THE POET IN THE NATION'S PLAYGROUND

In her novel Foreign Affairs, Alison Lurie situated two American researchers in London, one a young man, Fred, who finds it difficult to have an ‘authentic experience’ there. This he blames in part to ‘tourist disorientation’ which allows ‘foreign visitors … the full use of only two of their senses’: taste, and the controlled visual access comprised in the term ‘sight-seeing’. According to Fred, smell and hearing increase the sense of exclusion because they are direct transmissions of an alien culture, and touch is usually forbidden. He concludes, ‘Two senses aren't enough for contact with the world’ (Lurie 1998, 32–3). Urban tourism has generated both its own literature and forms of analysis, but some of it is also helpful in addressing the question of what happens when tourism re-locates itself in settled regions internationally valued and promoted because they are located within an area of wild ‘natural scenery’. In both cases, poetry, novels, plays and essays are all called on as tourism's ally and source of attraction. As Bertrand Westphal put it, ‘Literature allows us to name this newer and larger space, and to organise it according to a utopian ideal’ (Westphal 2011, 154–5). More than this, literature is specifically used by tourism to set up preconceptions and expectations, so that the – in this case – natural space is already textualised. It is directed to be experienced in the light of a promoted reading, so that ‘material spaces’ are in danger of becoming the ‘simulacra’ pointed to by Jean Baudrillard and endorsed by Westphal (Westphal 2011, 159). Adding to this the poverty of sense-experience noted in Lurie’s urban fiction, and given that the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats or Clare all evokes in different ways the importance of sensory contact as a – or the – key means of understanding nature as a living principle, there might seem to be a profound discrepancy between what literature offers and what rural literary tourism offers. Yet literature is certainly brought in to bolster a marketable tourism for ‘natural heritage’ in Cumbria, where a literature-backed nature-tourism celebrating the residence there of William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and his circle fulfils the same function of ‘fictionalis[ing] reality’ that is operated on a grander scale by corporate big business running the American theme parks or shopping malls (Westphal 2011, 163).