Memlik's House and Mountolive's Uniform: Orientalism, Ornamentalism, and The Alexandria Quartet

We think that we can change our clothes only. It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power.... The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The situation of Alexandria is most curious.

E. M. Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide

Critics have long recognized Lawrence Durrell's appropriation of orientalist discourse in writing The Alexandria Quartet (1957–60), even if they have disagreed on Durrell's accuracy and attitude toward Islam. Rosalind Gwynne, for instance, asserts that "though [Durrell] could be called racist and colonialist," he also "portrayed individuals and institutions of the colonized cultures with sympathy and insight" (90). Placing emphasis on the epistemological skepticism inherent in the novel series, James Gifford states: "Superficially, The Alexandria Quartet is an orientalist text in that it stirs ideas of the mystical Muslim world which one must admit exists primarily in the Western mind. However, this superficial image evoked for mood is quickly usurped by an Orient which is completely unknown" (par. 3). In the harshest assessment, Marilyn Adler Papayanis asserts that the Quartet "celebrates diversity and Levantine cosmopolitanism, even as it indulges in the coarsest of Orientalisms" (45). Roger Bowen, on the other hand, sees Durrell's use of orientalism as "ironic, self-conscious, and playful" (167). Bowen goes on to state: "In a novel sequence where 'not knowing' is the chief preoccupation... no enquiry can ever be complete. In this arena of uncertainty Durrell's use of orientalist furnishing becomes suspect even before it is subject to a sustained undermining." While interpretations of these four novels based on race are both appropriate and illuminating, The Alexandria Quartet presents not a simple or single misreading of Egypt. I would like to complicate the racial arguments about the Quartet, by suggesting another form of "not knowing" that operates alongside race in the novel sequence—a misguided vision of Egyptian society based on class prejudices.

My main source for rethinking the relationship between Britain and its empire is David Cannadine's Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (2001), a clear response to Edward Said's important work. Cannadine's thesis is that recent discussions of the Empire have been dominated by writers and critics who saw it from the periphery, looking back on Britain, and by American critics who have always privileged race over class. For Cannadine, this line of argument is based on a false premise about the British perception of its domestic social world when the country was at its imperial zenith. Rather than seeing themselves as part of a modern democratic, bourgeois, mercantile, and egalitarian world, most Britons during the latter half of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century "generally conceived of themselves as belonging to an unequal society characterized by a seamless web of layered gradations, which were hallowed by time and precedent, which were sanctioned by tradition and religion, and which extended in a great chain of being from the monarch at the top to the humblest subject at the bottom" (4). That is to say, even with the legislative strides toward democracy enacted in the Victorian period, the British clung, if with increasing nostalgia, to a traditional hierarchical vision of social organization, and this vision was extended and applied to the colonial societies as well. The term that Cannadine uses to describe Britain's efforts to create the illusion (if not the reality) of a well-ordered, interconnected global Empire is "ornamentalism": "For ornamentalism was hierarchy made visible, immanent and actual" (122).

The central point in the history of the British Empire for Cannadine is the Indian Mutiny of 1857, when the native population, including many of the officers in the army, revolted against British rule. The mutiny began in Meerut on May 10 when Indian soldiers suspected that their bullets were greased with cow's fat and pig's fat (unclean to Hindus and Muslims, respectively...