Orientalism by Edward W. Said

Author:Edward W. Said [Said, Edward W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5386-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Flaubert’s work is so complex and so vast as to make any simple account of his Oriental writing very sketchy and hopelessly incomplete. Nevertheless, in the context created by other writers on the Orient, a certain number of main features in Flaubert’s Orientalism can fairly be described. Making allowances for the difference between candidly personal writing (letters, travel notes, diary jottings) and formally aesthetic writing (novels and tales), we can still remark that Flaubert’s Oriental perspective is rooted in an eastward and southward search for a “visionary alternative,” which “meant gorgeous color, in contrast to the greyish tonality of the French provincial landscape. It meant exciting spectacle instead of hum-drum routine, the perennially mysterious in place of the all too familiar.”105 When he actually visited it, however, this Orient impressed him with its decrepitude and senescence. Like every other Orientalism, then, Flaubert’s is revivalist: he must bring the Orient to life, he must deliver it to himself and to his readers, and it is his experience of it in books and on the spot, and his language for it, that will do the trick. His novels of the Orient accordingly were labored historical and learned reconstructions. Carthage in Salammbô and the products of Saint Anthony’s fevered imagination were authentic fruits of Flaubert’s wide reading in the (mainly Western) sources of Oriental religion, warfare, ritual, and societies.

What the formal aesthetic work retains, over and above the marks of Flaubert’s voracious readings and recensions, are memories of Oriental travel. The Bibliothèque des idées reçues has it that an Orientalist is “un homme qui a beaucoup voyagé,”106 only unlike most other such travelers Flaubert put his voyages to ingenious use. Most of his experiences are conveyed in theatrical form. He is interested not only in the content of what he sees but—like Renan—in how he sees, the way by which the Orient, sometimes horribly but always attractively, seems to present itself to him. Flaubert is its best audience:

… Kasr el-’Aini Hospital. Well maintained. The work of Clot Bey—his hand is still to be seen. Pretty cases of syphilis; in the ward of Abbas’s Mamelukes, several have it in the arse. At a sign from the doctor, they all stood up on their beds, undid their trouserbelts (it was like army drill), and opened their anuses with their fingers to show their chancres. Enormous infundibula; one had a growth of hair inside his anus. One old man’s prick entirely devoid of skin; I recoiled from the stench. A rachitic: hands curved backward, nails as long as claws; one could see the bone structure of his torso as clearly as a skeleton; the rest of his body, too, was fantastically thin, and his head was ringed with whitish leprosy.

Dissecting room: … On the table an Arab cadaver, wide open; beautiful black hair.…107

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