Writing Egypt: Flaubert
Tourism as Livelihood
• Usually the country’s third largest industry
• Note that even the Greeks traveled to Egypt as
tourists
Flaubert in Egypt
• Letters (mostly to Mom) and notes translated
and edited by Francis Steegmuller in 1972
• Travels with journalist/photographer Maxime
du Camp in fall of 1849 (du Camp records his
observations but much later)
• Doesn’t plan on writing a travel book because
travel should only be used to “enliven one’s
style” (8)
Influences
• Had always longed for the exotic; heavily
influenced by Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales
(Greeks vs. Turks) and The Arabian Nights.
• Longed to have sunshine rather than the
clouds of Rouen.
• Loves antiquity, has studied Greek and Latin
• Du Camp convinces Madame Flaubert to let
her son go along and funds him
First Impressions
• “I had my first sight of the Orient through, or
rather in, a flowing light that was melted silver
on the sea.” (28)
• After he landed, he “gulped down a whole
bellyful of colors…”
• Did his travel diaries lead him towards the
Realism he created in Madame Bovary? (48)
Making Use of their Time
• Instead of being “idle tourists,” they hire an
Arab for four hours a day so that they can ask
him questions about birth, marriage, Mecca,
etc. (61)
• For the evenings, they hire a storyteller and an
effendi (72)
Overwhelming Impressions
• “You ask me whether the Orient is up to what
I imagined it to be. Yes, it is; and more than
that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I
had of it.” (75)
• Letter to Dr. Jules Cloquet: “What can I write
you? As yet I am scarcely over the initial
bedazzlement. It is like being hurled while still
asleep into the midst of a Beethoven
symphony, with the brasses rumbling….
Cont’d
• ..and the flutes sighing away; each detail reaches
out to grip you; it pinches you’ and the more you
concentrate on it the less you grasp the whole.”
(79)
• Everything is reversed: “In Europe we picture the
Arab as very serious. Here he is very merry, very
artistic in gesticulation and ornamentation.
Circumcisions and marriages seem to be nothing
but pretexts for rejoicing and music-making…” 80
Lots of Women
• At that time, all the “dancing girls” had been
ordered out of Cairo and were found in Kena,
Esna, and Assuan. The most famous” Kuchuk
Hanem, at Esna.
• When she entertains Flaubert, he “feels like a
tiger.” She fuels his imagination endlessly.
• “How flattering it would be to one’s pride if at
the moment of leaving you were sure that ..
.
• .. That she would think of you more than of
the others who have been there, that you
would remain in her heart!” (119)
• When they go on the Nile, “we live in the
grossest idleness, stretched out all day on our
divans watching everything that goes by”
(126)
After Effect
• “Passing Abydos, I thought of Byron. That is
his Orient, the Turkish Orient, the Orient of
the curved sword, the Albanian costume, and
the grilled window looking on the blue sea. I
prefer the baked Orient of the deouin and the
desert. . . Why have I a melancholy desire to
return to Egypt, to sail back up the Nile and
see Kuchuk Hanem? No matter; the night I
spent with her is the kind one doesn’t have
very often, and I enjoyed it to the full…” (214)
Final Thoughts from Flaubert
• “Traveling makes one modest—you see what a
tiny place you occupy in the world.” 220
• 30 years later, he writes his niece shortly before
his death: “For the past two weeks I have been
gripped by the longing to see a palm-tree
standing against the blue sky, and to hear a stork
clacking its beak at the top of a minaret.” 222
• As a state of mind, Egypt is with him until the end