Title: Weird<i>farang</i>thing: dark tourism in Alex Garland's<i>The Beach</i>(1996)
Abstract: Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 Alex Garland, The Beach, London: Penguin, 1997, pp 163–164. I would like to thank James Collinge and two anonymous reviewers for instructive comments on a draft version of this article.2 Roger Bowen, ‘Journey's End: Conrad as Revenant in Alex Garland's The Beach’, Conradiana 39(1), 2007, pp 39–57, p 45.3 Garland, The Beach, p 19.4 For example, John Hatcher, ‘Lonely Planet, Crowded World: Alex Garland's The Beach’, Studies in Travel Writing 3(1), 1999, pp 131–147.5 Hatcher, ‘Lonely Planet’. See also Alex Tickell, ‘Footprints on The Beach: Traces of Colonial Adventure in Narratives of Independent Tourism’, Postcolonial Studies 4(1), 2001, pp 39–54, pp 42–44; James Annesley, ‘Pure Shores: Travel, Consumption, and Alex Garland's The Beach’, Modern Fiction Studies 50(3), 2004, pp 551–569. See also Garland's own comments in his interview with Ron Gluckman, ‘More Postcards from The Beach’ (1999), www.gluckman.com/BeachGarland.html (accessed 3 December 2013).6 The beach is founded in 1989 and Richard travels to it in 1995 (see p 136). For a review of the early and mid-1990s literature on dark tourism, see Philip Stone and Richard Sharpley, ‘Consuming Dark Tourism: A Thanatological Perspective’, Annals of Tourism Research 35(2), 2008, pp 574–595, pp 576–579.7 Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies (1983), Philip Beitchman and W G J Niesluchowski (trans), London: Pluto, 1990, pp 11, 57.8 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Apocalypse Now’, in Simulacra and Simulation, Sheila Faria Glaser (trans), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp 59–60; Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), Paul Patton (trans), Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. The connection of The Beach to Baudrillard has been established in previous studies, including William Stephenson, ‘Island of the Assassins: Cannabis, Spectacle, and Terror in Alex Garland's The Beach’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46(4), 2005, pp 369–381, pp 374–375.9 John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster, Andover: Cengage Learning, 2010, pp 163–164.10 On River Kwai tourism, see Maurizio Peleggi, ‘National Heritage and Global Tourism in Thailand’, Annals of Tourism Research 23(2), 1996, pp 432–448, p 443. On Cambodia, see Zoltan Istvan, ‘“Killing Fields” Lure Tourists in Cambodia’, National Geographic Today, 10 January 2003, http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/pf/3128314.html (accessed 15 December 2013).11 Garland, The Beach, pp 147, 175–176.12 Victor Alneng, ‘“What the Fuck Is a Vietnam?”: Touristic Phantasms and the Popcolonization of (the) Vietnam (War)’, Critique of Anthropology 22, 2002, pp 461–489.13 For example, Hatcher, ‘Lonely Planet’, p 141.14 Garland, The Beach, p 323.15 Joan C Henderson, ‘War as a Tourist Attraction: The Case of Vietnam’, International Journal of Tourism Research 2, 2000, pp 269–280, pp 271, 272, 276; Alneng, ‘Touristic Phantasms’.16 Henderson, ‘War’, pp 276, 277, 278. See also Alneng, ‘Touristic Phantasms’, pp 473–475, which adds that some tours allow tourists to dress up in ‘Viet Cong’ pyjamas, while good shots on the firing range receive ‘VC’ medals and scarves (p 474). For a tourist report on a shooting range outside Phnom Penh, which allegedly used to include live animals among its targets, see Justin Pushman, ‘I Want to Shoot Guns’, 28 August 2008, www.bootsnall.com/articles/08-08/i-want-to-shoot-guns-phnom-penh-cambodia.html (accessed 20 December 2013).17 Alneng, ‘Touristic Phantasms’, pp 470, 462.18 Baudrillard, The Gulf War; Baudrillard, ‘Apocalypse Now’, p 59.19 Garland, The Beach, p 254.20 Alneng calls The Beach ‘a major contribution to the phantasmological understanding of international tourism’. ‘Touristic Phantasms’, p 468.21 In one exchange Daffy and Richard identify that the US TV series M*A*S*H, though set in Korea, was really about ‘Vietnam. Korea was the excuse’ (p 185). Similarly, in The Beach Thailand becomes ‘the excuse’ for Richard's own fantastical Vietnam War tour.22 Garland, The Beach, pp 255, 144, 85, 86–87.23 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Holocaust’, in Simulacra and Simulation, pp 49–51, at p 51.24 Garland, The Beach, p 281.25 Alneng, ‘Touristic Phantasms’, p 476.26 Garland, The Beach, p 127.27 Bowen, ‘Journey's End’, p 46; Rodanthi Tzanelli, ‘Reel Western Fantasies: Portrait of a Tourist Imagination in The Beach (2000)’, Mobilities 1(1), 2006, pp 121–142, 129–130.28 Gluckman, ‘More Postcards’.29 Peleggi, ‘National Heritage’, pp 434–435, 442.30 Garland, The Beach, pp 22, 37.31 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of Simulacra’, in Simulacra and Simulation, pp 1–42, p 1. Original emphasis.32 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, London: Sage, 1990, p 11. See Tickell, ‘Footprints’, p 48. Gaming experience of Thailand is mentioned in Maxine Feiffer's discussion of traveller perspectives, in which the term ‘post-tourist’ was coined. She cites a Time Out magazine advertisement for tours in ‘Thailand, where you can meet both sides in the guerrilla war on a “trip down the By river, which will make you think you've just changed places with a character from Apocalypse Now”’. Maxine Feiffer, Tourism in History: From Imperial Rome to the Present, New York: Stein and Day, 1985, p 260.33 As discussed in Stone and Sharpley, ‘Consuming Dark Tourism’, p 579.34 See Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, p 11.35 Annesley, ‘Pure Shores’, pp 563, 562, 563.36 Gluckman, ‘More Postcards’.37 Dimitri Doganis (dir.), The Real Beach, October Films, 2000. My transcription.38 Hatcher, ‘Lonely Planet’, p 143.39 Tickell, ‘Footprints’, p 45.40 Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, p 41.41 Edward W Said, Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage, 1993, esp. p 78.42 Woloch, The One; Tickell, ‘Footprints’, p 45.43 Garland, The Beach, pp 13–14, 14.44 Garland, The Beach, p 58.45 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899), Robert Kimbrough (ed), New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1988, pp 13–14. For further comparisons, see Bowen, ‘Journey's End’.46 John Hutnyk, The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation, London: Zed Books, 1996, p 217.47 Garland, The Beach, pp 16–17, 46, 52.48 Woloch, The One, p 25.49 Garland, The Beach, p 52.50 Garland, The Beach, p 424; Annesley, ‘Pure Shores’, p 556.51 Garland, The Beach, p 355.52 Garland's description of The Beach as ‘anti-travel’ is in Gluckman, ‘More Postcards’.53 Garland, The Beach, pp 237–238. The most basic definition of the Thai term ‘farang’ is western foreigner. For nuanced discussion, see Tzanelli, ‘Reel Western Fantasies’, p 138.54 In its margins, the novel encounters some of the grimmer by-products of tourism in Thailand, albeit from a limited, western perspective. For instance, in the final chapter Richard reports Cassie's arrest for heroin smuggling and her likely execution. More subtly, The Beach introduces the subject of the trades in sex and drugs as Richard more than once imagines being tricked into ingesting the blood which runs from the apparition of Daffy's open wrists, an expression of the narrator's perception of the threat of AIDS. The manner in which Richard communicates his anxieties regarding the disease through imagined encounters with Daffy is symptomatic of his paranoia. It also highlights his casual unawareness of Thais, since he fails to consider that Daffy's blood-splattered hotel room, which he fears stepping into, will be cleaned by the Thai maid with whom Richard shares a broken conversation.55 Ron Gluckman, ‘Postcards from The Beach’ (1999), www.gluckman.com/Beach.html (accessed 3 December 2013); Lisa Law, Tim Bunnell and Chin-Ee Ong, ‘The Beach, the Gaze and Film Tourism’, Tourist Studies 7(2), 2007, pp 141–164; Tzanelli, ‘Reel Western Fantasies’. I take ‘popcolonizing’ from the title of Alneng, ‘Touristic Phantasms’. The Beach tour receives mixed comments among 877 reviews which it had received on tripadvisor.co.uk by 13 November 2013, though more are positive than negative. Critical comments nonetheless bring home the ironies of which I write: for example, ‘there were 10 longtail boats and 8 speedboats in the bay when we were there, altogether about 500 people, with lots of noise and chaos, no fun’. See www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g303908-d553587-r160808209-Maya_Bay-Ko_Phi_Phi_Don_Krabi_Province.html (accessed 13 November 2013).56 See also Avital Biran and Yaniv Poria, ‘Reconceptualising Dark Tourism’, in Richard Sharpley and Philip R Stone (eds), Contemporary Tourist Experience: Concepts and Consequences, New York: Routledge, 2012, pp 59–70; Richard Sharpley, ‘Towards an Understanding of “Genocide Tourism”: An Analysis of Visitors’ Accounts of Their Experience of Recent Genocide Sites’, in Contemporary Tourist Experience, pp 95–109.57 Stone and Sharpley, ‘Consuming Dark Tourism’.58 Ngamsom Rittichainuwat, ‘Responding to Disaster: Thai and Scandinavian Tourists’ Motivation to Visit Phuket, Thailand’, Journal of Travel Research 46(4), 2008, pp 422–432. Diem-trinh Thi Le and Douglas G Pearce, ‘Segmenting Visitors to Battlefield Sites: International Visitors to the Former Demilitarized Zone in Vietnam’, Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 28(4), 2011, pp 451–463. Biran and Poria suggest these empirical studies undermine the assumption of thanatouristic motives for travel to ‘dark’ tourist sites. ‘Reconceptualising Dark Tourism’, pp 64–65.59 Garland, The Beach, p 1.