The City at Three P.M.

by LaSalle, Peter;

  “You will see it,” he tells me vacantly, perhaps trying to picture it himself. “Just look out the window, down the street of the village that leads to the sea. The house isn’t there, but you will see where it was. Right at the end of the street. You know, why don’t you stop there, visit it for me.”

  From across the table he looks right at me. I can tell that this is something very important to him.

  And I pronounce, cavalierly, decidedly Gallic style: “I certainly will!”

  Finally, the next afternoon, I get out of the Air France jet in the bone-dry, ninety-degree June glare of Tunis. After booking into what seems a businessman’s hotel called the Omrane, I later walk around some in the fine, white city, its wide main Avenue Bourguiba lined with box-cut trees and alive with sidewalk cafés, the melody-meandering Arab pop music playing everywhere. I feel the relief—even the sweet rush—of arrival that comes after you have spent altogether too much time jumping ahead of yourself and thinking about an upcoming trip, planning it, instead of just letting it happen—letting the first sights simply rise like some stum-bled-upon dreamscape you always suspected was there but never were convinced would actually materialize, to dazzle you with the dreamlike texture that all travel, especially travel alone, certainly is. In a cubbyhole restaurant on Rue du Caire that evening, I eat what might be described as, well, “the best fucking couscous of my life” (the tomato sauce of it tangy, and the big bowl of semolina containing not only the usual carrots and potatoes and chickpeas of a Paris couscous, but good green peppers and yellow squash piled high, too, the chunk of gamy lamb topping it tender). There, the few guys in slacks and open-collared casual shirts eating are seated at the rows of tables so they are all facing the small TV hung high up, watching the news. The news includes some clips of U.S. soldiers in dun camouflage fatigues and with automatic weapons ducking around the side streets of occupied Baghdad, looking confused, even outright scared; the sniper attacks and bombings of this the summer of 2003 have already begun. Tired from having gotten up not long past dawn to make sure I was out at CDG in time for my flight despite a near-total public-transit strike in Paris, I go back to the hotel, stretch out still dressed on the made bed, and read through the introduction to my Penguin Classics edition of Salammbô; it is a commentary I haven’t looked at yet, written by the translator, the aforementioned A.J. Krailsheimer.

  Tunis has a trolley system. Even this late at night, the empty kelly-green trams with their buttery lit windows pass slowly by in the empty street right below my window, rumbling, and the overhead electric connections flash blue light in the darkness, which is nice. The stark modern room has white walls, and it smells of sandalwood furniture polish for the heavy dark-wood fare, an aroma that’s somehow really nice, too, spicy. I suppose I already wish I was going to have more than two weeks in Tunisia—the place feels that right.

  Also, I suppose I have no idea then that there’s eventually going to be a real bonus on this trip, and in a way it will grow out of my preliminary brushes with sadness before coming to Tunis; it will be one of those Big Realizations (keep both caps) that don’t come along very often, for boneheaded me, anyway.

  Krailsheimer begins his introduction by flatly stating that “nobody but Flaubert” could have written Salammbô, which is true, of course, then he devotes the several following pages to basically defending, at the expense of celebrating, the book. To be frank, that’s often the tenor of even much of the appreciative criticism I’ve seen on it, the curse it has been saddled with in what passes for literary history.

  5. Salammbô and Its Controversy

  In 1857, right after his popular success with Madame Bovary— success helped no small amount by the novel being cause for a famous court trial charging obscenity and suggesting anti-clericalism—Flaubert started making plans for a novel about ancient Carthage. By his own count, he had already read a hundred books on its almost mythical civilization.

  He had long been fascinated with what for many Europeans at the time were the intriguing lands of the East, though work on the novel wasn’t coming to life for him. Flaubert hit a hard wall when he realized that he had no chance of writing about a place he hadn’t seen firsthand, even if he had considerable experience elsewhere in that part of the world from travel when younger. To borrow Steegmuller’s translation of a letter from Flaubert to a friend:

  I absolutely must make a trip to Africa.... Once again I’ll live on horseback and sleep in a tent.... But this trip will be a short one. I need to go only to El Kef (thirty leagues from Tunis), and explore the environs of Carthage within a radius of twenty leagues, in order to acquaint myself thoroughly with the landscapes I’ll be describing…I’m a third of the way through the second chapter. The book will have fifteen. As you see, I’ve barely begun. Under the best circumstances, I’ll not be finished for two years.

  He was right on one count: the eventual product did contain fifteen chapters, but deciding after he went to Carthage that he previously had too much all wrong (“everything I have done on my novel has to be done over”) and with the Flaubertian obsession of elevating prose itself to something close to sacred, the creation of it a visionary, semi-religious experience (or, to put it another way, just saying “le mot juste” doesn’t do justice to the full transcendent rhapsody of the process), Salammbô was five years—long and wearying—in the making. It was published in 1862, when he was forty-one.

  The novel is based on a revolt of unpaid mercenaries in the Carthaginian army during the Punic Wars, when Carthage—originally founded by the Phoenicians who set out from the area of Syria/Lebanon—fought Rome for dominance of the Mediterranean. Often labeled the Mercenaries War (241-238 BC), the conflict, historians say, called into question the very premise of Carthage’s military power, which had always combined a crack navy with well-paid mercenary soldiers, all skillful professionals, recruited from throughout the ancient world. It was this formula that did later allow Hannibal (247-183 BC) to set out by sea and then parade his fabled elephants—the equivalent of today’s state-of-the-art combat tanks—across the snowy Alps and nearly bring Rome to heel, before Rome finally triumphed, invading and brutally conquering Carthage. The Romans burned the city to the ground in 146 BC; they built their own city on top of the charred ruins, sticking to the original name of Carthage (in Phoenician, “New City”), for what was to become the second most important metropolis in their own vast empire, before the Vandals invaded after that and then the Arabs from the East coming in after them. Against the backdrop of the revolt, Flaubert’s novel centers on a star-crossed love between one of the triumvirate of leaders of the mercenary troops, a rugged yet sensitive young Numidian named Mâtho, who himself probably should have been a lyric poet and not any military commander, and Salammbô. She is the daughter of the top Carthaginian general, a ravishingly beautiful but hauntingly strange young woman; sometimes very cold in her ways, she was raised by priests of the Punic goddess Tanit. The novel’s battle scenes are graphic, and there is also detailed depiction of the Punic practice of sacrifice of children to the gods. The novel’s characterization is mostly a matter of voices speaking directly, often gushingly, from the heart in set speeches rather than in any realistic way, maybe as in an opera (Maupassant described Salammbô as exactly that in a published appreciation of the book, with Flaubert being his beloved mentor and a fellow Norman). What Krailsheimer poses—that nobody but Flaubert could have written it—is largely due to the characteristic richly handsome prose, pure Flaubertian. However, on just about every other count the book has been considered a questionable offering, even seen as “un-Flaubertian” (odder than his apprentice-work novel La Tentation de Saint Antoine, with one article I read bluntly labeling Salammbô as “Flaubert’s mistake”), and the situation has been that way ever since F. first read chapters of it in manuscript to literary friends, including the Goncourt brothers; apparently, they tried to gently convince Flaubert (this is just what a writer needs from buddies when you show them something you wrote
that you’re personally crazy about) that he would be wise to put it in the drawer and not pursue its publication.

  But it was published. And it did sell well—as said, Madame Bovary had already established Flaubert’s name in the marketplace—though most critics at first bombed it for alleged historical inaccuracies. The tastemaker of the day Sainte-Beuve attacked it in no less than a lengthy, three-installment essay; an admirer of Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert labored to answer the criticism in a series of long and defensive letters of his own. Sainte-Beuve even questioned the essential subject, wanted to know “Why Carthage?”—a civilization that had left few traces and whose everyday customs and lifestyle were virtually unknown, a comparatively blank ledger to the modern world; if ancient history were to be examined, Sainte-Beuve argued, wouldn’t glorious Greece or glorious Rome have been a better choice? Further, Sainte-Beuve asked why write of what he saw as a footnote even in Carthage’s history, the incident of a mercenary revolt, therefore making the novel’s subject still more marginal?

  And the criticism segued right into the twentieth century, with Marxist critic Georg Luckács seeing it as mere bourgeois indulgence in pretty words and romantic clichés fit for the tastes of “shop girls.” And then the late Edward Said entering the discussion in his book-length 1979 study Orientalism. He holds up Salammbô as contributing to the tendency—which he argues got full venting in the nineteenth century—of Europeans viewing the Orient as a territory of The Other (the “Orient” at the time was often considered the Middle East and Islamic environs), a place savagely irrational, sorely in need of colonizing Europeans’ organization and moral refinement. Such a perception of the region, Said emphasizes, remains strong today and has become a tool for Western political power and hegemony (the latter, like “gaze,” recently another one of those “in” words for scholars, I guess); he says it fuels more of the condescending ethnocentric stereotyping by the West of people living in that part of the globe, specifically the Muslim inhabitants, as very inferior, an outlook tracing clear back to the Crusades.

  Which does make sense. And did you notice how in the build-up to the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein was continually shown in evening TV news reports with stock footage of him wearing an oversize gangster’s fedora and brandishing an automatic rifle on the dais, or unsheathing and wildly waving around a huge ceremonial saber? And, you know, I always greatly admired Edward Said, and I would say that my own politics remain close to his; plus, reading him, I certainly always appreciate his graceful and balanced critical prose itself. But his fundamental thesis in Orientalism veers toward the simplistic, and when I came upon what he says about Salammbô before making this trip, I got the feeling that as fair as he tries to be in treating Flaubert (who doesn’t get raked over the glowing accusatory coals to the same degree as a noisy Christian traveler like Chateaubriand, also some lesser-known early journalists he criticizes; Flaubert and the very dreamy—and oh-so-eerie—Gérard de Nerval are given gentler critical treatment by Said when he addresses their writing about the so-called Orient), yes, as fair as he attempts to be with Flaubert, Said—not to put too fine a point on it—is wrong in even implying that one might take this sort of critical approach concerning Salammbô.

  Or possibly, as with so much political literary criticism lately that repeatedly assaults “canonized” literature, Said just “doesn’t get it.” And while considering myself pretty much as respectfully PC in everyday life as the next person, I also know when to abandon the simple, though often admirably idealistic, logic of that tack. I know that when it comes to Art, the ground rules change, have nothing whatsoever to do with political agenda, really. And most anybody who has written creative fare himself or herself and therefore experienced the singular feeling of hitting on something uncannily transcendent when you are sitting before the glowing computer screen, let’s say, pecking away at the black keyboard of your overpriced Mac PowerBook G4, let’s also say, he or she definitely knows that to be the case. Indeed, it means to actually produce on the page, while writing, a fine turn of phrase in a line of poetry or a smooth meshing of events for a twist of drama in a novel that goes beyond reason, as you sense the icy, satisfyingly clear transport of the metaphysical and the whispering of the larger wonder of the world, which you hope you can let a reader—rich or poor, established or disenfranchised—savor for a minute or two, if only to know the full capacity of one’s imagination and the extraordinary human beings we all are (kind of a William James moment, a variety of religious experience, no doubt, for both the writer and eventually the reader). Up against the strong effect of such artistic magic, argument via practical deductive reasoning and whatever else helps to render so many matters for literary scholars lately PC or not PC sours like coffee cream left in the faculty-lounge refrigerator too long, with, worse, most of the opaque high-tech linguistic “theory” that has earned many a party promotion and tenure in literature (perpetrated by talents surely less gifted than socially concerned, elegantly expressive Said) itself taking on the look of but the diversion of a bunch of giggly adolescents goofing around in the local video arcade.

  Which again means that it often seems there’s little important—to employ that earlier adjective—coming from those academics, but there is—to try to salvage a point made in the midst of the gusting wind of the last paragraph—much important coming from a book like Salammbô.

  Which could be the real and more significant controversy about the novel—argument on just how it does, in fact, manage to wield such inexplicable power.

  6. Hey, Here’s an Idea

  I won’t go as far as Saul Bellow once did in proposing the abolishment of all departments at colleges and universities devoted to study of modern literature. Bellow said that a better tack might be to just let people read the books on their own, remove the meddling middleman who has been undermining the original reader-author love affair altogether too much lately. But here’s what I do say: What if every literature professor were forced to try his or her hand at attempting to write a few short stories or a sheaf of poems?

  I mean, there was a time when a lot of scholars had tried this somewhere along the way—future lit profs once wide-eyed undergrads often daydreaming of becoming writers themselves, yet eventually putting that aside and dedicatedly going on to lecture and write about literature—a time when professors unabashedly loved the books they taught and when they understood the specialness of them better, possibly because they had tried some writing themselves. I suppose that today most undergrads with any creative inclination usually go into the many graduate M.F.A. programs currently available, and, I hate to say it, those who aspire to be academics simply proceed directly to a Ph.D. program, without much artistic sidetracking, for what is a practical, very divergent route and with a completely different relationship to the literature they should be in awe of. (I remember once seeing a young literature professor at my own university coming out of the chairman’s office; the chairman had just given her the good news that her promotion with tenure was approved by the university, and she was announcing gleefully and flauntingly—also add some nerdy nasal intonation—to anybody she ran into plodding along the green linoleum of the department’s building: “I’ll never have to read a primary text again!”) You know, attempting to produce some fiction or poetry, the scholar might experience a measure of what I have been talking about, learn firsthand the essence of the unique creative rush if only in a stolen glimpse of it, and, with that happening, suddenly Art and aesthetics might be in vogue again in English departments. Years ago Harold Bloom, an indisputably major modern-day scholar and critic, wrote an awful novel that came my way for review, a virtually unreadable performance, but I’ve often thought that the fact he attempted to produce literature himself gave the man something extra, an insight, that maybe has afforded him the decidedly rare edge he has—as lovably cranky as he can be—over so many more predictable contemporary literary observers.

  I know, I’m really wandering, but it all will eventually figure i
n. Because I am thinking about this kind of stuff during my time in Tunisia, as I think more and more about the story of Flaubert and Salammbô. Despite the amount of controversy, the novel did emerge somewhat triumphant, principally in France. It became for many a revered Secret Text, you might say; the lush diction and visionary power of it, even the psychological complexity of its doomed central love affair, definitely and revealingly Sadeian in a way, had a great influence on the French Parnassians and Symbolists. In their own defining contrariness, they went against the grain, adopted it as a manifesto. Painters also took it to heart, the nineteenth-century Symbolist master Gustave Moreau most prominent among them. Actually, on this current Salammbô mission, I’d made it a point while in Paris to seek out Moreau’s spacious studio, which has long been maintained as a museum for his work. It’s up in the staidly gray Seventeenth Arrondissement and chock full of his billboard-sized visions of classical and Biblical scenes in wild, ultra-radiant color that go beyond the simple hallucinatory, almost qualifying as bona fide psychedelic. Gustave Moreau—now there was one guy who obviously did “get it.”

  7. Plasticize Your Documents

  I’m at the top of the wide main boulevard, Avenue Bourguiba, at twilight.

  This is right before the ancient gateway arch built by the first Arabs here, which announces the entry to the old city and the Medina (near this very arch, supposedly, Cervantes once fought the “infidel”). I notice on the sidewalk a tiny key-making kiosk with an old, rather Jules Verne-ish red-metal contraption outside, coin-operated, in which you can laminate identity cards or the like. A sign says in French that your documents are important, their good condition, and you should protect them, plasticize them. I know that in a country like this such carried documents are very important, the police regularly asking to see one’s papers, yet it also strikes me right then and there as almost a metaphor for what Flaubert was trying to do with his constant mad note-taking while in Tunisia that he writes of in his letters—Flaubert attempting to preserve everything, beat time, so he could preserve it even better than that, really plasticize it, when he eventually did sit down for the five long years of surely mot juste-ing in rainy Normandy. I ask myself if all art isn’t just that, what the sign advertises: