Freud`s Couch, Scott`s Buttocks, Brontë`s Grave; .: Culture Trails: Adventures in Travel - Hardcover

Goldhill, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226301311 ISBN 13: 9780226301310

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

The Victorian era was the high point of literary tourism. Writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Sir Walter Scott became celebrities, and readers trekked far and wide for a glimpse of the places where their heroes wrote and thought, walked and talked. Even Shakespeare was roped in, as Victorian entrepreneurs transformed quiet Stratford-upon-Avon into a combination shrine and tourist trap. Stratford continues to lure tourists today, as do many other sites of literary pilgrimage throughout Britain. And our modern age could have no better guide to such places than Simon Goldhill. In "Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, Bronte's Grave", Goldhill makes a pilgrimage to Sir Walter Scott's baronial mansion, Wordsworth's cottage in the Lake District, the Bronte parsonage, Shakespeare's birthplace, and Freud's office in Hampstead. Traveling, as much as possible, by methods available to Victorians - and gamely negotiating distractions ranging from broken bicycles to a flock of giggling Japanese schoolgirls - he tries to discern what our forebears were looking for at these sites, as well as what they have to say to the modern mind. What does it matter that Emily Bronte's hidden passions burned in this specific room? What does it mean that Scott self-consciously built an extravagant castle suitable for Ivanhoe - and star-struck tourists visited it while he was still living there? Or that Freud's meticulous recreation of his Vienna office is now a meticulously preserved museum of itself? Or that Shakespeare's birthplace features student actors declaiming snippets of his plays...in the garden of a house where he almost certainly never wrote a single line? Goldhill brings to these inquiries his trademark wry humor and a lifetime's engagement with literature. The result is a travel book like no other, a reminder that even today, the writing life still has the power to inspire.

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Simon Goldhill is professor of Greek literature and culture and fellow and director of studies in classics at King's College, Cambridge, as well as director of the Cambridge Victorian studies group. He is the author of many books, including Love, Sex, and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives.

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FREUD'S COUCH SCOTT'S BUTTOCKS BRONTË'S GRAVE

By Simon Goldhill

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2011 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30131-0

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................vii1 THE GOLDEN TICKET......................................12 LION HUNTING IN SCOTLAND...............................173 PANTING UP THE ENDLESS ALP OF LIFE.....................374 SEETHING IN YORKSHIRE..................................615 OH FOR A MUSE OF FIRE!.................................836 FREUD, ACTUALLY........................................103How to Get There.........................................123Photo Credits............................................131Further Reading..........................................127

Chapter One

THE GOLDEN TICKET

I HAVE NEVER STOPPED being slightly anxious about the premise of this book. "Make a pilgrimage," proposed my editor over a grilled tuna salad. "Go anywhere and write about it." It sounds at first like a golden ticket. A set of destinations rose like a sunrise in my mind. The romance of the dusty open road, or at very least a Kerouac fantasy, is part of the adolescent mind of everyone of my generation. The mysterious traveler who blows into town, the life-changing encounter with a stranger, never forgotten, never recovered, the slow climb that reveals the breathtaking view—we all share these cultural myths, as we trudge to work or sit halfheartedly at the desk.

The trouble is that any really serious pilgrim travels alone. You are meant to make a journey where the very traveling leads you to explore yourself, your relation to God, or your life or your past. The endpoint is somehow only a small part of the process of inward transformation. This sort of pilgrimage started with the early Christians. A woman called Egeria left France and went to the Holy Land in the fourth century. It is boggling to imagine how hard it must have been, even with the securities of the Roman Empire and its straight roads and military checkpoints, for a woman to travel alone, as a Christian when Christianity was still a precarious institution, across such a distance and in such conditions. But not only did she make it there and back, she also wrote an account for her fellow sisters of the Church, telling of her tearful, overwhelmed response to the sites of the Passion, and of the services and worship she saw. It is one of the very first bits of prose we have written by a woman, and it now survives just in fragments, a tattered glimpse of her journey across deserts and darkness toward her enlightenment. I have a soft spot too for Prudentius, the fourth-century Christian Latin poet from Spain, who describes stopping in a church on his solitary trip to Rome, where he lay on the ground in front of the picture of a saint, weeping and wailing all afternoon at the image of martyrdom. That's how pilgrims do it—on bloodied knees, crawling toward an epiphany of self-awareness.

But I don't like being on my own. Although I am an academic who loves to spend all day in the library, and I get very jumpy if I don't get those long reading hours, nonetheless I don't like to eat alone, drink alone, sleep alone, walk alone, or even be silent for long. (I am not necessarily the person you want to sit next to in the library.) But if you go on a pilgrimage with a bunch of mates, I thought to myself, it is bound to turn into a comedy. You end up with Three Men in a Boat (and Montmorency the dog). Or Chaucer's pilgrims—a bawdy, sexy, drunken crew who started from a pub for a good time out together, telling stories all the way. Even Robert Louis Stevenson, an intense and self-absorbed young man, found that his journey of self-discovery veered into comedy the moment he decided to travel with a donkey (called Modestine, and the real star of his Travels with a Donkey). When you are no longer alone, instead of the Kerouac moment on the open road, it's Cliff Richard singing, "We're all going on a summer holiday," or Little Miss Sunshine. I had no desire to go there. Travel with a group might just be able to escape comedy, I supposed, but only at the expense of something worse: I knew the shuffling lines at Lourdes, the coach parties in Jerusalem, intently following the upheld umbrella toward the photo op of spirituality. I had no desire to go there either.

My first attempt to find some middle ground between lonely, despairing self-analysis and group pranks involved me sidling up to my wife, the lawyer. She is used to cutting through the desperate prose of her opponent's hopeful arguments. "You want me to be the straight woman to your pilgrim wit," she sniffed. "Or you want me to be the dumb American, while you expound on the history of places older than my country. Unattractive invitation. I'm not taking time off work for that." (Lawyers do not think of time like you or I do. There is no place for pleasure, let alone a journey of self-discovery. Time is divided simply into billable hours and nonbillable hours.) As I further reflected—aloud, stupidly enough—that a pilgrimage with one's wife would mean a journey of discovery into the complexities of marriage, a portrait of one's soul mate, so the prospect of a road trip for two—It Happened One Night? Thelma and Louise?—receded further and further. So I decided that what I needed to do was to make up a party of four Jews. To be four Jews on a train would have the structure of a joke—that would deal with the comedy—but you could guarantee that one of us at least would always be depressed and overintellectualize the occasion.

While I was ruminating on how a one might organize a modern, gregarious, uncomic pilgrimage, I was also struggling with the more pressing concern of where I wanted this pilgrimage to go. Each of my friends had a view, and expressed it firmly with growing excitement, as their imagination toyed with the golden ticket. I had quickly ruled out the natural world: Ayers Rock may be reached by a dusty road, but I couldn't see any mileage in a trip to such a hokey site of spiritual transformation. I had already written two books about Jerusalem, and the trip to get there is nothing, these days, in comparison to the difficulty of living there (unless you come from the occupied territories, and that would be a different project altogether, especially for four Jews). I could contemplate visiting the Ganges or Mount Fuji or any one of a host of pilgrimage sites my friends came up with, but the trip would be marred for me by the relentlessly touristy nature of such a project—I could only ever experience it as a rank outsider, baffled by the holiness of cows or nodding politely at awe before cherry blossoms. I was afraid that all I could do would be to smile at my own inability to escape from the stereotypes I already had—or end up like a Westerner in a sari, sadly mimicking a longed-for mystique. I wanted a trip that wouldn't leave me gaping or aping.

My editor came to my rescue. "Do something Victorian," she said. I had been nattering right through the tuna salad about the thrill of my new project on nineteenth-century ideas of the past, and my research group in Cambridge, and how great it was to be paid to read Victorian novels. Her insight was brilliant. Pilgrimage was all over the place in Victorian Britain, but not in the way we might immediately expect. The notion of a Victorian pilgrimage set me whirring with excited ideas and plans. The disappointment on the faces of my friends—no islands...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226301311
• ISBN 13: 9780226301310
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 144
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Wiley-VCH GmbH; product_safety@wiley.com; ; Boschstrasse 12; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland