Cuts from the book’s original conclusion: Alex Garland, Michel Houellebecq, Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag, Paul Theroux
In celebration of a future that could well be one of limited options—accompanied, perhaps, by a multitude of interpretive variations—I will conclude this study with examples that illustrate my point about the potentialities of formal play while also recognizing its limitations: the boundary at which art for its own sake becomes less a venue of alternative readings than an excuse for self-censorship, an avoidance of stark truths that require hard solutions. Art offers only hypotheses in the end. It offers pliable, if therefore also potentially workable, strategies for a new planetary humanism. Releasing the latter from the constraints of various institutional “bodies-without-organs,” operating with renewed vigor across the globe, remains an unfulfilled requirement.
Avant-garde play: Garland, Houellebecq, Sontag, Theroux
I have written elsewhere on particular late modern works that achieve the kind of distancing and reversal, estrangement and appeal, that characterize the avant-garde canon of travel writing on the Orient. Two examples are Alex Gardner’s The Beach (1996) and Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme (2001), novels that depict how traveling to exotic terrains at first seem endowed with liberating opportunities but are quickly transformed into readymade experiences that undermine the effects of escape itself while perfectly satisfying the consumerist impulses that characterize many people’s daily lives, impulses that readily thwart or modify desire even as they indulge it. In both of these works, the quest for authenticity is answered with the obvious postmodern solution of the prefabricated tour: researched, streamlined, packaged and marketed for just the right audience of supposedly unique and adventurous—if also pre-screened—individuals. Gardner’s book reveals the bad faith behind imposing the age-old Western fantasy of Paradise Recuperated onto the late, imperialist one of the postwar War Game, the Club Med/boot-camp version of cleansing the earth of difference and danger (an especially bad vacation combo fostered by rapid globalization, resurgent and diversifying racisms, and the ubiquity of video-style death simulations as popular entertainment). Houellebecq’s book takes Garland’s thesis further by narrating the industrialization of another kind of package tour, one that exploits the availability of commercialized sex in Southeast Asia as a marketing tool for travel, if also as a marketing tool for Houellebecq’s novel. The reversal of expectations that avant-garde formal procedures involve manifests itself in Garland’s book as the literary excitement of turning a make-believe Vietnam War (“play”) into a “real” disaster for the protagonist as part of the post-Reagan War on Drugs (a war that—like the War on Terror it anticipates—continues without abatement). Ironically, it is the very suppliers of the required intoxicants who become the reluctant enforcers of the New World Order in the novel, just as real police and government operatives within that Order have used their authority to protect the drug trade,[1]the profitability of which ensures its de facto legality in capitalist society. The downside in Plateforme, of course, is that sexual tourism—something the book’s reactionary author clearly considers a cynical product of Sixties liberationist ideology—becomes the target of an Islamist terrorist organization operating in Southeast Asia, using sexual liberation as a justification for supposedly religiously-sanctioned mass murder. Dumb ideas always “hook up,” he seems to say, in the so-called clash of civilizations to produce a bad, even explosive, combo.
While the latter denouement is anticipated in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) in which a party of anti-war activists foolhardily bring their international peace demonstration, complete with press teams, to the border of Cambodia only to be fatally sniped at by the Khmer Rouge, Garland’s novel owes an even greater literary debt to Michel Herr’s masterpiece of new journalism and postmodern language play, Dispatches (1977). Less evident as formal predecessors, but vital as the ideological fulcrums from which both books seem historically suspended or even reproved, are Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Nightand Susan Sontag’s Trip to Hanoi (both 1968). While Sontag’s book is less known than Mailer’s bombastic, sprawling eructation of a protest novel, her travel book must have seemed, at the time of publication, even more provocative than Mailer’s as a work of cultural fact-finding based on a North Vietnamese-sponsored junket to the capital of a country then considered by many Americans an enemy nation. Sontag’s revolution of consciousness toward the North Vietnamese is a subtle, intellectually painstaking process, fastidiously pre-achieved and then re-achieved after conceding, in the opening pages of the book, her basic commitment to the anti-imperialist stance of her hosts. What bothers her about them is the “aesthetic sensibility” (18), the almost childish Marxist-Leninist phraseology (in English, hence a translation issue as well) that lacks sufficient intellectual nuance or cosmopolitan breadth for Sontag, qualities she obviously prides herself on having and which render her discourse, as she states it, more objective, more precise, more “adult” if simultaneously more playful—“play”: the thing that allows nuance and invention to take over. At the same time, she acknowledges that the basic arguments of her hosts are “true” and that the “flattened-out,” ideological language they employ seems increasingly justified in the course of her stay. It is at this stage that the reader realizes Sontag’s mission is to ennoble that flattened-out language with a sufficiently nuanced sensibility. Yet in some ways, her own subtlety gets flattened-out in the process, even if that process implies that language itself is beggared in the face of imperialist atrocities and mass destruction. At first she considers her Vietnamese hosts as mere children (the old orientalist trope), but soon comes to see them as heroes while her own sophisticated language becomes almost immaturely inappropriate. Toward the end of the book, it is the “experience” (72) of visiting Hanoi that allows her to accept this compromise of sensibility based on her developing insight that the specific conditions of war in Vietnam have necessitated a disciplined culture of survival, reinforcing a long history of social regimentation and stoic self-sacrifice for the modern cause of national self-determination.[2] As Sontag concludes, Vietnamese society “deserves to be idealized” (72). In this way, her book demonstrates the continuing relevance experience and morality have with regard to the manipulation of forms and the interpretation of signs that the avant-garde excels at for the sake of alternative futures. At the same time, and in aesthetic defiance of the more empirically-bound approaches to writing “travel essays,” many other avant-gardists do not presume that a visionary purpose need affirm itself empirically in any comprehensive way. The future must always surprise. “If not,” they seem to ask, “why go?”
Finally, while Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar (1975) may seem a purely conventional travel book in almost every respect—less formally innovative or intellectually challenging than the kinds of experiments a committed avant-gardist might pursue with explicitly literary motivations—it does provide evidence of receptivity to avant-garde tactics on the part of established travel writers in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. Two passages in particular illustrate the kind of reversal of expectations I have been arguing for as an indicator of both a hermeneutics of reciprocity and the reversal of gaze as fundamental to the avant-garde intensification of an aesthetics of diversity by recognizing and heightening difference. While the first example is almost infantile in its anecdotal provocation, the second is perfectly elementary in its illustration of avant-garde technique, one I have already characterized for its qualities of “simultaneous contrast.” What I am getting at is that avant-garde observational tactics try to anticipate the international, multicultural aspect of any discussion of East and West in a way the provokes recognition of a new cultural ecology of interactive if sometimes combative multiplicities.
My first example from Theroux is a veritable anamorph of narrative form: A fellow passenger on the night express train from Nong Khai in Thailand tells Theroux the story of his experience at the White Rose bar and brothel in Vientiane, Laos. The tall, perfectly gorgeous woman he encounters there tells him that she will do anything he wants for four dollars. He eyes her “fantastic knockers and […] beautiful brown back” (211) and sodomizes her “for all it [is] worth,” i.e., in a way that might be called aggressive, hermeneutically-speaking. When he feels down her thigh, however, he discovers she has a large male sex (“process,” he calls it), not to mention a snarky grin on her face. But the speaker quickly qualifies his narrative by saying that “it ain’t the same story” (212) that Theroux (or the reader) might have already guessed at. The traveler ends up talking with “Oy” (as his mysterious sex partner is called) and decides that, despite her sex, she’s not a man at all but (only) “a girl with a prick!” (212). Though he acknowledges experiencing a moment of “panic” (what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has famously identified as “heterosexual panic” (912-921)), he realizes, on reflection, that he is strongly, almost sentimentally, attracted to her. Thus, as an explicit consequence of a cultural framing of the reversal of gaze, he discovers, in an echo of Segalen’s thesis, that he has seen himself “not as he was.” A kind of incorporation and reciprocity has been enacted, allowing him not to respond with the usual intercultural outrage or violence,[3]but to think fondly of Oy—even hoping to see her again.
[The following paragraph, with block quotation, was retained in the Palgrave MS.] The second example, though perfectly mundane, provides an even more explicit instance of how the aesthetics of diversity, accelerated and exacerbated by the Avant-garde, might be utilized by a classic travel writer. The passage, in fact, goes to the heart of Theroux’s personal strategy of writing about trains:
The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represents the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical. (209)
Though asserting, in effect, the essence of each culture encountered in the great railway bazaar, Theroux’s observation also suggests how a cacophony of cultures might aesthetically interact through the conjoined apparatuses of travel and modernity. Such is the great railway bazaar, whether integrated or discontinuous. While often superimposed in the most ruthless historical conditions of oppression, rail systems prove both useful and burdensome to the future of the various communities that require them, albeit with local features specific to those communities. These features symbolically crystalize the simultaneous contrasts of anthropologically distinct groups in the throes of globalization. Compared to the hard fact of rapid transportation, the “essential paraphernalia” that Theroux talks about seem perfectly inessential to any outsider, yet each item acts as a kind of signature quality, distinction, or contrast that exemplifies the cultural integrity of its origins. It is an impure marker, however, and thus points the way to a kind of cultural hybridization that will nonetheless affirm a new standard of integrity in a global multiplex of evolving and interacting communities and individuals (if also, perhaps, extremely disappointing culinary fusions).
[1] Consider CIA operations in Latin America in the 1980s or the Mexican police’s alleged role, more recently, in the kidnapping and murder of hundreds of Mexican college students.
[2] Needless to say this tradition of self-sacrifice has also been ridiculed and parodied by various dissident writers in Vietnam, most conspicuously in the novels of Duong Thu Huong, the best of which is Novel Without a Name (1995).
[3] Such responses are not untypical, as recently evidenced in Okinawa, Japan, in an incident between a transgendered woman and a male U. S. marine that ended in her death.
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