Here We Are Nowhere (Bienvenue à l'Hôtel Non-Lieu)

The Overlook Hotel (The Shining, 1980) 

 

 

For a long time, I have dreamed of one day living in a hotel. Not staying for a short break or even a prolonged period, but living there full-time (and, indeed, dying beyond my means in a hotel just like Oscar Wilde) [1].

 

It isn't the amenities or services that attract per se, so much as the notion of anonymity and the fact that it provides an escape from domesticity and all the horrors of home, sweet home. The idea of not actually owning property also appeals. 

 

Since this is essentially a fantasy, concerns about the cost or feasibility - I know that many hotels have rules governing maximum duration of stay - haven't really entered my thinking. 

 

Nor have I worried about the fact that hotels can provide only a transient and somewhat artificial sense of community. In fact, that's part of the attraction; not belonging anywhere or having to establish long-lasting relationships with neighbours seems a plus to me and I imagine it would be far more fun interacting with a rotating cast of staff members, ghosts, and fellow guests. 

 

However, recently, I've begun to have my doubts and I'm not so sure that life in what the French anthropologist Marc Augé termed a non-place [2] is really such a great idea ... 

 

It's not that I fear being unable to sustain my identity, or that I might feel alienated and alone. Rather, my concern is that, ultimately, living in a hotel - no matter how fabulous - might begin to feel as if one were in limbo, neither here nor there, and once you tire of nowhere there is, of course, nowhere left to go [3] ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Oscar Wilde died on 30 November 1900 at L'Hôtel, 13 Rue des Beaux Arts, 75006 Paris, France, where, famously, he disliked the wallpaper. Readers interested in staying in what is now termed the Oscar Wilde Suite will find all they need to know by clicking here.    

 

[2] See Marc Augé, Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Éditions du Seuil, 1992); recently republished as Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, trans. John Howe, (Verso, 2023). 

      Augé coined the phrase non-place to refer to those spaces where traditional notions of history, identity, and human relations, are, if not erased exactly, then suspended. Examples of a non-place include a hotel room, an airport lounge, or a shopping mall. When you enter, you might immediately feel a sense of familiarity and yet they incite no sense of belonging. 

      Readers who would like to read the Introduction to the second edition of Non-Places can find it on the Verso blog page: click here.   

[3] I'm recalling here the line from the Stiff Little Fingers song 'Here We Are Nowhere', written by guitarist Henry Cluney, which can be found on their debut album Inflammable Material (Rough Trade, 1979) and listened to on YouTube by clicking here - 59 seconds of punk genius.