7.07 Mapping Dreams

 

PEI and Tamara

 

So we’ve seen that while the tourism industry feeds our desires to meet the literary experience we want, it also ultimately falls short, artificial and curated as it is. More, that “front stage” showcase nearly always masks a broader and more complicated context which, often as not, is fraught with profit motives and exploitation across history, even death. And so I left us with the idea that somewhere–somehow–in the interchange between these two spaces (front and back stage) we might find something meaningful and satisfying.

You’re entitled to ask, “Yeah, but how?” And we’ll get there, I think. So to start today, let’s think about place, about geography, about space, some more. Le Febvre told us last time that space is produced. That is, it is always a dynamic interaction between the fantasy image of its designers and the actual behavior across history of those who have lived in it. But then there’s Italo Calvino. . . . 

Have you read Calvino? My gosh, where to start with this magnificent thinker? My favorite (as oddball as it is), is one of his last books, Mr. Palomar, a series of observations by a quite eccentric but nonetheless it-is-hard-to-call-brilliant man. There are also some other great places to start with him; um, if once a winter’s night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, maybe Cosmicomics, of course. But I’d like to spend just a little bit of time with his book Invisible Cities. It’s set up to be a conversation between world traveler Marco Polo and the famed Kublai Khan. Polo, in a sort of lyrical prose, describes several dozen made-up cities he has visited, and then the Khan quizzes him about them. Along the way, we learn about humanity through Polo’s descriptions. Let’s look at one or two. 

Early on in the book, Polo describes the city of Tamara. He starts by describing it this way:

The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth-drawer’s house; a tankard, the tavern; halberds, the barracks; scales, the grocer’s. Statues and shields depict lions, dolphins, towers, stars: a sign that something–who knows what?- has as its sign a lion or a dolphin or a tower or a star. . . . 

Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts. . . .

However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it. 

Well, you can see why I’ve been thinking about it, yes? It’s our tourism experience. We see prepared before us images intended to represent an idea or moment from our reading: the Enchanted Bookcase, the Haunted Wood, a carriage ride or raspberry cordials or a young actor costumed in red pigtails. 

And if we accept the images and narrative offered to us, we only believe we are visiting. Whatever the place really is, PEI and Montgomery’s historical reality, we don’t find it.  

Theme

 

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I have to ask, Romantic Literary Landscape or Grittier Reality? Where should we turn our gaze?

My PEI Failures

 

So that’s our current problem: we are either riding across the imaginary surfaces of the places we visit (just as the tourism industry stages for us) or we sneak behind the curtain and look into the garbage bins in some kind of cynical left-wing expose which ruins our vacations. And well, now, that’s a binary opposition, isn’t it? Two, exclusive, polarized choices. And if you’ve been listening to the podcast for any length of time, you know I am highly skeptical of such choices. I mean, they’re handy for quick assessments —sometimes— but I would never recommend using them for serious interpretations. Instead, we can inspect the binary itself for the thinking, the ideologyFrom Todd Gitlin and Antonio Gramsci, a system of beliefs—ra... More, which built it, for the more complex relationships that really exist between the opposing sides (which are never merely opposites), and for the misalignments between it and the object it tries to measure.

Take, for instance, the comment I might get so far in this season: I’m ruining the fun and relaxation of literary travel by thinking too hard about it. There’s a binary working there: fun is set in opposition to thinking. You can’t have fun if you think too much. Anyone making such a comment is counting on it not being thought about. Said so plainly–Fun is Not Thinking—I suspect we all can see the problem. People who aren’t thinking aren’t guaranteed to have fun: though they may become frustrated or angered by something they encounter and have no understanding of why. And people who are thinking are by no means denying themselves fun. Puzzles can be fun; mysteries can be fun; creating original works of art can be fun. They’re just not in the category of fun where I might also put roller coasters and Mardi Gras beads. So right away, I can reject the opposition as being some real kind of “opposite.” In fact, we might have been better to say the two terms each have subsets in the other: There are categories of fun which include thought and some which don’t. There are categories of thinking which are more or less “fun,” perhaps. But the astrophysicist and I will disagree on what those categories are. Fun is a matter of taste, of personal interest. Thinking? Less so.

But we’re also talking about a particular kind of tourism here, literary tourism. This isn’t about going to yet another roller coaster, but this one has Chewbacca pictures slapped onto the side of it. Readers are folks in search of meaningful experiences. They want, I believe, to discover something by making that physical visit, something related to the book they’ve read. It may be that topophilia we’ve talked about, that almost biological urge to pilgrimage to meet the land and map the world of the author and her creation. Or, it might be to realize the space of the characters from the book. In that case, the “true” location becomes less important than the perfect simulation of one: so Pinocchio Park in Tuscany, Italy, is worth the visit, maybe, or of course the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Florida; a Jane Austen weekend in Hyde Park, or Avonlea Village on PEI.

In any event, if we didn’t require the place to be meaningful, we wouldn’t need to travel to that particular space: any would do, if all we wanted was thoughtless fun. (And yes, we will come back to that claim before we’re done!) 

But my claim so far? In part, it’s that the tourism industry is more often driven to the “presentation” of meaning as it believes we want it than the more authentic meaning itself. That we buy this (and I mean that figuratively and literally) is partly because it’s all that is offered to us: I can walk right up to Stephen King’s gate of his house, but he’s not coming out to let me in. I can see Montgomery’s Enchanted Bookcase but I am neither certain it is actual nor am I able to see it as she did in the non-museum house where she saw the reflections. It’s always an “almost.” 

I can enjoy the experience, I can have fun, but the meaningful part always falls short. To make up for it, I take more photos (themselves not quite the experience), I buy souvenirs, I post on social media (maybe someone else watching my trip on Insta vicariously can find me a different sort of meaning). We’re already in “substitution” mode. One of the key pieces of advice I would give my students when we traveled was to first, “Set down the phones and cameras. Let the experience meet your eyes directly. Slow down and feel that experience. You can always tell stories later.”

And I still remember a group of teachers I joined to travel to Japan in 2002. So much more we might have experienced had we not stopped every 30 minutes for a 15 minute single-file photo shoot of a particular shrine or statue. Is it impossible to share photos? When it came to group photo time, I would take pictures of all the cameras piled up for our guide to use, one after the other. 

Sorry for that side rant, but here’s the thing. If I just wanted photos, I could order them. I’m traveling here to meet something meaningful, and that requires some kind of thinking about it. True, on PEI I was far more interested in Montgomery than Anne the character. And you may, just a minute ago, have heard me mention a place on PEI that I had not before. So far I’ve talked about Heritage Places and park authorities and museums. I have not talked about Avonlea Village, which is basically a theme park for Anne of Green Gables, not a mile or so from the other sites.

And I don’t want to say much of it except that first, I didn’t go. The good news is that you can park and walk in without paying anything. The bad news is that, from what I saw, it is more of an artificially Anne-fantasy style outdoor shopping mall. There are hyper-bright colors, a couple of musical shows which sometimes appear with comical characters, and then half a dozen shops and eight different restaurants. They boast that amongst all the replica buildings, three are original to Montgomery’s hometown of Cavendish, but you’ll soon see that the town church is now—I kid you not—a BoomBurger restaurant. At least it wasn’t MooMoo BBQ, which serves authentic “Texas” cuisine, just the thing for your meaningful PEI visit. So, yeah, I didn’t go. Sure, it might have been fun for some (and it turns a hefty profit, I understand), but it’s not meaningful, even to those just seeking Anne.

But that’s the “front stage,” the industry’s offering of authenticity and . . . fun. I had to look elsewhere. And I admit it: I failed to try everything the literary tourism industry was offering when it came to Anne of Green Gables. Because I thought that—….well, I just thought.

The Unhandy Embrace

 

It’s not just Anne, though, is it? I’m betting you’re thinking of some of your own experiences. What you’ve seen and where you’ve–well, let’s say you and I have been discriminating. Maybe not like the full-on wine connoisseurs, but selective enough to know what does and doesn’t match what we’re after. Hopefully.

And this industry keeps trying to serve up the simulation and circumvent our discrimination. (Hey, that rhymed.) 

One literary work which still pulls folks to London, for instance, is the world of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. If you skip all the movie and TV scene tours, you can still do a walking tour which promises gaslit alleys and the famous Sherlock Holmes pub. Do I have to tell you that the walking tour ends there? But it’s all about the mood, the aura. You can go to a Sherlock Holmes museum which is actually at 239 Baker Street, because when Doyle was writing his books, Baker street only went up into the 100s. Later, the street grew longer, and the property the museum nabbed applied for a special permit to get the address 221b. If you talk with them, they will tell you that Holmes’s apartments have been well kept, pretending that these are in some odd way real. 

But let me ask, what are these tourists interested in? The ambience? The mood of the 1890s gaslight? Certainly London now looks and behaves nothing like Doyle’s era. It’s like, both tourist and tour work together to force a literary fiction onto the actual city map. They can’t, of course. The simulated mood stops can’t compete against the infamous London city crosswalks. And, more, these tours don’t even work to represent Holmes as a character, anyway. We get the romanticized part, but not the darker chapters. Holmes was someone who always sought a case, something for him to think about, which for him was quite fun. But when he had little to puzzle over, to question, he inhabited what Doyle describes as a “dreary, dismal, unprofitable world.”  And we miss, of course, Holme’s own “7% Solution” to this dreariness: the 7% formula he created for his cocaine use, which I think is first mentioned in the novel The Sign of the Four.  So come on, tour operators! We want authentic Holmes. Let’s meet a cocaine dealer. Or are we, maybe, pretending that this part of London doesn’t exist? Did we really come all the way to London for only the G-rated romantic version of the books we admire? 

No doubt we could say the same for James Joyce’s Dublin. It’s kind of difficult to find an unironic celebratory mood anywhere in Joyce’s works. But that won’t stop us from marking June 16 each year as Bloomsday, the date when the events of his novel Ulysses takes place, and when his character Leopold Bloom walked the streets. Now this is an event a little different from the ones we’ve spoken about before: it’s a marked festival at a certain time, a commemoration of Joyce and his novels as much (and certainly more) than an authentic meeting of Bloom. There are foot races and theater performances, concerts and food fests, walking tours and readings. It’s a celebration of all things Joyce (and a few things which aren’t at all connected to Joyce). It’s closer, then, to our Mardi Gras conception of fun, because we certainly don’t go for authenticity, except again in that idea that we want Dublin to somehow act the same as it did in 1904. Good luck with that.  And besides, while we’re eating our mutton kidneys, shouldn’t we remember that Bloom spent most of the novel in a state of profound alienation and despair over a world that demands violent, macho heroism? It was just this sort of boisterous and performative celebration that Bloom found himself rejecting. But no matter, I guess. Enjoy the mutton.

What’s happening here is something theorist Edward Said called “imaginative geography.” He says that what we do is build for ourselves mental maps of places—maybe ones we’ve read in books or through art or just plain personal desire—long before we actually get there. We replace the actual geography with that imaginative one. 

Now this may seem harmless in some ways, but let’s recall first some of the histories of Marquez’s Aracataca and of Montgomery’s PEI which built the tourism attractions we actually meet. Our gaze is directed to what we desire to see, not what is there. We don’t then, in fact, actually meet the places we travel to. We meet the best version our discriminatory taste guides us toward, rejecting everything that doesn’t fit. 

For Said, this is not a small matter. He’s writing from a post-colonialist perspective. In other words, he’s talking about “imaginative geography” in terms of how Western visitors meet the Arab and African worlds. Here, try it this way. Let’s say I want to take you on a trip to Morocco to the city of Casablanca. What does your head immediately do? What do you expect to see and do? And, for those of you under the age of 30, there’s this movie from 1942—I know, I know, it’s in black and white—that stars some famous dead people. See it. And your head will be forever changed about your travel expectations there.

This imagination we carry, we readers, can actually, then, be not only wrong, but even dangerous. Our efforts to reject the simple Worlds simulated for us and to think about the sometimes grittier Earth behind the scenes are not about “fun” at all. They’re about ethics.

Some Skeptical Exercises (Part 4)

 

I want us to play, today. I want us to experiment with some of this dream-mapping we do, or rather, to reveal and undo it some. If you’ve followed along with our episodes, yes, I’m introducing another set of Skeptical Pilgrim exercises, some quick and simple ways to experience what I’ve been talking through. I’ve got three different experiments in this fourth installment of these. Find the link to all three and the previous ones in the Show Notes.

But here’s one from this week:

We’ll call this the “Anti-Insta Crop.” We spend so much time trying to capture the best photo of our travel experiences, of the places we visit. We wait our turn to get close to a view or site, we turn the camera and stretch and crane to get just the right shot. We fire off a dozen or more, hoping that one will work well. Then we go through our filters to, you know, “fix it,” because we know that even the reality of our visit needs adjustment for others to see it and really appreciate it. And then, and this used to be afterwards with Photoshop or something, but now our phones can do it with AI, we start erasing the extra people, reshaping our own faces and figures . . . we know that our physical visit never measured up to the meaningful moment we wanted, and so we repair and adjust, make even more artificial, our images for others, our photos for the re-produced memories.

Let’s go the other direction. Go to that beautiful landmark or even that really nice spot in your own yard. Take a photo that does what I’ve described, the perfect shot for social media. Now, and this is the important part, zoom out. And I mean way out, 200% or more, and show us everything: the highway, the trash can, the telephone wires, the lawnmower, whatever is there. All of it. Now describe that urge you feel, the one where you want to start the cropping process again. I don’t care about the photo: I want you to focus in on that need to change it. What’s going on there?

Find this exercise and two more at the link in the Show Notes. And every episode I’ll offer you a few more. 

Zaira and Hard Spaces

 

Ah, that’s the sound. Listen to it.  [sounds of traffic]

Not literary tourism, but along the lines of our talk so far is Iain Sinclair’s 2002 book and film, London Orbital. In it, in a kind of travelogue because I can think of no other genre to call it, he literally chooses to walk the perimeter of London’s M25 highway, 117 miles that basically circles the city. It’s busy, dangerous, loud, exhausting, and filthy. 

[clip from London Orbital]

It’s an “empire of insanity,” the farthest thing we might imagine from tea time, Big Ben, or a Sherlock Holmes walking tour. And I offer it as a conception fitting this gritty reality. And while he takes this kind of psychogeographical walk, Sinclair spends time doing what I suggested last week: literally reading the landscape as you and I would a book. And while the book and film are both worth the time, here are a few things he concluded. He calls the roadway, a “psychological sickness of modern Britain,” a dystopian space of marginalized society which acts like a “security collar fixed to the neck of a convicted criminal.” It enforces isolation and exists to bury the wreckage of earlier times: the rubble of demolished asylums and hospitals and toxic landfills. It is a place of amnesia, not of meaning. Trying to find meaning here is useless; all you get are “diesel-induced hallucinations” which go around and around in a massive circle, “metaphors for madness.”

And yes, I think London Orbital is worth a read or watch. Not because I want it to replace John Keats House or Shakespeare’s Globe or the Dickens Museum or even the British Library, but because this, too, is part of the London that endures and that Londoners must endure. It exists with Hatchard’s 1797 bookshop and Station 9 ¾ and the Old Cheshire Cheese pub where Mark Twain and Samuel Johnson drank. They’re all London.

And no, this won’t make the literary experience any more authentic. Walter Benjamin already showed us that the “aura” of art, of history, of the literary work, is ultimately beyond us. So no, it won’t get us there. But it will help us better grasp the larger truisms of place, of seeing past the simple surface destinations which we have already pre-imagined.

The other day, I watched the 1995 French film, La Haine. It was a Cannes honoree, and I had heard of it off and on through the years. And wow, talk about a visceral, agonizingly dark movie. The whole film taking place in under a day, three young men involved in violent riots against the brutalizing police wander around their neighborhood without much purpose, until one of them finds a police officer’s lost gun. They live in the Parisian banlieues, project housing that only increases their isolation and hopelessness. It’s all filmed in black and white, and the towering apartments and cement plazas and claustrophobic tunnels and ruined buildings where they gather seem to me to be a more important narrator than any of the characters. In fact, the layout of these complexes–the narrow alleys, the high-density buildings—were specifically designed to limit visibility, to filter bodies, and to make it easier for police vehicle patrols. It has nothing to do with supporting quality of community life.

Paris is no “City of Lights” here, though one scene shows them looking across the city at the Eiffel Tower and trying unsuccessfully to time their fingersnaps to its nightly darkening of lights. They have no control or connection: when they find themselves briefly downtown, the tensionAs a literary term, I often use this in place of "conflict" ... More is real: the beautiful and wealthy spaces of the rich and tourists offer more danger to them than the criminal home spaces. Best Director at Cannes Mathieu Kassovitz doesn’t pull punches, and the character with the most conscience, Hubert, reminds us that hatred, La Haine, creates more of it, that we are like people falling from a skyscraper, counting the floors in our descent, telling ourselves along the way, “So far, so good.”

Both Sinclair and Kassovitz are working hard to show us that behind-the-scenes reality, the people who work and struggle and suffer in our communities, packed away where the tourist industry and comfortable neighborhoods will not reveal them. For those who remember our journey with Le Guin’s Omelas story, it feels like each is showing us the Suffering Child behind our idyllic denials. And it’s worth noting here that this isn’t just about social conditions, but also the psychological and even biographical realities behind our imagined spaces.

I said that Edward Said explained our “imaginative geographies.” And of course, even allowing ourselves the space and freedom to do this, to imagine a new space or a literary space which we might meet, is a mark of privilege. Hubert in La Haine says that he needs to get out of the Projects one day, to which his mother has no response at all but to keep on with her sewing. She knows better. 

Urban studies philosopher David Harvey, in his book The Condition of Postmodernity, agrees. He tells us that our urban spaces aren’t mapped by anything like our dreams or imaginations, but by the brutal and real material flows of profits, of real estate, of class power.  Yeah, did I mention that he is a Marxist urban studies philosopher? Anyway, Harvey takes everything we’ve talked about today, though, and kind of turns it on its head.

He is also reading us like we read a book or landscape. Sure, we can see films like London Orbital or La Haine, we can read books which do much the same, like Teju Cole’s Open City, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, the magnificent Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, or even George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. All of these are excellent reads and–whether fiction or nonfiction–show us dimensions of life behind our travels to these places. But Harvey’s question is still something a bit different.

He says, “The geography text, rather than exposing the world to our view, exposes the author.” And I will add, the reader.  Aren’t these just more narratives for us? More texts for us who David Harvey calls ‘middle-class intellectuals’? Are we just using them to engage some cool aesthetic of structural poverty, systemic racism, and urban decay? I do it myself, right here—reading cool texts while remaining perfectly safe. Aren’t we in a place of privilege to produce such books and movies, and then to watch them, all to assume or perform some kind of Instagram photo of our own? Here I am talking about these art films and great but more obscure titles: does this in any way make me what, a better traveler? A more ethical tourist? Perhaps more thoughtful, but I do it while still . . . reading cool texts.

None of us are going to watch La Haine and visit the banlieues as literary tourists. None of us will walk M25, nor do I recommend it. There are parts of Bombay I hope never to see, and since I know how so many in Antigua may feel about me when visiting Antigua, I’m not especially eager to ask them about it. But, you know, if I just read about this side of the world or watch it on screen, I’m still comfortable, safe, distanced, inauthentic.

In Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan about the city of Zaira. Here is the end of that chapter;

The city [of Zaira consists] of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock. 

As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

I like reading this. But will I dare meet it meaningfully?

Go look in some crevices somewhere. But before that, read something about it.

Closing

What are you carrying away from today’s reading? To see what we are currently working on or to join my next project, head over to Waywords Studio dot com. Remember, that’s two s’s right in the middle. Thanks for listening!

Our theme music is by Randon Myles. Chapter headings are by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski.

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me on social media or check what’s new at Waywords Studio dot com.

 

Bibliography

 

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 217-251.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. “A Study in Scarlet.” The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Doubleday, 1930, pp. 15-86.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Blackwell, 1989.

Heather, J. D. “Concrete Forms of Hate (La Haine).” Medium: Architecture, Landscape, & Urban Design, 17 July 2016.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Sylvia Beach, 1922.

Kassovitz, Mathieu, director. La Haine. Lazennec Tout Court, 1995.

Polapragada, Agastya. “La Haine is not a Black-and-White Film.” NTU Film Society, 10 Nov. 2025.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Western Printing Services, 1978.

Sinclair, Iain, and Chris Petit, directors. London Orbital. Illuminations Media, 2002.

Sinclair, Iain. London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25. Granta Books, 2002.