Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 20

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Popular Culture Review

whether any of us can approach the same sense of wonder-the authentic sense of
discovery-that the first Spanish explorer, Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, felt upon his
encounter. Using “P” to denote the value of the authentic discovery, Percy asserts,
“if the place is seen by a million sightseers, a single sightseer does not receive
value P but a millionth part of value P” (46). The primary reason for this devalu
ation is not the numbers of tourists, necessarily, but the amount of information that
we unavoidably carry with us as we go to the canyon. We are burdened by a
complex, deeply-rooted collection of data that creates in us expectations of “The
Grand Canyon”-an image, an idea, not a physical phenomenon. We can see the
canyon not for what it is but for what we have been told it is. The “symbolic
machinery” that creates our expectations and informs us also causes a “loss of
sovereignty.” We are, therefore, no longer in charge of our experience, and the
more we travel, the more we lose the horizon. Though we should probably apply
Percy’s value “P” not to a Spanish explorer but to an unknown native American,
his example still illustrates intuitively that the trouble with tourism, in this sense,
is the trouble with travel. It affects anyone who follows another, and, with very
few exceptions, we are followers. Again, this frustration is not a new one. Mark
Twain, in The Innocents Abroad (1869), the remarkable nar- rative of America’s
first pleasure cruise, confronts the issue as he tours Rome:
What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which
swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other
experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you
are walking where none others have walked; that you are be
holding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breath
ing a virgin atmosphere....To be thefirst—that is the idea. (266)
In celebrating the thrill of discovery, Twain also recognizes that for the touristeven at the beginning of the Tourist Age-such a feeling is unavailable. He contin
ues, “[w]hat is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me?
What is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to
feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it passes to others? What
can I discover?-Nothing. Nothing whatsoever” (267).
So what is the tourist to do? To try to answer this question, we can begin
by altering one of Shakespeare’s most memorable lines and applying it to the Tourist
Age: all the world is a sight, and we are merely tourists. This petty theft may help
illustrate an important point about the nature of the tourist experience, that, like
Shakespeare’s original assertion, via the character Jacques, that the world is a “stage”
and we are “players,” sights and tourists also require playacting. The search for
authenticity in this late phase of the Age of Tourism relies on-for better or for