On an April evening in 1865, Louis Marie Julien Viaud, then 15 years old, found some newspaper reproductions of "the temples of mysterious Angkor," just then being "discovered" by the French. The effect upon the adolescent was extreme. "I saw myself becoming a kind of legendary hero . . . fascinating thousands of people, worshipped by many."
It is quite in accord with his character that the boy later to become famous under the pen name of "Pierre Loti" saw himself first and only then the ostensible object of his inspiration. No matter whether he sets a tale in the South Sea, Turkey or Japan, it is first the heroic figure of the author one notices, sometimes all but obscuring his exotic background.
So when he finally made the journey (called a "pilgrimage" because of his boyhood resolve) in 1901, 35 years later, it is himself he saw silhouetted against the towers of Angkor. "I raise my eyes to look at the towers which overhang me, drowned in verdure, and I shudder suddenly with an indefinable fear as I perceive, falling upon me from above, a huge fixed smile."
The smile belongs to one of the many faces of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara in the temple of Bayon in the middle of Angkor Thom, an expression more usually seen as peaceful and reassuring. This was, however, not dramatic enough for Loti. "They smile under their great flat noses, and half close their eyelids, with an indescribable air of senile femininity, looking like aged, discreetly cunning ladies."
Women often figure in Loti's enlargement of his fears. One remembers the fickle Polynesian bride in "Le mariage de Loti," the sly and mysterious Turkish charmer in "Aziyade," the duplicitous Okiku-san in "Madame Chrysantheme." These women exist for the same reason that the exotic backdrop is there -- to enlarge Loti.
Even better than banyan trees, spiders and giant bats, women could illustrate that sense of "ailleurs," that quality of "otherness" that created the opaque exoticism upon which Loti's forays into the picturesque so depended. As Loti wrote in his "Japanese" novel, it is necessary that "we have absolutely nothing in common with these people."
In his Angkor book, however, the scenery takes over. "The forest, always the forest, and always its shadow . . . one feels that it is hostile, murderous, that it breeds fever and death; and one is seized with a desire to escape from its terrifying stranglehold." There is no woman he could create who would satisfactorily exemplify this. He would have had to wait until Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, was invented.
Since there is no symbolic female around, however, Loti can pay closer attention to the background and thus write better about it. "With time and neglect each of the superposed terraces of the temple has become a kind of suspended garden where the immense leaves of the banana trees are mingled with the white tufts of a most fragrant jasmine."' And "these towers with their squat forms and rows of crowns might be compared in outline to colossal pine cones placed upright."
And since there is no fictitious female to distract him, he can talk about something other than himself. He speaks of the "new adventurers," the French who "are disturbing in a small way the eternal forest." But soon "these pale conquerors will have left this Indo-Chinese soil . . . will pack their belongings and flee." Then "there will hardly be seen any more wandering in these regions, as I am wandering, men of the white race, who are so foolishly covetous of governing immemorial Asia, and of disturbing everything they find there."
Loti disturbed little. Though he had in 1886 brought back 600 kg of souvenirs from his trip to Japan, he was in 1901 somewhat shopped out and in any event did not have the means to ship off anything large. This would be left to French writer and art historian Andre Malraux, whose exploits did indeed rival those of Lara Croft.
Instead he wrote everything up, waited until 1912 to publish, and a year later Baines' English translation appeared. It got much wrong and made Loti's style even more willfully archaic than it was. Michael Smithies, doyen of Thai historical studies, has now repaired the text -- "all the 'hithers' and 'yonders' and other archaisms of the original translation have been removed and three serious slips corrected" -- and has added the necessary notes and the illuminating introduction.
Loti's pilgrimage to Angkor was among his last, and back home he looks once again at the illustrations that had originally stirred his imagination. In the pensive final pages of his book he also finally gets himself and the backdrop in something like focus. "Nevertheless, out of my short life, scattered about over the whole world, I shall have extracted something, a kind of education which does not yet suffice, but has brought already an outline of serenity . . . this is the only thing of value that I have been able to bring back with me."
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