Scudéry’s Theater of Disguise: The Orient in Ibrahim

Scudéry’s Theater of Disguise: The Orient in Ibrahim Harriet Stone I T IS HARDLY SURPRISING that Scudery’s Ibrahim (1641), despite a verisimilar and largely favorable description of Turkish history and culture, depicts an Orient more European—serving the Western world view—than Oriental. Thematics alone suffice to suggest how the Oriental setting is but an elaborately veiled feint for European domina­ tion. Color is doubly local, that is, located not only in the exotic dif­ ference of the Orient but in the very prejudicial mind of the hegemonic European reader who gazes through the text at this Other culture. Justinian travels to the Orient, where circumstances cause him to assume an Oriental identity. The hero’s partaking of the exotic, however, con­ stitutes no permanent obstacle/exile, for he never relinquishes his Chris­ tian loyalties and eventually returns to assume fully his European iden­ tity. The history of Justinian’s voyage to the Orient is thus a metaphor for the hero’s self-discovery; the narrative brings him outside of himself, into another land and another culture, in order to enhance his selfknowledge . The Italian hero enslaved and sentenced to death by his Islamic cap­ tors comes to enjoy both privilege and power under Soliman II. Sparing his life, the sultan makes Justinian his favorite pasha, the Grand Vizir Ibrahim. Soliman later awards Ibrahim six months of freedom to return to Monaco to see his beloved Princess Isabelle Grimaldi. Finally, despite the sultan’s own overwhelming desire for the same Isabelle, whom he has brought to Constantinople, the sultan frees the couple and secures their safe passage back to Europe. Justinian, alias Ibrahim, becomes Justinian again thanks only to Soliman’s intervention. Significant for the question of knowledge, for the epistemology of the novel as it fixes the identities of the European self and the Other, is the fact that the Oriental identity created here is disposable, a role assumed intermittently, then definitively rejected. The Euro-centeredness of the tale which culminates in the hero’s return home suggests that the Orient figured by Scudery is essential only as Other to the Western sub­ ject. The Orient is the medium through which the European (hero and reader alike) comes to understand himself and to know his place in the VOL. XXXII, NO. 3 51 L ’E sprit C réateur world. Outside of the European representation that conceives it, outside of this fiction, the Orient has no meaning; it is inessential, unrepresenta­ ble as a separate, autonomous culture.1 The Orient thus serves as a theater for the European’s play, a device used to display him to himself. I shall argue that in this theater not only the Orient but the European sub­ ject slips from knowledge. If the novel conspires to bring the European into contact with the Orient so as to afford him knowledge of a foreign culture and, by the same gesture, to help him to know himself by knowing this Other, it does not, however, seal this voyage hermetically. Despite the elaborate sym­ metry of a plot structure whose patterning assures the coincidence of stories over some 1700 pages,2the novel does much to subvert the pleni­ tude of the resolution that unites the European couple in marriage on European soil. Predicated on the presence of the Other, the hero’s journey to the Orient details an escape into the self that is actually an escape from the self, a story of alienation. On the one hand, Soliman is the malevolent opponent who threatens the autonomy of the European subject and that of the European state that he menaces militarily. On the other, the sultan imitates in all of his many beneficent acts the generous paternalism on which the symbolism of the French monarchy is based. By mirroring these two cultures, Scudery denies both their difference and, implicitly, the hero’s auton­ omy. Soliman is at once enemy and savior; consequently, any knowledge based on his mediation connotes a false idea of separation, a false notion of difference and identity. To the extent that the Otherness which Scudery would situate outside Europe is finally located back within it, back in Europe and...