Absentminded Prolepsis: Global Slackers Before the Age of Terror in Alex Garland’s The Beach and Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme

By Sweet, David Lehardy

THIS ESSAY EXAMINES THE AMBIGUOUS, even contradictory, role of the European “slacker” in Alex Garland’s The Beach (1997) and Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme (2001). In both novels, the slackers portrayed are white male travelers who experience not the anticipated escape from the cultural malaise they attribute to their own societies, but an exacerbation of that malaise through its exportation. Insofar as travel itself constitutes a fairly anomalous slacker activity, it conveys very effectively the contradictions at the core of the slacker’s cultural stance. This happens as the consumer impulses behind the slacker’s desire for travel are gradually revealed in the course of each novel’s denouement. Until dien, these impulses are either repressed or rationalized so that the slacker-traveler can maintain a Utopian vision of an authentic experience, despite his truer dystopian or hedonistic inclinations. Whether as proletarian drifter, tentatively drawn to the glitz of consumer offerings, or as disaffected yuppie, culturally slumming it to mask his or her real conditions as a member of what Pierre Bourdieu has called the “new bourgeoisie” (Latham 76-78), the slacker-traveler in these novels is a kind of sociological edge figure, whose shifting identities indicate a potential “unsettlement” (in the Freudian sense) that may take place as the subject crosses various geographical and cultural borders (Musgrove 39). In the end, however, the slacker’s reactionary impulses distort and override the inchoate idealism of his earlier withdrawal from the rat race of Western capitalism. Thus, what both authors anticipate with surprising absence of mind1 is a kind of maturation or cultural turn into the new millennium on the part of the so- called Blank or X Generation of the 1980s and 1990s, a turn from a vaunted disaffection with capitalist culture and its “ethic of duty” (Bourdieu 366-67) to a resigned, if sometimes exuberant, acceptance of hegemonic conditions-conditions revealed through the experience of travel. For no matter what their original class status, Western slacker-travelers are always flattered by the appearance of imperial privilege that accrues to them as conspicuous consumers in non- Western settings where they are invited to play roles to which they are unaccustomed back home.

THE SLACKER AND OVERSEAS TRAVEL

The discovery that travel is personally empowering results in an ideological equivocation that exposes the consumer and careerist tendencies the slacker stance was intended to obscure. Writing on the threshold of our own Age of Terror, both Garland and Houellebecq seem vaguely aware of a post-millennial irony conveyed by their respective protagonists, protagonists who assume the role of nonconformist visitors to the Global South in conditions where difference is largely staged as exoticism for mass consumption. As postmodern travelers, both figures represent repackaged Baudelairean/ Zew<

Less an actual constituency than an imaginary ego-construct generated by literary and popular culture and associated with college-educated whites in their twenties and thirties, the slacker may be depicted as originating from either the working or middle classes of affluent Western countries, especially the United States. Important milestones of slacker culture are Richard Linklater’s debut film Slacker (1991), various grunge-works including Beck’s hit single “Loser” (1992), Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984), Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985), Douglas Coupland’s eponymous Generation X (1991), and more recent works ranging from Michael Hornburg’s Bongwater (1996) to Kate Christensen’s In the Drink (2000), the latter confirming slacker links to women’s writing, if not to feminism. More broadly, James Annesley has described the fiction of the white American youth culture of the eighties and nineties as a “blank fiction” reflecting an “atomized, nihilistic worldview” epitomized by the political indifference of the slacker (Blank Fiction 3). While such fiction can be linked to postmodern “anxieties about subjectivity, representation and the relationship between text and context” (4), the authors associated with Generation X have tried to distinguish themselves from such writers as Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo, for instance, through a relaxation of formal and ideological demands. This slackening of formal invention and political commitment captures the sense of generational futility in a society that is perceived to belittle effort, imagination, and idealism through an overabundance of consumer offerings and a disjunction between political rhetoric and political action.

The novels of Garland and Houellebecq suggest that such attitudes are, if not pervasive in the West, at least widely recognized and that they have spilled over American borders and crossed into a global mainstream of mostly younger, mostly white consumers, although botlt novelists seem preoccupied with the male slacker’s “structure of feeling,” to borrow Raymond Williams’s phrase (12, 27). But these attitudes, far from having a liberating potential, encourage a reactionary politics and aesthetics as the maturing slacker comes to sanctify global policing by the very national and corporate entities that formerly oppressed his or her sense of personal agency. With the spectacle of national emergency, various war-related “language games,” to use Jean-Francois Lyotard’s terminology, entice the slacker to coordinate personal agency to the exigencies of mass mobilization. In short, the slacker philosophy, characterized from the start by ambivalence, is distorted to the point of curtailment as the subject matures and as globalization reaches its own age of terror.

The slacker sensibility was shaped both by and in opposition to the 1960s counter-culture of “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” While the male slacker cultivates a pose of dropping out and turning-on, he has not decided what to tune in to, because all ideals seem either exhausted or prefabricated. The slacker stance originally manifested itself during the economic fallout of de- industrialization in the 1970s and was nourished by a youthful nihilism expressed most vividly in Britain’s punk culture (Latham 87). But on the heels of a new, if temporary, consumerist euphoria, buoyed in the Reaganite and Thatcherite eighties by a smorgasbord of tax breaks, deficit spending, and the emergence of service and software industries, the slacker attitude became one among a repertoire of counter-cultural stances that could be recuperated by the market as “fashion” or “style.” At the same time, careers in venture capitalism were not an option for the slacker, because the ex-hippies, abandoning their anti-establishment heroics, had already sold out and done that, while the new yuppies, in their unrestrained pursuit of wealth and status, constituted the homegrown cultural opposite of the slacker, even if they sometimes occupied intersecting social planes.resulting in what sociologist Rob Latham has identified as a yuppie/slacker dialectic.2 But if upwardly- mobile professions were off-limits to the slacker, so was consumer dearth; indeed, commodities and consumer labels of all kinds are the virtual medium of slacker expression {Blank Fiction 9). Yet they are utilized with a sense of irony that subtly acknowledges that “freedom of choice” is really a form of intimidation designed to ensure that the consumer buy or be relegated to social invisibility. The slacker chooses a kind of low-intensity consumption made up of gadgets, cheap entertainment, intoxicants, used cars, or even backpacking,3 as if to say he is only in the world but not a producer of it, that he is nomadically infringing on the system, not supporting it.

Thus, while the slacker may not make a successful passive resistor, he consistendy enacts a resistant passivity. The slacker deftly displays, as if adhering to a moral principal, a reluctance to embrace consumer culture fully so as not to imply an uncritical acceptance of global capitalism and the corporate careerism of its practitioners. He essentially wants, Peter-Pan-like, to enjoy the benefits of consumer culture and its “ethic of fun” without assimilating its “ethic of duty”-the puritanical, corporate ideology it prescribes-because to do so would be to “sellout” to a culture that alternately bores, oppresses, and tempts.4 The slacker exercises, then, a flexible relation to the system. He withdraws from recommended career paths, resigns himself to marginal status or at least simulates such a lifestyle (a kind of transient proletarianism typified by the “Macjob” [Coupland 5]), and conditions himself to live on less. In the end, there is usually a bourgeois escape hatch provided through educational credentials or parental support. Indeed, when travel itself becomes the preferred mode of resistance, considerable expenditures that would seem to belie the slacker ethos may have to be made, even though travel is considered a basic right (Alneng 463; see also Furlong 249). Fortunately, modern tourism provides even indigent proles with a range of affordable packages, and many of the cheaper pleasures supplied with the tour have their own cheesy appeal to the slacker’s sense of irony, an irony that allows him to dismiss the pieties of traveler snobs who disdain glitzy, popular destinations. The slacker’s capacity for both backpacking and the package tour vividly conveys his essential relaxation of ideological demands and stylistic criteria. Whether at home or abroad, the slacker’s alienation thus constitutes not so much an ideology as a defensive shield against the criticism that ideology, left or right, encourages. At the same time, his sensibility also seems to be a fairly genuine response to late capitalist culture’s power to negate such categories as the genuine, the authentic, or the real (categories for which the slacker-even Garland’s and Houellebecq’s- feels a guarded nostalgia, though not one to which he readily admits). The attention to commodification in slacker narratives (Blank Fiction 9) offers evidence of this pervasiveness, as does the almost utter erasure, in the two novels at hand, of the Southeast Asian Other’s subjective reality. This erasure is achieved by commodifying any remaining trace of that Other through the objectifying gaze and voice of a Western observer-narrator who sees the Other only as a form of entertainment, a complex of signs to be decoded with the aid of certain cultural referents: songs, films, television broadcasts, books.

The Beach

In Alex Garland’s The Beach the slacker ethos is manifested by Richard’s initial rejection of the idea of home and its associated metonyms, an idea that constitutes the first category in the dialectical opposition of responsibility and leisure that operates throughout the text. Home encompasses a wide range of physical and ideological adjacencies (including family, nation, duty, work, and race) that are mostly elided in the novel but which sometimes erupt as unbidden memories. The point of Garland’s beach is that it represents leisure, an escape or reprieve from a domesticity that is the cultural death of the slacker-traveler. In this way, Richard’s sensibility seems to derive from the High Modernist aesthetic characterized by “silence, cunning and exile” and the severing of genealogical or “filiative” ties. What the beach and travel enable is a kind of “affiliative” (Said 17)-and thus creative-potential by replacing the world of integrative responsibilities (home, family, nation) with one of self-realization, or at least a self-fulfilling hedonism. In this way, as Caren Kaplan has demonstrated, we see that in an age of mass tourism the postmodern traveler may simply be a rehash of the modern one, a traveler who tries to separate him or herself from the herd by romanticizing travel as a kind of exile in which “aesthetic categories and ahistorical values” are generated by attending to one’s sense of existential isolation from politics, mass movements, marketing strategies, and economic advantages (Kaplan 28).

At the same time, this sense of existential isolation and creative possibility cannot be premeditated. It has to seem as if it just happened by accident. In this way the slacker adapts a modernist aesthetic to the requirements of a postmodern casualness, atonality, and flatness. Yet this apparent acceptance of things as they are, this “unitary sensibility,” as Susan Sontag might have called it (qtd. in Bertens 32), is a pose. The experiences are not random, and the narrative in which the slacker appears is not just a cheap genre novel, even if many of the characters act as if it were. Richard’s beach is a multi-layered, polysemie metaphor of the impossible desire for authenticity, a desire that pollutes the category or object it seeks. The very act of identifying the beach removes it from the ideal space it occupies in the traveler’s imagination, yet it can only have that status through repeated acts of spoliation. Garland illustrates this when Richard tries to make the perfect footprint in the sand: to be perfect it must be spontaneous, unpremeditated, natural, something discovered by accident. But the original, authentic footprint never looks quite original enough (just as the actual Thai beach where Danny Boyle shot the film version of Garland’s book had to be landscaped to suit the filmmaker’s cinematic notion of what the perfect beach should look like [Annesley, "Pure Shores" 557]). Richard steps repeatedly into the sand to make just the right footprint. Indeed, this repeated action expresses Garland’s point: the “original” is always a retrospect; the “natural” is a construct or simulation. To capture the original, the natural, the real moment of being is to duplicate it; yet only through such duplication does any adequate conception of it appear. This is a paradox that has become a fairly consistent feature of the anthropology of travel, yet it continues to fluster both travelers and critics alike.5

At the same time, one cannot help recognizing the allusion to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, in which the footprint represents the intrusion of the Other into what Crusoe deems his solitary domain. In The Beach, the Westerner simulates that intrusion for his own entertainment, even as he enacts his own intrusion into the Other’s geographic space. The nature of the Other is dictated and authenticated repeatedly by the traveler himself, even though he does not entirely believe in his own validations: Richard simply settles-in exemplary slacker fashion-for the staged recovery of stereotypes he is willing to entertain mostly because they are staged in the first place. There is no Other he has not already encountered in modified form through popular or literary media. He assumes there is some distortion involved, but such distortion is desirable and thus endemic to his quest for the imaginary-real. The disappointment of unembellished reality would only implicate the slacker in ways that seem intolerably accusatory and ideological. Any assertion of authenticity from other quarters would be perceived as contributing to the fog of narrow interests the traveler strives to transcend through the exceptionalism of his presumably autonomous perspective. Should the subaltern ever speak, as Gayatry Spivak has proposed, the slacker would simply filter the messages through a system of “discordant interpretations” (Umberto Eco, qtd. in Alneng 477) that reconfirm the cultural traces and reductive signs that amuse or flatter him. Thus, for the slacker, the original and the authentic-categories for which he maintains an attitude of cautiously nostalgic attachment-are only accessible through the time- lag of belatedness, through conditions of un-originality, secondariness, parody and pastiche, categories to which he is also attached.6

In the novel’s dialectical opposition between home and escape, travel does not represent a genuine desire for contact with the host culture; rather, it is a leisurely supplement to a repressed desire for home itself, albeit home recast in the slacker’s self-image. This desire is especially apparent in Richard’s loaded denials of ideology as the motivation behind the “beach life” he celebrates in parodie song (a half-remembered disco tune). While denying that ideology underlies his companions’ reasons for living at the beach, the actual community they create-replete with leaders and work gangs- increasingly resembles a summer camp, the institutional prelude to boot camp. Richard and his peers have established a kind of secret, indeed illegal, Club Med, where they can normalize the secret languages and disguised behaviors of youth culture. Without hostile surveillance or oppositional critique, these secrets are laid bare and become foundational, but in the process features of the parental or institutional environment that the slacker once repressed become increasingly normative and thus restrictive. The community resorts more and more to a range of consumer supplements (gadgets, conveniences, distractions) to escape what was supposed to be the perfect escape and thus to uphold the picture of contentment the slacker uncritically embraced as a fulfillment of his absentminded quest. Thus, the traveler’s escape becomes another prison, his hedonism an object of peer scrutiny, his cool friends jailers. Indeed, to maintain the illusion, the latest visitor (Richard) to the perfect beach becomes himself a jailer, a spy, an intriguer, and a party thug, exemplifying the schizophrenia by which ideology reconfigures itself in the aporia of escape.

This transformation is made possible through Lyotardian “language games.” While Lyotard has described such games as “a heterogeneity of elements . . . [that] give rise to institutions in patches,” he also says that society’s “decision makers manage these clouds [and] allocate our lives for the growth of power . . . optimizing the system’s performance-efficiency” (Lyotard xxiv). By systematizing a range of signs drawn from video, television, literature, and cinema, Richard arms himself against critiques of his incipiently patriarchal, colonizing mindset. The ‘Jim-Bob” game, derived from the American television series The Waltons, campily announces the beachcombers’ need to turn their community into a kind of family, but only in accordance with the rules of a language game that presumably inoculates that need from the presumed disease of seriousness and moral responsibility. A battery operated “GameBoy” provides another vocabulary for militarizing the slacker, a vocabulary that pivots on the expression “Game Over.” Game over means the end of play, hence a return to that other-and-serious- family, home, or set of inherited responsibilities one thought one wanted to escape. Thus “GameBoy” becomes a kind of inverted Fort-Da game behind which lurks a hypostasized figure of death that the player overcomes through serial resurrections in a system where life means adherence to game rules and the technical mastery of play. As in religion, death is overcome by turning it into a convention, a temporary state before play resumes, so that the real risk in life- unmitigated, non-sublimated death-can be shrugged off. Richard also employs a code drawn from literary and cinematic representations of the American War in Vietnam, especially from author Michael Herr’s use of American grunt terminology in his book Dispatches (1977). Aside from the many official acronyms and euphemisms that have filtered into popular consciousness – MIA, DMZ, pacification, search and destroy, and so on-Richard avails himself of a grunt polarity contrasting “Nam” with the so-called “world.” Strangely, “the world” does not signify foreignness or engagement abroad. It signifies America, the world of home, while Nam signifies the devaluation of all (home) values. In grunt mythology the world is civilization, where reason and responsibility prevail, and the rest of it- Vietnam, Thailand, the Orient-is mired in illusion, disorder, defective ideologies, hysterical religions, and endless war (though a war that proves mostly innocuous to the Western slacker who sees only fictional characters dying on the big screen, most of them “gooks” – non-persons in black pajamas presumed better off dead). Richard allows this polarity to reverse the earlier categories of the home and the world, of the West versus the beach. Grunt mythology, streamlined through media channels, upsets tlie former dialectic and imposes derogatory ideas of the Third World onto the initial Utopian vision of the beach. This superimposition turns the beach into a different kind of playground where deeper layers of civil constraint can be shed to expose a heart of darkness and Dionysian passions. Once again, as in religion, the home is fortified through the suspension abroad of values it maintains within its own boundaries. The beach, initially mistaken for a sanctuary from the home crowd, only fully manifests its meaning when the tour is supplemented with a tour of duty. No matter how much one might spurn one’s country, one is compelled to be its representative and to take pride in its atrocities as long as they can be rhetorically retooled as a winning strategy that felicitously masks their horror. Vietnam becomes a movie to be replayed again and again for the nostalgia of great one-liners. Newer wars are embraced for their entertainment potential, as when Jed admits to Richard that, yes, he supposed he had been “looking forward to the Gulf War [One] in away. It was all dramatic and exciting, and like you said, I wanted to see what would happen” (Garland 252).

Richard’s game plan casually assimilates the Other through objectification. Thus, Garland’s armed Thai guards patrolling the dope field adjacent to the beach recall film versions of the “Viet Cong” or People’s Liberation Front (PLF), subtly improved, like Richard’s footprint in the sand, with exotic touches: in one instance, a dragon tattoo, a pale scar, an AK47, and two missing teeth. As Richard remarks, “He was perfect [. . . .] If only I could have frozen him I’d have circled him like a statue in a museum, taking my time, noting his posture and listing the items he carried, studying his eyes to read what was happening behind them” (281 ). What we find is a mythical zoo specimen displayed as an object of study or a trophy of Western power. Yet the application of grunt terminology is distorting. The guards of the dope field are called VC, while their actual role in terms of the novel is more collaborative, like that of the Army of (South) Vietnam (ARVN) during the war. The real enemies, we finally learn, are the new arrivals, the Richards of the future who want a piece of paradise. The drug lords are the ones who actually help maintain the status quo on the beach and who preserve a colonial enclave for the original founders of the beach, Generation X’s old guard. In the end, even though the victims in the novel are white Western tourists (Sten, Christo, Zeph, Sammy), they seem emblematic of all aspirants to the territory’s Utopian promise-aspirants who might include the kind of Southeast Asians Garland does not bother depicting, the ones who, like the real VC, do not conform to the Western vision of the region as a country of lackeys or suppliers of intoxicants. With the help of various insulating and dehumanizing language games, the slacker has turned against youth itself, against outsiders and underdogs, against the masses and against the future, in order to play his own war games and indulge his ethic of fun. Although Richard eventually leaves the beach, it is clear that he only rejoins his more progressive friends to save himself from Sal, who is an even greater proto-fascist than himself, and who marks Richard in turn as a culpable newcomer: the FNG (Fucking New Guy) who, accidentally or not, provided the map for the others who followed him to the beach. Thus, Garland “redeems” Richard by conveniently displacing the narrator’s more suspect impulses onto his female counterpart, thereby imputing to femaleness in general, perhaps, the ideological susceptibilities the novel anticipates in the male slacker. In the end, Garland wants his male slacker-protagonist to be seen as an imperfect resistor, not a virtual collaborator who slips away when his own life is endangered. As a result, the novel’s redemptive conclusion allows his protagonist to preserve some of the idealism that originally prompted his slacker behavior. As we shall see, it is both the self-serving aspect of such changes of heart and the fictional recourse to such devices that Houellebecq refuses to sanction in Plate- forme-even at the risk of jeopardizing the implicit sympathy or narrative pact between reader and narrator- protagonist.

Like the drug lords of the novel, the travel industry also requires green isolated spaces for its special trade, if only to maintain the illusion of what James Annesley calls the “pure shores” of Richard’s Utopian style of travel, with its elitist expectations and predatory games of skill. But this purity has itself been staged for the traveler who prefers not to have to see the Other in great numbers, unless for the purpose of filling out his checklist of cultural things-to-do-from “witnessing extreme poverty” to “being in a riot”-all for the sake of appearing “worldly and interesting” (162), as Garland’s protagonist says (never bothering to imagine what extreme poverty might be, or why riots take place). If Garland’s book is a “vision of the all-colonizing global forces of homogenization,” as Annesley calls it (“Pure Shores” 564), it is nevertheless important to identify the racist, exploitive assumptions-camouflaged by a postmodern discourse of interlocking frames of reference-on which that homogenization depends.

Plateforme

In The Beach, participants in the drug trade stand in for the native Other. Interestingly, Garland never mentions that other vehicle of contemporary fantasy about Southeast Asia: prostitution. It is as if the youthful slacker had not grown into the neo- colonialist mindset with the requisite cynicism to tackle this more sordid occidental preoccupation with the East, one that is fully explored in Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme, as if to provide a literary update on the male slacker’s progress and assimilation of youthful language games to the agendas of Lyotard’s “decision makers,” agendas to which he more or less acquiesces in middle age. Garland does, however, reveal the prurience of the slacker’s belated obsession with Vietnam when the character Mr. Duck strangely regresses to a preadolescent state and invites Richard to look at the famous photograph of Kim Phuc fleeing a napalm attack, as if the image had been performed for postwar consumers of pornography. In this episode Garland captures the obscenity of certain attitudes about the American intervention in Vietnam, attitudes that routinely dismiss evidence of its atrocities as propaganda.

Thailand’s flesh trade is partly a product of that war, as Houellebecq makes plain in his novel, which concludes with a section called “Pattaya Beach,” named after an R&R location created in the 1960s for the sexual entertainment of American GIs and to which the narrator-protagonist retires after witnessing a terrorist attack he has helped provoke. The narrator is named Michel, perhaps to call attention to the ways in which he is both like and unlike the author.7 Michel’s attitude about relations between the West and the Global South is one of cynical expediency. Since, for him, the West is rich and sexually frustrated and Southeast Asia is poor yet replete with delectable bodies, the latter might as well offer its sexual favors for profit. Indeed, although Houellebecq frames some of Michel’s more provocative pronouncements with irony, these framing devices often seem cosmetic or inconsistent, suggesting that such distancing effects are a questionable attempt to dodge responsibility for such statements. As Martin Crowley has written: “The space of narration, and hence the framing of the material it presents, becomes indeterminate: the frame gives way, slides over its material, allowing none of it an unambiguous place” (26).

Shortly before Michel’s perfect holiday resort-one that caters to sexual tourists-is literally exploded by religious fanatics, the narrator offers some observations about Alex Garland’s book and the difference between its beach and the tourist platform Michel has been developing with his compatriots Valerie and Jean-Yves for the post-millennial tourist industry, the declared agenda of which is “le partage du monde” (the division of the world) (Houellebecq 242; my translation here and throughout). The backpacker’s perennial need to go further than anyone else in search of an authentic site his very presence will spoil is labeled a “paradoxe du double bind” (300) in Houellebecq’s novel, suggesting the vanity, even Faustian insatiability, of the backpacker’s quest for an original purity no experience can ever satisfy. Such desire does not really suit the slacker ethos and seems to derive instead from the tropes of individualized exile characteristic of a modernist aesthetic.8 As Kaplan explains, these tropes not only remove the traveler from “politics and history to generate aesthetic categories and ahistorical values” (28) but also tend to occlude signs of “collective displacement” (24) and the eco-cultural degradations caused by modern imperialism. As Houellebecq repeatedly shows, this paradox is endlessly recapitulated in such backpacker “bibles” as The Lonely Planet or Le Guide du Routard, which hypocritically disparage comparatively developed tourist destinations in favor of others considered off the beaten track. In this way, they set in motion the very processes that popularize and over-develop the alternative destinations they advertise. Michel’s contempt for such guides, however, does not spring from any sort of ecological altruism or ideological rigor. Rather, it reflects a “tourist” sensibility that views travel to oriental spaces not as a nostalgic colonialist fantasy of authenticity but as a neo-imperialist industry in which one purchases a package tour and consumes its itemized contents. Such an approach works well with the older, more cynical, slacker type because it makes travel easier and enhances an increasingly reductive sense of pleasure. Hoellebecq thus offers a seeming rejoinder to “the discourse of ‘authentic’ travel [that employs] a series of uniformly derogatory images to express opposition to herd-like tourists who mechanically ‘consume’ what is fed to them by travel agents” (Ni Loingsigh 76). The aging slacker has simply accepted the obvious-that the tourist industry is ubiquitous and that any style of travel whatever will be mediated by it, whether it seems so or not. Yet, in a sense, this (increasingly flexible) desire for uncomplicated ease has always been the slacker’s chief motivation. Unlike Garland’s protagonist, Houellebecq’s overcomes the double bind of authenticity while nevertheless acknowledging it as the tourist’s primary-if most unreasonable-demand upon the industry. Ironically, tourists only seem willing to consider something-a site or experience-authentic when it has been labeled as such-that is, when it has been de- authenticated according to the old “modernist” criteria, since tourism can only offer packages that have been marketed, tested, and improved for the consumer in advance. Michel’s and Valerie’s platform constitutes “une forme de subversion particulierement subtile” (Houellebecq 300) by inverting this modernist ethos and recasting authenticity in new semiotic and entrepreneurial terms. Indeed, the platform achieves maximum tourist appeal as the numbers of participants and providers increase-in short, as the supposedly de-authenticating features of tourism, the guides, hotels, restaurants, bars, and the tourists themselves, proliferate. In effect, the authentic experience has been realigned with the signs of that experience. This semiotic proliferation and simultaneous homogenization or “flattening” is implied by the very title of Houellebecq’s novel, as Michel Biron makes clear in his discussion of Plateforme: “Le titre semble repondre a la necessite, formulee dans Extension [du domaine de la lutte], d’inventer ‘une articulation plus plate, plus concise et plus morne’” (38; The title seems to respond to the necessity, formulated in Extension du domaine de la lutte [Houellebecq novel], to invent “a more fiat, more concise, more dull articulation”) for the contemporary realist novel.9

Jonathan Culler has written about how this proliferation of signs has always functioned as an object of disapproval for persons who imagine they partake of a more legitimate experience of travel that is unspoiled by the low-brow expectations and enthusiasms of an always newer kind of traveler, the tourist-a creature Culler seems to identify with as a postmodern decoder of signs (Culler 153-67). But Houellebecq takes some of the wind out of Culler’s critical celebration of this proliferation, this accelerated substitution of signs for the real, by subtly refracting Culler’s argument through Weberian notions of a capitalist “disenchantment” of the world. Houellebecq essentially says that if semiotic proliferation captures the essence of postmodern travel, then why not push it to the final frontier, the eroticized body of the Other? Put labels and price tags on it and make sure the customer believes he has got his money’s worth: a bona fide exotic experience, certified as such by the industry through the professionalized language game of advertising. This new ethos assumes, of course, that the less palatable aspects of such a strategy can be ignored-by believing, for example, that the sex workers required to attract more tourists are freely and happily plying their trade without any pressure other than that of supply and demand, and that the trade itself is not inconsistent with business ethics, on the one hand, or the cultural consumption of signs that underlies the desire for travel, on the other. And if the sex workers are unhappy or the consumers diseased, who really cares? It’s all about the consumption of signs anyway, not authentic human beings. Ironically, when the tourist encounters the authentic, it is treated as a game, but when it is a game, the tourist accepts it as genuine. There is a perverse consistency to Houellebecq’s logic, one that partly calls the bluff of those who would casually deconstruct the authentic or the real by suggesting, in effect, that if the Other is just a construct or language game, his or her exploitation, even elimination, may be an acceptable outcome of that game. But Houellebecq’s approach also affronts, indeed unmasks, the puritanical apologist for capitalism who rhetorically excludes sex as an appropriate object of exploitation while making full use of it through the medium of advertising. Indeed, as Rob Latham argues (74), the consumption of goods provides an illusion of power and control, a sort of reductive role-playing, that the consumer wants to extend to the domain of intimacy and sex, thus reducing them to a quantifiable system of exchange.

If everything has been recuperated and rationalized by the system, Houellebecq seems to say, why pretend that sex is not a fundamental motivation and thus a negotiable resource for travel and leisure? In short, why not give in to the tourist’s repressed desire and capitalize on it? (Its repression, in a sense, being the sign of its authenticity.) Indeed, sex is treated in the novel-especially in the encounters between Michel and Valerie-as an almost mystical, consciousness-expanding experience that exemplifies “the authentic” or “the real thing,” even if love is never mentioned by the narrator as an accompanying emotion. (Valerie’s devotion to Michel implies that she, at least, may be willing to identify her feelings as such, further suggesting that their intra-racial relationship represents the apex of a hierarchy of sexual transactions in a global system of exchange-but only because she, as a white Western woman, has generously provided a sexual outlet for her man in an act of feminine grace, as Houellebecq would seem to see it.)10 For Michel sex is it, yet it suffers no devaluation, no loss of aura, through commercialization, since “aura” is a fiction anyway. In fact, sexuality gains through its commercialization: the platform is marketed and authenticated as a human right. Club Aphrodite’s most effective sound-byte is “parce qu’on a le droit de se faire plaisir” (248; because one has the right to enjoy oneself), proving that anything can be exculpated with a clever turn of phrase. This parody of human rights discourse is paired with another one asserting the right to dominate the world (287). The commercial enjoyment of sex is presented as an exemplary instance of the enjoyment of power, a power made possible by the geopolitical inequities that global tourism regularly exploits. Michel, however, considers this second right-the right of one group to dominate another-to be the very one that European society has relinquished at home because of its masochistic political concessions to the kind of human rights presumably enshrined in international law and to their supposedly universal application-that is, to people of non-European origin whom our protagonist seems to consider undeserving of such rights. In view of this legal obstacle to the racist vision he espouses, Houellebecq’s narrator suggests that the white European fully exploit while he can the commercial availability of the Third World body-the only channel for European sexuality, which he considers repressed at home. Ifs a classic Conradian opposition between the repressive conditions of Western civilization and the possibilities of release in the “blank spaces” of the world through capitalist exploitation.

The consequence of this commercial assault is a terrorist counterattack, one that the Western press in the novel both condemns and explains as “understandable” given the kind of resort Michel’s associates have created. For the characters of the novel the outcome is unexpected, if not completely beyond their imagination. Thus, unlike the novel’s serial sex scenes, which mimic other such scenes in the kind of American best sellers the protagonist regularly reads, the attack represents a stunning deviation from the predictability of Michel’s progress with Valerie from one pornographic scenario to another.11 At the same time, Houellebecq’s sustained anti-Third World, anti-Muslim rhetoric and imagery prepare the reader for precisely this denouement and seem calculated to provoke a range of audiences, from progressives to immigrants to women.12 Indeed, the narrative is structurally framed by three rather crude but interrelated images that capture the sexual violence being harnessed to precipitate, imaginatively, a cultural war between developed and developing world, rich and poor, secular and religious, male and female. The first is a nightmare vision of a religious fanatic, described as having a demonic vitality, being violently dismembered by modern construction machines (41). The second is the explosion of the bomb in the Crazy Lips Cafe toward the end of the main narrative. Coming as it does after a paranoid digression by Michel about how the Western metropolis is becoming a jungle, the second image can be seen from one perspective as an attempt to silence the crazy verbosity of such a speaker. An alternative-and, to my mind, more persuasive-reading, however, would interpret the episodes as a symbolic exploding of female genitalia or, more precisely, of the supposedly feminizing tendencies of modern societies, by frustrated and anachronistic patriarchal ideologies. This idea is reinforced if the first image is construed as the figurative castration of those same patriarchal ideologies by the forces of modernization. And while Houellebecq generally applauds this emasculation of fanaticism, his own criticisms of modernity virtually revalidate the misogyny he attributes to the ideologies he clearly deplores. This is exemplified by the third image: a hunk of rotted meat suspended in a girl’s panties and displayed as a work of art-an image described by Michel as having a kind of “internal necessity” or “authenticity” for him, perhaps because it captures his sense of an enforced or accelerated putrescence in modern French sexual mores (179). Such images, and the formal prominence attached to them, suggest that the author is enacting a kind of cultural genital mutilation of both East and West to illustrate what he considers the “colonization . . . of private life” (Crowley 23) by either free trade or fundamentalist values. Thus, Houellebecq’s own art verbally consolidates the sexual violence with which he impugns the progressive and reactionary elements that reinforce the repressive conditions, as he sees them, of the postmodern world. In this regard, Houellebecq’s fiction affirms, perhaps unintentionally, a range of insights elaborated in contemporary globalization theory-including Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s contention that both progressive and reactionary elements across the globe, in their capacity to precipitate crises, tend to strengthen the hold of Empire in its stunningly exceptionalist, yet strangely diffuse, consolidations of sovereign power.13 Michel’s middle-aged misanthropy, which Houellebecq presents with imagistic exuberance despite the often clinical tone, suggests a maturation and hardening of the younger slacker’s puerile ennui. In effect, Michel, a self-described middle-aged functionary of mediocre talents and aspirations, is a portrait of the slacker in a mid-life crisis. After years of working as a civil servant without pleasure, ambition, or hope, Michel asks at the beginning of the novel what he has produced in his life and concedes that he is little more than a “modest parasite” (88) not unlike the crushed cockroach he describes earlier in the same episode. Thus, youthful disillusion accedes to middle-aged self-loathing and ressentiment as Michel declares his lack of sympathy for the urban young, a generation of mixed racial groups that constitute a new kind of Other in his metropolitan habitat of Paris and which he considers alternately dangerous and superficial (261-62)-14 While such groups provide docile sex partners abroad, at home they constitute an explosive social reality his compatriots’ former, if thwarted, idealism helped foster. He can no longer identify with the values that turned him into the near non-entity he is; indeed, his lack of identification now extends to the entire world in an almost heroic inflation of his anti-heroic indifference: “L’humanitaire me degoute, le sort des autres m’est en generale indifferent, je n’ai meme pas le souvenir d’avoir jamais eprouve un quelconque sentiment de solidarite” (290; Humanity disgusts me. I am basically indifferent to the fate of others; I can’t even remember experiencing any feeling whatsoever of solidarity). As Michel Biron has suggested, Michel seems initially to display a non-conflictual personality, a postmodern depressive modeled after Melville’s Bartleby, a slacker prototype who verbalizes his oppositional stance with the phrase, “I would prefer not to” (29). But Michel, a reliable accountant and organizer of contemporary art exhibitions for the Ministry of Culture, does not prefer not to work: he simply shuns the cultural pieties of contemporary Europe and America, preferring peep shows to the kinds of exhibitions he organizes, massage parlors to the “healthy life” resorts to which he is taken on his first tour of Thailand, capitalist exploitation to social progress. Alhough he respects certain professional women, he dismisses most of them as putes and salopes, and after the death of his father (an alpinist or protobackpacker, whom he naturally despises), he quickly signs up for a group tour that will provide access to brothels where his prejudices will be confirmed by the women servicing him and by the misogynist language games he routinely plays.

This “effacement of personality” or deadening of affect caused by consumerism’s mediation of human relations can lead, as Biron tells us, to a generalized aggression that sooner or later finds its object (33-34). With the help of Valerie-who is both a savvy professional woman AND, perhaps implausibly, a sexual dynamo whose primary goal in life seems to be to get Michel off-Michel enjoys the privilege of seeing his ideas about women and sex put into practice in a way that provokes extreme reactions from others (both at home and abroad) and thus reinforces, as if on cue, various negative ideas he also has about Third World cultures. Thus, while critiquing his own society, he can also provoke a variety of overseas host cultures and trigger the kind of violent reaction that will transform his putatively counter-cultural stance into a pretext and justification for Western hegemonic infiltration into far-flung territories. It is as if he were saying-not unlike Marx on British rule in India (Hardt and Negri 436)-that, although Western capitalist society is horrible in most respects, it is a necessary advance on any sort of pre-modern alternatives, the vestiges of which have to be Westernized before any remaining issues of cultural alterity can be ameliorated through either global revolution or, more likely, greater imperial consolidations of power over the multitudes. Ironically, the religious fanaticism that Michel sees as merely regressive is largely a product of the most advanced stage of Empire, as Hardt and Negri have claimed.

The platform Michel establishes is a self-fulfilling fantasy worthy of the slacker’s passive-aggressive relation to reality. If Michel’s relation with Valerie helped sustain his dream of an effortless, fantastic power to change the world into a multinational whorehouse, the terrorists can be thanked for snapping him out of it. After the attack, the death of Valerie, and the combined deaths of hundreds of tourists and local workers, Michel finds himself back in his humbly solipsistic slacker world, though his new condition closely resembles a state of shock. The attack has reminded him that the artificial paradises established with the launch of Club Aphrodite might be seen not only as a cultural affront, but also as one demanding reprisals. The idea that the combined cultural and economic infiltration of certain countries constitutes a form of war is made explicit by Valerie earlier when she says that capitalism itself is “un etat de guerre permanente [ . . . ] une lutte perpetuelle qui ne peut jamais avoir de fin” (274; a permanent state of war … a perpetual struggle that can never end) . Consequently, postmodern wars on terror might be seen as simply an enhanced form of a capitalism that promises the endless enrichment of a few corporate power blocks. Michel is now a veteran of the cultural war between global opportunists and vulnerable locals. Indeed, for Michel, the war is an allegory of the inner one he has been waging all along against an array of groups, both at home and abroad, who threaten his sense of identity. It is as if Michel were the true fanatic in his dream of dismemberment-by-modernization, except that in his case it is the modernity of cultural hybridization that he cannot tolerate, because it reveals that his late slacker ethos is just another imperialist structure of feeling indulged in by disillusioned white males who see other cultures as affordable dreamscapes for the fulfillment of their tawdry fantasies, as places in which to indulge their language games.

Like many veterans of unpopular empire-driven wars, Michel refuses to be a critic of his former Mission. In the final section of the book, he discovers a bitter kind of solace for his suffering by beating a retreat to Thailand’s Pattaya Beach. A shadow of his former fantasy – without the validating presence of Valerie-Pattaya Beach is a kind of Club Aphrodite at reduced rates, with lower quality merchandise and none of the confidence-boosting advantages of vested corporate interests. With the remains of a small fortune inherited from his father (the slacker’s perennial safety net), Michel now lives in more authentic slacker style-gritty and lonely in his sustained condition of overseas anonymity, though protected by his Western status. This does not stop him, however, from reiterating his old critique of the West for its simultaneous egoism and masochism and for its creation of a system he considers unlivable but which continues to be exported to spaces abroad (349). He does not seem to have noticed that he is its latest export, preparing the way for the greater infiltration to come. He is a kind of secret agent of the collective imperial unconscious, advancing its interests while invalidating his claims upon it through a kind of self-marginalization. Conclusion

Finally, as if to highlight the intersection of slacker disillusion and modernist exile, Michel writes down his narrative – albeit with the caveat that any notion of aesthetic redemption be abandoned. He even suggests that his story should not be read, should be forgotten like himself in the “non-world” of the Other: “Pas que ces commentaries . . . puissent avoir un destinataire” (345; Not that this commentary can have an addressee). While this may magnify the irony of our appreciative reception of his novel, it is also a final self-defense – as if the fictional author-narrator had decided in advance to negate any future objection to his story by disavowing its literary worth. He seems to want to insulate it from the kind of critical deconstruction any act of writing risks. In the novel’s repertoire of ironies and contradictions, this autodiegetic recording of the narrator’s life story for future consumption represents the global slacker’s final act of bad faith, a self-denigration that screams READ ME – not unlike the air of casual unconcern with which Richard narrates The Beach. If either of these books gives an impression of formal design or deep significance, both narrators resort to the postmodern insinuation that any such impressions are probably the critic’s confabulation. To attach a meaning, purpose, or value to the slacker’s narrative is to do so at one’s own risk, not the fictive author’s (and thus perhaps not the actual author’s as well). The slacker will not be held accountable for the meanings one finds because he knows that textual signs are shifty markers connoting different realities to different interpreters, many of whom will be critical of the narrator’s flexible stance and will insist that certain actions, however rhetorically framed, have ideological and moral implications that the author must acknowledge in some way. Thus, neither Richard nor Michel will ever admit to engaging in the sort of reterritorialization that might be construed as imperial acquisition. But should their feints at power ever engender the kind of intervention that would justify such claims, they need only remind their critics that the ironic flatness of their discourses conveys a sustained sense of non-conviction that screens both narrator and author from any easy attribution of blame.

Yet, if Michel’s promotion of free trade through commercializing sex constitutes the more provocative test of authorial intention, Richard’s hegemonic discountenancing of the Other’s authenticity through fictive stereotyping renders Garland’s novel an equally suspect aestheticization of the neo-imperialist project. As a slacker, Richard manages to recuperate some of the idealism of his original motivation for travel – but only by ceasing to travel at all, as Garland draws his protagonist – Marlow-like – back from the abyss. Like Michel, Richard also writes a narrative, but he does so safely ensconced in his home where he confidently, if somewhat narcissistically, addresses the known quantity that is his audience: a youthful slacker audience he can assume will be disinclined to judge him harshly, if at all. By failing to take account of other audiences, Richard’s assumptions reinforce the sense that the Other’s commodification is now complete. Neither narrator nor author seem capable of identifying the local population of Thailand through anything but an artificial nexus of imaginary flows, an almost Gordian intersection of ethnoscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes (Appadurai 33) that help sustain, in this instance, a neo-imperial mindset. Both author and narrator thus adhere to an assemblage of formal images – disseminated through various media portals – that substitute for the locals in overseas spaces. Such adherence allows Richard (and Garland) – with a kind of calibrated absence of mind – to withdraw any deeper significance or value from the people represented by those images. Unlike real subjects, these imaginary constructs can be easily disassembled, dispossessed, dislocated, and disremembered without apparent loss of reader empathy for those engaged in their disassembly – or so the fiction of recording a personal narrative might have one believe.

Houellebecq’s protagonist’s relation to the Other is the more complicated, if equally debasing one. Michel represents a true postmillennial Kurtz, with Pattaya Beach as his contemporary abyss. But the abyss is less a modern inferno than a postmodern, postcolonial purgatory in its lackluster accommodation to certain cultural requirements – “mobility, diversity, and mixture” – on the one hand (Hardt and Negri 150) and to the politics of national sovereignty, on the other. If the more humiliating features of the world market are sometimes camouflaged or de-sensationalized in these newer nation-states, the same features are rigorously maintained behind the scenes, as the New World Order, with the help of various contractual agents, tightens its grip over the productive power of the multitudes – those numberless outsiders who labor at the low end of the system. Although the native subject ceases to be codified in traditional terms as absolute racial Other, he or she acquires a kind of differential otherness in Michel’s narrative through a new hierarchy of transactional relations that makes inequity and oppression seem almost liberating in their entrepreneurial guise of unfettered – if ultimately unglamorized – sex work. While this phenomenon may serve the regional interest of accelerating development, it does so by economically colonizing the last vestiges of personal intimacy. The Islamists respond by simply wiping these vestiges away, even as they attack the strategies of commodification that have corrupted them. And while the extremists correctly assert that humanism, in its various guises, has served too long as a rhetorical gloss for empire, its actual passing away, as Houellebecq’s novel implies, hardly promises to be any more liberating than its commercial appropriation – not so much because of the dangers of extremism as because of the reactionary stances extremist actions inspire, even among individuals, like the slacker, who take pride in a conscientious detachment from social hierarchy and political machination.

Northern Illinois University

1 I am referring, of course, to J. R. Seeley’s famous description of how the British acquired their empire, paraphrased in Said, Culture and Imperialism 9.

2 In Consuming Youth, Latham explicitly identifies this dialectic through which the two social strata face off-only to fuse at some level through mutual stylistic mimicry. It is also worth noting that in Douglas Coupland’s signature novel Generation X at least one of the characters who interacts with the primary protagonist (a quintessentially self-searching slacker) is of a much higher social status and, for this reason, may only seem to share his ethos, knowing an eventual return to a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle remains available.

3 The slacker’s occasional recourse to backpacking is part and parcel of this low-intensity consumption. As a style of mobility practiced by such West Coast Beats as Gary Snyder and celebrated in Jack Kerouac’s novel Dharma Bums, backpacking loses all spiritual or ecological connotations when appropriated by the slacker. Although it affords an appearance of autonomy, it is simply cheaper than other modes of travel.

4 The protagonists of Coupland’s Generation X experience a similar range of responses to American consumer society.

5 Interestingly, this dilemma of discovery replicates a problem Homi Bhabha has interrogated with respect to Derrida’s analysis of Western ethnocentrism and its relation to temporality, whereby the otherness of the ethnological Other parallels the alterity of the future vis-a-vis presentness, as a result of which no original presence can be identified except through the very secondariness of our representations. See Phillips 69.

6 For a discussion of the difference between parody and pastiche in relation to the postmodern, see Jameson.

7 Although some of Houellebecq’s public statements have led critics such as Pierre Assouline, editor in chief of Lire, to conclude that “Michel et Houellebecq, c’est tout un” (Michel and Houellebecq are one and the same), Houellebecq has also imposed, in Jerome Meizoz’s words, “une double constrainte flagrante” (a flagrant double constraint) by saying such things as “[Je] m’indigne que certains journalistes [fassent] volontairement une confusion entre ce que disent mes personnages de roman et des propos attribues a l’auteur” (140, 139; It irks me that certain journalists voluntarily substitute statements made by my characters with those attributable to the author).

8 Insofar as this backpacker ideal differs from the slacker’s own outlook, Garland demonstrates the parasitical nature of the latter’s appropriation of the backpacker’s low-budget itinerancy. What the slacker really seeks is a space in which to insulate him or herself from responsibility and history. The criteria for determining such a space are always flexible-a matter of performativity, even amorality- and once Richard locates his beach, he quickly accepts its occupants’ house rules.

9 Later in this essay I will return to Biron’s discussion of the “personnage non conflictuel” (29) in Houellebecq’s novels.

10 Consider, for example, the speculations of one of the protagonists-also named “Michel”-in an earlier novel by Houellebecq, Particules elementaires (The Elementary Particles): “. . . he could not come to any other conclusion: women were indisputably better than men. They were gentler, more affectionate, loving and compassionate; they were less prone to violence, selfishness, cruelty or selfcenteredness. Moreover, they were more rational, intelligent and hardworking. What on earth were men for, Michel wondered as he watched sunlight play across the curtains. In earlier times, when bears were more common, perhaps masculinity served a particular and irreplaceable function, but for centuries now men clearly served no useful purpose. For the most part they assuaged their boredom playing tennis, which was a lesser evil; but from time to time they felt the need to change history-which basically meant inciting revolutions or wars. Aside from the senseless suffering they caused, revolutions and wars destroyed the best of the past, forcing societies to rebuild from scratch. Without regular and continuous progress, human evolution took random, irregular and violent turns for which men-with their predilection for risk and danger, their repulsive egotism, their irresponsibility and their violent tendencies-were directly to blame. A world of women would be immeasurably superior, tracing a slower but unwavering progression, with no U-turns and no chaotic insecurity, toward a general happiness” (137). 11 Franc Shuerewegen has likened this conformism of scenes to the kind of flattening he associates with postmodernism, suggesting that postmodern discourses have a slacker lilt: “On definit souvent le courant ‘post-moderne’ en litterature comme une mise a plat des discours et, donc, comme un refus de toute specificite discursive. Cela vient egalement apporter de l’eau a notre moulin ici. Nous avons definit plus haut l’erotisme houellebecquien comme un conformisme. On pourrait sans doute le decrire aussi, ce qui revient au meme a tout prendre en compte, comme un post-modernisme” (44; We often define the postmodern current in literature as a flattening of discourse and, thus, as a refusal of any discursive specificity. This only adds more fuel to the thrust of our argument. Earlier we defined Houellebecquien eroticism as a conformism. Without a doubt we could also describe it, all things considered, as a postmodernism).

12 Indeed, Houellebecq successfully defended his right to call Islam “a stupid religion” in a French court of law, and his right to write what he wants was defended in the press by Salman Rushdie (Meizozl25).

13 For instance, Hardt and Negri characterize fundamentalism “not as a re-creation of a premodern world, but rather as a powerful refusal of the contemporary historical passage in course” and, in this way, compare it to postmodern and postcolonial theories as “symptom [s] of the passage to Empire” (146-47), although they also acknowledge major differences. Such symptoms are often identified as problems or crises to which Empire responds with solutions- sometimes institutional or discursive, sometimes destructive-that simply enhance its global control. Empire operates in conditions of “exceptionality”-that is, its rights (as indicated in Lyotardian theory) are based on “a series of techniques that, founded on a state of permanent exception and the power of the police, reduces right and law to a question of pure effectiveness” (16-17).

14 Yet with the 2005 riots in Paris one can chalk up another instance of Houellebecqian cultural prolepsis. At the same time, it is interesting that Houellebecq’s protagonist, while complaining of a dangerous mix of ethnicities in inter-urban zones, can also appreciate the need of the tourist industry to promote a congenially multicultural image for advertising purposes. Multiculturalism is perfectly acceptable to Michel through the prism of capitalist “spectacle,” in Debord’s sense of the term.

Works Cited

Alneng, Victor. “‘What the Fuck Is a Vietnam?’: Touristic Phantasms and the Popcolonization of (the) Vietnam (War).” Critique of Anthropology 22.4 (2002): 461-89.

Annesley, James. Blank Fiction: Consumerism, Culture, and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto Press, 1998.

_____. “Pure Shores: Travel, Consumption, and Alex Garland’s The Beach” Modern Fiction Studies 50.3 (2004): 551-69.

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Critical Dimensions of Globalization. Public Worlds: Volume One. 1996. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Bertens, Hans. “The Postmodern Weltanschauung and its Relation to Modernism: An Introductory Survey.” A Postmodern Reader. Ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993. 25-70.

Biron, Michel. “L’effacement du personage contemporain: l’exemple de Michel Houellebecq.” Etudes francaises 41.1 (2005): 27-41.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. 366-67.

Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

Crowley, Martin. “Houellebecq-The Wreckage of Liberation.” Romance Studies 20.1 (2002): 17-28.

Furlong, Ellen. “Making Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France, 1930s to 1970s.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40.2 (1998): 247-86.

Garland, Alex. The Beach. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Houellebecq, Michel. The Elementary Particles. Trans. Frank Wynne. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

_____. Plateforme. Paris: Flammarion, 2001.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Postmodern American Fiction. New York, London: W. W. Norton, 1998. 654-63.

Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996.

Latham, Rob. Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Benington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Mei