Reviewed by: Journal 1879–1886 Richard M. Berrong Loti, Pierre . Journal 1879–1886. Eds. Alain Quella-Villéger and Bruno Vercier. Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2008. Pp. 812. ISBN 978-2-84654-172-5 Coming out two years after the appearance of Volume i, which covered the decade preceding the appearance of Loti's first novel, Aziyadé, this second volume of the first unabridged edition of his diary spans the years during which the author wrote and published most of his famous works: Aziyadé (1879), his tale of an affair between an English naval officer and a Turkish odalisque (and, between the lines, a handsome boatman), which Roland Barthes misread in a careless essay; Le mariage de Loti (1880), the story of that naval officer's affair with a vahiné, one of the things that convinced Gauguin to go to Tahiti; Le Roman d'un spahi (1881), a much less romantic inter-racial affair set in Senegal; Mon Frère Yves (1883), a highly homoerotic story of the relationship between a French naval officer and a Breton sailor to which Genet would allude in Querelle de Brest; and Pêcheur d'Islande (1886), Loti's masterful transfer of painterly Impressionism to literature. Since I explained the state of the diary as it now exists and how it differs from what Loti originally wrote in my review of the first volume (NCFS: 35.3: 682–83), I won't repeat that here. [End Page 334] Instead, let me start by explaining that this part of Loti's diary does not, unlike say that of Edmond de Goncourt, tell us much about the fascinating Parisian literary scene of the time. Loti was an active officer in the French navy from 1873–1910, so while he did spend some time in Paris, he was never a regular in the era's literary salons, which he hated. He came to know Alphonse Daudet rather well, corresponded with him, and through him met Zola and Goncourt, but his mentions of encounters with them are brief and uninformative. Loti very much admired Flaubert, but his rise to fame with Le Mariage de Loti came just after the latter's death so he never got to meet the author of Salammbô, to which he repeatedly refers in both his diary and his works. Nor, sadder to say, does Loti speak much in this part of his diary about the creation of those works. He notes when he started and finished them, but in these pages as we have them now there are no reflections on their composition. We see that he struggled with Pêcheur d'Islande for over a year, evidently doing a great deal of rewriting, but these pages contain no insights into what the issues were. What they do reveal, however, is the development of Loti's preoccupation with recording feelings in a way that would allow him to retrieve them later, as well as amazement at the way involuntary memory could provide him with unexpected access to apparently forgotten moments in his past and the vivid emotions that were part of them, what he referred to as "le passé mort." He was astounded, for example, while visiting India on his way back from a tour of duty in the Far East, to discover that certain things there summoned up long-forgotten moments from his sojourn in Tahiti fourteen years before: "cela m'impressionne et je vois que ces souvenirs de là-bas vivent encore au fond de mon cœur" (681). Since, despite what he had at first assumed, these memories and emotions, so difficult to recover voluntarily, nonetheless still resided in his "dessous mystérieux," and since sights, sounds, and smells revived them involuntarily, Loti, a generation before one of his great admirers, Marcel Proust, became progressively more intrigued with involuntary memory and how to facilitate its operation. Already in 1880 he dreamed of gathering together "dans un volume décousu une foule d'impressions éprouvées jadis dans tous les pays du monde" (168). Soon he was writing to his friend Émile Pouvillon: "ma vie à moi s'use à lutter contre la fragilité des choses, à retenir tout ce qui s'en va...
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Sep 1, 2010
Tristan Plank + 2
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