An Officer of Civilization

by Nurit Buchweitz

  Modular Narration and Tourist Guides as Passive-Activism

  The first part of Platform is a travelogue, documenting the adventures of the narrator while touring Thailand, and reflecting upon his experiences. This form is a variation of the memoir and thus clearly close to those of the autobiography and confession. Michel is in a holiday resort “situated on the east coast of KoSamui, the hotel perfectly evoked the sort of ‘tropical paradise’ you see in travel agents’ brochures.” (p. 62) [«Situé sur la côte est de Koh Samui, l’hôtel évoquait parfaitement l’image du paradis tropical tel qu’on le représente dans les dépliants d’agence.» (Plateforme, p. 87; emphasis in the original)]. He is clearly disappointed since the supply does not meet his demand:

  I didn’t require as much. All I wanted right now was a decent body massage, followed by a blow job and a good fuck. Nothing too complicated on the face of it, but looking through the brochures I realized, with a feeling of profound melancholy, that this didn’t at all seem to be the speciality of the place. There was a lot of stuff like acupuncture, massage with essential oils, vegetarian food, or tai-chi; but of body massages or go-go bars, nada. On top of everything, the place had a painfully American, even Californian, feel about it, focused on ‘healthy living’ and ‘meditations activities’. I glanced through a letter to What’s On Samui from a Guy Hopkins, a self-confessed ‘health addict’ who had been coming to the island regularly for twenty years. ‘The aura that backpackers spread on the island is unlikely to be erased quickly by upmarket tourists,’ he concluded. It was depressing. I couldn’t even set off in search of adventure since the hotel was miles from anywhere. In fact, everything was miles from anywhere, since there was nothing here. The map of the island indicated no identifiable town center; rather, a number of cottage resorts like ours, set on tranquil beaches. It was then that I remembered with horror that the island had had a very good write-up in the Guide du Routard, which listed it as a place that had managed to avoid a certain moral slide. I was caught like a rat in a trap. Even so, I felt a vague satisfaction, however theoretical, at the notion that I actually felt up to fucking. (p. 64; emphasis in the original)

  [«Je n’en demandais pas tant. Tout ce que je voulais pour l’instant c’était un honnête body massage, suivi d’une pipe et d’une bonne baise. Rien de compliqué, en apparence; pourtant, en parcourant les brochures, je m’aperçus avec une tristesse croissante que ça ne semblait pas du tout être la spécialité de l’endroit. Il y avait beaucoup de choses du genre acupuncture, massage aux huiles aromatiques essentielles, nourriture végétarienne ou tai-chi-chuan; mais de body massages ou de go-go bars, point. Tout semblait en outre baigner dans une ambiance péniblement américaine, voire californienne, axée sur la healthy life et les méditation activities. Je parcourus la lettre d’un lecteur de What’s on Samui, Guy Hopkins; il se ← 37 | 38 → définissait lui-même comme un health addict, et revenait régulièrement dans l’île depuis une vingtaine d’années. ‘The aura that back-packers spread on the island is unlikely to be erased quickly by upmarket tourists’, concluait-il; c’était décourageant. Je ne pouvais même pas partir à l’aventure, puisque l’hôtel était loin de tout; à vrai dire tout était loin de tout, puisqu’il n’y avait rien. La carte de l’île ne révélait aucun centre perceptible: quelques résidences de bungalows comme la nôtre, au bord de plages tranquilles. Je me souvins alors avec effroi que l’île était décrite de manière très élogieuse dans le Guide du Routard. Ici, on avait su éviter certaines dérives; j’étais fait comme un rat. J’éprouvais quand même une satisfaction vague, légèrement théorique, à l’idée que je me sentais en état de baiser». (Plateforme, p. 90; emphasis in the original)]

  In this excerpt, the three possible routes of reading converge and compete. As a confession, the choice of words is emotive, expressing ‘melancholy’, ‘depression’, and ‘horror’ at the turn of events, and even self-pride when the protagonist-narrator is ‘satisfied’ at having maintained his libido under such excruciating circumstances. It is an intimate account of personal emotions and bodily reactions; the wording reflects a highly individualized perception of events.

  Yet this is also a realistic novel in which the surroundings are significant. Such holiday resorts are a utopia for Westerners, seemingly a perfect realization of the idea of transnational commerce in the service of the leisure industry. These are carefully controlled sites which provide a commercial answer to passion, distant from Western geography and aesthetics; in other words heterotopias, spaces of otherness, an approximation of utopia in non-hegemonic conditions.39 Houellebecq offers us a glimpse behind the scenes of leisure society, in which mass-tourism to exotic destinations is mediated by guidebooks. These books are also a powerful marketing tool, since they attribute exotic traits to indigenous expanses and culture. Exoticism is not necessarily inherent to people or places; via the guidebooks, those objects are seen as exceeding the cultural context, and undergo de-territorialization and de-contextualization – removing the objects from a natural, yet alien, distant, and threatening context, and inserting them into artificial, controlled, and familiar surroundings. The economics of tourism to Third World countries has more to do with mystification than responsibility to cultural diversity. This type of pre-arranged, pre-coordinated package is the kind of tourism Michel wants to apply to ← 38 | 39 → Thailand, as he admits: “to put it bluntly, what I really want, basically, is to be a tourist.” (p. 20; emphasis in the original) ]»pour dire les choses plus crûment, ce que je souhaite au fond, c’est pratiquer le tourisme» (p. 31)]. In this respect, Michel is a consumer of culture’s own flesh and blood.

  Michel’s experience as a tourist is mediated by three guidebooks: the Michelin, the Guide du Routard, and The White Book. He turns to them consistently, consulting them at length as sources of information. Not only does Michel observe the local sites by reading from the Michelin, he also compares its information with that found in the backpacker’s guide. After marking the differences between the two, he usually dismisses the latter: “The first stop was Kanchanaburi, which all the guidebooks agree is a lively, animated city. To the Michelin, it’s a ‘marvellous starting point from which to explore the surrounding region.’ The Guide du Routard, on the other hand, considers it a ‘good base camp’.” (p. 42; emphasis in the original) [«Le premier arrêt eut lieu à Kanchanaburi, ville dont les guides s’accordent à souligner le caractère animé et gai. Pour le Michelin, c’est un ‘merveilleux point de départ pour la visite des contrées environnantes’; le Routard, quant à lui, la qualifie de ‘bon camp de base’.» (p. 62; emphasis in the original)]. Michel is also very familiar with the information provided by The White Book and uses it in altercations with fellow tourists (p. 57; Plateforme, p. 81), whom he characterizes according to the guidebooks they read. For example, Josiane, the liberal feminist he despises, would naturally, in his eyes, take up the Guide du Routard (p. 31; Plateforme, p. 47), while René, who is determined to enjoy the region’s offerings to the full, albeit in a domesticated version – for example, his reaction to the “delicious … roast pork” he tasted: “‘All we’re missing is a drop of wine,’ René said sadly” (p. 50) [«‘Çamanquejuste un peu de pinard…’ émit René avec mélancolie.» (Plateforme, p. 73)] – adheres strictly to the Michelin.

  As Michel becomes submersed in his role as tourist, he quotes extensively from the Michelin Guide. Whenever he reaches a site, he quotes ready-made extracts from the guide instead of describing his own impressions. In so doing, he clearly signals his collaboration with the typical contemporary inclination to favor image over reality within the framework of the general virtualization of reality: Michel is concurrently located within physical and virtual reality, as provided by the guidebook. The guide is ostensibly a more rewarding experience to the protagonist, much more than the reality within which he physically exists. Thus he is ← 39 | 40 → no longer limited by his physical body in perceiving a territory, since the map charting it seems to be more interes
ting. The image of reality invokes a concreteness more complex and far more detailed than the real thing; reality meanwhile becomes devoid of all content, leaving behind only a schematic image. This is demonstrated in the following passage, in which a perfect switching of dimensions takes place: “Not much remained of King Ramathibodi, apart from a couple of lines in the Michelin Guide.” (p. 57; emphasis in the original) [«Du roi Ramathibodi il ne restait pas grand-chose, sinon quelques lignes dans le guide Michelin.» (Plateforme, p. 82)]. The huge mechanism of guidebooks serves to devaluate the original. As such, Michel regards the Guide du Routard with disdain since, true to the textual principle of the protagonist’s assimilation into Western thinking, the Routard is useless: it does not contribute to the expected ‘disneyfied’ experience. Thus to him, “All in all, these backpacking routards were bellyaching bastards whose goal was to spoil every little pleasure on offer to tourists, whom they despised. In fact, they seemed to like themselves more than anything else […]. Humanitarian Protestant cunts, that’s what they were, they and the ‘cool bunch of mates who helped to make this book possible,’ their nasty little faces smugly plastered all over the back cover. I flung the book hard across the room […].» (pp. 36–37; emphasis in the original) [«En somme ces routards étaient des grincheux, dont l’unique objectif était de gâcher jusqu’à la dernière petite joie des touristes, qu’ils haïssaient. Ils n’aimaient d’ailleurs rien tant qu’eux-mêmes […]. Des connards humanitaires protestants, voilà ce qu’ils étaient, eux et toute la ‘chouette bandede copains qui les avaient aidés pour ce livre’, dont les sales gueules s’étalaient complaisamment en quatrième de couverture. Je projetai l’ouvrage avec violence dans la pièce…» (Plateforme, pp. 54–55; emphasis in the original)].

  Yet Houellebecq not only represents a chronotope, he also cogitates on it. The reading of the word as a novel of ideas emerges through this emphasis on guidebooks; the text becomes a study in approaches to mass-tourism. In fact, the narrator’s reference near the beginning of his travelogue – with full documentation of his source – to Edmunds and White’s research “Sightseeing Tours: A Sociological Approach”, hints at this reading (p. 26; Plateforme, p. 39. As Zygmunt Bauman has contended, the tourist is an ideal in a society of consumers, in which products and lifestyles are measured according to aesthetic standards; touristic destinations are measured neither according to ethical nor religious values, nor ← 40 | 41 → to individual choices, but rather simply by purely aesthetic standards. The tourist alone can determine whether his experiences were enjoyable, and only from an aesthetic perspective. There are no authoritative value standards outside the tourist (as existed in the case of pilgrimage) to instruct him, other than the impressions and opinions of other tourists – these often serve as an aesthetic option in contrast to which others shape their identity as aesthetic consumers and tourists (indeed our protagonist quotes extensively from internet commentators).40

  The guidebooks represent three genres of modern tourism. The difference between them lies in the extent and nature of their involvement in the host culture. Each one is designed to accommodate a different touristic audience. The Michelin is a guide for mass tourism that seeks to provide abroad a stylized version of home or a realization of Western fantasies: Western standardized hotels, fenced resorts, exotic experiences; a paradise designed to meet Westerners’ tastes. The kind of tourist for which this guide caters experience the country through air-conditioned buses. By contrast, the backpackers’ experience involves unmediated contact; since they aim not to interfere with the host culture, they seek to avoid westernized facilities, and do not ignore the indigenous population. The third representative guidebook, The White Book, provides information to help tourists obtain, cheaply, that which is expensive or illegal in the West. It caters to exploitive mass tourism, which is economically and culturally culpable for enhancing prostitution and paedophilia in local cultures.

  Read as a realistic novel, in this work mass tourism and the leisure industry are transfigured on the diegetic level into a play of personages that form a clash of ideas. However, this could also be perceived differently, in the well known tradition of the roman à thèse dating back to Persian Letters. Indeed, on the one hand the combination of the group of tourists and the perspective of an opinionated narrator who seeks out the pleasures of the imagined East and readily enters into confrontation with his peers seems contrived in order to emphasize an argument. Michel fiercely rids himself of the backpackers’ guide because of its complaint that mass tourism ruins the country. ← 41 | 42 →

  For the manipulative masochist, it is not enough that he is unhappy; everyone else must be unhappy too […]I tossed my Guide du Routard into the trashcan at the gas station. Western masochism, I thought. (p. 73; emphasis in the original)

  [«Pour le masochiste manipulateur, il ne suffit pas que lui-même soit malheureux; il faut encore que les autres le soient […] je jetai mon Guide du Routard dans la poubelle de la station-service. Le masochisme occidental, me dis-je.» (Plateforme, p. 102)]

  On the other hand, this reads as the case of an unreliable narrator, engrossed in consumerism, indifferent to human beings and resentful of global responsibility. Houellebecq could be arguing against the postmodern deformation of commercialized life.

  Yet at the same time, the backpackers’ guide offers no real alternative; as McCann points out, “Accepting the local is to accept its poverty and to reinforce the conditions that permit the wealthy tourist to remain superior in economic terms […] the contrast with the simplistic sentimentalities and the pious platitudes of the Guide du Routard is evident”.41 Could the dismissal of the Guide du Routard be an argument against Western hypocrisy? Could the narrator be reliable, after all, and the argument different, even contrary: a tract on self-devaluation?

  The Western masochism to which the narrator refers calls to mind Baudrillard’s analysis of the nature of contacts between globalizing Western hegemony and traditional cultures. He argues that Western culture is already a caricature of itself, all it can export is self-negation and devaluation:

  Our [the West] potlatch is one of baseness, shamelessness, obscenity, debasement and abjection. This is the whole movement of our culture – it is here that we raise the stakes. Our truth is always to be sought in unveiling, de-sublimation, reductive analysis – it is the truth of the repressed, of exhibition, of confession, of laying bare. Nothing is true if it is not de-sacralized, objectivized, shorn of its aura, dragged on to the stage. Our potlatch is the potlatch of indifference – an in-differentiation of values, but also an indifference to ourselves. If we cannot lay our own lives on the line, this is because we are already dead. And it is this indifference and abjection that we throw out to the others as a challenge: the challenge to debase themselves in their turn, to deny their own values, to lay themselves bare, to make their confession, to own up – in short, to respond with a nihilism equal to our own.42 (emphasis in the original) ← 42 | 43 →

  This is the basic approach expounded by the Routard; in view of the devaluation of Western developmental feats, its authors are determined to find in the East the lost paradise of their dreams, irrespective of local reality or interests. Theoretically, this is hardly less exploitive than other forms of mass tourism. Proceeding with this argument, the overtly exploitive White Book is yet another, intensified, example of a version of trends already existent in Western culture. If, at first, the legitimized use of this guidebook arouses in the reader feelings of shock and resistance, due to the blatant, outrageous opinions of the narrator, these are followed by a newer, deeper tremor, following the realization that the logic of the White Book is the warp and woof of cultural order, not a deviation from it.43

  It is typical of Houellebecq to set the stage for a novel of ideas but to obscure the ideas which the reader expects to find. Granted, Houellebecq’s intervention art is passive, first and foremost since it seemingly cooperates with order and does not adopt one fixed position; the hybrid nature of the
narration, of which there is no single, conclusive reading, replicates the logic of consumer capitalism and its chief principle: choice. At the same time, this uncertainty can undermine our patterns of thinking and, potentially, become humbly corrective. In regarding himself as an officer of civilization,44 Houellebecq “hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbits.”45 Most importantly, he refuses to parrot the reassuring liberal-humanist discourse. On the contrary, he articulates what belies it, simultaneously attacking Western arrogance and Western devaluation.

  Houellebecq’s poetics of passive-activism creates trauma by its very passivity. Like a traumatic memory that will simply not disappear, it keeps the reader alert and on edge. Beyond all its provocations, his work tells the truth in a world of diplomatic lies (a result of the culture of political correctness), blurring the distinction between worthy and disreputable. It is passive, since it does not outwardly and categorically rebuke values; on the contrary, it seems to cooperate with them and nothing in the narration ← 43 | 44 → leads us to grasp the literary enunciation as unreliable. It is activist in that it requires its readers to confront reality head on, and does not allow them to retreat, in dismay, to a place where supposedly ready-made and safe answers are to be found. Far from articulating a particular agenda, Houellebecq promotes the necessity of giving shape to one.

  Houellebecq gives a clue to his poetical method within the narrative. The passage in which Michel comments on Agatha Christie’s poetics includes meta-poetic implications, encouraging the reader to connect it with Houellebecq’s own poetics. It encapsulates the possibility that the author’s ‘cruel descriptions’ of consumer society stem from none other than a fundamental defense of this order: