Tourist Writing: Facing and Embracing the Otherness of Space and Narrative

This paper sets out to examine a specific body of fictional narratives featuring tourists as protagonists. It is the experience of tourists that determines the plot development, dynamics and denouement of these narratives, and the present paper focuses in particular on Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Hotel (1927) and Tennessee Williams's The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950). The representation of tourists in fiction contradicts what most theories within tourism study posit, as these fictional tourists are placed outside their comfort zone and, additionally, perceived as individuals, not part of a homogeneous mass. Such placement outside a circumscribed world, as the analysis of the two novels shows, is achieved by heterotopian spatiality which the texts construct, whereby the concept of heterotopia relies on Michel Foucault's writing. The aspect of individuality is stressed through the narrative technique called free indirect discourse; spatiality and narrative combined thus set the scene for representing the experience of tourists. Protagonists in the two novels, Sydney Warren and Karen Stone, embody Dean MacCannell's and Zygmunt Bauman's views of tourists as modern pilgrims, in search of self-discovery through interaction with otherness. Using extracts from both novels, the paper shows how this otherness is constructed spatially, the role narration plays in the process, and the effect it has on tourist protagonists. The analysis results can, finally, be used to advance the academic study of the interconnection between space and narrative in literary [sic] a journal of literature, culture and literary translation Borders and Crossings No. 2 Year 10 04/2020 LC.1 ISSN 1847-7755; doi: 10.15291/sic/2.10.lc.1 2 fiction and deepen the understanding of tourists’ behavior in relation to the particular place in which they find themselves.