Third International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

Critics often consider Michel Houellebecq’s novel “Lanzarote” to be a condemnation of mass tourism and see his narrator as the epitome of the tourist unable to appreciate the beauty of the island. A close literary analysis, however, provides a more complex picture of the narrator as he intertwines several conflicting discourses, which ultimately create an ambiguous and paradoxical vision of tourism. His praise of mass tourism is weakened by irony, his description of the island appears as a parody of tourist guides, and his ethnological discourse aims at ridiculing travelers. Such complexity also invites the reader to wonder about the narrator’s dishonesty, as he disregards the specificity of Lanzarote’s tourism. Why claim that tourism is insufficiently developed when it is precisely the island’s first source of revenue? Why barely mention César Manrique’s heritage and the status of the island as a UNESCO biosphere protected site, and reduce them to their mere economic aspect? My hypothesis is that Lanzarote can be read as a “tourist narrative,” whose aim is to represent the reality of mass tourism and to denounce its destructiveness through a complex narration that subverts the codes of both travel writing and promotional literature.