French Global by Suleiman Susan Rubin;McDonald Christie;

Author:Suleiman, Susan Rubin;McDonald, Christie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism/General
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2011-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

The Case of Flaubert: Travel Letters and Notes

Flaubert’s Correspondance and travel notes speak volumes to both questions that concern me here: first, the thorny (and artificial) separation of the literary traveler from the fugueur and the tourist, and second, the shifting identity of this voyager between what we would today call a national and a global axis—a vacillation that in the process perhaps undoes our contemporary tendency to think of these terms as binaries. A judicious reading of the documents pertaining to Flaubert’s travels through the orient (including his letters, his travel journals, and the comments of his travel companion, Maxime Du Camp) reveals, first, significantly intermingled features of the literary traveler, the fugueur, the tourist and the antitourist, making any classification tenuous. It is worth noting that his Voyage en Egypte was composed after the fact and offsite: unable to compose a narrative of his travels while he was on the spot, Flaubert took sporadic notes and wrote the oriental journey once he was ensconced again at home in Normandy.26 One is tempted to put the accent in the compound concept “travel writer”—at least for this particular specimen—emphatically on the “writer” element, which seems always to mediate and so de-emphasize the travel. Flaubert nonetheless characterizes his traveling as compulsive (and thereby re-emphasizes it) in a formulation that anticipates Albert’s expression of his insatiable and immediate need to take off. Here first is Albert: “I continued to be tormented by a need to travel . . . what should I do now, I asked myself ? Go . . . !”27 And here is Flaubert, back in Paris from the orient. He writes to Louise Colet, “Je lis en ce moment un livre . . . sur les chevaux du Sahara . . . Pauvre Orient, comme j’y pense! J’ai un désir incessant et permanent de voyage [I’m reading a book about horses of the Sahara. How much I think about the Orient! I have an incessant and permanent desire for travel].”28

Throughout his eastern travels, Flaubert was driven by an archaeological impulse, yet his passion for ruins was often doubled by the fear of becoming a mobile spectator—a tourist—as he expressed in this letter to Louis Bouilhet written on the road: “Nous allons la semaine prochaine commencer nos courses, aux Thermopyles, Sparte, Argos, Mycènes, Corinthe, etc. Ce ne sera guère qu’un voyage de touriste (oh!!) [Next week we will begin our whirlwind trip to Thermopyles, Sparta, Argos, Mycenae, Corinth, etc. It will hardly be more than a tourist journey (oh!!)].”29 Touring the orient, Flaubert often deprecated tourism, even the kind Biasi calls “scholarly” (tourisme savant), exemplifying the torn consciousness of the Western world that Jean-Didier Urbain summarizes so: “If Europe invented tourism at the dawn of the nineteenth century, it very quickly repudiated this invention.”30 In a striking prefiguration of Huysman’s Des Esseintes, who preferred turning the pages of a Baedeker guide to London to touring the city himself, Flaubert in Egypt, to the exasperation of his travel companion Maxime

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