Abstract
Travel and the development of increasingly speedy means of transport seem indissociable from modernity. If travel inevitably alters the human sense of space, travelling at great speed changes the human understanding of geography and time altogether, Virilio argues. The rise of mass tourism in the late twentieth century, many suggest, has tended to erase spatial and local differences (Debord, Bauman, Augé, Virilio, Koolhaas). It also seems indissociable from the concept of “postmodernity”: the tourist is for Bauman a postmodern archetype. Augé’s term “super-modernity”, characterizing a world of “non-places”, made only for rapid transit, suggests contemporary experience can be understood as an intensification of long-standing trends within modernity. The second part of the chapter turns to the literary treatment of travel from the era of the “rise of the novel” to Houellebecq’s Platform.
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the online journal Studies in Arts and Humanities sahjournal.com.
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Notes
- 1.
Ellingham, Fisher et al., The Rough Guide to Spain, 10th Edition, London: Rough Guides, 2002, p. 590.
- 2.
Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, New York: Norton, 1992, p. 6.
- 3.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (trans. by Nicholson-Smith), New York: Zone Books, 1995, sections 167–168.
- 4.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, in McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx : Selected Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 472.
- 5.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (trans. by T. Parsons), Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Classics, 2001, p. 119.
- 6.
Bauman , Life in Fragments, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, p. 97.
- 7.
Christopher Schaberg, Airportness: The Nature of Flight, New York, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, p. 3.
- 8.
Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (trans. by J. Howe), London: Verso, 1995, p. 78.
- 9.
Augé quoted by Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. 102.
- 10.
Michel Houellebecq, Platform (trans. by F. Wynne), London: Vintage, 2003, p. 131. Emer O’Beirne relates the world of Platform and other novels of Houellebecq and contemporary French writers to Augé’s discussion of ‘non-lieux’ in O’Beirne, “Navigating Non-Lieux in Contemporary Fiction: Houellebecq, Darrieussecq, Echenoz and Augé”, Modern Language Review, 101, 2006, pp. 388–401, p. 394. https://doi.org/10.2307/20466790 (accessed 26.8.2019).
- 11.
J.G. Ballard, “Airports: The True Cities of the 21st Century”, Blueprint 1997, reprinted here: https://www.utne.com/politics/homeiswherethehangaris (accessed 23.3.2018). Ballard writes: “I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the 21st century. The great airports are already the suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis […].”
- 12.
Rem Koolhaas, “The Generic City”, in Koolhaas and Mau, Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large, New York: Monacelli Press, 1995, p. 1252.
- 13.
Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (trans. by C. Turner), London: Verso, 2005, Chapter 2.
- 14.
Carol Crawshaw and John Urry, “Tourism and the Photographic Eye” in Chris Rojek and John Urry (eds.), Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 1997, p. 180.
- 15.
See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1994.
- 16.
Sontag , On Photography, London: Penguin, 1979, p. 9, cited by Crawshaw and Urry, “Tourism and the Photographic Eye”, p. 183.
- 17.
Mark Ravenhill, Faust is Dead, scene ten, from Ravenhill, Plays I, London: Methuen Drama, 2001, p. 113.
- 18.
Michel Houellebecq, Platform , p. 231.
- 19.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, paragraph 4.
- 20.
Crawshaw and Urry, “Tourism and the Photographic Eye”, p. 182.
- 21.
Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, London: Sage Publications, 1998, p. 191.
- 22.
Bauman , Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 2000, p. 110.
- 23.
Houellebecq , Platform , p. 311.
- 24.
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, London: Penguin, 1963, p. 78.
- 25.
Nurit Buchweitz and Elie Cohen-Gewerc, 2015, “Leisure and Posthumanism in Houellebecq’s Platform and Lanzarote”, Comparative Literature and Culture, 17(4), 2015, p. 4. https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2528 (accessed 26.8.2019).
- 26.
In a review of Platform entitled “The Sexual Bomb Thrower” Charles Taylor writes: ‘“Platform” has been called the “A Modest Proposal” of sex tourism, and like Swift’s essay, the safest, shallowest way to dodge its implications and distance yourself from its logic to is to fall back on the safe position of appreciating it as a wicked satiric exercise. Reading “Platform,” the same as reading Swift, requires you to take the writer’s reasoning seriously, meet it head on and, if you find it repulsive, refute it.’ (Salon.com Review published 2.8.2003. http://www.salon.com/2003/08/02/platform_2/) (accessed 4.10.2019).
- 27.
Emer O’Beirne, 2006, “Navigating Non-Lieux in Contemporary Fiction: Houellebecq, Darrieussecq, Echenoz and Augé”, Modern Language Review, 101, 2006, pp. 388–401, p. 394. https://doi.org/10.2307/20466790 (accessed 26.8.2019).
- 28.
“An Immodest Proposal: The Sex Trade and Sex Tourism in Michel Houellebecq’s Platform” is the heading of a section of Marco Malvestio’s article “Trading Butterflies: The Representation of Asian Sex Workers in Vollmann and Houellebecq”, Enthymema, no. XXIII, 2019, pp. 57–72. https://doi.org/10.13130/2037-2426/11921. Malvestio brings out how the novel strangely “oscillates” between satire (of Orientalist Western tourism, and even of the sex trade) and “complicity with the colonial power dynamics that regulate the relationships between Asian countries and the West” as well as deliberate ignorance of the realities of prostitution.
- 29.
Augé , p. 78.
- 30.
“The number of people displaced from their homes due to conflict and persecution last year [2015] exceeded 60 million for the first time in the United Nations’ history, a tally greater than the combined populations of the United Kingdom, or of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, says a new report released on World Refugee Day today.
The Global Trends 2015 compiled by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) notes that 65.3 million people were displaced at the end of 2015, an increase of more than 5 million from 59.5 million a year earlier.
The tally comprises 21.3 million refugees, 3.2 million asylum seekers and 40.8 million people internally displaced within their own countries.
Measured against the world’s population of 7.4 billion people, one in every 113 people globally is now either a refugee, an asylum-seeker or internally displaced—putting them at a level of risk for which UNHCR knows no precedent. http://refugeesmigrants.un.org/%E2%80%98unprecedented%E2%80%99-65-million-people-displaced-war-and-persecution-2015-%E2%80%93-un (accessed 21.3.2017).
- 31.
Eavan Boland, “Mise Éire”, from The Journey, in Boland, New Selected Poems, Manchester: Carcanet, 2013, p. 59.
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Kane, M. (2020). Travel: From Modernity to…?. In: Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37449-5_6
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