Orientalism

by Edward W. Said
Gustave Flaubert was a 19th-century French novelist who traveled extensively in Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and Lebanon between 1849 and 1850. Deeply influenced both by the latent Orientalism in 19th century French culture and also by his experiences in his Orient, Flaubert’s account of his trip and his use of Orientalist motifs in his later fiction show how pervasive and hegemonic Orientalism and Orientalist discourse had become in Western European culture by the 19th century.

Gustave Flaubert Quotes in Orientalism

The Orientalism quotes below are all either spoken by Gustave Flaubert or refer to Gustave Flaubert. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
The West’s View of the Eastern World Theme Icon
).

Chapter 2, Part 4 Quotes

In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of a previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these. Direct observation or circumstantial description of the Orient are the fictions presented by writing on the Orient, yet invariably these are totally secondary to systematic tasks of another sort. In Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert, the Orient is a re-presentation of canonical material guided by an aesthetic and executive will capable of producing interest in the reader.

Related Characters: Edward Said (speaker), Napoleon, Alphonse Lamartine, Gustave Flaubert, Gérard de Nerval
Related Symbols: The Orient
Page Number and Citation: 177
Explanation and Analysis:
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Gustave Flaubert Character Timeline in Orientalism

The timeline below shows where the character Gustave Flaubert appears in Orientalism. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
The West’s View of the Eastern World Theme Icon
Knowledge and Power Theme Icon
...William Lane, Ernest Renan, Silvestre de Sacy, and the literary work of Alphonse Lamartine, Gustave Flaubert, and others. Yet, because the topic is so broad, the present study will necessarily be... (full context)
Chapter 2, Part 1
The West’s View of the Eastern World Theme Icon
Belief, Consensus, and Reality Theme Icon
The Personal as Political Theme Icon
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... (full context)
Chapter 2, Part 4
Knowledge and Power Theme Icon
Belief, Consensus, and Reality Theme Icon
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... (full context)
Knowledge and Power Theme Icon
Belief, Consensus, and Reality Theme Icon
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... (full context)
Knowledge and Power Theme Icon
The Persistence of Racism Theme Icon
Flaubert, in general, dehumanizes his Oriental subjects in the name of vivid description. For example, when... (full context)
Knowledge and Power Theme Icon
Belief, Consensus, and Reality Theme Icon
The Personal as Political Theme Icon
...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... (full context)
Belief, Consensus, and Reality Theme Icon
...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... (full context)