Chapter One - Without obligation: exotic appropriation in Loti and Gauguin

Summary

‘We all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.’ Montaigne's celebrated call for cultural relativism provides us with an early example of a European, and more specifically French, tradition of questioning one's own cultural legacy through the invocation of difference. Occupying a central position in the French literary canon, ‘Des cannibales’ conflates a quasi-ethnographic self-scrutiny and the interrogation of other traditions. Thus behind Montaigne's defence of the non-European lies his denunciation of a barbarous European legacy, epitomized by the Wars of Religion in sixteenth-century France. This circuitousness, working back from the exotic to the domestic, forms a leitmotif in French literature. In Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), for example, the Persians Usbek and Rica pen letters that convey a satirical view of France, as well as throwing light on the Orient. Interest in the exotic in nineteenth-century France was intense, with Ingres's erotic Oriental interiors and Delacroix's Morocco, the poetry of Hugo, Nerval, and Baudelaire, and the prose of Chateaubriand and Flaubert being among the most notable examples in a highly developed tradition. But again, the gesturing towards alterity implicit in such exoticism regularly involves Western projection and fantasy, and comes with a back-handed reference to domestic norms and values.