'Che brutta invenzione il turismo!': Tourism and Anti-tourism in Current French and Italian Travel Writing

Abstract

'Che brutta invenzione il turismo!':1 Tourism and Anti-tourism in Current French and Italian Travel Writing Catharine Mee The rivalry between travellers and tourists goes to the very heart of the culture of travel and is a recurrent feature of much travel writing. With the growth of the tourist industry both travellers and travel writers are confronted with the presence of tourists in even the most exotic and remote destinations, and distinctions made between travellers and tourists become increasingly tenuous. In these circumstances, ironically, the most virulent 'anti-tourists' are other travellers, other tourists, and travel writers. Although tourists are increasingly present in the places that are the subject matter of travel narratives, they do not usually play a major role in those narratives. However, tourists do persistently turn up in many travel texts; Jean-Didier Urbain even suggests that the tourist is the 'antihero' of the travel book.2 James Buzard, in his study of British and American travel writing, has shown that anti-tourism goes back as far as the origins of tourism itself in the early nineteenth century.3 Shifting the focus onto French and Italian travel texts from the last few decades, I will consider here how anti-tourism has evolved, and whether indeed it has evolved. This will lead on to a closer analysis of two very recent texts: Francesco Piccolo's Allegro occidentale (2003)4 and Alexandre Kauffmann's Travellers (2004),5 that both, unusually for travel writing, address tourism in detail, which results in a more considered approach to the subject. Since the literature of travel is inseparable from the context of contemporary tourism, I will begin with a brief overview of some of the ways in which the rivalry between travellers and tourists has been addressed in studies of tourism. Daniel Boorstin's much-cited essay 'From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel'6 helped instigate the study of tourism in the social sciences.7 The highly critical tone with which Boorstin addresses his subject is typical of texts that consider tourism a degraded [End Page 269] form of travel and insist strongly on the distinction between travellers and tourists.8 However, such attitudes are often founded on stereotypes rather than on the study of tourist practices. Responding directly to Boorstin, Dean MacCannell defends tourism as a quest for authenticity in response to the alienation of modern society.9 Many of the subsequent studies have used typological approaches to tourism in an attempt to differentiate between tourists according to their activities and motivations.10 Such typologies have placed tourists, travellers and even anthropologists in the same systems of classification. Significantly, travellers are usually treated as one category of tourist, although they are described with a variety of different terms.11 Such studies are useful in moving on from Boorstin by considering traveller-tourist distinctions as internal to tourism, part of the anti-tourism that is a characteristic of many tourists themselves.12 However, in their inaugural editorial for the journal Tourist Studies, Adrian Franklin and Mike Crang are critical of the 'obsession with taxonomies' in tourism research, although they admit that 'as yet tourist studies has not come to terms with the continual oscillation around the poles of traveller and tourist'.13 In a more recent attempt to address the issue, Scott McCabe argues that the way tourists or travellers construct and present their experiences depends on their audience.14 It is not the aim of this paper to create another traveller-tourist typology, but to consider where travel writers place themselves and, following McCabe, to relate the travel writer's position to his/her audience: the reader. Although studies of tourism often quote the texts of travel writers, their main focus is on travel and tourism as social, rather than literary, phenomena. James Buzard examines literary anti-tourism in greater detail. Buzard concludes his study with the end of the First World War, considering the following period...