The Art of Travel
Alain de Botton
III. On the Exotic
GUIDE: Gustave Flaubert
1.
De Botton reflects on the small, manmade aspects of landscape that give us insights into the people that created them: "a plug socket, a bathroom tap, a jam jar or an airport sign may tell us more than its designers intended, it may speak of the nation that made it." He is acknowledging the power of people to stamp their culture, history and mindset on minute details of the landscape. |
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was born in 1821 and died in 1880. He was a renowned French novelist. He was known for his precise and 'harmonious' use of language and his use of literary realism and romanticism. His first novel was Madame Bovary.
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2.
De Botton explores the more traditional definition of 'exotic': shanke charmers, harems, minarets, ..." and introduces his guide, Gustave Flaubert who hated his homeland and dreamed of travel to Egypt. Flaubert idealised exotic landscapes through his characters in his writing: "'I dreamt of faraway journeys through the lands of the South; I saw the Orient, her vast sands and her palaces teeming with camels wearing bells ... I saw blue seas, a pure sky, silvery sand and women with tanned skin and fiery eyes who could whisper to me in the language of the Houris.'" In contrast, the reality of the Orient was much noisier: "Landing took place amid the most deafening uproar imaginable: negroes, negresses, camels, turbans, cudgellings to right and left, and ear-splitting guttural cries. I gulped down a whole bellyful of colours, like a donkey filling himself with hay". The description is less refined but exciting and Flaubert's metaphor emphasises the eager joy with which he connected to his new landscape. 3.
De Botton compares this to his trip to Amsterdam. He describes the "buildings with elongated pale pink bricks... long rows of narrow apartment buildings ... a democratic scruffiness to street furniture; an absence of ostentatious; straight streets interspersed with small parks, suggesting the hand of planners with ideas of a socialist garden city." De Botton attributes his pleasure for the mundane features of Amsterdam to his own personal values. He suggests that it reflects his own ideas about life. It is interesting that this foreign landscape encapsulates his own personal worldview more than his homeland concluding with the idea that: "What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home." 4.
This section outlines Flaubert's hatred for bourgeois (middle class) France and its people by referencing his "Dictionary of Received Ideas". His contempt for the 'sheep-like qualities' of his peers is obvious in the satire. De Botton suggests that Flaubert finds the Orient so exotic because it embraces the values he loves and rejects those he hates. |
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Key Ideas
Representations of imagined landscapes are often idealised.
We represent lands and people as 'exotic' because they symbolise our own worldview (personal philosophy) that is not reflected in our own homelands. |