Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid

I. Presenting and Representing Orientalism

They cannot represent themselves;they must be represented. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte1 How does one represent other cultures? —Edward Said, Orientalism T he intellectual maelstrom that has kept the debate about Orientalism swirling across disciplines is a persistent metaproblem of much postjust -about-everything discourse: how can or should reality be represented ? Look under any philosopher’s stone from almost any era and you will find an opinion. Read canonical historiographic treatises and you will come across methodological insights and oversights. The various twentiethcentury isms as structurally adjusted or existentially exhibited did not end on a positive[ist] note, although a pragmatic assessment would be that reality—whatever it really is—was little affected by what intellectuals in university chairs and students on bar stools thought it might be. Reality is not an academic issue for Said, whose worldli[fi]nessed watchword has been to speak truth to the rude reality that he steadfastly opposes. Orientalism, Said reflects, is a book that would not have been written had he not been “politically associated with a struggle.”2 He is after all a literary critic who proposes that texts are “in” the world, which is to say they are “enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society.”3 His polemic was not offered as I Presenting and Representing Orientalism 237 the 1,002nd tale of an ongoing fantasy in which his world only seems to be suffering. His problem is with reality, not about it. The main problem that permeates the superstructure of Said’s prose and infiltrates the basal drive underlying his discourse is that the real Orient in which he has a stake has been represented in such a way that it is absented. Indeed, “Orientals themselves” are not only misrepresented, but said to be pervasively denied the possibility of making themselves present. Hence, as the lead epigraph from Karl Marx implies, “they must be represented .” Is it the case that, at the time when Said wrote Orientalism, no existing presentations about the Orient properly or adequately represented the real Orient? Had no scholar yet succeeded in opposing the many misrepresentations? Does Edward Said have the authority—apart from being an author who was born an Oriental—to represent individuals imagined out of their reality? Are real Orientals unable to represent themselves, or is it that such self-representation is ignored or hard to find? These are the relevant questions that I address to a thesis based on a “set of historical generalizations” and a critical style that scoffs at any need to be “exhaustive.”4 As Patrick Williams suggests, representation may be the most “abiding concern” of Said’s work.5 But Said is clearly not enamored with Marx’s literal meaning, so what does he mean by “representing”? The main clue is provided in a passage from Orientalism that discusses the Marx epigraph: My analysis of the Orientalist text therefore places emphasis on the evidence, which is by no means invisible, for such representations as representations, not as “natural” depictions of the Orient. This evidence is found just as prominently in the so-called truthful text (histories, philological analyses, political treatises) as in the avowedly artistic (i.e., openly imaginative) text. The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original . The exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient does represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient. “Sie können sich nicht vertreten sie müssen vertreten werden,” as Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.6 238 Charms of and Against Orientalism A reader of Orientalism might assume that Said is representing the unrepresented against the backdrop of real history. Modern Orientalism is said to begin with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Surely Napoleon really existed.7 However, the point of Orientalism is to read that history only through texts. Said opens no unexplored mounds, measures no standing ruins, reconstructs no jumbles of ancient shards. His discursive archaeology, attributed to historian Michel Foucault rather than Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie, is one that allows him to proceed unsoiled by the disturbed facticity in artifacts of the past and unsullied by contradictory facts. Despite...