“Behdad’s book provides an important and timely contribution to cultural and post-colonial studies; its historical breadth and critical insights will guarantee its success beyond mere academic ‘trendiness.’ It will be a lasting work, one that will become required reading for specialists of modern European literature as well as discourse theorists.”–Francoise Lionnet, Northwestern University

Ali Behdad is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Belated Travelers

Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution

By Ali Behdad

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1994 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-1454-7

Contents

Preface,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction: The Predicaments of Belatedness,
1. Orientalist Desire, Desire for the Orient: Ideological Splits in Nerval,
2. From Travelogue to Tourist Guide: The Orientalist as Sightseer,
3. Notes on Notes, or with Flaubert in Paris, Egypt,
4. Kipling’s “Other” Narrator/Reader: Self-Exoticism and the Micropolitics of Colonial Ambivalence,
5. Colonial Ethnography and the Politics of Gender: The Everyday Life of an Orientalist Journey,
6. Allahou Akbar! He Is a Woman: Colonialism, Transvestism, and the Orientalist Parasite,
“Tristesse du Depart”: An Open-ended Conclusion,
Notes,
Bibliography,

CHAPTER 1

Orientalist Desire, Desire for the Orient: Ideological Splits in Nerval

Desires are already memories.—Italo Calvino, INVISIBLE CITIES

When we speak today of a divided subject, it is never to acknowledge his simple contradictions, his double postulations, etc.; it is a DIFFRACTION which is intended, a dispersion of energy in which there remains neither a central core nor a structure of meaning.—Roland Barthes

The covers of the two-volume Garnier-Flammarion edition of Nerval’s Voyage en Orient are illustrated with two orientalist paintings, Lecomte du Nouy’s L’Esclave Blanche and Rosset’s Costumes Orientaux (see figures 1 and 2). The first painting depicts a naked Circassian slave woman posing lewdly with a cigarette in her hand and an intoxicated gaze, representing her idleness in the harem. The second portrays the severity of Oriental veiling, subtly implying, by the clearly apparent dark eyes of the Oriental woman, a lasciviousness that must be kept hidden behind the mask. These contrasting images of the Orient are striking, above all, because they point to the contradictory stereotypes of Oriental life represented so abundantly in European paintings, postcards, and travel writing since the midseventeenth century—stereotypes such as the harem as a site of eroticism, the Oriental woman as an object for voyeurism, and the veil as a repressive mask. But the paintings are also interesting for the way they represent the split in the Western vision of its Other: the cleavage of the masked and the exposed, the “cut” between maximum visibility and total inscrutability, the division between a desire to indulge in corporality and a profound repression of the body.

These paintings and the division of Nerval’s text into two volumes seem particularly insightful in the case of a text so split as Voyage en Orient. In Nerval, one constantly encounters the opposing poles of orientalist representation: obscurity surrounding the object of representation and an insatiable desire for unveiling inherent in representational practice. The narrative of his journey perpetually vacillates between being a naked representation of the modern Orient and a masked figuration of an orientalist romance, between the blunt generalizations of an “official” orientalist and the more subtle understanding of Oriental culture by an amateur traveler, and between unmasked repetition of the institutional discourses of Orientalism and veiled deflection of them.

The cover paintings can also be taken as an astute comment on Nerval’s narrator, whose psychological splits, ideological duplicity, and political division constantly disrupt an already broken discourse. Like the antithetical images of the painted women on the covers, the speaking subject is caught between a fantasy of the Orient as a dream world where his desires are realized and an image of Oriental society as an unattainable, concealed domain of absolute repression. But these paradoxical views of the Orient are not merely textual or subjective contradictions, or even dualities—as most of Nerval’s critics have pointed out. Rather, they disclose a historical split in the discourse of mid-nineteenth-century Orientalism. I say “split” because, as Roland Barthes points out (see the second epigraph above), it implies dispersion and deflection and is subject to multiplication, whereas “double” indicates a dual and binary relation—Nerval, to use a Barthesian expression, was not contradictory, he was dispersed. My use of the first term, though it has its source in Jacques Lacan’s discussion of the subversion of the subject and the splitting phenomenon at the moment of the subject’s accession to the symbolic field of social discourses, is not purely psychoanalytical. As I will show later, the split between the speaking subject and her or his discourse has clear political and ideological implications. This splitting, whose dispersing effect eventually subverts the orientalist’s certainty, marks the primal division (Spaltung, to use Lacan’s term) of the subject and his discourse into a conscious (or official) relation to the Orient and a veiled unconscious relation that can manifest itself only in vacillations of the orientalist subject—and only at moments of discursive uncertainty. Masked under the veil of certitude and marginalized by the orientalist’s “will to knowledge,” the orientalist unconscious—if I may call it that—manifests its disruptive force for the first time in Nerval’s Voyage en Orient, which, as Edward Said has pointed out in passing, marks a “swerving away from discursive finality of the sort envisioned by previous writers of the Orient.”

Mediated Discourse and Split Subjectivity

The comma in the title of this chapter pinpoints the split in the relation of the orientalist subject to the Oriental Other as well as that of the text to the exotic otherness it represents. On the one hand, I am interested in the way Nerval’s Voyage en Orient repeats and thus participates complicitously in “orientalist desire,” that is, the historical urge to “capture” the Other through the official or dominant discourses that the speaking subject has at his or her disposal. Chateaubriand’s statement in the preface to the first edition of his Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811), “I was searching for images; nothing more,” provides an appropriate example of the orientalist desire that implies observation and representation without any personal participation in the social reality of the Orient. The experience of the Oriental journey is here viewed either as a kind of scientific research or as a romantic self-discovery; the enunciating subject in both cases assumes the role of a savant in search of (self-)knowledge that must be gained through his or her observations and studies in an “other” place. The Orient, as Constantin de Volney remarks, provides the European with “a field suitable for political and moral observations.” The orientalist desire thus involves a conscious act of producing “meaning” for the public from one’s personal experience in Oriental countries without any interest in, or recognition of, the Other’s subjectivity or culture. On the other hand, I am primarily concerned with the birth of a desire for/of the Orient (le désir de l’Orient, to use Nerval’s own words) manifested by amateur travelers like Nerval, Eberhardt, or Flaubert whose relations with the Oriental Other included involvement, participation, and indulgence, a kind of giving oneself over to the experience of the Oriental journey without trying to capture the Oriental “signified.” Far from being an egoistic drive for knowledge, the desire for the Orient is the return of a repressed fascination with the Other, through whose differentiating function European subjectivity has often defined itself since the Crusades. Beyond their interests in self-realization through their journeys to the Orient, travelers such as Nerval, Eberhardt, and Flaubert had a great desire to understand and even become part of the Oriental culture. Such a desire, as I will discuss shortly, makes the orientalist subject surrender his or her power of representation and pursuit of knowledge by becoming a hedonistic participant in the “immediate” reality of the Oriental culture.

Michel Butor is right to argue that,

for Nerval, Chateaubriand’s journey remains a voyage on the surface [un voyage de surface]. He himself devised his own voyage, utilizing annex centers, lobbies of ellipses encompassing the main points which would allow him, by using parallaxes, to make conspicuous the whole depth of the snare harbored by the normal centers. Roaming through the streets of Cairo, Beirut, and Constantinople, Nerval is always lying in wait for anything that would allow him to sense a cavern extending beneath Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem [cities visited on Chateaubriand’s voyage].

At the heart of Nerval’s discursive practice is the positivistic belief that a full understanding of the Other is possible through immersion, an extended experience that authorizes the subject to speak about the Oriental. Unlike his romantic precursor, Nerval always searches beyond the surface to find what has been ignored by other travelers. Confronting on his arrival the symbolic veil that blocks his vision, Nerval’s narrator begins his account of the journey with a critique of the superficial traveler:

But Egypt, solemn and pious, is always the country of enigma and mysteries; the beauty surrounds itself, as before, with veils and wrappings, and this gloomy attitude easily discourages the frivolous European. He leaves Cairo after eight days and rushes toward the waterfall of the Nile, searching for other disappointments which science has in store for him, and which will never be suitable to him. For ancient initiates, patience was the greatest virtue. Why go so fast? Let us stop and attempt to lift a corner of the stern veil of the goddess of Saïs. [Mais l’Egypte, grave et pieuse, est toujours le pays des énigmes et des mystères; la beauté s’y entoure, comme autrefois, de voiles et de bandelettes, et cette morne attitude décourage aisément l’Européen frivole. Il abandonne le Caire après huit jours, et se hâte d’aller vers les cataractes du Nil chercher d’autres déceptions que lui réserve la science, et dont il ne conviendra jamais. La patience était la plus grande vertu des initiés antiques. Pourquoi passer si vite? Arrêtonsnous, et cherchons à soulever un coin du voile austère de la déesse de Saïs.]

The traveler here identifies himself differentially: even though Nerval’s narrator considers himself a “touriste” at certain points in his narrative and feels “deeply unhappy and discouraged” in encountering the practical difficulties of traveling in Egypt, he is quick to distinguish his philosophy of the journey from that of his literary precursors, Chateaubriand and Lamartine. Unlike these early nineteenth-century travelers, who passed quickly through Cairo and spent most of their time in Haute Egypte in order to study the historical sites and sacred monuments commonly accepted as archaeologically important, Nerval’s narrator is a serious and patient traveler who wishes to indulge in the enigmatic city and see beyond the obscured appearances, searching for more “authentic” aspects of its culture. Instead of sliding over the signifiers of otherness in Cairo, Nerval’s narrator is interested in the hidden signifieds of the Oriental city. The orientalist traveler is also impelled by the epistemophilic desire to expose what he finds hidden, a desire that in this case is coupled with an erotic urge to see the imaginary nakedness behind the veil. Nerval’s wish to “soulever un coin du voile austère de la déesse de Saïs” must be read as both a metaphoric statement about his desire to see beyond the surfaces and a more literal wish to tear the veils of the Oriental women in a voyeuristic attempt to see their hidden bodies.

Ironically, then, the traveler’s critique of superficiality—or even scientificity (“d’autres déceptions que lui réserve la science”), depending on how one reads the passage—implicates Nerval’s discourse in the orientalist urge to penetrate the Oriental culture. Here the seemingly benevolent desire to see the “real” Orient paradoxically aligns Nerval’s discursive practice with that of an earlier precursor, namely Volney. Nerval’s praise of patience as the most valuable virtue of a traveler and his interest in the present state of Oriental society echo closely Volney’s words: “Most travelers [to the Orient] kept themselves busy with studying the antiquities instead of the modern state; almost all, rushing through the country, have missed two excellent ways to know it: time and the usage of the language.” Expressing the orientalist desire to know, Nerval’s narrator, like the Cartesian subject, wants to claim an epistemological mastery over the field of his observation, which in turn grants him the authority to represent: “I know/ speak because I was there for a long time.” In his “Journal de bord,” Nerval’s narrator, like the authoritative Volney, even goes so far as to claim access to the voice of truth: “the humble truth does not have the immense resources of dramatic and novelistic devices” (1:337).

Nerval’s attempt to go beyond the discursive practice of one set of precursors brings his account of the journey into an affiliation with another precursory mode of representation. In the field of orientalist discourse, the traveler is always inscribed within a filial relationship, and therefore there is no escape from the authority of the nom-du-père, the symbolic “Father” who defines the Law of representation. The subject’s occasional attempts to overcome the authority of such a dominant figure are precisely what binds him to the Law in a chain of affiliation—denying the authority of Chateaubriand means recognizing Volney’s doctrine; and similarly, the rejection of Volney’s paternal influence implies the affirmation of Edward William Lane’s authorial power; and so on. In short, there is no “outside” to the discourse of Orientalism: to write about the Orient inevitably involves an intertextual relation in which the “new” text necessarily depends for its representational economy on an earlier text. Not only is Nerval’s desire for the Orient mediated by the orientalist texts he has read—as I will discuss in more detail shortly—his discursive practice is conditioned by the concepts and strategies of the official or dominant modes of discourse from which his text tries to distinguish itself.

And yet, if Nerval’s narrator follows Volney’s doctrine of immersion, it is not always to represent the arid “reality” or to frame the Oriental experience in an organized travelogue like his orientalist precursor, but rather to indulge more effectively in the pleasure principle associated with Oriental culture. Nerval, I want to argue, initiated a hedonistic tradition in Orientalism that viewed traveling in the Orient as a leisurely stepping out of the familiar reality of European home, a journey that would ease the cultural ennui associated with daily life—it is not fortuitous that one of the earliest uses of the word tourist appears in Nerval, a point to which I will return in Chapter 2. He considered France “the land of coldness and tempests,” and he was motivated to travel in the Orient by the desire to spend “some magnificent days amid the Orient’s splendid landscapes” (2:363). Thus, in contrast with the journalistic urge to report the events of an explorative journey, in Nerval we encounter a kind of hedonistic spontaneity that turns the occasionally serious orientalist into a man of pleasure, a sort of self-indulgent flâneur uninterested in re-producing an already copiously depicted image. As a modern traveler at a time of discursive overproliferation, Nerval’s narrator is less interested in engaging in the orientalist activity of “meaning making” than in pursuing an insatiable desire to enter the Orient’s image repertoire as a participant—in this sense he can be considered a precursor of modern anthropologists. Having spent a month of nocturnal vagabondage in Constantinople, he wrote, “I did not attempt to represent [peindre] Constantinople; its palaces, mosques, spas, and shores have already been described so many times: I simply wanted to give an idea of a promenade through its streets and squares at the time of major holidays [i.e., Ramadan]” (2:361). Confronted with the excess of discursive production, the traveler abandons his representational practice, recognizing the aesthetics of silence and the pleasure of participation. The power of earlier representations, instead of providing the subject with the authority to represent, discourages him from portraying the Oriental city.

Nerval’s account of his journey to Constantinople therefore is not a representation but a figuration; that is to say, instead of framing what is seen by the subject, the narrative incorporates him into the profile of the very picture it makes, thus eradicating the distant relation of observer and observed object. The month of Ramadan, during which diurnal fasting occasions nocturnal celebration, transforms the exotic into the carnivalesque. Here there is no distinct boundary between an observing subject and an observed Other. Everyone becomes a participant in the nightly spectacle. Nerval’s narrator, dressed as a Persian merchant and fully accepted by the tolerant city, spends most of his time in the cafés, indulging in the nocturnal pleasures of the Oriental city. The narrator even claims to have been entertained by “marvelous tales, narrated and declaimed by professional storytellers,” a claim that in the case of a traveler who did not speak Arabic suggests a profound desire for self-exoticism, a desire to be an “Other,” as he wrote under his photo portrait (2:233).

As a text of pleasure, “Les nuits de Ramazan” recounts the subject’s pleasure by reproducing the object of desire—that is, the story itself. The long and suspensefully narrated “Histoire de la Reine du Matin et de Soliman Prince des Génies,” though reproduced from its literary sources, splits the representational practice of the orientalist subject, as the narrative of the voyage becomes an imaginary tale divested of most ideological implications of a discourse on the Other. Here there is no claim to “realist” representation, no desire to produce a framed image of a verifiable reality from which nothing emerges but a sign of exoticism. As in the Orient, “everything becomes a tale [tout devient conte]” in which even the reality of the speaking subject is incorporated.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Belated Travelers by Ali Behdad. Copyright © 1994 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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