By David Lodge
Born in 1935 and educated at University College London, David Lodge
is one of the best-known authors of campus or university novels such as Changing
Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988).
While these fictions display his gift for satirical and ironic descriptions
of life in an academic environment, Paradise News (1991) revolves
around the issue of travelling. specifically mass tourism, as experienced
on the beautiful island of Hawaii. The island seems to be flooded with tourists,
the novel's protagonist Bernard Walsh being one of them. This is put into
a global perspective by one of the other characters of the novel, Roger Sheldrake,
an academic doing research in tourism. He reflects on tourism as a new quasi-religion
in the following excerpt. - David Lodge, Paradise News (Harmondsworth:
Penguin. 1992), 78-79.
"Tourism is wearing out
the planet." Sheldrake delved into his silvery attaché case again and brought
out a sheaf of press-cuttings marked with yellow highlighter. Re flipped
through them. "The footpaths in the Lake District have become trenches. The
frescos in the Sistine Chapel are being damaged by the breath and body-heat
of spectators. A hundred and eight people enter Notre Dame every minute:
their feet are eroding the floor and the buses that bring them there are
rotting the stonework with exhaust fumes. Pollution from cars queuing to
get to Alpine ski resorts is killing the trees and causing avalanches and
landslides. The Mediterranean is like a toilet without a chain: you have
a one in six chance of getting an infection if you swim in it. In 1987 they
had to close Venice one day because it was full. In 1963 forty-four people
went down the Colorado river on a raft, now there are a thousand trips a
day. In 1939 a million people travelled abroad; last year it was four hundred
million. By the year 2000 there could be six hundred and fifty million international
travellers, and five times as many people travelling in their own countries.
The mere consumption of energy entailed is stupendous."
"My goodness," said Bernard.
"The only way to put a stop
to it, short of legislation, is to demonstrate to people that they aren't
really enjoying themselves when they go on holiday, but engaging in a superstitious
ritual. It's no coincidence that tourism arose just as religion went into
decline. It's the new opium of the people, and must be exposed as such."
"Won't you do yourself out
of a job, if you're successful?" said Bernard.
"I don't think there's any
immediate risk of that," said Sheldrake, surveying the crowded lounge.
Wear out (v,): to damage, ruin, exhaust - delve (v.):
to search by putting your hand deeply into it - attaché case (n,):
a thin case used for carrying business documents -sheaf (n,): several
pieces of paper held or tied together - press-cutting (n.): a short
piece of writing or a picture, cut out from a newspaper or magazine - trench
(n.): a long narrow hole dug into the surface of the ground - fresco
(n.): a painting made on a wall while the plaster is still wet - erode
(v.): gradually destroying the surface - exhaust fumes (n.): waste
gasses from cars - avalanche (n.): a large mass of snow, ice, and
rocks that falls down the side of a mountain (similar to landslide) - raft
(n.): a flat floating structure, usually made of pieces of wood tied together.
used as a boat - consumption (n.): the act of buying and using products
- entail (v.): to involve something as a necessary part or result
- stupendous (adi.): surprisingly large or impressive - superstitious
(adi.): strongly influenced by a belief which is not based on fact or reason
but on old ideas about luck, magic, etc. - coincidence (n.): sth.
which happens by chance
Lake District: an area in northwest England famous for its beautiful
lakes and mountains and visited by many tourists
Sistine Chapel: a chapel in the Vatican, Rome, famous for the paintings
on its ceiling done by Michelangelo
Notre Dame: a famous cathedral in central Paris, which is a
beautiful Gothic building from the 12th century
William Sutcliffe was born
in 1971. The Londoner is the author of three bestsellers, New Boy The
Love Hexagon and Are You Experienced? His novels have been hugely
successful and translated into eleven languages. The adventures and misadventures
of 19-year-old Dave, a cynical young man who uses his 'gap year' between
school and university for a big exotic journey through India, are related
in Are You Experienced?, which was first published in 1997. A hilarious,
enormously readable satire on backpackers who are only interested in 'getting
to know themselves' and mostly ignorant of India and its people, the novel
narrates Dave's experiences as a rite of passage into adulthood - he returns
a wiser, more experienced man. Below you find two passages from the novel.
The first one takes place in a train station
in the middle of India, with Dave and a journalist from Great Britain as
the only foreigners. Here the first-person narrator Dave gets a severe dressing-down.
The journalist accuses him - and with him his generation - of being completely
uninterested in India and the Third World. In the second passage. David takes
the Bus to Goa, formerly a hippie 'hang-out', today a place of mass-tourism.
- William Sutcliffe, Are You Experienced? (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1997). 139f., 142f.
'I might do an article on you,' he said. 'About me? What have you got to say
about me?' 'I'm not sure. Tell me - what do you do all day?' 'What do I do?'
I gave him a suspicious look. 'You know - I'm travelling. I'm a backpacker.'
'But what do you do all day? How come you don't get bored?' 'Bored? You could
never get bored here.' 'What do you do, though? In each place.' He
looked genuinely interested. 'Well, you get there. Look for a hotel. Hang
out there for a bit. Look around town for a few days. Eat. Read. Sleep. Talk
to other travellers. Think about where to go next, then - you know - it's
a big hassle to get the tickets for your next journey, so you prepare yourself
for that. Then bite the bullet, spend a morning queuing for tickets, and
the next day you move on.' 'Right. So the most significant and challenging
thing you do in each place is to buy the tickets for getting to the next
place.' 'No, I didn't say that.' 'Yes you did.' 'It's fine. I've got more
than enough material already.' 'Like what? What are you going to write about
me then?' 'I think ... something about how it's not hippies on a spiritual
mission who come here any more, just morons on a poverty-tourism adventure
holiday. The real point would have to be about how going to India isn't an
act of rebellion these days, it's actually a form of conformity for ambitious
middle-class kids who want to be able to put something on their CV that shows
a bit of initiative. All the top companies want robots with initiative these
days, and coming to the Third World is the ideal hoop for you to leap through.
You come here and cling to each other as if you're on some kind of extended
management-bonding exercise in Epping Forest. Then, having got the nasty
business of travel out of the way, you can go home and prove to employers
that you are more than ready to settle down for a life of drudgery. I suppose
you could call it a modern form of ritual circumcision - it's a badge of
suffering you have to wear to be welcomed into the tribe of Britain's future
elite. Your kind of travel is all about low horizons dressed up as open-mindedness.
You have no interest in India. and no sensitivity for the problems this country
is trying to face up to. You also treat Indians with a mixture of contempt
and suspicion which is reminiscent of the Victorian colonials. Your presence
here, in my opinion, is offensive. The whole lot of you should fuck off back
to Surrey.'[…]
In Bombay, I only needed
to take one sniff of the city to realize that I couldn't face staying, and
walked to the nearest travel agent to buy a ticket for the first bus to Goa
(quicker than the train at mere sixteen hours, according to The Book). The
bus was due to leave in two hours, actually left in four hours, and took
three more hours to reach the edge of Bombay. Once we reached the open road,
it was already after midnight, so I decided to try and fall asleep just as
the driver put a tape of Hindi musicals on at top volume. This tape played
all night, periodically interrupted by me standing up and shouting at him
to turn it down. When I did this, everyone on the bus stared at me as if
I was mad. Apparently, it was common practice for bus drivers to play music
to help keep themselves awake while they drove through the night. At one of
our innumerable stops, I bought a box of biscuits from a road-side stall
so that I could tear off strips of cardboard in order to improvise a set
of ear-plugs, which, it turned out, didn't make any difference to the noise,
kept on falling out, and gave me sore ears. I also ate all the biscuits in
one go, just to try and take my mind off things, which made me feel sick.
The bus broke down half-way through the following day, and I ended up hitchhiking
to Panjim (the capital of Goa) in the back of a truck, with a pile of axles
for my seat. In a delirium of anger, frustration,
loneliness and arse pain, I just about managed to face the one final leg
of journey, which was to take a local bus out of the city to the beach. I didn't care where it was going, or which resort
I ended up in as long as there was a beach. I had clearly been wrong about
the joys of travelling.
Suspicious (adj.): thinking that someone might be guilty of
doing something wrong or dishonest - genuine (adj.): sincere, real - hassle
(n.): something that is annoying, because it causes problems or is difficult
to do - bite the bullet (v.): do something unpleasant - spiritual
mission (n.): religious work that involves going to a foreign country
in order to teach people about Christianity or help poor people - moron
(n.): idiot - conformity (n.): behaviour that obeys the accepted rules
of society or a group - ambitious (adj.): determined to be successful,
rich, powerful etc. - CV: curriculum vitae, a short written document
that lists your education and previous jobs, which you send to employers
when you are looking for a job - leap through a hoop (n.): usually
performed in a circus by animals: jump through something resembling a circle
- extended management-bonding exercise (n.): a course for bosses to
create more team spirit - drudgery (n.): hard, boring work - circumcision
(n.): the act of cutting off the end of the penis, here referring to a ritual
- badge of suffering (n.): a sign, e.g. a medal that one has suffered
and been brave, usually in war - tribe (n.): usually: a social group
consisting of people of the same race - sensitivity (n.): the ability
to understand other people's feelings and problems - contempt (n.):
a feeling that someone or something is not important and deserves no respect
- reminiscent of (adj.): reminding of - offensive (adj.):
very rude or insulting and likely to upset people - sniff (n.): informal:
a small amount or sign of - periodically (adv.): a number of times,
usually at regular times - stall (n.): a small shop with an open front
- ear-plugs (n.): sth. you put into your ears so as not to hear what
is happening around you - sore (adj.): painful - take my mind off things:
so I would not worry - axle (n.): the bar connecting two wheels on
a car or other vehicle - arse (n.): (vulgar) the part of your body
that you sit on - leg (n.): (here) part - resort (n.): a place
where a lot of people go for holidays
Epping Forest: a forest in Great Britain
Victorian colonials: the officials who would run the British Empire in
the age of Queen Victoria (1837-1901)
Surrey: a county in southeast England which is one of the
Home Counties. Many of the people who live there travel to London every day
to work, and most people think of Surrey as a wealthy, mainly middle-class
area
The Book: allusion to one of the main tourist guides for students
and backpackers, here The Lonely Planet (see page 49)
Hindi: an official language in India
Born in England to Indian parents Pica Iyer was educated at Eton,
Oxford and Harvard. Currently dividing his life between California and Japan,
Iyer is a renown regular contributor to international magazines and a writer
of non-fiction. His articles explore how our world is shaped by the way cultures
interact, collide and cohabit. Drawing on his personal experiences, he relates
in his writings extraordinary insights info the way the global and the local
meet. - Pica Iyer, "The Nowhere Man", Observer, February 16, 1997.
By the time I was nine,
I was already used to going to school by transatlantic plane, to sleeping
in airports, to shuttling back and forth three times a year, between my parents'
Indian home in California and my boarding school in England. While I was
growing up, I was never within 6,000 miles of the nearest relative. From
the time I was a teenager, I took it for granted that I could take my budget
vacations in Bolivia and Tibet, China and Morocco. It never seemed strange
to me that a girlfriend might be ten hours flying time away, that my closest
friends might be on the other side of a continent.
It was only recently that
I realised that all these habits of mind and life would scarcely have been
imaginable in my parents' youth; that the very facts and facilities that
shape my world are all distinctly new developments, and mark me as a modern
type. It was only recently, in fact, that I realised that I am an example,
perhaps, of an entirely new breed of people, a transcontinental tribe of
wanderers that is multiplying as fast as international telephone lines and
frequent flyer programmes. We are the transit loungers, forever heading to
the departure gate. We buy our interests duty-free, we eat our food on plastic
plates, we watch the world through borrowed headphones. We pass through countries
as through revolving doors, impermanent residents of nowhere. Nothing is
strange to us, and nowhere is foreign. We are visitors even in our own homes.
This kind of life offers
an unprecedented sense of freedom and mobility: tied down nowhere, we can
pick and choose among locations. Ours is the first generation that can go
off to visit Tibet for a week, or meet Tibetans down the street. At a superficial
level, this new internationalism means that I can meet, in the Hilton coffee
shop, an Indonesian businessman who is as conversant as I am with Magic Johnson
and Madonna. At a deeper level, it means that I need never feel estranged.
If all the world is alien to us, all the world is home.
I have learned to love foreignness.
In any place I visit, I have the privileges of an outsider: I am an object
of interest, and even fascination; I am a person set apart, able to enjoy
the benefits of the place without paying the taxes. And the places themselves
seem glamourous to me - romantic - as seen through foreign eyes: distance
on both sides lends enchantment. Policemen let me off speeding tickets, girls
want to hear the story of my life, pedestrians will gladly point me to the
nearest golden arches. Perpetual foreigners in the transit lounge, we enjoy
a kind of diplomatic immunity; and, living off room service in our hotel
rooms, we are never obliged to grow up, or even, really, to be ourselves.
And yet, sometimes, I stop
myself and think. What kind of heart is being produced by these new changes?
Must I always be a None of the Above? When the stewardess presents me with
disembarkation forms, what do I fill in? My passport says one thing, my face
another. My accent contradicts my eyes. Place of residence, final destination,
even marital status are not much easier to fill in; usually, I just tick
"other".
Beneath all the boxes, where
do we place ourselves? How does one fix a moving object on a map? I am not
an exile, really, nor an immigrant; not deracinated, I think, any more than
I am rooted. I have not felt the oppression of war, nor found ostracism in
the places where I do alight; I scarcely feel severed from a home I have
scarcely known. Yet is "citizen of the world" enough to comfort me?
Alienation, we are taught
from kindergarten onwards, is the condition of our time. This is the century
of exiles and refugees, of boat people and statelessness; the time when traditions
have been abolished, and men become closer to machines. This is the century
of estrangement: one third of all Afghans live outside of Afghanistan; the
second city of the Khmers is a refugee camp; the second tongue of Beverly
Hills is Farsi.
We airport hoppers can,
in fact, go through the world as through a house of wonders, picking up something
at every stop, and taking the whole globe as our playpen. And we can mix
and match as the situation demands. "Nobody's history is my history," Kazuo
Ishiguro, a great spokesman for the privileged homeless, once said to me,
and went on, "Whenever it was convenient for me to become very Japanese,
I could become very Japanese, and then, when I wanted to drop it, I would
just become this ordinary Englishman." Instantly, I felt a shock of recognition:
I have a wardrobe of selves from which to choose, and I savour the luxury
of being able to be an Indian in Cuba (where people are starving for Yoga
and Rabindranath Tagore), an American in Thailand or an Englishman in New
York.
Unable to get stirred by
the raising of a flag, we are sometimes unable to see how anyone could
be stirred. I sometimes think that this is how Salman Rushdie, the great
analyst of this condition, somehow became its victim. He had juggled homes
for so long, that he forgot how the world looks to someone who is rooted
- in country or belief. He had chosen to live so far from affiliation that
he could no longer see why people choose affiliation in the first place.
Besides, being part of no society means one is accountable to no one, and
need respect no laws outside one's own. If single nation people can be fanatical
as terrorists, we can end up ineffectual as peace keepers.
We become, in fact, strangers
to belief itself, unable to comprehend many of the rages and dogmas that
animate (and unite) people. Conflict itself seems inexplicable to us, because
partisanship is; we have the agnostic's inability to retrace the steps of
faith. I could not begin to fathom why some Muslims would think of murder
after hearing about The Satanic Verses: yet sometimes I force myself
to recall that it is we, in our floating scepticism, who are the exceptions,
that in China or Iran, Korea or Peru, it is not so strange to give up one's
life for a cause.
We end up, then, a little
like non-aligned nations, confirming our reservations at every step. We tell
ourselves, self-servingly, that nationalism breeds monsters, and choose to
ignore the fact that internationalism breeds them too. Ours is the culpability
not of the assassin, but of the bystander who takes a snapshot of the murder.
Or, when the revolution catches fire, hops on the next plane out.
Sometimes though, just sometimes,
I am brought up short by symptoms of my condition. I have never bought a
house of any kind, and my ideal domestic environment, I sometimes tell my
friends, is a hotel room. I have never voted, or ever wanted to vote, and
I eat in restaurants three times a day. I have never supported any nation
(in the Olympic games, say) or represented "my country" in anything. Even
my name is weirdly international, because my "real name" is one that makes
sense only in the home where I have never lived.
If I have any deeper home,
it is, I suppose, in English. My language is the house I carry around with
me as a snail his shell; and in my lesser moments I try to forget that mine
is not the language spoken in America, or even, really, by any member of
my family.
Yet even here, I find, I
cannot place my accent, or reproduce it as I can the tones of others. And
I am so used to modifying my English inflections according to whom I'm talking
to - an American, an Englishman, a villager in Nepal, a receptionist in Paris
- that I scarcely know what kind of voice I have.
I wonder, sometimes, if
this new kind of non-affiliation may not be alien to something fundamental
in the human state. The refugee at least harbours passionate feelings about
the world he has left - and generally seeks to return there; the exile at
least is propelled by some kind of strong emotion away from the old country
towards the new - indifference is not an exile emotion. But what does the
transit lounger feel? What are the issues that we would die for? What are
the passions that we would live for?
Boarding school (n.): a school where students live as well as study
- budget (adj.): very low in price - scarcely (adj.): almost
not or almost none at all - breed (n.): a particular kind of person
or type - transcontinental (adj.): crossing a continent - tribe
(n.): a social group consisting of people of the same race - transit lounge
(n.): airport lounge for people who use the airport to switch directly to
another flight without leaving the airport - revolving door (n.):
a type of door in the entrance of a large building, which goes around and
around as people go through it - impermanent (adj,): not staying the
same for ever - unprecedented (adj.): never having happened before
- internationalism (n.): the belief that nations should work together
and help each other - enchantment (n.): the quality of being very
pleasant or attractive - disembarkation form: form to be filled
out before getting off a ship or airplane - marital status (n.): whether
someone is married - used especially on official forms - deracinated
(adj.): with one's (cultural) roots removed - ostracism
(n.): if a group of people ostracize someone, they refuse to accept them
as a member of the group - alight (v,): to step out of a vehicle after
a journey - severed (adj.): cut off - citizen (n.): someone
who lives in a particular town, country, or state - alienation (n.)..
the feeling of not being part of society or a group - exile (n.): a
person who is forced to leave his or her country and live in another country,
especially for political reasons - refugee (n.).. someone who has
been forced to leave their country, especially during a war, or for political
or religious reasons - playpen (n.): an enclosed area in which a very
small child can play safely, that is like an open box with sides made of
bars or a net - savour (v.): to fully enjoy
a time or experience - stirred (adj.): if a feeling stirs in you, you
begin to feel it - juggle (v.): (here) to try to fit two or more jobs,
activities etc into your life, especially with difficulty - affiliation
(n.): the connection or involvement that someone or something has with a political,
religious etc organization - accountable (adj.): responsible for the
effects of your actions and willing to explain or be criticized for them
- dogma (n.): a set of firm beliefs held by a group of people who expect
other people to accept these beliefs without thinking about them - inexplicable
(adj.): too unusual or strange to be explained or understood - agnostic
(n.): someone who believes that people cannot know whether God exists or
not - partisanship (n.): strongly supporting a particular political
party, plan or leader, usually without considering the other choices carefully
- fathom (v.): to understand what something means after thinking about
it carefully -non-aligned (adj.): anon-aligned country does not support,
or is not dependent on, any of the powerful countries in the world - self-serving
(adj.): showing that you will only do something if it will gain you an advantage
- used to show disapproval - nationalism (n.): love for your own country
and the belief that it is better than any other country - breed (v.):
produce - culpability (n.): deserving blame - bystander (n.):
someone who watches what is happening without taking part - domestic environment
(n.): relating to family relationships and life at home - snail
(n.): a small soft creature that moves very slowly and has a hard shell on
its back - inflection (n.): the way in which a word changes its form
to show a difference in its meaning or use - receptionist (n.): someone
whose job is to welcome and deal with people arriving in a hotel or office
building, visiting a doctor etc - propel (v.): to move, drive, or
push something forward
Golden arches: synonym for McDonald's (the yellow M-sign of McDonald's
looks like two golden arches)
None of the Above: Option to be filled out on forms if no other answer
fits
Khmer: tribe of Cambodia
Farsi: the language of Iran
Kazuo Ishiguro: (1954-) novelist, born in Nagasaki but came to England
in 1960. Well-known for novels such as The Artist of the Floating
World (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1989)
Rabindranath Tagore: (1861-1941) a Bengali Indian writer, one of the
most important Indian writers of the 20th century. His works include Gitonjali
and Chitra, a play which he translated into English
Salman Rushdie: (1947-) a British writer born in India, who won the
Booker Prize for his novel Midnight’s Children. In 1988 his novel
The Satanic Verses offended Muslims because they said that it was
insulting to their religion, with the result that Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran
gave a fatwa, an order that Rushdie should be killed. He had to live
in a secret place for many years