From this it is very evident that Orientalism is a man-made field and not a universal or pure truth. Orientalist disciplines were changing (even as Orientalism claimed the values of an unchanging, classical Orient) into their modern form, in which “power… dwelt in the new, scientifically advanced techniques of philology and anthropological generalization.” (Said 121) Silvestre de Sacy was the forerunner of modern Orientalism: “his work virtually put before the profession an entire systematic body of texts, a pedagogic practice, a scholarly tradition, and an important link between Oriental scholarship and public policy.” (Said 124) He was responsible for his revisionist projects: all of his work was presented “as a revised extract of the best that had already been done, said, or written.” (Said 125) He was reproducing the Orient for the Occident, but only those parts that he deemed useful or important; these were carefully selected and arranged topics from the greater body of Oriental knowledge. He believed that “the vastly rich (in space, time, and cultures) Orient cannot be totally exposed, only its most reprehensive parts need be. “(Said 125) Sacy was thus in a position of authority that modern Orientalism so proudly touts - he was the one that chose what was important from the Orient and his choices gave semiotic power to the topics that would now represent the entire Orient.
A novel that functions as a framework of modern Orientalism is Bouvard and Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert. It is a satire, a “comic encyclopedic novel on the degeneration of knowledge and the inanity of human effort.” (Said 113) It tells the tale of the two main characters’ attempts at finding new knowledge through scientific methods, when in fact what they are moving through is “the whole disillusioning experience of the nineteenth century.” (Said 113) Bouvard and Pécuchet work their way through various fields of knowledge, but fail at all their pursuits. Each failure leads to another field of knowledge, characterizing the disillusionment that one feels when knowledge does not apply to reality. Flaubert saw the modern man as progressing forward past this disillusionment, the European being regenerated by the Orient - this vision “is global and it is reconstructive” and “it represents what Flaubert felt to be the nineteenth-century predilection for the rebuilding of the world according to an imaginative vision, sometimes accompanied by a special scientific technique.” (Said 114) Flaubert referred to this regeneration as “the historical law that civilization moves from Orient to Occident” and expressed the belief that “two forms of humanity [would] at least be soldered together.“ (Said 113) Bouvard and Pécuchet both emulate this vision throughout the novel in their various scientific pursuits of knowledge. The reference to soldering the East and the West together was Flaubert “mock[ing] the blithe indifference of science to actuality, a science which anatomized and melted human entities as if they were so much inert matter.” (Said 115-116) This novel essentially deals with the resistance of reality to knowledge - each of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s failures are ascribed to the imperfection of knowledge and to the notion that it is impossible to know everything. Flaubert himself acknowledged that he might have read at least 1500 books to research the novel (which is why it is referred to as an encyclopedic work) and that goes to show this vast canvassing attempt to acquire knowledge. However, reality cannot be completely represented through simple collection of information, as Bouvard and Pécuchet discover. They realize that what knowledge is as espoused by reputable intellectuals often does not conform to reality. They discover that not only that there is a fragmentation of the knowledge (that it is not a wholesome totality) but also that the scientist’s subjective beliefs and opinions filter into the work indefinitely. Science, also, is immature and cannot be counted on for complete development. In the face of such factors, they find a wide discrepancy between what is presented as knowledge and actual reality. These ‘representations’ of reality are what constitute the corpus that is ‘knowledge’ and the two men find it hard to reconcile ‘knowledge’ with ‘reality’.
Their various pursuits into the branches of knowledge are their obstinate attempts at making empirical reality correlate to the knowledge presented in texts by supposedly objective scientists and intellectuals. Take, for instance their adventures in the medical field - they attempt to study anatomy but their scientific, objective attempts at understanding what they were seeing on the operating table was not enough for them to grasp the information. They had to turn to an explanatory work by which they consulted a manual on the subject by a man reputed in the field, Alexander Lauth. This is but one instance in which they find themselves attempting to gain knowledge through textual sources and in the same breath discounting practical application as a source of knowledge. In another scene, Pécuchet quarrels with a practiced doctor for the right to treat a patient on the precedent that he had read up on the medical field and that "those who revolutionised the science did not practise—Van Helmont, Boerhaave, Broussais himself." (Flaubert 89) Thus, the revolutionized, modern man was not a man of practice, but a man of knowledge - that is, knowledge gathered from knowledgeable men from specialized backgrounds of repute. This is based upon the notion that the knowable is not something founded in reality but rather it is a quality that is attributed to the representation of reality. This representation, a man-made construct, is found in the textual form. The imagination is what makes sense of information and puts together these representations: both Bouvard and Pécuchet realize that “without the imagination, history is defective.” (Flaubert 162)
Knowledge could not be conceived of as something that represented reality in its totality, but rather as something that imitated reality as a concise and manageable representation: “one might take a subject, exhaust the sources of information concerning it, make a good analysis of them, then condense it into a narrative, which would be, as it were, an epitome of the facts reflecting the entire truth.” (Flaubert 154) This is the very essence of modern Orientalism and what Silvestre de Sacy himself did - he took sections from the library on the Orient that he deemed important and as best representations of the reality that he wished to present, and this formed the cornerstone of authentic, scientific, modern Orientalism. Bouvard put it concisely by saying that "science is constructed according to the data furnished by a corner of space. Perhaps it does not agree with all the rest that we are ignorant of, which is much vaster, and which we cannot discover.” (Flaubert 96) It essentially boils down to the realization that “knowledge no longer requires application to reality; knowledge is what gets passed on silently, without comment, from one text to another. Ideas are propagated and disseminated anonymously, they are repeated without attribution; they have literally become idees recues: what matters is that they are there, to be repeated, echoed, and re-echoed uncritically.” (Said 116) Our two heroes eventually give up this pursuit of knowledge when they realize it’s best not to dabble in reality. They return to their life as copyists - “from trying to live through and apply knowledge more or less directly, Bouvard and Pécuchet are reduced finally to transcribing it uncritically from one text to another.” (Said 114) And, this, as aforementioned, is the framework of modern Orientalism.
The framework sets the backdrop for the Orientalist’s ego. Edward Said in Orientalism says that “in Orientalism resided the Orientalist’s conception of himself, of the Orient, and of his discipline.” (121) The Orientalist was well aware of his position of power and saw himself as “a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished.” (Said 121) His sciences of philology (lexicography, grammar, translation, cultural decoding) “restored, fleshed out, reasserted the values of both of an ancient, classical Orient and of the traditional disciplines of philology, history, rhetoric, and doctrinal polemic.” (Said 121) This was the source of his authority and power and he could praise his position as the “secular creator” (Said 121) from his restructuring of knowledge and the very discipline of Orientalism.
Edward William Lane was a man of the nineteenth century who found himself directly involved in the investigation of the life of the Orientals, particularly concerning the Egyptians. He comes forth into the modern field of Orientalism as a “writer who intend[ed] to use his residence for specific task of providing professional Orientalism with scientific material.” (Said 157) Lane prefaces his book The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians by steadfastly standing by his supposed objectivity: “What I have principally aimed at, in this work, is correctness; and I do not scruple to assert that I am not conscious of having endeavored to render interesting any matter that I have related by the slightest sacrifice of truth.” (Lane xxiii) Any ‘sacrifices’ of truth, however, were unconscious. This treatise was not purely representative work as it relied, inadvertently, on “the sheer egoistic powers of the European consciousness at [its] center,” (Said 158) and that subjectivity colored all ‘truth’ with an Occidental agenda and flair.
Modern Egyptians was presented such that three motifs come forth. The first was the Orient as a place of pilgrimage. Lane found himself in Egypt on multiple occasions, drawn by that tableau of queerness that intrigued all Westerners. The second motif was of the Orient as a spectacle, or the tableau vivant - this spectacle, or essentially that queerness that has been mentioned before, is what Lane attempts to characterize. The last motif was the very process of comprehensive interpretation that the European undertook, through which Lane would go on to establish his authority and power as an Orientalist. This interpretation is the “Romantic restructuring of the Orient, a re-vision of it, which restores it redemptively to the present… Every interpretation, every structure created for the Orient, then, is a reinterpretation, a rebuilding of it.” (Said 158) This was ultimately the work of the modern Orientalist, and this work itself conferred authority to the Orientalist.
Lane immersed himself in the culture of Egypt. Modern Egyptians was put forth to establish his authority in the field of the study of Arab life, and Lane even went so far as to discredit another prominent work, Essai sur les moeurs des habitants moderns de l’Egypte. His opinion on the work was that “its author appears to… have fallen into an error of considerable magnitude, in applying to the Egyptians, in general, observations which were, in truth, for the most part descriptive of the manners and customs of their naturalized rulers.” (Lane xvii) In planting a seed of doubt in the credibility of that work he brings Modern Egyptians to the forefront as cornerstone of knowledge on the Egyptians as a totality. This authority comes from the methods by which he gained insight into this more holistic body of knowledge:
“I acquired some knowledge of the language and literature of the
Arabs… I have associated, almost exclusively, with Muslims of
various ranks in society: I have lived as they live, conforming with
their habits… I have been able to escape exciting, in strangers, any
suspicion of my being a person who had no right to intrude among
Them… I constrain them to treat me as a Muslim.” (Lane xviii)
Lane, therefore, could enter into the very Orient, backed with his knowledge of their language and through his powers of observation and ability to act like them, he could don a mask of scientific objectivity and record detail for detail the truth of Egypt. He was essentially producing “a systematic work on the country and its inhabitants.” (Said 159)This would then go on to be generalized into the very truth of the Muslim world - “Lane’s authority was gained, not by virtue simply of what he said, but by virtue of how what he said could be adapted to Orientalism.” (Said 158) This was how modern Orientalism worked - the Orientalist would gather as much information as possible and re-present it as a cohesive, textual unity, and this would then be reaffirmed and reproduced by other Orientalists, and Lane’s “work was disseminated into the profession, consolidated by it, institutionalized with it.” (Said 159) He was dealing with what had once been a threat in the era of classical Orientalism, but he was demystifying the once threatening Islamic land with his scientific study of the Egyptian culture.
“The impression Lane wished to give was that his study was a work of immediate and direct, unadorned and neutral, description, whereas in fact it was the product of considerable editing… and also of a considerable variety of quite special efforts.” (Said 159) Thus, one can note the irony behind his accusations against the attempts at universalizing claims that are in fact narrow in reality - he himself does that in Modern Egyptians. The entire worked is littered with phrases like ‘in general’ and ‘in most cases’ and other such instances in which he points out that what he is observing is an observed norm in a case by case basis- the manner by which he presents these observations, however, clouds the fact that they are mere observations and mask them as an essential truth about all of the Egyptians. This manner is essentially the use of excessive amounts of detail down to minutiae that create the impression of authenticity: “what seems to be a factual reporting of what one rather peculiar Muslim does is made to appear by Lane as the candidly exposed center of all Muslim faith.” (Said 161) The actual Egyptian is often lost in the shuffle as “Lane’s text cancel the human content of its subject matter in favor of its scientific validity.” (Said 161)
Once again we see the characterizing polarization between European and the Oriental, as is the norm for Orientalism. Lane quickly arises as the figure of authority in his work and as a result, as the figure of authority in the field itself. This is not just through his gross amounts of detail and generalizations - “… in Lane’s text the narrative voice is ageless; his subject, however, the modern Egyptian, goes through the individual life cycle. This reversal, by which a solitary individual endows himself with timeless faculties and imposes on a society and people a personal life-span, is but the first of several operations regulating what might have been the mere narration of travels in foreign parts, turning an artless text into an encyclopedia of exotic display and a playground for Orientalist scrutiny.” (Said 161) Lane mentions that “so strange to [the Egyptians] is the idea of a man’s incurring great trouble and expense for the purpose of acquiring the knowledge of foreign countries and nations” (Lane xxii): this attitude characterizes just another one of the operations by which Lane turns the Egyptians into an object of study rather than acknowledging them as a group of people with a history and an actively changing future. It traps the Egyptians in a static state in which only the Occident is capable of pursuing knowledge - the Egyptians can only be known.
Lane’s narrative voice is the essence of his so-called objectivity. This ultimately “depends on his cold distance from Egyptian life and Egyptian productivity” (Said 162) and “he literally abolishes himself as a human subject by refusing to marry into human society. Thus he preserves his authoritative identity as a mock participant and bolsters the objectivity of his narrative.” (Said 163) He was not a participant in the object of his study and from his elevated position as chronicler of knowledge and truth, he worked on the exposition of the Oriental through detail and reassembled Egypt in an Orientalist fashion. All of these techniques were intended to have his observations “changed into a document of useful knowledge, knowledge arranged for and readily accessible to anyone wishing to know the essentials of a foreign society.” (Said 159) This is just as Silvestre de Sacy did, and Lane reinforces the tradition of disposing of pre-existing knowledge; this is the emergence of his authority as a modern Orientalist. “Thus while one portion of Lane’s identity floats easily in the unsuspecting Muslim sea, a submerged part retains its secret European power, to comment on, acquire, possess everything around it.” (Said 160) It is a masked power, a hidden power, and this is the difference between modern and classical Orientalism - the classical Orientalism was engaged in an outright war against the Islamic lands; this new process was a much more subtle one by which the Orient would be dominated through the knowledge that was constructed of it through direct, supposedly objective observation and recorded detail: “Lane’s prose never lets us forget [that] that ego, the first-person pronoun moving through Egyptian customs, rituals, infancy, adulthood, and burial rites, is in reality both an Oriental masquerade and an Orientalist device for capturing and conveying valuable, otherwise inaccessible information.” (Said 160)
Essentially, the modern Orientalist, through his various philological methods, established his position as the creator “of Oriental culture [that] became categorically Oriental.” (Said 166) It characterized the Orient as an objectively presented reality, as if all knowledge on it was secular, as if structures of Occidental power were not secretly entangled in the framework of the study. “Orientalism acquired the Oriental as literally and as widely as possible; on the other, it domesticated this knowledge to the West, filtering it through regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases, periodical reviews, dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, editions, translations, all of which together formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West, for the West.” (Said 166) The Orient, a Western creation, thus existed as an extension of Western power, restoring the Orient to the context of the present in an ever-changing world where power has to evolve to successfully continue dominating.
Works Cited:
Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet. Stationer's Hall, London: Simon P.
Magee, 1904. The Project Gutenberg. Web. 10 Apr. 2011.
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Lane, Edward William. The Manners & Customs of the Modern Egyptians. N.p.: J.M.
Dent & Co., 1908. Google Books. Web. 10 Apr. 2011.
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Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Print.