Pierre Loti Research Articles

The Homoerotics of Orientalism

The Homoerotics of Orientalism

변화하는 서양의 남성성이 바라본 세기말의 동아시아: 피에르 로티의 <건자두부인>을 중심으로

변화하는 서양의 남성성이 바라본 세기말의 동아시아: 피에르 로티의 <건자두부인>을 중심으로

Literatura, ciudad e imaginarios urbanos : el País Vasco y la literatura francesa

El presente trabajo analiza la evolución de la representación literaria del País Vasco, comparando la imagen que Pierre Loti construyó a finales del siglo XIX con la imagen del País Vasco que aparece en obras literarias del siglo XXI, en particular en las novelas de Jean Echenoz y Marie Darrieussecq. Se trata de ver cuál es el lugar y la función del País Vasco en el imaginario de escrito es franceses contemporáneos, un imaginario muy vinculado a la ciudad y a la realidad urbana, y confrontar ese imaginario con las principales herencias imaginarias del País Vasco.

Boris Pilniak and Sergei Tretiakov as Soviet Envoys to China and Japan and Forgers of New, Post-Imperial Narratives (1924–1926)

Author(s): Clark, Katerina | Abstract: During the 1920s, Soviet cultural authorities sought to develop a new, post-imperialist literature that would acknowledge a “new East” and supersede the enchanted exoticism of writers like Pierre Loti. They also sought to establish in the countries of the Far East institutional and individual cultural links that might attract leading writers there to the cause of communist internationalism. With these goals in mind, they sent to East Asia two prominent writers, first Sergei Tretiakov, who spent eighteen months in 1924 and 1925 as a professor of Russian literature at Peking University and correspondent for Pravda, and then Boris Pilniak, who traveled to China, Japan, and Mongolia in 1926 (and returned to Japan for a visit in 1932). This article discusses these writers’ visits and some of the literary works they generated in response to their encounters with East Asia in order to address the general question of whether communist internationalist culture was generated vertically (by instructions, efforts, and institutions set up by “Moscow” and the Comintern) or forged horizontally (by personal links and as a result of individual agency). As a case study in how the two writers attempted to present a more authentic account of the East, the article discusses the contrasting ways they represented the Chinese revolutionary. Keywords: communist internationalism, Comintern, First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, Russian literature, Sergei Tretiakov, Boris Pilniak, Russia-East Asia relations

Ecocriticism avant la lettre: human–animal encounters in colonial travelogues by Gautier, Fromentin, Lorrain, Loti and Maupassant

ABSTRACTEcocritical human–animal encounters, animal semiotics and literary depictions of human–animal relations in French colonial accounts of travel to Algeria and Morocco in the nineteenth century are the focus of this essay. Authors studied include Guy de Maupassant (Au Soleil), Eugène Fromentin (Une année dans le Sahel), Théophile Gautier (Loin de Paris), Jean Lorrain (Heures d’Afrique) and Pierre Loti (Au Maroc). Human–animal encounters decisively shape the travellers’ perception and understanding of the people and culture they encounter. They are a synecdoche for the French colonisers’ encounter with North Africa, its people, nature and customs. Highlighting their conquering mind-set, the travellers feel the need to write in great detail about these encounters which must be textualisés [inscribed], rationalised and thus safely “contained” in order to be intellectually possessed by the travellers. To date, ecocritical scholarship has neglected Orientalist travel writings, which were stigmatised for perpetuating imperialist discourse and serving the imperialist colonial project.

Does Love Know No Borders? Culture-Crossed Lovers in Les amants désunis and Les nuits de Strasbourg

Cross-cultural love has been a contested site of encounter in literature since the colonial period and has met with prejudice and contestation of various forms, both in colonial and postcolonial societies. Despite an uneasy acceptance of love, or even its categorical rejection, the couple is a recurring archetype in the literature produced by writers of both European nations and of those places colonised by Europeans. The stakes involved cut across questions of race, purity and hybridity, as well as nationhood, and bear the historical imprint of the pseudo-scientific understandings of racial hierarchies and miscegenation, especially in the latter's meaning of the mixing of different races through procreation. Even though uncomfortable precursors such as Pierre Loti's Le Mariage de Loti or Andre Gide's L'Immoraliste have staged colonialist figurings of mixed-race couples, a good number of contemporary Francophone writers have penned novels centring on love in both their autobiographies and novels. Through a reading of two novels by Algerians writing in French, this article will trace some of the reasons why love is such an obsessive, recurring archetype and why it should appear in contemporary francophone texts as a site of cultural and political tensions. Both novels present couples struggling to love each other against the backdrop or in the wake of war: the lovers of Assia Djebar's Les nuits de Strasbourg live with the consequences of World War 2 and the Algerian War of Independence, and Anouar Benmalek's Les amants desunis are separated first during the War of Independence and then during the Algerian civil conflict of the 1990s.Cross-cultural love in the colonial imaginaryI use the term cross-cultural in this article so as to account for the many factors that may complicate a loving relationship across cultures, including ethnic differences as well as differences in political and social power, language, religion, family organisation and the status of women. This should not be understood, however, as a desire to downplay the significance of the concept of or colour in social reactions to relationships, since the notion of different human races was vital to justifying and maintaining power over colonised peoples during the period of the second French Colonial Empire (1830-1962). Jocelyne Streiff-Fenart, in her essay on metissage in Franco-Algerian relations, highlights precisely this point when she states that colonial societies used skin colour as an organising principle: souvent bien sur, le propre de la societe coloniale etant de s'organiser en fonction de la couleur, c'est la categorie de race qui sert a organiser, a legiferer, a phantasmer les unions mixtes.1The prejudice and condemnation that bi-racial relationships have engendered are most evident in cases where legal jurisdictions outlaw such mixing. Thirty-eight states in the United States, for example, had introduced laws against interracial marriages by the 1930s, and such unions continued to be outlawed by thirteen states until 1967.2 In the French encounter with its colonial peoples, despite an historical colour-blindness - in other words, the political effort to disqualify race as a category on which to claim rights or to interact with the state3 - miscegenation and the children that issued from such unions were sources of moral outrage and attempts to control sexual behaviour through judicial processes. Under Louis XV, for example, an edict of 1731 forbade interracial marriage in order to avoid staining the white race.4 This rejection of racial mixing, which was based on a political and pseudo-scientific - as well as an emotional - fear of the degeneration of the white through the existence of mixed-race children, was strongly voiced in France in the writings of Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who claimed in 1887 that miscegenation within France was resulting in degeneration and depopulation. …

The “Franco-Russian Marseillaise”: International Exchange and the Making of Antiliberal Politics in Fin de Siècle France

The “Franco-Russian Marseillaise”: International Exchange and the Making of Antiliberal Politics in Fin de Siècle France

Distressed micropsia: size distortion and psychological disturbance in Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks and in subsequent travel writing on Japan, 1880–1900

ABSTRACTThe travel books of Isabella Bird are noted for their accuracy and for their close attention to detail, measurements and statistics. In general, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) is no exception. However, when describing physical size, Bird vastly exaggerates the smallness of Japan and the Japanese while depicting herself as much larger in comparison – despite being roughly the same size as the average Japanese subject herself. In this article, I argue that Bird’s size distortions can be read as a sign of neurosis, and I demonstrate how subsequent writers such as Pierre Loti and Rudyard Kipling also used distortions in perspective and proportion to signify psychological discomfort. I describe how both Japanese and avant-garde Victorian art used perspective distortion to signal emotional distress, and suggest that art, as well as contemporary psychological theories, may have influenced the way these authors depicted physical size.

The French in Turkish Style: The Turkish Words in Pierre Loti's novel, Aziyade,

The French in Turkish Style: The Turkish Words in Pierre Loti's novel, Aziyade,

A study on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “Ball” -related “Ball of Edo” of Pierre Loti-

A study on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “Ball” -related “Ball of Edo” of Pierre Loti-

The Representation of the African American as Colonial Oppressed in Texts of the Soviet Interwar Years

The article provides an overview of the representation of the African American in Soviet publications, looking both at works by Soviet writers and at works by African Americans. It discusses an evolution in the representation of both Africans and African Americans in published texts from prerevolutionary exoticist conventions, as in Pierre Loti, or emphasis on their spirituality, as in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, to emphasizing their debased position and the class nature of their oppression. The article discusses the impact of developments in Soviet policies and ideology on this evolution, such as the “Black Belt” doctrine of the Comintern, and traces their impact in works by Claude McKay and Richard Wright, and also in the travelogues of Soviet visitors to the United States, such as Boris Pil'niak, and Il'ia Il'f and Evgeny Petrov.

Living on in Translation: Fin de siècle Operatic Adaptations of Pierre Loti's Le Mariage de Loti

This article focuses on two operatic adaptations of Pierre Loti's Le Mariage de Loti: Léo Delibes' Lakmé (1883) and Reynaldo Hahn's L'Île du rêve (1898). It will analyse these operas as translations that initiate afterlives for the original text by transforming and adapting it in new contexts of production and reception. These translations will also be considered as afterlives of Polynesian culture as it is represented in Loti's text. The article will look at the shifts, or changes, enacted upon the original text by the translator, as well as the extent to which the translations adhere to or shift away from exoticist norms. It will argue that Lakmé reinforces such norms, while also at times enacting shifts which call them into question. L'Île du rêve offers a close translation of Le Mariage that only deviates from the original in order to reinstate the exoticist norms that Loti attempted to challenge.

Richard M. Berrong, Putting Monet and Rembrandt into words. Pierre Loti’s Recreation and Theorization of Claude Monet’s Impressionism and Rembrandt’s Landscape in Literature

Negli ultimi tempi la questione del cosiddetto «impressionnisme litteraire» ha suscitato un rinnovato interesse dimostrato dalla pubblicazione di svariati contributi scientifici a cui viene ad aggiungersi questo recente volume dedicato, nello specifico, alla relazione tra la scrittura di Pierre Loti e la pittura. Ponendosi sulla scia di una critica anglosassone che pone l’accento sulle implicazioni filosofiche per la definizione di uno stile impressionista (l’espressione come risultato di un ...

1918, The Forbidden City Opened to All ― Chinese Imperial Palace in Western Eyes, from Marco Polo to Pierre Loti

1918, The Forbidden City Opened to All ― Chinese Imperial Palace in Western Eyes, from Marco Polo to Pierre Loti

Avant-Garde in the South Seas: Akamatsu Toshiko's Micronesia Sketches

Convergence 1 Portfolio Curated by Charlotte Eubanks Avant-Garde in the South Seas: Akamatsu Toshiko’s Micronesia Sketches In fall 1939, the young artist Akamatsu Toshiko (1912–2000) could not have been happier. Though surviving more or less hand-to-mouth by selling caricatures of pleasure seekers at Tokyo’s Ueno Park, she was living the life of a free artist, having successfully escaped the stifling role of priest’s daughter in the small-town frontier of desolate northern Japan for formal training in the Western arts of oil painting and dessin (understood in Japan as a style of quick sketching from life). And she was in love. In October 1939, Akamatsu went to the movies with her lover avantgarde painter Yamamoto Naotake (1907–?) to see the documentary film Yap. She recalls, “Lustrous men and women in straw skirts dancing. Coconut palms in fruit, banana leaves rustling in the breeze. Before we knew it, we both sighed, ‘Ah! I’d love to go!’” (Maruki 2013, 84). Two months later, when Yamamoto jilted her for another woman, that is exactly what Akamatsu did. She sold her art, packed her bags, and bought a one-way steerage-class ticket on a boat departing Yokohama on January 19, 1940, bound for the island of Palau, which was the diplomatic and military hub of Japan’s imperial infrastructure in the southern Pacific, headed by the South Seas Bureau (Nan’yōchō) in Koror. While traveling south, she began keeping a sketchbook, opening with a detailed study of the deck (Figure 1). Versed in popular maritime literature, both from domestic production and via translations of works by Herman Melville and others, Akamatsu is attentive to the tools of maritime life, while also indulging in romantic fantasy. “Like Gauguin who died in Tahiti,” she writes, “I wanted to continue doing my art in the South Seas, I wanted to die in the southern islands. . . . The whistle sounded and I held the bouquet to my chest. ‘Farewell, farewell.’ The boat pulled out of the harbor 2 Portfolio and I waved my hands until they hurt” (Maruki 2013, 85–86). Modeling herself on the likes of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), Pierre Loti (1850–1923), and Herman Melville (1819–91), Akamatsu turned a gaze at once colonial and romantic toward the redemptive landscapes and open horizons of the southern ocean. During her five months in Micronesia, Akamatsu completed 186 dessin , in addition to the dozen or so sketches that illustrate her journal. The dessin was a powerful visual medium in twentieth-century Japan, and Akamatsu was one of its masters. At mid-century, the dessin artist employed a simple tool (pen, pencil, or charcoal usually) to render a line drawing on paper. The sketch was meant to capture not only the visible, physical details of a scene but also movement, emotion, and the dynamics of light and shade. Writing in 1947, sketch artist Kawashima Ri’ichirō describes the practice of dessin as follows: “If you want to sketch something , it’s not a matter of capturing the surface form of the object made available by the reflection of light. Say it’s a chestnut; if you just reproduce the surface of the chestnut, that’s not art. Cezanne, in drawing his Figure 1. Akamatsu Toshiko, untitled. Pencil on paper, 26.0 × 19.0 cm. Akamatsu’s handwritten date of 1939.1.19 is incorrect. Private collection. Reproduced by permission of Yugen Gaisha Ruru Joji Maruki and with the assistance of the Maruki Gallery. Portfolio 3 chestnuts, got under the shell to the kernel of the chestnut’s life force. That’s what you have to do, if you want to sketch properly” (Kawashima 1947, 3). Like many artists active in the early to mid-twentieth century in Japan, Kawashima supported himself, at least in part, by publishing journalistic accounts of, and dessin sketches from, his travels. Indeed, like Akamatsu, Kawashima was active in surveying Japan’s newly acquired territories, as in his 1940 account of travels in China. In terms of subject matter, dessin tends toward figures of women and natural landscapes, often conflating the two (woman-as-landscape). For newspapers and publishing companies...

Getting Loti's Drift

Perhaps more than any other novel, Aziyade (1879), Pierre Loti's hyperromanticized tale of an English officer's clandestine love affair with beautiful Turkish woman, holds pride of place among Orientalist literary fantasies of penetrating the harem and achieving forbidden bliss. At the same time, ever since its publication, Aziyade has provided fodder for detractors intent on calling its heterosexual love story-along with the author's sexuality-into question. Such innuendos reach from the conjecture of Loti's contemporary, Edmond de Goncourt, that Loti's love, in his first book, was monsieur, to Roland Barthes's hyperbolic praise of the novel, century after its publication, as a minor Sodomite epic.1 I suspect few contemporary readers miss the vague, yet persistent, undertow of homoerotic desire and homophobic anxiety that drifts in and out of the impressionistic fragments comprising this love story of man and woman, although they may well not know what to make of that undertow, may not even be sure where it exists in the text, in fact may feel they are missing Loti's altogether.Given the ascendance of queer theory, postcolonial critique, and transnational studies in literary and cultural studies, it is curious how little has been written about the bewildering mix of often contradictory homoerotic, colonial, cross-cultural, and Orientalist desires converging in this once wildly popular novel.2 In fact, as this essay demonstrates, critics and theorists interested in the libidinal underbelly of empire making, transnationalism, border crossings, and culturally distinct economies of sexuality have much to gain by attending to Loti's text. It is less surprising that few efforts have been made to place the novel's homoerotic undertow within the context of Ottoman mores that forms its setting, which Loti experienced firsthand as naval officer stationed in Turkey. For only in the last decade has there emerged generation of historians of sexuality whose fluency in Ottoman, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian has enabled them dramatically to reshape our understanding of pre-twentieth-century Middle Eastern sexual cultures. The light that such archives shed on the structure of male homoerotic practices in Ottoman society in particular reveals the degree to which the novel's elliptically conveyed fantasies of homoerotic desire and fear are inevitably shaped and framed by historical reality that makes conspicuous what the text renders indirect and latent.3 In this regard, it is telling that the novel's most blatant, indeed generic, hallmarks of Orientalism-the appropriation and cordoning off of otherness, the evocation of an Orient of desire that transcends time and place, the fetishizing of exoticism-accrue primarily to the heterosexual romance between the novel's narrator and the title female character. In contrast, the narrator's repeated brushes with homoeroticism evoke gritty materiality that cannot be so easily reconfigured as abstraction, metaphor, or allegory. While such moments of homoerotic frisson are not without Orientalizing tendencies, overall these instances undermine and reframe Loti's Orientalism in ways that have implications for range of debates ongoing in transnational and queer theory today.First, I want to tease out the implications of my title's key term for the argument that follows. What does it mean to get Loti's drift or, conversely, to suspect one is missing his altogether? How might this figure of speech serve asa conceptual tool for examining Aziyade's conjunction of perverse sexuality, Orientalizing fantasy, Ottoman context, and impressionistic narrative form? On the most basic level, the very act of asking Do you catch my drift? insinuates that deeper meaning is hidden within the innuendo that suggests but refuses to name its presence. Such teasing obliqueness calls to mind the phenomenon that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the epistemology of the closet, in which knowingness and deniability work together to create the open secret. …

Shakespeare’s sisters in Istanbul: Grace Ellison and the politics of feminist friendship

This article attempts to reconstruct a story of friendship between an English journalist, Grace Ellison, and two Turkish sisters, Zeyneb and Melek Hanoum. The sisters served as Pierre Loti’s models for the main characters of his novel Les Désenchantées. In 1906, they left Istanbul to escape from the oppressive regime of Abdülhamit II and started living in Europe, where they met Ellison. Ellison encouraged them to write, and edited and co-authored their books in English. She pursued Virginia Woolf’s idea of women’s solidarity, working for women whom Woolf might have termed “Shakespeare’s sisters”. Although her friendship with the sisters raises the question of subaltern agency within the discursive domain of orientalism, it cannot be reduced to the binary relationship between orientalism and its silenced Other. Taking the historical context and class background into account, this article argues that what Ellison sought for was an eternally postponed, future friendship between women across cultures, nations and classes.

From Ethnographical Subjects to Archaeological Objects: Pierre Loti on Easter Island (Rapa Nui)

In 1872 French sailor Pierre Loti visited the desolate Pacific island of Rapa Nui . Descriptions in his diary and drawings were published and received great public interest. Here were all the ingredients to satisfy nineteenth century ideas of the exotic: remote, tropical, cannibal inhabited, strange rituals and frenzied dancing, and in addition – the ruins of an ancient and unknown civilisation. But Loti had visited the island almost at the end of its occupation by its indigenous people. The large stone statues had not been erect for some time, even though he recorded them as being so, and its population had been decimated. So Loti’s graphic and written descriptions were embellished for his audience, a fact that is almost as interesting as the real fate of Rapa Nui.

“Dans le passé mort”: Pierre Loti, Images, and Time

Often overlooked as a theorist of photography, Pierre Loti (1850–1923) provided original insights that anticipate those of critics such as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag. Through consideration of three Loti texts—“Dans le passé mort” (1891), the 1893 preface to Charles Lallemand’s Le Caire , and “Photographies d’hier et d’aujourd’hui” (1909)—I show that Loti, who started experimenting with photography as a child, recognized the medium as an art form early on. Photographs, whose analogical nature makes them effective tools to preserve family memory and history, provide him with an alternative to the more fragile, less truthful painted portrait. Finally, as parts of collections, photographs enable Loti to construct a character and to find his place in history.

Traces et restes du Japon, ou le grenier de Pierre Loti

Pierre Loti, travelling in Japan, does not belong to the movement of “Japanophilia” that prevailed in France at that time. On the contrary, he is more often cruel, even racist, than laudatory. This problematic relation can be interpreted differently in the works he devotes to Japan (in his Journal [Ed. Alain Quella-Villéger and Bruno Vercier. Paris: Les Indes savantes (collection “Rivages des Xantons”), 2008], letters, articles, and three novels, among them Madame Chrysanthème [Ed. Bruno Vercier. Paris: GF Flammarion, 1990]), and, in addition to his works as a writer, in considering the numerous objects he brought back from his travels, among them photographs of Uyeno and of the atelier Beato which fill two albums. This collection of various objects has never been examined in relation to these issues raised by his writing. At the intersection of these traces and fragments, between these material relics and the literary genres that Loti handles at leisure, this article proposes to restore the link between objects which, though outside of his literary work, are nonetheless connected to his literary art: for these objects testify to a unity between the past and modernity, to a continuity which for Loti is inconceivable, but which, from the depths of his “grenier,” interrogate his literary work. This article is illustrated with unpublished photographs taken by the author at the Archives du Musée de Rochefort.