Page 238 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes the notion of an 'interest' will acquire a good deal of sense. Thereafter interests were defended
with much zeal and expense. So far my outline is a gross one. What of the typical experiences and
emotions that accompany both the scholarly advances of Orientalism and the political conquests
aided by Orientalism?
First, there is disappointment that the modern Orient is not at all like the texts. Here is Gérard de
Nerval writing to Théophile Gautier at the end of August 1843: I have already lost, Kingdom after
Kingdom, province after province, the more beautiful half, of the universe, and soon I will know
of no place in which I can find a refuge for my dreams; but it is Egypt that I most regret having
driven out of my imagination, now that I have sadly placed it in my memory. This is by the author
of a great Voyage en Orient. Nerval's lament is a common topic of Romanticism (the betrayed
dream, as described by Albert Béguin in L'Ame romantique et le rêve [The Romantic Spirit and the
Dream]) and of travelers in the Biblical Orient, from Chateaubriand to Mark Twain. Any direct
experience of the mundane Orient ironically comments on such valorizations of it as were to be
found in Goethe 'Mahometsgesang' or Hugo 'Adieux de I'hôtesse arabe'. Memory of the modern
Orient disputes imagination, sends one back to the imagination as a place preferable, for the
European sensibility, to the real Orient. For a person who has never seen the Orient, Nerval once
said to Gautier, a lotus is still a lotus; for me it is only a kind of onion. To write about the modern
Orient is either to reveal an upsetting demystification of images culled from texts, or to confine
oneself to the Orient of which Hugo spoke in his original preface to Les Orientales, the Orient as
'image' or 'pensée,' symbols of 'une sorte de préoccupation générale [a kind of general
preoccupation].' If personal disenchantment and general preoccupation fairly map the Orientalist
sensibility at first, they entail certain other more familiar habits of thought, feeling, and perception.
The mind learns to separate a general apprehension of the Orient from a specific experience of it;
each goes its separate way, so to speak. In Scott novel The Talisman (1825), Sir Kenneth (of the
Crouching Leopard) battles a single Saracen to a standoff somewhere in the Palestinian desert; as
the Crusader and his opponent, who is Saladin in disguise, later engage in conversation, the
Christian discovers his Muslim antagonist to be not so bad a fellow after all. Yet he remarks:
I well thought . . . that your blinded race had their descent from the foul fiend, without whose aid
you would never have been able to maintain this blessed land of Palestine against so many valiant
soldiers of God. I speak not thus of thee in particular, Saracen, but generally of thy people and
religion. Strange is it to me, however, not that you should have the descent from the Evil One, but
that you should boast of it. For indeed the Saracen does boast of tracing his race's line back to
Eblis, the Muslim Lucifer. But what is truly curious is not the feeble historicism by which Scott
makes the scene 'medieval', letting Christian attack Muslim theologically in a way nineteenth-
century Europeans would not (they would, though); rather, it is the airy condescension of damning
a whole people 'generally' while mitigating the offense with a cool 'I don't mean you in particular.'
Scott, however, was no expert on Islam (although H. A. R. Gibb, who was, praised The Talisman
for its insight into Islam and Saladin), and he was taking enormous liberties with Eblis's role by
turning him into a hero for the faithful. Scott's knowledge probably came from Byron and Beckford,
but it is enough for us here to note how strongly the general character ascribed to things Oriental
could withstand both the rhetorical and the existential force of obvious exceptions. It is as if, on
the one hand, a bin called 'Oriental' existed into which all the authoritative, anonymous, and
traditional Western attitudes to the East were dumped unthinkingly, while on the other, true to
the anecdotal tradition of storytelling, one could nevertheless tell of experiences with or in the
Orient that had little to do with the generally serviceable bin. But the very structure of Scott's
prose shows a closer intertwining of the two than that. For the general category in advance offers
the specific instance a limited terrain in which to operate: no matter how deep the specific exception,
no matter how much a single Oriental can escape the fences placed around him, he is first an
Oriental, second a human being, and last again an Oriental.
So general a category as 'Oriental' is capable of quite interesting variations. Disraeli's enthusiasm
for the Orient appeared first during a trip East in 1831. In Cairo he wrote, 'My eyes and mind yet
ache with a grandeur so little in unison with our own likeness.' 11 General grandeur and passion
inspired a transcendent sense of things and little patience for actual reality. His novel Tancred is

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