[Gocamino] Two new books on pilgrimage

[Eldor Pederson]

On the same day last week I acquired two new books about pilgrimage that may be of interest to some readers of this list server. One is directly relevant to the Camino as it describes a "pilgrimage" on the Camino Francés (why that is in quotations will become clear in a bit) and the other discusses the evolution of the pilgrimage to Lourdes.

 

Moore, Tim. 2005. Travels With My Donkey: One Man and His Ass on a Pilgrimage to Santiago. New York: St. Martins. 328 pp. ISBN 0-312-32082-5).

 

Reading this account of a trip made from St. Jean to Santiago in the company of a donkey has proven a little disappointing. It certainly does not compare favorably in any literary sense to Robert Lewis Stevenson's Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes. Moore is a British humorist, and he works very hard to make this book humorous, sometimes in a rather sophomoric way as the double entendre in the subtitle suggests. Certainly the travails of walking the route with a donkey are at times quite humorous, and Moore makes a number of side-splittingly funny comments on the route, his fellow travelers and related matters. In its humor, the book reminds me of various writings by the Iowa-born Anglo-American humorist Bill Bryson, with whom Moore is compared on the dust jacket. The first chapters often have one in stitches, the middle chapters are mildly amusing, and by page 250 one is quite thoroughly tired of the all too often forced wackiness. 

 

Moore's writing is frequently at the edge of potty humor. No opportunity is missed to make fun of the historical figures who started and developed the route. In the present world Moore is almost contemptuous of those who make the pilgrimage for spiritual reasons, a view he makes evident early and often. He is especially brutal in commentary on the writings of one Shirley McLaine, who perhaps deserves his acidic and sometimes very funny remarks. Aside from an almost obligatory obeisance to Stevenson early on, Moore does not seem to have been much influenced by Cohelo or any of the other writers who have made the trek to Santiago, or some other long walk with a donkey, and subsequently written about it. 

 

Those who have a deep and personally felt spiritual reason for the pilgrimage may find Moore's book offensive. I hope he has well-disguised some of his fellow pilgrims as they are likely to sue for libel otherwise. As I understand it, Britain makes it fairly easy to mount such lawsuits, and more than one fellow pilgrim is presented in a most unflattering light. Anyone who has my slightly pathological habit of acquiring and reading almost anything on the pilgrimage will want the book, but for someone seeking a more balanced, but still at times quite funny, view Jack Hitt's book is a much better choice even if it is more than a decade old. If one happens to read French, there is an amusing website looking at the pilgrimage by a human and a donkey written from the donkey's point of view: www.chemindecompostelle.com<http://www.chemindecompostelle.com/>  (Thanks to Stuart Thompson for the citation).

 

 

 

 

 

Kaufman, Suzanne K. 2995.  Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. viii + 255pp  ISBN 0-8014-4248-6

 

Unlike Moore's work, Suzanne Kaufman's sober and scholarly study of the development of the pilgrimage to Lourdes is not written for mass market consumption. Originally written as a PhD dissertation, and still showing some of the marks of that origin, the study is strongly recommended to any one with a serious interest in pilgrimages.  In both its origin and its nature, the trip to Lourdes, usually made by train or automobile with only the last few meters to the grotto made on foot, is about as different from the pilgrimage to Santiago as one Christian-origin pilgrimage can be from another. Interestingly, I did not find more than a brief passing mention of the much older pilgrimage to Santiago in the book, although Lourdes is closely framed by the two major routes into the Pyrenees followed by pilgrims to the Galician center. Lourdes was the most successful of a number of 19th and early 20th century shrines attracting pilgrims to sites of miracles, however defined, and in the process a remote village in a mountain col became a major destination for millions of tourists and pilgrims. The book is a fine study of how that happened. If anyone is advising Ph.D. students in a relevant field, a wonderful topic for a dissertation would be a comparative study of pilgrimage to Santiago versus one to Lourdes or Fatima!