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Chapter 2, Part 3
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
Nineteenth-century Europeans in the Orient all seek, like Lane, to distance themselves from—and purge their accounts of—“unsettling” (usually sexual) Oriental influences. However, more literary writers eagerly embrace topics that are taboo to academic Orientalists. And the primary form of these literary accounts—both real and fictional—is the pilgrimage. These pilgrimages share two main features: the pilgrims learn about the Orient through scholars before embarking, and their writings tirelessly conform (and thus contribute) to Orientalist discourse.
As more and more Europeans visit the Orient, the discourse shifts. Its basic premises don’t change, but writers from outside academic institutions start to add their own flavor. The very idea of a pilgrimage—a journey (often long and arduous) to a shrine or other place of special, usually religious significance—contributes to the idea of the Orient as an unusual place, a place full of experiences that are unthinkable in daily life at home in Europe.
Themes
Accounts of Oriental pilgrimages also highlight important differences between French and British writers in 18th- and 19th- century Orientalism. British pilgrims are usually bound for India, a major and well-established colony of their empire. For them, the Orient exists in an inherently political realm: it is a thing that their people possess and from which they extract material for their own use. For the French, the modern Orient is a place of loss, from the medieval Crusades up to Napoleon’s evacuation from Egypt. This dynamic evidences itself in the work of academic French Orientalists, too. Academics and pilgrims all seek an “exotic [and] attractive reality” rather than a scientific one.
Because Said sees Orientalism as a tool of empire, he makes distinctions between the French and the British as his account circles toward the 19th century. France’s first colonial empire had largely collapsed thanks to competition with the British, while the British Empire was flourishing. What Said wants readers to understand here, however, is that Orientalism is a tool of empire that doesn’t necessarily need colonies to flourish. Even when their foreign land holdings were small, Orientalism allowed the French to maintain their sense of themselves as different than and superior to the kinds of people a European nation colonized—Oriental subjects. This in turn lays the groundwork for their conquests in North Africa and Southeast Asia.
Themes
François-René de Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire tells the story of his trip through the Orient in 1805-1806. In it, he presents the Orient as a “decrepit canvas” to be restored. More specifically, he articulates one of the earliest and most powerful versions of the idea that the modern Orient is so “low, barbaric, and antithetical as to merit reconquest” by enlightened, liberal Europeans—the same ideas Cromer will articulate a century later. Thus, from the arrogant and self-assured height of the 19th-century Orientalist, Chateaubriand cares less about modern Orient itself than the space it gives him for the imaginative work of accessing the meaning of its past—something unavailable to the native but obvious to the enlightened outsider.
While academic Orientalists in the 18th and 19th century certainly trafficked in racist stereotyping to prove the superiority of Europeans compared to Oriental subjects, racist tropes come to the forefront in accounts written by amateur Orientalists like Chateaubriand in the 19th century. Chateaubriand’s nakedly political ideas express openly ideas that are often expressed more subtly in 18th century academic Orientalist discourse. This shows how they’re taking on a life of their own, and how they develop into the concepts a later Orientalist like Cromer will inherit. Said alleges that the discourse of Orientalism is attractive to writers like Chateaubriand because it allows them to see what they want to see in the Orient (usually, a reflection of their own superiority).
Themes
When Chateaubriand travels back to Europe via Egypt, he hires a representative to carve his name into one of the pyramids. This is the cheeky act of a vandalizing tourist. But it also speaks to his obsession with the legacy of his writing. This in turn points to one of the attractions of Orientalist discourse, which provides a ready and capacious realm in which a person could leave a mark on the world. But it also gestures toward the limitation of personal writings like Chateaubriand’s, which lack the aura of scientific objectivity and risk turning the Orient into a purely individualized fantasy realm. Notably, both the power and limitation of discourse require the depersonalization of the Orient, turning it into a topos —a set of received ideas—rather than a place.
The other thing that Said finds particularly telling in Chateaubriand’s account is the way that it privileges the written word over direct experience. Chateaubriand is more interested in the mark he leaves on the world than anything else. He casually uses the Orient as a way to enhance his own reputation, without concern for the consequences this might have on the people who live there—he doesn’t care, Said has established, because he already thinks of them as subhuman. For him, Orientalist discourse is a means of accessing and deploying social and literary attention and power. And each time a writer does this, he or she augments and reinforces the discourse, making it stronger for the next person.
Themes
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Similarly, French poet Alphonse Lamartine exposes his “bundle” of preconceived notions when he goes east in 1833. His narrative immediately imposes his vision on the Orient. When he doesn’t like what he sees, he refers to Orientalist accounts that (in his opinion) describe it better or he interprets what he sees to fit his worldview. If he can do neither of those things, he dismisses what he sees entirely. Unsurprisingly, he then claims this circumscribed and tamed Orient for European possession. In remaking the world so thoroughly—in reducing it to a purely abstract conceptualization to be used as a mirror reflecting his own poetic genius—he goes even farther than Chateaubriand in imposing himself on the Orient.
Again and again, Said critiques Orientalism and Orientalists for failing to give proper weight to the world as it is rather than as Orientalism says it is (or should be). For him, Lamartine represents one of the worst examples of this willing myopia, one that highlights the role of the Orientalist’s sense of superiority. If Chateaubriand saw his written words as a way to impose his vision on the Orient, Lamartine seems to see the whole library of Orientalist discourse as a tool for making the Orient palatable—and for reinforcing his own sense of cultural and individual superiority.
Themes
The next two writers under consideration, Gérard de Nerval and Gustave Flaubert, are important to Said’s argument because they, of all 19th-century travelers made the most “personal and aesthetic” uses of their visits. Key features of the way they talk about the Orient had already been suggested to them by European visions of the Orient—its exoticism, its macabre and sadomasochistic potential, its “secrecy and occultism” and, above all its mysteriously alluring women. Moreover, both seek to put the Orient to their personal use, to reinvigorate themselves by its exoticism and antiquity. For these Orientalists, the Orient exists as a place to rediscover themselves. Although this is different from academic Orientalists discourse, which wants to grasp, appropriate, and codify the Orient, but it draws from the same sense of superiority and power. And the similarity shows how pervasive Orientalist ideas have become in 19th-century Europe.
Said points to the way that lay (that is, non-academic or non-political) Orientalists not only feed and strengthen Orientalist discourse but help it to diffuse more widely in society. He does this more by implication than anything else, but it’s worth noting that one of the major shifts in 19th-century society is a vogue for the Orient in fashion, decoration, music, and literature. This shows the power of an unquestioned discourse to shape reality, as people with no direct knowledge of or contact with Eastern cultures were given frameworks with which to think about it—frameworks which emphasized its difference from their culture and implied the value of the Orient for adding interest to their lives, whether in a racy novel or a piece of art to hang on the wall.
Themes
Narratively, Nerval structures his trip as a voyage into the depths of an Orient that Chateaubriand and others had only superficially described. Ultimately, then, Nerval’s Orient becomes nothing more than a giant memorial to absence—an unstable, fragile place that he takes as a blank slate for the expression of European genius.
Despite his complete lack of formal training as an Orientalist, Nerval stakes his authority on his ability to plumb its depths in order to really understand what it means. But this “understanding” is really just a projection of his own (and Oriental discourse’s) beliefs. In doing so, he must ignore what’s there, making a blank space for himself to fill up with these ideas.
Themes
It is hard to comprehensively address the Orientalism of Nerval’s countryman, French novelist Gustave Flaubert, because it’s so pervasive in his large body of work. But Said lists what he feels are its most salient features. For Flaubert, the Orient was a “visionary alternative” to the boring and familiar French landscape, an “exciting spectacle” instead of “humdrum routine,” and a great, ancient mystery, dead and ready to be brought back to life by a skilled writer like himself.
Said opened this chapter with Flaubert, and now he circles back to the French novelist’s work. At the beginning of the chapter, Said analyzed the way that one of Flaubert’s unpublished stories depicts the workings of 19th-century Orientalist discourse. Now, he contextualizes Flaubert among his countrymen. Flaubert, like the others, sees the Orient simultaneously as a stimulatingly exotic place and as a blank slate that allows him almost unlimited artistic license. It’s no longer a real place where real people might suffer the consequences of Europeans’ ideas about them—instead, it becomes a wholly fictional realm that can be used to titillate audiences without any sense of responsibility.
Themes
Flaubert, in general, dehumanizes his Oriental subjects in the name of vivid description. For example, when he describes a visit to the syphilis ward of a hospital, he renders the ill patients in gory yet clinical detail, draining them of their humanity and reducing them to cankerous disembodied parts. Rendering this scene as a theatrical production allows Flaubert—and his readers—to repress their disgust or sympathy. Similarly, Flaubert empties Oriental women of their own humanity and considers them valuable only as objects that allow the European male subject (Flaubert) to rejuvenate, inspire, and express himself, as when his sexual encounter with Egyptian courtesan Kuchuk Hanem becomes a place where he seeks to master her in much the same way that academic Orientalists control their material by encompassing and domesticating the Orient with words.
A writer like Flaubert exercises his power over readers by directing their attention. Said contends that he does this by dehumanizing Oriental subjects until they’re empty enough of meaning to be used as metaphors. Put that way, it’s easy to register the violence inherent in his writing. It’s harder to see in action, however, because Flaubert operates under the umbrella of Orientalism—a commonly accepted discourse that already treated Oriental subjects as subhuman and as a convenient mirror that helps Europeans to see and understand themselves. In a way, this isn’t unlike the way Marx uses suffering Indians to add weight to his pro-socialist-revolution arguments without fully acknowledging the autonomy of potential revolutionaries who happen to be Oriental subjects.
Themes
This points to the paradox at the root of academic Orientalism. In seeking to codify the exotic and strange, it drains the Orient of its living, complex reality. Said thinks that Flaubert might have perceived his own exuberant and exciting descriptions as an antidote to rigid and dry academic prose. But, whether one is constructing the Orient with “verve and style” or “copy[ing] it tirelessly,” the discourse isolates it as a place totally foreign to the allegedly real world of Western experience. It becomes, as always, a tool for Westerners to think with and through.
In identifying and describing Orientalism, Said draws on his training as a literary critic (training which, in the second half of the 20th, century focused heavily on contextualizing literature) and his perspective as an Oriental subject. No longer willing to let Westerners speak for and describe him, he instead describes for them the discourse of Orientalism, discourse that became so widespread and so compelling in the 18th and 19th centuries that it was practically invisible to its practitioners and beneficiaries.
Themes
The farther into the 19th century Said’s survey goes, the more any text about the Orient becomes burdened by the discourse’s past and by layers of “interests, official learning, [and] institutional power.” English pilgrims’ trips, for example, were almost always to India. The sense that the British government had a better handle on the Orient than the French did comes through in a heightened assurance of the British writer’s inherent superiority and even more baldfaced racism. Readers can find the epitome of this British arrogance in Alexander William Kinglake’s travel narrative Eothen, or—in a more complex form—in Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah.
Part of the reason Orientalism became so invisible was because its invisibility served the interests of the powerful. The turning of European attention toward the oil-rich and strategically positioned Near East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries sharpened colonial appetites and added urgency to the project of domesticating the Orient and turning it into a European possession. And that’s also true for the British, who (unlike the French) had both an imaginative and a literal claim to much of the Orient in the 19th century.
Themes
Thus, Said finds that Richard Francis Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah bears the marks of a struggle between Burton’s sense of himself as a rebel and as a potential “agent of [European] authority.” To a far greater extent than any other writer in the 19th century, Burton immersed himself and participated in the Arab culture, even successfully disguising himself as a Muslim and participating in the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Thus, his observations and generalizations about life in the Orient feel far more compelling than anyone else’s, because he presents himself as a participant rather than a distant observer. Yet, his authorial and authoritative presence is everywhere in the text, from the extensive footnotes to his personal sense of triumph when he understands—masters—a previously esoteric law or custom.
Richard Francis Burton was an explorer and travel writer. He was also, although Said downplays this in his analysis, a British soldier in India for a time before he took his pilgrimage to Mecca. Burton seems to have been genuinely interested in the cultures and languages he immersed himself in, as Said admits. Yet, he sees in Burton an ultimate failure to overcome the accumulated weight of Orientalist discourse. Although he participates, Burton can’t shake his sense of himself as a Westerner, a person with a right to walk the world as he wanted to and to impose his interpretation on it. In a way, Burton’s work is more dangerous than others, because it offers itself as with such immediacy even though it utterly fails to acknowledge or even recognize the position (and therefore actual and potential biases) of its author.
Themes
Despite Burton’s originality, his work—like the others discussed in this chapter—exists in the context of what Flaubert dismissively called a “regulated college of learning.” By the mid-19th century, it was impossible to think of the Orient as a real place rather than a “domain of […] scholarly rule and […] imperial sway.” Early Orientalists like Renan, Sacy, and Lane gave both the Orient and their academic discipline a setting and rules; later Orientalists merely added detail and color to the scene. The question of how Orientalist discourse turned itself into an inescapable, endlessly self-replicating institution in the 20th century is the question of the third chapter.
No European writer of the 18th or 19th century could—or did—produce their work in a vacuum outside of their culture, and since their culture was stepped in Orientalist discourse, no European writer could escape its gravitational pull. Even the most imaginative and clearsighted of them—for Said, Flaubert and Burton—end up regurgitating the ideas first formulated in academic Orientalism generations earlier.
Themes
