Page 239 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

steeped in racial and geographical platitudes; everything is a matter of race, Sidonia states, so Notes
much so that salvation can only be found in the Orient and amongst its races. There, as a case in
point, Druzes, Christians, Muslims, and Jews hobnob easily because -- someone quips -- Arabs are
simply Jews on horseback, and all are Orientals at heart. The unisons are made between general
categories, not between categories and what they contain. An Oriental lives in the Orient, he lives
a life of Oriental ease, in a state of Oriental despotism and sensuality, imbued with a feeling of
Oriental fatalism. Writers as different as Marx, Disraeli, Burton, and Nerval could carry on a
lengthy discussion between themselves, as it were, using all those generalities unquestioningly
and yet intelligibly. With disenchantment and a generalized -- not to say schizophrenic -- view of
the Orient, there is usually another peculiarity. Because it is made into a general object, the whole
Orient can be made to serve as an illustration of a particular form of eccentricity. Although the
individual Oriental cannot shake or disturb the general categories that make sense of his oddness,
his oddness can nevertheless be enjoyed for its own sake. Here, for example, is Flaubert describing
the spectacle of the Orient:
To amuse the crowd, Mohammed Ali's jester took a woman in a Cairo bazaar one day, set her on
the counter of a shop, and coupled with her publicly while the shopkeeper calmly smoked his
pipe. On the road from Cairo to Shubra some time ago a young fellow had himself publicly
buggered by a large monkey -- as in the story above, to create a good opinion of himself and make
people laugh. A marabout died a while ago -- an idiot -- who had long passed as a saint marked
by God; all the Moslem women came to see him and masturbated him -- in the end he died of
exhaustion -- from morning to night it was a perpetual jacking-off. . . .
Quid dicis [what say you?] of the following fact: some time ago a santon (ascetic priest) used to
walk through the streets of Cairo completely naked except for a cap on his head and another on
his prick. To piss he would doff the prick-cap, and sterile women who wanted children would run
up, put themselves under the parabola of his urine and rub themselves with it. Flaubert frankly
acknowledges that this is grotesquerie of a special kind. 'All the old comic business' -- by which
Flaubert meant the well-known conventions of 'the cudgeled slave . . . the coarse trafficker in
women . . . the thieving merchant' -- acquire a new, 'fresh . . . genuine and charming' meaning in
the Orient. This meaning cannot be reproduced; it can only be enjoyed on the spot and 'brought
back' very approximately.
The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behavior issues out of a reservoir
of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved,
always detached, always ready for new examples of what the Description de I'Égypte called
'bizarre jouissance'. The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness. And this tableau quite
logically becomes a special topic for texts. Thus the circle is completed; from being exposed as
what texts do not prepare one for, the Orient can return as something one writes about in a
disciplined way. Its foreignness can be translated, its meanings decoded, its hostility tamed; yet
the generality assigned to the Orient, the disenchantment that one feels after encountering it, the
unresolved eccentricity it displays, are all redistributed in what is said or written about it. Islam,
for example, was typically Oriental for Orientalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Carl Becker argued that although 'Islam' (note the vast generality) inherited the Hellenic
tradition, it could neither grasp nor employ the Greek, humanistic tradition; moreover, to
understand Islam one needed above all else to see it, not as an 'original' religion, but as a sort of
failed Oriental attempt to employ Greek philosophy without the creative inspiration that we find
in Renaissance Europe. For Louis Massignon, perhaps the most renowned and influential of modern
French Orientalists, Islam was a systematic rejection of the Christian incarnation, and its greatest
hero was not Mohammed or Averroës but al-Hallaj, a Muslim saint who was crucified by the
orthodox Muslims for having dared to personalize Islam. What Becker and Massignon explicitly
left out of their studies was the eccentricity of the Orient, which they backhandedly acknowledged
by trying so hard to regularize it in Western terms. Mohammed was thrown out, but al-Hallaj was
made prominent because he took himself to be a Christ-figure. As a judge of the Orient, the
modern Orientalist does not, as he believes and even says, stand apart from it objectively. His
human detachment, whose sign is the absence of sympathy covered by professional knowledge, is

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