Orientalism

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.