Monday, 6th
August, 2012
On Anticipation
For French novelist Gustave
Flaubert (1821-1880) the exoticism of Alexandria
was drawn from the sight of camels, Arabs fishing peacefully and the tumultuous
cacophony of the guttural cries and exuberant colours that filled the docks on
his arrival. Although modern day Amsterdam
can be perceived as ultimately different, for de Botton it was also similar. In
describing an apartment he sees, de Botton conveys a wish to want to live the
life the space implies. It is a wish I can relate too. I felt it in my
fantasies of Portugal only a
few years back and it is a want I long for in my pilgrimage to Ireland – the
quiet, the green, the clean empty waves.
De Botton’s notion of the exotic
comes from experiencing the mundane and everyday in a different way, symbols of
being abroad; the use of the double a in
words such as Aankomst, sockets,
signs and bathroom taps all amount to a
difference. De Botton describes difference as a pleasing idea, acknowledging
that countries can and are different. Yet the difference is more, it conveyed a
promise of happiness that may provide an improvement on what his country was
capable of. De Botton’s notion of the exotic suggested to him that Amsterdam could prove to
be more friendly and pleasant to his own concerns and temperament.
The idea of difference and
the promise of happiness were also entrenched in the mind of Flaubert from an
early age. Yet could Flaubert’s notion of Orientalism
be said to have helped establish what Sturken and Cartwright deem relationships
of power, a relationship that is reinforced by the photographic gaze? The act
of looking whether photographically or not has been deemed to give power to the
onlooker over the object that is being looked at. For Sturken and Cartwright
visual anthropology and travel photography, the traditional painting of people
in “exotic” locations such as the work of French Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and the institutional
photography and categorization of people of various ethnic backgrounds,
prisoners, and mental patients all function in varying degrees in representing
codes of subjugation and dominance, difference and otherness.
Was Flaubert’s Orient coded
as an exotic other which Sturken and Cartwright put forward as representing a
world that has been supposedly unspoiled by modern civilization, an idealized
paradise? Such a notion certainly relates to the work of Gauguin whose
idealized paintings from Tahiti and other French
colonies failed to reflect the influences of French colonialism. Gauguin’s
paintings, for Sturken and Cartwright fit into a binary opposition that conveys
white/other, male/female and civilization/nature. The women that Gauguin
presented in his paintings were conveyed as exotic, they were deemed different
and so formed the other to both himself and the viewer.
As Sturken and Cartwright
posit categories of what is deemed normal and exotic have also been established
through the gaze of the camera when wielded by anthropologists, and used in travel
magazines and other magazines that represent non-Western locales such as National Geographic. In its use to
document foreign cultures from its inception, photography has been shown to
provide visual codes of difference between anthropologists and their subjects
thus reinforcing binary oppositions such as white/dark, European/native, man/woman,
masculine/feminine and civilized/primitive. Subjects within the photographic
frame were often identified as a particular category of people rather than
individuals thus establishing them as other. Mute the person’s represented in
the photographic image, as Sturken and Cartwright maintained had no control
over how they are represented or in what context.
The photograph helps establish
difference and meaning is established through difference and so throughout the
history of representation and language such as Flaubert’s, binary oppositions
such as those above have been used to organize meaning.
However, Sturken and
Cartwright state defining things in terms of binary opposition can be deemed a
reductive way of viewing the complexity of difference. For French philosopher
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) all binary oppositions are encoded with values and
concepts of power, superiority and worth. The category which is deemed the norm
is set against that which is deemed abnormal or as Sturken and Cartwright
state, aberrant in some way which in turn can be defined as other. The primary
category, the norm, or unmarked is in
opposition to that which is abnormal unmarked.
For Sturken and Cartwright, in order to understand difference in terms that do
not reproduce concepts of superiority and dominance and to be able to
understand how sexism and racism function we need to analyse social and
cultural meaning but we also need to look at linguistic meaning.
In regards to Flaubert’s language
as a form of representation in defining Orientalism,
as with photography and other forms they can all be considered to be what
Sturken and Cartwright express as elements that are central to the production
of ways in which Western cultures characterise Middle-Eastern and Eastern
cultures with qualities such as exoticism and barbarism which attributes them
the notion of other.
Palestinian–American cultural
theorist Edward Said (1935-2003) believed
that Orientalism is about “the Orient’s special place in European Western
experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of
Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of it’s
civilizations and languages, it’s cultural contestant, and one of its deepest
and most recurring images of the Other”. (Sturken and Cartwright. 2005. P. 104)
For Said the concept of the Orient in turns defines both Europe and the West
and so Orientalism Sturken and Cartwright state is used in order to set up a
binary opposition between what they deem the West, the Occident and the East,
the Orient which in turn is attributed negative qualities. Orientalism is thus
found in political policy and cultural representations within commercial
advertising and contemporary popular culture which in filmic terms show Asian
women as highly sexualised and Arab men as terrorists.
Film stills “Carry On – Follow
That Camel” 1967
My fantasy is juxtaposed with
reality. The summer holidays are drifting by or rather floating away in regards
to the amount of rain we are experiencing. I’m working 6 days a week, I am
anchored to everything Flaubert hated, “the sterile, banal, and laborious” (de
Botton. 2003. P. 71)
When I do get a chance to
surf, a chance that comes through lack of waves rather than work, it is busy,
really, really busy. Kids and parents on bodyboards charge towards the beach
buffeted by frothing white water. The rest of the world are on hire boards,
mini-mals, longboards, kayaks and anything else that will float their often
over sized frame.
The solitude. How I long for
the solitude. To leave the chains of domesticity and the suffocation of
materialism.
De Botton’s enthusiasm’s of Amsterdam held a
connection to his dissatisfactions with home, his country, its “lack of
modernity, and aesthetic simplicity, with its resistance to urban life and its
net-curtained mentality.” (de Botton. 2003. P. 78) Dissatisfactions that scream
when the car parks in my neighbouring beaches charge £6 or £7. Oh if only the
wind blew offshore!
My home, the village I have
chosen to live in is slowly transcending to what feels like the bourgeois
society that Flaubert despised. Maybe it has always been this way but now it
seems especially so. As Flaubert wrote “it’s strange how the most banal
utterances (of the bourgeoisie) sometimes make me marvel. 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.” (de Botton.
2003. P. 79)
For de Botton, Flaubert both
found and welcomed life’s duality, its binary opposition within Egyptian
culture; shit-mind, death-life, sexuality-purity, madness-sanity.
Am I looking for a form of
duality to my own life? Is it a case of the grass is always greener?
For de Botton we are drawn to
something because we identify with the characteristics it conveys. Flaubert’s
admiration of the camel was due to his identification with its stoicism and
ungainliness. Touched by a camels sad expression Flaubert also identified with
its awkwardness combined with its fatalistic resilience. Some of the camels
qualities were also shared by the people of Egypt;
their silent strength and humility, the antithesis of the bourgeois arrogance
of Flaubert’s France.
What am I identifying with?
Surfing? Some label it free
or soul surfing, the opposite to competition surfing. I have always been drawn
to pursuits that exemplify solitude – distance running, caving, climbing and
surfing. Even when you are with others you are also alone.
Solitude – the quiet spaces
away from the hustle and bustle of crowds.
You travel with curiosity.
Flaubert, much like de
Botton, obsessed over inventing stories for people he came across on his
travels. Questions about what they do, where they are from, what are their
hopes and dreams? Such questions combine to build an idea of a fantasized life.
Questions that bring to mind the work of French artist Sophie Calle (b. 1953)
in the series “Suite Ventienne” (1980)
where she followed a stranger to Venice and “The Hotel” (1981) where Calle worked as a chambermaid in a hotel in
Venice, photographed and made notes of guests personal items, read diaries and
paperwork, opened suitcases, and inspected rubbish bins and laundry thus
discovering and imaging who they might be.
S Calle “The Hotel” 1981
As Cotton highlights Calle’s
work also embraces duality conflating fact and fiction, performance and
spectatorship and exhibitionism and voyeurism. For me duality could be said to
exist between realism and romanticism.
The reality of Flaubert’s Egypt may have
been very different from the fantasies he developed as a child as his diaries
sometimes suggest. Many years after his return his travel companion Maxime du
Camp (1822-1894) reinforced these ideas albeit from an embittered perspective.
For Flaubert the stupidity of the European bourgeoisie followed him into Alexandria and was
typified by the inscribed name of “Thompson
from Sunderland” on Pompey’s Pillar.
This creeping of modern
societal stupidity is also encroaching on my village as signs indicating
everything and nothing begin to spread throughout like a field covered in fresh
manure.
However, as de Botton states
Flaubert’s attraction to Egypt
had not been misconceived for he simply replaced an overtly idealized image
with a more realistic one replacing a “youthful crush for a knowledgeable
love”. (de Botton. 2003. P. 97) In the end Flaubert admired the Orient
profoundly.
Bibliography
C Cotton, 2007 The Photograph As Contemporary Art Thames
& Hudson: London
De Botton, 2003 The Art of Travel Penguin:London
E Newby, 1995 A Book of Travellers’ Tales Pan Books
Ltd: London
Tolstoy L, 1969 What Is
Art? And Essays on Art London: University Press Oxford
Copyright Mark King 2012
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