Summary
Said’s term, introduced in Orientalism’s Chapter One, III-IV, for the preference for the schematic authority of a text over the disorientations of direct encounters with the human — the attitude by which Napoleon knew Egypt through books before conquering it, and which Chapter One, IV analyzes through Voltaire’s Candide and Cervantes’s Don Quixote (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.89, 101-103 / printed p.80, 92-94).
Details
- Napoleon’s preparations for Egypt were almost fanatically schematic and textual: Egypt acquired reality in his mind through ideas and myths culled from texts, and he saw the Orient only as it had been encoded first by classical texts and then by Orientalist experts (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.89 / printed p.80-81).
- Two situations favor a textual attitude: confronting at close quarters something relatively unknown, threatening and previously distant, where one falls back on what one has read (travel books and guidebooks are its natural texts); and the appearance of success, where a book’s instructions working in reality encourage belief in more books by the same author and on the same subject (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.102-103 / printed p.93-94).
- In the resulting dialectic of reinforcement, readers’ experiences are determined by what they have read and writers take up subjects defined in advance by readers’ experiences; such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe, producing in time a tradition, or what Foucault calls a discourse (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.103 / printed p.94).
- The Orient of this attitude was silent, available to Europe for the realization of projects that involved but were never directly responsible to the native inhabitants, and unable to resist the projects, images or descriptions devised for it (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.103 / printed p.94).
- Chapter One, IV closes the analysis: this side of Orientalism’s strength lives its own life, as books about fierce lions will do until lions can talk back, and the discourse suffused Napoleon and de Lesseps’s activity with meaning, intelligibility and reality above and beyond the Orient’s powerlessness to do anything about them (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.104 / printed p.95).
- The same attitude governs the copyist’s desk with which Chapter Two, I glosses Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet: knowledge no longer requires application to reality, but is passed on silently, without comment, from one text to another, its ideas repeated without attribution as idées reçues (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.125 / printed p.116).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, Discourse, Napoleon Bonaparte, Description de l’Égypte