One-Way Street

Derrida and the Odyssey of Metaphor

I have some friends who like to tell a story about how they drove Jacques Derrida to the airport after a conference at the University of Pittsburgh. The challenged they faced, besides making sure Derrida made his flight, was finding a topic of conversation. After all, they were lowly grad students and he was the father of deconstruction. My friends had recently become parents for the first time, so they turned to the topic foremost in their minds at that time. Derrida was a father himself, and he was sympathetic to the travails of new parents. My friends always concluded their story of their ride with the great philosopher with, "We talked about baby spit up with Jacques Derrida!"

In his first letter in Counterpath, Derrida informs his collaborator, Catherine Malabou, that he can't chose a travel companion because deciding upon a travel companion is "like being asked whether you would consent to being born or to die with this one or that one." Throughout the book Derrida seems rather nervous about traveling, admitting at one point that if it weren't for all his speaking engagements, "I would never have budged." Nevertheless, Derrida would have been an ideal travel companion, especially to Greece, which seems to bring out the best in him. One short chapter, reproduced from a work not translated into English, focuses on Derrida's ruminations on a Greek photographer on the Acropolis. Photography, Derrida shows us, is really about time. When you photograph a foreign city you are taking a shot of a city "already condemned to expire." Should you return to the city, the place recorded in your photographs will be a lost city. In a way, ordinary tourist photographs are really shots of something that is already gone.

I've always been interested in the idea of a philosopher trained in close reading techniques--for what is most of Derrida's work but highly refined close reading in the literary manner--turned loose in the world. Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street exemplifies the idea. I bought Counterpath expecting an odyssey of metaphor, as Derrida puts it at one point. Unfortunately, Malabou diverts us away from the places Derrida visits--New York, Italy, Japan--and back to Derrida's texts. The bulk of Counterpath consists of extended quotations from Derrida's other works. In an effort to give the book a conceptual unity, Malabou focuses on the verb "derive" as it appears in Derrida's work. This isn't a terribly interesting concept, especially when sustained over an entire book. Derrida's original contributions to the book, mostly in the form of letters written to Malabou, are surprisingly prosaic. He says he becomes a different person while traveling ("I'm not sure I've ever traveled , myself, with 'me.'") and he dislikes the commotion of traveling. And that's pretty much as far as he goes.

So we can add travel to the other blank spot in Derrida's life, along with movies--he claimed to watch movies all the time but he has nothing to say about them. Maybe Derrida's true attitudes about travel can be discerned in his remarks on Italy. He tells us that Italy is the only place he visits simply for the sake of traveling there. Yet, he had little to say about the country except it invokes some "beautiful memories," which he declines to share with us. I wonder if Italy, along with the cinema, are the places to which Derrida traveled to take a break from being Derrida. He seems to have never traveled with Derrida.

La Bella Figura

Earlier this summer when I was in Rome I concocted a scheme by which I could move to Italy and make a living selling tee shirts that said, "I survived crossing a street in Rome." Then I calculated the benefits of living an Italian lifestyle (great food, friendly people, naps in the middle of the day) with the costs of daily life in Italy (trains that may, or may not, let you out at your stop) and decided to return to the US. Beppe Severgnini, a Milanese journalist, explains the paradoxes of Italian life in his new book, La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind. Severgnini's argument is that Italy prefers beauty to, say, a functioning judicial system. Indeed, as anyone who ventures beyond the standard tourist circuit can see, for all its enchantments and G8 membership, Italy is a bit Third-Worldy around the edges. Severgnini documents the frustrations and joys of la vita Italiana in a series of vignettes ranging from the cliched (Italians' casual attitudes about stop lights) and the insightful (the strengths and weaknesses of Italian flight attendants). He can be glib, but he's a (mostly) clear-eyed observer of his wonderful, exasperating country.

Bourdain in Beirut

Anthony Bourdain, whose cookbook Les Halles Cookbook always makes me feel like a harassed Mexican kitchen slave while cooking some of the best meals I've ever prepared, has a piece in Salon about getting caught in Beirut during the whatever it's called--conflict, war, folie à deux. The party amidst the bombs is coolness as a form of resistance, although in the morning there are worried calls to parents and improvised plans to escape. Bourdain's imperious sympathy is toned down a bit; he admires these people and he allows himself to be photographed cowering on a cot while soldiers chat idly nearby.

Berlin's New DDR Museum

If you ever find yourself in Berlin (never been there myself, but I hear it's nice--lots of lakes), visit the new DDR Museum. From the description in the New York Times, the museum offers visitors a chance to confirm their stereotypes about East Germany, the land of an omniscient security service and female swimmers who shaved their backs. You can enter a (surprisingly stylish) apartment (at left) and allow yourself to be bugged. There are exhibits on the Trabant (the workhouse car of the DDR), nude bathing (quite the pastime in East Germany), and, of course, surveillance equipment. No mention in the article about any exhibits on Olympic doping, though. Nostalgia for East Germany is surely among the most peculiar of nostalgias, but there are people who have it.

Holiday in Papua

Jonathan Yardley takes a look at Lawrence Osborne's The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall. Osborne is another "Disney World is the end of civilization" traveler, but he's fascinated by entirely made-up environments as well. For instance, he lingers in Dubai's otherworldly airport, where the duty-free shopping includes Maseratis. Dubai is a stop on the way to his ultimate destination, Papua, which has its good points (it's pretty much the opposite of Disney World) and its drawbacks (cannibals). Before you can say "neo-colonial tourist," though, Osborne recognizes how unreal Papua is in Western eyes, describing it as "the far side of the looking glass, a parallel world about which Indonesians and Westerners could make only fraudulent images."

After recently returning from Italy and also contemplating issues of authenticity in travel, I found Osborne's description of the process of travel perfectly captures its insidious, and entirely necessary, effect on you:

A journey is never a simple thing. The hitches and the boredom, the missed connections and the empty hours are the price that must be paid for leaving one's real life and entering an unreal one. On the other hand, this temporary unreal life has its advantages. You have nothing to think about except the logistics of the journey itself, in all their maddening detail and stupidity. With time even these details take on a poetic urgency. How far is it to the bridge? Is the car waiting on the far side of said bridge? It is only when you are thoroughly submerged in such questions that you begin to become unconscious.

The Quaintness Collector

"Experience the culture like a local--you'll spend less money and have more fun," advises Rick Steves. As travel philosophies go, this is a pretty good one, and, to the best of our ability, this is how we spent our two weeks in Italy. Watching the World Cup final in a small town park in Le Marche was certainly a native cultural experience, but other experiences were not so unambiguously authentic.

Take, for instance, the Piazza Grande in Arezzo, as lovely a public space as you're likely to find in Italy. Unlike piazzas in Rome or Sienna, the buildings surrounding the Piazza Grande are well-maintained and clean. No shutters closed for forty years, no crumbling mortar. Colorful medieval banners, many of them looking like Ferrari logos, hang from the upper stories. This public space is well ordered partly because of the jewelry money that comes into town, partly because the town itself was almost completely rebuild after World War II. The town is a reconstruction of an idea of Arezzo.

Is that bad? American travelers are pretty wary of artifice because so many of our major tourist destinations are pure artifices: Las Vegas, Disney World, even Times Square. As Rick Steves knows, we travel to Europe to see a more authentic and historically-grounded culture. My family and I traveled all over Tuscany and Le Marche to find it, and we did: bad grocery stores, fantastic restaurants tucked into the countryside, silly television, and landscapes that looked incredibly like travel-book images of Italy.

But it was speaking to Italians about traveling to America that clarified things for me. They wanted to travel to Chicago for the skyscrapers and the blues music. I didn't have the heart to tell them the skyscrapers were cubical workfarms and the blues little more than yuppie feel-good music. But the current realities of skyscrapers and blues music--two of Chicago's most significant contributions to twentieth-century culture--were beside the point. As Henry James, the unabashed "quaintness collector," understood, travel is an aesthetic experience, not an empirical one, especially when travelling to Italy. We travel with an idea of what a place should look like, and we seek out the objects that embody that idea. After all, no one travels for the prosaic experience of going to a European hardware store. (No great shakes, let me tell you.) We travel to places like Arezzo because artifice is part of the authentic experience of travel. Otherwise, we might as well stay home and watch television.