(Continued) Cultural critic, Walker Percy writes in his essay The Loss of the Creature about the quandary facing modern travelling-people, by calling upon the travels of Spanish explorer Garcia Lopez de Cardenas and his travel journal in discovering the Grand Canyon, making a mark of “P” to mark down an aesthetic discovery. Percy writes: “If the [Grand Canyon] is seen by a million sightseers, a single sightseer does not receive a value of P but a millionth part of value P” (46). This is not a means of Percy to disparage the value of the Grand Canyon, but rather, he underscores the all important factor in travel of expectation, i.e. the inevitable expectation left upon us by those who have been there before us, and the unavoidable preconceptions of what the experience will be like. When one travels to the Grand Canyon, trapped in our backpacks and rucksacks, hiding, looking to be fulfilled, is the expectation of the Grand Canyon, and the value one receives from the Grand Canyon hinges greatly on whether this expectation can be met. It is this pivotal idea of expectation in travel, and whether or not it can be met, that will ultimately label one as a “traveller” or “tourist.” In, The Innocents Abroad, while in Rome, Twain writes:
What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any experience can bring him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are bholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere ... to be the first – that’s the idea ... What is there in rome for me to see that others have not seen before me? What is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others? What can I discover? – Nothing. Nothing whatsoever (266-267).
Twain sets a high threshold indeed for achieving a “thrill” from Rome (one that speaks to anywhere) and herein lays his foundation for classification as “traveller” or requisites for the scarlet letter of “tourist.” Melton delineates this as the quest for “authentic experience” (11) and subsequently quashes the possibility of its attainability in modern travel.
Melton holds “authentic experience” to the same high regard as Twain holds “Discovery!” and, for now, I hold the two more or less synonymous, but I will differentiate between the two later. As would be natural for an author writing about Twain’s travel writing, Melton’s requisite condition of “authentic experience” to transcend the tourist-traveller divide lies an almost equally impossible distance away from the travelling person’s grasp as Twain’s notion of “Discovery!” and furthermore Garica Lopez’s “P” value. Melton elaborates on the notion of authenticity. He explains,
This quest is definitive of modernity and belies an intuitive belief that life in Western civilization is devoid of authentic experience. Tourists then, seek it elsewhere. Herein lies the ultimate and inescapable of tourism: no matter how often it promises authenticity, it can never fulfil that promise; moreover, it never did, even when tourists called themselves travellers (11).
This concept of travel, as a means to escape a world that is devoid of value, can be seen elsewhere. In one of the most challenging and problematic travel books written, Henry David Thoreau flees society in order to “live deliberately” at Walden Pond, “to suck the marrow out of life” in a removed social setting that has shed itself of inauthenticity (91). But this idea then begs the question of what type of world one will find abroad: Will one inherently find “value” or be able to “live deliberately” simply because one physically relocates? Whether this found world has value or not and whether one does or can find this value are both $64,000 questions. Melton’s precondition of “authentic experience,” Twain’s notion of “Discovery!” or Garcia’s “P” value all place limitations on what the travelling-person can achieve in travel, and suggests all that there is left can only be achieved through touring. Jonathon Culler writes of a “ferocious denigration of tourists,” a concept that Melton explores:
“The backpacker looks down upon on the man in a rental car, who in turn looks down on the crowds in a tour bus, and these people, also in turn, may look down on those who stay at home watching The Travel Channel. All of these people are travellers, and all are tourists; the words are synonymous” (9).
By conceding claiming the synonymy of travellers and tourists, and by simultaneously holding his argument of authenticity, Melton effectually argues that no ‘travelling people’ are “travellers” and all are “tourists,” less they can discover something. Melton labels this phenomenon as, “the ultimate and inescapable failure of tourism,” for, as he believes, expectation will ultimately and inescapably thwart authenticity (11).
But I am not convinced. I hold that, in accordance with Melton, that travel is indisputably the search for authenticity. The purpose of moving from place to place is to experience the real differences in culture, community and social behaviours. (Or, if you’re 21, new types of beer and attractive foreign women). Furthermore, I concede that expectation is forever at odds with authenticity, and that such a conflict jeopardizes chances for authentic experience. And I agree with Melton that any preconceived notions of travel will ultimately result in the failure of the experience itself in satisfying the romantic ideals of travel and authenticity. Melton playfully adapts Shakespeare, reworking Jacques’ bounding insight in As You Like It: “All the world’s a sight, and we are merely tourists.” Melton continues his tourist metaphors by explaining that whenever one “tours” there is, as Coleridge originally coined the phrase, “a willing suspension of disbelief” geared toward tourism, which he calls “touristic faith.” As Melton bastardizes one canonical author and quote after another, the point that he is making is this: every tourist willingly pretends to adopt authentic experience and discovery (even though they may not achieve it), and the closest one does come to achieving this, while simultaneously pretending that they actually have, therein signifies the overall value of one’s vacation, or holiday, or weekend at the beach.
But I disagree. I believe authentic experience and discovery can occur. By the lofty standards set by both Twain and Melton, one would wonder why anyone would ever travel anywhere, if authentic experience is so far out of reach for travelling-people. If (for Twain) there is “nothing” in Rome to “thrill” him, why is he there? By Melton’s standards, only locals of Rome would ever be able to achieve authentic experience, but yet even a born and bred Roman fails to meet Twain’s criteria of “Discovery!” To take Twain’s point even further, one could ask the author: “If this is true, if one needs “Discovery!” to “thrill” them, then why be anywhere? Because the world has pretty much been discovered already.” To take Twain’s point to the extreme, one could ask: “Why be alive if there is no ‘Discovery!’ in Rome? Because surely there is as little in Rome as anywhere else.” And to further dissect Melton’s argument, with the standards that he sets on authenticity, only local, born and bred Romans would ever be capable of meeting authentic experience, but yet, this is not travel, it is inhabitancy and no more.
Melton constructs a wide description of what it is to be a “tourist” and claims that such a description applies to being a “traveller.” One can be a backpacker, part of a tour group, or at home watching the travel channel. This is due to none of the groups achieving the “traveller” threshold of “authentic experience.” But what Melton ignores, which I find surprising as I believe it is a vital, if not the vital aspect to travel is location. The act of physically being in a place. (OED: “to make a journey”) In stark contrast to the complexity and ambiguity of defining and achieving authentic experience, one can, easily (perhaps not in a financial sense) and definitively, achieve authenticity in location. Meaning, the romantic ideal of the traveller can be considered a tourist (in Melton’s sense of the words being synonymous), but a tourist (again using Melton’s definition) cannot be considered a traveller without authentic location. The OED’s definition of travel as “the act of travelling” or to “make a journey” is a crucial distinction that Melton does not touch. A person watching The Travel Channel may be “touring,” but the physical travelling they have done is from their kitchen to their living room and, if they are American, probably back and forth again once they run out of snacks. Watching Travel Channel may be “touring,” but it is unconditionally excluded from the hotly debated sliding scale of the tourist-traveller continuum. We may not be able to define what travelling is, but surely we can recognize what travelling is not.
Melton’s argument begins by describing the basic notion of touring/travelling and transcending the two identities simply as “by learning of foreign cultures.” With his later requisite authentic experience (albeit unobtainable in his opinion) mandatory to crossing the tourist-traveller boundary, Melton unconsciously verifies that authentic experience lies deeply embedded in “foreign cultures.” (But that travel and its imperfections prevent a tourist from achieving that experience, thus rendering all travellers tourists and so on, hence why he believes the two terms to be synonymous). But, it is my contention that if authentic experience exists, which Melton affirms does, then it must be attainable by a ‘travelling person,’ and is not a privilege to locals alone. What this authenticity is, and how to achieve it are areas of my thesis on travel where I’m fucking clueless; but, in short, my goal for this second European travel (3,500 words later, Sorry) is to find it. And, if you haven’t guessed already, it is to become a traveller myself ... but that probably goes without saying.
My plan on finding authentic experience on this trip relies heavily on keeping expectation as low as possible. Obviously, I expect to have fun, but I mean to keep what I expect the journey to be like at a minimum.
This means: 1) Travelling alone. When travelling with someone or in a group, there forms an instant expectation, because, most likely, you know the person well, know their characteristics, what they are like and, therefore, involuntarily form preconceived notions of what they will be like or likely to do along the journey.
2) My itinerary, starting point, notwithstanding, is entirely blank. Once I touch down in Portugal, I have no obligations whatsoever, just a small amount of dollars that will turn into a much smaller amount of euros to will take me wherever it can. I have no return ticket, and no idea from where I will be returning. This contrasts greatly with Twain (who boarded a ship on a fixed travel itinerary in The Innocents Abroad) or Bryson (who had a fixed route, and his trips were always well-funded, making whatever his proposed itinerary is, easily accomplished). I literally hope to go where the wind takes me, not my own expectations. I have a 4-week break for Easter and one final on May 24th (God, I love studying abroad), so I have the time to do this. I may be back weeks after the break is over, with fifteen minutes before my capitalism exam, or I may be back in 3 days having lost all my money on hookers and blow. But, in anticipation of reducing expectation, I have never been to Portugal, and, if I’m honest haven’t the greatest idea of what to expect, besides Portuguese.
3) Through my designs in format mentioned above (Oh, about 3,000 words ago) this decreased sentiment of expectation will be reflected in my writing. No thinking back, for it has already been written. No thinking forward, because I know not what to think about. At any given point along this trip, I will literally be the summation of two things: the dwindling stack of cash I have, and the blogs that I have written along the way. No more, no less. (I’m a bit of a Romantic sometimes ...)
4) I’m growing a trail beard. I think this one speaks for itself.
So what questions am I up against? What questions do I hope to answer? First, is Twain’s notion of “Discovery!” and second is Melton’s “authentic experience ... those are the main two. Being that Melton’s opinions and ideas come from Mark Twain, (as they should, for he’s writing a bloody book about him) I will condense to Twain’s one notion of “Discovery!” for reasons of simplicity, and I like the idea of going up against Twain. (The man who practically invented, or at least embodied, the rise of travel and the greatest ever travel writer versus the kid that would change it all and ... yes, you’ve guessed it, America’s next literary legend, spawning a denigration of a once esteemed literary genre into thousands of hapless bloggers on the web ... who’s ready to travel?!). So, in short (for this has gotten WAY longer than I expected!) when I fly to Portugal on April 9th, I am in search of “Discovery!” which will thereby transform me from a “tourist in Prague that doesn’t feel like one” to the “altogether impressive creature” of traveller. What will be this “Discovery!”? How the fuck should I know?! That’s what I’m going to find out ... LW
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