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Unit 20: Edward Said's Crisis [In Orientalism]: Textual Analysis

Everything they knew, more or less, about the Orient came from books written in the tradition of Notes
Orientalism, placed in its library of idées reçues; for them the Orient, like the fierce lion, was
something to be encountered and dealt with to a certain extent because the texts made that Orient
possible. Such an Orient was silent, available to Europe for the realization of projects that involved
but were never directly responsible to the native inhabitants, and unable to resist the projects,
images, or mere descriptions devised for it. Earlier I called such a relation between Western
writing (and its consequences) and Oriental silence the result of and the sign of the West's great
cultural strength, its will to power over the Orient. But there is another side to the strength, a side
whose existence depends on the pressures of the orientalist tradition and its textual attitude to the
Orient; this side lives its own life, as books about fierce lions will do until lions can talk back. The
perspective rarely drawn on by Napoleon and de Lesseps -- to take two among the many projectors
who hatched plans for the Orient -- is the one that sees them carrying on in the dimensionless
silence of the Orient mainly because the discourse of Orientalism, over and above the Orient's
powerlessness to do anything about them, suffused their activity with meaning, intelligibility, and
reality. The discourse of Orientalism and what made it possible -- in Napoleon's case, a West far
more powerful militarily than the Orient -- gave them Orientals who could be described in such
works as the Description de I'Égypte and an Orient that could be cut across as de Lesseps cut
across Suez. Moreover, Orientalism gave them their success -- at least from their point of view,
which had nothing to do with that of the Oriental. Success, in other words, had all the actual
human interchange between Oriental and Westerner of the judge's 'said I to myself, said I' in Trial
by Jury. Once we begin to think of Orientalism as a kind of Western projection onto and will to
govern over the Orient, we will encounter few surprises. For if it is true that historians like
Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt emplot their narratives 'as a story of a particular
kind', 1 the same is also true of Orientalists who plotted Oriental history, character, and destiny
for hundreds of years. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Orientalists became a
more serious quantity, because by then the reaches of imaginative and actual geography had
shrunk, because the Oriental-European relationship was determined by an unstoppable European
expansion in search of markets, resources, and colonies, and finally, because Orientalism had
accomplished its self-metamorphosis from a scholarly discourse to an imperial institution. Evidence
of this metamorphosis is already apparent in what I have said of Napoleon, de Lesseps, Balfour,
and Cromer. Their projects in the Orient are understandable on only the most rudimentary level
as the efforts of men of vision and genius, heroes in Carlyle's sense. In fact Napoleon, de Lesseps,
Cromer, and Balfour are far more regular, far less unusual, if we recall the schemata of d'Herbelot
and Dante and add to them both a modernized, efficient engine (like the nineteenth-century
European empire) and a positive twist: since one cannot ontologically obliterate the Orient (as
d'Herbelot and Dante perhaps realized), one does have the means to capture it, treat it, describe it,
improve it, radically alter it. The point I am trying to make here is that the transition from a merely
textual apprehension, formulation, or definition of the Orient to the putting of all this into practice
in the Orient did take place, and that Orientalism had much to do with that -- if I may use the
word in a literal sense -- preposterous transition. So far as its strictly scholarly work was concerned
(and I find the idea of strictly scholarly work as disinterested and abstract hard to understand:
still, we can allow it intellectually), Orientalism did a great many things. During its great age in
the nineteenth century it produced scholars; it increased the number of languages taught in the
West and the quantity of manuscripts edited, translated, and commented on; in many cases, it
provided the Orient with sympathetic European students, genuinely interested in such matters as
Sanskrit grammar, Phoenician numismatics, and Arabic poetry. Yet -- and here we must be very
clear -- Orientalism overrode the Orient. As a system of thought about the Orient, it always rose
from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenth-
century Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in
Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia. Similarly a verse from the Koran would be considered the best evidence of
an ineradicable Muslim sensuality. Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different
(the reasons change from epoch to epoch) from the West. And Orientalism, in its post-eighteenth-
century form, could never revise itself. All this makes Cromer and Balfour, as observers and
administrators of the Orient, inevitable. The closeness between politics and Orientalism, or to put

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