Increase in motor travel, both for business and pleasure, has changed the character of lodgings en route. Formerly the motorist seeking good lodging en route had to detour through the heart of the city. There he could not avoid a view of the courthouse, the shops, the industrial, commercial, and residential districts. Now the motel makes all this unnecessary. Meanwhile, city planners and traffic engineers, hoping to reduce congestion in urban centers, spend large sums on bypasses and super highways to prevent the long-distance motorist from becoming entangled in the daily life of their community.
Motor courts sprang up during the depression of the 1930’s. The earliest tourist cabins were simply a cheaper alternative to the hotel, resembling camping facilities. But within a decade motor courts were improved and standardized. In 1935, the first year for which the Department of Commerce reported statistics, there were about ten thousand motels or tourist courts; after twenty years there were some thirty thousand. The new chains and associations of motels soon enabled a motorist to use the same brand of soap, the same cellophane-covered drinking glasses, and the same “sanitized” toilet seats all the way across the country. The long-distance motorist, usually anxious to avoid the “business route,” then needed to wander no more than a few hundred yards off the super highway for his food and lodging. What he secures in one place is indistinguishable from that in another. One thing motels everywhere have in common is the effort of their managers to fabricate an inoffensive bit of “local atmosphere.”
The next development has been the luxury motel. With its stateroom-sized sleeping rooms, “fabulous” bar, and deck-sized swimming pool, it now resembles nothing so much as the luxury ocean liner. “Getting there is half the fun.” Tourists and business travelers “relax in luxurious surroundings.” The motel passenger, too, is now always in mid-ocean, comfortably out of touch with the landscape.
On the new interstate speedways we see the thorough dilution of travel experience. The motels, which Vladimir Nabokov has brilliantly caricatured in Lolita, are the appropriate symbol of homogenized American experience. Although (perhaps because) no place is less any place than a motel, people nowadays vacation in motels for a week or more as they used to relax in luxury liners. They prefer to be no place in particular—in limbo, en route. Some new tourist restaurants on super highways (Fred Harvey has a large chain of these of uniform design, appropriately called “oases”) are actually built on top of the highway, on a bridge, to which speeding motorists have equally easy access, regardless of the direction in which they are going. There people can eat without having to look out on an individualized, localized landscape. The disposable paper mat on which they are served shows no local scenes, but a map of numbered super highways with the location of other “oases.” They feel most at home above the highway itself, soothed by the auto stream to which they belong.
Now it is the very “improvements” in interstate super highways (at expense to the Federal government alone of a half billion dollars a year) that enable us as we travel along to see nothing but the road. Motor touring has been nearly reduced to the emptiness of air travel. On land, too, we now calculate distances in hours, rather than in miles. We never know quite where we are. At home, as well as abroad, travel itself has become a pseudo-event. It is hard to imagine how further improvements could subtract anything more from the travel experience.
VI
NOT SO many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel—movement through space—provided the universal metaphor for change. When men died they went on a journey to that land from which no traveler returns. Or, in our cliché, when a man dies he “passes away.” Philosophers observed that we took refuge from the mystery of time in the concreteness of space. Bergson, for example, once argued that measurements of time had to be expressed in metaphors of space: time was “long” or “short”; another epoch was “remote” or “near.”
One of the subtle confusions—perhaps one of the secret terrors—of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did. Moving only through time, measuring our distances in homogeneous ticks of the clock, we are at a loss to explain to ourselves what we are doing, where, or even whether, we are going.
As there comes to be less and less difference between the time it takes to reach one place rather than another, time itself dissolves as a measure of space. The new supersonic transports, already in the design stage, will take passengers across our continent in less than two hours, from Europe to America in two hours and a half. We are moving toward “Instant Travel.” It is then, I suppose, thoroughly appropriate in this age of tautological experience that we should eventually find ourselves measuring time against itself.
We call ours the “Space Age,” but to us space has less meaning than ever before. Perhaps we should call ours the “Spaceless Age.” Having lost the art of travel on this earth, having homogenized earthly space, we take refuge in the homogeneity (or in the hope for variety) of outer space. To travel through outer space can hardly give us less landscape experience than we find on our new American super highways. We are already encapsulated, already overcome by the tourist problems of fueling, eating, sleeping, and sight-seeing. Will we enlarge our experience on the moon? Only until tourist attractions have been prepared for us there.
Even our travel literature has shown a noticeable change. Formerly these books brought us information about the conduct of life in foreign courts, about burial rites and marriage customs, about the strange ways of beggars, craftsmen, tavern hosts, and shopkeepers. Most travel literature long remained on the pattern of Marco Polo. Since the mid-nineteenth century, however, and especially in the twentieth century, travel books have increasingly become a record not of new information but of personal “reactions.” From “Life in Italy,” they become “The American in Italy.” People go to see what they already know is there. The only thing to record, the only possible source of surprise, is their own reaction.
The foreign country, like the celebrity, is the confirmation of a pseudo-event. Much of our interest comes from our curiosity about whether our impression resembles the images found in the newspapers, in movies, and on television. Is the Trevi Fountain in Rome really like its portrayal in the movie Three Coins in the Fountain? Is Hong Kong really like Love is a Many-Splendored Thing? Is it full of Suzie Wongs? We go not to test the image by the reality, but to test reality by the image.
Of course travel adventure is still possible. Nowadays, however, it is seldom the by-product of people going places. We must scheme, and contrive, and plan long in advance (at great expense) to be assured that when we arrive there we will encounter something other than the antiseptic, pleasant, relaxing, comfortable experience of the hundreds of thousands of other tourists. We must fabricate risks and dangers, or hunt them out. The writings of Richard Halliburton (The Royal Road to Romance, 1925; The Glorious Adventure, 1927; New World to Conquer, 1929; The Flying Carpet, 1932; and Seven League Boots, 1935), became popular at the very time when travel for thousands of Americans was becoming a bland and riskless commodity. To make a glorious adventure out of travel, Halliburton had to relive ancient adventures. Like Leander he swam the Hellespont; he retraced the routes of Ulysses, Cortés, Balboa, Alexander, and Hannibal. Even “Mysterious Tibet”—one of the few remaining places on earth which physically challenge the traveler—has had its mystery abolished. Recently, Justice William O. Douglas has shown ingenuity in seeking out travel adventures; his books are understandably popular. But they too are only a blander version of Richard Halliburton. Pierre and Peg Streit ingeniously make adventure by motoring by English Land Rover from Paris to Katmandu in Nepal: “A Jouncing Tour of Kipling’s Wild Land” (Life, September 2, 1957).
Nowadays it costs more and takes greater ingenuity, imagination and enterprise to fabricate travel risks than it once required to avoid them. Almost as much effort goes into designing the adventure as into surviving it. For this the touri
st millions have not the time or the money. Travel adventure today thus inevitably acquires a factitious, make-believe, unreal quality. And only the dull travel experience seems genuine. Both for the few adventuring travelers who still exist and for the larger number of travelers-turned-tourists, voyaging becomes a pseudo-event.
Here again, the pseudo-event overshadows the spontaneous. And for the usual reasons. Planned tours, attractions, fairs, expositions “especially for tourists,” and all their prefabricated adventures can be persuasively advertised in advance. They can be made convenient, comfortable, risk-free, trouble-free, as spontaneous travel never was and never is. We go more and more where we expect to go. We get money-back guarantees that we will see what we expect to see. Anyway, we go more and more, not to see at all, but only to take pictures. Like the rest of our experience, travel becomes a tautology. The more strenuously and self-consciously we work at enlarging our experience, the more pervasive the tautology becomes. Whether we seek models of greatness, or experience elsewhere on the earth, we look into a mirror instead of out a window, and we see only ourselves.
4
From Shapes to Shadows:
Dissolving Forms
FIRST YOUNG LADY: “Have you seen Omnibook? It takes five or six books and boils them down. That way you can read them all in one evening.”
SECOND YOUNG LADY: “I wouldn’t like it. Seems to me it would just spoil the movie for you.”
IT IS ONLY a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will—or to our extravagant expectations—is a shapeless world.
When Michelangelo in the traditional story explained that he carved his statue of David simply by taking away the superfluous marble, he meant that his peculiar vision dwelt somehow in that particular block of stone. Sculptors always, of course, choose a piece of marble because it is well suited to the figure they have in mind; and they often shape the figure to the marble’s flaws. Every artist marries form to matter: he sees his poem in words, his painting in oils on canvas, his statue in stone, his building in some specific material.
Art has often been identified with divinity, precisely because the artist gives his work a unique, inimitable embodiment. Like a man, a work of art has a soul, a life all its own. It used to be taken for granted that every work of art possessed a mysterious individuality. A picture could not be made into a poem, a play was not to be found in a novel. Until recently there were surprisingly few dramatizations of novels. Abridgment was an art not much practiced in literature. Of course there were legends and folk tales which were transformed by different minstrels or different generations, and so were variously embodied, but the great work of art was that which had the power somehow to remain uniquely itself, and itself alone.
The “original” had a priceless and ineffable uniqueness. Men spent fortunes and risked lives to possess the Elgin marbles or a Mona Lisa, to save a particular painting by Domenico Veneziano, or to secure a treasure by Benvenuto Cellini. Approximation was never enough. Every work of art had the fixity, the precise boundaries, which until recently were attributed to God’s work in the Creation. The idea of fixity of species, which possessed the minds of European and American men until the mid-nineteenth century, was a way of extending to all creation the simple notion that the world was not infinitely malleable. God’s artistry had made fixed, definite forms, so that, in Lucretius’ words, “Where each thing can grow and abide is fixed and ordained.”
I
THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTIONS of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Graphic Revolution of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have done much to change this. If art and literature were to be made accessible to all, they had to be made intelligible (and inoffensive) to all. Popularity was then often bought at the cost of the integrity of the individual work. With the rise of liberalism came the rise of the vernacular languages and literatures. Now the common people could read great works in their own marketplace English, French, German, Spanish, or Italian, instead of having to know the learned languages of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin in which classical authors had written. Popular government, bringing with it universal literacy and education for everybody, brought also the popularizing of works of art and literature.
The age of the rising middle class in Victorian England was, of course, the age of the fig leaf. “The fig leaves of decent reticence” which Charles Kingsley described were applied not only to statuary but to literature as well. In order to make works of art a national resource available to all, so that anybody of either sex could without embarrassment be taken on an edifying conducted tour of the greatness of the past, the works of art themselves were garbled, emended, watered down, and taken out of context—all in order to make them bland and digestible to uncultivated palates. The Age of Education thus ironically became the Age of Expurgation. The New Expurgation, unlike the Old (of the days of the licensing of printed matter), aimed less to expunge offensive doctrine than to hide offensive facts of life. All this had its effect on literature. Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807) were designed to make the bard familiar to the young. Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825), from whose name we derive the word “bowdlerize,” meaning to expurgate by removing offensive passages, in 1818 published his ten-volume Family Shakespeare, “in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” It went through four editions in six years, and numerous others thereafter. Encouraged by his success, he prepared a similar six-volume edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “for the use of Families and Young Persons, reprinted from the original text with the careful omissions of all passages of an irreligious or immoral tendency.”
What the new public museums were to works of art, the new popularizations were to works of literature. The precious literary objects, once enjoyed almost exclusively by the aristocrats of birth, wealth, or learning, were now to be put on display for the millions. Some, of course, went into tolerably accurate cheap editions. But while sculpture, painting, tapestries, and objets d’art were taken out of context by being removed from monastery and palace to the public museums, much of the best literature was taken out of context by being abridged, expurgated, simplified, and popularized.
How to make the esoteric, difficult, lengthy, archaic, and subtle classics of an aristocratic society “interesting” and “edifying” (the eighteenth-century phrase was “amusing and instructive”) for everyone? In England and elsewhere the age of the Protestant Reformation, the seedtime of modern liberalism, was of course an age of translations—for example, Sir John North’s Plutarch (1579), John Florio’s Montaigne (1603), and above all, the great King James version of the Bible (1611).
In the United States in the nineteenth century popular education and popularization tended to become synonymous. A stigma, the odium of an outdated priestly aristocracy, was put on anything that could not be made universally intelligible. Equalitarian America attached a new, disproportionate importance to the knowledge which all could get and to techniques which all could master. In England, for example, rules of spelling had been slow to develop; Shakespeare himself had been illiterate by the standards of the American schoolmarm. But in the United States, where the people were desperately in search of a cultural standard that any able-bodied citizen could meet with reasonable effort and modest opportunities, the spelling fetish established itself quite rapidly. Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book (1789) and his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) sold by the millions. Americans were inclined to overvalue whatever could be made intelligible to all: the work of the journalist (Benjamin Franklin) or of the popular humorist (Mark Twain). Popularity became confused with universality. If the Bible was truly an inspired Great Book, it must h
ave something to say to everyone; by a quaint reversal, it then became axiomatic that anyone could understand the Bible. In the twentieth century our highest praise is to call the Bible “The World’s Best Seller.” And it has come to be more and more difficult to say whether we think it is a best seller because it is great, or vice versa.
The Graphic Revolution accentuated all these tendencies. It brought new forces toward popularizing, toward reshaping—and toward disembodying—works of art. This it did in several ways.
First came the cheapening of printed matter. In the United States until about 1830 books were sturdily made, but expensive to manufacture. The cheap book came in the 1840’s. It had been made possible by the new paper-making machines and cylinder presses, which could turn out large quantities at low cost. What historians of the subject call the “Great Revolution in Publishing” had arrived when, in 1841, two New York weeklies, the New World and Brother Jonathan, entered into cutthroat competition. These weeklies, printed like newspapers to secure a cheap postal rate, were actually devoted to printing serialized novels which had been pirated from England or written by Americans. When readers objected that they could elsewhere buy some of these novels complete before the serials were finished, the competing weeklies began to issue “supplements” and “extras.” Each of these was a whole novel, printed on newspaper presses, and commonly unbound. Competition became intense and prices came down. In 1842 Bulwer’s Zanoni, issued almost simultaneously by the two weeklies (and also by the more reputable Harper’s), could be bought for as little as six cents a copy. This intense competition did not last. In April, 1843, the United States Post Office ruled that supplements had to be mailed under book rates; then these weeklies, and with them the appeal of shoddy books, declined. The rise of copyrights laws, and the gradual enforcement of international copyright regulations (not generally effective till the Berne Convention of 1886) later made pirating difficult and reduced the supply of widely salable, royalty-free books. But never again was the American book trade quite the same. Cheap books were here to stay.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Vintage) Page 13
