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Chapter 1, Part 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Orientalism, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The West’s View of the Eastern World
Knowledge and Power
Belief, Consensus, and Reality
The Persistence of Racism
The Personal as Political
Summary
Analysis
When he died in 1880, French novelist Gustave Flaubert was working on an unfinished novel satirizing the bumbling incompetence of the 19th-century bourgeoise’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge and dominance. In it, Flaubert has one of his protagonists blithely declare that contact with Asia is bound to “regenerate” Europe. Although this sketch is underdeveloped, it gestures toward Orientalist ideas that had become entrenched by the late 19th century, specifically, the ongoing distinction between the East and West as geographic and cultural regions; the use of the East (here Asia) as a tool for Western use; and a sense, borrowed from the Romantic movement, that Western culture has been drained of energy. Flaubert also gives readers an image of Orientalism as a closed system of knowledge, when he has his protagonists decide to become copyists who endlessly and uncritically replicate received knowledge.
Said interprets Flaubert’s bumbling protagonists as perfect examples of Orientalist discourse. What makes this more interesting is that Said presents Flaubert as able to see through the discourse, at least at some moments. How Flaubert encounters—and uses—the Orient will be the focus of a later section in this chapter. That matters to Said because it shows, yet again, how pervasive and powerful a discourse like Orientalism can become. And this scene from Flaubert’s notes shows the continuity of Orientalism’s main ideas (the Orient is different, the Orient is less developed yet still a valuable resource). Romanticism was a 19th-century literary and cultural movement that reacted against the rigid rationality of the Enlightenment. It emphasized, instead, emotions and imagination. In this light, the Orient for Flaubert’s characters isn’t a place to colonize physically but a place from which Europe can steal the best, most exciting and titillating experiences to prod its imaginative faculties back to life. Romanticism thus becomes, for Said, a key driver of Orientalism’s expansion from scholarship to the realm of literature.
Themes
In this chapter, Said proposes to trace the development of Orientalist discourse between the Middle Ages and the 19th century. Several things change in this time: European explorers and colonists travel farther and farther beyond the Islamic lands of the Near East; historical anthropology begins to put civilizations into conversation with each other; some thinkers and artists, inspired by history, become interested in Oriental cultures, bringing Orientalist discourse increasingly into public consciousness; and the scientific revolution led to a frenzy of classifying the natural world as minutely as possible.
As in the previous chapter, Said starts with a late 19th- or early 20th-century example that illustrates Orientalism. He invites readers to recognize the continuity between the ideas it expresses and ideas that might still be current in their own culture, then turns toward the past to show how long Orientalist discourse has held sway and how deeply entrenched it is in Western consciousness. The creative borrowing of Oriental themes and images Said describes here explains how Orientalism begins to seep from universities and learned societies into public consciousness.
Themes
Thus, what Said calls “modern” (18th- and 19th-century) Orientalism mainly distinguishes itself from its predecessors by an appeal to a quasi-scientific objectivity. The 18th-century Orientalist understands himself (they were all men) as rescuing the Orient from obscurity through heroic acts of scholarship. No longer a representative of Christianity, the Orientalist becomes a sort of god, recreating their world through their expert interpretation. Individual contributions to the discourse codify and pass down ideas that often ultimately take on the force of quasi-religious beliefs. This chapter examines the legacies of two key Orientalists, Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan, whose work bears witness to these shifts and the way that Orientalism doesn’t just contribute to imperialism and colonialism but in fact demands it.
“Modern” (as opposed to medieval) Orientalism bears the stamp of the Scientific Revolution (16th and 17th centuries) and Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries), two European developments which saw a massive shift in the way society produced knowledge. A new emphasis on empiricism—on direct observation and description of events—led to massive scientific advances. But rather than following suit, Said alleges, Orientalism indulged in a faux empiricism, which used the language of science to give weight to an already hopelessly biased discourse.
Themes
