Orientalism

by Edward W. Said

  40. Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin, vol. 9 (Études philosophiques 1) of La Comédie humaine, ed. Marcel Bouteron (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. 39; Renan, Histoire générale des langues sémitiques, p. 134.

  41. See, for instance, De l’origine du langage, p. 102, and Histoire générale, p. 180.

  42. Renan, L’Avenir de la science, p. 23. The whole passage reads as follows: “Pour moi, je ne connais qu’un seul résultat à la science, c’est de résoudre l’énigme, c’est de dire définitivement à l’homme le mot des choses, c’est de l’expliquer à lui-même, c’est de lui donner, au nom de la seule autorité légitime qui est la nature humaine toute entière, le symbole que les religions lui donnaient tout fait et qu’ils ne peut plus accepter.”

  43. See Madeleine V.-David, Le Débat sur les écritures et l’hiéroglyphe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles et l’application de la notion de déchiffrement aux écritures mortes (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1965), p. 130.

  44. Renan is mentioned only in passing in Schwab’s La Renaissance orientale, not at all in Foucault’s The Order of Things, and only somewhat disparagingly in Holger Pederson’s The Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Webster Spargo (1931; reprint ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972). Max Müller in his Lectures on the Science of Language (1861–64; reprint ed., New York: Scribner, Armstrong, & Co., 1875) and Gustave Dugat in his Histoire des orientalistes de l’Europe du XIIe au XIXe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve, 1868–70) do not mention Renan at all. James Darmesteter’s Essais Orientaux (Paris: A. Lévy, 1883)—whose first item is a history, “L’Orientalisme en France”—is dedicated to Renan but does not mention his contribution. There are half-a-dozen short notices of Renan’s production in Jules Mohl’s encyclopedic (and extremely valuable) quasi-logbook, Vingt-sept ans d’histoire des études orientales: Rapports faits à la Société asiatique de Paris de 1840 à 1867, 2 vols. (Paris: Reinwald, 1879–80).

  45. In works dealing with race and racism Renan occupies a position of some importance. He is treated in the following: Ernest Seillière, La Philosophie de l’impérialisme, 4 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1903–8); Théophile Simar, Étude critique sur la formation de la doctrine des races au XVIIIe siècle et son expansion au XIXe siècle (Brussels: Hayez, 1922); Erich Voegelin, Rasse und Staat (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1933), and here one must also mention his Die Rassenidee in der Geistesgeschichte von Ray bis Carus (Berlin: Junker und Dunnhaupt, 1933), which, although it does not deal with Renan’s period, is an important complement to Rasse und Staat; Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1937).

  46. In La Renaissance orientale Schwab has some brilliant pages on the museum, on the parallelism between biology and linguistics, and on Cuvier, Balzac, and others; see p. 323 and passim. On the library and its importance for mid-nineteenth-century culture, see Foucault, “La Bibliothèque fantastique,” which is his preface to Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 7–33. I am indebted to Professor Eugenio Donato for drawing my attention to these matters; see his “A Mere Labyrinth of Letters: Flaubert and the Quest for Fiction,” Modern Language Notes 89, no. 6 (December 1974): 885–910.

  47. Renan, Histoire générale, pp. 145–6.

  48. See L’Avenir de la science, p. 508 and passim.

  49. Renan, Histoire générale, p. 214.

  50. Ibid., p. 527. This idea goes back to Friedrich Schlegel’s distinction between organic and agglutinative languages, of which latter type Semitic is an instance. Humboldt makes the same distinction, as have most Orientalists since Renan.

  51. Ibid., pp. 531–2.

  52. Ibid., p. 515 and passim.

  53. See Jean Seznec, Nouvelles Études sur “La Tentation de Saint Antoine” (London: Warburg Institute, 1949), p. 80.

  54. See Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Philosophie anatomique: Des monstruosités humaines (Paris: published by the author, 1822). The complete title of Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s work is: Histoire générale et particulière des anomalies de l’organisation chez l’homme et les animaux, ouvrage comprenante des recherches sur les caractères, la classification, l’influence physiologique et pathologique, les rapports généraux, les lois et les causes des monstruosités, des variétés et vices de conformation, ou traité de tératologie, 3 vols. (Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1832–36). There are some valuable pages on Goethe’s biological ideas in Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), pp. 3–34. See also Jacob, The Logic of Life, and Canguilhem, La Connaissance de la vie, pp. 174–84, for very interesting accounts of the Saint-Hilaires’ place in the development of the life sciences.

  55. E. Saint-Hilaire, Philosophie anatomique, pp. xxii–xxiii.

  56. Renan, Histoire générale, p. 156.

  57. Renan, Oeuvres complètes, 1: 621–2 and passim. See H. W. Wardman, Ernest Renan: A Critical Biography (London: Athlone Press, 1964), p. 66 and passim, for a subtle description of Renan’s domestic life; although one would not wish to force a parallel between Renan’s biography and what I have called his “masculine” world, Wardman’s descriptions here are suggestive indeed—at least to me.

  58. Renan, “Des services rendus au sciences historiques par la philologie,” in Oeuvres complètes, 8: 1228, 1232.

  59. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History since Hegel, trans. William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 307.

  60. Renan, “Réponse au discours de réception de M. de Lesseps (23 avril 1885),” in Oeuvres complètes, 1: 817. Yet the value of being truly contemporary was best shown with reference to Renan by Sainte-Beuve in his articles of June 1862. See also Donald G. Charlton, Positivist Thought in France During the Second Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), and his Secular Religions in France. Also Richard M. Chadbourne, “Renan and Sainte-Beuve,” Romanic Review 44, no. 2 (April 1953): 126–35.

  61. Renan, Oeuvres complètes, 8: 156.

  62. In his letter of June 26, 1856, to Gobineau, Oeuvres complètes, 10: 203–4. Gobineau’s ideas were expressed in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–55).

  63. Cited by Albert Hourani in his excellent article “Islam and the Philosophers of History,” p. 222.

  64. Caussin de Perceval, Essai sur l’histoire des Arabes avant l’Islamisme, pendant l’époque de Mahomet et jusqu’à la réduction de toutes les tribus sous la loi musulmane (1847–48; reprint ed., Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1967), 3: 332–9.

  65. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841; reprint ed., New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), p. 63.

  66. Macaulay’s Indian experiences are described by G. Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1875), 1: 344–71. The complete text of Macaulay’s “Minute” is conveniently to be found in Philip D. Curtin, ed., Imperialism: The Documentary History of Western Civilization (New York: Walker & Co., 1971), pp. 178–91. Some consequences of Macaulay’s views for British Orientalism are discussed in A. J. Arberry, British Orientalists (London: William Collins, 1943).

  67. John Henry Newman, The Turks in Their Relation to Europe, vol. 1 of his Historical Sketches (1853; reprint ed., London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1920).

  68. See Marguerite-Louise Ancelot, Salons de Paris, foyers éteints (Paris: Jules Tardieu, 1858).

  69. Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile, ed. David Fernbach (London: Pelican Books, 1973), pp. 306–7.

  70. Ibid., p. 320.

  71. Edward William Lane, Author’s Preface to An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836; reprint ed., London: J. M. Dent, 1936), pp. xx, xxi.

  72. Ibid., p. 1.

  73. Ibid., pp. 160–1. The standard biography of Lane, published in 1877, was by his great-nephew, Stanley Lane-Poole. There is a sympathetic account of Lane by A. J. Arberry in his Oriental Essays
: Portraits of Seven Scholars (New York: Macmillan Co., 1960), pp. 87–121.

  74. Frederick Eden Pargiter, ed., Centenary Volume of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1823–1923 (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1923), p. x.

  75. Société asiatique: Livre du centenaire, 1822–1922 (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1922), pp. 5–6.

  76. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Westöstlicher Diwan (1819; reprint ed., Munich: Wilhelm Golmann, 1958), pp. 8–9, 12. Sacy’s name is invoked with veneration in Goethe’s apparatus for the Diwan.

  77. Victor Hugo, Les Orientales, in Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Pierre Albouy (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 1: 616–18.

  78. François-René de Chateaubriand, Oeuvres romanesques et voyages, ed. Maurice Regard (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 2: 702.

  79. See Henri Bordeaux, Voyageurs d’Orient: Des pélerins aux méharistes de Palmyre (Paris: Plon, 1926). I have found useful the theoretical ideas about pilgrims and pilgrimages contained in Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 166–230.

  80. Hassan al-Nouty, Le Proche-Orient dans la littérature française de Nerval à Barrès (Paris: Nizet, 1958), pp. 47–8, 277, 272.

  81. Chateaubriand, Oeuvres, 2: 702 and note, 1684, 769–70, 769, 701, 808, 908.

  82. Ibid., pp. 1011, 979, 990, 1052.

  83. Ibid., p. 1069.

  84. Ibid., p. 1031.

  85. Ibid., p. 999.

  86. Ibid., pp. 1126–27, 1049.

  87. Ibid., p. 1137.

  88. Ibid., pp. 1148, 1214.

  89. Alphonse de Lamartine, Voyage en Orient (1835; reprint ed., Paris: Hachette, 1887), 1: 10, 48–9, 179, 178, 148, 189, 118, 245–6, 251.

  90. Ibid., 1: 363; 2: 74–5; 1: 475.

  91. Ibid., 2: 92–3.

  92. Ibid., 2: 526–7, 533. Two important works on French writers in the Orient are Jean-Marie Carré, Voyageurs et écrivains français en Égypte, 2 vols. (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1932), and Moënis Taha-Hussein, Le Romantisme français et l’Islam (Beirut: Dar-el-Maeref, 1962).

  93. Gérard de Nerval, Les Filles du feu, in Oeuvres, ed. Albert Béguin and Jean Richet (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 1: 297–8.

  94. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davison (Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Co., 1967).

  95. Jean Bruneau, Le “Conte Orientale” de Flaubert (Paris: Denoel, 1973), p. 79.

  96. These are all considered by Bruneau in ibid.

  97. Nerval, Voyage en Orient, in Oeuvres, 2: 68, 194, 96, 342.

  98. Ibid., p. 181.

  99. Michel Butor, “Travel and Writing,” trans. John Powers and K. Lisker, Mosaic 8, no. 1 (Fall 1974): 13.

  100. Nerval, Voyage en Orient, p. 628.

  101. Ibid., pp. 706, 718.

  102. Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, trans, and ed. Francis Steegmuller (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1973), p. 200. I have also consulted the following texts, in which all Flaubert’s “Oriental” material is to be found: Oeuvres complètes de Gustave Flaubert (Paris: Club de l’Honnête homme, 1973), vols. 10, 11; Les Lettres d’Égypte, de Gustave Flaubert, ed. A. Youssef Naaman (Paris: Nizet, 1965); Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris, Gallimard, 1973), 1: 518 ff.

  103. Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 285.

  104. Flaubert in Egypt, pp. 173, 75.

  105. Levin, Gates of Horn, p. 271.

  106. Flaubert, Catalogue des opinions chic, in Oeuvres, 2: 1019.

  107. Flaubert in Egypt, p. 65.

  108. Ibid., pp. 220, 130.

  109. Flaubert, La Tentation de Saint Antoine, in Oeuvres, 1: 85.

  110. See Flaubert, Salammbô, in Oeuvres, 1: 809 ff. See also Maurice Z. Shroder, “On Reading Salammbô,” L’Esprit créateur 10, no. 1 (Spring 1970): 24–35.

  111. Flaubert in Egypt, pp. 198–9.

  112. Foucault, “La Bibliothèque fantastique,” in Flaubert, La Tentation de Saint Antoine, pp. 7–33.

  113. Flaubert in Egypt, p. 79.

  114. Ibid., pp. 211–2.

  115. For a discussion of this process see Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge; also Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist’s Role in Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971). See also Edward W. Said, “An Ethics of Language,” Diacritics 4, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 28–37.

  116. See the invaluable listings in Richard Bevis, Bibliotheca Cisorientalia: An Annotated Checklist of Early English Travel Books on the Near and Middle East (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1973).

  117. For discussions of the American travelers see Dorothee Metlitski Finkelstein, Melville’s Orienda (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961), and Franklin Walker, Irreverent Pilgrims: Melville, Browne, and Mark Twain in the Holy Land (Seattle; University of Washington Press, 1974).

  118. Alexander William Kinglake, Eothen, or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East, ed. D. G. Hogarth (1844; reprint ed., London: Henry Frowde, 1906), pp. 25, 68, 241, 220.

  119. Flaubert in Egypt, p. 81.

  120. Thomas J. Assad, Three Victorian Travellers: Burton, Blunt and Doughty (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 5.

  121. Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madinah and Meccah, ed. Isabel Burton (London: Tylston & Edwards, 1893), 1: 9, 108–10.

  122. Richard Burton, “Terminal Essay,” in The Book of the Thousand and One Nights (London: Burton Club, 1886), 10: 63–302.

  123. Burton, Pilgrimage, 1: 112, 114.

  Chapter 3. Orientalism Now

  1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), pp. 46–7.

  2. The number of Arab travelers to the West is estimated and considered by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod in Arab Rediscovery of Europe: A Study in Cultural Encounters (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 75–6 and passim.

  3. See Philip D. Curtin, ed., Imperialism: The Documentary History of Western Civilization (New York: Walker & Co., 1972), pp. 73–105.

  4. See Johann W. Fück, “Islam as an Historical Problem in European Historiography since 1800,” in Historians of the Middle East, ed. Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 307.

  5. Ibid., p. 309.

  6. See Jacques Waardenburg, L’Islam dans le miroir de l’Occident (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1963).

  7. Ibid., p. 311.

  8. P. Masson-Oursel, “La Connaissance scientifique de l’Asie en France depuis 1900 et les variétés de l’Orientalisme,” Revue Philosophique 143, nos. 7–9 (July–September 1953): 345.

  9. Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt (New York: Macmillan Co., 1908), 2: 237–8.

  10. Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, Ancient and Modern Imperialism (London: John Murray, 1910), pp. 118, 120.

  11. George Nathaniel Curzon, Subjects of the Day: Being a Selection of Speeches and Writings (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1915), pp. 4–5, 10, 28.

  12. Ibid., pp. 184, 191–2. For the history of the school, see C. H. Phillips, The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1917–1967: An Introduction (London: Design for Print, 1967).

  13. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).

  14. Cited in Michael Edwardes, High Noon of Empire: India Under Curzon (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965), pp. 38–9.

  15. Curzon, Subjects of the Day, pp. 155–6.

  16. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, in Youth and Two Other Stories (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1925), p. 52.

  17. For an illustrative extract from de Vattel’s work see Curtin, ed., Imperialism, pp. 42–5.

  18. Cited by M. de Caix, La Syrie in Gabriel Hanotaux, Histoire des colonies françaises, 6 vols. (Paris: Société de l’histoire nationale, 1929–33), 3: 481.

  19. These details are to be found in Vernon McKay, “Colon
ialism in the French Geographical Movement,” Geographical Review 33, no. 2 (April 1943): 214–32.

  20. Agnes Murphy, The Ideology of French Imperialism, 1817–1881 (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1948), pp. 46, 54, 36, 45.

  21. Ibid., pp. 189, 110, 136.

  22. Jukka Nevakivi, Britain, France, and the Arab Middle East, 1914–1920 (London: Athlone Press, 1969), p. 13.

  23. Ibid., p. 24.

  24. D. G. Hogarth, The Penetration of Arabia: A Record of the Development of Western Knowledge Concerning The Arabian Peninsula (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1904). There is a good recent book on the same subject: Robin Bidwell, Travellers in Arabia (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1976).

  25. Edmond Bremond, Le Hedjaz dans la guerre mondiale (Paris: Payot, 1931), pp. 242 ff.

  26. Le Comte de Cressaty, Les Intérêts de la France en Syrie (Paris: Floury, 1913).

  27. Rudyard Kipling, Verse (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1954), p. 280.

  28. The themes of exclusion and confinement in nineteenth-century culture have played an important role in Michel Foucault’s work, most recently in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

  29. The Letters of T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, ed. David Garnett (1938; reprint ed., London: Spring Books, 1964), p. 244.

  30. Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the Sown (London: William Heinemann, 1907), p. 244.

  31. Gertrude Bell, From Her Personal Papers, 1889–1914, ed. Elizabeth Burgoyne (London: Ernest Benn, 1958), p. 204.

  32. William Butler Yeats, “Byzantium,” The Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan Co., 1959), p. 244.

  33. Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1974), p. 119.

  34. See Harry Bracken, “Essence, Accident and Race,” Hermathena 116 (Winter 1973): pp. 81–96.

  35. George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872; reprint ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1956), p. 13.

  36. Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (1939; reprint ed., New York: Meridian Books, 1955), p. 214.