Stendhal’s Gaze: Towards an hermeneutic approach of the tourist

From Isherwood to Stendhal, or from Urry to MacCannell

In his 1990 classic The Tourist Gaze, John Urry broke new ground with regard to the study of the tourist as a subject – I use the word ‘subject’ to refer to ‘perceptual awareness’, as distinguished from the object or ‘that which is observed’. Instead of describing tourism as an objective reality that may be summed up as a collection of beaches, must-sees and museums, Urry describes tourism from a subjective perspective, which he calls ‘the tourist gaze’. Urry himself does not refer to the philosophical discipline of phenomenology, but phenomenologically speaking, the tourist gaze nevertheless represents a particular intentionality of consciousness. Phenomenologically speaking, tourism is not a collection of activities, but a specific way of relating to the world. The Tourist Gaze introduces a perspective in which the world materialises exactly according to touristic expectations. Following John Urry’s (2002) analysis, tourists are consumers par excellence, not straining to broaden their horizons, but looking for confirmation of the representation of the world as pursued by tourists. The tourist gaze is fixed, and it fixes. Tourists are not interested in development and change (like journalists, for instance, are), but in prefabricated images. The tourist gaze represents a touristic view of the world that has already incorporated everything other than the tourist, himself. Such a tourist wants to encounter that which is typical of countries: French people wearing berets and carrying baguettes, the English countryside as painted by Constable and Dutch people wearing wooden shoes and growing tulips. Such tourists do not want to face disturbing differences, on the contrary: they want to recognise those differences, realise they are part of their mental image archive and thus be reassured. These tourists are looking for clichés: ‘When tourists see two people kissing in Paris, what they capture in the gaze is “timeless romantic Paris”’, says Urry (2002: 3).

Urry’s analysis of tourism resulted, among other things, in his being accused of wrongfully reducing tourism to a field of representations. His analysis supposedly ignores the fact that tourists actually do meet other people and may indeed broaden their horizons. In a 2001 article in Tourist Studies, Dean MacCannell launched a proposal to substitute the term ‘tourist gaze’ by the term ‘tourist agency’. Without repeating his analyses in full, I would like to discuss several of the points MacCannell has made. MacCannell applauds Urry’s analysis, yet at the same time points out that there is a contradiction in his theory. According to Urry, certain tourist destinations may become objects of the tourist gaze because tourists anticipate, particularly in their fantasies and daydreams. The tourist that surfs the Web at home can just imagine himself on an island, under a palm tree, sipping a piña colada. He dreams of the sea, the mountains and the magnificent landscapes that are not a feature of his home environment. Picture postcards, Internet sites, brochures and the holiday snapshots of neighbours and colleagues are representatives of this particular gaze. According to MacCannell, however, this implies that such a gaze, that the intentionality of perception, is always more than merely a gaze and always presupposes a narrativity of desire. In other words, touristic representations alone cannot explain tourists’ motives.

Consequently, Urry’s theory is too superficial, too one-dimensional to successfully set forth any explanation, says MacCannell. Urry describes the perception of a gaze that has already gone beyond its perceptive qualities. That must be the case: otherwise, daydreams and fantasies could not be involved and tourists would merely function as camera’s, merely registering – just as the British writer Christopher Isherwood (1980), who lived in Berlin in the 1920s, described in his A Berlin Diary:

From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. (p. 1)

Not only does Isherwood describe what the main character sees, he also describes how he sees it. This is – as I will illustrate by referring to Stendhal – a phenomenological feature. However unlike the French romanticist, Isherwood describes his persona as a near emotionless onlooker, ‘not thinking’, absorbing everything, that equals himself to a camera. All impressions, or imprints, says the narrator, will be developed later. The question is, whether tourists are similarly impressionable and passive onlookers. MacCannell says they definitely are not. If to the tourist, real life is elsewhere, we are not merely talking about existing representations such as photographs in a brochure but also about mental imagination. According to an emphatic MacCannell, tourists are not like cameras: they are daydreamers, prompted to travel. Opposing the image of the tourist as a passive registration device, an unrelenting zombie-like must-see chaser, is a much more winsome image of the tourist that is aware of the fact that the world is not a collection of photo-opportunities but rather a collection of stories, expectations, encounters and, especially, opportunities to gain self-knowledge. Tourists not only gaze, they act, too: they choose, and the impressions they acquire during travel provoke reflection. Although Jonas Larsen’s revision of Urry’s gaze to a 3.0-version enriches it in many ways, the gaze remains ‘intentional’ in the phenomenological sense of the word (Urry and Larsen, 2011). As Edmund Husserl (1982) defines intentionality as the character of human consciousness to ‘be conscious of something’, the gaze is such an intentionality par excellence. In the 3.0 version of the gaze, the tourist remains a consciousness, be it updated, gazing at the world. MacCannell (2001, 2011), therefore, prefers to substitute the term ‘tourist gaze’ by the term ‘tourist agency’. This agency is the whole of the touristic consciousness, which is not merely visual or intentional. Gazing and staring melt into longing and recounting, and the latter two especially do not depend on the gaze, but rather always accompany it, aim it and mould it. So, the visibility that is typical of the tourist gaze already presupposes something invisible and this in turn implies that the objects that the tourist perceives are always supported by a language, by a narrative fed by desire. I therefore understand this tourist agency, this whole of touristic consciousness, as interpretative action. Travelling, especially the touristic travelling of those bent on discovering the planet and experiencing new situations, presupposes interpretative action.

We recognise this in the gaze Stendhal describes: rather than by the registration of what the tourist perceives, the tourist gaze is completed by narrativity and emotions. According to MacCannell, Urry describes a gaze that always presupposes a second gaze, one that represents touristic longing and narrativity. MacCannell comments,

In possession of the second gaze, the human subject knows that it is a work in progress; knows that it can never fulfil the ego’s demands for wholeness, completeness and self-sufficiency. On tour, the second gaze may be more interested in the ways attractions are presented than in the attractions them-selves. It looks for openings and gaps in the cultural unconscious. It looks for the unexpected, not the extraordinary, objects and events that may open a window in structure, a chance to glimpse the real.

To MacCannell, Stendhal’s gaze is ‘the second gaze in action’.

MacCannell relies extensively on Stendhal and his Mémoires d’un touriste. He can now explain why tourists are so very eager to go beyond the limits of the tourist gaze: it is a mechanism that is part of the second touristic gaze. According to MacCannell (2001),

The act of sightseeing is itself organized around a kernel of resistance to the limitations of the tourist gaze. […] The desire to escape the limitations of the tourist gaze is built into the structure of the gaze itself - into the fact that the first tourist gaze requires a second. By means of the second gaze, tourists are always already aware of the false promises that are routinely made in the name of the transparency of the inner workings of Being. (p. 31)

Rather than postulating an artificial difference between the serious traveller and the pleasure-seeking tourist, MacCannell sees the subjectivity of the latter as fixed by the desire to swerve off the beaten track. In Promenades dans Rome, Stendhal takes great pains to steer clear of the familiar haunts. He advises visitors of the Eternal City against engaging the services of the ciceroni. This reminds us of the tourists of our own time, who deny that they are – shallow – tourists and prefer being called travellers. However, it is a denial that is part of tourism. More than anyone else, tourists are people that desire to visit places that no tourist ever sees. This is a first aspect of what MacCannell calls the ‘kernel of resistance to the limitations of the tourist gaze’. But there are other aspects: the tourist gaze always reaches beyond itself, longs to do more than merely visit and fulfil a representation. According to MacCannell, however, these other aspects do not concern the fact that, as Urry implies, tourists are always looking for the extraordinary, that, which daily life fails to provide.

From this angle, the 1838 text Mémoires d’un touriste is quite a remarkable text: not about a quest for the extraordinary (which was popular at the time, for instance, in the travel literature of Chateaubriand or Larmartine) but stressing the commonplace. MacCannell (2001) uses Stendhal’s Mémoires d’un touriste – ‘the oldest on the subject and, I believe, still the best’ – in his deconstruction of the tourist gaze when he points out that the French tourist in it is not looking to experience anything extraordinary (p. 31). On the contrary, he is interested in the ordinary details of locations. ‘In fact, he takes great delight in the very ordinary details of the places he visits’ (MacCannell, 2001: 32). Mentioning the Stendhal character Mr L …, MacCannell says that the man travels to have something to talk about. For MacCannell (2001), it is precisely this indomitable urge to narrate, ‘narrating the unseen behind the details’ (p. 33), that makes Stendhal the perfect second gaze tourist, which he goes on to call ‘Stendhal’s gaze’ (p. 34).

Stendhal, the perfect tourist

Stendhal was an experienced traveller. He was a great admirer of Napoleon and his time in the Napoleonitic army during the 1812 Russian campaign constituted his very first travel experiences. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1812, the consequently unemployed Henri Beyle left for Milan, where he would remain until 1822. He travelled through Italy several times during this period. Using the alias Stendhal, he published his Histoire de la peinture en Italie in 1817, followed by Rome, Naples et Florence. His Promenades dans Rome – a rather remarkable travel guide when read through twenty-first-century eyes – dates from 1829. When Stendhal introduces the word ‘tourist’ in his Mémoires d’un touriste, the word subsequently becomes part of everyday language. His motive for writing such a self-analytical type of travel guide is that the Frenchman wishes to dissociate himself from the wild expectations people have of travel in the Romantic period. To Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, for instance, his travel to Italy is ultimately of formative value, called Bildung. All Goethe’s efforts are aimed at achieving a viewpoint that renders multiple phenomena understandable from a single, universal perspective; Stendhal aims to do exactly the opposite. Goethe is on a quest to discover and reveal the unchanging truth about existence; Stendhal portrays the ever-changing reality of every day. Stendhal strips travel of its Bildung-pretence and presents himself as a tourist. ‘I do not travel to gain knowledge about Italy, but to enjoy myself’, he writes in Rome, Naples et Florence (18 January 1817; cf. Bertrand, 2004). Like Goethe, Stendhal (1891 [1838]) loves Italy, but he considers his own country worth a travel report as well: referring to Mémoires d’un touriste, he writes, ‘The fact that there are hardly any travel reports about France has emboldened me to publish this one’ (p. 19). He has little time for travellers that wonder off the beaten track to the extent that they have not a single point of reference left: ‘I do not travel to meet savage peoples, like the fearless sight-seers that roam the mountains of Tibet or set foot on South Sea islands, but to see new sights’ (Stendhal, 1973b: 600).

But travel and tourism are not only central to Stendhal’s Mémoires d’un Touriste. It cannot escape the attentive reader of Le Rouge et le Noir that in the first pages, Stendhal describes the perspective of a traveller visiting the town of Verrières, with the reader as the outsider that is being drawn into the novel to observe what is happening. However, the visiting traveller is not actually a character in the novel, he is a metaphor for the outsider perspective: observation is only possible when the everyday perspective is replaced by a fresh perspective. Also, Stendhal (1830) is fully aware of the traps the visitor may walk into:

‘Yield revenue’ is reason enough for deciding everything in this little town which seems so pretty to you. The stranger on arriving might be led by the beauty of the fresh deep valleys surrounding it to imagine that the inhabitants have an eye for the beautiful: they speak only too often of the beauty of the neighbourhood. Indeed, it cannot be denied that they prize it highly; but that is because it attracts strangers, and these enrich the proprietors of the inns, and thus, through the mechanism of the customhouse, ‘revenue’ is produced. (Chapter II)

Unlike the omniscient that populate today’s novels, Stendhal’s traveller is someone curious, someone who explores the relations between the people he meets but that, above all, does not talk, himself: he is not present as an actor, but only shares his insights with the reader. He observes, he does not engage. He is every bit as much an observer as the reader.

This, then, is precisely what attracts Stendhal to travel. He is interested in people’s outlook on life or, as he himself often says, he is interested in morals: ‘The author has spent ten years in Italy: instead of pictures or images, he described its morals, the customs and the art of pursuing happiness’ (Stendhal, 1973b: xxxviii.). Mémoires d’un touriste cultivates the same attitude with regard to France. Stendhal is not only the first self-proclaimed tourist ever but also the first domestic tourist ever. In May and June of 1837, he tours the interior of France accompanied by a friend, the writer Mérimée, visiting Bretagne and Normandy. Mémoires d’un touriste, which is largely based on this trip, features a character called Mr L…, an iron merchant: it is his travel report we read. The iron merchant sometimes has to wait a day in some town or other. When that happens, he ventures out into the town to listen to the stories of its inhabitants. The creation of this artificial character offers Stendhal the opportunity to comment on matters from perspectives that are not necessarily in keeping with his own political affiliations or religious doubts. The book, consisting of two volumes, is neither a classic travel report nor a novel, but rather an endless enumeration of incidents, sights to see and remarkable matters that cross the writer’s path. The work lacks a storyline, lacks deepened characters and, being relevant to our subject: the iron dealer, the tourist, is not looking for anything at all. He is, just like the traveller in the opening pages of Le Rouge et le Noir, an outsider that does nothing but kill time and hope that the stories he hears and the places he visits will offer some entertainment. Neither Stendhal’s narrative nor his perspective or his characters display any uniformity. The iron merchant – a tourist without itinerary – faces everything that crosses his path quite openly. Stendhal is known for the skilful way in which he develops his characters. None of that in Mémoires d’un touriste. More than merely a chronicler of inner nature, he is also the chronicler of the external: he is the archetypical man that sets forth into the world. Stendhal’s is a restless mind – incapable de rester en place – and he is never around long before he gets bored. From this angle, he is a follower of his compatriot Montaigne and a forerunner of today’s tourists. Stendhal travels, but unlike his contemporaries Gérard de Nerval and Chateaubriand, he is not looking for any terra incognita and neither does he whip up a world of fantasies about his travel destinations at home and then travel to see them come true. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the number of published travel reports is on the increase. Initially, most are about Italy, but later new destinations become popular, especially destinations in the unknown orient, such as Egypt and Turkey. Unlike other nineteenth-century travel writers, like Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal stays close to home and can never be caught being what Edward Saïd (1978) calls orientalist: he never reduces an oriental destination to representations that can exclusive arise by observation from a Western perspective. Stendhal is open to anything. He observes people, listens to their stories. He never travels for the sake of his report, he always writes afterwards, without a care for what actually happened. While writing, Stendhal trails his thoughts and his travels and therefore we, reading, never quite know where we are. It is all about the ‘I’ that travels (cf. Robinson, 2004). Critics have accused Stendhal of egotism, a style that features the frequent use of the words I and me. However, according to Stendhal (1973a), an account of the mouvements intérieurs de l’âme can only be given in the first person (p. 30). Yet egotism does not result in a naive ego document, it focuses attention on the paradoxical problems writers encounter when they write about themselves: ‘I often think, what eye can see itself’ (Stendhal, 1973a: 31)? The egotist always describes himself in relation to his environment, and so naturally, travel enriches the egotistical writer. In the opening lines of Mémoires d’un touriste, Stendhal writes, ‘I do not use the words I and me because I am an egotist, there is just no other way to say something quickly’ (Lacouture, 2004: 259; Stendhal, 1973a: 19). Say things quickly, that is what Stendhal does. In Mémoires d’un touriste, the narrator says that he does not speak of Paris because speaking of Paris would take him a lifetime. Stendhal is interested in things that are usually considered boring. From that perspective, Stendhal’s gaze is perhaps an inversion of the romantic gaze we come across in Goethe’s Italian travels. Goethe looks for objectivity, strives for largeness and wholeness; Stendhal’s (1973b) travel books are always catalectic, they are collections and he, himself, is always the leading man: ‘I don’t pretend to talk about what things are: I talk about the effects they have on me’ (p. xxxviii).

Stendhal uses the subjectivity of egotism: he describes how impressions affect him, what he feels, his annoyance, his fascination and his amazement. But nothing is planned. Reading Stendhal, one gets to know the inhabitants that the writer meets – and especially the writer himself – rather than a country, a region or a town. True, Stendhal aims to write as realistically, honestly, naturally and faithfully as possible, however, with regard to his experiences as a traveller, not with regard to the factualities he encounters. And as Goethe does, Stendhal creates a narrator who is central to all occurrences and locations. Rather than the creation of a comprehensive survey of places or routes, the specific perspective of this specific traveller is the heart of the matter: ‘The traveller who delights in describing every last detail of the country he is traveling in can easily write a hundred-part report. However, the viewpoint of someone who merely notes what he has experienced is very limited indeed’ (Stendhal, 1973b: xxxv).

He talks about trips he has never made and made trips he has never talked about. Remarkably, the author hardly mentions the Italy he knew so well in the famous novel La Chartreuse de Parme, which actually takes place in Italy. Stendhal’s Parma is a construct, an invented city in which the famous octagonal thirteenth-century abbey is absent, but that does have a prison tower that never existed in the real Parma. Neither Parmesan cheese nor Parma ham are mentioned. Stendhal describes nothing a tourist would want to go to Parma for. His Parma is very unlike James Joyce’s Dublin, which is completely realistic notwithstanding the experimental style of the Ulysses: tourists can literally follow in the footsteps of its main character. Stendhal’s subjectivity is absolute: he makes the world disappear and builds a new one in its place, a feature may be incidental in a novel but is particularly prominent in the ‘touristic’ work of Stendhal. Walk through Rome guided by Promenades sur Rome and you’ll most likely get lost. So for the most part, Stendhal’s travels take place in his own mind – a mortal sin, according to travel writer Paul Theroux (2011):

For a writer to describe a place he or she has not bothered to visit is not only self-deluded but deeply insulting to the people living there and to those travelers who actually troubled to go there. Laziness, indifference, contempt, fear of the place, fear of travel, fear of being disillusioned, and the novelist’s natural instinct to fantasize – all are factors in the decision of a writer to stay home and invent the exotic, as Saul Bellow did, conjuring up an Africa he had never seen while sitting in his book-lined study in Tivoli, New York, without ever having to swat a tsetse fly. Even so, you know a writer’s mind, and especially his or her fantasies, from the fiction. You know what they think of themselves, and other people, and of the world. (p. 215)

According to Theroux, Stendhal is not up to the standard. Apparently, Theroux believes the world simply is what it is: travellers may discover its truths. Theroux’s phenomenology is flat and transparent, whereas Stendhal’s is labyrinthine and open to multiple interpretations. Stendhal’s travels never result in an unambiguous report. His travelling, the people he meets and the issues he has to deal with all take place in relation to Stendhal: he wants to get a grip on them and therefore, he has no choice but to write about himself. Stendhal is subjective, whereas Theroux prefers to be as objective as possible – which would be feasible only when the world were nothing but a globe full of facts. However, when the world is what it is objectively, why go out at all? Theroux only manages to distinguish between serious travellers (he, himself) and tourists because he adopts such a blinkered phenomenology. But with Stendhal, we may argue that serious travellers forget to take themselves seriously. Central to Stendhal’s tourism is the tourist, rather than the destination: the experience, rather than the fact. The trip is simultaneously internal and external, the travel report a faithful transcription – though not about places, but rather about the experience of the subject.

Due to both the good quality of his writing and the fact that he wrote during the historic interlude between the days of the Grand Tour and those of collective tourism, Stendhal’s reflections on himself as a tourist are unique. He examines himself without prejudice, scientific or otherwise. Later, phenomenologists will say he has described that which appears to his consciousness – a first person singular consciousness: not the must-see Roman Coliseum, but his experience of the Coliseum in Rome. In an era that lacks a scientific psychological discipline, Stendhal is a master psychologist.

Never trust a cicerone: Promenades dans Rome

Stendhal (1973b) knows that travel will yield knowledge about himself, though it will not yield any general knowledge of the world: ‘I do not in any way profess to point travellers in the right direction – each man for himself as far as that is concerned: all I do is write about the direction I took’ (p. xxxviii.). And instead of knowledge of objects, this orientation – hardly an intentionality, rather a passive affectivity – yields pleasure. In other words, Stendhal (1973b) discovers that he is the kind of tourist that does not travel for any reason other than travelling itself:

Travel is a source of pleasure to me. It affects me like good music, because I enjoy the beautiful aspects of nature. I have thanked nature for the fact that I have a soul that is responsive to the pleasure that natural events can bring; they affect me like good music […] To me, travel is a great source of pleasure. (p. xxxv)

To Stendhal, pleasure is the main goal of touristic travels. And aiming at pleasure is always aimless: pleasure is instantaneous; there is no road that leads to it; it has no after-effects. In this respect, it differs from the desire that is so important to Goethe: the fulfilment of a desire can be postponed. The proceeds of Goethe’s formative travels last him a lifetime; Stendhal’s travels are all about being in the moment. Desire takes time, pleasure just takes a second. Pleasure is present in the moment itself. However, this does not mean that desire is in any way better than pleasure. Roland Barthes (1975 [1973]) is undoubtedly right when he says that

Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favour of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure. Apparently, Desire has epistemological dignity, whereas Pleasure has none. (p. 57)

Desire is Goethian and often involves suffering; pleasure is Stendhalian. Goethe’s main theme is ‘strong, noble values’; his travels are a means to realise them. Stendhal travels from one place to the next, from day to day, from anecdote to anecdote. He steers clear of development and growth. In doing so, he dismantles the pretentious project of the Romantic traveller and reveals what the tourist truly experiences: pleasure.

Stendhal knew Rome very well. In his days, Promenades dans Rome was in use as a successful tourist guide and people associated his name with this work, rather than with the novels he is famed for today. In the book, he introduces a narrator that sometimes actually coincides with himself but is, at other times, someone completely different. The closing sentence of the introduction is as ambiguous as the rest of the book: ‘All anecdotes in these volumes are true, or at least that is what the writer believes’ (Stendhal, 1973b: 598). Now, the writer of the book – an imaginary character who nevertheless bears a remarkable likeness to Stendhal – acts as a cicerone: a tour guide. In the Promenades, this unusual cicerone guides his guests through the city – compare Boccaccio’s Decamerone, where the stories are being told by different people. We get to know the city through its famous buildings, ruins, popes, emperors and artworks, but also through ordinary residents that have their day-to-day worries, political quarrels and love affairs.

The term cicerone is probably derived from the name of the Roman philosopher and orator Cicero, who guided people through court cases. In Rome, the cicerone was the guide that took travellers around the city, bubbling with enthusiasm for the historic buildings and the artwork. In de Promenades, however, the cicerone prefers teaching tourists to make their own way through the Eternal City. ‘I would like to say to travellers: on arrival in Rome, don’t take any advice, buy not a single book …’ (Stendhal, 1973b: 608). This cicerone soon turns out to be an anti-cicerone and without more than a hint of cynicism, Stendhal (1973b) writes,

On arrival in Rome, immediately get in a carriage and, assuming you feel drawn towards either barbarism and horror, or beauty and shapeliness have them take you to either the Coliseum, or Saint Peter’s Basilica. You will never get there on foot, due to the many curiosities you will come across en route. You don’t need any itinerary, nor a cicerone. (p. 608)

Travel guides, says our alternative cicerone, will all too quickly ruin our pleasure in travelling (Stendhal, 1973b: 610): ‘The cicerone must make sure he doesn’t defile the beautiful workings of the soul with advice’ (p. 1084). It is unsurprising that Stendhal advises his tourists to try and spend some alone-time in the Coliseum, something that apparently posed a problem as early as in 1827 and that nowadays equals trying to swim without getting wet. In addition to the precursor of the modern tourist, Stendhal is also the precursor of the flaneurs we encounter in French literature: Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire and Louis Aragon.

Towards a hermeneutics of the tourist

One might say that the fact that the nineteenth-century writer Stendhal travels like a tourist and uses his travels to get to know himself better does not necessarily mean that today, tourists travel with the same mind-set. At best, what MacCannell proves by referring to Stendhal is that travel may be beneficial to human character. However, MacCannell is not out to offer an alternative for the one-sided image that emerges from Urry’s The Tourist Gaze. The tourist gaze presupposes a ‘what-you-see-is-what-you-get’, superficial, one-to-one phenomenology, which, however, only becomes possible itself by the desire to see. What is lacking in MacCannell’s referral to Stendhal is the hermeneutical approach of the tourist. Stendhal remains a tourist-cum-sociological phenomenon; he is not a source of self-interpretation. This narrativity of the self is not just a characteristic of Stendhal: it may be developed in any one of us as tourists. True, this approach is not new, but it is still rare in tourism research. In hermeneutics, the philosophical method developed by thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, no attempt is made to reduce the multitude of perspectives to reach a single, ultimate truth. From this angle, hermeneutics is not a theory: it is a fundamentally reflective attitude. As Jamal and Hollinshead (2001) write,

The 20th century hermeneutic tradition is an anti-foundational approach where the self is embroiled intimately with the other, thus requiring an interpretive relationship between the seer and that which is seen, for example, by the tourist gaze and as experienced by the tourist self.

To re-flect literally means to bend back. The hermeneutic attitude portrays humans as interpretative beings – with interpretations being neither correct nor incorrect – who are simply interpreting themselves and the world around them. Stendhal’s gaze reveals that the touristic gaze causes people to reflect upon themselves, rather than to empirically tick off must-sees. Jamal and Everett (2004) undoubtedly score points when they make tourist researchers aware of the cultural bias and defend a ‘hermeneutic charity’ that softens the emancipatory gaze of the critical researcher. To me, Stendhal represents a clean break with the possibility to construct a ‘view from nowhere’ in order to obtain scientific knowledge about the tourist gaze, supported by data. The hermeneutical approach of the tourist does not aim to reveal the ‘true essence’ of the tourist, but, like literature and the arts, to motivate us to question our being in the world – as tourists.

Many tourists think in terms of ‘them’ and ‘us’. ‘Them’ represents objects to visit, boxes to tick off on a list of must-sees (cf. Sontag, 2001). But this can only happen because tourism exists by the grace of the encounters it involves, encounters, in turn, that can only happen where there are two sides involved: the object side and the subject side. Rather than to the world and the others as objects, Stendhal’s gaze is directed to us, ourselves; it calls on us to consider travelling an excellent opportunity to reflect upon ourselves rather than on the objects. Travelling, by travellers or tourists, offers ample opportunity for what Paul Ricoeur (1990) calls, in Oneself as Another, a hermeneutics of the self. Based on Ricoeur’s oeuvre, David Wood distinguishes a minimum of three frames of reference. The first with regard to the relation between man and the world; the second with regard to the relation between man and man and, finally, the third with regard to the relation between man and himself. ‘The mediation between man and the world is what we call referentiality; the mediation between men, communicability, the mediation between man and himself, self-understanding’ (Wood, 1992: 27). From a hermeneutical viewpoint, we may argue that, in contrast to the other two frames of reference, Stendhal’s type of tourism contributes to self-understanding. Travelling – understood as the on-going challenge to examine one’s attitude towards the other – is taking narrative action. Travelling teaches us to suspend the frames of reference we usually apply to the world. This not only implies that the world cannot be reduced to a collection of sightseeing opportunities that each need to be interpreted univocally and correctly. It also implies that the self remains multi-interpretable, even though contexts may change. Here, interpretation does not refer to the unveiling of true, singular meaning but, in Ricoeur’s terms, to producing live meaning. Therefore, interpretation is always primarily self-interpretation.

MacCannell referrals to Stendhal result in a rich, hermeneutical perspective on the touristic mind-set that does not reduce the tourist to a Weberian ideal type, but rather sees him as a live human being. This is what renders his viewpoint interesting from a philosophical point of view. It recognises the fact that every single human being, including every single tourist, is unique in his or her own way. It is an analysis that starts from uniqueness, not from ideal types.

The answer, therefore, to the initial question, ‘is travel inherently beneficial to human character?’, cannot be found by assuming we learn a lot when we travel to famous and interesting places – this represents the object side of travel – but rather by acknowledging the capacity we have for self-reflection. Without, as Stendhal calls it, egotism, the touristic subject remains a passive camera like the one Isherwood describes, a gazer, gawking at whatever is on display. Stendhal, I would uphold, radicalises the subject side of the tourist. Instead of objectively representing the world, travel in this respect becomes a way of constructing the self.