ABSTRACT:
I propose to speak about travel as liminal pastime, a kind of symbolic inversion.
characterized by changed behavioural attitudes including routine dress code, and ranging from wandering great distances in space or time to exploring the depth of the subconscious while (not) remaining at the same point in space or time. The title is borrowed from a well-known story by Joyce Carol Oates and represents the general focus of the paper. Thus, it is my plan to look into the rationale for traveling as a borderline interval segregated from everyday existence. Travelling for pleasure is a relatively modern occurrence; furthermore, mass tourism as a cultural phenomenon evolves as a result of a radical change in man’s attitude to the world beyond the boundaries of his native habitat. However, as each person has his/her own space bubble, a traveler’s microcosm includes certain values which also travel and are likely to be enhanced in very different ways. Novelty and strangeness, the essential elements in the tourist experience, can be handled in very different ways by different types of travelers, and adopted to varying extents by organized tourists, explorers, or drifters. In the words of the emblematic BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke, tourists travel "to the country of the mind- - the perceived India of Taj Mahal, a Paris of the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, a Spain of bullfighting (even though in real-life Spain baseball, not bullfighting, is the number one sport), rather than modern globalized cities with new scientific and technological landmarks. Consequently, depending on the type of travelers and their quest, it appears they have seen different places - either expanding, shunning familiarity and transgressing new borders and embracing maximum novelty, or shrinking back and looking for familiarity and zero novelty as in Anne Tyler’s "Accidental Tourist.- |
