Published in 1879, this was the first novel by Louis Marie-Julien Viaud, who afterwards became known as Pierre Loti. It preceded The Disenchanted, whose story is a sort of sequel to this, by 27 years.

It started out as a bit of a duty book, to be honest, as I'm aiming to complete Loti's Turkey-related oeuvre. But it turned out to have more than a few nuggets of interest.

The plot was not one of them...

It's 1876. While stationed in Thessalonica (then part of the Ottoman Empire), an English naval officer (confusingly named Loti) encounters Aziyade. She's young, beautiful, and Circassian (of course she is...), but more to the point, she's the fourth wife of a much older Turkish businessman, and like all Ottoman women of her class, she resides in a harem.

There's no compulsion about the liaison. Aziyade is as interested in Loti as he is in her. No doubt it's a thrilling experience to be smuggled out of the harem to meet her young lover (disguised as a Turk) for secret evening assignations.

Even so, you can see right from the beginning how this is going to play out... You only have to look at the power differentials... Or at this early extract from a letter by our protagonist: "You will say that to reach this point a terrible fund of selfishness is necessary; I do not disagree; but I've come to think that whatever pleases me is good to do, and we have to spice up the bland meal of life as best we can."

Then Loti receives orders to leave Thessalonica, and head for Constantinople. What to do? He "almost" loves young Aziyade, after all...


There's lots of water in the story...

Initially, post-move, Loti is based in Pera (the area around the Galata Tower, on the north bank of the Golden Horn). After a few adventures with Armenians or Greeks, of which he preserves "only the charmless memory left by the feverish love of the senses", and after a dalliance with a young Jewish woman, and another with a 17-year-old Bulgarian, he moves across the Golden Horn to Stamboul, poses as an Ottoman Albanian named Arif, and organizes for Aziyade to move in with him. She is 18 or 19 at this point. How could this be possible, you wonder... Well, her husband is away a lot; the co-wives in the harem are very supportive of each other; her servants are loyal, and always up for a bit of intrigue. And the neighbourhood is surprisingly tolerant: "It was well known that I couldn't be called Arif, and that I was a Christian from the West, but my oriental fantasy no longer offended anyone, and they called me by the name I had chosen."

Aziyade knows how it will all end: "My soul is yours, Loti. You are my God, my brother, my friend, my lover; when you're gone it will be the end of Aziyade; her eyes will be closed; Aziyade will be dead."

She's really nauseatingly loyal and forgiving. Even when Loti temporarily evicts her to install Seniha in his little den (which doesn't work out, because this new woman wears French clothes...), Aziyade returns. "The episode with Seniha was closed," says Loti, adding, in unctuously self-satisfied tones: "Its result was that we loved each other more warmly." Seriously??

Inevitably, Loti is called back to England. He does briefly investigate the possibility of staying in Turkey, and even gets permission to join the Turkish army (which is about to go to war with Russia). But he pulls back, and sails away.

On the way home, he tells us he adores Aziyade, loves her with the most tender and pure affection... But not long afterwards, he finds out that Aziyade's husband has discovered her clandestine relationship (supposedly because of their indiscreet behaviour towards the end of his stay, when she becomes desperate and reckless). She is now isolated within the harem. And she is ill.

By May 1877, Loti is back in Istanbul. Achmet, the second of his young manservants, has gone off to fight the Russians. And Aziyade is dead. So Loti, too, goes off to fight. He dies in October of the same year in the battle for Kars.


"We were walking along the great wall of Istanbul, a solitary place par excellence, where everything seems to have come to a standstill since the last Byzantine emperors"

Marcel Proust apparently loved the book, and could quote long passages from memory...

I found it all very irritating...

Firstly, the fragment form that Viaud uses (I'll use his real name, to avoid confusion with the central character) mixes extracts from Loti's diary with correspondence to and from friends and family, and the dates jump around disconcertingly. Joseph Boone contends that this formula -- "the impressionistic, nonlinear structure..., [consisting] of brief, numbered, intensely lyrical sections whose order seems as dictated by patterns of spontaneous association as by the logic of causality characteristic of formal realism" -- contributes to the general sense of "drift" embodied in the novel. Maybe. But it also makes for disjointed reading.

Secondly, there are aspects that just haven't aged well.

Viaud's exoticism is again on full display. Examples, just some of many:

-- "Turks have a love of the past, a love of immobility and stagnation."
-- "Why should I take away from them the superstition that makes them all the more charming?"
-- The party at Izeddin-Ali's is all indolence, indulgence, and dreamy decadence, and returning to reality is a gloomy business: "You imagine having been visited by some dream from the Thousand and One Nights, when you find yourself, in the morning, wading through the mud of Istanbul amid the activity of the streets and bazaars."

And his character's sense of sexual and colonial entitlement is inordinately exasperating. Any woman who attracts him is considered fair game, and his penchant for disguise, as Hacer Esra Almas points out, carries markedly imperialist undertones: Loti compares "playing the effendi" to children playing at being soldiers, a stance that "exposes the Orient as a culture that the Western European easily masters, without the opposite being possible".

These are predictable flaws in a book of its time.


Eyupsultan, where Loti claimed to have lived with Aziyade

Nevertheless, Aziyade is interesting for four reasons.

1.
What was the real story? I know we shouldn't ask this, but truth and fiction are so intertwined in Viaud's work that you can't help it...

James Barrie's account is very useful here. In 1876, the real Julien Viaud embarked on a clandestine affair with a married Circassian woman named Hatijeh. The romance was all over very quickly. It began, just as it does in the book, in spring in Thessalonica; and then it relocated to Constantinople -- but not to Eyup, as Loti claims, but rather to Haskoy, a predominantly Jewish area. Once back in France, in 1877, Loti began his book. (He simultaneously began reinventing his house, by designing a "salon turc"... Thomas Armbrecht reflects: "Having left Aziyade when he departed from Turkey, Loti brought her into his house by creating a special space for her. How is the reader to interpret Loti's desertion, but subsequent exaltation, of his lover, whom he could not bring to France since she was married and he was a naval officer? The most plausible explanation is that the MEMORY of Aziyade, as created in the eponymous novel, was more meaningful to him than the woman herself." Hmmm... We thought as much...)

Anyway, Barrie continues, the book was published in January 1879. The author was not named (Viaud did not adopt the penname Pierre Loti until 1881, and his first three novels were published anonymously); nor was the real name of Loti's lover cited. But the real Aziyade, unlike her counterpart in the book, was still alive and well. Barrie explains the inevitable tragic coda: "Although banned in Turkey, Aziyade [the book] did the rounds of the harems and soon became a talking point. People speculated on the identity of the young Turkish woman, who had had the audacity to have a relationship with a French officer under her husband’s nose. It didn’t take long for the scandal to reach Aziyade’s door... As there weren’t many wealthy Turkish households who relocated from Salonika to Constantinople in the winter of 1876, her husband Abeddin soon realised that it was his own wife who had been unfaithful. So it wasn’t until after the book’s publication that Abeddin discovered his young wife’s infidelities and responded. This explains why she survived over three and a half years after Loti had abandoned her, in which time her husband had no evidence that his wife had strayed. With the book as evidence he could punish his wife as he saw fit. She was confined to a room, where she died in October 1880, if one can believe the inscription on her gravestone."

Based on the designs on her tombstone, Barrie also wonders whether Hatijeh had children, one of them perhaps Loti's... Be that as it may, whereas the fictional Loti came storming back to Istanbul just months after his departure, the real Loti did not return until 10 years had gone by -- seven years, therefore, after Hatijeh had died.


Haskoy, where they probably did live

2.
Was Aziyade a man...?

Drawing on the description of the relationship between Loti and his servant/boatman Samuel, and the background culture in the Ottoman Empire, some critics have alleged the whole Aziyade story was a cover for what was actually a gay relationship... This is almost certainly taking things a bit far. But it's true that the novel several times tiptoes onto forbidden ground, only to back off again precipitously. As Boone comments: "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."

Richard Berrong offers a good textual analysis of this issue: "The relationship between Loti and Samuel is never described directly as anything other than a friendship and seems, indeed, to have been viewed as nothing more than that by most of Viaud's readers over the last century. A close examination of the text, however, will show that the author appears intent on leading at least some of his audience to view it as much more: not only to see Samuel as being in love with Loti, but also to see Loti as drawn to the boatman. Because his personal situation and the times in which he wrote did not allow him to portray male same-sex desire openly, at least in a positive fashion, Viaud resorts to several devices to suggest it. These devices create a rhetoric of contextualized suggestion and ambiguity that constitutes, even today, a significant type of gay discourse, and that makes of this apparently simple narrative a much more complex and interesting work." He goes on to cite the way Viaud evokes a setting that allows for surmise (we are told about "the vices of Sodom"; we hear about a "strange kind of prostitution", dancing-boys being cheaper than women, and so on); sketches a character who is not bothered by conventional morality; and draws striking parallels in Loti's relationships with Samuel on the one hand and Ayizade on the other. He concludes: "The major achievement of Aziyade is that, regardless of whatever confessional quality some readers may choose to ascribe to it, it dared, even if anonymously, to depict male same-sex desire in a non-homophobic and even sympathetic fashion to a general public... In this respect, it is an important part of the gay literary heritage."

In another piece, Berrong explains how the depiction of these themes, plus Viaud's "flamboyant" lifestyle, gave rise to plenty of satirical cartoons in the French popular press of the time. Despite no evidence of actual homosexual activity, Viaud later came to be described as "a distinguished gay writer", and grouped with authors such as Andre Gide and Jean Cocteau. This might be an exaggeration, but as Berrong points out: "Read in chronological order, Viaud's novels present the story of a gay man working to come to an understanding of his feelings and who he is as a result of them, the first novelistic corpus in Western literature to do so. It would be a half-century before any other major novelist in English or French undertook something similar in so positive a fashion."



3.
How do we evaluate Viaud's Turcophilia?

Viaud's work is full of stereotypes, and he is undeniably an unabashed exoticist. (According to Edward Delille, writing in 1893, this characteristic -- "the exotic, outlandish element" -- was to no small extent responsible for his overnight rise to acclaim: "Totally unknown one day, on the next he had brought out a romance and was famous.")

Viaud's permanent nostalgia mode also leads, as Almas comments, to a "complete disregard of all modernizing efforts".

And the project to remodel his house -- which, after le salon turc, went on to feature another nine rooms representing different historical periods and/or foreign countries -- definitely smacks of display, artificiality, even kitsch (especially as Viaud is often pictured, exuberantly attired in the appropriate costume, in the midst of the objets d'art). It's hard to overlook the blatant cultural appropriation that is going on here.

Yet Viaud is not the out-and-out classical imperialist who disdains and tramples his surroundings in equal measure. He had what Connelly calls "a rare and genuine affection for the cultures he visited", and looked askance on the way Western influence was changing things: "Indeed, the overriding atmosphere of [Pierre] Loti's output is one of a lost innocence, a yearning nostalgia for a world before the corrupting influence of Europe and an unfulfilled search for somewhere for Louis Viaud to belong."

And the author's sympathy for the plight of the Ottoman Empire is noteworthy. The love story recounted in Aziyade is set in distinctly turbulent times. The political backdrop is the Ottoman Empire's struggle to find its own way amid the ever-increasing pressure being exerted by the European powers, and the story is bookended by the "Saloniki Incident" and the battle for Kars.

As Sultan Mourad is replaced (after only three months' rule) by his brother, Abd-ul-Hamid, our protagonist Loti comments: "Despite my political indifference, my sympathies lie with this beautiful country that they want to suppress, and very slowly I am becoming a Turk without realizing it." The Constantinople Conference of the Great Powers occurs during the novel's timeframe: "The poor Turks refuse with the energy of despair the conditions that are being imposed on them; for their pains, we want to make them outlaws." And as the Ottomans get ready for war, and the soldiers assemble, Loti tells us: "I would willingly leave with them, and get myself killed somewhere in the service of the Sultan." In the end, of course, he does...

There was a lot wrong with the Ottoman Empire, much of it very clear to Viaud. Yet he seems to have had a sense of fair play that was affronted by what was being done to the entity disparagingly dubbed "the sick man of Europe". Viaud would have agreed with Elie Kadourie: "To the extent that the Ottoman Empire was sick, to the extent that it died of sickness, we may with no exaggeration say that it died of Europe."



4.
Why -- despite the many, many, MANY irritations -- is Viaud so fascinating?

I had planned to make this post very short. I didn't like the book particularly. Period.

But then you start reading around it a bit more, and you realize what a lot of complexity this patchy little novel conceals, and you get sucked in... Viaud/Loti has been warmly embraced, and just as coldly spurned. I wonder if we're again experiencing an inflection point, as new concerns and currents mine his work for different precious commodities.

As Barrie points out: "While Loti was a showy anachronism, hated and loved in equal measure in his lifetime, his writing has an appeal today that has transcended literary fashion. His anti-colonial, anti-war, travelling-to-escape motifs apply easily to today’s restless multitudes that travel to get away from the humdrum of life back home."

Boone also relates his themes to our current concerns: "Loti's desire to distance himself from the Europe of his origins, to shed (however ambivalently) his European self, helps contemporary readers see the novel's fantasy projections as just one thread in, to use Chakrabarty's phrase, 'a radically heterogeneous,' transcultural interchange greater than the narrator's musings. In this regard, Aziyade provocatively anticipates and speaks to the focus on transnationality, globalism, and diaspora that has superseded the postcolonial theoretical emphases of the 1980s-90s." Viaud/Loti may not have been entirely conscious of the chords he was touching, but his imagination "forms a site of multidirectional flows in which knowledge, authority, and discovery move along manifold paths", refusing conventional boundaries and constructions.

His work speaks, for sure, to the traveller within us, and its motivations. For Charlie Connelly, "Loti was ... never comfortable in himself, always seeking a new identity, constantly reinventing, never finding a persona in whom he could be wholly content... It was as if he were writing a version of himself, that Pierre Loti was the person he wished Louis Viaud could be, living the life he wished he could live... Never able to find happiness in himself, Pierre Loti was Viaud's attempt to make sense of the ever-present doubt that travelled wherever he did, as if the words that flowed from his pen on to paper may one day provide answers to questions he didn't even know he was asking."

When departure time nears, Loti says to Achmet: "I will be over there, very far from you, and that country hardly resembles yours at all; everything is paler there, and the colours are duller; it's like it is here when it's foggy, but even less transparent if anything... Everything there is planned, regulated, numbered; there are laws for everything and regulations for everyone."

I was reminded of what I wrote in my diary when we left Cote d'Ivoire to return to the UK: "Those final hours -- a glimpse of a lizard on a wall; the strains of a Kofi Olomide song, warm and pulsing; the placid beauty of the lagoon in the twilight; the twinkling lights of Plateau as the plane rose over Abidjan. There's a lump not just in my throat but in my heart. I have a huge feeling of desolation and enormous loss, a longing not to be here but to be there. I am overwhelmed by a sense that the play is over, and the curtain has come down on the brilliantly lighted stage, and now it's time to step out into the cold darkness, and face the long walk home."

It is this resonance -- as I identify with his need to travel, his need to find out who he is, his need to blur boundaries -- that keeps hauling me back to Pierre Loti. So we're not finished yet...