In 2006, I found myself in Istanbul meandering aimlessly through the Grand

Bazaar, one of the oldest covered markets located in the Fatih district of the city. I had an hour to kill and began navigating through the labyrinthine passageways like a flâneur perusing the chess boards, ceramic wares, hanging lanterns and other sundry goods displayed in the stalls. At one point I stopped and watched as a particularly aggressive salesman attempted to press a fez into an unsuspecting tourist’s hand insisting it was a nice gift that was authentically Turkish. Never mind that there were no longer any reputable fez manufacturers in the country or that Kamel Atatürk had officially banned the Ottoman fez in 1925 as part of his national modernization

TerraCognita

Gavin Murray-Miller

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program: the vendor was intent on selling this man and the numerous other tourists he would no doubt accost that day an “authentic” piece of Turkey, an article that would, no doubt, over the years serve as a tangible and distinct reminder of a few days spent in a foreign city.

For anyone who has traveled, this experience is a veritable rite of passage that confirms one’s status as a tourist. It can be invariably multiplied across a wide range of countries and cities. In Cairo, street hawkers sell papyrus scrolls with hieroglyphs and Pharaonic images. On a visit to Agra, you encounter vendors peddling ghungroos—musical anklets adorned with bells used in classical Indian dance—who inform potential female customers that they were worn in the harems of the Mughal Empire. Outside the kiosk, a local is trying to convince a British couple to visit a nearby marble shop. He assures them that the marmistas in this particular workshop are descended from the Persian craftsmen who originally decorated the Taj Mahal. These and countless other examples are emblematic of the culture and practices of the modern tourist industry which extends from respectable travel agencies offering luxury vacation packages to street vendors and local business owners that make a living off the daily foot traffic of foreigners. With few exceptions, what tourists are purchasing is a promise of an enriching experience or authentic object—a “souvenir” in the idiom of the tourist trade.1 In numerous cases, cheaply-made goods intended to be sold to tourists are touted as icons of national identity and heritage, many of which no longer have any real relevance for the society in question. Egyptians gave up using papyrus long ago and no longer practice the art of hieroglyphic writing; the only Turks who don fezzes are found in restaurants and

1 Arthur Asa Burger, Deconstructing Travel: Cultural Perspectives on Tourism (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2004), 14.

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theater houses catering exclusively to foreigners.“Tourist kitsch depends on a sterilized version of history,” Ilan Stavans and Joshua Ellison have claimed.2 It may also be added that it is a fetishized version of history as well, one that attempts to construct and convey the temporary impression of elsewhere which is, ultimately, the object of tourism.

In an age in which the global constantly impinges upon and interacts with the local, however, are foreignness and exoticism concepts which continue to hold any real meaning? Or have they been reduced to a series of stereotypical and generalized symbols like the fez and the papyrus scroll that are intended to satisfy certain desires for “local color” no matter how clichéd they might in fact be? A globalized modernity, Carol Gluck reminds, implies that “elsewhere is everywhere now.”3 As societies throughout the world acquire an exceedingly hybridized and multicultural complexion, locality and the specificities of place—what the traveler is, in the end, searching for—become ever more remote.4 The sight of the gilded Macdonald’s arches stenciled against the Beijing skyline or the Starbuck’s logo transposed into Cyrillic script glimpsed in a Moscow shopping mall may not fit the stylized images of Oriental pagodas and Russian cupolas found in popular travel guides, but they are, nonetheless, part of the modern landscape the traveler encounters and interacts with upon leaving home. The modern voyageur confronted with the prospect of this globalized or “Americanized” vista may find themself sympathizing with Joseph Conrad who, when recounting the fantastic voyages of Marco Polo in the early

2 Ilan Stavans and Joshua Ellison, “Reclaiming Travel,” The New York Times, 7 July 2012.3 Carol Gluck, “The End of Elsewhere: Writing Modernity Now,” The American Historical Review, 116:3 (June 2011): 677.4 Milena Ivanovic, Cultural Tourism (Cape Town: Juta, 2008), 23.

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1920s, lamented that “nothing obviously strange remains for our eyes now.”5 Travel no longer suggests engaging the exoticism of elsewhere; it increasingly entails coming to grips with the “end of elsewhere.”

Yet if we scrutinize the culture of tourism we inevitably ask another question: why do we travel? Naturally, from time to time we desire a brief intermission from the daily obligations and routines that normally fill our schedules. A week or ten days to go elsewhere and either clear our minds or seek out different forms of entertainment we might not find in our normal milieu. There is, however, another urge that compels us to leave home: a desire not only for exoticism, but also for an authentic experience that offers personal enrichment in some capacity. It is this inclination which, in our minds, separates us from the vulgarity of blatant tourism. We seek more than immediate self-gratification and look askance at those we might see participating in these exact activities.6 In the 1820s, the Irish historian and writer Richard Robert Madden derided the Europeans flocking to Egyptian cities. While he had come to the Near East to study its mysterious past and enhance his knowledge of antiquity, the same could hardly be assumed of the other travelers he encountered. “Our modern Egyptian travelers appear to have one motive for every journey, whether in Thebes or Memphis,” he sneered, “and that is to make pictures.”7 While it is easy to thumb our noses at the tourist snapping pictures, it is harder to admit that we are, on some level, in search of the same thing, namely a direct and memorable encounter with a history and culture that is not our own. The travel writer records and preserves

5 Joseph Conrad, “On Travel,” Last Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1926), 90.6 Burger, Deconstructing Travel, 10; Ivanovic, Cultural Tourism, 22-23.7 Richard Robert Madden, Travels in Turkey, Egypt, Nubia and Palestine (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1830), 2:41.

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his experience in eloquent prose; the rest of us capture it with point-and-shoot cameras. The difference is not the intent, but the way we remember the experience and confirm it to ourselves.

In watching the Turkish vendor place the fez in the hand of the anonymous tourist, I was reminded of a passage from Théophile Gautier’s Constantinople. A French poet and literary critic who traveled extensively through the Mediterranean during the nineteenth century, Gautier came to Istanbul from Paris in the early 1850s with the intention of exploring the Ottoman capital and chronicling his experiences. He was, by this point, a self-proclaimed Orientalist with a genuine interest in Turkish and Arab culture. During the 1840s, he had decided to commit himself to writing and travel, first visiting Spanish Andalusia and then French Algeria. As he claimed, he aspired to a life of “cosmopolitan vagabondage” and to become a citizen of the world.8 According to his travel notes from his time in Istanbul, one day, while walking along the banks of the Turkish Straits, he threw the cap he had brought with him from Paris into the water and, for the remainder of his time in the city, donned a fez. This single act symbolized Gautier’s application for and awarding of that coveted world citizenship. He was no longer a French national but rather an inhabitant of the cosmopolis, the “world city” which defies identification with a particular homeland. And yet had the tourist in the Grand Bazaar ventured to take the fez offered to him and place it atop his head, I would not have thought him a citizen of the world. He would have been a gullible tourist, and nothing more. Why was this the case?

Gautier’s generation lived half their lives under a spell and the other half divested of these very same illusions. In their

8 Théophile Gautier, Constantinople et autres textes sur la Turquie (Paris: La Boite à Documents, 1990), 33.

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youth, they had been enchanted by the Orientalism of poets like Lord Byron and René de Chateaubriand, salon paintings featuring lascivious Turkish harems and scenes of sultanic opulence. Its antique charm, the crumbling ruins, the lingering medieval religious sensibilities evoking the magnificence of the Bible: these qualities were certainly attractive to those with sensitive temperaments and romantic imaginations. In the Orient, a visitor found “the customs and practices both public and private of yesterday,” as the travel writer Eugène Fromentin claimed.9 To go east was to encounter a world forgotten by modern time and unspoiled by the materialism and conceit rampant among Europeans of the nineteenth century. It “differs [from Europe] just as the day differs from night,” Guatier wrote with sincerity. And precisely because of this unalloyed character, the Orient offered a pleasurable means of escaping the anxieties and trivialities of European life. It allowed those yearning for a more idyllic and simpler time to lose themselves in reveries for a few hours.10 “We covet the Orient on rainy days,” the novelist Gustave Flaubert insisted.11

Traveling through the Mediterranean during the 1850s and 1860s, Gautier would learn just how hackneyed the Orientalist aesthetic was. In the domain of art, the sensual, idealized and perfect were accessible; in the domain of reality, on the other hand, disillusion and disenchantment made for more bitter returns. Whether in North Africa or Asia Minor, nowhere could he find the harems, Oriental splendor or turbaned men idly smoking hookahs that he had glimpsed

9 Eugène Fromentin, Between Sea and Sahara: An Algerian Journal, trans., Blake Robinson (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 20.10 Théophile Gautier, Théophile Gautier, Voyage en Algérie (Paris: La Boite à Documents, 1898), 34.11 Letter to Louise Colet 11 December 1846, Gustave Falubert, Letter to Louise Colet 11 December 1846, Gustave Falubert, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Club de l’Honnêt homme, 1974), 12: 570.

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on the canvases adorning the exhibition halls of the Parisian salons. “Constantinople looks a lot like London and nothing like the Orient,” he wrote back to a friend, unamused.12 The exoticism and mystique gleaned from the costumes of French operas, salon paintings and literature of the early nineteenth century was, he later admitted, nothing but “a charming phantasmagoria” concocted by poets and artists.13

As in Istanbul, so too in Egypt. Alexandria’s cosmopolitan atmosphere, European buildings and modern train stations evoked nothing of the city’s classical heritage, while Cairo had little of the “authentic” Orient to offer the tourist. “Without the distinguishable minarets and palm trees,” Gautier bristled, “you would hardly believe yourself to be in Africa.”14 William Howard Russell, a correspondent for the London Times, had an equally critical view of Cairo, a city “most distressingly European” in its look and character. “Tall gaunt French and Italian looking houses seem staring at each other over partitions and garden walls as if in surprise at finding themselves in such a place,” he wrote in 1858. “The junction between the two is as ill-assorted as a Paisley fringe to a Cashmere shawl.”15 The static and timeless East conveyed by writers and artists had been supplanted by an era of increasing European influence, accelerated change and forward-looking sultans and emirs attracted to the prospect of western-style reforms. “Now is the time to see the Orient,” Flaubert advised his mother while making a trip through Egypt and the Levant in the late 1840s, because it’s disappearing, it’s getting civilized.”16

12 Letter to Louis de Cormenin 5 July 1852, in Gautier, Constantinople, 24.13 Gautier, Gautier, Voyage en Algérie, 140.14 Théophile Gautier, Théophile Gautier, Voyage en Égypte (Paris: La Boît à Documents, 1991), 38, 75.15 William Howard Russell, My Diary In India In The Year 1858-69 (London: Routledge, 1860), 1:31.16 Quoted in Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (New York:

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British observers in Meiji Japan were particularly sensitive to the rapid changes spurred by encounters with the West. Prior to the 1850s, Japan’s tradition of isolationism had shielded the island from foreign and “barbaric” influences. Yet with the opening of Japanese ports to foreign merchants beginning in the 1860s, a generation of Japanese statesmen and intellectuals embraced westernization as the guiding mantra of a “new Japan.” For many Europeans witnessing the nation’s march toward modernity, however, the effects were nothing short of grotesque. Elegant kimonos gave way to high-colored shirts and overcoats; the matted floors and lacquered writing tables traditionally found in offices and trade agencies were replaced with desks and chairs imported from Europe. According to Sir David Wedderbun who undertook an extensive voyage across Asia and the Pacific in the 1870s, the Victorian public now only asked a single question when it came to the land of the rising sun: “Will not the distinctive charms of Japanese life and manners within a few years disappear forever beneath the monotonous surface of modern civilization?”17

Assessing the newly-laid rail lines—a potent symbol of modernization in the nineteenth century—commissioned by the state in the decade after the Meiji restoration, the British naval commander of the Pacific fleet, Cyprian Bridge, denounced them as the “ugly scar of ‘Western Progress’—the shibboleth of New Japan.”18 The railroad was, in his opinion, only one of many foreign influences perverting the beauty and traditions of “the real Japan,” and he execrated everything from the “copies of European restaurants” beginning to replace Kyoto tea-houses to the arrival of Christian

Little Brown, 2006), 265.17 David Wedderburn, “Modern Japan,” The Fortnightly Review, new series (London: Chapman and Hall, 1878), 23:418.18 Cyprian A. G. Bridge, “The City of Kiyôto,” Fraser’s Magazine, new series (London: Longmans Green, 1878), 17: 58.

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missionaries and the seemingly insatiable infatuation for all things western currently in vogue among Japanese elites. “It is a pitiful tale, this overwhelming of an interesting and even romantic country by a deluge of vulgar common-place...,” Bridge despaired. “Those who would see anything of the real Japan should visit the country without delay.”19 What Bridge failed to realize, however, was that what he considered vulgar and commonplace was, in actuality, quite novel and innovative to Japanese observers. “Old Japan,” with its rich traditions, styles and patently Oriental traits was, as Bridge himself implicitly admitted, a creation of Europeans’ longing for “a different age.”20 Such desires prefigured the nostalgia that today remains the stock-in-trade of the modern tourist industry with its contrived traditions, exotic panoramas and claims to historical authenticity that are routinely packaged for tourist consumption.

The destruction of these pre-modern utopias was often most explicit in Europe’s colonial dominions, areas which European travelers and tourists increasingly had better access to over the course of the century as native populations were subdued and cities refashioned for the needs of colonial administrations. By the mid-1800s, French travelers need only make a two-day trip by steamboat across the Mediterranean to see this “civilizing” process unfolding in all its violence and ferocity. Following the invasion and subsequent occupation of Algeria commenced in 1830, French architects, engineers and settlers had begun to alter the physical and cultural geography of the Ottoman Maghrib in significant ways, transforming the once Moorish towns and cities of North Africa into European metropolises. Walking about the Marine quarter in the center of Algiers, one discovered “a little rue de Rivoli” cutting

19 Ibid., 70.20 Cyprian A. G. Bridge, “The Mediterranean of Japan,” The Fortnightly Review (1875), 24:208.

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through the heart of the city thronged by buildings resembling “Parisian imitations.”21 Everywhere a traveler turned, it was the same “bourgeois banality” one was accustomed to in France, Gautier complained.22 Gone were the Arab bazaars, the looming Moorish facades and the dark, labyrinthine streets so bemusing to foreigners. They had been replaced with European cafés where one overheard sibilant conversations conducted in French, wide boulevards lined with shops and theater houses frequented by European tourists and settlers.

In spite of their distance—in some cases, thousands of miles—from the continental fatherland, colonial settlers intended to lead European lifestyles in Africa and Asia, bringing with them forms of sociability and entertainment that mixed with or, in some case, altogether eclipsed indigenous cultural practices. While in Cairo, Gautier heard violins and classical guitar emanating from cafés and filling the streets but nowhere could he find traditional Arab music with its “muffled rhythms” and “bizarre tonalities.”23 The sobriety and piety that French observers associated with Muslim culture was vanishing in the midst of the cabarets, theaters and gambling houses run by North African colonists. “It is a very distressing sight,” the dramatist Ernest Feydeau remarked while watching Arabs sitting at French cafés in Algiers, “to see them publicly imbibing glasses of absinth and aping the manners of their vanquishers under the pretext of civilization.”24

In a colonial world predicated upon fast-paced modernization and a global economy, could a traveler still expect to encounter the foreign and exotic? Rather than the timeless and sublime Orient admired by romantics, the generation at mid-century was forced to recognize the East

21 Fromentin, Between Sea and Sahara, 11.22 Gautier, Gautier, Voyage en Algérie, 38.23 Gautier, Gautier, Voyage en Égypte, 74.24 Ernest Feydeau, Ernest Feydeau, Alger: Étude (Paris: Editions Bouchene, 2003), 62.

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as a site of change and transition little different than Europe. In both its ideology and practice, modern colonialism was premised upon a desire to reproduce Europe culturally, socially and topographically upon distant shores. It implanted and attempted to naturalize European populations on faraway continents, introduced the miseries of industrialization and endowed regions with new toponyms and identities. Europe was transformed from a geographic reference into an idea, one that proved exceedingly malleable and capable of taking root in almost any soil. Contemplating the Europeanized vistas beginning to appear across Africa and Asia, Ernest Feydeau gazed into the future only to see the horror of a globalized modernity consisting of homogenized cultures devoid of any sense of mystery or uniqueness. “One day . . . the entire globe will be dishonored by symmetry, and everything will be lowered to an inflexible level,” he warned. “Banality will reign over an incommensurable ennui.”

Voyageurs were spectators to this grand drama unfolding before them. They watched and recorded as their mythologies crumbled and a world once conceptualized in terms of difference, stark cultural contrasts and spatial oppositions violently contracted. To leave Europe for the shores of North Africa or Japan no longer entailed crossing radically divergent temporal and cultural barriers, that nearly mystical passage from the modern and progressive time of the West into the primordial past of the East. One now departed Paris only to re-encounter its simulacra in Algiers or arrived in Istanbul to find themselves reminded of London. Occident and Orient, once imagined as mutually-exclusive and hermetic spheres, began to acquire a troubling conceptual dissidence. “The Orient is disappearing,” Feydeau lamented in 1860, “disputing the terrain step by step, but it is disappearing with its exquisite forms.” Indeed it was, or at least a certain idea of it was

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anyway. The idea of the Orient held by Feydeau, Gautier and their coevals had always been a fantasy construction fashioned by the imaginations of romantic poets and writers. Their willingness to put faith in this representation said more about their dissatisfaction with their own society than it did about eastern societies. The appeal of the Orient lay precisely in the fact that it represented the complete opposite of nineteenth-century Europe. In this collective utopia was expressed the desire to escape the constraints and monotony of western modernity, to abandon the materialism and industrial landscapes of the present and seek solace in a mythic past.

It is exactly this point that distinguishes Gautier from the gullible tourist. Modern tourism is the illusion which insulates us from the reality of an ahistorical and “flat” world, to use the expression proffered by Thomas Friedman. It attempts to incarnate the authentic and transform the foreign into an acquirable and easily portable commodity. Travel, the author Michel Houellebecq insists, is “that most dream-like of commodities,” one that permits the tourist to gratify their personal desires and expectations of foreign places and cultures for a price. Gautier did not have this luxury. His world was one in which illusions were shattered, not sustained. For his generation, to wander meant to feel one’s self constantly in the nightmarish shadow cast by globalization. Today, we are free to roam uninhibited by these anxieties. As tourists, we can seek comfort in the knowledge that an entire industry and economy now exists to reinforce our anticipation of elsewhere. Travel has become an existential quandary of a different type. We no longer confront the globalized dystopia envisioned by nineteenth-century intellectuals. Rather, we encounter its mirror image: the highly-stylized simulacra of elsewhere.