Critical Terrains

French and British Orientalisms

Lisa Lowe

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781501728051
• eBook ISBN: 9781501723131
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria inglese

Examining and historicizing the concept of "otherness" in both literature and criticism, Lisa Lowe explores representations of non-European cultures in British and French writings from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Lowe traces the intersections of culture, class, and sexuality in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters and Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and discusses tropes of orientalism, racialism, and romanticism in Flaubert. She then turns to debates in Anglo-American and Indian criticism on Forster's Passage to India and on the utopian projection of China in the poststructuralist theories of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes and in the journal Tel Quel.

1

Discourse and Heterogeneity: Situating Orientalism

Par la diversité de son humeur, tour à tour mystique ou joyeuse, babillarde, taciturne, emportée, nonchalante, elle allait rappel-ant en lui mille désirs, évoquant des instincts ou des réminiscences. Elle était l’amoureuse de tous les romans, l’héroine de tous les drames, le vague elle de tous les volumes de vers. Il retrouvait sur ses épaules la couleur ambrée de l’odalisque au bain; elle avait le corsage long de châtelaines féodales; elle ressemblait aussi à la Femme pâle de Barcelone, mais elle était par-dessus tout Ange!

[According to her changing moods, in turn meditative or gay, talkative, silent, passionate, and nonchalant, she awakened in him a thousand desires, called up instincts or memories. She was the beloved mistress of all the novels, the heroine of all the dramas, the vague “she” of all the volumes of verse. On her shoulders, he rediscovered the amber color of Ingres’s Odalisque au bain; her waist was long like the feudal chatelaines; she resembled the “Femme Pale de Barcelone,” but above all, she was a complete Angel.]

Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857)

In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, a novel reflecting the tedium and homogeneity of French provincial life, Emma’s young lover Leon imagines that he finds on her shoulders “the amber color of the Odalisque au bain” The workings of masculine desire are illustrated by the young lover’s metonymic substitution of Ingres’s Turkish bather’s shoulders—smooth-skinned and distantly exotic—for the doctor’s wife whom he holds in an adulterous embrace. As Leon imagines the shoulders of one of Ingres’s oriental women, his conflation enunciates and reiterates an established association of the oriental with the feminine erotic. Throughout Flaubert’s writing versions of this theme abound. Masculine romantic desire is often introduced by an oriental motif: an oriental ballad accompanies Frederic’s meeting with Madame Arnoux; Salammbô’s golden ankle chain piques Mâtho’s desire; the Egyptian courtesan Kuchuk-Hanem uses rosewater to perfume the traveler’s hands. Such associations of orientalism with romanticism are not coincidental, for the two situations of desire—the occidental fascination with the Orient and the male lover’s passion for his female beloved—are structurally similar. Both depend on a structure that locates an Other—as woman, as oriental scene—as inaccessible, different, beyond. At this moment in Madame Bovary, the structural similarities make it possible for romanticism to figure itself in orientalist terms, and likewise for orientalism to figure itself in the romantic tradition.

Léon’s conflation of Emma and Ingres’s odalisque also reveals that some romantic and orientalist desires function fundamentally as a matter of cultural quotation, or of the repetition of cultural signs. Léon “quotes” Ingres’s orientalist painting to signify and to enhance his romantic desire; but, ironically enough, the orientalist painting is itself a “quotation” of other orientalisms. We know that Ingres never traveled to North Africa or the Near East. He derived the colors and textures for his bathers and Islamic interiors from the eighteenth-century illustrations and the descriptions he found in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu1 and in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes. The Orient of Leon’s reference to Ingres is a heterogeneous amalgam: Ingres’s paintings of Turkish odalisques bring together iconographies of a multiplicity of Orients—derived at times from painted scenes of Tangiers, Cairo, and Jerusalem, at other times from literary fictions of Persia.2

In this particular example from Flaubert, we understand that orientalism—the tradition of occidental literary and scholarly interest in countries and peoples of the East3—is hardly a discrete or monochromatic phenomenon. To the contrary, the representation of Leon’s quotation from the Ingres painting illustrates how literary figures and narratives express a nexus of various modes of representation; in this case, romantic poetry’s representation of women, orientalist literature’s representation of the Orient, orientalist paintings of women, and romantic paintings of women are all enunciated in the moment when Leon substitutes the shoulders of the odalisque. As the intertex-tuality of this scene demonstrates, none of these individual traditions of representation can be discussed as if it were simple or uniform; nor can the social contradictions of which they are crucial representations be equated or analogized. In Flaubert’s France, for example, the discursive representations of gender have social determinants—including the organization of the family, the construction of sexuality, medical practices—which are distinctly different from the conditions that produce discourses about cultural and racial differences; yet these diverse means of inscription traverse one another in Madame Bovary. The means by which the French culturally dominated and occupied Algeria after 1830, significant determinants of the discursive production of cultural and racial difference, are in turn different from the circumstances of emerging industrial labor in France which gave rise to discourses about the working class. But as we will see, these distinctly different concerns overlap in the construction of the warring factions in Flaubert’s Salammbô. Hence, the means of representation of various discourses are fundamentally heterogeneous and unequal; furthermore, these discursive apparatuses differ over time, and do not necessarily correspond across national and cultural boundaries. Yet, despite their essential nonequivalences, discursive means of representation overlap and are mutually implicated in one another at different moments.

My study treats orientalism as one means whereby French and British cultures exercised colonial domination through constituting sites and objects as “oriental.” The discussions that follow are inscribed within an unqualified criticism of the persistent hegemonies that permit western domination of non-Europeans and the Third World. Yet, as much as I wish to underscore the insistence of these power relations, my intervention resists totalizing orientalism as a monolithic, developmental discourse that uniformly constructs the Orient as the Other of the Occident.4 Therefore I do not construct a master narrative or a singular history of orientalism, whether of influence or of comparison. Rather, I argue for a conception of orientalism as heterogeneous and contradictory; to this end I observe, on the one hand, that orientalism consist of an uneven matrix of orientalist situations across different cultural and historical sites, and on the other, that each of these orientalisms is internally complex and unstable. My textual readings give particular attention to those junctures at which narratives of gendered, racial, national, and class differences complicate and interrupt the narrative of orientalism, as well as to the points at which orientalism is refunctioned and rearticulated against itself. I suggest that the elucidation of these heterogeneous sites may prove useful, in terms of both method and political strategy, because they mark the places where orientalism is vulnerable to challenge. In focusing my interpretations on these sites, I hope to demonstrate how the logic of a discourse that seeks to stabilize domination is necessarily one that makes possible allegories of counterhegemonies and resistances to that domination; at the same time, these allegories suggest that it may not be possible to essentialize one privileged mode or site of struggle against domination, for each site is already multiply constructed. In this sense this book is a consideration of the unevenness of knowledge formations—the nonequivalence of various orientalisms in French and British culture, and the incommensurability, within specific orientalisms, of different narratives that concurrently challenge or corroborate the power of orientalism—in order to suggest, ultimately, that a critical acknowledgment of noncorrespondence, incommensurability, and multiplicity is necessary in effective contestations of colonial domination.

The Limits of Orientalism

It is necessary to revise and render more complex the thesis that an ontology of Occident and Orient appears in a consistent manner throughout all cultural and historical moments, for the operation that lends uniform coherence and closure to any discourse risks misrepresenting far more heterogeneous conditions and operations. When Michel Foucault posits the concept of discursive formations—the regularities in groups of statements, institutions, operations, and practices—he is careful to distinguish it as an irregular series of regularities that produces objects of knowledge. In other words, a phenomenon such as the notion of the Orient in early-eighteenth-century France may be said provisionally to be constituted by some sort of regularity—that is, the conjunction of statements and institutions (maps, literary narratives, treatises, Jesuit missionary reports, diplomatic policies, and so forth) pertaining to the Orient. But the manner in which these materials conjoin to produce the category “the Orient” is not equal to the conjunction constituting “the Orient” at another historical moment, or in another national culture. With the idea of an irregular series, Foucault emphasizes that neither the conditions of discursive formation nor the objects of knowledge are identical, static, or continuous through time. In this way he seeks to avoid some of the overdetermining idealities of traditional historical study, with its desire for origins, unified developments, and causes and effects.5

In a similar manner, my book works against the historical desire to view the occidental conception of the oriental Other as an unchanging topos, the origin of which is European man’s curiosity about the non-European world. If we misapprehend that an object is identically constructed through time, we do not adequately appreciate that the process through which an object of difference—in this case the Orient—is constituted, is made possible, precisely by the nonidentity through time of such notions as Occident and Orient. That is, fundamental impermanence and internal discontinuity undermine the stability of both the relationship between the terms and the terms themselves. When we maintain a static dualism of identity and difference, and uphold the logic of the dualism as the means of explaining how a discourse expresses domination and subordination, we fail to account for the differences inherent in each term. In the case of orientalism, the misapprehension of uniformity prohibits a consideration of the plural and inconstant referents of both terms, Occident and Orient. The binary opposition of Occident and Orient is thus a misleading perception which serves to suppress the specific heterogeneities, inconstancies, and slippages of each individual notion. This heterogeneity is borne out most simply in the different meanings of “the Orient” over time. In many eighteenth-century texts the Orient signifies Turkey, the Levant, and the Arabian peninsula occupied by the Ottoman Empire, now known as the Middle East; in nineteenth-century literature the notion of the Orient additionally refers to North Africa, and in the twentieth century more often to Central and Southeast Asia. Notions such as “French culture,” “the British Empire,” and “European nations” are likewise replete with ambiguity, conflicts, and nonequivalences. And, as we shall see, nineteenth-century British literature about India is marked by an entirely different set of conventions, narratives, figures, and genres from those in the French literature about Egypt and North Africa for the comparable period. The British and French cultural contexts for producing such literatures at that particular moment are distinct: not only are there many noncorrespondences between the individual national cultures and literatures, but also, in the nineteenth century, the governing methods derived from Britain’s century-old colonial involvement in Indian culture, economy, and administration are in contrast to those typifying the French occupation of North Africa, a contrast that exemplifies nonequivalent degrees of rule and relationship.

In addition, the assumption of a unifying principle—even one that must be assumed to be partly true, that the representation of the Orient expresses the colonial relationships between Europe and the non-European world—leaves uninvestigated the necessary possibility that social events and circumstances other than the relationships between Europe and the non-European world are implicated in the literature about the Orient, and that the relative importance of these other conditions differs over time and by culture. To allegorize the meaning of the representation of the Orient as if it were exclusively and always an expression of European colonialism is to analyze the relation between text and context in terms of a homology, a determination of meaning such that every signifier must have one signified and every narrative one interpretation. Such a totalizing logic represses the heterologic possibilities that texts are not simple reproductions of context—indeed, that context is plural, unfixed, unrepresentable—and that orientalism may well be an apparatus through which a variety of concerns with difference is figured. The Orient as Other is a literary trope that may reflect a range of national issues: at one time the race for colonies, at others class conflicts and workers ’revolts, changes in sexual roles during a time of rapid urbanization and industrialization, or postcolonial crises of national identity. Orientalism facilitates the inscription of many different kinds of differences as oriental otherness, and the use of oriental figures at one moment may be distinct from their use in another historical period, in another set of texts, or even at another moment in the same body of work.

There is, of course, a very important political statement contained in the thesis that orientalism is an expression of European imperialism. Yet, when one proposes polemically that the discourse of orientalism is both discrete and monolithic, this polemic falsely isolates the notion of discourse, simplifies the power of this isolated discourse as belonging exclusively to Europe, and ignores the condition that discursive formations are never singular. Discourses operate in conflict; they overlap and collude; they do not produce fixed or unified objects. Orientalism is bound up with—indeed it reanimates some of the structuring themes of—other formations that emerge at different historical moments: the medical and anthropological classifications of race, psychoanalytic versions of sexuality, or capitalist and Marxist constructions of class. Moreover, the means of representation of any discursive production are uneven, unequal, and more and less enunciated at different moments. For example, in various texts by a single writer such as Gustave Flaubert, the representation of the Egyptian courtesan Kuchuk-Hanem in Voyage en Orient (1850) and Correspondance (1853) figures her oriental otherness in both racial and sexual terms; whereas in Salammbô (1862) the drama of the barbarian oriental tribes builds on a concurrent set of constructions of the French working-class revolts of 1848; and in L’éducation sentimentale (1869) the oriental motif is invoked as a figure of sentimental and romantic desire, offering a literary critique of this theme. In this sense this orientalist situation represented in Flaubert’s texts is hardly uniform or monolithic; rather, it constitutes a site in which a multiplicity of heterogeneous discourses engage and overlap, not...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1 Discourse and Heterogeneity: Situating Orientalism
• 2 Travel Narratives and Orientalism: Montagu and Montesquieu
• 3 Orient as Woman, Orientalism as Sentimentalism: Flaubert
• 4 Orientalism as Literary Criticism: The Reception of E. M. Forster’s Passage to India
• 5 The Desires of Postcolonial Orientalism: Chinese Utopias of Kristeva, Barthes, and Tel quel
• Conclusion: Orientalism Interrupted
• Works Cited
• Index