08 Jan On the Exotic (ALAIN DE BOTTON)
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the term “exotic” became synonymous with the Middle East. When Victor Hugo published his cycle of poems Les Orientales in 1829, he could declare in the preface, ‘We are all much more concerned with the Orient than ever before. The Orient has become a subject of general preoccupation, to which the author of this book has deferred.’
Hugo’s poems featured the staples of European Orientalist literature: pirates, pashas, sultans, spices, moustaches and dervishes. Characters drank mint tea from small glasses. His work found an eager audience, as did the Arabian Nights, the Oriental novels of Walter Scott and Byron’s The Giaour. In January 1832, Eugene Delacroix set off for North Africa to capture the exoticism of the Orient in painting. Within three months of arriving in Tangier, he was wearing local dress and signing himself off in letters to his brother as ‘your African’.
Even European public places were becoming more Oriental in appearance. On the fourteenth of September 1833, a crowd lined the banks of the Seine near Rouen and cheered as a French Navy boat christened the Louxor sailed upstream to Paris on its way from Alexandria, bearing, in a specially constructed hold, the giant obelisk lifted from the temple complex at Thebes, destined for a traffic island on the Place de la Concorde.
In the more fugitive, trivial association of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change—from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide.
And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality.
What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
THE ART OF TRAVEL
Alain de Botton
