THIS 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,” 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 take place as the subject crosses various geographical and cultural borders. In the end, however, the slacker’s reactionary impulses distort and override the inchoate idealism of his earlier withdrawal from the rat race of Western capitalism. Thus, what both authors anticipate with surprising absence of mind1 is a kind of maturation or cultural turn into the new millennium on the part of the so-called Blank or X Generation of the 1980s and 1990s, a turn from a vaunted disaffection with capitalist culture and its “ethic of duty” to a resigned, if sometimes exuberant, acceptance of hegemonic conditions—conditions revealed through the experience of travel. For no matter what their original class status, Western slacker-travelers are always flattered by the appearance of imperial privilege that accrues to them as conspicuous consumers in non-Western settings where they are invited to play roles to which they are unaccustomed back home.

The Slacker and Overseas Travel

The discovery that travel is personally empowering results in an ideological equivocation that exposes the consumer and careerist tendencies the slacker stance was intended to obscure. Writing on the threshold of our own Age of Terror, both Garland and Houellebecq seem vaguely aware of a post-millennial irony conveyed by their respective protagonists, protagonists who assume the role of nonconformist visitors to the Global South in conditions where difference is largely staged as exoticism for mass consumption. As postmodern travelers, both figures represent repackaged Baudelairean flâneurs, aware of their status abroad as anonymous tourists, but also endowed with a sense of their uniqueness, and thus with a creative, if possibly sinister, potential that circumstances alone can draw forth. If such circumstances anticipate certain neo-imperialist game plans currently enjoying official sanction in the United States and Britain, the ethical horizons mapped in these books suggest the slacker’s perverse capacity for both accommodation and defiance.

Less an actual constituency than an imaginary ego-construct generated by literary and popular culture and associated with college-educated whites in their twenties and thirties, the slacker may be depicted as originating from either the working or middle classes of affluent Western countries, especially the United States. Important milestones of slacker culture are Richard Linklater’s debut film Slacker (1991), various grunge-works including Beck’s hit single “Loser” (1992), Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984), Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985), Douglas Coupland’s eponymous Generation X (1991), and more recent works ranging from Michael Hornburg’s Bongwater (1996) to Kate Christensen’s In the Drink (2000), the latter confirming slacker links to women’s writing, if not to feminism. More broadly, James Annesley has described the fiction of the white American youth culture of the eighties and nineties as a “blank fiction” reflecting an “atomized, nihilistic worldview” epitomized by the political indifference of the slacker. While such fiction can be linked to postmodern “anxieties about subjectivity, representation and the relationship between text and context” (4), the authors associated with Generation X have tried to distinguish themselves from such writers as Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo, for instance, through a relaxation of formal and ideological demands. This slackening of formal invention and political commitment captures the sense of generational futility in a society that is perceived to belittle effort, imagination, and idealism through an overabundance of consumer offerings and a disjunction between political rhetoric and political action.

The novels of Garland and Houellebecq suggest that such attitudes are, if not pervasive in the West, at least widely recognized and that they have spilled over American borders and crossed into a global mainstream of mostly younger, mostly white consumers, although both novelists seem preoccupied with the male slacker’s “structure of feeling,” to borrow Raymond Williams’s phrase. But these attitudes, far from having a liberating potential, encourage a reactionary politics and aesthetics as the maturing slacker comes to sanctify global policing by the very national and corporate entities that formerly oppressed his or her sense of personal agency. With the spectacle of national emergency, various war-related “language games,” to use Jean-François Lyotard’s terminology, entice the slacker to coordinate personal agency to the exigencies of mass mobilization. In short, the slacker philosophy, characterized from the start by ambivalence, is distorted to the point of curtailment as the subject matures and as globalization reaches its own age of terror.