Round the World in 80 Ways (Page 2)

Löfgren begins his book by brushing aside some of the most persistent bugbears that have plagued tourism studies, pointing out that people who study tourism too often "feel a need to legitimate their seemingly frivolous topic by pointing out its economic and social importance" (it is, after all, the world's biggest industry) and insisting that "surely tourism is too important a topic to confine within the boundaries of 'tourism research.'" And, while he is unabashed about the importance of tourism, he does not overstate its coherence as a topic of study. Although the book covers an impressive sweep of time, Löfgren cautions against the sort of longue-durée catch-all narrative that "fall[s] into evolutionary or devolutionary traps, like 'from the Grand Tour to Europe on $5 a day.'"

The structure of On Holiday is borrowed from a distinction first elaborated by the French sociologist Jean-Didier Urbain, between what he calls "the Phileas Foggs and the Robinson Crusoes of the tourist world"--i.e., those traveling on a neurotic empiricist quest to gather information and knowledge, and those just looking to "get away from it all." The first section of the book is called "Landscapes and Mindscapes" and follows the inheritors of the Phileas Fogg tradition of educational touring--the manufacturing of experience, the creation of the picturesque, the meaning of motion, postcards and memorizing.

To find the roots of this empiricizing tendency in tourism, Löfgren rightly goes back to the gentleman's Grand Tour of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, trotting out a young Carolus Linnaeus with his obsessively detail-oriented journal and the unforgettable Joseph Plumptre and his bag of "knick-knacks"--notebooks, telescope, barometer and the indispensable Claude-glass--all to help him in his "collecting" of the picturesque.

From the "picturesque" Löfgren moves on to the "sublime," sketching out how industrializing nations set about "nationalising the sublime" in the nineteenth century, with expressions like "a Swiss view" and "the American sublime" gaining currency as a result of their endeavors. This is followed by a rather intriguing chapter on transportation and the relationship between various types of motion and the packaging of experience. He correctly points out the revolutionary significance of the standardized journey time that came with the advent of railway and steamship travel, and he takes us through the "rediscovery of walking" that resulted. He concludes the "Phileas Fogg" section of the book with a discussion of postcards and the production and narration of experiences.

The discussion of walking contains a number of interesting insights, among them the assertion that the vogue for promenades and hikes was "related to the new forms of landscape patriotism in the early nineteenth century. Roving the countryside, you came in contact with the real folk--you could 'walk yourself Swedish,'" as one Swedish author put it. This discussion of walking is skillfully handled, but it also offers a perfect opportunity that Löfgren overlooks. It is the figure of Thomas Coryate, one of the most fascinating characters in the history of tourism. In 1608, this eccentric English courtier walked from Venice to London, just for a lark, and published his account under the title Coryats Crudities, Hastily Gobled up in Five Moneths Travells. Coryate was not just a consummate tourist but a devilishly effective publicity hound. It seems a shame that this book should pass him over.

From Phileas Fogg, Löfgren turns to Robinson Crusoe and the other side of Western tourism--the desert-island tradition of getting away from it all. The growth of spas is looked at, as is the Swedish tradition of owning a summer cottage on the coast. Here, as indeed throughout the book, there is perhaps an excessive and rather random-seeming reliance on examples from the Swedish experience, a fact Löfgren acknowledges in his introduction and that, at its better moments, can even make for a refreshing change from most Anglo-American studies. It is, nevertheless, a definite limitation.

It's the kind of limitation that's quickly forgotten, however, when one reads the discussion of gender that graces the pages on cottage culture. Löfgren paints a delightfully tragic portrait of the "Vacation Dad," who drags the family out to the coast for a summer in the family cottage. Inevitably, his handyman skills pale next to those of the local men, writes Löfgren, and

the cottage world can thus become a testing ground of conflicting projects. The men may feel like visitors to a female-dominated universe of flower garlands and picnic baskets or feel they can't live up to the expectations of the vacation Dad. And the women can feel imprisoned in a male world of endless practical projects and quests, like the woman in Margaret Atwood's poem Bored, who is "bored out of her mind" as she helps in her husband's do-it-yourself schemes: she patiently holds the log while he is sawing or the string while he is measuring, weeds out the garden he planted, or just sits still in the boat he is rowing, the car he is driving.

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