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Surviving Desert Islands: by Guy Redden and Libby Macdonald
Alex Garland's novel The Beach, published in 1996, is narrated by Richard, a young British traveler in Thailand. At the start of the narrative, he checks into a guest house in Khao San Road, the backpacker hub of Bangkok, where a man going by the name 'Daffy Duck' furnishes him with a cryptic map before committing suicide. The map eventually leads him and two French traveling companions, Etienne and Francoise, to a beach on a remote island in a Thai national marine park. Here, a small group of backpackers have set up their own secret community 'away from it all'; away from the tourist hordes and spoiled places like Ko Samui and Ko PhaNgan--places that were hip before they were popularised. In this illicit settlement, hidden from the outside world by encircling cliffs and forest canopy, Richard adapts to the needs and pleasures of an alternative, selfsufficient community of free, selfempowered youths. He takes up his place in the division of labor by becoming a fisherman, and spends leisure hours smoking pot purloined from the plantations of Thai drug dealers who inhabit the other side of the island. The Beach, it seems, is the realization of youthtopia. For the most part, the plot is concerned with the social bonds that the community fosters, the novel lifestyle, sexual undercurrents and the threat embodied in the notion of 'the outside': the danger of discovery by the authorities, the drug dealers and the tourists. Eventually, however, this construction of Paradise is torn apart by internal tensions and the pressure of secrecy. The community is dissolved in a confusion of violence and killings, and the surviving travelers return home. This narrative is obviously informed by a long literary tradition of island stories. Beginning with a secret map of the island, and ending with the violent selfdestruction of the beach community, it can be seen to share elements with novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and William Golding's Lord of the Flies. As a story of the colonization of an exotic, or exoticized, island, The Beach can be positioned within the desert island genre, a genre optimized in, or, arguably, inspired by, the Robinson Crusoe story, and which was popular throughout the period of British high imperialism. Through reference to The Beach and contemporary desert island TV shows and films, this paper investigates the contemporary use of the generic conventions of desert island narratives. It particularly questions the nature of their social currency as it is clear that contemporary desert island stories no longer serve, as they did in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to legitimate imperial expansion and colonization.
The Desert Island Tradition - Themes and Variations The western tradition of island adventures can be traced back to the epic adventures of classical literature, but Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719, can be seen to have established a new sort of island story. It provided a crystallization of previous island tales into, as Martin Green puts it, 'a single long narrative' (Green 1989: 35). In his book, The Adventurer, Paul Zweig identifies Crusoe as something of a turning point in the history of adventure literature in general. Whereas the adventurers of antiquity are, according to Zweig, shamanistic, demonic and fluid characters mediating between human and magic worlds, adventurers like Crusoe embody a selfsufficiency that is comparatively unadventurous. Crusoe demonstrates that 'at the ends of the earth, the right lessons to teach, and to learn, are the lessons of home' and occupies a world where 'distance is merely a geographical, not an ontological, fact' (Zweig 1974: 128). James Joyce described Crusoe as 'the true prototype of the British colonist' and the book as a whole as a 'prophesy of empire' (qtd in Phillips 1997: 334). Defoe's book established an ideological framework for the development of the desert island story, or 'Robinsonade', during the nineteenth century; a model for configurations of culture and nature that was in harmony with the culture of empire. Imperialism was a historical precondition of the emergence of these desert island adventures. With the expansion of the routes of empire came the accounts of experiences in exotic foreign places, especially in the Pacific, upon which they would draw (Robinson Crusoe itself is based upon the true story of Alexander Selkirk, a rather sanguine sailor who elected to be marooned on a small Pacific island rather than endure passage with his captain). Indeed colonization--in the sense of the appropriation and settlement of foreign land--is the literal subject matter of these stories, and this is true also of parodic and postcolonial reworkings of the Robinsonade. Desert island adventure must not be thought of as a selfcontained genre, but one that is part of a much broader literature of adventure and comprises an evolving and variable set of narrative conventions. However, despite its variability and its crossovers with other adventure genres, it is possible to posit a number of family resemblances through combinations of which the desert island genre may be identified. Overall, desert island fiction can be seen as involving variations on a journey of an individual or group to a distant, secluded and mostly uninhabited island or islandlike locale, survival upon or capitalization of the resources of the island and elaboration of the physical and cultural implements this involves, and a return home, often preceded by a conflict with indigenous neighbors or among the travelers. Within this frame different emphases may be made. In some desert island narratives the travelers arrive at the island by design, in others they are marooned or shipwrecked; sometimes the island is viewed as a paradise or an opportunity, sometimes as a site of exile or danger. And, of course, in some of the more nuanced narratives it is all of these things. In order to be able to locate The Beach within the context of this literary tradition we will discuss two aspects of desert island stories--the imaginary geography of the literary island, which renders it a site of thiscultural sociopolitical experiment, and the social role of the desert island genre in enculturating values. Conceived as geographically dislocated and limited, the desert island is envisaged as a selfcontained space, distant from the realm of normal experience. The separate topography puts what culture there is into telescopic focus, isolating its agents from the quotidian patterns and social avenues of home culture and forcing their remarkable behaviors into relief thereby. It facilitates assertions of cultural value: the island is a testing ground in which the dispositions and artifacts that are brought to it demonstrate their worth. Hypotheticals such as the British radio program Desert Island Discs are a good example of this. Here the guests have to select records and books that they would choose to take to a remote island. For the generic shipwrecked adventurer with a record player physical subsistence is assumed and the issue becomeswhat tokens of the musical and literary cultures of home would lend them spiritual sustenance in the limit case of irrevocable exile. Hence, the desert island scenario becomes an imaginative device through which values may be assigned reflexively--not just to things found, but ones inherent to home. However, the use of the desert island device to provide reflection on the value of high culture is rather novel. The association between the island site and tests of survival is more common and is inscribed in the paradigmatic feats of Crusoe. To the shipwrecked Crusoe his island becomes a site of natural resources, and the realization of their potential depends upon what he brings to the situation in the form of personal qualities and tools from his home culture. Yet his test does not reveal 'intrinsic' cultural value, but the economic value that it represents. From the beginning Crusoe's crisis lies not only in his isolation from society but also in his isolation from market economy. While salvaging useful items from his wrecked ship he finds some money: 'O Drug! said I aloud, what art thou good for? Thou art not worth to me, no not the taking off of the Ground; one of those knives is worth all of this Heap' (Defoe 1975: 47). Money has no value in a subsistence economy of one. However, Crusoe gradually masters his alien environment by using the tools and skills he has to create more tools and skills, resulting in the exponential growth of the returns on his labor. He makes a table through recourse to his 'capacity of reason' (55), learns to domesticate goats (61), and builds his dwellings and a grindstone (66). His industriousness eventually leads to his successful dominion over the island such that after eleven years he reaches the point where he does not 'want anything but society' (117). His sovereign individuality is confirmed in his mastery of nature, his going one step further than mere survival. It is at this point that he starts to encounter the natives, who use the other side of his island and stand for the opposite of civilized technological culture living naked by fire and human flesh (129). Crusoe's interactions with locals marks a shift in the political economy of the island. After eighteen years he has built up wealth he 'has no use for' (153) and, by dint of fate (or the exigencies of plot) he is in possession of eleven guns (140). When he saves Man Friday from consumption he gets his society and becomes a ruler and a military leader in firm political control of all subjects and economic surplus and able to accommodate indigenes into civilized culture. The narrative ends with the return of Crusoe to Brazil and England, the restoration of his wealth (much increased during his absence) and his acquisition of hero status in his home culture on the grounds of his capacity to survive. In the Crusoe story the tokens of home culture--Crusoe's person and his tools--act like a yeast which when applied to terra nullius found in a state of nature allow it to leaven into supposedly civilized society. In what Phillips refers to as 'the dialectical geography of home and away' (1997: 29), cultural values are expressed through the possession and domestication of an alien and pristine environment. The whole expansionist fantasy depends upon a kind of simplification figured in the imaginary geography of the island as an isolated site of untapped natural resources awaiting discovery and transformation by the technological mastery of the Western heroic subject. Not incidentally, people native to the area fall under the rubric of nature to be improved upon, rounding off legitimation of the imperial matrix of geopolitical economy. Crusoe's achievement is metonymic of the imperial values of industriousness, the sovereign subject's right to rule by virtue of who he is and the warrants of Providence. As Phillips notes 'the island Crusoe discovers... is a vehicle for social, political and moral reflection. In the seemingly uncomplicated, simplified geography and economy of the island, Crusoe's Christian, petit bourgeois social outlook seems more convincing than it might have done in a more textured setting' (1997: 30). The imaginary constructed requires the foreign space of the island to be perceived as a culturally uninfected one in order for home values to emerge unchallenged. The generic island and its indigenes become foils reflecting and promoting imperial socioeconomic achievement. In providing a frame for social values, the generic island provides a manageable environment in which they can be naturalized without too much resistance, one that Crusoe and subsequent adventurers have been able to survey, circumnavigate and name. In Treasure Island, and similarly in The Beach, the privileged possession of a map is enough to imaginatively possess the island, and in both stories, it is indiscretion in sharing this privileged information with strangers that is the catalyst for a violent narrative climax. In Garland's story, Richard and his fellow travelers start referring to their destination as 'our island' before reaching it, and, in what is, perhaps, a telling gesture to previous mappings of the paradigmatic island, they consult a guide book to locate their island among many others, and to differentiate it from those already colonized by tourists. As many critics have pointed out, there is a relationship between cartography and imperialism. The mapping and colonization of the island in desert island fiction paralleled the mapping and colonization of empire, and the paradigmatic realism of Robinson Crusoe saw the location of the fictional island in real geographical space, with the real inhabitants of that space transcribed as embodiments of an unadulterated state of nature, or of natural savagery. The ease with which the space of the island can be mapped lends a semblance of objectivity to the values with which it is invested. While, after an ambitious swim to reach their island, Richard and his friends are washed up on the shore as destitute as any shipwrecked Crusoe, they are not required to display the sort of survival skills that form the main part of the Robinson Crusoe narrative--the colony of the Beach is introduced readymade and the occasional 'rice run' to Ko PhaNgan allows the otherwise isolated community to purchase such necessities as rice, soap and batteries for the Gameboy. Nevertheless there is some correspondence between the community's 'back to nature' ideal--involving the daily activities of fishing, gardening and carpentry--and the values of selfhelp, industry, ingenuity and mastery of nature that Rousseau located in Robinson Crusoe. In his treatise on education, Emile, Rousseau claimed that Robinson Crusoe would be the first, and, for a long time, the only book that his pupil would read (1911: 147). The utility and independence Crusoe demonstrated in making his island fitted perfectly with the ideal of liberal individualism, the ideal of Enlightenment, and the ideological foundation for the new industrial capitalist economy. It also exemplified for Rousseau the sort of masculinity that this ideal demanded. Following Rousseau, the literary islands of the nineteenth century were overwhelmingly the setting for didactic stories written for boys. As Joseph Bristow has observed, the circumscribed imaginary geography of the island lent themselves to the inculcation of colonial values in the young: 'The island...has provided the European imagination with an ideal scene of instruction. On islands geographically sealedoff units there is the possibility of representing colonialist dreams and fears in miniature' (1991: 94). Frequently these stories were set in the Pacific, at the very edge of the imperial map, and increasingly the values they emphasized shifted from liberal individualism to confident nationalism and physical power. By the time R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island appeared in 1857, the matter of survival had become routine, a game even. The youngest of his three heroes remarks that being castaway is 'the best thing that ever happened to us, and the most splendid prospect that ever lay before three jolly young tars' (16). Violent confrontations with savages and pirates impress upon the boys the serious business of adulthood. Treasure Island, which was first published in 1883, takes the facility with which heroes perform a step further. Native people disappear altogether and survival is reduced to wise use of supplies for the length of time it takes to acquire the bounty and quell the mutineers. No attempt is made to cultivate the land. Yet the emerging constant underlying the variability of the desert island genre is quite clear: the island itself is a passive generic site for the performance of samecultural concerns--whether or not the island and local people are objects of those themes, or just (apparently) backdrops. The fortune hunting of Treasure Island, for example, sanctifies the western legalistic modes of capitalist appropriation that win the day over Silver's workingclass thievery. And the particular masculine heroism young John Hawkins attains is ideologically aligned with the triumph of this system of rights. Of course, one might well question what right any Europeans have to be on and control the resources of any desert island, whether the latter be natural ones or buried treasure. This is a question that the desert island narratives of empire characteristically elided in their support of dominant ideologies of race, class and gender. Indeed, in so far as these stories necessarily involve the appropriation and exploitation of the island space, there are restrictions on the way such questions may be posed. As Phillips argues such stories of adventure are, despite differences, ultimately confined to a limited range of politics (1997: 168). At the most general level, whatever transpires at each island site, imperialist ideology is expressed in discursive limits which render access to foreign land the assumed right of the confirmed heroic subject. The social, economic and geopolitical narratives of desert island fiction then, clearly lent themselves to the legitimation of colonialism. The classes of subject figured were real off the page and their activities were subtended by the capital and social mobility that allows colonial transports, both real and imaginary. The influence of island books (and other adventures) upon men who conducted empire is beyond doubt. An 1888 survey of the reading tastes of 790 boys in different kinds of school found Robinson Crusoe to be the most popular single book, almost twice as popular as the runner up, Swiss Family Robinson; in a 1908 survey, 800 readers of The Captain rated Treasure Island, Coral Island and Robinson Crusoe as among the ten best boys books of all time (Richards 1989: 8). These immensely popular stories undoubtedly inspired some readers to seek out adventure themselves by actively contributing to the construction and maintenance of empire in distant places. For the rest, they reinforced the hegemonies of imperial culture and fueled the popular sentiments that made such activity possible. In her book Problematic Shores: The Literature of Islands, Diana Loxley goes as far as saying that 'The motif of the island cannot simply be understood as just another 'theme' that variously appears and disappears throughout British and European literary history' (1990: xi). Rather, island narratives are 'in essence, literary expressions of the theme of British colonialism' (her italics) (1990: xi). However, when we consider that the desert island genre has survived beyond the disintegration of the British empire there seems to be less support for Loxley's essentialization of a historically contingent relationship between island fiction and a particular sociohistorical form of colonialism. The desert island novels of empire certainly did express the theme of British colonialism and, like so many other texts, they textually mediated colonialist praxis. The modes of travel and cultural values they express are undoubtedly imperialistic. Yet this is also to say that they were, on the whole, novels set in their contemporary world. The Beach, however, despite being a fantasy of literal colonization and being written by a British author, is set in a contemporary milieu that does not reduce to the thematics of British imperialism. Its desert island conventions are applied to contexts of western youth culture and international backpacker tourism: the book expresses postmodern and postnationalist themes particular to its cultural moment. We argue then that the desert island motif is a theme that 'variously appears and disappears' in Western literary history. In the remainder of this paper we elaborate our reasons for this position with reference to recent desert island narratives, and then question whether, in their contemporary use, devices of the desert island genre may still appeal to geopolitically problematic cultural values regarding travel to and action in foreign places.
The Desert Island in Shifting Currents The conventions of the desert island tradition vary, articulate with many discourses and gain specific cultural meanings through their contextualization. However, this does not mean that we can simply dismiss the ideological relationship between contemporary desert island fantasies and previous ones. They still repeat the most general trope of the tradition whereby a piece of foreign land, an island, becomes the location of an individual or group's disconnection from their normal social milieu, and, consequently, the site of a sociocultural test of some kind. Whatever cultural milieu it is projected into, this scenario is always geopolitically loaded, begging questions about 'rights' of passage and the relationships between various actors, places and resources. While the sociohistorical formation of British high imperialism is over That is not to claim, of course, that its effects are not still felt, by those in countries formerly colonized. and the desert island appears in new milieux and even media, there may also be various points of continuity and difference in the values that are conveyed. A good example lies in Robert Zemekis's film, Cast Away (2000), which is a contemporary Robinsonade. Top international Federal Express systems manager Chuck Noland is the only survivor when the plane he was traveling on crashes in tropical Southeast Asia. He survives upon an island, mastering its resources and his skills until his ability to build a boat leads to his escape after four years. The film affirms the same capitalist values of personal ability and industriousness as Crusoe--the character type confirmed as heroic by adventure being an international businessman once more. Previously engaged in a business expedition, fortune diverts Chuck into an alternative performance of his personal worth on the island site. The marked difference from Crusoe lies in the lack of engagement with and therefore dominion over natives. He is not in the business of governing, just that of being a remakable, successful manager of the type who has legitimate business to conduct in the area. Cast Away then sanctifies a neoliberal globalist capitalism, not British imperialism--though of course, an important commonality lies in the redemptive affirmation of international capitalist adventurism. It proves itself under the severest test: when the going gets tough, the tough--the entrepreneurial--keep the faith, bear their essential dispositions to survive, and get going again. The recent outbreak of island 'reality' TV shows in the anglophone world is also illustrative of the way contemporay desert island narratives express values previously conveyed by the genre in combination with ones pertaining more specifically to their cultural moments. The titles of some of these shows, such as Survivor (USA), Shipwrecked (UK), and Treasure Island (Australia), immediately invoke a western tradition of adventure and survival. The first series of each involves the transport of a group of Westerners to a desert island where the cameras record their attempts to get by and achieve certain goals in the alien environment over a period of several weeks. In Shipwrecked the participants are put into two camps with the Crusoean brief of having to make the most of the island and the few home comforts and tools that they are allowed. In ways unimaginable upon the islands of boy's fiction, the clash of egos and sexual encounters (a store of condoms are among their tokens of home) seem to be the main dramatic threads. Participants can drop out whenever 'tribal' life becomes too much, and a nearby luxury resort awaits returnees, constituting their restoration to their normal social order (or rather consumer luxuries many would aspire to). Survivor blends this survival scenario with a game show format, leaving a series winner as the ultimate individual survivor figure. Treasure Island is similar, though the winner is the one who has worked out where the treasure is by accumulating clues throughout the series. Survivor and Treasure Island articulate familiar themes of fortune hunting and the search for triumphal sovereign individuality before restoration into civilized, egalitarian community takes place (the final episode of Treasure Island seems to be little more than an extended promotion for the resort where they assemble in luxury to review their feats). All three shows have competitive formats which allow dominant heroes to emerge. That passing the island test still translates into socioeconomic rewards in the home culture to which one is restored (as in Crusoe and Treasure Island) indicates an enduring predilection for converting a heroism attained through adventure experiences into cultural and economic capital. As ever these contemporary desert island narratives remain, at heart, socioeconomic ones concerned with what a community of westerners may make of terra nullius over which they have a temporary proprietary relation--even though the modes of travel and appropriation involved are no longer 'colonial' (the islands of course were hired for the purpose of making the shows).
Accumulating (Cultural) Capital on the Beach These narratives illustrate the fact that the desert island tradition has social currency today because the values of adventurism and heroism which the simplified geography of the island has been used to accentuate are still highly relevant in contemporary western capitalist culture. One just has to think of the popularity of executive survival courses to recognize the importance of performing these values in a current entrepreneurial labor culture which requires the individual to distinguish their ability to excel in the face of challenge in order to gain access to economic and social status rewards. Cast Away and the desert island TV shows cannot be said to socially legitimate or fashion territorial colonialism (unless they retrospectively legitimate it in cultural memory) and are shorn of racist overtones by not depicting government over or conflict with native people. Yet they are ideologically consonant with the capitalist rationalities that subtended much colonial adventurism in the past. However, The Beach, the success of which arguably inspired this recent outbreak of island film and TV, is interesting in its greater deviation from previous desert island fantasies. On one level the novel seems to be a rather conventional desert island narrative. It is a very literal fantasy of settler colonization in which the young travelers illegally set up their community on a pristine island in a Thai national marine park. The plot includes a number of desert island devices, which at times uncannily echo previous works. As already mentioned, Richard aspires to and finds the island through a map ceded to him by a dying man (like in Treasure Island), and threatening native people occupy the other side of the island and end up in conflict with the settlers (as in Robinson Crusoe). Richard also cites the value of adventure as the motive of travelers like himself (Garland 1996: 19). Yet other aspects of the novel are harder to accommodate to the heroic desert island tradition. On the one hand the beach appears to Richard to be Eden (58). On the other he has weird racist fantasies of being a western soldier in the Vietnam War fighting against 'slant eyes' (238). The Thai drug dealers become (to him) the 'VC' (280) and newcomers to the beach community are labeled FNGs (fucking new guys) as were US soldiers on their first tour of duty in Vietnam (86). Littered with references to the film Apocalypse Now, the latter part of the novel is a portrait of madness and a social degeneration which results in the reclamation of the entire island by the Thai gangsters. The island of The Beach becomes a dystopia which reveals 'the savage within' like the one in Lord of the Flies and it consequently subverts the productive optimism associated with other desert island survivals. Perhaps the most significant deviation of The Beach is that fact that the experiment undertaken is not one in economic accumulation. Indeed, in many ways the initial utopianism of the beach community is marked by a will to forgo the commodity form whereas the narratives previously discussed force people to take a holiday from commodity culture, but one that ultimately foregrounds their economic competencies. The community has defined itself against mainstream commercialized culture from the beginning when it was started by a group of travelers disillusioned with the commercialization of other destinations such as Bali and Ko PhaNgan (136). It offers an alternative kind of voluntary exile in which participants are driven by the desire for a particular type of cultural capital which accrues from achieving subculture distinction against a mainstream culture represented by mass tourism. From the beginning of the novel the hero and his traveling companions pursue subculture capital of the kind Sarah Thornton identifies as embodied in the form of ''being in the know'' (1997: 203). Thornton discusses the types of ad hoc club and rave communities which 'may come together in a single summer or endure for several years' (1997: 200). Among these communities status is conferred upon those competent in the latest knowledge and rituals, and the value of such competency is augmented by contrasts with the inanity of the mainstream. The heroic adventurism involved in the story concerns the ability to prove subculture competence by being up to date with the esoteric knowledge that defines true independent traveling as opposed to industrial tourism. The broader subculture community in question in The Beach is that of Western youth backpackers. Richard, Etienne and Françoise find their way to the secret location of the supposedly idyllic beach by appropriating scarce knowledge from the cues of the cryptic map. It is this scarcity of knowledge that enhances its subculture value as the key to being fashionably 'in'. Their desire is also partly steered by the counsel of friends from home, people they meet on the road, and the Lonely Planet guide, which distinguishes those islands spooled by tourism and therefore passé among 'adventurous travelers,' from the areas of the archipelago are currently 'in' (Garland 1996: 25). But they seek to go beyond these previously mapped places. When they finally arrive, after some adventure, they find a direct democracy and subsistence economy of thirty youths cut off from commodity relations with the outside world. As with many a Robinsonade, marks of home culture are apparent. However in this case home does not refer to a place. They play soccer, smoke cigarettes and dope and have a Gameboy, all of these being marks of a global youth culture (144). It is the needs for rice and batteries for the Gameboy which ultimately reveal and inflame the fragility of the selfsufficient communal culture as two of the members have to travel to the outside world (Ko PhaNgan) to buy provisions, money, of course, being the other token of home that they have maintained in their possession. The buyers, Richard and Jed, furtively drink a coke and take the opportunity to criticize sunbathing tourists before returning (172). From this time on the tensions between overexposed individuals grow until the violent dissolution and their restoration of the survivors to their internationally dispersed homes, which for some means further travel. This dissolution of the beach scene can be read as the passing of its subculture value. When Richard first arrives there he is told by Sal that the place is a beach resort a place for holidays. He is a little put out as he holds to the traveler/tourist distinction. She then says that the place is also more than a beach resort and that the residents don't want it to turn into one (96). However, as it is discovered by more people it loses its distinctiveness. The denouément is brought about by the arrival of three newcomers too many who are discovered by the Thai drug plantation guards. The wheel turns full circle as the beach ceases to be the 'in' place just as Ko Pha Ngan had previously. The Beach can be read as a postmodern dystopia. It plays with postmodern nostalgia for organic community; yet it highlights mobility, the desire for transport through exotic experience and what Bauman refers to as the postmodern trope of 'never arriving' (1997: 87). It also projects a postmodern style of solidarity based upon what Gergen (1991) has called 'microwave' relationships of instant affect between strangers who are briefly close before they move on; and replete with intertextual popular culture references, traveler's tales, and guide books, it acknowledges the textual mediation of experience. The Beach dystopia is an ironic affirmation of the navigation of global culture through individual choice in comparison with the stifling social obligations of a nonmarket division of labor and bioregional dependence. Bauman writes of the postmodern touristic impulse as concerning mobilityasfreedom, based on the desire to avoid rather than assemble a fixed identity. Above all 'there is no mortgaging of the future, no incurring of longterm obligations, no allowing something that happens today to bind the tomorrow' (1997: 89-90).
However, the imaginary of The Beach expresses a real subculture not simply an openended postmodern irony. In an interview, Garland attributed the success of The Beach not only to the driving narrative, but to the subject matter in which backpackers were protagonists. This, he felt, appealed to a 'silent demographic' underrepresented in contemporary literature (Creatures). The irony of this international backpacker culture lies in the fact that belonging to no place can cost a lot of money (in relative terms). At some level, all desert island narratives are socioeconomic narratives. In the margins of The Beach lurks the specter of the capital which permits both the geographical and imaginary transport of travelers like Richard--just as colonial capital brought Crusoe to his subsistence in a different social milieu. The community of The Beach, although a temporary achievement of selfsufficiency against a mainstream commercial culture, is a fold in a wider commodity culture in which the young travelers are able to buy their mobility. The circumscription of the real economic conditions of possibility of The Beach's subculture community experiment, is intertwined with a certain geopolitical effacement of Thai agency. The foreign land, as so often in desert island fantasies, is viewed as terra nullius to be put to use for the ends of the incoming community. The Beach blatantly employs the trope of the menacing native, with the group of armed Thai dope farmers occupying part of the island, providing a constant outside threat to the community. The only other Thais in the book are servants. A tacit supremacism lies in constructing a contemporary culture as the site of adventure without attempting to engage with it, especially when any guest's presence ultimately depends upon the hosting of that culture. This returns us to our overarching problem: that in some ways, The Beach occupies similar conceptual space to previous desert island fiction by virtue of its use of certain generic markers, while it also projects themes and cultural practices that are not found in and, indeed, are historically anomalous to previous imperial fantasies. To what extent then can it be seen as a contemporary engagement with imperialist ideology? And if it is imperialistic then how? And what is the contemporary social significance of its imperialism? This is tantamount to asking whether there can be more than one imperialistic mode of travel. Just as with the pedagogical use of desert island fiction in the nineteenth century, The Beach has a potential function in shaping cultures of travel. As John Frow has pointed out, tourism is an activity in which textually garnered preconception is mapped onto empirical experience, in which the 'marker' is constitutive of the 'sight' (1997: 74). Imaginaries of places and possible relationships to them by outsiders cannot be separated from the practice of travel. It is a priori impossible to willfully travel somewhere without reference to expectations which are based on received conceptions and influence courses of action. There is, of course, no guarantee which sources of information a given traveler will valorize or how she or he will act upon them or value them after experiencing a place. Nonetheless, bestsellers like The Beach and the practices they portray are highly suggestive among the profusion of constructions of travel. In some ways the imaginary of The Beach may still be understood as cognate with the imperial ideology of previous desert island fiction. The main continuity lies not in the promotion of fortune hunting or the appropriation of political control, but at a broader level concerning the way that the generic conventions of the desert island tradition structure enduring Western cultural values concerning travel and adventure which overemphasize the rights of Western heroic subjects to use foreign spaces to pursue samecultural ends while denying the agency of native people over those places. The Beach may uphold contemporary western relationships to foreign places that could be described as imperialistic in geopolitical terms, even though this imperialism does not take the form of territorial conquest but imbalanced power relations deriving from touristic privilege. In an ethnography of western backpacker tourism in Thailand Lisa Palmer finds in evidence the negative impacts of what she calls 'the West's own historical and ongoing practice of projecting desires and cultural practices onto the 'Other'' (1998: 71). She found that many backpackers engage in activities that would not be acceptable in public space in their home cultures and which offend many local people--lounging 'wasted' in the 'idyllic' surroundings of a hill tribe village or tropical island (82), and 'nude sunbathing and an assumed 'free for all' from the tropical fruit orchards and coconut plantations, all in full view of the always modestly dressed locals and land owners' (83). In an article in The Observer newspaper Nigel Williamson portrays an international drugbased party culture of travelers, people going to faroff places and acting as 'the ultimate hedonists' (1997: 16). One of his interviewees raises the question 'does the freedom to party really mean the freedom to wreck a peaceful environment?' (16). Another, a British party traveler interviewed in Goa, India, is more cavalier ''The beaches are getting polluted, so why not go somewhere else? The world is our oyster. There are a million beautiful beaches. It's a free world and it's our money to spend where we like'' (17). Inscribed in such an extreme attitude is a belief in the superiority of the consumer's right to choose. The fantasy resembles that of the bourgeois youth Bourdieu describes as temporarily excluded from economic power and necessity and who are able to engage in aestheticism geared towards attaining 'the taste of liberty' (Thornton 1997: 207). In the case of youth party travel in Asia, young people use their available economic capital to pursue consumer experiences which accrue cultural capital in and are fashioned by their home culture, but they do so abroad with a variety of consequences of host societies--though as their relation to the Other is commodified, negative social and environmental impacts arising from their actions are absorbed as a cost on the 'supply side'. Erik Cohen's influential study of youth travel on the islands of Southern Thailand (the area in which The Beach is set) reveals marked similarities to the travel patterns and values depicted in The Beach, though of course the appropriation of the land is not so literal. Cohen traces the development of tourism facilities for young backpackers on two beaches on two different islands in Southern Thailand (Phuket and Ko Samui). The first waves of Western travelers arrived in these places in the mid 1970s, initially camping on beaches, staying in towns or even staying with local families for free (1982: 200). The subculture dynamics that he found shaping traveler's desires are the same as those depicted in The Beach with 'in' destinations being promoted by word of mouth on the traveler's routes of Southeast Asia (205). He found the travelers to be mostly interested in recreational tourism (rather than sightseeing) predicated on the 'pristinity' of the natural resources in the area (207). Yet as various beaches became spolit by overdevelopment they went 'out' among travelers causing recession in the local areas (206). According to Cohen, the search for the unspoilt makes 'youth tourism an unstable phenomenon, permanently expanding it into new, as yet 'undiscovered' localities' (207). Among travelers 'The dominant pastime is (sic) lying, possibly naked, on the beach, sitting for hours in the small open restaurants or smoking 'ganja' (marijuana),' and they exhibit 'little curiosity or concern with the world beyond the beach' (209). Their sociality was marked by a 'hedonistic or narcissistic selfpreoccupation' in which being alone in seeking experience was an aspiration. Associations formed were largely fleeting and did not result in permanent bonds (210). While much of this is consonant with and explains the appeal of The Beach, Cohen goes on to discuss that which the simplified geography of the dislocated desert island and limited concerns of selfabsorbed adventurists both ideologically bracket: the crosscultural socioeconomic consequences of modes of travel. The weird autonomy of the eponymous Beach community on 'their' Thai island expresses a real type of sociogeographical segregation whereby beach areas become dislocated from their native populations and become displaced into sites for the performance of narcissistic tourist desires which reduce touristnative encounters and the access of natives to their beach (Cohen 1982: 211). This results in cultural conflicts over the beach as a resource. For the locals the sea is a source of fish. 'For the tourists, however, the sun, the beach and the sea are sources of pure pleasure, the gist of the 'island paradise'' (211). Their ways of realizing these natural resources are, however, often alien to local cultural morès. Resentment is especially caused by nude sunbathing, which for the natives is 'a gross act of indecency' (211). The tension caused by disrespect for Thai customs is, in turn, a major factor in touristoriented crime committed by locals (212). On an economic level, while there were definite regional benefits, people immediately local to the beaches received little benefit from tourism (224). Almost all tourist facilities were owned by nonvillagers and this owner class tended to spend profits on nonlocal luxury items, while tourist industry workers received from half to a little more than the official minimum wage of Thailand (2167). This socially, economically and culturally imbalanced situation was, however, ultimately allowed to continue because of the accommodation of traveler's liberties by the tourism industry staff and owners who were the main cultural intermediaries of the situation and who sought to maintain the good will of the travelers for business reasons (223) . In another ethnography of long haul youth travelers, Luke Desforges finds an individualistic subculture based upon the desire to 'collect experiences' from places, experiences that have cultural value when translated into traveler's tales at home (1998: 178). Indeed, one of his interviewees was able to use her travel experiences to get a job, as they signified her demonstration of the selfconfidence desirable for professional work. In this case cultural capital translates into economic capital in the youth's coming of age: the taste of liberty pays off in the logic of a broader culture which cherishes the notion of selffashioning through adventure (Desforges 1998: 185). With reference to the work of Mary Louise Pratt, Desforges draws parallels between the backpackers 'collecting places' and colonial naturalists collecting samples and information around the world. He recognizes that today's experiential travelers don't have the same projects as nineteenth century naturalists. Nonetheless he still finds relevant two points drawn from colonial discourse theory: 'firstly, that representations of the Other and their fixing of difference are somehow linked to the interests of Western power, and secondly, that they have material consequences for the place represented because representations are lived as reality' (1998: 186). In his critique of totalizing approaches to colonial discourse, Nicholas Thomas similarly refutes the simplistic notions of text and context, preferring to point out the performative nature of colonial imaginaries within colonial cultures that are understood as being constituted by both texts and practices (1994: 2, 171). Thomas's work may provide a key to understanding the relationships between the ideological imperialism of The Beach and that of desert island narratives imbricated with a previous style of territorial conquest and resource appropriation. He argues that territorial conquest has been treated as the definitive type of colonialism, where in fact there are many possible forms of imbalanced power relation between geographically distributed locations and populations, and these include contemporary liberal ones (1994: 16, 171). This does not, however, mean that history is marked by the succession of discrete 'vacuumpacked' colonial cultures. The analytical challenge becomes to account for 'the endlessly variable localized expressions of colonialism while remaining aware of the continuities among these manifestations' (1994: 67). Colonial projects 'are best understood as strategic reformulations and revaluations of prior discourse, determined by their historical, political and cultural contexts' (1994: 171). Contemporary desert island fictions graft generic markers that were established in the period of European territorial colonialism into different cultural contexts creating continuities and disjunctions in the values the genre may express. It is misleading to suggest, as Loxley does, that the desert island genre is 'the' genre of British territorial colonialism despite its formation under the latter's auspices. Yet at the same time the simplified geography of the desert island--which becomes the site for the performance of samecultural rituals and values in a foreign place--continues to be ideologically problematic in so far as it effaces local agency over that place. The 'limited range of politics' that Philips argues is integral to the genre seems to be tied up with an enduring Western culture of adventurism which confers cultural value on the subject's appropriation of resources and experiences in alien foreign sites and is unconcerned with the crosscultural socioeconomic consequences of such engagement. Studies of tourism development indicate an international business in which travelers have the buying power that allows them to act out their desires. Regardless of whether these actions benefit local people or not, that power is unique to an international class of economically and socially mobile class of actors that plays a major role in the global redistribution of power through their ability to purchase their wants in various locations. As David Harvey has noted 'globalization' and 'neocolonialism' may both be inadequate terms to describe the uneven spatiotemporal development this asymmetrical concert of forces causes (qtd in Bartalovich 2000: 147). John Frow (1997: 101) is more outspoken, arguing that the logic of tourism 'is that of a relentless extension of commodity relations and consequent inequalities of power between center and periphery, First and Third Worlds, developed and underdeveloped regions, metropolis and countryside. Promising an explosion of modernity, it brings about structural underdevelopment, both because of its control by international capital and 'because it is precisely the lack of development which makes an area attractive as a tourist goal''. In reality thiscultural adventures abroad do not take place in a socioeconomic vacuum as they do in The Beach. The sanctification of the colonizer's right of access to foreign resources is an aspect of all imperial projects. It is certainly controversial to suggest that The Beach is an imperialist novel, or that the backpacker tourist culture it is part of is imperialistic. However, is it not the case that imperialism often involves the pursuit of one party's cherished freedoms?
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