Imperial Messages: Orientalism as Self-Critique in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle (review)

Imperial Messages had its origin in a 2005 Harvard dissertation supervised by Judith Ryan; the version issued by Camden House in one of its customarily well-produced volumes has been revised and tightened, although the argument remains essentially the same.

Lemon’s point of departure is the growing body of work questioning the applicability of postcolonial theory to the case of Austria-Hungary and its successor states after 1918. His overall point is to question scholarship growing out of Edward Said’s path-breaking Orientalism (1978) because it does not take up the case of Austria, whose intellectuals, he argues, used orientalist rhetoric to question the politics of their own lands rather than to craft an identity related to an outside Other. This point is made in the volume’s introduction with reference to a wide range of scholarship on germanophone orientalism, making the work of Susanne Zantop and Nina Berman his particular targets for critique.

Yet the volume which follows differs rather radically from the kind of cultural studies analyses that one might expect when taking up texts from an empire and critiques of its hegemony. Lemon takes up texts by Hofmannsthal (“Das Märchen der 672. Nacht” and “Der Kaiser von China spricht”), Musil (Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß), and Kafka (“In der Strafkolonie,” “Beschreibung eines Kampfes,” and “Schakale und Araber” in one chapter, “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer” and “Ein altes Blatt” in another). Through a series of close readings, he shows how tropes and topoi associated with orientalism are used in quite different fashion in these texts.

Where many critics refer to the attitudes of the germanophone elite to the ethnic others of the Dual Monarchy as colonialist and imposing a western hegemony, Lemon shows how this class of texts actually serves another function: they allow their authors to exert self-critique rather than critique of the Other. As Lemon summarizes his findings about how orientalist discourses work in the context of these authors’ critiques of Austria-Hungary:

[ . . .] these texts manifest two basic modes of self-critique, both of which refute central premises of the Saidian conception of the discourse. First, in implying an analogous relationship between Occident and Orient these works subvert the fundamental orientalist notions of an East /West dichotomy and of European superiority. Second, in those texts with Eastern settings or figures, the use of orientalist tropes and topoi to allude to the “eastern Empire of Austria Hungary” suggests a meta-textual subversion of the discourse itself.

(145)

That is, Lemon’s chosen texts use the tropes of orientalism, but exercise critique on different grounds than today’s scholars would assume.

This volume’s strength is its careful, well-argued close readings of literary texts. Lemon has done the hard work of looking up and re-evaluating three generations of formalist criticism, as these texts were addressed by critics from Richard Alewyn and Walter Sokel to a raft of lesser-known ones. In such references, he is honoring a past generation of scholars who were at pains to trace how texts work internally, as he rescues their work for the present generation and shows how their work on the authors and their intentions can be extended to apply to Austria-Hungary’s historical context. Lemon faces the texts’ Chinese Emperors, Czech prostitutes, and alien others among the familiar representations of the empire’s ethnics and leads us into seeing how the authors use them to refer to their own problems and issues.

What Lemon does not do is follow the current generation of Austrian post- colonial theorists into specific historicized considerations of what those tropes and topoi mean as site-specific references. Lemon knows these texts: he cites them as showing “cohesion” (12)—most notably, in this reviewer’s regard, the Kakanien Revisited project (http://www.kakanien.ac.at/) and Habsburg Postcolonial: Machtstruk-turen und kollektives Gedächtnis (Innsbruck: 2003). Yet he does not move...