ABSTRACT
Why does Angkor Wat continue, to this day, to fascinate us? That is one of the questions this paper strives to answer. It does so in a circuitous fashion, by harking back to the ravishment experienced by writers, artists, and filmmakers at the sight of the temple or its other worldly figurationsthe apsaras, the Cambodian dancers, the ruins, etc. This fascination may have been elicited by a reconstitution of Angkor Wat, such as the one seen by the French poet Michel Butor at the 1931 Colonial Exposition when he was an impressionable young boy,2 or by the chromolithographs that adorned the pages of such illustrated journals as L’Illustration, as Clara Malraux recounts in her memoirs.3 For those who wanted to “dream about Cambodia,” they could turn to Francis Garnier’s Voyage d’Exploration en Indochine, with its colorful portraits, lavish maps, and exotic panoramas. And for those in need of immediate contentment, the Musée Guimet would provide all of the rapture that could be felt at the sight of Cambodian artifacts. One thing seems clear: the experience of being spellbound or transfixed described by these men and women was achieved by visions or ways of imagining visually. In fact, as Martin Jay reminds us, “the word fascination . . . has itself an origin in the Latin for casting a spell, usually by visual means” (1993: 11). This study traces a genealogy of this fascination for Angkor Wat and what it reveals of the “ideology of the visible”4 and its stakes. Angkor is not simply a monument to man’s creativity, a repository of cultural values, or an object of pure aesthetic enjoyment; it is the site of intense aesthetic re-imagining, and political and economic appropriation.
