Essays in Criticism 2008 Scott 64 81

NEW IMPRESSIONS XIII
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Edward Saids Orientalism
MATTHEW SCOTT
WHEN GERTRUDE BELL came to Damascus in 1905, she

wrote of the immortal view of a great and splendid city
with its domes and minarets.1 Beyond lay something more
awful: the desert, the desert reaching almost to its gates. And
herein is the heart of the whole matter. The province of Syria,
stretching from Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley to Antioch
and containing Christians, Jews, and Muslims united only in
lethargic struggle against their Turkish masters, kept alive for
her a more primeval battle between the elemental forces
named in the title of her book, The Desert and the Sown. It
was the finality of Bells narrative the manifest belief that
she had solved a problem of definition that troubled Edward
Said when he turned upon her as an exemplary case in
Orientalism. His early critics charged Said with cherry-picking
his sources for bits of especial nastiness in order to make the
case against Western imperial xenophobia.2 But whether guilty
of that or not, it is easy enough to find such attitudes in Bell.
She writes so archly at times remarking for example that
[t]he Oriental is like a very old child [whose] utility is not
ours that we might be forgiven for neglecting her quiet quali-
fier: human nature does not undergo a complete change east
of the Suez (pp. xxi-xxii). For Said, however, her dominant
tone is one of judgement No one who does not know the
East can realise how it all hangs together3 and its result is
to present the Arab as a single, unchanging entity with centuries
of experience and no wisdom.4 The assessment provokes an
Essays in Criticism Vol. 58 No. 1

# The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgm025
64
EDWARD SAIDS ORIENTALISM 65
angry moment in Orientalism, anger which can cloud our
appreciation of Saids much subtler argument that attempts
such as Bells to comprehend the East were necessarily
doomed to fail because of their avowedly sympathetic intentions.
J. H. Plumb, reviewing Orientalism a year after its publication
in 1978, wrote of the intellectual excitement present in its fun-
damental concept that one societys view of anothers culture
may be used, like an interpretation of the past, to sanctify its
own institutions and political aggression. But he complained
as well about its self-posturing verbiage and Saids debt to con-
temporary literary theory.5 Orientalism remains a good primer
to such concerns as Derridean linguistic scepticism, Freudian
psychoanalysis, Marxist and Foucauldian new historicism.
What such otherwise diverse approaches share is a suspicion
about both the traditional grounds of humanist enquiry and
the ability of individuals adequately to assess the effects of
social power upon them especially at the level of linguistic
utterance. That suspicion is a key part of the thesis tacitly under-
pinning Orientalism: that social and political space can only be
mapped as a shady imaginative geography (p. 71), the product
of texts rather than the result of any direct apprehension of the
real. But however enamoured he might have been of Adorno
and struck by some of the ideas of post-structuralism, Said
remained a humanist, if one of an occasionally strange order.
His writing reaffirms throughout the continuing influence of
Vico and his difficult insight that human beings write their
own history through their institutions.6 And if criticism is to
remain humane, he insists, then it must itself wrestle with the
notion that, as Eric Auerbach has it in an essay on Vico, insti-
tutions are in full accordance with the human nature of the
period.7 Orientalism is, on Saids account, just such an attitude.
Orientalism reads less well as a single thesis than it does as a
set of three discrete essays. Little noticed by its commentators,
this should not surprise us: as befits a polemicist, Said is sup-
remely an essay writer. Indeed, with the exception of his first
book and Orientalism, all his literary-critical works derive
from earlier essays that were revised over time, their theses
hung onto earlier thoughts in varying states of coherence. In
the first part of Orientalism Said is chiefly concerned with
66 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
establishing the textual nature of the space of the East in
Western thought and is determined to suggest that it has a quali-
tatively different imaginative currency to other half-imagined
foreign places because it has been an arena of continual
imperial ambition. He then sharpens his focus as he assesses
British and French writing during the nineteenth century, a
period of expansion through the more specific zone that stretches
roughly from the edge of the Ottoman empire to India. The
purpose of this second chapter is to argue that attitudes to other-
ness were consecrated in texts about conquered subjects and
hardened in the process both into foreign policy and into the
lax cultural repetition of received opinion. It is the third and
final chapter that remains the most controversial. Here, he
attempts to show that the foundations of academic and
literary attention to the East, growing out of the period of
empire, were sustained into a twentieth century fascination
with the other that was in its scholarship at best patronising
and at worst a sanction for unreasonable interference in the
region in the imperial twilight and beyond.
Although Gayatri Spivak has called it the sourcebook in the
discipline of postcolonialism, she is quick to put distance
between Orientalism and later enterprises such as her own:
Saids book was not a study of marginality, nor even of margin-
alization. It was the study of the construction of an object, for
investigation and control. The study of colonial discourse,
directly released by work such as Saids, has, however, blos-
somed into a garden where the marginal can speak and be
spoken, even spoken for.8 Orientalism is not about the under-
represented or the excluded, but rather about the ways in
which diverse cultures were homogenised and simplified in per-
petuity by acts of representation that left their actual objects con-
cealed. His concerns were, he always insisted, far more to do
with Western ways of thinking and imagining the self than
anything specifically to do with the recovery of the actual
imperial object. To analyse the phenomenon of Orientalism,
in Saids contention, is to explain how diverse human beings
fit themselves together in a pattern of social interaction that is
new and alert to the vitality of individualism but in which the
subjective experience often feels peculiarly alienated and lonely.
Such subjects find merely what they have been taught to look
for, since the practice of human interaction with the other
can only be replayed as a set of structures inherited from the
past, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed by such disciplines
as philology, which in turn were naturalized, modernized, and
laicized substitutes for Christian supernaturalism (p. 122).
Orientalism intends to historicise this baffled sense of alien-
ation within the longue duree of Western imperialism. It is
quickly obvious that Said, writing in the period of Arab
Israeli negotiations at Camp David, is sceptical about the
ability of one society sympathetically to understand the con-
ditions and concerns of another. More contentious is his
related thesis that this ignorance was put to specific use as a
tool for imperial control because it freed writers, administrators,
and academics from the responsibility to be accurate in their
depiction of the Orient. Said argues that their depictions,
though very varied, constituted a homogeneous, coherent
entity though he discovers it employing very different genres
and forms of analysis. Robert Young, taking him at his most
Foucauldian word, asked how Said himself could hope to
escape from the all-pervasive ideology that he had identified.9
But although he is very explicit about the internal consistency
of the phenomenon at the start of the book, it gradually
becomes apparent that Orientalism, as Said uses it, really
names a type of thinking about the vague space of the East
that is revealed in a large number of texts about it, rather than
some inescapable ideology that must necessarily condition all
writing about colonial subjects. Early on he says, of Disraelis
remark that the East is a career, that Disraelis statement
about the East refers mainly to that created consistency, that
regular constellation of ideas as the pre-eminent thing about
the Orient, and not to its mere being, as Wallace Stevenss
phrase has it (p. 5).
Saids subtle moderations of tone (mainly, pre-eminent,
mere) reduce the force of his claim and suggest that, while
we can never get at the absolute essence of a place, most but
not all writing about the East by Westerners has been content
to play around with received ideas and facile explanations
that tell us more about the writer than the object of his study.
The connection between direct imperial ambition in a particular
region and the writing produced about it remains highly import-
ant to Said throughout the book because it is, he contends, in
this relationship that the idealised representation of the other
can have immediate real and political consequences. It is for
this reason that certain writers and works seem able to escape
the charges of Orientalism more easily than others. In his intro-
duction, Said notes that his own study might be accused of
assuming a similarly unhealthy intellectual authority over a
body of material relating to the Orient (p. 19). It does so, he
implies, in the way that Goethes Westostlicher Divan might
be said to without the imperial ambition of British, French,
and more recently American scholars of the East, who write
from within a culture that has a contemporary imperial
presence on the ground. Said never felt himself truly to belong
to America but doubtless would have been content in the
company of Goethe.10
A crucial moment in Orientalism occurs when Said claims,
with a touch of structuralist panache, to have identified the
three distinct types to which all the writing that is his concern
conforms. First, there are the purportedly scientific studies of
the East produced during the years of empire, such as Edward
William Lanes Modern Egyptians, in which the writing is
purged of an authorial sensibility (p. 168). Both of the others
are more literary, and the authorial self features prominently.
His examples are Richard Burtons Pilgrimage to al-Madinah
and Meccah and Gerard de Nervals Voyage en Orient, the
latter being (according to Said) more self-obsessed than
the former. Although he attempts to drive a wedge between
the two, Said finds it hard to sustain much of a distinction and
ends up admitting that both depend heavily upon the topos of
pilgrimage. The angriest sentiments in Orientalism certainly
emerge when he discusses the first of these categories, which
we might call academic Orientalism. Saids severest critics,
such as Bernard Lewis, Ernest Gellner, and Robert Irwin, have
themselves reserved their strongest language for what they
perceive to be an attack upon a host of honourable endeavours,
which did more than merely make of the East a constructed
object for specious scientific analysis. Nevertheless, at least as
important in terms of representing and explaining the East to a
Western audience were, Said suggests, those other forms of
literary writing, which leaned, to some extent, upon the
academic studies.
Perhaps because Saids critics have been so preoccupied with
rebuffing his attack upon academic Orientalism, they have
paid less attention to his related claim that it was only as the
West sought to control the geographical space of the East
through colonial expansion that it became the focus of intense
aesthetic activity, resulting in the production of a vast body of
work in the arts that took the East as its subject. Said
contends that the phenomenon of Orientalism was explicitly
Romantic, reminding us of Friedrich Schlegels famous dictum,
It is in the Orient that we must search for the highest Romanti-
cism (p. 98). The East for European Romanticism was one
of the imagined past, he contends, of the Sakuntala and the
Upanishads, and indeed the relationship between the two
phenomena is more important to Said than has been generally
noted, even in the studies of the Romantic period, such as
those of Leask, Makdisi, and Sharafuddin, which build upon
Orientalisms conclusions.11 If Orientalism is Romanticisms
longest-lasting legacy, then it also provides evidence of an
ongoing challenge to the universalising goals of the Enlighten-
ment. Saids account is of a forced possession of the other, in
which sympathy dissolves into subjectivism. Individual charity
becomes collective conquest and the sorrow of the other is
borrowed as evidence of an ability to feel deeply without our
really trespassing beyond our own emotional realm. A pessi-
mistic vein running throughout the book is the challenge of scep-
ticism itself: that there may simply be an experiential gap
between individuals which no effort of sympathy can bridge.
The first British and French Middle Eastern intrusions of the
Middle Ages long pre-date Romanticism of course, and Said
makes a half-hearted attempt in the sweep of his first chapter
to suggest that modern Orientalist attitudes first emerged in
the wake of the Crusades. He distils work on the origins of
the Western suspicion of Islam, such as that of
R. W. Southern, and concludes that scholars of the twelfth
century, such as Peter the Venerable, created a complex, if
ignorant, set of assumptions about Islam, which fed into the
deliberately fictitious representations in Dante, the Poema del
Cid, and the Chanson de Roland, in all of which the Orient
and Islam are always represented as outsiders having a special
role to play inside Europe (p. 71). Said hopes at this point to
establish the existence of an earlier form of Orientalism that
fed inexorably into the later organisation of knowledge, but
which was more haphazard: What it is trying to do, as Dante
tried to do in Inferno, is at one and the same time to characterize
the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a thea-
trical stage whose audience, manager, and actor are for Europe,
and only for Europe (pp. 71-2). This is Said at his most flam-
boyant: it is shape-shifting and suggestive rather than conclusive.
The reader might well ask for example how far, for Said, the
Western idea of the Orient is confused with that of Islam, or
indeed where that idea of the Orient finds itself geographically
located.
Imperialism, Romanticism, and Orientalism coexist in ready
symbiosis for Said, but this makes his claims to have identified
earlier forms of the same phenomenon problematic. In an
early review of Saids book, Sadik Jalal al-Azm decides that
Orientalism is not really a thoroughly modern phenomenon,
as we thought earlier, but is the natural product of an ancient
and almost irresistible European bent of mind to misrepresent
the realities of other cultures, peoples, and their languages, in
favor of Occidental self-affirmation, domination and ascen-
dancy.12 What Al-Azm diagnoses is a perennial problem with
historical analyses of the longue duree: the danger that identifi-
cation of a broad underlying trend such as suspicion of the
other will simply serve to essentialise the subject of study, in
this case the West. Said never answered this specific charge in
print, but would presumably have replied that a phenomenon
identifiable as Orientalism exists widely in the West but that
its modern guise is conditioned by the strange convergence of
imperialism, historicism, philology, and sentimentalism that
come together during Romanticism.
The second chapter in Orientalism is the heart of the
book, containing lengthy analyses of both academic scholars
(Lane, Renan, Sacy) and literary figures (Flaubert, de Nerval,
Chateaubriand, Kinglake, Burton). In his essay Roads Taken
and Not Taken Said claims that Raymond Schwabs La Renais-
sance orientale has a simple thesis: Romanticism cannot be
understood unless some account is taken of the great textual
and linguistic discoveries made about the Orient during the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.13 Orientalism
is in many ways a political reckoning with this statement.
Most of the hostility directed at Said has been focused upon
either the theoretical machinery of its opening chapter or the
fierce polemic of the last. But it is the long second essay that
should most interest the literary historian: it remains a highly
impressive analysis of transformations in the representation of
the Orient during the Romantic period. Orientalisms pre-
Romantic manifestation was, he writes, a chameleonlike
quality, that cannot be simply detached from the interest in
Gothic tales, pseudomedieval idylls, visions of barbaric
splendor and cruelty (pp. 118-19). What came after is a space
in which facts and explanations are textually specific, as
indeed is the written record of personal experience. We can
take issue with the rigidity of Saids paradigm shift noting
that there is a body of imaginative writing about the colonial
arena in the pre-Romantic period that draws on actual experi-
ence (as in the work of Aphra Behn) but there is a general
validity to his claim that helps us, for example, to account for
the extraordinary popularity of Byrons Oriental Tales. Aesthetic
value in writing about the Orient clearly came to rely to an ever
greater extent upon the supposed facts of the narrative, some-
thing reflected in the footnotes that accompany Thalaba or
Vathek, or in the immense popularity of the Middle Eastern
travel narrative in the nineteenth century. Said is at pains to
suggest that such literary enterprises, though driven by the
apparent desire to represent a part of the world that was
entering the European consciousness as a space of imperial
engagement, were in fact unsympathetic to their subject,
either ignoring it or repeating the analyses of academic
Orientalism while serving at the same time as an expansive
canvas upon which to project the authorial self.
Saids detailed and impressive reading of Chateaubriands
Itineraire de Paris a` Jerusalem, et de Jerusalem a` Paris is
central to his argument. Chateaubriands narrative follows a
pattern often encountered in nineteenth century accounts of
the Levant and especially the Holy Land of emotional
self-discovery, which passes from disappointment and even
boredom through recognition to revelation. This is sometimes
pretty unsophisticated, as in Herman Melvilles Clarel; at
other times, a sense of exasperation predominates, as in
Kinglake, Cullen Bryant, and Twain. Said highlights a particu-
larly disembodied and mystical passage from the Itineraire as
representative of the work as a whole. Here Chateaubriand
not only reads the landscape of Judea typologically, as a text pro-
phesying the future, but even appears to see his own act of ima-
ginative conjuring as an analogue for the divinity that shaped the
desert itself: the ego dissolves itself in the contemplation of
wonders it creates, and then is reborn, stronger than ever,
more able to savor its powers and enjoy its interpretations
(p. 173). The Romantic timbre of Saids language is marked
here: he would like to make Chateaubriands narrative
conform to the famous missed crossing of the Alps in Book VI
of Wordsworths The Prelude, an episode that was the focus
of several celebrated deconstructive readings of the period in
which Orientalism was conceived.14 In that poem, and in
Saids account of Chateaubriand, the disappointment of actual
experience is replaced by an apprehension of the imaginations
power to displace immanent reality with something internal
and transcendent.
Said claims in The World, the Text and the Critic that the
most interesting developments in literary theory during the
years of his writing of Orientalism took place in the field of
Romanticism, and his own earlier book played its part in that
history. It gradually becomes apparent that a particular
interpretation of Romanticism lies at the heart of Orientalism,
one which anticipates a distinction explored in Jerome
McGanns slightly later Romantic Ideology (1983). Romantic
literature, McGann argues, articulates a condition of difficult
double-mindedness regarding the real, its ostensible subject,
which is always disguised by an appeal to imagination, the
faculty beloved of all its most vocal advocates. The Romantic
ideology involves either a simple retreat from the muckily real
into the imagination, or alternatively a subordination of real
events to a set of ideas that can remain free of the actual
human experience. Contained within this ideology, later
followers of McGann have suggested, is a suspicion of the
body, of racial difference, and of actual political events. Said
anticipated all these developments. His Chateaubriand is one
who has transcended the abject, if frightening, reality of the con-
temporary Orient so that he may stand in an original and
creative relationship to it. . . . he is no longer a modern man
but a visionary seer more or less contemporary with God; if
the Judean desert has been silent since God spoke there, then
it is Chateaubriand who can hear the silence, understand its
meaning, and to his reader make the desert speak again
(p. 173). McGanns influential if destructively critical interpret-
ation of Romanticism is latent in Saids earlier analysis: both see
the Romantic imagination as keen to reduce otherness to a set of
explanations that have little to do with actual reality, concerned
instead with the eradication of material complexity and its
replacement with the simple aggrandisement of the self.
Orientalism says more about Romanticism than this,
however, and its own double-mindedness makes a fuller and
richer response to the actual political implications of Romanti-
cism than much later historicist criticism. It is Saids powerful
sense of a formative confusion lying at the heart of Romanticism
that remains so remarkably sharp. Products of a period of
human history at once formative of the modern sensibility and
also confused about its own intentions, both fascinated by the
other and fiercely nationalistic, the greatest works of the
Romantic period are at once humanitarian and inclusive and
yet honest about the limits of any human comprehension of
other people (and peoples). In Book II of The Prelude Words-
worth writes of his past, The vacancy between me and those
days / Which yet have such self-presence in my mind, / That,
musing on them, often do I seem / Two consciousnesses,
conscious of myself / And of some other Being (1805; II.
29-33).15 At such moments, self-knowledge and faltering
empathy with the half-hidden parts of consciousness are
joined together. It is a post-Enlightenment spirit that longs to
be an intimate of, and yet always remains distant from, the
other.
Orientalism, Said argues, could not have come into being as it
did without the eighteenth century emphasis upon sympathy and
the belief that with an effort of feeling one human being can
happily enter into the emotional life of another. Here, his
attack upon philology becomes extremely significant: Herders
Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit
(1784-1791) was a panoramic display of various cultures each
accessible only to an observer who sacrificed his prejudices to
Einfuhlung (p. 118). Orientalism grew from the belief that
an eighteenth-century mind could breach the doctrinal walls
erected between the West and Islam and see hidden elements
of kinship between himself and the Orient; but, in its failure,
it banished the idea of sympathetic identification, creating
instead a phantom other in its own image (p. 118). With an
impressive intellectual honesty, Said acknowledges the failure
of human sympathy, not as a postcolonial theorist might,
hoping to recover the experience of differentness, but rather as
someone attempting to understand how human science went
wrong when it assumed that emotion could ever be anything
but obscurely documented and locally conditioned. One impli-
cation of this is that, when Byron rhymed Orientalism with
western sentimentalism in Beppo, he rightly drew attention
to something fundamental that was already manifest in his
own earlier poetry.16 The Giaour, for example, for all its
gathered notes about Islam, is in the end a poem about the
inability of a Muslim and a Christian each to recognise the exist-
ence in the other of the emotions that they have in common. A
fragmentary poem, it is as though to imply the poets inability
in turn to communicate that impasse to his readers. The
failure of Orientalist writing ever adequately to speak about
the other in terms that escape its own subjectivity might be
seen as part of Romanticisms rejection of eighteenth century
universalism. The hopes of Herder or Smith, that human
feeling might be a bridge to universal sympathy, a feeling for
and of the other, are revealed in Saids account of Romanticism
as a set of hopeless ideals. This is not because post-Romantic
writers do not hope to speak truly for the other, but because
the old Enlightenment ambition, once faced with ever-increasing
diversity, runs over into bafflement.
Robert Irwin, extremely and openly hostile towards the
sharp-suited Said, calls Orientalism a work of malignant char-
latanry that is repetitious and contains lots of mistakes.17 Irwin
admits that Said was a subtle and well-respected literary critic,
but makes no attempt to read the book as a work of literary cri-
ticism, resisting the very idea that the discipline could ever have
political application, and appearing resentful of Saids desire to
move beyond appreciation. Said himself spent a good deal of
time reflecting in print on what it is that the critic might be
said to do, and was resolute about holding on to a form of
humanism in literary study in the face of developments in the
academy that had begun to assume literature to be merely
the product of social forces. The extent of Orientalisms
humanism is vexed, however, because Said insists that the
literary writers of the nineteenth century repeated the assump-
tions of academic Orientalism and so contributed to a relatively
consistent and homogeneous discourse about the Orient. It
might be said, therefore, that they were all conditioned by a
single political ideology, though the material that he describes
is itself often baffling in its variety. Literary theory tends to
look for similar qualities in diverse works, and as it does so
ceases have much to say about the local choices that human
beings make when they write. Saids awareness of that danger
is apparent from the closing pages of The World, the Text,
and the Critic: objects of study both dehumanized and exorbi-
tant have taken over critics attention, while intellectual debate
increasingly resembles high-pitched monologue in narrow corri-
dors (p. 292). In Orientalism, he identifies an academic dis-
course and a political climate that contributed to a trend in
thinking about a part of the world that could be both specific
in imperial and vague in imaginative terms. But while he
would surely deny Irwins claim that the academic discipline
of Orientalism had little to do with the Orient as it is portrayed
in literature, Said sought only to read the latter in the context of
the former, to show that they have a degree of interdependence;
he did not suppose that all such writers are immediately compli-
cit in colonial atrocity the minute they set pen to paper. Said was
a defender of the human determination to resist social forces,
even if individuals, as he recognised, can only swim so far
against the prevailing tide. Every pilgrim sees things his own
way, he writes, but there are limits to what a pilgrimage can
be for, to what shape and form it can take, to what truths it
can reveal: these words run to the spiritual heart of the book
(p. 168).
Saids work matters because, most unusually in modern criti-
cism, it takes the Romantic challenge of scepticism seriously and
sees the failure of sympathy and the experience of bafflement in
the face of the other as a principal legacy of Romanticism. The
restorative, healing fiction of pilgrimage, and the redemption
earned in the face of scepticism through the creative act, are
identified by Said as a key to Romantic Orientalism: every
major work belonging to a genuine if not always to an
academic Orientalism took its form, style, and intention from
the idea of pilgrimage there. In this idea as in so many of the
other forms of Orientalist writing, the Romantic idea of restora-
tive reconstruction (natural supernaturalism) is the principal
source (p. 168). It cannot be lost on students of the Romantic
period that Said is here invoking the work of M. H. Abrams,
and furthermore that, in referring to Natural Supernaturalism,
he points to a book which, more than any other, provoked
later Marxist-influenced writers on the period. Abrams describes
Romanticism as a movement the grandest ambitions of which
might be investigated as part of a single, distinctly humanistic
and yet quasi-theological cast of mind. Abramss appearance
in Orientalism is purposeful: for Said, Orientalism was an
aspect of a reconstituted theology that, like Abrams, he saw
as the essence of Romanticism an attempt to conceive of the
human subject in ways that were mythic but ultimately secular
(p. 65). The place of the suprarational mystery in the Wests con-
figuration of the East, its creation of a space in which strange
paradigms of thought and behaviour could exist in challenging
and baffling ways was, Said suggests, part of a wider enterprise
in which the Romantics sought to preserve a theological
heritage one in which, in Abramss words, they undertook
to save the overview of human history and destiny, the existential
paradigms, and the cardinal values of their religious heritage, by
reconstituting them in a way that would make them
intellectually acceptable, as well as emotionally pertinent.18
Saids work has been claimed by those who reject the legacy of
Abrams and other critics such as Bloom and Bate, whom they
suppose to work within an apolitical critical paradigm, one
that has nothing to do with the discourse of empire. Those
making such a claim must ignore the extraordinary prominence
of these critics and others Auerbach, Empson, Richards in
Saids intellectual development. In focusing upon the pilgrimage
as a central topos in Romanticism, Said repeats a donnee of
Bloom: that the quest romance is the governing trope of the
Romantic narrative, and in The World, the Text, and the
Critic, in a telling essay on the nature of criticism, he again
turns to Bloom and Bate as he looks for evidence that
humanistic criticism remains alive in American letters (p. 151).
In Orientalism, Said makes much of philology as a tool in nine-
teenth century intellectualism, suggesting that the real base of
human thought is its language: he cites Coleridges apophthegm
from Biographia, that [l]anguage is the armory of the human
mind, as support for his case that in critical reading we might
get away from the idea that language is somehow ordained by
God (p. 136). It is an eccentric way to read Coleridge, but at
one with the attempt made throughout Saids oeuvre to
remain a secular critical thinker, one for whom all cultures
and religions are to be treated with scepticism, and none more
so than the apparently heuristic discipline of criticism. We
should keep the human in view in all his variety, Saids work
suggests, while being attentive to the different languages that
are used to describe him. For the casual reader of Orientalism
the humanist models of his youth are perhaps unexpected, but
they remain a crucial presence nevertheless, and, in his final
chapter, it is I. A. Richards who emerges as a model of
generous pluralism. What distinguishes him, and Empson as
well, from the American New Critics, Said wrote in The
World, the Text, and the Critic, was his search for critical exact-
ness without appeals to the prestige of literature or of everyday
experience. Precision in dealing with literature was gained for
him in the use of words, and words can only be precise by a
science of words, purified of inexactness, emotion, or sloppiness
(p. 145).
Saids critical heroes are those who attend closely to the issue
of the aesthetic genesis of the literary work, to its words, and
there is, he observes, difficulty in finding a vocabulary . . . that
deals with human agency as well as the impersonal repeating
discourse of literary structure (World, pp. 157, 155). This is,
in its way, the same problem that faced British and French
writers on the Middle East only there, according to Said at
least, with far more dire consequences. Much of the vexed
third chapter of Orientalism is concerned with the period that
led up to the events of 1948, and Said focuses as a consequence
on figures such as Bell and Lawrence, seeking to draw out a tran-
sition in European writing from latent to manifest Orientalism,
the latter being part of a self-conscious programme of justifica-
tion for imperial interference in the region. Saids disdain for
both writers seems to me ill-judged and unkind a reaction
to the tone of feigned aristocracy present in inter-Orientalist dis-
cussions (p. 336) but behind it lies a feeling of justifiable
indignation.
In the autobiographical Out of Place Said revisits the empty
towns and villages where his extended family had lived, disco-
vering new families living in their former homes. By the early
spring of 1948, my entire extended family had been swept out
of place, and has remained in exile ever since, he writes
resignedly, and what remains are fragments of text and
image.19 Orientalism is a record of emotion as much as it is a
reckoning with theory. Perhaps the keenest emotion is his disap-
pointment at the suppression of individual feeling in the imperial
work of public servants. There is a conflict, Said insists, between
the narrative of their personal engagement with the Arabs and
the cultural vision, complete with a language of oppression,
into which this is made to fit. Such cultural criticism is conducted
in bad faith: the interpreter apprehends a novel diversity, but
only to allow it to be reduced into accommodation with the
already known. The defeat of narrative by vision, is Saids
neat phrase (p. 239), which might stand as a rejoinder to
every messianic politician who has allowed a gruesome local
particularity to be ignored in the pursuit of some obscure and
inappropriate goal.
Texts, Said writes in the essay The World, the Text and the
Critic, are a system of forces institutionalized by the reigning
culture at some human cost to its various components, and
they must be read so as to expose things that otherwise lie
hidden beneath piety, heedlessness, or routine (World, p. 53).
Criticism is, for Said, an oppositional attitude of mind, and his
exemplary critic in this essay, unlikely on first reflection, is
Keats, whose envisioning of the Grecian urn finds at once
graceful figures adorning its exterior and the little town
emptied of this folk, this pious morn (World, p. 53). If this
is an act of critical inventio, a discovery or recovery of some sup-
pressed human fact, then it is a moment of Janus-faced emotion-
al awareness: Keats senses both presence and absence; the trust
of aesthetic contemplation is at once repaid, with human life
animated before him, and then frozen uncomfortably by the dis-
torted recognition that the town is dehumanised and empty
forever more. Keatss poem is an example of humane criticism
because he gives uncertain voice to the absent dead; he imagines
the figures as beings that have come from a specific place, which
once was real. But in so doing he reminds us that the town is
deserted or that other people have moved into the empty
houses: that this humanity, for whom he experiences such
momentary feeling, exists now in nothing other than his own
language. At such times, it seems that the best we can do to
record anothers tragic loss is to mark the moment at which
we sense that the significance of their loss has eluded us.
There is a telling moment in Saids 1995 Afterword to
Orientalism, in which he confesses to a certain pleasure in
reading the Western accounts of the East that form the basis
of his critique by writers whom he enjoys in spite of their
views, such as Lane and Flaubert. He does so not to dismiss aes-
thetic pleasure as specious or irrelevant, but rather to remind the
critic of the need to accommodate the force of pleasure in any
account of critical reflection. Aesthetic pleasure is often a
matter of feeling that we have the privilege to remain silent,
that we have in some sense been spoken for; but it is also only
pleasure in the text that can press us forward to discover those
other voices, to ensure that silence has not already spoken for us.
Orientalism tells of the failure of human sympathy ever ade-
quately to bridge the gap that exists between one human con-
sciousness and another, a gap that widens tragically under
circumstances of time, distance, or oppression. But there is some-
thing also in the book of real grace in the sense that ethical
engagement may be wrought out of the acknowledgement of
that bafflement. It is a form of reckoning with distance, a recog-
nition that while we will never fully apprehend, say, the sacrifice
in Keatss poem, its sacrifice is also there in our time as our
critical attention draws us gradually away from dwelling
purely within ourselves.
University of Reading
NOTES
1
Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the Sown: The Syrian Adven-
tures of the Female Lawrence of Arabia (1907; New York,
2001), p. 158.
2
The best impartial record of these attacks is in Zachary
Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The
History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge, 2004),
pp. 182-214. See also Abdirahman A. Hussein, Edward Said:
Criticism and Society (2002), pp. 224-35.
3
Gertrude Bell, From her Personal Papers, 1889-1914, ed.
Elizabeth Burgoyne (1958), p. 244.
4
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; 2003), p. 230.
5
J. H. Plumb, New York Times Book Review, 18 Feb. 1979.
6
Saids most developed analysis of Vico is in the final chapter of
his Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1975).
7
Eric Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
(New York, 1959), p. 198.
8
Cited in Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism (Oxford, 2003),
p. 8.
9
See Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing, History,
and the West (1990), pp. 119-40.
10
The comparison is made in Paul A. Bove, Introduction,
boundary 2, 25/2: Edward W. Said (Summer 1998), 9.
11
See Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East:
Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge, 1992); Mohammed Sharafud-
din, Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with
the Orient (1994); Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism:
Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge,
1998).
12
Sadik Jalal al-Azm, Orientalism and Orientalism in
Reverse, Khamsin, 8 (1981), 5-26, cited in Zachary Lockman,
Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and
Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge, 2004), p. 196.
13
Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983),
p. 151.
14
See in particular Andrzej Warminski, Missed Crossing:
Wordsworths Apocalypses, Modern Language Notes, 99
(1984), 983-1006.
15
The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill
(Oxford, 1984), p. 393.
16
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick
Page (Oxford, 1970), p. 629.
17
Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and
their Enemies (2006), pp. 277, 4, 282.
18
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and
Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971), p. 115.
19
Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (2000), p. xiv.

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NEW IMPRESSIONS XIII

WHEN GERTRUDE BELL came to Damascus in 1905, she

Essays in Criticism Vol. 58 No. 1

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