Author: Barbara Schaff
E-mail: bschaff@uni-goettingen.de
Department: English Department
Institution: Goettingen University
Title: “The Only Way I Can Deal With Egypt is as Molly MacCarthy Did With
Christmas: Alphabetically”: Vita Sackville-West’s Tourist Experience in Egypt
Abstract:
This paper proposes a close reading analysis of Vita Sackville-West’s chapter on
Egypt in her travelogue Passenger to Teheran (1927) as an example for the use of the imaginary as an anti-tourist literary strategy.
When Vita Sackville-West set out to Teheran via Egypt in 1926, Egypt had already been on the British tourist map for nearly a century. Not only had Thomas Cook developed a solid tourist infrastructure for Egypt since the 1870s, not only had
Egypt been written about extensively in numerous British travelogues and tourist guidebooks, it had also been placed in the centre of cultural attention more recently by a new bout of Egyptomania following Howard Carter’s archaeological findings in the 1920s. In her narrative Passenger to Teheran, Vita Sackville-West develops various literary strategies of resistance to established tourist practices and tourist experiences, undermining the already well established Egyptian tourist discourse. In my paper I am going to explore how Vita Sackville-West uses the category of the spatial imaginary in order to escape the control of a descriptive and denotative tourist discourse by developing new forms of associative and connotative writing, in which the imaginary follows anticipation and replaces factual experience. In her text, place and experience rarely converge. The experience of place (and its literary representation) becomes irrelevant, is delayed, denied and replaced by a tourist imaginary that transcends any spatial and temporal coordinates and redefines the tourist activity not as consumption, but as production of new aesthetic meanings.