At Home in the Museum:

Pierre Loti, Self-Collected, Self-Possessed

ANTHONY PURDY

C’était un simulacre : un rappel d’Orient

- Robert de Montesquiou, “La maison de Loti”

C’est une maison exhibitionniste mais introvertie !

- Alain Quella-Villéger, Pierre Loti le pèlerin de la

planète, 369

The very title of Shawn Levy’s box-office hit of the 2006-2007 holiday season, Night at the

Museum, evokes and exploits familiar childhood fantasies of a place of magical transgression, of a world in which anything might happen. The setting – New York City’s American Museum of

Natural History – is emblematic of the large public museum which, entrenched since the nineteenth century as one of modernity’s major producers of Weberian disenchantment, has always harboured dreams (or nightmares) of a double life, the shadowy promise of a Jekyll and

Hyde existence. Seen in the bustle of day with its crowds of visitors and army of guards, its vitrines and text panels speak with scientific authority of order and discipline, of a rational universe where everything is in its right and proper place; at night, however, when the crowds have deserted its echoing halls, the suspicion lingers that the museum’s organizing principles might prove inadequate to the task assigned them, that categories might be confused and boundaries crossed, especially those that guarantee the separation of life and death, animate and inanimate. It is this sense of quietly threatening wonder, of a possible lapse into the more Purdy - 2 intimate (yet so much more ‘foreign’) imaginative space of the curiosity cabinet, that James

Fenton captures in his poem, “The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford,” when he warns, “But do not step into the kingdom of your promises/To yourself, like a child entering the forbidden/Woods of his lonely playtime.”

What do we make, then, of a museum that is not conceived as a bastion of rational ordering, a museum that is first and foremost a house, a museum that is lived in and slept in, a museum secreted room by room around himself and his family by a man-child who wrote more than forty books and sailed ten times round the world with the French navy, but who never forgot his promises to himself nor ever missed an opportunity to enter “the forbidden woods of his lonely playtime”? Pierre Loti, born Julien Viaud, turned his childhood home into just such a museum, filling it with souvenirs of his travels, his loves, himself. The objects he collected made no scientific claims to represent the world’s cultures. Loti lived in his house, and his objects, though present in extraordinary concentrations, were furnishings rather than exhibits, unencumbered by the museum trappings of labels, classifications, and catalogues. In Susan

Pearce’s museological terms, his collecting falls into the modes of ‘souvenirs’ and ‘fetish objects’ rather than that of ‘systematics’: “Both are part of an attempt to create a satisfactory private universe, and both do this by trying to lift objects away from the web of social relationships, to deny process and to freeze time” (84).

In this, he is the very incarnation of the private collector described by such classic theorists of collecting as Susan Stewart and Jean Baudrillard. It is in this context of the artist as collector that I broach the question of the specificity of the nineteenth-century artist’s house when it is conceived as a museum by the artist himself. (The masculine pronoun here and throughout is intended not so much to underline the unsurprising fact that the majority of Purdy - 3 nineteenth-century artist’s house museums were once the homes of male artists, as to acknowledge that any conclusions I may draw are highly provisional since based on a single case study – that of Loti’s house in Rochefort. The term artist’s house should nevertheless be understood generically as including the more restrictive writer’s house; while it is true that some of my observations focus particularly on Loti as a writer, my discussion as a whole does not seek to provide generalizable insights into the writer’s house as a specific subset of the artist’s house.)

If Loti is at home in the museum, it is because it is there that his life coheres and makes sense, that his collection collects him.

The House as Museum

Following and adapting Stewart, though Baudrillard would not take us in a significantly different direction, we might, predictably and schematically, see in Loti’s collection (of cultures as well as objects) a form of commodity fetishism that erases labour by masking all histories of production: the collected object is not produced, nor even appropriated; it is found, given, inherited, bought, thereby replacing the narrative of production, of the social labour of its making, with “the narrative of the individual subject – that is, the collector himself” (Stewart 164, 156). By extension, the construction and furnishing of a domestic interior becomes a form of self- fashioning – “Each sign is placed in relation to a chain of signifiers whose ultimate referent is not the interior of the room . . . but the interior of the self” (158) – and the house, like the collection, becomes “a mode of control and containment” (159), a compendium of random, ahistoric knowledge that strives “for closure of all space and temporality within the context at hand” (161). In the case of the artist’s house, this context is the life of the artist, which is why the collection, despite its synchronous nature, must be acquired – and the house expanded and Purdy - 4 redesigned – over time, in a serial manner (and not once and for all) as an articulation of the rhythms, the continuities and discontinuities of the collector’s biography, the ebb and flow of his fortunes (166).

Like most museums, Loti’s house grows and evolves to accommodate his collection, but the relationship between house and collection is never simply one of storage and display. For here, the collection serves first and foremost to decorate the house, a verb we must understand in

Loti’s case in the strongest possible sense, as a categorical imperative: “Il n’y a d’urgent que le décor” (Suprêmes visions d’Orient, 1385). To decorate is to take full possession, both of one’s environment and of one’s objects, and is therefore vital to the collector’s sense of self, for as

Walter Benjamin reminds us, “ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them” (67). Paraphrasing Stewart’s characterization of a child’s creation of a private museum, we might say that Loti’s house serves to subsume the environment “to a scenario of the personal. The ultimate term in the series that marks the collection is the ‘self,’ the articulation of the collector’s own ‘identity’” (162). Or, as

Baudrillard would have it, “it is invariably oneself that one collects. . . . the final term must always be the person of the collector” (12); and perhaps more than most collectors, Loti in his house, “[s]urrounded by the objects he possesses,” becomes “the sultan of a secret seraglio” (10).

Sold by Loti’s son, Samuel, to the town of Rochefort in 1968, the Maison de Pierre Loti has operated as a public museum since 1973. However, its museal destiny had been in little doubt since the ten year-old Julien Viaud had constructed his first natural history museum there in 1860. Its transformation started in earnest in 1877 with the creation of a “salon turc” out of the objects brought back from a tour of duty in Salonica and Constantinople. Viaud’s life – and more particularly his domestic arrangements – in Turkey also provided the subject matter for his first Purdy - 5 novel, Aziyadé, published anonymously two years later, thereby establishing a lifelong pattern of literary transcription of life into fiction. Thus, while it was Pierre Loti’s literary success that would drive and finance the expansion and complete refashioning of the house over a period of more than 25 years, the initial impetus and continuing inspiration came from Julien Viaud’s life and travels: the Turkish Room, begun in 1877, would be reworked in 1881 and 1889, and again in 1894; the Japanese Pagoda was built in 1886, the Gothic Room in 1887, the Arab Room in

1894; the construction of the Renaissance Room, the Mosque, and the Room of Egyptian

Mummies followed the purchase of the next-door property in 1895; while the Chinese Room, incorporating the eight tonnes of objects ‘salvaged’ by Viaud from the sack of Pekin (including some from the Imperial Palace), was not added until 1902 (Bault 9). House and literary work draw, then, on the same sources, are two expressions of a single experience.

Although not his only home – Loti-Viaud died in his ‘Basque’ house at Hendaye, purchased in 1904, and was buried in the garden of the “maison des aïeules” on the île d’Oléron

– the house in Rochefort at 141 rue Saint-Pierre (later rue Chanzy, now rue Pierre-Loti) in which

Viaud was born in 1850, would become the naval officer’s “port immobile” (Quella-Villéger,

Pierre Loti l’incompris, 238), the writer’s “maison-refuge, maison-sanctuaire” (Bault 7) to which he always returned from his countless voyages. It was here that Loti’s embalmed body was brought in June 1923 for the state funeral that filled the streets of his birthplace for three whole days. Memories of the massive outpouring of grief at this celebrity funeral – Loti was adored by his enormous public and on intimate terms with the rich and famous – might have coloured

Sacha Guitry’s reflections as he visited the house in 1931, noting as he left that “nulle maison n’a plus l’apparence d’une maison mortuaire que cette maison natale” (66). It is more likely, however, that Guitry was struck, on the one hand, by an overwhelming sense of absence in a Purdy - 6 house in which everything was designed to reflect and define the personality of an owner now dead and, on the other, by the abundant reminders of death that filled the house as testimony to

Loti’s own obsession with mortality. The Room of Mummies, the Arab Room’s tombstones, and the stela stolen from Aziyadé’s tomb that graces the Mosque are but the most striking examples of a cult of death that constantly plays with the idea of the museum as mausoleum.

The House Museum as Chronotope

Theories of collecting almost invariably stress the peculiar temporality of the collection. For

Baudrillard, collected objects are associated with “an enterprise of abstract mastery” whereby the subject “seeks to piece together his world, his personal microcosm” and to “assert himself as an autonomous totality outside the world” (7-8). In this way, objects help the subject to “establish dominion over time” (15), interrupting its irreversible flow toward death, translating the real time of history into the synchronic configurations of the collection, “[f]or collecting simply abolishes time” (16): “What man wants from objects is not the assurance that he can somehow outlive himself, but the sense that from now on he can live out his life uninterruptedly and in a cyclical mode, and thereby symbolically transcend the realities of an existence before whose irreversibility and contingency he remains powerless” (17; stress in original).

Such a view is obliquely compatible with Theodor Adorno’s characterization, in “Valéry

Proust Museum,” of the art museum as family sepulchre: when art objects are collected and placed in a museum, they are withdrawn from the world, torn from their context of origin, and recontextualized in such a way as to participate in strategies of hegemonic power. Today’s blockbuster touring shows simply reinforce such strategies of decontextualization, further contributing to the displacement of history by the values of display and the market. The case of Purdy - 7 the house museum, however, is somewhat different. While it is certainly true that Loti’s objects, as displayed in the ‘theme rooms’ they decorate, have undergone a radical erasure of labour and of their original context of production and circulation, it would be a mistake to conclude that they bear witness to a straightforward destruction of aura in the translation from cult value to exhibition value. The reason for this lies in the objects’ status as personal souvenirs rather than as works of art, a factor that complicates things in interesting ways.

In the house museum, the synchronous time of the collection is disrupted by the souvenir’s reference to past events, to the biography of the collector. The collected objects in

Loti’s house are not simply metaphors of absent abstractions – Turkey, Japan, Islam, Ancient

Egypt, the Renaissance, the peasantry – deployed in an ahistorical simultaneity; they are metonymically anchored in experience, in a history lived by Julien Viaud. It is this presence of the past that creates a characteristic atmosphere of nostalgic reverie, of temporal doubling – both now and then – that constitutes the ‘magic’ of the souvenir, its ‘use value’ as we might say. As

Stewart argues, while the point of the collection is forgetting, the point of the souvenir is

“remembering, or at least the invention of memory” (152). The objects with which Loti surrounds himself refer back to a context of acquisition and have a precise function: they are there to recreate, in the peace and tranquillity of his own house in Rochefort, the worlds he has known and the lives he has lived through his extensive travels. In this sense, it is difficult to speak unequivocally of loss of aura or destruction of cult value, since the objects are defined through their active participation in a ‘scenario of the personal’ that is not confined to the autonomous universe of the collection but replays scenes from the ‘life of Loti.’

In the case of the house museum, then, we must think in terms of a double chronotope, a double actualization of time in space. On the one hand, we have the chronotope of the museum Purdy - 8 qua museum, of the collection qua collection, a chronotope of preservation, of withdrawal from circulation and from history, of the substitution of spatial configuration for temporal flux, of synchrony for diachrony, a chronotope that, in the very attempt to deny death, reinscribes it in the form of loss of aura. On the other hand, there is the chronotope of the fetish and the souvenir, of the house qua house, in which all the signs and paraphernalia of death, all the objects metaphorically ‘killed’ by the act of collection, come to new life in the person of the collector as he doubles not only as curator but also as architect, designer, decorator, and metteur-en-scène – and, of course, as writer, since the ‘scenario of the personal’ that is the ‘life of Loti’ is also the stuff of which Loti’s books are made.

The House as Text and Mise-en-Scène

Stripped to its essentials, the formula for Loti's exotic novels – the best known of which are

Aziyadé (1879), Le Mariage de Loti (1880) and Madame Chrysanthème (1887) – is stunningly simple: in each case Loti, a British naval officer, goes native and falls in love in a foreign land –

Turkey, Tahiti, Japan – with a local woman; the sexual adventure lasts until the hero leaves with his ship and the woman is left to deal with the damage. This is the scenario – a melancholic story of love and abandonment in a distant country – that haunts and informs the house, which is no doubt why commentators, such as Marie-Pascale Bault, almost invariably describe the house as an integral part of Loti’s œuvre: “Loti ne sépare pas la vie de l’œuvre. Sa maison-labyrinthe compte assurément au nombre de ses œuvres : l’une des plus belles, n’hésitent pas à affirmer certains” (15). Indeed, it is not unusual for the house itself to be compared to a text, as in Bault’s assimilation of the thematic arrangement of the décor to the chapters of a book (13) or Guitry’s observation on the disjuncture between outside and inside and the impression the visitor has of Purdy - 9 entering the world of a book: “De la rue, la maison de Loti est aveugle et muette. J’entends par là que ses volets sont clos et qu’elle ne dit rien. Elle est comme un livre à l’envers. Entrons : c’est un livre à lui – ou plutôt un recueil de ses pages choisies” (59-60). Instead of the chapters envisaged by Bault, Guitry sees each room as a novel, thereby giving a new twist to his overwrought metaphor: “Tout de suite, à gauche, le Japon. Et la porte qui le sépare de la

Bretagne est une porte épaisse, en bois massif de ce côté, tandis qu’elle est de l’autre en laque rouge incrustée de nacre. Cette porte me fait penser à une reliure mixte sous laquelle on aurait réuni Pêcheur d’Islande et Madame Chrysanthème” (62-63).

If the novels do much to bring the house to life, peopling it with ghosts and animating it with stories, the house in turn draws attention to certain non-narrative features of the novels. I have suggested that the urge to decorate – the urgency of the décor – goes well beyond the requirements of sentimental nostalgia (or even of Stewart’s “invention of memory”). It is an extension of the collector’s desire to possess the world that, in Loti’s case, takes the form of a drive to transform his domestic surroundings into theatrical backdrops for his tireless self- fashioning. As Pierre de Boisdeffre writes, the transformation of the house into a “Musée du souvenir” is inseparable from the serial transformations of Loti himself: “Et pour compléter l’illusion, déguisons-nous! Voici Loti habillé en bédouin, en émir, en pharaon, en pêcheur breton, en pelotari basque, en acrobate, en seigneur de la Renaissance, en mandarin chinois, en roi d’Assyrie, bien plus à son aise dans chacun de ces habits d’emprunt que dans ses ridicules costumes anglais” (53).

At the end of Madame Chrysanthème we see Loti leaving Nagasaki with eighteen packing cases of souvenirs and objets d’art, most of which must have found their way into the pagoda constructed in 1886 on the ground floor of the house in Rochefort. Unlike many of the Purdy - 10 other rooms, the pagoda was not inaugurated with an extravagant costume party, a practice that started with a Louis XI dinner served in April 1888 in the Gothic Room that Loti had completed in the previous October: “invitations et menu en vieux français, costumes d’époque (‘environ l’an de grâce 1470’), ménestrels et jongleurs, acrobate sortant d’un pâté, plats étonnants, servis dans une vaisselle appropriée – hanaps, drageoirs, aiguières et coupes – , tout a été pensé par Loti pour recréer une certaine idée du Moyen Âge” (Vercier et al., 22). Extravagant theme parties of all kinds followed throughout the 1890s, culminating in the Chinese party of May 1903 to inaugurate the newly finished Chinese Room.

Between the ‘real’ life dressing up, at home and abroad, and the ‘fictional’ dressing up of the novels, there is only the blink of an eyelid. This is particularly clear in Aziyadé, where Loti gives free rein to his unabashed Orientalism, his lifelong Turcophilia. The novel abounds in elaborately (and self-consciously) constructed interiors, Orientalist décors carefully staged by

Loti the set designer and costumier. His explicit models are the French Orientalist painters whose vision mediates everything he sees: “Cela était si coloré et si bizarre, qu’on eût dit moins une réalité qu’une composition fantastique de quelque orientaliste halluciné” (76). Even his ship’s cabin falls under the spell of the decorator’s art: “J’avais meublé d’une manière originale ce caveau, où ne pénétrait pas la lumière du soleil: sur les murailles de fer, une épaisse soie rouge à fleurs bizarres; des faïences, des vieilleries redorées, des armes, brillant sur ce fond sombre”

(57). (The fictional cabin here is simply a reflection of Viaud’s habitual practice, in evidence since the decoration in 1872 of his cabin aboard the Flore with objects taken from Easter Island.

For the rest of his naval career he will go on turning his cabins into “véritables musées flottants en miniature” (Vercier et al., 10). By 1903-05, new heights of luxury will be attained with the Purdy - 11 installation in his cabin on the Vautour of a piano and a full-size reproduction of the stela from

Aziyadé’s tomb in Topkapi.)

We would not, however, do justice to the text’s complexity if we lost sight of the fact that the urge to dress up is theatrically self-conscious to the point of self-parody. This is evident in a scene which sees Loti, in full naval uniform, enter by the front door of a house in the backstreets of Salonica only to leave soon after by the back door, dressed as a Turk or an Albanian. Inside, the transformation is described in explicitly theatrical terms, the tone lively, bordering on camp:

Début de mélodrame. – Premier tableau: Un vieil appartement obscur. Aspect assez

misérable, mais beaucoup de couleur orientale. Des narguilhés traînent à terre avec des

armes.

Votre ami Loti est planté au milieu et trois vieilles juives s’empressent autour de

lui sans mot dire. . . . Elles se dépêchent de lui enlever ses vêtements d’officier et

se mettent à l’habiller à la turque, en s’agenouillant pour commencer par les

guêtres dorées et les jarretières. Loti conserve l’air sombre et préoccupé qui

convient au héros d’un drame lyrique. (39)

Before leaving the dressing-room to step onstage, Loti pauses to admire himself in the mirror:

“Loti trouve qu’il n’est pas mal en effet, et sourit tristement à cette toilette qui pourrait lui être fatale” (39-40).

Roland Barthes once argued that the point of Loti’s transvestism was to transform himself into a describable object – “en objet descriptible – et non en sujet introspectible" (180).

Framed thus in the mirror, Loti is not so much disguised as transfigured, an actor in the tableau vivant that for him was Turkey. The function of costume, the point of dressing up, is to dissolve the subject/object distinction through the pictorial integration of the body, a practice which Purdy - 12

Barthes assimilates to the emergence of modern writing: “Ainsi un auteur mineur, démodé et visiblement peu soucieux de théorie (cependant contemporain de Mallarmé, de Proust) met à jour la plus retorse des logiques d’écriture: car vouloir être ‘celui qui fait partie du tableau’, c’est

écrire pour autant seulement qu’on est écrit: abolition du passif et de l’actif, de l’exprimant et de l’exprimé, du sujet et de l’énoncé, en quoi se cherche précisément l’écriture moderne” (181). In the end, Loti’s urge to collect, like his urge to write, is perhaps less about the abstract mastery described by Stewart and Baudrillard than about the production of an ‘other space’ in which the self can feel at home and blend into the background.

The House as Heterotopia

A common theme running through the various accounts of Loti’s house is the difficulty of saying exactly what kind of place or space it is, so diverse are the impressions and effects that it creates.

For Bault, its juxtaposition of intimacy and ostentation, of antiquarian pastiche and Oriental eclecticism, conventional bourgeois salon and personalized Arab décor, is disconcerting for the purist, or indeed for anyone whose aesthetic taste reflects the norms of the day (13). For

Boisdeffre, the place is at once a house, a museum, a mummy’s tomb, a monument to the dead, and a magic lantern show, its unity guaranteed only by the eccentric personality of its owner :

“Un homme singulier l’habite. . . . Il se tient derrière chaque objet, chaque tenture, chaque bibelot” (12-13). In this respect, Stewart reminds us that, in the construction of narratives of interiority, “eclecticism rather than pure seriality is to be admired because, if for no other reason, it marks the heterogeneous organization of the self, a self capable of transcending the accidents and dispersions of historical reality” (158). Purdy - 13

We might be tempted to think of Loti’s house as a kind of highly idiosyncratic utopia, an ideal space that brings together under one roof all the far-flung and disparate places that haunt his imagination and his memory. And yet, unlike utopias, Loti’s house exists – it is a real place.

In this, it is more like those “other spaces” that Michel Foucault calls heterotopias and that are

“something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality” (24). More particularly, Loti’s house participates in several different kinds of heterotopia. I will confine myself to three.

The first is exemplified in those places, such as the theatre, the cinema, the garden and the zoo, that are “capable of juxtaposing in a single place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (25); this Loti accomplishes in miniature, turning his house into a world. The second is that of the museum with its heterochrony of indefinitely accumulating time, so typical of nineteenth-century western culture, and its “will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place” (26). The third is the most curious of all, for it is that of the mirror. Curious because, on the face of it, the mirror is a utopia, “a placeless place”: “In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface” (24). But it is also a heterotopia, since the mirror exists in reality, inviting me to “discover my absence from the place where I am” by making me present elsewhere, in the mirror world: “The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with Purdy - 14 all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there” (24). In this, Loti’s house is a hall of mirrors in which the artist can see himself at any time, at once here and there, real and unreal, a part of the picture but never fully present anywhere.

Loti’s house, as Bault recognizes, is ultimately a ship: “Comme un navire, cette demeure constitue un microcosme séculaire, isolé du reste du monde. Elle permit à Pierre Loti d’attendre la mort, tout en continuant de voyager dans son propre univers : orient recréé, histoire maîtrisée,

Asie revue et corrigée, cet ensemble représente une étonnante création” (15). One wonders if

Foucault might have had Loti in mind when he wrote, in his own curiously nineteenth-century way, of “the boat as the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates” (27). Museum, book, theatre, ship, mirror – Loti’s house is all of these, a dreamspace where Loti was at home and forever absent.

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