Pour une poétique de l'écriture exotique: Les Stratégies de l'écriture exotique dans les lettres françaises aux alentours de 1850 (review)

Vladimir Kapor describes his study as "une version entièrement refondue et abrégée de ma thèse de doctorat" (5). Pour une poétique de l'écriture exotique has all the virtues and limitations of the genre. Of course, the virtues and limitations usually involve the same elements. This is a very thorough study of the principal exotic literature appearing around 1850. If it had no other qualities, and it does, the bibliographical information on the subject, as well as a sense of the current debates in the field, are probably the most up-to-date currently available. The limitations are due to this plethora of scholarship. The flow of the argument is often interrupted by allusions to sundry scholarly debates swirling around the subject under discussion. One can congratulate Kapor for having "abrégée" his dissertation and still wish he had cut a bit more.

Pour une poétique is structured in such a manner that about a third of its three hundred plus pages is given to theoretical considerations concerning the exotic, followed by examinations of specific authors and texts, notably Gautier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, and Gobineau. The final major section, "L'écriture exotique et son contexte intellectual," concentrates to a great extent on the notion of the barbarian, and illustrates Kapor's disdain for simplistic generalities.

Kapor begins by noting that although the exotic has been subjected to numerous discussions "le concept reste très flou et mal limité" (8). He then proceeds to provide an overview of the most prominent approaches to the issue. Thus something is exotic by its relation to something else, the unknown to the known; the exotic belongs not to an established order, and one finds its appeal in a thirst for evasion and desire for new worlds. What all of these elements have in common, and which Kapor readily acknowledges, but does not develop greatly, is that the exotic is to some degree the product of the beholder's imagination. Thus an Ethiopian is exotic to a French person, and the contrary, because of each individual's sense of what is usual and what is unusual. Kapor probably does not pursue this aspect of the question because he is more interested in the narrative strategies for depicting the exotic than in its psychological underpinnings.

Kapor quite reasonably observes that one's approach to the exotic depends on "la perspective adoptée et le corpus de recherche choisi" (18). He defines literary exoticism as "un phénomène qui se présente comme situé à la croisée d'au moins deux cultures différentes, ou autrement dit un phénomène littéraire qui se veut interculturel" (19; emphasis in text).

What makes this definition interesting is the notion of intercultural which implies some sort of equal exchange between two cultures. As Kapor illustrates in his discussion of specific authors, inequality rather than equality is the order of the day for most of them. Kapor had chosen the period around 1850 because it was a turning point in French political and cultural history with the revolution of 1848, and according to Bourdieu, the emergence of the professional writer (35). Yet as sweeping as these changes might have been, the writers Kapor discusses continue to give priority to Western values and physiognomies, and to follow, in the description of the Other, "les critères distinctifs biologiques traditionnellement admis" (234). Yet this nod to science "ne suffit pas . . . pour dénoncer une pratique comme un comportement "raciste" (234). The impression one has is that these artists of the exotic, however tradition-shattering in other areas, tended to reinforce the racial and racist stereotypes inherited from "les idéologies racialistes du siècle des Lumières" (235).

To the extent there was...