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Citation: Harper's Magazine July 1998, v297, n1778, p9(3)
Author: Lapham, Lewis H.
Title: Anywhere but here.(reflections on imaginary travel
destinations)(Column) by Lewis H. Lapham
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COPYRIGHT 1998 Harper's Magazine Foundation
The rain at Marly is not wet.
--Louis XIV
In the New York Times early last May I noticed a story about a tour
operator offering to conduct a limited number of guests to the wreck of the
Titanic, two miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. The descents into
the abyss were scheduled for August, the one month in which the sea was calm
enough to permit the coming and going of a Russian submersible, but space
could be reserved for only two people at a time, each of them paying $32,500
for the round trip. Although entertaining neither wish nor hope of booking
passage, I cut the item from the paper and filed it with one that I'd come
across last February in the Los Angeles Times about a nonprofit organization
in San Francisco that provides "reality tours" to the scenes of human squalor.
At prices ranging from $30 to $525 the Global Exchange sends concerned
citizens, most of them students or retired librarians, into the slums of
Mexico, Guatemala, and Vietnam, sometimes into the poorer neighborhoods around
San Francisco Bay. The tourists travel in air-conditioned buses supplied with
bottled water, chocolate espresso beans, and organic pears, and from time to
time they stop to talk to battered women and homeless men, to inspect a
toxic-waste dump or an emaciated chicken. The paper quoted Jerry Mallett,
president of the Adventure Travel Society, to the effect that even the best
and happiest of Americans cannot be expected to play endless rounds of golf,
and that after one has come to the end of the menu at all the Hyatt hotels in
Florida and Hawaii, even the most expensive resorts exude a threadbare sense
of deja vu. "Sitting on the beach, that's for the minority today," Mallett
said. "People want to learn about their surroundings."
The two reports suggested new directions in the travel business and ways
out of the difficulties foreseen as long ago as 1962 by Daniel Boorstin in his
book The Image. Taking up the question of what happens to the consciousness of
people imprisoned within the self-referential spaces of the media's
magic-lantern show, Boorstin observed that modern travel differs very little
from going to a movie or turning the pages of a magazine. The travelers never
arrive at any new place. Having seen it all on film, not once but a thousand
times, they meet with experiences already enbalmed in some other medium, and
they might as well be living in a museum or an electronics store.
During the thirty-odd years since Boorstin remarked on the effect, the
movie and television industries have done their best to open lines of escape
into the fields and forests of a world elsewhere. They address their special
effects the dinosaurs, the explosions, the fairy-tale castles to audiences
bored or disappointed by the terms of their prerecorded existence. Just as
nineteenth-century English factory workers yoked to the machinery of the
Industrial Revolution found the shortest road out of Manchester in a bottle of
gin, so also the indentured clerks wired to the technology of the
communications revolution find in Steven Spielberg's postcards the easiest
exit ramp out of Bridgeport.
A few of the more adventurous spirits at the cineplex apparently wish for
something more solid than images floating in a weightless void (something with
heft and substance that might promote them from the rank of mere spectator and
fill what they take to be the empty boxes of their lives with the toys of
consequence and action), and maybe they'll content themselves with improvised
theme parks in the streets of Tijuana or at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
But the profit in their restlessness has yet to be fully exploited, and two
weeks after I read about the voyages to the wreck of the Titanic, the morning
mail brought word of possibilities to which I previously had been blind.
The suggestion took the form of a press agent's letter drumming up trade
for a New Year's Eve party next winter in the palace of Versailles, an
occasion billed by its organizers as a "Fantasy Island type of proposition"
for "romantic souls" looking to make the long journey "back over 300 years to
the Feasts of the Sun King," the music of Jean Baptiste Lully, and the
presumably reassuring sight of their own reflections in the Galerie des
Glaces. Available to anybody willing to pay $1,300 for an invitation, the
evening promised roast partridge, fireworks, footmen in gold lace, gracious
appearances by modern-day notables, among them "automotive mogul Lee Iacocca
and actress Stephanie Powers," striking the poses original to the late
Princesse de Tingry and the once-upon-a-time Duc du Maine.
I don't know how I could have been so slow to take the point. For the last
twenty years the merchants of the news and entertainment media have been
fattening the market for historical romance. The fashion advertisements pose
their mannequins against the backgrounds of the Ming dynasty or the Inca
empire; the television networks delight in tales of King Arthur's court;
university development offices arrange to send their most openhanded alumni on
summer cruises (complete with lesson plans and history professors) to the land
of the pharaohs and the pillars of Hercules. The Hollywood movies most often
in the news--Titanic, The English Patient, Braveheart, Amistad, The Wings of
the Dove, Jefferson in Paris, The Age of Innocence, The Scarlet Letter,
etc.--aspire to the poetry of travel guides.
What the characters do or say matters less than how the costumes look and
the way in which the nostalgic cinematography drifts through the kingdoms of
time past, which, as the producers well know, remain as foreign to most
American audiences as the lost continent of Atlantis. Our schools don't teach
much history, and even among people believed to be educated, the historical
record divides into only three parts--time present, living memory, and
antiquity. Antiquity is everything longer ago than anybody in the conversation
can remember having seen as a child, an enchanted place where Abraham Lincoln
reads his speeches to Julius Caesar, who is comparing swords with King
Ethelwulf, who waits on the cliffs of Avalon for the black ship bringing Marie
de Medicis and Hermann Goring home from the siege of Troy.
I think of the number of people I meet who say (not without an air of
self-congratulation) that they would rather have been born in the eighteenth
century or the twelfth, and maybe they could be persuaded to pay first-class
prices (comparable to those asked for the better staterooms on the Titanic) to
wander the pilgrim road back in time. Given the daydreaming of a market both
ignorant and rich, I can imagine a new generation of tour operators selling
weekends in the fifteenth century and twenty-one-day excursions to the Italian
Renaissance or the California Gold Rush. At the high end of the market, the
early demand presumably would favor mise en scene within the upper ranks of
society during historical periods notorious for their displays of decadence
and silk, and having listened to enough corporate executives complain about
the watery, milquetoast pleasures available on the company retreats to Hilton
Head (too much golf, no insolent intellectuals to send to the galleys or the
lions), I expect that Nazi Germany might prove as popular a destination as
ancient Rome.
Assuming that the tour operators agreed to dress the sets, seeing to it
that everything was the way it was in the good old days--the costumes correct,
the meat rotten, the soldiery treacherous and cruel--they undoubtedly would
come up against some early difficulties with the hiring of competent staff. It
isn't always easy to find reliable falconers, or well-trained gun crews
capable of firing ships' cannon at the intervals recommended by Admiral
Horatio Nelson, and it might be hard to hire a regiment of unemployed German
automobile mechanics willing to wear the uniform of the Waffen SS, or a
sufficient number of unwed mothers in Marin County to supply the redlight
districts of the Barbary Coast.
Even so, and notwithstanding the bureaucratic delays apt to be imposed by
governments reluctant to lend their citizens and their parliament buildings to
the games of let's-pretend, the technical problems could be overcome. In some
countries it might be necessary to construct rather than rent the impressions
of time past, but the ample reserves of unskilled labor currently adrift in
the world would allow for the repeated stagings of natural calamities and
ill-advised military campaigns.
The only serious obstacle in the way of making a success of the business
probably would prove to be the character of the American tourist, an innately
sensitive and cautious individual unaccustomed to the sight of human heads
posted like traffic signs on the gibbets of Elizabethan London. We are a
thoroughly domesticated people who make rules against raw milk and unmediated
emotion, afraid to drink alcohol or smoke tobacco or eat the unwashed salad.
Although we like to weave the story of our exceptionalism with the thread of
frontier cloth (gaunt, stiff-necked figures, solitary and self-reliant,
forever striding west), when given the chance to wander into the mountains or
follow the call of the wild, we fall back behind the lines of our prepared
excuses and check into the nearest cage.
Without air-conditioned buses and organic pears (to say nothing of the
sunglasses, the Tylenol, the bottled water, and the cell phone), none of the
journeys through the world in time would be as much fun as they might be made
to seem in a movie by Merchant Ivory. All very well to go blithely off into
eighteenth-century London wearing the wig and feathered hat of a noble duke,
but what if one didn't know that the duke had a clubbed left foot, that his
bowels were incontinent, his mistress in the habit of referring to him as a
foul-smelling stoat?
At Louis XIV's palace most of the apartments were poorly ventilated and
smaller than the closets at a Four Seasons Hotel; a bathroom was a chamber
pot. The king encouraged the members of his court to play cards for stakes
certain to force them into bankruptcy. Beyond the age of thirty, few people
retained possession of their teeth. Smallpox was always near at hand, and when
a member of the royal family died, the autopsy was conducted as a polite
ceremony that everybody was expected to attend, the head sawed open, the
entrails presented to a duchess in a silver bowl.
Neither was Rome in the first and second centuries B.C. without its
inconveniences. The streets were narrow and crowded, the wagon traffic
impassable, the jerry-built apartment blocks subject to frequent fires and
imminent collapse. Men shaved with dull razors; women painted their arms with
chalk, their eyebrows with ashes, and their lips with the dregs of wine.
Even the high-minded tourists, the ones hoping for political or moral
lessons, would have trouble with the quaint, old-fashioned customs. A six-week
voyage on a slave ship bound from the Bight of Benin to Charleston, South
Carolina, almost certainly would prove more instructive than a "reality tour"
through the northeastern settlements of Washington, D.C., but it wouldn't be
an adventure that one would want to undertake without adequate stores of
Prozac. Readers of William Bennett's Book of Virtues might wish to spend a
summer in Puritan New England, attending the witch trials and applauding the
sermons of Jonathan Edwards, but unless they remembered to refrain from
blasphemy, they would find themselves denied the privilege of speech.
Sooner or later, the more experienced pilgrims would learn to engage
consulting historians. Attached to rich households or corporate headquarters
with a status similar to that of personal trainers, the historians could point
their patrons in safe directions (Florence, yes, but not in 1351; by all means
a tour of Czarist Russia, but not during the reign of Ivan the Terrible and
never in the winter), and travel to the kingdoms of the past would be confined
to very few times and places, the choice of roles limited to the extremely
small cast of historical characters clever enough to have anticipated the
great truths of late twentieth-century hygiene.
Most of the parts played on the stage of Louis XIV at Versailles wouldn't
appeal to the modem American traveler: the Grand Dauphin was too fat, Madame
de Montespan too cynical, the Duc de Vendome too fond of stale and stinking
fish. The courtier best matched to the refinement of our modern sensibility
probably would prove to be M. de L'Orme, the king's physician, who lived to
the age of ninety-four. As described by Nancy Mitford in The Sun King, he was
a careful man, "who spent his days in a sedan chair draped with blankets and
lined with rabbit fur. When obliged to go out he covered himself with a
morocco robe and mask, also with six pairs of stockings and several fur hats.
He slept in a sort of brick oven, surrounded by hotwater bottles, and he
always kept a bit of garlic in his mouth, incense in his ears, and a stalk of
rue sticking out of each nostril." Not only a careful man, but a prescient
man, certain that if he had been asked for an opinion, he would have
preferred--all things considered, and even when taking into account the
loveliness of Louise de la Valliere and the conversation of Racine--Versailles
the movie.
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