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Abstract
A review of literature on authenticity argues in favour of what is called here substantial authenticity, against objective, constructed and existential notions, argued as non-mutually exclusive. Several themes in substantial authenticity are found in Nuevo viaje a la Alcarria (New Journey to the Alcarria), a book by the Nobel Prize winner for Literature Camilo Jose Cela: nostalgia/hostility to modern society; social integration; autonomy from society; opposition to capitalism/commodification and opposition to pose/style/fashion. Besides the characteristically modern stance implied by some of such engagements with authenticity, Cela's work also presents postmodern traits (such as disregard for knowledge and ambiguity as to its own (non)-fictional status), prompting a discussion on the limits of the non-fictional text. The discussion is especially relevant because the authority of Cela as a famous writer (which he reinforces by concealing sources and suggesting mystical access to Otherness) enables him to apparently change the very social and cultural landscape in which he travels. This takes place both in the long-run (the region already contains markers of his first trip, which are likely to be reinforced by the second) and in the short-run (immediate transformative effects in the interaction between the author and local people).
Notes
1 Evoking a British best-seller novelist, The Catherinle Cookson Trail consists of steel street markers that locate the sites of houses where Cookson was born and raised, despite that the houses do not exist anymore (Rojek, Citation1999, p. 198). Similarly, Egypt's second major city, Alexandria, is an important tourist hub that lacks touristic sights and is largely known in the West due to the fictional works of Lawrence Durrell (Dunn, Citation2006).
2 Quoted in Hiernaux (Citation2006, p. 468).
3 Source: Centre for Travel Writing Studies at Nottingham Trent University website (http://www.studiesintravelwriting.com/publications.php?id=594).
4 Quoted in Wang (Citation1999, p. 350).
5 In such context, ‘the assumed isolation of the tribal societies ( … ) is assumed to lessen the problem of “contamination”, and preserve in a purer form the unique features which can be assumed to cohere into an integrated whole.' (Featherstone, Citation1995, p. 136).
6 Quoted in Wang (Citation1999, p. 357).
7 Quoted in Noy (Citation2009, p. 222).
8 Quoted in Russell (Citation2000, p. 6).
9 Olsen (Citation2002) is in the same vein when he holds that by changing the social relations ‘between the tourist, the product and its seller, the tourist industry has increasingly been able to provide products that create a feeling of authenticity in individuals'.
10 Later, Greenwood amended some of his views on this.
11 In Baugh's (Citation1988) rendering of Heidegger, ‘human beings are authentic when they make their existence their own by deciding for themselves what it is to be a human being' (p. 478). For Sartre
authenticity involves assuming responsibility for one's existence in its entirety, including those aspects one encounters as given. One does this by conferring a meaning upon one's self and circumstances, not just by taking up an attitude towards them that reveals them in a certain light, but by acting to change what one encounters as having already been there, in accordance with a value one has chosen. (p. 478)
Baugh also sees in common to both philosophers the notion that
one is authentic ( … ) when one's existence is organized on the basis of the chosen end of one's individual existence as a finite transcendence, when this end is chosen in the awareness of the contingency of the choice, and of what the situation makes possible for one's ‘being-in-the-world’. (p. 479)
12 This can involve nostalgia as the idealization of ‘ways of life in which people are supposed as freer, more innocent, more spontaneous, purer, and truer to themselves’, which are usually located in childhood or in the past (Wang, Citation1999, p. 360). More specifically, nostalgia is defined by Turner (Citation1987, p. 152–3) as the loss ‘rural simplicity, traditional stability and cultural integration following the impact of industrial capitalism’.
13 ‘Cela is interested in people in the natural state ( … ), which is connected with a certain anti-intellectualism and a dislike for what he considers to be artificial’.
14 Mieder (Citation1985, p. 119) defines proverbs as ‘wisdom, truth, morals, and traditional views in a metaphorical, fixed and memorisable form and which is handed down from generation to generation’.
15 The notion refers originally to late nineteenth century attitudes towards the Orient by travellers ‘who had lost the once authentic experience provided by a world that was disappearing’ (p. 168).
16 Quoted in Casas (Citation2004, p. 154).
17 In the case of the sexton, rather than an ‘anti-social’ stance or condition, what one sees is actually social reproduction at work, as sons and daughters repeat their father's rapport with a religious institution.
18 The 1986 edition by Plaza and Janes is used in this paper and all quotations in English extracted from the work are by the author of the paper.
19 Quoted in Sim (2005, p. 5).
20 In a study of V.S. Naipaul's Among the Believers, Nixon (Citation1991, p. 75) writes that the author,
values the element of arbitrariness and is eager to convey the sensation of being a prisoner of fortune in a strange land. Yet, as a polemical travel writer given to broad cultural generalizations, he feels a strong impulse running counter to the first: the urge to transcend the limitations of the chance encounter.
21 Isaac Peral was a Spanish engineer, sailor and designer of the first Spanish submarine, launched in 1888 (Source: Wikipedia).
22 One of the examples provided is ‘En Atanzón, en cada casa un ladrón’ (‘A thief in every house, at [the village of] Atanzón’, p. 67).
23 Interestingly, disregard for meaning is present in a famous, possibly apocryphal, story involving Cela and narrated, amongst others, by Astorga (Citation2008). In a session of the Spanish Senate, of which he was then a member, Cela was asked at some point by another Senator (a priest) if he had ‘fallen into sleep’ (‘¿Está usted dormido?’). Denying it, he added, ‘I am sleeping’ (‘Estoy durmiendo’), which prompted the other Senator to utter, ‘Well, that's the same, right?’. Cela replied, ‘No es lo mismo estar dormido que estar durmiendo, de la misma manera que no es lo mismo estar jodido que estar jodiendo’ an analogy which does not translate fully into English (‘It is not the same to have fallen into sleep and to be sleeping, in the same way it is not the same to be fucked up and to be fucking [someone]’). Cela thus considered that a relevant difference exists between the two utterances on sleep (meaning the same but grammatically different) because between two other utterances a difference in grammar is (correctly) associated with a difference in meaning. (In fact, meaning ends up by playing a part in the story. If the pair jodido-jodiendo (fucked up/fucking (someone)) were replaced by a pair grammatically related in the same way but with a different, non-sexual, non-slanged, non-polemic content (e.g. by ayudado-ayudando (helped/helping (someone)), the underlying irreverence would disappear and would make the episode unworthy of note).
24 Quoted in Wang (Citation1999, p. 357).
25 Quoted in Urry and Larsen (Citation2011, p. 114).
26 Quoted in Sim (2005, p. 5).
27 Hobsbawm calls into attention the recentness of some traditions, which he shows as invented at some point in time. They are defined not as something which might have evolved organically over centuries in such a way as being considered somewhat a collective multigenerational work, but as originating in the efforts of single individuals or small groups. In some cases, they stem from the intervention of outsiders, including colonial powers favouring or making specific interpretations to colonial subjects’ practices.
28 Actually, Cela has invented characters on previous travel writing (Henn, Citation2004, p. 112).
29 The fictional status of Cela's 1946 trip, that originated Viaje a la Alcarria is debatable: although Cela presents himself in such work as the lonely traveller, he was accompanied by two photographers (Henn, Citation2004, p. 82). Notwithstanding, even if some of the readers of Cela are aware of this fact and Nuevo viaje is suspected of being at least partially fictional, its influence on the formation of visions of the Alcarria within the public may still be significant. One can think, for example, of the impact (mentioned in the Introduction section) of a novel on the tourist status of a small Swedish town (Ridanpää, Citation2011).
30 Again, it seems unlikely that Cela would fabricate the references to the plaques, as literary tourists might well check them.
31 Quoted in Robinson and Andersen (Citation2011, p. 164).
32 In the Spanish original: ‘No me trates de usted, tú y yo somos de la misma quinta más o menos, bueno, quiero decir que por ahí nos vamos de edad … , tú y yo somos amigos desde hace cuarenta años, Felipe’. Sir is used in the translation into English to convey the difference existing in Spanish between ‘usted’ (third-person singular) and ‘tú’ (first-person singular).
33 An old Spanish standard for weighting varying according to region and equivalent to 11.5 kg when used today (which is rare).
34 The wordplay is based on that a novillada is a bullfight in which young bulls are used and cabrón (literally male goat, also with horns) is derogatory term for a man whose wife has been unfaithful. As in many other languages, cuernos (horns) symbolize spouse infidelity.
35 According to Reed-Danahay (Citation2005, p. 70), Pierre Bourdieu
substituted Lévi-Strauss's tristes tropiques, and its critique of modern civilization, with an image of tristes paysans, and an attendant critique of the influences of modern capitalism on traditional socioeconomic peasant societies. Bourdieu adopted a linear historical approach that could position peasants as examples of past societies in the present.
36 For Urry (Citation1990/Citation2002, p. 74), de-differentiation is ‘a reversal of the long-term process of structural differentiation by which relatively distinct social institutions had come to specialise in particular tasks or functions’. For him, postmodernism not only dissolves the boundaries between high and low cultures but also between different cultural forms such as tourism, art, education, photography, television, music, sport, shopping and architecture.
37 Quoted in Lisle (Citation2006, p. 64).