Summary
T. E. Lawrence, Oriental expert and agent of empire, whose Seven Pillars of Wisdom and whose letters Said presents in Orientalism as the clearest case of the conflict between narrative history and vision: the Orientalist-as-agent who stimulated the Orient into movement, imposed a Western shape on it, and contained it in a personal vision of failure and betrayal (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.234, 238-251 / printed p.225, 229-242).
Details
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Lawrence belonged to the band of Oriental experts — with Gertrude Bell, D. G. Hogarth and St. John Philby — posted to the Orient as agents of empire and formulators of policy because of their intimate knowledge of the Orient; they were not academics, and their role was not to subvert academic Orientalism but to make it effective, their frame of reference fashioned by scholars in the line of descent from Edward William Lane and their imaginative perspective principally by Rudyard Kipling (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.233 / printed p.224).
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Writing to V. W. Richards in 1918, Lawrence presented the Arab as an old, old civilisation refined clear of household gods, a race trained out, in mental and moral fatigue — an image defined, Said argues, from the cleansing perspective of one not an Arab, the White Man; the Arab accumulates no existential thickness and remains the same across the records of the inner desert (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.237-239 / printed p.228-230).
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His own synopsis of chapter 1 of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom gives the new dialectic of expertise in brief: the knowledge of some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples allowed the Arab rebellion to begin, and its affairs then miscarried amid clashing jealousies (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.247 / printed p.238).
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Lawrence meant, in his phrase as quoted, to make a new nation and “to give twenty millions of Semites the foundation on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts”; within the semiotic field called Semitic, “Arabs could be swung on an idea as on a cord”, and the Arab Revolt acquires meaning only as Lawrence designs meaning for it, the Orientalist become the representative Oriental, in unresolvable conflict between the White Man and the Oriental (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.250-251 / printed p.241-242).
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Chapter Three, II’s close completes the reading: in the crooked-lane passage Lawrence confesses that “we had borne the vicarious for our own sakes,” and later added a theory about “the old men” who stole the triumph from him; as white expert he assumes the role of Oriental prophet giving shape to a movement in “the new Asia,” and when the movement fails it is his disappointment that counts — Aeschylus’s mourning Asia and Nerval’s disappointment become, in Lawrence, both the mourning continent and the subjective consciousness expressing an almost cosmic disenchantment, thanks not only to Lowell Thomas and Robert Graves. All the events putatively ascribed to the historical Arab Revolt are reduced finally to Lawrence’s experiences on its behalf: style as a form of displacement and incorporation by which one voice becomes a whole history (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.252-253 / printed p.243-244).
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In Chapter Three, III Lawrence recurs as the obvious example of Orientalist authority redistributed to the realm of sensational revelation, having more to do with personalities or governments than with knowledge (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.293 / printed p.284). Massignon, Said notes, opposed Lawrence’s type of policy in his dealings with Faisal and held that the British represented “expansion” in the Orient (PDF p.279 / printed p.270).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, Gertrude Bell, Rudyard Kipling, William Robertson Smith, Sykes–Picot agreement, Louis Massignon