Taking the tour: The romantic ruins of Carl Shuker’s Anti Lebanon

Abstract

This article positions Carl Shuker’s Anti Lebanon (2013) as a postcolonial text that both identifies and examines the role of a romantic symbolic in the semiotic structures of a neocolonial modernity. The article discusses this romanticism primarily in two ways: as a Baudrillardian simulacral economy of signs and tropes, but also, drawing on the work of romantic scholars like Alan Liu and Jerome McGann, as an engine of repetition by which the romantic ruins — or “timeless” commonplaces — of a particularly Western culture and history efface the specificities of other times, places, and cultures. The relationship of this romantic symbolic to modernity is, I argue, the key insight of Shuker’s novel, and draws on the idea of the dialectic as explored by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In its tour of this romantic modernity the essay focuses on three of the novel’s ruins: an abandoned amusement park, a labyrinth, and the figure of the vampire. As I argue, the ruins of romanticism — those elements of the supernatural annexed by modernity — have become like the photo opportunities of a Western literary consciousness the tourist-reader relies on when confronted by difference. In our consumption of these ruins, the very objects that might once have signified the decomposition of modernity, the hegemony of Shuker’s globalized modernity is granted a perpetual and vampiric afterlife. In these respects Shuker’s text can be read as an exploration of distinctly postcolonial concerns.

Under the sign of a touristic modernity in ruins — Lebanon’s Holiday Inn — Leon Elias, Anti Lebanon’s (2013) less-than-reliable centre of consciousness, undergoes a modern enchantment, that of the supernatural: he is bitten by a vampire:

He was passing the last dead and empty synagogue of Beirut then under the shadow of the scarred and disembowelled Holiday Inn and then he dissolved again and was passing under a sign that read ENTRANCE ENTRANCE ENTRANCE and moving through some dark and empty thrown-stone-and cartridge-littered [sic] streets in Zarif or Patriarchate or anywhere, a ghost city, who knew, near even the Corniche Mazraa, when the face of the body bit him on the neck. (Shuker, 2013: 70) ¹

Among the romantic ruins of Lebanon Leon is bitten by a decidedly romantic trope, a spectre whose countless and evocatively-timeless iterations continue to haunt the semiotic structures of modernity. ² At this moment, Leon is infected by what Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1973) might have referred to as myth. If it should seem strange that our twenty-first-century protagonist should fall victim to a genre-defining, gothic-romantic anachronism, perhaps it is an effect of that same touristic modernity where referents of time and place slide away. As Leon notes, this could be “anywhere”, but as this novel of labyrinths and vampires will insist, this could also be any time. Leon is bitten by the deceased Frederick Zakarian who, hours earlier, was murdered in Leon’s presence by the bullish Bashir. In order to remove the body from the crime scene Bashir and Etienne, the other party to the murder, wire the corpse to Leon and a motor scooter. Together these parts — Leon, scooter, Zakarian — make one of the many monstrous conjunctions in a novel fascinated with “Frankensteined” (6) and hybrid perversions (87); ³ but this is also an image suggestive of the historical, cultural, and aesthetic responsibilities to which Leon, Shuker, and the liberal reader remain wired. In such a passage, freighted as it is with such a range of signifiers — the ruin, the “dissolv[ability]” of reference, capitalist modernity, tourism, and the supernatural — it becomes apparent that Shuker has an appellation for this responsibility: romanticism.

How, then, as New Zealand author Carl Shuker’s text gives us occasion to consider, does one critique the symbolic of modernity when one of its supposedly critical aesthetics — romanticism — is in fact the discourse by which it maintains its privilege? What happens when one tries to ruin an aesthetic premised on the aesthetics of the ruin? What happens when one attempts to pit excess, the unknowable, the supernatural, against a system in which the uncanny has become canny? What happens when the dissident or artist has become a tourist? All such questions are implied by Shuker’s investigation of a modernity that has assumed for itself the status of myth by its leveraging of its anti-modern other, romanticism. As I hope to show, such a romanticism becomes in Shuker’s text modernity’s most cherished ruin, an entrancing foil behind which its more ruthless efficiencies may remain mystified. As Shuker’s novel suggests, in order to come to terms with this modernity, if not also its traffic in the supernatural and spiritual, its privileging of the aesthetic so key to its success, one must first acknowledge, after Jean Baudrillard, the simulacral nature of a romantic symbolic that has become a governing conceit of modernity.

Such a reading of Shuker’s novel is, I would suggest, inherently postcolonial in its tenor, and as one reads through the very few scholarly articles dedicated to Shuker’s writing, it is apparent that such a reading (Evans, 2007), especially when paired with an attention to the force of globalization (McNeill, 2009), is common ground for a Shuker novel. As Dougal McNeill puts it, Shuker’s work exists at the “intersection of the historical and the decontextualized contemporary” (2009: 131); his fiction draws out “the ‘vexed politics of culture’ in the confrontation between the postcolonial and the global” (quoting Evans, 2009: 147). Shuker’s three novels, The Method Actors (2005), The Lazy Boys (2006), and Anti Lebanon (2013), as well as his time-limited digital publications collected as Three Novellas for a Novel (2008), all share themes of diaspora, alienation, and atrocity, and all pay close attention to the sovereignty of the aesthetic in a modernity of “late capital” made infamous by the work of Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson — both of whom appear to have been influential in Shuker’s writing. ⁴ Other influences include Don DeLillo, J. G. Ballard, and Bret Easton Ellis — authors similarly engaged in a modernity often described as postmodern for its qualities of pastiche, simulation, and consumerism, if not also that sense of history at an end.

As I will argue, Shuker’s engagement with romanticism in his latest novel is an extension of his engagement with the “postcolonial and global”. Moreover, for Shuker, romanticism is not merely a term by which to identify the novel’s genealogy — its semiotics — but rather a way of identifying the enduring power of (neo)colonial modernity. As Shuker’s novel suggests, modernity’s sovereignty, its power to enchant, is keyed to its dialectical bond with the anti-modern impulses of a kind of romanticism. More specifically, it is Shuker’s identification and analysis of this simulacral romanticism that is, I think, the novel’s central insight. Lebanon itself, that great, if brief, European experiment in laissez faire capitalism, could hardly be bettered as one of modernity’s most compelling romantic ruins. As I will describe it, the simulacral romanticism of Shuker’s Anti Lebanon — precisely, a romanticism removed from time and place — is central not only to a reading experience the Western reader and literary tourist is invited to enjoy, but also to the very ideological nature of a modernity whose power to govern, precisely to “ENTRANCE” (70), is invested in its continual reproduction of the anti-modern — the mythic, the supernatural, and the exotic. Nowhere is this dialectical and uncanny energy so apparent as in the “logic” of the ruin.

As I hope to show, Shuker’s romanticism manifests as a series of tropes, a reliquary of familiar and “timeless” features. Such a romanticism, now little more than an itinerary of ruins, offers the reader (not least, the literary scholar) the experience of the tourist; an experience, as Alan Liu describes it, of passage through “the already known” (1989: 4). Romanticism, thus packaged, and long since relieved of its peculiar habitation of time and place, has become a simulation of itself — a simulacral romanticism to which the Western reader remains wired. ⁵ As Liu, Jerome McGann, and others have argued, such a symbolic system precedes the reader-tourist’s experience of the differentials of location, temporality, culture, and history (McGann, 1993/1983). As the novel suggests, the medium for this tour through the already-known is the romantic symbolic, among whose ruins Shuker elects the vampire as his agent of modernity.

So it is then that the novel’s first vampire, Frederick Zakarian, brings to a reading of the novel a certain set of form-giving generic expectations, something which is apparent in that long sentence with which I began, with its final twist, its noirish stain of genre. ⁶ Zakarian himself stands in for the romantic aesthetic — a condition that has become an echo chamber or labyrinth. Indeed, Zakarian is little more than an aesthetic condition: a series of “preformulated received patterns” that “occur at any time” (18). Zakarian suffers from “echolalia” (16), a speech disorder which causes him to repeat the words of others; his condition asks the reader to consider the romantic symbolic as an anachronous structure of repetition. ⁷ This connection between repetition and romanticism is further complicated by Shuker’s wiring of these with capital and orientalism in the figure of a bejewelled commodity, a Peri. The Peri is

some kind of perversion of a Christian angel, I think, a Persio-Christian hybrid, I don’t know, some kind of mistake, or distortion […] some kind of nineteenth-century quasi-colonialist invention […] some tourist composing pseudo-Orientalist poetry in the lyric mode? Thomas? Campbell? No, Thomas Moore? […] a Gilbert and Sullivan musical too? […] Iolanthe? (87)

In a novel about aesthetics or, more specifically, the aesthetics of a simulacral romanticism, why not reference orientalism? For Friedrich Schlegel, that great theorist of romanticism, “the orient was the purest form of romanticism” (Said, 2003/1978: 137). In this Peri the dominant strands of Shuker’s novel are fused: romanticism, tourism, colonialism, and consumption.

Along with the oriental (just one of the sightseeing ruins on the reader’s tour of a romantic symbolic), Shuker surveys further the tropes of romanticism in the formation of a familiar monster; a conjugation of parts “we” — the liberal or Western reader — cannot help but acknowledge as ours. Put simply, although the novel may appear ever stranger the deeper the reader goes in their tour of the text, it is also the case that the reader raised on the canonical ruins of romanticism will find themselves reflected in the mirror of their own readings and romantic conceits as they find themselves increasingly at home among a cannily-uncanny economy of signs. These signs are the ruins — le point de capiton — by which a literary and romantic landscape maintains its sovereignty over the otherness of the actual, those differentials of the local, the specific, the time-bound. Indeed, the novel reads as a menagerie of romantic entertainments. Along with those romantic objects mentioned already (the supernatural, the exotic) Shuker adds an anti-hero whose tour through the Levant parallels the growth of the artist’s mind. The tour itself, as much as the development of the artist-wanderer, is a romantic ruin. As the text makes clear, Leon is certainly a tourist: he “passes” (186) as Brazilian, Palestinian, English, and Japanese; he looks international and is the product of an international relationship. His mother was one of those Japanese “revolutionary tourists” (44) — the phrase nicely captures the connection between romantic and tourist that Shuker teases out — to have travelled to Lebanon during the Civil War. Leon flees Lebanon under the guise of the tourist (he makes his way through Jordan, Syria, Japan, before settling in London) but nevertheless submits to the tourist experience; unlike the Danish boy he travels with he does not, however, buy a “yellow Hezbollah t-shirt” (172). If romanticism once bore the imprimatur of the dissident or revolutionary, for Shuker the romantic tour is now more accurately seen as an “economic ceremony” (187), and the tourist a “blank, imminent […] economic event” (185). The figure of the romantic artist — Leon — is as likely to be a “sex tourist” (223), their art little more than the usual “bullshit” (209) or “tourist photos” (210). In the great tradition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799–1850), or Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818), Leon (surely an allusion to Shelley’s Laon in The Revolt of Islam, 1817) undertakes a tour of spiritual awakening towards what Said describes as a “Christian supernaturalism” (2003/1978: 122). Certainly something of Leon’s aesthetic provenance can be traced: Leon’s “familiar” is a small, blind, and decrepit dog called Harold; the Peri referred to above refers also to Byron, specifically the Peri who features in the poem “To Ianthe” that prefaces Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; and is there not also something Byronic about Brioni, the couture menswear store and site of Leon’s symbolic rebirth? ⁸ As the romantic symbolic demands, Leon is also, of course, an artist: he is a film maker, a novelist, a memoirist and poet, responsible, among other literary achievements, for the murder of that most unromantic of writers, a “language poet” (263). As a simulation of the romantic artist figure Leon himself is one of the novel’s romantic ruins.

At the point where we feel we have experienced the uncannily familiar in our tour of this romantic symbolic, we have in fact experienced what we might refer to as the effect of the romantic ruin. Certainly, the term is a feature of Shuker’s text. The novel begins with the direction: “In or near ruin” (3); the phrase, or versions of it, runs throughout the novel, and, as one might expect from so vague a deictic declaration, the referents multiply in a kind of loose semiotic sprawl, their repetition suggestive of the kind of aesthetic sovereignty the novel appears to advert to obsessively: Leon’s father’s heart is described in this way (10); Leon’s grandmother’s Japanese garden is described like this too; the labyrinth Leon enters is a ruin, as is the novel’s amusement park; the body of a dead vampire is something “ruined and wrong” (70); Leon describes himself as “ruined” (137), and, of course, Lebanon is a city in ruins (97). Importantly, the term also applies to experiences of space and time: in a moment of intimacy with his girlfriend and later wife, Emmanuelle, Leon “wait[s] for ruin to transpire”. Amid the collapse of space, time, and history he waits “for destruction, joints to rip, nails to scream and bend […] vines to slither and gather and fill the walls. A roar of white noise […]” (121). The ruin is thus both an object and a process occurring in both time and space. The ruin also puts the reader in mind of perhaps the great ruin-gazer of modernity: Benjamin’s angel of history. Leon finds a version of this angel graffitied on a ruined wall — a figure, like Leon, both “ancient and brand new” (22) and, so, one of modernity’s cherished anachronisms — like romanticism itself.

As many have pointed out, the ruin is the great object of modernity, and not least for the reason that in its refusal to be useful it enables those more romantic considerations that serve among the most compelling consolations of and for modernity:

The ruin is a ruin precisely because it seems to have lost its function or meaning in the present, while releasing a suggestive, unstable semantic potential […] [T]he ruin signals the impending breakdown of meaning and therefore fosters intensive compensatory discursive activity. In its ambivalence and amorphous-ness, the ruin functions as a uniquely flexible and productive trope for modernity’s self-awareness. Indeed it is one of the master tropes of modern reflexivity, precisely because it encapsulates vacuity and loss as underlying constituents of modern identity. (Hell and Schönle, 2010: 6)

The romantic ruins of Shuker’s novel — the tour, the artist, the supernatural, the ruin itself, and the exotic — serve the ambivalence of modernity; they serve its dialectic insofar as they offer the system their “unstable semantic potential”, but in so doing, they offer also that sense of system-mortifying self-critique, an immanent antipathy, by which the system recuperates and reproduces its cultural dominance as part of an “eternal cycle” (Hell and Schönle, 2010: 1). Indeed, it is romanticism’s uselessness, adrift from its mooring in time and place, devoid of its revolutionary contexts, that makes it appealingly anti-modern. The “Anti” of the novel’s title — that signifier of dialectic — can thus be seen to signal the novel’s engagement with an uncanny modernity or, more specifically, modernity’s lease on a dehistoricized romanticism. With its antinomic structure, modernity ushers in its own process of ruination, precisely that dialectical process in which “modernity undermines itself and lapses into mythology and self-destruction” (Hell and Schönle, 2010: 7). ⁹

If modernity shores itself not against ruin, but by its ruins, it does so in order to maintain a temporal condition too. In the ruin’s “dialectic [of] absence and presence, fragment and whole” (Hell and Schönle, 2010: 7), the evocatively incomplete object invites the tourist-reader to conflate the time of its spectation with time past as well as the messianic time of the object’s redemption — the ruin’s reconstruction as an imaginary whole. Such a romantic dispensation, this hedging towards both a nostalgically posterior and messianically anterior ideal serves to maintain the hegemony of the modern “now” (modo), all the while regulating a caravansary of readers and writers whose critical insights continually map worlds of difference as “ever-always-the-same” (Benjamin and Osborne, 1994: 83). For Shuker, then, a ruin is an object, sign, or idea that, in its status as a marker of repetition and anachronism — “a thing both ancient and new” (Shuker, 2013: 22) — signifies not the real but the already read, the already known: the aesthetic. And so it is then, that this novel will take certain of its readers on a tour of their own ruins, the “already knowns” of a now timeless romantic way of reading difference, the local, and the specific. Of all the ruins Shuker charts in his tour of the romantic ideology, three serve as focal points in his critique of modernity: Luna Park, the labyrinth, and the vampire.

To begin a novel with an amusement park is, one might suggest, to implicate the novel itself, one of the great objects of modernity, with the many amusements available to the Western tourist-reader. Moreover, one might argue that beginning the novel with this abandoned relic is also to comment on a romanticism reduced to the logic of the tour and the laws of leisure and consumerism. ¹⁰ Such a romanticism, as Shuker represents it, has become our amusement; its “romantic” ruins have become the simulacra beneath which the experience of culture as time-bound and spatially-specific, becomes increasingly untenable. By this reading Shuker’s debt to Baudrillard seems especially apparent: it is hard not to notice the concordance of this amusement park with Baudrillard’s famous analysis of Disneyland (1994). Luna Park, the run-down and abandoned amusement park where Leon works as a security guard, is not only a commodity, but part of a franchise empire, a pseudo-colonial endeavour. The park could exist anywhere. As a romantic ruin the park signifies excesses of sensation and affect, indeed the gothic intensities of madness and the supernatural easily associated with the signifier Luna. More specifically, the park exemplifies the relationship between consumption and the successful evocation of something exotic and irrational. And yet, it is here that Shuker also establishes his first great image of modernity: the park’s giant Ferris wheel might as well be Henry Adams’ famous dynamo.

As I have suggested, in the spirit of Baudrillard’s “Disneyland” the reader is invited to read Luna Park as Lebanon. The Park’s “Haunted House” mirrors Lebanon’s “dead” streets; Beirut’s famous (tourist-worthy) “green line” is a “silent forest forming around […] skeletal buildings” (12); the enchanting power of the amusement park, the city’s uncanny double, is mapped onto the city itself when Leon subconsciously transposes the Park’s Ferris wheel over the “spokes of the city” (11). Thus, the simulacral environment maps the real: the romantic ruins precede the “present”. This is the logic of the tour. The undead wheel also presents something of the uncanny temporality of the modern too: its “illusion of motion in deceleration […] that reversed wheel-within-a-wheel” (5) effect is the action of a modernity propelled by progress into an ever-renewing now while gazing back at the ruins of the past. If such a dialectical motion — an anti-movement — is evocative of Benjamin’s angel, as Shuker appears to suggest, it is an illusion afforded modernity by its perpetual recycling of the romantic. The city thus lies somewhere between mystification and business as usual, precisely the location of modernity: “somewhere tentative and teetering, plausible and liminal, a shifting threshold” (69). Modernity exists in constant animation, even if to those who care to spectate on its ruins, it seems to have fallen into disrepair. At Luna Park modernity’s auto-destruction is merely one revolution away from its re-creation.

The park can be said to further map the city in its evocation of the romantic monstrous: the rides themselves are “frankensteined”, composed of assorted “scavenged parts” (6). ¹¹ And, of course, Beirut is a “Frankensteined” city: a city “made of pieces of herself” (149). Lebanon is composed, one might say, of a range of confessions, a range of sects, but also a range of influences including the allied forces victorious after the First World War, the French, who governed Lebanon until 1940, Syria, Israel, and displaced Palestinians. Lebanon has also been notoriously available to incursions by Western capital. With a constitution (the “national pact”) based on little more than a handshake, and a Christian presidency leading up to the Civil War willing to embrace Western free-market liberalism, Lebanon — Beirut was briefly the “Paris of the Middle East” (146) — quickly became a jewel (the Peri) in modernity’s crown. The nowhere and no-time qualities of an amusement park franchise are thus apt for such a state. Lebanon has become one of modernity’s great ruins: as Leon observes, in the “city about to fall” (7) one finds oneself among “the [abandoned] Kuwaitis’ apartment complex […] Roman ruins, the Hariri mosque, the Orthodox cathedral, the Maronite cathedral, and the Virgin megastore” (12). The commercial and the confessional reside side by side, vulnerable to semiotic and aesthetic slippage. In any case, the structures of leisure combine with the forces of history and culture, and if they tend to slip from their discrete spheres, this bleeding of reference is something inflicted by modernity. Such historical concatenations are not confined to leisure consumption either, but extend to include military consumption too: a Lebanese Armed Personnel Carrier is actually a “U.S.-made Vietnam era APC […] mounted with a massive but ancient Russian antiaircraft gun” (11). The junk of world history, indeed the “ancient” ruins of modernity, if not also its violence, returns and is recycled in Lebanon; it is a place in thrall to the repetitions and aesthetics of some other place, some other time. As Shuker seems to suggest, modernity’s connection of leisure, commerce, and history is usefully offset by the category of the romantic ruin.

If the ruined Park represents modernity’s inhabitation of the postmodern of global investment, the novel’s other ruin-site, the labyrinth, represents modernity’s tenacious hold on the pre-modern. As with the antinomic structure of modernity, the labyrinth is another dialectical or anti-structure: labyrinths exemplify artistry in their design and composition while offering up chaos and disorientation; they offer both pleasure and terror, and are also superb structures for the “habitat[ion of] monsters” (Doob, 1992: 25). As Penelope Doob has written, the labyrinth is a “maze of contraries” (1992: 25); in one’s experience of its “simultaneous affirmation of antinomies” (1992: 9) it “prescribes a constant doubling back” (1992: 1). As Leon’s experiences reveal, the labyrinth is also a place of anachronism and repetition; it is yet another ruined echo chamber.

Leon’s labyrinth, an “ancient and empty mansion” (109), is certainly and unambiguously a ruin: “only the larger structure of what had once been there showed through the tangle” of vines, foliage, and trash (10). Upon entry Leon is met by “four great winding staircases […] bookended at each side by two descending” (111). The building is designed as a mirror of itself, and already the language of description seems inadequate to the structure. Leon, now certainly an echo of the stair climbers of M. C. Escher’s “Relativity” (1953), begins his ascent of one of the staircases only to be brought back to the place from which he started. There are, here, certain features by which Leon might reckon his passage: a bath, some burned boards, a “blackened dinner knife” (111), but even these objects of differentiation prove to be both elusive and allusive: Leon will see this dinner knife later in his narrative in the Japanese home of his grandmother; the bath (or, at least, its echo) will feature again — in yet another time and place — in Emmanuelle’s apartment. Having taken the direction marked “CANAL ANTÉ” (111), Leon now takes the “CANAL POSTÉRIEURE” (112) but to the same effect: “from no point could he ascertain where things had gone awry” (112); there was no place from where to “figure the trick” (112). This last phrase returns the reader to the “optical trick” (5) of the park’s Ferris wheel, if not also the entertainment of another of the park’s rides: a “gaudy metal man-made maze” (6) designed and built by an “uncanny idealist” (6). The labyrinth isn’t simply a building, but more properly the amorphous and antinomic space and time of the modern subject. As Leon moves forward, through space and time (anté) he somehow, simultaneously, moves backwards (postérieure). In essence he is in the “eternal cycle” of modernity, enchanted by its stroboscopic effects, its condition of temporal aliasing.

This last consideration is to the point as the novel briefly “tunnels” (69) into its own narrative future: the dog (Harold) and guard Leon encounters in the labyrinth belong (it seems) to time future, time present, and time past. The guard whose death Leon witnesses on his (ostensibly) first visit in the labyrinth is the guard he meets and converses with later in the text’s narrative: “Not you this time” (134) says the guard to Leon on this occasion. Again, Shuker is careful with his deictics: as the language suggests, Leon has been through the labyrinth before, although the novel offers no reason for the reader to believe the guard could know this. As the text suggests, Leon was, is, and will be, the guard’s murderer; he will have been the labyrinth’s monster. In so far as the novel is filled with such echoes — doubles, double-backs, and anachronisms — it becomes clear that all the characters inhabit the labyrinth. “[W]e labor in the labyrinth of this world” says Doob, “unable even to see it properly, let alone to orient ourselves or find a sure way out” (1992: 335). Moreover, as Simon Critchley reminds us, we are inheritors of a romantic modernity where romanticism “provides the profile for a modernity in which we are both unable to believe, but which we are unable to leave” (1997: 97). In the mise en abyme of modernity, as the novel suggests, we make our way among the passageways (or errors) that are so many repetitions. As Leon recognizes, this is a space of “great reptilian familiarity” (111). The labyrinth is thus a figure for modernity’s uncanny and antinomic symbolic; at its heart, as Leon puts it, lies a “mystery” (135), that something-utterly-enchanting which, as Critchley has it, we, as modern subjects, are “unable to believe” even if this experience of disbelief also signifies the sort of romantic wonder we have learned to read and enjoy.

This conjunction of the romantic and the modern is all the more evident the deeper Leon delves in the labyrinth. At what we might imagine to be the labyrinth’s centre, Shuker reveals a kind of semiosis, a density of myth, an experience decidedly anti-modern. Shuker loads this passage with signifiers drawn from the popularized notion of the monomyth, famously documented by Joseph Campbell, if not also a sense of the archetype apparent in the work of Northrop Frye. Leon thus wades in the darkness, “hands held out like a crucifixion” (114), immersed in the dark water and the “smell of shit” (115), lost in “the labyrinth pubic and beautiful” (115); he moves ever forward through a veritable white noise of mythic passage, through water and space that becomes “psychotic”, “as if it were his own” (115). As the scene unfolds it becomes clear that both the romantic and the modern find their shared source at the centre of this labyrinth in myth: Leon is thus an ancient and a very modern monster as he makes his way through this baptismal cistern, this psychic sump of darkness, to emerge into a tourist modernity via the electronic doors of a men’s clothing franchise:

At the end of the corridor at last the scotoma faded from his eyes and he watched himself emerge dripping and dark through the racks of suits, his reflection coalescing […] stencilled letters in backward cursive on the window — inoirB — dnik a fo eno eb ot — floated enshadowed on his chest, transposed, as if in imprimatur. To be one of a kind. (116)

The “imprimatur” is fitting, as is the jacket it comes with. Leon emerges branded in one of the great romantic liberal slogans (“to be one of a kind”), and, as the reversed text reveals, he is deep inside the mirror of reproduction. ¹² The world of international capital is inseparable from the labyrinthine underworld of the supernatural — modernity and its anti-modern romantic double cannot be separated. Indeed, such is the logic of the labyrinth that one can’t be sure which end of the spectrum one inhabits: at which end of this passage does the mystification exist? What we see here is the emergence of the modern romantic subject as something to fear — an anachronism, a consumer and tourist, a murderer and vampire.

As a vampire, Leon’s status as a supernatural subject is not really the novelty it might perhaps seem to be. As the liberal-protestant doctrine Carl Schmitt (1986/1919) allied with romanticism insists, we are all one-of-a-kind exceptions; the Western reader (whoever that might be) has long since assumed the privileges of the elect of a romantic supernaturalism. Thus, vampires are everywhere, as ubiquitous as tourists. Indeed, as Anti Lebanon gives us occasion to consider, tourist and vampire share a close resemblance. Both, we might say, are spawned by modernity’s connection of profiteering and colonialism — the origins of tourism. The vampire is the child of early globalization. Like the romanticism for which they seem so often to stand, they are a European-introduced species:

[The first pyr was] perhaps picked up — like a germ — by Godfrey de Bouillon and Peter the Hermit somewhere in the Serbian forests between Belgrade and Nish on the First Crusade, accidentally recruited on the march towards Jerusalem. […] Any troop of soldiers with cynical leadership, a sacred cause, and little in the way of qualms is the pyr’s natural habitat. The pyr is lost in time; he haunts the present, and lost in the labyrinth, haunts all time. (148)

This is, one might suggest, one of the novel’s darker conflations: the romantic spectrum on which the tourist and vampire reside is broadened here to incorporate a further interloper — the soldier. As the novel illustrates, a veritable caravansary of soldier-tourists, soldier-vampires — Syrians (158), Palestinians (143, 148), and Israelis, but also “Japanese commandos” and “sunburned IRA” (149) — have been drawn to Lebanon’s civil war. As Shuker’s reference to the Christian Crusades suggests, Lebanon is that accursed and contested place where a European and romantic ideology meets the realities of a so-called “East”. As Shuker’s evocation of the iron-red Nahr Ibrahim River suggests, the legacy of this encounter is blood (137). For Shuker, then, the violence of civil warfare — real, bloody, and literal — is indissoluble from the ideological violence imbued in the romantic aesthetic the novel so carefully recalls. For Leon the spectrum on which these connections are related condenses to a node during an academic seminar in which he is presented with the “only civil war photograph of a vampire” (145). In the photograph the hooded vampire sits at a grand piano, his M14 automatic rifle laid on the piano’s dusty top. As Leon realizes, the photo has been taken inside the seemingly “untouched” (147) “rooftop floor” of “the most photographed empty hotel in the world, the Beirut Holiday Inn” (146). As Leon notes, the photograph was taken months after the hotel had “burned”, and yet here at this piano, in this uncannily unruined space, sits the vampire, a “French mercenary”, playing, of all things, Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday”. Tourist, soldier, vampire, and pianist thus coalesce, “Frankensteined” (6) one might say, as a timeless and placeless construction.

The pyr is then, precisely, an anachronism; its power, its provocation to the Western imaginary, is the power of reproducibility in breach of time, place, and culture. ¹³ As a ruin, as a feature in the romantic itinerary, the pyr is timeless, an agent of what Jerome McGann describes as the “Romantic Ideology” (1993/1983) whereby a romantic symbolic determines the experience or representation of a particular past, present, or culture through the laws of an ideological system of ideas (ruins) no longer grounded in their own time and place. Leon, as vampiric agent of such an ideology, is thus depicted tunnelling through time and space; like the repeated phrases of the echolalic, and for that matter, the reiterated ruins of romanticism, Leon can “occur at any time” (18). The novel is littered with examples of such tunnelling, and while in such moments the novel typically becomes impressionistic, the experience is linked to the vampiric infection. Leon first tunnels — a “magical transference” (69) — after he is bitten by the (un)dead Zakarian, and although this initial instance seems limited to some transport of consciousness, later instances suggest an ability to move unaccountably through time (as if remembering the future, 231) and through physical space (137). This notion of tunnelling is also evocative of the experience of the labyrinth (126–7). As the novel so economically suggests, vampire and tourist are each other’s double; both move free of the bonds of time and space. For Shuker, the vampire, like the ruin, like the angel graffitied on the wall, is always something “ancient and brand new” (22).

As vampires, Zakarian and Leon are agents of modernity and in this respect Shuker draws on an established critical tradition. As the novel suggests, at the root of this tradition lies Karl Marx, echoes of whose thought, as well as Friedrich Engels’ (1976/1878) Anti-Dühring, reverberate in the novel’s anxious echolalia of allusion as well as in the diction of several of its characters. In the song lyrics Leon cuts out and includes in a collage (“Those midwives to history put on their bloody robes”, 40), we hear Engels from his theory of force, ¹⁴ while in Lauren’s muttered remark about the former Lebanese President Michel Aoun (“Tell him to wake up from his dream so we can wake up from our nightmare”, 42) we hear Marx. Behind such pastiche lie Marx’s romantic concerns about a modernity characterized by “revolutionary crises [that] anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service” (1919: n.p.). As this nightmarish language suggests, the permanent revolution of capitalism remains uncannily romantic in its reanimation of the dead. Marx, like Shuker, was all too aware of modernity’s reliance on its own anti-modernity. As Chris Baldick has elucidated, Marx made the connection between capitalism and vampires, and was sensitive to the ways in which capital could make use of the mythological (the supernatural) to its own advantage: “Marx was keenly alert to the ways in which the achievements of bourgeois political reform and capitalist industry could take on the aspect of the mythological and the fabulous” (1987: 124). Moreover, “[c]apitalist reality had indeed surpassed the hyperbole of myth, […] by using its vaunted enlightenment and rationality to convert the modern world into the equivalent of a medieval nightmare” (1987: 124).

Leon’s inaugural tour takes him beyond the Levant to Japan and the home of his grandmother, a location described as “in near ruin” (234). Noticeably, his trajectory towards this place of origin is presaged by Leon’s stay at his spiritual home — that timeless, placeless ruin of globalized modernity, the 24-hour McDonalds. He emerges from McDonald’s “on the seventh day” (207) and, as the biblical phrasing suggests, it is as a representative of a new fundamentalism inseparable from modernity that Leon pursues the future. ¹⁵ This suggestion is further evident where Grandmother draws Leon’s attention to her Persimmon tree (237). Persimmon, or diospyros, represent the union of a Christian tradition (Dios — God, the fruit are sometimes referred to as the “fruit of God”) and the nightmarish weight of the (un)dead (Pyr — vampire). Diospyros is thus a dialectical organism, a fitting emblem of the modernity Shuker presents. If Leon is a messianic figure, he is a rough beast, and as the novel’s final paragraphs appear to suggest, the vampire tourist shall inherit the world.

The final pages of the novel offer an answer to those questions with which I began, and which Shuker’s novel appears so often to pose its readers. Shuker’s modernity is, thus, one in which aesthetics has replaced ethics, where something like romanticism, with all that it might signify — dissent, art, affect, belief, imagination — is but a foil to market-driven imperatives, if not also the maintenance of what Don DeLillo’s narrator in Underworld describes as the “furtive sameness” (1997: 785) of a globalized economic system. Under cover of its own romanticism, Shuker’s modernity commits a violence against the specificities of time, place, culture, and difference; this is a neocolonial violence that is as aesthetic as it is real, and as Shuker suggests, its agent is Leon — that romantic ruin, a vampire-artist, a tourist-murderer, and politician — modernity’s messiah. By the novel’s end, Leon has become a spokesperson for the Christian diaspora of Lebanon but, as the novel makes evident, the Christian supernaturalism Leon is allied with is another way of describing the romanticism he, like modernity itself, will use to leverage advantage and control. The novel closes with Leon’s bid for power in Lebanon — and with an event stage-managed to resemble a romantic’s entry into the political.

Leon thus chooses the North Cloisters of the Wilkins Building at University College London for its “churchlike” qualities, that are “not oppressive but allusive; [evocative of] the borrowed air of reason” (261). And while the element of the spiritual sits well with the “appearance of liberality” (261) Leon hopes to simulate — a quality connected to his decision to begin the event with a musical recital, to invite artists, and to have his guests “mingle among the art” (225) — Leon’s desire for the “allusive” and “borrowed” cannot be separated from Marx and Engels’ concerns about the force of dead tradition (the undead of history, we might say), the force of recurrence and repetition. As Leon notes, “Cloisters is a passage-way […] it is a tunnel” (261). Cloisters is then a portal through which the past, free of its bond to the differentials of time, place, culture, may be misrecognized as both the present and the future. The passageway or tunnel is precisely an error in the multicursal labyrinth; to “tunnel” is also, as I’ve suggested, to collapse spatial and temporal difference. Not surprisingly Leon hears himself speaking with “the ventriloquist’s passion” (261) the words of his father and the words of the conservative Christian leader Etienne Saqr. The logic of repetition — reminiscent of the mirror-language of Leon’s fellow vampire, Zakarian — is as apparent in the highly aestheticized qualities of Leon’s language, right down to the doubling of vowels and consonants. The Maronite men in attendance at the event are thus described by Leon as “impeccably groomed and impeccably tanned” (255); there is something of this fascination for mirroring language too in Leon’s consideration of the “pendulum” that swings from “error to error” (257). Once again the motif of repetition indicates the collapse of time and space, as is apparent here in the semiotic slippage of the word “error” for era (time) and error (space — the passage-way in a labyrinth). Despite Leon’s attempts to appear liberal his presentation contains further uncanny echoes: where he recognizes himself as “galvanized”, repeating the word when he describes his desire to turn and galvanize the weak (258), we hear echoes of the galvanic experiments of the nineteenth century crucial to Mary Shelley’s imagining of her monster. Where Leon speaks of his desire to “make the inevitable occur” (257), we cannot help but hear an echo of the drunken planning of murderous men hoping to make Zakarian’s death, that “entire awful stupidity inevitable and ignorable and unreal” (67).

The novel closes with an irony: Leon describes “tourism [as] a death sentence” (261) for Lebanon. He is correct; this has been the history of the orientalist romanticizing of the “East” by which colonial modernity has annexed a culture by translating it into knowledge and aesthetics. And yet, as the novel also reveals, Leon is himself a repetition, a figure in thrall to the dialectical energies of a modernity in which we are all inscribed, a mirror symbolic that reveals to us the already known. Leon’s entry into this mirror of reproduction (262) occurs then in typically mirror-like terms: “I am now who now I am” (255). Leon’s identity is a repetition of another “I” in some other yet simultaneous “now” — the now (modo) of a modernity in which history has been reduced to the ruins of a simulacral past. This is, one might say, the existential declaration of a subjectivity constituted in the labyrinth of mirrors: the endlessly recursive and yet radically shallow mise en abyme of an ideological symbolic characterized by — maintained by — its power to exempt itself from history. As Shuker’s text suggests, this is an exemption managed by modernity’s continual reproduction of its anti-modern other, its romantic double. And what can Leon’s statement of identity mean in a novel so loaded with copies, pastiches, doubles, and repetitions? Characters such as Albert, Zakarian, Emmanuelle, Keiko, and Leon’s own doppelganger all mirror Leon to some degree. Albert, like Leon, is a “young man out of his time” (256); both men in this respect resemble another character, Etienne, who, earlier, is described as “an anachronism” (35). Like Leon, who could be from anywhere, Albert is “a German, and the most stereotypically English of men” (256), but Shuker enforces his point about the interchangeable and endlessly reproducible nature of modern subjectivity by describing Albert as a “consummate actor and chameleon” — precisely, as the partial pun suggests, a version of Leon. Emmanuelle’s appearance reminds the reader of Leon’s sister, Keiko, who is herself repeated in several other figures in the novel. Leon himself looks very much like Emmanuelle, who looks a lot like Keiko. As Leon notices, Emmanuelle (her name is notable for the repetitions it contains within itself, and that mirror effect in the final syllable) matches Leon so closely, in fact, that having sex with her is like “making love with himself” (123). This is, then, a world deprived of difference and thus of the possibility of relating. Through examples such as these (and others; the novel seems often to refer to its own ability to generate motivic repetitions) the possibilities of connection-making reveal no larger historical perspective nor the sort of critical attention to the local and real that a text, such as Shuker’s, so immured in repetitions calls out for. Instead, the reader is left with what passes for an epiphany on Leon’s part; unsurprisingly it is expressed in the self-referential, eternal, mirror-language of his aesthetic condition — a narrative time without temporality, entirely free of any sense of referent: “and then there was no more and then” (245).

Despite all the novel’s signifiers of difference and otherness — the intricacies of Lebanese history, vampires, the impossibilities of the Labyrinth — “we”, that Western reading class among which I include myself, find ourselves utterly at home in our tour of this particular exotic. Shuker has provided such a reader with the colonial experience or, more specifically, with the colonizer’s experience of difference, place, and culture, afforded them by modernity’s dialectical entanglements — that monstrous wiring together of a series of ruins “we”, in our touring of the world, mistakenly refer to as romanticism. The point of Shuker’s text is to identify the way in which something vaguely and evocatively resembling romanticism (a series of ruin-like tropes), a loosely-defined ideological commonplace, has become a kind of simulacrum, a renewable enchantment. If Lacoue-Lebarthe and Nancy are right to refer to romanticism as modernity’s “foil” (1988: 15), it is because of romanticism’s ability to reflect or mirror (key ideas in the novel) the norms of its host structure, all the while signifying that same structure’s undoing, its decay or degradation. And as Leon slouches towards Beirut to be born we recognize in this pyr a messiah of the Christian right: an anachronism, a romantic, and, as an orientalized figure with a newly acquired “London accent” (263), a colonial man entranced by versions of his own conceits — a tourist.