Pierre Loti and the Theatricality of Desire (review)

Peter Turberfield's study centres on the patterns of desire in Loti, seeking to reconcile the ambiguities, contradictions and conflicting emotions that pervade a body of work often deemed colonialist/sexist by uncovering the unconscious urges that motivate them. The study also explores the political implications of this revisionist approach to Loti in the context of colonialist and orientialist patterns of inter-cultural contact and representation. Recurrent focal points are: Loti's ambiguous feelings towards his mother (fluctuating from rejection of her as the embodiment of stifling social and sexual expectations to an unconscious desire for a return to the mother's body); the conflicting desires born of his bisexuality; and his ambivalent sense of identity as reflected in his cross-cultural transvestism. Embedded within each of these are perceptive reflections on the 'performative' nature of identity, and the analysis maintains an important distinction —which nonetheless recognizes moments of suggestive slippage —between Loti, the writer, and Loti, the protagonist. A range of psychoanalytic theorists guides the discussion which is organized into sections focused on the apparatus of performance: 'Theatricality', 'The Cast', 'The Stage', 'The Wardrobe' and 'The Audience'. In 'Theatricality', Turberfield innovatively applies the theories of Judith Butler and others to Loti's play-acting and dressing up in order to suggest that identity in Loti is performative, discontinuous, resisting conformity to social norms of identification. A fascinating extension into the political realm sees this instability of identity as a challenge to conventional binary conceptions of Self/Other difference and proposes that Loti's transvestism may be consciously playing with cultural stereotypes in order to ironize them. Likewise in 'The Cast', Turberfield analyses how Loti's insertion within a bisexual paradigm of desire creates a power asymmetry which undermines —although not without ambivalence —the Western, patriarchal structures of dominance and exploitation within which Loti's work is commonly read. An awareness of ambivalence is carried forward into 'The Stage' which reflects productively on the importance of 'déjà vu' in Loti's staging of his exotic encounters before applying Freud's theories on Eros and the destructive instinct and on masochism to the frequent juxtapositions in Loti's work of death and eroticism. Returning to identity as performative, 'The Wardrobe' relates Loti's cross-cultural transvestism to cross-gender transvestism's challenge to (gender) binaries and its calling into question of hierarchical relationships (between genders). Such a transgressive questioning of identity both becomes a form of escape from the suffocating roles Loti is expected to play by family, society etc. and reveals how disguise and the impression of cultural 'internality' it generates for Loti may subvert Orientalist discourses based on Self-Other polarities. 'The Audience', finally, turns to questions of performativity in relation to Homi Bhabha's concept of stereotype as fetishistic repetition to conclude that the ultimate unconscious desire defining Loti's work is for a return to the mother. This book marks an innovative approach to Loti's work which, in addition to offering valuable overviews of key psychoanalytic approaches, provides new insights into the patterns of desire in Loti and the ideological implications of their destabilizing of colonialist patterns of representation.