A Suitable 'Platform'
Sex, travel, and unmitigated violence in the human jungle
By Cole Coonce
Right about the time the turbines' whine shifted to a roar, I set my book down. I knew I had made a mistake. My backpack had way too much gack - pounds of useless information in the form of modern McProse - and I pride myself on traveling light.
All the summer reading I had stuffed into my luggage - DeLillo, Will Self, and something called Good in Bed, by some gal who isn't Candace Bushnell, but chicks dig her just the same - were superfluous. Intellectually neutered.
Yes, off the tarmac and over the ocean our steed had jetted when I got to the passage in Platform about the writer spilling his seed, as it were. The novel's vacationing pro/antagonist relieves his biological impulses into a John Grisham novel ("I ejaculated between two pages with a groan of satisfaction. It didn't matter; it wasn't the kind of book you read twice..."), and I smiled and thought today's books aren't worth reading once, including the ones I'm shlepping in my carry-on. Excepting the one in my hands.
"I made a small hole in the sand to bury [it]; the problem now was that I had to find something to read. Life without anything to read is dangerous; you have to content yourself with life..."
Oy. I had spent a couple of hours killing time until time killed me, as the ol' existential saw goes, circumventing LAX checkpoints and silently venting spleen, doing the hurry-up-and-wait shuck 'n' shuffle that is all de rigueur foreplay/boreplay to boarding any flight nowadays, while allowing the new arbiters of Public Safety and Civil Intervention to have their way with me in (a lack of) manner(s) that was every bit as dehumanizing as it was banal.
During the breaks in the degradation, my companion was Michel. Michel, the more-or-less eponymous voice in Platform, the latest brick of fiction from the Ashcroft Age's de facto literary enfant terrible, Michel Houellebecq.
"In the bathroom mirror I contemplated myself disgustedly; my anxious bureaucratic face clashed horribly with what I was wearing; I looked exactly like what I was: a forty-something civil servant on holiday trying to pretend he's young; it was pretty demoralizing."
Thus spake Michel, and, in era when nobody grows up anymore but everybody has crow's feet, who can't relate to our French frère garbed fecklessly in khaki shorts and a Radiohead T-shirt as he haplessly and futilely prepares himself for interaction with fellow surrender monkeys vacationing in the Far East, on an Asian holiday which will degenerate into the most mercenary exchanges of sex tourism?
As a meta-Freudian footnote, it is worth mentioning that Houellebecq's real-life mère is a recent convert to Islam. Verily, as Platform's denouement, Michel's girlfriend (!) gets it in an act of terrorism from those same dastardly bastards. As sexy, comely, nymphomaniacal Tourist Industry Power Brokers go, girlfriend Valerie is certainly neutral enough, but her demise is inevitable. I mean, she coughs her cell number the day after Michel rationalizes to the both of them his preference for fuckee-suckee impoverished Asian prostitutes to amorous contact with a woman who speaks his language and might be his intellectual equal. Bedding down with a drunken imperialist whore-hopper cannot go unpunished, can it?
Okay, that is a riff for those with a bent for theological vengeance far more pushed than mine. But suffice it to say, every time I hear of another 20 bodies buried at the bottom of the rubble at an embassy in the center of the capital city of a Middle Eastern o(i)ligarchy or at a bucks-up hotel blasted by an exploding Toyota pickup truck in some Third World Tourist Trap, I think, yeah, Michel got the math right - and he got it right first. How prescient is his work? In 2001, a month before a ragtag cadre of Muslim fanatics commandeered a couple of jetliners and stuffed them into some towering totems of master capitalism, Platform was released in its native tongue. Two years later, its translation is just now in your chain-book establishments. Finally.
In the interim, the planet has changed, all right. Literature has yet to follow suit, and it gets more turgid in inverse proportion to its own obsolescence. It has missed the zeitgeist, man.
Once in London, I cleared Customs and dumpstered DeLillo and his limp, archaic fellow travelers in a silver bin outside some cyber-café. I was on holiday in today's new, modern world. I read Platform twice. And when I was done, the pages didn't stick together.Published: 09/11/2003
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
