Book a Break and Buy the Book

Is literary tourism a phenomenon that can be experienced?  The novelist, Marcel Proust, expresses the effect that literary texts have upon places in the minds of certain readers in his most famous novel. Just a note before you plunge in, Bergotte was Proust’s character whom he based on the Nobel laureate, Anatole France:

Going to the Champs-Élysées Garden was unbearable for me.  If only Bergotte had described it in one of his novels, I would probably have wanted to get to know it, like all those things whose 'double' had been planted in my imagination.  Description warmed the things, made them live, gave them a personality, and I wanted to find them again in reality; but in this public garden nothing was attached to my dreams. (Proust)

 

Aller aux Champs-Élysées me fut insupportable. Si seulement Bergotte les eût décrits dans un de ses livres, sans doute j’aurais désiré de les connaître, comme toutes les choses dont on avait commencé par mettre le « double » dans mon imagination. Elle les réchauffait, les faisait vivre, leur donnait une personnalité, et je voulais les retrouver dans la réalité; mais dans ce jardin public rien ne se rattachait à mes rêves.      

             Marcel Proust (1913, 386) À la Recherche du temps perdu

Holidays in Brittany

I spent 4 years researching this certain type of reader and their visitor experience during a slow residency in Concarneau.  Concarneau is the archetypal unknown town, at least for the 7 million British holidaymakers heading to France each year. But if they bought the right book then booked their break there, they would be well-rewarded. Concarneau is a Breton seaside town and fishing port on the south coast of Finistère. The right book to take along as holiday reading is the detective novel, The Yellow Dog (now in Penguin edition). More ambitious readers of TRAVEL WRITERS ONLINE could also take the French original, Le Chien jaune, both in paperback and as an audio-book for the ferry crossing. The detective character, Maigret, has become better known in the UK and US thanks to Rowan Atkinson’s portrayal of Simenon’s detective chief inspector, DCI.

The Yellow Dog

Literary tourism has received academic attention, but as yet, many questions remain unexplored, particularly, why novels stimulate travel and the nature of the relationship between reading fiction and holidaymaking.  Tourism and reading literary texts have strong links since they are both leisure activities pursued for pleasure, distinguishing themselves from work, even though reading and travelling are also work activities in everyday life.  

Balbec and Marcel Proust

Unravelling whether a novel has contributed to visitor numbers at a particular destination, though, is fraught with complexity since the writer of the novel may have chosen the setting of the story because it was already a holiday destination; the classic example of this is Marcel Proust's fictional seaside town of Balbec, which has been identified as the French resort of Cabourg in Normandy.  If knowledge of the literary connection makes certain visitors behave differently at the destination then this reveals what value literary tourism has to offer; it is this group which is of most interest to my study since their decisions at the resort may well provide a basis for improving the experience of the literary visit. 

It is good to research into what makes us more fulfilled and to find what stimulates us intellectually and affects us emotionally to develop our identities.