From 1879 to 1906 Julian Viaud, at first anonymously and then under the pen name Pierre Loti, published a dozen novels that earned him fame and fortune both at home and abroad. The most successful of them, such as Pêcheur d'Islande (Iceland Fisherman) and Les Désenchantées (The Awakened), went through hundreds of editions in France and were translated into dozens of languages. (1) Viaud was elected to the French Academy, the greatest distinction France confers on a person of letters, at the remarkably early age of 41. Abroad, Henry James described him as a "remarkable genius" and Willa Cather confessed that "she should swoon with joy if anyone saw traces of Loti in her work." (2)
Viaud kept a diary from his teens that he mined for most of these novels, as Proust, one of his great admirers, would do a generation later. Starting in 1891, however, with Au Moroc (Into Morocco), he also began using material from this diary to create travel narratives, again under the name Pierre Loti. Since the central figure in many of the novels and all of the travel accounts is named Pierre or Loti, the generic distinctions between those novels and the travelogues are sketchy at best. (3) They were even further blurred by the titles that were assigned to some of the novels when they were translated into English. Aziyadé was often published in English as Constantinople, Le Mariage de Loti as Tahiti, Le Roman d'un Spahi as The Sahara, and Madame Chrysanthème as Japan. If some of his novels have been viewed as travel narratives, however, it is equally valid to view those travel narratives as art - sometimes, as we shall see, in a very literal sense.
Having traveled to India in 1900, Viaud decided to return via Persia so that he could do some sight-seeing. In Vers Ispahan (To Isfahan), which he wrote up from his diary and published in 1904, Viaud has Loti recount day by day the two and a half months he spent traveling on horseback and later by carriage from Bender-Bouchir on the Persian Gulf north through Shiraz and Isfahan to Tehran and eventually to the Caspian Sea.
Though Viaud met many people along the way, and though, since he himself spoke Turkish and his guides were Persian, he would have been able to communicate with them, Loti tells us virtually nothing about the individuals he encounters, from the peasants and townsfolk to his meeting with the Shah himself. He only tells us what he sees with his own eyes, hears with his own ears (other than conversations), smells with his own nose, and feels with his body.
Of these four senses sight is the most important, and he begins the book with an invitation to his readers that centers on the verb "to see".
Qui veut venir avec moi voir à Ispahan la saison des roses prenne son parti de cheminer lentement à mes côtés, par étapes, ainsi qu'au Moyen Age.
Qui veut venir avec moi voir à Ispahan la saison des roses consente au danger des chevauchées par les sentiers mauvais où les bêtes tombent. . . .
Qui veut venir avec moi voir apparaître, dans sa triste oasis, au milieu de ses champs de pavots blancs et de ses jardins de roses roses, la vieille ville de ruines et de mystère . . .; qui veut venir avec moi voir Ispahan sous le beau ciel de mai se prépare à de longues marches. . . . (Let whoever wants to come with me to see the season of the roses in Isfahan make up his mind to travel slowly at my side, stage by stage, as people did in the Middle Ages.
Let whoever wants to come with me to see the season of the roses in Isfahan agree to the dangers of travel on horseback along bad trails where animals fall. . . .
Let whoever wants to come with me to see the old city of ruins and mystery appear in its sad oasis, in the middle of its fields of white poppies and its gardens of pink roses. . .; let whoever wants to come with me to see Isfahan under the beautiful May sky prepare himself for long hikes. (4))
There is no talk of learning about the people, their history, their customs; no factual, intellectual knowledge. Loti offers strictly a sensory experience, as if he were inviting us on some incredibly arduous tour through a modern museum of art, sound, and smell in which no talking is allowed and there are only the most cursory signs posted next to the exhibits. There is never any background, never any information other than what we would perceive if we were along on the journey ourselves with no knowledge of the language and no way of communicating with the inhabitants, having to rely almost entirely on our senses.
To emphasize the importance of sensory perception as the first means of experiencing this world, Loti refrains from identifying things until we have first encountered them through his senses. Early on, for example, as he is crossing the deserts of southern Persia, Loti describes what he can see from the window of one of his lodgings: "D'un côté, quelque chose de sombre et de gigantesque, quelque chose de brun et de rouge, s'élève si haut qu'il faut mettre la tête dehors et regarder en l'air pour le voir finir: la grande chaîne de l'Iran" (41; On one side, something dark and gigantic, something brown and red, rises up so high that you have to stick your head outside in the fresh air to see the end of it: the great chain of the Iran Mountains). Had Viaud written, instead, "on one side the Iran Mountains rise up," etc., the effect would have been completely different. In most of our cases, since we have no idea what the Iran Mountains look like we would have acquired only a fact-that Loti saw them-and had no sensory image. If we do have an image of them, from a photo or even personal experience, we would have imposed that image, rather than the one that Loti saw as he looked at them from that particular perspective at that particular time. In either case, we would not have felt that we were seeing the mountains with him at that moment. To create such a feeling of participation, throughout the book Loti gives us a sensory impression first so that we all have the same experience and only afterward an identification. We are constantly looking at, hearing, smelling, and feeling things and trying to figure out what they might be, just as if we were crossing Persia with him.
To emphasize the immediacy of this experience, Loti usually keeps to the present tense. He also uses the first person plural rather than the singular when describing what he does, as if we are there experiencing everything with him and he is speaking about both of us. As he starts out across the plains of southern Persia, for example, he remarks: "Nous mettons une heure et demie à traverser péniblement cette plaine, où les pieds de nos bêtes s'enfoncent dans la terre molle et grasse. . . . Les nomades ne cessent de nous entourer, les femmes s'attroupant pour nous voir, les jeunes hommes venant caracoler à nos côtés sur des chevaux qui ont l'air de bêtes sauvages" (69; We have spent an hour and a half crossing this plain with difficulty; the feet of our animals are sinking into the soft, rich earth. . . . The nomads keep surrounding us, the women gathering to see us, the young men coming to caper at our sides on horses that look like wild animals). Rather than tell us what he did, Loti is intent on giving us the impression that we are along on the journey with him, experiencing it ourselves. Half a century before Lowell Thomas, 3-D movies, smellorama, or any of the other tricks that Hollywood has employed to achieve the same effect, Loti wanted us to feel that "we are there!"
Given this, you would expect the text to be full of painstakingly detailed descriptions, precise verbal efforts to capture and convey what Loti saw, heard, smelled, and felt so that we could imagine that we were doing the same. Northing could be farther from the truth. Loti's descriptions are unfailingly brief, never more than a sentence or two, usually noting a color, a sound, a smell, a sensation, but in the simplest of terms. How then did he possibly expect us to feel that we were experiencing something about which we know so little?
One brief passage midway through the narrative provides a key. As he stands looking over Shiraz, Loti remarks:
Il y a vraiment quelque chose, dans ce pays de Chiraz, un mystère, un sortilège, indicible pour nous et qui s'échappe entre nos phrases occidentales. Je conçois en ce moment l'enthousiasme des poètes de la Perse, et l'excès de leurs images, qui seules, pour rendre un peu cet enchantement des yeux, avaient à la fois assez d'imprécision et assez de couleur.
(103-104; There is truly something in this land . . ., a mystery, an enchantment, that we cannot put into words and that escapes through our Western sentences. At this moment I understand the enthusiasm of the Persian poets and the excess of their images, which are the only ones that had both enough imprecision and enough color to render to some extent this enchantment of the eyes.)
Loti was not interested in conveying all the detail of the physical world through which he moved. He knew that, no matter how detailed he got, we still would not see, feel, smell exactly what he had experienced. What he believed, however, was that we could experience the effect that that foreign world produced on human consciousness, the "mystery," the "enchantment," and that in doing so we would feel that we were there. To achieve that effect details were, in fact, to be avoided, since the Persian poets who had succeeded in conveying it did so by imprecision. And so, Loti in this travelogue set about using imprecision and color to make us experience the effect, and not the details, of the world he had visited.
This calls to mind the approach of his painterly contemporaries the Impressionists, and in particular Claude Monet. Like Loti, Monet was not interested in conveying the physical details of the world around him. Rather, he wanted his viewers to experience the effect, the impression, that that reality had had on him at particular moments in time. It will therefore come as no surprise that at one moment in To Isfahan, as if to tip his hand to those who have caught his strategy, Viaud, who had himself studied painting in Paris in the 1860s and begun his publishing career as an illustrator, has Loti allude to the Impressionists. Describing the interior of a house in Koumichah, he remarks:
Les portes intérieurs, qui me sont défendues, ont des rideaux baissés, en ces soies persanes si étranges et si harmonieuses, dont les dessins, volontairement estompés, troubles comme des cernes, ne ressemblent d'abord qu'à de grandes taches fantasques, mais finissent par vous représenter, à la façon impressionniste, des cyprès funéraires.
(164; The inside doors, which are forbidden to me, have lowered curtains, made of those Persian silks that are so strange and harmonious. The patterns on them, intentionally blurry, dim like vague circles; at first they only look like fantastic blurs, but they end up depicting funerary cypress trees the way the Impressionists do.)
Once we see what Viaud is up to, the lack of detail, the imprecision of his descriptions, starts to make sense.
Perhaps the first tenet of Monet's Impressionism was the centrality of light: in his paintings he attempted to portray not things themselves, but rather how light played off them and changed their appearance, in other words his perceptions of them. As Dina Sonntag has written, "the mood of a moment, evoked by qualities of light, was of greater importance . . . than the precise development of details in service of an objective representation of things." (5) In the same way, over and over again Loti is very careful to describe things not just by themselves but as they appear in specific light. One night as his convoy wends its way up a steep and narrow path to a higher desert plateau he remarks: "A mesure que nous montons, les aspects se déforment et changent, à la lueur incertaine des étoiles" (47; As we climb, appearances are deformed and change in the uncertain light of the stars). One evening in Isfahan he stands in the central square and observes how "la mosquée Impériale, de bleue qu'elle était tout le jour, commence à devenir, pour une minute magique, intensément violette sous les derniers rayons du couchant" (201; the Imperial Mosque, which was blue during the day, begins to become, for a magic moment, intensely violet under the last rays of the setting sun). On his last night before he leaves Isfahan he makes a special trip, despite the dangers, to watch from a window of the dyers' bazaar as "sous l'éclairage discret de tous les petits diamants qui sinctillent là-haut, [the Imperial Palace] paraît trois fois plus grande encore qu'à la lumière du jour" (218; under the discreet lighting from all the little diamonds that sparkle up above, [the Imperial Palace] appears three times larger still than in the daylight). Over and over throughout To Isfahan Loti shows us not the thing itself but rather the way it appears under a particular light at a particular moment.
Monet did this wherever he painted. But Loti undertook it so thoroughly in most of To Isfahan because he felt that there was something particularly transformative about the light on the high plains of central Persia, something that very much contributed to the "mystery" and "enchantment" that he had experienced there. When he comes back down off them near the end of his journey and looks over Tehran, he remarks that, while there are "toujours les myriades de petites terrasses et de petites coupoles en argile, . . . il y manque la lumière qui les transfigurait, dans les vieilles villes immobilisées d'où nous arrivons" (247; still the myriad little terraces and clay cupolas, . . . the light that transfigured them in the old, still cities from which we have come is missing).
If the Impressionists were particularly concerned with the effects of light, they also realized, for the same reasons, that any given object changes its appearance, if not its reality, as a function of the other things around it. In the same respect, in To Isfahan Loti often describes things in terms of their surroundings. In Shiraz, for example, when describing the houses he notes that the walls are made of grey brick or grey earth. Some of the doors "s'encadrent de vieilles faïences précieuses, représentant des branches d'iris, des branches de roses, dont le coloris, avivé par le contraste avec toutes les grisailles d'alentour, éclate encore de fraîcheur au milieu de tant de vétusté et de ruines" (84; are framed with old, precious clay tiles depicting iris or rose branches. Their coloring, brightened by the contrast with all the surrounding grey, bursts with freshness in the midst of so much decrepitude and so many ruins). As he wonders the disintegrating covered streets of Isfahan at night and suddenly comes to an uncovered intersection, he notices that the "étoiles . . . paraissent plus rayonnantes encore entre ces murailles crevées et ces masures, dans ce cadre de vétusté et de ténèbres" (217; stars . . . appear even more radiant amid these collapsed walls and hovels, in this frame of decrepitude and shadows).
Loti's favorite way of illustrating the effects of surroundings on appearance is to situate something against a background. Gazing at the Imperial Mosque of Isfahan at night, he notices that "elle trouve le moyen d'être encore bleue, alors qu'il ne reste plus de couleurs autre part sur la terre; elle s'enlève en bleu sur les profondeurs du ciel nocturne qui donnent presque du noir à côté de son émail, du noir saupoudré d'étincelles. De plus, on la dirait glacée; . . . on a aussi l'illusion qu'elle dégage du froid" (219; it still finds a way to be blue, even though there is no longer any color elsewhere down on earth; it rises up in blue against the depths of the night sky that almost look black next to its glaze, black dusted with sparks. Furthermore, you would say it is frozen . . . there is the illusion that it is giving off cold).
Elsewhere this technique creates a striking sense of depth and three-dimensionality, as if we have put on 3-D glasses. As they cross the southern desert early during the journey, Loti notes how "les grandes dattiers, autour de nous, découpent de tous côtés leurs plumes noires sur le ciel plein d'étoiles" (36; the large date trees around us set forth their very recognizable black plumes against the star-filled sky). As he sits before the caravansary of Abadeh, he notes that "derrière nous, les grands murs crénelés qui s'assombrissent découpent leurs dents sur le ciel d'or vert" (151; behind us, the tall crenelated walls, which are growing darker, set forth their crenelations against the green gold sky). As he approaches Koum, he observes how "les grandes cimes, deux fois hautes comme nos Alpes, se découpent toutes roses, dans leur gloire de la fin du jour, sur un fond couleur d'aigue-marine" (240; the tall mountain peaks, twice as high as our Alps, stand out, completely pink, . . . against a background that is acquamarine). Everything is seen in relationship to something else and in particular against some other color, a very painterly technique.
Sometimes these descriptions quite literally evoke an Impressionist canvas: early on, as they cross the deserts of southern Persia at night, Loti notes: "Trois heures du matin. Sur l'étendue claire, une tache noire, en avant de nous, se dessine et grandit: ce sont les arbres, les palmiers, les verdures de l'oasis" (32; Three o'clock in the morning. Against the clear expanse before us, a black blur takes shape and grows larger: it is the trees, the palm trees, the greenery of the oasis). Again, first an unmediated sensory impression, the black blur, then the intellectual analysis and identification, trees.
Given that everything is presented strictly as it is perceived with no concern for how it may actually be, it should not come as a surprise that in the world of To Isfahan mountains move. As they cross the plains of central Persia Loti notes that "à droite et à gauche, infiniment loin, les deux chaînes de montagnes continuent de nous suivre" (152; on the left and right the two mountain chains, infinitely long, continue to follow us; cf. 207). Not "seem to follow us" but "follow us." Rationally we know that the mountains are not moving. But Loti is intent on getting us to set our rational, analytical selves aside and experience this world as it strikes our senses, just as Monet did.
Pierre Loti/Julien Viaud has often been described as a painter with words. Indeed, André Suarès went so far as to declare that "Bien plus que Sisley, Claude Monet ou les Goncourt, Loti a été le grand impressionniste" (more than Sisley, Claude Monet or the Goncourt brothers, Loti was the great Impressionist). (6) Some of his novels, such as Iceland Fisherman (1886), show him developing verbal equivalents of the techniques his painterly contemporaries were employing at the same time. In To Isfahan, Viaud took advantage of the freedom from having to tell a story offered by the travelogue to attempt a work that comes about as close to painting, and often Impressionist painting, as one could get with words. One has the feeling of moving from one sight to the next and watching as Loti captures it on his verbal canvas in a way that reproduces its initial, immediate impression on him. If we learn little factual information about the Persia of 1904 in the process, we learn a great deal about how Loti felt that he could use some of the techniques of his Impressionist contemporaries to provide Westerners, who unlike our contemporaries really had little likelihood of actually going there themselves, with the next best thing: the feeling that they were traveling To Isfahan.
1. For publication data on Loti's works as of 1924, cf. N. Serban, Pierre Loti: Sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris: Presses françaises, 1924): 338-353.
2. Henry James, "Pierre Loti," Essays in London and Elsewhere (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1893) 151; James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) 189.
3. Loti himself dismissed attempts to pigeon-hole his works into genres. In the Discours de réception he gave upon his election to the Académie française in 1892, he declared that "peu m'importe d'abord qu'un livre s'appelle roman ou s'intitule de tel autre nom qu'on voudra . . . je fais un égal dédain des étiquettes et des règles, et je laisse disputer, sur la matière, les ergoteurs, impuissants à créer" (Discours de réception de Pierre Loti [Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1892] 64; first of all, whether a book is called a novel or whatever other name people like does not make much difference to me. . . I do not care about either labels or rules, and I let those who quibble over details, and who are themselves unable to create, argue back and forth about the matter).
4. Pierre Loti, Vers Ispahan (St. Cyr sur Loire: Christian Pirot, 1988) 23. All translations are my own.
5. Dina Sonntag, "Prelude to Tahiti: Gauguin in Paris, Brittany and Martinique," Paul Gauguin: Tahiti, ed. Christopher Becker (N.p.: Gerd Hatje, n.d.) 88.
6. André Suarès, "Loti," Présences (Paris: Emile-Paul Frères, 1926) 212.