If the city is given a meaning, or, rather a feeling by the novel what is the experience of the tourist? What does he look for? What does he wish to get and experience? The interviews show in most cases not any elements of literature, but rather some personal relationship and involvement in something labelled as important and famous because cultic. The behavior operating here is governed by religious mechanism with its special rites and language (Dávidházi, 1994, 39) The experience is not void of psychological content, i.e. of a religious mode in the psychological sense. The tourist may become emotional, he may cry, so a definitely elevated, sometimes even cathartic experience may take place. This is how the tourist may turn into a pilgrim and in the same way the souvenir bought at the ’shrine’ may become a ’relic’.
The analysis of the extent to which every souvenir has got the potential to become a relic or whether souvenirs are produced with an innate relic-making intention exceeds the scope of this study. However we may assert that the tourist
173
may transform into a pilgrim and the pilgrim ’dormant in many tourists’
(Dávidházi, 1994, 41) may be resuscitated even if only for a few seconds. The feeling of recognition or the experience of witnessing and testimony may take place several times during the travel bringing together with it an emotional state of mind .Equally, the pilgrim is often functionally a tourist. Besides his elevated state he needs accommodation, he has to eat, he spends money. This evident point has been fully exploited by pilgrim tourism and as a result, pilgrimage is and has been not only a religious activity but an important trigger of economy from the earliest ages.
One of the discourses on the tourist gaze (Urry, 2001) is the question of authenticity. Peter. D. Osborne distinguishes between the ’authentic’ and the
‘pseudo’ experience, and he suggests the search for both is characteristic of tourists activities. It is not always possible he claims to make the difference between the two while the same tourist might be attracted by both (Osborne 2000, 73). Urry says the tourist gaze as a postmodern phenomenon does not separate the authentic and inauthentic but both are valid for the tourist: a historic place as much as the Disney World, and the post- tourist is aware of the fact he consumes pseudo-attraction (Urry, 1990, 100)
Accepting the notion of pseudo-attraction we think in the case of our study real value attractions function as pseudo attractions and we believe the tourist often cannot make the difference because his evaluation does not move in the framework of rational judgement. In the image making process of the tourist photos and their appearances on the social media are of special importance:
‘photography and tourism work as meta systems which permit us to transform something experienced into something contemplated, consumed and personal’
(MacCannel 1976 quoted in Osborne 2000,75).
Joyce tours in Dublin, Bulgakov tours in Moscow and Angels and Demons tours in Rome
My ongoing research investigates tourist of Dublin James Joyce city tours (Bloomsday tours), of Bulgakov city tours in Moscow and of Angels and Demons city tours in Rome. On the basis of some examples I would like to answer the three points of my assumptions above
1. The tourists according to the interviews and blogs analyzed in my research most often have not read the novel and to the question whether they wished to read it in the future the most frequent answer was ’perhaps’, which means they do not approach the scenes as additions to literature. To the question whether the building meant anything for them in terms of architecture the answer was either uncertain or negative. Actually they did not see the point in these questions saying they were there because of the novel scene which of course was not an answer in the strict sense but tautology. The imagination for them was burdened
174
with the totality and unquestionable character of cultic behavior. This approach is especially tangible in cases of buildings: very often the houses visited because of the novel are disinteresting and have no special character, often very typical for the age and time they were built and carry no special architectural value. We can say there is not much to see on them. (Lime Street, Old doorway of Westland Roe Post Office, Cumberland street, Sweeny’s Chemist, Paddy Dignam’s House in Dublin). On the contrary in some cases the building is very special and is a piece of architecture of outstanding value as in the case of the clinic of Master and Margarita which most obviously was inspired by the Khmini City hospital (where even Lenin was cured) built in 1907 originally as a dacha for Sergei Pavlovich Patrikeev a honorary curator for Czar Alexander School and was designed by the famous modern architect Franz Osipovich Shekhtel (1859-0926) who also designed the Moscow Art Theatre. It strengthens our point that aesthetic value counts little: exceptional and ordinary pieces of architecture are brought to common denominator for the literature city tour tourist proving it is not only not literature they look for but not even architecture.
2. What innate potential makes certain novels become ’prey’ for tourist? In all the tree novels there is an intensive mobility of the protagonists: they permanently change places, they are moving from place to place giving a special dynamics to the narrative. These motions are of course to be interpreted symbolically and metaphorically in literature studies approaches (in Joyce’s novel Bloom’s stations relate to Odysseus’ wanderings whereas in Bulgakov the plots of the certain scenes are over toned with connotations of Heaven and Hell).
The tourists according to the interviews most often have not read the novel and they do not know about and are not interested in the academic readings, but still follow the route of the city tour organized for them which means their interest is to be looked for elsewhere. Their expectative interest determines their experience as well which has got nothing to do with academic readings of either literature or architecture, but can only be understood on the terrains of psychology. This interest is neither better nor worse than educated approaches since culture is not to be understood only as high culture but as popular culture as well. Bloomsday ritual in Dublin (after the name of the protagonist Leopold Bloom an unsuccessful advertisement canvasser and with a humorous reference to Doomsday (Dies Irae) is based on the idea that the plot of the novel takes place on one day (16th June 1904). Concrete time references we may add also tend to enhance tourism as tangible issues to capture. Bloomsday started as a joke in 1954 and has become ’an act not merely a study of homage, but in effect a sort of pilgrimage’ (Takács, 1994, 249) Ulysses is well known for the referential interpretation of Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus’s travels are a par excellence metaphor for travel, motion and mobility for classical European tradition. Bloom is an ironic equivalent of Odysseus in Joyce’s modern fiction
175
(which in fact is ’The Great Modern Fiction’ not void of cultic overtones) for all scholars of English literature. The contemporary tourist who follows the stations of any Ulysses city tours may be the postmodern Odysseus with another twist of irony and meaning. This problem takes us to the third question of value.
3. That academic or educated value is not the motivation for literature city tourism the best proof is the success of Angels and Demons city tours in Rome.
Dan Brown’s novel is everything but not high literature and even as pulp fiction it cannot be rated among the best ones. In this case the situation is of course is more complicated because a blockbuster movie came out produced in 2006 directed by Ron Howard starring Tom Hanks The Angels and Demons phenomenon should not only be analyzed as literature tourism but as film tourism to be paralleled with other movies produced on the basis of a ’sacred book’ like Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings. The fact that a pulp fiction can create as intensive a literature city tourism as cultic novels of modernism shows the most how much this motivation is not linked to what is claims to be about:
literature. Pulp fictions can any time become cult fiction.
In the case of Angels and Demons another huge problem raises: architecture and art that play an intensive part in the novel are the peaks of Rome’s monuments having been commented on by historians of art and architecture and having been visited and considered by all the so-called elite intellectual people since they were created. It is a huge question whether the ’consumption’ of Rome through the book worth’s the same as the interpretation of those buildings and sculpture at a ’face value’. Is this kind of interpretation just another way of understanding culture and cultural tourism?
Summary
Without touching directly the two thousand year long debate concerning the nature of the work of art, of value, of where the interpretation of the real meaning in the triangular interrelation of the author, the audience and the work of art is we can say marginally we have done so. The most important thing we can state is that the answer to what motivations induce and along what elaboration processes the literary tourists’(and in the broad sense all tourists’) memory is determined when creating a so-called authentic experience the major factor is imagination, fictitiousness and often cultic processes with ’quasi-religious behavior.’ Caren Kaplan says travel is a mythologized narration of displacement (1996). If we accept the landscape is consumed as a dreamscape and is elaborated as memory scape it means authenticity is an imaginative product. The theoretical question is then: what do we sell and buy?
176
Experience is evidently emotion specific and emotions have important impacts on cognitive organizations: on attention, on memory and on thinking. Linton proved in his research (1980) that events possible to recall well are the unique and characteristic ones. Already William James claimed in his psychology study book (1890): ’My experience is something I can pay attention to.’ Quasi-religious experiences are definitely unique and characteristic by nature: the intensity of emotions related to them seems to (pre)determine cognition, experience and memory as well.
Authenticity is a pseudo-reality for those who consume cultic places and the experience of the locations become independent of reality in the everyday sense.
This phenomenon seems easier to capture if the spot of cultic approach visited by thousands of tourists every year is a natural place like Bella’s cliff from Twilight interesting only because of the film, Loch Ness which is visited mainly because of the monster or the Equator which is a theoretical line rather than a real locus. The visitors in these cases are in a place which is not what it is, which in a sense does not exist only in terms of a very special interest. But in cases of buildings or city locations visited because of a novel the place seems ’more’ real since it is a built object definitely and tangibly existing. It is not easy to understand that the reality even of built objects may be as imaginary as that of natural sites.
The aim of this study was to prove that in case of literary city tours the experience of the visitor is a very special cognitive structure that while mutually
’corrupting’ literature by means of architecture and architecture by means of literature in a psychological process of quasi- religious cognition results in a special experience phenomenon in terms of imaginary reality and re-interprets literature through architecture and architecture through literature The reality of the authentic experience in this case is unreality itself.
References
Assmann, J.(1991) A kulturális emlékezet.Írás, emlékezés és politikai identitás a korai magaskultúrákban.ford. Hidas Antal.Budapest. Atlantisz . (Cultural Memory.Writing, remembrance and Political Identity in Early High Cultures)
Augé, M.(1995) Non-places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.Trans.john Howe.London, New York: Verso
Basu, P.(2013)Memoryscapes and Multi-Sited Methods in.Research Methods for Memory Studies .ed.: E. Keightley and Michael Pickering
Belhassen,Y.,Caton,K. and Stewart,W.P. (2008)The search for Autenticity in Pilgrim Experience. The Annals for Tourism Research. 35.4. 668-689
Best, S (1989) The Commodification of Reality and the Reality of Commodification: jean Boudrillard and Post-modernism. Current Perspectives in Social Theory 9.23-52 Dávidházi, P.(1994) Cult and Criticism: Rituals int he European Perception of
Shakespeare.Literature and its Cults: an Anthropological Approach.Eds: péter Dávodházi & judit Karafiáth.Budapest-Argumentum
177
Debuyst, F.(2005). A hely szellem a keresztény építészetben. Pannonhalma: Bencés Kiadó Eco, U.(1986) Travels to Hyperreality : Essays. Trans.William Weaver.San Diego: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich
Edensor, T. (2000) Staging Tourism: Tourists as Performers. Annals of Tourist Research 27.2.322-344
Erőss, F.(1994) Psychoanalysis and its Cults. A Brief Survey .in. Literature and its Cults.An Anthropological Approach. Budapest:Argumentum
Halbwachs, M.(1980). Collective Memory.trans:Francis J. Ditterand Vida Yazdi Ditter.New York: Harper
Jakle, J.A (1994) The Visual Elements of Landscape. Amherst :University of Massachusetts Press
Kaplan, C.(1996) Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham:
Duke University Press
Linton,M.(1980) Transformations of Memory in Everyday Life.In: Neisser (ed.) Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts San francisco, Freeman
Lowenthal, D.(1979) Environmental Perception. Preserving the past. Progress in Human Geography 3(4) 549-559
MacCannel, D.(1973) Staged authenticity. Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings.
American Journal of Sociology 79.3. 589-603
MacCannel, D.( 1999) The Tourist. The Theory of Leasure Class 1976. London: University of California Press.Reprint
Mitchell, W.J.T.( 2005) What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press
Moscovici, S.( 1984) the Phenomenon of Social Representations. Social Representations 1984.3-70
Nora, P. (2010). Emlékezet és történelem között.válogatott tanulmányok.vál. és szerk.K.Hortáth Zsolt.Ford. Haas Lídia et al. Budapest: Napvilág
Norberg-Schulz, Ch.(1980) Genius Loci. Towards the Phenomenology of Architecture.
London:Academy Editions
Oatley,K-Jenkins, M (1996): Understanding Emotions. Blackwell Publishers Inc, Cambridge,MA
Osborne, P. D. (2002) Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture. Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York
Pine, B.J and Gilmore,J.H (1999).The Experience Economy. Boston. Harvard Business School Press
Radstone, S and Hodkin, K. (2003) Regimes of Memory:An Introduction.in: S. Radstone and K. Hodkin (eds) Regimes of Memory.London: Routladge
Ricoeur, P (1999) Emlékezés-felejtés-történelem (Memory-Forgetting-History).In. A kultúra narratívái (The Narratives of Culture).Budapest.Kijárat kiadó
Rigó, B.(2005) Recenzió: Christian Norberg Schulz : Genius Loci. Vigília 2005/1
Stafford, B.M. (1997). Good Looking.Essays on Virtue and Images.2nd ed.Cambridge:MIT Press.
Takács,F. (1994). The Idol Diabolized:James Joyce in East European Marxist Criticism. In Literature and its Cults. An Anthropological Approach. P.Dávidházi &J.karafiáth (eds) Argumentum
Takács, J. (1999) Antropológia és irodalomtörténetírás (Anthropology and Literary Criticism) in: Buksz, I 38-47
Urry, J. (1999) The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies.London.
Sage Publications
178