The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel: The Aesthetics of Self-Fashioning in the Era of Globalization (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

Edited by

William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A Routledge Series

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The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel The Aesthetics of Self-Fashioning in the Era of Globalization

Stephen M. Levin

New York London

First published 2008 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2008 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Levin, Stephen M., 1971– The contemporary anglophone travel novel : the aesthetics of self-fashioning in the era of globalization / by Stephen M. Levin. p. cm. — (Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references (p. 169 and index). ISBN-13: 978-0-415-95549-2 ISBN-10: 0-415-95549-1 ISBN-13: 978-0-203-92856-1 (ebk.) ISBN-10: 0-203-92856-3 (ebk.) 1. Travel in literature. 2. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Adventure and adventurers in literature. 5. Travel—Social aspects. 6. Travel—Psychological aspects. 7. Alienation (Social psychology) in literature. 8. Self in literature. 9. Culture and globalization. I. Title. PR888.T75L48 2008 820.9'32—dc22 2007041759 From INTO THE WILD by Jon Krakauer, copyright © 1996 by Jon Krakauer. Used by permission of Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc.; and by arrangement of John A. Ware Literary Agency. Brief quotations as submitted from THE SHELTERING SKY by PAUL BOWLES. Copyright 1949 by Paul Bowles, © renewed 1977 by Paul Bowles. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0-203-92856-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-95549-1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-92856-3 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-95549-2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-92856-1 (ebk)

For Nathan Levin 1912–2007

Contents

Preface: A Point of Entry Acknowledgments Chapter One Introduction: Adventure Travel, Leisure Practice and Social Critique

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Chapter Two The Contemporary Crusoe: Obsessionality and Adventure Travel

34

Chapter Three Postmodern Pilgrimages: Conversion and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the Hysterical Travel Narrative

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Chapter Four The Self in Ruins: Mourning and Melancholia in Contemporary Travel Writing

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Chapter Five Conclusion: Negation as a Lived Critique of Global Culture

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Notes

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Bibliography

169

Index

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About the Author

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Preface

A Point of Entry

Ultimately, modern oppression, as opposed to the traditional oppression, is not an encounter between the self and the enemy, the rulers and the ruled, or the gods and the demons. It is a battle between dehumanized self and the objectified enemy, the technologized bureaucrat and his reified victim, pseudo-rulers and their fearsome other selves projected on to their “subjects.” That is the difference between the Crusades and Auschwitz, between Hindu-Muslim riots and modern warfare. That is why the following pages speak only of victims; when they speak of victors, the victors are ultimately shown to be camouflaged victims, at an advanced stage of psychosocial decay. —Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism

This study focuses on authenticity as a cultural value. Although the chapters are organized around psychoanalytic categories, the book is not intended to be a moralizing critique—as some have felt Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism to be--but one that, in the spirit of Nandy’s epigraph, explores a link between dehumanized selves and the objectification and oppression of others. The problem of authenticity strikes me as being an especially timely and important one: as I write this preface, the Associated Press has just issued an article describing the National Geographic Society’s new “Geotourism Charter,” which outlines principles of a new kind of tourism defined by “authenticity and making a place better by visiting and spending money.”1 “People are looking for things that are not homogenized,” David DePetrillo, Rhode Island’s tourism director, explains in the article, while a testimonial from a self-described geotourist states that he “wants to be as foreign as he can get.” In critical as well as popular discourses, the concept of authenticity remains a central focus in considerations of selfhood and ix

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cultural practice.2 Even though no critical consensus prevails as to whether authenticity denotes a social fantasy or a “real” subjective state, the ideal of authenticity continues to motivate cultural practices and act as a cathexis of imagined communities. For this reason, it is of central importance to postcolonial and postmodern studies of contemporary culture that seek to understand the pervasive contradictions that characterize globalization and decolonization: increasingly porous borders and more open transnational cultural circuits in an era of intensified cultural ethnocentrisms; the diminishing salience of historical memory despite a proliferation of new ways to disseminate information; and a persistent faith in narratives of modernity and progress that runs parallel to nostalgic appeals to an imagined past. The seeds of this project can be traced to two events in my undergraduate studies that produced some of the initial observations and questions central to the study. The first of these events was a reading of Edward Said’s Orientalism; the second a one-year stay in Nepal as a participant in a study abroad program. Of the many factors that influenced my decision to go to Nepal in 1991, I recall that among them was a desire to distance myself from U.S. military action in the Gulf. What interests me now, in retrospect, is how Nepal came to occupy for me a privileged role in an elaborate anti-modern fantasy and why traveling there felt, at the time, like a principled response to the war. During my stay, I found the people of Nepal to be extraordinarily hospitable. Yet my memories of that initial trip to South Asia, unlike of subsequent trips, are tinged with a sense of loss, which I now attribute to the dissolution of the initial fantasy as I gained a deeper understanding of Nepal’s complex social realities: its plural histories and politics; its inescapable hybridity, or modernity, manifest in the ubiquity of non-governmental organizations; the rapidly transforming urban landscape of Kathmandu; and the omnipresence of tourism. One can make Nepal a cipher for projections of an anti-modern Shangrila only by denying its historicity. Said, more than anyone perhaps, showed that such a representational strategy equates to a cultural effacement, and that this mode of discourse has enabled imperial praxis through the colonial and postcolonial eras. I first read Orientalism just before going to Nepal. Once I returned, I began to consider the work in the context of the kind of touristic melancholia I experienced while overseas and upon my return to the U.S. Although I was persuaded that Said’s critiques further refined our understanding of the collusion between representation and political domination, it still seemed to me necessary to consider the implications of viewing the

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Orient as a construct of fantasy. If the discourse Said surveyed did not in fact manage to describe the actual Orient, it did indeed reflect a salient mythos of the Western imagination. To some extent, then, it seemed to me that Said was correct to argue for the monopolistic sway of this representational field. In the course of depicting the inescapability of Orientalist discourse and the inextricable link between colonial travelers and political domination, he also described a vast pathology of the West: a civilizational strategy to come to terms with a loss. This insight may only reveal something about the tenaciousness of ideology. Orientalism not only sustains the institutions of political domination; it also functions as a mode of expression for discontent at home and, perhaps, as a means of neutralizing this discontent. The present study, then, seeks to undertake an examination of the core myths and fantasies of colonial culture. It attempts to outline a conceptual framework in which a preoccupation with the Orient emerges as a symptom of the constraints on subjective possibilities in the West. I find it somewhat disconcerting to reminisce that my performance in Nepal as an adventure traveler adhered so closely to Dean MacCannell’s conception of travel as a search for authenticity. During my stay, I never once visited the Everest base camp or trekked through Annapurna. I opted instead to spend the bulk of my time in the far western “frontier.” In my view, the high mountain regions were overdetermined by an excess of markers that delimited them as tourist sights: guidebook commentary, official sponsorship, trekking hostels and, invariably, a throng of sightseers. Still, something about this willful seclusion proved troubling. I realized even at the time that this notion of the frontier emanated from the imaginative discourse of tourism. As MacCannell observes in his study of sightseeing and modernity, a sight is defined as such only by way of markers. No destination offers a path to unmediated access: even the absence of markers is interpreted by the sightseer within the representational field of tourism. In this study I suggest that the excess of markers in contemporary culture intensifies the desire to escape and results in repetitious, and frequently selfdestructive, enactments. At the same time, I argue that these enactments constitute a form of social commentary even if they fail to produce any sort of programmatic politics. Many of the narratives I examine are set against the backdrop of war, and many others portray travel as an alternative to work and materialism. Even if, in the end, these narratives affirm existing power relations, the structure of the fantasy reveals a desire to escape the rigid parameters of modern subjectivity. Just as Said portrays the episteme of

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Orientalism as totalizing and wholly constitutive of modern experience, these adventure narratives allude to a sort of injunctive, patriarchal fortification that overwhelms the subject and cannot be circumvented. This sense of a subject against the backdrop of the disenchanting forces of modernity also recalls another central referent for this study: the explorations of loss and nostalgia in Frankfurt School writings on civil society, selfhood, and mass culture. In his 1962 reminiscence to The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs recalls the sense of foreboding among many artists and intellectuals as they witnessed the imminent fall of tsarist Russia and Hapsburg rule in Europe. “Now, who will save us from the West?” they wondered. If twentieth-century adventure narratives do not succeed in articulating concrete alternatives to the West, they do reflect the extraordinary structural constraints that both produce the desire for alternatives and work to ensure these desires are brought into the service of social reproduction.

Acknowledgments

The writing of a book is its own mode of adventure, and I am very grateful to those with whom I have traveled. Several university settings provided guidance and support and served as models for both scholarly research and academic citizenship. The project emerged out of my graduate work in the Program in Culture, History, and Theory at the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University. I am especially thankful to Robert A. Paul, Angelika Bammer, and Paul B. Courtright, who encouraged me to pursue my own scholarly interests, challenged me to find conjunctions between cultural, postcolonial, and South Asian studies, and offered ample positive reinforcement along the way. I give thanks also to Joyce Flueckiger and Kim Loudermilk for their advice and feedback in the project’s early stages. Brenda Crosby provided essential logistical assistance. The School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech enriched my curiosity and understanding regarding parallels between tourism and metaphors of travel suggested by new media. I thank Jay Bolter, Shannon Dobranski, and Carol Senf for their mentorship and support. I spent an enjoyable year in the Department of Language and Literature at Columbus State University, where I found a collegial environment to talk formally and informally about the ideas in this book. I want especially to thank the British and Postcolonial Studies faculty, including Dan Ross, Jim Owen, Pat McHenry, Cécile Accilien, Susan Hrach, and José Barroso. I also received very helpful feedback from a research discussion group attended by Noreen Lape, Robert Cummings, Josh Eyler, and Joseph McCallus. I thank Barbara Hunt for encouraging my efforts. I want very warmly to thank the students and faculty of the Department of English at Clark University for hosting a lively discussion of a portion of the book, and for providing much-needed support and assistance to

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help bring it to completion. Virginia Vaughan was a wonderfully supportive and generous chair during this process. I am deeply appreciative to my editors at Routledge for deftly guiding this book through the production process. I especially would like to thank Professor William E. Cain, and editors Max Novick, Elizabeth Levine, and Erica Wetter, and Alicia Solsman of IBT Global. The company of friends and family made it possible, and worthwhile, to write. I wish to thank my parents Barbara and Donald, and my brother Norman, for their patience and care. Stacy Morgan, Terry Easton, Theresa Same, Brian McGrath, Benjamin Junge, and David Raney have been great academic discussants and friends. Beth Gale generously read and commented on a draft of the manuscript. Finally, I recognize my grandfather Nathan, the quintessential autodidact, who never had the opportunity to attend college but whose tireless intellectual curiosity always gave me something to strive for.

Chapter One

Introduction Adventure Travel, Leisure Practice and Social Critique

The lack of definiteness in the center of the soul drives people to seek a momentary satisfaction in ever-new stimulations, sensations, external activities; it is this lack which entangles us in the dizzy groundlessness and restlessness which expresses itself now as metropolitan tumult, now as a passion for travel, now as the wild hunt of competition, now as the specific modern infidelity in the realms of taste, styles, attitudes, and relationships. —Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money This relativizing of the exotic goes hand in hand with its banishment from reality—so that sooner or later the romantically inclined will have to agitate for the establishment of fenced-in nature preserves, isolated fairy-tale realms in which people will still be able to hope for experiences that today even Calcutta is hardly able to provide. —Siegfried Kracauer, “Travel and Dance” Although many types of experience go to the establishment of the capacity to be alone, there is one that is basic, and without a sufficiency of it the capacity to be alone does not come about; this experience is that of being alone, as an infant and small child, in the presence of mother. Thus the basis of the capacity to be alone is a paradox; it is the experience of being alone while someone else is present. —D.W. Winnicott, “The Capacity to be Alone”

Critical studies of travel writing have tended to underscore the presence of two opposed narrative strategies. The first strategy focuses on the intersection of travel cultures and the representational orders of imperial power and domination. It follows what we may provisionally describe as a “rationalist” aesthetic. The second strategy, sometimes presented in celebratory 1

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terms, stresses the more modernist link between travel writing and personal expressivity. Its emphasis on interiority, confession, and individuality reflects what we may provisionally call a “romanticist” aesthetic. One narrative register inclines toward the acquisition of information, description of detail and an omniscient point of view; another favors sentiment, the minutia of human subjects and the dramas of subjective experience over the scientific certitude of informational orders.1 This study outlines yet a third trend in a travel writing that has become particularly salient in the era marked by decolonization, mass culture, and the cultural order of late capitalism. Positioned as a kind of revolt against the prevailing traditions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, I propose that this third current in the genre may be categorized as a literature of “negation.” The subject of the literature of negation may sometimes resemble the heroic and allknowing explorer, or the introspective searcher who, through the journey, refines and narrates a highly individualized articulation of self. Yet when examined at the level of its motivations and fantasies, this literature reflects a sustained effort to compensate for a perceived void produced by the specific conditions of modern social life. This study by no means seeks to dispute the historical entanglement between travel, tourism and imperial power—a relationship that has received much critical attention since Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978 and elegantly outlined the manifold interpenetrations of narrative expression and political domination. At the same time, this study does aim to shift the focus somewhat away from the analytic parameters of Orientalism. Whereas Said and his interpreters have tended to explore the relational dynamic between metropole and periphery, I wish to examine the bond between the metropole and the self—to the extent that these entities are defined and elaborated in narratives of travel. In so doing, I aim to consider modernity as a cultural system that informs narrative expressions of selfhood. My specific focus will be on narratives of adventure travel that illustrate a decidedly unstable and self-destructive orientation to selfhood. Such narratives by no means make up the totality of late twentieth-century travel literature, but they do, I argue, index a subculture that emerges with the evolution of global modernity and that resonates with recent theory on late capitalism and postmodernity. A study of the aesthetics of this subculture offers an opportunity to explore a dimension of decolonization that represents a significant, but perhaps more empirically elusive, aspect of the legacy of colonial confrontations: the colonization of the subjectivity of the colonizers.2 This study, then, seeks to explore the ways that decolonization permeates the subjectivity of everyday life. It views as intrinsic to decolonization a conception of modernity that

Introduction

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valorizes authenticity as a cultural value but imposes strict limitations on expressive possibilities. In short, I wish to take seriously the kind of “revolt” embodied in the adventure travel narrative, even if this revolt, in the end, reproduces existing power relations. The value of this approach, I hope, will be to focus attention on the strategies subjects employ to manage alienation in commercial societies, and to identify an idiom of travel that is undertaken not as an act of nation building, nor merely for pleasure, nor to cultivate civility and cultural credentials. The expression of alienation in mass culture by no means equates to the fraternal social movement envisioned in classical Marxist theory, but it may point to the presence of a more prosaic “everyday form of peasant resistance,” to borrow James Scott’s phrase, in commercial societies.3 This observation is intended not to romanticize popular culture or leisure practice, but rather to highlight the potential for mass culture to have a diagnostic function in cultural studies of modernity. Such an approach to mass culture underscores that modern societies must provide for the remediation of alienation in order to survive, and affirms the central role that leisure and consumerism play in social reproduction—for example, as strategies to keep alienation at bay. Yet even as leisure practice serves this function in preserving the social order, it offers its own coded commentary on the constraints of modern social life, and on the pronounced difficulties of self-fashioning in the era of globalization. For the specific subculture of adventure travel I wish to address, this critique assumes the form of an attack on what we might call the paternal order, or what Lacan refers to as “the law.” Instead of a direct political commentary, these travel narratives portray a failed identification. Ernesto Laclau draws on recent social and political theory to demonstrate that subjects are never fully incorporated as citizens, that an irreducible gap separates them from the constellation of sources of social authority (Laclau 1994). The adventure narratives I discuss do not depict a subject eager to internalize the social order, as was the case, for example, for participants in the Grand Tour who sought to fashion themselves as products of a specific national history and geneaology, but rather portray a subject who enacts a dramatic negation of the social field of signification. In so doing, these narratives illustrate the unique limitations the modern era poses for the fashioning of selfhood, and reveal a subculture of travel in which self-annihilation emerges as a viable alternative to re-incorporation into the social order.4 The conceptual framework of this research owes much to the early twentieth-century efforts of the Frankfurt School to describe the nexus of mass culture, ideology, and modern political consciousness. It also draws from more recent examinations of tourism and leisure practice by Caren Kaplan,

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Sara Mills, Inderpal Grewal, Mary Louise Pratt, Chris Rojek, John Urry, and Dean MacCannell, and from work that explores the aesthetic features of globalization, late capitalism, and postmodernity by Arjun Appadurai, Frederic Jameson, and John Tomlinson. The embattled subject depicted in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents also provides a critical point of reference. All of these inquiries offer substantive commentary on the connection between modernity and alienation and suggest links between global culture and specific political and expressive forms. The remainder of this introduction seeks to situate the present study in the context of this earlier research and, at the same time, to draw a distinction between travel practices in the era of globalization and leisure travel during the colonial era. Since I contend that one may make inferences about “actual” tourist cultures from readings of literary character types, I will consider also the connection between literary and cultural presentations of travel and tourism. Finally, as the three chapters that follow each attempt to outline a schematic of a particular character type, I will survey some of the antecedents for this sort of approach and assess the value of mapping out the character systems that structure modern travel texts. I hope that this discussion will serve two purposes: to further schematize the genre of contemporary adventure travel literature and the subcultural literature that depicts a decisive failure of self-realization through travel; and to situate the methodological approach of this study within a larger body of social and cultural theory. FRANKFURT SCHOOL ORIGINS: THE METROPOLIS AND THE CRISIS OF THE BOURGEOIS SUBJECT In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that a recidivist tendency within the Enlightenment threatens to destroy the defining feature of Enlightenment thought: the capacity for “reflection.” Writing against the backdrop of the consolidation of fascism in Europe, Horkheimer and Adorno contend that industrialism has not strengthened the capacity for reflection but rather has facilitated a “retreat from enlightenment into mythology” (xiii). This retreat takes place due to the emergence of a vast technical apparatus to administer economic productivity, which reduces the social arena to an abstraction—to “apprehension, classification, and calculation” (27). Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment thought, the authors state, in fact share a similar propensity toward forms of mystification, though they introvert the terms: “animism spiritualized the object, whereas industrialism objectifies the spirits of men” (28). As

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social relations come to be perceived with the solidity of myth, the modern world “abandons” thought; thought survives only in the “reified form of mathematics, machine, and organization” (41). The work of the Frankfurt School on the whole examined how this mythic fixity of thought—its transmutation into ideology rather than its deployment as a practice of critical reflection—enabled the rise of totalitarian regimes and assigned the “autonomous” realm of art the special function of critique. Yet the root of these insights entails a complex formulation—one which holds particular relevance to the study of modern travel—concerning the crisis of selfhood that unfolds in the age of Enlightenment. To Horkheimer and Adorno, one may find evidence for this crisis in the transformation of sacrifice. Whereas premodern societies engaged in sacrifice as a means to appease the spirits that maintained cosmic order, modern societies present no clear means of “binding” subjects to the social arena. The system of industrial production secures the consensual participation of modern subjects only through the reward of individuation. The rationalization of nature leads to the decline of the animistic spirits once thought to hold together the cosmos. But just as nature becomes rationalized, so does the self. The self becomes despiritualized and, in the place of spirits, structured in accordance with an all-encompassing rationality. Mimesis, once associated with the old order, now becomes “mimesis unto death” as the self and nature are subject to the same rigidified conceptual schema. This dialectic creates the conditions for the crisis of the bourgeois self: the self becomes an abstraction in the service of productive relations, but through this very process acquires the status of “selfhood.” The development of subjectivity thus runs parallel to the evolution of modernity. In psychoanalytic terms, the rationalization of nature necessarily brings about the consolidation of ego. Adorno struggled over whether this structuration of the self, which emerges only through rigid socialization, indeed embodies in some regard a new form of “freedom.” He asserts, for instance, that in the age of industrialism “the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere.” Yet the true emancipatory potential of this individualized sphere—of selfhood—proved to be a central, and unresolved, concern of critical theory (Adorno 17–18; see also Whitebrook 132–40). Horkheimer and Adorno turn to the Odysseus myth in order to illustrate how the “birth” of subjectivity in fact equates to a renunciation of one’s internal nature. As they argue, only the “cunning of reason” allows Odysseus the illusion that the law has somehow been circumvented. Odysseus’s separation from home over the course of his ten-year journey enables him to elude

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“archaic” configurations of the law. For Odysseus, home signifies quiescence and conjures the threat of merger or “engulfment.”5 Adventure—the antithesis of quiescence—serves then to “hold the I together” by functioning as a performative gesture that produces separation from both nature and the law (Horkheimer and Adorno 33). Wandering enables Odysseus to escape the old cosmic order of mythical fate. Yet during his journeys he appears to be hopelessly ambivalent. His constant homesickness suggests a longing for the pleasures that attend the experience of merger or of losing the self—one may think here of Freud’s notion of the “oceanic.” As Horkheimer and Adorno show in their interpretation of the encounter with the sirens, Odysseus longs to surrender to the siren song—to merge with the other—but dreads the self-annihilation such a merger would entail. To ensure that the integrity of his selfhood remains intact, Odysseus chooses to listen to the sirens from a distance; he experiences the song aesthetically—as an expression of beauty—rather than as the embodiment of a cosmic order. This mastery of external nature, however, requires a particular kind of organization of his internal nature: a consciousness that prioritizes rationality. Odysseus therefore acquires subjectivity by remaining separate from the sirens, but in so doing turns himself over to the civilizing process. Travel, we might say, expresses the cunning of Odysseus’s choice: it allows him to elude the threat of merger, preserve the solidity of his selfhood, and hold on to the illusion that he stands outside the law of civilization. Indeed the contradictory character of this choice—which at once articulates the self and a longing for home—is what makes Odysseus, as Horkheimer and Adorno argue, a prototype of the “bourgeois individual.” Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that the Odysseus epic prefigures not only the distinctive structure of modern travel but also the specific differences between romantic and modern idioms of travel (43). Siegfried Kracauer begins to characterize these differences in an essay called “Travel and Dance.” Kracauer opens by arguing that the roots of an idiomatic transformation in the practice of travel must be sought in the acceleration of mechanized society: Today the society that is called “bourgeois” indulges in the desire to travel and dance with an enthusiasm far greater than that shown in any previous epoch for these sorts of profane activities. It would be all too facile to attribute these spatio-temporal passions to the development of transportation or to grasp them in psychological terms as consequences of the postwar period. (65)

For Kracauer, modern travel serves no purpose other than to effect the manipulation of space and time. By contrast earlier forms of travel hinged

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on the “double existence” of the subject: betwixt and between “real” life and some “eternity” or “other realm” beyond “spatio-temporal life.” According to Kracauer, this orientation toward eternity served to make “real” life more meaningful (69). As an example, Kracauer cites the travels of Goethe: “When Goethe traveled to Italy, it was to a country he sought with his soul. Today the soul—or whatever it is that is meant by that word—seeks the change of environment offered by travel” (65). Instead of the augmentation of real life, the modern subject indulges in the distortions of travel to escape merely being “a tool of mechanized industry.” The traveler seeks the illusion that one may “roam freely through the dimensions” (68). Travel, in this context, is undertaken not to enlarge the experience of the present (the “soul”) but rather to annihilate, or negate, the dimension of “real” life altogether. Kracauer argues that the ascendancy of “mechanistic categories”—those granting primacy to reason and productive relations— overshadows concern for a distant and eternal future. As with Horkheimer and Adorno, Kracauer asserts that the process of mechanizing external nature necessarily requires a massive repression of the irrational—that is to say spiritual—elements of internal nature. Travel, then, offers a means to “change locations” in a “spatio-temporal coordinate system” that has been depleted of any reference to eternity. Modern travel therefore offers a kind of inauthentic reminiscence of eternity: it creates the illusion for travelers that “the shackles are burst . . . and infinity is spreading out before them” (72). Yet as an experience it remains parenthetical. It remains disconnected from the real of everyday life, and in fact produces for the subject the impression of being detached entirely from everyday life.6 As these texts suggest, the Frankfurt School tended to view the relationship between human subjects and the civilizing process as agonistic. This fact should perhaps not be surprising in light of the group’s indebtedness to Freud and Marx—their commentaries on travel reflect a concern with both the Marxist problem of alienation in increasingly commodified societies and Freud’s view of the constitutionally opposed interests of individuals and the social order. At the heart of these inquiries lies an exploration of the status of the “father” in mechanized societies—that is, the displacement of social authority onto the domain of the law. For Horkheimer, Adorno, and Kracauer, the law underwrites subjectivity but at the same time imposes strict demands for organization and constraint. The modern subject seeks a means to recuperate the repressed elements of internal nature—to somehow experience this hidden realm of subjectivity in its “authentic” form. One could expect this undertaking to take the form of rebellion or protest against the law. Yet as Odysseus and Kracauer’s discussion of modern travel and dance

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illustrate, modernity provides for a means to simulate this sort of authentic expression without truly posing any threat to the law. The cunning of reason displayed by Odysseus enables him to sustain the illusion of individuality even as he renounces any real connection to a primary object and suffers the constant deferrals of a return home. Similarly, the traveler depicted by Kracauer withdraws into a fantasy of freedom from the stratification of time and space, but this “virtual” experience bears only a parenthetical relation to the real: the subject experiences authenticity only by escaping from the real. In sum, psychoanalytic theory enables these Frankfurt School theorists to introduce a theory of subjectivity into Marx, but the view is wholly pessimistic: any effort by the subject to articulate the full expressive potential of internal nature has the quality of false consciousness. In the genre of travel writing I investigate in the following chapters, the subject refuses the pleasures of this sort of false consciousness. The “double existence” it requires (as Kracauer calls it) proves untenable. The challenges that result for consolidating a sense of selfhood, as a result of the failure of paternal authority to take hold, become quite apparent. Their attempts at escapism result not in the sort of affectation of autonomy suggested by the Frankfurt School writers, but rather in a kind of pathological attack on the self. The conventional bourgeois avenues for the expression of the self ’s idiom—the pleasures of individuation or the manipulation of space and time—prove an insufficient compensation for the severe dominance of the father—the law. Hence no identification with the father takes place, and the typical process for the fashioning of selfhood becomes short-circuited. The following chapters are therefore organized around the concept of “oedipal” pathology. Each expands upon a failure of the law to underwrite subjectivity and follows the travelers’ efforts to write themselves into being outside the parameters of the law.7 An examination of the recent theoretical literature on travel subcultures will provide some background for the study of character systems in travel narratives and for the specific orientation toward negation I wish to derive from the textual readings. MYTHOLOGIES OF ESCAPE: METHODOLOGIES FOR THE STUDY OF TRAVEL AND TOURISM The field of travel and tourism studies encompasses a wide range of social practices and research methods. As a number of commentators have pointed out, the very distinction between travel and tourism functions as a kind of floating signifier, with travelers tending to define themselves in

Introduction

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opposition to the more institutionalized practices of tourism. This opposition surfaces, for example, in Paul Fussell’s compendium of travelogue essays, The Norton Book of Travel. While Fussell distinguishes between highbrow “art” travelogues and popular narratives, James Buzard observes that this dismissal of mass culture is “fundamental to and characteristic of modern culture” (Beaten Track 18). A more subtle expression of this dyad appears in Mark Cocker’s survey of twentieth-century British travel writing, which stresses the peculiar virtue of austerity in adventure, as opposed to touristic, travel writing. The title of his study, Loneliness and Time, itself reflects something of this idealization (see also 132–62). Another dominant tendency in tourism studies is the “descriptive” approach. Rojek and Urry characterize this effort as an attempt to arrive at an “operational” definition of tourism by reducing touristic phenomenon to a set of essential parameters: a minimum number of days, in a particular range of locations, with a limited constellation of stock activities and so forth (2). Studies of this sort typically rely on conventional social science methods. Survey data, for instance, may serve to provide a portrait of the habits and behaviors of tourists, which may in turn be expressed through economic and statistical indicators. Another investigative modality, more consonant with the spirit of the Frankfurt School and advanced by the recent work of Chris Rojek, John Urry, Dean MacCannell and others, supplements these more descriptive approaches with considerations of the imaginative worlds of travelers. In addition to examining the manifest behavior of travelers, this work explores the latent motivations and fantasies that constitute subjectivity and inform the “mythologies of escape” that surface in travel discourse. The advantage of this approach—one that explores the subjective life of the traveler—is that it foregrounds the relationship between leisure practice and the fashioning of selfhood. As Rojek points out, industrial planners have historically recognized that leisure facilitates the expression of selfhood and have in fact frequently viewed leisure as a necessary complement to work. The development of museums, city parks, zoos and gardens in Britain and the U.S. in the nineteenth century all attest to a doctrine of managed recreation that encouraged the moral improvement of citizens.8 The so-called “rational recreationists” believed that planned parks and services would draw people away from the vices of the crowded metropolitan streets (Rojek 46). Yet these “play” spaces—what Henri Lefebvre calls “ludic” spaces (84)—remained an imperfect escape at best from the constraints of a rapidly evolving capitalist culture. As Lefebvre contends, ludic spaces may appear to permit one the freedom to cultivate

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The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel

individuality, but they promote modes of expressivity that are in fact consonant with the logic of the market and vulnerable to particular ideological interests. This contradiction led Simmel to conclude pessimistically that modern commercial cultures allow for no genuine form of escape. In Simmel’s view, as outlined in The Philosophy of Money, the modern subject seeks constantly to disrupt the rationality of the bourgeois order. Yet in addition to reducing all objects—including the interior world of the subject— into a system of exchange values, the hegemony of the money economy turns leisure spaces over to the rapidly shifting ground of fashions and trends. The commodification of leisure compels the modern subject, for whom leisure produces the impression of separation from the everyday world of work, toward even more radical forms of escape.9 Simmel clearly views leisure as central to the articulation of selfhood. Modern subjects, he argues, seek definition. Their desire to exceed the interpretive parameters of the labor process derives from “the lack of something definite at the center of the soul” (“Conflict” 484). For Simmel, this search reaches its apotheosis in the quest for stimulation in the chaos and disorder of metropolitan life. In the city, one may gratify the interminable need for new and more potent forms of stimulation in order for one to feel “outside” the conceptual framework of labor. This process, however, takes its toll on the subject: Simmel contends that overexposure to urban stimuli produces a mental disposition he calls “the blasé attitude” (“Conflict” 484). The constant need for new stimulations, he contends, induces nervous disorders such as neurasthenia as well as character pathologies predicated on the pursuit of risk and “adventure,” such as gambling and promiscuity (“Adventure” 188–91; see also Rojek 102–104). Significantly, Simmel states also that modern symptomatology includes “a mania for traveling.” Like the gambler, the traveler seeks a means to separate decisively from the regimentation of everyday life. These forms of adventure both express attempts to acquire subjective structure outside the domain of the law. Simmel’s emphasis on the ties between leisure and modern subjectivity proves useful to Rojek and Urry’s effort to call attention to the “compelling links between culture and tourism” (19). The focus on culture yields many avenues for investigation: the transformation of nature into spectacle, the romanticization of prostitution, drugs and other urban “crimogenic” zones as tourist sights, the establishment of “heritage centers” and other forms of “cultural tourism,” and the transgression of local constraints regarding gender roles (Rojek and Urry 5–19). A recurring question pervades all of these inquiries regarding the social role of leisure practice and, more specifically, what

Introduction

11

leisure practice reveals about the relationship between subjects and modernity. For Dean MacCannell, whose The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class represents somewhat of a founding text of modern tourism studies,10 leisure fundamentally expresses the discontent of modern subjects and yet, at the same time, assists with the reproduction of the social order. MacCannell shows how the performative dimension of travel, and particularly the paradigmatic act of sightseeing as a sophisticated practice of reading, serves to remediate the sense of “alienation” immanent to modern subjectivity. MacCannell sometimes views the origins of this alienation in conventional Marxist terms—as the demise of an organic connection between the worker and the object of his labor. On other occasions, he depicts it as a more general problem of “belonging”—as the need for the individual to establish, symbolically, membership in the social totality.11 Sightseeing, which MacCannell regards as exemplary of leisure practice, facilitates this membership because it emphasizes the individual’s unique “quality of experience” and not merely the quantity of labor he produces. Yet by serving this function, leisure practice also ensures the consensual participation of the subject in the society as a whole. The tourist, as Georges van den Abbeele writes in an analysis of MacCannell’s argument, “enslaves himself at the very moment he believes himself to have attained the greatest liberty” (van den Abbeele 5). Although MacCannell does not stress the traveler’s capacity for critique, he does portray the tourist as a sophisticated interpreter of culture, and the question of whether the tourist’s journey must serve a strictly ideological function remains unclear. Indeed, he has sometimes been charged with displaying excessive empathy toward the traveler—even by underscoring the traveler’s alienation—by critics who view the discourse of tourism strictly as an adjunct of political domination, and particularly as an extension of colonial authority or an expression of nostalgia for empire.12 Clearly, the notion that tourists employ a complex semiological process of reading sights does not negate the possibility that this process still serves the interests of the dominant social order. In the introduction to the 1989 reprint of his book, MacCannell in fact acknowledges leaving unanswered the question of whether tourism manages to “liberate consciousness” or, alternatively, ensures one’s entrapment in a “prison house of signs” (xx). Yet he nonetheless reaffirms, and expands upon, his argument regarding the capacity of tourism to dispel alienation. Not only does sightseeing permit individualized experience outside the labor process, it also facilitates the suppression of history by converting modern markers of history into a system of attractions. Tourism, MacCannell argues, enables the substitution of a perfunctory homage to historical events for genuine historical consciousness:

12

The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel Postmodernism and tourism are only the positive form of our collective inarticulateness in the face of the horrors of modernity: of mustard gas and machine guns, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dachau, Buchenwald, Dresden. Tourism is an alternate strategy for conserving and prolonging the modern and protecting it from its own tendencies toward selfdestruction. Ground zero at Hiroshima, the Kennedy assassination site, the ovens at Dachau, the Berlin Wall—all figure in The Tourist as important attractions. Sightseeing, rather than suppressing these things from consciousness, brings them to our consciousness, “as if ” we might assimilate them. (xix-xx)

In effect, MacCannell suggests that even the “horrors” of modernity become incorporated into the endless differentiations of modernity, so that they become mere devices in the tourist’s bid to individuate from the rigidified schemas of labor and rationality. They become assimilated to what he refers to as the “dialectics of authenticity”—a dialectic between self and object (the sight) that serves the articulation of the self ’s idiom and not the critical development of historical consciousness. This dialectic emerges most centrally out of the tourist’s desire to achieve a strictly individualized experience of the sight. In the sociology of modernity outlined by MacCannell—as well as that advanced by the Frankfurt School—the impulse to articulate the self ’s idiom in fact represents the engine that drives cultural production.13 For MacCannell, tourism represents a literal enactment of this process and, further, provides a penultimate metaphor for it. Indeed the semiotic framework MacCannell employs to describe sightseeing also may apply to a more general theory of capitalist consumption. In MacCannell’s formulation, the tourist attraction consists of the three elements: the tourist, a sight, and a marker. The dialectics of authenticity proceeds from the tourist’s wish to gain unmediated access to the sight. The absence of mediation represents for the tourist the only path to authenticity insofar as it implies a wholly individualized relationship between the tourist and the object. Markers, then, play a contradictory role for the tourist. On one hand, they allow the tourist to identify the sight as a sight. Yet, simultaneously, they signify the intervention of an outside party that saturates the sight with meanings. Markers may take myriad forms, including signposts, guidebook commentary, advertisements, postcards or, most pernicious of all to the sightseer, the presence of other tourists. Confronted with the perception of an excess of markers, the tourist ventures to another sight in search of a more authentic experience—that is, to find an object that allows for a less mediated, and so more personal, relationship.

Introduction

13

One can see how this dynamic encourages the endless proliferation of tourist sights. In the course of seeking out the “real” London or the “real” India in order to avoid the inauthentic staged version of these places, tourists by their very presence mark the real version and so render it inauthentic. They then set out in search of an undiscovered sight—one perceived to be less tainted by markers and so more authentic. The frequent updates undertaken by publishers of adventure guidebooks attest to a frantic effort to keep pace with the latest tourist discoveries. At the same time, the ample documentation of sights provided in guidebooks produces and excess of markings.14 For MacCannell, the very distinction between travel and tourism represents not an attempt to denote a more culturally sensitive tourism, but rather “part of the problem” (The Tourist 10). The wish to be a traveler (and not a tourist) reflects the modern drive toward authenticity and the demand for an infinite reproduction of sights. The cost of assuaging the alienation of the modern subject is the endless differentiation of modernity—the turning of most everything into a tourist sight. The question persists, however, of whether this interminable pursuit of difference amounts to a celebration of difference or a capitulation to ideology. Is it not possible, in other words, that pursuing a more authentic connection to a sight results in a demystification of the other and enhances historical or cross-cultural understanding? To acknowledge such a possibility would be to affirm a kinship between the modern tourist and the flâneur, whom Baudelaire, Kracauer, and Benjamin tend to cast as a sort of organic intellectual and deconstructionist of modern social life. Yet the flâneur’s alienation becomes a necessary precondition for critical consciousness, whereas for the tourist it becomes an occasion to renew one’s sense of membership in the social fabric of the nation-state. Still, the question remains as to whether the expression of the self ’s idiom through travel enables some transcendent subjectivity and allows the subject to establish a different, and perhaps more critical, relationship to home. Resolving whether the traveler subverts, or perpetuates, dominant ideology proves difficult to answer because the leisure voyage may express alienation even as it serves to reproduce the social order. Even if the voyage should conclude with the interpellation of more pliable and passive citizens, it may still act as an expressive medium for some discontent. Regardless of the outcome, then, it would seem that the traveler warrants a degree of empathy. The journey, after all, enacts a complex effort to produce and animate the self. The voyage, we might say, represents an attempt to insert the self within the chain of signification. Indeed, a very condition of the formation of selfhood entails the establishment of a subject-position or some relationship to the law and, as Sara Mills has argued, this process always entails a negotiation.

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The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel

Working within a decidedly Foucaultian framework, Mills views the confessional aspect of travel narratives as a “response to disciplinary pressure.” Travel writing—and particularly women’s travel writing—portrays the subject moving through a system of signs, some of which are written on the self and some of which are resisted. The subject, she states, “negotiates with pre-existent schemas which are discursive in nature” (38–39). The extent to which the voyage serves, in the end, to renew attachments to the social order back home depends substantially on the sorts of identifications forged in the course of the voyage. Recent studies investigating the links between gender, race, and travel have shown that the disposition of the voyage—its capacity to promote critique or perpetuate ideology—and the status of these identifications hinge to a great degree on how the subject is positioned visà-vis ideological interests back home. In a sense, the consolidation of an identification represents the purpose of the journey—the journey has enabled the traveler to find, as it were, his place. Though travel offers a performative moment to examine these identificatory struggles, such struggles are in fact central to all intersubjective experience. Another way of stating this would be to say that, generally, the formation of subjectivity takes place through an encounter with the Other. As Frantz Fanon and recent commentators on Fanon’s work have pointed out, in colonial and postcolonial contexts this other is imagined primarily according to fantasies of racial alterity. Fanon, following Lacan, viewed the subject as being defined structurally by a constitutional lack. The promise of recognition from the other is the basis of the subject’s desire, but the identification with the other elicits a contradictory and frequently impassioned response: the opacity of the other’s “enjoyment” generates frustration and undermines the will to form a bond. The subject hopes—in the case of the colonizer, demands—that the other will recognize the contiguity of the subject as a “self” and so answer for the subject a crucial question: “What is my desire? What is my position in the imaginary structuration?” (see Lane 298). Christopher Lane’s reading of Travels in the Congo, a colonial-era travel text by André Gide can offer an illustration of the dynamic that arises when self-realization is sought through immersion in fanstasies of cultural difference. As Gide begins his journey, he shows emphatic contempt for colonialism. He initially sees the purpose of his trip as part of an effort to expose the fallacies behind European racism. Yet once he reaches the western African coast, Gide must confront the perception of his own radical alterity. He finds that he lacks any cultural framework with which to identify. He finds himself, in other words, voided of subjectivity. As Gide remarks while watching a dance—an “ecstatic” ritual through which, he says, a group of Africans “manifest their joy”—he “gazes into an abyss” (qtd. in Lane 298).

Introduction

15

Gide consciously aspires to a diplomatic mission, but his narrative betrays an underlying wish to recuperate an identification with European civilization—an identification that, before his trip to Africa, had been suppressed by his anti-colonial critiques. Identifying neither with Europe nor Africa, Gide lacks any viable subject-position and “oscillates between idealizing and de-idealizing the indigenous.” By traveling to Africa, however, he achieves a kind of “self and national reparation” (Lane 286–87). The journey allows him to find redemption in the law he previously rejected. Lane even suggests that the restoration of his bond to France in fact represents the unconscious hope of his voyage to Africa. Instead of centering his narrative on French and Belgian racism and advocating for colonial reform, Gide becomes a sober apologist for the French colonial administration. Upon his return from the Congo, for instance, he affirms the redemptive effects of his trip: the “primitive races . . . teach civilized man to understand himself better.” “To know and see oneself better,” he asserts, “one must first leave oneself” (qtd. in Lane 287). In the following chapters, I examine travel texts that illustrate a decidedly different path than that followed by Gide. Most of the travelers of these texts refuse, at all costs, to pursue any remediating course for their alienation. They manage neither to recuperate a latent identification with their homelands nor to uncover any alternative means of coming to terms with the alterity of the other they encounter overseas. Instead, they attempt to negate the terms of selfhood altogether. In some cases, as I suggest with respect to a particular phase of V.S. Naipaul’s work, artistic production comes to substitute for an affiliation to the law—as if the “imaginary” law created in the symbolization of art can perform the same function as an identification with the law of the social world. This symbolization, I offer, permits the survival of the self but in a “melancholic” form; it conveys a tone of resignation regarding the loss or absence of the “father.” As should already be apparent, the analytic approach I employ in these discussions relies considerably on notions of self and subjectivity, and a debt to psychoanalytic theory must be acknowledged. I will therefore proceed in the remainder of this introduction to outline explicitly the contribution of psychoanalysis to the study of travel cultures, and to suggest ways in which this conceptual emphasis might supplement social and historical approaches to travel. THE ROUTES OF SELFHOOD: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND TRAVEL STUDIES As one might expect from the view of culture outlined by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents—where individuals and civilization coexist in chaotic and

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The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel

embattled tension—early psychoanalytic thinkers tended to view travel as the expression of a longing to gain freedom from the constraints of the social world. The Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, for instance, suggested in 1914 that the appeal of sunbathing lies in its enactment of a regression through some obvious symbolism: burying oneself nearly nude in the sand, surrounded by water without any apparent boundaries. In a later essay, entitled “Sunday neurosis,” he draws a comparison between church holidays and vacations and states that these practices serve the essential function of allowing “mankind . . . to tear to pieces the otherwise worshipped totem animal” (qtd. in Fliess 349). Festivals such as the Bacchanalia and Saturnalia, as well as the recurring holiday of the Sabbath, ritualize an “atavistic striving for ‘liberation.’” Freud himself introduces the idea that travel gives expression to a latent protest.15 In his 1936 essay A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, he writes that he “had long seen clearly that a great part of the pleasure of travel . . . is rooted . . . in dissatisfaction with home and family.” Beyond the limits of home, travel offers the opportunity to become the author of one’s own text: “When first one catches sight of the sea, crosses the ocean and experiences as realities cities and lands which for so long had been distant, unattainable things of desire—one feels oneself like a hero who has performed deeds of improbable greatness” (247). More recent psychoanalytic explorations of travel also stress its capacity to enable transcendence of the limits of everyday social life. In his extensive examination of “vacations,” Alexander Grinstein speculates that the appeal of wilderness travel lies in the temporary relaxation it permits of the “anal” rigidity of social norms: one goes into the wilderness to escape disciplinary expectations regarding cleanliness, control and so forth—to “loosen” one’s bowels in the woods as it were. According to Grinstein, this sort of escape may prove difficult for those with particularly demanding superegos. A patient of his, for instance, shows an inability to be idle and constantly seeks some “productive” activity while on vacation, which still fails to dispel persistent masochistic selfreprisals regarding his “laziness” (171–73). Grinstein interprets this refusal to liberate oneself from the social order, even temporarily, as a fear of unleashing primal instinctual impulses. The vacation, he asserts, facilitates a regression to a state of selfhood that preexists socialization—to “an early form of object relationship”—and may, as a result, liberate aggression from the restrictive influence of ego and superego formations (176). To a person for whom these early relationships conjure intense anger—or desire—for the object, jettisoning the protective parameters of civilization can prove unsettling. At the same time, however, the recovery of these childlike states represents the source of the immediacy that enables the perception of individuation and authenticity.

Introduction

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David Espey explores the link between these regressions and the production of authenticity in his essay “Childhood and Travel Literature.” Travel, he suggests, implies a capacity to turn oneself over to the processes of fantasy and imagination; other activities that encourage fantasy, such as reading literature, therefore bear a close relation to travel (see also Fussell, Abroad 212). Childhood signifies a time during which autonomous interior worlds are unstructured and embodies the state when one has the greatest access to this sort of “play.” The British travel writer Jonathan Raban, for example, employs the symbolism of childhood to affirm the conception of travel as a narcissistic wish to be free of all object ties. In his account of his voyage down the Mississippi, he evokes his domineering father as a symbol of the oppressive burdens of civilization: “At the river, I was free to dream of what it might be like not to be a child; and all I could imagine was that there would be no father, no constraints” (qtd. in Espey 52–53).16 Espey acknowledges an implicit social critique in this formulation that he associates with romanticism and nostalgia. The valorization of childhood innocence reflects a “desire to find an unspoiled world” (Espey 54). As Paul Fussell has argued, the thematic of childhood serves to dramatize “an implicit rejection of industrialism and everything implied by the concept ‘modern northern Europe’” (Fussell, Abroad 210). For Fussell, this narrative convergence of themes concerning personal expressivity and social critique acquires its most forceful expression in a literary renaissance led by the modernist British travel writers of the 1920s—among them D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. His presentation of the historiography of travel writing, while decidedly romanticist and nostalgic,17 attests to the importance of incorporating the insights of psychoanalytic theories regarding the “self ” into studies of travel grounded in concrete social and historical realities. The exclusive reliance on one interpretive valence tends to produce a hermeneutic blind spot. On one hand, a strictly social and historical approach fails to explain the intense concern with the production of selfhood evident in modern travel narratives. Yet by the same token, a psychoanalytic model that inclines toward generalized or structural readings cannot establish connections between narrative shifts within the literature and the cultural specificities of modernity. Only a sustained interdisciplinary engagement can adequately address the novelty of themes pertaining to selfhood and self-realization in modern travel literature. Studies by Nigel Leask and Chloe Chard demonstrate, in their examinations of early travel literature, that the genre evolved in pronounced ways contingent on industrialization, the increased accessibility of travel to the masses, shifting attitudes toward the empire overseas, and the evolving interests and

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The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel

tastes of readers. Broadly speaking, the rhetoric of early European travel texts exhibit a tension between resistance to change and the maintenance of national character, between self-expression and loyal pronouncements of citizenship. Chloe Chard argues that while travel texts of the early years of the Grand Tour stress the importance of preserving one’s identity when crossing national and cultural boundaries, those of the latter decades of the eighteenth century embraced the more unsettling aspects of travel and prioritized the cultivation of selfhood over the preservation of social norms. In her view, these narrative turns are attended by pervasive references to the authors’ “guilt” and “anxiety.” Yet on the whole, she is less concerned with investigating the origins and motivations of these affects than with cataloging the frequency of references to them in the historical record (cf. Thomas). One hope for the present study is that it may build upon Chard’s work by contributing to a theory of subjective life that enhances our understanding of the social framework in which these symptoms are constituted. In arguing that many forms of travel are undertaken primarily for the expression of selfhood, and so mobilize the unconscious fantasies and desires of the traveler, I wish to stress the importance of a theory of subjectivity as a complement to any historically grounded analysis of the conditions of colonialism, decolonization, and globalization. Such an interpretive approach addresses the emotional registers conjured in touristic encounters—“pleasure” and “guilt” in Chard’s study, for example—and the irrational paradoxes at the heart of what Renato Rosaldo, to take his formulation of the sophistry of tourism as an example, calls “imperialist nostalgia”: A person kills somebody, and then mourns the victim. In more attenuated form, someone deliberately alters a form of life, and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to the intervention. At one more remove, people destroy their environment, and then they worship nature. In any of its versions, imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of “innocent yearning” both to capture people’s imaginations and to conceal it complicity with often brutal domination. (69–70)

Any attempt to provide logical coherence to these contradictory expressions of love and hate requires a model of subjectivity. Although such models may draw more from philosophy than psychoanalysis—as in Simmel’s writings, for instance—I argue in this work that the pervasive contradiction described by Rosaldo may be illuminated at least in part by exploring the dynamics of early object relations. Just as Gide teeters from the “abyss” of the African unknown to a more assured European citizenship, the

Introduction

19

modern traveler sees in the so-called savage the promise of recognition or, alternatively, the embodiment of some prohibited enjoyment. This encounter with the savage takes on such urgency precisely because it serves to resolve a constitutional schism between the subject and modernity. Dean MacCannell has in fact referred to the use or consumption of “primitives” as a means to articulate selfhood, with its clear implications of violence, as a kind of cannibalism (Empty Meeting Grounds 21–25). This stance toward otherness, and the aggression it necessarily entails, must be viewed as a by-product of the specific path to subjectivity symbolized by Odysseus—specifically by his protracted attempt to inhabit a space between nature (home) and the law. The expropriation of the primitive into an aesthetic discourse is necessarily an aggressive act, and emanates out of the conflict between subjective life and the constant abstractions of modernity. The importance of studying modern travel cultures lies in the fact that they so frequently, and often self-consciously, seek a resolution of this conflict—the irrational elements of travel subcultures reflect and index more generally the irrationality of modern culture. This association explains why Dean MacCannell, in his study of tourism, professes to undertake an “anthropology of modernity.” Attention to the “unconscious” structures of modern culture provides a basis to establish connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena— such as the links that Renata Salecl draws between tourism, nationalism and colonialism. According to Salecl, the valorization of individuality, combined with an excessive inhibition of individual desire, precipitates an envious attack on the pleasure of others. (Salecl 45–47; see also MacCannell, Empty Meeting Grounds 22). At the level of the unconscious, tourism resembles other modern cultural movements that elicit deep emotional responses: the wish to inhabit a society with a less rigid paternal structure sires an attack on those who already appear to live under the aegis of fewer constraints. All of the narratives I examine in this study illustrate how the imagined experience of adventure travel serves primarily as a means to articulate selfhood. The use of the term “negation” is intended to refer to a particular variant of this narrative. More precisely, I wish to describe a sub-genre of travel literature in which aggression is directed primarily inward instead of outward—a cannibalism, to use MacCannell’s metaphor, directed toward the self rather than imagined savages. Since travel and travel literature encompass a vast range of texts and practices, in the following sections I will briefly survey some key scholarly studies of travel writing and outline the methodology I adopt in the subsequent chapters. In so doing, I will attempt to delimit my subject matter by addressing three critical distinctions: the separate but interrelated domains of tourist practice

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The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel

and travel literature; the uniqueness of late twentieth–century adventure travel versus earlier permutations of travel; and the relation between the specific subcultural niche I describe and the practice of adventure travel on the whole. Throughout the discussion I aim to foreground the role of travel in constituting modern selfhood and to affirm the need for adopting a decidedly interdisciplinary methodology that can properly address the mechanics of subject formation. GENRE SCHEMATICS: DEFINING ADVENTURE TRAVEL “Asia: Freeing the Spirit” —Preface to a guide to “spiritual retreats” in Asia, on roughguides.com

It will hopefully be apparent from the foregoing discussion that the present study’s focus on the dynamics of subjectivity does not preclude an affinity with recent social and historical studies of travel. In slightly divergent ways, both approaches seek to illuminate the relationship between the traveler and a larger social structure. Indeed, historical approaches to travel do differ somewhat from my effort here to explore travel as an index of some modern structural relation to the law—along the lines of what Lacan calls a “fundamental fantasy.”18 A central interest of recent social and historical scholarship has centered on countering the conventional wisdom that travel enables enhanced freedom from the law, and in underscoring the ways in which travel in fact facilitates the consolidation of social identities—particularly affiliations with race, class, gender, nation and empire. Although ostensibly concerned more with the construction of relations of power than the character of selfhood, I think the trope of alienation may serve to unite the two areas of emphasis. Both methodologies take the premise that membership in a social group acts to attenuate alienation. Examining travel as a symptom of modern culture suggests that alienation underwrites the impulse to travel and that the pleasure of travel in part derives from the heightened sense of group membership that travel enables. This framework also addresses the possibility that the journey may express and encourage a nihilistic repudiation of selfhood rather than an affirmation of power. I hope, then, to affirm a connection between this study and recent research by Mary Louise-Pratt, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Karen Lawrence, David Spurr, and Sara Mills. Whereas these studies implicate the rhetoric and practice of travel in imperial representations, I wish to highlight the subjective struggle that precedes this eventual identification with power and, further, point to a genre in which the negation of selfhood emerges as a viable alternative to social integration.

Introduction

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In the early modern period, travel functioned mainly as an officially sanctioned practice that quite explicitly sought to deepen the traveler’s affiliation with a group. This certainly was the case with the Grand Tours of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Unlike modern adventure tourism, the social institution of the Grand Tour was decidedly programmatic: it aspired toward the edification of the citizenry by exposing them to sites that embodied the heights of European achievement. The Grand Tour offered an opportunity for British men to cultivate their aesthetic sensibilities by traveling throughout the European continent—primarily to Italy and France. Participants viewed their experience as a vital supplement to their educations. Their travels enabled them to expand their knowledge of political economies, modern history, legal frameworks and foreign languages. After one to five years on the continent, they typically returned to England to exercise their newly acquired diplomatic skills as administrators within the British government.19 A clear ethos and a concrete set of objectives informed the journey. Travel was supposed to consolidate one’s corporate identity as a patriot, a British citizen, and a carrier of the best of Western civilization. The Grand Tour sought not to promote the sort of autonomous experience that Simmel describes in “The Adventure,” but aimed to inscribe the highest virtues of cultural achievement. It functioned as a vehicle of socialization rather than escape. The Grand Tour embodied the prescription for Enlightenment travel offered by Francis Bacon in “Of Travels” in 1625: “Let it appear that he doth not change his country manners for those foreign parts; but only prick in some flowers of that he hath learned abroad into the customs of his country” (Bacon 81–82; see also Korte 45). British bourgeois travelers were encouraged to enter what Mary Louise Pratt calls “contact zones,” but only as a means to secure confidence in Britain’s status as an emerging cosmopolitan—that is to say imperial—polity (Pratt, Imperial Eyes 67). By the nineteenth century, social and cultural developments in Britain substantially transformed the ethos of the Grand Tour. Enhanced opportunities for women and the expansion of the middle classes made travel accessible beyond the domain of male elites. These demographic shifts undoubtedly ruffled many in the wealthy classes, who lamented the “popularization” of a once exclusive practice. This plaint surfaces particularly with the publication of the Baedeker guidebooks in 1827, which invited “the masses” to replicate the experience of the Grand Tour on their own.20 The expansion of the traveling classes notwithstanding, the Grand Tour by its very structure evoked a contradiction that eroded its ideological objectives. As Dennis Porter observes, the unsettling effects of entering into a contact zone often opposed the Tour’s official purpose: “The tour was both a form of higher education

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The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel

and an instrument of social reproduction that required an extended absence from paternal surveillance and an exposure to temptation that risked subverting the institutional goals” (51). Although the Grand Tour aimed to solidify ties to Britain, the inherent transgressions of travel promoted heightened attention to subjective experience. For an example of a travel text that challenges the stated objectives of the organized tour, Barbara Korte cites Laurence Sterne’s 1768 narrative A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Sterne places the utmost emphasis on the individual experience of the traveler and shows little concern for any “sightseeing programme” (Korte 59). His tone, and the tone of romanticist travel writing generally, inclines toward the celebratory: he lauds the expressive possibilities presented by travel.21 If the Grand Tour ushered in competing conceptions of “official” and “expressive” travel, it only reflected a larger cultural antipathy between individuality and standardization. By the late nineteenth century, concerns with individuality and self-expression become normative in travelogues. Many travel narratives self-consciously adopt the rhetoric of rebellion and nostalgia. Yet at the same time, this new tone of subversion is accompanied by pervasive avowals of anxiety and guilt—indicative both of fears of national decline and of intensifying critiques of modernity.22 From 1880 to 1940, the dominant theme in travel writing shifts attention from the accumulation of national culture to the metaphysical realities of an interconnected world. As Helen Carr remarks, globalization was “not a word used but a condition that was widely recognized” (73). This incipient transnational consciousness gives rise to a range of social criticisms. Some of these criticisms advocate a form of national retrenchment: they affirm the primacy of the nation and reject internationalism, namely empire building, on the grounds that it necessitates excessive cross-cultural contact and so poses a threat to white racial contiguity. Other commentaries express a more generalized disenchantment with modernity: they associate industrialization—which includes the transformation of the landscape, the emergence of middle-class consumer society, and the fragmentary life of the metropolis—with a society in decline. These views both share a romanticist notion of an organic society sundered temporally and spatially from an immediate, present-day quagmire. If the “retrenchment” narrative conveys a fear for the dissolution of the white race, the romanticist critique invokes the “noble” savage nostalgically as an emblem of a better era. Both formulations suggest a shift in the conception of travel: whereas the Grand Tour provided a means to cultivate a public identity, travel in this period acts as a platform to defend private selves and pine for social alternatives. For example, Wilfrid Scawen

Introduction

23

Blunt uses his accounts of his travels through India and northern Africa as an occasion to denounce British imperialism and to argue for the fitness of Indians to self-govern; he rails against the “‘filthy modern tide’ of English commerce.”23 Somewhat more attuned to the notion of travel as an expressive medium, Hilaire Belloc, in a 1902 narrative called The Path to Rome, advocates a mode of travel that rejects all modern conveniences (Carr 78). Belloc suggests that traveling in discomfort separates one from the common tourist who descends on sites canonized in Thomas Cook’s tours and guidebooks. Indeed, Belloc now seems a predecessor to a contemporary subculture that sees austerity as a central criterion by which to separate tourists from the authentic adventure or “budget” travelers portrayed in guidebooks such as Lonely Planet and Rough Guides. Belloc also anticipates the modernist writers who turn the idea of travel as an escape from patriarchal authority into literary craft. As Carr notes in her survey of this era, the travel writer’s repudiation of modern amenities reflected a desire to escape the turmoil of two world wars in Europe and to seek out a simpler life. The literary travelogues of the interwar years, heralded by Paul Fussell in Abroad as the highest achievement of the genre and encompassing the work of Evelyn Waugh, D.H. Lawrence, Freya Stark, E.M. Forster, Edith Wharton, Graham Greene and others, are diverse in their geographic interests and narrative styles yet somewhat uniform in their melancholic tone and disillusionment with modernity.24 Whether this emerging nostalgia and dismay with England truly represents something of an oppositional discourse—a counterweight to the interpellations of national identity—warrants closer examination. Scholars of colonial and postcolonial travel cultures have argued that the presence of a sentimental or antimodern critique in fact constitutes a necessary feature of colonial representation. Ali Behdad, for instance, argues that the heterogeneity of Orientalist discourse ensures its cultural hegemony: “the discourse of tourism unsettles the authority of the Orientalist savant, but it reimplicates its shifting forces in a whole new series of new and more efficient relations of power” (16–17). Behdad in part attributes the ideological function of travel to its capacity to channel alienation and to produce a heightened sense of individual expression. Yet he focuses attention more on the material and imaginative implications of turning the Orient into a commodity. On one hand, the colonial system tended to expropriate the writings of travelers as “valuable information” even if, as was often the case, the travelers themselves opposed colonialism (17). Perhaps even of greater consequence, however, the traveler invariably remained enmeshed within the Orientalist order of knowledge. Having produced a phantasmagoric image of the Orient to compensate for an England in decline, the traveler finds that the “real” Orient, once encountered through the journey,

24

The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel

proves a disappointment in comparison to the fantasy (Behdad 25–26). For Behdad, anxieties over national decline cause the traveler to become dismissive and patronizing toward the other, and frequently to discover some new alliance to the colonial mission. For the most part, recent studies of travel in colonial contexts, including those by Behdad, Inderpal Grewal, and Mary Louise Pratt, stress an ideological complicity to dominant power relations. Grewal shows that guidebooks and travelogues helped to legitimate colonialism by providing interpretive order to the exotic presence of subject territories and peoples for England’s working classes. As with landscape painting and museums, Grewal writes, travel narratives “civilized” the British public: they were “disciplined through a knowledge that involved the reification and domestication of the non-Western ‘other’” (90–91). Such discipline stalled the momentum of working-class radicalism and feminist politics by “sublimating the alienating” aspects of cross-cultural encounter into national ideologies of “taste” and “vulgarity” (90). Grewal invokes the terms “individuation” and “discipline” somewhat synonymously to refer to the insertion of the subject into an ideological order. For Grewal, individuation implies adaptation: one articulates selfhood by adapting successfully to cultural norms. For both the citizenry of colonial Britain and the growing bhadralok (middle) classes of Indians who traveled West, alienation could be redressed only by establishing citizenship—mainly by receiving an “aesthetic education” in the ways of national culture. Grewal contends that even narratives most exemplary of the Romantic tradition—in which travelers circulate among so-called natives and then present their experiences to a voyeuristic readership—rely on a presumption of radical difference between modern and traditional despite their frequently sympathetic tone. The mastery these writers achieved at switching between “native” and “cosmopolitan” modes of being testified to their deeply integrated sense of self. Grewal argues that the encounter and representation of the other served to solidify a sense of Englishness and so to divert attention from internal social antagonisms centered in Britain on race, class, and gender. Also examining links between travel and ideology in the context of European expansion, Mary Louise Pratt describes the traveler’s gaze as an “imperial eye” that normalizes the alterity of the other. Spanning the late 18th to 20th centuries, Pratt compares the explorer’s “discourse of manners and customs” with “confessional” travel writing that features the author’s subjectivity more prominently (134, 150). Pratt observes that writers in the first tradition, embodied by David Livingstone, often consciously envisioned themselves as ancillaries to European expansionist projects. By contrast, those travel writers who affected the narrative voice of the “solitary, introspective Individual”

Introduction

25

frequently criticized European violence and the stoicism of the explorer-writers, and often acknowledged their own guilt (145). Yet for Pratt, “informational” and “sentimental” narrative registers, while seemingly opposed, both subject the native to mystification. If the former aspires to a scientific depiction of the landscape while generally ignoring the presence of human subjects, the latter exaggerates the degree of reciprocity and exchange between European and native and masks the hierarchies of the colonial relationship (Imperial Eyes 78– 80). Consonant with Behdad and Grewal, Pratt concludes that there is “more than one way to skin a cat”: the multiplicity of colonial discourses in the end functions in consort to serve the interests of the colonial regime (150). These studies all expand upon the analysis of ideology initiated by Edward Said in his landmark text Orientalism by revealing some clear mechanisms by which the dominant order neutralizes or incorporates immanent critiques. Among the first writers to explore the dynamics of colonial representation, Said expresses some futility regarding the capacity of any utterance to surpass a deeply entrenched—in fact structural—hierarchical distinction between Orient and Occident. He arrives at this conclusion in part because of his theoretical reliance on a view of power and knowledge as a closed system. As Said reads it, this system invests the law with absolute authority and compels a reading of travel discourse as strictly ideology. In the nearly thirty years since Said’s immensely influential text was published, some critics have shown that this framework has the effect of reifying the very Orient/Occident dichotomy Said wishes to expose as a construct of colonial administration. If all colonial discourse refers back to an already established signifying system, there is no real way to account for the mutability of this system; all immanent antagonisms and contested views lead back to a static structure.25 These critiques of Said notwithstanding, Orientalism continues to inform studies of how the institutions of imperialism co-opt travel discourse. Ali Behdad, for example, concludes that tourism operates as an “extension of cultural domination” (37). Although attuned to a pervasive sense of “belatedness” and cultural loss in colonial travel writing, Behdad states that the symbolic father “defines the law of representation.” In his view, “there is no ‘outside’ to the discourse of Orientalism” (23). While I agree with Behdad on this point, I do wish, again, to consider the basis for the persistence of a discourse of alienation rather than the moment of the incorporation of this discourse by the administrative arm of empire. The methodological framework of Orientalism also informs Simon Gikandi’s study of late colonial narratives. Gikandi points to the increasing prevalence of narratives “that dislocated the colonial project itself or called its central assumptions into question,” yet concludes that “such narratives

26

The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel

still functioned within the epistemology established by the dominant culture of colonialism” (xiii). Indeed, Gikandi persuasively illuminates the many ways in which this narrative collusion takes place. For example, he observes that the ironic tone of Anthony Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859) enables some seemingly subversive insights: Trollope questions the English identity of the West Indies, makes sport of white Creoles, and affirms the inevitability of interracial marriage. Yet Gikandi argues that Trollope not only fails to produce any sort of “critical position,” but also reconfigures colonial authority dialectically through the use of irony: he establishes his authority by asserting the novelty of his position—such as the necessity of miscegenation—only to fall back “surreptitiously . . . on inherited paradigms,” such as racial hierarchy (92–97). Gikandi proceeds to show that the romantic tradition of colonial narrative responded to a perceived “crisis of culture” that afflicted mid-Victorian England (103). Travelers frequently valorized the “black other” as a savage or utopian figure in order to reflect back on the status of Englishness. For texts such as James Anthony Froude’s The English in the West Indies or the Bow of Ulysses (1888), which Gikandi describes as “a travelogue haunted by doubts about the moral character of Englishness,” the native “exists in a world before sin or the law, beyond selfconsciousness and morality” (84, 110). As Gikandi shows, this apparent critique of English character in fact reproduces the racial alterity of the native and conceals the historical conditions of imperialism. He concludes: “what we have are narratives in which the ethnographic act—the gesture of travel, learning, and discovery—is sublimated to imperial fantasies, desires, and anxieties” (110). Whether travel narratives depict the other in utopian or dystopian terms, to Gikandi the effect remains the same: both presentations place the native in a “savage slot” that serves to “enhance the utopian possibilities of the domestic epos” (113, 118). Gikandi provides a useful bridge to the study of late twentieth-century travel writing in that he not only illuminates the ideological aspects of late colonial travel writing, but also links the aesthetic of the romanticist idiom to increasingly frequent expressions of collective cultural anxiety during the colonial period. The projection of the other as the sign of utopia constitutes one of the structural features of romanticism; this projection consists of all that is perceived to be lacking—that is, in a state of ruin or decay—back home. In the years following the Second World War, these two aspects of romantic travel writing—a simultaneous preoccupation with exotica and a sense of selfhood, as bound to the fate of the nation-state, in crisis—become even more magnified. As Josef Böröcz suggests in his sociological study of recent leisure migration, commercial societies increasingly define citizens

Introduction

27

narrowly as consumers, thereby heightening the presentation of cultural difference as a “marketable product.” Globalization provides new opportunities to remediate alienation by converting “social distance” into a saleable commodity (737). Given the unique context of the market, Böröcz argues for the novelty of contemporary travel and against any transhistorical understanding of tourism as a timeless human pursuit. For Böröcz, the effects of “capital accumulation” and “industrial capitalism” necessarily inflect the relationship between the tourist’s home and the destination society. The potential for the tourist industry to profit off an imago of place—and specifically the representation of difference—has produced a massive growth machine that encourages tourists to approach hosts in the same manner that consumers do commodities. The market, it follows from Böröcz’s argument, necessarily infiltrates the imaginative framework in which travelers desire to undertake and then come to understand their journeys. In Böröcz’s analysis, the market functions as an epistemological prison much as the discursive frame of Orientalism operates for Said: in both instances, a discursive web circumscribes any expressive utterance by the traveler. While to some extent the present study ratifies the pessimism of Böröcz’s account, it also acknowledges that the desire to surmount these epistemic constraints represents the most essential aspiration of the traveler. The traveler seeks unmediated experience even if the global market precludes such experience. The study therefore recognizes the influence of capital flows on culture, yet still wishes to train an interpretive lens on the cultural productions of travelers and the manifold representations of their struggle for selfhood. We might be served, then, by a provisional definition of adventure travel as the practice that emerges out of a dialectical opposition between traveling subjects and global commercial society. The study of adventure travel aims not to describe a practice separate from tourism, but rather to examine the process by which the travel/tourism distinction becomes culturally salient. Certainly not all tourists wish to be adventure travelers. As Böröcz shows, many tourists happily embrace commercial services and remain content to seek out “pseudo-events” such as theme parks or resort environments.26 Yet those travelers whose discourse stresses a subcultural affiliation—separate from tourists—do embody a particular orientation toward modernity and a mode of seeking relief from alienation, even if these travelers do not practically operate outside the commercial infrastructure of tourism. This observation should not be seen as a refutation of the ideological dimension of adventure travel, but rather as a suggestion that adventure travel reveals more than the workings of ideology. In sum, the practice of adventure travel offers a window to the structure of a fundamental fantasy: the subject’s acquisition of subjectivity against the backdrop of the overwhelming array of

28

The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel

injunctions—buy this, do this, be this—that constitute the hyper-rationalized modern market society. As I have proposed, in many cases the journey indeed succeeds in fulfilling this fantasy: it serves to remediate the subject’s alienation and to produce the sought-after sense of selfhood. Holland and Huggan, who provide an extensive survey of recent adventure travel literature, show that travel’s role in articulating selfhood frequently stems from its intersection with identity politics, a point that again complicates the dismissal of travel as merely an ideological practice. The journey, as I have said, allows the traveler to “discover” or consolidate an affiliation to a subculture. Identity, in this sense, denotes a subject-position that “places” the subject within the chain of signification. Indeed, the current landscape of adventure travel literature appears substantially to support this view. Travel titles increasingly reflect the notion that identity niches correlate to separate modalities of travel, so that one may travel in a specifically masculine, feminine, black or gay or lesbian manner.27 Critics have assessed this literature differently. In some cases, scholars have yielded to a “temptation . . . to conscript women’s travel writing into the service of an emancipatory politics” (Holland and Huggan 114). Alternatively, as Holland and Huggan note, some scholars contend that the fissuring of identity niches within the travel genre reflects the endless social differentiation encouraged by contemporary market forces: instead of emancipatory politics, women’s travel writing attests to the “commodification of women writers, women’s writing, women’s literature, and the institutionalization of women’s studies” (113). “Identity,” then, may in fact function in the same ideological manner as “individuation,” as described by Grewal: as a means to establish a niche in the social order and so to dispel a previously felt sense of marginalization. The question remains, then, whether the production of selfhood through travel amounts to anything more than an aesthetic experience. Does it pose any real threat to the paternal structure of the law, or does it preserve the structure of social authority by providing modern subjects with a much-needed affectation of authenticity? In other words, does adventure travel represent the modern embodiment of the cunning of reason? Many travelogues do appear to display a degree of political self-consciousness that would at least pose the question of the need for a separate analytical category from leisure migration or adventure travel. One may cite, for example, the many recent texts that explore the impact of travel on the fashioning of Black diasporic and African-American identity.28 At the same time, it seems not altogether clear how these more politicized travelogues differ from those that, in Peter Hulme’s words, embrace “the journey as a form of therapy” (92). What, for example, separates Alice

Introduction

29

Walker’s sojourn to Zora Neale Hurston’s birthplace in Florida from Robyn Davidson’s 1700 mile trek across the Australian desert?29 In this study I by no means wish to overlook the creative possibilities of these narratives. The very notion of pilgrimage, to which these authors allude, underscores the potential for a spiritual dimension to adventure travel that, in the end, may result in some fundamental transformation of the subject. I do not wish to suggest that the journey must result in one of two outcomes: either the “therapeutic” solidification of subjectivity, or the “neurotic” attack on (negation of) the law and selfhood. The framework of this study, I hope, preserves the possibility that some modes of travel bear an affinity to artistic process. While I do not attempt a full consideration of the relationship between travel and art here, it seems reasonable to affirm the potential for an affinity between travel and art that could jar the relationship between subject and social authority, enhance critical consciousness, and engender a renewed respect for cultural alterity. Yet the general preoccupation of recent travel writing concerns the search for new modes of authenticity in light of “late-capitalist cultural possibilities” (Holland and Huggan 197). As Holland and Huggan note, adventure travelers now aim to respond to Evelyn Waugh’s pessimistic pronouncement in 1946 regarding the “end of travel writing”: they seek to overcome the sense that modernity has supplanted the possibility of authentic adventure (1). While Holland and Huggan primarily examine the range of narrative strategies employed to “recuperate” the authenticity of travel, I am mainly interested in this work with depictions of the traveler’s repetitive, and eventually failed, efforts to recover this authenticity. These portrayals dramatize the destructive impulses that Freud referred to as the death drive: in the face of an implacable paternal authority that denies the capacity for self-creation, their central protagonists resort to self-annihilation. At the same time, these narratives suggest a decidedly Marxian relevance to the concept of alienation. For Marx, alienation derived from the tendency of human subjects to invest powers in objects that lie beyond their control. Although he linked the capacity to fashion selfhood most fundamentally to the labor process, his social theory stresses the overriding importance of subjectivity and individual autonomy. Marx linked the institutions of capitalism to alienation precisely because they compel individuals to turn the products of their labor—of their essential creativity—over to the state and political economy.30 Whereas Marx envisioned a revolutionary response to this condition based on formal political organization and class consciousness, recent history shows that the market has a seemingly limitless capacity to placate modern workers. Rather than intensify alienation, the “fetishism of commodities” appears to offer myriad routes to selfhood. This study suggests that the negation of selfhood

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The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel

represents another option, not foreseen by Marx, for alienated subjects. It further offers the hypothesis that this response represents another form of revolutionary expression, albeit one that yields no programmatic critique of capital and hence no progress toward Marx’s utopian society. This subgenre of the travel literature not only affirms Waugh’s prediction concerning the impossibility of travel, but also presents a commentary on the inescapability of alienation in an era of globalization that is characterized primarily, to these travelers, by deterritorialization and cultural sameness. NOTES ON METHODOLOGY: A POETICS OF LATE CAPITALISM Why are these books always the most read and the most frequently published? What needs do they satisfy and what aspirations do they fulfill? What emotions and attitudes emerge in this squalid literature, to have such wide appeal? —Antonio Gramsci, on popular serial novels, from his Prison Notebooks

The reference to self-fashioning in this book’s title is intended to evoke Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, which argues in its introduction for a mode of criticism “intent upon understanding literature as a part of the system of signs that constitutes a given culture.” The “proper goal” of this criticism, Greenblatt continues, is a “poetics of culture” (4–5). The following chapters proceed mainly by undertaking close readings of texts, but in so doing seek to delineate a subculture that indexes the cultural dynamics of decolonization, globalization, and postmodernity. Consonant with the disclaimer Greenblatt offers in the introduction to his study of selfhood in the 16th century, I do not wish to argue for a single “history of the self” in the era of multinational capital. Yet just as Greenblatt follows these remarks with a schematic of “governing conditions common to most instances of self-fashioning,” I hope at least to offer an hypothesis regarding the persistence of self-fashioning as a source of motivation in contemporary culture. This observation strikes me as being especially important because postmodern theory has sometimes downplayed the critical importance of the drive to articulate selfhood as a determinant of cultural practice. Frederic Jameson, for instance, has suggested that late capitalism is marked by a “shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology” in which the “alienated” subject has been replaced by one who is “fragmented” (14). David Harvey, pursuing a similar line of inquiry, explains this distinction as follows: We can no longer conceive of the individual as alienated in the classical Marxist sense, because to be alienated presupposes a coherent rather than

Introduction

31

a fragmented sense of self from which to be alienated. It is only in terms of such a centred sense of personal identity that individuals can pursue objects over time, or think cogently about the production of a future significantly better than time present and time past. (53)

Both Jameson and Harvey do acknowledge that this “decentering” of selfhood has adverse consequences, including the effacement of historical consciousness and feelings of “anxiety and loss of reality.” Jameson particularly, however, emphasizes the aesthetic possibilities of this fragmentation—how, for example, the disjunction of schizophrenia may be generalized to cultural style and be mined for more “joyous intensities” (29). While both Jameson and Harvey point to the underlying nostalgia of contemporary aesthetic practices—in the sense that old forms are recycled—they seem to minimize the centrality of selfhood as a cultural ideal. The point I wish to underscore is that while fragmentation may be a viable aesthetic in art, it fails as a basis for subjectivity. If indeed one is persuaded that the character idioms I sketch in this book are prominent models for late capitalist subjectivity, then a wide gap appears to inhere between art—the aesthetic dimension of late capitalism—and everyday life. The aesthetic of negation in travel practices, I propose, offers an index of the persistence of alienation and the salience of the ideal of authenticity. The subject of late capitalism still has the modernist quality of yearning for a higher purpose and meaning, yet when faced with the perceived absence of any viable position in the social order, whether as a consumer or in identity politics, this subject seeks to destroy altogether the foundation from which such yearnings could be expressed. While acknowledging that such an approach may necessarily be provisional, perhaps serving to map out areas of research for subsequent multidisciplinary studies, this discussion does suppose a close relationship between reading adventure narratives and “actual” travel. I argue that both practices— of traveling and reading about travel—index similar needs and aspirations. As Michael Denning remarks in his study of nineteenth-century American dime novels, the mythography of popular literature reveals a good deal about the underlying desires and fantasies of its readers. Denning refutes the notion that leisure reading constitutes mere “escapism,” and instead suggests that popular texts encode forms of political expression. He does not dismiss the importance of escapism as a motivator for leisure activity, but instead underscores the symbolic complexity of escapism. As Denning notes, some critics have refused to see in leisure activity a meaningful response to social conflict, as reflected, for example, in this statement by Gareth Stedman Jones: “To study leisure and popular recreation as a distinct subject—particularly if we try to think

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of it in terms of a polarity between ‘class expression and social control’—leads to a real danger of overpoliticizing leisure as an arena of struggle” (qtd. in Denning 65). Denning affirms an inextricable link between politics and the sentiments of popular literature, yet suggests that these sentiments remain coded in the complex language of the unconscious: escapist literature must be read as “dreams, daydreams, or wish fulfillments” (66). Following Gramsci, he contends that this literature acts not strictly as “a narcotic against the banality of everyday life” but expresses rather “the philosophy of the age” and “the fantasizing of the common people” (Gramsci 371; Denning 67–69). Although both Denning and Gramsci invoke the concepts of “fantasy” and the “unconscious,” neither inclines toward any explicit use of psychoanalysis. Their approach to literary analysis perhaps most closely resembles Raymond Williams’ notion of “cultural materialism.” Williams, like Gramsci, contends that literature embodies the ideals of particular historical periods and social groups. True to his generally Marxist leanings, Williams tends to evaluate the politics of a literary work according to its stance on class conflict; he views literature as an index of class consciousness. Still, by viewing literature as mainly a form of “social communication” rather than as an expression of some transcendent creativity, he establishes the importance of making “popular” art an object of study (Long Revolution 39; cf. Marxism and Literature). This study seeks to apply the insights of cultural materialism while further exploring the implications of the idea that literary representation reflects a popular “dreamworld.” It is materialist in the sense that it examines adventure travel narratives as a fantasized response to the social framework of global capitalism. Yet it does not interpret this response strictly within the purview of working-class politics. It may seem paradoxical to view the negation of selfhood as a viable response to material conditions—one that might fit into a Marxian framework that sees the literary unconscious as daydream or wish-fulfillment. Nonetheless I do propose that these narratives portray a wish to transform the social order. This struggle indeed ends tragically, and is frequently sublimated to acts of violence, thereby attesting to the failure of any sort of Marxian politics to take hold. Even in fantasy, the triumph of a working-class identity, or any other subjectposition, is notably absent. The fantasy instead centers on doing without the social order altogether: in effect, the traveler chooses to destroy the self, or to inhibit the production of the self, rather than to accede to social authority—to what we may call the domain of the father.31 The textual interpretations I present in order to begin the task of producing a schematic of this cultural fantasy oscillate decidedly between “high” and “low” registers. In most instances, I have chosen to analyze fictional works rather than those that exhibit the autobiographical, “memoir” structure typi-

Introduction

33

cally associated with travelogues. I focus on travel novels for two key reasons. First, while the essay and novel both constitute forms of “literary” representation, the novel form allows for a “heterogeneous” style of discourse that permits more direct insight into conscious and unconscious motivations.32 Since the novel to some degree depersonalizes the relationship between the author and the journey, it tends to feature more of a meta-commentary on the traveler. Such a commentary may manifest itself by revealing contradictions between conscious and unconscious motivations, satirizing the traveler’s intentions, or undercutting the inclination within travel essays to present the traveler’s journey in heroic terms. In short, the novel frequently presents a more multi-dimensioned view of the motives and fantasies that sustain the adventure. A second reason for the emphasis on the novel concerns the effort I make in the following chapters to analyze the traveler’s relationship to the law as a permutation of an oedipal relation—that is, as a disavowal of the principle of separation symbolized in the figure of the father. By focusing on fictional works, I aim decidedly to draw attention away from the biographies of particular authors, and instead to focus my efforts on the character systems in the texts as imagined responses to a felt sense of social alienation. One may certainly turn to the wealth of literature exploring the lives of Paul Theroux, Paul Bowles, and V.S. Naipaul, for instance, and indeed I believe that doing so will enrich our understanding of the roots of their propensity to travel and the degree to which travel allowed for an expressive response to social alienation. Such inquiries can only enable us to understand the limitations of modernity—and specifically the overly narrow scope for self-definition it accords for cultural, national, racial, gendered, and sexual identities—and the many critiques of modernity that drive the impulse to fashion for oneself a narrative of adventure. Each of the character “positions” I discuss—which I describe as obsessional, hysteric, and melancholic33—represents some effort by the traveler to fashion selfhood outside of the realm of existing cultural conventions. In undertaking this sort of analysis, I seek not to excoriate the drive for individuality, but rather to examine the ways in which the social order may co-opt this drive or make a satisfactory resolution to this struggle nearly impossible.

Chapter Two

The Contemporary Crusoe Obsessionality and Adventure Travel

. . . an obsessional neurosis presents a travesty, half comic and half tragic, of a private religion. —Freud, “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices”

In his essay “Travel and Writing,” Michel Butor writes that the explorer “seizes with his language the land he crosses” (13). According to Butor, “voyages of exploration” follow a different logic than voyages of pilgrimage. Whereas voyages of exploration seek to plant flags and redraw maps to signify an annexation of territory, pilgrimage is undertaken to engraft a sense of membership into a larger tradition. Neither of these models fully captures the dynamic motivations of the obsessional traveler, for whom the seizure of territory dramatizes an effort to gain exclusive possession of language. Like Crusoe, who conquers his island primarily by naming it, the obsessional wishes to separate from the intersubjective field of shared language. As with other modern travelers, the “blank” quality of a geographical space attracts the obsessional traveler much more than the unique attributes of the space itself. The contemporary adventurer seeks not a specific territory, but raw material that may be suffused with his own authentic imaginings. If the subject associates the homeland with an overwhelming bureaucratic rationality—one that denies the self-gratification of creation and discovery—then adventure travel may provide the option of exercising the will of one’s subjectivity overseas. Again, it must be acknowledged at the outset that this will to submit alien territory to a representational schema of the “discoverer’s” own design is constitutive of colonial and post-colonial forms of exploitation. Yet my purpose is not so much to assess the conduct of the obsessional traveler according to principles of cross-cultural sensitivity or tendencies toward xenophobia, but rather to underscore how deeply the legacy of colonialism informs popular narratives of travel and discovery, even when this legacy is a subject of critique. 34

The Contemporary Crusoe

35

Unlike the rationalist idiom of colonialist travel texts, modern and contemporary travel narratives feature a decided preoccupation with internal states: the manifest rhetoric of these texts suggests an overwhelming concern with identity and self-development rather than with manners and customs of locals, the idiosyncrasies of landscape, or anything we might consider pragmatic politics. It is not that introspection was entirely absent in the earlier writings. As Mary Louise Pratt shows, the presence of a confessional, sentimental genre of travelers’ prose lent the European presence overseas an air of vulnerability that only served to obscure the intensity of colonial violence (“Scratches” 145–50). Nonetheless, eighteenth and nineteenth century narratives do not prioritize autobiography to the total neglect of contextual description as modern travel tales tend to do. Only since the 1950s has the travel genre demonstrated such a focused concern for the production of selfhood, the struggle to forge out of the impression of homelessness what V.S. Naipaul calls “a way in the world.” It is certainly justifiable to argue, then, that the sentimentality of contemporary travel narratives neglects asymmetries in power relations, or even that these narratives provide a model by which one might derive enjoyment from these relations. In this chapter, however, I am interested in a more preliminary question posed by this genre: what are we to make of the relentlessness of this search for identity? And further, do traveler’s concerns regarding a perceived lack of identity reveal anything about the quality of subjective experience in modern commercial societies? In beginning such an inquiry, I want to explore the possibility that the expressive cultures of adventure tourists register a link between the commodification of geography and the specific anxiety that arises from the perception that one lacks a coherent, viable self. This aspect of the discourse of adventure tourists, I argue, warrants attention as much as does its role in legitimizing imperialism. Clearly, the aim is not to negate the importance of such criticism.1 Yet I would contend that predominance of themes of protest and rebellion within the obsessional literature poses the need for a more extensive analysis that, above all, takes the motivations of these travelers seriously. More specifically, I am proposing that certain cultural practices may be interpreted the way one might read signs of an illness. Such a theory purports to understand obsessions in popular culture first and foremost as symptoms: we may assert that the chaos evident in the internal states of adventure travelers, and the ascription of geographical border-crossing as a curative, are diagnostic of a larger cultural proclivity toward neurosis. In this sense we may speak of an anxiety specific to the industrialization of space (nostalgia for a time before the earth is paved over) and an orientation to territory that inclines toward discovery and mastery.

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This will to mastery represents a particular feature of obsessional character formation and follows a different route toward resolution from hysteric and melancholic modes of travel discussed in the following chapters. The obsessional idiom operates according to its own unique character style: namely, as a disposition to geography that aims to organize space according to a system of representation devised by the explorer. By contrast, the melancholic traveler, whom I discuss in Chapter Four, operates according to a logic of rejection. The hysteric traveler, whom I discuss in Chapter Three, operates according to a logic of submission. Each strategy serves to restore a deficit within the self and so provide evidence of its solidity. This consolidation of selfhood indeed represents the basis of authenticity. The subject in each instance selects (although “selection” is an imperfect term insofar as the adoption of a character position incorporates conscious and unconscious mental processes) from a range of strategies in order to compensate for a loss. What exactly forms the basis for this loss, and why the mind should turn to travel for relief, are questions that can be explored through a close examination of recent adventure narratives. In these narratives the obsessional traveler resembles the prototypical European colonial explorer but is not portrayed as an heroic conqueror. Instead, the novels depict the obsessional traveler as the tragic product of a collective social failure. What, then, does the obsessional seek to gain from the overseas journey? The answer, as I hope to show in the discussion that follows, should be sought in the essential way that narrative creation enables the creation of a self. Among the character types I describe in this study, a neurotic pattern prevails in which the much sought-after experience of authentic selfhood is found through some sort of geographical encounter; a transferential relationship is established between the adventurer and an outside object. For the obsessional, the strategic route to the formation of a true self will entail the subjugation of the object to a representational order: the saturation of “empty” space with the subjectivity of the traveler. As with the man described in the case study Freud published as “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” the obsessional traveler seeks to compensate for a loss with imagination. In the case of the Rat Man, the patient expresses a revolt by constructing a highly personalized, and mostly inaccessible, narrative. Just as the Rat Man’s labyrinthine plot to repay a debt—and thus to protect two close relations from harm–expresses an unconscious desire, so does the obsessional’s adventure represent a displacement of a deep-seated conflict. The adventures undertaken by both are, to some degree, equally irrational and born of the same structural opposition. A review of the psychoanalytic

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literature on obsessional neurosis will enable a more precise description of the conflict and compromise at issue. MASTERY AND ENLIGHTENMENT: THE UNDERLYING STRUCTURE OF OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS In the case study of the Rat Man, Freud recounts the struggle of a person caught “between the persisting influence of his father’s wishes and his own amatory predilections” (Freud, “Notes” 200). Although this remark recalls Freud’s early libido theory, which attributed neurosis to inhibited discharges of sexual energy, its true novelty lies in its depiction of a patient immobilized by a conflict between the wishes of his “true” and “false” selves. The Rat Man’s plight, we might say, derives not from a mere inhibition of libido, but rather from a configuration of object relationships that hinders his efforts to preserve a particular kind of self-experience. As Freud and subsequent commentators on the Rat Man case have shown,2 the obsessional employs language as a means to nullify his desire and so to achieve a certain degree of authenticity. Unable to actualize his true wishes in the face of an overwhelming prohibition, and condemned as a result to suffer perpetual doubts about the viability of his own self, he seeks escape through the certitude of his own internally generated narrative. For the obsessional, desocialization becomes preferable to falsehood.3 We now know the Rat Man to be a 29 year-old lawyer named Ernst Lanzer (Mahony, Freud and the Rat Man 11–30).4 The crisis of authenticity, and his subsequent obsessions, ensue from the difficult choice of whether to marry his beloved Gisela. Unable to make a choice, and so to pursue the object of his desire, he becomes convinced that more decisive action will have dire consequences: “If I marry the lady, some misfortune will befall my father (in the next world)” (Freud, “Notes” 223). Although the father has passed on some years prior to the treatment, the influence of the father, Freud argues, continues to mediate the patient’s desires in a manner similar to superstitions (221–22). What makes this role of saboteur so effective, even more so in death than life, is the strong identification, and indeed love, Lanzer has for his father. The father quite literally brings the patient into being through oedipalization. Because Lanzer shared a close relationship with his father, any effort to defeat his influence, and so to “kill” him, conflicts with the substantial affection the patient has for him. Yet even so, the father represents false choices on a number of counts. In circumstances very similar to the quandary Lanzer faces regarding Gisela, we learn that the father chose to marry a woman of high standing assigned to him by his parents rather

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than his true love, a woman of more modest means. Lanzer wishes to make a different choice. In Stuart Schneiderman’s words, “he wants to be true to his love where his father was false,” but fears of reprisals from his deceased father bar the path to doing so (102). The obsessions represent an attempt to resolve the conflict. As Freud writes, Lanzer “resolved this conflict, which was in fact one between his love and the persisting influence of his father’s wishes, by falling ill; or, to put it more correctly, by falling ill he avoided the task of resolving it in real life” (198–99). According to Freud, then, the Rat Man’s illness entails two critical components: interference by the father with the expression of the patient’s true desire, and the substitutive achievement of a degree of authenticity by way of obsessional ideas and behavior. The puzzle of just how the father impedes the patient from making authentic choices, and what properties of the patient’s obsessions in turn rectify the need for some certainty of self, must therefore be addressed. I will explore these questions first by reviewing the details of the Rat Man case; then by proceeding to a more general explication of the structure of obsessional neurosis; and, finally, by suggesting an application of this case to a theory of obsessional travel. Over the course of his analysis, Lanzer recounts numerous occasions in his life when sensual impulses were accompanied by hateful feelings toward his father or fears of recriminations by his father. He eventually recalls an event that Freud considers to be the genesis of the repetitions evident in his patient’s later behavior. Lanzer does not remember the incident, and knows of it only because his mother disclosed the details. Apparently, between three and four years of age, Lanzer had bitten someone, and as punishment his father beat him. The little boy flew into a rage during the beating and screamed the names of common objects: “You lamp! You towel! You plate!” and so forth (205). Upon hearing of this episode Freud interprets Lanzer’s present-day obsessions, which deny the possibility of a relationship with Gisela, as follows: “If my father were alive, he would be as furious over my design of marrying the lady as he was in the scene of my childhood; so that I should fly into a rage with him once more and wish him every possible evil; and thanks to the omnipotence of my wishes these evils would be bound to come upon him” (248). As this restatement suggests, the patient’s ambivalence toward his father—at once acknowledging him to be like the closest of friends and yet resenting the sacrifice he compels Lanzer to make—nullifies love or desire altogether. Doubting his own impulses, the patient grows to distrust his wishes and to make choices that he experiences as compromised or, more precisely, false. It appears that, as Freud contends, “a man who doubts his own love may, or rather must, doubt every lesser thing” (241).

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The obsessions function to convert this doubt to certainty by fortifying the patient’s self with a sense of his own authenticity. Yet the strategies deployed to shore up this newfound certitude will inevitably be highly roundabout, since they must act as an expression of the prohibited affect while nonetheless circumventing it.5 As Anna Freud has observed, the mechanisms at the disposal of the mind for this undertaking consist of elaborate thought (ego-based) processes, such as denial, repression, isolation, magical thinking, indecision, and intellectualization (A. Freud 116– 18). As might be expected, these defenses come with a cost, for in order to protect the “intactness” of these self-made narratives, the obsessional must isolate himself from the object world. The external object world, after all, threatens to animate the affects that the patient unconsciously labors to avoid and therefore to thwart the achievements of his obsessional scheme. Moreover, it threatens to expose the irrationality evident in a narrative creation on which the patient relies for a sense of solidity. In his analytic sessions with Lanzer, Freud becomes the agent of both perils: the transference conjures forth the hatred and fear the patient feels toward his father, and the scrutiny of analysis dissolves the intricate narrative Lanzer employs to sustain the repression of these affects. As I have already suggested, the Rat Man’s foremost obsession, and the manifest reason he seeks Freud’s help,6 revolves around the fear that some form of rat torture will be inflicted on both Gisela and his deceased father. Another nodal point of his narrative concerns a debt he believes he must repay in order to prevent these dire events from occurring. This “debt fantasy” proceeds from the moment when he hears the recitation of the rat tale by his captain. During the narration, Lanzer loses his glasses, and rather than hold up his army unit by searching for them, he requests a new pair from his optician in Vienna for the next day. When the parcel arrives, the captain advises him that he must repay the money owed for shipping charges to a Lieutenant A. As we learn later, our patient knows that the captain has made an honest error, and that no such charges are due to A. However, Lanzer formulates an obsessional vow—“You must pay back the 3.80 crowns to Lieutenant A”—and insists that making the payment would offer a way to safeguard Gisela and his father (168). He then concocts a highly elaborate and nonsensical scheme of how to accomplish this feat. As Freud remarks, Lanzer initially attempts to make the payment through another officer who plans to meet A at the post office, but this officer ultimately fails to reach A. Lanzer in fact is relieved by this turn of events, because the wording of his vow emphasizes that he must pay back the debt in person. He resolves to go to the post office with A and another Lieutenant B, who

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supposedly paid the shipping charges. The plan, Lanzer tells Freud, is “that A should give the young lady there [at the post office] the 3.80 Kronen, so that the young lady should give them to B, and that then he himself should pay back the 3.8 Kronen to A” (168–69). However, this plan never materializes and the Rat Man must hatch an even more muddled scheme if he expects to repay the debt. He decides to wait until the company completes its maneuvers, and then takes comfort in the possibility that he might visit A in the town of P———. In the evening he takes a train to Vienna. Unsure of whether to proceed with his efforts to fulfill the vow, he travels to Vienna despite thoughts that he should exit the train at each stop and return to P—- (171). In Vienna, he meets a friend who manages to calm him for the evening and who points out the sophistry of his obsession. As Freud is quite stunned to learn, the next morning the patient and his friend go to the Vienna post office to repay the debt. At this juncture it becomes evident that he knew all along that the debt was owed to an official at the post office and not to A. Once away from his friend, Lanzer persists with his plans to repay the debt, suggesting for instance that a doctor (such as Freud) might issue a certificate asserting that he must complete this transaction with A “in order to recover his health” (173). Freud notes that the consideration of additional details about these efforts only make his behavior “even more senseless and unintelligible than before” (173). Freud even interjects an expression of sympathy for the reader: “It would not surprise me to hear that at this point the reader has ceased to be able to follow. For even the detailed account which the patient gave me of the external events of these days and of his reactions to them was full of self-contradictions and sounded hopelessly confused” (169). Yet significantly, in his attempt to link the “rat delirium” to various focal points of his patient’s life, Freud exhibits a tenacity equal to that of his patient. He includes a map to document the Rat Man’s travels, attempts to place the events within a coherent chronology and, with respect to the vow, seeks some rational reason as to why Lanzer felt compelled to make the payment to A rather than to another official. Despite the precision of this explanation, scholars continue to question the veracity of the facts presented in the Rat Man case.7 Freud’s analysis proves more compelling when he turns to the associative rather than logical properties of Lanzer’s anamnesis—as, for instance, to a reading of the multi-layered signifier rat8—although even here commentators dispute that his findings fully explain the many facets of the Rat Man’s sprawling narrative.9 At the very least, they tie together only fragments of the story. Without resolving the various positions in this debate, it is worth considering the possibility that some element of the patient’s discourse is impervious to interpretation and that this opacity represents a strategy of his neurosis. For

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Lanzer, language appears to provide a strategic means to overcome his doubt. In order to understand fully the nonsensicality of his compulsions, we must assess his motivations for rendering himself unintelligible. Along these lines, José Brunner offers the suggestion that the Rat Man’s speech serves an “affective aim” rather than a “descriptive purpose” (516). According to Brunner, the Rat Man’s recollections “perform and express the confused features characteristic of his inner, mental landscape” rather than present a reliable account of external reality. Brunner contends that the Rat Man’s utterances exhibit the formless quality of primary-process thought and exist only to express unconscious connections in the patient’s mind. As such, the maps and lists Freud transcribes to make sense of the details are irrelevant. Brunner advances this point as part of an argument regarding the obsessional character of the analytic process, but he also suggests how the speech of the obsessional enables the fashioning of authentic selfhood. In Brunner’s view, Lanzer’s behavior enacts a parody of cultural norms (518–19).10 The protracted twelve-year courtship of Gisela, his devotion to his father, the train ride to repay his debt and his worries about the omnipotence of his own speech all display the quality of hyperbole; they suggest excessive courtship and filial devotion and an absolute literalism of language. His actions appear to caricature the rules to which he has consciously expressed a wish to conform. This hypervigilance to seemingly arbitrary codes and maxims reflects the travesty of what Freud calls a “private religion.” Brunner stresses the political dimension of this behavior: the obsessional opposes or critiques external authority in the guise of adhering to it. His internal narrative, incoherent as it seems, contains within it a disavowal of rules and regulations—of the law—and an insistence on acting according to his own temporality. In response to external rules, the obsessional counters with an alternative, personalized framework of language games. It appears on the surface that he wishes to master the codes of the intersubjective world. Yet in the end, he abandons these codes because they threaten to undermine the certitude of his own selfhood. Freud describes this dynamic as an attempt to enact simultaneously “a revolt and its opposite.” Although Brunner plays up the political aspect of the Rat Man’s refusal of authority, we have already traced its roots to the patient’s doubts about his own love and acknowledged the paralytic toll it takes on his ability to perform simple everyday tasks. The obsessional’s rejection of language is particularly telling, for language marks the subject’s entry into sociality and constitutes the paternal law. A consideration of the anal stage of development, so frequently associated with obsessional character, illustrates this negation further. As Stuart Schneiderman shows in his study of the Rat Man, the process of toilet training compels the child to

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adapt to social norms and to accept the compromises that attend the acquisition of language (91–93). By responding to the caretaker’s (generally signified in psychoanalytic discourse as “mother’s”) demands to expel or to retain his feces, the child learns to control his instincts in exchange for rewards of love and approval. In so doing, he participates in a conversation in which the “gift” he offers possesses the symbolic value of speech. Although the mother’s love motivates the exchange, what the child gains from the transaction is a sense of his own capacity for language—of his expressive powers as a subject. The ritual of toilet training signals the moment when a child agrees to surrender a part of the self in order to participate in a reciprocal, public, shared field of signification. When the child fails to receive adequate recognition as a speaking subject in this exchange, he may reject the shared law and retreat to the satisfactions of an internal, private language. To return once again to the Rat Man case, we recall that the father’s false choices—specifically, his decision to marry for money rather than love—provides the impetus for the patient to retreat to the certitude of his ideas (i.e. a vow he must fulfill). His obsessional character, then, entails not only the conflict between love and hate stressed by Freud, but also a failure of identification. It is not only that the patient suffers the weight of a prohibition, but also that he fails to identify with his father and reacts by attempting to generate his own law. In Schneiderman’s words, “if the son cannot go to his father for the phallus he can go nowhere . . . except perhaps to the psychoanalyst” (11). Schneiderman, following Lacan, attributes this failure of identification to the contradictory demands made upon Lanzer by his mother (11–12). Lanzer’s mother not only relates the story about his father to him, but she also appeals to her son to be true to her where his father was false. At the same time, she counsels Lanzer to marry a rich wife. Since the latter option would represent the same false choice made by his father, and thus make him vulnerable to the same criticism his mother makes of his father, Lanzer’s only choice is to love his mother as his father failed to do. This choice, however, entails a nullification of his desire. To the extent that his entry into language will conjure the same reproaches that his mother directed toward the law—again for being false—the obsessional will strive to neutralize speech as well. The very prospect of intersubjectivity is subject to the same prohibitions as sexual desire. Language, the exchange of signifiers with an other, produces affects that are anathema to the obsessional and must be warded off. The acquisition and use of language mirrors the development of sexuality. The realization of desire, insofar as it requires attachments to other objects, depends upon the use of language and requires one to become a social being. The obsessional refrains from making the sacrifice required by sociality, and instead forges a true self through his own private idiolect. Nonetheless,

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because he has internalized the structure of language—and in turn, the law— this retreat requires the ongoing conversion of incoming signifiers into neutral products of his own consciousness. Thus the obsessional does not merely abandon the law once and for all (as with psychosis) but rather compulsively and repetitively protects a personalized law by warding off incoming signifiers. If the Rat Man “loses” Freud by furnishing him with obfuscating and unintelligible speech, then he succeeds in sustaining the impression of possessing a monopoly with respect to all of his expressive acts. For the obsessional, inaccessibility equals authenticity. This evasion of shared language—of intersubjectivity altogether—provides a conceptual model for the adventure. In a sense, the Rat Man evades Freud’s sense-making efforts by embarking on a meandering and thoroughly inscrutable journey. Much as modern adventure travelers seek to distance themselves from the institutions of tourism by targeting remote destinations devoid of markers as tourist sights, the Rat Man resists, and perhaps even protests against, Freud’s efforts to understand him by traveling “off the map.” The geographies charted by both the backpacker and the Rat Man exist only in the imaginary—within the private language of the self—and can be conveyed only by employing the literary devices of a memoir or travelogue. Part fact and part fiction, these creative efforts imply a kind of deliberate, yet paradoxical isolation. Just as the Rat Man pursues treatment with Freud but resists his treatment once there, the traveler insists on documenting his travels, but fears that by so doing he makes his “discoveries” vulnerable to intrusion. One might compare the Rat Man to the climber who resolves to ascend the world’s tallest mountain peaks. In both cases, the travelers commit to repetitive, virtually impossible tasks that derive their meaningfulness from the recognition of outside listeners (verification from Freud or from a group of climber enthusiasts), and from the sense that their achievements are celebrated and, importantly, impervious to mimicry. For the obsessional, isolation represents both a triumph and tribulation. As an expression of revolt against the father, the obsessional journey permits a self-imposed exile that serves an important purpose: it glorifies the exceptionalism of the solitary traveler’s expressive acts and imagination. At the heart of this obsession lies a fear of otherness: suspicion of anyone who might produce a competing narrative of the target landscape. Nowhere do we find the structural features of obsessional neurosis better articulated than in the classic adventurer archetype of Robinson Crusoe. Like the Rat Man, Crusoe rebels against the rigid laws and injunctions of his father; takes refuge in his own asocial enclave; imposes his will by assuming the role of an autocratic figure who single-handedly establishes the social order; and agonizes constantly at the prospect of losing his autonomy.

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OBSESSIONAL TRAVELER PROTOTYPES: CRUSOE’S THERAPEUTIC IDIOM V.S. Naipaul says of Robinson Crusoe that it dramatizes a mythic “dream of being the first man in the world, of watching the first crop grow . . . the dream of total power” (Naipaul, “Columbus and Crusoe” 206). Other commentators on the novel have criticized the middle-class triumphalism of the narrative as a “quintessential colonial fantasy” (Strachan 93) or, along similar lines, have viewed Crusoe as a kind of prototypical capitalist who embodies Western civilization’s single-minded pursuit of economic success (Watt 86). Even Marx invokes the resourceful Crusoe as an icon for industrialized society.11 Yet while one cannot deny that Crusoe achieves remarkable prosperity during his twenty-six years of island seclusion, it must also be acknowledged that he frequently behaves irrationally and suffers from an array of paranoid fantasies. If Crusoe indeed serves as a sort of modern archetype—exemplifying the bourgeois individualist drive to achieve dominance over the physical world—then he also underscores the thoroughly neurotic basis of this will to domination. In short, he illustrates the affiliation between the adventurer’s “dream of total power” and obsessional character structure. Crusoe begins with a rebellion against his father that, as with the Rat Man, must be considered incomplete. His identification with his father is fraught with contradictions, which are only resolved over the course of his twenty-six year exile on the island. On the one hand his father wishes for him to follow the “middle Station” of life as he himself as done, and to this end has provided Crusoe with “a competent share of learning, as far as House-Education, and a Country Free-School generally goes, and design’d [him] for the Law” (5). Yet Crusoe also identifies with his father’s household autonomy, where he seems to be free from outside authority and restrictions. In this sense, Crusoe is as an exemplary modern figure not unlike Faust, as portrayed by Marshall Berman (53–54). Whereas Faust revels in having escaped the fetters of tradition, he nonetheless suffers for wielding his power to undercut the patriarchal foundations of the religious, social and natural order. Despite his father’s injunctions, Crusoe will be “satisfied with nothing but going to Sea” (5). The “Sea,” however, does not facilitate a clean break from the “Law.” While it may distance Crusoe from the sense of falsity that living in accordance with the law entails, it does so only at the price of desocialization, paranoia and guilt. The early events of the novel establish the central tensions of Crusoe’s character, to which his eventual confinement on the island may be seen as providing a kind of intrapsychic resolution. Torn between settling “at home

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according to [his] Father’s Desire” and “running quite away from him,” Crusoe pines to become a seafarer yet fears that, were he to do so, “God would not bless [him]”; his father’s admonitions to this effect intensify these fears (8). This initial equivocation returns with intensity following the misfortunes Crusoe suffers on his maiden voyages. In one instance, having nearly drowned en route to London, his father’s warnings are repeated by the father of a shipmate: “if you do not go back, where-ever you go, you will meet with nothing but Disasters and Disappointments till your Father’s Words are fulfilled upon you” (17). In spite of these cautions, Crusoe continues to pursue a wandering life over one that binds him to home or to the law, but the diffidence of his deliberations attests to the intense feelings of guilt he harbors as a result of his noncompliance: But my ill Fate push’d me on now with an Obstinacy that nothing could resist; and tho’ I had several times loud Calls from my Reason and my more composed Judgment to go home, yet I had no Power to do it. I know not what to call this, nor will I urge, that it is a secret over-ruling Decree that hurries us on to be the Instruments of our own Destruction. (18)

Crusoe internalizes his father’s disapproval at the same time that he defies his advice and, consequently, interprets his hardships as justly deserved punishment. Burdened by guilt, Crusoe finds that even successes prove perfunctory. During a prosperous tenure in Brazil as a plantation landlord, for example, he becomes restless: “I was coming into the very Middle Station, or upper Degree of low Life, which my Father advised me to before; and which if I resolved to go on with, I might as well ha’ staid at Home, and never have fatigued myself in the World as I had done” (37). Crusoe appears as a figure caught betwixt and between; assertion of his independence subjects him to repeated self-recriminations, and the prospect of acquiescing to his father’s wishes makes him feel despondent and stifled. Without a genuine choice to make, Crusoe fails to form an identity of his own, a condition metaphorically represented in his eventual mooring as a solitary castaway on the deserted island.12 Once on the island, Crusoe proceeds to engross himself in the task of harvesting the material resources around him, until he produces an impressive simulation of a functional civilization. As a number of commentators on Crusoe have observed, vast tracts of the novel consist of meticulous descriptions of Crusoe’s productive activities. In a recent introduction, J.M. Coetzee attributes Defoe’s skill as a writer to his use of “bold, empirical

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description.” Coetzee writes: “When Crusoe has to solve the hundreds of little practical problems involved in getting the contents of the ship ashore, or in making a clay cooking-pot, one can feel the writing move into higher gear” (viii). Yet if Crusoe ushers in the era of the modern realist novel—by presenting, as Coetzee states, “a minute, ordered description of how things are done”—it sustains this literary attentiveness only through a depiction of Crusoe’s obsessional efforts to classify and organize the raw material of his island environment. Crusoe achieves complete dominance of territory by converting, at least according to his own perceptions, unformed matter to structured mass; out of the formlessness of the sea he fashions his own law. Accordingly, his journal records only his “Day’s Employment,” furnishing exhaustive accounts, for instance, of the construction of a table, the strategies employed to hunt game, and the harvesting of corn and barley (70–80). These labors provide a means for Crusoe to transform his alienation into the perception that he has produced, ex nihilo, a civilization. As Richetti has observed, his work represents “an achievement of the Hegelian mastership” (164). Of paramount significance, however, is that this ascendancy takes place only as a response to the irreconcilable choices he faces prior to the shipwreck: rebel against his father and suffer alienation and guilt, or choose the “middle way,” as his father advises, and therefore live falsely. In the face of this dilemma the island represents a third alternative: a transitional space, in the Winicottian sense,13 safe enough to permit Crusoe’s maturation. As the island compels him to withdraw from all social relations, he secures unchallenged authority and his temperament improves, but this position of comfort and safety persists only so long as intersubjective competition remains absent. Recalling the Rat Man’s obsession with repaying the debt, then, Crusoe’s cultivation of the island represents an attempt to forge from his own interior being a grand narrative (or law) to ward off the threat of external models that resonate with an impossible choice.14 As we have already observed with respect to his travels prior to the shipwreck, any form of social exchange will require Crusoe to tolerate either the trajectory his father plots for him or his own revolt against it. Solitude therefore proves comforting for Crusoe because it affords him subjective certainty; the evasion of speech saves him from falling back into the doubt that plagued him prior to the shipwreck. One may in fact interpret Crusoe’s religious conversion as a sign of his identification with a god-like figure that possesses unchallenged power over his domain.15 By his fourth year on the island, the acquisition of religion has made his isolation not merely tolerable, but a source of contentedness: “I entertain’d different Notions of Things. I look’d now upon the World as a Thing remote,

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which I had nothing to do with, no Expectation from, and indeed no Desire about” (130). Like the God whose virtues he extols, Crusoe has “neither the Lust of the Flesh, the Lust of the Eye, or the Pride of Life. I was Lord of the whole Manner; or if I pleas’d, I might call my self King, or Emperor over the whole Country which I had possession of. There were no rivals” (130). Indeed, when potential companions do surface, Crusoe responds to them as rivals and moves to preserve his autonomy by expunging what he perceives as an alien presence. This negation may be symbolic—whereby Crusoe transforms the person or entity into a mere projection of himself, a “double”—or literal—as when he resolves, in a fit of paranoiac rage and anxiety, to kill what he imagines to be a cannibalistic threat. Two examples of doubling in the novel are evident in the rudimentary relationships Crusoe forms with Poll the Parrot and the emblematically subaltern Friday. Poll initially joins the ranks of Crusoe’s retinue, along with his dog, goats and two cats, but he alone possesses the potential for acquiring the ability to speak. Yet Poll’s utterances only mimic his owner, and he most frequently repeats the circular meditations that symbolize Crusoe’s obsessional loop: “Robin Crusoe. Where are you? Where have you been?” (143–4). Crusoe’s intent ruminations on these questions of identity facilitate the deferral of an active choice regarding whether to become a seafarer or a middle-class merchant and, in the process, of his emergence as a coherent subject. Although Poll’s voice initially jars him awake in terror, Crusoe finds consolation upon realizing that it echoes his own and poses no threat to his asocial, liminal refuge. Despite the fact that Poll’s remarks allude to the notion that Crusoe’s name exists only as an empty signifier, void of any connection to home and decidedly lacking any positive content we might call identity, and so carry a message of particular ontological gravity, Crusoe finds them comforting. While one might expect Poll’s echo to taunt Crusoe by reminding him of his isolation, it instead affords him the comforting illusion of companionship without true interdependence. In the figure of Poll, Crusoe finds a token of the unqualified success of his monopoly. So long as the parrot remains a cipher onto which he projects his own thoughts and feelings, and not a complicated subject who compels him to enter an intersubjective field, Crusoe sustains the fantasy of complete individuality. He tolerates emulation because the presence of a mirror image poses no threat to his imaginings of a world devoid of external objects, and hence preserves the impression that his desires and decisions originate exclusively with him. Accordingly, when he dines with his animal companions—“me and my little Family” as Crusoe calls them—he observes that “I had the Lives of all my Subjects at my

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absolute Command” (149). Poll occupies a special position within this order (“Poll, as if he had been my Favourite, was the only Person permitted to talk to me”) but his speech only facilitates the illusion of a kingdom of diverse subjects when in fact the script originates entirely from Crusoe. This comfortable stasis ends once Crusoe discovers the footprint and must once again think of himself as inhabiting a matrix of objects, thereby losing his omnipotent status on the island. At no point does Crusoe consider that the footprint may signify his imminent rescue or the acquisition of a friendly collaborator.16 Instead he attributes the print to “Satan” and then to “Savages of the Main Land,” whom he fears will “devour” him (157). In a scene that typifies the degree of self-devaluation Crusoe experiences when confronted with the other, Crusoe resolves to measure the print so as to rule out the possibility that his own foot made the mark; yet he finds the impression to be far too large.17 For the next two years, Crusoe retreats. He abandons his bower, takes up refuge in a secluded cave and lives “in the constant Snare of the Fear of Man” (164; original emphasis). This withdrawal marks the breakdown of Crusoe’s heretofore successful efforts to shape his external environment into a reflection of his own image—what we might call his “incorporative” character idiom—and in fact exposes this strategy as a protective gesture aimed at preventing his own incorporation by others. Up to this point, Crusoe had managed to evade his father’s demands through the construction of an elaborate fantasy, the survival of which depended on his asociality and unchallenged dominance. The invasion of the “real” world conjures the same feelings of inauthenticity that made Crusoe restless prior to the shipwreck. For Crusoe, reentering the social realm precipitates a dissolution of selfhood, which manifests as a literal fear of being consumed. He now worries that he will be “murther’d and devour’d before Morning” (164). With the threat of annihilation no longer warded off by a sustained perception of autocratic rule and the guarantee of an object-free existence, the other necessarily appears as a persecutory force. For Crusoe, this force materializes as the literal peril of cannibalism.18 Paradoxically, the abject fear Crusoe suffers as a result of his encounter with the group of so-called “savages” enables a shift in character structure that eventuates in the restoration of his psychic health—as depicted in what we might refer to as the “rescue” phase of the novel. This final third section of the narrative portrays a series of events that concludes with Crusoe at once ensconced in the middle-class lifestyle his parents desired for him and continuing with his own independently wished-for career as a seafarer: the last two pages of the novel reveal that Crusoe, having become rich through his plantation interests, marries and has three children (304). To understand

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fully how Crusoe manages this remarkable reentry into the social order, we must focus on his gradual adaptations to an assemblage of symbolic codes and preferences—or, more precisely, his internalization of the law. Three factors are of particular importance to this developmental progress, each of which permits Crusoe to adjust to limited degrees of social involvement without regressing to the characterological crisis that preceded the shipwreck. First, anxiety over the perceived threat of cannibalism revives for Crusoe an impression of belonging to a wider social community, and specifically, it must be said, to one defined in terms of racial and national structures of feeling.19 By way of a negation—the cannibals represent the “not-me”—Crusoe expresses for the first time on the island that he believes himself to be a fragment of a larger whole. His reflections after finding the footprint, for instance, directly recall the geographic and religious referents of England: thus in his cave he “gave God thanks that He had cast my first Lot in a Part of the World, where I was distinguish’d from such dreadful Creatures” (166). In addition to these imaginings regarding “savagery,” Crusoe’s intensifying connection to the signifying world of Christianity enlarges his sense of kinship with people elsewhere. While his Biblical studies frequently reinforce his conviction that his fate on the island constitutes a divine punishment for the “original sin” of disobeying his parents’ directives,20 these readings also furnish him with a paternalistic law that at least lends itself to the perception of existing beyond human language. This last feature is significant, because the attribution of scripture to divine origins provides Crusoe, at last, with an authority that transcends the contradictory injunctions of his family environment. From the early stages of the shipwreck, the law of Christian doctrine slowly comes to substitute for the tainted law, embodied by his father, that Crusoe assiduously resists. Whereas his identification with his father made full participatory experience impossible, the identification with “God” gives Crusoe the symbolic force to authorize all of his actions with god-like status. His religious faith allows him to engage with others as subjects and so to maintain the autonomy that he has fiercely protected throughout.21 The full potential, then, of this newfound religious authority is realized only when invoked as a force of subjection in the dyadic relationship between Crusoe and Friday. This relationship affords Crusoe a ritualistic framework within which to practice the only mode of sociality he has to this point proven willing to tolerate—the conversion of the other into a mirror image. It must be noted that Friday becomes reduced in the novel to a cipher, without a subjective life of his own. Yet through Friday, Crusoe assumes the role of a missionary who receives unqualified affection from his disciple, much as a parent would from a child. Crusoe himself acknowledges Friday’s

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contingency: “never Man had a more faithful, loving, sincere Servant, than Friday was to me; without Passions, Sullenness or Designs, perfectly oblig’d and engag’d; his very Affections were ty’d to me, like those of a Child to a Father” (209). In Defoe’s fantasy of the evolution of Western civilization, Crusoe functions for Friday as the law. He equips Friday with both religion and language and, again in the fantasy, produces him as a subject. More than a hint of narcissism is therefore apparent when Crusoe states that he “began really to love the Creature; and on his Side, I believe he lov’d me more than it was possible for him ever to love any Thing before” (214). As difficult as it may be to view the exploitation of Friday as an expression of love, one must acknowledge that, despite his servitude, Friday manages to animate Crusoe’s nascent emotional life and attenuate his pathological aversion to human companionship. The decided presence of this maturational arc prompts Robert Koff to compare the love between Friday and Crusoe to the transitional space produced in psychoanalysis between patient and therapist.22 Friday provides Crusoe, albeit less willingly than in the analytic context, with a stable object that neither provokes feelings of guilt nor poses the danger of disintegration. Because Friday acts with no independence whatsoever, he represents no competitive threat and, as a result, serves to palliate Crusoe’s sense of isolation and to bridge his transition back to the realm of humanity. Even so, outside the context of the subjection of Friday Crusoe remains fragile. When rescue appears imminent, he fears that Friday will “forget all his Religion . . . and all his obligation to me” (224).23 These periodic anxieties notwithstanding, Crusoe’s mirroring alliance with Friday, the stabilizing identifications he forms in reaction to his paranoid fantasies regarding savagery, and his internalization of Christianity all facilitate his reentry into the social world. The lasting impact of Crusoe, however, and the basis of the link to modern obsession, lies in its depiction of how this socialization takes place: the conversion of a condition of absolute solitude to one of absolute mastery. Only in isolation is Crusoe able to forge any coherence of self; only in the attainment of complete control over the external world does he discover the means to authenticity. Any social exchange that demands reciprocity, such as the brief arrangements Crusoe attempts in Britain and Brazil, proves alienating to him and incites the impulse to escape. The crucible of the shipwreck, by contrast, provides Crusoe with the very disunity he requires in order to consolidate his own sense of self since, in the face of this alienation, Crusoe has no other choice but to pursue what Horkheimer and Adorno refer to as an “atomistic interest” (61). Crusoe comes to recognize himself as the antithesis of the disorder he confronts in the shipwreck and on the island—as a “self.” This process—the production of continuity out of raw diversity—underlies the entire notion of

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adventure, and for this reason Horkeimer and Adorno turn to prototypical adventure narratives like Crusoe and Odysseus to describe the specifically modern dialectic whereby alienation feeds the drive toward mastery: Radical socialization means radical alienation. Odysseus and Crusoe are both concerned with totality: the former measures whereas the latter produces it. Both realize totality only in complete alienation from all other men, who meet the two protagonists only in alienated form—as enemies or as points of support, but always as tools, as things. (62)

According to the obsessional logic outlined here by Horkheimer and Adorno, socialization is anathema to the autonomy of the self, so the traveler ventures elsewhere in order to produce a “totality” outside the realm of extant social relations. Such a feat necessarily requires treating the object world as mere adjuncts of the self—as “things.” As Crusoe shows, a particular confluence within the symbolic order—in his case, the intersection of racial and religious affiliations and against the backdrop of Friday’s subjection—may lend itself to a degree of compatibility between the obsessional character idiom and forms of active social engagement.24 But Crusoe suggests that this social engagement assumes a strictly authoritarian form. Only over the course of his protracted isolation does Crusoe display a willingness to embrace his British citizenship and to renew his identification with the symbolic order. However, as I will illustrate in the next section, many contemporary travelogues do not depict this sort of re-integration with the social order, and in fact demonstrate that, superimposed onto decidedly modern contexts, the core structure of the Robinsonade consists of an irresolvable preoccupation with death and annihiliation. CRUSOE REVISIONISM: FROM TRIUMPHALISM TO TRAGEDY At the heart of the obsessional narrative is a protest. Crusoe rejects the injunction of his father to seek the “middle station” of life, just as the Rat Man repudiates his father’s choices regarding the selection of a lover.25 Though both men consciously reject their fathers’ directives, they still retain an attachment to their fathers in the form of a lingering identification, and therefore their revolts remain only partial. In terms of narrative trajectory, the “incomplete” character of this rebellion drives them toward a liminal existence: they seek separation from their family milieus but fail to tolerate the resulting guilt and alienation, and then, with no other recourse, seek refuge in a self-generated language. I have attempted to show how in each case their reintegration

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with the symbolic order of the social world is made possible through the internalization of a paternal structure—such as religion, race or an individual (such as an analyst)—that resolves the core problem of inauthenticity. Yet what should happen if the subject clings to his liminal status and rejects all manifestations of the law? It seems entirely plausible that, given the chance to occupy his hermetic fortress without the looming threat of an invasion, Crusoe would have been content on the island indefinitely. Once the island boundaries are breached, however, Crusoe succumbs to hallucinatory fears of persecution. He emerges from this spell only because he successfully plays out his homicidal impulses. In the modern travel narrative, the obsessional rarely experiences this sort of “triumph.” Either the paranoiac fears of invasion envelop the traveler in a trenchant psychosis, or the impulse to annihilate the threat of intrusion yields tragic, and not redemptive, results. I will explore this point with reference to three modern travel narratives exemplary of the Crusoe schematic: Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast, Alex Garland’s The Beach, and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. THE INVENTOR: NEGATION AND DYSTOPIA IN THE MOSQUITO COAST Paul Theroux’s contributions to the travel oeuvre typically enlarge upon the theme of nostalgia for a bygone era, a mood that he attenuates with a tone of sardonic detachment.26 This theme—the structure of which centers on a separation or loss that can never be repaired—accords with the trajectory I outline for the melancholic travel genre. Yet The Mosquito Coast, a mostly self-conscious rewriting of the Crusoe myth, portrays a specifically obsessional resolution to the problem of loss, and in so doing illustrates the apocalyptic potential inherent in such a programmatic response. Whereas the melancholic traveler reacts to the dissolution of selfhood with resignation, and may even represent his nostalgia for wholeness as a source of redemptive virtue, moral armament, or artistic inspiration, the obsessional inclines toward mastery; he seeks to restore fragmentation to coherence. In The Mosquito Coast, this undertaking falls to a family patriarch named Allie Fox, whose wholesale contempt for modernity motivates his search for a “blank” area of the map—one, he says, with “no roads, no towns, no names”—where he intends to impose his own distinctive order. What becomes apparent over the course of the novel is that Allie will not consent to any compromises concerning his personal vision of the ideal society. He regards any syncretism with preexisting social forms as anathema to his own utopian vision.

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Having rejected a tainted world, Allie pursues the only profession that will preserve his coveted insularity: he works as an inventor. Like any inventor, he strives constantly to chart new territory, but Allie does so with an aggressive temperament that hints at the volatile dynamic between protest and novelty. Rather than employ existing technology as building blocks for his creations, Allie insists on beginning from scratch. The most logical extension of this propensity for pure invention entails a rejection of language altogether—a notion affirmed in Allie’s longing for a place with “no names.” Yet when the novel opens, in Hatfield, Massachusetts, Allie appears to have discovered a compromise between an absolute repudiation of civilization and wholesale adaptation; he seems to have settled into a tolerable degree of social participation. He lives with his wife and four children on Tiny Polski’s remote farm, where he works as a technician with preternatural skill. He has apparently arrived at the farm after spurning a Harvard scholarship “in order,” he says, “to get a good education” (14). Charlie, who narrates, describes his father as a “disappointed man—angry and disgusted” (59). Yet on the farm at least, Allie gains some comfort in his identity as an inventor who counters a social world deemed to be false. Invention signifies a process of sustaining an alternative subjectivity, made necessary by an absolute rejection of the material world. At the same time, although he insists on producing his inventions from scratch, Allie is by no means detached from the social world around him. His manner of severing ties to the material world should not be construed as strict escapism. Allie’s fantasies always suggest the transformation of a degraded world into one that more fully lives up to its idealized potential. His social critique does not lead to the detachment characteristic of physical hermitage or any transcendent mysticism, but rather inspires his determined, unrelenting efforts to reshape his environment. The ideological underpinnings that inform Allie’s rigorous attempts to apply his social critique are evident in the clashing sentiments he expresses regarding education and technology. Allie at once worships the potential of technology and abhors what he regards as its persistent misapplication by corrupt bureaucracies. As examples of the gap between promise and practice he cites an intellectual lassitude that favors pointless applications such as television; a corrupt division of labor that betrays national boundaries and exploits unskilled migrants; and a self-interested business culture that rewards scientific mediocrity. These plaints recall the crippling ambivalence that the Rat Man and Crusoe feel for their fathers—and for the social laws and norms that their fathers embody. In the simultaneous indictment of a society gone awry and the propagation of a corrective,

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Allie dramatizes the dialectical—and specifically obsessional—tension between protest and novelty. He personifies the obsessional wish to turn a false world into a true one. The cataclysmic events of The Mosquito Coast are set in motion when a challenge is posed to the abundant confidence Allie places in the transformative power of his inventions. Polski rejects his latest and most technologically sophisticated invention: a cold box that operates on gas instead of electricity. Allie demonstrates the icebox to Polski with considerable enthusiasm, but Polski remarks only that he’s “got no use for it” (35). With this dismissal, Allie ceases to view Hatfield as a viable place in which to execute his authentic vision. Charlie observes that as he and his father exit Polski’s home his father smiles, a sign that Allie has already hatched a plan to seek a clean slate elsewhere. Without conferring with his family or even informing them of his intentions, Allie hastily gathers some rudimentary supplies and then, two days after the confrontation with Polski, takes his family on a drive across the east coast to Baltimore to secure passage on a ferry to Honduras. Recasting Crusoe’s misfortune as a principled choice, Allie remarks upon departing the homeland that has evoked such strong antithetical feelings of love and hate, “Goodbye America—if anyone asks, say we were shipwrecked” (75). On board the ship to the Mosquito Coast—a vessel dubbed the Unicorn, as if to presage the unattainable, mythical status of the object Allie pursues—Allie’s conduct further exemplifies the obsessional drive to constitute an exclusive fount of social authority. An encounter with the Spellgoods, a missionary family stationed in Honduras who reappear sporadically throughout the novel and serve to accentuate the irreconcilability between religious and obsessional authority, only invigorates Allie’s efforts to cast himself as a kind of Nietzschean superman. For Allie, belief in an extramural god acts only to weaken human resolve. During one typical squabble with Reverend Spellgood, he states that he rejects praise for God because “Man is God” (93). Allie believes that he may in fact function as god, and this view drives his efforts to bring his ideal society to fruition; his inevitable failure to perform with divine authority precipitate his relentless rage and aggression. At various stages this aggression will take a masochistic form, as when Allie appears increasingly to detest signs of his own humanity. He claims, for example, that he can go days without food, never needs sleep and never gets sick (156). At the height of his success in the jungle, he acknowledges that his inventions make him “feel a little like God” (209). Yet when his autarkic society goes awry and he grows desperate to restore his family’s willingness to be adjuncts to his obsessional schemes, he becomes aggressively authoritarian. At the height of the crisis, he insists on absolute control, telling his

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family that, “I am the captain of this ship, and those are my orders” (336). The seeds of this insistence on dominance manifest more playfully on the Unicorn, although Allie’s antipathy for competing authorities still compels him to try to “out-captain the Captain” as the two men work on the repair of a faulty pump (104). Unlike Crusoe, who over time accedes to collective ideologies based on religion and race, Allie rejects all extramural doctrines and beliefs and defends the autonomy of his individual vision throughout.27 Allie, then, seeks out his social separation much more decisively than Crusoe, whose “discovery” is somewhat more serendipitous. In Honduras, Allie immediately purchases a town called Jeronimo, located in a remote wilderness, still with his family uninformed of his plans yet following inexorably. Jeronimo, which Allie describes as being “better than a desert island,” appeals to Allie precisely because it appears to exist outside of any discursive frame; it is, to Allie’s mind, prelinguistic (121). The family’s arrival prompts Charlie to reflect on a previous instance when he learned that a place derives meaning only by way of its structuration through language. Thinking back to a trip that he and Allie once took to the Massachusetts State Line, he recalls that, “Father pointed to a small black stump and said, ‘That’s the State Line there.’” “I looked at this rotten stump—the State Line! Jeronimo was like that. We had to be told what it was” (138). For the obsessional, this act of naming—of imposing meaning on a void—constitutes the object of an unremitting quest. When Allie sets his eyes on Jeronimo, he declares, “Nothing—nothing! This is what I dreamed about—nothing!” (138). Functioning as the town’s formative symbolic authority, he then proceeds to articulate the blueprint that will be Jeronimo’s civilizational idiom: I see a house here . . . Kind of a barn there, with a workshop—a real blacksmith’s shop, with a forge. Over there, the out-house and plant. Slash and burn the whole area and we’ve got four or five acres of growing land. We’ll put our water-tank on that rise and we’ll divert part of the stream so we get some water into those fields. We’ll have to lose some of these trees, but there’s plenty more, and anyway we’ll need timber for a bridge. . . . (139)

After Allie finishes outlining these schematics, the Foxes and a few local Zambus who had been living in the bush begin the labor of transforming Jeronimo. Allie’s vigilant surveillance ensures that the work takes place under the aegis of his supervision. Charlie notes, for instance, that “it was father’s policy that no one should be idle” (147).28 Yet even as Allie’s ideal society begins to materialize, Allie, like Crusoe, shows signs of paranoia regarding

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the permeability of this society’s boundaries and the contingency of his authority. Initially, operations at Jeronimo begin promisingly enough. Allie clearly reaches his emotional apex while participating most intensively in the process of rationalizing Jeronimo’s landscape to accord with his designs, as evidenced by his tendency to break into song while he works: “Under the bam! Under the boo!” (150). As with Crusoe, Allie finds comfort and safety only through the negation of intersubjective competition; he organizes around the conversion of others to his idiom. For this reason, Allie’s periods of contentment are fleeting. He takes great pride, for example, in completing the centerpiece of Jeronimo’s infrastructure—a large-scale model of the “Worm Tub” that he had previously showcased for Polski. Allie’s personification of the ice-box as an entity with “lungs”, “a pair of kidneys” and a “liver” reflects the degree to which technological innovation functions for him as a paternal signifier—a symbolic equivalent to god. The awe that Fat Boy, as the icebox comes to be known, inspires in the inhabitants of Jeronimo certainly appeals to Allie’s narcissism, but more importantly it registers the success of his attempts at conversion and the recognition that his inventions have brought into being a purified world. Charlie, at once daunted by his father’s abilities and attuned to his father’s potential for madness, recognizes the symbiosis between the anthropomorphized machine and his father. The genesis of Fat Boy coincides with Allie and the instantiation of the law: This was no belly—this was Father’s head, the mechanical part of his brain and the complications of his mind, as strong and huge and mysterious. It was all revealed to me, but there was too much of it, like a book page, full of secrets, printed too small. Everything fitted so neatly and was so well bolted and finely fixed it looked selfish. I could see that it had order, but the order—the size of it—frightened me. (168)

Once finished, however, Allie’s celebrations are demonstrative but brief, since only by pressing forward with the conversion of others—with the creation of doubles—can he sustain the impression of exclusive authority. The continuous performances he enacts to assert his mastery ensure that he remains, in Charlie’s words, “the Sole Proprietor of Jeronimo” (229). These performances, which take the guise of rituals of conversion, purification and discipline, function as Allie’s obsessional repertoire. He labors, for example, to spread the Jeronimo conceit to outlying areas by undertaking multiple expeditions to introduce ice where it was previously thought to be

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unknown. Inevitably these endeavors fail to live up to Allie’s utopian aspirations precisely because they confront him with signifiers of alterity. The presence of tin cans along the trail hints at an a priori civilization, and the discovery that the residents of a nearby village have already seen ice affirms this fact decisively: “What can you do with people who have already been corrupted,” Allie says (198). Where conversion fails, Allie relies on a defensive impulse to purify Jeronimo of all foreign influence. This constant assertion of his own vision manifests in his tendency to ridicule Christian missionaries and expressions of local animistic beliefs with equal fervor, displaying an aversion to both modernity and so-called “savagery.” Another instance of his contrived insularity surfaces in his scant knowledge of external political events. He has never heard of Mussolini and, of particular importance to the downfall of Jeronimo, shows no awareness of mounting civil conflict along the Nicaraguan border. Charlie, who along with the rest of the family has been a willing if occasionally skeptical adjunct to his father’s plans, recognizes still the monolithic character of his father’s rendering of the law. Charlie attempts to follow his father’s plans, but he too suffers the burden of being held to an overly authoritarian paternal signifier. He struggles with his father’s refusal to admit—and in fact his active campaign against—all contrary points of view. To counter Allie’s rigidity, the children construct a secret hideaway they call “the Acre.” The Acre provides the children of Jeronimo with an opportunity, above all, to act as children. As Charlie notes, “Father treated us like adults, which meant he put us to work. But we were children—homesick half the time and afraid of the dark and not very strong” (215). To be more precise, The Acre functions as a negative image of Jeronimo. It is, as Charlie states, “filled with things that Father had forbidden,” such as radios, schools, churches and money (176). The Acre is founded in a spirit of contrariety: it represents the split-off “bad” counterpart to the benign object embodied by Allie’s Jeronimo. For Charlie, The Acre represents a place to indulge the imagination or to entertain beliefs and behaviors deemed irrational, and therefore toxic, by Allie. Yet even more importantly, The Acre allows for quiescence. As Charlie notes, his father aims constantly to discipline and improve the environment. Allie believes that “it’s savage and superstitious to accept the world as it is” (242). Charlie, on the other hand, seeks to escape the implacability of his father’s discipline and so takes refuge in his own private arena where he and the children may live outside the burden of Allie’s repetitions and interminable civilizational improvements—where they may, as Charlie says, “live like monkeys” (241). The ice expeditions, which result in Allie’s first and most substantial failure to disseminate the Jeronimo idea, mark a turning point in the novel.

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Despite the fact that the ice melts en route to the target destination and that the local natives appear disinterested and are indentured to three armed soldiers, Allie misrepresents the success of the mission. He insists that the natives were “flabbergasted and confounded” upon witnessing the ice (233). Charlie, who after this episode becomes increasingly distanced from his father, notes that Allie’s lie “made me lonelier than any I had ever heard” (235). Allie suppresses all awareness of these setbacks, even upon finding that the Ropers, a local Zambu family who had been residing in Jeronimo, had defected to a nearby mission and thereby exhibited a preference for a competing civilizational idiom.29 The appearance of the three armed soldiers in Jeronimo represents for Allie the return of the repressed. Just as Crusoe had fashioned the island around him into a reflection of his own image only to become paranoiac concerning the invasion of cannibals, Allie deems the soldiers “scavengers” and becomes preoccupied with their removal. When the soldiers enter Fat Boy, Charlie says of Allie that “men he hated had penetrated this private place” (259). Whereas the vanquishing of the cannibals serves to consolidate Crusoe’s identity and facilitate his social reintegration, for Allie the failure to eliminate the scavengers precipitates a psychotic break. When the soldiers refuse to leave, Allie, declaring that no one in this world “has to endure a minute of oppression,” hatches a plot to lock them inside Fat Boy and leave them to die from the intense cold (257). The plan, however, backfires when the soldiers begin firing their guns and induce a massive explosion that destroys the buildings and envelops Jeronimo in toxic ammonia. The Fox family escapes unharmed only because Charlie leads them to refuge in The Acre, and from this moment forward Allie becomes incoherent—that is, severed from the field of signification—and the family is reduced to a contingent, virtually helpless existence. Allie refuses to acknowledge the loss altogether—saying only “I’m happy Jeronimo is destroyed”—and instead works toward the refinement of his autarkic symbolic universe. He will henceforth rely only on “physics, not chemistry” he says. “No chemicals except those that occur naturally” (271). For Allie, the demise of Jeronimo enables a kind of freedom because it releases him from the tethers to what had evolved into a decidedly shared social world. He happily declares that the disaster, which destroys all of the family’s possessions, is “like being shipwrecked” (276). The destruction allows him to start, once again, ab initio. Allie never gains an opportunity to rebuild Jeronimo, and instead the very impossibility of asserting an exclusively independent and authentic vision of his own prompts a dramatic mental retreat. He tells the family that America has perished in a war, apparently conflating the burning of Jeronimo

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with the end of the United States (285). It appears that Allie, sensing his family’s fading loyalties, will now say anything to sustain their faith in his vision. In the final episodes of the novel, Allie continues with a desperate effort to find the last wilderness. Despite the family’s destitution, he remains deeply critical of all other settlement models they encounter. He refuses, for instance, all gifts from a local Miskito’s fecund vegetable garden and upon departing calls it “pathetic” (283). He declares that “if it’s on a map I can’t use it” (289). “Home” becomes a forbidden word because it suggests an alternative to Allie’s constant motion. Perpetual movement functions for Allie as the only guarantor of his authenticity because it alone sustains the illusion of absolutist control. At its most extreme, this outlook entails not only a rejection of external sources of authority but a complete fantasy of their demise: in Charlie’s words, “when it looked to [Allie] as though America was doomed, he invented a way out” (286). As the novel closes, Allie strives toward complete but impossible separation. When the makeshift hut that he constructs to shelter the family in a lagoon after the fall of Jeronimo is washed away by the monsoon, he tells the family that they must fight against the current, because “down there is death” (323). Amid the disaster, he continues to insist that everyone else is dying and that they alone possess the ingenuity to survive; “the whole world is ours,” he declares (325). Charlie observes that Allie appears to forget the past altogether, as if memory constitutes an intolerable tie to an external law. The four children, near helpless, begin to call their father “captain.” The mother insists that “we have to do as we’re told” (364). The resolution for this apocalyptic scenario comes when the entire family, having escaped the lagoon on a boat and now pushing upriver, passes the Spellgoods’ house. Charlie, now certain that his father has gone mad, attempts to make contact with Emily, the Spellgoods’ daughter whom he met on the ship from Baltimore, but Allie attempts to sabotage the effort by setting fire to the Spellgoods’ generator. Unable to see Allie retreat into the woods, the Spellgoods mistake the deed as the work of communist rebels and open fire in the brush, ultimately shooting Allie in the neck. As Allie dies on the ship, the family allows him to believe that they are continuing his fantasy of going upstream against the current. Allie dies contentedly with these thoughts in mind, and his frailty prompts Charlie to wonder whether the desperation behind Allie’s search for the last wilderness derives from an underlying weakness and vulnerability (379). The root of this vulnerability, as I have attempted to show in this chapter, originates with an overly restrictive symbolic system that produces the syndrome of a false self. The struggle against such a system pervades any dyadic relationship, a point to which Allie’s tortured affinity to his wife attests. Allie

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refers to his wife as “mother” throughout the novel, and holds contradictory views of her as a disloyal aide and a protective caretaker. On the boat, he tells her “you’ve always been against me. You always tried to undermine me” (366). Then, nearly in the same breath, he says, “don’t leave me . . . I’m bleeding, Mother” (369). One of the central contributions of psychoanalysis has been to address the balance of separation and attachment that any person must labor to achieve—with respect both to “maternal” dyads and “paternal” symbolic structures. As Christopher Bollas has argued, for the obsessional this balance presents a scenario resolvable either through successful character development—as with the arduous process endured by Crusoe—or, as with the more tragic ends depicted in The Mosquito Coast, death. Bollas contends that the absorption of objects into the obsessional’s symbolic realm functions as a way to truncate unconscious experience: “Pathological obsession is aimed at maintaining a terminal object that ends all unconscious use of the object: ideational, affective, somatic, or transferential” (Bollas, Cracking Up 78).30 The obsessional travel genre, then, portrays subjects who desperately seek separation in order to articulate their personal idiom, but who ultimately fail to neutralize and control objects in the way they desire. In other words, their relationship to these objects remains dialogic despite their efforts to make it monologic. THE PERFECT FOOTPRINT: VIOLENCE & OBSESSIONALITY IN ALEX GARLAND’S THE BEACH Alex Garland’s popular 1997 novel The Beach presents one of the most explicit, if pessimistic, renderings of the youth subculture of adventure travel of any recent novel or travelogue. The novel dramatizes the impossible circumstances that arise when travel at once becomes central to personal expressivity and a means of incorporating or eliminating the threat posed by external objects. Hailed by critics as a dissection of the mentality of “Generation X,”31 The Beach portrays this group as full of adolescent rebellion, alienated and searching for meaning, and largely indifferent to worldly concerns: all of which suggest a conflict between self-articulation and the social order. This sense of restlessness leads Richard, a mid-twenties British traveler, and a young French couple to seek out a mysterious beach spoken of by a man at a Thai guesthouse, who signs in under the name “Daffy Duck” and who, when he confronts Richard, appears incoherent and traumatized. That evening he commits suicide and tacks to Richard’s door a map to the beach. Although an experienced traveler, Richard seems largely jaded when he arrives in Thailand. He takes a cursory walk down the backpacker-dominated Ko Sanh Road and

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then veers briefly into the Patpong district, but acknowledges that he’s “not much for sight-seeing” (30). Etienne and Françoise, the French couple, also claim to be bored with the tourist circuit in Thailand. Etienne expresses a wish to do something “different” than the other backpackers, who all seem to “do the same thing” (19). The only solution, Etienne suggests, is to venture to a place not inhabited by other tourists, and so the hastily scrawled map marking a potentially obscure beach becomes invested with an allure that far exceeds that of his adventure guidebook. This adventure guidebook, maligned by Richard and his friends, is subject to a structural contradiction, simultaneously promising escape from touristic modes of sightseeing and prescribing a whole ensemble of touristic codes and practices. The hermeneutic paradox of the adventure guidebook stems from the fact that by canonizing the sight, it enervates its potential for private “use”; it turns an unbeaten path into a well-trodden one. The obsessional response, then, attempts to redress a kind of depreciating value of objects, which results when these objects can no longer be personalized, by annihilating them. The Beach depicts this structural feature of adventure by way of an extended metaphor of video games. For Richard, the excitement of these games derives from the thrill of eluding death, a feat that can be accomplished only by killing all other objects that appear on the screen.32 In the subculture of backpackers in Thailand, this defensive aggression manifests as a contest among tourists: secrecy becomes of utmost importance and all other backpackers are viewed as potential enemies. In The Beach, the utopian ideal of a place apart from other objects can only be sustained through an unconscious substructure of paranoia and violence. The figure of “Mr. Duck” functions as an emblem for this undercurrent of violence. He symbolizes the “unthought” that structures both Richard’s character and the intersubjective field of the beach.33 Initially, Mr. Duck appears only in Richard’s dreams, but as the story unfolds Richard grows less able to distinguish between dreaming and waking life and takes to addressing Mr. Duck as if he were present. One may view Mr. Duck as an analogue to Friday. Yet whereas Friday plays a mostly subservient role to Crusoe—as a safe introjection—Mr. Duck acts as a voice of conscience that forewarns of Richard’s own psychotic break and ultimately exposes the madness of the obsessional fantasy on which the beach is founded. As Richard, Etienne and Françoise ride a train out of Bangkok, Richard dreams that Mr. Duck aims his slashed wrists toward a ceiling fan, so that blood “falls around [Richard] like rain” (34). This imagery establishes the metaphor of war as a framing device for the narrative. Richard peppers his telling of the story with military jargon and numerous allusions to Vietnam and the 1991 Gulf War. When

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the trio finally arrives at the “forbidden” marine park where the beach is purported to be, it turns out that the park is in fact a marijuana field defended by armed militia. Directly adjacent to the beach, the field presents a stark contrast to the travelers’ idealizations, but is in fact inseparable from these idealizations. The demilitarized zone represents the manifest reality of the dreamlike (and latent) character of the beach. A description offered by two travelers, Sammy and Zeph, who hear rumors of its existence, affirms the beach’s otherwordly status: Think about a lagoon, hidden from the sea and passing boats by a high curving wall of rock. Then imagine white sands and coral gardens never damaged by dynamite fishing or trawling nets. Freshwater falls scatter the island, surrounded by jungle—not the forests of inland Thailand, but jungle. Canopies three levels deep, plants untouched for a thousand years, strangely colored birds and monkeys in the trees. On the white sands, fishing in the coral gardens, a select community of travelers pass the months. They leave if they want to, they return, the beach never changes. “Select?” I [Richard] asked quietly, as if talking through a dream. Zeph’s vision had entirely consumed me. “Select,” he replied. “Word of mouth passes on the location to a lucky few.” “It’s paradise,” Sammy murmured. “It’s Eden.” (58)

The geographic proximity of a militarized war zone to the travelers’ paradise underscores that violence constitutes a structural counterpart to the aspirations of privilege and exclusivity expressed in this exchange. Richard, not yet entirely sold on the premise of a beach paradise, refrains from acknowledging that he has a map to the beach and then discloses it only as an afterthought upon leaving. When Richard, Etienne and Françoise finally arrive at the beach, they encounter a group of thirty travelers who initially welcome them cordially. Sal, a matriarchal figure with a decisive leadership role in the community, informs Richard that the place is a “beach resort . . . a place to come to for vacations” (97). Richard is disappointed by such a nondescript account. He tells Sal that he expected “an ideology or something. A purpose.” Yet as the trio begin to take on work assignments and to assimilate to the quotidian simplicity of the beach, they discover that the group indeed represents a comprehensive way of life that not only contrasts with the life they previously

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knew, but stands in direct opposition to it. It cannot be said, then, that the day-to-day rituals and performances of the beach arise organically from a set of constitutional codes and beliefs. Instead they are organized around the negation of the rules and principles that the beach members associate with their home worlds in European and American metropoles.34 Much of the travelers’ enthusiasm seems to center mainly on the fact of this separation more than on the pleasures derived from everyday activities. In fact, Richard offers a conspicuously succinct description of a typical day: swim in the lagoon, eat breakfast at eight, proceed to work (based on assignment to one of the group’s fishing, gardening, cooking or carpentry details), eat dinner at four, go to sleep at nine. This routine proceeds much as one would expect in a pre-industrial equatorial village, and on the surface that appears to be the basis of its appeal to the travelers. Yet if the exotic simplicity of village life constituted the main draw for the travelers, we could explain neither Richard’s descent into psychosis nor the intensifying social conflict that precipitates the violent demise of the community. In order to account fully for these events, we must consider the more irrational underpinnings of the quasi-nationalist substructure that both strengthens ties of affiliation among members of the beach and riles their anxieties—that is to say, its obsessional lineaments. These symptoms—a will to separate and anxiety regarding the preservation of the boundary that symbolizes separation—index a line of narrative continuity between Crusoe and The Beach. As with Crusoe, the beach travelers strive to shake an external law and to produce in its place one with more vernacular authenticity. In The Beach, the effect of this distance is achieved predominantly by a kind of induced amnesia. Richard acknowledges the ameliorative effect of amnesia in a framing anecdote, when he recalls that he originally took to travel after parting ways with a girlfriend. “Escape through travel works,” he says. “By the time the plane was airborne I’d forgotten England even existed” (115). In a more substantive episode, Richard travels with Jed, his partner in charge of surveying the surrounding waters for potential intruders, to the mainland town of Hadrin to renew the beach’s rice supply. At first eager to do a service for the group, Richard becomes uneasy when he realizes that “encountering the world would bring back all the things I’d been doing such a good job of forgetting” (164). His expectations are realized when a group of backpackers, recently arrived in Thailand from Cambodia and Vietnam, decidedly reject him after he awkwardly attempts to join their conversation. To comfort himself, Richard reflects on the protected enclave of the beach and takes solace in the notion that the beach is a place “where you could walk into a conversation at any time between anybody.” As with Crusoe and

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Allie, Richard’s romanticized conception of an autonomous place, as one that is separate from the persecution of the outside world, is accompanied by a degree of fear and introversion. Richard confesses, for instance, that the myriad voices around him “sounded like threats” to the “true preciousness of our hidden beach” (175). What Richard refers to as the “amnesiac effect” of the beach serves to mask the pain of this antagonism. Even with respect to his companions, Richard concedes that he knows nothing of their past lives and has discussed with them only the extent of their prior travels. The beach relies on this short-circuiting of diachronic awareness to sustain the illusion of autonomy. In this manner even homesickness is neutralized. Richard confesses in a conversation with Françoise that the mere mention of their parents “was slightly disquieting and neither of us wanted to dwell on the subject” (203). As if to underscore the point, Richard notes that members of the encampment do away with last names: “second names felt connected to the world, maybe because they were a link to family and home” (317). Severing this link—by way of forgetting—sustains a sense of separation from an outside law which, more than quotidian rituals, underwrites the intense emotional investment the travelers make to the sight. In the end, the repression required to preserve the sense of separation founders due to a sequence of crises that force into conscious awareness a clear sense of the ideological work necessary to sustain the illusion. These crises expose the underlying violence behind the fantasy of the beach as a utopian hideout: that the beach, in other words, requires a defense of a boundary even at the cost of annihilating all competing objects. As the novel’s conclusion reveals, once the travelers realize the vulnerability of the boundary they go to any lengths to assure that it remains impermeable. Yet this proves to be an impossible task and, as Richard’s trajectory affirms, the effort inevitably leads to madness. The rest of the group manages to elude the intrusion of the real until the beach’s final demise only because they redouble their faith in surface appearances upon hearing Sal’s plans for the restoration of order. Recognized as an authority due to her senior tenure on the beach, Sal bears responsibility for issuing the official rhetoric that will help the community navigate a sequence of crises. The first of these crises, a mass food poisoning, shows this public relations apparatus at work and illustrates Sal’s ongoing efforts to conceal smoldering antagonisms and to recuperate social order. This imbroglio begins when Keaty, a beach member working fishing detail, makes the mistake of placing an already-dead fish in his bucket, causing most of the camp to fall ill—with the notable exception of Richard who is away on a surveillance mission. Richard takes advantage of the opportunity to exercise some hostility

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toward Bugs, Sal’s partner, with whom Richard has frequently sparred. Assigned to assist Bugs, Richard instead humiliates him by refusing to help him outside. After Bugs soils himself indoors, Richard openly taunts him, telling him “Jesus, Bugs. Can’t you hold on?” (265). This treatment of Bugs leads to the deterioration of camp unity and manifests a skein of masculine aggression that has pervaded camp relations throughout. Sal gestures toward neutrality and responds by formulating plans for a ritual celebration to reaffirm the beach’s status as a utopian paradise where camaraderie prevails. The next crisis compels Sal to hasten her efforts, and necessitates a more dramatic suppression of violence than the deflation of simmering antipathies. While the group convalesces after the food poisoning episode, three Swedes who manage to stay healthy take over the fishing detail. Not fluent in English and having arrived at the beach uninvited, the Swedes—Karl, Sten and Christo—remain somewhat aloof from the group. Richard reasons that their marginal status might explain their reasons for fishing outside of the lagoon in the open ocean. The consequences for doing so are disastrous: as the group sits divided into two feuding factions in the longhouse—after Bugs punches Keaty for his fishing gaffe—Karl enters with Sten’s mangled body draped across his back. He announces that a shark attacked them while they were fishing, and that he remains unaware of Christo’s whereabouts. Richard sets out to find Christo and finds him badly injured and in need of immediate medical attention. An ethical dilemma, then, confronts the group: either take Christo back to the mainland where he likely will inform authorities about the secret beach, or keep him on the island and allow his condition to proceed apace. At this juncture, Richard echoes Sal’s hard line. Etienne suggests that Christo and Sten’s body should be left on the mainland and their families notified, to which Richard replies: “Yeah, and meanwhile we’d definitely get discovered. We’d be finished. It’s the worst idea I ever heard” (311). Sal not only rejects any notion that Sten and Christo should be returned to the mainland for medical attention, but also views the funereal ceremony as an opportunity both to heal divisions within the group and to declare publicly the overriding importance of preserving the beach’s survival. As she tells Richard, “Funerals have a way of drawing people together, don’t you think?” (315). Upon burying Sten, Sal delivers a speech emphasizing the theme of renewal and informs the group that in three days the beach will hold its annual “Tet festival”—a celebration marking the founding of the beach. Christo remains secluded in a hospital tent where only Jed—and later Richard—are aware of his presence. He stubbornly refuses to die—that is, he cannot be “buried”—and Sal regards his slow death as a secret to be guarded and an imminent threat to the Tet festival. She orders that he stay secluded,

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and for the most part everyone accepts her dissimulations concerning his deteriorating status. Only Jed and Etienne recognize the kind of panoptic power that Sal wields and begin to question, however timidly, the threat of force keeping the beach intact. Richard, as Sal’s chief agent designated to carry out these connivances, comes to symbolize this threat of force. He spends most of his time at the “DMZ”—shorthand for “demilitarized zone,” the stretch of marijuana fields guarded by armed Thai soldiers that lies at the boundary of the beach—performing surveillance. There he conducts in secret the activity that sustains the beach’s aura of uniqueness: the warding off of potential strangers—of outside objects. As with Allie, who, after the demise of Jeronimo, makes a labored but impossible attempt to separate from a tainted civilization, Richard succumbs to both violence and madness in the course of overseeing the line that delimits the beach from “the world.” On one occasion he attacks Karl—who emerges slowly from shock following the shark attack—out of fear that Karl will discover that Christo remains alive yet slowly dying in seclusion. Although Sal covers for him, her expressions of favoritism confer Richard with the reputation of one who “does things for Sal.” Richard grows increasingly alienated from the group and enters into a dreamlike state wherein he ruminates incessantly on the obsessional idea of the perfect place. He begins playing a game that entails trying to leave the “perfect footprint” in the sand, which Keaty likens to “insane” people trying to draw the perfect circle (309). On the DMZ, he starts to converse with Mr. Duck as a “real” interlocutor rather than encountering him, as he did previously, as an apparition in his dreams. The dialogues with Mr. Duck—one of the founders of the beach who sought, like Richard, to defend its boundaries against intrusion before going mad and taking his own life—symbolize Richard’s internal struggle to come to terms with the beach as an insoluble problem. Mr. Duck attempts to persuade him of the futility of guarding the beach against the “cancer” of outside travelers. He describes to Richard how he used to assemble plastic airplane models, only to find that he could never do the “perfect job”; dissatisfied, he would place firecrackers in the models and “blow them up” (328). For Mr. Duck, joining Richard on patrol in the DMZ represents the culmination of an enduring obsessional fantasy: having exercised exclusive agency in creating the beach, he now wields the god-like omnipotence to destroy it. Both of these acts—generation and dissolution—serve to further the fantasy of a selfenclosed object world and produce the sought-after impression of authenticity. In fact we may view Mr. Duck’s suicide, however tragic, as the penultimate achievement of the separation and autonomy that the obsessional traveler

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seeks: in his death he has found a means to distance himself from the mass of “other” travelers. At the same time, Mr. Duck compels Richard to consider that the very existence of the beach is premised on a kind of warfare with outside objects. Richard at first refuses this awareness and, feeling that he has been tricked, even attacks the apparition of Mr. Duck. Mr. Duck replies that he never offered Richard “anything but Vietnam.” “It so happens you wanted the beach, too.” “But,” he explains, “if you could have had Vietnam and kept the beach, it wouldn’t have been Vietnam” (378). Although Mr. Duck causes Richard to reflect more concretely on the consequences of his actions, his presence serves to reinforce Richard’s obsessional quagmire more than it coaxes him toward rationality and conscience. Richard emerges from his isolate delirium only when Mr. Duck persuades him that “it all works out”: that is, that the destruction of the law fulfills the same obsessional desire for autonomy as the invention of the law. Whereas one may interpret Richard’s final actions on the beach as evidence that he has “come to his senses”—by finally recognizing the violence on which this imagined community is predicated—he continues throughout the final crisis to teeter between feelings of unreality and conscious awareness of the underlying militarism. He alternately approaches events, for instance, as if enmeshed in a video game and then expresses disbelief at the degree of destruction being wrought. A sequence of events leading to the decisive downfall of the beach will test, but only partially break, his commitment to the obsessional fantasy. These events unfold when Sammy and Zeph, the two travelers to whom Richard had furnished a map en route to the beach, manage after weeks of stagnancy on an adjacent island to manufacture a raft and, along with three companions, reach the island where the beach is located. The Thai drug guards, however, intercept them and, upon realizing that the travelers have a map that could lead masses of tourists to their field, kill the entire group. Richard and Jed, who alone execute surveillance on the beach’s borders, had considered this massacre as a contingency, and so Richard remains ambivalent as to whether he should grieve for his former friends or take solace that he no longer need worry about the new arrivals discovering Christo. Still partially invested in the fantasy, he confesses that “it had all gone wrong or it had all gone right. I couldn’t decide which” (361). He further expresses surprise that “death still has the capacity to appall” him. Upon reporting back to Sal, Richard finds that she appears comforted by this turn of events and her conviction strengthens his own. His encounter with Jed, however, elicits a decidedly different response. Jed, who spends all of his time in seclusion nursing Christo, acknowledges the news but tells Richard that he no longer believes in the beach. Surprised by Jed’s response, Richard

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attempts to explain the importance of these events: “it means the beach is safe. Tet and morale . . . and our secrecy . . .” (371). Yet the rejection of Christo by the camp has brought to light for Jed the internal contradictions of the beach (or we may say, it has exposed its unconscious substructure, the unthought): he tells Richard that the beach is only about denial, “out of sight out of . . .” (373). Hearing this explanation helps Richard to consolidate some of his own latent skepticism regarding the drastic measures being taken to preserve the beach’s borders. His most decisive reality-testing comes when he engages Etienne, the group’s most vocal dissident, in casual conversation only to find Etienne too terrified to speak frankly to him and desperately fearful of reprisals for undermining the unity of the beach. The novel ends with a Richard engineering an escape with Jed, Keaty, Etienne and Françoise. These plans are foiled, however, when the drug guards intrude on the eve of the Tet festival to warn the camp that they inhabit the beach only with their consent. They produce the map recovered from Sammy and Zeph to show that the pact between the factions has been violated. To stress their point, the soldiers deposit before the camp the five dead bodies of the travelers they killed. When the guards abruptly exit without killing anyone else, Sal half-heartedly implores the group to continue celebrating, but nearly everyone appears traumatized and begins to attack and dismember the corpses. Sal’s eyes fall to the map that the soldiers leave behind and she notices the handwritten note from Richard thereby disclosing, to her horror, the source of the breach in the veil of secrecy protecting the beach’s location. Once exposed, the group turns on Richard and begins to stab and punch him. Slipping in and out of the obsessional fantasy until the end, Richard converses amidst the beating with the phantom Mr. Duck about how this Vietnam scenario should end: “evacuation,” he concludes. As if on cue, his fellow conspirators overpower the rest of the group with spears and the five escapees make their way to the makeshift raft abandoned by the five deceased travelers. The narrative effectively concludes at this point, although Richard provides a concise account of how the remaining camp members eventually abandoned the beach. Richard closes with an acknowledgement that he carries “a lot of scars” and then offers that he likes “the way that sounds” (436). Despite the catastrophic ending, the residual memory of the beach— symbolized as markings on the body—still fuels the obsessional fantasy of separation from a civilizational law. It is important to underscore that the beach travelers commit to generating a new law, and do not merely reject an existing one. This fact, I contend, comprises the obsessional character of the beach and fundamentally differentiates it from, for instance, the structure of melancholic travel.

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THE EVASION OF ATTACHMENT: A JOURNEY INTO THE WILD If The Beach’s depiction of a contemporary backpacker subculture extends the Crusoe myth by underscoring the violence that results when authentic selfhood is sought through the elimination of intersubjective competition, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild dramatizes the deleterious impact of the pursuit of this obsessional idea on the individual. Although very much influenced by the mythography of the American West, Christopher McCandless relies less on a geographically separate realm onto which to graft one’s own authentic civilizational idiom, such as the islands in Crusoe and The Beach or Allie’s Jeronimo. No outward acts of violence are necessary to defend the protected area’s geographical boundaries. Instead the young explorer described by Krakauer attempts to shed all human relationships, and therefore to preclude any meaningful engagement with outside objects; violence exists primarily as a form of masochistic self-denial. This subject of Krakauer’s narrative pursues not so much a Shangri-la, as in the texts previously discussed in this chapter, but rather a modus vivendi that embodies the very notions of autonomy and self-reliance.35 Travel still holds the promise of radical separation. As a highlighted passage from his copy of Dr. Zhivago suggests, he seeks to commit himself to “something absolute,” such as “life or truth or beauty,” instead of “man-made rules” (102). Yet rather than defend the boundaries of some circumscribed territory, he seeks physical and mental separation by remaining in constant motion as a means to elude merger with other objects. This position ultimately proves untenable. In the end, the effort to find this absolute, to live exclusively in accordance with his own self-generated law, compels him to invent and then take refuge in a wilderness of sorts, which becomes his own makeshift island. As McCandless himself makes clear, his journey, which ends tragically with his death in Alaska, symbolizes an epic intrapsychic struggle: he acknowledges as he begins his travels that death represents one outcome of what he calls “the climactic battle to kill the false being within” (163). Unlike the fictionalized imaginings of the texts previously discussed in this chapter, Krakauer’s work consists of investigative reportage that seeks to piece together the details of twenty-something itinerant, Christopher McCandless, who roamed the western United States for two years under the alias “Alex.” Krakauer summarizes the story as follows: Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar

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Like Crusoe, McCandless came from a middle-class family that anticipated his striving toward a degree of mainstream affluence. His father, who confesses that he “misread” Chris, expected that the bank account would be used for law school (20). McCandless rejects his parent’s assistance decisively, and perhaps somewhat aggressively, declaring in a letter to his sister that he cannot accept any gifts from them “because they will think they have bought my respect” (21). He asks the post office to hold all of his parent’s letters for one month in order to maintain the impression of normalcy and then, in August, drives west in his old Datsun, eventually landing in Lake Meade National Recreation area in Nevada. As if to underscore his rebellion against paternal authority, he ignores posted signs prohibiting off-road driving: as Krakauer suggests, the law of Thoreau overrode the laws of the state (28). What McCandless refers to as his “Alaska Odyssey” should be viewed as the culmination of a two-year effort to divest himself of all residues of parental and institutional authority. His travels during these two years, however, reflect Chris’s frequently strained efforts to find some sort of compromise position: he repeatedly forges relationships only to sever them when they become too substantial. Consonant with the other narratives I discuss in this chapter, McCandless’s attempts at separation are punctuated with rants against civilizational decay: “he’d fulminate about his parents or politicians or the endemic idiocy of mainstream American life,” recalls Ronald Franz, an eighty-year old man who becomes a close acquaintance (52). In a letter to Franz, McCandless speaks philosophically of his pursuit of detachment, arguing that joy does not “emanate only or principally from human relationships” (56–7). Yet in his dayto-day existence, at least during this period of his travels, McCandless appears to seek out and genuinely enjoy the companionship of others. His rebellion against authority, then, is tinged with ongoing ambivalence concerning the prospects for establishing a decidedly intersubjective idiom of belonging. He establishes attachments and then takes to the road when these connections resonate with the shared authority of human relationships rather than the monopolistic authority of solitude. In the months leading up to his Alaska adventure, McCandless circulates among several different communities. He befriends the owner of a grain elevator,

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Wayne Westerberg, who picks him up while hitchhiking and persuades him to stay at his home in Carthage, South Dakota. Krakauer notes that McCandless finds “a surrogate family” among the farm employees and that he departs only reluctantly when Westerberg commences jail time for selling illegal cable boxes. After McCandless moves on he has all of his mail forwarded to Westerberg’s address and tells everyone he meets “that South Dakota was home” (18–19). As a parting gift, he vests Westerberg with a 1942 edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It appears, at least momentarily, that McCandless adopts a substitutive family for the natal family he assertively rejects. Indeed, even as he devotes most of the next several months to hitchhiking and to a solo canoe excursion down the Colorado River to the Gulf of California, he seems to establish meaningful friendships and strong attachments. Most notably he takes to two drifters, Jan and Bob Burres, who clearly reciprocate his affections. As he did with Westerberg, McCandless makes a concerted effort to sustain this relationship: Jan Burres relates that “he made a point of staying in touch” by sending a postcard “every month or two” (31). A telling detour in McCandless’s travels takes place when he waylays at Bullhead City, Arizona, where he takes on a job at a McDonald’s and contemplates—as his journal indicates—that he “might finally settle down and abandon [his] tramping life” (39). Krakauer describes Bullhead as “a haphazard sprawl of subdivisions and strip malls”—not the sort of place one would expect McCandless to seek out given his antipathy for “the bourgeois trappings of mainstream America” (39). Yet McCandless stays in Bullhead for two months, his longest stint in one place in the two years between Atlanta and Alaska, and lives a “surprisingly conventional existence.” He works full time and, at the consent of an old proprietor, takes up residence in an abandoned trailer. His tenure in Bullhead ends, however, when he receives an invitation from the Burreses to visit them in a drifter community outside of Niland, California, known as the “Slabs” (43). Krakauer describes the Slabs as the seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society—a tolerant, rubbertired culture comprising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the perpetually unemployed. Its constituents are men and women and children of all ages, folks on the dodge from collection agencies, relationships gone sour, the law or the IRS, Ohio winters, the middle-class grind. (43)

McCandless spends a month at the Slabs, where he tends the Burres’ book table in the commune’s streaming flea market. Jan Burres indicates in interviews with Krakauer that McCandless was gregarious and fond of socializing: “he was no recluse.” “He had a good time when he was around people,

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a real good time” (44). Yet at the same time, Burres recalls that McCandless planned constantly for his Alaska odyssey and always resisted the notion of a protracted stay. One detects in these episodic vacillations a painful conflict between the substantive social ties he forged and the centripetal force of the utopian, asocial existence he imagines. In practical terms, the plasticity of McCandless’s approach to socializing manifests as an oscillation between two competing choices: whether to surround himself with companions or to pursue his ideal of an objectfree life. Krakauer presents this choice largely as a principled one and offers analogous accounts from other American travelers in an attempt to establish a pedigree for McCandless’s story. Although pilloried—as one letter to Krakauer puts it—as “another case of underprepared, overconfident men bumbling around out there and screwing up because they lacked the requisite humility,” Krakauer takes seriously McCandless’s aspiration to live in accordance with aesthetic ideals of beauty and truth (72). Among the predecessors he cites is Everett Ruess, a twenty-something Californian who disappeared in southern Utah in the early 1930s. Ruess’s letters suggest an astute critic of modern civilization who makes a measured decision to follow “an obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown” rather than “a paved highway . . . to the discontent bred by cities” (88). As with McCandless, Ruess showed remarkable commitment to his romantic ideals—he in fact spent some four years in the Utah wilderness without any apparent modern amenities. Like McCandless, Ruess adopted a traveling pseudonym—“Captain Nemo,” after the Jules Verne character who “flees civilization and severs his ‘every tie upon the earth’” (94–5). And also like McCandless, Ruess exhibited an ability to tolerate enormous degrees of physical discomfort, and “at times he even seemed to welcome it” (92). He boasted in letters of his brushes with near-death and, by all accounts, wandered across the soft-earth cliffs and canyons of Utah without exercising due caution. He disappeared in 1934 under indeterminate circumstances. The most prominent feature that pervades these examples is the “either/or” structure of their formulations regarding wilderness and civilization. What must be puzzled out in the cases of Ruess and McCandless is the fine line between the commitment to an aesthetic idealism and the enactment of a radical separation that borders on masochism and self-abnegation. The extreme eradication of all of their extant object ties suggests an attempt to escape from an insoluble problem, not unlike the irreconcilable choice the Rat Man must make between love and money. Indeed, Krakauer’s investigations into McCandless’s early life reveal that his “greatest paradox concerned his feelings about money” (115). His parents note that he always found

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the family’s material success embarrassing and strongly resisted the acquisition of wealth. Even though Chris excelled at numerous activities—ranging from sports to music to science—he repeatedly abandoned projects in order to reassert his individuality. He writes a successful computer program but refuses to divulge how, he rejects any instruction on how to improve his raw skills in a racquetball game, he quits several jobs despite precocious successes, and he agrees to attend college and consider law school only as a concession to his parents. For Chris, money functions as the penultimate symbolization of paternal authority. Although I wish to focus mainly on how the impulse to travel is represented, and to refrain particularly in this instance from extensive speculation and psychologizing, Krakauer’s own research into Chris’s history produces some striking parallels to the case of the Rat Man. Krakauer attributes the apparent origins of Chris’s failure to form a lasting identification with his father to the unearthing of a family secret. We may recall that Lanzer views his father’s desire as false for having married for financial security rather than for true love. In an investigation that Chris initiates on his own accord, he discovers his own family history is marred by a similarly inauthentic genealogy. Walt McCandless, Chris’s father, maintained a relationship with his ex-wife even while remarried to Chris’s mother, inflicting immense suffering on both women and requiring him to support two families. The revelation causes a dramatic dislocation for Chris: as Krakauer writes, “Whenever Walt McCandless, in his stern fashion, would dispense a fatherly admonishment to Chris . . . Chris would fixate on his father’s own less than sterling behavior many years earlier and silently denounce him as a sanctimonious hypocrite” (122). Any concession thereafter to his father’s wishes strikes McCandless as dissimulation: as the articulation of a false self. Yet as the case of the Rat Man illustrates, even nascent object relationships hint at paternal authority. It is not just the father that is false, but the entire realm of language that constitutes the law. As a result, McCandless finds it difficult to maintain the attachments he makes without compromising his own sense of authenticity, and so he feels compelled to travel alone. Only by severing all social ties does he find a means to kill what he calls “the false self within.” McCandless arrived in Alaska in late April, 1992, after working for a month with Westerberg’s combine team in Carthage to earn money for supplies. In a final postcard to Westerberg, sent in May, he writes: “If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild” (133–4). Krakauer argues that this note suggests complex motivations and indicates a penchant for risktaking activities, but not an intention on McCandless’ part to end his life.

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To illuminate the roots of these motivations, Krakauer draws from his own extensive experience with mountain climbing in Alaska. When the avoidance of death depends on the single-minded attention to one’s every small movements, he writes, then one learns to master and trust one’s own impulses. This kind of improbable achievement—the cheating of death—provides the only means of satisfying a demanding and competitive paternal figure. Krakauer draws parallels between his own life and McCandless’s: both had fathers who loved their children deeply but saddled them with “oppressive” expectations, who demanded a degree of accomplishment approaching perfection and who imposed an inflexible “blueprint” on their life trajectories (one that was meant to culminate, in Krakauer’s case, with Harvard Medical School). Under such circumstances, the only means of symbolically “slaying” the father—thereby ushering oneself into subjectivity—lies in undertaking a task that at once achieves radical separation and emphatically asserts mastery (ownership) over one’s own individual impulses.36 One attains mastery, in other words, only in a private language and not in the shared realm of signification. The Alaska trip, then, enables McCandless to extinguish thought much in the way that the Rat Man’s vow to repay a debt serves to ward off any external interpellation. A passage quoted by Krakauer from John Haines’ The Stars, The Snow, The Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Northern Wilderness cites a similar wish to “put away thought” as a motivation for adventure: With the gathering force of an essential thing realizing itself out of early ground, I faced in myself a passionate and tenacious longing—to put away thought forever, and all the trouble it brings, all but the nearest desire, direct and searching. To take the trail and not look back. Whether on foot, on snowshoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing shadows—a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could. (127)

The nullification of thought—and desire—enables the symbolic separation from the social world and, so it follows, from the authority of the law. For McCandless, this effect manifests in the narrowing spectrum of expression found in his Alaska journal. Much like Crusoe’s meticulous taxonomies after his arrival on the island, McCandless documents only the means of his survival; Krakauer describes the journal as “little more than a tally of plants forged and game killed” (183). It appears, as a scrawled note in the margins of his copy of Dr. Zhivago affirms, that McCandless takes refuge in the “wordlessness” of nature (189).

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McCandless establishes his camp just outside of Denali National Park, where he survives for nearly four months. The man who picked him up and drove him most of the way along the Alaska Highway recalls the pride he displayed before his trip: “[He] said he didn’t want to see a single person, no airplanes, no sign of civilization. He wanted to prove to himself that he could make it on his own, without anybody else’s help” (159). In Fairbanks, McCandless purchases a guide to the region’s edible plants at the University of Alaska bookstore. Three days later he hitches a ride to a path known as the Stampede Trail and proceeds to hike twenty miles into the brush. He notes in his journal that he had originally planned to continue walking westward, declaring that he “might walk all the way to the Bering Sea” (164). Yet when the woods prove too densely thicketed, McCandless resigns himself to setting up camp at an old bus that was abandoned by developers in the 1960s after plans to build a road fell through. After two months of successfully living off edible plants and small game, McCandless apparently decides to end his tenure in the wild, and hikes back toward the road; to his surprise, he discovers that the Teklanika River, which he forded easily at the beginning of the summer, is now impassable. He returns to his encampment, where he manages for another two months. However, despite a varied diet, he burns more calories than he consumes. Experimenting with ways to reverse his dramatic weight-loss, he begins consuming the seed pods of wild potato plants. Although the fact is not documented in his guidebook, these pods are toxic and likely Chris’ consumption of them cause him to starve to death. As Krakauer stresses, McCandless betrays no signs of bitterness as he approaches death. His final note reads, “I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all!” (199). In a potentially revealing gesture, however, he signs an S.O.S. note affixed to the bus by his family name, Chris McCandless. By contrast, the “declaration of independence” he scrawls on the inside wall of the bus at the beginning of his sojourn bears the signature of his alias, “Alexander Supertramp.” It declares: “Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the great white north. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild” (163). This shift in self-identification may indicate that, like Crusoe during his protracted residence on the island, the Alaska odyssey substantially transformed McCandless. Further evidence for this possibility derives from one of his few qualitative journal entries in the latter part of his trip: “Happiness only real when shared” (189). It seems possible that, like Crusoe, McCandless’s protracted isolation led to an increased capacity to tolerate intersubjective experience without conjuring

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harsh internal reproaches of inauthenticity. Yet whether he would have approached travel and adventure with a diminished sense of urgency, or whether he would have continued the cycle that prevailed over the preceding two years—of forming and then abandoning attachments—is something one may only speculate upon. 37 CONCLUSION: PROTESTS & NEGATIONS By contending that the journeys I discuss display the aesthetic features of obsession, I by no means wish to preclude empathy and understanding for the travelers. This discussion aims not to dismiss these figures as neurotic, violent or antisocial. On the contrary, I hope to empathize with the motivational impulse while arguing that the predicament of modernity—which saddles the adventurer with dead objects—can lead to a well-meaning but often destructive reparative act. The destructiveness of the act derives from the very impossibility of a successful resolution. In psychoanalytic terms, what makes the scenario irresolvable is that any introjection will conjure the impression of falseness—of inauthenticity. Bollas describes the obsessional as one who strives to maintain an hermetic space of self-enclosure, akin to Crusoe’s island: The obsessed person feels impinged upon by the object; as in its ancient usage, it is like being taken over by a demon, driven crazy by an intrusive idea . . . The object of pathological obsession is a purely projective container into which the individual evacuates his psychic life in order to terminate contact with it. (Cracking Up 79, 87)

For the obsessional traveler, the container assumes the form of an imagined geography over which one may exert absolute control. The obsessional traveler does not aim to escape—as conventional wisdom regarding adventure travel frequently presumes—but rather to “find reality.”38 One need not turn to psychoanalytic theory to articulate the sort of rebellion I wish to describe here. A similar formulation appears, for example, in Simmel’s essay “The Conflict in Modern Culture” or even in the kind of protest and rebellion that Dick Hebdige describes in his research on youth subcultures. The protest that Hebdige identifies in the structure of punk music, for instance, appears to resemble that evident in the practice of adventure travel. According to Hebdige, punk music seeks an escape from the dead objects of modernity, signified by various arenas of antagonism: “the school, police, media and parent culture” and, most significantly, race relations (29).

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The language of punk rockers suggests a desire for the creation of an alternate world. For instance, Steve Jones, a member of the Sex Pistols, declares: “Ordinary life is so dull that I get out of it as much as possible” (27). The difference between adventure travel and punk rock is that the latter ultimately offers a means, at least on the order of aesthetics and representation, to “get out of it.” While the punk rocker relies on the subculture of an arts movement to express a protest, the adventure traveler seeks something along the lines of pure creativity, which can only be attained through an extraordinary negation of objects both external and internal to the self. For the obsessional, even the institutional framework of an arts movement resonates too strongly with the already-existing social world. The obsessional seeks new objects, and a utopian premise to bring them to life.

Chapter Three

Postmodern Pilgrimages Conversion and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the Hysterical Travel Narrative

Silence: Silence is the mark of hysteria. The great hysterics have lost speech, they are aphonic. —Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” Have you then come to the point of such torpor, paralysis, that you are not happy except in your pain? If it is so, let us flee toward countries that are analogous to Death. —Charles Baudelaire The so-called Western “values,” what kind of values are they? I don’t think, for instance, that the America of today is a country with values or “culture”: it is a huge monstrous “non-culture, a “noncivilization” . . . It’s an apocalypse. —Paul Bowles

In the previous chapter I examined how a failed identification with the paternal order precipitates a crisis of selfhood that motivates specific forms of travel. These travels, I argued, reflect an effort to fashion a self outside the paternal order. Moreover, I have suggested that psychoanalysis can enhance our understanding of this dynamic, insofar as its depiction of the oedipal drama as a developmental achievement mirrors the pull of “reality” whereby a subject surrenders the blissful fantasized space of the maternal dyad and consents to a degree of socialization. Readings of recent travel novels show that the travel cultures of the late twentieth century exhibit a decidedly different attitude toward the symbolic father than their earlier counterparts. The Grand Tour narratives of the nineteenth century, for instance, reflect the height of confidence vested by colonial powers in their regimes. As Mary Louise Pratt demonstrates, the purveyors of this genre 78

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of travel writing consisted almost exclusively of upper class male explorers, such as Richard Burton, James Grant, and John Speke, who reveal little of the crisis of faith in Enlightenment rationality that afflicts later travel texts (Imperial Eyes 200–213). Pratt shows also that women’s travel writing flourished during this period, but rather than celebrate the solidity of colonial selfhood, these texts emphasized the heightened latitude of subjectivity that travel enabled. The work of Mary Kingsley in the 1890s, for example, reflects transformations in the public sphere that followed emancipatory movements in Europe and Britain. Yet while women’s travel narratives frequently celebrated the escape from overly restrictive expectations back home regarding proper gender roles, they still showed a great deal of faith in Enlightenment principles; enhanced opportunities for individual expression were optimistically linked to new modalities of political freedom.1 By contrast, twentieth-century travel narratives reflect a profound disillusionment with modernity that took shape after two ruinous wars. Instead of a thematic emphasis on “heroic” discovery that portrays travelers as “monarchs of all they survey” (Pratt 201–213), these later travelogues stress escape from an overdetermined and fragmented consumer landscape. Recent advertisements from a popular adventure travel magazine offer a telling illustration of the intensity of this disenchantment with the paternal order. A slogan for a large seller of outdoor gear says to “get outside yourself ”; another states that “your job is not your life”; and another, for the North Carolina tourism bureau, shows arrows pointing away from “stress, worry, work and boredom” and toward a wilderness background.2 In the segment of the adventure travel industry that markets cross-cultural encounter as part of the adventure experience, escape entails not only “roughing it” but also an immersion in otherness. As Anne Beezer shows, trekking companies that specialize in expeditions to Africa, India and the Himalayan region promise an experience outside of—and in fact opposed to—the overly rationalized environment of modern societies. The 1990–91 Explore company therefore claims that “the intention is not only to see and enjoy great and famous sights, but also to get to know the ‘other’ side so rarely seen” (Beezer 119). In the publicity for another touring company, an encounter with villagers in Turkey is described as “the perfect antidote for world-weary bodies and minds” (127). Although the phantasmagoric quality of these constructions cannot be denied, I have attempted to underscore the degree to which these advertisements imply an addressee afflicted by a sort of modern malaise. Unlike the prewar narratives, then, the appeal of traversing cultural boundaries—of assuming a nomadic idiom of selfhood—lies in the opportunity to articulate a truer version of the self ’s idiom, and not in the

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opportunity to escape a limitation. Since the overall tone of these modern narratives speaks to an underlying loss, I have suggested that an analysis of them may provide insight into the features of a kind of modern neurosis. The distinction between pre– and postwar travel—and the link to neurosis—may be glossed as two variations of what the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott calls “play.” In a clinical anecdote, Winnicott describes a patient’s recollection of seeing an airplane on the way home from a session. The patient imagines herself “being the airplane, flying high” and then, in her daydream, sees the plane crash to the ground (Winnicott, Playing and Reality 58). Winnicott’s transcription of the analysand’s anamnesis from an extended three-hour session shows her meandering in her free associations as if, Winnicott deduces, she wishes not to be “found”—as if any mirroring on Winnicott’s part would somehow pose a threat. Winnicott shows that this threat derives from the patient’s expectation that any recognition of her existence by the analyst would frame her in the other’s gaze. As she says, “if I matter to you . . . I want to do things to please you” (62). In order to protect her own creative expression—her own play—she affects constant movement. Although she wishes to have these expressions mirrored back to her—to verify her own existence—she eventually concedes that she finds the evasions preferable to the feelings of being false that emerge when this movement ceases. As the session concludes, the analysand offers an interpretation of a session marked not only by her rhetorical peregrinations but also by her physical migrations throughout the office: “looking-for is evidence that there is a self ” (63). Her remarks indicate that any insertion in the paternal order, in which she feels the imposition of identity at the expense of her own idiom of selfhood, results in a defensive effort to keep herself in a state of flux. Winnicott observes that “as a plane, she could be, but then suicide.” “But,” the analysand states in response to this interpretation, “I’d rather be and crash than not ever be” (63). This patient’s predilection for wandering resembles another character who embodies the ideal of floating subjectivity: the urban flâneur, that aimless itinerant whom Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer associate with the “classic bohemian” milieu of mid nineteenth–century Paris.3 Yet whereas the patient’s free-floating searches take place only within the safe haven of the clinical environment, the flâneur’s circulation through the metropolis obtains sanction from external social mores. For Benjamin, the flâneur, as exemplified in the lyric poetry of Baudelaire, emerges in the context of “disenchantment” brought on by the modern age. This figure seeks to “endow the crowd with a soul” that has been lost as a result of the “disintegration of the aura” that once gave social formations an air of permanence (“On Some Motifs” 194–195).

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The flâneur must come to terms with his dissociation from the scenes of the city: as Benjamin writes, “the man of leisure can indulge in the perambulations of the flâneur only if as such he is already out of place” (172). What makes this alienation bearable is the subject position of the poet-artist, which holds forth the mission of re-enchanting the city through art.4 Recent commentators have pointed out that the practice of flânerie presumes a decidedly “male gaze.” For example, Griselda Pollock asserts that “the gaze of the flâneur articulates and produces a masculine sexuality which in the modern sexual economy enjoys the freedom to look, appraise and possess (79). Yet if nineteenth-century urban space did not permit women the same freedom to rove about the city as men—without being subject to the stigma of prostitution, for instance—the twentieth-century city certainly enabled, and even encouraged, the sort of self-fashioning in which the flâneur engages, at least within the narrow logics of commercialization. More specifically, shifting parameters of domestic space made shopping a primary means for women to participate in the pleasures of commodification. As commodification displaced traditional cultural moorings, life in the metropolis produced both a nostalgia for stable subjectivities and a kind of “hallucinatory euphoria”5 at the opportunity to individualize one’s idiom of selfhood—to play, as Christopher Bollas puts it, with the “arts and crafts of ontology” (81). We see, then, two manifestations of “play”: in Winnicott’s patient, the inhibition of play and, in the figure of the flâneur, the expansion of the domain of “objects” of which to make use for the expression of the self ’s idiom. While the flâneur would appear to signify enhanced opportunities for creativity, recent commentators have suggested that this figure in fact reflects both the heightened latitude for self-definition and social burden of rootlessness. Elizabeth Wilson, for example, emphasizes the “disintegrative effect” of the absence of any secure social foundation: The flâneur represented not the triumph of masculine power, but its attenuation. A wanderer, he embodies the Oedipal under threat. The male gaze has failed to annihilate the castrate, woman. On the contrary, anonymity annihilates him. The flâneur represents masculinity as unstable, caught up in the violent dislocations that characterized urbanization. (109)

Drawing from Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Wilson observes that Baudelaire’s desire is “polarized between perversity and ‘mystical consummation’” (109). Although I have proposed different categories with which to understand them, these valences within Baudelaire’s poetry correspond to the

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modal choices that I attribute to the modern traveler: the will to mastery found in obsession or, the subject of this chapter, the kind of oblation of the self that one finds in hysteria. Melancholia, in the schematic I have proposed, reflects neither the logic of mastery nor of submission, but of masochistic detachment. All three responses take place within a social order marked by a weakening of the law—the “Oedipal under threat” described by Wilson—that simultaneously provides limitless possibilities for self-definition and produces profound dislocations. In this chapter, I wish to focus on the experience of “mystical consummation” as the hallmark feature of hysteria. The structure of this experience, I propose, consists of a deeply felt identification with some “other,” such that the self surrenders entirely its individuality. In contemporary narratives of adventure travel, hysteric characters appear as globetrotters who don the symbolic vestments of an idealized cultural group—perhaps by joining a Buddhist monastery, an ashram or a Bedouin caravan—in an effort to void their own consciousness. As my title indicates, I suggest that this form of cross-cultural immersion bears a familial resemblance to pilgrimage. Yet pilgrimage typically presumes a complex devotional context, encompassing the pilgrim and a particular site, that enables a sort of conversion experience; as an example, the Hindu term for pilgrimage sites, tirtha, literally means “crossing over.”6 In Hindu India, a worshipper’s selection of pilgrimage sites depends on a mythography of the local landscape and the particular qualities of the deities that reside there. By contrast, the postmodern variant of pilgrimage presents a generic structure rather than one that relies on symbolic context. The postmodern traveler approaches pilgrimage as a form of masquerade. As a form of play, however, the wearing of masks takes place not within any extant semantic framework, but as an attempt to submerge oneself wholly into another language in order to compensate for a lack. I do not mean to suggest that the distinction I draw here is simply a matter of periodization—not all contemporary pilgrimage narratives reflect the structure I describe. In many cases, tourists and travelers invoke the language of pilgrimage to describe encounters that strengthen, rather than dissolve, ego boundaries.7 These pilgrimages do not carry the taint of rebellion, at least to the same degree, and present another set of questions regarding the dialogics of cross-cultural exchange. That is, they may resonate more with the notion of participation suggested in the anthropological sense of participant-observation. In recent adventure travel narratives we find the persistent portrayal of a search for ecstatic or mystical fusion with a cultural “other” that possesses an allure merely for the fact that this other lies at a distance—simply, for not being “here.” In the following sections, I will

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explore the implications of this argument as it pertains to the study of modern travel and tourism. More specifically, I will aim to reconcile my use of the trope of pathology with the frequent assertion that, as one travel columnist puts it, modern adventure pilgrimages take one “to the distant shores of self-discovery.”8 As with the other character structures I describe, the wish to escape to an “elsewhere” suggests a rebellion against the prevailing social order of modernity. Yet the rebellion of the hysteric follows a different trajectory than the obsessional and melancholic. Rather than forge a new civilization outside the paternal order, like the contemporary Crusoe, or undertake a form of self-punishment that eventually enables a return home, like the melancholic, the hysterical traveler seeks to submit the self to the enveloping presence of cultural otherness. As I will attempt to show through a discussion of Paul Bowles. The Sheltering Sky and Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky, as well as through an examination of some recent travelogues, the submission of the hysteric frequently takes on the character of an aggressive effort to nullify the self. These texts reveal a persistent desire to escape the postwar destruction of Europe and America, which may be figured, to cite a few examples, as the effects of the war itself, environmental devastation wrought by industrialization, or the oppression of ubiquitous commodification. I will first present a more systematic treatment of hysteria and then turn to the travel narratives themselves. TOWARD A SCHEMATIC OF HYSTERIA The term “hysteria” has been applied to such diverse phenomenon that any attempt to chronicle its many manifestations within a singular history risks seeming contrived.9 Derived from the Greek word for uterus, hystera, the term dates to antiquity, where it denoted disease states caused by the “wandering womb” that circulated throughout the female body (Logan 8). Hysteria variously has been linked to witchcraft and possession in the Middle Ages, to an organic disorder of the nervous system in the Renaissance and, through the work of Freud and Josef Breuer at the end of the nineteenth century, to a disorder with mental, rather than physical, etiology. Although seldom invoked now as a diagnostic category, hysteria continues to draw extensive critical attention in literary and psychoanalytic theory.10 Many of these theories support the contention that hysteria manifests in the body and that it primarily afflicts women. In keeping with some post-Freudian formulations in psychoanalytic theory, I will stress the metaphorical value of the categories of “gender” and “the body” over their literal significance for the definition of

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hysteria I wish to present here. This interpretive framework will regard gender as an orientation to what I have been referring to as the law or paternal order, or field of representation. The “body” will signify an orientation to the self and the subject’s desire. A common formulation within literary studies, and particularly within the field of psychoanalytic feminism, casts hysteria as an association between women and the failure of narrative. Mary Jacobus, for example, depicts hysteria as the inaccessibility of language to women. The hysteric symptom surfaces as a result of this dissociation, and in fact functions as “speech” where the opportunity to speak is otherwise denied. Jacobus writes: Women’s access to discourse involves submission to phallocentricity, to the masculine and symbolic: refusal, on the other hand, risks re-inscribing the feminine as a yet more marginal madness or nonsense. When we speak (as feminist writers and theorists often do) of the need for a special language for women, what then do we mean? (29)

As Peter Melville Logan observes, the separation from the symbolic leads to a tendency to valorize hysteria “as a radical social critique” insofar as the narrative of the hysteric subject represents an attempt to invent a language outside the “phallocentric space” of the dominant social order (9). In fact Logan’s own study of nineteenth-century British prose narratives interprets hysteric symptoms—encompassing a range of “nervous conditions” such as hypochondria or melancholy—as a protest against the emergent middle-class bifurcation of work and domesticity. Advancing a critique that further affirms the relationship between neurosis and mass culture, Logan shows that writers and social critics of this time pointed to the proliferation of these nervous disorders as evidence of the deleterious conditions of modern civilization. In the medical literature examined by Logan, and in the feminist theoretical construction summarized by Jacobus, pathology signifies a refusal to align oneself with the dominant social order. How this refusal produces bodily symptoms, and what these symptoms have to do with “the arts and crafts” of selfhood, are questions that may be illuminated by turning to the psychoanalytic canon. The modern psychoanalytic conception of hysteria begins with Freud, and an examination of his work will enable us to define this character structure with greater precision. Freud developed his early view of hysteria through the case studies of Anna O. and Dora and, though neither case can lay claim to any real clinical success and Freud later repudiated many of his own interpretations, these case studies do inform later theoretical presentations of hysteria. Recent

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interpreters have focused on Freud’s observation that these patients displayed an inability to provide an integrated account of their own life histories. Freud concluded that the absence of “an intelligent, consistent, and unbroken case history” pointed to repression and signalled an underlying trauma marked by conflicted sexuality. Yet later commentaries indicate that this fragmentation of speech signifies a stalled effort to come into one’s own as a subject (and so to articulate one’s desire) rather than a literal quashed (repressed) sexual impulse (Studies in Hysteria 160–61). In the clinical setting, the nuances of these readings prove crucial for determining a direction for treatment. As has been well documented, Freud refused to take seriously Dora’s claims of abuse and this empathic failure caused the sessions to be terminated after only seventy hours of therapeutic work. Nonetheless, even though Freud’s interventions quite likely served to abet and worsen Dora’s hysteric symptoms, his exposition of the case offers a foundation for the schematic of hysteria that emerges in later literary and psychoanalytic theories. Brought to Freud’s Vienna office by her father, Dora (an alias for Ida Bauer) began treatment in 1900 at age seventeen.11 Freud’s write-up of the case (“Fragment”) focuses attention on the six-year affair that Dora’s father had been having with Frau K. Dora tells Freud of the attempt by Frau K’s husband, Herr K., to seduce her when she was fourteen, and states that she feels that “her father handed her over to Herr K.” as compensation for overlooking the adultery. Under the pretext of concern for his daughter’s occasional nervousness and melancholia, Dora’s father turns her over—again, “hands her over” in Dora’s view—to Freud in order to convince her that her suspicions are delusional; Dora’s father wishes for Freud to “bring her to reason” (20). Freud observes that she exhibits only the minor physical symptoms of coughs and headaches—and so diagnoses her with a “minor hysteria”—though in fact she suffered from frequent illnesses, including severe asthma and bouts of aphonia. Still, for the most part Freud disregards Dora’s own astute observations regarding her family and commits to a diagnosis of hysteria. He tells Dora that she in fact harbors a suppressed wish to assent to Herr K.’s advances and, further, shares a similar love for her father and for Freud himself. Dora demonstrates significant resistance to these interpretations but, as Elaine Showalter writes, she never manages “to tell her own story” (43). She does, however, terminate her meetings with Freud after only eleven weeks. One point of evidence attesting to Freud’s dedication to an hysteria diagnosis concerns his conspicuous inattention to details of Dora’s family life and the social context in which she grew up.12 Through secondary sources, we learn that Dora’s mother displayed little affection for Dora and her older brother, Otto, and was excessively controlling in the household. Her father

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suffered from a number of illnesses, including a syphilitic infection that he kept secret and passed onto his wife, and a detached retina in his one functional eye. Dora took to nursing her father during this latter illness, but was supplanted when Frau K. took over her role first as nurse, and then as confidant. It appears that initially an identification with her father led Dora to serve as an accomplice to her father’s affair, taking efforts to preserve its secrecy, but this changed once she informed her parents of Herr K.’s advances. None of the four adults displayed any sympathy toward Dora after the allegations. Instead they treated her as an object whose presence fulfilled a necessary role in a familial drama in which, in their view, everyone derived benefits. Even Freud himself corroborates this view, going as far to suggest to Dora that acceding to Herr K. would have been best “for all parties concerned” (“Fragment” 108). After her parents’ disavowal of the abuse, Dora developed severe depressive symptoms and expressed increased bitterness toward her mother and father. Indeed much of her somatic symptomatology must be understood as a reaction to the intensifying alienation she suffered due to her estrangement from her familial and social environment. While hardly passive in her resistance to both her family’s collective denial and Freud’s seduction theory, having sought a means to articulate her protestations, Dora still remains detached from the symbolic or “phallocentric space.” She finds no one—no objects—within her milieu with whom to form an identification. In Freudian terms, the case of Dora illustrates a dramatic oedipal failure in that she finds no narrative—no chain of signification—in which to insert herself. A more thorough study of the social milieu in which she grew up could lend further support to this claim. As a “Viennese version of the New Woman of the 1890s” (Showalter 42), Dora sought to escape the limitations imposed on her as a Jewish woman in a bourgeois family. Patrick Mahony depicts Dora as a young woman who endured multiple domains of marginalization: “In the annals of Western culture, Dora has emerged as a paradigmatic example of how patriarchal forces in the nineteenth century—political, social, and medical—oppressed a Jewish girl who had to write out her pain in her body” (Freud’s Dora 2). Dora has become an important emblem for feminist theory because her story encapsulates the problem of establishing women’s subjectivity within a patriarchal social environment. If the pain that traveled to different areas of Dora’s body—in addition to asthma she suffered from facial neuralgia and myriad other illnesses throughout her life—represents one variant of hysteric symptomatology, another variant might manifest as the self, rather than the somatic symptom, as the entity that wanders. This view would suggest that the somatic symptom with which hysteria is so often associated does not define the illness

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but rather constitutes one possible symbolization of the illness. The manner of symbolization, in other words, derives from the expressive repertoire of a particular time and place. As Elizabeth Bronfen observes in her review of Charcot’s research and her study of self-staging in portrait paintings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “every age seemed to have its own specific form of hysteria” (158–59). More than the somatic symptoms, then, the underlying structure of hysteria may be sought in Dora’s wholesale rejection of the patriarchal order and the unmitigated alienation she felt from her family: in the absence of an identification with the law, and as part of her protest against the law, the hysteric subject refuses to articulate the self ’s idiom. One could logically deduce in fact that the somatic symptom embodies a quite literal assault on the self. Still another manner of refusal, which I contend prevails in the adventure travel literature, may take the form of mimesis: as part of an inability or refusal to assert the self ’s own idiom, the hysteric engages in the imitation and performance of an idealized other. This masquerade compensates for the nonexistence of the self and represents the only means by which the hysteric chooses to signify subjectivity. The hysteric’s proclivity toward mimesis in fact forms the basis of Jean Martin Charcot’s research at the Salpêtrière, the psychiatric hospital in Paris where Freud served as an assistant in 1868–69. As part of a project to construct a five-part typology of hysteric states, Charcot hypnotized his patients and captured their hysterical fits in engravings and photographs. Yet these patients, who were asked to perform “scenes” of their personal dramas in an amphitheatre before a diverse audience, merely “staged” presentations of what Charcot himself desired to see; they produced the performances to accord with Charcot’s already-established nomenclature. Bronfen observes that the portraits of one of these patients, Augustine, betray genuine “mental and physical suffering” but also notes that her poses simulate “an already existent cultural repertoire of pictures of possession and demonology” (161, 159). Augustine, then, unconsciously hints at her own underlying trauma, but her “treatment” only intensifies her alienation since her mode of expression is dictated entirely by an “other”—the doctor Charcot. Her presentations of self necessarily entail distortion: “distortion caused by conversion of the hysterical symptoms and distortion caused by passed-on figures of the imagination, namely of the ecstatic, of the seductress, of the imitator of Christ” (160). In an analysis that resonates with the notion of the adventure travel narrative as a coded critique of modernity, Bronfen suggests that the emergence of hysteria coincides with the precursors of a postmodern age that undermines any certainties regarding the solidity of the self. Indeed the very

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recognition of the mutability of the self represents a sign of its destruction. Contrary to the humanist conceptions of the self, the postmodern “I” lacks any stable foundation or coherence (Bronfen 158). As an illustration, Bronfen points to Woody Allen’s 1983 film Zelig, whose central character exists only through the presentations of self he conjures for his analyst. He exists only as pastiche of other people and idealized personalities, while “the core of his own identity seems to be effaced, a nothing” (165). For the hysteric, then, the performance signals both an effacement of the self and a repudiation of the law. In his decidedly psychoanalytic examination of hysteria, Christopher Bollas depicts the mimetic aspect of hysteria as an effort to preserve the innocence of childhood.13 The hysteric, he explains, rejects all forms of “object love” in a determined effort to re-create a primal “Eden” embodied in the symbiosis of mother and infant (35). This effort stems from the hysteric’s rejection of the law: without an identification to guide the subject’s desire toward external objects, desire instead turns inward to an imagined Eden. Desire for the hysteric becomes, as Bollas states, “autoerotic”: Hysterical symptoms not only ensure the private continuation of autoerotic life, they also constitute a rebellion against the claims of object-love. They nurture—indeed, drive—the idiom of thought that we know as daydreaming, but which Freud unmistakably sees as an extension of autoerotism into ordinary life: the street walker, Freud notes, is cut off from fellow walker, absorbed in the auto-erotic universe of privately imagined gratifications. (Hysteria 36)

The asociality of the “street walker” brings to mind the same multivalent readings of the flâneur: that is, does this urban wanderer constitute an emblem of postmodern flexibility or a “castrated” subject who finds refuge from his displacement in daydreams? Bollas argues that, in the case of the hysteric, this separation from “fellow walkers” amounts to an evasion of selfhood. Just as the hysteric attacks the law, so does he “undermine his own creativity and productivity” by seeking exclusive fulfillment in internal objects (Hysteria 74). The fragmentation of the hysteric’s narrative—as Freud witnessed in his early case studies—in fact functions as an attempt to “sabotage cognitive development” (19). In place of cognition, the hysteric seeks the “loss of consciousness” altogether, which itself becomes a manner of articulating the self (39): Augustine’s “possession” by the ecstatic or Christ, for example, acts out a union with a lost Eden that forecloses on any expression of her own individuality. In the literature of adventure travel, the hysteric assumes the guise of an explorer who seeks, and valorizes, this loss of consciousness. This aim,

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I would contend, structures much of the discourse on wilderness and the realm of “extreme sports,” which encompasses such activities as high altitude mountain climbing, white water kayaking and arctic trekking. These activities strive toward an escape of both the law and “ego” awareness—as the slogan of the wilderness retailer REI puts it, a chance to “get outside yourself.” In the remainder of this chapter, however, I wish to explore travel narratives that depict the cross-cultural encounter as a persistent site of the hysteric’s quest to escape the self, particularly as this quest derives its motivation from a rejection of a landscape of postwar destruction and, later, of the limits on subjectivity imposed by commodification. Where the conditions of modernity serve as the impetus for the journey, I show that hysteria functions as an idiom of selfhood for both men and women travelers. Narratives of both suggest a lack of access to the field of representation. This observation in fact accords with Bollas’ observation that, despite a long-standing historical association to women, hysteria afflicts both genders equally (24–25).14 As I will demonstrate through a reading of a few exemplary texts, the hysterical traveler turns to the symbolic reservoir of the signifier “noble savage” as a mask for the self. In some cases, doing so produces a scenario where the traveler sustains a long-term performance of an imago of the other, while in other instances the traveler appears to be enveloped (or “possessed”) in a violent act of capitulation to this other. THE LIFEDRIVE HYSTERIC: LAURENS VAN DER POST’S PRODUCTION OF THE INTERIOR SELF If, as Paul Fussell argues, the period between the wars marked the apex of the travel book as belles-lettres—as a literary engagement with so-called exotic locales—the end of the Second World War gave rise to a travelogue genre that increasingly portrayed the journey from West to non-West as being driven by a current of desperation. Laurens van der Post, a British citizen who was born in 1906 in South Africa to a prominent Afrikaner family, turned his travels in Africa into a sophisticated philosophical commentary on the metaphysical division of the Western self, which he held liable for the emergence of fascism and for racial antagonisms in colonial Africa. He moved frequently throughout his life back and forth between England and South Africa, and traveled extensively throughout the African continent (Cocker 76–78). In a best-selling 1951 account of his exploration of two remote areas of Malawi (then Nyasaland), he explains his travels as a process of excavation, through which he unearths aspects of his interior world previously suppressed within the context of European cultural traditions:

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This text, Venture to the Interior, presents a largely linear description of the two areas under exploration—the mountain pass of Mlanje and the Nyika plateau—but also displays subtle overtones of tragedy through the depiction of its European characters. Van der Post himself manages to overcome the fate of these other Europeans by recovering, through his encounter with Africa, his “savage” self. In effect, Venture replicates a common Freudian antinomy between primary and secondary processes: the first associated with “primitive” societies and the latter with “civilization.”15 Yet significantly, van der Post makes this association not to argue for the superiority of the West, but rather to attribute recent irruptions of violence in Europe to a misplaced emphasis on “rational” (secondary) thought. Van der Post’s account follows the tropes of rational discourse and contains little of the romantic affectations found in other travelogues of the 1950s, such as Wilfred Thesiger’s popular Arabian Sands (1959). Many of his descriptions, however, appear to be coded as parables that gloss a critique of the “split” he observes in European subjectivity. One of the most dramatic scenes in Venture to the Interior, for example, concerns a European forester stationed in the mountains of Mlanje. Van der Post portrays the man, Richard Vance, as having had an unhappy childhood and lacking any confidence in his own abilities. In the mountains of Mlanje, Vance finds an escape from both his unhappiness and his own personal deficiencies. Upon first meeting him, van der Post seems to subtly acknowledge the tragedy of Vance’s attachment to the landscape: “This is very beautiful, well-nigh perfect. Might be somewhere in Europe,” I said, realizing it was a half-truth but not yet aware of the full one. “Yes,” he said, with a warm look that took in the whole valley. “Yes. It is absolutely perfect.” (123)

Toward the end of the book, van der Post remarks that the ideal of perfection underwrites much of European misery and violence: “to love only perfection is just another way of hating life, for life is not perfect” (241). Vance, he seems to say, clings to the “masculine” character of European selfhood and

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so never manages the synthesis of European and African qualities that van der Post believes would offer a corrective to his unhappiness. In the narrative’s most dramatic scene, the tragedy of Vance’s monolithic adherence to the European aspect of his character, at the expense of the African elements, is underscored when, displaying more faith in his technical prowess than the forces of nature, he drowns while fording a stream. Because Vance so strongly identifies Europe with superiority and perfection relative to Africa, he himself is rendered passive, condemned merely to meditate on a perfect, but unattainable, landscape. A similar censure of Western violence surfaces in van der Post’s recollection of an execution he witnessed seven years prior to the current expedition, as a Japanese prisoner of war in a Javanese camp. As he remembers seeing one prisoner decapitated and another run through with a bayonet, van der Post claims to experience something of an epiphany: the Japanese acted violently because, he deduces, like those on all sides of the war “their awareness of themselves, and of life, was inadequate.” Their deeds reflect the consequences of elevating “a part of ourselves at the expense of the whole” (225). For van der Post, Africa embodies the dormant components of European selfhood. The traumatic sight of the executions prompts a recuperative daydream, which he shares with his fellow prisoners of war: Africa came to my rescue. I talked to them about the animals of Africa for two and a half hours; about the bush, the plains, the great free mountain-tops and immense skies, about a life that was a continuous trek, a journey without walls or streets to hem it in. The sense of doom, the transmitted memory of the killing in the afternoon, receded, thanks to that recreated vision of my boyhood in Africa, and before the night was over our jail rang with laughter over the antics of baboons and elephants, lion and rhinoceros. I had realized then how deep, how life-giving and strengthening was this vision of Africa in my blood; that possessing this, and my knowledge of our nearness to each other, I could travel to the end of the world and time. (224)

This passage illustrates the associative links that van der Post makes between Africa and childhood: not only to his actual “boyhood in Africa,” but also to the innocence of the animals and the primal, Edenic location marked by “the end of the world and time.” In later works, van der Post’s replicates these same idealizations of Africa and consolidates his view that Africa enables a transcendence of European selfhood. The Lost World of the Kalahari, an account of a protracted quest for

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a tribal group of the Kalahari Desert called the San, constructs these idealizations in two key ways: first, by ascribing supernatural occurrences to the African landscape as, for example, in van der Post’s claims of a “magical” aptitude for prophecy (a gift conferred by the landscape); and second, by reducing the San to an incorporeal presence. Van der Post’s leanings toward the supernatural have occasionally made him vulnerable to charges of mysticism, yet his philosophical dichotomization necessitates a characterization of Africans as possessing a kind of mystical or spiritual quality. Mark Cocker offers a summary of the numerous collocations employed by van der Post to enrich his characterization of Africans as a sort of mystical presence: In Laurens’s other works there is undoubtedly a recurring and curiously mathematical or geometric vocabulary of the spirit. When describing the Bushmen, for example, he has written of ‘an ancient, centred people,’ ‘contained within the symmetry of the land,’ their ‘own authentic pattern,’ ‘fateful proportions,’ ‘natural sense of discipline and proportion.’ Other stock words and phrases—‘wholeness,’ ‘at-one-ness,’ ‘togetherness of things,’ ‘the master pattern within me,’ ‘the master level where all levels are joined’ ‘instinctive certainty of belonging,’ ‘belonging to the purpose of all around me,’ belonging to the ‘overall purpose of the day’—disclose a constant desire to express unity in nature and between humans and nature. (90)

Hysteria enters into this discourse insofar as the idiom of “belonging” suggested in these passages originates with a negation of the self—through the attainment of a timeless horizon rather than the instantiation of any cultural framework related either to Europe or Africa. Although the linearity and coherence of van der Post’s narrative structure may, on the surface, seem contrary to the hysteric’s discourse, he sustains this consistency only by way of his oscillations between a rejection of “Europe” and a search for the “San.” Indeed the chronicle of his search for the San, and not actual descriptions of the people, occupies most of the narrative of Lost World. As long as van der Post keeps the imago of the African—for him, that Edenic conception of the mother-infant dyad—within sight but still at a distance, his motivation to continue the journey, and so to articulate some version of subjectivity, remains active. An example of what Chrisopher Bollas calls the “life-drive hysteric,” van der Post demonstrates solidity of self through a performance of an idealized (mother-like) object. It perhaps should not be surprising that van der Post begins Venture to the Interior with the words, “Africa is my mother’s country” (17). We may presume

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that if Africa did not affect this symbolization of innocence, his travels—and his narrative—would come to an end. THE DEATHDRIVE HYSTERIC: THE SEARCH FOR THE SHELTERING SKY The thematics of the fiction of Paul Bowles frequently combine an unrelenting critique of modernity with a persistent belief in the redemptive potential of travel. Born in 1911, Bowles grew up in New York City and New England and attended college at the University of Virginia. Disenchanted with what he perceived as the strict intellectualism of higher education, he left school and went to Paris, where he associated with a thriving avant-garde arts movement. He befriended Gertrude Stein and wrote poetry, but abandoned his writing quickly and, from 1929 to 1945, established his reputation primarily as a composer. He vigorously returned to writing, however, in 1945 when, inspired by his wife Jane Bowles and influenced by the Surrealists, he accepted a contract to write a novel. The business of writing was for Bowles inextricably entwined with his identity as an expatriate, and in July 1947 he left the U.S. once again to settle in Morocco. He remained in North Africa until his death in Tangier in 1999. In her biography of Paul Bowles, entitled You Are Not I, Millicent Dillon describes the very different effects that travel had on Paul and Jane. Jane, she states, suffered from numerous phobias throughout her life and these fears seemed to be exacerbated by traversing cultural boundaries. As recalled by Paul in a conversation with Dillon in 1992, Dillon describes the impact on Jane of crossing the border on a trip to Mexico early in the couple’s relationship: . . . it seemed they were growing closer each day. But once they left Houston and crossed the border into Mexico, everything changed. Suddenly, Paul recalled, Jane was in terror. She was terrified of the dogs that ran free in the villages. She cowered on the floor in the back of the bus among the Indian women with their babies and their bundles. She wouldn’t even look out the window.” (65)

This sense of dislocation becomes a central thematic concern in Jane’s fiction, which envisions the deterritorialization of identity as a necessary precursor toward some new modality of selfhood. Jane Bowles’ work hinges on the impossibility of cultural translation. As Brian Edwards puts it, her writing does not “traverse the gap of two cultures, but instead figures and resides in

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that gap itself ” (208). Some critics of Jane Bowles’ work have suggested that this was an impossible space to inhabit and from which to write. Edwards, in his discussion of Jane Bowles, poses a useful distinction between a postmodern aesthetic of fragmentation and a deterritorialized aesthetic of subjects “living in translation”—without a solid center and speaking in a “stuttering” language that signifies the effort to inhabit a void, a space without or perhaps beyond identity. Yet Edwards makes a persuasive case that Jane’s work reflects the emerging and novel aesthetic of the postwar city of Tangier, and that this space inspired Jane’s distinctive literary idiom, even if it was not always the easiest one to occupy. Edwards seems to suggest that in the very unique instance of Jane Bowles, negation proved to be an inhabitable and even energizing condition, as if she found a way for subjects to live and thrive artistically outside of language (Edwards 213–28). Paul Bowles, according to Dillon, differs from Jane in that he embraces the opportunities for translation posed by cross-cultural encounters, even if the characters in his fiction typically fail to flourish creatively from the expressive possibilities such encounters generate. Bowles eagerly anticipated his entry into a new landscape: “For him, the stranger the landscape, the more forbidding and mysterious it was, the more he relished being in it. He reveled in all that was unconnected to the life he knew in the U.S., in any sign of another mode of existence, particularly one that was ostensibly more primitive and more mysterious” (Dillon 92). This proclivity for travel stems inextricably from Bowles’ disillusionment in the wake of postwar society in the U.S. and Europe.16 At the same time, his fiction presents a decidedly ambivalent view regarding travel as an escape from the horrors of war and western decadence, as I will illustrate through readings of the story “Pages from Cold Point” and of his well-known novel, The Sheltering Sky. These works portray a nearly heroic, but ultimately tragic, attempt to leave the West behind. Without the authority of the law back “home” to underwrite subjectivity, the travelers of Bowles’ narratives not only fail to articulate a creative idiom of selfhood based on an encounter between West and non-West, but also actively seek through a union with some other the absolute dematerialization of the self. This assault exemplifies the dynamics of a kind of “death-drive” hysteria: “death” in this case signifies the very denial of selfhood. “Pages from Cold Point,” published in 1961, relates the story of a disillusioned university professor, Norton, who decides to abandon his university post and seek refuge, along with his sixteen-year old son Racky, on a remote island in the Caribbean. The opening words of the story reveal the depth of alienation behind Norton’s decision to relocate:

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Our civilization is doomed to a short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. Life is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go. Perhaps some day another form of life will come along. Either way, it is of no consequence.” (362)

This diffidence—the sense that “either way, it is of no consequence”—sets the tone of the narrative. Once he settles on the island Norton assumes the role of passive observer, as if he lacks the will to assert any new or authentic idiom of his own life. He shares the same affinity for decay as the melancholic traveler, but unlike the melancholic he neither finds creative potential in his own detachment nor approaches his “adventure” as a purgative rite to atone for his inescapable part in the “process of decay.” The opening scene of the narrative stages Norton’s rebellion against the law through a confrontation with his “sensible” brother, a “successful lawyer” who “disapproves” of Norton’s decision to abandon his job and go “off to the wilds” (363). Norton confesses to “loathing” his brother, and he and Racky escape his injunctions, and those of civilization generally, by settling in a house on Cold Point “across the island and quite isolated on its seaside cliff ” (364). From this point on the action of the story reaches a plateau. The narrative, in a sense, comes to a standstill in the same way that Norton’s desire becomes fixated on the object that, for him, embodies utopian virtue. Racky appears to him to lie beyond the pale of civilizational decay. Ironically, this fixation prevents Norton from attaining complete satisfaction on the island. Though he describes the scene from the house as idyllic, he appears somewhat unsettled and his admiration for Racky’s youthful “innocence of vision” is compromised by his feelings of envy (365). Norton’s effort to make sense of his “love” for Racky gives the “I” of his first-person narration its continuity. We may say, in other words, that Norton’s pursuit of his object of desire motivates him to generate his narrative and gives the narrative, and therefore his self, a measure of constancy. One component of this effort entails ensuring that Racky continue to signify the properties of the ideal. He strives, then, to preserve Racky’s innocence by sequestering him from what he refers to as “the paralyzing effects of present-day materialism” (365). The equation of Racky to a “pure” essence that may someday become vulnerable to corruption mirrors a similar concern about the island itself. One day, for instance, while sitting alone on the beach, Norton worries over the ephemerality of the paradise around him:

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The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel One must have lived in the United States to appreciate the wonder of this place. Still, even here ideas are changing each day. Soon the people will decide that they want their land to be a part of today’s monstrous world, and once that happens, it will all be over. As soon as you have that desire, you are infected with the deadly virus, and you begin to show the symptoms of the disease. You live in terms of time and money, and you think in terms of society and progress . . . Here for the moment at any rate, one has a feeling of staticity—existence ceases to be like those last few seconds in the hourglass when what is left of the sand suddenly begins to rush through to the bottom all at once. For the moment, it seems suspended. And if it seems, it is. Each wave at my feet, each birdcall in the forest at my back, does not carry me one step nearer the final disaster. The disaster is certain, but it will suddenly have happened, that is all. Until then, time stays still. (368)

On the surface, the reduction of the so-called “natives” to a timeless essence reflects a typical Orientalist representational strategy. Yet this passage also illustrates the structure of a personal pathology: Norton views the onset of civilization as a harbinger of his own death. After “the final disaster,” he says, “it will all be over.” For Norton, only the stoppage of time can stem the encroachment of civilization. As the story shows, this stoppage equates to the cessation of a maturational process—to the sabotage of cognition. It entails, in other words, a negation of the self, which Norton achieves through a merger with the object that for him personifies the antithesis of decay. “Pages” makes a quite literal connection between the preservation of this innocence and the repudiation of sexual maturation. Norton panics when he learns that Racky has been seducing local boys on his daily excursions to a nearby village. Racky no longer seems to him a child, but rather “another person—an adult, mysterious and formidable” (374). Unable to confront Racky, Norton allows himself to be seduced into an incestuous relationship. He returns from a walk to find Racky undressed in his bed and, still motivated by a fantasy that he and Racky may both stay ensconced in a timeless Eden, lies next to him: “a child, a child” he thinks as walks in (378–79). The act holds for Norton the promise of escaping a backdrop of imminent nuclear destruction, but only at the cost of his own self’s articulation: as he enters the room, he states that Racky “lay so still. Warm and firm, but still as death” (379). The affair continues for a week, during which Norton professes to be “fully happy” (379). For this brief span, Norton manages to convince Racky to stay near the house, thereby preserving the illusion that Racky embodies

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a static child-like essence and, further, retaining the idealized object for his own exclusive possession. Yet the “disaster” he anticipates indeed transpires. After a week, Racky breaks the spell by threatening to notify Norton’s brother of the incestuous affair, then blackmails him into establishing a substantial trust fund and finally, on an excursion to Cuba, abandons Norton and leaves him to return to the house alone. Still, even after returning, the very memory of the affair enables Norton to persist with his utopian fantasies: “I am perfectly happy here in reality,” he concludes, “because I still believe that nothing very drastic is likely to befall this part of the island in the near future” (381). He sustains this belief only through a continued suppression of the self ’s development, a point punctuated in the symbolism of the narrative’s final scene. As Norton daydreams on the beach, he describes the gratifying sensation of “drowning” the self: as he states, that “part-floating, part-submerged feeling of being in the water” (381). His union with Racky, actualized and then conjured in his daydreams, enables the dissolution of consciousness he seeks. Bowles explores this compulsion to efface the self ’s development further in his novel The Sheltering Sky. Published in 1949, The Sheltering Sky depicts the journey of three Americans through North Africa just at the close of World War II. The travelers appear to arrive without any clear sense of purpose, yet they convey an immediate impression of unrest. Though married for twelve years, the story’s main protagonists, Port and Kit Moresby, communicate in terse and awkward exchanges and their relationship has in recent years grown distant. Kit suspects that Port invites the third traveler, a friend named Tunner, to act as a foil to any substantive effort to deal with the absence of intimacy between them. The idea to undertake the journey clearly originates with Port, while Kit merely accompanies him “without reiterating her complaints too often or too bitterly” (14). He sets few parameters for their adventure, saying only that they plan to be away for “a year or so,” and he clearly wishes to view their trip as an exercise in travel and not tourism: The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home . . . as he claimed, another important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the

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Port decides on North Africa arbitrarily: they go because a freighter happens to be available from New York. The region holds no particular appeal for them—to the contrary, the region has been spoiled by colonization and the area ravaged by the presence of recent military operations—yet Port maintains that this trip will at least enable them to flee “the aftermath and memory of the war.” As Port states, “I’d still a damned sight rather be here than back in the United States” (15).17 The trio’s voyage across Africa facilitates the novel’s exploration of the marriage between Port and Kit; the restless equivocation these characters display toward the landscape mirrors the lethargic indifference in their relationships. Their attitude toward travel reflects a disposition toward their partner: a geographical attachment corresponds to the structure of a romantic one. Port, for instance, expresses such revulsion for Europe that he desperately seeks a utopian alternative. Convinced that “Europe has destroyed the whole world,” Port wishes to see perfection in the African landscape—as he puts it, to “penetrate to the interior of somewhere” (95, 167). Yet like the permanent sense of dislocation that Naipaul describes as the “enigma of arrival,” Port travels without ever reaching his destination: The landscape was there, and more than ever he felt he could not reach it. The rocks and the sky were everywhere, ready to absolve him, but as always he carried the obstacle within him. He would have said that as he looked at them, the rocks and the sky ceased being themselves, that in the act of passing into consciousness, they became impure. (168)

For Port, any prospect of attachment conjures the stigma of decay. As a result he remains aloof and inaccessible. He follows only his own muse, and his insistent detachment acts as a constant source of frustration for Kit. While traveling, he is independent and secretive and virtually shuns intimacy, with the notable exception of a thwarted liaison with a sixteen-year old Arab prostitute. Kit, on the other hand, keeps her focus constantly on Port, so much so that the novel suggests that she lacks the agency to act assertively on her own behalf. One symptom of her passivity takes the form of an exaggerated sense of destiny. To Kit, every event augurs the next, and her unceasing efforts to unlock the encoded determinism of her environment becomes so all-encompassing that little room remains for her own individual impulses:

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A great part of her life was dedicated to the categorizing of omens. And so it is not surprising that when she found it impossible to exercise that function, because of her doubt, her ability to go through the motions of everyday existence was reduced to a minimum. It was as if she had been stricken by a strange paralysis. She had no reactions at all; her entire personality withdrew from sight; she had a haunted look. (44)

In the unfamiliar environs of Algeria, Kit finds herself less able to recognize and interpret these omens, and so she becomes more reliant on “orders” from her companions. Yet Port refrains from issuing such orders: “he hung back, hoping thereby to discover what she really wanted” (49). Tunner, however, acts much more aggressively. Once Port pursues his own independent course and separates himself from the group, Tunner gives Kit the structure and direction she craves; he saves her from the confusion of acting “on her own desires” (49). The combination of Port’s remoteness and Kit’s aversion for self-direction lends a sense of inevitability to the adulterous liaison that ensues. After Port ventures ahead to Boussif on his own, leaving Kit and Tunner to take the train, Kit attempts to resist Tunner’s advances. While on the train she withdraws from him and sets out on her own to explore a fourth-class car. Yet as she moves through the carriage, the environment to her seems grotesque and terrifying. She fixates particularly on a diseased man whose visage is “the most hideous human face she had ever seen” (85). This micro-odyssey symbolizes the fear evoked when Kit strikes out on her own. She experiences her subjectivity strictly as void and becomes terrified when she attempts to act independently. The description of her emotions as she walks through the carriage conveys the vanishing point of her selfhood that derives from the traversal of a boundary: “she had the impression of living a dream of terror which refused to come to a finish.” This emptying of subjectivity is accompanied by a temporal disjuncture: “She was not conscious of time passing; on the contrary she felt that it had stopped, that she had become a static thing suspended in a vacuum” (86). She fends off this terror only by returning to Tunner and offering herself as an object of his desire. We may say that Kit and Port embody two contrasting orientations toward the “nothingness” of being: Kit struggles to ward off the terror of emptiness, while Port embraces and organizes around this emptiness. In the course of his travels, Port appears “alone, abandoned, lost, hopeless, cold.” Yet he clings to this “glacial deadness” because it comprises “the core of his being; he had built the being around it” (141). To him, the desert sky signifies a utopian enclosure that always lies at a distance. Indeed while he and Kit

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sit atop a rocky cliff overlooking the desert, he describes the “sheltering sky” as a “solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind.” Behind the sky, he tells Kit, is “nothing . . . just darkness . . . absolute night” (101). Kit shudders at the implications of Port’s pronouncements and appeals to him to stop talking this way. Unlike Port, she wishes to remain in one place, and she finds his detachment and his seeming complacency toward meaninglessness intolerable. Whereas Port, in a characteristic pose of the melancholic, keeps the idealized object always at a distance, Kit employs the other’s desire as a cloak that serves to “fill” the void of subjectivity; the two protagonists reflect two divergent orientations to both love and travel. For Kit, the possibility of love lies in becoming “whatever he wanted her to become,” while for Port, love remains forever out of reach. He therefore affects a sense of resignation, or “infinite sadness and repose” (124). It appears, then, to be an inexorable finish to the novel when Port should find some comfort in his death,18 and when Kit, left alone, quite literally becomes reduced to a cipher as a result of a traumatic amnesia that dramatically effaces any trace of her own selfhood. The amnesia begins when Port dies due to complications from typhoid. Having made their way to progressively smaller villages and with Port now barely conscious, Kit and Port find themselves at a French colonial station in the village of Sbâ. They arrive in Sbâ after Port plots to leave Tunner behind, a plan that must be revised upon learning from a civil officer that Tunner is in pursuit to return Port’s stolen, and now recovered, passport. Port appeals to Kit to pack her bags hurriedly to depart.19 Yet Port’s then nascent illness takes a turn for the worse, and Kit assumes the burden of finding a place for him to convalesce. Port’s condition fails to improve, however and in Sbâ, three-quarters through the novel, he dies from peritonitis. For an instant, Port’s death seems to vitalize Kit’s sense of her own subjectivity. She surreptitiously leaves the station before anyone discovers Port’s death and goes to a nearby pool to bathe. The bath appears to promote a feeling of rebirth: She felt a strange intensity being born within her. As she looked about the quiet garden she had the impression that for the first time since her childhood she was seeing objects clearly. Life was suddenly there, she was in it, not looking through the window at it. The dignity that came from feeling a part of its power and grandeur, that was a familiar sensation, but it was years ago that she had last known it. (247)

We soon see, however, that these gestures toward independence function as a defense against the void of subjectivity rather than a renewal. After

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the bath Kit falls asleep beneath a tree and forgets what happened the day before: “At present, what had gone before was indistinct, unidentifiable. Resolutely she turned her mind away, refusing to examine it, bending all her efforts to putting a sure barrier between herself and it” (267). Instead of rebirth, she retreats through a temporal displacement that acts as yet another strategy of self-effacement. The final quarter of the novel chronicles Kit’s actions through a period marked by a dramatic, and violent, abnegation of selfhood.When a caravan passes by the arching tree where she slept the previous night, Kit impulsively approaches the riders with her small valise and mounts one of the camels. For the next several months, she travels with a group of nomads through the Sudanese desert. One of the men of the caravan, Belqassim, forces Kit to submit to his sexual advances. She initially resists but then relents and, without showing any signs of subjective engagement, becomes more conciliatory: she was “conscious of making the gestures of love only after she had discovered herself in the act of making them” (273).21 Although Belqassim slowly asserts a claim of ownership on Kit, another of the camel drivers forces himself on her as well and she becomes a consort to them both. They proceed southward toward Belqassim’s Sudanese home, where Belqassim disguises Kit as a man and then locks her in a secluded, dark room in the compound. He tells her that she must remain quiet so as not to draw suspicion from Belqassim’s other wives. For the most part she stays alone in the darkened corridor waiting for a servant to bring her food. On occasion, Belqassim surreptitiously comes to the room to see her. Kit now willingly accedes to his advances, again underscoring the violence of her self-effacement, and even begins to appreciate her role as one of Belqassim’s preferred wives.20 Kit resolves to escape only when a crisis surfaces: Belqassim grows tired of her and ceases to visit, and it turns out that the other wives have been poisoning her food out of jealousy. Still, Kit never seems fully determined to surmount Belqassim’s claim of ownership on her. Even as she maneuvers through the labyrinthine complex toward the city streets, she acknowledges feeling guilty, thinking “he’s your husband” (294). Indeed, her tendency to fashion herself into the object of another’s desire, and not any concerted bid to recover a sense of agency, drives her escape. She realizes in fact that “any creature even remotely resembling Belqassim would please her quite as much as Belqassim himself. For the first time it occurred to her that beyond the walls of the room, somewhere nearby, in the streets if not in the very house, there were plenty of such creatures” (293). Once she reaches the town center, a few local men identify her as a foreigner, connive to take her money, and

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then contact the American Consul, who arrange for her transport to Algiers. The prospect of “return” sends Kit into a panic. She fears that contact with civilization will again compel her to confront the “I” that she has to this point buried. In being rescued, she fears “she had betrayed herself, established contact with the other side” (304), and worries that this is “the end”: It would not be long before they found her. They would stand her up before a great mirror, saying to her: “Look!” And she would be obliged to look, and then it would be all over. (307)

This image in the mirror represents the imaginary that Kit refuses to recognize. She chooses immersion in the other’s narrative over selfhood, even if such a state necessitates her own violent submission to the other. Even when a representative from the Consul accompanies her to Algiers, where a distraught Tunner greets her, Kit wanders off in yet another attempt to steal away from the symbolic realm of civilization. CONCLUSION: POSTMODERNISM AND THE ADVENTURE TRAVEL GENRE Postmodern theory typically emphasizes the flexibility of identities, the shifting parameters of cultural and national boundaries and the instability of the law. On the surface, such theories would seem to invite application to the literature of travel. Travel narratives, after all, tend to valorize the auratics of otherness—the expropriation, at least temporarily, of the identities of “unfamiliar” cultural groups. As I have described in this chapter, the motives for an undertaking of this sort may hinge on a desire to lose, or even to annihilate, the self. Alternatively the goal of the adventure may be to find the self—as exemplified in the adventure industry’s common rhetoric of the self ’s “discovery” or “improvement.” I have suggested that these two idioms of travel exhibit the logic of two orientations of hysteria—namely, of “life” and “death” drive hysteria. Neither form, however, suggests the free-floating logic of postmodernism. In fact, narratives of the self ’s discovery reflect the structure of modernism much more than postmodernism, while narratives of the self ’s negation highlight the failure of postmodernism to underwrite any sustainable form of subjectivity. In other words the hysterical version of pilgrimage enables the enhancement or the annihilation of the self, but fails to engender the hybrid forms envisioned in postmodern thought. I have argued in this chapter that both life and death drive hysteria entail the performance of the imago of an idealized object. Since representations of

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pilgrimage and conversion comprise a significant segment of the literature of adventure travel, it bears considering further the extent to which these narratives necessarily follow the “neurotic” structure I have derived from readings of van der Post and Bowles. In many travel texts the motivations of the traveler remain opaque and any similarity to the structure I describe in this chapter may seem less obvious. Esther Freud’s novel Hideous Kinky may serve as an example. The story of a young Englishwoman who travels to Morocco with her two daughters, ages five and seven, Hideous Kinky depicts the bohemian ethos of 1960s counterculture without any of the social commentary or clear pathos evident in van der Post or Bowles. Because the five-year old daughter narrates, the reader is privy to few details regarding the mother’s motivations for the trip. We do learn that she is recently divorced, ventures to Morocco in search of adventure with no clear timetable for a return, and funds the trip by way of periodic payments forwarded to Morocco by the girls’ father. These details hint at an underlying rebellion, but for the most part the narrative focuses on the quotidian aspects of the threesome’s travels rather than any interior monologue regarding selfhood. Yet despite the manifest story of bohemian or “budget” tourism, the struggle that takes shape between the mother and her children reveals something of the latent character structure of hysteria and travel. Midway through the novel, for instance, “Mum” decides that she wants to become a Sufi. Inspired by her acquaintance with Luna, a Danish woman who has settled in Morocco, married a Moslem man and chosen to abide by Islamic codes of conduct, Mum’s decision sends the young daughter into a panic. She resolves to change her mother’s mind: “‘Oh Mum, please . . . ’ I was prepared to beg. ‘Please don’t be a Sufi’” (99). The discord makes for some comic moments, as the daughters become stewards of the law while mother embraces the free-floating subjectivity enabled by her travels. She takes a Moroccan lover, Bilal, whom the girls adopt as a father figure only to be confused when the two lovers separate and Mum becomes intimate with someone else. A more somber tone prevails when Mum follows the suggestion of two American tourists to visit a Sufi teacher in Algiers, and the older daughter, Bea, asks if she can stay behind in Marrakech to attend school. The younger daughter tails along apprehensively and begins to suffer from nightmares. Indeed, she grows increasingly fearful of her mother’s conversion: . . . the longer we stayed the more I hated it. Not because of the mosque, or the days themselves, which were a calm round of courtyards and prayers and whispering corridors, but because of the nights.

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The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel Because of the Black Hand. I was convinced the disembodied hand was only waiting for its moment to close its sooty fingers round my throat. I lay awake against the warmth of Mum’s sleeping body and waited for the slow thud of its approach. With every night’s reprieve my anxiety did not lessen, but a new fear, a wild and uncontrollable fear, took hold of me. The Black Hand was going to strangle Mum. (157)

Whereas Mum seeks an escape from the law, the daughter finds such an escape terrifying. She begins to wet the bed. When the two finally return to Marrakech, they find Bea angry at being abandoned for so long and enrolled, of her accord, in a missionary school. The signs of Englishness that Mum so wishes to jettison are, in turn, earnestly adhered to by the daughters. Notably, the filmic version of Hideous Kinky explicitly cites the “annihilation of the ego” as Mum’s primary motivation for the journey—a phrase conspicuously absent from the novel.22 The expression suggests a consonance with hysteric character structure. Indeed, although it is not always so easy to ascertain the rationale for the journey, the picture that emerges in Hideous Kinky contrasts with overtly postmodern glosses on adventure travel. In Video Night in Kathmandu and Global Soul, for instance, Pico Iyer offers acute descriptions of “counter-cultural imperialists” who descend on “Third World” cities and beaches and transform them into a global pastiche (see also Holland and Huggan 164–166). Often such travelers enjoy the ferment of creativity that stems from the assemblage of disparate elements—which, as some critics have noted, makes adventure travel akin to a form of bricolage.23 Yet throughout this discussion I have attempted to show that, in many cases, a closer investigation of the traveler’s character structure reveals a complex effort to resolve a crisis of selfhood. In this chapter, I have argued for the presence of an “hysteric motif ” in the travel genre, in which this effort assumes the form of submission to the other as a means to foreclose the enunciation of the self. This other may be signified as “Africa,” “Sufi” or tragically, for Kit, any object external to herself. In each case the idealized object proves preferable to the disappointment of civilization.

Chapter Four

The Self in Ruins Mourning and Melancholia in Contemporary Travel Writing

Foucault is notoriously taciturn on the topic of the psyche, but an account of subjection, it seems, must be traced in the turns of psychic life. More specifically, it must be traced in the peculiar turning of a subject against itself that takes place in acts of self-reproach, conscience, and melancholia that work in tandem with processes of social regulation. —Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power Perhaps “the tourist” was really an early postmodern figure, alienated but seeking fulfillment in his own alienation—nomadic, placeless, a kind of subjectivity without spirit, a “dead subject.” —Dean MacCannell, Introduction to the 1989 edition of The Tourist Waste and cadavers all . . . —Jennifer Radden, The Nature of Melancholy Only Patagonia, Patagonia can match my immense sadness. —Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia

In his 1621 treatise Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton describes idleness as “the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness” (158). The remedy for this condition, he insists, lies in recreation and travel: there is “no better physic for a melancholy man than change of air, and variety of places, to travel abroad and see fashions” (335). Yet Burton’s prescription seems at once oddly contrary to the tone of contemporary adventure narratives—which so frequently read as sustained meditations on loss—and still complexly consistent with the spirit of these narratives. In the modern idiom of melancholic travel, the journey acts as a gesture of commitment to a loss rather than as a curative for that loss. The journey, that is, symbolizes the 105

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melancholic state—functions as an expression of it—and cannot be said to provide an antidote in the sense evoked by Burton. Yet though these modern narratives indulge their melancholic states—perhaps, it may be said, to the point of masochism—they do in many cases address themes of redemption and recovery. If travel does not function quite the way that Burton describes, animating the senses in a manner that abates the melancholy condition, then it may be possible, these later narratives suggest, to restore oneself by delving deeper into the melancholy state itself—to derive a kind of satisfaction from its enlargement, rather than its mitigation, in the journey. Travel, in other words, may offer a curative after all. Although Burton advocates work, in addition to travel, as a remedy for melancholy, his Renaissance-era musings anticipate a significant cultural debate regarding the relationship between what Hume calls “the passions” and the increasing rationalization of everyday life. By the seventeenth century, two competing conceptions of human nature become increasingly salient in literary, philosophic and social discourse: an Enlightenment view that stresses the human capacity for reason and a Romanticist one that eulogizes an essential humanity that supposedly preexists the trappings of civilization. These opposed idealizations were no doubt given increasingly concrete expression over the course of the colonial expansion of the Tudor period, which provided numerous occasions to expound upon the distinction between so-called “savage” and “civilized” persons. While there is some risk here of reducing the history of western expansion to a set of overly structural abstractions, the manifold representations of the tension between Enlightenment and Romanticist principles indicate the importance of this tension as a register of the onset of modernity. One may thereby discern a conceptual affinity between Herder’s polemical defenses of the “primitive,” Baudelaire’s railings against “the ruins of the bourgeois world,” the more scientific formulation in Freud’s opposition of civilization and its discontents, and the grand theoretical statement made by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Each of these positions in some manner casts modernity as a struggle between a stable, well-regulated subjectivity and a free-floating, individualist critique. As Chris Rojek points out in his history of leisure, the advancement of capitalism has sought to accommodate these tensions in order to make the staid regime of work more palatable to the masses by, for example, demarcating structured “work” time and unstructured “free” time (Rojek 45–49). Moreover, market culture takes direct advantage of the passions by mining the murky terrain of personal desire to forge new arenas for consumption. Yet despite these accommodations, the persistence of romanticism attests to a tendency, as Judith Butler puts it in the above epigraph, to

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“turn away” from the state. This turning away, I wish to show in this chapter, forms the basis of melancholia in the realm of modern culture and surfaces as a pervasive leitmotif in contemporary travel writing. The notion of a turning away suggests the structure of a revolt against the law, akin to that described previously with respect to obsession and hysteria. Indeed, as numerous commentators have noted, obsession and melancholia bear somewhat of a familial resemblance. Julia Kristeva, for instance, observes that each complex represents a kind of modal attitude regarding the emergence of selfhood. One may view melancholia, she suggests, as obsession without the adaptation of “anality”: “The melancholy person who extols that boundary where the self emerges, but also collapses in deprecation, fails to summon the anality that could establish separation and frontiers as it does normally or as a bonus with obsessive persons” (339).1 In the obsessional travel narrative, the traveler seeks to compensate for the loss of one symbolic universe—a loss typically precipitated, quite literally in the Crusoe idiom, as a revolt against the father—by producing an exclusively self-generated, and thereby untainted, symbolic world as an authentic alternative. Obsession entails a restorative gesture. As we saw in Chapter Two, this gesture frequently degrades into violence or self-annihilation since every effort to substitute for the loss resonates with the threat of inauthenticity and leaves the traveler in a paranoid and defensive state. The melancholic traveler, by contrast, attempts no such restoration. Although still motivated by a rebellion,2 the melancholic traveler either forecloses on the possibility of whole, integrated selfhood altogether or suffers through the journey as a kind of self-prescribed “penance” for the revolt. As I hope to show in this chapter, then, the melancholic literature presents two possible outcomes for the traveler: either the journey results in a reinvigorated identification with the state that was left behind (after the penance); or, alternatively, the traveler derives an ethical stance from the fragmentation of selfhood (resigned to alienation) that, frequently, finds an outlet in literary expressivity. For the melancholic traveler, the focus remains on the loss rather than the remediation of loss. Such a character type lends itself to a range of variations, each of which aims to convert loss into an aesthetic of selfhood; this aesthetic may be organized around, for example, nostalgia, guilt, or suffering. One version of the melancholic taveler, for instance, exhibits an abiding romance with the idea of detachment, which typically takes the form of an extended reflection on the impossibility of modern selfhood. Rather than the aggressive obsessional approach to this dilemma, the melancholic traveler channels the loss into a writerly persona. Narratives in this idiom, explored in this chapter through the works of V.S. Naipaul and Geoff Dyer, can have a

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mournful tone but suggest that the act of writing itself produces a coherence of identity. In fact they assert a decisive and mutually supportive link between melancholia and the productive effusion of creative expression. Another variant of the melancholic idiom, one that exerts more ideological force, portrays the traveler “slumming” in places marked as socially and culturally distant, either to affirm the degraded state of the external world or to renew the traveler’s sense of belonging back home.3 These travel narratives redress some anxiety concerning the authority of the law by revealing the corrupt nature of everything foreign to it. They vindicate the social order at home by demonstrating that everything overseas is, often literally, shit. Although the tone of these texts may be journalistic or satirical and not palpably melancholic, and though the tribulation of the journey enables a renewed identification with the writer’s homeland, the narrative still organizes around the melancholic structure of detachment and rejection. As one might anticipate, this form of the melancholic travel narrative presents some troubling political implications. Still another version of melancholic travel explores the valorization of suffering as a reflection of the traveler’s guilt. Unlike the tragic tone of the previous model, here the traveler romanticizes—or fetishizes—the elements of hardship in the journey. One finds less emphasis on the redemption of home, yet through the trials of suffering the traveler renews a sense of affiliation, at least temporarily, with the social order that he or she originally sought to escape. Wilfred Thesiger’s classic travel work Arabian Sands may serve as an exemplary text in this mode. In all of these variations of the melancholic narrative, then, the journey enables the traveler to symbolize a loss. In some instances this act of symbolization permits the traveler to return home with a more confident sense of subjectivity, while in other cases no such return takes place. The traveler instead defers a return indefinitely as if to linger on, and find pleasure in, the loss. As I contend in the final section of this chapter, the significance of this analysis lies in its ability to illustrate how a kind of lived social critique— as manifested in the everyday practices of mass culture—can in some cases be neutralized through the performance of the journey. When the traveler returns home, the narratives typically suggest that the state of melancholy recedes as the traveler becomes re-integrated as a subject of ideology into the homeland. When melancholia persists, however, and the traveler refuses a return home, then the narrative may revel in a form of express nihilism or, potentially, undertake a sustained critique of the ruins and fragmentation of modernity. This latter position suggests that melancholia may offer a kind of morality or ethics. Contrary to the solitude or self-destruction evident in the obsessional and hysteric idioms, or to the kind of adaptation that is encoded

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in a narrative of return, a sustained reflection on detachment at least has the virtue of acceding to the irrevocable gap between public and private selves. The traveler makes no sustained attempt to merge the two sides. Arriving at a more precise sense of the structure of melancholia will serve to make the parameters of this sub-genre, as well as the distinctions within the genre, clearer. As Jennifer Radden argues in The Nature of Melancholy, the literature pertaining to melancholy long predates the modern era and drew extensively from philosophical, cultural, biological traditions before being expropriated, to some degree, by the discourse of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century. An analysis of contemporary conceptions of melancholia reveals a debate among modern views that poses a difficult question for any application to an interpretation of culture: is loss in some way constitutive of all subjectivity or is it specific to the conditions of modern social life? And further, does any basis exist to speak of a late twentieth-century idiom of melancholia that somehow justifies its usage here as departing from the more general theoretical formulations found elsewhere? In other words, does the “lack of definiteness in the center of the soul” that Simmel ascribes to metropolitan life at the fin-de-siècle assume a distinctive form in the rise of leisure travel as mass cultural practice in the latter half of the twentieth century? I will first address the literature of melancholia in psychoanalysis and cultural criticism, and then turn to the particularities of postcolonial contexts to support the contention that the last several decades present a unique set of conditions for the melancholic travel writer. LOSS THEORIES: THE SUBJECT OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND POLITICS Psychoanalysis by no means stands alone in proposing that subjects are fundamentally split from some (imagined) integrated whole and, as a result, divided and alienated in their essential structure. As I have already noted, the idea of a division between the public and private self—between the ordered exterior world and an unstructured interior one—features in philosophic, as well as psychoanalytic, commentaries on the rise of bourgeois culture.4 Yet the psychoanalytic arguments merit attention because these formulations both inform and run counter to the approach to mass culture that I wish to propose in this chapter. On the one hand, these theories give foundation to the notion that mass culture could function both as a symptom and as an unconscious form of critique. They also help to explain the compulsion and repetition that pervades the modern traveler’s tendency to articulate and then continually to relive a perceived loss. By presenting a strictly structural

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account of the antagonism between subject and object, however, psychoanalysis appears to challenge any effort to historicize this antagonism. In order to show that adventure travel practices may be read as a symptom of modernity, as I wish to argue, some effort must be made to concretely link abstractions of human subjects to models for cultural practice. How is the antagonism inherent to the psyche related to the antagonism that pits modern subjects against an excessively repressive patriarchal law? For Freud, the primary antagonism that all subjects must confront entails the loss of a caretaker, whom the infant initially perceives as co-extensive with itself. This caretaker not only works to provide for the infant’s basic needs, but also embodies an ideal of integration that the infant defends at all costs. Coming to terms with the separation of mother and infant represents one of the child’s most difficult, and necessary, developmental achievements. Freud’s description of the fort-da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle offers an account of the child’s effort to ascribe meaning to, and in fact master, this loss: One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive “o-o-o-o” [for German fort, “gone”]. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful “da” [“there”]. This, then, was the complete game—disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act. (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 15)

In his interpretation of the game, Freud suggests that the act of ritualizing the loss of the mother—of finding a means to express it in symbolic terms—shores up the child’s sense of self and furthers its individuation as a unique subject: The interpretation of the game then becomes obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach. (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 15)

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Through such symbolizations, Freud suggests, the child matures from being a mere object of his mother’s desire to being a subject in its own right.5 This process in fact personifies the progression that Freud and, more directly in these terms, Lacan, attribute to the oedipus complex: the paternal symbolic world enables a separation from the maternal dyad. The apperception of loss is, however, predicated on a fallacy, for the integration of the mother and infant exists only as fantasy—as an imaginary ideal. The infant loses what it never really had to begin with. A parallel seems apparent between the fort-da game and the process of mourning, which Freud, in his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” describes as “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 243). In the course of mourning, one responds to the loss of an object by withdrawing all libidinal investments from it and, over time, investing these attachments elsewhere. The libido theory on which Freud relies in this essay presents this process more as a transfer of energy than as participation in a language game: “each single one of the memories and expectations,” he writes, “in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it” (245). Later re-workings of Freud’s theory, particularly by Lacan, illustrate how this detachment of libido amounts to a symbolization, which serves to compensate for the loss of the object. This symbolization enables the subject, as Zizek puts it, to “retain the notional essence of an object” (659). As with the maturation of the infant, who accommodates the loss of the mother only grudgingly, the game permits mastery of the loss and represents a refusal to concede completely the disappearance of the object in immediate reality. “The work of mourning,” Zizek asserts, “has the structure of sublation” (659). In a 1920 essay, “The Ego and the Id,” Freud revisits the issue of melancholia and suggests that the subject internalizes the lost object by way of an identification, such that a trace of the lost object sediments in the ego. This formulation makes the distinction between mourning and melancholia much less clear. Freud seems to indicate that melancholia represents an inevitable outcome of the loss of an object— that melancholia is constitutive in some way of all subjectivity. Yet the melancholic, unlike the mourner, refuses to break the attachment to the object, and instead seeks some other means to possess it beyond as a notional essence. Such subjects reject narrativization—the metaphor of the fort-da game, for instance—as a compensation for the loss and so lack the capacity to mourn. In their resolve to preserve the lost object, then, they resort to turning the object into an absolute: something that cannot be

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killed. Instead of a breaking of the attachment there is for the melancholic, as Judith Butler writes, “the incorporation of the attachment as identification” (134). The melancholic subject, to be more precise, internalizes the object and regards it as an ideal. As Freud shows in his discussion of identification in “The Ego and the Id,” the incorporated object forms the basis of the superego and functions as an apparatus of conscience. For the melancholic, all available objects in the immediate world fall short of the exalted ideal. Indeed one’s own expressive capacities are perceived to be lacking insofar as every symbolization remains inferior in comparison to the spirit of the lost object. The mistake made by the melancholic person, according to Zizek, is to confuse a loss with a lack: “what melancholy obfuscates is that the object is lacking from the very beginning, that its emergence coincides with its lack, that this object is nothing but the positivization of a void or lack” (660). To insist on unconditional attachment to the mother from the outset, and to refuse narrative substitutions that could offer a degree of consolation, means striving impossibly toward the resolution of a split that, in the end, is inherent to the structure of subjectivity from the “very beginning.” This unremitting adherence to an ideal produces a character orientation marked by a pervasive nostalgia. Unable to find any object worthy of forming a lasting attachment, the melancholic pines for the unattainable. Significantly, depictions of this pining, such as that found in Kristeva for example, suggest an aesthetic of travel: “Knowingly disinherited of the Thing, the depressed person wanders in pursuit of continuously disappointing adventures and loves; or else retreats, disconsolate and aphasic, along with the unnamed Thing” (338– 39). (The “Thing” to which Kristeva refers signifies the ideal object that resists narrative expression). Further, in the course of this searching, the melancholic takes a decidedly dismissive stance towards those objects encountered along the way, treating them as though they are tainted with, as Zizek states, the “shadow of a future separation” (Zizek, “Melancholy” 661). The stratagem employed by the melancholic in this case entails a kind of displacement predicated on rejection: by regarding the “new” object as lost, the melancholic manages to preserve the ideal. There are therefore two key properties of melancholia that generate a kind of Janus-faced set of impulses: a longing for the idealized object that will fill the subject’s lack, and a rejection of all surrounding objects as insufficient to function as replacements. What distinguishes the melancholic, then, from the more general process by which all persons come into being as subjects is the refusal to abandon the lost object. Typically, the objects that provide for the formation of subjectivity originate in the social world. The signifiers “fort-da” for instance are not arbitrary, but rather represent building blocks that enable the infant to participate

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in an existing symbolic system—the law. As recent work in theoretical politics demonstrates, the subject occupies a decidedly ambivalent position with respect to this law. On one hand, the objects that form the building blocks of the law call out or “hail” the subject and offer the potential to function as substitutions for the perceived loss.6 These calls are answered because the objects give substance to social existence by structuring the subject with identity. We may explain this point further by again referring to Freud’s discussion of identification in “The Ego and the Id.” As Freud notes, the ego has no content or structure prior to identification. It acquires character only through the internalization of objects that serve to “fill” its sense of lack. Freud depicts this process as a kind of distillation, whereby the object, unable to be possessed, leaves a residue: “the character of the Ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and . . . it contains the history of those object-choices . . . accepted or resisted” (29). Without the law, the ego remains a mere void. Though identity, as an alternative to lack, proves a persuasive motivating factor in compelling persons to consent to their own subjection, the law also stands as an affront to the subject’s own wish for self-determination. While created in the law’s image, the subject resists being reducible to the law; it values, and in fact requires, its own individuation. This conflict between individual creativity and subjection may be illustrated by a passage cited by Ernesto Laclau and Lilian Zac from Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus: But freedom is of course another word for subjectivity, and some fine day she does not hold out any longer, some time or other she despairs of the possibility of being creative out of herself and seeks shelter and security in the objective. Freedom always inclines to dialectical reversals. She realizes herself very soon in constraint, fulfills itself in the subordination to law, rule, coercion, system. . . .” (Mann, qtd. in Laclau 11)

The “objective” social world offers “shelter and security,” but also demands a sacrifice of the subject’s freedom. It challenges the perception that one is “the origin of ‘her’ expressive forms” (Laclau 12). One by-product of this dialectic, as Judith Butler notes, is guilt, which represents both a necessary precondition of the subject’s individuality and, at the same time, a consequence of turning away from the law (27). In Freud’s terms, guilt serves as a symptomatic index of the superego, which Freud depicts as the residuum, or “shadow,” of the matrix of one’s incorporated objects. The melancholic person occupies a particularly curious position with respect to the law. Since the melancholic refuses to surrender the lost object, and rejects all potential substitutes as inferior, it may seem reasonable to

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propose that the melancholic lies at a greater remove from the law than others. This would imply that melancholic subjects exhibit greater resistance to interpellations, and therefore are less likely to be incorporated as subjects of ideology. Homi Bhabha suggests something of this very argument. By internalizing the authority in its ideal form, Bhabha contends, the melancholic enacts a repetition of a revolt intrapsychically. The relentless self-indictments these persons manifest are in fact intended for the law. Yet this repetitive working out of a critique, strictly within the confines of the mind, are precisely what give melancholia the character of a revolt that has been, in Bhabha’s words, “crushed” (65). Rather than producing an outwardly directed activism, all of the aggression the melancholic harbors for the object—due to its capacity to frustrate—is directed toward the self. With respect to contemporary travel cultures, I have indicated that the adventure narrative reflects these masochistic tendencies but allows a dramatization of the melancholic’s self-reproach beyond the level of intrapsychic fantasizing. Again, in one form this presentation may take the form of an expressive treatise on the virtues of the melancholic condition as a critique of the material world. Or alternatively, the journey may take the form of a restorative “bad trip” that serves to mitigate the saliency of the ideal and facilitate a renewed identification with the traveler’s social milieu back home. MELANCHOLIC NARRATIVES AND THE RUINS OF MODERNITY Critical interpretations of modern travel cultures have noted the pervasiveness of the themes of loss and nostalgia in travel writing of the modern period. Although Ali Behdad and Dean MacCannell, for instance, clearly perceive the relationship of the traveler to colonial power differently—Behdad seeing it as mainly an adjunct to Orientalism and MacCannell as a rather sophisticated search for authenticity—they do in fact agree on the motivational roots of modern travel. They both offer a characterization of travel as a repetitive and frustrating task: as Behdad puts it, as “an insatiable search for a counterexperience in the Orient and the melancholic discovery of its impossibility” (15). Nineteenth-century narratives steeped in colonial contexts, and twentieth-century narratives in postcolonial contexts, both display a preoccupation with loss. The French poet and painter Gérard de Nerval, for example, refers to Cairo during his 1844 trip as a “fallen capital” and a “vast grave.” As he writes: The night of my arrival in Cairo, I was profoundly sad and discouraged. After riding a few hours on a mule in the company of dragoman, I

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managed to convince myself that I was going to spend the six most boring months of my life there, and meanwhile everything was organized in advance so that I could not even stay a day less. Is this, I asked myself, the city of The Thousand and One Nights, the capital of Fatamite and Sudanese Caliphs? (45)

Nerval’s lament seems outwardly not so different from, say, Paul Theroux’s proclamation in his preface to The Best American Travel Writing 2001, that “there are no Edens anymore: we live on a violated planet.” “Travelers,” Theroux continues, “are witnesses to change and decay” (xvii). One finds echoes of Nerval further in Paul Fussell’s declaration that the age of travel has ceded to modern tourism, which, Fussell argues, compares to travel as “plastic . . . to wood” (651). Even Edward Said seems to echo Nerval’s focus on ruins and decay, as in his requiem for the old streets and hotels of Lebanon. Said elegizes the Grand Hotel in Sofar as a “somber, bombed out, ragged, and yet a quietly dignified, even majestic ruin” set amidst the incursion of “unplanned, unzoned, unrestricted housing and commercial areas [that] have completely defaced, indeed massacred, the physical setting for which Lebanon has once been famous” (283).7 Yet aside from the common concern with decay, these pronouncements are issued in decidedly different cultural contexts and do not convey precisely the same meaning. Ali Behdad attributes the melancholic sentimentality of Nerval, and other nineteenth-century Francophone travelers such as Flaubert and Loti, to the sway of an Orientalist romance. Nerval’s primary aim, according to Behdad, lay in exposing—or unveiling—the Orient, but the “belatedness” of his arrival repeatedly frustrates his efforts to do so. Other Orientalists, such as Chateaubriand, whose 1818 journey Nerval self-consciously strives to retrace, have arrived before him; even more troubling for Nerval, the Orient itself has been transformed and fails to correlate to the imaginings of an Orientalist mythography derived from older texts. Echoing Nerval, the more recent plaints reserve the same hostility for modernity, but not ostensibly in the service of Orientalism. One wonders, rather, if they contain something of a more substantive critique, perhaps along the lines of what Fussell refers to as “an implicit rejection of industrialism and everything implied by the concept ‘modern northern Europe’” (Abroad 23). Whereas Nerval asserts a desire for the exotica of the Orient, the contemporary writers rail more generally against metropolitan culture. The comparison affirms the importance of interpreting the idealized object of the melancholic journey within historical and cultural context. If, for Nerval, the loss originates with the demise of the idealized Orient,

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the rationale behind expressions of mourning in the twentieth-century texts is more difficult to ascertain. Fussell idealizes a particular kind of travel experience, Theroux more generally an unsullied world, and Said the quaint idiosyncrasy of old Lebanon. Clearly, it seems perhaps disingenuous to compare Said to Nerval at all insofar as Said draws in his essay on his memories as an inhabitant of the land about which he writes. Yet in addition to the canonization of Said’s journey in a decidedly touristic forum—namely, Travel & Leisure magazine and then again in the Best American annual—a simple conceptual affinity may be noted between the two writers: a shared longing for a past Orient. They both reflect the degree to which nostalgia indexes rapid social transformations in the context of colonial expansion and the growth of urban industrialism. They differ only in the manner in which they seek to come to terms with their loss: Nerval turns to the Orient as a place to be consumed in order to exhume the “true” Orient of Chateaubriand’s era, while Said makes a sobering critique of the development schemes that have transformed the Lebanese landscape. The presence of the imaginary of the Orient pervades both narratives, yet the critique that arises out of the nostalgia diverges substantially. The ghost of each of these critiques, however indirectly referenced, is the legacy of British colonialism and the era of global culture that follows in its wake. The dissolution of the British empire provides an occasion for the proliferation of a range of melancholic narratives, with different logics of nostalgia—Fussell’s concern for authentic travel experiences is not the same as Said’s allusion to the violent and unjust articulation of modernity in Lebanon. The ineluctable transition from a postcolonial to a globalized environment makes Britain a particularly useful setting for examining how “auratic” sites of the global state are reconfigured in light of the disenchanting forces of internationalization. As a shifting signifier, postimperial Britain offers an especially revealing case study in modern travel, insofar as its decline leads to a new aesthetics of melancholia. In his examination of the significance of place in the British imagination, Ian Baucom notes that English identity owes much to canonical locales that possess auratic significance for English national sensibilities, such as the English cottage and countryside. Metropolitan culture, as he demonstrates through a reading of the romanticist poetry of Wordsworth, runs counter to Wordsworth’s attempts to promote a codified, insider knowledge of British places: “the city induces a forgetfulness of precisely the skill the poems teach—the skill of reading and valuing England’s memorial places” (33). As the consolidation of empire attains increasing significance for Britain in the mid nineteenth century, both as triumphal symbol of British power and as

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a constant threat of destabilization at the borders, it engenders a nationalized effort to preserve traditional markers of English identity. In his study of British modernity, Raymond Williams identifies this movement as “a new self-consciousness of the picturesque” (Country and City 119).8 Williams chronicles the “feelings of loss and pain” that attend the metamorphosis of the cherished ideal of the English agrarian way of life—a loss that, he notes, points to a specifically English structure of feeling that consists of a “perpetual retrospect to an ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ society” (96). Following this analysis we therefore see that the demise of feudalism inaugurates a literary corpus that reflects an “idealisation of feudal and immediately post-feudal values: of an order based on settled and reciprocal social and economic relations of an avowedly total kind” (35). With the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the emergent structure of feeling registers the incipient changes as “a kind of fall” from the more authentic rural society (96). Williams focuses more on changes in social structure—particularly the emergence of bourgeois culture and class tensions—than on the consolidation of the empire overseas, but he identifies the presence of an entrenched nostalgia within English national culture that gives rise to various forms of anti-modern sentiment. For Williams, the particularities of the English response to the growth of cities form something of a template for the deep-seated traditionalism that surfaces in other expressions of European modernity. He provides a basis, therefore, to link the pessimism that manifests in Nerval’s journey to Egypt and the nostalgia apparent in the narratives of his postcolonial counterparts. Yet a subtle distinction separates the stance these writers assume toward the idealized object: whereas Nerval holds out some hope of finding the lost object, the later writers have foregone that possibility altogether. In the earlier text one detects a lingering hint of romantic sensibilities, while the later works convey a tone of a counterromance. It may help to consider this distinction as a contrast between “extroverted” and “introverted” expressions of nostalgia. The former resembles Renato Rosaldo’s depiction of “imperialist nostalgia,” in which travelers seek to recover a lost object they themselves have been complicit in destroying. In its postimperial form, the melancholic travel narrative displays no such “innocent yearning” and, insofar as the traveler deems the object irrecoverable, no concern for altering a way of life. Instead the traveler approaches the journey with something of a quiet resignation: the repetition of the journey confirms that the ideal in fact does not exist, and so ensures that it remains protected in the enshrined space of the imagination. That is not to say that the aesthetic of melancholic travel opposes the logic of imperialism, or that the repudiation of romanticism that one finds in

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melancholia represents a particularly radical critique of modernity. The rejectionist posture of this “style” may indeed reinforce ethnocentric stereotypes and, as I show later in this chapter, the melancholic adventure may provide an outlet for tendencies toward self-punishment that in turn enable the traveler to live more comfortably within metropolitan centers of power. Yet an exploration of V.S. Naipaul’s attempt to come to terms with decay in the English countryside, in his autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival, shows that melancholia may indeed act as the basis for a rather sophisticated critique of modernity even if it appears, despite Naipaul’s occasional assertions to the contrary, to be an uncomfortable space to inhabit. Naipaul’s version of melancholic travel functions as a philosophical meditation on the status of identity in a postimperial society. In this work and others, he elevates travel to a ceaseless occupation through which one comes to terms with a permanent condition of dissolute selfhood. In the next section I examine The Enigma of Arrival and then suggest how a recent travel writer, not writing self-consciously in a postcolonial context, extends some of Naipaul’s themes. MELANCHOLIC SUBLIMATION: NAIPAUL’S POSTCOLONIAL ARRIVAL Although he has written more than a half dozen travel books set in India, Africa and the American South and expressed a strong affinity with a kind of ethos of displacement, Naipaul never articulates his travel experiences within the framework of adventure travel. Though his earlier work reflects some of the common hallmarks of recent travel writing—“comedy, funniness, the satirical reflex” as he puts it—he acknowledges that this pose acts as a way to “cover up for confusion” (Enigma of Arrival 153). Departing from England in 1960, Naipaul confesses that he felt the temptation to write as a European colonial reporting tales of adventure back to a metropolitan audience. Yet his own background, as a Trinidadian of South Asian descent, complicated his efforts to take this stance. As he writes, “The fight between my idea of the glamour of the traveler-writer and the rawness of my nerves as a colonial traveling among colonials made for difficult writing” (153). These difficulties stem not only from Naipaul’s deep ambivalence regarding travel, but also from his skepticism regarding the very possibility of stable, rooted selfhood. This subject occupies much of his attention in his later work. The Enigma of Arrival, an account of his residency in a Wiltshire cottage, represents his most systematic treatment of it. The novel draws a complex parallel between the social demise and transformation of an erstwhile imperial estate and a personal transformation that enables Naipaul to express the pervasiveness of

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nostalgia in his life’s work. The tone of Enigma vacillates from agonized tension to philosophical resignation. As he recalls his sea voyage from New York to England, as an eighteen-year old headed to Oxford in 1950 on a scholarship, Naipaul remembers that he wanted to be free of London just as soon as he arrived. He wished to remain “a man on the move”—to “stay with the ship” (174). Decades later, while walking through the Wiltshire countryside, he recounts a similar state of restlessness: There was no village to speak of. I was glad of that. I would have been nervous to meet people. After all my time in England I still had that nervousness in a new place, that rawness of response, still felt myself to be in the other man’s country, felt my strangeness, my solitude. And every excursion into a new part of the country—what for others might have been an adventure—was for me like tearing at an old scab. (8)

Naipaul seems here to resist the very notion of belonging; frequently, he seems intent on believing that he is incapable of it. Were this sense of dislocation manifest only in England, one might suspect that, as a member of the mid-century wave of immigration to Britain, Naipaul might articulate some connection to a diasporic identity. Yet Naipaul goes decidedly against that route, instead organizing his writing around his own sense of displacement, detachment, and loss.9 Trinidad offers Naipaul, at least in this phase of his career, no more solace than England. In his view, colonial expansion deprived the country of any traditional order and, moreover, the voraciousness with which he pursued his education focused his imaginings of escape overseas; Trinidad, he writes, represented a “landscape of anxiety” (152). Yet at the same time that he asserts his wish to remain in motion, Naipaul clearly places a great deal of stock in mooring oneself to place. The manor functions as a cipher for his conflict regarding his attachment to place: he longs to establish roots yet reconciles himself, at least at the level of philosophical abstraction, to the impossibility of doing so. In one sense Enigma chronicles a shift in the structure of feeling of the English countryside that attends rapid industrialization and the demise of colonial estates. Naipaul describes this shift as the emergence of “a new attitude to the land . . . the house as a place of shelter, not as a place to which you could transfer (or risk transferring) emotions or hopes” (56). When he arrives, Naipaul imagines how the manor must have operated during its colonial apex. In its current state, the manor offers an occasion to contemplate “the idea of ruin” (15). Much of his narrative, then, consists of ruminations on vestiges from a bygone era that, he notes, sometimes persist amidst rapid

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change, and then disappear as he bears witness. The following scene reflects the intensity with which Naipaul idealizes the trace survivals: In that lane one Saturday afternoon, when they were free from school and the bus, I saw the children from Jack’s old cottage playing. Like prehistorical children, in a great solitude. But they were among the leftover tires of the silage pit (certain ones had been turned into their toys, their pretend paddling rafts); and the whitening banks and mounds of excavated rubble spouting scattered weeds, pale green with bright yellow flowers; and concrete blocks left over from the building. (60)

This passage provides Naipaul with an evocative metaphor for the encroachment of modernity: innocent children playing amidst rubble and weeds. Naipaul occasionally expresses disbelief that the manor residents manage to forge ahead in such an environment, yet he also shows admiration for those who incarnate in their lives some aspect of the old ideal. Naipaul lauds the structure and meaning that traditionalism confers; he laments the meaninglessness of modern lives that appear not to be governed by any organizing principles. He describes, for example, the sister of a murdered tenant as being marked by her “family past . . . a past that had really been the absence of a great event” (78). The novel’s most prominent embodiment of Naipaul’s nostalgia is found in the figure of Pitton, the last of the legendary sixteen gardeners that once meticulously cared for manor grounds, whose life Naipaul views as a grand tragedy. For Naipaul, Pitton proves a disappointment because he remains constrained by “a form of caste behavior” but, simultaneously, fails to really know his “mysterious craft” and mistakenly strives to cast himself as a modern gentleman (234, 239). Neither a willing relic of an old way of life nor possessed of the social capital to be successfully modern, Pitton appears to Naipaul to virtually lack subjectivity. He produces flower arrangements that speak “of death and the rituals of farewell” (235). Naipaul draws a decided contrast between Pitton and Jack, an earlier tenant whose meticulous gardening suggests to Naipaul “the remnants of an old peasantry, surviving here like the butterflies among explosions of Salisbury Plain, surviving somehow industrial revolution, deserted villages, railways, and the establishing of the great agricultural estates in the valley” (18). Naipaul’s pining for the more self-assured days of British state power has led some critics to view him as an apologist for colonialism.10 Yet Naipaul laments not so much the loss of colonialism, but rather the absence of a structuring authority. The dissolution of this authority not only leaves in its wake a physical ruin, but also creates a generation that seems to Naipaul fated to a

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kind of passivity: rather than actively pursue an aesthetic ideal, the modern subject appears content not to acknowledge decay and instead to embrace an inferior substitute of the past. Naipaul rejects the banality inherent in this stance. He clings to decay because, as he writes, “decay implied an ideal, a perfection in the past” (210). From this vantage point, then, one sees how the manor landlord becomes something of a romantic figure for Naipaul— and the figure in Enigma with whom perhaps he feels the greatest kinship. Although the landlord, an icon of the imperial order, has transformed from a graceful young man to one who embodies “the fatness of self-indulgence and inactivity,” Naipaul admires that he takes some solace in “the debris of his garden, the debris of his own life” (211, 217). Both Naipaul and the landlord refuse to let the ideal of the English countryside pass away easily: the landlord falls deeper into acedia, while Naipaul perhaps evades this fate through his writing. Yet both make a choice to take a place amongst the ruins. Naipaul rather unconvincingly asserts that during the course of his stay on the manor he comes to replace the idea of decay with the idea of flux (278). He asserts that he finds a way, in other words, to surrender his fantasies of authenticity. The true enigma of arrival, Naipaul shows, is that the ideal exists only at a distance; the insertion of the subject necessarily transforms, and so degrades, the idealized object. Although one does not truly gain the sense that Naipaul derives personal contentment from this insight, he adeptly renders a central paradox of postcolonial subjectivity. Naipaul suggests that the grandeur of empire dissolved once he, the former colonial subject, arrived in Britain: the scene of the admittance of the colonized to the metropole necessarily attests to the empire’s defeat. Yet Naipaul’s nostalgia is directed not to the solidity of colonial power, but to the modus vivendi of authenticity itself. Although Naipaul’s many travelogues exhibit this same focus on decay,11 The Enigma of Arrival marks the point in Naipaul’s literary corpus when he attempts a sustained reflection on decay as a motivation for travel, and on the more general human struggle to forge an identity in a fragmented world. Naipaul refuses to apologize for his nostalgia and in fact seems to acknowledge the pursuit of integration and wholeness as a universal human striving. Although his exploration of these themes clearly originates with the colonial encounter between Trinidad and Britain, he casts modernity more generally as the era of social devolution, wherein every journey and arrival only affirms the superiority of what came before. While his tenure in the English countryside teaches him, in a manner of speaking, to live with flux, this lesson serves only to make him resigned to the permanence of his melancholy and not to cure it.12 After he leaves the manor this point becomes particularly clear:

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Even though Naipaul seeks to be an aloof observer of the fragmentation of social authority in the English countryside, he suffers much of the same effects of this dissolution that he attributes to his neighbors on the Wiltshire manor. Rather than merely a defense of empire, we might see in Naipaul’s work an excavation of melancholic fantasy and, further, a portrayal of how this fantasy functions as a critique of modernity. Modernity, Naipaul suggests, compels one always to feel out of time and place. The fickle and rapid fluctuations of style come to replace the stable and rooted authority of the law; Naipaul appears to offer an ethnographic chronicle of what Simmel calls “the specific modern infidelity in the realms of taste, style, attitudes and relationships” (“Metropolis” 415). Despite his efforts to become reconciled to flux, he clings to his traditionalism: “I had lived with the idea of change, had seen it as a constant, had seen a world in flux, had seen human life as a series of cycles that sometimes ran together. But philosophy failed me now” (335).13 Naipaul, in the end, is unable to live with change because he refuses to mourn the loss of his romanticized view of England. He fails—or refuses—to consider the possibility that England has survived the end of empire. This unwillingness to surrender his dream of an authentic British golden age constitutes one of the central features of the melancholic travel narrative. In Freud’s conception, melancholy is distinguished by “an exclusive devotion to mourning,” in which “the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged” (Mourning 239). In The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul acknowledges modern London only to dismiss it, and views its flourish of new immigration and industrial development only as evidence of an absence—a lack. THE LITERARY RUIN: DYER’S SEARCH FOR OBLIVION Toward the end of his stay in Wiltshire, Naipaul is afflicted with an illness that he says “diminished his energy” and pushed him “into middle age” (88). Amidst the remnants of the manor, he himself transforms into a ruin. This is perhaps a fitting conclusion given the novel’s insight that every arrival, every

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coming into being as a subject, results in disappointment. For the melancholic traveler, perpetual motion is preferable to the stasis of arrival. A consideration of a recent travelogue by British writer Geoff Dyer,14 Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do It, further illustrates the ways in which Naipaul addresses not only a condition of postcolonial displacement, but also an idiom of travel specific to the era of globalization. Although the jacket classifies the book as “travel/humor,” this narrative portrays a poignant personal descent over the course of a decade of travel. A series of loosely connected vignettes, Yoga chronicles Dyer’s travels to Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Libya and several locations in Europe and the United States. Dyer appears disillusioned by most of what he encounters, and indeed focuses predominantly on the mutual decay of both himself and the places he visits. At times, like Naipaul, he revels in this decay: amongst the ruins he feels most at home. He notes in fact that the trips he depicts in Yoga were originally conceived as the basis of a book about ruins loosely organized around Freud’s Rome analogy in Civilization and Its Discontents.15 Yet when he actually begins his travels—in Rome—a decidedly different book emerges. Dyer’s daily routine becomes notable for its passivity, with the focus more on his interior life than on his actions or the external world. He bonds with fellow travelers over a “love of idleness and marijuana,” but even with respect to these activities he lacks motivation and his attention is always on the past. In one scene, for instance, as he gazes at the remnants of a statue of Constantine, Dyer confesses to being “overwhelmed by antiquity.” He wishes to “enter the dead time of statues and see things through their unpupiled eyes.”16 When later he sees a photo of himself at this location he describes his appearance as “fading, ghostly transparent, impermanent” (126–27). Ruins exert a kind of magnetic pull on Dyer, and draw him to the urban decay of Detroit, the gauche art deco of South Beach, Florida, and the backpacker guesthouses in Thailand and Indonesia. As is the case for Naipaul, the ruins affirm for Dyer a state of perfection that he locates in an earlier, dead time. Although Dyer claims to feel more at home among these ruins than anywhere else, he seems far from contented. He confesses to passing the time with “half-hearted drug abuse, indolence and disappointment,” and remarks that his preoccupation with antiquity drives him to take LSD in order to “achieve unmediated access to the living past” (125). Dyer manages some wry observations in the course of his travels—seemingly finding humor in the preposterous abjection of places—but he conveys a sense of extreme isolation and fails to make any substantive connections to the people and places he encounters. He forges attachments to memories and idealizations rather than to tangible things. In the Thai resort, for instance—

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called the Sanctuary and, in Dyer’s telling, distinguished mostly by the intensity of its parties and rampant drug use—he describes a sexual encounter with a woman named Kate. Although this experience provides Dyer with a fleeting feeling of belonging, his portrayal suggests that the true reward of the liaison stems from the memory that it generates. Upon leaving the Sanctuary Dyer notes that, “Dying, at its best, might be something like this. Everything was a memory, and everything was still happening in some extended present, and everything was still to come” (113). Since Dyer interprets every destination as a facet of this decay—as a reflection of what he calls the aesthetics of “postindustrial ruination”—his experiences only intensify his focus on an “elsewhere” that is necessarily distant (218). He therefore resists any attachment to his immediate surroundings. At Leptis, in Libya, he states that he seeks solitude and that social interaction makes him “feel burdened with a terrible loneliness” (201). In Amsterdam, he more comically acknowledges a “neurosis” that compels him always to keep traveling even when he is “already in the place [he] wants to go to” (163). Dyer, following the trail of Isak Dinesen, concludes that he suffers from a kind of “pretraumatic stress”: “constantly in flight, an exile everywhere” (213). Throughout Yoga, Dyer draws an increasingly complex connection between what he describes as “the grimy, fallen condition of the world” and his own negative self-perception. Although he never fully accepts any affiliation with a travel subculture, Dyer represents his experience as if it reflects a distinctly modern form of restlessness. He writes, for example, of the mass appeal for European leisure travelers of the exotic auratics of the developing world: All visitors to the developing world, if they are honest, will confess that they are actually quite keen on seeing a bit of squalor: people living on garbage dumps, shantytowns, that kind of thing. In India we met a Swede who had strayed into one of the worst slum districts in Bombay. To elicit his sympathy and money a woman who was begging shoved her dead baby in his face. There was a group of about six of us listening to this story; we were all horrified and, I think, more than a little envious. (37)

What distinguishes Dyer’s own narrative from this sort of voyeuristic Orientalism is his portrayal of this behavior fundamentally as an assault on the self. Quoting Blake, he observes that “beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs” (223). Dyer wishes for oblivion because he wishes to do away with ambition and disappointment, neither of which serves any purpose in a fallen world. At

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its core, this sentiment contains a critique of modernity, but its most visible consequence for Dyer is despair. Against the backdrop of Detroit’s neglected urban infrastructure, he finally states, “the person I least wanted to be was me” (233). Two losses, then, surface in Dyer’s narrative: of place engulfed by modernity, and of the production of self inhibited by an overwhelming sense of belatedness. A short travel essay by Susan Orlean illustrates this point further. Describing the Khao San Road in Thailand, which has become a mainstay for young backpackers, Orlean relates one local family’s struggle to adjust to the rapid changes brought on by the influx of travelers. A young daughter, whose parents now operate an internet cafe where they once occupied a quiet residence, recalls a time when “there were no foreigners.” Then, she continues, “it changed, like overnight, and I never went outside again” (234). The road is now filled with cheap guesthouses and a cacophony of activity, led by youthful travelers in search of sex and drugs, continues through the night. These visitors have, Orlean writes, “turned Khao San into a new sort of place—not really Thai anymore, barely Asian, overwhelmingly young, palpably transient, and anchored in the world by the Internet, where there is no actual time and no actual location” (231). Orlean observes that people come to Khao San to disappear—quite literally in the sense that the road acts as a gateway to other Asian “adventure” destinations. Yet they also come to disappear in the sense of finding oblivion, achieving through the performance of adventure travel a negation of the self. SHIFTING SIGNIFIERS: AUTHENTICITY AS A CULTURAL VALUE The notion that immersion in an alienating cultural environment may fulfill a subjective desire for authenticity arises not out of a singular human condition, but from specific contexts and representations. Although a full discussion of cross-cultural research lies beyond the scope of the remarks I wish to make here, it should be emphasized that such studies attest to a high degree of variability in the ways in which social environments facilitate the construction of selfhood. Some recent research in Asian contexts, for instance, suggests that a more salient social division between public and private arenas may make personal authenticity less of a fulcrum for identity than in Europe and the United States. Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi, for instance, argues that persons in Japan display much more conscious awareness of their circulation within—and attachment to— group hierarchies. In Doi’s view individualism, when elevated to a cultural

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ideal, may act to obscure the border between individual and social worlds, thereby imposing on subjects the task of demarcating boundaries between public and private selves.17 Where cultural models make these distinctions between private and public realms more explicit, as Doi argues is the case in Japan and India, the preoccupation with authenticity may not register so urgently. This observation underscores the extent to which these character systems emerge out of particular social and historical circumstances. Nonetheless the melancholic traveler seeks to keep pace with an essentially modern cultural contradiction: the conditions that gave rise to mass tourism in the 1950s, which made the imagined experience of travel accessible to far greater numbers, also eroded the spectrum of places where this fantasy could be pursued by European and American travelers overseas. Recognizing this fact as part of the dialectical character of modernity, Claude Levi-Strauss opens Tristes Tropiques, his account of his 1955 transatlantic trip to Brazil, with the note “I hate travelers and explorers.” Tristes Tropiques (literally translated as “melancholy tropics”) paradoxically exposes how travelers mythologize cultural difference as a means to shore up the fantasy of authenticity even as it shares in travelers’ nostalgia for a bygone era. “Journeys,” Levi-Strauss writes, “those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all.” He continues: Mankind has opted for monoculture. Now that the Polynesian islands have been smothered in concrete and turned into aircraft carriers solidly anchored in the southern seas, when the whole of Asia is beginning to look like a dingy suburb, when shantytowns are spreading across Africa, when civil and military aircraft blight the primeval innocence of the American or Melanesian forests even before destroying their virginity, what else can the so-called escapism of traveling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history? (17–21)

These images of the devastation wrought by the expansion of multinational capital resemble the iconography of ruin and decay depicted by Naipaul and Dyer. Yet unlike those authors, Levi-Strauss seems less interested in fashioning selfhood from an aesthetic of loss. Instead his primary interest concerns the status of the anthropological record. Whereas the previous writers portray a self coming to terms with the loss of an idealized past, Levi-Strauss’ melancholy derives from something more akin to the loss of an archive of cultural diversity. His purpose is calculated more toward amassing

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knowledge—about real, authenticated places—than toward consolidating his own sense of self. One may argue that such an archive is no less an arbitrary cultural construction than the self—and as much an Enlightenment invention—and question Levi-Strauss’ faith that with a keen eye and the benefit of time between journeys he is able to do more than “chase after the vestiges of a vanished reality.” Though Levi-Strauss is motivated more by the capacity of critique to achieve greater levels of empathy and understanding with the places he visits than with any preoccupation with his own identity, the hint of dismay regarding the loss of the anthropological record mirrors Naipaul’s resignation at the loss of the Wiltshire manor. Both expressions of loss emanate from a notion of authenticity as cultural value: the former concerns the disciplinary practice of anthropology, and the latter an historic past grounded in cultural tradition. COMIC MASOCHISM AND THE BAD TRIP Within the last three decades, the mass-marketed novels of adventure travel have made a decided departure from Naipaul’s earlier innovations. These quasi-fictionalized accounts turn melancholic travel writing on its head by refiguring the traveler’s underlying sense of lack and impetus to escape as a coming-of-age scenario in which the adventurer endures a sequence of trials and then returns home with a renewed sense of purpose. Travel narratives of this category tend to emphasize the redemptive power of a particular kind of suffering that derives from the travails of living in an exotic land and being separated from home. As with Naipaul, texts in this genre convey a melancholic tone, but they conclude with an affirmation of heightened personal insight and so contain a degree of triumphalism not found in Naipaul or Levi-Strauss. For these travelers, “roaming off the beaten path” acts as a metaphor for both a staged encounter with the so-called Third World and for the drama of separation and individuation. The return is of crucial significance in this genre, for the return enables the fulfillment of a fantasy in which an ordinary subject leaves home and, upon completion of a difficult adventure, gains enhanced social capital at home.18 The fantasy of individuation is achieved—in narrative at least—even as the return home presents the challenges of surviving in a workaday world and conforming to the pressures and limitations of the dominant youth subcultures. William Sutcliffe’s 1997 UK bestseller Are You Experienced illustrates some of the conventions of this genre and offers insight into a specific milieu of adventure travel—pioneered by guidebooks such as Lonely Planet and Rough Guide—that have grown rapidly in popularity since the 1950s.

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A novel about travel, Are You Experienced centers on the character of Dave, who decides to spend a substantial part of his summer vacation in India with his friend Liz after his friend James teases him that he is too scared to go. Dave defends himself by saying that he has already planned a trip to Switzerland, but James insists that Dave is a coward: “You can’t face doing any real travel because you don’t think you could survive in . . . ‘in a different culture.’” (28) Like Dave, the reader of this novel is left confused because the text advances both a critique of travel by portraying its strongest advocates as snide, pretentious and obviously insincere youth, and a romantic fantasy by ultimately redeeming Dave’s experience. The novel advances the same detached critique found in Levi-Strauss and Naipaul, albeit in a comic mode. Yet unlike those authors, Sutcliffe renders Dave’s alienation as a necessary stepping stone toward a more confident level of social integration. If the travels of Levi-Strauss and Naipaul suggest a principled alienation—one that contains a social critique organized around themes of loss and decay—Are You Experienced illustrates how adventure travel serves to convert melancholic alienation into measured citizenship. Sutcliffe’s narrative frequently operates as satire, and indeed he displays a degree of self-consciousness regarding the lack of substance behind Dave’s search for authenticity. In one scene, for instance, we meet a seemingly level-headed journalist who issues to Dave a monologic condemnation of youth travel, claiming: “it’s not hippies on a spiritual mission who come here anymore, just morons on a poverty-tourism adventure holiday. The real point,” he continues, “[is] about how going to India isn’t an act of rebellion these days, it’s actually a form of conformity for ambitious middle-class kids who want to be able to put something on their CV that shows a bit of initiative . . . You also treat Indians with a mixture of contempt and suspicion which is reminiscent of the Victorian colonials” (140). Although Dave appears momentarily wounded by this diatribe, he makes an obscene gesture to the journalist and proceeds with the remainder of his journey, which consists of a disjunctive mélange of apathetic beach lounging, determined isolation from both other travelers and Indians, and disabling bouts of sickness. This latter point seems especially crucial to the transformative power of his trip. In the book’s final chapter, entitled “Dave the Traveler,” Dave asserts that he has become “almost a new person.” “As a new person, the time was right to clear the way for new friends. That was the whole point of university. I would be able to begin again as the new me—not as Dave the mediocre North London schoolboy, not as Dave the sexual failure, but as Dave the Traveler” (235). Having suffered through his experience in India, Dave now readies himself to take on the burdens of

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British citizenship. He has consolidated through his journey a foundation for what British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott calls a “true self.”19 Whereas Levi-Strauss and Naipaul place misery into the service of a high literary modernism, Dave translates his suffering into the currency of middle-class social capital. Dave explains his bid for distinction20 in this manner: “crapping your pants, for example, is a dire and miserable experience; but having crapped your pants—I mean, that’s a pretty good conversational party piece” (213). In depicting Dave’s personal transformation from discontented youth to self-assured wage-laborer, Sutcliffe proposes a theory of social reproduction. Herein lies the contribution that psychoanalysis offers to a social theory of modern leisure practices: Dave’s travails indicate that the national subjects tolerate the dominant models of social collectivity—offices, factories, schools—only when they attain a degree of contentment through the individuating effects of travel. Of course, this search for authenticity need not take place exclusively within the idiom of adventure, but tourism research indicates that the discourses of escape and adventure represent an increasingly popular response to the quickening pace of deterritorialization globally. Only by considering the intrapsychic pressures generated by the decline of “real” opportunities to experience substantial differences in culture and geography do we begin to understand how a case of “Delhi belly” can become suffused with the nationalist aesthetics of modern Britain. THE MELANCHOLIC JOURNEY: EXPRESSIVE CULTURE OR COLONIAL PRACTICE? So what do we make of the fact that adventure travel converts the affliction of alienation to a mark of distinction? Does Dave’s journey to India recall, as the journalist accuses, earlier generations of colonials? A number of critical studies of leisure travel, by establishing a connection between the capacity of adventure travel to neutralize alienation and the persistence of global inequalities, do indeed ratify such a view. Postcolonial and feminist critics particularly have viewed the romantic roots of modernist adventuring as the basis for ethnocentrism, environmental ruin and market-driven globalization. Caren Kaplan, for example, argues that the “international aesthetic” of travel remains trapped by a “business picture” which degrades geography in favor of a quality of experience (69). A significant feature of these critical studies of travel is their willingness to assign conceptual priority to the cultural dimension of globalization. Whereas analysts of global connectivity have tended to focus on economic

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forces, Inderpal Grewal, for example, draws an associative link between travel and imperialism by evoking the symbolic concepts of sublimation, alienation and individuation. In so doing, Grewal demonstrates that the manner in which people establish a relationship to place helps to sustain the social, political and economic structure of globalization; subjectivity is not a mere effect. Grewal views alienation as a kind of “homeless” metaphysical state brought on by the displacement of traditional mores and values in the context of modernity. Individuation denotes not a process by which one acquires symbolic markers of individual uniqueness, but rather the means by which one becomes inscribed as a subject within the social order. Grewal’s schematic of individuation differs substantially from the research models employed in the recent cultural studies movements, which regard expressive culture as a wellspring of “symbolic creativity,” to borrow a term deployed by Paul Willis, one of the key figures in the British Cultural Studies movement in the 1970s at the University of Birmingham. A central tenet of cultural studies, in Raymond Williams’ well-known coinage, holds that “culture is ordinary.” Skeptical of conventional distinctions between “high” and “low” culture, cultural studies contends that not only are expressions of everyday life meaningful, but also that they constitute an effort to forge new identities and value systems in order to fill the void left by the corrosive force of “modern state bureaucracies and rationalized industry” (Willis 210). Although sometimes crude, youth subcultures contain the aesthetic foundation of what Willis calls a “practical existentialism” (211). A question arises, then, of how we might reconcile Grewal’s model, derived from her investigation of colonial settings, with current theories of personal expressivity in studies of mass culture. Does individuation necessarily imply social adaptation, as Grewal implies? Moreover, how do we account for the avowedly countercultural tone that permeates so much of the travel genre? Can individuation produce a dissonant relationship to prevailing ideology rather than a reflective one? Even if we confront the politically troubling possibility that travel may ultimately make one feel more at home in the metropolitan centers of power, we must still reckon with the idiosyncrasies of the melancholic idiom. Although Dave the Traveler eventually remediates his alienation through the acquisition of social capital, Naipaul and Levi-Strauss display a skepticism toward all meaning and a reluctance to attach to any object. At the very least, I believe, we should view adventure travel practices as emblematic of a collective cultural concern with the search for meaning, even if these quests result, as with Dave, in a facile resolution that favors the extant social structure. A consideration of alternative models of individuation may provide the means to enhance our understanding of both of these

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impulses—the initial rebellious drive to explore meaning for oneself and the more sophisticated disillusionment with all meaning and representation—and so open the door to the possibility that the expressivity of the traveler may serve another function than the reproduction of the social order. Studies of travel writing and touristic cultures by Dennis Porter and Dean MacCannell may not conclusively extend our optimism on this latter point, but they do envision travel more as an active, creative practice than as a defensive retreat. One of the most comprehensive efforts to apply psychoanalytic theory to travel narratives, Dennis Porter’s Haunted Journeys focuses more on the literature’s transgressive aspects. Significantly, transgression for him tends to imply less a subversion of dominant discourses than a crossing of borders as a means for individuals to fulfill both conscious and unconscious desires. He links the impulse to travel to a wide array of personal motivations: the satisfaction of drives that may be denied at home because of repressive sexual or domestic politics; the fulfillment of a kind of death drive, as reconfigured in Lacan’s notion of jouissance, that derives pleasure from peril; or the suffusion of an exotic region with personal fantasies, a “transference- love” that Porter summarizes as “the projection of early prototypes onto geographic space” (11). Porter remains attuned to the “public motives” for European travelers as well—among them conquest, exploration, colonization and trade—but he attributes the creative tension evident in the texts to a commingling of personal pleasure and public obligation. Given his effort to survey the production of travelogues over a two hundred-fifty year period, as well as the wide range of psychoanalytic theories he invokes, Porter offers no systematic analysis of the concepts of authenticity or individuation. Nonetheless the multiplicity of texts he examines affirm an interconnection between the expressive genre of the travel narrative and the beginnings of European concerns with selfhood and self-fashioning in the age of exploration. By exposing this historical “coincidence,” Porter affirms with Grewal that the representational strategies of travel literature emerged alongside colonial interests. Yet through an instructive remark on Lacan—what Porter calls the “ideological fixity associated with Lacan’s imaginary order”— Porter suggests that while the consciousness of the traveler acts in consonance with ideology, it need not be merely a reflection of ideological interests (19). Derived from his description of the “mirror-stage” in early infant experience, Lacan’s notion of the imaginary underscores the need for selves to be fixed and sustained with an illusion of wholeness. And although some detractors of Lacan contend that this fixity is only achieved through insertion in a symbolic order (as with Grewal), others have pointed out that while such an achievement entails a measure of ideological work, subjects in fact possesses a high

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level of flexibility in configuring themselves out of components from the symbolic world. MacCannell elucidates this possibility in some detail. In his oft-cited The Tourist (1976) and his later work Empty Meeting Grounds (1992), MacCannell draws on semiology and Lacanian psychoanalysis to show how leisure activity, of which tourism is emblematic, serves primarily to reproduce existing work relations in the context of “postindustrial” society. As with Grewal, this feat is accomplished by sublimating the tourist’s alienation “into a relationship with the modern social totality” (Tourist 7). Yet MacCannell makes a critical departure from Grewal. Whereas Grewal views sublimation as the insertion of a subject into an ideological matrix—more specifically, in her study, of educating individuals on the aesthetics of being “British” or “Indian”—MacCannell sees leisure and aesthetics as innately “characterized by a near absence of alienation” (Tourist 55–56). In his view, travel provides a sense of authenticity simply because it enables the illusion of ordering disparate experiences into a singular whole. In contrast to the disciplinary function Grewal assigns to travel, for MacCannell travel represents a kind of “safety-valve” for modern society: subjects dispel alienation by traveling overseas, participating in experiences unmediated by the fragmentation and artifice of modern life and “collecting” these experiences in order to craft unique, and therefore “true,” selves.21 It is not the sense of belonging to a collective that frees subjects from the burden of alienation but rather the illusion that one has ventured through chaos and assembled the pieces on one’s own. It must be stressed that Grewal and MacCannell are concerned with two different moments in the history of travel and that this fact may explain their divergent understandings of travel and alienation. Grewal’s investigation focuses on the apex of the colonial era, while MacCannell aims to undertake “an ethnography of modernity” (Tourist 1). Their very different, if equally downbeat, interpretations of travel may offer a theoretical signpost for the dividing line between the age of colonial exploration and the era of mass participation in adventuring. For if Grewal at times overstates the suffocating will of collective consciousness over individual expressivity, the contrast with MacCannell suggests that in the colonial period collective identities indeed had more salience as a cultural ideal than in the contemporary period. This shift may be due to the declining importance of national (and certainly imperial) identities, the higher valuation placed on individuality in modernity, or diminishing opportunities to feel “authentically” part of any collective as a result of the ever-increasing fragmentation of society due to globalization and the expansion of commodity markets.

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It should perhaps elicit little surprise, then, if the most comprehensive study of adventure travel to date recapitulates the modernist anxiety about the loss of “pure” travel. As Holland and Huggan observe, the geopolitical landscape has made individual fantasies of discovery, exotic experience and selffashioning much less attainable. Building on the theoretical propositions set forth by MacCannell, Holland and Huggan plumb volumes of travel essays issued within the last thirty years in order to survey the range of practices employed by travelers to produce the effect of individual authenticity. This study finds that the travelers’ journeys “are rarely as traumatic or heroic as they would have us believe” (23). Holland and Huggan shed more light on the strategic routes that lead to authentic selfhood than they do on the roots of anxiety about loss of purity. These strategies depend largely, they argue, on a proliferation of symbolic realms with which travel enables a sustained identification. Theoretically consonant with Grewal, Holland and Huggan envision an implosion of aesthetic realms into multiple domains of identity politics. Not limited to the aesthetics of the nation (and national codes regarding taste and vulgarity and so forth), the traveler actively cultivates a masculine, feminine, black or gay or lesbian subjectivity by participating in popularly encoded idioms of touristic experience. Indeed, the appearance of numerous anthologies marketed to specific identity niches attests to the effectiveness of shared subcultural affiliations in tempering alienation at home; subcultures, it appears, constitute another arena for sublimation. As noted previously, this aspect of the literature has received a mixed reception from critics. Given the traditionally masculinist orientation to adventuring, for example, some commentators have focused on the emancipatory potential of opening the field (Holland and Huggan 114). Without discounting the vital fact that subcultural affiliations may promote realms of expression that contest, rather than simply reiterate, social norms, we should perhaps consider why Holland and Huggan conclude that “identity” functions in the same role that Grewal assigns to “ideology”: replacing the malaise of not belonging at home with the more positive effects of self-integration. Indeed, the extant critical literature offers little hope for a travel experience that does not ratify ideologies of the market or of imperialism. To the extent that the adventure tempers alienation, it pacifies. Yet if this literature tends to valorize the fragmentation of selves, the trope of the melancholic traveler may still point the way to the presence of a nascent social critique. In order to understand fully how such a critique might function, we must consider how the creative efforts of the prototypical melancholic traveler communicate an ethical stance toward the social world.

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We return, then, to the place we began: the traveler’s boredom. The post-1960s travel literature is rife with examples of individuals who, struggling against the ordinariness of their everyday life, embark on an elaborate odyssey. More and more commonly, depictions of wandering backpackers appear as fictionalized accounts with strong doses of embellished melodrama, such as the added plot line of a murder mystery or a confrontation with a local paramilitary organization.22 Thematically, these narratives move from states of mundaneness to excitation; they begin with boredom and then proceed to what Winnicott, in describing the origins of creativity, refers to as “play” (Playing and Reality 41). In the beginning phases, the main character exhibits the symptoms of one who has suffered a loss, even if the origin of this loss remains outside conscious awareness. All of the features that Freud identified with mourning and melancholia are present: loss of interest in the world, loss of the capacity to care for any new object, and inhibition of activity. Yet this impression of meaninglessness—of being detached or marginalized from everyday social rituals—provides an essential catalyst to the initiation of the journey. In the language of psychoanalysis, we might say that this inertial withdrawal marks the movement of the subject into a transitional space, where one’s desires no longer feel authentically one’s own. Suffering from the perception that his or her desires derive only from an outside source—from socialization—the soon-to-be-traveler waits for a more personalized (and so authentic) desire to surface.23 This moment in fact contains an incipient social critique, and without passing through it the subject would never progress from isolationist to adventurer. In effect, the traveler undergoes a separation on two fronts: a negation of the world of objects at home, and then a literal escape abroad. Clearly this process lies at the core of all creativity. As Winnicott says, “it is only . . . in this unintegrated state of the personality that that which we describe as creative can appear” (Playing and Reality 64). Yet the singular rejection of the entire realm of signs, and the subsequent struggle to recompose them in some way, remains the particular mode of creativity of the melancholic. This dynamic tension—between passive alienation and active “play”—drives the dialectic of this aesthetic. In order to extend our grasp of the social critique that the figure of the melancholic embodies, we must establish links between the psychoanalytic portrait and other arenas of social theory. For Walter Benjamin, to cite one example, the ambivalence of melancholia—between passive alienation and active “play”—reflects the aesthetic principles most integral to the dialectics of modernity. In Benjamin’s view, the vacuity of the modern world originates with the instrumentality of language. The implacable manner in which “things” are suffused with objective meanings creates a surplus of language in

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the material world, and so forecloses any individual search for subjectivity. Benjamin views all acts of “naming” as an “intimation of mourning” since the establishment of any meaning will always result in lost possibilities. In modern society, however, aesthetics suffers a particularly acute fate due to a proclivity for “overnaming” (73). At the same time, Benjamin believes that privileging the instrumental use of language creates such an exaggerated state of impoverished meaning that it generates a renewed drive for enchantment. The very culture that reduces people to commodities and recognizes exchange value as the only meaningful register of worth also provides, by way of its abundance, evidence of the lifelessness of objects. A collection of commodities at a local shopping mall, then, energizes a longing for another kind of world because it makes transparent the devaluation of all life as market abstractions. In my view, the melancholic traveler’s alienation provides an index of the narrow parameters within which market culture allows for the construction of meaning. Following Benjamin, the journey of the melancholic also represents an effort to re-enchant a world of dead objects. Even so, Benjamin appears to underestimate the capacity of the commodity to generate unlimited transcendent meanings. Although the traveler seeks some kind of authentic experience beyond the commodity realm, this search paradoxically leads back to the commodity itself. Hence Dave the Traveler’s discovery that his adventure translates into the currency of social capital. In this instance, travel may offer an opportunity to invest commodities with new meanings, but it hardly seems to occasion the revolutionary consciousness regarding the overall logic of commodities that Benjamin envisions. Yet I would like to close by emphasizing that Dave need not exemplify the only resolution to an adventure. Whereas Dave manages to recuperate through his travels the solidity of his British identity, Naipaul and Levi-Strauss suggest something more like the rejection of national attachments altogether. If this rejection explains the persistence of a melancholic tone within their travel writings, it also alludes to the ethics of a journey that does not result in the traveler’s incorporation as a subject of ideology.

Chapter Five

Conclusion Negation as a Lived Critique of Global Culture

There is something dreadfully willful about the way she dies: she brings it on herself. Maybe her self-annihilation is mad, but there is something strangely heroic about it as well. The willfulness and activism of her death confirm her as more than a helpless victim, either of her lover or of her society: she is a tragic protagonist in her own right. Her selfdestruction is a form of self-development as authentic as Faust’s own. —Marshall Berman, on Gretchen of Goethe’s Faust

In All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman depicts Faust’s inner struggle as a prototypical condition for, as the subtitle of his book declares, “the experience of modernity.” The central decision over which Faust labors regards how he wishes to orient himself to the social world: he remains, as we witness in Goethe’s opening act, torn between modalities based on separation versus participation. While isolated at “home,” Faust revels in the capacity to invent, without limitations, his own idiom of subjectivity; he embodies the modernist ideal of self-creation. Yet he also feels trapped, and longs to venture outside so that he may apply his vast stores of knowledge and creativity to further the transformation and development of the material world. Faust, we know, will eventually choose to escape his unhappy seclusion by establishing attachments and assuming meaningful social roles. In his initial metamorphosis, he pursues a romance with Gretchen. Then, in a second metamorphosis, he becomes a land developer and proceeds to modernize, with sweeping scale, the world around him. The tragic dimension of Faust, as Berman recounts it, stems from the fact that neither choice—separating himself from the world to cultivate the limitless potential of his individuality or participating in the world to shape it in his image—enables him to avert a sense of his own destruction. Solitude permits the unfettered expansion of subjectivity, but also leads to anomie: 136

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As Faust sits up through the night, the cave of his inwardness grows darker and deeper, till at last he resolves to kill himself, to seal himself up once and for all in the tomb his inner space has become. He grasps a flask of poison. But just at the point of his darkest negation, Goethe rescues him and floods him with light and affirmation. The whole room shakes, there is a tremendous pealing of bells outside, the sun comes up and great angelic choir bursts into song: for it is Easter Sunday. “Christ is arisen, from the womb of decay!” they say. “Burst from your prison, rejoice in the day!” (Berman 44)

After this momentous event, Faust proceeds to exit the “cave of his study” and discover renewed meaning in civilization. Yet in both the roles of suitor and industrialist, he finds he loses his original authenticity: “It appears that the very process of development, even as it transforms a wasteland into a thriving physical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside the developer himself ” (Berman 68). To Faust’s dismay, the application of his knowledge to the cause of modernization necessitates the suppression of much of his subjective life. Still, he resigns himself to the process, after reconciling himself to the idea that developmental progress, whether internal or external, necessarily requires the destruction of what came before. The figure of Mephisto signifies the unquestioning valorization of progress without concern for consequences: “I am the spirit that negates all!/ And rightly so, for all that comes to be/ Deserves to perish wretchedly . . .” (qtd. in Berman 47). Faust, then, links the concept of negation to two idioms of death: the first as the threat of Faust’s own death, and the second, guised in the utopian idea of modernization, as the death of “traditional” others. As in the adventure travel texts I examine in this study, negation functions as a mode of self-development. What makes Faust an especially pertinent emblem for the study of adventure travel is the inextricable connection it draws between this idiom of self-development and the social context of modernity. Specifically, Faust exemplifies the dialectical contradictions that make the articulation of subjectivity in modernity potentially tragic. For Faust, “the Father” at once enables the production of subjectivity, and the remarkable new freedoms that attend the expansion of the interior world, and the restrictions imposed by the law of the father. Goethe’s narrative shows that this conflict, between self and law, derives not exclusively from intrapsychic structures—a “libidinal deadlock,” to borrow a phrase Zizek uses in exploring the roots of ideology (Mapping 6)—but rather emerges out of the social conditions of capitalism and global culture. By attempting to render a schematic of an adventure travel subculture, I have sought to underscore the entwinement

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of negation, death drive, and global culture. It therefore bears considering for a moment the genealogies of these terms and how we may envision the relationship between psychological structures and cultural frameworks. In so doing, we may assess whether negation, as a kind of self-annihilation, represents a predominant route to authenticity in modern culture or merely one route among many possible avenues to self-development. The concept of negation surfaces in both philosophic and psychoanalytic models of subject formation, yet takes on somewhat divergent meanings in each. Although a brief discussion here will hardly address the nuances of these arguments, I do hope that it serves to call attention to a correspondence between Hegelian dialectics, oedipal dynamics, and Lacan’s notion of the law of the father. In its philosophical usage, particularly as deployed by Hegel, negation figures into the dialectical process that enables the subject to come into being. For Hegel, the subject emerges out of contradiction: it derives its form in opposition to the social structures and institutions in which it is enmeshed. Hegel imagines a dynamic developmental process that proceeds from the constitutive conflict between the abstraction of the “general will” of civil society and the will of individual citizens.1 Consciousness therefore takes shape in response to an absence, as “negative reason.” Hegel envisions negation as a process of separation from the social structure: this separation entails not the repudiation of the social order but rather a means of differentiating one’s consciousness or “being.” Through separation, one fashions oneself as a subject. The defining moment for Hegel in the subject’s becoming begins with alienation: the very inability of the subject to be subsumed into the social structure creates the conditions for the existence of subjective life. Hegel, we know, proceeded to contend that this dynamic state— the opposition of self and structure—could still, in the end, result in a state of “absolute” equivalence. He believed that once sufficiently differentiated from the social structure, the subject will recognize a likeness in the structure and choose to reconstruct its original unity. Hegel referred to this as the “Speculative” moment of development, or the negation of the negation. In this developmental phase, the self seeks to overcome the alienating effects of separation and restore the original wholeness of self and other. Psychoanalysis at once expands upon this “generative” model of negation, as the basis of a symbolic function that produces the subject, and poses a seemingly contrary usage that links negation to death drive. Consonant with the Hegelian model, psychoanalysis affirms the connection between reason, intended here to refer to consciousness of the self ’s being, and separation. This formulation is most notably developed in post-Freudian

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interventions of Klein and Lacan. For Klein, the self comes into being on the heels of an unsettling loss or absence. As Jacqueline Rose remarks in her discussion of “negativity” in Melanie Klein, Klein underscores the formative role of alienation in the emergence of reason: In these earlier papers, it is stated over and over that the subject first comes to experience itself negatively. Self-alienation gives the colour of the subject’s coming-to-be: ‘nothing good within lasts . . . the first conscious idea of “me” is largely coloured by painful associations.’ (152)

Particularly in her early work, Klein stressed the role of hate and aggression toward the original object in the subject’s development. Negativity, then, constitutes a response to the infant’s experience of the original object-relation as “persecutory.” Railing against the “bad” object in fact constitutes a necessary precondition for the production of subjectivity: the pain of the inevitable detachment between subject and object—between infant and mother—activates the process of differentiating the self. In her later work, Klein de-emphasizes the significance of hate and aggression and instead links negation to the dialectics of symbolization.2 As the subject comes into being and differentiates its own selfhood from the original object, it relegates something to non-being: “something has to be discarded, something falls away” (Rose 155). Although negation facilitates the “birth” of the self, it also entails a kind of “death.” It implies the repudiation some part of the object that cannot be symbolized; it denotes possibilities of subjectivity that are foreclosed.3 On the whole, Melanie Klein posits a progressive developmental trajectory for the infant. Despite the distress of its origins, the infant ceaselessly attempts to incorporate the object into its imaginative experience and, in the course of maturation, cultivates a more sophisticated capacity of care and concern for it. At the same time, by stressing the presence of destructive impulses toward the object at the genesis of selfhood, Klein affirms the centrality of the death instinct at the heart of subjectivity. Although she plots a maturational path that envisions the subject achieving a degree of constancy and stability, the potential for aggression—toward the self or the object—persists. Indeed, destruction holds particular appeal for the subject since it offers a way out of the eternal frustration that inheres in the relationship between self and structure. In this study, I have frequently invoked the Lacanian convention of referring to the structure as the Lawof-the-Father. For Lacan, the law denotes the chain of signification—the rules of language—that constitutes the Symbolic order. Becoming a subject requires an act of submission to language: the insertion of one’s “self ” into

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this order through the adoption and cultivation of a subject-position. In effect, one agrees to take in—or introject—elements of the father in order to structure the self. Negation as death drive entails a rejection of the father, and therefore of oedipalization. One refuses to insert oneself as a sign under the law, and so refuses to articulate the self ’s idiom. In what sense, then, does negation embody the spirit of Mephisto and the specific structures of feeling of modernity that Berman derives from Faust’s “tragedy of development”? Through an examination of adventure travel narratives, I have sought to establish a connection between a character orientation that inclines toward the negation of selfhood and the expansion of global culture. Adventure travel presents a kind of paradox in that it appears to embody both “life” and “death” drive elements. In some forms, the adventure represents an escape from death: travelers seeks to separate from the stasis of home and, out of the experience of fragmentation overseas, re-constitute themselves on their own terms. I have suggested that this act of willfully separating oneself from the social order results in a kind of consciousness that we may say resembles “art” or “critique.”4 I have also described another outcome in which the journey serves more of an ideological function: the subject acquires a sense of its unique individuality overseas, which serves to mitigate an alienating relationship to the law at home. In so doing, the subject returns from the adventure with a renewed identification with the social structure and participates more energetically as a workercitizen. On the whole, however, this study has focused on another means of remediating alienation besides the attainment of philosophic insight or the heightened acceptance of social norms. It suggests that the adventure represents not an escape from death, but rather a drive toward it. The texts I examine portray subjects who cannot reconcile their development with the structure of the law, and so seek authenticity outside the domain of the law altogether. After an agonized quest, the journey tends to conclude tragically with the subject’s own symbolic, and in some cases literal, annihilation. By employing a methodology that relies on interpretations of representative texts, I have intended to demonstrate, rather than presume, a link between a character structure organized around negation and the conditions of global culture. The recurrence of this character type across a range of travel narratives, I argue, reflects a commentary on the possibilities of self-creation in contemporary modern life. The narratives I explore begin with travelers who present radical critiques of the law and then seek to forge an existence outside its domain. The substance of their critiques may differ, yet their journeys begin from the same standpoint of radical alienation: they rail against the signifiers of modernity even if they disagree on the precise

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signifiers in question. Despite their shared dispositions toward the law, these travelers pursue different strategies of remediation. I have designated these strategies obsessional, hysteric and melancholic, which correspond to three different orientations toward the object: mastery, merger, and detachment. I view the examination of these strategies as part of the general task of exploring the effects of global connectivity on cultural practice and representation. Although it has become somewhat fashionable to view travel as a dominant trope of global culture, I suggest that adventure travel should instead be viewed as a symptom: the underlying character structure that motivates the journey, and not the literal journey itself, offers the best index of the cultural experience of globalization. It may seem counterintuitive to underscore the importance of the “local” in a study of adventure travel, but the framework of this study does indeed affirm the priority of local experience. By interpreting the character systems of adventure travel narratives as symptoms, I wish not to advocate a model of global culture grounded in the idea of connectivity, but instead to expand our understanding of the impact of heightened connectivity on inner worlds. This approach has been most forcefully outlined by John Tomlinson. Tomlinson argues that studies of global culture should focus not on enhanced physical mobility, but rather on shifts in self-representation and subjective life: . . . when we slice into complex connectivity from this perspective, what we are concerned with is how globalization alters the context of meaning construction: how it affects people’s sense of identity, the experience of place and of the self in relation to place, how it impacts on the shared understandings, values, desires, myths, hopes and fears that have developed around locally situated life. (20)

Viewed through this lens, adventure travel represents a response to the transformation of locality. For Tomlinson, the dynamics of this transformation are captured in the idea of deterritorialization: the severance of connections between cultural meanings and place. Tomlinson stresses how disorienting these changes can be to subjects in their everyday experience of locality: “This is in many ways a troubling phenomenon, involving the simultaneous penetration of local worlds by distant forces, and the dislodging of everyday meanings from their ‘anchors’ in the local environment” (29). While deterritorialization does not result in the strict homogenization of culture and place, it does imply that local subjects must accommodate the perception of increased uniformity. Tomlinson refers to this perception as “unicity”: “a

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sense that the world is becoming, for the first time in history, a single social and cultural setting” (10). Like Faust’s final metamorphosis, where he takes on the role of industrialist, deterritorialization embodies a uniquely modern form of negation. It drives endless innovation development, yet it also aims to destroy—“melt into air”—all local institutions and symbol systems. As the tragedy of Faust’s final days reveals, it also leads to a negation of the self. Faust finds that he exists only to facilitate industrialization. He privileges a specific form of rationality while suppressing the full spectrum of his expressive potential. Yet even this fact fails to dismay Faust entirely because, despite his misery, he links his own self-development to industrial progress. He measures his individual authenticity according to his capacity to remake the material world even if industry, in the end, endangers his own life.5 Faust dramatizes the contradictions of deterritorialization: the imposition of a single language both signifies the self ’s development and ensures its demise. The adventure traveler I derive in this study from textual interpretations struggles with the same questions of separation and participation as Faust, but refuses the role of the industrialist. I have in fact suggested that the character formations I discuss offer a kind of “lived” critique of global culture. I acknowledge that this may seem an odd claim in light of the association frequently made between travel writing and imperialism. Much about contemporary travel narratives continues to affirm Edward Said’s view that they celebrate, if not the triumph of empire, then the status of the socalled developing world as a cipher and playground for the West. Yet many of these narratives do not openly embrace political domination or reconcile their social critiques of home and their overseas travels into an “aesthetic” discourse, as Said suggests of Conrad and Forster (Culture and Imperialism 187–89). Instead, they dramatize a kind of non-participation in the social structure. They portray a subject striving to come into being in the face of radical alienation. The travelers do, in some cases, find some sustainable form of subjectivity after a protracted struggle, but just as frequently they illustrate the futility of fashioning a self ex nihilo—outside the domain of the law. In sum, these travel narratives show that to exist outside the law is to incur a kind of death. Such a fate hardly warrants celebration, and as a narrative trajectory it clearly remains compatible with the Orientalist distortions surveyed by Said. Nonetheless, these narratives do portray the extraordinary demands that the self must endure in the context of global culture. On the whole, they cast modernity in oppressive terms. This subculture of adventure not only dramatizes the contradictory injunctions of modernity—to cultivate subjectivity yet internalize the rigid strictures of the social order—but

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also reveals the implications for selfhood when no resolution to these contradictions can be found. Clearly, the modern world offers many avenues to fashion selfhood. More prominent than travel may be the many salient religious, fascist, and identity movements that permit some immediate experience of the world. Unlike these avenues to authenticity, this travel genre permits no easy re-insertion into the social order. It rejects any ideological closure between the subject and the law, and so it pre-empts that Speculative moment envisioned by Hegel. While the rejection of the paternal function tends to make for an unstable and tragic character development, it does render a protagonist who appears to merit a degree of empathy: the adventurer who wanders in search of some utopian alternative to the myriad, and always tainted, subject-positions of modernity.

Notes

NOTES TO THE PREFACE 1. Michelle R. Smith, “Geotourism Trend: Authentic Travel.” July 16, 2007. http://fe73.news.sp1.yahoo.com/s/ap_travel/20070716/ap_tr_ge/travel_ brief_geotourism. 2. Some examples include Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self and The Ethics of Authenticity, Anthony Giddens’ Modernity and Self-Identity, and Vincent John Cheng’s Inauthentic: The Anxiety Over Culture and Identity.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. Debates persist regarding the extent to which these narrative registers can be periodized. Nigel Leask has recently argued against the notion of a discrete transition from Enlightenment to Romanticist aesthetics, contending that the two modes were frequently present within the same text and that the distinction between them reflects more a marketing strategy by publishers than any broad social transformation. 2. One text that does examine the myths and fantasies of colonial culture is Ashis Nandy’s seminal work, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Nandy observes specifically that colonial confrontations are marked by struggles over conceptions of selfhood and identity as much as by challenges for economic and political dominance. He notes that notions of progress and scientific rationality take shape defensively in the context of crises of identity during colonial rule and, subsequently, decolonization. Under colonialism, colonizers must articulate selves consonant with the social categories of ruler and ruled; during decolonization, they must find substitutes. 3. James Scott invokes this phrase to refer to forms of resistance by relatively powerless groups that stop short of “collective outright defiance.” He includes in this category a range of small-scale protests: “foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage.” For Scott, these actions often represent the best possible means of resistance for the peasantry and may, he concedes, amount only to a form

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of “individual self-help.” Although leisure travelers and the peasantry have different orientations to capital, Scott outlines the very useful, and I think relevant, idea that resistance in circumstances deemed by subjects to be near hopeless may take place at the levels of symbolism and subjectivity. See Scott 28–47. The application of Lacan to the study of cross-cultural conflict and encounter in postcolonial contexts is not without controversy. While some have opposed bringing transcendental western discourses—such as psychoanalysis and Marxism—to bear on the “historical” phenomenon of colonialism (cf. Young)— postcolonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha have used Lacan to explore the dynamic, and dialectical, processes that produce the subjectivity of colonizer and colonized. For example, in his essay “Remembering Fanon,” Bhabha invokes Lacan to argue that the colonizer is defined primarily as a “lack” that is structured only through the encounter with a colonized other. In his discussion of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Joel Whitebrook compares the journey of Odysseus to the developmental stages of childhood outlined in psychoanalytic theories. Just as Odysseus seeks to elude the old order of mythical fate, the child fears, as Margaret Mahler writes, “regression to a symbiotic state from which the toddler has only recently individuated” (qtd. in Whitebrook 297). The child longs for a reunion with the mother but also realizes that such a union would threaten its individuality and identity. Whitebrook provides an extensive discussion of Critical Theory’s use of psychoanalysis, with considerable attention to Adorno’s theory of subjectivity (132–52). Georg Simmel in fact suggests that this “parenthetical” quality of travel reflects a fundamental antagonism between human subjects and civilization, rather than a specifically modern conflict as argued in the later Frankfurt School work. In “The Adventure,” Simmel describes the adventure, as he does all cultural expression, as a reflection of the “tragedy of culture.” Simmel views the subject as inherently caught between the demands of the social order and the potential of his or her own human nature. The adventure pulls the subject “out of history” as it were—out of the ossified nexus of social relations. The adventurer, says Simmel, refuses to embrace any “organic relation to the world,” such as might be found in work: “In the adventure, we proceed in the directly opposite fashion: it is just on the hovering chance, on fate, on the more-or-less that we risk all, burn our bridges, and step into the mist, as if the road will lead us on, no matter what. This is the typical fatalism of the adventurer” (248–50). This fatalism derives from the attempt to separate “experience and rational analysis” (250). The adventurer approaches the uncertainty of the otherworldly—of fate—with the conviction of certainty. It bears underscoring at this juncture that my deployment of the terms “law” and “ideology,” owes much to the theory of ideology outlined by the French Marxist Louis Althusser. For Althusser, who derives this theory through a reading of Lacan, ideology consists of the subject’s effort to

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“personalize” the social structure. Although Althusser sees subjects as the end product of a system of social determinants, he contends that they achieve the illusion of autonomy by “centering” themselves within the social world and so acquiring a sense of social purpose and identity (123–30). Althusser casts ideology as a function of the register that Lacan designates the “imaginary.” While subsequent commentators on Althusser’s theory have criticized its deterministic properties, I think he remains useful for underscoring the subject’s drive for autonomy. Clearly the subject is not a mere effect of the social structure, but rather the product of multiple negotioations. Yet as I hope to show, the literature suggests that travel, as with other leisure practices, frequently follows the logic Althusser describes: the subject acquires a sense of identity through an experience that feels decidedly personal, and so redresses a previouslyfelt sense of social alienation. The travel idiom I discuss reflects a similar effort on the traveler’s part but without any final symbiosis between the individual and the social world. Instead the subject eschews the social structure altogether and attempts to live outside its imagined boundaries. This is the structure of negation I wish to highlight. In his discussion of the professionalization of leisure management, Rojek chronicles some of the various legal initiatives that advanced these programs. In Britain they included the Museums Act (1845), the Baths and Washhouses Act (1846), and the opening of Queen’s Park Museum and Art Gallery (1884) and the BelleVue Zoological Gardens (1904). In the United States, Congress established Yosemite Valley as the first public wilderness in 1864 and in 1916 formed the National Park Service. Construction of Central Park in Manhattan began in 1857 and was followed soon after by city parks in Hartford, Philadelphia and Boston (Rojek 45–48). One might pursue a fruitful comparison here between adventure travel and the progression of media technologies toward a more “virtual” experience, from the fantasy worlds of television to the transportive portals of the internet. Following the publication of The Tourist in 1976, the Annals of Tourism Research emerged as both an arena for the application for Maccannell’s semiological framework and a forum in which to debate its merits. The status of the term “alienation” in MacCannell’s book is explored in some depth by Georges van den Abbeele. Van den Abbeele examines the implications of MacCannell’s analogy between tourist and theorist, and specifically of whether the discourse of both serves to challenge or ratify existing ideology. The analogy rests on the notion that both tourist and theorist attempt to “present to [themselves] a conceptual schema which would give him immediate access to a certain authenticity (the “real nature” of his object of study” (13). As van den Abbeele points out, MacCannell eventually distinguishes between the two figures by suggesting that theorists

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Notes to Chapter One operate with a higher degree of consciousness with respect to their work, while tourists remain unconscious of the underlying logic of the sightseeing process—the difference hinges on the problem of mystification. Yet as van den Abbeele contends, this distinction may not be so clear-cut. Not only does the theorist rely “unconsciously” on the “traditional positions of Western metaphysics,” but also both theorist and tourist potentially, in the course of leaving and returning, destabilize their perception of the “home” they left behind. Even if they employ the same process, in other words, the ideological function, van den Abbeele asserts, depends upon where the voyage takes the tourist/theorist and not the voyage itself. As he states, “ideology is not so much the theorizing as the product” (13). It is worth underscoring van den Abbeele’s concluding insight here, insofar as it reserves hope for travel (and theory) as a critical practice, in which the voyage proves transformative and one’s perception of home changed. Ali Behdad, for example, suggests that MacCannell is perhaps too quick to defend the tourist (37). Yet it seems to me that the observation that sightseeing entails complex structures of interpretation and desire does not equate to a defense of the traveler’s ethnocentrisms. While it would be a mistake to view the tourist as an autonomous subject, seeing the tourist as strictly ideological risks recapitulating a version of Said’s hermeneutic circle: travelers are necessarily Orientalists, for whom every utterance functions as “an extension of cultural domination” (38). This emphasis on the “self ” also calls attention to a narcissistic dimension of modern culture. One might say that postmodernism signals not the death of the Cartesian subject, but rather the reduction of the differentiated elements of culture to objects of consumption. The rise of the internet has accelerated this process even further. For example, the Lonely Planet website houses a popular discussion forum called “The Thorn Tree” where travelers may exchange information about the latest “in” sight. At the same time, the forum is not limited to this function—it contains boards targeted for pleasure seekers as well as for those wishing to discuss politics and “responsible travel.” See Freud never addressed the topic of travel in any systematic manner in his essays, but he frequently alludes to a lifelong wish to travel to Rome—a wish that he repeatedly deferred fulfilling (until eventually making the trip in 1901). In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes that the wish to travel to Rome acted as “a cloak and symbol for a number of other passionate wishes” (226–30). More precisely, Freud attributes his avoidance of Rome to a childhood identification with the Carthaginians which, he states, expressed his sentiments about his own Semitic background—his sense of belonging to an “alien race.” Freud also makes frequent reference to his “Rome neurosis” in letters to Fliess. In the midst of working on his “dream book,” for example, Freud describes his obsession to Fliess: “I am

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not sufficiently collected, to be sure, to do anything in addition, other than possibly studying the topography of Rome, the yearning for which becomes ever more tormenting” (see Masson 332). 16. In some travel narratives, the return to this object-free state represents a necessary precondition for the transformation one undergoes while traveling. For example, Paul Bowles offers this excursus on solitude: “It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it takes its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.” (“Baptism of Solitude” 129) 17. In keeping with his conviction that the era of true travel has ceded to conventional tourism, Fussell emphatically contends that the golden era of the travel narrative reached its apex in the interwar years. The organizational scheme of his Norton Anthology reflects his conception of the history of travel writing as a negative evolution: a section entitled “The Heyday,” which does include some later work of postwar writers such Freya Stark, Paul Bowles and Eric Newby, gives way to another called “Touristic Tendencies.” Echoing the industry’s own familiar distinction between travel and tourism, he protests that “the late-industrial era has produced the phenomenon of tourism” which “is to travel as plastic is to wood” (651). To Fussell, a gulf of difference separates tourism from travel: [Tourism] is not self-directed but externally directed. You go not where you want to go but where the industry has decreed you shall go. Tourism soothes you by comfort and familiarity and shields you from the shocks of novelty and oddity. It confirms your prior view of the world instead of shaking it up. Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way. (651) Fussell’s concern regarding the disappearance of travel situates him within a specific literary idiom that comprises a substantial portion of the travelogue niche. An overriding tone of anxiety and loss distinguishes this realm of texts—anxiety about the diminishing possibilities of travel and a near-apocalyptic sadness about an era gone by. The nostalgia inherent in this framework mirrors the very crisis of selfhood that the travel texts themselves articulate. The challenge of not replicating this nostalgia in the process of deconstructing it represents a conundrum that shadows most studies of travel—the present one included. As Dean MacCannell remarks, “there is no way to prevent pronouncements concerning ‘the death of the subject’ or the ‘crisis of historicity’ from being readable as expressions of an

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Notes to Chapter One anticreative ethos, nostalgia for the bourgeois or Cartesian subject, and a Eurocentric past—the very institutions and concepts which the critics seek to deconstruct” (The Tourist xviii). For discussions of this concept see Dor and Fink. My discussion of the Grand Tour relies in part on Christopher Hibbert’s extensive historical overview and from Barbara Korte’s detailed analysis of the subtle shifts in emphasis over time in specific Grand Tour narratives (see esp. 40–65). James Buzard chronicles the evolution of the Grand Tour from 1660 through 1840 and sheds light on two key adaptive moments in its history: the rise of the “picturesque” from 1825 to 1840, when the Napoleonic Wars prevented travel to the continent and pastoral spaces in the British interior came to be marked as tourist sights; and the more complex process by which the Grand Tour, a strictly “ideological exercise,” continued to instill the virtues of national pride and personal edification after the popularization of travel in “the age of Thomas Cook and Son” (“The Grand Tour and After” 38). A history and critical discussion of the Baedeker guidebooks may be found in Rudy Koshar (2000). As Koshar shows, guidebooks not only facilitated mass participation in travel, but also mediated the imaginative construction of national, regional and “foreign” geographies. For Koshar, enabling national subjects to explore their individuality through travel served an ideological purpose for the state in Germany throughout the fascist period and into the 1950s. Although the leisure infrastructure has become more globalized and less tied to national cultures, in a sense Koshar illustrates how the channeling of alienation into leisure practice serves to reconcile the subject with the “symbolic father”—the repressive state in fascist Germany, for instance. As Roger Cardinal notes, this celebratory stance is not altogether incompatible with Enlightenment narratives that expressed a desire to document and “master” the destination environment. Romanticist travel writing viewed travel into the unknown as a means to facilitate “aesthetic and psychic exploration” (135). For Cardinal, this practice, like Enlightenment travel, still tends to fetishize the powers of mind; it merely stresses the mind’s aesthetic, rather rationalistic, properties. See especially 143–45. Helen Carr writes that between 1880 and 1940 travel writers became “increasingly anxious about the condition and value of modern Western civilization: was it and the white race degenerating? Might there be an alternative elsewhere?” (73). See also Dennis Porter, who addresses at length expressions of guilt in travel writing. He writes: “notions of guilt and duty are almost as important as desire and transgression. The acknowledgment of law and obligation, resistance to them and pervasive sense of guilt, recur with symptomatic frequency” (9). For a discussion of Blunt’s works, see Helen Carr (76–77). Blunt’s key travel texts include Ideas About India (1885) and The Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt (1907). Married to the granddaughter of Lord Byron

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and a friend of W.B. Yeats, Blunt anticipates much of the ambivalence of twentieth-century British modernism: he supports liberation movements yet looks nostalgically upon the old order of the peasantry and aristocracy, and he reserves harsh criticism for modernity, colonial expansion, and the rise of the new middle classes. As Carr says of Lawrence, he “longed for a truer, simpler, more intense way of being, and was endlessly disappointed” (83). The aspiration articulated here bears some resemblance to the nature writings of the American transcendentalists. Yet while Thoreau’s 1854 text Walden offers some pragmatic reflections on the discovery and attainment of utopian states of being, the modernist writers display a consistent tone of loss—a sense that the horrors of modernity threaten to extinguish the distinctive exoticism of distant parts of the world. For examples of recent critiques and evaluations of Orientalism, see Prakash, Porter, and Behdad. The term “pseudo-event” originates with Daniel Boorstin’s 1961 text, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (qtd. in Böröcz 714). Beyond the definitional issues, a number of factors complicate any effort to arrive at a precise assessment of the size of the adventure tourism industry. Industry providers stress the presence of a range of sometimes conflicting elements: outdoor recreation, “eco” friendly or sustainable practice, situational risk, physical exertion, motives based on “self-realization” or “self-actualization,” and cross-cultural social encounters (see Sung et al.). Some estimates place the annual revenue of this segment of the tourist industry at 200 billion dollars. The World Tourism Organization, an agency of the United Nations founded in 1925 to promote tourism as a source of revenue primarily for so-called “developing” nations, estimates that tourism comprises the world’s largest and fastest-growing industry and generates trillions of dollars of revenue annually. One may cite dozens of examples of travelogues marketed to “identity” niches. Recent titles include Jane Robinson (ed.), Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers (London: Oxford University Press, 2001), Sean O’Reilly (ed.), Testosterone Planet: True Stories from a Man’s World (San Francisco: Travelers’ Tales, 1999), Men’s Journal (ed.), Wild Stories: The Best of Men’s Journal: Ten Year’s of Great Writing (New York: Crown, 2002), Rosemary Caperton (ed.), The Unsavvy Traveler: Women’s Comic Tales of Catastrophe (New York: Seal Press Feminist Publications, 2001), Lucy McCauley (ed.), A Woman’s Path: Women’s Best Spiritual Travel Writing (New York: Travelers’ Tales Inc., 2000) and Outside Magazine (ed.), The Best of Outside: The First Twenty Years (New York: Vintage Departures, 1998). The magazine market reflects a similar degree of differentiation. Our World magazine, just to mention one, caters specifically to international gay & lesbian travelers. See Alasdair Pettinger (ed.), Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic (London and New York: Cassell, 1998) and Farah Griffin (ed.), A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing (Boston: Beacon

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Notes to Chapter One Press, 1998). These works reflect an ongoing debate in African-American Studies regarding the relationship between tourism, diasporic consciousness and political exigency. See for example Paul Gilroy’s work The Black Atlantic. Alice Walker recounts her trip to Florida in “Looking for Zora,” which appears in her In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Robyn Davidson’s travel book Tracks was a bestselling travelogue. The early Marx in fact addresses the ontological aspects of alienation quite directly. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx valorizes productive activity precisely because it elevates the subject’s expressive capacities; the subject produces selfhood in the act of making things. He writes, “Work is external to the worker. It is not part of his nature; consequently he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself. The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless.” Autonomy over labor is necessary to ensure the vitality of “inner life”: “The object produced by labor, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. The more the worker expends himself in work, the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself ” (qtd. in The Marx-Engels Reader 110–17). In Lacanian terms, one might say that these figures choose suicide over castration. Lacan described castration as the sacrifice one makes when accepting entry into the domain of language—that is, the phallic chain of signfication. The idea that novelistic speech represents a form of “heterogeneous discourse” originates with Mikhail Bakhtin. Writing in The Dialogical Imagination, Bakhtin argues that a novel acquires thematic unity by connecting all of its compositional elements through a “social diversity of speech types.” These speech types include direct authorial narration, the stylized speech of individual characters, forms of oral everyday narration, and forms of “semiliterary” narration (such as a letter or diary). Bakhtin referred to this diversity of speech forms in the novel as “heteroglossia” (262–63). As Hanna Segal points out, the term “positions” is employed by Melanie Klein to describe the developmental phases an infant passes through as he or she gains the capacity to relate to persons as wholes rather than as parts. Significantly, however, in Klein’s usage the term’s meaning exceeds the developmental context, and implies more generally “a specific configuration of object relations” (ix)—it signifies, in other words, a quality of personality that one may take on in adulthood in order to relate to the external world. The three responses I outline may best be conceived of as being analogous to this notion of positions: they represent a structural relationship between the self and object—a forged relationship between the traveler and an imagined geography.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. See for example recent studies by Pratt and Kaplan. 2. The secondary texts upon which I most centrally rely in my discussion of the Rat Man case include those by Anna Freud, Stuart Schneiderman, José Brunner, John Forrester, Charlotte Schwartz and Bruce Fink. 3. Though much more will be said later, one can anticipate an analogy to the adventure traveler, who favors the solitude secured by stepping off the beaten path over the enervating sacrifice of staying at home. 4. Some note should be made concerning the credibility of our knowledge of this patient. According to Patrick Mahony, the precise facts of Freud’s treatment with Lanzer as reflected in his day-to-day notes diverge somewhat from the final publication. In light of the inconsistencies, some interpreters have questioned the theoretical underpinnings of Freud’s analysis. José Brunner, for example, argues that analyst and patient are “at least partially fictionalized characters” and elects to extract a theory of obsessional neurosis from Freud’s literary stylings rather than from the record of the case itself (503). It also seems reasonable to suggest that Freud fictionalized elements of his case studies to protect the confidentiality of his patients. The accusation of inaccuracy would therefore seem more complex and hardly grounds to dismiss the substance of Freud’s insights. 5. I am using the term “expression” here to connote something of the manner of symptom-formation. We might say that the obsessions “signify” (in the semiotic sense) the avoided affect and, in so doing, register the presence of a conflict. 6. It should be noted that the obsessional must attain a certain degree of awareness about the defensive aims of his narrative in order to pursue analysis. This awareness will generally emerge in the face of the limitations that become apparent as his alienation from the object world intensifies. 7. The Stracheys, for example, deemed the map inaccurate and provided an updated version for the Standard Edition. Mahony quite bluntly contends that “Freud’s dynamic description of the Rat Man’s adult life is incoherent” (Freud and the Rat Man 35). 8. In Freud’s interpretation, the symbolism of the rat torture serves as an index of the patient’s “anal eroticism” (213). He attributes particular significance to an identification with a gambling debt his father once fell into and did not repay, thus making him a “Spielratte” (210). In addition, he makes note of the association of rats to money through the linguistic proximity of “ratten” [rats] and “raten” [installments], and likewise between rats and marriage by way of “heiraten” [to marry] (213–14). 9. Charlotte Schwartz surveys some of the criticisms of Freud’s treatment in this case, which suggest that the analysis colludes with the Rat Man’s obsessional tendencies. Specifically, these critics contend that Freud derives his

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Notes to Chapter Two theory of obsessional neurosis out of statements that in fact reflect an expression of a negative transference in the treatment: Freud, they say, interjects remarks that prompt Lanzer, and even coerce him, to produce particular responses. Schwartz concludes that these critiques have “essentially overstated the case.” She observes that “the criticism against Freud for neglecting the transference, for ignoring the negative transference, and for inducing a passive and submissive attitude in Lanzer is largely the result of a too rigid and too pristine application of the theories on transference and resistance” (394–95). An early discussion of the connection between obsession, parody, and satire appears in Victor Rosen. In charting the evolutionary phases of historical materialism, Marx writes “Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson’s island, bathed in light, to medieval Europe, shrouded in darkness” (Capital 170). Psychoanalytic interpretations of Crusoe have tended to view his wandering lifestyle and island isolation as metaphors for the stalled development of the subject. As I have already suggested, such a view does not necessarily counter the idea of Crusoe as a nascent imperialist or capitalist. Pearlman, for example, argues that while Crusoe is a depiction of middle-class individualism and colonialism, the novel is “an apology for the neurotic basis of those institutions” (40). See also Koff, Gliserman and Berne. Winnicott defines transitional objects as attachments that substitute for the lost primary object so as to make separation from that object tolerable. This object, such as a child’s security blanket, is eventually decathected and displaced by cultural interests. While Winnicott is concerned primarily with childhood development, he provides a framework through which to consider the role of symbolic processes in adult maturation. See Playing and Reality 1–25. This view signifies a departure from Ian Watt’s influential depiction of Crusoe as homo economicus. While the present framework ascribes importance to Crusoe’s productive activities, it views these activities more as a symptom or defense rather than a reflection of the triumph of modern individualism. In my view, Crusoe relates the story of a pathological retreat that results from the impossibility of individualism—of the conflict that, borrowing Althusser’s terms, unfolds from the contradictory interpellation that says “be separate” and yet “subscribe to the law”—rather than an allegory of the achievement of individualism. It is impossible, in my view, to fully assess the role of religion in Crusoe without considering broader definitions of religious experience and its relationship to cultural expression. While the present study takes a slightly different tack than Watt’s reading of Crusoe as an allegory for individualism, it also departs from the view of Crusoe as a “heroically spiritual slave” who, touched by “divine illumination,” begins to view his life in cosmic

Notes to Chapter Two

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17. 18.

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terms, as suggested by G.A. Starr and J. Paul Hunter (Hunter 80). While I would agree that religion suffuses Crusoe’s isolation with meaning and authenticity, and in fact plays a crucial role in facilitating his return to sociality, I believe that its function is mainly transitional. Crusoe is at heart a secular tale: once he gains the capacity to make choices that do not feel false, Crusoe internalizes the law of his father and assumes the life of a successful merchant. Crusoe does, however, acknowledge to some degree the irrationality of his response. He notes, for instance, that one would logically think that “to have seen one of my own Species would have seem’d to me a Raising me from Death to Life, and the greatest Blessing that Heaven itself, next to the Supreme Blessing of Salvation, could bestow” (157). As Seidel remarks, for Crusoe “the other is not only different but bigger” (123). One might point out parallels here between Crusoe’s irrational response to the footprint and infantile behavior. Crusoe’s persecutory anxiety, and the aggressive response that follows his discovery, is consonant with Melanie Klein’s portrayal of the overwhelmed infant who attacks the object because it poses a threat to the infant’s primary narcissism. See Hanna Segal 26–27. In this sense, Crusoe affirms Inderpal Grewal’s observation that the “sublimation of alienation” frequently involves the positioning of a subject within an extant racially defined group. As time passes on the island, Crusoe grows only more certain of this explanation. He reflects at one point that “the excellent Advice of my Father, the Opposition to which, was, as I may call it, my Original Sin” (195). To support this point, Richetti focuses on a dream sequence in which Crusoe foresees upcoming events, as if he achieves a kind of divine omnipotence (168). Starr extends this idea further by suggesting that Crusoe begins as a spiritual slave but eventually attains god-like status in a providential design. Koff argues that Friday personifies “the type of adoring, willing slave that some of these individuals will permit to establish contact with them.” Friday serves Crusoe much like the therapist who allows himself to become a willing extension of the patient. In so doing, the therapist reproduces a state resembling “natural narcissism” which, over time, permits the patient to achieve some integration of ego boundaries and so tolerate a degree of object relatedness (431). It should come as no surprise, then, that Crusoe becomes nostalgic when the time comes to leave the island: “I thought my self very rich in Subjects; and it was a merry Reflection which I frequently made, How like a King I look . . . I was absolute Lord and Law-giver” (241).

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24. Martin Gliserman makes a similar point in describing how wealth accumulation and resource management—which serve to “prevent the aggression” of others—compensate for Crusoe’s “fear of symbiotic relatedness.” As with Horkheimer and Adorno, Gliserman is interested in showing how the defensive (or sublimatory) strategies Crusoe develops to manage his alienation reflect more generally the cultural and economic orientation of modern capitalism (204–11). 25. To use the Lacanian conception of the paternal metaphor, we may say that Crusoe and the Rat Man reject the realm of phallic signification altogether, which typically serves the function of structuring the subject. It seems to me that one may engage in some debate concerning whether this rejection precipitates a psychotic break, which Lacan depicts as a repudiation of the signifying order of language. One may plausibly see Crusoe’s increasing contentedness with his seclusion as a manifestation of psychosis—an interpretation that would pose further ramifications for any reading that sees Crusoe as an emblem for modern culture and economy. At any rate, further consideration of the question of psychosis would need to reckon with the fact that Crusoe and the Rat Man do appear to re-integrate into the social worlds they left behind, a developmental feat that contradicts Lacan’s reading of the psychotic break as irrevocable. 26. For example, Paul Theroux’s 1975 work The Great Railway Bazaar has become a classic in the genre perhaps because it so efficiently encapsulates the logic of this nostalgia. Theroux’s aim, to ride all of the trains that passed through Victoria Station and then to return via the Trans-Siberian Express, constitutes a decided if playful rejection of modernity: the train is “a far cry from the anxious sweats of doom aeroplanes inspire, or the nauseating gas-sickness of the long-distance bus, or the paralysis that afflicts the car passenger” (11). One wonders if the shift in tone from Railway to The Mosquito Coast, toward increasing nihilism, reflects Theroux’s view on the increasing difficulty of finding any frontier to reproduce his rail journey. 27. That is not to say that a discourse of race is absent from The Mosquito Coast. On Polski’s farm, for example, Allie heaps scorn upon the migrant laborers and refers to them as “savages.” He rails against their squalor, ignorance of technology, and blind love for the United States. Yet Allie appears more affronted by the marginal status of the laborers, and not their race; he resents that they have, in his view, embraced a society that he regards as inauthentic. Charlie notes that Allie knows a great deal about the migrants, considers them a source of danger, and admires their kinship with the wilderness (39). In these sentiments Allie’s view of race seems characteristically romanticist. 28. Foucault’s description of the panoptic society’s twin compulsions to purify and discipline a community resonates with Allie’s approach to developing Jeronimo. Foucault writes: “The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community,

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the second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures. The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the two immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies—this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city.” By defending so ardently against the intrusion of “alien” elements into Jeronimo, and by imposing his will so absolutely over the day-to-day operations of the village, Allie exemplifies a specific character idiom that Foucault associates with modern forms of domination. (Foucault, Discipline 198) 29. It further reflects Allie’s self-absorption that the Ropers have, due to a miscommunication between Allie and Mr. Roper, become known as the “Maywits” during their residence in Jeronimo. This fallacy serves to accentuate the false sense of reciprocity that characterizes the bond between the two men: Allie seems incapable of relating to the Ropers with any genuine intimacy, and instead views them as subordinate participants in his master plan. 30. Bollas suggests that this defensive maneuver has its roots in an unstable childhood environment where unconscious thoughts and desires cannot be freely expressed. While he addresses these concerns within the context of clinical practice, I wish to stress the overlap with cultural theories that have attempted to reckon with the conflict between personal articulation and modern culture. Compare, for example, the following two quotations from Bollas and Simmel: The adult whose childhood relationship with the mother was secure can allow himself to deploy the “itness” inherent to his being in the supportive presence (and through the existence) of the other. Freud designated this ‘itness’ id, and Winnicott used the term ‘true self,’ though I find the term ‘idiom’ more apt. The adult who can experience his idiom will be able to surrender himself to the unconscious creation of experience, which in turn enriches that part of the self which is outside consciousness.” (Cracking Up 77) Simmel addresses the malaise potentially produced by the quickened pace of metropolitan life, which results in an attitude he calls “blasé”: The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived, but rather that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and gray tone; no one object deserves preference over any other.” (“The Metropolis and Mental Life” 414) To Simmel, objects may lose their ability to become “useful” to the blasé person; they no longer provide comfort, stimulate creativity, and otherwise

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32.

33.

34.

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Notes to Chapter Two become individualized to the person’s own subjectivity. For a discussion of the blasé attitude within the context of overstimulation in the metropolis, see Singer 93. The Oregonian, for instance, declares that “Generation X has its first great novel” (Baker E05). Along similar lines, the Times Literary Supplement dubs the novel “a hallucinatory Lord of the Flies for twentysomethings” (Fodden), a sentiment repeated in a jacket endorsement by contemporary novelist Nick Hornby, who describes the book as “a Lord of the Flies for Generation X.” The film based on the novel (2000) accentuates the video game metaphor by splicing music video-style clips into the main narrative that show the film’s star, Leonardo diCaprio, donning commando gear and gunning down targets. The film lends support to the view that these video games—of the first-person “shoot’em up” variety like Doom that Richard favors—embody an extreme scenario in repetition-compulsion: one executes a limited repertoire of maneuvers to eliminate an array of objects until the game ends and then begins again and so forth. In The Order of Knowledge, Foucault uses the term “unthought” to suggest that some aspect of the structure in which subjects are embedded remains latent. In any discursive formation, some quality of the the structure will be manifest—accessible to consciousness—and some aspect will not be representable in language. Foucault writes: “Man has not been able to describe himself as a configuration in the episteme without thought at the same time discovering, both in itself and outside itself, at its borders yet also within its very warp and woof, an element of darkness, an apparently inert density in which it is embedded, an unthought which it contains entirely, yet in which it is also caught. The unthought (whatever name we give it) is not lodged in man like a shrivelled-up nature or a stratified history; it is, in relation to man, the Other. . . . (Order 326) As much recent anthropological scholarship has argued, this notion of an organic community is deeply misguided and, in fact, all social identifications emerge through encounter and conflict with outside groups. This point is central to the present argument. The beach, though justified rhetorically as a response to commercialization and deterritorialization, hinges on principles of exclusivity and otherness that recall colonial identifications. A comparison may be made between this notion of self-reliance and that promulgated by the American Transcendentalists, particularly Thoreau and Emerson. The contrast between these figures and the figure of Krakauer’s text may be one of degree: whereas Thoreau and Emerson channel their creativity into textualized polemics, Krakauer’s subject attempts to forge actually-existing conditions where a kind of purified life of self-reliance may exist. Thoreau, it has been noted, lived a fairly typical bourgeois life outside

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of his experiment at Walden. He never seemed subject to the absolutism or perfectionism that drove McCandless to such asocial extremes. 36. Although Krakauer leaves the task of speculating on McCandless’s motivations to the reader, he does attribute the appeal of adventuring to the dynamic relationship between sons and fathers. One epigraph, for instance, taken from Donald Barthelme’s novel The Dead Father, describes the anger of the child Sam II toward his father as follows: “He is mad about being small when you were big, but no that’s not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, no that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved you, you didn’t notice” (145). 37. Sean Penn’s film adaptation of Into the Wild came out too late for me to undertake a full consideration of it here. Yet it is worth noting that the film’s final montage, combining shots of Chris’s last journal entries and his parents and home life, advances the interpretation that he fully intended to return and, like Crusoe, renew his connections to the social world. 38. Krakauer cites a passage from Paul Shepard’s Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature that extols the virtues of the desert as follows: “Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality” (25).

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. This apparent contradiction may help to explain why Mary Kingsley supported imperialist expansion even as she challenged the confinement of women to the domestic sphere. See Sara Mills 157–172. 2. These adverts all appear in 2002–03 issues of National Geographic’s Adventure magazine. 3. Discussions of the flâneur appear in Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and Siegfried Kracauer, “Offenbach and the Paris of His Time.” 4. As with the sub-genre of melancholic travel writing to which I link V.S. Naipaul and Geoff Dyer in the next chapter, artistic expression may function as sanctuary for the subject who refuses admission to the symbolic realm. 5. This term originates with Frederic Jameson, who employs it to describe the depthlessness of modern society. For Jameson, the anomie of fleeting euphoria substitutes for the solidity of centered subjectivity (72). 6. For a discussion of pilgrimage in Hindu India, see Eck 59–75. 7. Although it certainly warrants a fuller discussion than I am able to offer here, I would offer Malcolm X’s journey to Mecca as an example. On his 1964 Hajj, he describes witnessing—and in fact alludes to experiencing— the sort of ecstatic loss of consciousness that one might mistake for hysterical character structure. He writes of seeing “incapacitated pilgrims being carried by others” and notes that “faces were enraptured in their faith” (20).

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8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

Yet after the Hajj, he describes a consolidation of selfhood and writes of the changes this pilgrimage brings about in his worldview: “what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought patters previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions” (23). This particular phrase appears in Joe Robinson’s essay “Real Travel.” However, see Ilza Veith’s Hysteria: The History of Disease for a useful effort to connect medical and psychoanalytic theories. An account of the manifold scholarly approaches to hysteria appears in Micale, who describes the flourish of research in this area as “the new hysteria studies” (3–18). See also the volume edited by Sander Gilman et al. Recent scholarship has shown that Freud makes a number of factual misrepresentations in his write-up of the Dora case, including an assertion that Dora was “nearly nineteen” when she sought treatment with him, even though secondary sources indicate that she was only seventeen. Some have viewed these errors as further evidence of Freud’s reluctance to recognize the extent of Dora’s victimization (Mahony, Freud’s Dora 13). The background details I include here are drawn from Patrick Mahony’s study of the Dora case (Freud’s Dora 1–21). Bollas’ systematic delineation of hysteria derives from a synthesis of postFreudian theories, with a particular debt to Lacan. Although the contours of hysteric structure are apparent in the early work of Charcot and Freud, Lacan distills the semiology of symptoms produced by this earlier research into a problem of the subject’s desire. The hysteric, Lacan shows, fashions herself (or just as typically, Bollas argues, himself ) as an object of the “Other’s” desire because only the Other can provide structure to the self. The typical route of maturation—the consolidation of the self through an identification with the paternal order—cannot take place for the hysteric due to an oedipal failure. It should be emphasized that this failure manifests in the other character types I discuss as well; in fact, for Lacan neurosis fundamentally emerges out of the gap between self and paternal order. Where these character types differ concerns the structure of their desire—their attempted resolution to the oedipal failure. Bruce Fink identifies the elaboration of these types as one of Lacan’s central contributions to the ongoing reinterpretation and systematization of Freud’s theories. In Fink’s view, Lacan showed that “psychoanalytic categories . . . can be defined at a profound, structural level.” Fink continues: “In his lifelong attempt to formalize and extend Freud’s work, Lacan provides the basis for a structural understanding of obsession and hysteria that Freud himself did not provide” (118). As Bollas states, the hysteric’s refusal of the self ’s development equates to a denial of sexuality. Hence the hysteric does not “turn his or her identity on the lathe of sexual difference”: insofar as desire remains turned inward, or “autoerotic,” no real object choice is made (24).

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15. See Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks for a discussion of the history of these categories in Freudian thinking and the problems that arise in applying them to crosscultural analysis. 16. The emerging field of Bowles criticism underscores Bowles significant role in pioneering an arts counterculture. William Carlos Williams and Tennessee Williams praised his work, and Truman Capote, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg all adopted Bowles as an icon and made pilgrimages to Tangier to see him. Although quite separate from his own intentions, Bowles’ postwar disillusionment was reconstituted as “hip” by nascent figures of the 1960s counterculture (even Mick Jagger eventually ventured to Tangier to pay Bowles a visit). As Norman Mailer writes, “He let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the square, the call of the orgy, the end of civilization: he invited all of us to these themes” (Friend 93). 17. In his study of Americanist representations of the Maghreb, Brian Edwards describes Port, invoking Gayatri Spivak, as an “impossible figuration.” Port, in other words, departs from the “national epistemology” of American intervention in the Maghreb precisely by his inability to “translate and ‘foreclose’ the native informant.” Edwards argues that Bowles moves beyond “the limiting frames of national identification” but only through an “existentialist frame” that dramatizes and underscores Port’s (the American’s) distance from the object he seeks to know. There is perhaps no portrayal of the potential for cultural translation in The Sheltering Sky, but Bowles does, Edwards suggests, manage to interrupt the dominant mode of Orientalist representations by accentuating the cultural distance between the U.S. and Maghreb and rendering a scenario wherein the encounter cannot be disciplined to support the interests of American foreign policy (Edwards 101–05; see also Loshitzky 126–28). 18. Syrine Hout observes that utopian sentiment often relies on an association between death and freedom. Bowles himself makes this linkage clear in his autobiography, Without Stopping, in which he writes, “Like any Romantic, I had always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place which, in revealing its secrets, would give me wisdom and ecstasy—perhaps even death” (Without Stopping 282; Hout 114–16). Gena Dagel Caponi’s biography of Bowles, which devotes substantial attention to the “landscape of the unconscious” in Bowles’ work, suggests that death symbolized Bowles’ wish to distance himself from his European roots. Caponi writes: “On a purely symbolic level, does the impaling of the brain represent an artistic death wish? A longing for sleep, death, stasis, and cessation of activity pervades Bowles’s works, with his strongest statement occurring in his first novel [The Sheltering Sky] . . .” (161). 19. It bears mentioning here that the filmic version of The Sheltering Sky, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, renders the motivations of the three characters very differently than the novel. Bertolucci casts the story much more

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Notes to Chapter Three as a conventional love triangle: suspecting an affair, Port schemes to send Tunner away and whisks Kit to increasingly remote towns in order to have her to himself. The film appears not to capture the novel’s sense of Port’s detachment and complacency. In an especially revealing scene in the novel, for example, Port, on the back of a truck en route to Sbâ, reflects on the threesome’s arrival in Algeria and concludes in retrospect that he could not stay in one place because something there interfered with his writing. In the novel, it is not so much Port’s wish for intimacy with Kit that motivates their escape as his efforts to elude intimacy altogether. Port indeed arrives at this conclusion himself: He thought it was probably Tunner who prevented him from being completely at ease. Tunner’s presence created a situation, however slight, which kept him from entering the reflective state he considered essential. As long as he was living his life, he could not write about it. Where one left off, the other began, and the existence of circumstances which demanded even the vaguest participation on his part was sufficient to place writing outside the realm of possibility. (Sheltering Sky 199–200) In the novel and in the film, the presence of Tunner acts as a stumbling block for Port, but for very different reasons. The film suggests that Port is motivated primarily by a wish for attachment; the novel shows him motivated mainly by a need to preserve the absence of attachment. Brian Edwards suggests that Bowles intended this section of the novel as a critique of pervasive dualisms during the Cold War, and that in fact Kit’s relationship with Belqassim is intended as a symbol of the hybridity of the postwar Maghreb. As Edwards notes, readers from both Morocco and the United States resisted such symbols. While I do agree that Bowles may have had these notions in mind when writing The Sheltering Sky, the novel seems to me to render Kit more as someone who has suffered a great trauma than as one who makes a conscious, intentioned choice about the relationship. See Edwards 94–95. During this phase of the narrative, Bertolucci’s film departs substantially from the novel. The film veers from the menacing tone of the novel, and in fact presents the affair between Kit and the nomads as a willful, and even erotic, romance. Similarly, where the novel depicts Kit as being virtually imprisoned in Belqassim’s house and subject to retaliatory attacks by Belqassim’s other wives, Bertolucci presents Kit’s stay as more as a benevolent tryst with Kit suffering no animosity from the extended family. One may speculate that this phrase was added to the film, which stars Kate Winslett, to directly highlight Freud’s cachet as Sigmund’s great-granddaughter. While critics have generally taken a laudatory view of Esther’s literary skills (see Gorra, “My Architect”), curiosity regarding the family connection likely helped propel Hideous Kinky to the bestseller charts in Britain. This theory informs the interpretive framework Dean Maccannell employs in The Tourist. Indeed, the notion of travel as bricolage provides the basis for linking travel to modernist, rather than postmodernist, practice. Holland and

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Huggan make this point through an analysis of the work of Bruce Chatwin, whose success they attribute to the “allure of the nomad-individualist”: This airy sketch of the unfettered, venturesome, and freewheeling individual suggests why there is always likely to be a gap between “cultural” theories of the nomad and envisionings of nomadism as a pretext for personal—romantic—flight. In Chatwin’s work, nomadism is different again from either of these theories; it is tantamount to a highly idiosyncratic personal mythology, relying on a potpourri of materials that Chatwin, as determined bricoleur, can seize upon and utilize as will. (168–169) The valorization of this highly individualized, contiguous “personal mythology” contrasts decidedly with conceptions of a fragmented and free-floating subjectivity in postmodern theory.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. For further commentary on the affinity between obsession and melancholia see Sánchez-Pardo 23–32. I am emphasizing here that both obsession and melancholia are predicated on a loss. Where they differ, I propose, is in the trajectories of their revolts—that is, the strategies they pursue to remediate the loss. 2. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud describes melancholia as proceeding from a “mental constellation of revolt” which, due to an identification of the ego with the abandoned object, has “passed over into the crushed state of melancholia” (248). In Judith Butler’s terms, “melancholia is a rebellion that has been put down, crushed” (190). 3. Travel magazines have recently noted the rise of “poverty tourism,” which some commentators argue reflects an increased interest in “real” versus “packaged” touristic experiences. While I tend to agree with this formulation, I do not agree that the trend necessarily indicates heightened charitable impulses. I would suggest, rather, that such a mode of travel represents an attempt to turn poverty into an aesthetics of selfhood. See Kevin Doyle on the notion of “slumming.” 4. Aside from the brief allusions to Enlightenment and Romantic discourses I have already made, one may trace the foundations for a significant sphere of this literature to Marx. Rojek, for instance, notes that the Communist Manifesto envisions the metropolis and as an assault on nature (Rojek 95). 5. This formulation, though derived from a reading of Freud, owes much to the later work of Lacan. For Lacan, the fort-da game illustrates a process of metaphorization: the child, performing what Lacan calls a “signifying substitution,” translates the experience of loss into a language game. This substitution fundamentally facilitates the maturation of the child into a subject since, for Lacan, a subject is one who enters into and instrumentalizes language. By symbolizing a desire, the infant compensates for the loss of the

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6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

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mother by embracing, in her place, the substitutive satisfaction of the law. See Dor 111–114. The use of the term “hail” is intended to evoke Althusser’s notion of interpellation, which seeks to explain why and how subjects align themselves with the law. Althusser writes: “I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all) or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject” (130–31). This essay, fittingly entitled “Paradise Lost,” originally appeared in Travel & Leisure and was reprinted in the Theroux’s 2001 edited volume. Nigel Leask observes that the modality of the picturesque represented a compromise aesthetic in travel writing that simultaneously accommodated the Enlightenment will to survey and the Romanticist inclination toward sentiment. Especially prominent in Indian travel writing, Leask argues that the picturesque “set about ‘organizing’ British India for consumption in the imperial metropolis” (169). Picturesque representation catered to the European curiosity to see and “penetrate” the mysterious Orient; yet at the same time, the picturesque portrays the sight as temporally distant—as a quaint but exotic ruin (166–78). On this point, see also Baucom (185–187). As Baucom writes, “migrancy was not to be [Naipaul’s] theme.” Naipaul has been challenged for not embracing, or even recognizing, his ties to the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora. For example Derek Walcott has criticized Naipaul through a series of poems centered on the figure V.S. Nightfall. Selwyn Cudjoe has suggested that Naipaul’s “lack of identification with the National Struggles of Third World Peoples” points to his “neurotic indulgence” (Cudjoe 95; see also Gorra 74). More specifically, Cudjoe observes that Naipaul became increasingly distant from Trinidadian society from the 1970s onward, and that this distance “led him to an apocalyptic interpretation of history which saw only hopelessness in the aspirations of colonial and postcolonial people” (141). Cudjoe argues that unlike Joseph Conrad, whom Naipaul admired and who believed “one can transcend feelings of alienation,” Naipaul’s writing suggests that “no such transcendence is possible” (164). This focus is readily evident in Naipaul’s Indian trilogy, including An Area of Darkness (1964), A Wounded Civilization (1977) A Million Mutinies Now (1990). Timothy Weiss describes the trajectory of An Area of Darkness as follows: “Before departure [Naipaul] believes in the idea of a certain, special India, a spiritual land; on arrival, however, he experiences neither connection

Notes to Chapter Four

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13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

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nor exhilaration but the weight of the country’s impoverishment and a despair at its immense problems. The journey becomes torturous . . .” (110). To further clarify the structure of melancholic travel, one may liken Naipaul’s sense of resignation to the developmental achievement that Melanie Klein calls the depressive position. According to Klein, the child begins to develop some capacity and concern for the object, despite continued frustration. The child resigns itself, as it were, to the reality that the object always lies beyond reach. In this light it may not be so surprising that Naipaul has recently issued his support for the demolition of the Babri Masjid in India that has become a focal point of conflict between Hindus and Muslims (“Naipaul Supports”). Dyer has written a number of books that defy easy classification, including Out of Sheer Rage, for which he was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. He has also written a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud analogizes the development of the mind to the topographical evolution of Rome. The shadow of the past, he states, always remains in the form of ruins. New constructions may displace old edifices, but they never fully supplant them. Naipaul’s exploration of the history of Trinidad reveals a similar investment in antiquity. In The Loss of El Dorado, he writes: . . . to look for the aboriginal, pre-Columbus island, I had to ignore almost everything that leapt out at the eye . . . The landscape of the past existed only in fragments. To see one such fragment I looked at the drying-up mangrove swamp—green thick leaves, black roots, black mud—outside Port of Spain, ignoring the rubbish strewn highway and the bent and battered median rail and the burning rubbish dump and the dust-blown shack settlement beyond the highway and the shacks on the hills of the Northern range. From the top of Laventille Hill, among the shacks, I could imagine myself at the beginning of things if I looked selectively down at the Gulf of Paria—grey, leaden, never blue—and the islets in the Gulf. (146–47) For an extensive discussion that compares and contrasts the ideal of selfhood in South Asian and European contexts, see Alan Roland. A recent collection of travel narratives, entitled Bad Trips, summarizes the virtues of this sort of masochism on the road. Writes editor Keith Fraser in the introduction: “Some day you will use your journey. You feel fortunate to be suffering” (xiv). As Winnicott puts it, everyone must negotiate a compromise between a “polite or socialized self, and also a personal private self” that remains unique. The true self usually manifests in an “area chosen for a special treatment,” in which “there is no room for compromise” (Home 66, 70). This reference is intended to call to mind Bourdieu’s expansive research on consumer taste. Bourdieu contends that in the differentiated cultures of the West consumers seek to purchase, above all, the currency of subjectivity. In

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his view, positionality within social classes determines what cultural forms act as carriers of taste and distinction, and so consumer behavior among the petit bourgeoisie and the lower classes takes on a different character. While I disagree with Bourdieu’s ascriptions regarding class analysis, the notion of a distinction drive, wherein individuals seek above all to distinguish themselves from “others,” resonates with the conceptual framework of my argument here. 21. My choice of words here—“imagined” and “true”—is intended to evoke two specific psychoanalytic explanations for the pursuit of this integration of selfhood. As mentioned previously, Lacan’s concept of the “imaginary” implies that an individual will go to great lengths to sustain the illusion of integration and suffer much anxiety if unable to do so. Similarly, Winnicott’s distinction between “true” and “false” selves affirms the importance for an individual to derive authenticity by cultivating a sense of personal uniqueness outside of the public order (Home 65–70). 22. These themes surface, respectively, in Emily Barr’s Backpack and Alex Garland’s The Beach. 23. We might say that the traveler resembles the bored child who is just beginning to recognize his status as an independent being separate from his caretaker and who, in his boredom, is “waiting for himself.” (See Phillips 69).

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 1. Though the term “general will” originates with Rousseau, I invoke the term here to underscore Hegel’s debt to earlier philosophical work that posited a dynamic, rather than transcendental subjectivity. That is to say that both Rousseau and Hegel suggest that the subject emerges out of a dynamic relationship to social conditions and does not have any underlying, universal rationality. My discussion of Hegel draws in part from Callinicos, esp. 39– 53. 2. In this regard, as Rose notes, the later work of Melanie Klein converges with that of Lacan. Both theorists derive a dialectical model of development out of Freud’s short essay “Negation.” 3. Lacan most forcefully outlines the equation of negation with death: he refers to the realm of non-being, outside the domain of symbolization, as the “real.” As Rose notes, Lacan also most decisively detaches negation from the “destructive impulse” (155). Even though negation implies a denial or repudiation, Lacan shows that in the end it represents an affirmation of subjectivity. 4. An example may be found in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, which explores the utopian promise of culture, art and philosophy. Adorno argued that these forms functioned as criticism because they revealed the “dissonance between thought and actuality.” Philosophy aims to unveil moments of resistance to the “administered world,” guided by the possibility that this focus may one

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day reveal the possibility of a Hegelian resolution to the schism between self and object. See Benhabib 84–92. 5. Berman writes: “What this Faust wants for himself is a dynamic process that will include every mode of human experience, joy and misery alike, and that will assimilate them all into his self ’s unending growth; even the self ’s destruction will be an integral part of its development” (40).

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Index

A Adventure, in Frankfurt School, 6, 10, 51, 146n6 adventure travel: advertisements, 79, 159n2; connection to selfhood, 2–4, 27–29, 87–88, 112, 114, 125; contrast with pilgrimage, 82–83; imagined experience of, xi-xii, 9, 19–20, 31–33, 34, 61; as modern travel idiom, 23, 27, 35, 44, 102–104, 127–143, 147n8; and tourist industry, 27, 151n26; V.S. Naipaul’s view of, 118–119; as revolt, 43, 74, 76–77 advertisements, for adventure travel, 12, 79, 89 aesthetics, 1–2, 132–135, 145n1 alienation: and modernity, 3–4, 7, 11, 146–147n7, 147–148n11; and flânerie, 13, 80–81; in Marx, 11–13, 29–30, 152n30; in Naipaul, 164n10; and negation, 138–142; remediation of through travel, 15, 20, 24–31, 128–135, 140–142, 155n19 Althusser, Louis, 146–147n7, 154n14; 164n6 Are You Experienced? 127–129, 135 authenticity: crisis of, 36–39; cross-cultural approaches to, 125–126, 165n17; dialectics of, 12–13; and language, 41; as modern cultural value, ix-xi, 3, 137–143;

pursued through travel, 28–29; and subjectivity, 7–8, 16, 28, 31, 147n11; true and false selves, 42, 69, 73 , 166n21

B Bacon, Sir Francis, 21 Baedecker guidebooks, 21, 150n20 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 152n32 Baucom, Ian, 116, 164n9 The Beach: adventure guidebook in, 61; film adaptation of, 158n32; forgetting and remembrance, 63–65, 68; and notion of paradise, 62, 158n34; as obsessional narrative, 52, 60–68; war metaphors in, 61–61, 66–67, 166n22 Behdad, Ali, 23–25, 114–115, 148n12, 151n25 Benjamin, Walter, 13, 80–81, 134–135, 159n3 Berman, Marshall, 44, 136–138, 140, 167n5 Bhabha, Homi, 114, 146 Bollas, Christopher: on obsession, 60, 76; on hysteria, 81, 88–89, 92, 157n30, 160n13 Böröcz, Josef, 26–27 Bowles, Paul: “Pages from Cold Point,” 94–97; The Sheltering Sky, 33, 83, 97–102, 161–162nn19–20; on travel and modernity, 93–94, 149n16, 161n16

179

180 Bronfen, Elizabeth, 87–88 Burton, Robert, 105–106 Butler, Judith, 106, 112, 113, 163n2 Butor, Michel, 34

C Carr, Helen, 22–23, 150–151nn22–23 character systems in travel literature, 4–6, 8, 32–33, 36, 140–142, 156n28, 160n13 Charcot, Jean Martin, 87–88 Chard, Chloe, 17–18 childhood, thematic in travel literature, 17, 88, 90–91, 100, 146n5 Chatwin, Bruce, 162–163n23 Cocker, Mark, 9, 92 Coetzee, J.M., 45–46 colonialism: contemporary travel narratives relation to, 128–132, 145n2; and history of travel discourses, x-xiii, 23–27, 78–79, 116–123 comic masochism, 127–129 Crusoe. See Robinson Crusoe

D Davidson, Robyn, 28, 152n29 dialectics of authenticity, 12–13 Denning, Michael, 31–32 deterritorialization, 30, 93, 129, 141–142 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4–5, 106, 146n5 Doi, Takeo, 125–126 Dora, Freud’s case study of, 84–87, 160nn11–12 Dyer, Geoff, 122–125, 126, 159n4, 165n14

E English identity, 24, 26, 104, 116–122 Enlightenment: aesthetic of travel narratives, 1–2, 21, 79, 145n1, 150n21, 164n8; contrast with Romanticism, 1, 6, 106; and crisis of selfhood, 5–8; tendency toward mystification, 4–5, 126–127 Espey, David, 17

F False consciousness, 8

Index false self, 37, 54, 59, 69, 73, 80 Fanon, Frantz, 14, 146n4 Faust, as modern archetype, 44, 113, 136– 138, 140–142, 167n5 Ferenczi, Sandor, 16 Fink, Bruce, 160n13 flâneur, 13, 80–82, 88, 159n3 Forster, E.M., 23, 142 Foucault, 14, 156–158 Frankfurt School: Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4–5, 106, 146n5; on modernity and expressive cultures, xii, 3–9 Freud, Anna, 39 Freud, Esther, 83, 103–104, 162n22 Freud, Sigmund: Civilization and Its Discontents, 4, 7, 15, 123, 165n15; concept of the “oceanic,” 6; Dora case study, 84–87, 160nn11–12; fort-da game, 110–112, 163– 164; “Mourning and Melancholia,” 111–113, 122–123, 134, 163n2; on obsessionality, 36–43; views on travel, 148–149n15, 153n4, 153–154nn7–9 Fussell, Paul, 9, 17, 23, 89, 115–116, 149– 150n17

G Garland, Alex. See The Beach Gide, André, 14–15, 18 Gikandi, Simon, 25–26 global culture: alienation and, 22, 26–33; cultural dimension of, 2–4, 129–132; negation as a critique of, 136–143 Gramsci, Antonio, 30–32 Grand Tour, 3, 18, 21–22, 78–79, 150n19 Greenblatt, Stephen, 30 Greene, Graham, 17, 23 Grewal, Inderpal: on relationship between individuation and ideology, 28, 130–133, 155n19; on tourism and leisure practice; 4, 20, 24–25 Grinstein, Alexander, 16 guidebooks: colonial ideology and, 24; resistance of mass culture to, 127, 148n14, 150n20; as touristic

Index

181 markers, xi, 12–13, 21, 23–24, 61

H Harvey, David, 30–31 Hebdige, Dick, 76–77 Hegel, 46, 138–139, 143, 166n1, 166– 167n4 Hideous Kinky, 83, 103–104, 162n22 Holland, Patrick and Graham Huggan, 28–29, 133, 162–163n23 Horkheimer and Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4–8, 106; on Robinson Crusoe, 50–51, 156n24 Hurston, Zora Neale, 28 hysteria, character idiom of: and gender, 83–84, 89; history of, 83–89, 160nn9–13; life and death drive structures of, 102–104; and negation of selfhood, 92–94, 160; contrast with obsession and melancholia, 33, 36, 83, 141; and performance, 87–88; and postmodern pilgrimage, 82–83

I Identification: failed structures of, 8, 14–15, 78; hysteria and, 82, 86–88, 160n13, 161n17; and melancholia, 111–114, 163n2; obsession and, 42–51, 73, 75, 153n8; role of in ideology, 20, 107–108, 133, 158n34 ideology: and Orientalism, xi, 3–5; role of in subject formation, 131–137, 146–147n7, 164n6; and travel discourses, 13–14, 25, 27, 147–148n11. See also false consciousness individuation: as mode of social adaptation, 24, 28, 113, 130–133; subject’s idealization of 5, 8, 16, 127 Into the Wild: film adaptation of, 159n37; identification in, 73, 75; intersubjectivity and alienation in,

69–70, 72, 75; and negation, 52, 74, 159; travel and separation in, 69, 72, 74, 76 Iyer, Pico, 104

J Jacobus, Mary, 84 Jameson, Fredric, 4, 30–31, 159n5

K Kaplan, Caren, 3, 20, 129, 153n1 Kingsley, Mary, 79, 159n1 Klein, Melanie, 139, 152n33, 155n18, 165n12, 166n2 Korte, Barbara, 21–22 Kracauer, Siegfried, 6–8, 13, 80, 159n3 Krakauer, Jon. See Into the Wild Kristeva, Julia, 107, 112

L Leisure travel, history of, 20–25 Lacan, Jacques, 3, 14, 20, 111, 131–132, 139 Laclau, Ernesto, 3, 113 Lane, Christopher, 14–15 the law: as metaphor for paternal authority, 3, 6–8, 10, 15, 28–29, 88; and subjectivity, 13, 20, 74, 113, 146–147n7, 164n6 language, as field of intersubjectivity, 73–74, 134–135, 139–140 Lawrence, D.H., 17, 23, 151n24 Leask, Nigel, 17, 145n1, 164n8 Lefebvre, Henri, 9 leisure practice: as a form of social critique, 3; and travel, 9–11, 129; methodological approaches to, 30–33 leisure spaces, 9–10 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 126–127, 129, 135 Logan, Peter Melville, 84

M MacCannell, Dean, xi, 11–13, 19, 131–133, 147–148nn11–2, 148–150, 149n17 Mahoney, Patrick, 86, 153n4, 153n7 Malcolm X, 159n7

182 Marx: on alienation, 29–30, 152n30; on Robinson Crusoe, 44, 154n11; view of individual and society, 7–8, 32–33 masculinity and selfhood, 90 melancholia, character idiom of: comparison to obsession and hysteria, 108–109; and perceptions of loss, 109–111; views of travel, 23, 68, 105–107 Mills, Sara, 4, 13–14, 20 mimesis, 5–6 Mosquito Coast, The: opposing intersubjectivity, 56–59; role of the father in, 53–54, 58–59, 63–64; utopianism in, 52, 57

N Naipaul, V.S.: and Crusoe, 44; Enigma of Arrival, 118–122, 123, 126, 129; and melancholic travel idiom, 15, 33, 35, 107, 164– 165nn9–12, 165n16; nostalgic views of, 165n13 de Nerval, Gerard, 114–117 Nandy, Ashis, ix, 145n2 negation: concept of, 2–4; as a critique of global culture, 136–143; in The Beach, 63; in Into the Wild, 74; notion of obsessionality and, 47–53; selfhood striving toward, 8, 19, 20, 92–96 nostalgia, 18, 22–23, 112, 116–119, 149n17

Index P Paternal authority, 3, 8, 19, 70, 73, 79, 156n25. See also the law picturesque, 116–117, 150n19, 164n8 pilgrimage, 82–83, 159–160 Pollock, Griselda, 81 Porter, Dennis, 21, 131, 150n22 postcolonialism, x, 14, 23, 114–118, 146n4, 164n10 postmodern travel, 88, 102–104 Pratt, Mary Louise, 4, 20–21, 24–25, 35, 78–79 psychoanalysis and travel studies, 15–20 punk rock, 77

R Rat Man, case study of, 34, 35–41, 72–74, 153–154nn4–9 Robinson Crusoe: depiction of Friday, 49– 50; footprint and the “other,” 48–49, 58, 61; modernity and realism, 46, 50–51, 76; obsessional travel idiom and, 34, 43–51, 76, 83; Poll’s role in, 47–48; rebellion against father, 44–45, 53, 63; religion and, 46–47, 49 Rojek, Chris, 4, 106, 147n8 Rojek, Chris, and John Urry, 9, 10 romanticism, 22–23, 26, 106, 145n1, 150n21 Rosaldo, Renato, 18, 117 Rose, Jacqueline, 139, 162nn2–3 ruins, 106–108, 115–123

O

S

Obsession, character idiom of: in The Beach, 60–68; and Crusoe prototype, 44–51; failure of identification, 42; Rat Man case study and, 34, 35–41, 72–74, 153–154nn4–9; rejection of language and, 41– 43; as social critique, 41, 76–77; in Mosquito Coast, 52–60 Odysseus, 5–8, 19, 51, 146n5 oedipal pathology, 8, 33, 37, 140, 160n13 Orientalism, x-xii, 2, 25–27, 114–116, 124

Said, Edward, x, 25–27, 115–116, 142– 143 Salecl, Renata, 19 Schneiderman, Stuart, 41–42 Scott, James, 3, 145–146n3 self: crisis of, 5, 104; decentering of, 31; false consciousness and, 8; modern idiom of, 5, 32–33, 78–79, 88, 148n13; in travel writing, 2, 6 self-fashioning, 3, 30, 81, 131

Index Showalter, Elaine, 85–86 sightseeing, xi, 11–12, 22, 61, 147–148n11 Simmel, Georg: “The Adventure,” 21; on the blasé, 157–158n30; “The Conflict in Modern Culture,” 76, 146; on subjects and the moral economy, 9, 109 Stark, Freya, 23, 149n17 Sterne, Laurence, 22 Sutcliffe, William, 127–129, 135 symbolic father. See the law

T Theroux, Paul: Great Railway Bazaar, 156; The Mosquito Coast, 52–60 Thesiger, Wilfred, 90, 108 Thoreau, 70, 151n24, 158–159n35 Tomlinson, John, 4, 141–142 tourism: history of, 20–25; imagined experience of, 8, 13, 19, 151nn26– 27 transitional space, 46, 50, 134, 154n13 travel: approaches to studying, 8–15; defining, 8–9; different from tourism, 8–9, 13, 149–150n17; Enlightenment and Romantic modes of, 1–2, 6–7; narratives

183 and popular culture, 31–32; negation and, 2, 7; performative dimension of, 11 travel novel, 32–33 true and false selves, 36, 42, 129, 157n30

U Urry, John, 4

V Van den Abbeele, Georges, 11, 147–148n11 van der Post, Laurens, 89–93, 103 Venture to the Interior. See van der Post, Laurens virtual travel, 147n9

W Watt, Ian, 154nn14–15 Waugh, Evelyn, 17, 23, 29–30 Whitebrook, Joel, 146n5 Williams, Raymond, 32, 117, 130 Wilson, Elizabeth, 81–82 Winnicott, D.W., 80, 81, 134, 154n13, 165n19, 166n21

Z Zizek, Slovoj, 111, 112, 137

About the Author

Stephen M. Levin is Assistant Professor of English at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

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