month spent in Barcelona and southern France in January, my new question is: why are people spending all of their time (now with selfie sticks) taking selfies of themselves? It's not as if they are taking photos of the architecture in front of them, or the statue, the natural wonder, or the street scene. They are taking photos--over and over again--of their faces while the things they came to see blur out in the background.
Whenever someone starts in on one of their "people are so rude in ____" stories, I usually find out that it's because the person relating the tale KNEW that the person they were struggling to communicate with must have spoken English; they were just refusing to speak it so they might embarrass the traveler. My usual response is to ask how many McDonald's or WalMart employees speak French, or Italian, German? So why do they expect every person in another nation to speak English?
The best thing about this smart book, which does a fantastic job of pointing out that the historical precedents established by travelers years ago have carried forward into the present age; that the seeing the world through the lens of a camera is a problematic issue; that cultures that overvalue long work weeks have a tendency to turn leisure time abroad into time to continue working, just in different countries.
And, at the heart of it is the difference between travel and tourism:
"The degrading slide from culture to commodity, from leisure to free time, from authenticity to phony reproduction--described with such visceral disgust by Adorno--is similar to the way many have described the transition from travel to mass tourism....[Adorno says] Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work."
While this book is published by a university press, that should not scare off any person who thinks about their participation in traveling. It's important to know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and what you hope to get out of going to another country.
Reading this book gives one a great field guide of questions to ask yourself before you set off on your trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment