Painting with Words as Painters Paint: Pierre Loti’s Concern with Perspective

Abstract

Even before he took to creating art with words, French novelist Pierre Loti (1850-1923) was an avid drawer. So much so that, when he did write, he sometimes felt the need to supplement his verbal efforts with visual ones. In one of his autobiographically-based novels, Le Roman d’un enfant (1890), he recounts how, at the age of eight, he and his friend Lucette left absurd and incoherent letters in the street so that they could enjoy the reactions of those who stopped to read them. The narrator...