From Madame Chrysanthème to Madame Prune: Triads and Tribulations in Pierre Loti’s Japanese Novels

Abstract

Abstract The lack of scholarly interest in Pierre Loti’s second Japanese novel, La Troisième Jeunesse de Madame Prune (1905), has obscured the fact that it modifies our understanding of how Japan functions in the author’s imaginary. This article begins by offering a new reading of its better-known predecessor, Madame Chrysanthème (1887), concentrating on the insistent and proliferating use of triads. These structures involve characters (such as Loti–Yves–Chrysanthème), places (Loti–Nagasaki–Istanbul), and intertexts (Loti–Madame Chrysanthème–Le Mariage de Loti). Unlike in Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s and René Girard’s theoretical treatments of triangularity, Loti’s use of triads foregrounds the absence of desire, making Madame Chrysanthème an atypical novel in his corpus. Comparison with La Troisième Jeunesse de Madame Prune underlines this: in the later novel, Loti reinstates a fascination with both sexuality and mortality that was absent in its predecessor. Furthermore, because of its status as a sequel, it allows Loti’s use of nostalgia to gain in complexity, offering the coexistence of multiple temporalities in the same experience of the Japanese space.