Between the Book and the Lamp

This essay compares the “imaginative geographies of Egypt, 1849-50” (Gregory, 1994, subtitle) as constructed by Flaubert and Nightingale. The latte was the “lady of the lamp” although the lamp referred to here is a reference to Foucault who suggested that “the imaginary now resides between the book and the lamp” (Gregory, 1994). The point here is that flights of fantasy started in the libraries of Europe, leading to the traveller to other lands with pre-texts as to what they will find. There appears to me an element of the armchair psychogeographer about this approach –

This is relevant to my comments on how an opinion on landscape is filtered by our expectations of what it should look like. For example travellers in a developed country (e.g. myself walking the Thames Path, or Reinjan Mulder’s work in Holland) may be surprised at the lack of development, whereas explorers of more remote regions (Yan Wan Preston in China) may be concerned with incidents of industrialisation.

This perhaps feeds into the idea of precession of simulacra, in so far as preconceptions of what landscape should look like may not only control the way humans look at or react to the landscape but even how they manage it.

Gregory uses the terms “making seen” and “making scene” to help describe a process through which a space is negotiated by both politics and aesthetics. So while the psychogeographic approach suggests how a space is constructed by the traveller as they move through it (the path does not exist until it is walked), the pre-text suggests that this construction may be an adjustment to a model that already exists, if hazy, in the mind of the tourist.

Turning to the particularly travellers Flaubert and Nightingale, the latter took what might seem an adventurous trip up the Nile in a dajaneeah (houseboat). Nevertheless we discover that an etiquette had already developed for such a voyage, involving a system of flags to communicate who was travelling. Already we see an expectation of how to behave and what, or at least whom, to expect. This situation encouraged an attitude of “them” and “us”. Nightingale struggled to find words to describe the landscape, particularly the colours (this issue with describing colour and indeed the reality of colour itself I discussed in my Documentary essay: https://documentary515050.wordpress.com/2021/11/02/4-revised-can-you-photograph-an-orange-in-black-white/). This led her to find the Egyptian environment “un-natural” and furthermore to carry this approach over to the Egyptians themselves, describing them as “an intermediate race between the monkey and the man” (Gregory, 1994). Gregory goes on to discuss how the “characteristic tropes of the European colonial imagination” developed into a “discourse of negation” (Gregory, 1994). I see this as a negation of humanity, not just the viewed but the looker. Later when referring to “deficiencies of social reality” Gregory will ask “But whose social reality?” (Gregory, 1994).

Inherent in Nightingale’s writing is the comparison between an idealised antiquity and a modern reality – for her progress has been reversed. The nature of progress, or perhaps the progress of nature, is a subjective idea, however – for example the establishment of national parks and more recently the awareness of anthropocenic damage accepts that humanity cannot progress over all else for ever and proposes a more balanced approach to our existence on the planet, if it is to be continued.

Interestingly the author will go on to suggest that, whatever we think of their descriptions, the “limit-experience” of crossing a threshold away from the European is “only accessible to travellers from these places” (Gregory, 1994) – yet another reference to the importance of the commentator being both outside and inside, although clearly no guarantee as to the quality of the commentary.

Flaubert’s writings are more complex, as you might expect from an author. He was driven by “the desire to escape the conventions and confinements of bourgeois Europe” (Gregory, 1994). Gregory proposes a search for a “textually unmediated representation” not established between the book and the lamp, but points out that “The West, having preceded Flaubert to the East, is obliging him to record it there, like an unanticipated referent which forces its representation upon the text whose function had nominally been to evade it” (Gregory, 1994).

Flaubert’s reacts differently to Nightingale – he revels in the chaos, noise and colour of the modern Egypt and rebels against the Western requirement to appreciate and describe the treasures of antiquity. Flaubert immerses himself in every sense in the physicality of the place. Gregory correctly points that his gender permits this in a way that Nightingale’s would have strongly discouraged at the time, although I think the divergence in their attitudes remains clearly delineated beyond that. Nevertheless Gregory suggests that these might be two aspects of a colonial attitude – which sees everything available for the taking – an “accelerated absorption of the foreign” (Gregory, 1994) which may have seemed justified by the perceived otherness of the local people, intensified by the strangeness of the atmosphere/climate/geography.

Flaubert’s comment is telling: “Anyone who is a little attentive rediscovers here much more than he discovers … like so many refreshed memories” (Gregory, 1994). Hence the “fictive otherness” (Gregory, 1994) was reproduced in situ, captured for posterity if you will. Furthermore Gregory points out a “politics of reading or looking rather than listening”, partly because the latter could only be done through an interpreter. But this also fits well with the very Victorian hobby of collecting, the “world-as-exhibition” arranged as on display for the viewer and “captured” with the camera or the pen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Gregory, D. (1994) Between the Book and the Lamp: Imaginative Geographies of Egypt, 1849-50. At: https://www.jstor.org/stable/622723?origin=JSTOR-pdf (Accessed 7.10.2022)