Wharton’s Morocco and the Conundrums of Travel

                                        Delacroix The Sultan of Morocco

References are to the Century Publishing/Hippocrene edition of 1984.  Page references are in parentheses; numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     People are sometimes curiously self-conscious about being tourists.  In the days before cell  phones, I myself never liked to stroll through foreign squares with a camera around my neck.  Even looking around a new city in the United States, the visitor often strives to “fit in” and pass for a local.  The reason for this wish is not immediately obvious.  After all, the locals are merely going about their quotidian routines, while traveler, like an aristocrat, is not working and has expended money and time in pursuit of pleasure alone (and a little new knowledge can be as pleasurable as a new French sauce).  If anything, one might think the outsider could claim superior prestige.  An additional complication has arisen in recent times with those who criticize some aspects of interest in other societies as psychologically colonialist, “cultural appropriation” [1],  or simply serving the interests of the observer more than a true understanding of the other. 

     Yet since Herodotus’ time, it has been recognized that the traveler is likely to experience benefits more substantial than a view of Mont Blanc or the glow of Gothic stained glass.  The cliché declaring travel to be broadening might be rephrased by saying that the sight of foreign lands provides a kind of heightened awareness of alternatives, a sort of inversion of Dubois’ double consciousness in which the observer is privileged rather than oppressed.  Yet this gain is by no means regularly clear and straightforward.  Very often people project onto the “other” their own psychic contents: medieval monks stewing about how lusty women were or American minstrelsy making comic theater of the oppression of slavery.  Very often such judgements are intuitive and mingle justification of the writer’s own practices with genuine new insights adopted from other points of view. 

     A rhetorical vocabulary has developed in travel writing that embodies a view of the exotic scene not as another equally valid way of being human, but as simultaneously real and unreal, familiar and strange, understood and mysterious.  Edith Wharton’s In Morocco is in many ways an excellent book [2].  Wharton had toured the country in 1917 as the particular guest of the country’s Resident-General Hubert Lyautey, allowing her chauffeured rides and introduction to the traditional rulers.  She describes Morocco as having long been self-isolating after the manner of Japan with very few outsiders allowed to enter.  She obtained rare permission to visit harems and antiquities like the Saadian tombs, moving in a milieu that still included numerous absolute rulers surrounded by slaves and courtesans. 

     She provides ample information about the country’s history and circumstances including pages recording Gen. Lyautey’s achievements and an essay on Moroccan architecture [3].  Yet her skill is less in historical or political analysis than in description.  After one such detailed passage noting the sights before her eyes, the donkeys and camels, the mourners at a funeral, and an old “philosopher” smoking kif, she reflects on the character of her own vision.

 

One seems to be not in Africa itself, but in the Africa that northern crusaders may have dreamed of in snow-bound castles by colder shores of the same ocean.  This is what Moghreb must have looked like to the confused imagination of the Middle Ages, to Norman knights burning to ransom the Holy Places, of Hansa merchants devising, in steep-roofed towns, of Barbary, and the long caravans bringing apes and gold-powder from the south.  (32)

 

     Though she is in fact in Africa, she acknowledges that her view is subjective and may owe as much to her imagination as to the local scene.  Not only does she suggest the strangeness of life in Rabat by conceding that her view is that of an outsider, she feels motivated to make it stranger yet by referring it to centuries gone by.  After using the now-romantic term Barbary, she concludes the passage with a lovely evocation of something she has not actually seen at all.  (While she did witness camel transport, she was unlikely to have seen apes or gold in their cargoes.)  Thus her reportage is at once precise and specific and oneiric.

     This sort of conceit is woven throughout Wharton’s account.  What she sees before her eyes she regularly describes as unreal.  Morocco is “fantastic” (the word recurs five times in the course of her account), a “dream” (nine passages), where one may witness “wonders” (ten times).  The visitor feels she is living in a work of fiction, an “Oriental fable” (62).   The whole country for her was wrapped in “a blessed air of unreality” such that  “the scene became merely symbolical” (54).  Everything is visible only as though through a foggy “haze” (30) where the very light “gives a foretaste of mirage,” “magic becomes real,” and “the boundary between fact and dream perpetually fluctuates” (44) [4].  In an oddly tangled figure of speech, she says that “If one lose one’s way in Morocco, civilization vanishes as though it were a magic carpet rolled up by a djinn.” (28)  Here, in a strange reversal, the modernity to which the writer is accustomed becomes the fabulous carpet which, when removed, reveals a timeless land beneath.

     Its timelessness comes, however, at a cost.  Morocco to Wharton is moribund and static.  “The performance, like all things Oriental, like the life, the patterns, the stories, seemed to have no beginning and no end, it just went monotonously and indefatigably on till fate snipped its thread.” (121)  The Moroccans practice “supine indifference” that “lets everything crumble back to clay” (77).  They do nothing to maintain their own antiquities and holy places (33) resulting in  ”catastrophic desolation” (64), but, then, “nothing endures in Islam”  (72).  Thus “long animosity against the intruder has ended up by destroying her own life” (37) and  the palace of Moulay Ismael has devolved into “a carcass for his carcass” (70).  Modern Moroccan architecture is a tasteless imitation of Europe (35).

     Her belief in the timelessness and “stagnant domesticity” (152) of North African culture has political implications.  She admired Resident General Lyautey and described herself as a “rabid imperialist” [4].  To her “General Lyautey has twice saved Morocco from destruction” (161) and the general influence of French colonialism is wholly beneficent. 

    Not all tourists, of course, are conscious imperialists.  Yet today even those who explicitly praise another country’s way of life may be accused of “cultural appropriation,” a sin the boundaries of which are far from clear.  Someone from Omaha who relishes an hour enjoying an espresso and cognac at Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain is more likely to be admired for cosmopolitanism than to be criticized for trying to be French.  Ralph T. H. Griffith served in  the British colonial service, yet most would feel that his translation of the Vedas constituted a service to the Indian people and not a theft.       

     Even the most outlandish examples of cultural appropriation seem to be in origin naïve tributes rather than acts of oppression.  Liberals at least can agree that it is unseemly for high school teams to be called Braves, Chiefs, or even Redskins, but what is one to make of the fact that nearly a hundred thousand Germans are members of Indianerclubs?  Members dress as Native Americans and hold pow-wows at which they dance and enact ceremonies, all the while professing great admiration for the people they mimic [5].  While such hobbyists may be accused of racial stereotyping, they are innocent of racist contempt.  In the same way some Americans purchase tattoos of Chinese characters which neither the customer nor the artist can read, sometimes with amusing results.  Yet the reason people wish to have their bodies ornamented with Asian-ness is surely that they associate that part of the world with wisdom and beauty.  Are we to make any distinction between Griffith’s despicable portrayal of Blacks in Birth of a Nation and Al Jolson’s blackface in The Jazz Singer?  The theme, after all, of the first, was the defense of slavery and the Confederacy while the second centered on Jakie Rabinowitz’ love of Black music, a love that estranges him from his own culture and family. 

     Inevitably less aware of the nuances of art and customs than a native, the tourist’s appreciation is always based on only partial knowledge.  An outsider’s enthusiasm (or criticism) may be less a reaction to the other than to the visitor’s own.  The Cubists imitated aspects of African art without any attempt to understand it in context and the Imagist poets wrote lyrics based on Chinese models they were, for the most part, unable to read.  Yet the European art that resulted is accepted as beautiful as well as innovative, even if the artist knew little of genuine Yoruba or Tang conventions.  What applies to the reception of art surely may be said as well of the tourist’s view of another society.

     Wharton seems to have taken great pleasure in her Moroccan tour.  If her rhetoric indicates that she is far from an objective camera simply recording facts, that does no more than concede her inescapable limitation.  The reader may turn to anthropologists and historians for information about the country.  If one reads a novelist’s account, it is surely for a different reason. 

     To the art critic what matters about an attitude is what comes of it.  I recently saw the 1939 film of the D’Oyly Carte Company doing The Mikado.  It was an altogether delightful performance; the wardrobes and makeup usually clever, the singing and dancing all first-rate, though it was assuredly not Japan at all, nor was it in fact pretending to be.  The action takes place in a completely fanciful and rather silly realm the ruler of which has a Japanese title, probably as fanciful to most Victorian Englishmen as names like Pooh-Bah and Yum-Yum.  If the costumer consulted authentic Far Eastern fashions at all, it was merely as a starting point from which his fancy might fly.  In the end we have a fine entertainment.  Likewise, if some Dusseldorfer plumber enjoys daubing his face with war paint on weekends, I would be more likely to envy his ability to have fun than to object.

     I recall when I first set foot on Moroccan soil over fifty years ago and was utterly bedazzled.  That first day I may have had less understanding of Moroccan ways than I had gained after a few months there, but my initial ignorance allowed me a measure of wonder as valuable, I think, as knowledge.  We have a fine book by Edith Wharton.  It is about Morocco, but unashamedly expressing Euro-centric notions.  Nonetheless the book is filled with fascinating descriptions, memorable phrases, and curious anecdotes with which one might while away an afternoon.  What more could one ask? 

  

 

1.  The term’s first use according to the OED was in 1945 in an essay on Orientalism by Arthur E. Christy.  The same phenomenon was discussed as "cultural colonialism" in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies (for instance, by Kenneth Coutts‐Smith).  Both phrases imply criticism, an improper and very likely misunderstood use of another’s culture.

2..  The book was completed in 1919 and published in 1920.  Wharton had been living in France and in 1914 had visited Algeria and Tunisia.

3.  She is said to have written the book under contract while in urgent need of income.  Perhaps some of this information was simply padding to meet a publisher’s desires. 

3.  Letter to Sara Norton, March 12, 1901. 

4.  Similar expressions include “cities of ancient mystery” (23), a “vision” (71) as though preserved by “some powerful enchanter” with “a wave of his wand” (73).  The observer has a  “dream-feeling” (77) as though walking into the Arabian Nights (36).  Morocco is to her “fantastic” (58), a “marvel” (61) full of “wonders” (62).  The entire country is for her a “dream” (127) in which “twilight adds to the mystery” (82-3).x

5.  The expression Indianertümelei has been coined on the model of Deutschtümelei (a chauvinistic exaggerated preference for things German).  Such groups have a considerable history.  The first “cowboy club” (which included “Indian” participants) was founded in Munich in 1913.  This phenomenon is neither confined to those outside America nor to the ignorant.  In his great study of the Iroquois Lewis Henry Morgan mythologizes them by likening them to Homeric Greeks and in recent years sweat lodges and the like have become the vogue among some New Agers.

Misunderstandings of Travel [Waugh, Byron, Chatwin]

 

 

     Incidents of my own experience which are illustrative of the general principle here may be found inter alia in the following posts: “Hitchhiking in Algeria” (September 2010), “A Reading in Kathmandu” (November 2009), “Vignettes of Sunny Nigeria” (March 2011), “Festival in Ogwa” [Nigeria](January 2011), “Sacred Space as Sideshow” [Prague] (February 2010).

 

 

     The fine savor of travel often involves the pleasant acquisition of new knowledge.  Away from home one cannot avoid learning about other people’s history, art, cuisine, politics, and taste, in short, the wide variety of ways to be human.  All travel encourages receptive senses, even a stroll around the town next door, but the further afield one wanders, the wider one’s eyes are likely to open, and the more new data the traveler will process. 

     There is no smooth transition from naivete to cosmopolitan sophistication.  The traveler is in the position of a small child and feels a similar exhilaration and frustration born of occupying a world largely mysterious, learning daily, but with codes only sketchily known, A necessary concomitant of spending time in such realms of half-knowledge, of speculation and outright mystery, is that a good share of one’s conclusions prove more or less wrong, while others can never be satisfactorily tested and must remain hypothetical, and a good share of the world remains cryptic.  

     With or without guides and translators, the strangeness of being in strange places is enhanced by confusion over customs and values and most of all by imperfect mastery of other languages on the part of both foreigner and native.  This lack of understanding magnifies the irreducible distance between one consciousness and another.  The tolerance and acceptance a drifter must adopt when stranded in a tropical village where the road ends are perhaps the basis for the only workable attitude toward life, considering that everyone is always dealing with insufficient information.  Submission is sometimes all that one has. 

     Whereas earlier travel writers had emphasized the picturesque or the sublime in landscape or dramatic history or exotic in folkways, the great twentieth century English travel writers – Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron, and Bruce Chatwin – excelled at capturing the absurd, the accidental, the inexplicable in the center of the everyday.  Each presents the persona of a well-meaning innocent, cast about by circumstances, observing unstable chains of cause and effect which seem puzzling, inscrutable, and generally faintly hostile.   One ordinarily thinks of traveler’s enlightenment arising due to new information, the acquisition of which allows new insights about both others and one’s own habitual attitudes.  It not uncommonly happens that a complementary view will not supplant one’s preconception, but rather will come to seem equally true or will simply cast an experience as inexplicable. 

     A few examples may clarify this distinctly modern vision which focuses specifically on what is not seen, what is unknown.  Evelyn Waugh’s Labels (1930) describes a show he attended in Port Said, Egypt. 

 

Attendants were going about selling nuts, mineral waters, coffee, and hubble-bubbles . . . the doctor warned me that if I smoked one of these I would be bound to catch some frightful disease; I did so, however, without ill effects . . . we found ourselves in the middle of a hugely popular comic turn: two Egyptians in European costume were doing cross-talk . . . It was, of course, wholly unintelligible to us; now and then they smacked each other, so I have no doubt it was very much the same as an English music hall turn . . . their place was taken by a very pretty little white girl in a ballet dress: she cannot have been more than ten or twelve years old; she danced a Charleston . . . Then there were some Japanese jugglers, and then an interminable comic turn done by the whole company . . . After this a Negro of magnificent physique appeared.  First he thrust a dozen or so knitting-needles through his cheeks . . . It was while he was doing this that a fight began . . . The man on my right, a grave Egyptian with a knowledge of English, with whom I had had some conversation, suddenly stood up, and leaning across all three of us, struck down with his umbrella a resounding blow on top of one of the fighting heads . . . “What is the fight about –” I asked him.  “Fight?” he said, “Who has been fighting?”

 

The opening act of Egyptians mimicking Europeans suggests an unbridged cultural divide, yet the rest of the vaudeville seems ambitiously transnational, the sort of broad entertainment that might amuse anyone anywhere.  But just as the spectacle seems intelligible, the fight and then its resolution both occur without the slightest cause.  Then the “grave Egyptian” denies that it occurred at all.  Waugh (and his reader) can only look on in bemusement, murmuring perhaps with Puck “What fools these mortals be!” 

     There are multifarious trail-heads through the semantic field of unknowing in this incident.  Waugh, for instance, mentions his use of a public water-pipe in spite of being warned by a doctor.  He does not apparently even consider if the advice may be sound, or what the threatened disease may be, except that it is likely to be “frightful.”  Here the foreign setting allows Waugh to express the feeling many have, even in a semi-scientific society, that health is a matter of fate.  One hazards on forward until felled.  And by surviving unharmed to tell his story, the author becomes a sort of comic hero, turning the tragic emotions of pity and fear on their heads as all is well for the moment at any rate.  The reader feels blessed like the impetuous traveler and can reflect with some composure on that strange scene, the ever-varied procession  of humanity. 

     In The Road to Oxiana Robert Byron describes a Turkoman encampment in northern Afghanistan.  As the men are working somewhere else, the women all flee, while their dogs attack.  Once the dogs are subdued, the following scene occurs.

 

 I approached a mother and two children.  They fled into a kibitka, and I turned to a younger woman of magnificent carriage who was clasping a baby.  Placing it behind a wattle screen, she grabbed a pole, traced a circle in the dust in front of it, and came at me like a mediaeval knight.  Her face was screwed up with anger, and there was something in the tone of her denunciations that made me uncomfortable, as if I had been meanly taking advantage of her man’s absence.  The two old witches chuckled at the scene.  But our guard, a new one who had joined us at Andkhoi, was ashamed, and said that Afghanistan was like that.  He had on a sophisticated Western mackintosh, and was always taking snuff from a silver-mounted gourd with a ruby on its lip.

 

     The reader relishes Byron’s image of the lady of stately mien delicately setting her infant “behind a wattle screen” that she might free her limbs to express herself, undeterred by the fact that she is not understood.  He reacts with the lovely understatement of the faux innocent observer, saying he senses a subtle “something” in her “tone’ that made him “uncomfortable” when she is charging like a knight, apparently raging and hopping in hostility.

     The guide introduces another twist.  In contrast to the woman’s wary defensiveness before an outsider he is a slavish adherent of his partial and distorted notion of European ways.  One would, I think, have to look a long time in London before spotting another such rubied snuff-box even among the dandies.  He is like the cartoon savage in a loincloth and a top hat.  If this individual is not as world-wise as he may fancy himself, the reader may naturally turn to questioning the admittedly shaky authority of the writer, perhaps even of his own vision.

     In Byron’s anecdote the narrator, his guide, and most of the women in the camp are uneasy, cautious and defensive, unsure what their encounter may.  One might well understand Byron’s uncertainty about how to behave in an unfamiliar situation, the general anxiety about the sudden appearance of a mysterious stranger, and Andkhoi’s distress at seeing his employers treated disrespectfully.  The most unaccountable actions are performed by the “woman with magnificent carriage” who is as well the only decisive individual on the scene.  Here is figured the unbridgeable gap that separates each consciousness from all others, regardless of culture.  Just why does Byron feel the discomfort he attributes to his in some sense “meanly taking advantage of her man’s absence”?  Is it in any way related to his appreciation of her figure?

     Bruce Chatwin‘s experience during a coup in Benin was nothing short of Kafkaesque.  After being swept off the street “for your own proper protection,” he is denounced as a mercenary by a corporal with bad breath.

 

     He held up my fountain pen.  “What?”

     “A pen,” I said.

     What for?”

     “To write with.”

     “A gun?”

     “Not a gun.”

     “Yes, a gun!”

    

His bad cop interrogator is then replaced by a comparatively urbane functionary who seeks to reassure his prisoner, saying “Calm yourself, monsieur.  You do not understand.  In his country one understands nothing,” before marching him back to his cell.  Eventually a sort of hearing on his case is held.

 

A young zealot started mouthing anti-capitalist formulae until he was silenced by the colonel in charge.  The colonel then asked a few perfunctory questions, wearily apologized for the inconvenience, signed my pass, and hoped I would continue to enjoy my holiday in the People’s Republic.

      Chatwin’s story may be read as a cautionary warning against the blindness induced by ideology.  The willful unknowing produced by the desire to toe the government line allows a man to see a fountain pen yet call it a gun.  Yet the man who releases hum seems to subscribe to the exact same way of thinking and yet casually releases him.  The reader is willing to believe that the writer might have been arbitrarily killed.  Why did things turn out as they did?  No one knows.  Would there be any difference at all between the putative Marxism of this ruling party and a Western-allied dictator, or a third who cultivates a simple cult of personality? 

     In each of these incidents the observer is European and the scene before him is distinctly Other (though the pattern occurs as well, of course, in the observations of cultivated non-European writers) [2].  This sets in motion a peculiar dialectic in which on the one hand the writer implies the ethnocentric notion that other cultures are inscrutable, ridiculous, or childish.  At the same time the attitude confesses parochial ignorance since every custom must have a reason.  The implications spread from that point indefinitely: one side is more rich and powerful, yet the other may possess some greater wisdom, the one is on home ground and thus secure, the visitor at a loss, and so on into the speculative night.   All this from some unexceptional not-knowing.

     But in the most general terms, the author in each of these scenes does not know what to make of the spectacle before his eyes, so what is the reader to think?  Chatwin’s persecutor perhaps could see a weapon in a fountain pen, but why did Waughs’s interlocutor say he saw no fight?  In order to more placidly enjoy his evening out?  In Byron’s story the same events cause the “old witches” to laugh, the young woman to rage in fury, and the writer to scratch his head.  Does a “real” meaning exist?

     The Pyrrhonic skeptics of late antiquity felt that they could make use of such uncertainty and achieve peace of mind through acknowledging their ignorance, leading first to silence, but then to serenity and perhaps even to pleasure. [1]  Followers of the meditative via negativa such as the pseudo-Dionysius and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing have conjured deity out of purest no-thought.   And Bloom would make mis-reading a source of creative change. 

     The twentieth century offered new renditions of this paradoxical enlightening darkness.  In Sartre’s Nausea (1938) Roquentin reflects on the roots of a chestnut tree.  His experience is confined to the present moment, and he concludes “faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence . . . That root with its color, shape, its congealed movement, was beneath all explanation.”  A few years later in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus provided another memorable illumination sparked by ignorance.

 

At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man' s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this "nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd.

 

     This metaphysical occlusion of meaning is only the broadest initial reading of such misunderstandings of travel.  Whether such reflections are recorded in a journal or a book or whether they simply vanish like sparkles of sunlight on a stream, the trip will eventually end.  The traveler may then return with a livelier sense of the extent to which we all are finding our way about the darkness whether in our own home or in Timbuktu.  With the right spirit we can enjoy our bumbling as a kind of sport or gallant act in defiance of the unknown and make as much of our not-knowing as our knowing.  What more is there to travel?  What more to reading?  To life?

 

 

 

1.      1.  See Eusebius Praeparatio Evangelica, Book 14.

2.      2.  Recognizing the utility of the outside perspective, in the eighteenth century a series of books by Europeans in the pose of non-Europeans were published including Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721), Poullain de Saint-Foix’s Lettres d’une Turque à Paris (1730), d'Argens’ Lettres chinoises (1741), Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747), Beckford’s Vathek, and Johnson’s Rasselas (1759).