1.
On disembarking at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, only a few steps inside the terminal, I am struck by a sign hanging from the ceiling that announces the ways to the arrivals hall, the exit and the transfer desks. It is a bright yellow sign, one metre high and two across, simple in design, a plastic fascia in an illuminated aluminum box suspended on steel struts from a ceiling webbed with cables and air-conditioning ducts. Despite its simplicity, even mundanity, the sign delights me, a delight for which the adjective 'exotic', though unusual, seems apt. The exoticism is located in particular areas: in the double a of Aankomst, in the neighbourliness of au and an i in Uitgang, in the use of English subtitles, in the word for desks, balies, and in the choice of practical modernist fonts, Frutiger or Univers.
If the sign provokes such pleasure, it is in part because it offers the first conclusive evidence of having arrived elsewhere. It is a symbol of abroad. Though it may not seem distinctive to the casual eye, such a sign would never exist in precisely this form in my own country. There it would be less yellow, the typeface would be softer and more nostalgic, there would-out of greater indifference to the confusion of foreigners-probably be no subtitles and the language would contain no double as-a repetition in which I sensed, confusedly, the presence of another history and mindset.
A plug socket, a bathroom tap, a jam jar or an airport sign may tell us more than its designers intended, it may speak of the nation that made it. And the nation that had made the sign at Schiphol Airport seemed very far from my own. A bold archaeologist of national character might have traced the influence of the lettering back to the De Stijl movement of the early twentieth century, the prominence of the English subtitles to the Dutch openness towards foreign influences and the foundation of the East India Company in 1602 and the overall simplicity of the sign to the Calvinist aesthetic that became a part of Holland's identity during the war between the United Provinces and Spain in the sixteenth century.
That a sign could evolve so differently in two places was evidence of a simple but pleasing idea: that countries are perse and practices variable across borders. Yet difference alone would not have been enough to elicit pleasure, or not for long. Difference had to seem like an improvement on what my own country was capable of. If I called the Schiphol sign exotic, it was because it succeeded in suggesting, vaguely but intensely, that the country which had made it and which lay beyond the uitgang might in critical ways prove more congenial than my own to my temperament and concerns. The sign was a promise of happiness.
2.
The word exotic has traditionally been attached to more colourful things than Dutch signs: among them, to snake charmers, harems, minarets, camels, souks and mint tea poured from a great height into a tray of small glasses by a mustachioed servant.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the term became synonymous with the Middle East. When Victor Hugo published his cycle of poems Les Orientales in 1829, he could declare in the preface, 'We are all much more concerned with the Orient than ever before. The Orient has become a subject of general preoccupation-to which the author of this book has deferred.'
Hugo's poems featured the staples of European Orientalist literature: pirates, pashas, sultans, spices, moustaches and dervishes. Characters drank mint tea from small glasses. His work found an eager audience-as did the Arabian Nights, the Oriental novels of Walter Scott and Byron's The Giaour. In January 1832, Eugène Delacroix set off for North Africa to capture the exoticism of the Orient in painting. Within three months of arriving in Tangier, he was wearing local dress and signing himself in letters to his brother as 'your African'.
Even European public places were becoming more Oriental in appearance. On 14 September 1833, a crowd lined the banks of the Seine near Rouen and cheered as a French navy boat, the Louxor, sailed upstream to Paris on its way from Alexandria bearing, in a specially constructed hold, the giant obelisk lifted from the temple complex at Thebes, destined for a traffic island on the Place de la Concorde.
One of those standing in the crowd was a moody twelve-year-old boy named Gustave Flaubert, whose greatest wish was to leave Rouen, become a camel driver in Egypt and lose his virginity in a harem to an olive-skinned woman with a trace of down on her upper lip.
The twelve-year-old held Rouen-and indeed the whole of Francein profound contempt. As he put it to his schoolfriend Ernest Chevalier, he had only disdain for this 'good civilization' which prided itself on having produced 'railways, poisons, cream tarts, royalty and the guillotine'. His life was 'sterile, banal and laborious'. 'Often I'd like to be able to blow the heads off passers-by,' he told his diary. 'I am bored, I am bored, I am bored.' He returned repeatedly to the theme of how boring it was to live in France and especially in Rouen. 'Today my boredom was terrible,' he reported at the end of one bad Sunday. 'How beautiful are the provinces and how chic are the comfortably off who live there. Their talk is…of taxes and road improvements. The neighbour is a wonderful institution. To be given its full social due, his position should always be written in capitals: 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 he was fifteen (he was at school and fantasized about killing the mayor of Rouen), the author projected his Eastern fantasies on to his central character, Monsieur 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 Mémoires 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 civilization or lawyers-but identified with the traders of the East instead: 'Oh! To be riding now on the back of a camel! Ahead of you, a red sky and brown sands, on the burning horizon, the undulating landscape stretches out into infinity … In the evening, one puts up the tents, waters the dromedaries and lights fires to scare off the jackals that one can hear wailing far off in the desert; and 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 I dream will be 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 twentyfour, his father died unexpectedly, leaving him a fortune that allowed him to side-step the bourgeois career and attendant small-talk about drowned cattle he had seemed destined for. 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 into 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, and the first thing we saw on land was a pair of camels led by their driver; then, on the dock, some Arabs peacefully fishing. Landing took place amid the most deafening uproar imaginable: negroes, negresses, camels, turbans, cudgellings to right and left, and ear-splitting 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 haring 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 put 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 buildings from the early twentieth century with large ground-floor windows; bicycles parked outside every house or block (recalling university towns); a democratic scruffiness to street furniture; an absence of ostentatious buildings; straight streets interspersed with small parks, suggesting the hand of planners with ideas 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 oak 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 through the red front door every evening. I wanted to stand by the curtainless window at dusk looking out at an identical apartment opposite and snack my way through an erwentsoep met roggebrood en 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 personal life. There too we may find ourselves anchoring emotions of love to the way a person butters bread or turning against them because of their 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 the design. Whereas front doorways in London were prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accepted their status, they avoided pillars and plaster, they settled on neat undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, it spoke 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 change: from finding camels where at home there had been horses; from finding unadorned apartment buildings where at home they had had pillars. But there may be a more profound pleasure: 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 could provide.
My enthusiasms in Amsterdam were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, with its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, with 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 therefore 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 obverse of what had driven him to rage at home. And these were, baldly stated, the beliefs and behaviour of the French bourgeoisie, which had, since the fall of Napoleon, 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 sheep-like prejudices.
To group only a few of these dictionary entries into themes indicates the direction of his complaints against his homeland, upon which his enthusiasm for Egypt would be built.
A SUSPICION OF ARTISTIC ENDEAVOUR
ABSINTHEExceptionally 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; they always forget to put staircases in houses.
INTOLERANCE AND IGNORANCE OF OTHER
COUNTRIES (and their animals)
ENGLISH WOMEN-Express surprise that they can have pretty children.
CAMELHas 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 memories and worship 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 this is very difficult to explain …
SENTIMENTALITY
ANIMALS'-If only animals could speak! There are some which 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 X, I transacted my business there, and by X o'clock I was back here.'
PRETENSION
BIBLE-The oldest book in the world.
BEDROOM-In an old castle: Henri 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-Nice topic for dinner-time 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 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 ear-splitting, 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 amid the horses and the donkeys and the pedlars.'
Flaubert's aesthetic was rich. He liked purple, gold and turquoise and so 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: '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 Mekkeh, 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 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 is fundamentally chaotic and that, aside from art, attempts to create order imply 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 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 run-down, ravaged, in ruins, full of thorns or tall weeds and where a cow escaped from a neigbouring field has come to graze quietly. Admit that this is better than some policeman in uniform! How stupid order is!'