7.08 Building Fantasies

 

Leaving the Road Behind

 

I understand. The last couple of episodes I asked us to meet that raw Earth a bit, to find some kind of authenticity through looking at the history of a literary place and the “back stage” of tourism to find the difficult and diesel-powered labor and politics and poverty that seem to always exist in the backgrounds.

It’s a hard ask.

It’s almost the opposite of what we set out to do, we can imagine. We remind ourselves that yes, we want to find something real and meaningful in the spaces we visit, but that also we left our own homes and spaces sometimes just so we could get away from these realities. The raw earth of work, of unyielding concrete, of surveillance, of money and struggle. It’s all so cold and even morally exhausting. Why travel so far just to find that all over again?  

I mean, come on, Steve. Don’t you understand that travel and vacations are supposed to be a retreat? Some place happy and quiet and, I don’t know, air-conditioned?         And if the call to place, topophilia, is biological, somehow inherently linked to our natures, so is our retreat from the insecure, the dangerous, the uncomfortable. We seek in our travel a perfect, frictionless experience. 

We could travel to Florence for a Da Vinci or Michelangelo tour, of course, but we could also find 

“…the Italy and Paris of the Las Vegas strip where I once heard a tourist say she preferred the replica of Michelangelo’s David [in the Caesar’s Palace Hotel ‘forum’] to the real one in Florence (where there is no forum) because it was cleaner and the room was air-conditioned.”

This is philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco in his book Travels in Hyperreality, kind of a favorite read of mine, and a favorite thinker. A semiotician is someone who studies signs and symbols—basically looking at how they function in the real world and how they quietly shape our cultures and meaning-making. And sure, Eco’s example is only of one traveler, but we understand this woman’s preference. Why go see the real David which requires hot and still-aired museum waiting lines? 

Or, for that matter, why travel to the challenging and secure US White House to (maybe) get a quick tour glimpse of the real Oval Office when any number of presidential libraries across the country can (almost) give you the same thing?

“Constructing a full-scale model of the Oval Office (using the same materials, the same colors, but with everything obviously more polished, shinier, protected against deterioration) means that for historical information to be absorbed, it has to assume the aspect of a reincarnation. To speak of things that one wants to connote as real, these things must seem real. The ‘completely real’ becomes identified with the ‘completely fake.’ Absolute unreality is offered as real presence. The aim of the reconstructed Oval Office is to supply a ‘sign’ that will then be forgotten as such: The sign aims to be the thing, to abolish the distinction of the reference, the mechanism of replacement.”

This, for Eco, is the “absolute fake.” It is a simulation which works to replace the reality. Once upon a time, the Jungle Cruise ride was a big deal for those traveling to amusement parks like Cedar Point or Disneyland. Fake natives and robotic alligators would threaten tourists. Now, though, if they still operate, they are a waterborne bench for weary feet while boat guides offer bad puns. Our “old days” simulations like the Pirates of the Caribbean or The Haunted Mansion or Six-Flags Monster Mansion are just campy. 

Today, our simulated experiences have a greater ambition: genuine substitutes. I’m thinking of Disney’s Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance or Universal’s The Frankenstein Experiment. 

Those of a more literary bent will find perfect, idyllic, clean, curated, world-erasing reproductions of Hemingway’s writing studio in Key West, Victor Hugo’s beautiful writing bedroom from the island of St. Martin–um, in Paris—, and the beautifully restored and immaculate mansion of Mark Twain in Connecticut. Never mind that his time spent there was one of crushing financial anxiety and family grief. 

As Eco tells us, 

“…fake places give visitors the ‘hits’ of Western culture and suggest to the visitor, ‘We are giving you the reproduction so you will no longer feel any need for the original.’”

Our meaning-making and reverence for the pilgrimage complete, we may return to our homes with the photos (images of the simulations of the . . . ) and know that, sometime, somewhere, writers and their characters existed in a kind of heavily-vacuumed utopia. 

 

Theme

 

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

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I am producing this podcast from the serene and beautiful surroundings of Waywords Studio. You’d never believe the level of peace which has brought the Creative Muse to this microphone. 

All the Flavors

 

And so yes, we have to think a bit more about the simulations we meet. We’ve already talked about the curation of experiences, the tourist gaze which the industry anticipates and works to meet, how the raw experience of our travel is made as smooth as possible by those producing it. Disney, of course, has long been a master of this. Recently it spent over one billion dollars just to make the single wristband pass and phone app keys to reduce the kinds of emotional bumps and delays that would throw visitors out of the experience. We might name their philosophy “The Architecture of Reassurance,” and they place safety and courtesy as values and practices before even the show itself and business efficiency. It’s worked. Millions around the world choose Disney theme parks and simulations before other more raw experiences of travel, with Universal’s Epic Universe park–also in Orlando for convenience–a distant second.

And the rest of the industry learns with them. We choose simulation over whatever might be a more authentic destination. The concept of “literary pilgrimage” is, perhaps, a little diminished by this, of course, but it’s apparently a distinction we can live with. After all, most of the spaces I’ve named are only giving us stories like Star Wars, or Avatar or YA fiction, anyway. But still. I remember when I was 11 years old, my family made a stop at the famous Hershey, Pennsylvania, to visit this self-described “Chocolate World.”  But instead of the famous factory tour where I could see the chocolate actually being made, they had recently started a new “ride” which had those old Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-style animatronics teaching us about chocolate growing and shipping. I remember being pretty upset; well, until we got to the all-you-can-eat dessert buffet.

Writer Sam Jacobs describes a similar but amplified experience this way. He was visiting the Villagio Mall in Doha, Qatar. He was startled to find that the designers had made an enormous replica, a dead-on simulation, not of Venice, Italy, exactly, with all of its canals and boats and gondoliers and even St. Mark’s Square, but of the Las Vegas hotel The Venetian, which did the exact same thing. 

“…Villagio’s double-take sensation comes not from its attempts to replicate Italy but from how it recalls those famous desert-based grand-scale copies, the Venetian and the Bellagio. Villagio is a copy of Vegas, a replica that echoes replicas.”

And while he is thinking about this, this simulation or a simulation, itself exact in every detail, Jacobs finds himself standing under a perfectly painted artificial sky and next to a Starbucks where a sign reads: “Geography is a Flavor.”

And now, instantly, we can see the issue. The concept of pilgrimage, fraught with threats to our frictionless experience, full of hardship and real world history, is subverted, replaced, by whatever place we choose to build the replica. Jacobs says that place can be “measured, mixed, and poured” according to consumer recipes. “Replicas that echo replicas.” He calls this the Vriesendorp Syndrome, named after a woman who collected hundreds of cheap souvenir buildings to construct a little town in her apartment. 

In this way—and this is philosopher Jean Baudrillard–the copy offered to us completely precedes and determines what we accept as real. Baudrillard would tell us that the Villagio Mall in Qatar is not actually copying Venice, but it is copying Vegas’s “idea” of Italy. It’s not actually that the mall wants us to think it’s Italy; it wants the geography of Italy to become today’s offered flavor. 

I used to remind my students of Baudrillard’s idea of maps, especially as they related to how we believe we know. Here, for Baudrillard, in his book Simulacra and Simulation from 1981 a map isn’t really about trying to represent a real physical territory. Instead, the map precedes and generates the territory. It builds our knowledge-base, feeds our expectations, creates a prejudice often in opposition to whatever real earth is out there. 

Along our path of this season’s journey, I’ve referred back often to the academic writer Nicola MacLeod and her book Literary Fiction Tourism. In chapter 6 of this book she talks a bit about this simulation creation, describing them as socially-constructed destinations. She includes attractions like multi-sensory visitor centers, but always spaces which are deliberately constructed in order to “exploit” a literary theme. But for her, a literary theme is not anything derived from the literary work you and I would read necessarily, but a romanticized or even medievalized conception of it: purified and clean, excised of nuance.  She describes how tourist operators begin with their own literary vision, then move to explication and conversion in order to reap benefits. As I’ve suggested, there is little about the industry which is not obviously based on profit-growing. Authenticity is not the goal, but “explication” is instead the creation of “experience environments,” the simulation or map-building we experience. 

You might remember our quick discussion of Walter Benjamin a few episodes ago, who talked in his Arcades project about the first productions of these spaces, these enclosed environments of cafes and train stations and other public spaces, how they made spaces more comfortable against the hot and dirty outside world. But what I didn’t say then was that Benjamin isn’t entirely opposed to such spaces-–not at all. In fact, he sees in them, in these sometimes dreamlike designs of distractions, a real possibility. He believes that in the spaces of simulation, in these replicas of replicas, the chance to engage, dialectically, in dialogue with them, meeting a kind of “dream-wreck” which can actually resist the passive consumers and raise them up to a more political consciousness. That is, the very production and immersion in the simulation spurs us to question where we are and what that means. 

And what environments we have produced and choices we have to engage! Maybe you don’t know this, but Seahaven, Florida, the perfect town where Jim Carrey is the sole dupe in the movie The Truman Show–everyone else are literally actors—Seahaven is a real town called Seaside, a master-planned community built in the 1980s to perform a kind of cozy nostalgia of the American small town myth. So the real town, Seaside, is a designed performance of an American story which never happened, which then became a satire of small American town myths as Seahaven in the movie, turning the real-life performance into a literal television studio. And, of course, now, it’s a tourist destination.

And of course, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, with its fiberglass storefronts and chemical “Butterbeer” drinks is another Orlando simulation of a boarding school space that exists only in books. There is no historic site (despite what London might claim): the simulation is itself the destination. 

And by building a Boomburger restaurant in the historic Presbyterian church where Montgomery actually worshipped, the simulated Avonlea Village defies the very concept of authentic, cleansing the sacred space of its complicated historical memory, and repackaging it as a comfortable backdrop, a prop, for lunch.

Oh, and here is a good place to mention: Japan, for reasons we will explore later, has its own theme park called Canadian World on the island of Hokkaido. It is its own replica of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Well, actually, no. It’s a replica of PEI and its simulated version of Montgomery tourism: an absolutely inch-to-inch reproduction of the Green Gables house complete with Enchanted Bookcase and of Avonlea schoolhouse and church we find in Avonlea Village. Mercifully, however, the church is not the site of a Boomburger restaurant.

 

Lake Tahoe on Fire

 

But we’ve spent a fair amount of time talking about what the industry produces. Let’s take a moment and look at this phenomenon from the other direction. 

In Mark Twain’s book Roughing It, itself a kind of semi-autobiographical travelogue of his journeys, he tells us about how he accidentally set fire to the forests of Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he often camped. What’s interesting to me about this scene is that he doesn’t seem particularly upset. He doesn’t write about the environment of the woods, the devastating loss of his location. Instead he stands of the shore of the lake, watching it all, and he writes:

“Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the lake! Both pictures were sublime, both were beautiful; but that in the lake had a bewildering richness about it that enchanted the eye and held it with the stronger fascination.”

And wow, yes. The image, the reflection, was more vital and alluring than the reality. 

What I want us to consider now, of course, is that we are participants in this illusion. There’s a famous phrase we use when going to a theater play or musical or opera: we must entertain a “willing suspension of disbelief.”  This is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he used the phrase to talk about all of our reading experiences: poetry, fiction, ghost stories. For the experience to resonate with us, we must purposefully set aside our skepticism. And boy, I seem to be a big failure at this level. 

Writer Jeffrey Alan Melton calls this same concept for us “touristic faith,” our implicit agreement to go along with the illusions offered us. We are not passive in our victims of this simulation scam. As Melton says, we are “accomplices of the tourist establishment in the production of our own deception.” We pretend to be “gaining an authentic experience.” This is why I call the simulation a scam, but it also really isn’t a scam if we agree to it, right? What I’m curious about is why we agree that these two words, simulation and authenticity, can be synonyms.  

Maybe this is why Disney places safety and courtesy first in its experience: these are flatterings of the visitor, friend-making, so that by the time the host offers the stale biscuits, we’re still willing to call them “marvelous.” By the time we leave, we will remember the smiles and ambience, the flattering and warm fireplaces, and forget all about those biscuits or that cheap house wine. I remember the roped off sections of the PEI museums, the red Exit signs, the annoying teenage hikers, the Boomburger church, but this is specifically because I was there to learn about the literary tourism experience and understand the industry. Maybe more travelers have the capacity to ignore all of that. Or forget about it.

After all, my 1974 memory of Hershey Pennsylvania is tainted by the cheap animatronics, but I remember them as a formative experience. The most vivid memory I carry from that day was the all-you-can-eat dessert buffet, obviously, the thing which made my chocolate fantasy real. 

Twain seems to agree that our willing suspension of disbelief is accompanied by its own memory loss of the un-beautiful. In his first travelogue, The Innocents Abroad, he writes:

“Our experiences in Europe have taught us that in time this fatigue will be forgotten; the heat will be forgotten; the thirst, the tiresome volubility of the guide, the persecutions of the beggars—and then, all that will be left will be pleasant memories of Jerusalem, memories we shall call up with always increasing interest as the years go by, memories which some day will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that incumbers them shall have faded out of our minds never again to return.”

What our memories form is the beautiful reflection of the water instead of the actual burning of the earth in front of us. We frame those memories as the picture, not the actual place.

 

Pilgrim Exercises Part 5

 

We’ve been wrestling a bit with this odd but perhaps understandable desire for the frictionless literary tourist experience. Let’s play a bit with these ideas. You’ll find the link to all of these experiments and the ones from earlier in the season in the Show Notes.

But here’s one from today’s episode:

We’ll call this the Plaster-Crack Audit, and it’s partly what I did while visiting PEI. Go 

to some kind of managed ‘experience environment.’ This could be some suburban lifestyle center, a themed franchise restaurant, or a public botanical garden. Your mission is to locate and physically touch the exact points where the simulation is glued to the material world. Find, for instance, the faux-rustic wood grain that shows itself to be hollow plastic under your fingernail. Stand by the roped-off boundaries and look for the exit signs, the security cameras, and the labor quietly keeping the ‘magic enclosure’ from collapsing. Document the exact moment the illusion of reassurance fractures. What does the space look like the second you refuse to play the role of the submissive, participating consumer?  

Think about your emotional response here. Was this recognition a higher price for you than the one you might have paid by suspending disbelief?

Find the other experiments in the Show Notes!

Montgomery’s Lost Island

 

So we met Twain’s thoughts on image over reality and the fallibility of selective memory, and we see, I think, that we are all somewhat complicit in the simulation invasion, this concept that an imitation has become our desired destination for literary journeys. 

Does it help at all to know that Lucy Maud Montgomery felt the same way?  In 1912 she made a trip to Scotland where she visited Loch Katrine, a literary tourist destination made famous by Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem The Lady of the Lake.  When she arrived, she found that the lake’s water level had been raised by Glasgow waterworks, such that it covered the famous white pebble beach from the poem.  And she wrote:

“I cannot decide whether Loch Katrine disappointed me or not. I think it did, a little. It was as beautiful as I had dreamed it, but it was not my Loch Katrine, not quite the Loch Katrine of my “Chateau en Espagne.” And I resented the difference, as one might resent a change made in his childhood’s home on going back to it after long years… Since the installment of the Glasgow waterworks the lake has risen several feet and covered ‘the beach of pebbles white as snow.’ But I think I shall keep the Loch Katrine of my dream in my geography of the ‘Lady of the Lake.’ I like it better than the real one.”

And once again, we become participants in the imagined over the real. But I also understand Montgomery here. She’d rather keep the literary experience–the imaginative one which drew her to the destination in the first place—intact. She rejects the space she met, recognizing it as no longer what Scott met. 

Yi-Fu Tuan, the same human geographer who reminded us that topophilia is a real and biological phenomenon, also reminds us that our fleeing from harsh environments, our preference for safe and artificial spaces, is not some corrupt capitalist illness, not a Marxian nightmare, but a fundamentally healthy and human drive: in a very real way, this is all we’ve ever done through our history: we’ve built spaces that are separated and more comfortable than the great wild of earth. Our preference is both biological and, well, it defines civilization itself.  

So yes, even Montgomery preferred the idyllic and pristine gardens of literary ink to the industrial earth. And this is what she does in her Anne books, take that earth and have Anne re-imagine it for us, make it more rich and beautiful and perfect than any space of nature could possibly measure up to. 

Even so, this leads us to some very different questions about what our literary pilgrimages are actually about, if the destinations we encounter are little more than disappointments or third- and fourth-degree simulations of someone else’s vision of what drove us there in the first place. And so we’ve still not reached an answer to how to make these spaces authentically meaningful, have we?

Neither did Montgomery.  When the bulldozers and fires destroyed the farms of her beloved Cavendish to make way for the National Park for Anne fans, she was devastated by the changes. In 1928, she wrote:

“Alas, yes… Cavendish is being over-run and exploited and spoiled by mobs of tourists and my harmless old friends and neighbors have their lives simply worried out of them by carloads of ‘foreigners’ who want to see some of Anne’s haunts.”

All of that so that a simulation of her literature could be offered to us. Destroying the reality in order to replace it with the simulation. And the simulation has become the new reality destination for us. As she said a few years later, “[W]hen I love a place is it not doomed?”

These are some of the costs of our utopia illusions, of our beautiful fantasy simulations created for us to escape the raw earth. We overwrite, revise the reality, displace real families, real histories. Real pain. The cost of suspending that disbelief. The truth is that what we create and what lies beneath it are irreversibly entangled.

All this—all this opens up a kind of ethical challenge inside our imaginative geography: these romanticized, virtual fictions we read, create, or project to satisfy our biological topophilia are the very fictions that ultimately overwrite, displace, and maybe doom the physical landscapes we claim to love.

Montgomery said that “The world is a hard place to live in if one has a soul that can feel.”

And so I still think that wilderness is somehow worth the navigation, even when we do not always see the path.

Go out into the natural world someplace this week. Set yourself up where you can watch it. And while you’re there, work a little imagination in: read something.  

 

Closing

Thinking to use some of these episodes in your own classroom or book club? I have complete downloadable transcripts, discussion guides, and vocabulary sheets waiting for you at Waywords Studio dot com. Thanks for listening!

Music is by Randon Myles, and chapter headings voiced by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski.

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me on your favorite social spaces or grab the files at Waywords Studio dot com.

 

Bibliography

 

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, 1999.

Eco, Umberto. “Travels in Hyperreality.” Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, translated by William Weaver, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986, pp. 1-58.

Jacob, Sam. “Vriesendorp Syndrome.” Perspecta 41: Grand Tour, edited by Gabrielle Brainard, Rustam Mehta, and Thomas Moran, Yale Architectural Journal / MIT Press, 2008, pp. 26-37.

MacLeod, Nicola E. Literary Fiction Tourism: Understanding the Practice of Fiction-Inspired Travel. Chapter 6, “The Social Construction of Literary Places,” Routledge, 2021.

Melton, Jeffrey Alan. “Keeping the Faith: Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 61, no. 1, 1996, pp. 61-79.

Montgomery, L. M. The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career. Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1917.

Montgomery, L. M. The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery. Edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, Oxford University Press, 1985-2004.

Twain, Mark. Roughing It. American Publishing Company, 1872.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. “Disneyland: Its Place in World Culture,” with Steven Hoelscher in Karal Ann Marling ed., Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance, Paris: Flammarion, 1997, 191-198.   

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Columbia University Press, 1990.