Pierre Loti Research Articles

An Overview of the Nineteenth-Century Women of Istanbul in the Works of Pierre Loti and Yamada Torajirō

Ōtani Kōzui (1876-1948) was the first Japanese, or perhaps the first foreigner to point towards Turkey (Feb. 1924) as soon as the Republic was declared (Oct. 1923); the first to bring foreign direct investment to the Turkish Republic through his collaboration with the founding father of the Republic of Türkiye, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk at the Ankara Gazi Farm (Feb. 1927); the first to make a foreign industrial investment with his collaboration with Memduh Gökçen in Bursa (Apr. 1929). Ōtani was also one of the co-founders of the Japanese-Turkish Trade Association in Osaka (Nov. 1925), the Japanese-Turkish Association in Tokyo (June 1926), and he was the author of the lines on “Ōtani Kōzui Epitaph” dedicated to Turkish soldiers who lost their lives at the Ertuğrul Firgate Incident in 1890, erected at the Kushimoto Ertuğrul Memorial (Mar. 1929). This paper traces his footprints in the early years of the newly founded Republic of Türkiye.

“Aziyadé”: un romanzo tra sogno e realtà

This essay examines the debut novel by Pierre Loti Aziyadé, focusing on the relationship between the character of Loti and the young Circassian Aziyadé. Particular attention is also placed on the unrealistic geography of Istanbul, to the point that the city seems to be the setting for a medieval conte, and on Istanbul as a city of pleasure or of the “pâle débauche” by analyzing the homoerotic subtext of the novel. It has been observed that, in the Turkish context, among the potential factors of integration, capable of establishing spaces of freedom within the constrictive meshes of the Islamic ethical system for the success of erotic questions, a leading role must be attributed to the size of Istanbul. There have been many interpretations of the Loti-Aziyadé relationship; but only one seems to offer a broader view of the writer’s relationship with the beautiful Circassian. This interpretation makes use of René Girard’s theory of “désir triangulaire”. The novel is then analyzed in relation to the sources underlying it (Alfred de Musset, Chateaubriand, etc.).

Between the Picturesque and the Political: Judith Gautier and Pierre Loti’s Play La Fille du Ciel

ABSTRACT In La Fille du Ciel (1911), a play co-authored by Pierre Loti and Judith Gautier, allusions to ethnic equality between the Manchu and the Han celebrate the political thinking of Kang Youwei (1858–1927), a Chinese reformer who figures in the play as Puits-des-bois, the emperor's minister. In this article, I use the picturesque and the political to show how the play combines Orientalist fantasy and late-Qing politics. Conceived as a French melodrama, the play makes the rift between imaginary narrative and political debate narrower than one might expect, but the picturesque tendency of its performance eventually submerges the political subtext.

From Madame Chrysanthème to Madame Prune: Triads and Tribulations in Pierre Loti’s Japanese Novels

Abstract The lack of scholarly interest in Pierre Loti’s second Japanese novel, La Troisième Jeunesse de Madame Prune (1905), has obscured the fact that it modifies our understanding of how Japan functions in the author’s imaginary. This article begins by offering a new reading of its better-known predecessor, Madame Chrysanthème (1887), concentrating on the insistent and proliferating use of triads. These structures involve characters (such as Loti–Yves–Chrysanthème), places (Loti–Nagasaki–Istanbul), and intertexts (Loti–Madame Chrysanthème–Le Mariage de Loti). Unlike in Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s and René Girard’s theoretical treatments of triangularity, Loti’s use of triads foregrounds the absence of desire, making Madame Chrysanthème an atypical novel in his corpus. Comparison with La Troisième Jeunesse de Madame Prune underlines this: in the later novel, Loti reinstates a fascination with both sexuality and mortality that was absent in its predecessor. Furthermore, because of its status as a sequel, it allows Loti’s use of nostalgia to gain in complexity, offering the coexistence of multiple temporalities in the same experience of the Japanese space.

『일본 태양의 근원』과 소비에트 오리엔탈리즘

‘Asia and East’ was the old theme of Russian literature, but there are few works about real East Asian countries. Pilnyak’s novel Korni Yaponskogo solntsa was the first to describe real Japan in Soviet literature. Like Dante in the Divine Comedy, Hero-Pilnyak travels to a foreign space - Japan and tries to understand the roots of Japan.BR However, Soviet and Japanese proletarian writers criticized the exoticism of this story and unfairly assessed this novel. In addition, they compared this novel with Pierre Loti

Koloniale Fremdheitserfahrung und bikulturelle Eheschliessungen: zur kolonialen Ambivalenz bei Jesco Von Puttkamer und Pierre Loti

"Colonial Experience of Strangeness and Bicultural Marriages: On Colonial Ambivalence in Jesco von Puttkamer and Pierre Loti. The following article goes into the literary analysis of colonial strangeness and bicultural marriages through two colonial texts. Jesco von Puttkamer and Pierre Loti exemplify the subject of colonial strangeness from a travel experience. In their texts, colonial experience of foreignness focuses on excerpt of the colonists from their familiar surroundings with travel. The journey in the sign of colonization goes hand in hand with the perception of the foreign space and its inhabitants. Puttkamer's and Loti's main characters do not however abide by the colonial rule of radical distancing from the natives because they have romantic relationships with black women. In both cases, it is an ambivalent attitude of the colonial masters towards the non-European foreign region, which oscillates between positive and negative stereotypes. The depictions of mixed marriages are also characterized by ambivalence, because the black woman acts both as an object of fascination or desire and as a subject of racial power differences. These statements justify the thesis of colonial ambivalence, which is the subject of discussion here. The authors thus confirm the following results, which the article concludes with; namely, that the line between exotic strangeness and colonial stereotyping is difficult to draw. The analyzed narrative sequences also provide information that colonial intermarriage leads to mutual transformations. As an exchange of bodies, colonial marriages illustrate the interweaving of the colonial periphery and the European metropolis. To achieve the above goals, Whiteness and (post)colonial Studies provide theoretical foundations that make my investigation more plausible. Keywords: colonial travel, foreignness, ambivalence, intercultural marriages, reciprocity "

HYBRIDITÉ DES DISCOURS TOURISTIQUE ET RELIGIEUX DANS LA TRILOGIE DE VOYAGE EN TERRE SAINTE DE PIERRE LOTI (1894)

In 1894, Pierre Loti embarked on a journey to the Holy Land. On his return, he published a series of three volumes entitled The Desert, Jerusalem and The Galilee. Although presented as a travelogue, this trilogy is also the narration of a pilgrimage. The paper seeks to validate this hypothesis by analyzing the hybridity of the triptych' discourses, that of tourism and that of spiritual quest.

ON COLONIAL ANTICOLONIALISM

Este artigo versa sobre os debates encetados em resenhas críticas da obra de Pierre Loti acerca dos efeitos de sentido da obra do autor. Partindo da presença do discurso colonial que impregna a obra de Loti, promovemos um diálogo com as possibilidades interpretativas elaboradas pelos estudos aqui citados, atentando para as dinâmicas histórico-políticas de dominação epistemológica eurocentrada na intenção de promover a criação metodologias analíticas voltadas à elaboração de contrapedagogias da dominação epistêmica no âmbito da crítica e da análise literárias.

Reading Turcophilia: The Turkish Life of Pierre Loti in Aziyadé and Fantôme d’Orient

Aziyadé (1879) and Fantôme d’Orient (1891), an autobiographical debut novel and a travel narrative by Pierre Loti, are key texts in French exoticist literature. Set in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of its disintegration, Loti’s debut novel illustrates a young man’s discovery of life à la turque through an account of his stay in Istanbul and his liaison with Aziyadé, a young married Turkish woman from a harem. The affair ended with his departure, but Loti’s fondness for Istanbul remained. He returned to the city ten years later, as a best-selling literary writer and a member of the Academie Française, to seek the traces of his past. Fantôme d’Orient is the account of his three-day stay in search of his Turkish life and a self-reflexive meditation on memory, loss, death, and distance. Loti’s Turkish persona and profound attachment to the country raise questions on affect and affinity, or on what it means to write as a Turcophile. Taking its cue from the links among exoticism, imperialism and travel writing, this paper illustrates the personal, the political, and the poetic implications of Loti’s assumed Turkish identity. Focusing on affect and rhetoric, it seeks to answer how affinity shapes discourses conditioned by power and empire, highlighting its poetic potential and political sensibilities.

FASCINATION WITH THE MODERNIZATION OF JAPAN – REACTIONS OF THE WEST-EUROPEAN PART OF THE SILK ROAD TROUGH THE PRISM OF REVERSIBLE EXOTISME

The interruption of Japan's foreign relations, which has lasted since the beginning of the 7th century, was interrupted by the signing of the treaty of Kanagawa and the seizure of power by the emperor Mutsuhito, who called his reign the Meiji period, or „Enlightened rule.” It was during this period that the foundations for modernization of today's sophisticated Japan were laid. Japan begins to open up to the world, but it retains its independence, combining tradition and modernism in all segments. The journey and the exchange of ideas that have inspired many literary works, not only by the French writer Pierre Loti, on whose work this paper is partially based, then artistic ideas and artefacts, aim to explore the author of this paper, which focuses on the presentation of elements of Japanese art and culture at the Exibition Universelle in Paris, 1867.The analytical-comparative method used in this paper shows the remarkable place of Japan in the cross-section that transported silk from the Mediterranean to East Asia, which has become a symbol of the connection between East and West and metaphors for various myths and legends from previous periods, and today the link between western and eastern cultural development models, whose proximity and distance are constantly changing, leaving a strong mark on all societies.

Claiming modernity in Egypt: decadent orientalism and Mayy Ziyādah’s Fleurs de rêve

ABSTRACT In the Western decadent imagination, Egypt has been figured as the site of Orientalist fantasy, a land of sphinxes, pyramids, and mummies having little to do with modernity. For a modern Arab writer in Egypt to write in a decadent mode would be to risk recapitulating Europe’s Orientalizing vision. And yet, for the poet and feminist intellectual Mayy Ziyādah (1886–1941), to write in such a mode is also to assert one’s experience of colonial modernity. In her 1911 volume Fleurs de rêve, written in French, Ziyādah ironically undercuts the Orientalist vision of European writers such as Alphonse de Lamartine, Charles Baudelaire, and Pierre Loti with a picture of the modern female Arab subject as a full participant in the drama of modern consciousness. Ziyādah sets this performance against the backdrop of Cairo, a city freighted with Europe’s belated imperial presence. Ziyādah’s playful and ironic approach to decadence asserts Egypt’s modernity, reterritorializing a decadent sensibility to Cairo and rendering her speaker a subject prone to the tumults of ennui, violent mood swings, and the horrors of living death.

Импрессионизм в романе «Мадам Хризантема» Пьера Лоти

Pierre Loti was a novelist and a marine officer who visited lots of countries. He gained popularity writing about his travels and travel impressions. This article analyses his travel to Nagasaki back in 1885 where he lived for half a year and had a ‘temporary wife’. His novel written during that travel is called “Madame Chrysanthème”. It’s one of his most extravagant and interesting pieces which made the author world-famous. It reflected common interest in the oriental life typical for that time and it predetermined the image of Japan in the European consciousness of the second half of the 19th century. Pierre Loti wrote about his ambition to make the novel as impressionist as possible determining impressionism not as an intellectual but as a decorative phenomenon related mostly to arts and translation of sensory perception. His interpretation of impressionism was expressed in “Madame Chrysanthème”, which is an attempt to describe the world around us, represented not only by the material world but by the author’s sensory perceptions and feelings. To be exact, this is impressionism in fiction. The world is a product of our sensory experience, and the author’s goal is to fix this experience, which is the sum of his observation and impressions. Pierre Loti creates his work where color plays the main role together with sounds and words. They are a sum total of the elements determining the reality in equal amounts. Stylistically “Madame Chrysanthème” is created according to impressionist canons, with lots of epithets, comparisons, metaphors, the author’s neologisms. The novel is written as a diary where separate episodes in chapters are separated from one another by large white empty gaps. The article discusses similarity of impressionism and the Japanese culture. However, a closer look demonstrates considerable differences between the European and the Oriental minds.

The Discourses of Holy War and the Memory of the First Battles of Islam. Al-Andalus, 10th - 13th centuries. Tese de doutoramento em História

Beyond the imposing walls of Theodosius and at the foot of the hill where the famous Pierre Loti cafe sits –a place where you can enjoy one of the best panoramic views of the Golden Horn–, there is one of the most sacred corners of Istanbul: the mosque known as Eyup Sultan. This building, pilgrimage destination and a sacred place chosen by thousands of adorned children who celebrate the rite of circumcision, was ordered by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II to house the tomb where it is believed th...

Erotics of the ruins: longing for the lost antiquity in Pierre Loti’s La Mort de Philae

ABSTRACT Where does the material presence of antiquity in ancient ruins fit in with the perception of the parallel declines of western civilisation and the possibility of an exotic “other”? This article investigates this question in relation to Pierre Loti’s La Mort de Philae (1908). It uses Joshua Billings “erotics” model for Classical reception, highlighting the dialectics of a never-satisfied desire to retrieve the absent from classical ruins. It demonstrates that the attraction of the classical past is heightened by its perceived imminent disappearance. Ruins, as physical traces as well as material absences, epitomise the dialectics of reception and reinterpretation of both Classics and the exotic operated by Loti. In the light of past and imminent decadences, Loti comes to valorise the fragmentary as a potent heritage of the ancient past as its incompleteness enhances its symbolic decadent value, and allows for a creative engagement that subverts the announced “aporia” of exotic travel writing.

The Greatness of Conrad's Victory

The Greatness of Conrad's Victory Jeffrey Meyers (bio) I have read Joseph Conrad's Victory (1915) five times during the last 60 years, have published two essays and two chapters about it, and want to explain why this underrated novel has had such a powerful aesthetic and emotional hold on me. The influential and usually perceptive Albert Guerard—dutifully followed by his student and disciple Thomas Moser—is wide of the mark in his comments on Victory. Emphasizing its weaknesses and ignoring its strengths, Guerard calls the book "one of the worst novels for which high claims have ever been made by critics of standing: an awkward popular romance built around certain imperfectly dramatized reflections on skepticism, withdrawal, isolation." Contra Guerard, I believe that Victory, though partly a romance inspired by The Tempest, is also deepened and enhanced by economic, historical, military and political themes. The novel has fascinating autobiographical revelations about Conrad's father and wife, and important allusions to coal mining, the Swedish warrior-king Charles XII, the Franco-Prussian War, and nationalistic hatreds. Victory has subtly recurrent patterns, intriguing characters, and daring sexual imagery; the poignant Liebestod is highly allusive, psychologically complex, and deeply moving. Victory opposes the idyllic portrayal of romantic love in South Sea islands, which had been stamped upon the western imagination by Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Pierre Loti, and Paul Gauguin. Instead, it compares the tragic fate of a gallant man and young woman in a tropical paradise to Shakespeare's The Tempest and, rather surprisingly, to Conrad's punitive childhood exile in the wastelands of Russia. But Melville's Typee, despite his portrayal of the [End Page 272] dolce far niente life in the Marquesas, also warns about the dangers of violence and death in those distant domains: "Many a petty trader has navigated the Pacific whose course from island to island might be traced by a series of cold-blooded robberies, kidnappings, and murders, the iniquity of which might be considered almost sufficient to send her guilty timbers to the bottom of the sea." Victory is firmly based on reality and on the lawlessness of these colonial outposts. The protagonist Axel Heyst's exile is self-imposed, but his retreat from the world is not safe from predators. He not only loses his money and his friend, but also his lover and his life. Conrad quotes or alludes to Shakespeare's As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. But there are even more allusions to The Tempest than Frederick Karl and other critics have noticed. Miranda-Lena is cast away on a remote desert island inhabited by Prospero-Heyst and Caliban-Pedro. Ariel-Wang, Heyst's "familiar attendant," performs a vanishing act as if he had wings. Heyst hears a "tempest of fiddles" from the ladies' orchestra and repeats, Prospero-like, "I am enchanted with these islands… a magic circle." He also echoes the famous lines from The Tempest, "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on" by observing, "There are more spells than your commonplace magicians ever dreamed of." Heyst's existence on Samburan, a remote, isolated, and primitive place, also recalls Conrad's lonely and hermetic years with his father in Russian exile. After the failure of the Polish revolution and the death of his wife, Apollo Korzeniowski's courage gave way to dejection. In a letter, he wrote a terribly depressing account of his solitary existence with his young son: "Poor child: he does not know what a contemporary playmate is; he looks at the decrepitude of my sadness and who knows if that sight does not make his young heart wrinkled or his awakening soul grizzled." Heyst's father's portrait and possessions, books and ideas, reinforce his spectral presence and emotional influence, his profound mistrust of life, and crippling negation and [End Page 273] despair. Like Conrad's mother, who died in exile of tuberculosis, Lena sacrifices her life for the man she loves. Like the Russians who imprisoned Conrad's revolutionary father, Jones and Ricardo persecute and punish their helpless victim. Conrad begins Victory with a detailed description of the Tropical Belt Coal Company (which resembles the ruined silver...

Meubles: The Ever Mobile Middle Ages

Medieval furnishings preserved in aristocratic estates and ecclesiastical institutions took on new life in the nineteenth century as the turmoil of the French Revolution reactivated their use value, transforming them into collectibles, fuel, or raw materials for new building projects. This essay relies on the taxonomies of reuse proposed by archaeologist Michael Schiffer to evaluate the preservation, recycling, and repurposing of objects such as medieval choir stalls, chests, and beds by conservators, architects, artists, and collectors Alexandre Du Sommerard, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Albert Jacquemart, Victor Hugo, Pierre Loti, and Frédéric Spitzer. These prominent figures' repurposing of antique furniture mirrors nineteenth-century constructions of the medieval period itself.

Du disciple au maître : Victor Segalen et Paul Gauguin

L’idée de cet article vise à présenter une relation particulière entre le peintre et le poète, et à examiner les influences de la vision de Gauguin, que Segalen nomme Maître-du-Jouir, sur la création littéraire de l’écrivain. Les deux Français avaient beaucoup en commun: un sens du mystère, une fascination pour le primitif et l’exotique et un don pour l’ambiguïté. À partir de 1903 jusqu’à sa mort en 1919, la poésie et la prose de Segalen tenteront, à l’instar de l’art de Gauguin, de découvrir l’exotisme à sa manière tout en confrontant de plus en plus les limites du pouvoir d’appréhension de l’artiste occidental. Dans Les Immémoriaux, Segalen adopte un point de vue maori pour commenter la culture occidentale. Le plus grand exploit de l’auteur était de rompre avec l’exotisme colonial d’écrivains voyageurs du XIXe siècle, à titre d’exemple Pierre Loti. Là où ces auteurs ne prétendaient pas renoncer aux valeurs occidentales, voire impériales, tout en décrivant des cultures étrangères, Segalen, imitant son Maître Gauguin, était extrêmement conscient de ses représentations de l’autre de manière particulièrement moderne. Segalen réalise dans son roman ethnographique une sorte de translation d’un art à l’autre qui est, pour lui, une démarche créatrice par elle-même.

The Fall of an Empire, the Birth of a Nation’s Friend: The Turkish Reception of Pierre Loti

The Fall of an Empire, the Birth of a Nation’s Friend: The Turkish Reception of Pierre Loti

On not wanting more: feminist drift in Zeyneb Hanoum’s A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions

ABSTRACTThis essay reads Zeyneb Hanoum’s A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions as a key site where early-twentieth-century feminism, Orientalism, and queer modernism intersect. Zeyneb’s text offers a feminist critique of the western model of temporality in which subjects are compelled always to want more and to work for the future. Drawing on the queer modernist strategies of Pierre Loti, Zeyneb uses the familiar trope of Oriental lassitude to explore an alternative to western time and to Orientalist narrative modes, which inevitably tell stories about women from the harem who internalize this desire to want more. Zeyneb, like Loti’s hero, finds an existence in the “nothing happens” time associated with scenery and incident. But while Loti’s hero morphs into pure desire, Zeyneb retreats into a passive, self-abnegating state of illness in which she radically avoids self-assertion, to the point that much of her autobiographical book is written by her collaborator. As she erases herself, she opens up a homosocial, communal, female world where the self-promotion and future-orientation of the west become irrelevant. Grounded in the idea of the silent harem, she imagines a static world in which desire itself is replaced by sympathetic, feminist understanding.

À la rencontre des Égyptiens contemporains dans les récits de voyage en français au tournant du siècle (1890-1914) : De l’Orient rêvé à l’Orient politique

If from the 19th century onwards, the travel genre was characterised by the expression of the narrator's subjectivity, the present article examines the way in which certain travellers of the following century, such as Maurice Barrès, Édouard Schuré and Pierre Loti, were able to shift their focus and meet the Egyptians beyond Genre Painting. Without seeking any kind of poetic renewal, these authors seek to achieve a discourse with a generalizing scope. By freeing themselves from the account and emphasising the development of a modern East, they moved away from the travel genre and moved towards to a literature of ideas.