Summary
Gustave Flaubert, whose encounter with the Egyptian courtesan Kuchuk Hanem Said takes in the Introduction as the pattern of the Orientalist speaking for the Oriental, whose Egyptian spectacle passages illustrate the Orient enjoyed as a living tableau of queerness, and whose unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet supplies Chapter Two, I with its frame for the nineteenth century’s secular, reconstructive faiths (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.15, 112, 122-125 / printed p.6, 103, 113-116).
Details
- Flaubert’s Kuchuk Hanem never spoke of herself, never represented her emotions, presence or history; he, foreign, comparatively wealthy and male, was the one who spoke for and represented her, a pattern Said says fairly stands for the relative strength between East and West and the discourse that pattern enabled (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.15 / printed p.6).
- Flaubert’s descriptions of public coupling, a marabout and a santon in Cairo, quoted by Said, show the Orient watched from a reservoir of infinite peculiarity by a European watcher never involved and always detached, for whom the old comic business of the cudgeled slave, the trafficker in women and the thieving merchant acquires a new, fresh and charming meaning in the Orient (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.112 / printed p.103).
- Flaubert died in 1880 without finishing Bouvard et Pécuchet, his comic encyclopedic novel on the degeneration of knowledge; in his sketches for its conclusion the two clerks debate mankind’s future — Bouvard brightly, that Europe will be regenerated by Asia and the two forms of humanity soldered together — before confessing their secret desire to become copyists again and turning to transcribing knowledge uncritically from one text to another (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.122-123 / printed p.113-114).
- Said glosses Bouvard’s vision as the nineteenth-century predilection for rebuilding the world according to an imaginative vision, and Flaubert’s copyists as the fate of knowledge become idées reçues, repeated and re-echoed uncritically; Flaubert was prescient enough, Said says, to see that in time the modern Orientalist would become a copyist, like Bouvard and Pécuchet (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.123, 125, 130 / printed p.114, 116, 121).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, Textual attitude, Imaginative geography