Getting Loti’s Drift

Perhaps more than any other novel, Aziyadé (1879), Pierre Loti’s hyperromanticized tale of an English officer’s clandestine love affair with a beautiful Turkish woman, holds pride of place among Orientalist literary fantasies of penetrating the harem and achieving forbidden bliss. At the same time, ever since its publication, Aziyadé has provided fodder for detractors intent on calling its heterosexual love story—along with the author’s sexuality—into question. Such innuendos reach from the conjecture of Loti’s contemporary, Edmond de Goncourt, that Loti’s “love, in his first book, was a monsieur,” to Roland Barthes’s hyperbolic praise of the novel, a century after its publication, as “a minor Sodomite epic.”¹ I suspect few contemporary readers miss the vague, yet persistent, undertow of homoerotic desire and homophobic anxiety that drifts in and out of the impressionistic fragments comprising this love story of man and woman, although they may well not know what to make of that undertow, may not even be sure where it exists in the text, in fact may feel they are missing Loti’s drift altogether.

Given the ascendance of queer theory, postcolonial critique, and transnational studies in literary and cultural studies, it is curious how little has been written about the bewildering mix of often contradictory homoerotic, colonial, cross-cultural, and Orientalist desires converging in this once wildly popular novel.² In fact, as this essay demonstrates, critics and theorists interested in the libidinal underbelly of empire making, transnationalism, border crossings, and culturally distinct economies of sexuality have much to gain by attending to Loti’s text. It is less surprising that few efforts have been made to place the novel’s homoerotic undertow within the context of Ottoman mores that forms its setting, which Loti experienced firsthand as a naval officer stationed in Turkey. For only in the last decade has there emerged a generation of historians of sexuality whose fluency in Ottoman, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian has enabled them dramatically to reshape our understanding of pre-twentieth- century Middle Eastern sexual cultures. The light that such archives shed on the structure of male homoerotic practices in Ottoman society in particular reveals the degree to which the novel’s elliptically conveyed fantasies of homoerotic desire and fear are inevitably shaped and framed by a historical reality that makes conspicuous what the text renders indirect and latent.³ In this regard, it is telling that the novel’s most blatant, indeed generic, hallmarks of Orientalism—the appropriation and cordoning off of otherness, the evocation of an “Orient” of desire that transcends time and place, the fetishizing of exoticism—accrue primarily to the heterosexual romance between the novel’s narrator and the title female character. In contrast, the narrator’s repeated brushes with homoeroticism evoke a gritty materiality that cannot be so easily reconfigured as abstraction, metaphor, or allegory. While such moments of homoerotic frisson are not without Orientalizing tendencies, overall these instances undermine and reframe Loti’s Orientalism in ways that have implications for a range of debates ongoing in transnational and queer theory today.

First, I want to tease out the implications of my title’s key term for the argument that follows. What does it mean to “get Loti’s drift” or, conversely, to suspect one is missing his drift altogether? How might this figure of speech serve as a conceptual tool for examining Aziyadé’s conjunction of perverse sexuality, Orientalizing fantasy, Ottoman context, and impressionistic narrative form? On the most basic level, the very act of asking “Do you catch my drift?” insinuates that a deeper meaning is hidden within the innuendo that suggests but refuses to name its presence. Such teasing obliqueness calls to mind the phenomenon that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the “epistemology of the closet,” in which knowingness and deniability work together to create the open secret. Some of the most homoerotically charged moments in Aziyadé operate according to a similar logic in which the narration seems to wink at those privileged readers who pick up on its innuendo, while such inferences pass over the heads of the masses who miss the drift of the...