here - Tom van Nuenen

Transcription

HOW TO GET LOST
R EFLECTIONS ON CONTEMPORARY TOURISM
AND TRAVEL WRI TINGS BY C EES N OOTEBOOM
How to get lost: reflections on contemporary tourism
and travel writings by Cees Nooteboom
Tom van Nuenen (ANR 246526)
Supervisor: Prof. dr. Odile Heynders
School of Humanities
Department of Culture Studies
Tilburg University
July 2011
Tom van Nuenen 2011, some rights reserved
Licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License
The examples of Alice and Xavier’s waarbenjij.nu should be read
in conjunction with the website’s images in appendix B
English translation of Dutch excerpts by the author
Includes bibliographical references
Typeset in Cambria
Printed and bound by Prisma Print at Tilburg University
Cover art by Chris van der Linden
ABSTRACT
This thesis focuses on tourism as a popular phenomenon in contemporary society, with an aim of
connecting tourism-related theories to travel writings. Travel writing is observed as a practice
performed by established and ad-hoc writers alike, with representations that are coming to us
through ‘traditional’ printed travel stories and through new media, involving digital journals on
travel websites such as waarbenjij.nu. Theories from cultural studies (sociology, philosophy,
narratology) are assembled to frame tourism and to question travel writings by renowned Dutch
travel author Cees Nooteboom. His work is placed against a backdrop of amateur itineraries on
travel websites such as waarbenjij.nu. By doing so, an understanding is sought of both traveling
itself and of the writings that so often accompany it.
Rhetoric analyses of Nooteboom’s work in the context of current-day tourism show a fresh
perspective on the author, and demonstrate how the writer reframes theoretic concepts of tourism.
Nooteboom’s essays and novels are characterized by deferral: the writer and his protagonists take
detours that lead them off the trodden path, postponing decisive conclusions in favor of a more
complex understanding of what it means to travel. Through entangling fiction and reality, exploring
the role of gazing and imagery, and reframing postmodern travel figures such as the flâneur and the
post-tourist, the travel writer frames himself as someone dislodged from a fixed place and time. By
doing so, he also contributes to a better understanding of the ad-hoc writers on travel websites,
developing an account of incentives that fuel the need of contemporary tourism.
Key words:
1. Travel Writing.
2. Tourism.
3. Gaze.
4. Flânerie.
5. The work of Cees Nooteboom.
What has happened to us has either happened to everyone or to us alone; if the former it
has no novelty value and if the latter it will be incomprehensible. (Pessoa, 2002, p. 26)
CONTENTS
1
PREFACE
PART I
A TRAVELING FRAMEWORK
6
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCING TOURISM
Historical overview
Toward the individual
Digital tourism
7
9
11
12
CHAPTER TWO
BORDERS OF EXPERIENCE
Tourist fiction
Deferred experiences
Fictional storytelling
15
16
18
20
CHAPTER THREE
I GAZE, THEREFORE I AM
The controlling gaze
Fixing the Other
Forms of gazing
24
24
26
27
CHAPTER FOUR
PHOTOS OR IT NEVER HAPPENED
Investigating the visual
Photographs as travel objects
From pictures to words: ekphrasis
30
30
33
34
CHAPTER FIVE
INCORPORATING POSTMODERNISM
The innocent post-tourist
The postmodern condition
Variations on flânerie
37
37
38
41
PART II
DIGITAL DELIBERATIONS
44
PART III
A TRAVELING ANALYSIS
49
CHAPTER SIX
INTRODUCING NOOTEBOOM
A letter to the writer
50
50
CHAPTER SEVEN
DESCRIBING THE BORDERS
Roads to Santiago
Captain of the Butterflies
52
53
60
CHAPTER EIGHT
FIXING THE GAZE
Nomad’s Hotel
64
64
CHAPTER NINE
PHOTOS IF IT NEVER HAPPENED
All Souls’ Day
De Wereld een Reiziger
72
72
80
CHAPTER TEN
THE SOLITARY POSTMODERNIST
Lost Paradise
Philip and the Others
82
82
86
A letter from the writer
The long and short of it
91
92
94
POSTFACE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
98
REFERENCES
99
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B
APPENDIX C
A letter from the writer (Dutch)
Alice & Xavier, recaptured
Waarbenjij.nu homepage
105
106
108
DIGITAL
DELIBERATIONS
INCORPORATING
FIXING THE GAZE
POSTMODERNISM
PHOTOS OR IT
PHOTOS IF IT
NEVER HAPPENED
NEVER HAPPENED
THE SOLITARY
POSTMODERNIST
POSTFACE
PREFACE
INTRODUCING TOURISM
PREFACE
while these words are being written, Alice and Xavier are traveling across Bonaire. We may not
know who these people are, but we can tell where they are right now, and what they are doing. On a
popular travel website1, the Dutch couple keeps track of their honeymoon on Bonaire, through what
can be called a digital form of travel writing. To anyone who is interested, they post their tales of
beauty, adventure and leisure. They are, as they put it in one of their blogs, de koning te rijk2, a
phrase that conveys a feeling of being on top of the world. The French equivalent is être heureux
comme un roi3 (‘being happy as a king’), and literally, the Dutch expression means being even
wealthier than His Majesty.
The English rendition may prove to be the best metaphor. These tourists feel like there is no
better place on this world to be than right there – they are at their peak. And in terms of
psychological riches, the Dutch and French comparison with kings seems inept: the happiness of
these travelers seems to stem from the fact that royal responsibilities can be put aside for a
moment. At home we have our jobs, our financial worries, our agendas. But Alice and Xavier are
free. Free, because they are experiencing a temporary form of otherness, to speak with Levinas4:
seeing other places, meeting other people, living another sort of life. And what is more: these
experiences are so important to them that they are willing to take the precious time (how often
does one go on a honeymoon?) to daily post reports about them on their travel website. What
commitment!, choosing to write about rather than relishing the moment. And while these two
wrote down their faraway findings, the writer of this thesis remained at home. Studying books and
visiting websites with stories by those who went away. Enabling him, as John Urry (1990) put it, to
travel without moving.
What better place to start an investigation of the modern-day itinerary than on the digital
highway? A Google search on May 21, 2010 on the keywords travel writing resulted in finding
websites such as the Travel Writing Portal and Write101. Both sites contain a collection of articles,
tips, reviews, and names of publishers for the aspiring travel writer. The Travel Writing Portal asks
us: “So you want be a travel writer? Or a more successful one than you are?”5 And Write101 teaches
us how to improve in this area: “What to include when writing about your travels and what to leave
out!”6 With about 73 million other Google hits, the sheer number of relevant websites stands to
prove the apparent urgency of travel writing. Not just by renowned authors, but by common
tourists all over the world. The number of publications that can be found in regular book stores
reflects this cultural disposition: the section on travel comprises numerous photo collections,
guides, and books with titles such as Unforgettable Places To See Before You Die (Davey, 2004). Sure
enough, there are quite a lot of those places, so hopefully we will not die anytime soon. Smit (2009)
names us 100 Spiritual Places You Have To Have Seen, and Schultz (2003) even illustrates 1,000
1
See Appendix B.
See Appendix B.
3
See Theissen, S. & Hiligsmann, P. (1999). Uitdrukkingen en spreekwoorden van A tot Z. Paris, Brussels: De Boek.
4
To Levinas, the encounter with the Other can be considered a privilege. "The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not
in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness." (Levinas, 1991, p. 150).
5
See http://www.transitionsabroad.com/listings/travel/travel_writing/index.shtml. Retrieved March 7, 2010.
6
See http://www.write101.com/trav.htm. Retrieved March 7, 2010.
2
PREFACE
Places to See Before You Die. Traveling, in our contemporary society, seems more of a necessity than
a possibility.
Surely, this popularity is related to the decreasing cost of being a tourist. As far as it concerns the
Western consumer, one hardly has to be financially ‘wealthier than the king’. From the twentieth
century on, a process of democratization has been involved in tourism (Blanton, 2002): diminishing
expenses enable more and more people to embark on far away journeys. Today, tourism is a vast
cacophony of mobilities, with many sorts of incentives driving them. As such, it is an arresting
subject that is being studied from different disciplinary fashions, and with different outcomes. One
thing that many will agree upon, however, is that tourism is a cultural venture. Rojek & Urry (1996,
p. 5) pose the notion that tourism and culture are not to be seen as separate identities, because they
overlap in many important ways. Therefore, they argue, the social science of tourism should be
complemented by a ‘cultural analysis’. From a stance of cultural studies, such an analysis cannot
ignore the writings that tourism yields; this is where travel writing comes in. Connecting concepts
of tourism with these travel writings would require an interdisciplinary approach, combining a
sociological discourse with one of cultural and literary studies. Such a dynamic conceptualization of
tourism can be an exploration of the margins of the different disciplines, which hopefully results in
“unorthodox questions and answers” (Heynders, 2009) involving tourism and authorship – and the
casus of travel writing that connects the two. This thesis is an attempt to offer such fieldwork.
Introducing his essay Travel Writing, Casey Blanton (2002, p. 2) notes that the sequence of
leaving one’s home, an adventure, and – hopefully – a safe homecoming makes for a historically
persistent form of narrative. Even the oldest stories, allegedly, derived from traveling:
Homers Odyssey is a prime example. John Zilcosky (2008, p. 4) adds in his essay Writing Travel that
contemporary literary critics have developed the thought that every form of narration is in fact a
form of travel. They often use the word metaphor as an example – which etymologically means
'change of place'. It seems we are, by virtue of our language, mobile at all times. On the other hand,
Zilcosky reminds us of Walter Benjamin (1969, p. 389, in Zilcosky, 2008), who noted that the
writing of travels also requires its exact opposite: stillness and solitude. The Odyssey could only be
written after the voyage was at end – and likewise a piece of paper can only be written upon if it is
placed on a solid, stable object. Several travel writers such as Friedrich Nicolai, Goethe and
Johannes Fabian described the difficulty of writing during physical movement, and the
improvement of one’s writing after a few days of rest. Likewise, photos taken whilst moving are
usually not the clearest ones. The intertwinement of mobility and stillness seems to be a central
aspect of travel writing itself: capturing travel experiences means stopping, to describe or
photograph the many extraordinary things one encounters when traveling. And when one is truly
de koning te rijk on a journey, these stops seem to imply the loss of valuable time. So why do it? To
answer that question, we need a profound writer. Preferably someone who has trotted the entire
globe, and who can help us understand the motives and consequences of travel writing.
The first novel of Cees Nooteboom, Philip and the Others, was written after touring Europe in
1953. He also wrote travel stories for Dutch magazine Elsevier, and many of his novels can be
considered travel writings in some way. His ‘literary travel writings’, as we might blatantly call
them, defy the simplistic and always hint at a more complicated relationship between tourist and
tourist site. And it shows: the author has repeatedly stated that he is no tourist, but a traveler
(Piryns 1988, p. 59). Indeed, the term tourist seems pejorative. It has the connotation of being a
2
PREFACE
mere sightseer, superficially following the well-trodden route. Sociology teaches us that many
people will prefer to call themselves travelers or visitors (Crawshaw & Urry, 2002, p. 178). We
might ask ourselves, then, where travel writing ends and ‘tourist writing’ begins. Alice and Xavier
do not seem to mind relying on their Lonely Planet, and portraying the somewhat predictable
outcome – but Nooteboom’s novels compete with every conventional travel guide, as his friend and
art critic László Földényi (2006, p. 177) puts it.
To answer the question why his works are this evocative, we might need more time. But a first
estimate can be made. In Hotel Nooteboom (2007), a film about the writer and his books, colleague
writer Connie Palmen mentions that one of the core elements in Nooteboom’s literature is the role
of time. In the same movie we see the writer himself pondering over Marcel Proust’s grave, and
citing from his essay De Filosoof Zonder Ogen: “The feeling that this black tomb is filled to the brim
with crammed time, keeps imposing itself on me. Retrieved time . . . available to anyone who reads
him” (Schwerfel, 2007, trans. TvN). This is investigating le temps perdu indeed – but Nooteboom’s
method for doing so seems different than that of Proust. Nooteboom is not a victim of lost time, like
Proust was when he tasted the famous madeleine cookie, involuntarily awakening his memories.
Nooteboom seems to be actively searching for time, and for the universality of the happenings
within it. In Nootebooms Hotel (2002b) the writer notes: “The world of Proust is a cosmos to which
you always can return, in which art, in the end, is the only reality and not, as is thought so often, the
nostalgic recalling of a past as a past” (Nooteboom, 2002b, pp. 182-3).
It appears that the role of literature, here, is to bring back time. But when it concerns traveling,
writing in order to ‘save’ time brings about additional complications. Blanton explicates this
problem: travel writings describe “the strange, the exotic, the dangerous and the inexplicable.” As
such, they seek to “tell a truth that paradoxically may be untellable” (2002, p. 2). This is either
because of the external circumstances that prohibit the writer of ‘speaking the truth’, or because the
writer deliberately chooses to change the story. According to Chris Rojek (1997, p. 52), the social
construction of tourist experiences always, to some extent, invites “speculation, reverie, mindvoyaging and a variety of other acts of imagination.” The interaction between truth and fiction is a
key element of travel writing, Rojek and Zilcosky concur – and so it may prove useless to raise a
dichotomous wall between them. Nooteboom is an interesting author in this light: his work
includes poetry, literature and travel stories, and might attest the interaction between reality and
fiction. This presumption is accentuated by several other cues: Margot Dijkgraaf mentions in one of
her interviews with the writer that “whether something is true, whether something has actually
happened, is no valid criterion to Nooteboom” (Dijkgraaf, 2009, p. 65, trans. TvN). And the writer
himself gives us another cue: his website7 contains an interactive map of all the places he has
visited – either by his novel’s characters or by himself. Whether fictional or physical, the stories of
these places are equally important, he seems to tell us.
Perhaps it is because of this complexity that both Nooteboom’s truthful travels and the stories he
makes up about them are well respected. The author has been awarded with many international
prizes, many of which have something to do with his focus on imagery. In the laudation of the
prestigious Dutch P.C. Hooftprijs, politician Hans van Mierlo commended Nooteboom for being a
master at ekphrasis, a rhetorical description of something that has been seen (Dijkgraaf, 2009, pp.
33-4). And he is not the only one who notices this quality: in Germany, Nooteboom is known as Der
7
See http://www.ceesnooteboom.com/?page_id=710&lang=nl. Retrieved March 13, 2010
3
PREFACE
Augenmensch (Földényi, 2006, p. 180). It becomes clear that analyzing the writer’s work brings
along the subject of putting visual experiences in words. In this potency of literature we hear the
echo of James Heffernan (1993), who put forward that the arts are best capable of “showing the
friction between words and images.” Within travel writing, this visual aspect seems all the more
important: Rojek & Urry (1996) insist that, when analyzing tourism, a focus should rest upon the
examination of the human senses, especially the eye. This subject of gazing, and the consequential
pictures that tourists take on their voyages, needs to be further sought out.
But firstly it is important to consider the long-standing history of travel writing. From the
pilgrims in the thirteenth century, to the “conquering heroes” of the New World in the sixteenth and
seventeenth century (Blanton, 2002, p. 9), to the hasty tourists of the 1950’s and later (MacCannell,
1976, p. 3) who started enjoying the commodification of tourism. In contemporary society, the
tourist is a more relevant figure than ever before. Jokinen & Veijola (1997, p. 23) argue that he is
increasingly being used in writings on the postmodern condition. Concepts such as ‘post-tourism’
by Maxine Feifer (1985) and the flâneur as described by Walter Benjamin (2002) are entwined, and
in need of clarification. The issue of postmodernism8 is even more relevant since Nooteboom is
often associated with it. Academic and author John Maxwell Coetzee has written in a review on
Paradise lost that Nooteboom has a “reputation as a postmodernist, not only in respect of his
fictional procedures, where he has plainly been to school with Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges,
and Italo Calvino, but in his sensibility too, cool, intellectually sophisticated, ironic” (Coetzee, 2008).
The writer himself wants nothing to do with terms of postmodernism (Dijkgraaf, 2009, p. 41), but
he is a part of a historical context – just as much as his amateur contemporaries who are being
addressed by Write101 and the Travel Writing Portal. It seems fair to regard him in this
perspective.
Summarizing the above: it seems necessary to further analyze the sociology of tourism in order
to gain an understanding of travel writing. And inversely, the description of current travel writers
may teach us a thing or two about the contemporary changes in tourism. This thesis thus becomes
something of a conversation between theorists and writers, who can supply each other with
knowledge and experience. The research methodology revolves around a sociologic, cultural and
historical understanding of tourism and travel, which is linked to a qualitative analysis of
Nooteboom’s novels, travel writings and poetry. While the most notable concepts will be split up in
different chapters, they shift and intertwine with each other. So we move onward to the theoretic
framework, thereby neglecting the skepticism of Nooteboom himself, whose protagonist in All souls’
day describes a Tilburg University graduate, “with the usual mix of Marxism and Catholicism still
clinging to him like a dirty nimbus . . . in a musty office in a dried-up dream factory” (Nooteboom,
2002, p. 12). Indeed, this writer may not need academics – but they certainly do need the writer. He
can supply them with both his travel experience and his capacity of explicating these experiences
with great articulacy. The latter is of great importance: as Martha Nussbaum indicates, literature is
able to cultivate our powers of sympathetic imagination. It enables us to comprehend the motives
and choices of people different from ourselves – an essential part of what she calls ‘world
8
The concepts of ‘postmodernity’ and ‘postmodernism’ are often used interchangeably. We will adhere to the terms as the
Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction proposes: ‘postmodernity’ is used when describing the historical era after the
age of modernism, due to developments in the political, social, economic, and media spheres. ‘Postmodernism’ will be used
when discussing “the set of ideas developed from philosophy and theory and related to aesthetic production” (Nicol, 2009).
4
PREFACE
citizenship’. “Narrative art has the power to make us see the lives of the different with more than a
casual tourist’s interests – with involvement and sympathetic understanding” (Nussbaum, 1997, pp.
85-8). Richard Rorty coined a somewhat similar concept: solidarity. He depicted it as the
identification with other people, which can be acquired by reading both historical reports and
fictional novels. These writings are able to describe what unfamiliar people are like, and can give a
“redescription of what we ourselves are like” (Rorty, 1989, xvi). An analysis of both leads us one
step closer to answering the most prominent question, that may seem so simple but that is so very
complex. It is the same question that has been asked to Nooteboom the most; it “returned
compulsively in every interview and just so many times that I cannot recall how often I have lied to
answer it” (Nooteboom, 2002b, p. 11, trans. TvN). The question is: why do we travel? Why does
Nooteboom do it? Why do Alice and Xavier do it? If we want an answer to this question, we need to
observe what is written during that time. Nooteboom may lie in interviews, but through his
writings we might a more earnest answer. Hopefully, this research can be an itinerary for finding it.
5
PART I
A TRAVELING FRAMEWORK
6
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCING TOURISM
Performing a ‘cultural analysis’ of tourism, as Rojek & Urry (1996, p. 5) have it, first of all requires
addressing some methodological choices. In the theoretic framework of this project, a strongly
relational approach is chosen, with a shifting focus between interrelated concepts and their
discursive workings in tourism and culture studies. It covers a wide scope, in the sense that it seeks
to combine insights of philosophers, sociologists, literary critics, and psychologists, scrutinizing
their contributions to the understanding of current-day tourism. It is also critical, meaning that it
refuses to neglect the normative element of analysis. It tries assessing what exists, what might exist
and perhaps even what should exist on the basis of a coherent set of values.9 In the analyses, the
established concepts are used as a canvas through which Nooteboom’s work can be interpreted.
The form used here can be defined as rhetorical analysis, examining the development of arguments
and strategies by the literary writer. Instead of aiming for an all-encompassing analysis of his
selected works, elements and passages are chosen that shed a different light on the theory, or that
are transformed by it.
Another useful addendum for our methodology is offered by Mieke Bal, who in her explanatory
work Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (Bal, 2008, p. 6) attributes her own profession as in the
realm of ‘cultural analysis’. She argues that
. . . in distinction from, say, cultural anthropology, ‘cultural analysis’ does not study culture. Culture is
not its object. The qualifier cultural in ‘cultural analysis’ indicates, instead, a distinction from the
traditional disciplinary practice within the humanities, namely, that the various objects gleaned from
the cultural world for closer scrutiny are analysed in view of their existence in culture. (p. 9)
When we regard a research-object in view of its cultural context, we must keep in mind that culture
is a dynamical framework. Just as objects are determined by their cultural surroundings, the
content of culture itself depends on the objects within them. Therefore, the relationship between
objects and their context is a strongly interactive one, and the field of cultural analysis is therefore
never strictly delimited. By selecting an object for analysis, we automatically question the analytical
field we operate in, and the methods that we use. Bal asserts that the humanities must hence seek
their heuristic and methodological research in concepts, instead of fully developed methods. These
methods fix the regarded object in a certain disciplinary fashion, whereas concepts can be regarded
with equal importance from different perspectives and disciplines (p. 4). The systematic theory
from which they are taken should not be neglected, but the biggest advantage of a concept is that it
can be both present in its theoretical framework and in the object it analyses. Bal (p. 21) notes.
“While concepts are products of philosophy and tools of analysis, they are also embodiments of the
cultural practices we seek to understand through them.” The most important counterpart for a
concept, to Bal, remains the analyzed object itself – not the concept’s historical or theoretical
context. Likewise, this research-project does not intended to provide a Foucaultian genealogy of
sorts concerning tourism (although discourse and power relations play a significant role), but to
connect current-day events that happen in the touristic field. While discourses are not traced
9
See also Norman Fairclough’s introduction of Critical Discourse Analysis (2010, p. 7).
7
CHAPTER ONE
historically, the historic roots of certain concepts will be taken into consideration to see how
meaning changes if we put these concepts in the perspective of contemporary tourism.
Bal’s notion resembles the predicament of the hermeneutic circle that also stresses the
reciprocity between object and concept. We can analyze an object through certain concepts, and
that object subsequently helps to further comprehend the concepts. A fixed, linear methodology of
accumulated theory and the thereby analyzed objects would yield results that lack finesse and
longevity. After all, we are traveling in (hermeneutical) circles. A circle has neither an end nor a
start; it keeps spinning from concept to object and back again. These two halves are mutually
supportive. As Bal puts it, objects “are not seen as isolated jewels, but as things that are alwaysalready engaged, as interlocutors, within the larger culture from which they have emerged.” (p. 9).
Now we can see more clearly the role of Alice and Xavier in these first chapters, in which our
concepts start the conversation. They are mediators, illustrating the used concepts and assisting in
building a framework through which Nooteboom’s works can be analyzed. Now let us enter our
circle, and first start with an introduction to that ‘larger culture’ Bal speaks of: tourism itself.
The popularity of travel writing that was mentioned in the introduction obviously parallels the
popularity of travel itself. The industry of ‘travel and tourism’ is the largest in the world, accounting
for 11.7% of world GDP, 8% of world export earnings, and 8% of employment. Based on monthly or
quarterly data series available for 150 destination countries, the number of international tourist
arrivals worldwide between January and August 2010 is estimated at 642 million (UNWTO, 2010).
This number is all the more convincing when compared with the 25 million arrivals in 1950
(Sheller & Urry, 2004, p. 3). Mass tourism is indeed a recent phenomenon – both its existence itself
as well as its analysis. On the second page of his comprehensive work The Tourist Gaze, Urry (1990,
pp. 2-3) confirms that “acting as a tourist” is one of the defining characteristics of “being modern10”
– because it is a contemporary trend, but also because concepts of mobility, globalization and
traveling are all readily applicable to notions of a postmodern society. To see what he means by
this, let us first define the tourist himself.
A rather technical definition was proposed by the International Union of Official Travel
Organisations (IUOTO) in 1963 and approved in 1968 by the World Tourist Organization (Leiper,
1979, p. 393). It states that (international) tourists are "temporary visitors staying at least twentyfour hours in the country visited and the purpose of whose trip can be classified under one of the
following headings: (a) leisure (recreation, holiday, health, study, religion and sport); (b) business
(family mission, meeting)" (IUOTO, 1963, p. 14). Erik Cohen (1984, p. 2) has commented that this
definition is a bit unsatisfactory, as it is too broad and theoretically barren. So, he notes, who
exactly this tourist is remains a point of debate. Whereas sociologists as Boorstin (1964, pp. 77117) and MacCannell (1973, p. 13) classify the tourist as a ‘unitary role-type’, others argue that
tourists differ considerably in their motivations (see also Cohen, 1972, 1974; Smith, 1978; Knox,
1987, pp. 3-5). Rojek & Urry also suggest that there is no common denominator for different
tourists, because this would ignore “whether these stays have in any sense the same significance to
visitors” (Rojek & Urry, 1996, p. 2).
10
The use of the word ‘modern’ may cause confusion, since different theorists use it in different contexts. Since the term here
th
th
does not refer to cultural tendencies of the late 19 and early 20 century, the word shall be mainly avoided when discussing
current-day tourism.
8
INTRODUCING TOURISM
One way of investigating this significance is by reading the travel writings yielded by tourism.
These writings surely differ in their form and content, which is an important source for discerning
the historical and personal differences within tourism. For instance, changes in travel writing may
be linked to changes in tourism in order to see how it has developed throughout the ages. To do so,
a few key elements of travel writing need to be framed. In The Norton Book of Travel, Fussell (1987)
argues that travel literature depends upon some degree of self-consciousness on the part of the
narrator that was not seized upon until after the Renaissance and, in fact, not highly developed until
the concern with ‘sensibility’ in the eighteenth century (p. 21). Another element of travel literature
is that it mediates between two poles: the individual physical thing it describes on one hand, and
the larger theme that it is ‘about’ on the other (p. 126). Its subject matter is simultaneously the self
and the world. The purpose and style of these narratives has evolved substantially over time, and
aspects of the modern-day travel book are inherited elements of all of its predecessors and close
cousins (Blanton, 2002, p. 2). The emphasis will ultimately lay on our object’s existence in the
present, as Bal suggests11 – but it is also important to keep its context in mind. Investigating the
concepts revolving around contemporary tourism and travel writing will be all the more effective if
we see how they differ from their historical counterparts.
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
Let us start our overview at the end of the Middle Ages, an era in which traveling was restricted to a
very small group (Towner, 1988, as cited in Urry, 1990). Pilgrims, missionaries and merchants –
such as Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus – predominated travel writing in the thirteenth
century. They gained geographical knowledge of the Far East and were mostly interested in
colonization and trade. In their writings, they mostly focused on the otherness of the cultures they
visited. This focus shifted in the late Renaissance during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, in
which the positivism of a ‘knowable world’, supported by philosophers as Descartes, Locke and
Newton, taught that the world was split up in mind and body – in external stimuli and an internal
world (Blanton, 2002, p. 11). This became a guideline for the English aristocratic youth, who
proceeded to seek these stimuli by embarking on the Grand Tour, a kind of ‘finishing school’ for
university students and writers (Ibid.). They witnessed classical antiquities and the legacy of the
Renaissance culture (see Towner, 1985) in order to “prepare [them] for diplomatic careers”
(Hibbert, 1969; Harkin, 1995, p. 655, as cited in Craik, 1997).
Travel writing in the nineteenth century coincided with the Romantic period. Key elements of
this era were subjectivity, sensitivity and self-discovery – like Rudyard Kipling describing India in
The Jungle Book. The accent shifted to the experiencing subject instead of his descriptions of people
and places. The key element became describing one’s experience – a concept that will return later
on. The end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of mass tourism, further accentuating the
endless possibilities of mankind that was felt by the Romantics. The optimistic preoccupation with
self-discovery persisted until the First World War, which shattered the optimism of the
Enlightenment and Romanticism, and replaced it with a “modern temper of doubt and anxiety”
(Blanton, 2002, p. 21). Travel writers felt fragmented, and went on a ‘quest for wholeness’, in which
11
Her suggestion stems from the fact that cultural analysis should pursue issues of cultural relevance (Bal, 2008, p. 9).
9
CHAPTER ONE
the use of irony started to play an important role. The Second World War further added to this
paradoxical aesthetic of homeliness and cruelty, giving rise to the anticonformist Beatnik
Generation in the 1950’s, with Jack Kerouac as its spiritual father.
Another significant attribute of the nineteenth and twentieth century was the democratization of
travel. Non-elite groups of tourists saw a generalization into more organized, predictable and
marketable forms of tourism (Craik, 1997, p. 119). Traveling became less of an educationally and
cultivating journey, and more of a private, passionate experience of escape, pleasure and beauty.
Apart from its utilitarian and intellectually challenging aspects, tourism became increasingly
‘playful’ and aesthetical. With mass tourism came the McDisneyisation of tourism (Ritzer & Liska,
1997): the processing of large amounts of tourists in efficient, calculable tourist environments,
offering a familiarity of consumption goods and mechanical or electronic attractions. The
commodification of tourist sites leads Blanton (and others12) to argue that the search for an
‘authentic’ tourist experience has become questionable. Travel has become little more than a
“required pilgrimage to the repositories of culture” (Blanton, 2002, p. 23).
However, the use of the word ‘pilgrimage’ alone seems to indicate that the motivation for
present-day voyages is still more than a requirement alone. Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner
compared contemporary tourism with the travels of pilgrims that were characterized by their
liminality. Being on a pilgrimage, one is performing rituals that are anti-structured, opposite to ones
normal, everyday life (Suvantola, 2002, p. 54). Through these rituals, the pilgrim’s journey became
something more than just bodily displacement. In the state of liminality, one is situated between the
normal world and the supernatural. According to Turner (1973), this feeling of liminality is shared
by all pilgrims who experienced it: the sensation of communitas (p. 192) that is a remarkable form
of solidarity among the individuals of a group of people that, as Rojek & Urry (1996) have put it
before, all experience something different. Turner proceeds to argue that a certain amount of this
liminality might also be present within current-day tourism.
According to Keith Tester, access to this liminal state nowadays is experienced by a certain type
of tourist: the ‘strolling pedestrian’ who is able to travel, arrive, move on, and all the while remain
anonymous. It is a singular kind of counter-tourist, in a poetic confrontation with the places he
visits. According to Tester it is this stroller, or flâneur, who experiences a ‘real’, ‘authentic’ view,
uncluttered by dominant tourist images (Tester, 1994, in Crawshaw & Urry, 2002, p. 179).13 The
figure of the flâneur will be more thoroughly discussed in the context of postmodernism. The other
important notion that needs clarification is the one of authenticity – for Tester leads us to believe
that the average tourist is so much tied up in the dominant images of the sites he visits, that the
experience of something authentic is reserved for this flâneur. If we consider research of Bywater
(1993, p. 32, as cited in Craik, 1997, p. 120), the difference between these two kinds of tourists may
have something to do with ‘cultural motivation’. He asserts that even though the majority of tourists
still visit historic monuments and sites, museums, art and music, very few of them are specifically
interested in these cultural opportunities. There is only a small percentage (according to Bywater’s
research. about 5%) that can be considered genuinely culturally motivated (Bywater, 1993, p. 42;
Silberberg, 1995, pp. 362-3, as cited in Craik, 1997, p. 120). The remaining two third of all tourists
do visit cultural attractions, but they select their travel destinations for other reasons. Unlike the
12
13
See, for example, MacCannell, 1973; Cohen, 1988; Rojek, 1996.
More on this can be found in chapter 5.2.
10
INTRODUCING TOURISM
Renaissance aristocrat youth, they are “adjunct, accidental or reluctant visitors” of culture (Craik,
1997, p. 120), confining themselves to the images the tourist industry feeds them. If cultural
interest is the key, then Alice and Xavier will likely never experience authenticity.
TOWARD THE INDIVIDUAL
While the current-day tourist can indeed be regarded as an opportunistic sightseer, Urry (1990)
depicts him as somewhat more wayward. He notes that the starting point of what some call
‘modern’ tourism coincides with a modern development: the economical shift from Fordism to
Post-fordism in the twentieth century. Jennifer Craik (1997) summarizes: “Tourism, it is argued, fits
in with trends in economic development toward service-based, consumer-oriented industries
associated with the production of symbolic or cultural capital rather than material goods.” This has
to do with the change from a system of mass consumption to a system of individual consumption. 14
Mass consumption puts the product producer in the spotlight, resulting in little freedom of choice
for consumption. Post-fordism, however, holds consumption as the central concept. The selection of
products is widened – often with a shorter lifespan. Consumers can choose between many brands,
and by doing so invest in their own identity by buying certain brands.
This, according to Urry, results in a more individualistic approach to consumerism, and an antireaction to the 'masses'. From the twentieth century on, the tourist became free to decide where he
wanted to go: he could now travel virtually anywhere, by airplane, train or car. According to Cohen
(1984), international tourism became a mass phenomenon after World War II when it took off to
embrace practically all social classes in industrialized Western societies (Scheuch 1981, p. 1095, as
cited in Cohen, 1984). This expansion was made possible by rising standards of living and the
shortening of the work year, accompanied by longer paid vacations in the industrialized Western
countries – and rapid improvements in the means of transportation (Dumazdicr, 1967, pp. 129-130;
Young, 1973, p. 30; Scheuch, 1981, p. 1094, as cited in Cohen, 1984). Instead of being McDisneyized,
tourists more and more chose to go their own way, away from the trodden path. The current-day
tourist seems to have an uncertain relationship with tourism itself. On the one hand, there are the
many calculable, standardized mass-tourist trips. On the other hand, the tourism of ‘slow travel’15
indicates a renewed interest in the individual experience.
It may also prove useful to keep in mind that travel writings are always individual stories. This is
true for travel novels and personal travel websites alike. And where a travel writer like Nooteboom
may be no ordinary tourist by virtue of his writing skills, there are a lot of writers who can be found
on the Internet whom we could easily classify as mass tourists, who by and large take the same
pictures and write the same interchangeable stories. The question then, is how we can regard their
individual experiences in the face of authenticity. Let us first consider the medium through which
they operate. How do travel websites (or round-the-world websites, as Urry puts it) work?
14
See also Aglietta, 1987; Hall, 1988.
Slow travel entails a more direct communication with the local community, instead of following guidebooks, in a low-impact
travelling fashion.
15
11
CHAPTER ONE
DIGITAL TOURISM
Travel websites are personal, and mostly temporal, home pages for independent travelers to
publicly chronicle the events of their round-the-world trips (Urry, 1990, p. 171). These pages
typically include some biographical information, some explicit or implicit motivation for the trip, as
well as maps, itineraries and information about the destination. Interactive features such as
guestbooks, online forum discussions and web polls encourage family, friends and other ‘armchair
travelers’ to follow and participate in these journeys: they can thus become members of the
expedition.
When surfing to Dutch travel site waarbenjij.nu, the first thing we see is a picture of a world map.
Above it, we can read the solemn yet promising line: ‘Ga op reis naar...’. It can be translated to
‘Travel to…’.16 It looks like some kind of recommendation; there is a place to go anywhere on the
globe. At the same time these words imply a possibility: clicking on the different parts of the map
results in finding travel stories from people who are currently there. People that can be followed, so
to speak. And of course following means traveling as well. It is remarkable that the terminology we
use to describe our use of the Internet ('surfing' on the digital 'superhighway') exemplifies the way
in which we are constantly traveling, even when standing still. There are specific travel-related
websites: Google Earth and Bing Maps grant us insight into what many locations on earth look like,
and sites of travel agencies offer us visual tours of the spots they offer flights to, so we can virtually
look around at the places they can physically take us to. And by doing so, even the people at home
can transform into 'virtual globetrotters': they can visit sites as waarbenjij.nu and see or read the
stories of other travelers – and by doing so, become part of their travels.
These digital wanderings are becoming ever easier to embark on. Within the first pages of Global
Complexities (1995), Urry notes that the 'technological and organizational innovations' from last
century ensured a compression of time needed to communicate. In contemporary society, similar
changes are occurring: the Internet accommodates an almost immediate communication. In today’s
civilization, “people are tourists most of the time whether they are literally mobile or only
experience simulated mobility through the incredible fluidity of multiple signs and electronic
images.” (Urry, 1990, p. 148). The integrated resources of Internet, laptops and digital cameras
facilitate frequently updated websites, and allow friends and family to play along in the global
adventures that they depict. The global stage thus becomes “an interplay between embodied global
travel and virtual representations of these experiences” (p. 169). Website visitors can find pleasure
in playing the virtual tourist game, even if they realize that they are not actually, physically
traveling.17
This playfulness may be an aspect of the World Wide Web itself. It is being used both for
instrumental goals as for recreational purposes. Or, as Jennie Germann Molz (p. 172) puts it: “The
more you work on the Internet, the more you play on the Internet.” Work and play become
seamless aggregates, with travelers working on their websites in distinct leisure spaces like hotel
rooms or Internet cafés. The resulting web pages are the result of authentic labor (see Chandler,
16
See appendix C.
There are many other sites that work with these ‘digital experiences’ as well. For example, Microsoft offers a customisation
for Windows: users can create an avatar and paste them into a travel backdrop: “Take a journey to the beach, escape to the
mountains, explore the city or go on a safari – while never leaving your PC.” See http://www.rulive.nl/aspx/experience.aspx.
Retrieved August 8, 2010.
17
12
INTRODUCING TOURISM
1997); it is remarkable that travelers who are pursuing a goal of leisure elect to partake in such
labor. The fact that the Internet can easily be used to publish tourist findings (with words or
pictures) makes it tempting indeed to become a travel writer of sorts. That is, until the trip is over,
at which time the author will lose his public. The web replaces the necessity of writing letters to
individual friends – they can all be addressed at once. And they all can react to the writers on that
very spot by leaving comments on the guestbook or online forum. Reactions like these basically
ascertain the existence of a keenly interested public. These writers may be guests to the country to
which they travel, but on the Internet they constitute the principal hosts, with the guests being the
people visiting their pages, reading their stories and seeing their pictures. Molz recalls an interview
with a traveler named Hilary, who kept track of her voyages through a website. She explains that
during her travels, she started doing things that would make a good read, things that her audience
would want her to do. “We’re doing it for the readers out there”, she explained (Molz, 2000, p. 177).
It seems that these writers are endeared to a certain form of professionalism, and will get into
leisure activities at least partially to fulfill a ‘working life’ purpose. As Nooteboom puts it in an
interview: “the professional alter ego existing inside of me has dethroned the regular walker, the
stroller, the tourist. No longer can I just walk across a street. No, the street is literally transformed
before my eyes in language” (Dijkgraaf, 2003, p. 9, trans. TvN). Everything these travelers set their
eyes on is a potential thing to frame – either by a text or an image. As Eddy Posthuma de Boer, the
photographer who has accompanied Nooteboom on many of his travels, explains it: “The
photographer is never simply traveling. He cannot permit himself the luxury of just looking around.
He does not see landscapes; he rather sees photos, images of reality as they may get depicted in a
photograph. The photographer and the writer are both outsiders. You do not belong there.”
Nevertheless, writing or photographing simplifies the process of unification, Dijkgraaf adds. “The
traveler is alone and is not a part of the population of the country he is visiting. However, through a
photograph, taken in the midst of these people, he is part of them for a while. He no longer is that
displaced figure” (Dijkgraaf, 2009, p. 24, trans. TvN).
Perhaps this is the most important thing to note, however trivial it may seem: travel writing, no
matter the form it takes, is considered to be about a unique experience. A specific travel book can
show us pictures and stories of places where one has been, and we feel this likely pertains to
essential experiences in ones’ personal life. In the introductory pages of a travel book titled
Unforgettable places to see before you die, Davey (2004, p. 11) is even more explicit: “Travelling
brings memories, and lots of them. There will be the big, ‘blockbuster’ memories – the kinds that
friends and family will clamour to share through your photographs and postcards.” Davey's tone
here seems typical of another trait of contemporary tourism: the strong belief in the sacral power of
the travel story and travel photo. There is a distinct lack of irony to be found here. This may be so
because – regardless whether our journeys are part of an elite, Grand Tour-like ideal, or a mass
McDisneyized trip – they are of great importance to our identity. The daily updates on travel
websites are more than mere personal travel diaries; they do not only serve as a mnemonic for the
authors themselves. It is no coincidence that there are many websites prominently showing us a
global map annotated with the percentage of the world that one has been to.18 The number of
18
See http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2451326089 or http://www.passportstamp.com/. Retrieved July 21,
2010.
13
CHAPTER ONE
stamps in one’s passport, the number of photos on one’s blog – they all contribute to the map of
ourselves. Where we are increasingly becomes the determinant of who we would want to be.
In one of their posts, Alice and Xavier recommend Bonaire to their friends as a prime location to
spend a vacation. “There have been few places we have been where the service and accommodation
were as good as here”, they acclaim.19 It seems that these travelers know exactly what they want.
The affiliation they have with their own tourist practice is far from ambiguous; their assertions
sound as confident as Davey’s. However, something is left out of the picture here. In these travel
writings, in capturing time that is spent on a voyage, there is always some sort of mediation going
on – between different people, and between different ways of storytelling. Things that are not
spoken of by Davey, and that do not turn up in the stories of Alice and Xavier who readily follow his
recommendations. It seems that these present-day travelers, constantly barraged with the
popularity of traveling – both in the analogue and the digital world – are convinced in advance that
they trip has to be fantastic. Travel writing thus tends to rally between reality and fiction, between
fantasy and actuality. The existential fulfillment as promised to the traveler by Davey is sure
tempting, but there certainly exist aspects that complicate the process. A major one is constituted
by fiction and fantasy – and the consequences they inflict on tourist experience.
19
See Appendix B, trans. TvN.
14
CHAPTER TWO
Every journey starts at home. In the case of Alice and Xavier, it is at the preparations of their
marriage. In the first posts on their travel website they describe the moment of getting married, and
the adjectives they use cannot be mistaken. “It was, in one word, fabulous”, they reminisce in one of
their stories.20 Later on, halfway into their week on Bonaire, they are even more zealous – and this
time, they are aware of it: “we realize that we speak in superlatives, but something better, in our
experience, is impossible.”21 To these travelers, deception and disappointment seem hardly an
issue. It is such a fantastic expedition that Alice and Xavier cannot even imagine a better experience.
They find it hard to describe how fantastic it is, exactly. “Our travel experiences may prove to be
untellable”, Blanton (2002) cautioned earlier, summarizing this problem. After all, the many things
the traveler experiences are typically unfamiliar. How is this alleged impossibility of capturing it in
words related to the ardor of our contemporary travelers?
To answer this question we need to establish a better understanding of what it means to travel.
Földényi (1997, p. 114) acknowledges the existential notion of traveling as he analyzes the writings
of Nooteboom: “traveling is not only about geography; what matters is that we learn to understand
our existence.” This understanding, however, is not solely dependent on the voyage itself. “Travel is
primarily an attempt to extend the external bounds of our existence without sacrificing the
possibilities actualized at our home place”, Jaakko Suvantola (2002, p. 42) notes. Travel can thus be
understood as the interaction between our desire to feel secure and our desire to reach out to the
world. This opposition is not only set in space, but also in time. We might concisely22 reflect on the
concept of Dasein that Martin Heidegger proposed in his Sein und Zeit, to clarify that the
existentialistic mode of traveling can be split up in both spatial and temporal displacement.
Literally, Dasein means ‘being there’ – which shows that we are always being somewhere, at a
specific geographic place (Suvantola, 2002, p. 18). Second, our being is bound to its ‘historicality’:
the Dasein is temporal, and uses a “calendar and a clock” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 429). It is important
to consider this temporality of traveling. It is valuable time that we spend; time that we would like
to preserve, to sustain – even when we are back home again. It is precisely because of this
importance that fantasy starts to play a role in tourism and travel writing. Time spent traveling
should be as good as it gets – so it starts to be entangled with different forms of fiction. With the
introduction of fiction in tourism, we see that the oppositions between reaching out and feeling
secure, between the external and the internal world, between here and there, then and now, are
starting to shift.
20
22
Even though making use of Heidegger’s complicated concepts ‘briefly’ may be considered an act of shortsightedness, his
concept proves useful even when considered in a limited manner.
21
15
CHAPTER TWO
TOURIST FICTION
The sites visited by the tourist are physically and psychologically distant from his ordinary life.
While he travels to unfamiliar places, at the same time he weaves a web of “tales, symbols and
fantasies” (Rojek, 19967, p. 53) around the experience. The reasons for this are twofold. Sheller &
Urry (2004, p. 3) describe this aptly with the concept of play. They do so in their aptly titled article
Places to Play, Places in Play. This title hints at the dual meaning of the word play. Firstly, it
concerns the tourist who is playing: his traveling is often a matter of lightheartedness and fun.23
Secondly, because tourism is also a play in itself – to which the hosts of tourist sites are actively
contributing. Hosts have an increasing awareness of the ‘tourism potential’ of their sites. Through
monitoring and modifying they try to maximize their potential as a tourist site. By doing so, they are
being transformed into a myriad of ‘lifestyle concepts’, dependent of global brands, marketing,
sponsorship and design. Their hosts, who are well aware of the stories surrounding them, culturally
produce them. But the guests, as well, create the stage. As soon as they choose the place they want
to travel to, the travel agency produces the first form of fiction. They show them pictures, explain
the cultural and aesthetic qualities of the country, and offer them ways in which they can become a
tourist. Urry (1990, p. 101) describes the traveling game of the tourist ‘as a child’, where one is told
where to go, for how long, what to eat, and so forth. It is a playful way in which a travel agency
decides for a large part what things we get to see. Still, the most commonly seen fiction is created by
mass media. Tourist sites are channeled through TV shows, movies, websites and – indeed – travel
writings, which are used by prospect tourist to frame and render these often-extraordinary sites
more comprehensible.
These representations all contribute to the creation of what Rojek (1996, p. 2) calls myths.
According to Rojek, the “mention of the mythical is unavoidable in discussions of travel and
tourism.” Rojek uses the concept in the context of Roland Barthes, who wrote about it in his classic
work Mythologies (1972). To Barthes, myths are the dominant ideology of our time. Their function
is to ‘naturalize the cultural’ – in other words, to make dominant cultural and historical values,
attitudes and beliefs seem entirely 'natural', 'normal', self-evident, timeless, obvious 'commonsense'. To better understand this, we need to recognize the key semiotic concepts the theorist
introduces. In the first place, there is the object – the signified – that is represented by a signifier –
the linguistic representation of the object. The signifier might thus be called a substitute for the
underlying meaning of it. Barthes saw the entire language of mass culture as a socially constructed
system of signs (signifier and signified combined) that hence produces a myth: a message that ‘goes
without saying’. Such myths reinforce the dominant values of their culture (Barthes, 2009, xix).
Contrary to the usual meaning of the word, a semiotic myth does not necessarily propagate a
false belief – or a true on e. It instead can be seen as an extended metaphor, helping us to make
sense of our experiences within a culture (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 185-6). An example is depicted
by Jaguaribe & Hetherington (2004, p. 157). They analyze in a Barthesian way how the favelas in
Rio de Janeiro are being represented – for example, in Black Orpheus, a film by Marcel Camus. The
film, in this case, is the signifier, which shows the viewer the signified: certain concepts like ‘vitality’
or ‘music-filled’ which are associated with Rio as we see this movie. What is important here is that
the relationship between these signifiers and signified is produced, and not necessarily existent.
23
Even though we have seen that travelers also enjoy ‘working’ on their trip, by maintaining their web spaces.
16
Tourists are narrowing their horizon of expectations through uncertainties. Sites are framed in
terms of prior knowledge, expectations, fantasies and myths – and none of these are certain to be
accurate. It is also critical to note that this framework for a large part stem from “the tourist’s
original culture rather than by the cultural offerings of the destination” (Craik, 1997, p. 118). If we
want to understand Craik’s statement in the light of travel writing, we can link it to the horizon of
expectations that German literary critic Hans Robert Jauss (1970) proposed: a mental set of
preconceptions yielding the perspective from which a story is read. The broader our horizon, the
more we can see. This horizon of expectations is important when it concerns tourists, since
everything they read about their destination beforehand tends to narrow it. In that sense, our
myths are a form of feeling secure. They grant the tourist the opportunity to travel to other places
whilst maintaining the conceptions that his own cultures taught him. This is quite an important
aspect of travel writing, since it is both a product of one’s horizon of expectations, as well as a
window, so to speak, that defines the horizon of the people who read the story.
This is not without consequence for the traveler himself. Because of these ideal representations,
actual tourist experiences can be disappointing when compared to them. Musing on this, Alain de
Botton (2002, p. 16) describes how a travel folder of Barbados reminded him of the paintings that
William Hodges created during his travels with Captain Cook. The picture itself was enough of a
reason for De Botton to go see that place. In Lanzarote, Marcel Houellebecq (2005) writes about the
same experience: the first impressions he has of his vacation destination are immediately compared
to the impression he got at the travel agency. Both writers note, however, that the expectations they
had are never fully fulfilled. De Botton describes that looking at the pictures he saw was a bigger
touristic success than the physical journey itself. That journey, after all, brought along physical and
psychological burdens – things that do not matter when we are at home, reading a book or looking
at a picture.
Zilkosky (2008, p. 6) rightfully adds that, because of this disappointment, we may never be
completely done with our voyage of self-fulfillment. He is reminded of Sigmund Freud, who noticed
that “wo Es war, soll Ich warden.” Zilcosky argues that the delay of fulfillment might be a key aspect
of travel. To Freud, the instinctual Es is channeled by the rational, organizing Ich – but the Ich can
never fully commit to the Es, because it is also influenced by the moralizing Über-ich. It seems
important to add to this that, to Freud, the friction between Es, Ich and Über-ich coincides with the
collision between the Lustprincip or Eros, and the Totestriebe or Thanatos. Thanatos is the search
for peace and quietness – which, in its most radical form, means death. The search for Thanatos,
closure, stillness, is always confronted with its opposite: as soon as we stand still, and end our
journey, we search for another goal and 'move on'. It ties in with the earlier mentioned opposition
between reaching out and feeling secure. Thanatos is the ultimate security: the resting, the stop, the
end of it all; while Eros means reaching out, experiencing, renewing. Arguably, this conflict between
Eros and Thanatos makes our travel experiences untellable, as Blanton put it, since we always want
to keep pushing forward, but need to stand still in order to tell the story.
17
CHAPTER TWO
DEFERRED EXPERIENCES
What is important is that Blanton’s conjecture is about communication: how deep can we delve into
the experience when we portray it to others? The underlying question is just as significant: what
kind of experience can be undergone by the tourist? Within the sociology of tourism, there is a
fundamental debate about the definition of the tourist experience.
A widely known critique of Daniel Boorstin (1972, in Suvantola, 2002, p. 51) is that the currentday tourist, contrary to the more attentive traveler, wants to see features that confirm his
expectations. Dean MacCannell (1973) later proposed something different: instead of looking for
what they already know, tourists are convinced that traveling results in authentic experiences. But
there is a catch, something on which both thinkers agree. With authenticity, MacCannell does not so
much mean that tourists want to encounter people or things that are somehow closer to nature or
to the real being of mankind – because the tourist industry has mostly always been there first,
creating a myth. The search for authenticity is more like “a rather desperate search for meaning in
life, a way of managing the diversity and novelty, the cultural instability that modern life presents”
(Harris, 2005). Cohen (1988) adds to this that tourism involves ‘communicative staging’:
persuading tourists that their tourist experience is authentic (Cohen, 1988, as cited in Craik, 1997),
while in fact there is a good deal of self-delusion involved. Craik notes that most tourists end up in
specifically negotiated tourist experiences – in a safe, controlled environment. Extreme examples
are Disneyland, Spaceport USA, or MGM studios: these places offer ‘controlled and controllable’
environments in which tourists know they are being fooled into thinking that they are experiencing
something authentic (Craik, 1997).
What does this word authentic mean, exactly? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines
‘authentic’ as ‘worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact’.24 In the context of
experience, one easily gets an Ahnung of what it refers to: genuineness, truthfulness, validity. To
find out the falsifiability of a concept it might be more useful to describe what it is not. French
sociologist Jean Baudrillard would call places like Disneyland a ‘simulacrum’. He warned that
contemporary American citizens are no longer able of experiencing reality – only so-called 'pseudoevents'. With this, Baudrillard refers to events (signifiers) that no longer relate to reality (signified),
but only to other images, in an endless form of delay. And according to the philosopher himself, this
is nowhere more true than in the realm of commodified tourism – with Disneyland as its main
example (Baudrillard, 1983).
Here, Baudrillard borrows heavily from another thinker, Jacques Derrida, who called this delay
différance and put it forward to better understand the power structures in language (Derrida,
2001)25. In French, différance means two things. First, the notion coined by Ferdinand de Saussure,
that language always differs from itself: we only know the meaning of a word because it differs from
the meaning of other words. Or to put it in another way: we can only comprehend language through
language. Second, the fact that the language we use always refers to more language, to more
signifiers. What is ultimately meant with this language, the signified, is never reached. It is deferred.
Within tourism, différance is surely at work: according to Baudrillard, travelers only get to see
24
See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/authenticity. Retrieved December 23, 2010.
Derrida, as a post-modernist, repeatedly resists to call différance a full-fledged ‘concept’ (see p. 279, 283), since it is a nonclosed ‘play of differences’ (emphasis mine) instead of an active attribute of language. However, it can be used as such,
Baudrillard proved.
25
18
simplified images of the cultures they visit. They only see the stage that is performed on, and not
the underlying signified local culture or society they visit. MacCannell (1973) adds that the search
of authenticity ends in a form of deceit – or ‘staged authenticity’ – within this closed and selfperpetuating system of signs. The traveler, constantly trying to find new and unspoiled places,
irrevocably turns up at the points everybody has already been to. Or, as Turner & Ash rephrase it:
“the pursuit of the exotic and diverse ends in uniformity” (Turner & Ash, 1975, p. 292). The
'pseudo-events' of Baudrillard are thus created on a touristic stage, on which the hosts can protect
themselves, countering the image of their own culture and create their own stories, whether true or
false (MacDonald, 1997, p. 175).
But does this render authenticity impossible? In one of his essays, Bas Heijne recalls a hotel in
Las Vegas – the Venetian – in which the city of Venice is recreated for tourists. It certainly has
nothing to do with the authenticity that Baudrillard has in mind – it is an organized experience.
However, Heijne adds, this hotel is not just a representation, not just an imitation of the original. It
is a replacement. The tourists in the hotel will doubtfully ever see Venice itself. And even if they
would, the issue of questionable authenticity remains questionable itself. In their work Authenticity:
what the consumer really wants, Pine & Gilmore address the fact that the city of Venice is to a large
extent inauthentic too: the water levels have been managed since the fourteenth century, and the
city itself remains “artificially rooted in the past to attract the very tourists” who are driving away
the local residents. The number of tourists has increased dramatically compared to the number of
residents (Pine & Gimore, 2007, p. 83). In this sense, tourists in The Venetian are experiencing the
same sort of ‘staged authenticity’. The tourists who stay at The Venetian “know Venice as a string of
images, and now they wander, for a minute, in the images for themselves . . . This is their Venice.”
(Heijne, 2004, p. 118, trans. TvN). What both Heijne and Pine & Gilmore teach us, is that the
environment may be staged – or fictional – but that does not make the experience of it any less real,
or less authentic. It might be helpful to inquire with Urry (1990, p. 2) again, who notes that the
contemporary tourist is mostly concerned with the differences between new experiences and the
ones at home. For example, he enjoys his vacation as time that can be spend freely, because it
contrasts with regulated time – in which work plays the most important role – at home.
We can find cues that point us in Nooteboom’s direction once again. In Nooteboom’s Hotel (2002),
he argues: “Perhaps the true traveler is always located in the eye of the storm. The storm is the
world, the eye exposing the world. In the eye, it is still, and whoever is situated there can discern
things that escape the entrenched.” And in one of his laudations, the jury of the Dutch Prijs der
Nederlandse Letteren praised the writer for inventing a “new genre, in which not the travel itself is
the main issue, but the consideration about differences and likenesses in diverse cultures”
(Musschoot et al., 2009). But when it involves the more casual tourists like Alice and Xavier, Ritzer
& Liska (1997) have another view on the matter: they argue that, instead of looking for differences,
tourists are more and more experiencing the same things as they do in their day-to-day lives, in
highly predictable, calculable and controlled vacations. They refer to this as the McDisneyization of
tourist sites – and their argument resembles the one of Boorstin offered some twenty years earlier.
Tourist sites are becoming more readily comprehensible. “Increasingly”, they note, “our vacations
are more and more like the rest of our lives” (Ritzer & Liska, 1997, p. 100).
Still, if our vacations were like the rest of our lives, we would probably not care to write about
every last experience. Friends and family would not care to visit the travel blogs, or post comments
19
CHAPTER TWO
on how much they envy the traveler. While the commodification that Ritzer & Liska address is a
valuable concept, it remains clear that, when traveling, we look for a different experience than
when we are at home – and that is where ‘authenticity’ comes into play. At best, we witness the
génie du lieu: a special, remarkable emanation from a particular tourist site, which can only be
found there. At worst, the experiences may be controlled, negotiated or staged. But that still does
not mean they are anything but authentic. Even if Disneyland is a stage, on which images are
performed that can only refer to other images, authenticity seems hardly a pressing matter if it is
just as well able of evoking the strange, the exotic, the dangerous and the inexplicable. As far as Pine
& Gilmore are concerned, authenticity is the “perception of real of fake held by the consumers” –
and the book hence focuses on how one can get consumers to attain such a perception. This is of no
great concern to us here; what matters is that authenticity becomes a subjective concept.
Still, even though the authenticity of one’s tourist experience may be subjective, this does not
imply that all tourists have an equal understanding of the images they see – and that may just be
what Baudrillard implicitly warns us for. According to Craik (1997) there is only a small group of
genuine ‘cultural tourists’, making up around 5% of all tourists, who search for a more thorough
comprehension of the cultures they visit. Instead of accepting the predictability of their travels, they
seek out new forms of cultural tourism experiences and hence spearhead new forms of touristic
development (See Hall & Zeppell, 1990, pp. 89-91 and Cohen 1972, p. 175 as cited in Craik, 1997, p.
126). As Rojek & Urry put it, this more thorough understanding of other cultures requires a
significant amount of work, “of memory, interpretation and reconstruction” (Rojek & Urry, 1997, p.
12). So while traveling and tourism surely are not simply like the rest of our lives, it also seems rash
to argue that they are the opposite of regulated work. All these travelers are actually performing a
regulated task frequently, by writing and posting travel stories, whether professionally or for family
and friends.
We have seen that there is quite a number of nuances in this ‘job’ of writing about travel
experiences. The next logical step is to look for a job description. The first remarkable thing we
have already stumbled across is that that travel writing has something to do with fiction. And where
it concerns the travel writer, we might add that this fictionalization may just happen deliberately.
Nooteboom himself provides a point of entry when he discusses the role of fiction in travel writing.
A travel story is always a story in which you play a part yourself . . . It frees you from the horrible
necessity of inventing something. You stage your life to a certain extent, and what you make up is
your own life, your existence as fiction. (Van Dijl, 1984, p. 49, trans TvN)
FICTIONAL STORYTELLING
The single form of power that the writer can wield, Nooteboom argues in the introduction to Hugo
Claus’ novel Het Verdriet van België (2004), is to create a world with his imagination that does not
exist, yet remains valid. (Dijkgraaf, 2009, p. 62). If that is the case, we ought to wonder what role
fiction may play within travel stories. Blanton (2002) describes two forms of travel writing: the
‘impersonal journey narrative’, with its ‘flat, linear structure’ (p. 4), without dramatization or
sensation on the one hand, and on the other the more ‘consciously crafted’ works, mostly
borrowing ‘from the world of fiction’ in a more aesthetically pleasing form, including action,
20
conflict, resolution and character. This difference between flat and round stories seems evident, but
Blanton’s choice of the word ‘impersonal’ may need to be revised. Alice and Xavier’s writings seem
very personal altogether. They stick close to the myths that the tourists have about Bonaire: scuba
diving, relaxing in the sun, luxury restaurants. In order to surpass those myths, however, a different
approach may be necessary. In an excellent collection of essays on travel writings by Harvard
University, Telling true stories, Adam Hochschild (2007) agrees with Blanton that there are many
differences between travel writings such as Homers Odyssey and the stories we read in most
newspaper travel sections. However, he maintains that an important difference lies in the extent of
unconventionality described by a story. He asserts that travel writers should put down the
differentness, as he puts it, of foreign places, instead of their own presuppositions. This also means
that they should let “some time pass” before they write down their personal experiences: the true
meaning of the things we see around us often takes time to reveal itself (Hochschild, 2007, p. 76). In
the same collection of essays, Phillip Lopate (2007, p. 78) reminds us of the famous distinction
between flat and round characters – between fictional characters that we only get to know from the
outside, acting with predictable consistency, and those whose teeming inner lives we come to know.
When describing our travels, we need to draw upon certain elements of our personality, cut some
others away, and hence make the ‘I-character’ a round one. According to Lopate, this process of
turning oneself into a fictional character is a “release from narcissism” (p. 81). Both Hochschild and
Lopate advocate a form of travel writing that is not so much a personal rendition of everything we
see, but a thought-out dramatization of the character – a fictionalized entity that is not as ‘personal’
as Blanton leads us to believe. A ‘consciously crafted’ character deviates from our personality. And
on the other hand, Alice and Xavier may tell us what they feel when they see certain things – they
still remain flat characters to us.
The problem here is that it is of course difficult to see when reality is taken over by fiction. A
literary classification in terms of fiction seems difficult, if not impossible. Zilcosky (2008) recalls, for
example, the Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2002) that makes a distinction between
authentic travel writings and fictional travel-related texts. A problem arises here, he argues: certain
influential travel writings get pinned down in the second category – somehow depriving them of
their eloquence. A prime example is The Travels of Sir John Mandeville in the fourteenth century.
The immensely influential impact of this itinerary must not go unnoticed: it is authenticated as the
only travel book in Leonardo da Vinci’s library and was of great influence to the wanderlust of
Christopher Columbus (Zilcosky, 2002). Indeed, tourist experiences always invite, to some extent,
invite “speculation, reverie, mind-voyaging and a variety of other acts of imagination.” (Rojek, 1997,
p. 52). But how is such a story created? When asked about this, Nooteboom answered:
There is always a fictional element in travel writings, if only because you have to choose something
out of an enormous amount of material. It is never a report from a to b and then to z. You lie in
itineraries. Sometimes, for example, you paint the night over a postcard. You recreate to enhance the
credibility. I know, it is better not to say such things. Because readers want everything to be true.”
(Brokken, 1984, p. 20, trans. TvN)
Nooteboom may be speaking for all travel writers here, but fiction cannot be found in equal
amounts in any travel story. The promise of travel websites is the opposite of fiction. It pledges to
show us real stories, by real people. This might be what readers of travel stories want to believe,
21
CHAPTER TWO
but it not only holds true for them. It takes little time zapping through contemporary media to see
the countless ‘true stories’, real-life soaps, personal confessions and documentaries. And as we saw
already, even travelers themselves want to fool their senses when walking through Disneyland or
the Venetian. What Nooteboom wisely adds is that there is always a fictional element to this
portrayed reality: by selecting a story alone, we choose which parts we tell, and by doing so we
recreate the story our own life. These stories are constitutional for who we are, or who we want to
be. In that respect, travel writing is a type of ‘life writing’, as Paul John Eakin coined it: a narrative
upon which our identity is construed. Eakin thinks of narrative as “not merely an appropriate form
for the expression of identity; it is an identity content.” (Eakin, 1999, p. 100). In the case of travel
writing, this seems all the more evident. We attach ourselves emotionally to the places we go to;
they are an integral part of our identity. “We are what we are largely because of where we are
from”, Suvantola (2002, p. 36-7) summarizes. This is, for a part, the reason that we compare new
places with the one we know from our homes, as Craik (1997) put it earlier. It also goes a long way
to explain that, despite appearances, Alice and Xavier’s travel stories are more than a narcissistic
boasting of just how special their travels are: it is a way of constructing their identity. Not only the
ones who stay at home, but they too get acquainted with themselves through their travel blog. All
these digital tourist writings are more than an aesthetic narrative: they serve as proof. Not just of
memorable activities, but of who these people are.
To Nooteboom, writing about his life means more than describing his bodily travels. Földényi
(1997) argues that the evocative power of Nooteboom’s works has to do with a lesson Aristotle
taught us: poetry is always more philosophical than history, because the poet does not care about
the singular fact, but about the everlasting truth pervading it. He seeks to make these moments
matter, to render them untouchable to the destructive forces of contingency and historicity, by
turning them into fiction. Alice and Xavier, on the other hand, seem a bit closer related to the
narcissism that Lopate warns us for. Their writings are immediate, flat renditions of their travels.
But this does make sense: after all, a travel blog is meant to be read by people who are primarily
interested in the writers. What is arresting about this, is that it implies that the ‘impersonal’
storyline that Blanton connects to the simpler forms of travel writer could possibly be ascribed to
the opposite party. By turning oneself into a fiction, a story can communicate its truth to the reader
– and conversely, by presenting the reader with a fixed, personal journey, there would be little left
to contemplate. Fiction, in this sense, is not a detractor from a truthful story, but more of a catalyst.
Czeslaw Milosz introduced a concept of writing that is useful here to understand how a
fictionalized story might do this: the telescopic eye. With it, one tries to integrate his own
experiences into history. It is like “a new organ . . . that perceives simultaneously not only different
points of the globe but also different moments of time” (Milosz, 1959, p.2-3). To put it differently:
the spatial and temporal Dasein of the present-day writer is multiplied: he experiences what has
happened on different places, on different moments. The images he sees are both of now and then.
“I do not see them in chronological order as if on a strip of film, but in parallel, colliding with one
another, overlapping” (Ibid.). Interestingly, this telescopic eye might be triggered by the myths we
mentioned earlier. Urry (1990) offers a meticulous categorization of different touristic ‘signs’, that
the tourist looks for while traveling – such as the ‘happening’: when something important has taken
place on a certain spot. MacCannell (1976, p. 44) refers to something similar with the concept of
‘markers’: cues that are providing the tourist with information about the site. Greg Richards (2001)
22
agrees with Urry that these markers play an important role in the tourist’s portrayal of a site.
Markers and signs resemble one another in that they both usually appear as a distinct visual
indicator on what is important, what needs to be seen. Myths operate through these markers, and
frame the things the tourist sees as he is at the site. However, while the telescopic eye might need
signs and markers to work, its focus does not rest on enforcing the myth. Milosz is trying to
understand his own past through the past of history. He performs a very specific way of life writing:
his telescopic eye, combining historical knowledge with own experience and the imagination of
someone else’s experience, is ultimately directed toward himself, and not toward the world.
Nooteboom seems somehow related to the telescopic eye. German philosopher and long-time
friend of Nooteboom, Rüdiger Safranski, recalls a passage from the writer’s book A Song of Truth
and Semblance (1990). Here, Nooteboom investigates the convolutions of reality and fantasy.
Safranski poses that these convolutions have to do with images, being projected between these two
worlds at all times. There are images that charge at us from the outside, from ‘reality’, and images
that derive from our imaginations. “We live in a cocoon of images, and it is of great importance of
which kind they are: if they are rich, our reality will be rich; if they are poor, we live in a desert”
(Safranski, 2008, p. 9). In underscoring the importance of the visual, Nooteboom leads us back to
Rojek & Urry (1996), noting that our focus should rest upon the examination of the eye. Let us see
how the act of gazing constitutes touristic fiction and reality.
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CHAPTER THREE
To say that there are many things to see while we travel would be an understatement. Je komt ogen
te kort, a Dutch proverb goes, meaning that we do not have enough eyes to see everything that
happens around us. Alice and Xavier describe seeing turtles, sea horses and lobsters during their
diving trips on Bonaire. The aspect of the visual is important to travel writing altogether, and needs
to be further examined (Rojek & Urry, 1996). Our writer Nooteboom happens to be an expert in the
field. “I have made seeing, you might say, my specialty”, he declares in an interview (Cartens, 2006,
p. 169, trans. TvN). A similar statement could be applied to our civilization as a whole: Rojek & Urry
(1996) note that within Western philosophy, our vision has been taken of old to be the most
dominant of all human senses.26 During the twentieth century, however, more critical views have
been developed. French philosophers like Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan have
formulated new approaches to understanding the way we look at things. An emphasis is given to
the power relation that is established by gazing at others. This understanding has been similarly
reflected within travel discourse (Rojek & Urry, 1996, p. 7) – so a logical step would be to regard
Nooteboom and his fellow travel writers as people with a certain kind of authority. If they really are
de koning te rijk, then we should keep in mind that with great power comes great responsibility.
And it is equally logical, then, to investigate what constitutes this power.
THE CONTROLLING GAZE
An overview of the gaze within tourism is put forward by John Urry, in his fittingly titled The Tourist
Gaze (1990). Urry describes a few base elements that make up this specific form of gazing.
However, to comprehend them, we first need to look at the concept of the gaze that Urry builds
upon. The sociologist follows in the footsteps of Foucault, especially his work Madness and
Civilisation (1964). The main point Foucault drove home here is that the gaze, along with concepts
such as ‘truth’, is historicized: the exact meaning of concepts depends on the historical context.
Foucault links this historical significance to knowledge and power. In every era, there are groups of
people assuming authority over what is true, in what we might call a “regime of truth” (Hall, 1997,
pp. 49-50). The gaze is one way of imposing this regime. In The Birth of the Clinic (1973) Foucault
studied the visual domination and control of scientists in asylums during the Enlightenment.
According to the philosopher, physicians created their own myth of superior knowledge by gazing.
Being part of a social-economic or intellectual elite-class, that ensured power over others,
constituted a world order that was rejected with the glorification of reason during the
Enlightenment, but
the clinic . . . was this constant gaze upon the patient, this age-old, yet ever renewed attention that
enabled medicine not to disappear entirely with each new speculation, but to preserve itself, to
assume little by little the figure of a truth that is definitive. (Foucault, 1975, pp. 54- 5)
26
They cite both Arendt, who argued that “from the very outset, in formal philosophy, thinking has been thought of in terms of
seeing” (Arendt, 1978, pp. 110-11) and Rorty: “It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which
determine most of our philosophical convictions” (Rorty, 1980, pp. 12-13; as cited in Rojek & Urry, 1996).
24
Foucault argues here that, rather than being empowered by intellectual knowledge or by a socialeconomic class, the physician controls his patients with the authority of his gaze, with which he
separates the patient’s physical (and curable) body from his personal identity. The fundamental
difference between the gaze of a physician and the gaze of a random viewer lies in the power it
generates for a physician. In the first place, he is supported by an institute: the medical clinic. This
institute grants the physician a kind of sovereign power over truth, using what Barthes would call a
myth, reinforcing the dominant values within medical science. Foucault continues to argue that this
power is unstructured and dynamic: the physician can utilize it as he wishes (Foucault 1975: xiii).
This is what renders the gaze such a potent tool: it never has to carry responsibility and has no
structural theoretical foundation. However, the physician never uses his gaze to change any
situation – it is not intent on intervention. Foucault asserts:
The observing gaze refrains from intervening: it is silent and gestureless. Observation leaves things
as they are; there is nothing hidden to it in what is given. The correlative of observation is never the
invisible, but always the immediately visible, once one has removed the obstacles erected to reason
by theories and to the senses by the imagination. (Foucault, 2003, p. 107)
In later years, Foucault would elaborate on the notion of the visible: he did this in Discipline and
Punish (1977), expanding on Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon. This was an imaginary type
of prison system in which the prisoner is placed in a cell in the centre of a circular building. Guards
in the watching towers at the perimeter can observe the cell, whereas the prisoner cannot see any
of the guards. What interested Foucault is that, in this system, it does not really matter whether the
guards are actually there, since the prisoner is never able to tell if he is being gazed upon. This
system of ‘anonymous power’ (Crawshaw & Urry, 2002, p. 177) that we see so often in popular
reality shows such as Big Brother, forms a suitable concept for understanding the digital travel
writings of Alice and Xavier. After all, these writings are publicly available and accessible to anyone.
Anyone might be looking at them. It seems there is always a factor of exhibitionism present in such
stories, a conscious choice to publicize the private.
Foucault’s image of the panopticon also resembles the way in which Sartre (1943) depicted the
gaze, addressing the fundamental difference between seeing and being seen. To Sartre, our being
comprises two facets. First, the being an sich, which is something impersonal, and non-reflexive –
Sartre called this être-en-soi, ‘being in itself’. Only after reflecting upon one’s self, the ‘I’ comes into
existence in what the philosopher named être-pour-soi – ‘being for itself’. Sartre furthermore
argued that this reflexive subjectivity is competitive: we all strive to be the centre of the universe,
the only true subjective being. The person who sees, maintains itself as the reflexive ‘I’: a conscious,
thinking entity that can be sure of its existence. The person who is being seen, on the other hand, is
degraded, stripped of consciousness and subjectivity. The condition could be summarized with the
phrase video ergo sum. According to Sartre, someone can be sure of his own existence only when he
is able to see the other – but this is only possible because he turns the other into an object of his
gaze. It is in this context that Sartre arrived at the concept néantiser: the annulation of the other’s
subjectivity (Sartre, 2000).
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CHAPTER THREE
FIXING THE OTHER
The concept of néantiser seems exceptionally relevant to our notion of the tourist, who is
constantly encountering others to offset against himself. We might track this discourse of
conflicting subjects back to postmodernistic theories of post-colonialism, which suggest that
Western social scientists disregard the views of those who they are studying – and thereby, we
might say, annulate the other’s subjectivity by capturing them in their own discourse. In his often
cited work Orientalism, Edward Said introduced the concept of Orientalism to pin down the “basic
distinction between East and West” (Said, 1979, p. 2) – between the Orient and the Occident. Said
depicts Orientalism as a specific discourse through which the imperialist West studies Eastern (or
more broadly, all non-Western) cultures. “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had
been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic being, haunting memories and landscapes,
remarkable experiences.” In other words, the Orient, a system of representations constructed by
European culture, serves as Europe’s “cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring
images of the Other” (p. 1). The Orient is defined in terms that are always binary opposed to the
attributes of ‘the European’ – he can be a terrorist, a servant, a religious fanatic – but in all cases
these attributes are part of the Other, and by offsetting ourselves against them, the Western scholar
can define his own identity, and even justify Western colonial and imperial ambitions. Orientalism,
in short, is a tool that does not help achieve an objective study of the Other, but one that primarily
facilitates self-affirmation.
Since Said put forward his rejection of representing the Other, there have been theorists who
criticized him for being too radical. Most of them agreed that his definition of ‘East’ and ‘West’ is
just as much an essentialized opposition as the ones he criticizes.27 Lash & Urry state that the
contemporary tourist is no Orientalist, but a global cosmopolitism: capable of being open-minded
when facing Others who are “geographically or culturally distant” (Lash & Urry, 1994, p. 255). In
the spirit of Said, Celia Lury (1997) contends that this open-mindedness is always accompanied by
its opposite. The global cosmopolitan may open up to the Other, yet he always calculates the risk of
misunderstanding, misuse, or discord. Lury links it to the assumed hostility of objects, and it might
be fitting to recall Sartre once more, who underlined the notion that the Other is capable of
objectifying us. Lury, in the same line, states that global cosmopolitism is a “calculated mix of
immersion and distance, trust and hostility” (Lury, 1997, p. 82).
However, it remains to be seen whether the gaze is as linear as Sartre and Lury lead us to believe.
A contradicting idea can be found in the theory of Lacan, who inversed Foucault’s idea of the gaze as
a tool for objectifying others. To Lacan, it is our identity, not that of others, that becomes doubtful
when we gaze: the fact we can see the objects around us makes that we ourselves can be seen. He
offers the example of a person looking in a mirror, in which the subject observes the observation of
himself. The mirror is only an example: any object that we see brings our own autonomous
existence into question. Lacan abridges: “I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I
do not see, not even discern. All that is necessary is for something to signify to me that there may be
others there” (Lacan, 1988). We might, as an example, think of an infant holding his hands before
27
For more detailed critique of Said’s Orientalism, see Spivak, 1990, pp. 62-63; Bhabha, 1994, p. 113; Buruma, & Margalit, 2004,
p. 2.
26
his eyes when playing hide and seek, thinking that he cannot be seen when he cannot see. The gaze,
to Lacan, is retroactive: it has as much to with being seen as it does with seeing.
This points us into the direction of another argument that can be offered against Sartre’s oneway gaze. Namely, that there is an Other to consider as well. An interesting perspective on gazing at
the Other can be found in Susan Sontag’s essay Regarding the Pain of Others, in which she
investigates the properties of the gaze, especially in relationship with suffering. Sontag firmly
rejects Baudrillard’s simulacrum. To think that reality slowly turns into a spectacle is a
“breathtaking form of provincialism” (Sontag, 2003, p. 104), she argues. The omnipresence of
images, instead of experiences, is an idea originating from that small part of the world, which is
lucky enough to merely remain a spectator of all the terrible things that happen in the world. And it
ignores the fact that somewhere, there are actually people experiencing these things. Sontag’s
appeal for the consideration of experience is important, both to our concept of the gaze as to the
notion of authenticity.
Let us first see how we can apply these aspects of the gaze to tourism. In the first place, the
tourist gaze does also have a dynamical nature. In the course of the centuries, the gaze was
‘authorized’ by different discourses. During the Grand Tour, it was educational; the gaze of presentday tourism is, as we saw, ‘playful’ (Crawshaw & Urry, 2002, p. 176). And, just like in the
panopticon, the tourist gaze is anonymous. Hosts of tourist sites are, by and large, unable to control
who is gazing at them, and why. Apart from the evident signs (the camera, the tour guide, the travel
map) a host can never really know which users are actual tourist and which ones are not. Neither
can the host control the reason why these tourists are there: it seems unlikely, for example, that the
myth (and subsequently, the tourist popularity) of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas is construed or
maintained by the people living there. On the other hand, Urry (1990) notes that these myths may
prove to be weaker than the ones in the medical world. The difference between the physician and
the tourist, Urry argues, is that the tourist does not have an institute backing him up. However, even
this seems debatable. Tourists do rely on an institute: their travel agency. It tells them exactly
where they should gaze at, and at what time of the year – and by doing so, it imposes a regime of
truth about which places are important, and which places are not.
Maybe there is a better argument for the presumption that the tourist gaze is not as all-powerful
as Foucault imagined: it is just as retroactive as Lacan pointed out. Crawshaw & Urry (2002, p. 182)
indicate that the tourist is both anonymously gazing at others, and being anonymously gazed at by
others. Street artists, salesmen or thieves all gaze at the tourists who wander down the streets. And
the awareness of ‘tourism potential’ (Sheller & Urry, 2004, p. 3) that these places possess is a result
of gazing at their tourists, as well. Now that we have a better conceptualization of the gaze, let us
consider the different forms of gazing that Urry proposes.
FORMS OF GAZING
Urry (1990, p. 104) offers a distinction between three forms of the tourist gaze. Two of these seem
problematic if we consider the earlier investigations in this thesis. According to Urry, the gaze can
be historical or modern – the object of the gaze is either old or new. Second, it can be authentic or
inauthentic: the object of the gaze is either natural, or man-made. Urry himself immediately
recognizes that these dichotomies are problematic. In the first place, the definition of a pure
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CHAPTER THREE
authentic or historical gaze is challenging. There are of course obvious authentic or historical places,
but sites that are restored or refurbished seem to defy the dichotomy, he adds. Indeed, the fact that
there is a difference between the ‘historical’ Taj Mahal and the ‘modern’ Venetian hotel – in the
sense that one is old and the other is new – is evident, but as we already established, the
obviousness of authenticity can be questioned. We might consider Baudrillard once again: in
contemporary society, the images we see of the Venice hotel are referring to other images, or myths
we know about Venice – and so the tourist gets caught in an endlessly deferred simulacrum. But
this deferral and mythmaking seems present just as well when considering the Taj Mahal, that
beautiful palace built by Shah Jahan in memory of his third wife, symbolizing eternal love. In that
sense, it also is a ‘man-made object’, and Urry’s distinction starts becoming vague. It seems we
cannot distinguish the authenticity of the tourist site itself from the experience of it. In that sense, it
is always man-made; consequently, it is also difficult to see authenticity as something that belongs
only to the object, and not the eye of the beholder.
The third binary opposition that Urry poses is the one between the romantic and collective gaze,
and it helps us understand how authenticity is related to experience. The romantic gaze is enjoyed
in solitary stillness, while the collective gaze involves mass consumption. Note that these opposite
forms of gazing are dependent of the experience, whereas the previous two ones were dependent of
the object being gazed at. The romantic gaze is distracted by the presence of other people, while the
collective gaze needs other people for a ‘shared process of visual consumption’ (Crawshaw & Urry,
2002, p. 177). In essence, it relates to a specific kind of aesthetic. Calling on Barthes, Urry talks of
the role of 'mountains, gorges, defiles and torrents' that 'seem to encourage morality of effort and
solitude' (Barthes, 1972, p. 74, as cited in Urry, 1990). This romantic ideal is a typical elite-class
ideal, and is opposed to the collective gaze, which is focused at places that were built for the masses.
Slow travel is geared specifically to the romantic gaze, focusing on spots that many others do not
see. It is the opposite reaction to an increasing homogenization of physical places. Globalization
plays a big part in this notion of ‘placelessness’ (Relph, 1976) where certain places as airports,
theme parks, highways and shopping malls become homogenized spaces of mobility and
consumption, emptied of their local specificity. This globalization, it seems, mostly revolves around
the collective gaze. Interestingly, it is the opposite – the romantic gaze – that seems to be important
to travel writing. As one of Nooteboom’s critics has it,
a travel story gets a certain intensity to it, because mostly, one travels alone. So one can do more
thinking, one is not distracted by acquaintances, friends, marriages... from the first to the last second
you are busy writing: it is a concentrated form of writing. (Van Dijl, 1984, pp. 48-9, trans. TvN)
While Van Dijl puts the emphasis on the romantic gaze, most tourists, of course, travel in a
completely other fashion. They enjoy the company of their friends or family, and on the digital
platform of travel writing, waarbenjij.nu included, they engage in conversation with them. Van Dijl
would argue that most tourists are being distracted all the time, engaging in the collective gaze that
diminishes the intensity of a solitary experience. The solitary experience is somehow a more
singular one. And if we stick to the notion of Tester (1994) who distinguishes the tourist from the
flâneur, who travels solitarily as well, then we could even connect the romantic gaze to the
authentic experience. However, if authenticity is really linked to collectivity, these ‘all-inclusive’
travelers on those overcrowded beaches do not seem to mind for it. Even though, as Turner & Ash
28
(1975, p. 292) put it earlier, their pursuit of the exotic and diverse and their Lonely Planet in hand,
brings them to “the same beaches and in the same restaurants.” Their experience is not a solitary
one, yet they still keep performing it. Perhaps we can understand their neglecting of the romantic
gaze because many tourists have found a way of authenticating their experience, so to speak. If
there is one thing that allows the travel writer to attest and capture the voyage – to frame the
experience – then it is through photography. There are hardly more effective ways of capturing a
moment than by pushing a button and rendering it permanent. Not only is a picture worth a
thousand words, it is also a thousand times more convenient in recording our travels.
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CHAPTER FOUR
The title of this chapter is derived from a popular phrase on social media. The phrase is used to
indicate that someone who doing something memorable, should take pictures of it. No matter how
uplifting or exciting the story, a picture proves more than a thousand words. Alice and Xavier, and
with them most travel writers, wholly agree: their travel blogs are heavily decorated with pictures
that accompany their tales – and that are a direct consequence of their gaze. According to Urry, one
of the most prominent ways in which tourists operate their gaze is by taking pictures (Urry, 1990, p.
138). These pictures are constitutional for our tourist memory: we get to see places we are going to
visit in advance, and we reconstruct them when the voyage is over, through the pictures we took
there (Crawshaw & Urry, 1997, p. 179). Even Nooteboom, expert on the subject, agrees. The writer
himself put forward in Holland Herald (Dijkgraaf, 2009, p. 24) that he can be best compared to a
photographer. It seems a necessary detour to investigate the photographer in order to better
understand the travel writer.
INVESTIGATING THE VISUAL
When examining the visual, one cannot disregard Maurice Merleau-Ponty, most notably his work
Causeries (1948). Merleau-Ponty is renowned for analyzing pieces of (visual) art, instead of
deliberating over philosophic issues. According to Jenny Slatman (2003, p. 22) he opted for this
approach because the visual arts are able to ‘break through our familiarity with the world’.
Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between primary and secondary modes of expression as also reflected
in the notions of the ‘spoken word’ (parole parlée) – a secondary expression that pervades
philosophy and other sciences – and the ‘speaking word’ (parole parlante), the primary expression
that is uttered in the creative domain of arts. The difference between the past and present form has
to do with the fixation of meaning: in science the denotation of what is analyzed is already
established or fixed. In the (visual) arts, however, the spoken word breaks through these fixed
meanings – because the meaning of art is always dependent of the observer. Merleau-Ponty went a
step further arguing that especially the modern arts were able to do this: they tend to stop and
question the viewer. Even if the represented object is an everyday object, a modern art form breaks
through our habitude of seeing the object.
How does this difference relate to travel photography? One could argue that the excess of
commodified travel pictures, taken over and over again at the same spot by innumerable tourists,
has lost its capacity of breaking through our habitude. If anything, they consolidate rather than
negate the represented myth: when we browse Google for the many comparable pictures of people
at the Tower of Pisa, for example, the sight remains quite unambiguous. This is quite different from
what Hans Jurgen Heinrichs indicates in his essay on Nooteboom: he considers him a writer
that practices what Merleau-Ponty refined . . . Some buildings and artworks prove, by the dimension
that is realized within them, that the act of beholding transcends looking at something, that the gaze
is guided by a higher authority. (Heinrichs, 2006, pp. 46-7, trans. TvN)
30
What Heinrichs seems to point out is that the photographs of Nooteboom somehow bear witness of
something perfect, something authentic – there is that elusive word again – that surpasses the
personal experience. This may be what turns photographing into such an attractive practice. Urry
(1990) might be able to explain this to a greater extent, as he sums up several characteristics of
photography. Here, he borrows from two other prominent theorists on photography: Susan Sontag
and John Berger. Photography, Urry states, firstly embodies a relationship of power: the object
being photographed gets ‘appropriated’ by the photographer. This tracks back to the power of the
gaze, and the definition Sartre gave to it: by looking at others, we may render them an object in our
subjective view. But we could also take it more literally: the picture of the thing we see becomes an
object, owned by the photographer. And, to complete the physical comparison: though we take
something – namely a photo – of an entity that is not ours, we rarely ever ask if we are allowed to.
Secondly, photos seem to transcribe reality, yet are actively structured. Sontag (2003) elaborates:
photos always are a testimony of someone who has been somewhere, and who has recorded what
was going on there. That is why photos are of immanent importance to journalists, she argues: they
carry an innate sense of objectivity, which seemingly makes them the ideal medium to establish the
state of affairs in the world around us. Berger remarks that, in the pre-modern age, we thought of
images as ‘ideal’: they showed us a perspective that was somehow a ‘unique centre of the world’
(Berger, 2008, p. 11). However, Sontag notes, every picture showing us something, will leave other
things out of perspective. Her critique, in Berger’s sense, is a typical modern one, putting a question
mark on Heinrichs’ (2006) alleged authenticity of the gaze. If we reread his words now, they can be
attributed to this pre-modern faith in the image, instigated by Nooteboom’s photos.
Ironically, according to Berger, it was the invention of the camera that put the ‘ideal’ experience
into perspective since it became clear that every perspective merely displays a way of seeing; that
the meaning of what we see is dependent of the context in which it is seen. This context is not just
personal, but also historical, Berger notes. History always constitutes the relation between a
present and its past. Therefore, “the relation between what we see and what we know is never
settled” (Berger, 2008, p. 4). Berger reminds us of Foucault, who also noted that the meaning of
everything we see is historicized. This turns photography, as Urry puts it, into a ‘democratic
medium’: everyone photographing and everything being photographed is equally interesting or
uninteresting (Urry, 1990, p. 139). Sontag (2003, p. 25) drives the same point home when she
states that photography is a form of art that, unlike most other art forms, does not require years of
professional training and experience. She recalls a photo exhibition in the wake of 9/11, called A
democracy of photos: it included of amateurs and professionals alike – none of which was found to
be more effective or valuable than the other. Luck and spontaneity, after all, are crucial factors
when taking a picture.
Indeed, it is valuable to keep in mind that every photo is merely another fixed perspective. But it
is questionable whether every picture is indeed as trivial as any other. We may look back upon
Heinrichs (2006) once more: what he may have wanted to clarify concerns the difference between
photography as leisure, and photography as art. It may be true that photography is democratic, and
that everyone is capable of producing a great photograph if he or she is lucky, but it seems evident
that there is still a difference between a random snapshot – whether successful or not – and a
photograph that has been thought through in advance by the artist. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman
points out: our representations can be “a step, or a mile, or a stellar year ahead of the world we are
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experiencing” (Bauman, 2004, p. 114), and this touches upon the idealism that the arts contain: a
truly masterful work of art implies perfection – a concept that Leona Battista Alberti formulated as
“the ideal of an arrangement in which any further change could only be for the worse” (in Bauman,
2004, p. 113).
Tourism seems to be deeply instilled with this quest for perfection. The tourist, after all, seeks an
experience that is extraordinary (Urry, 1990). He is not looking for a random, democratic snapshot
that is merely a ‘way of seeing’; he wants an ideal arrangement. But this search, as we saw earlier,
brings along disappointment. What the tourist is looking for is always runs ahead of him. As Rojek
(1993, p. 216) puts it, he is “always dully aware that [his] experiences could be better.” And his
pictures, in that sense, still do contain that notion of idealism: they can show him a perfect world, in
which “the truth is embellished” (Bauman, 2004, p. 77). Perhaps that is why Alice and Xavier keep
their travel disappointments – which, surely, they must have experienced – to themselves. The
stories and photographs they produce primarily represent the beauty of travel. The search for
beauty is authenticated from the moment the travel brochure is opened: the many paradise-like
sceneries one can see in travel advertisements all serve to prove how the agency can carry one
there. They promise ‘moments for eternity’.
This coincides with another aspect of photography described by Urry: “What is sought for in a
holiday is a set of photographic images, as seen in tour company brochures or in TV programmes . . .
And it ends up with travellers demonstrating that they have really been there by showing their
version of the images that they had seen originally before they set off” (Urry, 1990, p. 140). The
travel pictures taken by the tourist constitute his own, personal capturing of a perfect world – that
eludes being grasped if it is only gazed at. And indeed, as Heinrichs (2006) has put it earlier, writers
such as Nooteboom seem to be able to find such a timeless truth in the things they see. In one of his
essays on the writer, Földéni calls him someone “who tries to build a universe with his snapshots as
well” (Földéni, 2006, p. 181).
Building our own universe with our snapshots: it may be the only way of fixating all those
strange, exotic, dangerous and inexplicable things that we come across on our travels. After all, a
picture is “soothing, and assures general feelings of disorientation” (Sontag, 1979, p. 9). Taking
pictures from our own perspective, and writing stories in our own language, seems the only way of
comprehending what we encounter. Bauman underlines this when he states that to know is to
choose (Bauman, 2004): comprehension only exists because the storyteller framed and trimmed his
story. Waste is an indispensable ingredient of the creative process of humans. We can only create
something if we cut out the superfluous and throw away the useless – not unlike a sculptor.
Nooteboom rephrases it more eloquently in one of his poems: “I had a thousand lives and I took
only one!” (Bekkering, 1997, p. 30, trans. TvN).
The difference between stories and photographs is that the latter can be ‘reframed’ much easier:
we can simply take a picture from a different perspective. This makes it all the harder to select only
one of them. Many travelers upload hundreds of photos to their websites, each one overflowing
another and rendering all of them even more contingent. Bauman (2004, p. 25) notes that the
Internet is a way of memorizing an “excess of information”, and this certainly applies to these
pictures. When digital cameras can store thousands of photos, it is tempting to take a snapshot of
everything we experience. This is why the number of pictures on profile sites keeps growing. For
32
some profile websites, there are now no limits to how many photos can be uploaded: the size of
your personal web space simply gets bigger to accommodate any growth of information.28
Of course, we might wonder if a traveler who has a camera between his eyes and the world at all
times, is experiencing anything at all. Travel photographs usually stand to prove a foreign
experience, but when all one does is taking pictures, there is hardly time left to actually experience.
With this exponential growth of pictures on websites, and the decline of actual experiences, one
might argue that the meaning of these travel photos becomes inflated. This inflation is a major
theme of sociologist and philosopher Walter Benjamin, whose fascination with and frequent use of
the term ‘reproduction’ proves to be useful. In his essay The work of art in the age of its
technological reproducibility (2008) Benjamin epitomizes the elementary change in the aesthetic
quality of a work of art once it has been reproduced or becomes reproducible. He describes it as a
vanishing point, in which the ‘aura of authenticity’ of that work is lost. Obviously, art has always
been reproducible to a certain level, but Benjamin worried mostly about the revolutionary process
of reproduction. Photography, for example, was a new and amazingly fast process of reproducing
art at the time (Lechte, 2008). Berger (2008) confirms this loss of the ‘sacred’ meaning of visual arts
– and furthermore, he poses that the place in and for which the piece of art was made loses its
power as well. Maybe he refers to the myth that comes into being when a place gets remediated
over and over again.
Still, the pessimist view of Benjamin may require an addition in our contemporary age. Since
photography per definition is reproduction, there may be another force at work that devaluates the
photographed cultural object.
PHOTOGRAPHS AS TRAVEL OBJECTS
In an essay on what she calls ‘travel objects’, Lury (1997) points us into the right direction. She
suggests that mementos such as photographs and postcards help defining tourism, and hence offers
an opposition between what she calls travelers and trippers. Tourists are placed somewhere
between these types (p. 75). The difference Lury describes indicates the assumed integrity of the
objects that these travelers and trippers take home with them (p. 78). Traveler-objects, like
artworks, handicrafts, or items of historical significance retain their meaning across contexts. Their
integrity is always linked to their original place and culture. They do not need to travel to acquire
their status as such: they hold an authenticated relation to the original travel.
Tripper-objects, however, do not. Examples are mass-produced souvenirs, mementos, found
objects such as pebbles from the beach, incidental objects such as plane tickets, photographs and
postcards. Their meaning is constituted as they travel, especially by their final resting place. They
are something ‘to be brought home’, and as such gain their personal or sentimental value in an
arbitrary private sense only – they are not publicly valued. Therefore, Lury argues, the meaning of
these objects is volatile: once the object is taken home, it is vulnerable to losing its integrity and can
become redundant. Benjamin would consider these tripper-objects typical objects of the ‘age of
reproduction’: they lose their aura because of their mass reproducibility. But to Lury, it also has to
do with the ‘presumed degrees of knowingness’ of travelers, tourists and trippers: the tripper is
28
An example is Flickr: see http://www.flickr.com/help/photos/, found on July 25th, 2010.
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thought of as someone with little knowledge of the places he visits – contrary to the traveler. Per
consequence, tripper-objects such as photographs are deemed to hold only personal value: they are
significant only to the person who took the picture. He can use them as a mnemonic, to remember
what something looked like, or to show them to friends and family – even though that often leads to
another form of disappointment, since a picture can rarely live up to an experience. Arguably, we
can see pictures in the same way as stories: when they are more personal, they tend to exclude
themselves from having an audience. Conversely, keeping oneself ‘out of the picture’ will render it
more generic – and timeless.
Furthermore, the arbitrariness (and alleged authenticity) of photographs depends on the degree
of knowledge possessed by the tourist. When photos merely serve as a mnemonic or a trophy, they
are indeed only personal objects – but travel writers like Nooteboom choose their pictures with
more precision. After all, they are limited by the amount of pages to fill. According to Berger, an
important way of ‘sculpturing’ images is through the words that keep them company. These words
influence the meaning of the image: as soon as we read a text with a picture, the words have
“quoted the paintings to confirm their own verbal authority” (Berger, 2008, p. 21). So possibly, it is
the amount of knowledge on the subject, combined with the possibility to share it, which turns the
personal object into a public object. We can find a useful citation from Nooteboom, as he describes
the loss of our knowledge of our Roman-Catholic culture: “At the exact time that we lose our own
images because we no longer know the stories from which they sprouted, we get washed over by
globalization delivering images and symbols of others” (Dijkgraaf, 2009, p. 29, trans. TvN).
Authenticity seems to depend on who it is taking the picture and how is reworked. It could be a
picture of someone posing at a tourist site, or the site itself, posted at a website as evidence for the
undertaken journey – resembling the personal narrative we discussed in the second chapter. It
could also be an image that is elaborated on through words – the practice of ekphrasis.
FROM PICTURES TO WORDS: EKPHRASIS
Let us recapitulate for a moment. Starting off, we investigated the tourist experience through travel
writing. Then, we came to see that, due to the complications of myth and fantasy, the travel writer
gazes at the countless scenes that surround him, and takes pictures of them that stand to prove
one’s voyage, and that act as an identity construct. After that we realized that the way these images
are elaborated on, determines what role they play within travel writing. We have returned to words
again. At this point, the practice of ekphrasis should be discussed. This is tied closely to Nooteboom.
On winning the P.C. Hooftprijs, Dutch politician Hans van Mierlo mused on the writer:
You have the exceptional talent of turning the images you see, whether works of art or situations,
into language, which the reader can then turn back into mental images. You have a great command of
what the Greeks and Romans called ekphrasis, a rhetorical device involving the evocative description
of something that has been seen (Dijkgraaf, 2009, p. 33, 34, trans. TvN)
In the introduction to his book Museum of Words, James Heffernan defines ekphrasis as the ‘verbal
representation of visual representation’ (Heffernan, 1993, p. 3). It should be noticed that this ‘visual
representation’ makes ekphrasis stand apart from practices such as pictorialism and iconicity. The
latter two aim to represent natural objects and artifacts, while ekphrasis represents works of
34
representational art. It is a doubled signifier. Still, Heffernan’s definition is quite broad: the
described image can be a real painting, or a story revolving around the construction of something
fictional.
The relationship between words and images is not without friction. They are struggling for
dominance – a fight that, according to Heffernan, is ultimately won by language. After all, the images
we ‘read’ are always transposed by the words we read them through. These words confine the
range of meanings that we could grasp from a work of visual art – Merleau-Ponty would say that the
speaking word is exchanged for a spoken word. However, the language that is used to fix the image
always refers to more language. This leads, once again, to Derrida’s notion of différance: within
language there is an endless amount of signifiers linking to one another, and never reaching
closure. So while words indeed confine the range of meanings, they also open up an endless amount
of of new ones in a certain path. Thus, the width of meanings we can extract from an image gets
smaller, while the depth is getting bigger.
Heffernan, as well, acknowledges the force that words impose upon images. He notes that
ekphrasis is not only a way of speaking of a piece of art, but also a way of speaking to and for it. The
words of the interpreter constitute what is seen. However, in which way this constitution takes
place depends on the type of ekphrasis that is being used. On the one hand, there is notional
ekphrasis; on the other there is actual ekphrasis. Notional ekphrasis concerns an imaginary work of
art that exists only through the words used to depict it, whereas actual ekphrasis describes
something that can actually be seen. When we address the existence of ekphrasis in travel
literature, we discuss actual ekphrasis: the paintings and sculptures described by travel writers are,
for the most part, real ones. Travel pictures and stories focus on the visible world out there, and the
reader can compare his own picture of the Taj Mahal with those of all his predecessors. Notional
ekphrasis, however, does something else. Since it discusses an object that in reality cannot be seen,
it creates a myth surrounding an object – while actual ekphrasis is, especially in the case of widely
known pieces of art, is only capable of reworking or enforcing the myth.
Another important aspect of the practice of ekphrasis is what Heffernan describes as
representational friction (p. 37). This friction exists because the writer29 performing ekphrasis must
represent both the material medium of representation (the signifier) as well as the content of a
work of art (the signified). So he can never fully indulge in the painting: by describing the
techniques and materials, he must remain at a certain distance. Baudrillard might say that he can
never truly reach the signified, because there is always a signifier standing in the way. We might
consider representational friction to exist with experts, struggling to find a balance between
technical details and esthetic content – but this kind of friction seems important in tourism, as well.
When confronted with a cultural or historical artifact, monument or building, one could easily be
overwhelmed by the technical esthetics of such a sight (one could easily take a picture at the
craftsmanship of the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon without contemplating on the meaning behind
it). This was arguably what Safranski (2008, p. 9) meant when he stated earlier on that if these
images are rich, our reality will be rich; and if they are poor, we live in a desert. Our elusive concept
of authenticity may ultimately not be a property of our surroundings, but of ourselves, and the way
in which we deal with our experiences. If we record something as a one-dimensional picture, we
neglect its complexity, and our depicted image of it will likely be quite trivial – like all the recurrent
29
Heffernan prefers the word ‘poet’, perhaps because in ekphrasis, words are used for their aesthetic, evocative qualities.
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pictures of different people standing in front of the same apparent spot. More often than not, tourist
sites are clearly pointed out, by something that MacCannell (1976, p. 44) called a ‘marker’. Such a
markers provides the tourist with information about the sight, and is like the subscript of the photo:
it depicts and clarifies what to capture and what to neglect. But simply following the cues and
telling the same story has a risk of resulting in superfluity. Not that Alice and Xavier would care; the
pictures they take often do not even have a subscript. These images are for recreational purposes.
However, if one would record something and analyzing the different ways in which its content
speaks to him, he also gets to speak to and for the object. Merely capturing something does not
imply owning it – let alone understanding it.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Within sociology, the (historical) condition of postmodernity in tourism is often associated with its
commodification, from the decennia after the first World War onwards. In this era, mass tourism
emerged (Blanton, 2002). French cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1976, p. 38)
extrapolated the agricultural concept of monoculture to indicate what mass tourism entails: a
standardized, singular form of culture that exists across the borders – enforcing the dominant
myths accordingly. Lévi-Strauss maintained that every trip is tarnished by the overexcited
civilization of tourists who were there earlier. All these travelers, seeking foreign and unknown
places, ended up visiting the same ones. This resulted in a generation of travel writers who
established an ambiguous relationship with tourism: on the one hand they still sought “complexity,
authenticity and new ways of seeing” (Blanton, 2002, p. 23), on the other hand they were quite
aware of the absurdity of mass tourism and the subjectivity of any form of experience. And it did
not end there. The experience of being a tourist is since then captured many times in a postmodern
discourse. One of its leading figures is called the post-tourist.
THE INNOCENT POST-TOURIST
What should be noted first is that any definition of post-tourism is, to an extent, a contradictio in
terminis. As Cohen noted, tourists cannot be considered to compose a homogenous group. Opposing
the rather strict definitions of sociologists like Boorstin and MacCannell, he wrote that tourists “are
distinguishable by a wide variety of characteristics” (Cohen, 1979, p. 21). This should hold even
more for the post-tourist, since she is the embodiment of postmodernism in tourism. Still, he is
different from the ‘regular’, premodern tourist in several distinguishable ways.
In her often-cited essay Going Places (1985), Feifer investigates the traits of the post-tourist. To
her, the difference between ‘regular’ tourism and post-tourism depends on one of our main
concepts: authenticity. Feifer agrees with the previously discussed opinion of MacCannell (1973)
and Cohen (1988): tourists usually are searching for an authentic experience. But let us also remind
ourselves of the counterargument of Ritzer & Liska (1996, p. 107), stating that “many tourists today
are in search of inauthenticity.” They choose to go on commodified, calculable journeys to
Disneyland or the Venetian hotel, and enjoy the fact that these places are permeated by
hyperreality in which “the real has disappeared, imploding into the world of simulations.”
The tourists that Ritzer & Liska refer to strongly resemble Feifer’s post-tourists. All of them are
aware of the lack of authenticity on their trips, and even find pleasure in playing these touristic
games, laid out by the travel company or the tourist site itself (Sheller & Urry, 2004, p. 11). They
can enjoy these games, since they are identifying with them just briefly. To the post-tourist, travel is
an eclectic practice: visits can be “sacred, informative, broadening, beautiful, uplifting, or simply
different” (Ritzer & Liska, 1996, p. 102). The post-tourist is free in her experience: she
lightheartedly engages in the multitude of games. Instead of gazing at the world, we might say she is
glancing (Bryson, 1983), a more whimsical consummation of a sight without engaging in analysis or
reflection. Authenticity is no longer an issue, for every experience is just another one. Even the
commodification of tourism itself has been accepted, and the romantic gaze that Urry described
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seems to have moved to the background. If solitude and stillness are enjoyed, then only for a short
while, just until the next experience occurs. To reiterate: post-tourism is the enjoyment of the
surplus. This conceptualization becomes palpable if we consider travel websites, with their
barrages of stories and pictures, in which everyone has their say and everything needs to be
recorded and shared with others.
Why this enjoyment of the surplus? Perhaps because the post-tourist has become accustomed to
the fact that everyone around her is constantly traveling – if not physically then through imagery.
Feifer (1986) notes that the post-tourist is also a cyber-tourist, traveling via television, videos and
the Internet, without the need to leave home. We might argue that this order, nowadays, can be
turned around: each tourist is in the first place an Internet user. The World Wide Web is the
medium par exellence to travel from sight to sight and from site to site. Web addresses, hyperlinks
and Twitter walls are constantly in motion: the Internet is an utterly dynamic, fluid space in which
few things remain fixed or stable. Traveling like this may seem an incomparable reduction of ‘bodily’
tourism, but Urry (1990) notes that in the latter case, the experience is framed as well. Either in a
literal sense, by a car or tour bus window, or figuratively, by choosing between which places to go
and which ones to neglect.
The point Urry drives home is that any experience is limited. And even though the post-tourist
cannot step into her screen, move around and touch her surroundings, it does not imply that she
cannot acquire any knowledge. When we started our journey, looking at Alice and Xavier, we were
well aware that we were not there with them, on Bonaire. Still, we were able to learn something
about them, and the way they embody tourism. It might be best to adhere to the definition of Ritzer
& Liska and Urry: the post-tourist is an outsider, content with her simulated life, who finds pleasure
in playing a relatively innocent game of tourism. It is this relative innocence that reminds us of Alice
and Xavier, and it is no coincidence that they exclaim that they are de koning te rijk when they
describe driving “comfortably in our convertible, the diving gear in the back, cruising across
Bonaire with Caribbean music from the speakers... Ain’t life great?”30
THE WASTE OF TOURISM
How does this post-touristic innocence fit into the broader scale, exactly? According to Urry (1990,
p. 82), the postmodern influence within tourism is a cultural paradigm that characterizes itself most
notably as a “dissolving of boundaries.” These boundaries, that were evident in the age of
modernism, include the difference between 'high' and 'low' culture within tourism, the arts,
education, television, music and shopping. All these concepts interweave as well. Postmodernism as
a philosophical set of ideas is in that way a 'de-differentiation' (Lash, 1990, p. 11) and a leveling of
the cultural value of objects. Urry (Ibid.) recalls Walter Benjamin of whom we learned earlier that,
in a postmodern culture, the singularity, or aura of authenticity within the arts is lost and replaced
by its commercial value. Benjamin’s lost aura of authenticity implies a loss of value for the object in
itself.
However, this concept of authenticity that Benjamin and MacCannell confer does not take into
account the experiencing subject. It would be far-fetched to argue that the post-tourist does not
30
38
care about experience or beauty: the sheer number of travel writings alone seems to indicate
otherwise. It seems that a singular experience is exactly what is sought for when traveling, and
exactly what all these tales on websites stand to prove. Tourists may be gazing at simulations and
reproductions – they may even enjoy that practice – but that does not render their voyages any less
authentic. In that sense, the implication of de-differentiation is not as severe as Benjamin projects:
the post-tourist is aware of the lack of singularity, but she still thoroughly enjoys her travels. Yet,
she seems to be more than a puppet of commercialization. Someone who seeks out her own path
through the multitude of myths and images.
But Benjamin’s loss of singularity does come with another implication that might be more severe.
In his essay Wasted Lives, Bauman (2004) adds that, because our culture is intent on consuming,
objects have an ever-shortening lifespan. He summarizes this process with the concept of waste.
Every object we use is replaceable, and made to last for a short time only: every building permit,
product or contract is bound to an expiration date – and thus to its redundancy. Bauman coins it
liquid modernity, a metaphor for the ever-changing nature of our society. It encompasses the speed
at which products become superfluous, and the excessive amount of waste that remains. Waste, in
this sense, is more than just redundant material: it also encompasses workers, fashion and ideas –
in short, the hype. Bauman paints a picture of a society that is inhabited by people who travel from
experience to experience, without finding solace or rest. This modern man sees time as “…a bore
and a chore, a pain, a snub to human freedom and a challenge to human rights, none of which must
or needs to be suffered gladly” (Bauman, 2004, pp. 108-9). Though Bauman refuses to apply the
prefix ‘post-’ to his modernity, it does encompass a lot of notions from other postmodernistic
theorists. His modern man looks a lot like Feifers post-tourist – save for the more negative
connotation.
In the light of Freud’s deliberations that we have addressed earlier on, we might say that this
modern man is a radicalization of Eros: constantly pushing forward and deferring the closure of
Thanatos. This seems also relevant when addressing the writings on travel websites; Molz (2000)
poses that these mostly operate in the short-term too. While some sites retain all their content
online after the trip is over, their significance rarely outlives the trip itself, since the primary
purpose of most of these websites is to keep friends and family posted while the traveler is away.
And yet, Molz adds, such a site may be the only stable factor during one’s journey: the only fixed
address a traveler might have is his URL. And what is more: it serves as a beacon, emitting their
status as travelers. Alice and Xavier were found only by virtue of their URL.
While these electronic status updates get publicized the moment they are uploaded, free for any
digital traveler to see, we may recall the existence of that other type of travel writing, the one which
we might call to be more ‘old-fashioned’ and which is written more in the vein suggested by
Benjamin (1969): in solitary stillness. Nooteboom, serving as an example, once explained in an
interview: “Sometimes I write a piece years later, to let it tan, and when I plough through those piles
of notations, I can reconstruct everything” (Piryns, 1988, p. 59). To let a story become dormant
when it has just happened may seem like a difficult task for most of our current-day travel writers:
Urry (1990) adds that tourists, looking for an extraordinary experience, are in an impatient state –
and more aware of what they consume during their travels. This seems different from the alleged
lightheartedness and relativism of the post-tourist. Striving for an extraordinary experience seems
hardly compatible with an acceptance of the many faces of a trip, or with an acceptance of anything,
39
CHAPTER FIVE
for that matter. It might be the reason for the fact that there is hardly any irony involved in most of
these travel writings. Alice and Xavier are not looking for relativism, but for a singular,
extraordinary experience. And this is exactly what their relatives acknowledge it to be: their blogs
are visited by friends and family whose reactions often consist of mere superlatives. Still, as we saw
earlier, the ideal, final, and all-compassing journey does not exist, and is always deferred. Rojek
summarizes: “No sooner do we enter ‘escape’ activities than we feel nagging urges to escape from
them” (Rojek, 1993, p. 216). In this sense, post-tourists are a fine example of Bauman's impatience
syndrome. They constantly move from one object to another – because they want a different taste,
or just because they are bored (1985, p. 26, in Urry, 1990). Impatiently stockpiling extraordinary
experiences – it is a rather sobering summation of contemporary tourism. Alice and Xavier spend
their trip diving in wondrous waters, and dining in their luxurious hotel. Their story is the allcompassing pinnacle – until they move on to another trip, and Bonaire becomes a thing of the past.
This constant renewal leads to the question what the waste of tourism looks like. On first sight it
seems an obvious sort of waste: tourists leave their paper foils, tin cans and leftover food behind at
the beach and in their hotel rooms. But Urry warns us of something else, and it is the very same
thing that gets embraced by the post-tourist: the so-called 'democratization of travel'. Geographical
space is a strictly limited resource, Urry argues, and the thing that suffers most from touristic
revenues is undisturbed natural beauty (Urry, 1990, p. 42). “The tourist trade, in a competitive
scramble to uncover all places of once quiet repose, of wonder, beauty and historic interest to the
money-flushed multitude, is in effect literally and irrevocably destroying them.” Tourists all carry
the same Lonely Planet guides, intent on pointing them in original directions but ironically guiding
them all to the same places. We might say that the romantic tourist gaze destroys itself, and is then
replaced by the collective one, including the McDisneyized restaurants, bars, souvenir shops, travel
agencies and the like.
These are all rather uncomforting views on the current-day tourist, the impatient wanderer who
seeks extraordinary things but ends up on the same places as everyone else. De Botton (2002)
presents a compelling example of this realization, drawing upon a comparison between himself in a
foreign hotel room and the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt in 1799. The explorer’s
motivation for traveling was to locate uncharted territories – while De Botton felt the complete
opposite in his hotel room. In our liquid modernity, he seems to say, anyone can travel anywhere –
and anywhere has already been seen, been recorded, and as a result there is nothing new to
discover. All in all, it seems not so strange that the post-tourist has cut herself loose from the
romantic gaze – if she maintains it, the waste of tourism would be quite a disappointment. But she
has a problem as well, for in all her relativism, there is nothing extraordinary left. So how to
combine these viewpoints, and fulfill the quest for the ‘authentic experience’? It may prove useful
here to introduce another postmodern figure: the flâneur. Tester (1994, p. 1) argues that flânerie is
another concept that is often used to get a grip on the ‘nature and implications’ of postmodernism.
40
VARIATIONS ON FLÂNERIE
Charles Baudelaire, the poet who coined the concept of flânerie, had a remarkable relationship with
travel himself. In his essay Writing Travel, Zilcosky (2008, p. 79) describes Baudelaire as a
“reluctant traveler”: the poet once embarked on a trip to India, but decided halfway on his voyage to
turn around and go home. After this, he seemed to have acquired an ambiguous relationship with
traveling. On the one hand he constantly wrote about being homesick when he went on a trip, on
the other hand he always wanted to be somewhere else. Perhaps it is because of his 'romantic
nostalgia' (De Botton, 2002, p. 41), a combined lust for experiencing something new, and the
hesitation of leaving home, that the poet started writing about the flâneur, a figure who was able to
do both; experience authenticity, and lightheartedly stroll. In The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire
depicted the flâneur somewhat like a predecessor of Feifer’s post-tourist:
The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his
profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate
spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of
movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself
everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from
the world – impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince
who everywhere rejoices in his incognito (Baudelaire, 1964).
According to Baudelaire, on the one hand the flâneur is different from the crowd. He is slower, more
observing, idler. Yet on the other hand, he lives through the masses; he lives only from the masses.
(Jokinen & Veijola, 1997, p. 26). The flâneur seems to be a rather ambiguous type of person.
Reflecting this back to the dichotomy between romantic and collective gaze by Urry, we could say
that the flâneur simultaneously wants to have the romantic ‘elbow room’ (Benjamin, 1973, p. 174),
and to be bound to collectivity, to the masses from which he emerges.
To better understand this we need to return to Walter Benjamin. He admired Baudelaire for his
poetry and his theories on the flâneur, and considered him to be the ‘essence of modernity’
(Hubbard, 2006; Lane, 2001: see also Wilson, 1992, p. 93; Bauman, 1994, p. 26). While describing
Baudelaire, Benjamin was imitating his style: in his essay The Arcades Project, Benjamin created his
own imaginary maps of Paris, his own version of reality and truth, depending on the route he chose.
Benjamin wrote of many contradictory images, comparable to the wanderings of the flâneur in
nineteenth-century Paris (Van den Braembussche, 2007). However, he did not leave the flâneur for
what he was with Baudelaire: in one of his most well known works, Benjamin (1973) rejected
Baudelaire’s characterizations of flânerie. He emphasized that this living ‘through’ the masses does
not fit with the flâneur: it is someone who stands outside the masses, not as being part of them.
Benjamin saw the man who is tied to collectivity as someone who is ‘manic’: being jostled by, and
succumbing to the many fears and anxieties of the crowd (Benjamin, 1973, p. 174), whereas the
flâneur is calm, and out of place.
Bauman (1994), years later, reinstated the concept of the flâneur – giving him a more
postmodern connotation by juxtaposing him against the profile of the pilgrim. According to Bauman,
the pilgrim is the epitome of a fixed (premodern) society, while the flâneur, symbolizing
postmodernism, needs to keep his options open. The pilgrim was someone who thought ‘the truth
is elsewhere’, always looking for a different place, for an ultimate truth with which he could return
41
CHAPTER FIVE
home. He did this by carrying out certain rites de passage – tasks in order to be able to liminally
experience cultural artifacts. His travels constituted his identity: his footprints in the sand were
reminiscent of where he was going, where he was coming from, and why. Modern society, however,
erases these footprints as easily as they get impressed. And so it becomes impossible to constitute
an identity, and a goal. The postmodern flâneur is a stranger, who sees other strangers and knows
them episodically – without a past or consequences (Jokinen & Veijola, 1997, p. 24). He moves from
sight to sight, mocking playfully that what he sees – a self-aware man of leisure.
The flâneur resembles the post-tourist to a great extent: both are aware of the commodification
of tourism, both playfully stroll through these crowds, without any clear predestined goal.
Distinguishing Bauman’s flâneur from the post-tourist is even more difficult. If we adhere to
Baudelaire and Benjamin, however, we could typify the flâneur as a more lenient denomination of
the post-tourist: his stance on tourism is similar, but his performance differs: the flâneur takes his
time. But to what extent can these traits be attributed to our travel writer? In an essay on
Nooteboom, Földényi (1997) links aspects of the flâneur to the writer – although he does not regard
the lack of a predetermined goal to be as negative as Bauman chooses to do. Földényi notes that the
writer makes use of what Heidegger called Gelassenheit (meaning ‘resignation’): a way of thinking
in which someone accepts the fact that certain things happen, without the desire to intervene in
advance. One might call it preceding confidence – and only when this freedom is found we get to see
the “deeper elements” (p. 113) of a journey. Or as Arendt (1979, p. 12) remarked: “only the flâneur
who strolls idly by receives the message.” He experiences a ‘real’, ‘authentic’ view, uncluttered by
the dominant tourist images (Tester, 1994, in Crawshaw & Urry, 2002, p. 179). This places the
flâneur in odd contrast to his postmodern context: somehow, he is able of a singular, authentic
experience, even in our age of commodified tourism, in which authenticity is a fallible concept
altogether. Still, he is more than a premodern delusion. While concepts as ‘real’ and ‘authentic’
should indeed be regarded with caution, Földényi’s supposition does seem to indicate a difference
between Nooteboom and Alice and Xavier. This difference emerges through the notion of flânerie:
the idle stroller, who is so radically different from the hasty tourist, sees things that will escape
others. Nooteboom is, as Földényi put it, Gelassen, and therefore notices things that others fail to see.
The flâneur, in that sense, is the advocate of ‘slow tourism’: taking the time to absorb the things he
sees, and to let his stories ‘tan’ after the events took place, while Alice and Xavier, who are more
urgently concerned with their extraordinary experience, immediately put down their impressions.
To Urry (1990), the most salient feature of the flâneur is to be found in the democratization of
taking photographs – of being seen and recorded, and seeing others and recording them. Therefore,
the role of the gaze connects flâneurs and tourists, Jokinen & Veijola argue. Susan Sontag likewise
observes: “Adept to the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world
‘picturesque’” (1979, p. 55). And according to Bauman (1994, p. 26). “The flâneur goes for a stroll as
one goes to a theatre”, watching its staged authenticity.
But does this mean that the flâneur goes about taking pictures the same way tourists do? In the
previous chapter we saw how excessive photographs can distract from the experience itself – but
photographs surely can be more than a distraction. Both Nooteboom and Alice and Xavier are
performing Eakins concept of life writing, in which one’s stories comprise one’s identity. Still, they
differ – and the difference is the same as the one between the post-tourist and the flâneur. They are
alike in that they both stroll lightheartedly. But as Jokinen & Veijola (1997, p. 28) put it, the flâneur
42
is also intent on ‘inventing stories’ and ‘imagining lives’. Not only does he write his own life; he
creates a personal story, and performs his own ekphrasis on the many things he encounters. This is
not just glancing, but gazing at the world. Perhaps it is at this point that we can decipher the
difference between being the pejoratively sounding tourist, who on his all-inclusive trip hastily
describes or photographs the strange, the exotic, the dangerous and the inexplicable – and being a
traveler, who calmly but actively creates a story that somehow captures the meaning behind his
experience – even though that experience may be contingent.
It might be useful, once more, to apply the concept of irony here. We can borrow a definition of it
from Rorty (1989, pp. 73-4), who described an ironist as someone who has radical and continuing
doubts about a ‘final vocabulary’: a set of words that “serves as a fundament for our actions, beliefs
and lives.” He refrains himself from the metaphysical, does not hastily jump to conclusions, and
always keeps his options open. With that in mind, Davey’s recommendations on places to see before
we die and Alice and Xavier’s travel writings both show a distinct lack of irony. The immediately
published digital travel writings are jumping to conclusions more than ever, and their pictures do
so as well. Paradoxically, they seem intent on showing the reader what ‘reality’ in these travels
looks like. But as we saw (which is also what most theorists have warned for as well), reality is an
elusive matter. Nooteboom serves as a fine example. As Safranski states about the writer’s work:
“Irony renders the friction between reality and fantasy bearable.” (Safranski, 2008, p. 7, trans. TvN).
When using irony, the writer can surpass the boundaries of his own contingent experiences. He
does not merely consider his story to be the story, nor does he simply invent something that is only
fictional. He searches for reality by combining the two.
This may be the greatest opposition between the free roaming ironist-flâneur and the hastily
post-tourist. Rorty also has a definition for the opposite of irony: ‘common sense’. He depicts it as
constantly making use of one’s final vocabulary to unselfconsciously make statements about the
world (Rorty, 1989, p. 74). But in tourism, it might be more: common sense is the strict belief in the
existing myth – that is why it is a ‘common’ sense. When confronted with a site, the ‘common
sensitist’ does not doubt the object of his gaze. He trusts in a story and a truth that already exists,
without the need of questioning it. It makes for stories without surprises, disappointments or
otherness. The ironist rejects this, and in that way we can relate him to the flâneur. However slow
these two may proceed, the stories and images they construct are always on the move, mobile, and
without closure. Traveling concepts, indeed.
The pieces are set. The remaining question is how our writer elect, Nooteboom, plays with them. In
what ways does his performance of tourism differ from that of Alice and Xavier? In what ways does
he make use of myth, gazing, ekphrasis, flânerie? Alice and Xavier will step out of this thesis and
make way for Nooteboom in the second half of our hermeneutic circle. But let us take a small detour
first. The writer will arrive shortly, but patience is a virtue. And besides, one should not travel all
the way in one sitting. One has to rest for a minute on an iron station seat and watch the
surroundings. Surroundings on which could be elaborated forever, but for which there is simply not
enough space and time. For all we need to do is to open a window – in this case one on our
computer screen – to find countless stories and images that illustrate our findings.
43
PART II
44
p. 26: I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not see, not even discern.
All that is necessary is for something to signify to me that there may be others there. (Lacan,
1988)
The silence is broken when I hear a cough coming from somewhere to my left. I freeze in my
tracks. I’m not alone here. I slowly turn, my eyes wide open and straining in the dark to see
where the noise came from. Gradually, I begin to make sense out of the shapes that clutter the
walkways of the street. Homeless people, many of them, are lying amid boxes and refuse along
the edge of the walkway. Their shapes are broken up by rags, cardboard and paper that they
have used to protect themselves from the night chill. I must have taken a wrong
turn. Danger.31
p. 3: Many people will prefer to call themselves travelers or visitors. (Crawshaw & Urry,
2002, p. 178)
We entered Machu Picchu, were described to the very lazy train-riding tourists as "hikers", and
unloaded our packs for a quick tour.32
p. 19: The pursuit of the exotic and diverse ends in uniformity. (Turner & Ash, 1975, p. 292)
After breakfast we prepare ourselves for a visit to a beach that is in the top 3 of the most
beautiful beaches in the world. Our expectations are high, but when the beach proves to be
invisible under dense layer of tourists we are somewhat disappointed.33
p. 19: Our vacations are more and more like the rest of our lives. (Ritzer & Liska, 1997, p.
100)
Arriving in South-Africa, especially when landing in Johannesburg, seems like arriving in a
major airport of the USA.34
31
See http://www.travbuddy.com/travel-blogs/43341/Saigon-Nights-2. Retrieved June 12, 2010. The majority of these
hyperlinks will likely have been deleted.
32
See http://www.watchuswander.com/march.html. Retrieved May 4, 2010.
33
See http://zegtheteneblondjetegendeander.waarbenjij.nu/?page=message&id=2750875. Retrieved June 12, 2010. Trans.
TvN.
34
http://www.worldtravelstories.com/south_africa__story_2.htm. Retrieved June 3, 2010.
45
p. 32: The search for beauty is authenticated from the moment the travel brochure is
opened: the many paradise-like sceneries one can see in travel advertisements all serve to
prove how the agency can carry one there. They promise ‘moments for eternity’.
35
p. 20: A more thorough understanding of other cultures requires a significant amount of
work of memory, interpretation and reconstruction. (Rojek & Urry, 1997, p. 12)
Complete parts of this text [got] lost, leading to the fact that it is now half past one in the night
and, after five hours of Internet, we’re still not done with this story. (So don’t expect any
photos, we’re exhausted!) We hope that everyone enjoys this repeatedly typed story all the
more.36
35
Travel ad for Tirol, 2010. See http://brochures.austria.info/ar_AE/brochures/show/1794-Moments-for-eternity. Retrieved
August 3, 2010.
36
See http://zegtheteneblondjetegendeander.waarbenjij.nu/?page=message&id=2777599. Retrieved June 3, 2010. Trans. TvN.
46
p. 18: Contemporary American citizens are no longer able of experiencing reality – only socalled 'pseudo-events' . . . this is nowhere more true than in the realm of commodified
tourism. (Baudrillard, 1983)
The Imperial Palace Outside Gardens were the first stop of the day and then the Sony Building
to gaze at all the new . . . products. Our favorite spot was the dark air-conditioned room with
lounge chairs to watch a tv featuring different travel spots around the world.37
p. 35: If we record something as a one-dimensional picture, we neglect its complexity, and
our depicted image of it will likely be quite trivial – like all the recurrent pictures of
different people standing in front of the same apparent spot.
38
p. 2: Traveling, in our contemporary society, seems more of a necessity than a possibility.
We have learned a lot while traveling. We enjoy traveling a lot, and we plan to discover more
of the world in the future. Spanish, as well, is a language that we will always love. Dear nieces,
we now very well understand the words ‘traveling is addicting’!39
37
38
See http://www.watchuswander.com/september.html. Retrieved May 4, 2010.
Tourists posing in South Africa. Photo by Nathan de Groot, 2009.
47
p. 34: A picture can rarely live up to an experience.
Speechless, that’s what I am after this adventure. Yeah, right now because of my fatigue (we’re
going to do an attempt at partying tonight as well), but mostly because it cannot be described
how beautiful that island is and how incredible cool it is to drive across it. Even pictures
cannot show how great everything was.40
p. 34: He can use them as a mnemonic, to remember what something looked like, or to show
them to friends and family.
I will use this site for some reporting of my longer journeys abroad. Hopefully everyone can
enjoy them! (At the same time it is a recollection for myself: I would almost forget my
experiences!) Amicae amicique, friends and girlfriends: traveling is fun! Traveling is addicting!
Traveling is an exploration of the world, but also of yourself... On to a new search!41
p. 30: One could argue that the excess of commodified travel pictures, taken over and over
again at the same spot by innumerable tourists, has lost its capacity of breaking through our
habitude.
42
39
See http://nookyra.waarbenjij.nu/. Retrieved August 3, 2010. Trans. TvN.
See
http://gittaspruit.waarbenjij.nu/Reisverslag/?Australi%EB/...../&subdomain=gittaspruit&module=site&page=message&id=1041
863. Retrieved July 30, 2010.
41
See http://jacobvandijk.waarbenjij.nu/?page=profile. Retrieved June 27, 2010. Trans. TvN.
42
See http://www.tunliweb.no/Bilder_SM/_album_Toscana/e15_Pisa_leaning_tower.jpg. Retrieved August 4, 2010.
40
48
PART III
A TRAVELING ANALYSIS
49
CHAPTER SIX
Alas, it has been a long journey already, and we have not even been properly introduced to
Nooteboom himself. There already exists a large amount of biographical information on the writer43,
most of which will not be addressed here. But it remains necessary – and polite – to shake hands,
and to see with whom we are conversing.
A LETTER TO THE WRITER
Pleased to meet you, Cees Nooteboom. Your biography reads that you were born July 31, 1933;
your writing career up to today spans over 54 years. Your oeuvre includes novels, travel writings,
poetry and columns. You have written for several Dutch papers and magazines, including Het
Parool, Elsevier and Avenue. Your work for these papers varies from impressions to political reports,
from poetry translations to columns. In the 1960’s you gained recognition as a travel writer, when
you traveled the world for De Volkskrant – something you yourself described as a necessity. “I had
to ban the exaggerated lyric from my work. Writing requires a certain connaissance du monde. That
is why I started traveling” (Cartens, & Dijkgraaf, 2010, trans. TvN). Your travels are performed solo,
or paired: either with photographer Eddy Posthuma de Boer, or with photographer and partner
Simone Sassen. Pictures by both of them frequently end up in your travel novels. And the many
voyages you made together end up in your works, either as fiction or as non-fiction.
What holds true for both, is the person who wrote them down. According to Van den Brink, you
are a very specific sort of travel writer, namely
the adventurer, the man or woman that travels because at home, everything has become too
crowded, too familiar and too stuffy and who wants to collect unknown horizons, new names and
faces . . . His books are in the first place the report of a displacement . . . Nooteboom rarely ever writes
about the worries of traveling, but all the more about the arrival at a strange place and his attempts
to find something known, something understandable, something familiar as a stranger. (Van den
Brink, 1997, p. 51, trans. TvN)
It should be noted that describing the worries of traveling is no big issue with digital travel
writers, as well (au contraire, they are mostly glorified). When comparing your writings to the ones
of Alice and Xavier, one might even find that you are more worried, more critical about the reality of
tourism, than they are. But primarily, you do not seem to care too much for such academic analysis
altogether. “Terms such as meta-fiction and postmodernism never had my interest in any way . . .
But well, if the serious folks are contemplating on it, it has got to be good for something” (Dijkgraaf,
2009, p. 41, trans. TvN). Still, you give us academics so much to work with. In your writings –
especially the fictive ones – reality and fiction are never easily separable. You pose that “If you start
unraveling reality to serve the industry of meaning, there will never be that chemical or alchemical
magic that turns something into fiction” (Peters, 2006, p. 82, trans. TvN). Plus, you seem critical of
the people who read your novels do not share this relativism. About your readers, you note: “It
43
For example, see Cartens (1984); Bekkering et al. (1997); Beaudry et al. (2006); Schwerfel (2007); Safranski (2008).
50
seems that nobody wants to become confused [when reading]. You have to be clear on things as a
writer.” (Dijkgraaf, 2009, p. 30, trans. TvN).
And yet, that is not the entire story either. You remain to be a writer who is genuinely interested
in the world. Your traveling alone is proof of that. “I have never chosen the way of cynicism and
sarcasm. I am well aware of that” (Ibid, p. 14, trans. TvN), you stated. And yet, your view on
literature is one on autonomy, not on engagement. You do not write to inform your readers.
“Literature is not there for the answers, but for the questions, the questions that it asks itself, not
those of others . . . in short, you have to leave literature alone, you don’t need to seek for moral or
political missives. Literature doesn’t lend itself for anything (Ibid, pp. 64-5, trans. TvN).
The multitude of opinions may be explained by the fact that you have written so many books. The
selected bibliography on your website44 showcases more than fifty titles. When a writer has been
active for so long, it seems plausible to expect his tone to change over the years. As your friend,
philosopher Rüdiger Safranski, notes, your writing history shows “the same development as the
nineteenth-century Romantic period: it started with the romantic enchantment of the world and
the I, full of Weltschmerz and melancholy, and it ended with the equally romantic game of irony”
(Safranski, 1997-98). Yet, a chronological account of your stories would probably remain fruitless if
we want to capture them in terms of our main concepts. For example, the first concept we have
introduced – the authentic journey – is not covered in your first novel to any extent resembling the
level of treatment in your non-fictional travel writings. So we will address your writings in the
chapter where they fit in best, even though the most notable concepts will of course cross the
borders of these chapters. It is without doubt that our interpretations of your stories can ever
include all the narrative threads you have woven in them: we can only hope for an analysis that
somehow captures the issues on traveling we have just discussed. Our first stop: Spain.
44
Nooteboom’s website was created under supervision of the Nederlandse Taalunie and Uitgeverij de Bezige Bij on the
occasion of winning the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren. See www.ceesnooteboom.com. Retrieved March 24, 2011.
51
CHAPTER SEVEN
Before venturing into Nooteboom’s fictive stories on travel, let us begin by staying close to the
author’s nonfictional travel books. These travel writings are packed with knowledge on foreign
places. And while the author may not write to present his readers with clear-cut answers, Földényi
argues that his books still
compete with every Baedecker-guide, that in their plain, dry and boring way describe one city after
another in a country . . . to draw a comparison: the Baedeckers are like tourists who only look at
things through the eye of the camera (and never look at the pictures afterwards). The books of Cees,
on the other hand, make me want to throw away my camera and to look around with the naked eye.
(Földényi, 2008, p. 177-8, trans. TvN)
Why is it that Nooteboom’s novels are so different from the standardized travel guides? It is
important to recognize the earlier mentioned role of fictionalization: these stories may not present
themselves on the surface as fiction, but let us remember that each one is – at least partly – guided
by imagination. The writer himself helps us doing so. Responding to the question whether
Nooteboom ever made up his stories, he has said:
I work in a very precise manner. During my travels I frequently stop at the side of the road, and I start
describing the landscape, from a millimeter in front of me up to the horizon. But of course there’s
always an element of fiction in my travel writings. Sometimes, at a local grocer, I’ll buy ten postcards,
which I later inscribe. Or I’ll depict a landscape at a totally different place. In short: I will sometimes lie
and cheat, but that’s not such a bad thing. (Piryns, 1988, p. 59)
Apart from lying and cheating about certain specific places, Nooteboom has also shown a more
general interest in placing his novels in the realm of fiction than in reality. In his homeland, the
writer stated in an interview, readers
want writers to deal with the rumour of the world; and with that they unfortunately do not mean the
higher buzzing of transcendentalism, but those forms of psychological realism in which they present
society with a mirror of itself. I am bored to death when I read those kinds of books. (Dijkgraaf, 2009,
p. 65, trans. TvN)
We might say that the writer’s dismissal of the mirroring function of literature is a form of
romanticism, in which literature is more like a lamp that sheds a new, different light on the world,
as Meyer Howard Abrams (1971) would put it. Földényi’s appraisal of Nooteboom’s evocative
abilities seems to have something to do with what the author states here: that he is not interested
in books that mimic the world and tell the reader what it looks like, but that shed a new light on it
and induce one’s interest. Still, it would seem that nonfictional travel books are always, to an extent,
about mimicking the world around us. After all, they are about actual places. An important question
might be, then, which elements of the world – and of traveling through it – the writer illuminates in
a new way.
52
ROADS TO SANTIAGO
The front cover of Roads to Santiago reads “A modern day pilgrimage through Spain.” Given the
subtitle of the book it seems to deal with something going beyond the contemporary “required
pilgrimage to the repositories of culture” – as Blanton put it earlier. It likely refers to a more
complex, distinct way of travel writing: the book was awarded in Austria with the Internationale
Preis für Reiseliteratur des Landes Tirol in 1996, and in Spain with the Internationale
Compostelaprijs (Santiago de Compostela) in 2000.
Roads to Santiago contains a number of essays the author wrote during his travels through Spain.
Why are they a pilgrimage? Perhaps because of the great moral significance this journey has to the
writer. These essays are layered: besides the conventional form of travel writing in which
Nooteboom writes about the many impressions he gathers from his travels, he ties historical
information he has gathered about the places he visits to his own experiences. Not only is he
interested in historic data; he mostly focuses on the past as a place of experience, thereby
effectively creating a fictional component. By doing so, he confronts the reader with the ambivalent
role of time and place, which become entwined in his story. To Nooteboom, traveling has a lot to do
with rediscovering ‘lost time’. “I am making two journeys, one in my rented car and another
through the past as evoked by fortresses, castles, monasteries and by the documents and legends I
find there”, the writer notes when he embarks on his voyage (Nooteboom, 1997a, p. 40). And it is
through a myriad of stories – both real and fictional – that Nooteboom tries to trace the uniqueness
of Spain, “the permanent love of my life” (Dijkgraaf, 2009, p. 17, trans. TvN) as he puts it in an
interview.
So why is he so madly in love? Because to him, this country is the essence of writing: “arid,
weather-beaten, eroded. Everything is made of stone” (Schwerfel, 2007). Nooteboom seems
particularly interested in its romantic emptiness. In another interview, he puts it more elaborately:
I am very sensitive to certain landscapes. Especially to those involving rocks and deserts. I have a
strange relationship to nature. Mystic is too big a word. Perhaps it is something religious . . . When I
am [in Amsterdam] I almost constantly think about Spain, and while I am there I rarely think of
Amsterdam. In that sense I am being thrown around all the time. I should write more about that in
my itineraries. Without any use of irony. Incessant self-application of irony makes for an insidious
poison. (Brokken, 1984, p. 20, trans. TvN)
Here, the writer explicitly admits his fondness of the romantic gaze. But at the same time he seems
to require the opposite as well: he is traveling between his two homes, between Amsterdam and
Spain – between the romantic and the collective gaze. Upon first glance, it seems tempting to
associate him with the flâneur, whom Benjamin characterized as someone who needs elbow room,
but simultaneously ‘lives from the masses’. However, if we regard Nooteboom as being a flâneur, he
surely personates a different type than the postmodern figure deliberated by Bauman and others.
In Roads to Santiago, it becomes clear that the writer is not just looking for another contingent,
fortuitous story: he is searching for a truth of his own. In the very first sentence of the book, we can
already read his concern with the telescopic eye:
53
CHAPTER SEVEN
It is impossible to prove and yet I believe it: there are some places in the world where one is
mysteriously magnified on arrival or departure by the emotions of all those who have arrived and
departed before. (Nooteboom, 1997a, p. 3)
To the writer, this magnification of sorts that accompanies a trip has everything to do with le temps
perdu. However, his telescopic eye is not just shaped by conventional aesthetic pleasure of explicitly
‘historical’ sights. Describing his first trip to Italy, the writer tells of the huge impression it made on
him: “The whole of human life was enacted on a single, fabulous, public stage against a careless
background of thousands of years of sublime art” (5). Spain, in comparison, was at first a
disappointment. But as time went by the writer learned to love the country’s “brutish, anarchic,
egocentric, cruel” aspects. These elements of being less easily understood render Spain ultimately
more compelling than Italy, the writer argues. In Italy, “one often has the feeling that all the
treasures are out on display” (9). Spain, by contrast, offers a more elaborate, complex history, for
which “one has to make an effort” (Ibid.). The writer’s preference of complexity is not unwarranted
if we take into account the many detours and elaborations he is about to take. However, when
dealing with Santiago, with the myths of medieval pilgrimages surrounding it, we might as well
argue that it forms a quite ‘accessible’ treasure. Still, the writer argues, “those who only now the
beaten track do not know Spain. Those who have not roamed the labyrinthine complexity of her
history cannot know what they are traveling through” (5). The writer does sound like an old lover
here, telling a new one that his love is far more complex than she may look on first sight.
KNOWLEGDE AND CONTINGENCY
Though in the previous citation our writer seems a little skeptic about the most tourists visiting
Spain, he does want his readers to learn how to appreciate his beloved country. He refers to
fragments of Spain’s history throughout the book – from Salvador Dalí, to the ETA, to the history of
Christianity and Spain in general. It is of great necessity to understand the canvas of our own
western culture, Nooteboom advises elsewhere, because “at the exact time that we lose our own
images, because we no longer know the stories from which they sprouted, we get washed over by
globalization and with images and symbols of others” (Dijkgraaf, 2009, p. 29, trans. TvN). It is our
own culture, he implicitly says, that we need to understand in order to understand ourselves. Our
travel writer seeks to explain local history, and by doing becoming more than just a tourist. He
wants to make this place his home – and to some extent, the home of the European reader who, on
the surface, might not appreciate Spain for what it really is. The current-day traveler can read about
and compare virtually every place on Earth, but Nooteboom tries hard to keep the attention of his
reader with only one country for a while. By doing so, he provides his readers with a way into the
labyrinthine complexity one cannot do without if a country is to be understood properly. And for
his European public, understanding one’s own cultural history is even more important.
However, Nooteboom immediately recognizes that reading about or looking at the cultural past
of one’s own continent is complicated as well.
54
Words, like images, become upholstered in time, and thus obfuscated. When we say or read the word
war we cannot dissociate it from tanks, intelligence networks, tranches, bomber aircraft. No one
imagines that Alfonso and Yousuf engaged in modern warfare, but still it is very difficult to picture
what their battles were really like. In that sense you could say that the past does not exist. There are
images, to be sure, but they do not speak our visual language. (42)
What Nooteboom implies is that, in order to truly understand history, we need to gain knowledge of
it; to approach it like a historian, and see events in their historical perspective. But, resembling
Barthes, he notes that this, to an extent, is impossible. Our current-day knowledge constitutes its
own myth about the past. The “stark, unwieldy facts . . . change the nature of each individual event
again and again” (108), the writer warns. But still, these historical facts are the only vehicle for the
travel writer to transform an ‘individual event’ such as a personal story he reads, or a painting he
photographs, into one that is understood by his public for its content, rather than for its aesthetic
form. The writer’s abiding inclination to furnish his readers with historical data is the most effective
way of letting them understand Spain. Still, the writer is aware that his own knowledge is equally
flawed. “I can see, but I am blind to what I see. There must have been a time when people could
“read” these symbols like I read a traffic sign” (10). And this not only counts for him. Nowadays, he
implicitly states, people often do not know what the signs they see are referring to. The hasty
tourist follows the stories pointed out to them by travel companies or the places themselves; but
places that lack an inviting myth to begin with, are rarely seen.
Seeing those deserted places brings along a feeling of loneliness, and Nooteboom has an
ambivalent relation with that feeling. On the one hand, he regrets that tourists lose interest in the
history of his beloved country. But on the other hand, he enjoys the romantic stillness. This
becomes evident when he describes the difference between a Michelin travel guide and its Hallwag
counterpart. The writer prefers the latter, partly because the Michelin map uses red lines for roads,
where the Hallway map uses white ones. The white roads are more modest, as if no one before has
used them yet (16). The map is more consistent with the writer’s perception of Spain – and it also
caters for the sensation that he, like Alexander von Humboldt as described by De Botton (2002), is
somehow the first one to set eyes on all these wondrous places.
It is interesting to note that Nooteboom is confident that his random travels will carry him to
these empty, unspoiled places. This of course relates to the Gelassenheit that Földényi (1997) spoke
of. As Nooteboom declares when he finds a book in local store: “I embrace coincidence, and it
always comes my way” (231). The book leads him to an exceptionally beautiful valley that his guide
does not mention (Ibid.). This is a prime example of how Gelassenheit operates with the writer, and
how the slow traveling of the flâneur brings him to places that are ‘unspoiled’ by commodified
tourism. Sometimes, this turns his itinerary into something of a Lonely Planet-recommendation.
“Anyone interested in what a Spanish town looked like in the sixties should go to Soria”, because
“tourism and prosperity have not yet made their mark” (21). And further on:
The province is poor, the provincial capital is poor, and poverty does not shine, poverty is quiet,
poverty does not discard the old in favour of the veneer of emblematic junk which, like a botched
facelift, has messed up so much of what was old and authentic. (22)
Yes – he is even using the word ‘authentic’. It becomes increasingly difficult to refer to Nooteboom
as a post-tourist when he unambiguously distinguishes between locations in romantic, ‘poor’ Spain,
55
CHAPTER SEVEN
unchanged from how it was hundred years ago, from the popular cities that bask in the
commodification of tourism. Tourism is the practice that replaces poverty by wealth – and as we
saw earlier, Nooteboom has no affiliation with such banal aesthetics. He prefers the arid, the
eroded, for these barren elements prove that there is a past to be unveiled. However, ironically, his
recommendations might render turn these quiet, uncharted territories popular – or even turn them
into the emblematic junk he despises. The difference, again, is that the author constantly tries to
capture the authenticity of these unknown places.
Besides the historical background of these places, Nooteboom is well aware that an
understanding of them depends on the tourist himself. Authenticity, in this sense, is in the eye of the
beholder. And like Urry noticed earlier regarding tourists, Nooteboom is also looking for differences
with his own culture to establish understanding. As he describes the emptiness of Spain’s
landscape, he wonders: “Perhaps I am more susceptible because I come from a country suffering
from overpopulation” (52). And later on: “all the rooms have views across the valley to the city
silhouetted high on a hill, which in Holland we would call a mountain.” (107-8). The writer rarely
elaborates on these remarks. They are short statements that illustrate the differentness of other
places, as Hochschild (2007) put it; they open up the reader’s horizon of expectations to improve
his understanding of how the perception of even minor details may differ between a Dutchman and
a Spaniard. “For every story here I could tell ten more about all of the things I saw on my way to
Santiago de Compostela” (54), Nooteboom assures his readers.
This here is a key aspect of his travel writing. For every story he tells, he could have told ten
other ones. The writer is not satisfied with the story ‘as is’: he is set on adding to it. His only
limitation is the fact that he is writing a book, bound to a limited amount of pages. It is the
difference between the mind, which is able of creating an endless amount of stories; and reality,
which is singular in its storyline. It is in this context that we should read the question Nooteboom
poses himself: “Once events have happened in such and such a way, does that mean they couldn’t
have happened differently? In the mind, yes; in practice, never” (111). We are reminded of Bauman
(2004), who argued that we can only create something by throwing away the superfluous.
And what is more: by distilling a story from reality, we let go of the countless different ones we
could have made up. Nooteboom refers to this when he mentions “the thousands, millions of links
that can be established between this photograph or that fateful moment and other moments in
time” (Ibid.), and “there is always a parallel version in which the same facts present a different face”
(150). We create order out of chaos while that order cannot wholly exist – especially when the facts
involved are of a distant past, which “can create a feeling of almost divine omnipotence, as if
knowing how things turned out enables us to survey the past from a lofty position of superiority.”
(Ibid.) While in fact we read one specific story, it is only one amongst many. This confinement by
selection is a key friction in Nooteboom’s work. He is well aware of the limitations of his own final
vocabulary, but is equally wary of postmodern irony. He is looking for timelessness, while he
simultaneously recognizes that all moments in time, and all stories about them, are inescapably
contingent.
56
TELESCOPIC TIMELESSNESS
So how is this timelessness sought? As we saw earlier, Nooteboom makes frequent use of what
Milosz coined as the telescopic eye, through which he recollects the past as a present-day
experience. The writer puts it like this:
I stand and look, but the eyes that see are not mine, they belong to the others, to those of the past. It
is their gaze, the view is their reward . . . Some places do that to you, they have a certain magic
whereby you find yourself partaking in the thoughts of others, unknown people, people who existed
in a world that can never be yours. (333)
This appears to be an appropriate definition for the telescopic eye: it allows one to understand the
ages past in a glance. Like the tourist, who compares his own home with the place he visits, the
telescopic eye compares the times past with the present as we know it. Of course, it is difficult – if
not impossible – to attain a viable understanding of a past ‘that can never be yours’, that is always
appropriated by ‘others’. But still, the writer never ceases trying; always venturing further into the
story he suddenly partakes in, never simply skimming over the things he encounters. It takes time
to know time, he seems to say.
How to accomplish this task of understanding lost time, of loosening our existential ties with the
historical Dasein? It may involve an attempt to look at the past as if it were the present, a method
often deliberately applied by Nooteboom. “The idea that this was ever new. New! Just finished,
hewn out of those almost golden blocks of hard stone! How proud the makers were, how everyone
in the province crowded to see the sight!” (25). Further on, he notices: “All the travel books agree
that time has stood still here, but there is no question that, on the contrary, everything except time
has stood still here. That is what makes it so miraculous” (232). Engaging the telescopic eye is a
twofold endeavor: accepting the past as something that has passed, yet meanwhile reliving it in the
present. The understanding of different times may derive, as the writer argues, from the “desire to
weave a strand of eternity into your own life” (326). We could take it to be the antidote to what
Bauman called the contemporary ‘impatience syndrome’: a liquid, short-term life somehow attains
a frisson of eternity.
Still, there is no doubt that in the end, we cannot escape our own expiration date. “If I come back
in a hundred years’ time all this will have never existed” (313), the writer muses ironically. It is not
the places that will have never existed – for they are perched in the collective experience of
thousands of people – but the gaze of the person who by then will have been long gone. It puts the
tourist gaze into a whole new perspective; the gaze may force a power-relation upon the person
being gazed at, but when it involves a place, the gaze is more likely to backfire on the person who is
gazing. The consciousness of collectivity, of solidarity with other travelers, is in this sense
juxtaposed to the romantic desire that we, to speak with De Botton (2002), want to be the first
explorers of an authentic foreign place. When looking at age-old places that will outlast ourselves
without flinching, we might – as Nooteboom does – find solace only in the ‘telescopic collective
gaze’. Because we are “participating in a collective work of art” (3), involving people of times past
and times to come, in a bond that is consolidated by the fact that we have all been at the same place.
Still, although collectivity may be what the author finds so interesting about the telescopic eye, it
is not what he is looking for today.
57
CHAPTER SEVEN
Now and then it can happen, you are quietly observing the aesthetic qualities of a Romanesque
tympanum, when one of those couples show up wearing walking outfits as stiff as armore,
guidebooks firmly clasped in scrubbed hands, muttering relevant phrases aloud to each other
and scrutinising detail after detail – the sort you find sitting next to you at a concert with their
faces buried in the score. (172-3)
Here, our writer focuses his gaze on the ‘guidebook-people’, who are not paying attention to what
they see, but who are guided by the prefabricated stories surrounding the sight. Nooteboom’s
pejorative tone fits in with his preference for an unprejudiced gaze. “I simply cannot detach myself
from my own way of looking” (180), he declares further on. And he is not alone to think so: in one of
her interviews with the writer, Dijkgraaf acknowledges that “Nooteboom’s gaze does not adhere to
guidelines or art history; it roams, produces its own associations, and accentuates without relying
on the opinion of others” (Dijkgraaf, 2009, p. 33, trans. TvN). Still, our ironist writer, well aware of
his own inclination toward books and theory, continues in the next sentence: “I’m not one of those
people, am I?” (Ibid.). Because, as we learn later on, the writer always packs books to accompany
him on his journeys. “as a mainstay, a breviary, a talisman if you like.” (208-9). He absorbs
information from two sources: the world, and the text.
Even the author may be relying on the novels or historical texts he travels with – but to him this
is still quite different from the way in which most commodity tourists enjoy lying at the beaches
from travel brochures, without traveling further than this myth of ‘Spain as a coastline’. “How
insane that most people visiting Spain never venture beyond the burning glass that is the east coast.
“(204), he exclaims, sounding like the old lover again. And later, as he is traveling to the island of
Gomera: “Tenerife dwindles and the horrendous sprawl of tourist accommodation disfiguring the
bare south coast fades from view” (302). Nooteboom is happy to leave the excesses of commodified
tourism in the country he loves so much. The people that travel to Spain only to see the images they
had of it at home are radically different from our writer, who travels to see things in order to be
surprised. He is happiest when he can do so on his own, without anyone telling him where to look.
When visiting a church, he is relieved when “The guide focuses her attention on a newly arrived
visitor, leaving me free to wander” (205). The power-relationship that Sartre (2000) and Foucault
(2003) associated with the gaze is omnipresent here: the guide, gazing at Nooteboom, prevents him
from roaming freely. It is a very practical form of néantiser: as the guide focuses her gaze on the
writer, in order to inform him, she also prevents him from gazing himself. But as soon as the guide
stops gazing at the writer, he is free to do so. The author’s gazing coincides with his ability to start
‘wandering’, it seems – without anyone looking over his shoulder, or telling him where to look. His
gaze is one of secrecy, not into the lives of people but into the annals of history. When he arrives at
Santiago, and stands before the portico de la Gloria, the writer takes a quick look inside, when
“there’s no one around at the moment to prevent me from gazing over his mighty shoulder into the
church.” (342).
58
DEFERRAL
& THANATOS
With no one around, Nooteboom can gaze romantically at the things he is fascinated by. It seems
the writer is passively looking for these moments – Gelassen as he is, he enjoys the moments of
solitary stillness all the more. This seems to have to do with the role of deferral: when alone, the
writer has all the time he wants to circle around the object of his gaze, to contemplate on it, to
return to it later on. His travels are detours: the writer “cannot resist the temptation of side roads”
and “vistas that may lie in store for you on the other side of that hill or mountain range” (309). He is
deferring Thanatos, so to speak: the writer wants to understand the past, to experience it as the
present, and bring closure to it by understanding it – but in order to do so he keeps circling around
his objects, unwilling to disengage his gaze and end the deliberation. In an interview with Heinrichs,
Nooteboom reminds us of the workings of Eros and Thanatos even more explicitly. “Being on the
road means . . . having a philosophical and anthropological exchange with everything and crossing a
distance between both poles of birth and death” (Heinrichs, 2006, p. 32, trans. TvN).
Indeed, traveling seems more than physical movement: it also means moving between times,
between lives, and through stories. The ‘poles of birth and death’ are clearly not those of the writer,
but belonging to those of ‘everything’, as he puts it – and also those of everyone. Nooteboom is not
just stretching out his own life by traveling – he is crossing the borders between life and death
themselves, by discussing both the present, and the times past. The telling of such a vast story is a
constant delay of Thanatos. We see the proof of that in many passages where the writer admits he
does not want to end his own book. It seems a typical aspect of the writer who gets to write a travel
book, instead of a short blog: once it is finished, published, put to paper, there is no going back.
Thanatos is much more definitive than for Alice & Xavier, who can add to their travel story
whenever they want, rewrite parts with grammar of factual mistakes, or even delete the story when
it has lost its significance.
Not with Nooteboom, who is looking for a more thorough, long-lasting image of the country he
visits – an agglomeration of no less than everything. He wants his readers to become more aware of
Spain’s complexity. The most important feature to be able to enjoy this complexity, it seems, is
slowness, becoming evident in a few passages scattered throughout the book. In one instance, the
writer describes a guided tour through the church of Guadalupe. The writer tries to capture all the
sights he sees, but the guide hurries to the next item before he can do so.
Giving in to the persistent voice singling me out to hurry up, I tear myself away and am overcome by
an almost physical sensation of futility. All those books, so randomly opened, all those pictures sealed
from view, shut away, forbidden, as that man now shuts the door behind me. Gone, lost. (139)
The word ‘randomly’ is especially interesting here: what the writer hints at, is that all the things he
can see, read or do are less contingent when he is able to contemplate on them. If we do not
understand the story, we might as well not read it. Tourism, in this sense, is a repetition of
meaningless gestures, such as opening historical books or gazing at historical architecture –
without knowing the story behind it, because one needs to ‘hurry up’. The writer poses something
similar when he states that he prefers “to cover the distance . . . by car, so you have plenty of time to
adjust your sights, as it were. Flying is only a good idea when you’re not too familiar with the
country you’re going to.” (295). However, as he gets closer to Santiago, Nooteboom realizes that
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CHAPTER SEVEN
even his relatively slow trip by car can never compare to the expedition on foot by the pilgrims that
he is tracing in his story. So he gets out of his car, to walk for a day without staff or luggage, because
“by walking you become someone else” (330). The writer searches for ways to let the enormity of
the undertaking sink in – even if it is only an estimate.
Returning to the notion of authenticity, it becomes clear that Nooteboom’s definition of the
concept is strongly affiliated with the pilgrim. Experiencing a country to the fullest, to him, means
taking your time, traveling on foot, sneaking around corners and listening to what history tells you.
Nooteboom’s ‘modern-day pilgrimage’ is reminiscent of the real pilgrimage in that both are on a
journey of historic significance. Still, there are differences. We might say the author’s traveling is
slow, yet unstoppable. While a pilgrim finishes his pilgrimage when he has reached his destination,
Nooteboom is avoiding closure altogether. At the very end of the book, when the writer has reached
Santiago, he openly admits that he is trying to avoid the end. “And then once more I plunge into the
book that I will never finish because I don’t want it to end. Nor can it end: the more you read, the
more pages there are ahead of you” (340). This is one of the fundamental problems of travel
writing, and the reason that our experiences may be “untellable”: the more one sees, the more one
can elaborate on. The journey never ends. And in the final sentence, Nooteboom makes it clear that
even his extensive travels and gazing cannot even grasp the essence. “The traveller . . . knows that
behind the ramparts of history there must be a different Spain, a Spain that cannot, or perhaps does
not wish to, recognize his” (343). We might say that our current-day pilgrim is, like Bauman put it
earlier, unable of carrying out rites de passage like his ancient predecessors. The more he sees, the
more he realizes that he cannot truly understand it, that he cannot return home with an ultimate,
authentic truth. The picture that Nooteboom paints of the pilgrim at the end of his book, is a
peculiar picture indeed.
A real traveller finds sustenance in equivocation, he is torn between embracing and letting go, and
the wrench of disengagement is the essence of his existence, he belongs nowhere. The anywhere he
finds himself is always lacking in some particular, he is the eternal pilgrim of absence, of loss, and like
the real pilgrims in this city he is looking for something beyond the grave of an apostle or the coast of
Finisterre, something that beckons and remains invisible, the impossible. (337)
Indeed, Nooteboom resembles a pilgrim in the sense that he is looking for something invisible,
immeasurable. But the regular pilgrim is not looking for absence or loss; he stands to gain
something in the process of traveling, something he can return home with eventually, enlightened.
It is this concept of home that is rejected by the author. For home is always lacking something,
beckoning our writer to travel further. To defer Thanatos. In that sense, the metaphor of the pilgrim
may be incompetent.
CAPTAIN OF THE BUTTERFLIES
Before we go on, let us recall Bauman (1994), who emphasized that the notion of the pilgrim is one
that distinctly belongs to a pre-modern era. A time in which traveling meant carrying out rites de
passage, rituals that could elevate the traveler’s status once he reintegrated at home. Bauman
asserts that the short-term focus of modern society, with the short-term trips of tourists as a prime
example, is incompatible with the life-altering voyage of the pilgrim. Such a thing as a ‘modern day
60
pilgrimage’ seems an impossibility, in this sense. However, this would be too much of a generalized
conclusion. Of course, there is a difference between the easy-going tourist on an all-inclusive and
well-arranged trip, and a more thorough cultural tourist who tries to learn something of another
culture and takes that knowledge and experiences back home. We might even call these
experiences current-day rites de passage: traveling does help improving one’s status, attested by the
fact that tourists need to take certain pictures of certain places that prove their journey and bear
witness of their experiences. The question, then, is if this is possible with Nooteboom. Does he
himself believe in the pilgrimage that he is attributed with on his book cover?
The possibility of a modern-day rite de passage requires a certain fixed identity at home. We can
only really become something else in a journey when we are something delimited before we
embark. To conclude if Nooteboom is a pilgrim after all, we need to consider his thoughts on this
issue of identity. Remarkably, while the writer frequently makes use of his telescopic eyes to gaze at
times in which he did not live, he does not remember much of his own personal history. “Others can
recall their entire youth, complete with data, schools and events, as if they were their own
computers, but I cannot. Sometimes I wonder if I ever existed back then” (Cartens & Dijkgraaf,
2010). Here, the writer helps us understand what the role of memory means to him. He seems wary
of his own memory. This also becomes evident from the manner in which Nooteboom writes his
stories: while Alice and Xavier write down their stories the day they live them, the author prefers to
writes his stories long after they are at end – sometimes even years after. Many digital travel
writers operate rather differently: they write during their trip, while the experiences are still fresh,
not yet distorted by time. Why would our writer prefer to let his stories ‘tan’ before publishing
them?
An answer: because reality is not sufficient. Here, the role of memory becomes clear. On the one
hand, memories are our only way of capturing the experience of the past. But on the other hand,
they reshape, distort, erase parts of what we have been through – and Nooteboom often writes
about this aspect of memory. The fact that he is a traveler neatly ties in with that. As Rojek & Urry
put it, a thorough understanding of other cultures also requires a significant amount of work, “of
memory, interpretation and reconstruction.” The author explicitly seeks for the ways in which his
memory works. Either through his novels, in which his characters are searching for answers, or
through a more philosophical disposition: his poetry.
Despite the many poetical works Nooteboom released in his native tongue, Dutch, only some of
them found their way to an English audience. For this reading, the anthology of sorts called The
Captain of the Butterflies (1997b) will be used – specifically one poem that both explicitly and
implicitly discusses the tourist. The first division of the compilation is called Self and Others. Which
Others? Is it the people encountered on a journey, the Others as Said pointed them out? The
following poem (Nooteboom, 1997b, p. 20) might better explain who they are.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
Snow (23)
As if it doesn’t snow in your head!
As if for you too memory
is not like snow, snowing,
sifting down on all,
and all reshaped.
One thought of us
settles over the once so-unlit view.
That doubling soft-sloped hill, out there,
in the curve, by the palm trees,
those two are us.
They lie happy on the beach.
Books of ice, snowy cigarettes,
two remaindered tourists
in the lure of Iceland,
burnt in a crystal light.
So we forget ourselves,
tumble, white and silent,
over all past times,
we spin, floating, dancing,
over the white
of what is
not.
This poem starts off with the rebuttal of an opinion that is given before the text has even started.
One can only guess as to what that opinion could be – it seems an argument put forward by those
who write down their experiences in the heat of the moment. It is the voice of the contemporary
tourist, who has no time to let his experiences be tainted by fiction or fantasy, and who therefore
wants to portray reality as quickly as possible. These tourists are the ones that Nooteboom has
been considering with suspicion in the last few novels we have discussed. Why? Because for on the
one hand he is one of them, but on the other he feels different from them. These are perhaps the
Others that the writer offsets himself against. In any case they are people who the writer
approaches with the same “immersion and distance, trust and hostility” that Lury (1997) refers to
when she discusses the relationship between the tourist and the (Saidian) Other. What the writer
tells us is that there are Others in our midst as well. These other tourists, focused on the short term,
already stated their opinion before Nooteboom could answer it: why do you fictionalize what you
see? Why add fantasy to a world that is inexplicably strange, beautiful or ugly in itself? The author’s
counterargument is simple: because we all do so, no matter what. The remembrance of times past
turns everything into something different. And perhaps even a more poignant argument: because
we spin, float and dance while doing so – which does not seem to be a particularly unpleasant
activity. We can make up a past that is infinitely happier than the one actually experienced.
One thought can bring back a whole story. Things that we forgot can be triggered by memory, the
writer notes, like Proust’s youthful memories that were triggered by eating a Madeleine. Still, the
62
memory Nooteboom describes explains how drastic a happening may change in our minds. Palm
trees on Iceland are perfectly possible in our memory. And the same counts for him and his fellow
tourist: were they really there? Were they really them? They are the ‘remaindered tourists’ indeed:
what is left by memory of them is a remainder, incomplete and uncertain. And in the final,
narrowing stanza, he deals the final blow at how certain we can be of our memory, exactly. If
remembrance is dancing over ‘the white of what is not’, then it is solely a negation, it only grants us
access to what reality cannot be. If memory does indeed not grant us any possibility of knowing
reality, then how can one attach himself to a concept such as ‘home’, that is solely constituted by
memories? “We are what we are largely because of where we are from”, Suvantola (2002) noted
earlier, but to our travel writer this seems not so evident. Tourist sites may be comprised of myths
and stories, but what we call our home is just as tainted by fantasy and fiction. That is why
Nooteboom is not so much interested in reality when traveling, but allows his memory to do its job
of contaminating it. Writings one’s travels means that “you stage your life to a certain extent”, as the
writer explained in an interview with Van Dijl (1984). But it is not only the traveler who is staging
his own life. To Nooteboom, the stage is filled with memories.
Why then does the writer explicitly connect this stage to traveling? Perhaps because these
memories are of greater significance than the ones at home. The tourist, as Urry put it, seeks an
experience that is extraordinary (Urry, 1990) – and surely, the remembrance of travel experiences
are all the more precious because of that. Most of us will likely not find it hard to recall certain
impressive moments during our travels. The way in which Nooteboom deals with these memories,
however, radically differs from the way in which Alice and Xavier do so. Their story is one about
reality, about capturing the experience as it actually was – through photos of clear markers, such as
monuments or vistas, or diary-like stories of what happened each day. Their stories and photos
serve as some sort of rites de passage for when they return home, to show (off) their adventures to
others. The writer, however, has no need for immediate descriptions of places, because he cares
little for the ‘immediate’ perception. He seeks to mediate them, we might say, through time,
memory or fantasy. To an extent, this prevents the closure of the undertaken journey. Alice and
Xavier have a story and a digital box of pictures that prove their globetrotting. Nooteboom’s legacy
consists of half-fantasies and contaminated memories. Perhaps he cannot be considered a pilgrim at
all – after all, an essential characteristic of the pilgrim is his homecoming. But then what kind of
traveler is he?
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CHAPTER EIGHT
FIXING THE GAZE
In a bundle comprising interviews with the writer, Margot Dijkgraaf characterizes our writer in a
way worth contemplating:
His descriptions of color, sound, smell, the weather condition are encrusted with the explanation of
what the experience does to him: feelings of amazement, admiration, joy, melancholy. It is because of
this that the reader recognizes his own emotions and gets the feeling he reads something he already
saw before, but forgot. (Dijkgraaf, 2009, p. 34, trans. TvN)
According to Dijkgraaf, Nooteboom’s writing style is effective because it is recognizable, because
readers can incorporate his experiences into the ones of themselves. Even when these things were
not actually experienced by the reader, they seem real. The writer, as we saw in the last chapter,
turns his fiction into an experienced reality. And this entanglement has everything to do with his
senses – and by extent, with his way of gazing.
The way in which the author’s gaze operates ties in with the bigger question at hand: what kind of
traveler ís our writer, exactly? In the previous travel book, we saw that he cannot be fully compared
to the pilgrim. Perhaps to someone else? In another work, the writer uses a different figure,
someone even less grounded in the notion of home: the nomad.
NOMAD’S HOTEL
Two words make up the title of this collection of essays. The second one, the hotel, is a recurrent
image when sifting through Nooteboom’s works. In the introduction to another, older book, De
Wereld een Reiziger (‘The world a traveler’), the writer admits that he first wanted to call it
Nootebooms Hotel – but eventually decided against it. “As a title for the entire book, with all its
disparate stories, those two words sounded too possessive, uncomfortable” (Nooteboom, 1989a, p.
7), the writer argued. Thirteen years after De Wereld een Reiziger, the author seemed to have
changed his mind when releasing Nootebooms Hotel (2002b). It is a bundle of articles and essays.
The metaphor of the hotel might be a fitting title for such a collection of ‘disparate stories’ after all.
The hotel is a place of temporariness: one meets people, abides by the rules and arranges the room
to his taste – but only fleetingly. This place of passing features seems to be a perfect surrounding for
that other word in the book’s title, the nomad.
Some of the essays in Nootebooms Hotel were translated to English and finally bundled in
Nomad’s hotel (2006a). The English rendition also includes essays from De Wereld een Reiziger. The
translation from the writer’s surname in the Dutch version to the word nomad in the English book
is remarkable – but it is not elaborated upon in the book itself. Still, it does give one the impression
that there is some kind of relationship between Nooteboom and the nomad. This would seem to be
a transition from that other character he uses to describe himself, the pilgrim. While these figures
are both travelers, they certainly differ from one another. A nomad is an even more disparate figure
than a pilgrim. He is in constant state of movement, without the prospect of a home to return to.
Nooteboom explicates his choice for the pilgrim on the second page of the first essay, as he
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FIXING THE GAZE
elaborates on the question he left us with in Roads to Santiago: what anchor, what stable factor can
the present-day traveler still hold on to, if he is so radically disengaged from the places he visits?
Anyone who is constantly travelling is always somewhere else, and therefore always absent. This
holds good for oneself, and it holds good for others, the friends; for although it is true that you are
‘somewhere else’, and that, consequently, there is somewhere you are not, there is one place where
you are constantly, all the time, namely with ‘yourself’. And no matter how simple it sounds, it does
take a long time before you become fully aware of this. For there is always the incomprehension of
the ‘others’ to contend with. (Nooteboom, 2006a, p. 2)
While the pilgrim has his rites and the prospect of homecoming as a stronghold for his identity, the
only stable factor to the nomad is himself – both physically and mentally. The hotel is the ideal place
for him; a place that can be a home without the fixation that home brings. It seems paradoxical that
it is this loneliness that he is trying to convey to ‘others’. With the writer briefly mentioning these
others, we might wonder what they have to do with the Others that were theorized by Sartre and
Said, and how they are related to the nomad.
NOOTEBOOM AND THE OTHERS
“There is a lot to be said for a touch of ‘non-being’” (24), the writer argues as he travels across The
Gambia, without his friends or relations knowing he is there. We might say that to Nooteboom, the
existential pleasure of traveling, of being somewhere else, consists of its negation. “To bid the world
a temporary farewell” (21), as he puts it. It seems that, to the writer, the gaze as Sartre defined it is
not just directed at the people he encounters during his travels, but at the people who stay at home.
The people to whom one needs to explain it all when the journey is over, and when he is asked how
it was. The ‘incomprehension of others’ that Nooteboom mentions is only natural: sharing one’s
experience is always difficult, if not impossible – and the extraordinary nature of travel experiences
makes it all the more difficult. Still, for the pilgrim it might be easier than for the nomad. The
pilgrim might come home and describe his voyage to his acquaintances, in the same language,
through the same concepts. It would be a narrative of growth: performing rites, experiencing
liminality, and coming home. The nomad, however, would have a harder time expressing his
travels: he is always displaced, without a fixed starting point or narrative that he can use to offset
his experiences against. It is the pilgrim who says a ‘temporary farewell’ to the world, for in the end
he still has a home, a place he can return to eventually.
But let us not forget that these travelers are not just a nomad or pilgrim; they are describing their
journey to an audience. We might argue they are a much-needed foundation to the nomad. The
audience consists of Others, and these travel stories broaden their comprehension and horizon of
expectations. Moreover, it is the audience that somehow forms a home front for the nomad: unlike
the people encountered on his travel, the audience reads the story, takes it with them from that
moment on. Their incomprehension may always be part of the equation, but it is through reading
these stories that comprehension is sought. Their reasons for reading can be personal: the main
addressees for Alice and Xavier consist mostly of acquaintances. But in Nooteboom’s case this is
quite different: his readers want to read because they enjoy these stories, because it adds
something to their own experience. It enables understanding and comprehension. So these Others
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CHAPTER EIGHT
are something quite different than Sartre would make them out to be: instead of being the ones who
are objectified by our writer, they are constitutive for the subjectivity of the writer himself. Instead
of a real ‘temporary farewell’, of disappearing into nothingness, the writer always remains tied to
his audience – and thereby to the world.
The Others help keeping the writer in touch with the world; this is even more evident with the
Others of Alice and Xavier. On the Internet, the Others have a platform that allows them to converse
with the travelers who have said their ‘temporary farewells’. Websites like Waarbenjij.nu allow for
the posting of reactions below someone’s travel stories. These are called guestbooks for a good
reason: people visiting these websites are guests to the people traveling, the hosts. It is a typical
kind of relationship: the host entertains, provides his guests with stories and happenings; the guest
pays time and effort to enjoy these commodities, and acknowledges his visitation to the website in
the guestbook, where he also gets the opportunity to comment on the host. Of course, there is little
negative judgment to be found on most of these guestbooks, as the biggest part of the audience
consists of girlfriends, aunts, and colleagues. As a result, most of these comments are of the praising
kind, commending travelers for their courageous efforts, or stating things like ‘I wish I was there
myself’. The most important aspect of these guestbooks seems to let the host know that his stories
are being read.
It does not seem to be a farewell to the world at all when one is constantly being reminded of
how his travels resonate back home. We might ascribe it to a form of narcissism that these travelers
need to be reminded of their accomplishments. We are lead back to Lopate’s argument for releasing
oneself from narcissism by turning oneself into a fictional character. This lays bare a difference
between Nooteboom and Alice and Xavier: on the one hand, there are the tourists who write their
first-person stories and enjoy being glorified for them by their peers, and on the other hand, there is
the author who fictionalizes the things around him, as well as himself – becoming something of an
Other in the process. Since the writer gives an account of more than just his own experiences, we
might call his writings impersonal journey narratives, as opposed to the deeply personal writings on
travel websites. Earlier, we saw that Blanton associates this impersonal narrative with a flat, linear
structure – but such impersonality seems all the more complex.
This complexity becomes clearer in At the Edge of the Sahara, when Nooteboom describes a piece
of waste ground near his house in Rijswijk, which he called ‘The Land’. It was “a dangerous places
that I filled with my fears and fantasies” (93). Nowadays, the world has become ‘The Land’, the
writer goes on. And some places still fill him with the same overwhelming excitement, when they
are so different you cannot understand the signs, language and lives. He used to feel this with Spain
as well, but he has become somewhat of a Spaniard, knowing the language and history. This “state
of zero-gravity” (94) in the complete unknown is very pleasant. In this sense, the writer is not only
looking for a deeper understanding of another culture. He is once again looking to disband from the
person he is at home – another temporary farewell. In a completely foreign place like Morocco, the
writer feels he could “as easily be from Ohio” (Ibid.): his own personal traits have become a blur in
a culture that is so radically different from his own. Through becoming someone whose
characteristics become less definite, the writer pulls his gaze loose from himself, we might say:
where he himself comes from does not really matter anymore; the only important thing is that he is
now an Other.
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FIXING THE GAZE
This feeling of otherness, to the writer, coincides with a sense of fiction. Sometimes a faraway
place can be so strange that one has the feeling it cannot be real, Nooteboom argues when he is
sitting on a bench in a Gambian office.
I am not sitting here at all. It is a play by an African Pinter, for which I have been engaged at a huge
sum. Shortly, it will be time for the interval, then we will all rise, gauge the applause and go and have
a beer in the canteen. (29)
When his horizon of expectations is stretched wide enough, when the differentness of the tourist
site is big enough, the paradoxical feeling of staged authenticity comes into being. The writer is
taken by the feeling that the things he gazes at are, somehow, unable to be reality. This is the
radicalization of what Urry (1990) stated earlier: traveling is exceptional because it contrasts with
home. When it contrasts so sharply, one can only think of it in terms of home, in a play, after which
all the spectators can go to the canteen. This particular instance shows how Nooteboom’s gaze, too,
has to do with néantiser. Not only are the people in the office negated by the writer, he himself too
is ‘not really there’ anymore. However, instead negating these people in a Sartrian way, in which the
subject loses his subjectivity, they are fictionalized: suddenly they are actors in a play. It is his gaze
that triggers this fictionalization.
THE REFLECTED GAZE
Nooteboom is quite aware of the unequal power relationship of the gaze. When looking at the
homes of people in a foreign country, he realizes: “The only one to whom anything has happened is
me; seeing them has increased the distance, not lessened it. They cannot see my house, although I
can see theirs” (42). There is a difference between the seeing subject and the seen object, as Sartre
noted. But it does not end there. In many other instances, it is the writer who is the object of
someone’s gaze. When visiting Isfahan, a city that Nooteboom has never been to, the writer argues
that “you approach Persia with blind Western arrogance and find yourself confronted by thousands
of years of history without any point of reference” (130). The gaze hardly has a controlling power
here: when we get to places we know nothing of, one is more likely to be gazed at than to gaze at
others. Approaching the mosques in Isfahan, which are forbidden to strangers, results in “tension in
the air” (129) because of the many people that gaze at the tourist. In another passage, Nooteboom
finds out it is forbidden to take photographs in Mali without permission, as a result from the taboos
of the former regime (193). The gaze of the writer ricochets. He cannot gaze unlimitedly. But he
cannot refrain from looking either. At one instance, the writer is arrested for the crime of not
stepping off his bicycle as the president’s car passes by. He is brought to the police station, and his
statement is taken. “A certain redressing of the cosmic balance seems to have occurred: this time
not only have I written about them, but they have written about me too” (47), Nooteboom
recapitulates. It is all about the reciprocity of gazing here. We might connect it to Lacan (1988), who
reminded us that seeing implies being seen. To the author, this ‘redressing of the cosmic balance’ is
a recurring theme when discussing the gaze.
The writer does not just focus on the reciprocity, but also on the deficiencies of gazing. When
visiting a tribe in Mali, he wonders: “How long will our world permit the existence of theirs? The
only thing that detracts from the ‘wholeness’ of their society is that it can be seen by us, and it would
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CHAPTER EIGHT
not be the first time the rot has set in with our looking” (210). And when gazing at marvelous
artifacts in a museum, the writer feels like he is “constantly on the outside of all this splendor,
admiring it but unable to penetrate it” (132). Gazing seems like a hopeless undertaking to him. Still,
the writer does not give up doing so. Especially interesting to him are the countless ornaments,
shapes and signs in the mosques; the history imprinted on every stone. Nooteboom is
overwhelmed, for it is impossible to describe it all: “there is too much of it, too much” (137), he
stutters. And when the writer gazes at a stone figure, thousands of years old, he admits that “The
longer I gaze at him, the less I understand him” (145). He accentuates here that gazing is not a
singular event, but something progressive. According to Sartre, the gaze chiefly constitutes a binary
difference between the self and the Other. Said’s gaze distinguishes between Occident and Orient.
And Urry focuses on the difference between gazing at home and at a faraway place. Nooteboom, on
the other hand, argues that the more thoroughly we look, the less these differences are applicable.
It seems that the harder we try gazing, the more we change the fixed, Sartrian object of our gaze
into something of a subject. The object thus becomes subject, a meaningful Other, that somehow
gazes back and that, in its subjectivity, cannot fully be understood. Gazing means subjectifying. We
also see this when the writer finds a site that is closed for the public. He leaves such a site “as I
found it, undisturbed and itself” (42). Again, it is the gaze that turns the site into something else.
Understanding something is always a negotiated practice. The unexplored, unseen and unknown
site remains objective and ‘itself’.
To the writer, there is a certain disappointment in leaving such a site unseen. That is why
Nooteboom enjoys gazing solitarily – so he can choose to look at whatever he pleases. Traveling
alone is not always possible, however. When visiting museums, one has to clutter in groups; when
taking a tour, one has a guide telling him where to go. During his journey through the Gambia, the
writer rents a pick-up, and his local co-driver points him to the notable tourist sites along the way.
“He points where I should look, and I look” (41), the writer states in an almost admitting fashion.
The speed at which every village is passed by, as the guide is “steering me gently by my arm” (42),
is a concern to him. On several occasions, the writer explains his annoyance of tourist sites that are
staged for a mass public. “Amid the inconceivable otherness and authenticity, there now lurks the
all too conceivable artificial and fake, American whinging and the hawking of pathetic artifacts”
(96). Not often is the writer so clearly outspoken against tourism’s commodification. And,
remarkably, this aversion seems to have to do with the gaze as well. “Nowadays different sorts of
armies pass by, those of the tourists who no longer understand their visual language, no longer
what they signify or used to signify; only their beauty has remained” (13). The writer directs us
back toward Baudrillard and his endless deferral of signifiers. And while he may be annoyed by
these tourists because of their lack of understanding, the same thing happens to him. The most
important difference, however, is that Nooteboom does not understand the things he sees because
he looks at them for too long, while the armies of tourists lack an understanding because they pass
them by too fast, taking a picture of some artifact without asking what it stands for.
A prominent reason for this lack of understanding comes from the sense of importance and
devotion that traveling so often is associated with. “Travelling has a zealousness about it which
turns the traveler into a complete blockhead. He is searching for the extraordinary within the
everyday environment of others” (152), Nooteboom argues. It is like a game, he reckons further on,
“The game is called continuity” (153). The traveler only looks for the things he knows already,
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FIXING THE GAZE
preventing cognitive dissonance by framing the unknown in terms he knows. When describing
Munich, the writer starts off with the ironic statement that it lives up to its responsibilities – that it
is what the traveler wants it to be. Just like some other cities that “supply the traveller with the
image he has of them, even if it is a false one” (49). There are so many signs in this city that one
always is able to find an experience that lives up to the myth. “You will see what you want to see”
(50). If that is true, and we will see what we want to see, then the object of our gaze will always
remain just that: an object, fitting into the myth that we already know. One does not negotiate with
obviousness. The writer, however, never takes anything for granted, tries to negotiate with
everything he sees. But there is never enough time for him to bargain with everything. To live only
once is “a cruel prison” (42), he summarizes.
TELESCOPIC GAZING
In his struggle with the boundaries of time, the writer does add an escape clause to our finite lives:
“only on the stage do people seem able to escape this incarceration” (Ibid.). We are again
confronted with the importance of fiction – and also with the importance of the telescopic eye in
Nooteboom’s work. Milosz’ concept is hidden in the subtitle of the book, Travels in Time and Space.
And the writer quite frequently uses another word that hints in this direction too: the anachronism.
According to the writer, such an anachronism can be found in certain places, forming the stage for
an “age-old conversation” (7) between every great writer, philosopher or artist that has been there.
We see the writer combining his experience with historic stories. He lets the past talk back, as it
were – and by doing so, he stays engaged in the negotiation, and recycles the past by revoicing it in
the present. By doing so, it is preserved. However, as we saw already in Roads to Santiago, there is a
problem in recalling all this past as a present-day conversation partner: there is such an
overwhelming amount of pasts that can talk, that one easily gets lost in translation. In the essay
Forever Venice, the writer takes his Baedecker touring guide from 1906 with him to Venice, so he
has the past to protect him (8). That is, until the past becomes so intense that it is too much to
handle. The guide shows him so many stories that the writer is “lost in the territory of the dream,
the fable, the fairy tale” (Ibid.). The telescopic eye invites fiction in, and this fiction, once again,
overtakes reality. And to the writer this is a chance, rather than as a threat. “If you are sensible you
will let yourself be lost” (10), he advises.
This getting lost happens again in The Stones of Aran, the writer recalls a trip to Ireland, a country
he knows only through the works of writers like Yeats, Sygne and Joyce. His telescopic eyes are his
only guide when first visiting the island. At one instance, the writer tries to dismiss them, since “all
these images and stories” have “precious little to do with a modern reality” (69). But when he hears
stories about a co-writer Tim Robinson, an Englishman who stayed in Ireland for twelve years and
wrote an extensive book about it, he changes his mind. By reading Robinson’s writings, “you get the
feeling that every stone has been upturned, every document read, every sound listened to, as
though the walls of time do not exist.”(77). It is an interesting choice of words: Nooteboom, who
usually fills in the gaps of history with his telescopic eye, finds this book the perfect itinerary, an allencompassing guide to the island. The writer usually rejects these kinds of itineraries, for they
leave little to the imagination. But even he finds himself attracted to the evocative power of such a
comprehensive guide.
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This utter completeness seems to have something do with the historical nature of what is told.
While traveling through Persepolis, the writer finds that “you encounter the rarefied clarity of the
period before history became condensed into that clotted mass of complications, which eventually
gets handed down to us as ‘present’ (142). Nooteboom is relieved to wander around in a place that
loosens him from his “thousand ties” (Ibid.) with the world as he knows it, as he has learned to see
it. This is interesting: on the one hand, we find that the past can be ‘timeless’ in its heaviness, in its
amount. This is perhaps what the writer means when he states that there is “too much of it, too
much” (137). On the other hand, there are places that are timeless because they pull the tourist
loose from the world as he knows it; because they are lighthearted. These are the kind of voyages
that we associated Alice and Xavier with earlier.
At home, the writer reasons, he would never seek for the same historical stories of princes and
heroes that he does when traveling. Nooteboom acknowledges Urry (1990) here, who stated earlier
that an important aspect of traveling is the difference with one’s home; looking for an experience
that is extraordinary. To the writer, this extraordinary experience amounts to envisioning history.
To see the past in the present is the only true portrayal of a city, he argues (152). These historical
myths are the only access point to authenticity, even if they are “both true and untrue”, and if the
writer is “assembling falsehoods to make a plausible past.” Yet, in order to assemble this plausible
past, the traveler has to take his time. In the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, Italy, our author attends a
conducted tour, in which “the guide’s tempo is inhuman” once again. And what is more, “the haste
increases the transcience” (159), the writer adds: the faster we travel, the more we are bound to be
wildly impressed by the things we see. It is no wonder that Alice and Xavier, traveling to a foreign
country, feel the need to write their experiences down immediately: they are all the more
impressed by everything they hastily gaze at. It is the flâneur Nooteboom who opts for the slow
route.
Perhaps this is why our writer is so strongly opposed to the commodification of tourism: it
results in the hastily gaze, which prevents an understanding of the Other. This lack of
understanding is even more evident when the thing being gazed at is aged. When Nooteboom visits
a First World War memorial in Canberra, he is taken by what we might call the expiration date of
gazing. On the one hand, he reckons, things irreversibly happened. On the other hand, “The longer
this place exists, the more abstract the wars it commemorates will become” (117), the writer
ponders. And when he sees an old airplane, he reckons that “It will become stranger and stranger,
until there is nobody left any more who believes it ever flew” (119). It is a fitting metaphor: the
further these facts lie in the past, the more they become a myth, a range of stories that may or may
not be believed. The gaze as conversation turns into the gaze as short-term amazement. And the
longer these myths exist, the less likely it is that the tourist understands them. “In spoiled isolation,
having become asocial through self-indulgence, the white man travels through Africa and sees zilch.
And the tourists, who trail in ever-increasing numbers past the odd wild animal and dancing masks
for hire, do not see anything either” (215-6).
So then, which people are able to see? Nooteboom, lover of knowledge of the past, cites LeviStrauss, who talks about ethnologists. They “invite us to temper our smugness a little, to respect
different patterns of life.” (216) – and in this plea for respecting the complexity of differentness, we
hear the voice of many others, like Rorty or Nussbaum. The irony of this is that on the next page, the
writer almost gets sucked up in romanticizing the past, simplifying it to a time in which all the
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current myths were still uncharted. The writer tells about the first explorers of the New World, who
penned down their itineraries for the ones to come after them, and who returned home “with new
maps of words, written up in the books of their memory . . . The world had yet to be imprisoned in
that spider’s web of longitude and latitude” (217-8). For a moment, Nooteboom wallows in the
same nostalgia as De Botton when he describes Alexander from Humboldt. His telescopic eye is
romantically gazing; a tribute to solitariness, to the simplistic travel narrative that Blanton depicts
as the sequence of leaving one’s home, an adventure, and – hopefully – a safe homecoming. Further
on, the writer takes a look at the first world maps, on which entire continents were still lacking, the
different parts were completely out of proportion, and pictures of mythical beasts, follies and sea
monsters added to the tourist myth. In reality, the world proved to be different. The mythical beasts
proved not to exist, and in the current mapmaking, nothing is left to “chance or fantasy” (221). But
the romanticism of being able to chart new territories is undeniable. And the feeling that we
somehow want to do the same seems very true for current-day tourists as well. The author’s
romanticizing gaze stems from the same ideal; to truly explore, to go to places ‘where no man has
gone before’, seems the bare essence of traveling.
On the final pages of this essay, the author expresses the thought that it may be unfair to classify
himself as a pilgrim or a nomad. After all, he does not know the perils, the suffering and the
hardships of those journeys. Still, both Roads to Santiago and Nomad’s Hotel used both of these
figures as a metaphor. The pilgrim and nomad may not completely be out of place when depicting
the writer. Nooteboom realizes this as well, as he ends this last essay with contemplating on the
things that pilgrims and nomads have in common. It “has to do with distance” (Ibid.), he argues.
This is not just geographical distance, but also the sort that “has to do with remoteness and parting,
detachment and estrangement” (Ibid.). These qualifications do apply to our writer as well, who is
constantly focusing on the difficulties of gazing, and the impossibility of truly knowing the places
we visit. But at the same time, the writer is deeply absorbed by and involved with the places he sees.
He is not merely standing on the sideline, but trying to capture the workings of a place – often by
invoking its history, and gazing telescopically.
Of course, these things are not reserved to the writer. The friction between detachment and
involvement seems to be an important aspect of the tourist that on the one hand strives for an
authentic experience, and on the other hand can be characterized with the figure of the lighthearted
post-tourist who seems detached from everything he sees. Of course, both of these notions are
extremes – most tourists will move somewhere in between these notions. While doing so, their gaze
seems to be both identifying with the Other, and regarding this Other in his differentness.
Nooteboom, too, often showed this friction in this book. The detachment that belongs with this
gazing, however, is difficult to associate the writer with.
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While Nooteboom prefers traveling by himself, he often takes a photographer along with him,
whose photos regularly find their way into his writings. With good reason, it seems: the jury of the
Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren 2009 praised the author for the quality of pictures in his books,
stating that “Only photographs appear to be able of temporally capturing the essence of things”
(Musschoot et al., 2009). Perhaps this is why the writer often incorporates these photos in his texts
– and why virtually every digital travel writer does so, as well.
Still, it also seems evident that the use of photos differs per writer. While most travelers on
waarbenjij.nu post their pictures without an elaborate explanation (after all, the only option they
have is adding a short subscript), Nooteboom hardly ever lets the pictures speak for itself. They are
a part of his story – which in turn becomes a form of ekphrasis. This ekphrasis is of the reworking
kind: both the protagonists in his novels as he himself in his travel stories is deliberating on the
sights that are captured. Some of these already have an established myth surrounding them, some
do not – but in both cases, the writer is mostly concerned for his own experience. As we saw earlier,
Dijkgraaf mentions that “Nooteboom’s gaze does not adhere to guidelines or art history; it roams,
produces its own associations, and accentuates without relying on the opinion of others” (Dijkgraaf,
2009, p. 33, trans. TvN).
Our author might not rely on the tourists who make up myths about these art forms – but he
does rely on something else. We already saw that he is always interested in cultural history. Adding
to this, Rudi Fuchs, a friend of the writer, says about him: “Cees tries to place those paintings,
images or sculptures in their cultural historic circumstance. He travels there . . . In fact, those essays
on art are travel stories as well.” (p. 34-5, trans. TvN). We also learned that our writer takes the
time to do so. “While the job of the photographer ends when he delivers his photos after his
homecoming, the writer begins when he returns to the stillness of his working room” (p. 25, trans.
TvN). It seems to indicate, once again, what we already established: to Nooteboom, the telescopic
gaze only works if one takes the time. “Whether in his considerations on art or in his poetry, he has
an eye that, by nature, roams. Not restless, it roams” (p. 35, trans. TvN). Now, let us see how all
these aspects of our writer’s use of pictures come into play.
ALL SOULS’ DAY
Arthur Daane is the protagonist of the novel All Souls’ Day (Nooteboom, 2002a). In this fictional
book, we are confronted with similar deliberations as the ones we encountered in Roads to Santiago
and Nomad’s Hotel. This, too, is mostly a book of musings. The characters in it discuss philosophy,
art, friendship and history – for the biggest part on the backdrop of a late nineties Berlin. But there
are differences as well. For one, Daane has a different profession than Nooteboom: he is a producer
and cameraman of documentaries. Someone quite familiar with capturing his gaze, we might say.
He has lost his wife and child some years ago in a plane accident, and since then is trotting the globe
without a sense of home. He is a “traveler without a suitcase” (2-3), haunted by his own history – a
feature that we will discuss further on. His past has made Daane rather grim, a feature that is
accentuated by his visit to Berlin in wintertime.
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Daane has some friends in this city, with whom he regularly meets, but his other reason for being
there is a collection of bits and pieces of film that he is recording. While patiently strolling through
the city, he shoots “Random images that seemed to lack all rhyme or reason, but were connected
somehow. A world turned to pieces, filmed from the sidelines” (64). These unstructured images do
not involve any conversations or explanations: Daane wants to portray an anonymous world, made
out of walking feet, a pond by the moonlight, a chestnut tree during the four seasons – images that
occur to him, instead of looking for them. He is unsure how to fit these pieces in the puzzle: he
wants to make a film out of them, but does not know how. The filmmaker seems constantly
burdened by this sense of bewilderment: he works only to make money, and at the end of each
project “he would take time off and loaf around for a while” (2). Tourism, to the Daane, is equivalent
to being lazy – the opposite of regular and organized work, as Urry put it. And yet, as somewhat of a
travel writer, our protagonist is forced to ‘work’ by filming different parts of the city. He is never
quite free.
This might have to do with the différance of this book. Both Daane’s musings and his film are
stutteringly moving forward, without any obvious guideline or end in sight. All Souls’ Day, like so
many of Nooteboom’s works, is hesitant to jump to conclusions: plot-changing events are rare, and
the cities we read about are only described to serve as a cause for all the deliberations the cineaste
and his friends are engaging in. The book operates in the same way as Daane, who is described by
the narrator as someone who “always worked with whatever material came his way, with whatever
images he happened to run across.” (97). The Gelassen filmmaker has no idea what he will do with
all his material after he shot it. Daane himself argues that there has to be “a certain amount of order
in every life, including his” (103), but it seems that regularity and structure do not play such a big
part in his visual practices at all. The memory of the cineaste works in a similar unstructured
manner:
Suddenly, out of nowhere, an image – a church, a country lane, a handful of houses along a deserted
coastline – would pop absurdly into his head. The scene would be familiar, something he’d seen
before but couldn’t quite place, as if he carried a nameless but unforgotten globe around in his head.
(24)
A nameless but unforgotten globe – it is a fitting summarization of why the visual plays such a big
role with Daane – and with Nooteboom as well. It is reminiscent of Blanton, who said that our travel
experiences might prove to be untellable. The nature of images is one outside language; they can
tell us certain things about the world precisely because they do not need to speak about them. They
do not say more than a thousand words; they say something completely different. Their longevity
and generality might be one of the reasons why tourists take so many pictures as well: the image
remains, even when the narrative or meaning behind it is forgotten. And perhaps it is part of the
reason why Daane’s own movie is without words, as well. It is not about a contingent narrative
framing the picture, not about structure; chance and happenstance are the only guidelines here. It
seems that both the things the filmmaker sees in his mind, and the things he captures, are defined
by their random nature.
We can use a touristic figure to frame this use of randomness. Daane, after all, might be
considered a tourist in Berlin, gazing at the extraordinary things he encounters. His walks across
the city resemble those of the flâneur: idly strolling through his environment, the director sees
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things that others do not. Passing through the crowds, he captures moments that randomly appear.
His trip is less lightheartedness than the one of Baudelaire’s stroller, but they have in common that
through their Gelassenheit, they both see things that escape the crowd. To the filmmaker, these
sights contain some form of ideal arrangement. Just like the pictures of other tourists, Daane
captures images to show him a world in which the truth is embellished, as Bauman would have it.
But what the cineaste wants to preserve is no clearly outlined story, narrative or idea. His film
contains no narration, no interpretation. It seems that it is all about the voiceless visual: a set of
images that can be seen long after the maker is gone, and that just might spark someone’s
imagination in the future. The truth is embellished in these pictures because it is hidden, because it
presents itself not as a story, but as purely something visual.
TELESCOPIC PRESERVATION
With its clear focus on capturing lost time, it comes as no surprise that All Souls’ Day is also a novel
about historians. Elik Oranje, the woman with whom Daane falls in love during the course of the
novel, is focusing her Ph.D. research on an obscure queen of the Middle Ages, Urraca. A subject that
hardly anyone is interested in, as Daane remarks at some point – but to Elik, her discoveries of what
happened are “an act of love. She will rescue the woman from her suffocating obscurity, extricate
her from her grave of documents and depositions” (316).
Once again, the value of knowledge of the past is sought. But, like Nooteboom in Nomad’s Hotel,
Oranje stumbles across the problem of knowledge: every newfound fact raises new questions, and
it would always remain impossible to know what her queen had thought, or felt. “It was
unforgivable” (220). The quote from Callaso’s The Ruin of Kasch, at the final page of the novel,
rephrases this more accurately:
The greater the accumulation of raw data, the more it became clear that every historical trail was a
mute puzzle. Behind those names, those notarial acts, those judicial files, stretched the immense
aphasia of life, closed in upon itself, lacking all contact with a before and an after. (336)
In short: the raw, empirical data of the ethnologist are insufficient if we want to retrieve lost time,
since they do not include the experienced past. And this ‘mute puzzle’ is exactly what Daane is
interested in: the film he is making is a silent, semi-random collection of the experienced past that
has not been recorded otherwise. Why is this ‘aphasia of life’ so important to the filmmaker? A
supporting character in the novel asks the same question.
“Is it because you want to go on living after you’re dead?” No. It seemed logical, but that wasn’t it . . .
but you could hardly say you wanted to disappear along with the rest when you were putting
together a collection to save them all, could you?” (65)
Daane’s filmmaking hardly seems an egotistic act of immortalization. The director appears to have a
less self-aggrandizing goal in mind: saving the things around him from being forgotten – and by
extent, saving himself as well. “It had something to do with recording that moment, saving it before
it had disappeared” (57), the cineaste explains. Once again, the role of time and memory is crucial
here. More specifically, memories are conserved to withstand the tides of time. This is a clear goal
to the filmmaker: his entire trip to Berlin is based on it. So his wanderings through the city are
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perhaps not so much like the lighthearted practice of the flâneur as we might have guessed. The
nature of the strolls of the flâneur is one of leisure; but the cryptic film Daane is making is not just
that: it is a visual form of life writing, with which the cineaste struggles to find meaning in wordless
imagery. We might elucidate this focus on the visual by considering once more the concept of the
telescopic eye. At one point, Daane remembers being in Greece with his wife, who was reading him
parts of Homer’s Odysseus. While she does so, the protagonist envisions himself as a part of the
story:
While he roamed the hills among the holly oaks and olive trees, he had pretended that nothing had
changed since the time of Homer, that Odysseus had walked here and seen the same things that he,
Arthur Daane, was now seeing. Of course the sea was wine-dark, of course the ship on the horizon
was that of Odysseus, of course the ramshackle hut before them belonged to the swineherd Eumaeus.
(26)
History and present, fiction and reality are woven into each other through imagery and the
telescopic eye. The filmmaker experiences both his past and the myth of Odysseus as current
reality. We might say the historical tale of Homer’s hero and Daane’s own memories are being
layered on top of each other, becoming the same story. The focus on seeing in this fragment is
indicative for the role that the visual plays here. To the filmmaker, the moment in Greece feels like
“the two of them on that hillside had been woven into the story, that the poet had included them in
his epic . . . It is such moments that make “now” eternal” (27-8). The transformation from an actual
experience to a fictional story was discussed before, and in this book, again, Nooteboom
investigates this process. This becomes even clearer if we compare the hillside the cineaste
describes here with the one that Nooteboom describes in his earlier discussed poem Snow. The
notion discussed in that poem was about memories reshaping the past. Through Daane’s fragment,
we now see that it is precisely this fictionalizing of memory that can supply the experience with the
notion of eternity. Arthur and his wife become a part of Homer’s story by gazing at the coast. They
are incorporated into an ageless tale – which is exactly what the telescopic eye is about.
So why is the visual so appropriate for this immortalization? Perhaps because it can operate
outside the context of language, it can fit into multiple stories. The film Daane is making is
interesting in this context: the images he shows remain unexplained and voiceless as well, so they
can fit into different stories. The cineaste does not just want to portray a historically dependent way
of seeing: he wants to create images that are anachronistic, open to interpretation for anyone.
Instead of trying to describe reality in Berlin, the filmmaker wants to tell something about the
world by adopting the strategy of ‘show, don’t tell’: the images by themselves can tell a story.
Which kind of story this is, our protagonist does not know, but it is clear that the lack of context is
important to him.
There is an interesting contrast to be found between Daane’s strategy and the way in which the
tourist takes pictures, especially if we consider the self-portraits tourists shoot at historical or
fantastical places. We could argue that these pictures not only serve as proof, but also as discursive
artifacts that tie them to a certain type of story: the conqueror at the top of a mountain; the explorer
seeking out the pyramids; the pilgrim on his way to Spain. While the tourist actively photographs
himself into a certain type of story, the filmmaker’s postmodernistic approach has more to do with
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plurality. The film he makes can mean many things. What this shows most of all is that fiction and
reality are always at play when photos are involved.
GAZING AT REALITY
While pictures transform reality into a kind of fiction, using them to depict reality is a different
thing. Daane recurrently experiences how difficult it is to transform images into words when one
tries to describe reality through pictures. As he tries to envision Berlin before the wall was leveled,
he ponders: “No one who had seen this city when it was divided could ever forget what it had been
like. Not forget, not be able to describe it, not be able to tell the real story” (53). Again, he uses
terms of imagery; only this time, the bridge between the visual and the story is impossible to cross.
While Sontag stressed the capacity of pictures to actively structure reality, the cineaste argues that
some experiences cannot be represented at all. They are bound to a certain time, and restricted to
the people who were there at that certain moment.
Indeed, reality does not seem a good friend of our protagonist, whose job it is to transform it into
fiction. On the contrary: its role is the one of the main antagonist. During the course of All Souls’ Day,
it becomes clear that reality is no passive entity that can simply be described or depicted. Not only
does it gaze back, it acts. During the course of the book, our filmmaker finds out that the quest for
capturing time is not without hazards. At one point, our protagonist enters a construction field to
film it. He is stopped by a cop car, and told to leave the area as trespassing is forbidden. But as the
car speeds off again, it loses grip on the snowy road and hits a bulldozer. Daane – now suddenly a
disaster tourist - keeps on filming. Here, he does not let his film prevent him from dealing with the
facts: he speeds toward the car, and asks if he can help. But the cop replies. “No, you can go. And put
that camera away!” (56). The cop, being appropriated by Daane’s camera, feels threatened by it.
Sartre is not far away here. What is even more interesting is that the cineaste’s recordings start to
change reality itself. There is no such thing as an innocent gaze; it affects the thing being gazed at. It
is quite an ironic notion, since the gaze itself is not intent on intervention, as Foucault has it. Daane
only wants to capture certain parts of the city as they are an sich – a silent and gestureless gaze –
but by doing so he affects everything that happens around him. This creates a loop: the cineaste
films the situation that unravels before his eyes because he is filming it. It shows the paradoxical
nature of the photographer, who on the one hand wants to capture events that would also happen if
he were not there, but whose presence alone triggers certain events. We can supply Sontag here
with another structuring force of photographs: not only do they structure because they always
show something and leave something else out of sight, they also cause different forms of behavior.
Most of us will be familiar with the self-awareness and different behavior a nearby camera can
cause. Moreover, this has consequences for the alleged authenticity of travel pictures, that are taken
home as the kind of traveler-objects that Lury spoke of: objects with an integrity that is linked to
their original place and culture. Tourists strive for authentic pictures, if you will. However, this
authenticity is staged precisely because of the presence of their cameras.
The dangers of capturing time are explored to a further extent when we learn that Daane lost his
wife and child to a plane accident.
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All he had left now were photographs whose images seemed more remote every time he looked at
them . . . One morning they simply took off for Málaga and never came back. A scene he had filmed,
but never seen. (2)
The camera here becomes a tragic wall between experience and picture. The last photo of his wife
and child provides little comfort – it is a radical example of the inflation of pictures, taking over but
unable to replace the experience.
For the remainder of the book, the filmmaker keeps struggling with the conflict between his
profession and the need of experiencing reality. On the one hand he desires to be the photographer
on the sideline; on the other hand he cannot do without the actual experience. When strolling
through the park, the filmmaker is hailed by a woman from the Salvation army who is tending to a
badly hurt man. We see again that his gaze prefers not to intervene – it regards the action as if it
were fictional. “The first thing the movie director in him noticed was the scene, the absurdity of it”
(34). But Daane’s gaze is soon replaced by action: he is told to stay with the man while the nurse
goes to find help. Reality infringes itself upon the fictional story in Daane’s head; while the movie
director would prefer the world to be a stage, it clearly is not. His hesitative acting has to do with
the friction between detachment and agency. While the cineaste is, at times, forced to play an active
part in this story, he would mostly prefer to analyze the world from the sideline.
There are other characters in All Souls’ Day that refrain even more from acting. They have their
say in several short chapters that temporarily bring the story to a halt with their deliberations. We
might consider them to be angels, even though they are never explicitly named as such. However it
may be, these figures are no guardian angels; they are not intent on interfering, on changing history.
According to themselves, the reader must think of them “as the chorus, as observers who can see
further than you but who are powerless to intervene, though perhaps the people and events we’re
following exist only because we’re watching” (45). These angels seem to resemble the writer. By
virtue of their gaze, the characters in the book exist. It might be considered a reversed form of
néantiser: the creation of a story through the act of regarding it. This confirms the engagement that
the gaze is capable of in Nooteboom’s writings. It is able to add to reality just as much as it can
degrade it.
The ending of the novel underscores this point once more. Daane, a modern-day Plato, does not
think much of the physical world. It serves mostly as a burden to him, a triviality caught in a historic
coincidence. The philosophical musings of our protagonist are focused on the anachronism, the
telescopic eye: freeing the physical from its contingent historicity. Ironically, though, Daane’s is job
is to capture reality; as such he is very much engaged with it. It is what keeps him going. “A picture
a day keeps the doctor away” (103), he murmurs to himself – but ironically, his curiosity for the
visual does not keep the doctor away at all. Daane travels to Madrid to see Elik again, but his search
for her love proves to be fruitless. In a state of intoxication he wanders through the streets and,
fascinated by his environment, he starts filming a statue. The cineaste does not notice a group of
skinheads closing in on him, who end up assaulting the cineaste. Daane is almost killed by his own
gaze. And, what is more, the two weeks he spends in coma are the weeks that he was contemplating
on during the entire book: the protest marches against ETA’s assassination on local politician
Miguel Angel Blanco. Daane, recovering in his hospital bed, has no option of filming this event that
is now happening so close by. Only at the end of the novel, he gets to be the truly passive spectator
of reality. His gaze is rendered harmless, unable to infringe upon the things around him. His eyes
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are not even his primary sense anymore. The only thing the world communicates to the bed
stricken Daane is “the traffic on Plaza Manuel Becerra, the sounds of a city, horns, a siren, a
loudspeaker extolling the virtues of something", though he would never find out what.” (335)
THE ROMANTIC GAZER
So as we have seen, the telescopic gaze is quite important to Daane – and to Nooteboom as well.
Gazing, to them, seems to be mostly about adding fiction to reality. This explains why both the
writer and his lead character have it in for the travelers who all gaze at the same thing or act in the
same way. The protagonist elaborates on the matter when he describes a café in Berlin:
In café Einstein the Germans had been transformed into Europeans. You could swap this place for a
café on Place St. Michel in Paris or the Luxembourg in Amsterdam. The customers looked like ads,
just as he did. (47)
The collective behavior of these generalized tourists even has an impact on the filmmaker himself.
They become advertisements, representing a certain type of European behavior. Again, we see how
Daane turns the things (or people) he sees into fictional characters. It also shows the feeling of
contingency the cineaste has when he takes a look at the touristic masses. Why is that so? The
filmmaker gives us a clue when he picks up a Spanish newspaper, and reckons that
once you knew the rules, you could play from the sidelines . . . You’d obviously grasped the essentials
if you could understand the references in the newspaper, could follow the nuances of the latest
corruption scandal” (48)
This playing ‘from the sidelines’, that Daane mentioned earlier when he spoke about his own film, is
interesting. It shows that the impatience syndrome of the tourist is problematic to him, because it
involves some kind of passivity. While earlier on we saw that Daane was trying to remain an
observer from the sideline, he does want an active role in the play, insofar that he wants to
understand the things he sees. Perhaps that is why the director is interested in the knowledge of
history: it enables him to become an agent in the foreign city. This might also be the reason why he
is fascinated by museums and old, weathered places – not unlike Nooteboom himself. “All that
travel had given him a taste of what really interested him – cities that had managed to preserve
their proud heritage while the rest of the country sold itself to the highest bidder.”
To Daane, the riches of the past – that can be explored with the telescopic eye – are distinctively
romantic. They do not sell themselves to the highest bidder; they are deserted, devoid of touristic
commodity. We might say the cineaste’s telescopic eye is romantically gazing. This need for solitary
travel, unbound by regulations or fashion, is accentuated when the filmmaker is asked for
directions by two backpackers. “They had one of those wretched foldout maps that made the world
look as if it had been torn apart before you’d had a chance to find your way” (121), he complains.
While these tourists do not so much seem to be the problem to the writer, the structure of the map
they use is a bigger problem to the cineaste. This structuring forcer when traveling is precisely
what Daane lacks. He takes his time strolling idly across the city – resembling the flâneur but more
serious – and hence trying to capture things that others do not notice. The cineaste has little respect
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for the gaze that is guided by the hype: “For one moment, a day, a week, they were front-page news,
for several seconds they flowed through cables in every part of the globe, and then it began, the
black, delete-button darkness of oblivion” (123). Not unlike Bauman, Daane pleads for longevity in
a world that rushes from hype to hype. The short-term gaze and the short-term picture stand in the
way of a longer lasting understanding. Daane hopes to achieve such an understanding with his own
film, but whether or not he succeeds in that remains unknown. All Souls’ Day does not tell us if the
cineaste ever published his film – and we are not told what these images can do. The pictures
remain silent and gestureless here. In other works, however, the writer does deliberate on them.
NOOTEBOOMS HOTEL
The Dutch collection of essays Nootebooms Hotel (2002b, trans. TvN) contains an entire division
named Woorden over Beelden (‘words about images’), in which Nooteboom reflects on photography.
The first essay in the division is called Eddy Posthuma de Boer; in it, the writer pays homage to both
his friend and the profession of photography in general. The writer starts off with an
acknowledgement of what we already knew: the visual means a great deal to him. “Some of these
pictures are engraved so deeply that I often have the feeling they are printed on me, instead of on
paper” (105). What fascinates him even more is that for every image that sticks with us, there are so
many that we forget.
I have often wondered where the images remain, the millions or billions of images that we see during
our lifetime. We transform them to the images of our dreams, we use them as a reference, as points of
reference, as compressed memories, as experience and warning, but simultaneously we let a
countless amount of images pass through us that we will never remember as a distinct image. (1056)
Of course, he adds, life would be impossible if we remembered everything. But still, there is
something tragic to the loss of everything we see. And photography is capable of capturing these
images. It is a different take on what Urry has taught us, that photography is a ‘democratic medium’
in which everything depicted by tourists is equally interesting or uninteresting. Nooteboom attests
that it is this democracy exactly that allows the photographer to capture the seemingly random
moments that would otherwise be lost – not just the artworks, statues and impressive landmarks. It
greatly resembles the film Arthur Daane is making.
Which moments, then, are most easily forgotten, and most important to capture? Daane chose to
stroll through Berlin in Gelassenheit until he ran into the image, but in this essay, Nooteboom hints
at something else. As Bauman pointed out, pictures are made to somehow capture something
authentic (or as Alberti called it, an ‘ideal arrangement’). This result in disappointment, for reality
hardly ever compares to such a framed sight. But to Nooteboom, it is not perfection that needs to be
photographed, but this disappointment. “The unpleasant has the tendency to slip away” (107), he
argues. After all, every traveler experiences moments of frustration or anxiousness. They always
have to take account for the fact that the world around them does not adhere to their expectations,
that things can be disappointing or frightening even. “Travelling remains a tug-of-war, a
consideration between the things that you can and cannot do” (106), the writer summarizes. This of
course has to do with the otherness of the places that are visited, and with the subsequent
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impossibility of the traveler to influence this otherness in which he has freely engaged in. When
traveling to a foreign place, one can often not understand the foreign language, the customs, the art,
the culture – so one is more often than not has to cope with what the place has in store for him. And
yet, paradoxically, it is these moments that so many travelers enjoy reminiscing about when they
are back home. Depicting these things is what makes photography so appealing. It grants us an
insight into those difficult moments in which the traveler learns that he cannot change the situation.
Then there is capturing the Other, which brings along issues that Sartre warned us of: the
annulation of gazing, something quite resembling what that Sontag referred to as the appropriation
of ‘taking’ a photo. This “makes it understandable that in some cultures there is such a big
resistance against photography because people think that they are robbed of their soul, that
cursory thing” (109). Benjamin’s aura, too, is part of that, the writer adds. But the writer drives at
the contrary of Benjamin’s viewpoint, and not only Benjamin’s, when he states that taking pictures
is recognising, so very fast, what somebody essentially is and how he or she on that moment,
standing there, near that or that object, or in that certain emptiness, expresses his being optimally
and simultaneously knows that the other has seen him or her as him- or herself, as the one who he or
she is for him- or herself. (110)
The captured gazing of a photograph does not annulate the aura, it does not rob the photographed
person into object instead of subject – if anything, it affirms his existence. Photography is, to speak
in Nooteboom terms, capable of turning people into an anachronism: people looking at the camera,
trespass the borders of time, and while “everything on this world has unambiguously changed”, one
thing has stayed the same, namely “the sight of someone who looks at someone else, a transaction
between people that crosses their anonymity and future absence” (109). Knowing that we are seen
does not denigrate us, the writer implies, it brings out our very essence.
DE WERELD EEN REIZIGER
In De wereld een reiziger (Nooteboom, 1989a, trans. TvN), another Dutch bundling of essays,
Nooteboom proceeds to investigate the way in which photos bring out a certain essence. An
interesting case is the essay De dame op de foto (‘The lady in the picture’). Here, the writer has
bought a photo album with pictures from 1870 until 1920, called ‘Unbekanntes Wien’ (Unknown
Vienna) on which he performs ekphrasis. Remarkably, there is no photo of the book to accompany
the story: we have to trust entirely in Nooteboom’s words, since we likely have not seen the book
ourselves. What is more: the book is such an unknown one, that we might no longer consider this
ekphrasis actual, but notional. Nooteboom’s words are likely all that we will ever have to access this
book. Moreover, since the author does not show any form of representational friction here, we do
not get to know what the book itself looks like.
The writer feels estranged by looking at all the pictures in the photo album since, he argues, he
already knows the Vienna from Freud, Mahler and Schönberg. Yet at the same time, these photos are
unmistakably unbekannt. Not because of the clothing of the people, the horse and carriage in the
back, or the absence of cars – but because of the photo itself, “that has saved nothing except its own
lack of possibilities.” (182). Nooteboom seems to hint at the ‘way of seeing’ that this photo implies:
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it cannot be seen outside its historical context. For everything these photos show, they shave off a
thousand others. Still, despite its contingency, Nooteboom remains assured of the capacity of
photo’s to tell a story. This is mostly because of the people depicted in a photo. These people, he
argues, only leave behind this one image of themselves, “they cannot escape” (183). He gazes for a
moment at a woman, whose gaze captivates him. “Everything could be found at a local antiquary,
even that room could still exist somewhere, except for her and her flowers.” (Ibid.). Because, the
writer argues, his telescopic eye still sees her when he walks around Vienna today. “Her essence of
Vienna Lady floats like invisible powder in the Vienna air, she could not be disposed that easily.”
(Ibid.).
But as soon as he leaves her gaze, and thinks about the city itself, the writer again realizes how
things have changed. Around 1900 Vienna was “a greenhouse of new ideas” (184) – of course, the
writer refers to all the great thinkers he referred to earlier. Here, we see clearly how his telescopic
eye collides with the collective gaze of the present-day tourist. Back when the photo was taken,
“beneath that solid image . . . a number of people from Vienna knew that the once so visible solid
world was splintering” (185). The difference that Nooteboom names, resembles the one of De
Botton remembering Humboldt: back then, the world was still in motion, was still changing so
rapidly – while today, everything has been seen and said. It seems that, to our author, the
photography of people keeps them alive, while pictures of places mostly attest historical changes
and differences. The lady in the picture remains timeless: “If I walk through Vienna I think of her, if I
walk through Vienna I walk through her legacy” (Ibid.), the writer concludes. The city around her,
however, is defined by its historicity – seeing a picture of a city in past times mostly shows how
vastly it has changed. It is the recording of the personal story, in which the visual is an ongoing
story, parole parlante as Merleau-Ponty put it. This woman is proof of the fact that the past can be
seen in the present, and yet still remains something different altogether.
We saw that one of the most important aspects of photography, to the writer, is saving lost time.
What is certain is that it does not come easy. This already became evident with Arthur Daane, but
according to the writer, too, the photographer’s gaze is much more intense and exhaustive than
regularly looking. “I am, in fact, constantly looking if there is something that I have to preserve”
(Dijkgraaf, 2003, p. 11), the writer admits. The fixation on fixation: the writer could not resemble
Arthur Daane more. The difference between poetry and proze, to Nooteboom, is that proze
describes the practice of looking, while poetry is a “meditation on what seeing is, what the eye
implicates, what the difference is between the seeing and the seen” (Cartens, 2006, p. 169). After
these excerpts, it seems quite clear that this cannot only be attributed to poetry. In each of his
stories the writer seems concerned with the things that might escape everyone else; things that
would be lost if nobody captured them. This is important because taking pictures is an important
strategy for saving lost time. To the writer, photographs do not have the subtractive character that
Sontag or Sartre refer to: instead of structuring reality and negating the Other’s subjectivity, they
add fiction to reality and reinforce personal identity.
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The last task that remains is to frame Nooteboom in the context of postmodernism. Nooteboom has
been associated with the literary genre mostly because of his more recent novels. They are often
short stories, in which irony plays an important role and in which the magical realism of the
writer’s early career has mostly disappeared (Dijkgraaf, 2009). In order to seek out this difference
in the light of tourism, one of his recent novels (Lost Paradise) is placed next to his oldest one
(Philip and the Others).
LOST PARADISE
Lost Paradise (Nooteboom, 2007) is a type of story we just described: short, complex, and full of
irony. The writer, committed to the doubts of his readers, explicitly warns us for the relationship
between fiction and reality in a disclaimer after the title page:
Every resemblance in this novel to living persons is pure chance, unless someone insists on
recognizing themselves or others, in which case they should be warned that fictional characters may
be subject to a loss of reality. (0)
The story commences in a plane. Someone, who we could assume to be our writer, is seated in front
of an attractive woman. He is secretly gazing at her and the book she is reading. The gaze turns into
the playful, postmodernistic trait we associated with the flâneur earlier: because he is seated
behind her, the writer can look at her without her noticing. “I am a voyeur. One of the great delights
of travel is looking at people who do not know you are looking at them” (3).
The woman is not the only one who is lightheartedly gazed at in this preface. While sitting there,
the writer opens up one of the travel brochures that can often be found in planes. He reads the
advertisements, looks at the picturesque beaches and cities, and even of “the ever so picturesque
shanty towns – the slums or favelas or whatever you call the things. Currugated-iron roofs,
ramshackle wooden constructions, people who look as if they like living there.” (2) This hardly
covert critique on the western gaze fits in perfectly with the one of Baudrillard: images are being
used without a clear understanding of what they are referring to. On the other hand, our
protagonist is doing the exact same thing by commenting on the deceptive nature of these pictures:
the difference is that he is presupposing that these people do not like living there. His statement
seems to be just as much a “breathtaking from of provincialism”, as Sontag put it, as the ones he
criticizes. But not much further into the book we will learn just how bitterly ironic this statement
on favelas is.
When the actual story begins, we are introduced to Alma, a young German woman living in
Brazil, who travels with her friend, Almut, to Australia. While Almut is presented as a typical posttourist – traveling lightheartedly, glancing over her environment, and taking most things with a
sense of irony – Alma travels, as she puts it herself, to “exorcise a demon” (13): when once driving
her car into the favela, she found herself "enveloped by a black cloud" (12). Her understated poetic
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falsification turns the critique in the preface to the book into something a lot less ironic: portraying
the favela as an aesthetically pleasant site becomes impossible after Alma’s story.
Because of her horrible experience, Alma decides to travel to Australia, the land that she and her
friend always fantasized about. Her journey to the country is predominantly a form of escapism to
the dreamlike world of the aborigines, and contrary to the post-tourist, Alma feels far from Gelassen
about her trip. She may be a seasoned traveler, but Australia – with its mythical narrative of the
Dreaming – is her dearest destination. Like many travelers, the girls start collecting stories and
photos of the continent. Alma also describes a map of the world in the room of her friend, which
wasn’t like most maps: Siberia and Alaska, looking strangely elongated, were not at the top of the
map, but on the left and right sides; Australia had been moved to the top, making it look even more
like an island . . . and we knew that we would go there one day, to that upside-down world where
everything was different . . . (24)
Much like in Nomad’s Hotel, Nooteboom shows us a map that is different from the one that currentday tourists usually see. Only this time, the map is not lacking any continents, nor is it filled with
mythical beasts. Yet it is estranging all the same. There is just as much mythical power in these
maps and stories as there are in the maps described in Nomad’s Hotel – the difference is that
travelers are not bothered by the fact that there surely will have been other people visiting the
place they are traveling to. The place becomes something extraordinary because of its (alleged)
differentness. This is supported by the passage in which Alma depicts her enthrallment for ancient
Aboriginal art. What fascinates her, she tells us, is that these art forms – and drawings, body
paintings – were never written down. They were not meant for anyone beside themselves, “art that
belonged to everyone, except to us, because we did not have the keys to their secrets. All we could
hope to do was scratch the surface.” (26).
Yet again we get to see the fascination of Alma’s author with the power of imagery. These art
forms are all the more intriguing because they are non-linguistic and contain a plurality of
meanings. Yet all Alma is trying to do in this book is to understand these myths, which are all the
more interesting because “there were no written records. All kinds of things were sacred, but
nothing had been preserved in a book” (Ibid.). Just taking a photo certainly will not suffice, since the
myth she is looking for has more to do with a mindset than a relic. However, once she starts trying
to read up on the matter, she stumbles across the endless deferral of words. “The more Almut and I
read, the less we understood. It was too much and too complex, and yet it was its visibility that
drew us back again and again and gradually gave us the feeling that we might be able to leave our
own world” (28). Quite explicitly we see here just how evocative a picture can be: despite the
enormous complexity of their context, these Aboriginal art forms remain enthralling because they
themselves do not offer any interpretation, and always remain open-ended. Just like Arthur Daane,
Almut and Alma are captivated by this ‘mute puzzle’.
As soon as the girls arrive in Australia, they find out that this mute puzzle is even harder to piece
together than they initially thought. As was the case in Roads to Santiago and Nomad’s Hotel, the
disappointment of traveling plays a role here. Because the girls had so many expectations and
preconceptions about Australia, disappointment sets in the moment they arrive. “My Australia was
a fiction, an escape, which I realized the moment the plane touched down” (40), Alma admits, likely
speaking for many a tourist who had envisioned the country he was going to visit differently than it
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turned out to be. Almut, on the contrary “did not seem to notice the smell that permeates most
airports” (40).
Alma’s disappointment, reminiscent of Urry (1990), continues when the girls visit an exhibition
of Aboriginal paintings in Adelaide. Performing ekphrasis over one of the exhibited paintings, Alma
argues:
His painting was black – a night sky studded with infinitesimally small white dots, though even the
word ‘dot’ makes them sound too big. Your first thought, of course, was that they were stars, but that
would have been too easy. At first you saw only a monochrome black canvas. Only later did you
notice the thousands of minuscule points that may or may not have been stars. Through the intricate
net of dots you could vaguely make out an even darker shape: the Dreaming of a totem animal, which
in turn represented the flow of a tiny stream – so abstract that eyes such as ours cannot even see it
(32)
Guiding her readers through the process of seeing the painting, Alma shows how her focus shifts
from the black canvas, to the stars, to the spiritualistic totem animal that is depicted. She finds it
difficult to describe the things she encounters in the work of art, and what they mean to her.
However, representational friction does not seem to be the issue. “The painting itself was not the
problem” (33), she adds. So what then is the problem? It has to do with the Otherness of the painter,
with whom Alma finds herself even more fascinated. “Somewhere inside him, in his genealogical
make-up, his inner being, there was an invisible lizard that was not in fact a lizard and that would
never be visible to me in his paintings” (33). Apart from the difficulties with language, the most
persistent issue is the different mindset that she cannot grasp, preventing her “to participate in
their spiritual kingdom” (34). As in his other novels, Nooteboom underlines the importance of the
visual when trying to appropriate the Other.
To Alma, this appropriation is not accomplished by merely taking a picture of the painting. She
does not just want to possess the Other, she wants to understand him. The impossibility of doing so
recurs when Alma decides to leave Almut and to travel a week with an Aboriginal, with one of “the
oldest people on earth” (14). We never get to witness Almut’s activities during these days, but once
Alma returns she indicates her days were spent as frivolously as we might have expected. Alma,
however, keeps trying to break through the myth of Australia. Yet, both while traveling and
sleeping with this man, she keeps experiencing inaccessibility.
Nothing makes a sound here. If only I myself could be more quiet, I am sure I would be able to hear
the shifting grains of sand, the slithering of the desert lizards and the wind in the spinifex and the
balgas – the grass trees. (35)
Alma is constantly reminded of the Otherness of her lover, who guides her through the Australian
outback, and the differentness of “the place where he belongs and I do not” (67). Sharing the bed
with the thing she does not understand: Alma might be engaging in the most intimate of physical
travel, in order to grasp its Otherness. But the closer she gets, the more estranged she feels. “I feel
humbled in the face of his immeasurable age” (14), she ponders. This is not just a spiritual feeling:
Alma admires her guide for knowing where to find food and water in the desert – the primordial,
basic things. And no matter what, she cannot get through to him. “His face might as well been made
of onyx – it reveals nothing” (38), she mutters, disappointed. “He doesn’t want to talk about any of
the concept that brought me here: the myths, the Dreamtime…” (39). And yet, despite this
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unbridgeable differentness and the unsolvable myths with which she came to Australia, there is
closure for Alma. It is through the realization that she can only be who she is that she experiences
an almost ecstatic moment of happiness while being there. Through sleeping with this man,
everything around her becomes so intense that it trespasses the boundaries of language: “I reach a
point where things can no longer be described in words” (36). Yet, once again, Alma is constantly
describing this wordlessness. “I am both dark and light” (Ibid.), she figures. Through this battle of
words, the limits of language are first established, and then sought to be crossed.
This battle, however, is never really won. When the two girls meet an old man while strolling
through one of Australia’s cities, he summarizes the insoluble problem of differentness. “You
foreigners always have big expectations. Half of what you read is false. Their world has ceased to
exist. The ones you see here have fallen between the cracks” (43). The staged authenticity of
Australia prevents these tourists from understanding Australia as it is. For this, “you don’t have a
solution, neither do I” (44), he finishes. Unremarkably, Almut’s response remains limited to “A
penny for your thoughts” (Ibid.). To her, there seems to be no resolution to the issue – while her
friend is actively seeking for one during the entire novel. A bit further on, another local Australian
further elaborates on the matter of authenticity. He argues that the Aboriginal world being ‘closed
off’ is exactly what attracts all these tourists. “I have watched you people come in search of answers.
It’s everything all rolled into one, poetry, a total way of life. For people coming from a place of chaos
and confusion, it’s quite tempting” (51), he suggests.
The argument presented here has to do with one of the central issues in this work. It can be
summarized with a dichotomy we have discussed earlier: glancing versus gazing. A tourist can
either prepare himself for her journey by reading up on all the myths and looking at all the images –
attempting to understand its differentness – but that implies an endless expedition of words that
never reaches the Thanatos that the traveler ultimately searches for. This is the way in which Alma
travels. Alternatively, she can become a post-tourist, and freely glance at objects in Gelassenheit,
which is what Almut does. And quite like the post-tourist, Almut also seems to settle for the staged
authenticity of the country. Alma, at one point, reckons she would also prefer this post-touristic
playfulness, wishing “that I could simply let it wash over me without me understanding it, the way
we used to do back in our room in Jardins, when we let ourselves be seduced by the images” (52).
Still, through her countless ponderings on Otherness, Alma does acquire something, and becomes
somebody else by the end of the novel because of it.
In the second part of the novel we follow novelist Erik Zondag on his trip to Australia. He
experiences a temptation similar to Alma, trying to appropriate a certain myth. But his myth is no
country, but an angel. Erik meets Alma during a sort of tourist game in Perth, in which volunteers
are dressed up as angels and hidden throughout town to be searched for by participating tourists.
This tourist game is hardly as playful as Urry (1990) mentioned earlier: as soon as Erik discovers
Alma, hiding in a closet, he immediately falls in love with her and shares a single night with her on
the beach. Then she leaves, and the writer stays in awe, having to leave to his home country the day
afterwards. Hoping for another magical happenstance, he “waited in his hotel for a sign from her
until it was time to leave for the airport. But no sign had come” (141). To this tourist, as well, the
journey ends in disillusion. Arguably even more so for Erik than for Alma, who seems at peace at
the end of the novel. As she recapitulates on her journey, she realizes how she is now able to
wander through the desert, to find food and water and to be able to survive (76). In Lost Paradise,
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both the Gelassenheit and flânerie of Nooteboom’s earlier novels are replaced with rites, trials and
struggle to become a part of the Other. Through this struggle we see how the tourist, whose hopes
and dreams about a specific country are shattered by reality, is transformed into something else.
We might say the tripper has become a traveler, to speak with Lury (1997). Alma ends up as a
masseuse in Austria only to coincidentally meet Erik again. While he urges to see her again, she is
more hesitant, and detached. “Where I am has never really interested me . . . the world is my home”
(131), she responds, in a tone that is remarkably different from her initial Wanderlust.
In the epilogue of the book, the writer reintroduces himself. He is on a train station in
Lichtenberg, Berlin, and contemplates the book that he just finished writing. He decides to take a
train to Moscow, although he does not know why. “Probably because I have never been there
before. I will not know where I am going, so it will be easier to get lost” (145). And so we have
returned to the playfulness and irony that this novel started out with, typical of the writer as we
have come to know him. His desire to get lost is very different from the initial desire of his
protagonist, who started traveling in order to be found – but at the end of the story, Alma thinks
about traveling in a remarkably comparable vein as Nooteboom. On these final pages, the writer
once again meets the woman from the prologue. The second ludicrous coincidence, since Alma had
twice met Erik Oranje on vastly different places, too. The woman is still reading the same book:
Milton’s Paradise Lost. And this time, she starts a conversation with the writer: “You know, I think
the title is the best part . . . In that sense the story never really ends” (148).
So once again, the story remains unfinished. As before, Nooteboom ends with the notion of
deferral, and the lack of Thanatos. Just like in Roads to Santiago, where the writer kept on searching
for “something that beckons and remains invisible”, and in All Souls’ Day, where Arthur Daane ends
up in a hospital bed, unable to know what is happening in the world outside. Our protagonist may
end up bed stricken, but his ears and eyes remain restless, craving to capture something in the
world outside.
Lost Paradise finally ends with date and place notations – “Amsterdam, February 2003 – Es
Consell, San Luis, 26 August 2004” (150) – showing that restless traveling is not just a trait of the
protagonist. The one who made him up remains on the move, as well.
PHILIP AND THE OTHERS
Nooteboom wrote his first novel, Philip and the Others, in 1955, at the age of twenty. According to
the writer, the book was inspired by a road trip from North Cape to the Provence in 1953
(Nooteboom, 1968). Back then, Nooteboom has argued, he had not seen anything of the world; he
even feels a little embarrassed when he rereads his first novel (Safranski, 1997, p. 39). In a more
recently written preface to the book, the novelist refers to his younger self as “a young man with
whom I share a first and a last name”. In one of his articles on the writer, Safranski (p. 40)
acknowledges that Philip and the Others is different from the writer’s later outings: his first novel
showcases Nooteboom as a romanticist – whereas in later writings he would adopt a quite different
literary style of postmodernistic irony. We have already seen multiple instances of Nooteboom’s
entanglement of reality and fiction – yet in this first book, Safranski argues, the power of fiction is
triumphant.
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The story sets off with ten year old Philip Emmanuel Vanderley visiting his seventy-year old
uncle Antonin Alexander – an eccentric man of luxury, living in an enormous house in het Gooi, a
Dutch area renowned for the wealth of its citizens. The house is stuffed with all kinds of eccentric
trinkets and furniture. What comes off as golden rings and rubies, however, is later recognized by
Philip as copper and colored glass.
Antonin is a man of principals. “Have you brought me anything? . . . A visitor ought to bring
something” (3), he advises his nephew. In this book in which almost everyone is traveling, he is the
only sedentary man, the only one who remains homebound whenever he appears in the novel,
asking his visitors to bring along a travel object – a token of their trip for the one who stayed at
home. Both times when visiting his uncle, Philip has no gift with him, so he rushes outside to
provisionally cut off some rhododendrons. It is not an untypical move for the boy who during his
travels is hardly interested in travel objects. The most prominent things he gains from traveling are
stories.
The first story the boy makes up, is a travel story of sorts. Outside his uncle’s house Philip meets
a girl, Ingrid, who takes him to ‘Africa’ – a piece of waste ground on the next street. Both children
seem aware of the game they are playing, yet enjoy it thoroughly. When arriving at the piece of land,
Ingrid spits on a sign saying ‘Houses To Be Built Here For Sale’ – likely since it detracts from their
illusion. The kids then go and fetch ‘provisions’ – currants – from a local shop, and eat them on a hill
“from which we could see the whole of Africa” (Nooteboom, 1988, p. 12). The fragment shows both
the innocence and the seriousness of a tourist game, as played by 10 year olds. To the young Philip
(and many kids with him) the notion of traveling already is entwined with the notion of stories.
Philip and the Others is, in the first place, a book of stories. Most of these stories in are wrapped in
conversations, many of which are conversations within conversations. The reader has to keep track
of the quotation marks to see whose voice is talking. This postmodernistic play of layered
narratives has been utilized by Nooteboom in later novels as well, such as in The Following Story
(1994), but here the complexity of stories within stories also seems a method that complements the
main theme of this book: the endless detours of finding happiness. As in many of his other works,
Nooteboom presents us with deferral – this time in the form of layered storytelling. This play of
stories starts when Philip is hailed by an old, corpulent man named Maventer during his travels
through France. “‘Get your baggage,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll go.’ ‘Where to?’ I asked, but he looked at me
in surprise and said, ‘To the story of course.’ And so I went with him” (25). Again, the creation of
story is associated with the differentness of place.
This story that Maventer tells, creates an all-compassing myth in Philip’s mind. The story is about
a mysterious Chinese girl, who in her turn makes up stories for herself to Maventer. Through
Maventer’s stories, Philip starts seeing the illusory girl. He even starts conversing with her, until he
can actually see her before him. This moment, however, is distinctly unreal: “I saw her and suddenly
I was sure that this was no longer the real world, for things were alive and self-possessed in
another, different reality that all at once became perceptible, visible” (34). Philip, madly in love,
decides to chase after this romantic, dreamed, and ‘unreal’ girl for the rest of the novel – in a detour
typical of Nooteboom.
The stories the Chinese girl tells are often about her fantastical voyages to surreal countries. The
girl refers to the playfulness of these travels on several occasions, seemingly conscious of the web
of fiction she is weaving. In her travel stories she sometimes seems an odd example of the post87
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tourist, intent on play and portraying different kinds of travel stories. After she has told several
stories to Maventer, who in turn has told them to Philip, the girl tells Maventer she is intent on
disappearing into her stories altogether. “‘I’m going away tomorrow, and I’m not coming back. I’m
going to play something big this time’” (39), she explains. Maventer explains how he saw her turn
into a sort of pantheist god, melting with her environment: the trees, the landscape. Maventer walks
away, breaking the spell of her story, which turned her into a supernatural being. “As for me, I have
decided to grow old”, he adds, for “as long as she was there, I couldn’t grow old” (40). In this sense,
stories are timeless. Who travels through them, stays young – always capable of learning new
things, never completely finished.
This surreal, timeless dimension of travel, however, seems far from Philip’s reality when
traveling through Europe. Like Arthur Daane in All Souls’ Day, Philip repeatedly encounters the
dangerous elements of travel. During his first ride while hitchhiking, the driver tries to sexually
assault him. Later on, he and a girl he meets on his travels are being bothered and robbed in a café
by drunken Frenchmen. These men identify the youngsters as Americans – ‘capitalists’ – neglecting
Philip’s repeated objection that they are from the same continent as them (53). The gaze, here,
again constitutes a power-relationship, albeit not from guest to host, but vice versa. The Frenchmen
do not allow for any distinction beyond the myth of America they believe in.
Philip has a comparable encounter, albeit more positive, when he is hailed by a Yugoslavian man.
The man holds him for a fellow countryman because of his Rumanian cap (58). For the second time,
this traveler has no travel institute backing him up for anything: he is whatever the hosts thinks he
is. And Philip does not change that fact: the boy is a passive, gloomy traveler, who seems to lack
agency in where is going. This passivity is no Gelassenheit as we saw it earlier, for he fails at letting
go. Both the girl he chases and the choices he makes stem from his clinging onto the people he
meets. “I attach myself too much to things or to people; and so traveling is no longer traveling but
taking leave” (60). Only guided by his passion for a girl whose existence itself seems unlikely, he is
like many other of Nooteboom’s characters, searching for a reason to keep on traveling, to defer the
end of his journey.
Comparing him to different travel figures seems inapt. The boy is no nomad – after all, he has a
home to which he will return eventually – but to call him a pilgrim seems untrue as well. Whereas
the pilgrim is aware beforehand of the rites that he has to pass in order to reach a state of liminality,
Philip is in a constant state of hesitation as to where to go and what to do. When embarking on a
hitchhiking race to Calais with some of his travel friends, the boy hesitates to go at all: he feels he
has no reason for going there if he loses his travel buddies afterwards. And when traveling all the
way to Luxembourg in order to find the mysterious Eastern girl, Philip gives up his search just
before he arrives, realizing the chance of her being there is infinitely small. So he turns around to
France again (70). His doubts are often accompanied by disappointments. When Philip finally
reaches Calais, it is not at all what he had expected it to be: the rain is pouring down “until my skin
was numb and as cold as marble . . . I hated Calais . . . the houses stood apathetically and wretchedly
in the pouring rain” (62). Traveling, to Philip, is more of a burden than it is bliss.
These burdens get lightened only by the Others that the young man meets, and to whom he
attaches himself. On one of his hitchhiking tours, Philip is picked up by Fay, a girl who takes him to
her home. There, Philip gets acquainted with Sargon and Heinz. The boys both share their life’s
story with Philip – filled with disappointments and doubt, too. Philip finds it too hard to bear these
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stories of regret and hurt, at one point even pulling a pillow over his ears to not hear the ramblings
of these Others. While he finds it difficult to leaving the people he meets, the néantiser of these
Others is necessary to some extent in order to be able to travel, to be able to say hello and goodbye
to temporary friendships. And so finally Philip leaves the Others in France, and heads back to
Luxembourg, this time all the way.
As he walks through one of Luxembourg’s parks, Philip engages in a fictional conversation with
the romantic couples sitting on the benches. It turns into a conversation about love and traveling,
and the opposition between the two. The couples look at him, as if saying: “‘why do you disturb
us . . . This was our evening. It was specially prepared for us with silence . . . You are the intruder,
the unwelcome one.’” But Philip retaliates:
I pass between you in all the parks of the world. I walk past love, and I do not understand it. You
cannot divide yourself, surely. In the morning, when it is time to go to work, you leave each other,
and the bodies begin their lonely journey, both the caressed body and mine, the uncaressed one.
They move farther from each other than the night can ever reconcile or reunite. (93)
Here we see one of the main themes in this book: the unbridgeable gap between the lovers on park
benches – fixated, steady and immobile – and traveling, which means solitude, and leaving loved
ones behind. The ultimate proof of this is found a few pages further, at the end of the book and the
story. Here, Philip achieves the impossible and runs into the girl of his dreams. At that particular
moment we see him breaking through the story, through the fiction: “Anyone who now goes
through the passport control at Krusaa can perhaps still see me, for I am standing to the right of the
road by the bushes” (99). For a moment, the fictional character thinks of himself as someone real.
What happens next is as romanticized as it can get: the two youngsters immediately recognize each
other. They will spend the last pages together, as they go for a boat ride. Here, the two characters
envision yet another story, dreaming up a cavalcade of boats around them, with musicians,
philosophers, and writers.
But then she has to leave again. Philip tries to stop her, but she has made up her mind. “‘I want to
stay alone, and you know it.’” So Philip watches her walking out the door, out of the street, and he
calls out: “‘You must come back. Come back, it’s the same everywhere’” (106). But Philip must know
he is lying. He would not have traveled all the way himself if he really believed it. If love requires
complete stillness, it is unachievable for anyone who travels.
This should be the end – the protagonist as a changed man, catharsis, Thanatos – but Nooteboom
adds one last paragraph. “Long afterward, or not so long”, Philip goes back to his uncle, who once
again asks him if he has brought him a gift for stopping by. But Philip has come back from his
journey, and this book, with nothing on him. “‘No, Uncle.’ I said. ‘I haven’t brought you anything”
(107), he retorts. Not only did he not return with the girl of his dreams; traveling has brought Philip
so many disappointments that he has no dreams left to discuss in this novel. Safranski, in his
afterword to the Dutch version of the book, notes that this story is performing “the art of deferring
the waking up” (151). Through its constantly shifting narratives and magical storytelling, the story
delays the act of Thanatos – when does Philip meet the girl? What happens if he does? – until the
very last moment. And when it happens, the dream gets taken away definitively.
Why is this remarkable? In his essay on Nooteboom’s travel writings, Van den Brink (1997)
remarks that Nooteboom rarely ever writes about the worries of traveling, and all the more about
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CHAPTER TEN
the arrival at a strange new place and his desire to find something familiar, something
understandable from his perspective of the stranger. If we consider Philip and the Others to be a
travel novel, however, we see that it consists of numerous disappointments. Traveling the world
certainly is not without Weltschmertz: no matter how great the voyage is when we imagine it
beforehand, it consists of leaving Others behind, disappointments, or even finding yourself in
dangerous situations. In his novels, Nooteboom shows us all kinds of things that could weigh the
traveler down, and how all these hardships change the perspective of his journey.
The disillusionment of Philip makes it impossible to regard him as a postmodernistic travel
figure. As we saw, he is far too serious for being a flâneur, or a post-tourist. This utterly romantic
gaze with which Philip looks at the world, half real, half fictionalized, is a trademark of the writer
who has made him up. To return to Abrams’ metaphor of the lamp: the light that Nooteboom sheds
over the act of traveling throughout his oeuvre is one that leaves the image of the hastily posttourist darkened. It focuses on travelers who fictionalize, scrutinize, and dream. While few of them
are lighthearted, most of them find some form of solace in traveling, even though it results in loss,
pain or disappointment. And all of them seem to have troubles with ending their trip.
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POSTFACE
As Nooteboom has showed us time and again, ending a journey is difficult – and if it happens, it
usually means embarking on a new one. Time and again, our writer is lured toward another voyage;
and through the same force he delays the end of each trip as long as possible. This has everything to
do with the fascination these characters have with the world, its history, and its possible
configurations (through fiction). No matter if they stand on the sideline or engage in the
appropriating gaze, Nooteboom’s characters are all trying to understand the value of traveling.
The framework of travel and tourism showed us the author from this perspective. It also showed
that, in successive order, the figures of the pilgrim, nomad, flâneur, and post-tourist all proved to be
applicable to an extent, but never completely. The least applicable concept was the post-tourist, in
his lighthearted haste for different impressions and detachment from the world. While some of the
writer’s characters show a form of detachment with their environment, such as Philip in his dreamlike projections, we might say that with Nooteboom, travel is distinctly intense. Especially in his
nonfictional narratives, the author showcases a vigorous urge to understand what he sees, to
connect it to the past, or to enrich it with fictional elements. And Arthur Daane, Alma and Philip, as
well, are traveling with a goal – even though none of them will fully reach this goal, and many of
them face disillusion and disappointment. Still, some of these characters do succeed in the Gelassen
stroll of the flâneur – especially the author himself in his nonfictional works, but Arthur Daane, in
his random walks through Berlin, as well. Some characters resemble the pilgrim, who travels with a
singular goal of experiencing liminality and returning home afterwards: Philip, for example, is
moving toward such a catharsis during the entire novel, and Alma is searching for genuine
understanding of the Other. The notion of the nomad seems the most useful: it is applicable to Alma
as well, who argues that the world is her only home. And Nooteboom’s other characters, while some
of them do return home afterwards (most notably Philip), are also intent on staying on the road,
showing little desire for ending the journey or the story that accompanies it.
With their tendency toward deferral, complexity and fictionalization, comparing the writer’s
characters to Alice and Xavier seems difficult. The two travelers seem to experience travel in a
rigorously different manner. But what does the author himself think about the likenesses and
differences between his travels and those of the two globetrotters on Waarbenjij.nu? He was not
overenthusiastic on the Tilburg University academic – nevertheless, his response to the question
was as follows (personal communication, August 16, 2010).
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A LETTER FROM THE WRITER
Dear Tom van Nuenen. Not much time, being only a few days in the Netherlands between Spain and
China. My answer to your question is that you don’t need to be a writer for wanting to write
something to yourself or your friends about what you see and experience. It is a natural urge, that
luckily has not yet become extinct with most of us.
There is of course a difference between traveling individual and unattached travel, and a two-week
displacement with a tour operator to some exotic resort. For someone sitting at an office desk all
year long, that too can be quite an experience that he or she may want to report about. Everyone can
look, photograph and write, and most people do so. On all of my travels and at the strangest places I
encounter (young) people who throw in a year of their life to travel as a backpacker across Australia
or South-America, working on the road, etc. Doing so one will get a better understanding of images
from the so-called third world that he/she will see on television. And the new media, blogs, sites etc.
democratically offer anyone the option to write down impressions, put them on display window and
to receive reactions on them. By the way, the same thing happens to writers of books. I often get
reactions, corrections, additions from people who have been to the places I have described.
I remember a speech from Umberto Eco on the Buchmesse in Frankfurt, many years ago. The
general feeling was that people, because of new media, would read less and less. Out of the question,
he said, they will read more, albeit differently, on the screen. In the meantime, this appears to be
proven, considering the subject you are studying.
I would like to give one example. Two travelers, a man and a woman, at the end of their “working
lives” went to Santiago de Compostela on foot. They walked all the way from Brabant, and returned
on foot as well; they were busy doing so for nearly a year, and EVERY day they sent a postcard or a
letter, accompanied by the pension, refugio, monastery, church where they had rested. Their children
have traveled the same journey by car, made a drawing of all those stops, written a diary-like text
with it, xeroxed the whole thing, bound it and made a book out of it for friends and their parents, as a
memento. I received one of those copies, because of my book Roads to Santiago, one of the most
precious reactions to a book I have ever been given.
And someone else, a Dutch woman from Venezuela recently wrote me that I had predicted the
disaster with the Twin Towers, because I had once written in a piece from 1987 on NY (in De Zucht
naar het Westen) that I found the towers so thin and transparent that one day they have to fall down
as “wrinkled cigarette paper.” I had forgotten it, but it was written.
This, to Nooteboom, is what connects travel writers and tourists: both are giving in to their ‘natural
tendency’ to write about their experiences. The examples that the author offers clarify how the
endless deferral of images we see on television comes to a stop when we pack our bags and actually
go and see it. The image that we get from looking at the pictures seems further away from reality
than the tourist myth we may encounter when we are bodily standing there, on that beach, in that
township, before that piece of art. Not just because it is usually the past that is feigned in tourist
myths, but also because then, it is us who are fooled, vis-à-vis. So then, at least, we do not use
someone else’s eyes to be fooled.
The author might be considered humble for his comparison between writers and tourists. He
might be considered a tourist too, of course. But at the same time, we have found that the author
has distinct qualities when it concerns traveling. An important aspect, we came to recognize
through the difference between facts and fiction. We might consider Nussbaum’s argument that
literature is conductive to general human understanding because it acquaints us with the kind of
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thing that might happen, with “general forms of possibility and their impact on human lives”
(Nussbaum, 1997, p. 92). To Nooteboom, as well, the use of fiction is fundamental for our
understanding of travel altogether. As the writer puts it: “Without Homer there would be no Trojan
war, without Balzac there would be no French bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century, without Joyce,
no Dublin, without Shakespeare, no Richard the Second, without Musil, no K-und-K monarchy, and
vice versa” (Dijkgraaf, 2009, p. 60, trans. TvN). Fiction and reality are complementary when we
want to understand the Other, and the foreign place.
We also saw that the direct translation of an experience into a story is a different way of framing
than letting the experience ‘tan’, as the writer calls it, and adding fiction to it. The stories in Roads to
Santiago not only differ from the stories of Alice and Xavier in form. That alone would be a rather
trivial conclusion. They also include a wildly different content from the diary-like statements in
most digital travel writings. A similar difference can be found with photos that are either
immediately posted by our digital tourists, or elaborated on through ekphrasis. Let us recall
Benjamin, who posed that traveling requires its opposite in stillness and solitude. Nooteboom, we
have seen, works like this. He only writes long after his travels are at an end. By doing so, he lets the
fictionalization of memory and fantasy take their part in the story. This seems the opposite of
digital travel writing, in which one is starting to write immediately after the experience has taken
place, placing a story amongst the thousands of others.
We started off with the notion that travel writing might be seen through the concept of solidarity.
But looking at the myriad of online stories, one gets another sense of what contemporary traveling
entails. Most travelers, with their lionizing stories and evidential pictures, seem mostly interested
in a public to acknowledge their private goal of life writing. If these constant updates can be
considered a diary, then it is a diary that is scattered on the floor of a public library, a multitude of
different stories visible for anyone to see. Still, as Nooteboom reminds us, considering Alice and
Xavier as narcissistic post-tourists does of course not do justice to their experience. While diving in
the reef, one can hardly deny that these two holidaymakers were there, experiencing something
different, and probably being happy because of it. And their story of is not just meant for others to
praise them. It is also about sharing the value of travel.
This leads to an important understanding. Nooteboom, Alice and Xavier all perform the same
thing: they turn an intense, private experience into a publicly understood one. What the writer
argues in Nooteboom’s hotel (2002b) counts for Alice and Xavier as well: “The world of Proust is a
cosmos to which you can always return, in which art, in the end, is the only reality and not, as is
thought so often, the nostalgic recalling of a past as a past” (Nooteboom, 2002b, pp. 182-3). Perhaps
that ‘only reality’ is what all travel writers are looking for: an experience that can be relived
through its description – an experience that is devoid of irony, relativism, and contingency. If
anything becomes clear in Alice’s and Xavier’s writings, it is that they take their travels seriously.
This is possibly the reason why they are so eager to write it down: so they can recapture the time
spent traveling, so that it may be doubled, in a way, and relived by others or themselves when they
return. It is precisely what Eakin (1999) refers to when he speaks of ‘life writing’, constructing an
identity made up of traveling stories, and sharing that identity with the Others at home. But what
Nooteboom has taught us, is that we always make a decision between ‘writing lives’ and ‘traveling
lives’. Both constitute, both create. But we cannot do both simultaneously without somehow losing
focus at doing the other.
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It might be tempting to become suspicious of writings that somehow seem to replace the
experience of traveling itself. But it is crucial to understand that these writings do contain an
experience, even if it is a short-lived one. As Nooteboom explains in the preface to Een ochtend in
Bahia: “Some things I wrote down may have turned out to be ridiculous, but not more so than the
things that people have claimed who wrote down nothing” (Nooteboom, 1989b, p. 8, trans. TvN).
Travel writing might be tainted with myth, deferral, fixation or haste, but it still is a way of
preserving an experience. These stories and pictures may resemble one another, but still, there is a
search going on here, even though, to our writer’s characters, the journey seems more of a difficult
undertaking than to Alice and Xavier. “Bonaire has scarcely any roads. Getting lost is impossible”,
the couple notes poetically.45 The writer and his characters, on the other hand, seem lost all the
time; in their expectations, fantasies or dreams. Perhaps, then, the difference between travel
writing and ‘tourist writing’ is not so much dependent on the writing skill or style, but on
something else. Perhaps it is at the intersection of the recognizable reality and the evocative power
of fiction that tourist writing becomes travel writing.
Interestingly, this intersection of fiction and reality was also visited by Heffernan, in the
discussion of the different forms of ekphrasis. Actual ekphrasis, we might recall, is the
representation of an existing object, while notional ekphrasis represents a fictional object. What we
have learned from Nooteboom is that these two are not necessarily separated; they can both help
forming one pair of glasses with which we can better understand the world. As our writer put it
himself: the longer he gazes, the less he understands what he sees. But paradoxically, it seems clear
that all the things he has to say about the places he visits, stem from a more complex understanding
than simply penning down what was seen. The hasty glance with which the post-tourist looks at his
surroundings while traveling seems too quick to be able to interrogate what is seen. But as we saw
in Nomad’s Hotel, the writer’s gaze is far from detached, and distinctly intense. The broader ones
perspective, the more complex it becomes, and the less easy it is to frame it, or to fix it in a picture.
Similarly, through the incorporation of fiction, Nooteboom is able to rework, construct or defect
tourist myths he encounters. And while in Lost Paradise Almut says that there is nothing to be done
about tourist myths, her author seems to think otherwise.
THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT
In her study on American tourists, Gottlieb distinguishes between tourists who want to be a
‘peasant for a day’ and those who want to be the ‘king for a day’ (1982, p. 173, in Suvantola, 2002).
And it seems clear that, when wanting to be de koning te rijk, one is tired of being a peasant. Not
even so much in terms of wealth, but in terms of differentness. Tourism, in that sense, is an escape
from our historical and temporal Dasein, a rejection of contingency and a search for certain timeless
truth. The timeless is sought by capturing the momentarily in a story or a photograph. We might
call it the search for authenticity – but we should always remain wary of that idealist concept, for it
proves difficult to clearly define what exactly constitutes the authentic experience.
What is even more arresting is that both of Gottlieb’s options are valid for one day only. The
tourist is only there for a limited amount of time. Still, what he experiences during that short period
45
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of time, he hopes to take back home. It might not have the same gravity as the goal of the pilgrim,
but nobody who leaves home is hoping to not experience anything; and nobody would want to
return home without somehow being more aware of what another place is like. And writing about
it, or photographing it, is something that outlasts the limited time we spend abroad.
On the other hand, the stories that are written on such short term, seem to last equally short.
When the first part of this thesis was written, two Dutch people named Alice and Xavier were
traveling across Bonaire. Now it is drawing to a close, the couple is already long back from their
journey. And what is more: they have deleted their travel blog. Their public has read their stories,
and after that these stories have served their purpose. The website they were using is called
waarbenjij.nu for a good reason – it translates to ‘where are you now’ – which is not coincidentally
the same name as an English travel website (albeit abbreviated, so we can access it quicker):
wayn.com. Infinity is hardly a concern here: what matters is the present, and the present is
transient and ephemeral, as Bauman taught us. In this respect there is something to be said for
deleting these personal stories. They belong only to the present, to the current experiences of these
travelers.
So perhaps, after all, Alice and Xavier did not write these stories for ‘anyone and anytime’, even
though the accessibility of these stories may lead us to suspect otherwise. The alleged exhibitionism
of posting stories on a public website may be overstated; even though on the digital panopticon
anyone might gaze at them, the stage these writers set for themselves is quite temporary, and
meant predominantly for their friends and family. It is also a story that is written for the here and
now, that is not built to last. It is written as an identity statement, a certificate of accomplishment.
Not something to be overtaken by fiction, to lead its own life without the author’s approval. As
Heijne (2004, pp. 125-8) mentioned, the more we try to approach our experience by writing a story,
the more troublesome it is that once you write it down, reality becomes a form of fiction. Unlike
Nooteboom’s carefully composed stories, the ones by Alice and Xavier were chiefly written to
encapsulate reality; to capture what happened on that trip. It may have been possible to follow the
couple at the time, but perhaps Alice and Xavier eventually chose to remove their web pages
because, in the end, they do not want their honeymoon to become a publicly accessible story, but
merely a lived reality.
The story of Alice and Xavier is gone. But still, completely deleting things from the Internet is
hardly ever fully successful. For some months afterwards, their travel profile could still be
recovered from the cache memory of Google, the only remaining proof.46 And as we catch the echo
of their profile for the last time, we see how it reads: ik ben weer thuis. I am back home again. These
little words convey a lot about what may ultimately be the most important information for the
people visiting these blogs: when are you coming back? It is no coincidence that every blog on
waarbenjij.nu shows a ‘travel status’ containing the number of days that remain until the loved one
returns home. Their notion of travel exists only because its opposite does so: being at home. The
contemporary tourist wants to leave the known world behind, to forget about the daily trials and
tribulations – but once he returns, he continues his life as before he left it. He is looking for
dissociation from his daily life, and he paradoxically wants to bring just that back home; to be
someone different, yet still the same. It is what ‘life writing’ in tourism entails: an investigation in
how to get lost, and then found again. Getting temporarily lost is what contemporary travelers
46
See appendix B.
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strive for. A way to displace oneself without losing the core – or as Suvantola noted earlier, “an
attempt to extend the external bounds of our existence without sacrificing the possibilities
actualized at our home place.” This notion of traveling is opposed to the displaced, unbound nomad,
the figure that seems most appropriate to describe Nooteboom.
What Nooteboom, Alice and Xavier have in common, however, is that they all show that by
reading, one can travel along, and even repeat the journey – and that is what Proust was after when
describing the Madeleine, as well. Reading, like writing, means deferring an end. When it concerns
the invaluable act of traveling, this is a great asset. Alice and Xavier may have returned, but all we
need to do is turn back the pages to the preface of our investigation, and we will see that
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Despite the reputation of the scholar – a hermit sheltered away in his ivory tower – academic
research never is a solitary undertaking. I am, in the first and the last place, greatly indebted to my
tutor who guided me through the conception and construction of this thesis: prof. dr. Odile
Heynders. Additionally, I am grateful to dr. Jan Jaap de Ruiter for agreeing to be the second reader,
and to Jack van Nuenen, Nathan de Groot, and Sander Bax for their proofreading and commenting
on early versions of my project, which contributed greatly to its poignancy.
Then there are, of course, the more personal words of gratitude after these years of education. I
would like to thank my parents, sisters and granddad, for their support and patience with my
academic quandaries. Jasper, for his friendship and the according fruitful conversations about this
(and any) topic. My fellow master students, for an inspiring year. And my personal rots in de
branding, Hanneke.
I would like to dedicate this thesis to my sister Marieke. She understands the importance of travel
better than anyone I know.
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104
APPENDIX A
A LETTER FROM THE WRITER (DUTCH)
Beste Tom van Nuenen, Weinig tijd, ben maar een paar dagen in NL tussen Spanje en China. Mijn
antwoord op je vraag is dat je geen schrijver hoeft te zijn om voor jezelf of voor vrienden iets op te
willen schrijven over wat je ziet en beleeft. Het is een natuurlijke drang, die bij de meesten gelukkig
nog niet uitgestorven is.
Er is natuurlijk een verschil tussen individueel en ongebonden reizen en tussen verplaatsing voor
twee weken naar een exotisch vacantieoord met een touroperator. Voor iemand die een heel jaar op
kantoor zit kan dat ook een hele belevenis zijn waar hij of zij verslag van wil doen. Iedereen kan
kijken, fotograferen en schrijven, en dat doen veel mensen dan ook.
Ik kom op al mijn reizen op de gekste plekken (jonge) mensen tegen die een jaar van hun leven er
tegenaan gooien en als backpacker door Australië of Zuid-Amerika reizen, onderweg werken etc.
Wie dat doet krijgt een beter begrip voor beelden uit de zogenaamde derde wereld die hij/zij op de
tv zal zien. En de nieuwe media, blog , sites, etc. geven iedereen democratisch de gelegenheid zijn
indrukken op te schrijven, in de etalage te zetten en daar reacties op te krijgen. Dat gebeurt
overigens ook met de schrijvers van boeken. Ik krijg vaak reacties, correcties, aanvullingen van
mensen die op de plekken geweest zijn die ik beschreven heb.
Ik herinner me een rede van Umberto Eco op de Buchmesse in Frankfurt, vele jaren geleden. De
teneur was dat de mensen door de nieuwe media, Internet etc. minder zouden gaan lezen. Geen
sprake van zei hij, ze zullen meer lezen naar anders lezen, op het scherm. Dat is intussen, door
datgene wat U bestudeert, wel bewezen.
Eén voorbeeld wil ik nog geven. Twee reizigers, man en vrouw, gingen aan het eind van hun
"werkzame leven" te voet naar Santiago de Compostela. Ze liepen de hele afstand vanaf Brabant,
en kwamen ook te voet terug; ze waren daar een klein jaar mee bezig, en stuurden ELKE dag een
kaart of een brief met daarin vermeld het pension, refugio, klooster, kerk waar ze sliepen. Hun
kinderen hebben die reis met de auto nagemaakt, een pentekening van al die pleisterplaatsen
gemaakt, daarbij een dagboekachtige tekst geschreven, dat alles gexeroxt, ingebonden en er zo een
boek van gemaakt voor vrienden en voor hun ouders, als aandenken. Een van die exemplaren heb
ik gekregen, vanwege mijn boek De Omweg naar Santiago, een van de dierbaarste reacties die ik
ooit op een boek gekregen heb.
En iemand anders, een Nederlandse vrouw uit Venezuela schreef me pas geleden uit Venezuela dat
ik de ramp met de twin towers voorspeld had, omdat ik in een stuk uit 1987 over NY geschreven
had (in De Zucht naar het Westen) dat ik die torens in het zonlicht zo ijl en doorschijnend vond dat
ze op een dag wel naar beneden zouden moeten komen als "verfrommeld sigarettenpapier.”
Ik was het vergeten, maar het stond er echt.
Veel succes met U magister!
Cees Nooteboom
105
APPENDIX B
ALICE & XAVIER, RECAPTURED
106
APPENDIX B
107
APPENDIX C
WAARBENJIJ.NU HOMEPAGE
108

here - Tom van Nuenen

Transcription

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