Mimicry of a Hallucination: The Quest for Identity à l'Orient

Author(s): Stephen L. Bishop

Source: Dalhousie French Studies, Vol. 78 (Spring 2007), pp. 117-127
Published by: Dalhousie University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40838381
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Mimicry of a Hallucination: The Quest for Identity à VOrient

Stephen L Bishop

/f' the end of the Nineteenth Century, from the creation of the Union Indochinoise in
st 1887 until 1897, three Frenchmen, three soldiers of different ranks, worked and
traveled in Indochina for France. As soldiers, they were obligated to fulfill France's
colonial desires, but separate from their official responsibilities and goals, the three had their
own dreams of living à I 'Orient (as physical space and style of living). These individual
dreams were all different - for military glory, anthropological study, and as a personal
rebirth - but they shared a common link amongst themselves. Between them, in spite of their
different ranks, social circles, and tastes, they all wanted the same thing - the existential
hallucination that results from occupying a foreign position in the theatre of the Orient. They
wanted to enter into an Other world and an Other identity in order to lose themselves and
their own "real" world and identity.
Such a desire may seem similar to the quest for a sense of "erotic exoticism" about the
Orient that Norindr speaks of concerning early Twentieth Century fictional stories of the
region. But these soldiers' personal travel narratives of the colonization of Indochina at the
end of the Nineteenth Century are distinct from the fictional stories that writers produced at
the beginning of the Twentieth Century about the adventures of these same sort of men. The
stories Norindr refers to may have sought an analogous exotic Other, but at the same time
they "transformed this imaginary location where many of these fantastic adventures took
place into a familiar and readily identifiable terrain" (3). This transformation of the exotic to
the familiar was not what these late Nineteenth Century soldiers were seeking. In fact, they
wanted precisely to escape a (too) familiar identity for the hallucination that was for them
the Orient.
At the same time, however, it is equally important to recognize a common link between
these soldiers' identificatory dreams and France's colonial desires. The transformation of
which Norindr spoke represents the mimetic relation between the Métropole and its colonies
that France was trying to establish in order to better control her subjects, and thus serves as
an explanation for the popularity of the fictional stories of the Twentieth Century. Despite
the soldiers' desire for an identificatory escape and for the oriental hallucination to which
they held, their administrative and even personal goals only reinforced France's colonial
project. Accordingly, the individuality and independence of their dreams were mere
hallucinations in the presence of France's overarching colonial desire. What they were
looking for - adventure and discovery that were at the same time foreign and personal - was
all too often exactly what was needed for France to establish her colonial mimetic world. It
was thus when these soldiers' personal dreams seemed most to go against France's colonial
desires and escape French identity that the moment of the true hallucination of desire
appeared.
So what were France's interests in Indochina which these soldiers were working for
despite their own hallucinatory ideas? Traditionally the interest has several explanations, the
most frequent of which is commerce. There are volumes that speak of food goods, raw
materials, animals, methods of transportation, etc., and of the commercial advantages for
France and Indochina, although curiously, despite the often exhaustive treatment of the
products coming from Indochina, the hallucinatory drug opium is almost never mentioned
(Lemine, 186-220; Gourdon, 155-82; Russier et Brenier, 218-45; Gamier, 7). There is also
the well-known justification that colonization leads to the betterment of inferior races
through European civilization {la mission civilisatrice), which can be distinguished from the
more general commercial advantages that France claimed to bring to Indochina. But these

Dalhousie French Studies 78 (2007)

-117-

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118 Stephen L. Bishop

two explanations are only indications, products and tools, of France's hidden desire for the
Orient - the desire of an identity for France through the Orient.
This is the world of Orientalism, colonies, and the Other, a world very much present in
the French classical literature of Montesquieu, Nerval, and Flaubert among others. It is an
enormous subject, of which we will examine only certain aspects in order to analyze the
three soldiers' stories and their relation to France's history at the end of the Nineteenth
Century. We will interest ourselves in what these soldiers observed that resembled "drug
trip" experiences where one loses one's sense of identity in the hallucination of another
reality, of another world. They are experiences that produce the illusion of movement and
distance that is so important to the hallucination of a specific identity - an identity that is not
necessarily fixed, but which can always maintain an exact position relative to some Other.
The question then becomes how this illusion becomes real while helping to establish and
support differences that indicate where one is (not) located. The final question is how this
hallucination, of illusory distance not only from the identity of the Other but from the Self
too, is an auto-hallucination in that it cannot exist.
More specifically, we will consider ideas of the mimetic relationship, or the false
integration between the Occident and the Orient, which is so necessary to the creation of an
Other world to which one can escape one's own world through fantastic dreams without the
apparent danger of being trapped by this new world. It is the utilization of hallucination to
live a double existence. We will then see how this delicate balance between two worlds is
impossible, and thus how one is forced to establish and maintain a concrete differences so
that one can declare oneself on one side or the other of the lines of demarcation. This move
represents the fabrication of the reality of the hallucination to justify this double existence,
and is where the three men's dreams of an individual existence separate from their official
roles as French citizens and soldiers only succeeds in reinforcing France's relationship to an
Oriental Other. Finally, we will see how this reality cannot function as desired since one is
trying to fabricate a reality out of a hallucination. This paradoxical attempt is impossible if
the created reality is a true hallucination and it is illusory if the transformation is a
possibility. The creation of an identity for one or the Other through false distancing is an
auto-hallucination because it cannot satisfy the requirements for the reality of both at the
same time.
It has been generally accepted for some time now, as Edward Said convincingly
illustrated, that the Orient is an invention of the Occident (Orientalism-, Culture). The image
of the Orient arises from a definitional tool that the Occident can use to lift and establish
itself as superior. "[T]he Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting
image, idea, personality, experience" (Said 1978, 1-2). The Orient has thus functioned as a
secondary but essential support for the Occident . "European «culture gained in strength and
identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground
self (Said 1978, 3). Nonetheless, despite this imbricated relation of identity, the Occident
refuses to recognize a socio-cultural existence in the Orient that is equivalent or even
comparable to that of the Occident. The Occident invents an Other that needs moral,
economic, and cultural assistance in order to be more European, and thus needs Europe as a
benevolent mistress (Said, 1993, xii, xvii, 10, 101, 131-2; Bhabha, "Difference" 198-9, 209).
But despite this desire to help the Other and allow him to become more European, there is
no desire to see him, in fact, be European. One seeks to maintain a certain identificatory
distance between the two. One does not want the Other to resemble the Self in all aspects
(and thus become a "un petit Soi"), but only that the former resemble the latter in particular
domains - specifically, those that permit enough resemblance to allow for comparison, but
with sufficient differences so that one can maintain a sense of superiority.
One goal of this distance is readily apparent - the Orient functions as a
definition/contrast for the Occident and thus a "presque semblable" is needed, a strategy that
Bhabha has exposed in several articles (notably "Difference" and "Mimicry"). But another

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L'orient 119

result of this situation, even another goal, is to create a position in the world that is not
completely real. The West represents that which is real in the world; it is the example of the
Good, the Moral, the Civilized, etc. In colonial discourse, all others are only partial
imitations of this representation, and thus are not real. They are not even inferior, incomplete
copies that have a right to an inferior truth, but simply reflective spaces in which the Self can
see its authenticity by comparison. They are hallucinations that demonstrate reality.
The process for arriving at this state of (non)existence, as well as the state itself are
problematic. But before posing and treating this problem, it is necessary to see how the
Occident creates this "presque semblable" situation. Bhabha advances the idea of mimicry
as a way to have an Other that imitates the Self without being the same ("Mimicry").
Quoting from Lacan, he advances the idea that "the effect of mimicry is camouflage... it is
not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of
becoming mottled" (125). Thereby, one creates an Other who is the "subject of a difference
that is almost the same, but not quite" (Bhabha, "Mimicry" 126). As concerns the three
soldiers, a similar relationship can be pursued in the opposite sense. For example, in
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, De Quincey does not walk about in the lower-class
crowds to be one of them, but rather to be like them - "The pleasure is not at all to pretend
to be one of an inferior class; it is to pretend to be like them, fundamentally the same, but
different in all that really concerns one's sense of identity and self-esteem" (Barrell 2). In
this sense, the soldiers in this study are drugged flâneurs like De Quincey, who sought to
lose himself in the crowd in which he could camouflage himself but to which he did not
want to belong. These soldiers seek an Other identity, quite distinct from their usual French
identity, and employ the Other as a site of transformation. But at the same time they do not
want to become this Other, and thus try to avoid self-imbricating too much in this Other life.
It is a similar process to the one that De Quincey had attempted in order to calm his
fears of the Orient and the Other. According to Barrell, De Quincey had developed his
addiction to opium, a drug of dreams and hallucination, in order to "self-inoculate" against
the threat of an identity fractured by hybridity (17-9). Here, the soldiers were looking for this
same protection, or inoculation against a hybrid identity by experiencing the Orient as a drug
trip or hallucination. Accordingly, the desired result is not a question of a colonizer who is
essentially the same as the colonized but superior, but of a drawing closer of a dominant
subject and a colonial object that can resemble the Occident to a certain degree, but who is
too abnormal to be it (Bhabha, "Difference" 198). This abnormality permits the colonizer to
reject the integration (and independence) of the Other due to the latter' s incapability of
being real ("like him"). The colonial object becomes worthy of the Occident's gaze, but not
worthy of the respect that comes with a parallel existence.
The value of this ambivalence is that the Occident always has a point of reference that
can neither complain of its inferior position nor rightfully change it. The Other is always
outside the system that it helped and continues to help define and is dependent on the
recognition of this system for its reality. For example, Said saw that this ambivalence allows
one to mark every Oriental advancement in culture, commerce, politics, etc. as the product
of Occidental influences (Culture 40). It is as if there is an Occidental originality that
germinates in the Orient without Oriental assistance . There is no collaboration between the
two because the One has a real existence and the Other has an illusory (fabricated) one.
The soldiers' narratives repeat this move by describing their Indochinese voyages as
"drug trips", as experiences during which their senses become skewed and their identities
deformed. It is the Indochinese, Oriental(ist) experience that represents the dream-like state
into which they (willingly) enter in search of identificatory trials, but in which they
consistently refuse to recognize any status or power that is real. Ironically then, the French
colonial Orientalist vision of a lesser, imaginary Indochina therefore in need of French
assistance to shore up its tenuous connection to reality mirrors the soldiers' quest to
disembody their all-too-real French identity through a fantastic, hallucinatory Otherworld

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120 Stephen L. Bishop

experience.
The problems with this system of mimicry where the Self creates a hallucination to
function as its definition/contrast quickly become apparent. One critique is simply that the
soldiers' French identities are just as hallucinatory as any Indochinese one into which they
enter. While the soldiers can be said to have been previously "drugged" by a French
ideological colonial identity, such an observation obscures the point that for the soldiers,
and the French colonial mindset they both represent and resist, there is no question as to the
reality of the pre-hallucinatory Same. The sustainability of polarizing pre-hallucinatory and
hallucinatory states will ultimately confront them and cause them to "overdose" on the
experience, but it is not an initial concern . A more fundamental quandary is how these
soldiers can base a solid and permanent structure - their new identity - on nothing. If the
mirror is illusory, the integrity of the reflection is put in doubt. As the soldiers enter Lacan' s
world of the Imaginary, they need a mirror to find a discrete image of themselves but if they
find themselves with an image that is false, they create a false self. Consequently, in this
creation of the Other, the soldiers grant Indochina a certain reality.
They can recognize this reality by recalibrating the differences that they fabricated
earlier to assure that the Other is not equal to the Self. They can hide the Other's "abnormal"
essence that is necessary for maintaining the justification for the administration of colonial
subjects. One way of accomplishing this goal is to find another Other - that which is even
more distant from the Occident. Barrell explains that "there is this here, and it is different
from that there, but the difference between them, [...] is as nothing compared with the
difference between the two of them considered together, and that third thing, way over there,
which is truly other to them both" (10). For him, this construction of differences is similar to
Spivak's concept of the "self-consolidating other" (that there) and the "absolute other" (truly
other) (10). The two subjects that were so different are brought together in a hierarchy
opposite this second Other - "There is an East beyond that East, where something lurks
which is equally threatening to both, and which enables or obliges them to reconcile their
differences" (11). Although this unification is still a rapport between a superior and an
inferior, the two are now on the same side of the reality-hallucination split, and thereby are
equally real.
It is here that the real problems, or problems with the real start to manifest themselves.
The Self created a hallucination that it must now force to remain illusory at the same time
that it possesses a certain reality. That which was created with the ambivalence of mimicry
(the "presque semblable") is a colonial object that has only partial presence. It is as if the
emergence itself of the "colonial" is dependant for its representation on a strategic limitation
or prohibition of the authoritarian discourse itself. The success of colonial appropriation
therefore depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects, which assures its strategic
failure (Bhabha, "Mimicry" 127). Thus, one begins a series of contradictions that are
necessary to the proper functioning of the colonial system, but which cannot exist together
in reality.
The danger of this partial presence of the colonial object is that it now produces a
double vision of the object that reveals the ambivalence of colonial discourse, and thus
undoes its authority (Bhabha, "Mimicry" 129). The colonial object can perceive itself in a
doubled position, and thus in a mixture of the real and the illusory that the Self has created
in order to invest itself with its own identity. The Other can thus perceive the equally partial
presence of the colonizer - the "gaze of otherness" is reversed (Bhabha, "Mimicry" 129).
The Other can see here that it is also a "Self and that the other Self is equally an "Other".
The position of absolute authority of the Occident is destabilized, which in the case of the
three soldiers means a revelation of the truly hallucinatory nature of the new identities they
are trying to discover for themselves.
With this destabilization and revelation comes the uncertainty of the identity that was
one of the primary goals of creating the physical and symbolic space of the Orient. The

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L'orient 121

distance that one fabricated to produce two exclusive identities deforms and becomes a
hallucination itself. Either the Oriental identity is a hallucination that cannot support the
reality of differentiated superiority of the Occident, or it is not a hallucination, and thus
breaks down the distance that is necessary for the justification of the colonial administrative
system. In the end, every symbolic tentative is a complete failure. The attempted essentialist,
binary division between reality and hallucination becomes the only hallucination. The
soldiers are forced to abandon their quests for a hallucination-based identity or accept
Indochina as an equal partner in reality.
The attempt to find a new identity through the hallucinatory experience of the Other
and the attempts ultimate failure manifests itself in the stories of the four characters of this
study: Sous-Lieutenant René Normand in his posthumous collection Lettres du Tonkin
(1887), Lieutenant Frédéric Garcin in his diary Un an chez les muongs (1888-90), Maréchal
Lyautey in his epistolary collection Lettres du Tonkin (1894-97), and colonial France. Each
of these characters went on a voyage à I 'Orient. The first three did so as representatives of
the fourth and her goal of creating a colony that could function as the Other. But these three
men each think that they desire something different - they believe they have individual and
independent desires. They want to lose themselves in the hallucination that was this Other
world, in dreams that distinguish themselves from the reality of France. What they did not
understand was that these desires were neither individual because they were share by all
three, nor independent because their existences were dependent upon the goal that France
had. The only hallucination that existed was that of the idea of an individual and
independent identity.
The three men begin their attempts to enter into the world of hallucination with
voyages whose experiences resemble "drug trips". Before even arriving in this region know
for its opiate dreams, these military men immerse themselves in sensations that indicate their
dreams of losing themselves and drowning in an Other existence - a reflection of Said's
observations on identity loss through orientalist investigations (1978). The long voyage from
France to Indochina by boat is thus one which floats from reality to illusion.

Le voyage est une joie animale de se laisser vivre de cette douce vie de bord,
confortable, abandonnée, flottante au figuré comme au réel, où l'heure, l'espace,
la vie se fondent comme l'horizon en contours imprécis. (Lyautey 3)
It is during this voyage that they lose consciousness of time and space. Lyautey remarks on
several occasions how time is becoming nebulous, almost "démodé", and how he needs
precise indications to remind him that he still exists.

[L]a notion du temps se perdrait si les heures ne tintaient, sonnées par la cloche de
la passerelle, si l'affichage du point n'annonçait pas midi, si la sonnette du maître
d'hôtel n'avertissait du lunch de deux heures, du thé de 4 heures...; Il semble qu'il
n'y ait plus d'autre communication entre le passé et le bateau, qui s'enfonce
toujours plus avant, que le court et fugitif sillage un instant tracé sur la verte
plaine où l'homme ne marche pas; Oh! alors, dans cette douce vie, sans heures;
Les journées se confondent complètement. (7-8, 31, 36, 40)

For Normand too, time passes more and more slowly and languorously during the trip (8).
For Lyautey, this question of losing contact with temporal repères extends equally to the
notion of space.
L'abîme sous nos pieds, l'abîme sur nos têtes, autour de nous l'abîme des
distances; [Après avoir vu une phare pendant la nuit] II y a donc encore quelque
part une terre et un autre monde que celui de YOxus [son bateau]?;
and for several days he complains of the absence of firm ground (33, 35, 40-1).
At the same time that there is this temporal and spatial vertigo, especially for Lyautey,
senses and emotions become sharper for the three travelers. Lyautey remarks that "le bleu est

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 122 Stephen L. Bishop

plus profond, la lune plus vermeille, les étoiles plus dorées,... c'est une splendeur" and
during a visit to a city in India he encounters strong odors and colors that lead him to declare
himself "dans un parfum" (10, 37-8). Normand is a little less gracious, but also experiences
strong emotional reactions, "[A la vu des moeurs orientales] je n'ai jamais tant ri" (59). He
has other reactions that demonstrate more clearly how these changes of perception are
pleasing and enjoyable to him, "[J]e me porte jusqu'à présent bien mieux qu'en France. J'ai
trouvé ici le fameux appétit (Normand 78). Lyautey speaks too of the exquisite sensation of
eating differently when, describing a so-called Oriental meal, he declares that "l'on s'étonne
que ça ne fasse pas de musique" (47). Garcin adds to this description of sensorial
transformation with a more general observation, "Mais qu'était-ce que la perspective de ces
souffrances [un manque des luxes], auprès de la joie que me causait l'inconnu?" (22). They
start to ask themselves, "Où en suis-je? réalité ou rêve?" (Lyautey 18). Without realizing it,
they are in the process of trying to escape the Occidental vision and enter into the Oriental
one.

This voyage from reality to illusion continues and even intensifies once they have
arrived in Indochina. Senses and time exist as if in a dream. Lyautey says that "II était
impossible d'avoir l'occasion d'accumuler plus de sensations et d'observations" (200). And
Garcin remarks that ""le voyage [entre deux villes] me charma... [avec] des senteurs
marines, des parfums d'algues sèches" (163). Normand announces that "Tout ici est curieux;
les chevaux sont grands comme des chiens, mais les buffles... sont énormes... [et les couleurs
des costumes sont étonnant]" and then in the middle of a battle he has "le meilleur dîner que
j'aie fait de ma vie" (63, 91). Lyautey offers a long description of a procession at the Chinese
border ("Quelle fantastique journée!") that is fantastic itself in its extravagant, unreal, and
strange details (87-8). The perception and reality of time are also transformed by these
experiences. "Je me crois transporté à cinq ans en arrière: cette odeur de cadavres, ces corps
sans têtes, me rappellent le temps..." (Garcin 229). Lyautey states that an officer can
accomplish more in Indochina in six months "qu'un officier de France en toute sa carrière"
or "qu'en vingt-cinq ans de garnison de France" (80, 91).
The more one penetrates into Indochina the more this distancing from Occidental
reality and this slipping into the Oriental dream increases. Lyautey says:
Nous entrons dans le Fleuve Rouge, il y a là un coup de foudre de première
révélation. Il n'y a pas en Europe de nappe d'eau comparable,... Le soleil tombant
l'illumine à tel point qu'on ne distingue plus l'infection boueuse de son eau, et
c'est un rêve de glisser ainsi sur un vrai bras de mer,... au niveau de la vaste plaine
où les milliers de petits êtres jaunes et crochus tourbillonnent comme des insectes
dans la lumière (68).
It is here that the three men try to create an Other world to which they can escape but
which always remains sufficiently foreign so that it cannot perceive them as equals. They
demand a mimetic world. They create and invade a world that is always "presque français".
Saigon, for example, has all the French veneer, but "[o]n a très vite l'impression qu'il ne
faut pas gratter et que si l'on retire les fonctionnaires, les militaires et les énormes droits
protecteurs, tout craque" (Lyautey 54). Normand remarks that the city is completely French
except "si on [rencontre] de temps à autre un Annamite ou un Chinois" (50-1). There is
always a sharp distance maintained between the two, between reality and illusion, as one can
see in the physical division between French and Tonkinese affairs in two separate offices
(Lyautey 72). And even when Lyautey says that his house is becoming a "home" with the
supplement of Oriental decorations and bibelots, he never recognizes that these objects are
all strictly confined to a single room (102, 228, 357). Lyautey strictly avoids smoking opium
despite the fact that he has an opium bed in the room along with a smoking apparatus that he
often starts up because "[l'odeur] s'allie si bien au décor" (229, 357).
Contrary to the soldiers' professed hallucinatory and liminal states of mind, true

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L'orient 123

mélange is always rejected, such as the dinner described as "mi-chinois mi-français, en

somme parfaitement indigeste; voulant nous satisfaire, mais ne distinguant pas les nuances"
(Lyautey 163-4). Objects and people often come closer, but the essential distinctions
between French and other-than-French always remain at the base of the mimetic relations.
When Garcin considers the possibility of bringing his "boy" to Paris with him, he rejects the
idea because he knows that he could never tolerate "changements si durs" and the staying in
Indochina is "son rôle" (122). Normand even becomes angry in Algiers because he cannot
find places where Arab and French cultures are not mixed (7). Colonial mimesis exists to
reproduce (and reinforce) the Metropolitan ideology without permitting colonial subjects to
establish their own authentic existence. Accordingly, the Oriental aristocrats are said not to
speak like the French, but rather "comme des phonographes" (Lyautey 59). The Other can
have close connections with the Self, but never an exact resemblance.
One way of assuring this distance is to demonize the Other, and it is a strategy that all
three men employ. What constitutes the Other in their eyes is criticized and mocked.
Customs, characteristics and actions perceived as Oriental, and thus non-Occidental, become
immediately laughable and/or corrupt. The first contact that Lyautey has with an Oriental is
with an Annamite aristocrat who has the title of "Phu". Henceforth, he delights in calling
him the "Fou" (23). He remarks upon arriving in Tonkin that his "boy" is as ugly as his
culture and from a "race horrible" and "répugnante" (72, 73, 76). He also describes him as
having "Pair d'un chat" (83). Norman also finds Orientals "infectes" and "laids comme des
poux, sales comme des peignes" (38, 46, 146). He utilizes his own comparison with animals
- that they live a "vie de chien", which is all the more interesting as he also remarks, with
horror, that "Annamites mangent les quiquis [chiens]" (141, 181). Garcin admits that he
finds it impossible to guess the age of Orientals (50). But it is even worse for Normand - he
cannot distinguish between the sexes ( 1 46).
This constant criticism did not and could not admit any reflexivity. As a source of
distancing, it could not equally target the French, or there would be one similarity too many.
Therefore, when Garcin decries the Muongs for executing deserters as an example of their
savageness, he forgets to mention that the same punishment occurred in the French army
(55). And when he mocks a tirailleur who accidentally falls, he makes no reflexive
commentary in the next paragraph where he describes his need for help from his guide in
order to climb the path without falling (58). Even when an act seems universally
condemned, one finds cultural justifications to distinguish its commission by French and
non-French actors. For example, corporal punishment is said to be necessary for the natives
because they do not understand other punishments. It is explained as "dans les moeurs du
pays" (Garcin 102-4). The three soldiers also consistently forget that they never try to stop
what they label barbarities even though it is they who have official power. Reinforcing this
idea this idea, Garcin insists on the fact that the deserters who were executed were not killed
by French soldiers, although the act is done by tirailleurs who are all subordinate to every
Frenchmen who is present (242). Nor does he display any sense of irony when he describes
his "trial" several hours later of a Chinese man whom they have captured - "Son procès
n'est pas long. On le laisse là où on Ta pris, avec une balle à la tête" (246).
But this constant distancing becomes excessive and counter-productive if it produces
an Other that is too illusory. This ambiguous state of the relative value of the Other,
characteristic of all Orientalism, highlights the built-in contradiction of the hallucinatory
status of Indochina for these soldiers. Just as reaction to the Orient inevitably displays a
Derridean breakdown of binary difference through the différance of fascination and
revulsion, solidity and etherealness, etc., these soldiers begin to realize that their visions of
Indochina are not real enough to justify the existence and fix the identity of the Self.
Therefore, the soldiers try at the same time to find some qualities of the real in the
hallucination in order to not lose the former completely. They try to attribute the Oriental
experience a solid enough existence so that it can reflect the Selfs gaze. Such attempts are

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124 Stephen L. Bishop

readily apparent in the collecting of concrete souvenirs by the three soldiers. Normand sends
a collection of "réalia" to France as a manifestation of the theatre of battle, insisting once on
the fact that "la pièce est authentique" (77). Lyautey also finds proof of the reality of his
dream in physical representations. "[J]e douterais aujourd'hui que ces trois mois de vie
violente et empoignante n'aient pas été un rêve, si, à mon mur, devant mes yeux, un diable
de drapeau rouge à grands caractères bleus, déchiré de balles, ne témoignait pas que j'ai bien
vécu ces heures exquises" (197). The hallucination is thus concretized and the binary
opposition given new life.
But the more common way to accomplish this investment of the Other with a certain
reality is to narrow the distance between the Other and the Self by creating an other Other,
distanced still farther from the reality of the Self. This extreme Other is represented by the
Chinese for Lyautey and Normand and by the Chinese and the Annamites/Tonkinais for
Garcin (who was with the Muongs). The Chinese as pirates/invaders gave the three men a
raison d'être - protecting their little, culturally and militarily inferior friends. And this
raison d'être - superior and magnanimous protector - is one that can be recognized and
appreciated in the real world.
Accordingly, Garcin comments that the only cities that still exist escaped destruction by
the Chinese because they were under the direct protection of France (2). In fact, he sees that
the Chinese "infestèrent cette contrée," and that it is only the French who can chase them
away (3). Garcin prefers the Muongs and to justify his love for them, he attributes to them
Aryan characteristics that he sees as not existing amongst the other Orientals (13). He even
states that Annamites, who were indigenous to the region for centuries, are foreigners in the
Muong region, even though he fails to notice his own foreign status (32). He does not want
any Annamite ("non-indigènes") tirailleurs in his pure Muong regiment, although he has
(and states explicitly that he wants) French soldiers (91-2). Ironically, but logically, Lyautey
uses the Muongs in the reverse way. His charges are the Annamites, and thus it is the
Muongs who are the barbarians in opposition to the Annamites who accept French
civilization and carry umbrellas - "[Les Muongs] ont le fusil; l'Annamite préfère le
parapluie" (104-5). The final irony is that Garcin also sees as other Other the invaders from
Siam against whom he must defend the Muongs. These invaders are the English colonizers
(183-4). The original Other becomes the Selfs charge in the face of other Others, and
thereby worthy of French recognition, even if it is still as inferior.
It is now that the complex game of mimesis starts to crumble - when diametrical goals
of hallucination and reality openly clash. The soldiers need the Other to define their
existence, but this existence had as a goal to be superior to and independent of the Other.
The mélange does not function, but without this mélange the search for identity does not
advance. The intoxicating effects of the ambiguous nature of the hallucination/reality binary
begin to wear off. The soldiers are finally obligated to recognize the power of the Orient,
without which there is no "drug trip", no redefinition of identity.
In the three texts there is such a recognition of the effect of the Orient on the Occident
as concerns identity. Lyautey begins his book with a letter from a fried who asks him:

voilà longtemps queje pense à vous sans trop savoir où vous prendre, ce que vous
devenez, pensez, aimez, si vous êtes encore des nôtres,... si vous n'êtes pas
devenu un homme nouveau, un conquérant de pays neuf, conquis vous-même par
votre conquête, rêvant d'avenir (Préface - 1).
His friend recognizes that the transformation of a man's identity comes from "au dehors"
(Préface - III). It is a possibility that Lyautey recognizes himself. "[Donnez-moi des
nouvelles pour] que je ne revienne pas dans deux ans totalement étranger" (96). And it is a
truth that he must admit at the end of his stay when he leaves. "Je reste Indochinois de toute
ma foi" (438). For Normand, the situation is even more evident. He also stays there (forever)
and is completely transformed when he is killed during his tour (189). Garcin also admits

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L'orient 125

that in spite of all the hardships he has suffered, that "je m'y étais bien profondement
attaché: je le sentis alors" (281-2).
But although they can admit the truth of the effect, they cannot admit it into their lives.
They seek to inoculate themselves against this contagion. Therefore, although they left
France to search for exotic adventure, they turn to France as a new inoculating drug when
the hallucinatory experience becomes too real. For Lyautey, after several weeks in
Indochina, letters from France become "exquises" and give him a "joie interne", and he
requests European literature because "[i]ci, 1' 'image' fait un plaisir infini" (73, 201). And
after having been in Indochina several months, Garcin and Lyautey begin to dream regularly
of the past, and Garcin and Normand are always waiting for news of France from the Delta
(Garcin 191, 195; Lyautey 156; Normand 50). There are other soldiers who bear witness to
this same recourse to the familiar, like the commander of a fort whom Garcin meets who
does nothing but take care of a French garden. He has placed it outside of the fort because
there is better sun there, and thus risks his life going out each evening to water it, even
though his French plants inevitably die in the foreign climate (232, 256). Lyautey also
announces that he is put in a dream-like state when he encounters French flora (313).
Moreover, he professes a desire to have French horses although there are more than enough
Indochinese horses, and he comments that French cigarettes are a source of solidarity
amongst the officers (75, 77). Now, after their initial flight from the Occident for and
through the Orient, the soldiers need the Occident to escape from the Orient.
The roles are thus reversed - France has become the drug and the dream, and Indochina
becomes the reality from which the soldiers want to escape. This reversal destroys the
reassuring system of identity that the three men were looking for à l'Orient. Their original
reality can neither be completely left behind nor entirely reconfigured through a
hallucinatory Other. They needed an Other world separate from their reality in order to
assume the different identity they sought, yet such a sharp, defined separation is impossible.
The illusion of the Occident corrupts the reality of the Orient as much as the opposite, such
as the example of an Annamite king who is declared crazy by his subjects when he recounts
to them the effects of electricity that the French have shown him (Lyautey 411). In the end,
it is Lyautey who admits that he needs the reality of the Orient in order to return from his
French dreams. "[L]a pensée s'envole vers la France, se perd dans la forêt des souvenirs; les
images familières de quelque réveil, de quelque crépuscule de jadis, surgissant inattendues,
et il faut le son du gong... pour reprendre la notion de l'espace et du temps" (127).
The Orientalist vision of a hallucinatory mimetic experience that reinforces French
reality turns in upon itself and collapses. Accordingly, Bhabha's observation that colonial
authority turns from mimicry to menace can be equally used (albeit it ironically) to describe
Indochina's "hallucinatory authority" (133). The menace now is that the colonial gaze, and
by metonymy the soldiers' own gaze has been revealed to them to be an hallucinatory
authority of reality. Indochina's identificatory role for these soldiers thus undergoes a
process of mimetic reversal whereby the Other can escape from its prison of hallucinatory
object and construct itself as a Self, while the Self has to admit its subjectivity and its own
illusory status. Mimicry produces an Other distanced enough from the Self to justify and
maintain the colonial administration, but when one wants to bring it closer to reality to
realize and maintain a concrete identity it is no longer mimicry, but rather equivalence.
The result is that the individual French colonial soldier, as revealed through these
personal narratives, is trapped between reinforcing his country's colonial gaze and
establishing a new sens(ation) of identity. The soldiers are presented with the option of
buying once again into their identity as standard colonial representatives who fulfill,
experience, and live the dream of French empire or losing themselves completely in the
reality of colonized Indochina. Normand has succumbed to his contact with the reality of
Indochina, but Lyautey and Garcin survive to quit Indochina and reintegrate into French
colonial society, thus demonstrating that these seekers of hallucinatory experience have

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 126 Stephen L. Bishop

learned, in DeQuincey's words, "to fear and tremble" the hallucinatory experience (79). The
three men wanted to create a new identity separate from France, but they eventually return to
her without ever really having left. It is thus in the end that the quest for an independent and
individual identity through contact with a colonially-produced hallucinatory Other clashes
with the hallucination of a justification of colonial superiority without concrete links to the
inferior and produces the only viable hallucination - that of the very possibility of either
endeavor.

The University of New Mexico

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