consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general
ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical
reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections. If we can point to great
Orientalist works of genuine scholarship like Silvestre de Sacy's
Chrestomathie arabe
or Edward William
Lane's
Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians,
we need also to note that Renan's and
Gobineau's racial ideas came out of the same impulse, as did a great many Victorian pornographic novels (see
the analysis by Steven Marcus of "The Lustful Turk"
4
).
And yet, one must repeatedly ask oneself whether what matters in Orientalism is the general group of ideas
overriding the mass of material—about which who could deny that they were shot through with doctrines of
European superiority, various kinds of racism, imperialism, and the like, dogmatic views of "the Oriental" as
a kind of ideal and unchanging abstraction?—or the much more varied work produced by almost uncountable
individual writers, whom one would take up as individual instances of authors dealing with the Orient. In a
sense the two alternatives, general and particular, are really two perspectives on the same material: in both
instances one would have to deal with pioneers in the field like William Jones, with great artists like Nerval
or Flaubert. And why would it not be possible to employ both perspectives together, or one after the other?
Isn't there an obvious danger of distortion (of precisely the kind that academic Orientalism has always been
prone to if either too general or too specific a level of description is maintained systematically?
My two fears are distortion and inaccuracy, or rather the kind of inaccuracy produced by too dogmatic a
generality and too positivistic a localized focus. In trying to deal with these problems I have tried to deal with
three main aspects of my own contemporary reality that seem to me to point the way out of the
methodological or perspectival difficulties I have been discussing, difficulties that might force one, in the first
instance, into writing a coarse polemic on so unacceptably general a level of description as not to be worth
the effort, or in the second instance, into writing so detailed and atomistic a series of analyses as to lose all
track of the general
lines of force informing the field, giving it its special cogency. How then to recognize
individuality and to reconcile it with its intelligent, and by no means passive or merely dictatorial, general
and hegemonic context?
(…)
NOTES:
1. Thierry Desjardins,
Le Martyre du Liban
(Paris: Plon, 1976), p. 14.
2. K. M. Panikkar,
Asia and Western Dominance
(London: George Alien & Unwin, 1959).
3. Denys Hay,
Europe: The Emergence of an Idea,
2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968).
4. Steven Marcus,
The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England
(1966; reprint
ed., New York: Bantam Books, 1967), pp. 200-19.
5. See my
Criticism Between Culture and System
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
