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

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