Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"A Simple Heart in the "Bight of Benin": Bruce Chatwin's Critical Adaptation of Gustave Flaubert"
Karen Wyndham
Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Arizona
wynread@earthlink.net
Bruce Chatwin's Viceroy of Ouidah has been called exoticizing, crude and camp. However, few critics have closely analyzed the text for traces of Chatwin's writing strategy. I will suggest that Chatwin's second book performs a trenchant critique of colonialist literature through a strategic attack upon French Orientalists. In this presentation, I will be concerned with the first part of the book, in which Chatwin specifically targets Flaubert. Chatwin tells the story of Eugenia in critical response to Flaubert's portrayal of Felicite in A Simple Heart.
Chatwin does not merely tell Felicite's story through the character of Eugenia. Rather, adopting a strategy of textual intimacy, Chatwin deploys Flaubert's own literary practices against his short story. Through the story of Eugenia, Chatwin undermines the poignancy of A Simple Heart. Felicite's simplicity, her adoration of a stuffed parrot, are not merely instances of imperialist booty transported to rural France. The cost of such imports, Chatwin demonstrates, is the devastation of places like Ouidah. Ouidah literally shadows Pont-l'Eveque in its historical trajectory, although the former suffers far more.
Chatwin's re-writing of Flaubert adopts such an intimate strategy that specific passages, paragraphs and tropes echo A Simple Heart. Through a presentation of a few examples, I will demonstrate that Chatwin does not slavishly repeat Flaubert's story. Rather, he warps it just enough, so that those who know Flaubert's may trace his critique as a series of specific responses to specific moments in A Simple Heart.
Finally, I will suggest some of the dangers of this sort of writing strategy. Literary travelers like Chatwin run the risk of what Said has called the citationary problem of Orientalism. Unless read against A Simple Heart, Chatwin's trenchant critique is lost, for alone the story of Eugenia, like the whole of Viceroy of Ouidah, seems to reek of Orientalist excess. The dependence upon knowledge of canonized literature, then, becomes a problem for texts of counter-discourse. Post-colonial literature and traveling theory may, like Chatwin, depend upon a cultural literacy which readers simply do not have. Crossing borders -- be they those of nation or genre -- allows writers like Chatwin a sense of freedom, certainly, but this includes the freedom to be misunderstood.
Karen Wyndham
Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies,
University of Arizona,
P.O. Box 42001 Tucson, AZ 85733-2001
(520) 319-0363
wynread@earthlink.net
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