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

Absentminded Prolepsis: Global Slackers before the Age of Terror in Alex Garland's The Beach and... HIS ESSAY EXAMINES THE AMBIGUOUS, even contradictory, role of the European “slacker” in Alex Garland’s The Beach (1997) and Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme (2001). In both novels, the slackers portrayed are white male travelers who experience not the anticipated escape from the cultural malaise they attribute to their own societies, but an exacerbation of that malaise through its exportation. Insofar as travel itself constitutes a fairly anomalous slacker activity, it conveys very effectively the contradictions at the core of the slacker’s cultural stance. This happens as the consumer impulses behind the slacker’s desire for travel are gradually revealed in the course of each novel’s denouement. Until then, these impulses are either repressed or rationalized so that the slacker-traveler can maintain a utopian vision of an authentic experience, despite his truer dystopian or hedonistic inclinations. Whether as proletarian drifter, tentatively drawn to the glitz of consumer offerings, or as disaffected yuppie, culturally slumming it to mask his or her real conditions as a member of what Pierre Bourdieu has called the “new bourgeoisie” (Latham 76-78), the slacker-traveler in these novels is a kind of sociological edge figure, whose shifting identities indicate a potential “unsettlement” (in the Freudian sense) that may http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

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

SWEET, DAVID LEHARDY
Comparative Literature , Volume 59 (2) – Jan 1, 2007
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2007 by University of Oregon
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/-59-2-158
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

HIS ESSAY EXAMINES THE AMBIGUOUS, even contradictory, role of the European “slacker” in Alex Garland’s The Beach (1997) and Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme (2001). In both novels, the slackers portrayed are white male travelers who experience not the anticipated escape from the cultural malaise they attribute to their own societies, but an exacerbation of that malaise through its exportation. Insofar as travel itself constitutes a fairly anomalous slacker activity, it conveys very effectively the contradictions at the core of the slacker’s cultural stance. This happens as the consumer impulses behind the slacker’s desire for travel are gradually revealed in the course of each novel’s denouement. Until then, these impulses are either repressed or rationalized so that the slacker-traveler can maintain a utopian vision of an authentic experience, despite his truer dystopian or hedonistic inclinations. Whether as proletarian drifter, tentatively drawn to the glitz of consumer offerings, or as disaffected yuppie, culturally slumming it to mask his or her real conditions as a member of what Pierre Bourdieu has called the “new bourgeoisie” (Latham 76-78), the slacker-traveler in these novels is a kind of sociological edge figure, whose shifting identities indicate a potential “unsettlement” (in the Freudian sense) that may

Journal

Comparative Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2007

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