One Myth Replaces Another

...In short, there is in Said's very neat orchestration of invi-diousness a counter-sorcery that, had it not been accomplished earlier, would lay the foundations of "Occidentalism," a discourse elaborate, truant and mythicabout the West...

...The "method," suddenly denuded, is cast aside...

...It also conveniently excuses him from elaborating an alternative to Orientalism...

...Somehow Ernest Renan's tainted view about "Semites," real and imagined, becomes equated with Edward Lear's attempt to study the Egyptians by passing himself off for one of them (Does this hopelessly vitiate Lear's effort...

...It has adumbrated brilliantly flawed portraitures of things Eastern...

...The spell of the desert, the romantic paroxysms induced by the very word "Semite" in the minds of receptive loners like T. E. Lawrence, the self-assured formulation of all things Arab (he is "a Jew on horseback," said Disraeli), the easy ridicule of the supposedly primitive Egyptian psyche by such a forerunner Orientalist as Edward Lane, have spawned many and like patronizing encapsulations...

...Or has not Said's own prejudice, here as in so many other places, overwhelmed his insight...

...This lends to the Foucaultian "archaeology" of knowledge its quality of hovering over continuities of history without violating them by a crude subjectivism, much less by a party interest...

...It is basically 19th- and 20th-century Anglo-French and, to a lesser extent, contemporary A merican Orientalism that the author is here concerned with...

...One can't help wondering, though, if such techniques will ever be overcome in the era of nations...

...But Said has removed the Far East from his focus of study...

...The much-chastened Foucaults of that very West do not seem to allow themselves so luxuriant a conclusiveness...

...Does he suppose that discourse shall be answered by counter—discourse until some synthesizing structure ultimately subsumes both in spite of man's best efforts to inflame the contrarieties...

...It has tended to initiate new, succumbing generations of experts into its assumptions—assumptions said to have little connection to the richness of available facts...

...As a consistent and ever-enhanced body of Western metaphors, doctrines, beliefs, about the East in particular about Islam—this discourse world has purportedly acquired autonomy...

...To illuminate their artifact, the author has regretfully delimited his area of investigation...

...Yet there is a disturbing difference in Said's use of the method...

...He ascribes importance to individuals in creating the realms of discourse, whereas Foucault seems to find them evolving their own self-consistent panoply of metaphors irrespective of men...

...Moreover, this convenient fiction has been created by a distinguished train of specialists, intellectuals and artists, as diverse in time and place as Goethe and Gustave Flaubert, Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence, Gerard de Nerval, William Edward Lane, Sir Hamilton Gibb, and Louis Massignon...

...Once the pattern of violation is established by dozens of examples, however, an inexorable and unfortunate "blending" of the data occurs...

...Given this structure, much of the material conforms to the master hand of the book's strategist-composer...

...It is not that Dr...

...Said sets forth eloquently, and with a seeming inevitability, a wealth of citations—accented, at least at first, by his deliberate refusal to comment outright on the painfully obvious...

...On the more directly political level, they are matched by a Cromer's or a Balfour's presumptuous assumption of the white man's burden, or today by a certain state-funded American academic jargonludicrous appraisals put together in the interest of national power...

...We are left, finally, with prestructuralist accounts-rendering, and little in the way of helpful philosophical overview...

...The author's professed inspiration for this perplexing undertaking has been the writings of Michel Foucault, the French structuralist...

...With a fitting tribute to the richness of its engagement, he has likewise dismissed German and much other European scholarship from his detailed accounts...

...It has in many instances subserved and followed, not unnaturally, a political and economic expansion eastward...

...and it is Islam, specifically Arab civilization, that provides the context for Orientalist forays...

...Said, on the other hand, vitiates that apparatus of meticulous examination intrinsically aloof from the banality of forced conclusions and causality—by his own bias, his taking of sides in an emotion-charged debate grounded in contemporary world politics...

...indeed, outrage has from the beginning never been far from the surface...

...In retrospect, from the quite different presuppositions of our era, it is evident that Said is very often right, and bitterly right, about much of Western Orientalism...

...These supposed blunders, in turn, are equated with Bernard Lewis' supposedly condescending derivation of the Arabic word having to do with revolution from a root indicating the rising up of a camel...

...Reflective chapters that elegantly decode the documents of Orientalism and their unique lexicons, from an 18th-century efflorescence until now, are followed by a summation of disconcerting indictments...

...Reviewed by Norris Merchant The "Orientalist" phenomenon, as described in this book by Edward W. Said of Columbia University, emerges as a vast, impure intellectual construction whose roots can be traced to the very earliest Western portrayals of Eastern peoples...

...Asia, fearfully vast, occupies a space of equivalent vastness in the Orientalist literature of its Western suitors and exponents...

...The West stands certainly "guilty"if guilt may be spoken of in terms of the evolution of a discourse...

...Thus Said's chosen documents are said to constitute a universe of discourse, "Orientalism...

...The wanton Orientalist of another day would doubtless have made much of this, while being, himself, more at faultor in fact equally human...

...And this fantasy of the East has allegedly maintained and strengthened itself at every stage of Western development: It was augmented by the Crusades and by Christian contempt for heretics, abetted by the secularization of its images during the Enlightenment, and it grew truly portentous during imperialist struggles for Asian colonies...

...The irony is that Said, an Arab in origin, having accepted the dubious but au courant Western technique of elaborating a mode of discourse as a valid means of knowledge, has in the process of such an undertaking humanly transcended it...

...Still, some of that West, at least, appears now to be much aware of its inherited crudities, lending an air of naivete to many of this book's passages of indignation against past trespasses...

...In our own day, we are told, the fantasy has culminated in the tendentiously political stereotyping of Islam and, more specifically, of the Arab peoples, for purposes of rationalizing a political alliance and the cultural hegemony of which the West is both the manufacturer and the heir...

...Said is always wrong, but rather that his approach does not give him leave to categorize Orientalist phenomena so righteously...

...Orientalism, then, is here presented as essentially a Western transgression against reality made to justify aggression—the political and cultural rape of less powerful peoples who are most frequently described as passive, docile, impractical, intoxicated by mere rhetoric and living by emotion...

...Let us hope that a purer version of the entanglement of cultures will see both efforts as early, groping instances of the necessary cross-fertilizations of peoples, and of the mutual knowledge-enhancing of civilizations in their slow evolution hu-manward...