Hotel, Joanna Walsh, Bloomsbury. Rating: Ink sac
The revolutionary inventor, Nikola Tesla, spent all of his life – practically – living in New York City hotel rooms. One of his inalienable routines was feeding pigeons and bringing them back to his differing domiciles. He left a string of unpaid bills, and was ‘moved on’ from lots of different hotel gaffs, which he would use to court investment opportunities for his frenzied electromagnetic research. He died in a hotel room, which was eventually actually paid for by a small stipend by the Yugoslav government. This is the fitting end for a strangely aloof and antisocial inventor; perhaps mirroring the quasi-humanity of the life that he himself lived.
My own experience of living in a hotel was not quite so anonymous. I lived in a B&B for a month-and-a-half, in York. Yet I supppose I did feel some of what Joanna Walsh describes in this volume, a book about a period she spent reviewing hotels and the sort of effect it had on her psychology and her current romantic relationship. Hotels – she essentially claims – are like temples, in which one must ritually purge and exorcise oneself and yet one must also somehow live, or adopt the pretence of living. In a hotel, one is not compelled to participate in menial labour, so much so that its evidence is almost hidden, as if it is a behind-the-curtains ritual that only the Initiated can have access to. “There are no spades in my hotel, no evidence of any home work, or any other kind of work, only of its results.” (Walsh.) No hotel guest would ever join in with the gardening, the cooking, or sometimes even making their own cup of tea. To do so would be sacrosanct, and the implication of staying in a hotel is that you have something else more important to get on with than these totally human and fundamental aspects of participating in humanity.
I was allowed to cook in the B&B, though in the mornings I mingled with the guests and those who participate in the hotel-temple. My life became a ritual of divine and sanitised exactitude, as I couldn’t act as I really was, or thought I was. My entire existence was a contribution to a TripAdvisor review. It was heart-warming to read about an account of hotels that understands this, or some imprint of it: how hotels are metaphors for what we have turned into life itself. That hotels are essentially home, given that home can only be conceived as institutional. Institutional is familiar, heimlich, and the homely becomes unheimlich. It is only living in a hotel, or accommodation institution, that one can understand this. Accommodation used to be a divine duty; now, it is something that only makes sense from the perspective of logos and sanitisation.
What is it about hotels that give refuge to someone like Nikola Tesla? Perhaps it is that genius is detachment: that someone who can easily transcend time and space must live a life of morbid anonymity. I am curious about hotels, about their origin, about what point paid hospitality became a genuine norm. Was it industrialisation? Protestantism? Joanna Walsh’s book is subjective enough to never answer any of these questions, but I suppose the book is intended as a starting point in thinking about them or doing our own research.
Squidditas 