Eugene Delacroix, Doors and Bay- Windows in an Arab House, 1832
its full social due, his position should always be written in capital letters: NEIGHBOUR.'
It was as a source of relief from the prosperous pettiness and civic-mindedness of his surroundings that Flaubert contemplated the Orient. References to the Middle East pervaded his early writings and correspondence. In ‘Rage et Impuissance', a story written in 1836, when Flaubert was fifteen (he was at school and fantasised about killing the mayor of Rouen), the author projected his Eastern fantasies onto his central character, M. Ohmlin, who longed for ‘the Orient with her burning sun, her blue skies, her golden minarets… her caravans through the sands—the Orient!… The tanned, olive skin of Asiatic women!'
In 1839 (Flaubert was reading Rabelais and wanted to fart loudly enough for all Rouen to hear), he wrote another story, ‘Les Memoires d'un fou', whose autobiographical hero looked back on a youth spent yearning for the Middle East: ‘I dreamt of faraway journeys through the lands of the South; I saw the Orient, her vast sands and her palaces teeming with camels wearing brass bells I saw blue seas, a pure sky, silvery sand and women with tanned skin and fiery eyes who could whisper to me in the language of the Houris.'
Two years later (by which time Flaubert had left Rouen and was studying law in Paris, in deference to his father's wishes), he wrote another story, ‘Novembre', whose hero had no time for railways, bourgeois civilisation or lawyers but instead identified with the traders of the East: ‘Oh! To be riding now on the back of a camel! Ahead a red sky and brown sands, on the burning horizon the undulating landscape stretching out into infinity. … In the evening one puts up one's tent, waters the dromedaries and lights a fire to scare off the jackals that can be heard wailing far off in the desert; in the morning one fills the gourds at the oasis.'
In Flaubert's mind, the word happiness became interchangeable with the word Orient. In a moment of despair over his studies, his lack of romantic success, the expectations of his parents, the weather and the accompanying complaints of farmers (it had been raining for two weeks, and several cows had drowned in flooded fields near Rouen), Flaubert wrote to Chevalier, ‘My life, which in my dreams is so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love, will turn out to be like everyone else's: monotonous, sensible, stupid. I'll attend law school, be admitted to the bar and end up as a respectable assistant district attorney in a small provincial town such as Yvetot or Dieppe. … Poor madman, who dreamt of glory, love, laurels, journeys, the Orient.'
The people who lived along the coasts of North Africa, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestine and Syria might have been surprised to learn that their lands had been grouped by a young Frenchman into a vague synonym for all that was good. ‘Long live the sun, long live orange trees, palm trees, lotus flowers and cool pavilions paved in marble with wood-panelled chambers that talk of love!' he exclaimed. ‘Will I never see necropolises where, towards evening, when the camels have come to rest by their wells, hyenas howl from beneath the mummies of kings?'
As it happened, he would, for when Gustave was twenty-four, his father died unexpectedly, leaving him a fortune that allowed him to sidestep the bourgeois career he had seemed destined for, with its attendant small talk about drowned cattle. He began at once to plan an Egyptian trip, assisted in the task by his friend Maxime Du Camp, a fellow student who shared his passion for the East and combined it with the practical turn of mind that was a necessary requirement for anyone wishing to undertake a journey there.
The two Oriental enthusiasts left Paris at the end of October 1849 and after a stormy sea crossing from Marseilles arrived in Alexandria in the middle of November. ‘When we were two hours out from the coast of Egypt, I went up to the bow with the chief quartermaster and saw the seraglio of Abbas Pasha like a black dome on the blue of the Mediterranean,' Flaubert reported to his mother. ‘The sun was beating down on it. I had my first sight of the Orient through, or rather in, a glowing light that was like melted silver on the sea. Soon the shore became distinguishable; the first thing we saw on land was a pair of camels led by their driver, and then, on the dock, some Arabs peacefully fishing. We landed amidst the most deafening uproar imaginable: Negroes, Negresses, camels, turbans, cudgellings to right and left, and earsplitting guttural cries. I gulped down a whole bellyful of colours, like a donkey filling himself with hay'
3.
In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel in the Jordaan district and after lunch in a café [roggebrood met baring en uitjes) went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert's Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern-day Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar (far more regular than English or North American brickwork, and exposed to view, unlike the bricks on French or German buildings); long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows; bicycles parked outside every house (recalling university towns); street furniture displaying a certain democratic scruffiness; an absence of ostentatious buildings; straight streets interspersed with small parks, suggesting the hand of planners with dreams of a socialist garden city. In one street lined with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. I wanted to stand by the curtainless window at dusk, looking out at the identical apartment opposite, and then snack my way through an erwentsoep metroggebrooden spek before retiring to read in bed in a white room with white sheets.
Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements may seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. There, too, we may find ourselves anchoring emotions of love on the way a person butters his or her bread, or recoiling at his or her taste in shoes. To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be.
My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to a financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness and light.
In the more fugitive, trivial association of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and
Street in Amsterdam
change—from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide.
And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality.
What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
4.
To understand why Flaubert found Egypt exotic, it may hence be useful first to examine his feelings towards France. What would strike him as exotic—that is, both new and valuable—about Egypt was in many ways the obve
rse of what drove him to rage at home. And that was, baldly stated, the beliefs and behaviour of the French bourgeoisie, which since the fall of Napoleon had become the dominant force in society, determining the tenor of the press, politics, manners and public life. For Flaubert, the French bourgeoisie was a repository of the most extreme prudery, snobbery, smugness, racism and pomposity. ‘It's strange how the most banal utterances [of the bourgeoisie] sometimes make me marvel,' he complained in stifled rage. ‘There are gestures, sounds of people's voices, that I cannot get over, silly remarks that almost give me vertigo. … The bourgeois … is for me something unfathomable.' He nevertheless spent thirty years trying to fathom it, most comprehensively in his Dictionary of Received Ideas, a satirical catalogue of the French bourgeoisie's more striking sheeplike prejudices.
The organisation of only a few of these dictionary entries by theme indicates the direction of his complaints against his homeland, the foundation upon which his admiration for Egypt would be built:
A SUSPICION OF ARTISTIC ENDEAVOUR
ABSINTHE—Exceptionally violent poison: one glass and you're a dead man. Journalists drink it while writing their articles. Has killed more soldiers than the Bedouins.
ARCHITECTS—All idiots; always forget to put staircases in houses.
INTOLERANCE FOR AND IGNORANCE OF OTHER COUNTRIES (AND THEIR ANIMALS):
ENGLISHWOMEN—Express surprise that they can have pretty children.
CAMEL—Has two humps, and the dromedary one; or else the camel has one and the dromedary two—nobody can ever remember which.
ELEPHANTS—Noted for their memory and worship of the sun.
FRENCH—The greatest people in the world.
HOTELS—Are first-rate only in Switzerland.
ITALIANS—All musical. All treacherous.
JOHN BULL—When you don't know an Englishman's name, call him John Bull.
KORAN—Book by Mohammed, which is all about women.
BLACKS—Express surprise that their saliva is white and that they can speak French.
BLACK WOMEN—Hotter than white women (see also BRUNETTES and BLONDES).
BLACK—Always followed by ‘as ebony'.
OASIS—An inn in the desert.
HAREM WOMEN—All Oriental women are harem women.
PALM TREE—Lends local colour.
MACHISMO/EARNESTNESS:
FIST—To govern France, an iron fist is needed.
GUN—Always keep one in the countryside.
BEARD—Sign of strength. Too much beard causes baldness. Helps to protect ties. (Flaubert to Louise Colet, August 1846: ‘What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I'm essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous—not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slapstick comedy, but rather in the sense of a ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and most ordinary gestures. For example, I can never shave without starting to laugh; it seems so idiotic. But all of this is very difficult to explain.')
SENTIMENTALITY:
ANIMALS—'If only animals could speak! There are some that are more intelligent than humans.'
COMMUNION—One's First Communion: the greatest day of one's life.
INSPIRATION (POETIC)—Aroused by: the sight of the sea, love, women, etc.
ILLUSIONS—Pretend to have had a great many, and complain that you have lost them all.
FAITH IN PROGRESS/PRIDE IN TECHNOLOGY:
RAILWAYS—Enthuse about them, saying, ‘I, my dear sir, who am speaking to you now, was at X this morning. I took the train to Y, transacted my business there, and by Z o'clock was back here.'
PRETENSION:
BIBLE—Oldest book in the world.
BEDROOM—In an old castle: Henry IV always spent a night in it.
MUSHROOMS—Should be bought only at the market.
CRUSADES—Benefited Venetian trade.
DIDEROT—Always followed by d'Alembert.
MELON—Good topic for dinnertime conversation. Is it a vegetable or a fruit? The English eat it for dessert, which is astonishing.
STROLL—Always take one after dinner; it helps with digestion.
SNAKES—All poisonous.
OLD PEOPLE—When discussing a flood, thunderstorm, etc., they cannot remember ever having seen a worse one.
PRISSINESS/REPRESSED SEXUALITY:
BLONDES—Hotter than brunettes (see also BRUNETTES).
BRUNETTES—Hotter than blondes (see also BLONDES).
SEX—Word to avoid. Say instead, ‘Intimacy occurred …'.
5.
Given all this, it appears to be no coincidence, no mere accident of fashion, that it was specifically the Middle East that Flaubert was interested in. It was temperamentally a logical fit. What he loved in Egypt could be traced back to central facets of his personality. Egypt lent support to ideas and values that were part of his identity but for which his own society had little sympathy.
(i) THE EXOTICISM OF CHAOS
From the day he disembarked in Alexandria, Flaubert noticed and felt at home in the chaos, both visual and auditory, of Egyptian life: boatmen shouting, Nubian porters hawking, merchants bargaining, the sounds of chickens being killed, donkeys being whipped, camels groaning.
In the streets there were, he said, ‘guttural intonations that sound like the cries of wild beasts, and laughter, and flowing white robes, and ivory teeth flashing between thick lips and flat Negro noses, and dusty feet and necklaces and bracelets. ‘It is like being hurled while still asleep into the midst of a Beethoven symphony, with the brasses at their most earsplitting, the basses rumbling, and the flutes sighing away; each detail reaches out to grip you; it pinches you; and the more you concentrate on it, the less you grasp the whole… it is such a bewildering chaos of colours that your poor imagination is dazzled as though by continuous fireworks as you go about staring at minarets thick with white storks, at tired slaves stretched out in the sun on house terraces, at the patterns of sycamore branches against walls, with camel bells ringing in your ears and great herds of black goats bleating in the streets amidst the horses and the donkeys and the peddlers.'
Flaubert's aesthetic was a rich one. He liked purple, gold and turquoise and thus welcomed the colours of Egyptian architecture. In his book The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, first published in 1833 and revised in 1842, the English traveller Edward Lane described the interiors typical of Egyptian merchants' houses:
Bazaar of the Silk Mercers, Cairo, lithograph by Louis Haghe after a drawing by David Roberts
‘There are, besides the windows of lattice-work, others, of coloured glass, representing bunches of flowers, peacocks, and other gay and gaudy objects, or merely fanciful patterns. … On the plastered walls of some apartments are rude paintings of the temple of Mecca, or of the tomb of the Prophet, or of flowers and other objects, executed by native Muslim artists. … Sometimes the walls are beautifully ornamented with Arabic inscriptions of maxims in an embellished style.'
The baroque quality of Egypt extended to the language used by Egyptians in even the most ordinary situations. Flaubert recorded some examples: ‘A while ago when I was looking at seeds in a shop, a woman to whom I had given something said, “Blessings on you, my sweet lord; God grant that you return safe and sound to your native land.”… When [Maxime Du Camp] asked a groom if he wasn't tired, the answer was, “The pleasure of being seen by you suffices.” ‘
Why did the chaos, the richness, so touch Flaubert? Because of his belief that life was fundamentally chaotic and that aside from art, all attempts to create order implied a censorious and prudish denial of our condition. He expressed his feelings to his mistress Louise Colet, in a letter written during a trip to London in September 1851, only a few months after his return from Egypt: ‘We've just come back from a walk in Highgate Cemetery. What a gross corruption of Egyptian and Etruscan architecture it all is! How neat and tidy it is! The people in there seem to have died wearing
white gloves. I hate little gardens around graves, with well-raked flower beds and flowers in bloom. This antithesis has always seemed to me to have come out of a bad novel. When it comes to cemeteries, I like those that are
Engraving from Edward Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1842): Private Houses in Cairo
run-down, ravaged, in ruins, full of thorns or tall weeds, and where a cow escaped from a neighbouring field has come to graze quietly. Admit that this is better than some policeman in uniform! How stupid order is!'
(II) THE EXOTICISM OF SHITTING DONKEYS
‘Yesterday we were at a café that is one of the best in Cairo,' wrote Flaubert a few months after his arrival in the capital, ‘and where there were at the same time as ourselves, inside, a donkey shitting and a gentleman pissing in a corner. No one finds such things odd; no one says anything.' And in Flaubert's eyes, they were right not to. Central to Flaubert's philosophy was the belief that humans were not simply spiritual creatures but also pissing and shitting ones, and that we should integrate the ramifications of this blunt idea into our view of the world. ‘I can't believe that man's body composed as it is of mud and shit and equipped with instincts lower than those of the pig or the crab louse, contains anything pure and immaterial,' he told Ernest Chevalier. Which was not to say that we humans were without any higher dimensions; it was just that the prudery and self-righteousness of the age aroused in Flaubert a desire to remind others of mankind's impurities, occasionally by taking the side of café urinators (or even the Marquis de Sade, advocate of buggery, incest, rape and underage sex: ‘I've just read a biographical article about de Sade by [the famous critic] Janin,' he informed Chevalier, ‘which filled me with revulsion—revulsion against Janin, needless to say, who held forth on behalf of morality, philanthropy, deflowered virgins…').
The Art of Travel Page 5
