Modern tourism

So, what's The Sun Also Rises about? Masculinity and it's various crises (it is Hemingway, after all)? Life in the aftermath of the First World War? All that and, no doubt, plenty more. Still, what's struck me is how it's also a novel of tourism. Specifically, modern tourism:

After the coffee and a fine we got the bill, chalked up the same as ever on a slate, that was doubtless one of the 'quaint' features, paid it, shook hands, and went out.

'You never come here any more, Monsieur Barnes,' Madame Lecomte said.

'Too many compatriots.'

'Come at lunch-time. It's not crowded then.'

'Good. I'll be down soon.'

We walked along under the trees that grew out over the river on the Quai d'Orleans side of the island. Across the river were the broken walls of old houses were being torn down.

'They're going to cut a street through.'

'They would,' Bill said.

Taken from about a third of a way through the novel, when they're still in Paris. So many details, which seem to sum up a certain kind of modern holiday experience. The concern about the authenticity of the places being visited, with the wry acknowledgement that perhaps that very authenticity is actually mocked up. The desire to avoid one's compatriots in going off the beaten path. The dislike of any attempts by locals to change or modernise their own city or country, because that will destroy what has attracted you to that place in the first instance (that resentful 'They would').

It's perhaps a bit of a stretch. The narrator, Jake Barnes, does actually live and work in Paris. Yet his experience as detailed here identifies him not simply as an outsider, but specifically a tourist. And his journey to Spain is explicitly described as a holiday. The detailed descriptions of what was done and where they stayed, and what they ate - modernist in style as they might be - also have the feel of a tourist recounting his experience of  where he visited for a holiday.

The other characters, American and British expatriates, are certainly richer and more privileged than either your average backpacker or package holidayer of today, and yet they don't seem so different. Certainly, their experience feels closer to that of a modern tourist than it does to the earlier model of the Grand Tour, so aristocratic, and belonging to the 18th and 19th centuries. I've tried to think if this was the earliest example of this modern experience of being a tourist, and the only earlier examples I can think of, that I've read, is E.M. Forster's early Italian novels, A Room with a View, or Where Angels Fear to Tread. They even have holiday romance!

Of books I haven't read, Three Men in a Boat and it's sequel would appear to fit the bill. Can we go back earlier still? Henry James perhaps, or are we now coming closer to the notion of the Grand Tour? I'm sure people have done research on the subject. What was the point where the Grand Tour became modern tourism? Is it even possible to clearly unentangle the two notions, or is it only our retrospective view that wants to locate the beginnings of modern tourism in the aristocratic Grand Tour?

So, obviously, The Sun Also Rises is about much more than this, but still, it's interesting to place it in this context of modern tourism. Along with his history of bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway was hugely influential in popularising the bull running in Pamplona and accompanying festival. Who with? Tourists obviously:

The town was crowded. Every street was full. Big motor-cars from Biarritz and San Sebastian kept driving up and parking around the square. They brought people for the bullfight. Sightseeing cars came up, too. There was one with twenty-five Englishwomen in it. They sat in the big, what car and looked through their glasses at the fiesta.

Before reading this, the last time I saw the running of the bulls in Pamplona appear in a fictional narrative was in Zoya Aktar's film Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, another story about tourists!