{"id":90006,"date":"2015-09-22T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2015-09-22T16:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=90006"},"modified":"2015-09-22T15:48:12","modified_gmt":"2015-09-22T19:48:12","slug":"travel-souvenirs-an-interview-with-joanna-walsh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/22\/travel-souvenirs-an-interview-with-joanna-walsh\/","title":{"rendered":"Travel Souvenirs: An Interview with Joanna Walsh"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Joanna Walsh<\/p><\/div>\n

Joanna Walsh<\/em>\u2019s writing enacts what<\/em> Chris Kraus<\/em> has called<\/em> \u201c<\/em>a literal vertigo\u2014the feeling that if I fall I will fall not toward the earth but into space\u2014by probing the spaces between things.\u201d<\/em> Walsh, <\/em>a British writer and illustrator, is fascinated by liminal spaces, especially in the many varieties encountered by tourists. She\u2019s som<\/em>e<\/em>times<\/em> known by her French nom de guerre, Badaude<\/em>, loosely translated as \u201cgawk,\u201d and<\/em> suggesting<\/em> the <\/em>perambulatory<\/em> figure of the <\/em>flaneuse<\/em>. Her work <\/em>trades on the <\/em>literary <\/em>genres of the miniature<\/em>\u2014<\/em>short stories, essays, even postcards<\/em>\u2014<\/em>reminiscent of Marcel Schwob, Clarice Lispector<\/em>, Roland Barthes,<\/em> and Lydia Davis.<\/em> Her 2014 Twitter initiative @read_women is an archival who\u2019s who of modern female writers, extolling in its tweets the distaff works of everyone from Leonora Carrington to Elena Ferrante.\u00a0 Aside from her abundant online presence<\/em>,Walsh\u2019s prolific output includes three new <\/em>books<\/em>: <\/em>Hotel<\/a>, <\/em>Vertigo<\/a>,<\/em> and <\/em>Grow a Pair: 9\u00bd Fairytales About Sex<\/a>, all of which <\/em>run from<\/em> the bantam length<\/em>s of fifty-five<\/em> to<\/em> 170<\/em> pages.<\/em><\/p>\n

Among <\/em>her<\/em> seemingly disparate subjects are hotel architecture and <\/em>etiquette<\/em>, sexual politics in <\/em>twentieth-<\/em>century psychoanalysis, the perils of family vacations, the fantasias of cinema<\/em>,<\/em> and fables of transgendered witches<\/em>.<\/em> I<\/em>n Walsh\u2019s feminist cosmogony<\/em>,<\/em> all are brought to bear <\/em>as<\/em> inscrutable <\/em>souvenirs<\/em> of the everyday mundane.<\/em> She elucidates the slippery, gendered in-betweenness of everyday ritual in a manner reminiscent of Derrida\u2019s disquisition on the <\/em>chora\u2014that most mysterious and mundane of spaces, not unlike the anonymous corridor of a hotel.<\/em><\/p>\n

I reached Walsh, appropriately enough, at a hotel in Mexico. She and I shared a lively discussion about hotel culture and theory, travel fantasies, and the contemporary potential of fairy tales.
<\/em><\/p>\n

You write toward the beginning of <\/strong>Hotel <\/em><\/strong>that \u201c<\/strong>A hotel, restless, cannot be a home, not even a home away from home \u2026<\/strong> A hotel\u2019s secret is that it\u2019s only a seeming mini-break from the rights and wrongs of home.\u201d<\/strong> Similarly,<\/strong> in Bruce B\u00e9gout\u2019s<\/strong> phenomenology of the motor hotel,<\/strong> Lieu Common<\/em><\/strong>, he refers to the hotel as a \u201chome without qualities<\/strong>.<\/strong>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

A hotel has no qualities perhaps because its connections have different consequences than they do at home. Encounters are, as Raoul Vaneigem describes\u2014and I quote him in Hotel<\/em>\u2014formalized \u201cinauthentic.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hotel becomes a kind of disorienting counterfeit to the authentic shelter of the home, which is the dominant space of traditional Western values because it\u2019s a place of permanent or rooted dwelling\u2014in the Heideggerian sense of the word.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s something a bit silly about Heidegger and his hut (which I write about in Hotel<\/em>). There\u2019s nothing more kitsch than the search for authenticity\u2014but it\u2019s impossible not to engage in it at some level. There\u2019s something slightly silly about most desires, probably because they\u2019re not needs. Unless we\u2019re engaged in a constant struggle for basic necessities\u2014and thank goodness I\u2019m not\u2014we live in a world in which desires claim a massive role. Desire involves definition, choice, and rejection. Hotels are all about defined choices. A refusal of desire leads to a lack of definition. Homes have a lot of blank spaces. It\u2019s easy to get lost there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I<\/strong>f we could <\/strong>shift our traditional notions of <\/strong>\u201c<\/strong>placeness<\/strong>\u201d<\/strong> from the home to the hotel<\/strong>,<\/strong> we could find a new way of <\/strong>consider<\/strong>ing <\/strong>modern space.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, a hotel is a commercial enterprise. It\u2019s not set up for our benefit, though it appears to be. Nothing fits perfectly in this hotel where I am right now. The chair is far too low for the desk, and I have to sit on a pillow to type. It\u2019s difficult to think of either homes or hotels as pure space, as places we choose\u2014they are materializations of psychological space. Freud uses an economic metaphor, with \u201ca desire from the unconscious\u201d as the \u201ccapitalist\u201d who also needs the \u201centrepreneur\u201d of a \u201cdiurnal thought\u201d in order to construct a dream. The dreamer, I suppose, is a kind of consumer, or hotel guest. I wrote, \u201cA hotel is a dream and must avoid the disappointments of the actual, but it requires something physical: an entrepreneur to provide the furniture for desire. And it is made of both human and inhuman materials.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It would be interesting to imagine a hometel<\/em> without the context of either a hotel or a home, but I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s possible. Hotels and homes are codependent but it\u2019s a shifting codependency, as what we desire from either of them is not fixed. Though each can invade the other, what seems stable is their polarity, and also this\u2014if a hotel is an open but formalized exchange of money,\u00a0and time is money and so are so many other things\u2014for something that addresses itself to our desires, then homes also contain their very own halls of mirrors that conceal the number and nature of the things we sacrifice to keep us\u00a0homeful, not homeless. I think the knowledge that these things are hidden is at the heart of both hotel and home, and the relationship between them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The h<\/strong>otel<\/strong>\u2019s<\/strong> increasing focus on <\/strong>fantasy and interiority has<\/strong> made its own space<\/strong>\u2014<\/strong>it <\/strong>becomes part of<\/strong> the tourist\u2019s primary experience of travel<\/strong>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You could go on holiday and never step out of your hotel room. I\u2019m enjoying staying \u201chome\u201d in this hotel tonight. There\u2019s a big window overlooking a park and, even better, a six-lane highway whose lights provide some interest as it\u2019s night and the park is dark. I\u2019m definitely cheating on my spare time when I should be out \u201cenjoying\u201d the city.\u00a0
<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hotel<\/em><\/strong> also focuses on what you call the \u201clanguage system\u201d of the hotel experience, which <\/strong>brings<\/strong> the<\/strong> symbolic regime of patriarchy beyond domestic life into recreation<\/strong> and<\/strong> tourism.<\/strong> How important was it for you to dig outside of the typical theoretical reference points for <\/strong>\u201c<\/strong>homeliness<\/strong>\u201d\u2014<\/strong>Freud, Heidegger, the situationists, et cetera<\/strong>\u2014<\/strong>to showcase these dissenting female voices?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most of the writing I read on hotels by women was fiction or autofiction, not theory. Jean Rhys, Joan Didion, Katherine Mansfield\u2014they wrote about the texture of living in hotels, its rhythms and rituals. At the same time, Rhys and Mansfield wrote about service, the lives some of their women characters were keenly aware of refusing. We don\u2019t live in the early twentieth century, but service is something most grown-up women know about. Even rich women are usually the ones who organize and pay the cleaner, the nanny. And there\u2019s an intimacy to many of the services women provide professionally. The job of a chambermaid is so different from the job of a janitor, and these jobs still tend to be gendered. Most women who do the \u201chome work\u201d I talk about in Hotel<\/em>\u2014unequal amounts of unpaid domestic labor\u2014are encouraged to feel they\u2019re doing it for love, and I\u2019m sure that\u2019s the case, but they could do other things for love and they tend to have limited choice in the way love can be expressed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Mark Havens, Oceanview Beach<\/i>, 2015, from his Out of Season series. More available at MarkHavens.com<\/p><\/div>\n

The joke every American seems to make when traveling to Europe is that the hotels there are half the size and double the price.<\/strong> Do we expect different forms of hospitality, fantasy, amenities<\/strong>,<\/strong> luxuries?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know whether Americans expect anything different in their hotels. As a European, the U.S. sometimes seems an almost fictional space connected by a language\u2014and we\u2019re dominated by U.S. culture. An American friend first visited Europe as a student and was disappointed that the castles didn\u2019t look like the ones she\u2019d seen in Disneyland as a child. She\u2019d expected them to be pastel-colored and sparkly. As a child I knew what European castles looked like. I was instinctually revolted by the Disney version\u2014I knew castles didn\u2019t really glitter, and I felt I must be being obscurely manipulated\u2014but I had to engage in a kind of doublethink, knowing the Disney version might currently be more important.<\/p>\n

Do you think these differing symbolic orders of the European and American hotel are represented as such in their respective literatures?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The division seems more between the early and late twentieth century, and beyond. In the early twentieth century, people on both sides of the Atlantic really could live in hotels, but I doubt many of them were very glamorous. There was something shameful about living in a hotel, as though guests had neither the economic nor emotional resources to construct homes of their own\u2014but this had its own glamour, too. In the screwball comedies of the 1930s, Fred and Ginger, Loy and Powell are never at home.<\/p>\n

Are there other writers whose focus on the hotel presents a different perspective on the complexity of tourism and hotel dwelling?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I like Sophie Calle\u2019s work very much. She\u2019s one of the few artists who treats the subject of working, rather than staying, in a hotel. In a work called L\u2019Hotel<\/em>, she took a job as a chambermaid and illicitly photographed people\u2019s luggage. It\u2019s a typical Calle project\u2014a small-scale transgression, a minor, but very personal, impertinence. I love how she deals with the petty. She\u2019s not a shock artist\u2014and art is under so much pressure to shock\u2014but an annoyance artist, and annoyance is surely an underrated affect.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Sophie Calle, The Hotel, Room 47<\/i>, 1981. Image via Tate Gallery Foundation<\/p><\/div>\n

In <\/strong>Hotel <\/em><\/strong>you include a series of resort postcards<\/strong>,<\/strong> where you describe in short capsules some of the quotidian frustrations of marriage and love that exist just outside of the frame of the picture-perfect fantasy.<\/strong> In some sense, I think these parallel your new story collection, <\/strong>Vertigo<\/em><\/strong>, which often invokes a tourist whose spatial displacedness mirrors an estrangement from the <\/strong>\u201c<\/strong>confines<\/strong>\u201d<\/strong> of home. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Lots of the Vertigo<\/em> stories are holiday or travel stories, stories about places where we\u2019re forced to confront our own oddness, especially our oddness in groups, and particularly families whose members, traveling, have no recourse to the support structures of external relationships they have at home. I\u2019m also concerned with how strange words are, and how difficult it is to get them to visit reality for any length of time before they peel off, start obeying their own rules. I find all writing strange or estranging. I think I\u2019m one of those writers for whom, as Thomas Mann said, \u201cwriting is more difficult than it is for other people.\u201d When I started, I definitely found it hard to string a sentence together, and then I got interested in that. I don\u2019t like to read writers who make me feel they are entirely in control of their material. I don\u2019t like that relationship between a reader and a writer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also intrigued by your use of the paradigm of the fairy tale in <\/strong>Grow a Pair: <\/em><\/strong>9<\/em><\/strong>\u00bd <\/em><\/strong>Fairy tales About Sex<\/em>,<\/strong> because fairy tales are sort of a genre of tourist<\/strong> or <\/strong>travel literature.<\/strong> D<\/strong>o they provide you with a unique template?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Who is it that said that fairy tales are a king visiting another king to borrow a cup of sugar? Was it Angela Carter? That\u2019s what I love about fairy tales, the combination of the grand and the minute. I love Calvino\u2019s collection of Italian fairy tales\u2014such economy of language. There\u2019s a wonderful throwaway line in one of the stories about \u201ca little door into Scotland.\u201d How fantastic to cut any \u201crealistic\u201d approach to moving from one scene to the next.<\/p>\n

T<\/strong>he characters in <\/strong>Grow a Pair<\/em><\/strong> gorge on sex, of every form and pleasure.<\/strong> As fantasy genres, do porn and fairy tales have a unique bond in how we relate to them?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There should be more writing about sex, and it should be less sectioned off from other areas of writing. It\u2019s notoriously difficult to write about. How do we know if we\u2019re doing it right? We\u2019re back to anxieties about authenticity. Ideally, sex writing provides the writer with access to the fluidity of language. Writing about sex is often meant to be a turn-on, of course, so it\u2019s a kind of speech act that reveals language\u2019s multiple intentions. Everything becomes at least double. I like every kind of \u201csuggestive\u201d language\u2014and suddenly the word \u201csuggestive\u201d sounds so \u2026 suggestive. Once you start talking about sex, everything sounds dirty and all language is brought into question. I love puns, and lots of puns are dirty\u2014their function both to conceal and reveal at the same time. Puns are not really very funny though, are they? I\u2019m a real lover of stupid, clumsy, obvious jokes where the purpose is to rehearse something over, to make an exchange. I\u2019m not a fan of real wit. It can be bit show-offy and aggressive. I love a joke that ends lame\u2014phatic humor, perhaps.<\/p>\n

Well, I didn\u2019t really answer your question there \u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From Hans Ulrich Obrist\u2019s H\u00f4tel Carlton Palace, Room 763, Paris<\/i>, 1983.<\/p><\/div>\n

Erik Morse is the author of <\/em>Dreamweapon (2005) and <\/em>Bluff City Underground: A Roman Noir of the Deep South (2012). He is also a lecturer at SCI-Arc, Los Angeles.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joanna Walsh\u2019s writing enacts what Chris Kraus has called \u201ca literal vertigo\u2014the feeling that if I fall I will fall not toward the earth but into space\u2014by probing the spaces between things.\u201d Walsh, a British writer and illustrator, is fascinated by liminal spaces, especially in the many varieties encountered by tourists. She\u2019s sometimes known by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":795,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[35,19503,17,8960,19501,7265,2890,19502,16424,10916,1132,4062,4444,1362,19499,6514,19500,19012,19504,8670,13913,878,10608,18555,123,2646],"class_list":["post-90006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-art","tag-badaude","tag-books","tag-chris-kraus","tag-emotional-labor","tag-fairy-tales","tag-fantasy","tag-grow-a-pair","tag-hans-ulrich-obrist","tag-hotel","tag-interviews","tag-jacques-derrida","tag-jean-rhys","tag-joan-didion","tag-joanna-walsh","tag-katherine-mansfield","tag-liminal-spaces","tag-mark-havens","tag-motels","tag-object-lessons","tag-sophie-calle","tag-space","tag-tourism","tag-tourists","tag-travel","tag-vertigo"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHotel Life: An Interview 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