University of Cape Town – ELL2015S

Peter Anderson

17 September 2015

‘The Portable Room’:
A Personal Essay on the art of going nowhere pretty fast

“What am I doing here?”
– Arthur Rimbaud, writing home from Ethiopia in the 1880’s.

As an empirical precept, humanity is paranoid about appearing pathetic. This is of course not a problem. In an evolutionary consideration it is actually purely practical for our self-centering sentimentality, so indispensable in youth, to become subsumed under a drive for ‘adult’ dignity. The irony above all others of our age is that this procedure is apparently slipping away. Since on the whole we are not encouraged to grow up, on the whole we don’t, and for the most part we don’t want to. Of course though we, the children of the Western bourgeoisie in the early 21st Century, are taught to do our taxes, raise our families, hold down our jobs, drink, eat and smoke in moderation and eventually die respectably, to my mind this is no actual aggregate of a generation’s maturity. An adolescent can learn the utmost degree of pragmatism without her consideration ever essentially changing from that of a lanky child in want. I myself, being not yet into my third decade, can make no real claims to a knowledge of my paradigm or an interaction proper with what is currently called the world. But I have spent much of the little life I have already led in a state of perpetual reckoning with the history of fiction as well as my own experience, of which the latter has only so far alternated between institutional life and tourism. Unlike many people, I have always known how to enjoy myself partly by my own choosing. Fun, for me, is not necessarily a compromised quantity. So, having been to every continent but Antarctica and spent more than fifty nights of my life aboard cruise ships, I’d say I do by now have enough material to make a few remarks of substance about commodified travel. My intuition tells me that such a discursive, almost commonplace, topic will inevitably lead me back to my purposefully vague initial thesis: certainly I have hardly ever felt like less of a fully-fledged person than in the days I’ve spent being shepherded round an arbitrary continent from photo-opportunity to photo-opportunity.

If such phrasing makes me sound like a spoilt brat then that’s because I undoubtedly am one. It’s sometimes just as difficult not to regret the gifts of your circumstances as it is not to decry its hardships. At a certain point in teenage years I must have forgotten to distinguish my capacity for reason from my proclivity for inert dissent. As it is I have realized with chagrin more times than I can presently remember just how much I implicitly sympathize with Marlon Brando’s clichéd answer to the question “What are you rebelling against?” from The Wild One (1953): “What have you got?” Even this attitude is the result of a choice provided by my undeserved entitlement, and thus I perpetually tie up my brain in Gordian knots… The title of this essay denotes the abstract space in which I have found this process to be most pointedly effected. A ‘portable room’, as I say, is precisely a room just like any other, which is to say it particularly exists nowhere. As such, it is a place that can only contain what you yourself bring within its borders, and so whatever you encounter inside it can be nothing but a stripped reflection of you. Portable rooms exist almost everywhere these days; indeed they are probably one of the more seminal symptoms of modernity. As the world becomes exponentially mobile, hassled and rootless, the provision of transitional habitation inevitably arises as one of its signature growth industries. So we are increasingly the subjects of a paradoxical form of ubiquity. Each hotel room, cruise cabin, camping tent, train compartment and caravan is different from every other example of their category, but barring a few extreme exceptions they all exist in strict relation to an ideal spectrum of utility. Their immanent variation only makes visible their basic sameness. If you’ve been in one, you’ve been in them all.1This is the ontology of commodities. And it’s also the tautological point of the paintings of Andy Warhol. If you examine a canvas comprising dozens of silkscreened, side-by-side images of Coke bottles, Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, you might well find marks of singularity on every individual incarnation of the subject, but step back like you’re supposed to and you’ll see the big picture as a mere leveling of identity coupled with its own voiding of meaning: like a word spoken too often in too many different ways, the signifier can’t help but lose its referent. Much the same occurs in travel. However, what separates portable rooms from every other consumable object is that they are sold, and indeed actually operate, as frames for existence, access-points for an experience proper, instead of as things- in-themselves.

This is an understanding soon grasped in childhood, and often almost magically so. Winding from campsite to campsite through the Kruger National Park last July I was many times beset by what seemed an ancient suspicion of the possibility of accidental overnight teleportation. Since every day was spent transplanting a tent from one dirt

1. And this is essentially true even with regards to the question of venue quality: the star rating of a hotel room, for example, is just a scale of comfort based on the room’s content, not on its function. Thus the class divide between tourists staying at the Ritz and at a Holiday Inn belies and obscures for both residents the simple similarity of their experiences.

patch to a different one more than a hundred kilometres away, the incoherent waking minutes of each young morning were usually taken up with an effort to remember the new appearance of the outside world; the inside one naturally remaining unchanged over the journey’s span. This predictable disorientation soon reawakened in me hints of a more beautiful sense of alienation inherited from my earliest consciousness. In essence this was the same ‘map-of-the-world feeling’ expressed by Conrad’s Charlie Marlow in the first pages of Heart of Darkness, and I doubt there to be any self- conscious person alive who cannot discover within him- or herself a similar primordial shock at the vastness of potential place, the fact that there is a world at all outside their usual shelter. You only need unzip the tent’s entrance however to swiftly dispel all traces of imagination’s intimate empire. Here is reality, and most of the time it’s not that much to look at. But reality, as usual, is not the point. The tourism industry, after all, can only function through the wholesale marketing of such supposedly pre-orgasmic moments of arrested revelation. And even if we do not accede to the necessity of ticking off all the landmarks and checkpoints of a stop, we can ask instead (perhaps for an additional fee) to get taken to the ‘Real’ sites of the place in question, and this underbelly, this other side of the coin, this class of attractions ‘the usual tourists never see’, is always itself, like the black market, a construction made to support the establishment it purports to subvert. All of which is inherently the outcome of the logic of the Picturesque, which all portable rooms follow to the letter. Indispensable to the notion of the portable room as such is the presence of its window on the world. In its barest definition indeed, it is a room with a changing view.2

Keeping with a spirit of lightness and lucidity I will forsake the overused references on this point to thinkers like Adorno and Baudrillard and instead illustrate my meaning with two examples from satirical American 80’s movies. In Back to the Future Part II (1989), the uber-futuristic year 2015 is depicted as showcasing

2. A more speculative and pretentious essay could spiral off from this point, comparing this idea of the portable room to the human body as inhabited by the homunculus-like figure of Descartes’ cogito. Both can only come into conceptual existence as part of a relatively secular, rootless and alienated modern society where the individual mind can call into question the arbitrary and anonymous nature of its container, and also both call into underlying doubt the existence of the outside world at all…

innumerable brilliant inventions, including a set of wall-size video screens with a choice of idyllic views that have replaced all windows. And, in Top Secret! (1984), amidst uncountable 4th-wall breaks, one of the more prominent gags occurs when the protagonist’s train appears to be leaving a station, before it’s revealed that in fact the station was leaving the train on a parallel track instead, the view out the compartment window having fooled us via the old rules of relative motion. What is present in both is the understanding that frames should not and cannot be entirely trusted. A fantasy view will always do in place of an actual one and an actual one might really be a fantasy view. And this is the falsity implicit in the existence of any portable room. Its vantage point does show us the outside world, but in itself the room is always outside of this outside, external to the externality it already delimits through its mere presence. As its resident we partake of the room’s alienation. We’re interpellated into ‘feeling at home’ because ‘home is where the heart is’ and where can the heart feel more at home than in a place of utterly impersonal comfort and abstracted domestication? If there is not that much to really love about it than there is certainly almost nothing to hate. The problem in this form of advertising for an itinerant Romantic like me is that it cleanly packages escape itself. The Natural and the Urban are both made distant and static in their capacity to be equally bound by a postcard’s corners. And in choosing which postcard to make your portable room’s vista, you basically domesticate the world, not to mention your own fantasies. You can immerse yourself in the experience of your destination, but only through occasional forays from the base of your initial remove. As such, since you are never fully welcomed into nor utterly distanced from the place of your arrival, you never either reach a peak of subjective feeling nor an island of objective thought. In many ways this merely reflects the human condition, but its paradigmatic ubiquity is actually problematic because it aids in the latent dulling of the world.

I’m not claiming that today’s tourism is preventing the recognition of a more authentic sense of connection to foreign lands and cultures. If recent history has taught us anything, it is that to be dogmatic in conversations concerning cultural authenticity is to get quickly caught in a quagmire. Instead, what is really lost as a possibility is any encounter with the rightful, ‘mad’ otherness of being anywhere in particular at all. In my youthful dreaming, travel seemed a distant horizon of adventure, which is to say, a trip beyond the taken-for-granted, or just a risk.

Increasingly, in what many currently call our ‘risk society’, this conception of the world beyond is countermanded by planning. We are all apparently becoming the same, and so all nature-spots and nations – at least in the places worth visiting – are turning equally navigable and equally familiar.3 And, paradoxically, this leads to a defusing of personal agency. In every possible way the experience is a guided one. Even trips ‘off the beaten track’ have their own travel books, celebrity experts and famous resorts. As such, we get away from our normal lives so as to spend a period of time without the burden of choices. After all the initial anxieties are overcome, we allow ourselves to sit back and only passively make memories. The smaller and more similar the world gets, the less free we apparently are to create our own way in it.4

This indeed is the immaturity complex with which I began this essay. My own experience of travel has instinctually felt compromised by it: the more I know where I’m going, the less I value the journey for its not essentially being of my own choosing. I want to believe I can freely choose the unknown and the unfamiliar over the placid and expected, but this is a mode of thinking quite alien to my everyday being in as much as it is strange to my generation’s upbringing. How does one even become a radical, in any sense, when one has been told that every road is already mapped and each destination is just its own portable room? Nonetheless, I would claim that, more than ever before, a picaresque life is preferable to a picturesque one. It has been every self-conscious generation’s responsibility since the French Revolution to bring true humanity into the world, and none have so far succeeded. It is therefore my, and our, categorical imperative to break the frames keeping the viewer and the image separated, or else create the images that expose their defining fragility. The world does still exist, somewhere, beneath all its representations, and if we cannot know its truth then it is a far more beautiful life to spend traversing its traces than to settle for its bastardized commodification.

3. Of course this belies the reality that the world on the whole is becoming more unequal and Nature is presently irredeemably leaving our comfort zone.
4. Such phrasing is an attempt on my part to reclaim the vocabulary of radicalism that our post-1968 commodity market has reappropriated to create, within various layers of postmodern gall, a culture of false uniqueness based on the selling of neutered rebellion. In the absence of new words, the old ones have to be negotiated.

Word Count: 2125