Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The extent to which Orientalism developed as an aspect of imperialism has been the subject of much debate at the end of the twentieth century and on into the present one. The argument which has had most attention is that developed by the Palestinian critic and professor of comparative literature at Columbia University in New York, the late Edward Said. In two books, Said argued first that many nineteenth-century works of art depicted an imaginary Orient, a stereotypical Orient full of caricature and simplification. Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting Snake Charmer (1870), for example, shows a young boy, naked except for the snake wrapped around him, standing on a carpet and entertaining a group of men, dark-skinned Arabs festooned in rifles and swords, lounging against a wall of tiles decorated with arabesques and Arabic script. Said’s argument was that the intellectual history of Oriental studies, as practiced in the West, has been corrupted by political power, that the very notion of ‘the Orient’ as a single entity is absurd and belittling of a huge region that contains many cultures, many religions, many ethnic groupings. He showed for example, that the Frenchman Silvestre de Sacy, whose Chrestomathie arabe was published in 1806, was trying to put ‘Oriental studies’ on a par with Latin and Hellenistic studies, which helped produce the idea that the Orient was as homogeneous as classical Greece or Rome. In this way, he said, the world comes to be made up of two unequal halves, shaped by the unequal exchange rooted in political (imperial) power. There is, he says, an ‘imaginative demonology’ of the ‘mysterious Orient’ in which the ‘Orientals’ are invariably lazy, deceitful, and irrational.⁹⁰

Said took his argument further in Culture and Imperialism (1993). It was in the ‘great cultural archive,’ as Said put it, that the ‘intellectual and aesthetics in overseas dominion are made. If you were British or French in the 1860s you saw, and you felt, India and North Africa with a combination of familiarity and distance, but never with a sense of their separate sovereignty. In your narratives, histories, travel tales, and explorations your consciousness was represented as the principal authority . . . your sense of power scarcely imagined that those “natives” who appeared either subservient or sullenly cooperative were ever going to be capable of finally making you give up India or Algeria. Or of saying anything that might perhaps contradict, challenge . . .’⁹¹ At some basic level, Said insisted, ‘imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others . . . For citizens of nineteenth-century Britain and France, empire was a major topic of unembarrassed cultural attention. British India and French North Africa alone played inestimable roles in the imagination, economy, political life and social fabric of British and French society and, if we mention names like Delacroix, Edmund Burke, Ruskin, Carlyle, James and John Stuart Mill, Kipling, Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert, or Conrad, we shall be mapping a tiny corner of a far vaster reality than even their immense collective talents cover.’ It was Said’s contention that one of the principal purposes of ‘the great European realistic novel’ was to sustain a society’s consent in overseas expansion.⁹²

Said focuses on the period around 1878, when ‘the scramble for Africa’ was beginning, and when, he says, the realistic novel form became pre-eminent. ‘By the 1840s the English novel had achieved eminence as the

aesthetic form and as a major intellectual voice, so to speak, in English society.’⁹³ All the major English novelists of the mid-nineteenth century accepted a globalised world-view, he said, and indeed could not ignore the vast overseas reach of British power.⁹⁴ Said lists those books which, he argues, fit his theme: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Thackeray’s

Vanity Fair, Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Disraeli’s Tancred

, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. The empire, he says, is everywhere a crucial setting. In many cases, Said says, ‘the empire functions for much of the European nineteenth century as a codified, if only marginally visible presence in fiction, very much like the servants in grand households and in novels, whose work is taken for granted but scarcely ever more than named, rarely studied or given density . . .’⁹⁵