Tourism and the Modern Subject:. Tim Oakes. University of Colorado at Boulder. Seductions of Place , edited by C. Cartier and A. Lew London and New York : Routledge, He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.
Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he felt most at home Bowles , 6.
Port embodies what could be called the subjectivity of the modern conscience: a restless search for authenticity that can only be fleetingly satisfied by a self-induced uprooting, by homelessness, displacement and exile. Alienated from modern civilization—particularly its inclination toward mass destruction—Port is on an exotic and spiritual journey, a quest to reconnect the fragments of his being, and become an authentic person once again.
The other is the way Bowles fashions a landscape of seduction upon which this paradox is revealed and played out. The paradox is that Port knows there is no authenticity even as he continues to seek it out. The closer he gets to something pure, the more his own life dissipates. Arriving in Oran , on the Algerian coast, Port wants nothing more than to experience pure Africa, unsullied by the war and colonialism, and he pushes further and further beyond the coastal mountains and into the wilderness of the Sahara , growing increasingly weak from illness along the way.
He loses his passport—his official identity—and does not wish to have it back. In Oran , Port hears a story which foreshadows his journey. There they stay for a long time, dancing for the ugly men and dreaming of the desert and trying to save enough money to leave. One day, a handsome desert trader named Targui arrives from the south, sleeps with each of them, pays them in pure silver, and leaves. But instead they die there, on top of the highest dune, with their tea cups full of sand.
