MIRAGES OF DESIRE

If the conspicuous exotic in the works of Loti, Gauguin, and Segalen contrasts markedly with the Francocentric world of À la recherche du temps perdu, obsession with the Other is no less real in the novel. While Segalen delights in the preservation of a resistant difference, such irreducible alterity frequently awakens an aggressive frustration for Proust's Narrator. Yet desire in the Recherche also spawns its own exotic, as Proust recycles the hackneyed motifs that Loti and his generation handed down to him. Hence the Africanist nostalgia when he writes:

Given the ironic fluctuations in literary fashion, it is easy to overlook just how much Proust's generation was influenced by Loti. While his slide into obscurity for much of the twentieth century is not in question, David Sweetman rightly insists on Loti's ‘commanding influence’ in the closing years of the nineteenth century.