Page 225 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 19: Two Types of Orientalism—Orientalism as a Literary Theory

13. The Other as Inherently Contradictory Notes
"For a number of evident reasons the Orient was always in the position both of outsider and
of incorporated weak partner for the West" (Said 208). This statement implies an inherent
contradiction in the discourse of the other as I've described it thus far, one that's highly
significant in discussions of children's literature.
On the one hand, as we've seen, Orientals are the opposite of Europeans, in ways so basic and
unchanging that the Oriental mind transcends differences of specific places and times, and
always in ways that define European superiority. If there were no more colonies to colonize,
imperialists could no longer perceive themselves as being imperial; and so in a very basic
sense "Oriental" means "eternally and inalterably opposite to human."
On the other hand, however, as we've also seen, part of the European's superior humanity is
a more evolved sense of obligation to others less superior; the strong must colonize the weak
in order to help them become stronger, and so, in a very basic sense, "Oriental" means, "a less
evolved being with the potential to become human."
A non-human in the process of becoming more human. There is no way of resolving this
contradiction: Orientals cannot be both our unchanging opposite and in the process of changing
into us. The same contradiction appears in our discourse about children and children's literature,
and there is no way of resolving it there either. Instead, we tend to flip-flop, even within
single texts, between two contradictory ideas about children and our reasons for writing to or
about them.
I learned about this contradiction as I read through a Horn Book that appeared as I was
preparing this piece (May/June 1991), looking for evidence of the current status of conventional
assumptions about childhood in the journal most likely to represent it. On the one hand,
various authors and advertisers told me, "the strength of children's imaginations is such that
they can understand what other children are feeling" and "their imaginations make fanciful
things become magically real". On the other hand, however, children reading one new book
"will begin to look at their surroundings from a new perspective" (inside front cover) and
another book "encourages children to look beyond and into". In other words, children are
essentially and inherently imaginative, and so we must provide them with books which will
teach them how to be imaginative.
In a concise statement of this paradox, one Horn Book writer talks about a book which
describes how some children find an inventive use for an impractical gift: "the message in this
celebration of play is optimistic. It suggests that children take from their surroundings, no
matter how inconsistent or inappropriate, the raw material for imaginative creation". Is this a
suggestion in the sense of an evocative description, or in the sense of a recommendation'. It
seems to be both at once; children need to learn from books by adults how to act like children.
14. Origin vs. Decline
How is it that we adults know better than children do how to aa like children' Said provides
an answer for this, too, as he describes how Orientalists approached their subject: proper
knowledge of the Orient proceeded from a thorough study of the classical texts, and only
after that to an application of those texts to the modern Orient. Faced with the obvious
decrepitude and political impotence of the modern Oriental, the European Orientalist found
it his duty to rescue some portion of a lost, past, classical Oriental grandeur in order to
'facilitate ameliorations' in the present Orient.
The parallel "classical texts" of childhood fall into two categories. First there are written
descriptions of children of earlier times, not just the "classic" children's books but also the
classic texts of child psychology-Piaget, Vygotsky, Kohlberg. Second, there are our personal
versions of our own childhoods: what we identify as childhood memories. Believing that

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 219