The Global Soul : Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home

Berglund Authority Level 3

by Erick Heroux <heroux@nccu.edu.tw>
Assistant Professor of English
National Chengchi University
Taipei, Taiwan

"A Wary Yet Optimistic Global Soul"

Review of Pico Iyer's The Global Soul : Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home.
New York: Vintage Departures, 2001.

Pico Iyer is a fairly well-known travel writer and novelist, particularly for an English-language audience to read about Asia, and especially for the new phenomena of "travel" in an era of global consumption, borderless mass media, local hybridities of several cultures, surprising fusions of East and West, and the dubious effects of tourism. The book that established him in 1988 was Video Night in Kathmandu : And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East. Iyer has brought the now faded '60s "New Journalism" of Joan Didion and Norman Mailer up to date for a renewed multicultural and rapidly emerging global soul. This kind of writing continually remixes straight reporting with subjective and private revelations, along with thoughtful forays off into other texts on the topic at hand. In this recent book, Iyer reveals his personal experience as a kind of "global soul" – an upbringing and education and lifestyle that is postnational or transnational and cosmopolitan – while also reporting about the positive and negative experiences of a diverse global cast of characters. This is a soul, like any other, composed of both problems and promises. Iyer is respected among the literati as a book reviewer and cultural commentator. We read this book as an exemplary belle lettre essay -- part autobiography, part travel narrative, part social analysis -- that is at the frontier of global culture(s).

The author of The Global Soul knows that we are a bit confused today, and his ambition is to provide a sustained yet accessible meditation on the grounds of this confusion about a new global horizon of human experience. Each chapter explores with wit and occasional wisdom a different location and situation around the world. A deceptively breezy yet densely metaphorical overview in the first chapter, Iyer describes his experience of sudden homelessness when his house burned down in California, where he was then taken in by a poor migrant worker from south of the border, an interesting kind of unknown neighbor whose experience of home and homelessness oddly resonates with the nevertheless different class of homelessness that Pico Iyer experiences. The second chapter on "The Airport" presents his observations and multicultural conversations in the disorienting non-place of LAX, really a kind of liminal space, a threshold of cultural arrival and departure, where he deliberately lived for over a week. There Iyer watched them come and go and return again, those globe-trotting souls from every corner, not quite merging in the deceptively "neutral" zone of the modern terminal. What emerges there at LAX might be a kind of 3rd space hovering beyond both the modernism of its architecture and the dizzying hodge-podge of languages and cultural assumptions that swirl through the masses of people in transit. This is a space that is strangely familiar yet uncomfortable, welcoming and inclusive, yet impersonal and . . . well, transitory. But such global non-places present a universal culture of their own, one that everyone from everywhere can navigate.

The third chapter (yes Iyer does escape from the airport) visits his frequent-flyer bi-national friends in Hong Kong, where he surveys the "Global Marketplace". The fourth chapter discusses Toronto as perhaps the single most cosmopolitan city in the world today. Iyer reviews contemporary fiction from authors in Toronto and also interviews residents about the conflicts and satisfactions of living in an officially multicultural city that has somehow passed a threshold beyond multiple immigrant groups toward a globalist city. The fifth chapter reports about the disappointments of the Olympic Games held in the supposedly "world-class" city of Atlanta, U.S.A. The Olympics are now an uneasy amalgamation of both corporate marketing, central control, and genuinely populist enthusiasm, of both international fair play and also nationalist pride. In Atlanta, the games floundered into a provincial backwater of religious fundamentalism, racism, and business-minded boosterism, and ended with a small but frightening terrorist bombing. The chapter is a model of social analysis behind the current events at the global gathering. Iyer reveals the many contradictions of a cosmopolitan Olympic Village under the shadow of global capitalism that is "mass producing images of nationalism and universalism without much troubling to distinguish between them" -- all the while held in a "McSuburb" of transnational corporate culture. While it falls short of the mark, this chapter comes close to a critique of that economic globalization we usually hear about in tones either shrill or honeyed, that global system of neoliberalism and enforced trade, of eroded labor rights and ecological damage. Iyer's book admits of such topics only in the background. His foreground is the related world of cross-cultural flow, of diaspora and travel, of universal "deterritorialization". This latter term is all the rage among current theorists of global cultural effects. Iyer uses a more felicitous language to describe in a more detailed way what this means for actual human beings. Still the upshot is abstractly dialectical: both good and bad at once, a loss of local autonomy along with a gain of broader horizons and choices.

Moving on then to post-imperial London, chapter five sets down among the kind of people who immigrated there from the colonial periphery, seeking to find the imagined ideals of a literary English culture, but only to discover instead an often disillusioning land of racist exclusion and under-educated ignorance. This leads to a discussion of Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, as he is the exemplary writer of this disorienting "voyage in" to the fallen center of Empire. Iyer sees this as an older generation of immigrants from the far flung provinces of the old imperial system, a generation of voluntary exiles whose disappointments the real England versus the idealized one do not overlap much with his generation that grew up without a sentimental view of British centrality, but rather grew up as more globally polycentric. This younger generation of writers includes Rushdie and Gunesekera and Kureishi

Throughout The Global Soul, Pico Iyer very often refers to discussions with the more famous novelists that he personally knows: viz., Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie, a circle of top prize-winners that hints at an entirely new kind of literary generation. Future historians will not refer to them as "the lost generation" (Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, et al) nor as something like the countercultural Beat generation, and such; these writers are neither bohemian nor road running for the exit. Instead they seem to have settled in at home for the duration: it's just that this home is dynamically hybrid, or cultivated from their own multiple roots and grafts and sprouts. They write as cosmopolitans of a new sort – beyond the traditional "good European" postnationalist (the phrase is Nietzsche's 19th century version of high multiculturalism that remained within the bounds of euro-centrism). They write, that is, as cosmopolitans from below, exploring how one emerges despite racism and loss of ethnic "authenticity" into a creative globalist sensibility, an identity that refuses the either/or dilemmas of the old empire and yet likewise refuses the lazy way out through consumption of eclectic "lifestyles". Our attention is drawn equally to both the tense difficulties such new cosmopolitanism and also to the liberating potentials of creative fusions, proliferating choices. Given our time in which one might choose the best from two or three or so worlds, where one might also choose the worst from those same worlds, the possibilities for good and bad have become more interesting.

Pico Iyer also draws upon the literary works of much older classics, Emerson for example, in his meditations upon a set of conflicted meanings for humanity today, upon the inevitable consequences and choices with which we are daily confronted. Hence, this book shows how a sustained discussion about the effects of globalization on our personal experience can draw upon literary works in an edifying manner. The Global Soul is a book that can pull this off while simultaneously reporting from the frontlines of global contradictions with very personal confessions thrown in to reveal how these supposedly abstract universals of the global process come down to rest in one particular soul, one very wary yet optimistic soul.

The final chapter unveils Iyer's personal life today, married and living in a suburb of Tokyo. Although his wife Hiroko barely speaks any English, and Iyer barely speaks any Japanese, they have established a feeling of being at home in the world, married to it, so to speak. As the final word of this book of tensions and uncertain paradoxes, Iyer attempts to show that a globe-trotting cosmopolitan can indeed find a sense of peace.