Literary cults, i.e. the cultic approach to famous authors and works of art are not a new phenomenon, in special ways they have always existed. This realm of human phenomenon used to exist outside the interest of literary critics and serious academic approach since it seemed closer to popular representations than high culture to which literature scholars normally claim to belong to. With an anthropological turn in literary studies from the 1980’s and with a growing interest in human behavior outside the terrains of psychology studies literary cults have come more into the foreground .In the study of literary cults scholarly and popular grounds of literature have started to overlap as a result of which absolutely new questions have been raised concerning the author, the work of art and meaning (Dávidházi, 1989, 1994).Studying cults is a special interpretative practice that examines not only the texts but also the image of the author as well as objects and actions related to him/her in terms of how culture is consumed everything Paul de Man calls disdaining the ‘foreign affairs of literature’
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(Takács, 2002). We can state examination of cults means how a given literature is culturally imbedded.
Literary city tours: a corruption of both the buildings and the literary pieces. Or is it a different cognition?
In case of a building approached and interpreted from any aspect of literature it is not only literature that is ‘corrupted’, but architecture as well. We can say it is not only the piece of literature that is not appreciated for its immanent literary values, but the same is true for the building in terms of architecture: the visitor who appreciates a building because it is an important place in a novel will surely not give either the building or the literary piece a great esteem (according to their own terms: literature according to terms of literature, and architecture according to terms of architecture /let us not go deeper into the theoretical question of what these terms really are in their academic meanings/). But he/she does greatly esteem the … what exactly? What is the visitor’s reality and what is his experience? This is the question of this study.
The phenomenon will be investigated in terms of the following theories:
experience economy (Gilmore, 1999), collective and cultural memory (Halbwachs 1941, Assmann, 1999) genius loci and the phenomenology of architecture (Norberg-Schulz, 1980), social representations (Moscovici, 1984) and lieu de mémoire (Pierre Nora, 2010) respectively on a comparative and confronting method.
The house is not a building for its own architectural merits and is in no way an element of literature in the closest scholarly sense. What is the building then? Is it a fictitious place in a real urban space? Does it exist at all in the basic sense of the word? It surely does, because you can see it and you can touch it whereas it definitely has got a very intricate system of meanings in the sense of cognition.
With this provocative approach our final aim is to get closer to the notion of authenticity in the touristic space.
Besides the terrain of literature there are all kinds of cultic places in relation to famous persons like in case of the ‘Great Old Man’ Sigmund Freud (Erőss F.
1994), or Rembrandt, etc. Actually all kinds of places related to important historical figures can be conceived in terms of cultic meaning to a certain extent.
We are aware of the fact the term ’cult’ is very problematic , sometimes it seems too much burdened, sometimes even translucent. In a way it can be claimed all cultural tourism is pushed by some kind of cultic interest producing cultic behavior.
In this paper cult and cultic will be used in the relatively narrow sense of quasi-religious devotion towards something definitely not quasi-religious with a specific attitude, ritual and a language: ‘The attitude characteristics of cults is
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unconditional reverence, a commitment so total and devoted, so final and absolute that it precludes every conceivable criticism of its object.’ (Dávidházi, 1994, 31)
Elements of pilgrimage appearing outside the terrain of religion are well-known to all of us from boring school excursions when birthplaces, death masks, pens and slippers of famous literary figures had to be visited and observed on an obligatory basis. The cultic approach to outstanding literary, cultural, or historical figures have always attracted visitors and induced tourism. Visiting quasi sacred places is a typical phenomenon of cultic behavior. The tourist may sometimes only for seconds turn into a pilgrim who needs to obtain a relic at least in the form of a souvenir. Reduced size famous houses of famous people are available in the museum shop in puzzle or pop up form and/or as pictures on fridge magnets, mugs, and umbrellas or on T-shirts.
Placed of memory (‘lieux de mémoire’) gain essences originally not their own, that is to say, something that is not there, something that DOES NOT EXIST (it is of course a theoretical problem whether the concept ‘originally intrinsic’ to a place or there are as many interpretations as experiences. The question is very complicated since the personal experience is itself not definable and depends on age, education, culture, psychological state, etc., and can be approached synchronically diachronically, hermeneutically, micro-historically, etc. For the purpose of this study we assume that there is a tangible sign system of a place to be understood geographically, historically, culturally, that is worth examining from the point of view of the visitor’s perception). The pilgrim (-like) places are filled with contents originally not their own, i.e. with something actually not there. The goal of cultic travel does not actually exist and its significance should not be looked for in its real representative presence but in some other additional value. The goal of any cultic travel is NOT A PLACE, but, more precisely a NON-PLACE. Augé argues, as opposed to places non-places ‘ do not integrate to earlier places and they are classified and promoted to the places of ’places of memory’and assigned to a specific position’ (Augé , 1995,78, italics mine)
Mechanisms of consumption strengthen the need for spectacles (Best, 1989) and institutionalize how the tourist attractions should be gazed upon, photographed and framed (Urry, 1995). The ’toured objects’ (Belhassen, 2008) are then captured and reproduced as previously imagined in representative examples. The phenomenon may be interpreted with Mitchell’s (2005) ’pictorial turn.’ It is a shift that has been denoted as a transition into a society as spectacle. The real has become hyper-real or a simulacrum (Ricoeur, 1999), the world has been replaced by a copy of the world. Umberto Eco labelled this notion as the
‘authentic fake’ (1986), a concept possible to be paralleled to Stafford’s ’ocular centrism’ (1997).
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The most evident cultic places in literature may be burial places, homes of, or any important locations in relation to the deceased author. The touristic value is the personal aspect that may make the figure of the famous author more human and personal and possibly more consumable through a process of domestication.
The motivation is not to know or to understand better the oeuvre of the author, and the phenomenon has got nothing to do with the work of art. A huge number of visitors and potential visitors most probably have never read and will never read anything from the given author. These houses then, are not what they are:
they are permeated by a content that makes them special and create a ’feeling’
around them possible to compare to the notion of genius loci (Debuyst, 2005). In this sense real objects can be called fictitious as well. They do not exist in the manner they are consumed and conceived which means them ARE NOT THERE as they are in the cognition of the tourist pilgrim.