Image by Kit.
This essay is for Mohara Gill, because she gave me the idea.
Some years ago, critics worried that the novel was dying. The first novel, Tale of the Genji, was written by a Japanese woman Murasaki Shikibu in the early 11th century. And so it would be surprising to discover that such a long-lived literary form, which had survived so many drastic cultural changes, had outlived its welcome. Now of course that worry is long past. But there is one literary form that has recently died. When I was young, I organized my trips to Europe using tourist guidebooks. Now, however, these tourist guidebooks have almost disappeared. You can buy old ones on-line, but new ones are not being written. Like the tourist postcard, the travel guidebook is very nearly dead.
When young English gentlemen went on the Grand Tour, they hired what was called a bear leader, an older experienced cicerone. Then in the mid-nineteenth century, when many less accomplished travelers — tourists — went abroad they used guidebooks. The secular travel guide was a product of modern mass culture, which may be dated to the mid nineteenth-century after the demise of the Grand Tour. One could, I grant, find in medieval European pilgrimages an anticipation of these secular travels. When pilgrims came to Venice, for example, they had to wait for the boats to take them to the holy land. And so they used guide books to visit the numerous relics in the churches of that city. And in the middle ages, pilgrims coming to Rome and other holy cities used guidebooks. But what interests me are the commonplace modern secular guides, Fodors, Lonely Planet and the like, designed for middle class tourists. There is a literature on the Grand Tour but nothing much, so far as I know, about these guidebooks. And that’s surprising, for they are an interesting, original literary form.
Tourist guides were formulaic publications, produced by many publishers. They presented the attractions, listed hotels and restaurants of a country or city and usually had a potted history, a short language guide and a list of appropriate readings. And then there is a guide to language translation and, often, a list of books relevant to the visitor. Often these books had many authors, but sometimes no author was listed. And they needed to be regularly updated. When writing my forthcoming book about Naples, I have collected guidebooks- 27 at last count. They provide an historical record of tourism. But now they are obsolete. There is a recent reprint of the pioneering American guide, Arthur Frommer’s Europe on 5 Dollars a Day (1957), which now costs $27. Travel was inexpensive for Americans in the 1950s.
What killed the guidebook was of course the internet. Once you could make hotel and restaurant reservations and get the schedules and purchase museum tickets on-line, then the guidebook had all of the limited practical utility of a horse drawn carriage in the era of the automobile. You can leave your guidebooks at home if you’re traveling to a place that has reliable internet service. In principle, the same information can be presented in print and on-line. But changes in how material is presented surely influences the way it is understood. When I (still!) read the New York Times in hard copy, I am aware that I read differently on line, more less likely to skip and jump. The material in guidebooks was of uneven value. The brief histories and the lists of proposed literary and historical readings were often useful. But the lists of translated phrases were not, for there’s no better way to get in trouble than to know just a few words of a language. And of course the information online is up to date, and you can usually make reservations. Some years ago I organized travels with the fax, checking the cost of hotel reservations and then making then with another fax. But soon this unwieldily arrangement was replaced by the internet, which made it possible to learn what was available and reserve instantly. Restaurants, too, are on line. And of course a smartphone walks you right to your destination.
Imagine if you will a series of descriptions of visual artworks. In one context, in a tourist guidebook, these words could be a relatively loquacious commentary on art worth seeing. But in another context, in an academic art history book, they would be a relatively laconic scholarly account. The same words, but how differently they would be understood in these two diverse contexts. In the academic book, they would constitute knowledge about visual art. Students would be taught to understand them, they would be commented on (and critiqued) by scholars, and in the library they would be published with the other scholarly commentaries. But the materials in a tourist guidebook would have none of these roles. Gombrich, Wittkower and Nochlin are studied by their fellow scholars in academic art history. But there’s no comparable way in which Baedeker, Fodor and the other pioneering authors of travel guides are scholarly subjects, though there is a certain sociological interest in the history of tourism. Indeed that often travel guides have multiple authors is revealing. They don’t claim to propose the viewpoint of a single personality, as does much art history writing. There is an important difference in kind between fascination looking at visual art and interest in that art as a subject of knowledge, a difference as large and important as the response to a sacred artifact and a secular picture.. That difference is marked by the contrast between tourism and scholarship, or differences between the guidebook and academic writing.
When the monuments of a city have not changed much, then old guidebooks are stuck perfectly useful. Two of the greatest such books are about Venice. Venice for Pleasure by J. G. Links, the funniest guide that I know; and Venice and its Lagoon by Giulio Lorenzetti, which is the most thorough imaginable guidebook.
Note:
Arthur Danto’s philosophy is the source of my theorizing comparing tourist guidebooks and art history writing.
© Counter Punch
