Literary tourism and the quest for authenticity
Arriving in London for the first time many years ago, I hadn’t shaken off my jet lag before heading directly to London Bridge, where I walked with the morning crowds (“so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many”), and, fixing my eyes before my feet, “flowed up the hill and down King William Street, / to where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.” Following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot’s dreary commute to his tedious job at Lloyds Bank, a path memorialized in the lines of The Waste Land, I engaged in what has since become a part of all my travels: literary tourism.
That visit felt like Anna Quindlen’s account in Imagined London: A Tour of the World’s Greatest Fictional City (National Geographic, 2004), in which she marvels at the city’s array of literary sites: “I had been to them all in my imagination before I ever set foot in England. So that by the time I actually visited London ... for the first time, it felt less like an introduction and more like a homecoming.”
In The Literary Tourist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Nicola J. Watson, of the Open University, in England, calls the titular activity a secular variant of religious pilgrimage. Harvard’s Lawrence Buell, discussing the “Thoreauvian Pilgrimage” to Walden Pond in The Environmental Imagination (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1995), doesn’t scruple to label such tourism avowedly sacred: recounting the naturalist John Muir’s 1893 visit to Concord, Buell describes the portrayal of Concord as a place of “holy calm,” which “conveys a sense of treading in the footsteps of the ‘great men.’” Muir “concentrates his attention and reverence on the famous shrines ... and he acquires iconic mementos.” Buell compares such hagiographic devotion to the via crucis, the pilgrim’s re-enactment of Jesus’ procession to Calvary.
In the 18th century, travelers began visiting the graves, birthplaces, and preserved homes of dead literary figures, Watson writes, which led eventually to “reinventing whole regions of the national map as ‘Shakespeare Country,’ ‘Wordsworth’s Lake District,’ ... ‘Dickens’s London,’ ‘Hardy’s Wessex,’ and so on.”
Watson calls literary tourism “a deeply counterintuitive response to the pleasures and possibilities of imaginative reading.” She describes “the embarrassment palpable among professional literary scholars over the practice of literary pilgrimage” because, in the age of Barthes and Foucault, “only the amateur, only the naïve reader, could suppose that there was anything more ... to be found on the spot marked X.” Using a phrase from Jacques Derrida, she calls the landscape sought by literary tourists a “dangerously supplementary” text.
Other academics, too, denigrate the phenomenon: In a conference paper called “Site Specific: Wordsworth’s Two Visions of the Lake District,” Frank Duba, of Millersville University of Pennsylvania, looks at a video produced by the Cumbria tourism board featuring “a six-foot-tall busker in a red squirrel costume reciting an updated ‘rap’ version of Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.’” (This has to be seen to be believed: please Google “MC Nuts,” sit back, and enjoy.)
As Duba describes: “MC Nuts traipses through the Lake District, visiting forests, topiary gardens, and of course daffodils. The only human he encounters is a waiter serving champagne. Here is the official rationale behind this rapping squirrel: ‘Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” poem has remained unchanged for 200 years and to keep it alive for another two centuries, we wanted to engage the YouTube generation who want modern music and amusing video footage on the Web.’”
The video bespeaks a deep ambivalence about the poet’s legacy, Duba argues: “Wordsworth’s Lake District is perhaps a bit austere for tourist councils, with its beggars and farmers and shepherds, but no trains, no four-star hotels, and certainly neither champagne nor topiary gardens. Those very things that make the ‘MC Nuts’ video an ad for the Lake District — the country gardens, the beverage service — are foreign to Wordsworth’s vision. And as soon as the language of Wordsworth is changed, the poem is no longer Wordsworth’s, but the property of the tourist board.”
Indeed, ownership of literary heritage is what’s at stake here. Literary tourism involves a cheap appropriation, an amateurish displacement of the text’s aesthetic sanctity, critics claim. Who shall be in charge of a writer’s reputation? Who are the audiences, the ideal readers — our students or the day-tripping proletariat? Literary tourism, an engagement with the text outside the scholar’s realms of influence (the classroom, the archive, the monograph), may threaten the professoriate as market forces infringe on our careful critical deliberations.
Tourist versions of literature become oversimplified as they are packaged for popular consumption. We may believe that our academic “interpretive community” (Stanley Fish’s phrase) uniquely appreciates the intellectual property, the legacy, the brand, of the writer, whose integrity is sullied by less devout caretakers.
The problem of authenticity rankles: While our discipline meticulously certifies authoritative texts and exegeses, the tourism industry has less stringent standards. Florence’s Casa di Dante is actually an early-20th-century assembly near where the poet might have lived, displaying the sort of house he might have lived in. All of Baker Street spreading out from 221B has been “phonied up,” Quindlen writes, with gobs of tacky Sherlock Holmes memorabilia and little more. Even Shakespeare’s Stratford birthplace, the holy grail of literary tourism, isn’t what it seems. It’s a Victorian construct, transformed to look “more like the home of an aspiring bard” in the spirit of “19th-century fascination with ‘merrie olde England,’” writes Julia Thomas, of Cardiff University, in Wales, in a new book from Palgrave Macmillan, Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture, edited by Nicola J. Watson.
The enterprise strikes some as unseemly. In “Literary Tourism and Dublin’s Joyce,” Victor Luftig, of the University of Virginia, complains that Joyce’s name is “used to draw business to establishments built in a contemporary Dublin he never knew.” Luftig quotes the Irish writer Declan Lynch protesting that “perhaps the primary function of Irish artists is to persuade foreign people to disport themselves in establishments which hijack the artist’s name many years after they have turned up their creative toes.”
A final outrage, as Samantha Matthews, of the University of Sheffield, in England, explains in “Relic-Hunting, Graffiti, and Other Acts of Homage: The Literary Pilgrim’s Busy Hands” (also forthcoming in Watson’s book), involves actual desecration: 19th-century literary tourists chipped away at the ornaments on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s tomb and wrote their names on walls and windows in Shakespeare’s birthplace. She paraphrases Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad calling tourists “an invading force madly ‘hunting relics’ and ‘specimens’ ... stone fragments chipped from ancient monuments and religious buildings.”
With all that in mind, I made my way recently to the North of England for a conference, “Texts and Tours,” at Leeds Metropolitan University’s Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, to consider the topic from another perspective. While the center includes literary scholarship in its purview, it also draws upon anthropology, sociology, museum studies, planning, and public policy: a very globalist enterprise.
I discovered that, as we English professors fear, literary tourism does indeed involve a concerted and full-on cultural commodification. Presenters discussed strategies to maximize visitors, publicity, merchandising, and revenues, and angled to network literary houses into creative partnerships with the larger VisitBritain tourist agenda. Mere literature may become overwhelmed among many competing interests and “stakeholders.”
But I didn’t feel, as I’d thought I might, an aggrieved sense that my gods were being prostituted; instead, I left this gathering with interesting insights into how a different group of people with different objectives and approaches shared “my” authors. There was the occasional suggestion that struck me as a bit craven. (One tour organizer suggested ads in novels promoting local tourist link-ins: “You’ve read the book, now take a look!”) But when it comes down to it, publication is itself an act of commodification, as is composing a syllabus. I tried not to get overly sanctimonious since I, too, make a living off these writers.
Conference attendees — curators of such institutions as the Charles Dickens Museum, Dr. Johnson’s House Trust, the Freud Museum, the D.H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum, the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, the World of James Herriott — spoke of their commitment to using their locations as springboards for cultural education. The Dahl Centre’s director, Amelia Foster, promotes creative writing “by stealth,” with activities and workshops designed to draw on the literary atmosphere and get people writing. “A story is like a dream,” she said. “If you don’t write it down, you know you had one but you don’t know what it was about.” Dahl’s career didn’t take off until he was in his 50s, Foster reminds us, so there’s still time to discover latent literary gifts.
These curators love their houses — Stephanie Pickford, of Dr. Johnson’s House, spoke glowingly of the garret where he compiled his dictionary as “the shrine of the English language” — and strive to spotlight the enduring cultural resonance and relevance of their writers. Henry Lytton Cobbold, who runs Knebworth House, the home of his great-great-great grandfather the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton (“It was a dark and stormy night ... "), has perhaps as hard a task as anyone in this regard. Contemporary artifacts, like a Dark and Stormy Beer he said he found in Australia, help make connections with a modern audience. “We need to interpret an archive collection creatively,” Cobbold said. “It’s hard making bits of paper sexy.” (Not sure I agree. After the conference, back in London, I dropped in at the British Library: Gutenberg, Magna Cartas (plural!), Beatles lyrics scrawled on the back of envelopes, Virginia Woolf’s draft of Mrs. Dalloway, Brontë's Jane Eyre manuscript opened to “Reader, I married him.” I have to say, I was pretty highly aroused.)
Some sites carefully establish the provenance of their displays. The desk at the Brontës’ parsonage, in Haworth, promises Robert Barnard, former chairman of the Brontë Society, was indeed Charlotte Brontë's, and the ink stains were spilled as she wrote Shirley. Other sites create a more general period atmosphere. Some houses focus keenly on the specific writer who lived there. Others present more of a general Georgian or Edwardian heritage experience.
Literary tourism may involve following a route taken by a real writer (the Dylan Thomas trail, in Wales) or a fictional character (Leopold Bloom’s odyssey). It may involve real locations or imaginary ones that may become “real” (London’s King’s Cross Station now features a sign for Platform 9¾, of J.K. Rowling’s Hogwarts Express). It may be promoted by literary festivals, anniversary celebrations, or other strategic initiatives for making an old book seem timely.
While most literary sites embody a substantial cultural experience, some are more akin to theme parks. In Cumbria, for example, you can meet Peter Rabbit and all his friends in the magical World of Beatrix Potter Attraction. Even Disneyland, one conference attendee suggested wryly, might be considered a venue of literary tourism, observing that some people thought Walt Disney was the originator of Winnie the Pooh. There are sometimes competing claims and counterclaims about a given location. (“Does authenticity really matter in a world of fiction?” asked Mike Robinson, who organized the Leeds conference with Cobbold. Yes, I think it does.)
As I listened to these custodians talk, I thought about the similarity between their mission and mine. They’re trying to attract and increase audiences, talking up their guy, making connections between past and present. I think many of my colleagues would have been interested to hear these people explain their relationship to “our” writers — and really, they’re no more ours than they are theirs, or anyone else’s. In the age of reader response, we should allow that touristic “reading” may be as valid as many other ways of engaging a text.
In fact, I flatter myself that I’ve invented the perfect mode of literary tourism. When I travel, I always read in situ: Dracula among the ruins of Whitby Abbey, overlooking the River Esk; A Confederacy of Dunces in New Orleans; The French Lieutenant’s Woman in Lyme Regis; “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” on the D Train; “Paul Revere’s Ride” outside the Old North Church. It’s the best of both worlds, making me a tourist and a reader at the same time. Cheap and easy, no commercial or hermeneutic qualms whatsoever: I recommend it highly.
Randy Malamud is a professor of English at Georgia State University and author of The Language of Modernism (UMI Research Press, 1989) and Where the Words Are Valid: T.S. Eliot’s Communities of Drama (Greenwood Press, 1994). He edited the 2005 Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 36, Page B12