Leavings

Time is running out; 1 day, eked out from the madness, and spent among columns of pale beige, alternating with creeping diagonals of light. This is familiar, the quiet intensity; the falling of one’s gaze guiding the flow of the day. In a collection of essays on travel writing, aptly titled Writes of Passage, Joanne P. Sharp discusses Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence:

…Mayle cannot be accused of initiating a rush to Provence because Provence has been a favoured destination for British travellers and tourists for decades, stemming from the popularisation of the Cote d’Azur by English upper classes in the later nineteenth century. Even after discounting the Cote d’Azur, this is area that has witnessed large-scale migration so that ‘only very few Provencals today can claim a local origin that dates back more than one or two generations”. The authenticity that Mayle seeks to present is an invented tradition already.

In his book Late Imperial Romance, McClure discusses a concept closely related to the paradox of tourism mentioned in the introduction. Drawing on Frederic Jameson, McClure defines romance as being ‘designated to satisfy collective longings for adventure and Otherness, “magic and providential mystery”‘. But that which seeks to relate the excitement of these romantic places to others has ended up destroying them by making them known and so removing their mystery. McClure continues, ‘when it became impossible to ignore the prospect of global modernism, the eradication of the last elsewhere, the writers of imperial romance began to become uneasy’. In writing his Provence, Mayle at first offers a new romantic space of community life and easy living, in distinction from the fashionable images that had dominated. He offers an alternative to mass tourism: he contrasts his insider status with tourists who remain on the outside, linked to the place being visited only by economic relations. And yet Mayle’s therapy has limited effect. His books and their spin-off products themselves became fashion: his rebellion against the Anglicised, Americanised, Parisian-ised landscape of Provence became fashionable itself. Mayle’s Provence entered the commodity circuits of the image production - but became overproduced. Mayle’s Provence became mass produced and as a result could not provide the distinction required by bourgeois habits. Bourdieu has suggested that the bourgeois prefer ‘organised, signposted cultivated nature [and culture]‘. To enjoy distinction from mass tourism - an enjoyment of travel organised around the romantic gaze of the lone individual - requires knowledge of the place being visited, provided in many cases by travel books. Problems arise when a travel book becomes popular so that its knowledge becomes codified in the popular consciousness - and at times in the landscape itself - and becomes a new set of ’signposts’ for the bourgeois traveller. It appears that this has occurred with the Year in Provence phenomenon. It should perhaps come as no surprise that Lady Fortescue’s Perfume from Provence has become the middle class’s new talisman of rural France. This is not simply because it is somehow regarded as more authentic. It is more different, being as it is removed in time as well as in space. The aristocratic writing of Provence constructs a true positional good that cannot be obtained and so cannot become passe like Mayle’s descriptions. Now with the commodification of travel and travel writing it would seem that a foreign country really can only be the past.

- Joanne P. Sharp, Writing over the map of Provence

Travel, of course, is intimately linked to the idea of escape and liberation - we meticulously plan how we might transport ourselves to a new place each time, or to one which is slightly more familiar, counting in days and miles a peculiar measure of rest and respite (though this is of course is an over-simplification, for we seek more than this). Coupled with this are aspects of social behaviour and community ties, for who we travel with and the fashion in which we do so tells us a great deal about who (or what) we are. For myself, travel begs the question of location, identity, definition. Half a dozen dichotomies struggle to be heard and seen; I am who I am because I spent a year in New York, a month in Paris, a lifetime in Singapore. The act is itself insufficient and inconsequential; in November, as I travel to Paris once more, I am piqued by my not counting the days. Instead, I find myself transported, already, welcoming the structure and depth of literature and ideas that are inextricably linked to the trip. It expands, like a flower, the distinction between here and there lost in the meaning and purpose of the trip. No wonder, as a student, every trip was excruciatingly short - the itinerary was the goal. And then there is the epistemology of a place:

This study then explores the coming together of a particular imaginative geography, in this case a romantic one, with a particular place, the Kandyan Highlands. Until 1815 when the Kandyan Kingdom was conquered by the British, it was the site of another imaginative geography, that of the heaven on earth of the Buddhist god-king. This Kandyan imaginary was impressed on the landscape - on sacred mountains, rivers, town layouts, palaces and temples. It was encoded in the ritual and secular practices of the Kandyans, whose politics were no less real for being imagined. This imaginary geography, in other words, was inseparable from the concreteness of this place. In fact the very specificity of the place was in large part produced by the impress of this imaginary. After 1815, this particular imaginative geography became increasingly difficult for the Kandyan people to sustain as it became manifestly clear that the new British rulers intended to remain; for new political imaginations produce new imaginative geographies. At times running beside this Kandyan imaginative geography, at times running roughshod over it, was a British imaginary which reworked the former as the picturesque. This new imaginary was a form of translation which recuperated the Highlands for a British audience. In doing so it not only re-imagined the Kandyan imaginary, forcing the politics of the Buddhist god-king through the taxonomic grid of romanticism and utilitarianism, but re-imagined the physical place itself, the mountains and the lakes and forests. What this complex, unstable translation of the culture and nature produced was a hybrid creation, which began as a discourse, a way of seeing and talking about a place, and ended as a reconstruction of that place, as a concretisation of that new imagined geography.

- James Duncan, Dis-Orientation

So now I have tripped myself up again and am bogged down with thoughts and ideas about how we are, we have, we will know ourselves as we travel in every way possible. But this is the best way to end a day, to string together a idea, hold it there for a moment, before it flies into a million pieces and becomes dust, once more. This, I think, will be my ideal life. My hero for the day, then, is Mills, who as it seems, never put a foot wrong. We are all unwitting masters of our miserable, ignorant fates. What a marvellous, familiar, promising day.