From Tourism Studies to the Next Left: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Running Critique

From Tourism Studies to the Next Left: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Running Critique fustin Crumbaugh is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Mount Holyoke College. He has authored articles on topics such as the aesthetics of urban planning in Bilbao, mass culture icons of the Franco dictatorship , and the consumerist reinscription of Basque heritage. He is currently preparing a book-length manuscript on the cultural and political dimensions of Spain's tourism boom of the 1960s and early '70s. Shortly before his death, Vázquez Montalbán declared, "Bankok es una metáfora," an assertion that has since taken on new meaning for his readers (Tyras AO).1 The statement refers, of course, to Pepe Carvalho's travels in the author's detective novels and, specifically, to die depiction of tourism in Los pájaros de Bankok: according to Vázquez Montalbán, the city of Bangkok represents multinational capitalism's depredation of cultural difference (40). Anyone familiar with the Carvalho series knows tourism has been a recurrent motif, operating not only as an occasional structuring device of narration but also, precisely, as a "metáfora," that is, an analytical apparatus.2 Running alongside the traveling and migrant characters that populate the novels, one can track the detective's own process of touring the modern world, searching for clues to its criminal ways, wandering dirough its ruins, and shadowing the increasingly speedy and unbridled movement of capital. The general understanding of tourism both within the social sciences and in consumer culture has itself followed a similar route, carrying two separate but inextricably linked forms of conceptual baggage. On the one hand, tourism designates the sum total of an expansive network of economic and social transactions involving, among other things, transportation , consumption, and speculative investment. On the odier, tourism has acted as paradigm within the symbolic system of the modern world, a logic by which we interpret cultural difference—whether we realize it or not—by way of its commodificiation . In this sense, tourism has, from the outset, operated as a metaphor. Herein lies its theoretical and ideological complexity. As sociologist Dean MacCannell pointed Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 9, 2005 72 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies out many years ago in a groundbreaking study, tourism's symbolic structure offers the tourist not only entertainment but also what he refers to as the illusion of relief from the "discontinuity of modernity" through "ritual performed to the differentiations of society" ( 13) ? What is perhaps most fascinating about MacCannell's The Tourist:A New Theory of the Leisure Class is the bold assertion that the tourist acts in fact as "a metaphor for the modern subject" (1). If the tourist emblematizes modern subjectivity itself, dien it follows diat die figure of the tourist provides an indispensable hermeneutical blueprint for the study of culture in the modern world. We must dierefore acknowledge and learn from the uncanny similarities and dieoretical correlation between the respective undertakings of the tourist and diose who endeavor to interpret modern life. For, as MacCannell puts it, [t]he social scientist and the tourist stare at each other across the human community, each one copying the methods of the other as he attempts to synthesize modern and traditional elements in a new holistic understanding of the human community and its place in the modern world. (177)4 The figure of the tourist thus marks, at a theoretical level, the redoubling of an abstraction upon the context from which it emerged. It is through just such a theoretical redoubling in the novels of the Carvalho series that Vázquez Montalbán posits tourism as an analytical model through which to interrogate different forms of mobility intrinsic to multinational capitalism. Availing himself of a makeshift methodology diat traverses—like whar has come to be known as "tourism studies" itself—uncharted interdisciplinary landscapes, the author articulates an adaptive and transitory poetics of the Left in which tourism becomes a guiding meta-theory for the study of culture. Vázquez Montalbán's deployment of tourism as a metaphor (a vehicle of abstraction) ultimately turns a critical eye back upon what he views as the industry's political and structural...