Page 237 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

Friedrich Schlegel, who learned his Sanskrit in Paris, illustrates these traits together. Although by Notes
the time he published his Über die Spracbe und Weisbeit der Indier [On the Language and Wisdom
of India] in 1808 Schlegel had practically renounced his Orientalism, he still held that Sanskrit and
Persian on the one hand and Greek and German on the other had more affinities with each other
than with the Semitic, Chinese, American, or African languages. Moreover, the IndoEuropean
family was artistically simple and satisfactory in a way the Semitic, for one, was not. Such
abstractions as this did not trouble Schlegel, for whom nations, races, minds, and peoples as
things one could talk about passionately -- in the ever-narrowing perspective of populism first
adumbrated by Herder -- held a lifelong fascination. Yet nowhere does Schlegel talk about the
living, contemporary Orient. When he said in 1800, 'It is in the Orient that we must search for the
highest Romanticism,' he meant the Orient of the Sakuntala, the Zend-Avesta, and the Upanishads.
i As for the Semites, whose language was agglutinative, unaesthetic, and mechanical, they were
different, inferior, backward. Schlegel's lectures on language and on life, history, and literature
are full of these discriminations, which he made without the slightest qualification. Hebrew, he
said, was made for prophetic utterance and divination; the Muslims, however, espoused a 'dead
empty Theism, a merely negative Unitarian faith..
Much of the racism in Schlegel's strictures upon the Semites and other 'low' Orientals was widely
diffused in European culture. But nowhere else, unless it be later in the nineteenth century among
Darwinian anthropologists and phrenologists, was it made the basis of a scientific subject matter
as it was in comparative linguistics or philology. Language and race seemed inextricably tied, and
the 'good' Orient was invariably a classical period somewhere in a long-gone India, whereas the
'bad' Orient lingered in present-day Asia, parts of North Africa, and Islam everywhere. 'Aryans'
were confined to Europe and the ancient Orient; as Léon Poliakov has shown (without once
remarking, however, that 'Semites' were not only the Jews but the Muslims as well), the Aryan
myth dominated historical and cultural anthropology at the expense of the 'lesser' peoples. The
official intellectual genealogy of Orientalism would certainly include Gobineau, Renan, Humboldt,
Steinthal, Burnouf, Remusat, Palmer, Weil, Dozy, Muir, to mention a few famous names almost at
random from the nineteenth century. It would also include the diffusive capacity of learned
societies: the Société asiatique, founded in 1822; the Royal Asiatic Society, founded in 1823; the
American Oriental Society, founded in 1842; and so on. But it might perforce neglect the great
contribution of imaginative and travel literature, which strengthened the divisions established by
Orientalists between the various geographical, temporal, and racial departments of the Orient.
Such neglect would be incorrect, since for the Islamic Orient this literature is especially rich and
makes a significant contribution to building the Orientalist discourse. It includes work by Goethe,
Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Kinglake, Nerval, Flaubert, Lane, Burton, Scott, Byron, Vigny,
Disraeli, George Eliot, Gautier. Later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we
could add Doughty, Barrès, Loti, T. E. Lawrence, Forster. All these writers give a bolder outline to
Disraeli's 'great Asiatic mystery'. In this enterprise there is considerable support not only from the
unearthing of dead Oriental civilizations (by European excavators) in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria,
and Turkey, but also from major geographical surveys done all through the Orient. By the end of
the nineteenth century these achievements were materially abetted by the European occupation of
the entire Near Orient (with the exception of parts of the Ottoman Empire, which was swallowed
up after 1918). The principal colonial powers once again were Britain and France, although Russia
and Germany played some role as well. 5 To colonize meant at first the identification -- indeed, the
creation -- of interests; these could be commercial, communicational, religious, military, cultural.
With regard to Islam and the Islamic territories, for example, Britain felt that it had legitimate
interests, as a Christian power, to safeguard. A complex apparatus for tending these interests
developed. Such early organizations as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1698) and
the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1701) were succeeded and later
abetted by the Baptist Missionary Society (1792), the Church Missionary Society (1799), the British
and Foreign Bible Society (1804), the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews
(1808). These missions 'openly joined the expansion of Europe'. 6 Add to these the trading societies,
learned societies, geographical exploration funds, translation funds, the implantation in the Orient
of schools, missions, consular offices, factories, and sometimes large European communities, and

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