Enlightenment Orientalism by Srinivas Aravamudan

Author:Srinivas Aravamudan [Aravamudan, Srinivas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2011-11-11T08:00:00+00:00

THE SCIENTIFIC TRUTH (ENLIGHTENMENT)

OF SEX (ORIENTALISM)

Diderot’s oriental tale, Les bijoux indiscrets / The Indiscreet Jewels, is in direct conversation with Galland’s Les mille et une nuits (1704–17), Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721), and Crébillon’s Le Sopha (1742).48 Bijoux is a sustained meditation on the science of sexuality configured through a libertine framework.49 While Diderot’s novel was almost immediately translated into English as The Indiscreet Toys in 1749, it was not as celebrated as The Sopha, which had eighteen English editions between 1742 and 1801.50

Diderot’s Mangogul, the sultan of the Congo, evokes Schah-Baham and Schahriar. Having exhausted the court gossip, Mangogul resorts to a magical device to get to the heart—or the vagina—of the matter. A genie’s ring communicates authentic voices emanating from nether mouths, procuring narrative pleasure for him while sullying the reputation of many society ladies. These genital voices constitute truth telling when counter-posed against diversionary stories that obfuscate actual sexual behavior. According to the genie Cucufa (whose name suggests faire cocu, or cuck-olding), the ring will make the women speak “from the most honest part of them and the best instructed in the things you desire to know … from their jewels” (43, 354).51 While women’s upper mouths continue to traffic in social conventions, full of prevarication, digression, and deferral, the nether lips testify with an objective and empiricist discourse.

Over the course of the fiction, a developing structuralist taxonomy allows a number of individual énoncés (or discursive utterances) to lead to a comparative assessment of cultures. The agency and pseudoobjectivity of the female sexual organs as narrators in Bijoux make for two rival and somewhat incompatible claims. First, sex is made out to be the core experience of the female body, represented as a material site as well as a semantic archive. The body can be trusted to record the truth experienced and desired by the subject, and the marks of memory are elicited and recovered with minimal interpretation. Second, there is an important shadow claim that pursues and partly undoes the first. This is the suggestion that the truth of the body bypasses, negates, and silences its “owner,” rendering the subject unreliable for an empirical investigation of revealed truth. Favoring the nether mouth and bypassing the upper mouth, empirical truth assumes that the subject emits a false speech while the body wildly attests to its sexual exploits. The false speech is contradicted by the nether mouth’s exposé of the subject’s tendency to boast. As a result, many individuals are ridiculed in public. In the context of the heterosexual intrigues of the novel’s women and the sultan’s all-too-masculine desire to hear of these exploits, both the speaking jewels and their owner-subjects are overwhelmingly gendered feminine. While the sultan—the initiator of the sexual testimony—is a despotic male, the hearers of the accounts are a mixed-gender public that listens as each female jewel speaks on cue and shames the subjectivity of its owner. Paradoxically, the “Congolese” court is a “shame” culture featuring several “shameless” women.

Far from being innocuous, this empiricist demand

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