Economic Transactions between Characters: Representations of Tourism Practices in Contemporary Croatian Literature and Culture

The aim of this paper is to examine the complex relational dynamics between tourism (both as a global phenomenon and a set of specific practices), space and economy in selected literary texts whose narratives are set in two different economic and political periods: socialism, and capitalism and democracy. Since these concepts cannot be easily understood through disciplinary knowledge, this paper will view the chosen literary texts as pre-disciplinary cultural products that generate specific “social knowledge” (Felski) which presents the fullness of the social world more successfully than other forms of culture or knowledge. The authors whose literary texts were included in this analysis are contemporary Croatian writers: Antun Šoljan, Zoran Ferić, Boris Dežulović and Jurica Pavičić. The first two authors wrote texts in which the relationships between tourists and locals are prevalently of symbolic and exchange value, and they mostly belong to the sphere of libidinal economy. Dežulović and Pavičić deal with contemporary tourism practices which change the identity of towns and people forever. In conclusion, these two accounts from different socioeconomic and political chronotopes are compared through

Bearing in mind this leading idea about the devastating effect of mass tourism on a modern (Mediterranean) living space and local culture (Greenwood, 1989), which Dežulović embellishes with details from his own private history and for which he creates an imaginary topography of a city that no longer exists, the question arises: What can a literary text tell us about specific social phenomena?Is a literary text a reflection of social reality and a passive surface onto which a whole range of cultural, social, economic, philosophical and ideological beliefs will be etched?Questions such as this have been debated for decades and even centuries, and final answers can never be given.This paper will approach literary texts from two perspectives, which are largely related.The first is that of cultural studies, which breaks the Marxist asymmetric dichotomy of the base and the superstructure and looks at the social phenomenon as having both material and conceptual effects (Lee, 1999).If economic processes and material production condition and shape the field of art, this does not mean that art cannot and does not have a reversal effect on economic and social reality.Consequently, literature is thought to have great potential, far beyond its aesthetic strength of creative language use, and it is seen as a force that can influence the transformation of society and culture.On the other hand, Felski justifiably warns that people ascribe too much power to literature, to the extent that it can impose HUMANISTICA or overthrow power regimes (cf. Felski, 2016, p. 18).Texts do not affect the world directly, but possibly through readers, who are complex and often contradictory microcosms.This is why Felski tries to overcome the gap between the aesthetics and the ideology of a literary text, asking "how can art ever exist outside a many-sided play of passions and purposes?"(Felski, 2016, p. 18).In this sense, this text is methodologically grounded in cultural studies of materiality, everyday life and living culture, but is complemented by Felski's views on the purpose of literature as a concept that unites the aesthetic value of a literary text and its effects on the readers and the wider community (Felski, 2016, p. 18).One of the purposes of literature that Felski mentions in her book seems particularly pertinent to the subject of this paper: social knowledge.Literature produces knowledge that is characteristic and distinct from philosophical or sociological knowledge, which is why one should make sure not to reduce literature to the level of an inferior philosophy or sociology.Felski tries to answer the question about the character of the knowledge produced by literature, whether it gives us an additional dimension that cannot be obtained from other humanities and social sciences.She starts with the fact that a literary work offers an insight into the inner world of an individual which is not accessible in any other way (Molvarec, 2017, p. 31).Literature is, naturally, exempted from the necessity of epistemological reliability, accuracy, documentary truth, and so on, but it offers a type of knowledge which, though not verifiable, provides a more detailed and subtle insight into inter-subjectivity than any other type of knowledge could: "free to register fleeting expressions, penumbral perceptions, shifting foci of attention, subconscious motions of affinity and distancing: all the ephemeral and barely registered forms of consciousness and communication that help make up the stuff of social interaction" and thus "we come to know something of what it feels to be inside a particular habitus, to experience a world as self-evident, to bathe in the waters of a way of life" (Felski, 2016, pp. 123-124).Therefore, literature offers microscopic wispy social knowledge which cannot be obtained through the methods of other humanities and social sciences, and which talks about the subtleties of social relationships and thus not only represents but also creates new, significant forms of social meaning (also Felski, 2016, pp. 138-139).
Returning to the topic of this paper, which is already hinted at in the title: How do literary texts depict, analyse and interpret different mechanisms of tourism practice?Before going into a more detailed exploration of the topic phrased in this way, I came across a logical question: Tourism is studied by tourism science and economics, so isn't it a little presumptuous to turn to literature as a source of relevant knowledge?The position of economics and tourism science is unquestionable, but for some decades the phenomenon of tourism has prompted a lot of scientific interest in other social disciplines as well (mostly sociology and anthropology) and, more recently, in the humanities (cultural studies, literary theory).If tourism makes the greatest flow of goods, services and people that humanity has ever experienced possible, it is understandable that sociologists and anthropologists will be interested in examining the effects of tourism on local communities and culture (see Greenwood, 1989, p. 171).On the other hand, shifting literary science away from observing exclusively inter-literary phenomena of culture, geography or, more recently, economics, can be justified according to Stipe Grgas as follows: "In line with the above considerations of disciplinarity, I claim that the logic of economics itself prevents the consideration of the complexity of one's own subject.Economists rarely recognize this deficiency because they take the scientificity of their discipline for granted, and are thus not inclined to self-reflection" (Grgas, 2017, p. 88) Furthermore, by citing other authors, Grgas claims that economics functions within the framework of disciplinary knowledge, in which it is no exception, of course, and this simplifies reality.In other words, distorting the perspective of a problem beyond the scope of disciplinary knowledge is something that literary science can offer when it comes to economics, or, more specifically, tourism.It is here that Grgas sees the value of literature because it "offers the experience of a pre-disciplinary fullness of the world better than other cultural products" (Grgas, 2017, p. 88).
In this paper, the presentation and analysis of the fullness of the world that Grgas speaks about will be related to several phenomena that are narrowly or loosely related to the phenomenon of tourism and/or tourism practices.The first important component is the historical time which the literary texts evoke.In the examples covered by this analysis, there are two clear periods: the first one is the second half of the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s, and the second one is the war, the period of transition and the first two decades of the 21st century.These decades were inevitably marked by the economic and political orders of society: socialism on the one hand and capitalism and democracy on the other.This economic and political framework has had a major impact on the direction and development of tourism practices.In addition to the economic macro-framework, it will be equally, if not even more, important to analyse the microeconomic processes involving the characters discussed in the literary texts.How they manage their resources, how they produce, exchange, distribute, and spend them.And it is almost never only about material and/or financial resources; these resources are most often (also) symbolic.It would be more appropriate to say that the analysis will use the concepts of capital not only within the disciplinary knowledge of economics but also relying on French sociologist Bourdieu's views on cultural, social and symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1984).

HUMANISTICA
The last key component of the analysis will be space.It will not be seen as an empty container in which the storytelling takes place, but as being dynamic, semantically charged and socially engineered according to the insights of the theoreticians of the spatial turn (Lefebvre, Hardy, Soja).The characters do not only shape and mark space, it also affects them, influencing the conditions of their work, leisure, lifestyle, creating or destroying social communities.Space, especially from the perspective of tourism practice, becomes a source of profit, a place of consumption, a source of identity, and even an indicator of wider, global social changes.
Having in mind these research coordinates, the paper will consist of two units and a conclusion that will establish an interpretive thread between these two units.In the first part, the focus will be on the texts of Antun Šoljan (Izdajice [Traitors], Drugi ljudi na mjesecu [The Other People on the Moon]) and Zoran Ferić (Na osami blizu mora [Alone by the Sea]) that reflect the specificities of interactions between tourists and the local population in a particular socialist chronotope, with special emphasis on transactions of the libidinal economy (Lyotard, 2015).In the second part we will analyse tourism, touristic commercialization and commodification of culture and space from the transition period onwards in texts by Jurica Pavičić.These are literary texts whose narrative interest predominantly or dominantly deals with various forms of tourism practice or space in which this tourist dynamics occurs.Therefore, the main criterion for the selection of texts was the theme and the problem: tourist and economic relationships between characters in a specific chronotope.

How Was the Galeb Created?
The tourist is at first a typical modernist figure, a product of the introduction of more humane socioeconomic measures such as shorter working hours and wage increases and, consequently, the rise of leisure.In cultural theory in the last thirty years, the tourist has become a paradigmatic postmodernist figure of impermanence, temporariness, homelessness (Molvarec, 2017, p. 293) and almost a symbol of a mobile society (Urry, 2007).There is no doubt that in both academic and everyday discourse, ambivalent and often openly negative connotations are attributed to this concept, so the tourist is regarded as a neo-colonialist, a destroyer of nature, an uncritical consumer, etc.The first use of the word tourist in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in the late 18th century, when it was a synonym for traveller (Buzard, 1993, p. 1).Even today, these two concepts are sometimes neutrally equated, but the negative connotation of the word tourist is predominant in relation to the traveller, which is positive in terms of value judgements.It could be argued that such a value hierarchy is dominant today (cf.Buzard, 1993Buzard, , p. 1, 2002, pp. 49-50;, pp. 49-50;Crang, 2008, p. 65;Lisle, 2006, p. 77) and, consequently, anyone who travels refuses to identify himself as a tourist (Molvarec, 2017, p. 294).The traveller is identified as someone who rejects established routes and goes in search of the unusual, wants to get to know other cultures, languages and places unavailable to tourists (cf.Crang, 2008, p. 65;Hulme, 2002, p. 97); is open-minded and a free spirit (Buzard, 1993, p. 1), unlike tourists, who are homogenous, who travel in masses, seeking safety and comfort, where they necessarily become a cliché (Fussell, according to: Buzard, 1993, p. 2) in following the known pathways and the reproduction of the familiar, e.g.eating an English breakfast or going to a pub in a Mediterranean resort (Crang, 2008, p. 65).Of course, as almost all the authors cited so far highlight, such strict and sharp divisions are untenable in practice (e.g.Crang, 2008, p. 65), especially since the tourism industry as a part of global capitalism has the ability to absorb any resistance.Thus Crang points out that to those who want to get off the beaten tourist tracks, the tourist industry offers the so-called standardized alternative tourism system (Crang, 2008, p. 65).Buzard remarks that antitourism is turning into just another aspect of tourism and is subject to the same realization, rituals and hierarchy as tourism itself (Buzard, 1993, p. 4)."We are all tourists now and there is no escape", says Fussell (according to Buzard, 1993, p. 333).The literary texts which will be examined tend to see tourists primarily as "cash cows", as openly stated by the narrator in Šoljan's Izdajice.The choice of this phrase indicates the great importance of economic transactions in the relationship between the tourist on the one hand and the local community and the host country on the other.Consumption, earnings, profit, capital, investment, supply, demand are words that spontaneously come up when we think about tourism even through the individual, everyday experience of a lay person.Macroeconomic indicators of tourism as a global industry are, however, something that will not be the subject of this paper.We shall try to explore the literary imagination of microeconomic transactions of subjects in contact with the overall experience of culture by locals and tourists, which will consequently lead to the specific literary representation of the global impact of tourism on local communities in terms of unequal distribution of wealth and the increase of social stratification (cf.Greenwood, 1989, p. 171).
People studying the culture of travel and tourism often remark that the touristic journey is a liminal state and, accordingly, the tourist is a liminal figure (Ryan & Hall, 2001, p. 20), removed from everyday life, capitalist work relations and Protestant ethics, immersed in leisure space which brings pleasure and new life experiences.The border state of the tourist HUMANISTICA experience is usually marked by manifestations of hedonism (cf. Fox, 1995, p. 115), often symbolically labelled as the four S's (sun, sea, sand, sex) (Ryan & Hall, 2001, p. 6).The constraints of social roles in everyday life are abandoned, and the notion of what is deviant is reinterpreted, because during the holidays we tolerate behaviours that would otherwise be censured by the social community (cf.Ryan & Hall, 2001, p. 74).Out of these four S's, recent studies particularly explore sexual activity, and its central role for understanding modern tourism is often emphasized (Bauer & McKercher, 2003;Littlewood, 2001;Thurnell-Read & Casey, 2015).These studies primarily analyse sexual tourism as one of the most vibrant branches of diversified tourism offers and practices.Sex tourism has long been perceived as a single process involving a man from an economically developed country going to some underdeveloped country for the purpose of finding and using the sexual services of prostitutes.But closer analysis would suggest that such a relationship does not necessarily involve direct payment of money, especially if a woman seeks this service (Molvarec, 2017, pp. 349-345).In this paper, the focus of interest will be a specific aspect of sexual tourism practice which in Croatian is called galebarenje (a gerund form of the verb derived from the noun galeb meaning "seagull").Galebarenje is a phenomenon characteristic of the chronotope of socialist Yugoslavia, and it signifies the seduction of female tourists (usually several of them simultaneously and continuously throughout the tourist season) by a young, mostly handsome, or at least virile, local man.Leksikon Yu mitologije (The Lexicon of Yugoslav Mythology), which has preserved many of the well-known and lesser known phenomena of Yugoslav life and culture, describes the galeb as follows: Mostly local fellows, tanned since May, with lean muscles, white smiles, and discerning observational powers, catch fish just like true galebs: during the height of the season they catch those from the North Sea, leaving them grieving the next day, because the number of conquests is important, and time is running out... .Their lack of knowledge of foreign languages was only a plus, two or three German words were quite enough, a broader vocabulary would only reduce their chances.They were interesting to me, following them (which was not difficult because they divided the beaches into territories, so they always worked in one place) you could follow veritable summer soap operas... Former galebs, potbellied, mostly sitting on the riva the whole day, drinking watered wine, two or three at one table, visibly slower and irretrievably moved from the arena into the stands".(Leksikon Yu mitologije: Galebovi, n.d.) A few years ago the internet portal Tportal published a series of stories about several former galebs in which they explained how they used to seduce their women, and reflected on the past from the perspective of their bleak present.They were critical about the dynamics of male-female relationships during the tourist season today.Everyone agreed that there are no galebs left.One of them summed it up best when he spoke about young people just staring at their cell phones.Young men no longer know how to approach girls, girls travel in groups and are no longer interested in being seduced by the galebs, but prefer wild partying with lots of alcohol.As the old galebs point out, women have become more like men. 2  As for the biographies of galebs outlined in newspaper articles, two dominant narratives can be singled out.The first would be the galeb as a cultural ambassador.Here the galebs are presented as decent, subtle seducers, bons vivants who strive for refined pleasures in life.They resolutely reject the idea of financial benefit as their motivation, and they explain their practice of galebarenje as a way of offering foreign female tourists not only romance but also an insight into the specificities of the local culture, as a sort of total experience that could not be possible without their assistance.Such a galeb saw his identity as extremely urban and he preferred Western European tourists: Vodice has been expanding since the mid-1960s, and in the 1970s it went through a real touristic boom.British, French and Scandinavian women came.And German.But real ones, not what we have now...This is the third generation of gastarbeiters.In the past you felt like you were in Paris or Venice, it was no different here.None of those people come anymore.… I was not interested in girls from the East that people chased after at the Solaris [a hotel].I thought that was pathetic, without dignity...They literally waited for them in the corridors of the hotel and pulled them by the sleeve, they harassed them.Today that would be considered sexual harassment or abuse.For me, the challenge was getting a German girl, or British, Swedish... Since I was a kid we had regular guests from Zagreb, real city rascals with long hair.I picked up their mentality and lingo.I was looking for something more than lust and boasting about the number of conquests….Crude guys from the hinterland, says Goran, had no criteria when trying to pick up girls.To them, the number was important, and they went for girls who had money.They weren't embarrassed to have the girls pay for their drinks and dinners.He, on the other hand, wanted to leave an impression, to charm the girl with his story: 'It all came from Dubrovnik.There, the guys would meet foreign girls and lead them around the town.They talked about its history, they bought them drinks.They did not try to take advantage of them'.("Njemice su najliberalnije", 2013) I call the second type of galeb narrative "the seducer of comrades".These galebs specialized in female tourists from Eastern Europe who came 2 The web pages where these stories can be found are listed in the references ("Eh, kako se galebarilo u socijalizmu", 2013; "Na Beograđankama su pekli zanat", 2013; "Njemice su najliberalnije", 2013).
HUMANISTICA to the Adriatic, often based on political merit.Specifically, one galeb speaks about the Solaris Hotel in Šibenik as the main hunting ground.This type of galeb preferred quantity and went through girls as if they were on a factory line.He chose Eastern European female tourists because they were decent, educated and modest, and they were easy to impress with small gifts.We can assume that this type of galeb was from a modest educational and cultural background, as one of them admits that they didn't seduce Western European tourists because of the language barrier.
You would pick up girls 24 hours a day.By day at the beach, in the evening on the terraces that were packed.Even though at the Solaris there were guests from Germany, Scandinavia or Italy, the ideal targets were birds who were members of the Communist Party.Ante tells me that they were regularly without money, for a start.The then Yugoslavia was far more developed than their home countries.Though they might have thought they were living in paradise, one day on the Croatian coast was enough for them to realize from what sort of dump they had come.Suddenly they were fascinated and surrounded by fellows who had much more money than they did, and this situation worked better than any foreplay.Ante says to me: 'In today's money, I never spent more than 50 kunas on a gift, and it was a big deal to them.I remember this dentist girl who wouldn't put out in the beginning, and then we went to town where she saw a floral patterned pan in a shop.I went in and bought her the whole set.It cost me 40 kunas.After that she completely changed her attitude.I could do whatever I wanted with her'.… Eastern girls, I learned, were incredibly modest, nice and grateful.No dinners or expensive excursions.Let alone alcohol.("Eh, kako se galebarilo u socijalizmu", 2013) The key issue for this paper, which follows from the story of the former galebs, is why there are no galebs anymore, neither in reality nor in literary texts whose narrative universes are set in the present.What does this tell us about the literary articulation of tourism practices and to what extent are they conditioned by changes in social reality?Can literary texts provide, if not a definite answer, then at least a more complete and complex picture than the testimonies of former galebs?It seems that literary portrayals offer a view of at least three dimensions of the galebarenje phenomenon.Even a random, intuitive answer to the first question would lead to the reading of this phenomenon as a specific historical, social and culturally conditioned construct.Therefore, the first dimension of the analysis when trying to answer the question is that of time.The texts by Šoljan and Ferić were written at different times, but their narrative universe is set more or less in the same historical period.Another dimension worth mentioning is the specific mechanisms of functioning of tourism in socialist Yugoslavia, and the third is the economy of the relationships between the participants.Below we will show that the third dimension is key for understanding and interpreting the way particular aspects of tourism practice are presented in literary texts.Before we move on to the analysis of the examples, a term should be introduced which will prove suitable for analysing the economic relations: libidinal economy.In this introductory part, we shall briefly explain the term, and a more detailed elaboration of its applicability in literary analysis will be given in the discussion and conclusion.
Jean-François Lyotard published his book Libidinal Economy in 1974.Going against not only the classics of political economy but also psychoanalysts, Lyotard establishes libidinal desires as crucial for the circulation, survival and renewal of capitalism.Our libidinal impulses are in line with the capitalist economy, we unconsciously invest in it, and even when we criticize it, we fall under its regime (cf.Chukhrov, 2014).People's unconscious desires produce capitalist conditions.Modes of production, exchange and consumption point to the way libido functions, and it is the trigger of the capitalist order (Chukhrov, 2014).Libido is inclined to circulation and excessive consumption, and if it is stored in an object and is not manifested, it can result in oppressive social structures (Bennett, 2010, p. 109).Thus, according to Bennett, Lyotard's reading of the economy moves away from the neoclassical economic concepts of interest and utility (Bennett, 2010, p. 95).
The microlevel of libidinal economic activity is incorporated into a broader framework within which literary subjects operate.This framework, the chronotope, is largely mimetically depicted in the selected literary texts.It is possible to find correspondence between the idea offered by the literary text and the phenomena recorded in social reality.The stories of both authors, Šoljan and Ferić, are set on the northern Adriatic coast and/or islands, and the time is the first half of the 1950s in Šoljan's story Vrt slavuja (The Garden of Nightingales), and the 1980s in Ferić's story.There are some slight differences in the articulation of the spirit of time, depending on which decade the story is set in, but it can be stated that the chronotope is, to a certain extent, frozen and exemplifies some paradigmatic sites of Yugoslav tourism without too much analysis of the functioning of the tourism industry.A significant number of historical and anthropological studies on Yugoslav tourism have been published recently (I mention only a few of them: Duda, 2003Duda, , 2005Duda, , 2010aDuda, , 2010bDuda, , 2011Duda, , 2016;;Duda & Stanić, 2011;Grandits & Taylor, 2013) that explore the diverse aspects of how it changed over decades.For this topic, it is important to bear in HUMANISTICA mind that immediately after the establishment of socialist Yugoslavia, a social tourism project was started by encouraging workers to go on vacation and building numerous worker resorts.As early as the beginning of the 1950s, private rooms began to be more attractive to domestic guests than resorts (see Grandits & Taylor, 2013, p. 32) due to the limited capacity and bad conditions in the latter (Duda & Stanić, 2011).By the first half of the 1960s, tourism had mostly undergone a transformation from being largely dominated by the state to a semi-commercial kind and, despite the various ups and downs of the Yugoslav economy, tourism profits grew steadily over the decades (Grandits & Taylor, 2013, pp. 32-33).Even though control over tourism was liberalized, it is indisputable that tourism is an activity which, regardless of the ideological profile of the state, is supervised and directed, primarily through the regulation of (annual) vacations, which is related to the problem of worker rights, the influence of worker organizations, commercialization processes, etc. (Grandits & Taylor, 2013, p. 29).
In Šoljan's and Ferić's texts, the activity of the galebs is connected with spaces of state investment in tourism such as camps and hotels, as none of them were a private tourist enterprise, i.e. a lessor of accommodation, and the vast majority of them did not participate in the restaurant or hotel business in any way.Therefore, hotels or camps were a chance for them to meet female tourists with whom they would then try to enter into transactions that went beyond the framework of official economic exchange.Both with Šoljan and Ferić, the main characters refuse to identify themselves as galebs.They practise the typical galebarenje behaviour, but feel this determinant does not apply to them.It would appear that galebs, as well as tourists, are always other people (Molvarec, 2017, pp. 294-295).
Idle louts also annoyed us -professional seducers of foreign women who spent their entire preseason in swimsuits so that they could get their tan just right before the summer, and they would put on airs with their painted moustaches and bulky biceps.Obviously, you can't hold their trade against them, a man has to do something, but sometimes it is difficult to swallow the traits someone's trade leaves on him.(Šoljan, 1995, p. 40) Šoljan's characters like to identify themselves as bohemian, artistic, leisured guys whose desire for adventure is key in the application of galeb strategies; one gets the impression that their romantic experiences with female tourists happen by chance.This is particularly prominent in Vrt slavuja, where the initially innocent relationship with the German girl Gerta turns into a great love story with obstacles.In Drugi ljudi na Mjesecu, Angel and Zec plan to make money off tourists: at the bottom of the sea is dead capital, amphorae whose pieces can be glued together into a new, inauthentic amphora that can be sold to tourists.
Instead of the expected financial gain, they make erotic profits by seducing the German women Beata and Fifi and they cruise the Adriatic.The question is whether entering into erotic relationships with female tourists always involves some form of material and financial gain.This seems to be the dominant conviction of the environment in which Šoljan's characters operate.As already mentioned, the local population regarded tourists primarily as cash cows (Šoljan, 1995, p. 62).
Yes, the foreigner is useful, and you should take off your hat to the things he has or sells, but the foreigner himself?Please, don't give me that, the foreigner is a tourist!He comes, gorges himself, shits himself and leaves.Huh, and we, you know, have to live here when he's gone.(Šoljan, 1995, p. 62) He-he, so… you got into tourism?Good, good.... A gold mine, I tell you, this is a gold mine, heaven for our guys.Good for them, good!(Šoljan, 1995, p. 61) He knows what he's doing", said someone in the group rubbing his index finger against his thumb."Money, money!".(Also Šoljan, 1995, p. 65) The relationship between the galebs and the female tourists seems to be seen primarily through the economic notion of exchange.While Šoljan's protagonists largely flee from such a determinant by masking their behaviour with idealistic (true love) or adventurous (summer fun) motivation, Ferić's protagonists consciously accept the (libidinal) economic nature of their relationship with tourists.
Economic exchange must be one of the basic concepts in economics.It signifies the exchange of one scarce resource for another in order to satisfy one's wishes and needs.This results in spending, whether the goods and services are exchanged for money or both parties exchange goods and services ("Economic exchange".n.d.).In a purely economic exchange, both participants are consumers and exchange the contributions they have, while in an economic exchange with production, some participants can produce new goods ("Exchange economy", n.d.).
In Ferić's stories from the collection Na osami blizu mora, the characters obviously exchange their erotic capital, consuming each other's bodies.But is there any other kind of exchange?The initial stages of the relationship between the galebs and the female tourists are strongly marked by the market relationship of supply and demand, which certainly works in the galebs' favour, since they are greatly outnumbered by the female tourists.This numerical asymmetry leads to the domination of the quantitative principle, more precisely unobstructed libidinal consumption, without restraint, often HUMANISTICA even with several female tourists at the same time.Exceptions are female tourists who for some reason hold a high value or are trying to increase their value, for example, the very young and beautiful Dagmar, who had galebs standing in line for her, following a particular Darwinian social hierarchy (Ferić, 2015, p. 93).Another example is the attempt to increase one's own value through the creation of conditions of scarcity of goods and services, as in the case of Constanze who delays sexual intercourse with Luka (Ferić, 2015, p. 35), which can at first seem a risky strategy in a situation of large supply, but it turns out to be effective because of Luka's inexperience.There is another relationship model, where the female tourist is the embodiment of a fantasy about a mature, experienced and sexually open woman.The narrator reflects on this, inspired by the German woman Mutti: And suddenly it became clear that they, the boys from the island, played a very peripheral role here.They were just a right to freedom, a right to sexuality, free love.It was fashionable to liberate the body, providing it to others.And they entered that practice, they were like handbags or sandals.(Ferić, 2015, p. 104) Lovers are both expendable and replaceable, just like material objects of consumer desire.Both processes seem to work according to the same principle of satisfying a desire, namely that libido provides circulation of both erotic and consumer impulses.Does this mean that galebs realize their consumer impulses through relations with female tourists?The motif that could be noticed in Šoljan's Izdajice, material interest as the first reason for establishing a relationship with a female tourist, is also present here: "What I mean is he didn't marry the girl, but the car.Have you seen what the kid is driving?" (Ferić, 2015, p. 39).
From the behaviours of the characters, one cannot infer a conscious exploitative strategy that these malicious people hint at.However, socializing and a relationship, i.e. the exchange of goods with a female tourist, brings many advantages and benefits that raise the symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1984) of galebs, mainly through the consumption of status goods: driving in Constance's BMW, going to clubs and restaurants which would otherwise be unavailable, etc.The contextual framework of all of this is socialist Yugoslavia with its complex relationship towards the commercialization and consumerism of society; more on this in the conclusion.
Ferić's collection Na osami blizu mora opens with the story of the same name, and is different in some premises about the relationship between the galeb and the female tourists.Namely, the protagonists are the underage Luka and a middle-aged Slovak woman.Luka is a virgin and he sees an opportunity to lose his virginity with the Slovak woman.She is not very attractive, and the image is made worse by a grotesque detail: she is wear-ing a pink swim ring around her waist.The pattern of the galeb-tourist relationship is in some respects ritualized (cf.Molvarec, 2017, p. 351), and this one could be described as a perverted rite of passage.According to van Gennep, rites of passage mark a transition from one period of life to another, such as birth, social puberty, marriage, fatherhood, transition from one social class to another, professional specialization, funeral (van Gennep, 1960, p. 3), and they consist of several stages: separation (the person leaves their current status), transition (a liminal state of timelessness and lack of social structure), and reaggregation in which a person acquires a new identity (van Gennep, 1960, p. 11).In rites of passage, the exchange of goods and services as well as the circulation of gifts play a major role (Thomassen, 2014, p. 63).The transition is expressed spatially in the story through swimming from the shore to a nearby islet, but there is no exchange of goods in the conventional sense because the Slovak woman haggles with the (un)availability of sexual relations so Luka will take her to the dance, and he does not want to do it because of the social shame involved, because she does not represent a status symbol.She is unable to offer symbolic capital, she blackmails him with her erotic capital, which is not of very high value, so Luka carries out a perverted sexual act (in the armpit) which fills him with shame and represents an incomplete initiation, after which his return to society with a new identity is no longer symbolically possible even though other members of the community (other galebs) saw him in the transition phase, which at that moment still promised the possibility of passage: "He watched the pink inflatable ring with the pink hat move away.And away.And away.And he remained on the islet and could not go back among the living at any cost" (Ferić, 2015, p. 14).

The Configuration of the South
Jurica Pavičić appeared in Croatian literature in the 1990s with his detective stories Ovce od gipsa (Sheep Made of Plaster, 1997) and Nedjeljni prijatelj (Sunday Friend, 1999) in which he criticized society.He also publishes newspaper articles and columns in Slobodna Dalmacija, Zarez and Jutarnji list.Over time, his stories, novels, columns and newspaper articles began to grow into an organic whole in which one can recognize several specific thematic obsessions: the socialist project of modernization, the anthropology of Split and Dalmatia, the anthropology of tourism, the transformation of space under the influence of social and economic factors, and the impact of space on the lives of people.Since they all arise from the same focal point, in my analysis I will not make a distinction between Pavičić's fictional and nonfictional prose.The titles that will be included It has already been mentioned that space and its transformation will be analysed in this paper as the link between culture, economy and tourism.This will be more apparent in the analysis of Pavičić's texts than those of Šoljan or Ferić.
In the past few decades in literary and cultural theory, much attention has been paid to the problem of space, under the influence of the transdisciplinary shift towards space which established a stronger link between the economic conditions of capitalism and the symbolic potential of spatial notions in literature and culture, first in human geography and later in many other humanities and social sciences (cf.Grgas, 2012, p. 170).Today, based on the contributions of Lefebvre, Foucault, Soja and others, it is generally accepted in the humanities that space is produced and that it should be seen as a social and cultural category and as a possibility for a more complete understanding of human history (Grgas, 2012, p. 170;Koroman, 2013, p. 125).Space is inevitably socially produced and affects the human community.Furthermore, imaginary spaces can have a clear effect on the transformation of the identity of a subject, as well as tangible social, economic and cultural consequences, especially in the discourse of creating tourist destinations (McCabe & Marson, 2006), which will be discussed later.
The topic of space in contemporary Croatian literature has already attracted considerable research interest, primarily for (sub)urban spaces of transition, most often Zagreb (cf.Kolanović, 2008Kolanović, , 2011;;Koroman, 2013;Nemec, 2010).What about the key region with regard to tourism, Dalmatia and Split as its central city, which is special because it became a globally recognizable trendy tourist destination only a few years ago?To get back to the beginning: the concept of Split as a hit destination with all the commercializing and commodifying effects is pinpointed in Dežulović's text with which I started this paper.The question is, what is the difference between the concepts of the space of Split and Dalmatia at the beginning of the millennium and today?How does a literary text record, (pre)signify and interpret economic processes, tourism practices and geopolitics, which changes city and natural spaces and thus the lives of people, both publicly and privately, professionally and intimately?
Split has always inspired numerous travellers, writers and artists.A large number of their testimonies can be found in Anatolij Kudrjavcev's Vječni Split (The Eternal Split, 1985).Kudrjavcev points out that two pictures of Split are dominant in those otherwise heterogeneous records.One is a postcard panorama, an idealized image of the paradigmatic city views -"romance with an operatic atmosphere, with stage scenery and theatrical lighting" (Kudrjavcev, 1985, p. 122).The other, much rarer, peeks behind the stage scenery (Kudrjavcev, 1985, p. 119), bringing forth a sense of anxiety and fogginess.Such authors mostly described the districts of Get and Veli Varoš as a hellish labyrinth of dirty dark narrow alleys, a hotbed of fornication, immorality, crime, filth, vices, disease and prostitution (Kudrjavcev, 1985, pp. 168-170, 278, 325-331).A similar image of Split is visually explored in the film Ta divna splitska noć (A Wonderful Night in Split) directed by Arsen Anton Ostojić in 2004.The entire film was shot in black and white, and the characters from the underworld move through rundown interiors of dilapidated dwellings or through narrow alleys depicted from the perspective of a pedestrian, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere and showing the dark side of "the most beautiful city in the world" (as the people of Split call it) on New Year's Eve.This was symptomatic for the beginning of the millennium and illustrative of the topic of this paper: the singer in the film who performs at the Peristyle for New Year's Eve welcomes the people of Split and those few lunatics who have come to Split to welcome the new year.Today, in 2019, such a remark would seem almost surreal.
And while in Dežulović's text Split: kronika jedne propasti the main character is a city which is no longer there, which exists only in the author's mind and which determined his identity, in Pavičić the main character is a city with many faces, which emerge as if in a palimpsest when some detail perceived by the narrator evokes them.In Pavičić's oldest collection of columns, Split by Night (published in 2004, with the oldest text written in 1995, others from 2001 to 2004), most texts are documentary records of Split in transition which in various ways exemplify or implicitly or explicitly discuss Split as a hopeless city, a phrase popular in the media in the 1990s and 2000s (Cf.e.g.Lalić, 1999).Pavičić locates the first significant instance of the media fixating on Split as a problematic, controversial and chaotic city in the collective memory, an idea that would later become widespread and deeply rooted, in the 1980s.He refers to the article by Darko Hudelist published in Start in 1988 in which he calls it the devil island (Pavičić, 2004, p. 7), primarily because of the growing problem of narcotics that culminated in the 1990s (Andrijašević & Lalić, 2008, p. 418), but, as Hudelist later also explained, as a Krležian metaphor for social problems in Yugoslavia just before its disintegration ("Split je vražji otok", 2010).In his introductory text to the collection Split by Night from 1995, Pavičić says there is no Split by night postcard because even without it the association for Split is blackness: narcotics, communal disintegration, delinquency, poverty, traffic chaos, ecological cesspool (Pavičić, 2004, p. 7).

HUMANISTICA
In order to clearly show the shift from the image of Split as the devil island through a hopeless city to the hit destination from Instagram profiles, attention should be paid to several issues in the analysis of Pavičić's texts: 1. Descriptions of urban and suburban landscapes of Split and its surroundings which often occasion cultural observations 2. Descriptions of space transformations in articulating global tourism and economics issues 3. Views and reflections on the socialist project of modernization and its impact on the living culture and economic practice of people In the first collection analysed, the descriptions of urban, suburban and peripheral landscapes mainly correlate with the idea of Split as a hopeless city, but also with the actual or assumed importance that this city holds in the Croatian symbolic imagery.Therefore Pavičić draws similarities between Split and Naples, cities with strong symbolic and cultural capital from the past, but with great social, communal, infrastructural and political problems in the present.In addition to these verifiable facts, Pavičić also depicts the local mentality when writing about the desperate acceptance of fate, the inhabitants' conviction that their city is a prison from which they need to escape (Pavičić, 2004, p. 8), the feeling of hopelessness and the belief that authentic existence is possible somewhere else (Pavičić, 2004, p. 138).These are starting points for painting the specific psychogeography of the Mediterranean in later texts, which will turn out to be based primarily on economic and technological foundations.The permanent crisis of material and economic living conditions is associated with the social and cultural crisis of the Mediterranean, which is manifested in its permanent incompleteness.According to Palestinian film director Elia Suleiman quoted by Pavičić, the Mediterranean is unfinished houses, unfinished jobs, unfinished dreams (Pavičić, 2004(Pavičić, , p. 186, 2018, p. 13, p. 13).Even though it is indisputable that the Mediterranean is lagging behind the North in terms of the economy and technology, thus becoming a periphery in relation to northern centres of economic and political power, Pavičić relies on temporal and spatial categories in describing such socio-geographic and cultural images of the Mediterranean.Just like an unfinished house is a good metaphor for the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean is also: A place without the present, chained between the future and the past.The future that never seems to happen, which is always delayed, as a never fulfilled promise of progress.And the past which the Mediterranean celebrates, which it meticulously records and glorifies, just like every community whose present is bleak.This past is often a kind of cult, partly because it is a substitute for the current irrelevance and failure, and partly because it is the subject of trade exchange.(Pavičić, 2018, p. 14) Both past tourist notions regarding the Adriatic coast and the tourism practices of its inhabitants today have had their effects on space, and in Pavičić's texts they are inevitably connected with the sphere of the state or global economy, and the microlevel of the local community.As for the state and global levels, the key project is that of modernization in socialism, which was comprehensive, all-pervasive and whose effects can be felt in almost all spheres of life, and then the transition into a capitalist market economy in the 1990s as a part of the global economy, inextricably linked to general global economic trends.
A platitude in catastrophic discourse about Split as a hopeless city is the motif of illegal construction, which has (supposedly) turned Split into an urban jungle.Pavičić often deals with this topic.However, contrary to common beliefs that often fall into the trap of cultural racism about the primitive outsiders and the cultured local people, Pavičić critically observes the undoubtedly negative sides of this phenomenon, such as the catastrophic infrastructure -e.g.Split has the smallest volume of sewerage per capita among major European cities (Pavičić, 2004, p. 9), the wanton destruction of its most important resource, space, by rampant growth (Pavičić, 2004, p. 185), ecological problems etc.He also points out that Split was actually founded by squatting, as a sort of refugee camp, so it is a paradox that from today's perspective the periphery is considered ugly, since it was created in the same way as the celebrated city core -by the same pattern of squatting and illegal construction (Pavičić, 2004, pp. 49-50).This is the scary anti-city of concrete and glass that shocks tourists and brings to mind Cairo, Bombay and Karachi (Pavičić, 2004, p. 185).On the other hand is the Borgesian city-labyrinth, a perverted town with upper floors (Pavičić, 2004, p. 185), which has become one of the most famous Mediterranean destinations in the last ten years.However, Pavičić is not particularly interested in images of the city core, except in his later texts where they exemplify global tourism phenomena, mostly the gentrification of the centre (Pavičić, 2018, p. 22).He is interested in the transformation of the coastal environment of Dalmatian cities over the decades, then the islands as places where vacation houses were built during the era of socialism, and the districts of Split which grew as a result of socialist modernization.Having in mind these three spatial focuses, the coordinates of Pavičić's narrative can be clearly inferred from his texts about economic and tourist global processes, as well as about the microtransactions of his protagonists, embedded in the wider context of the chronotope of the Mediterranean, i.e. through its various stages from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, with a special focus on the 1950s.Below I will outline the basic plot of this story, through examples from Pavičić's texts, and in the conclusion I will highlight its specific HUMANISTICA moments, which are complementary to the first part of this paper about the practices of galebarenje.
In the 1950s and 1960s, generations of people making a living in the hinterland from agriculture and livestock breeding, abhorring the sea, realized what kind of dead capital was hidden next to it.They moved to the shore and fulfilled a special local and amateur vision of mass tourism as a counterpoint to the already mentioned story of the construction of worker resorts and, later, big hotels.
The irony of history is that in patriarchal cultures, these lands usually belonged to the unwed and youngest sisters because land by the sea was considered the poorest.Then came the turning point in the 1960s: the plots next to the sea, where figs, carobs or olive trees were grown, suddenly became as valuable as Tolkien's rings.Families that lived by the sea suddenly discovered an elixir for a transformation from chronic misery to material security.On their grandparents' land, thousands of Croats, Montenegrins and Greeks built three-storey apartment wonders with facades in all colours, and they put up that mythical inscription which would mark the Mediterranean over the following three decades: ZIMMER FREI, SOBA CAMARA ZIMMER.The space was devoured longitudinally, the construction snaked in thin strips along the coast and the roads, and unlike in Spain, tourism here was extensive and amateur, and investors as well as profits remained in the local environment.This is the Dalmatia I grew up in: a Dalmatia where everyone has a vacation house, and where doctors, engineers and judges rent rooms to tourists.One generation built the houses and accumulated profits, another learned languages and educated their children in cities (Pavičić, 2018, p. 19).
Particularly important was the construction of the Adriatic Highway in 1965, which "had its own autochthonous, spatial consequences" (Pavičić, 2018, p. 50) -it was built very close to the sea and raised the value of the worthless land next to the sea, resulting in the construction of a whole series of vacation houses and holiday resorts.Parallel to this, a whole range of housing units were built in Split for the needs of the workforce in the growing processes of industrialization and modernization of Yugoslavia.In them lived people who did not participate in tourist transactions and who actually made up the majority of the city's population in terms of the industrial needs of the factories in Split and its surroundings, which was the main reason why, since the times of socialism until recently, Split was viewed as a transit city on the way to the islands, and it did not have adequate hotels and other tourist facilities, due to the ecologically disastrous consequences of that same industry, among other things (Pavičić, 2004, pp. 10-11, 27).
In the example of the building in Spinut where Pavičić spent his childhood and youth, he analyses the effects of architecture on people's lives.What fascinates him most is "its ability to change the way people live, change the way they do their jobs, and -finally -to change what people are" (Pavičić, 2018, p. 164).
In his building at 20 Ljudevit Gaj Street, there was a complex but transitory economy of exchange: All that time, the hallway and the stairs were a channel of economic exchange, where goods flowed.Pots, salt shakers, blood pressure gauges, Vernier callipers, sewing machines, drill bits, slide rules, spanners number 12 circulated throughout the building.Food travelled the most: fried smelt, cherry strudels, stuffed peppers, tripe with parmesan, sauerkraut and beans, chickpeas and dried peas, frittoles and angel wings, whole baked cakes, as well as slices of pies left over from birthdays.… However, at 20 Ljudevit Gaj Street, you didn't only exchange objects and food.Skills were also exchanged.Over the decades, the residential building became an intricate organism in which -because of its complexity -there was diversification, and each organ in that organism had a function.(Pavičić, 2018, pp. 170-171) Pavičić perceives the building at 20 Ljudevit Gaj Street as a kibbutz, which levels class differences, as the "(only?)micro-space where socialism succeeded" (Pavičić, 2018, pp. 171-172).Not to make the whole picture too utopian, Pavičić introduces the topos of a vacation house into this story.On the one hand, the fact that so many people had one confirms the thesis that class differences were not wide in socialism, but on the other hand, it shows the significance of the class aspirations of certain layers of a supposedly homogeneous working class.
Vacation houses were built with one's own hands over many years because they were "part of the male culture of leisure" (Pavičić, 2018, p. 75) and they might be "the most authentic expression of Croatian and Yugoslavian half-way culture, a culture that wanted to be both a socialist and a consumerist paradise" (Pavičić, 2018, p. 73), a compromise between the proclaimed ideology of class equality and an aversion towards the acquisition of wealth on the one hand, and the desire of a large number of individuals for private property on the other.It was also a form of investment, and later a source of income through leasing (Pavičić, 2018, p. 78).In several places in the texts the vacation house appears as a motif of consumer desire, and the possession of one as the "top of the pyramid of consumer goods" (Taylor, 2013, p. 202) would strengthen or affirm one's symbolic position in an allegedly classless society, along with some subtler signs of greater class stratification such as shopping in Trieste or buying then-rare household appliances.Interestingly, in Pavičić such expectations and desires are manifested by women, who then put pressure on their husbands to be more ambitious, and use them as exponents that will accomplish their class wishes, which is a potentially controversial motif for an analysis of gender relations, but there isn't enough space in this text to consider it further.
Over the decades, vacation houses became diversified in terms of layout, size and interior design, which points to a clearer manifestation of class differences and the level of economic or cultural capital (Taylor, 2013).Having a vacation house became a burden for the young generations, and this fact coincides with the rise of contemporary tourism which is global and interconnected, professional and corporate.And this is the last stage of this story, exemplified in the city destination from Dežulović's text discussed at the beginning of the paper.After the end of the war and since the beginning of the new millennium, mass sales of family homes and former vacation houses mostly to foreign nationals have become a regular epidemic, prices have skyrocketed -Pavičić is explicit -and a summer villa has again become the privilege of the rich (Pavičić, 2018, p. 82).Luxury apartment resorts owned by foreign hotel groups are sprouting up on land which once belonged to our ancestors.These investments are gradually destroying any possibility of economic self-sustainability of local communities.Pavičić sees this as part of a broader battle of the Mediterranean against its own economic and political colonization, which it is losing because it has no other resources with which it could rise up except through selling rooms with sea views in an ever decreasingly authentic and increasingly simulated universe of Mediterranean life:

Conclusion
The analysed texts tell a story running from the 1950s to the present time.This is not a parallel or an alternative story of tourism practices, but certainly a special and coherent one -often based on complex economic and cultural transactions.The key periods are socialism, the time of war and the transition, and global capitalism.My intention was to show that the practices are not always disparate, and that sudden leaps dependent only on changes in the paradigmatic framework are rare.At first, it would seem that certain phenomena and manifestations spread microscopically, and that they organically emerge from or return to a wider social or cultural context.However, this explanation does not clarify the small discontinuities that at some point break the new paradigm: are the two faces of tourism -the erotic and the leasing-related -antipodes, or do they have common origins?As always in humanistic disciplines, the answer is difficult to find, but even with this limited corpus of literary texts as a bearer of social knowledge, it is possible to put forward some hypotheses and potential conclusions.I go back to the term of libidinal economy.It has already been said that, according to Lyotard, libidinal economy can be found in the background of the capitalist system.Simply put, our desires are irrational, which enables the perpetuation and expansion of capitalism.We think we can resist the logic of capitalist production, but our libidinous impulses are in accordance with this economy (Chukhrov, 2014).The logical question is: Does this mean that a socialist economy does not function according to the libidinal principle?
Keti Chukhrov explored this conundrum in her text Sexuality in a Non-Libidinal Economy (2014), in which she tried to clarify how sexuality and the economy worked in the Soviet Union.The capitalist economy rests on surplus value which actually incorporates this libidinal desire.What happens to a socialist economy which is based on the rejection of goods, surplus value, competitiveness in production and distribution in accordance with needs constructed through de-libidinalized consumption habits (Chukhrov, 2014)?Libido cannot manifest itself in surplus value, and then this unreasonable, intense activity is transmitted to work, social responsibility, ethical acts, art and culture -it becomes zeal and dedication more than pleasure and jouissance.Goods are unattractive and depersonalized because they are there only to meet basic shared and common needs (Chukhrov, 2014).Basic knowledge of the history of society and the economic organization of socialist Yugoslavia is enough to help one perceive significant differences in relation to what Chukhrov wrote.This has already been stated in this paper: the presence of a consumer culture, (limited) availability of foreign products, commodification and commercialization of tourism, leasing and profit.Ideological and moral concerns appeared sporadically (Grandits & Taylor, 2013;Taylor, 2013), but libidinal economy seems to have established its course discreetly through decades of contradictions of Yugoslav socialism.Judging by literary texts, the manifestation of libidinal economy depends on the specificity of the characters.Šoljan's and Ferić's galebs do not have means of production, to use a Marxist term.They either reject the conventionality of everyday life (in Šoljan) or are too young to be part of an economic and social machine (in Ferić).They have no economic, social or cultural capital.They only have the erotic kind -body, charm, seduction skills -with which they try to realize their libidinal desire: literally a sexual one, but even more a symbolic one -the realization of sexual freedom, getting acquainted with Western popular and consumer culture, enjoying a desirable lifestyle realized through transactions with female tourists.Space is once again shown as a significant dimension through which these phenomena are manifested.They do not take place through tiny, scattered, grey, private entrepreneurship of leasing a room in a vacation house or a family home.Their transactions take place HUMANISTICA within the official, socialist, state-planned tourism in hotels and holiday camps.In literary texts, this homogeneous and structured space often represents the centre of social, economic life and places of entertainment (Pavičić, 2018, p. 88), but because of its harmonic restrictedness it does not allow libidinal desires to move in the direction of monetary economy of profits, so profit is made through other means.
The circulation of libidinal desire in the actions of characters that function within the classical structure of socialism (workers, technical and other intelligentsia) is different.Despite aspirations for a classless society, class differences are visible through many subtle and not so subtle signalsas already shown in the examples with vacation houses, shopping abroad, travelling and buying symbols of conspicuous consumption (Veblen, 2008).As Taylor notes in his article about the history of vacation houses in Yugoslav society and culture, in the 1970s they started becoming increasingly bigger and more luxurious, often built with the money of gastarbeiters (Taylor, 2013, p. 204).Since other entrepreneurial activities were not possible, over time vacation houses were increasingly treated as an investment and were often illegally leased to tourists.An example of such a gaudy gastarbeiter house is found in Pavičić's story Drugi kat, nebo (Second Floor, the Sky) in which the father of the female protagonist adds a floor for each child, but they have to vacate them when the summer arrives, and with it the tourists (Pavičić, 2008, pp. 13-15).Summer and vacation houses were built erratically, they were scattered, without system and control, like a tumour or Caulerpa taxifolia, as Pavičić wrote (Pavičić, 2004, p. 185), and this "emergence of anarchic leisure architecture" (Taylor, 2013, p. 218) also marks the course of libidinal economy.
Desires are directed towards surplus value and consumption and towards the demonstration of vertical class mobility.The war and the immediate post-war situation of transition halted this old Zimmer frei economy.It is impossible to precisely identify the point when the paradigm of tourism was changed and when the power shifted from individuals and microeconomic transactions to the sphere of corporate capitalism, but in the analysed narrative texts this process is again expressed through spatial categories: the sale of family land to foreign hotel funds, the sales of vacation houses to foreigners, the gentrification of old city centres, namely Split, and the transformation of apartments in the city centre into luxury apartments for tourists.You will no longer find more or less ugly concrete two-or three-storey houses without facades along the highway, but rather tastefully decorated and adapted middle-class flats in the city centre itself.Such an apartment will provide for the whole family -as can be seen from the example of Pavičić's story Tabernakul, after the family finally got rid of an old cotenant, assigned to them by the socialist regime long ago because their home had more square metres than they had the right to (Pavičić, 2013, p. 13).He survived all the socioeconomic changes and died during the time of global tourism, which means that he prevented them from cashing in on their apartment before his death.
While the workers were carrying the new wardrobes, the new TV set and a kitchenette, Maja watched the apartment like a newly fledged nobleman.… 'Man,' she said, 'four stars, five minutes from the historic centre.The agencies will go wild when they see this'.(Pavičić, 2013, p. 32) This outlines the coordinates of the last phase of the chronicle of a downfall, the death of city centres and the urban spirit in the name of tourist consumption, which has already happened in Venice and Dubrovnik.Thus "at the beginning of the 21st century, Dalmatia writes a new line in its history of utopias" (Pavičić, 2018, p. 287), concludes Pavičić ironically.Belief in a utopia sooner or later sustains a crushing defeat, but it seems that the utopia of tourism has a thousand faces, and this paper has tried to show at least some of them and in what ways they stimulate the libidinal desire of all involved.Therefore, it seems that this utopia is here to stay, at least for a while.