" Edward Said's 'Orientalism' " - Matthew Scott

Since Edward Said published his Magnus Opus 'Orientalism' in 1978, the book has been in the center of an international debate up until now. Out of the reactions came a lot of supporters on one side and shocked critics on the other side. It started a discussion everyone had been waiting for and, more importantly, it opened doors to other delicate subjects that needed to be questioned. 

Interesting was Said's notion that the phenomenon of Orientalism is explicitly Romantic. Scott elaborates on this idea. The East was for Romantics an imagined past and the Other a charity project in which sympathy dissolved into subjectivism. The linguistic discoveries made about the Orient during the late eighteen and early nineteenth centuries were a crucial part of Romanticism. Like in art, the aesthetic value in the writing about the Orient grew out of the popular travel narrative. 

There was an uncanny paradox in which the authors wanted to describe the 'true' oriental space to their captivated European public, yet the disappointment of the actual experience was replaced by a more mystical and transcendent one. Jerome McGann speaks in his Romantic Ideology (1983) of the double-mindedness regarding the real in Romantic literature. The subject is always disguised by the author's imagination. This as a kind of retreat from reality or subordination to ideas that can remain free. Later on, critics implied that enclosed to this ideology, is "a suspicion of the body, of racial difference, and of actual political events". Eventually, the goal of every oriental writing at that time was emotional self-discovery. You can call it some sort of pilgrimage. In this process, the Other and his reality were reduced to steps, helping hands in the journey of the author or a fictional European explorer. It is almost narcissistic. 

Don't get me wrong. These Romantic works are as Scott describes "once humanitarian and inclusive and yet honest about the limits of any human comprehension of other people". They want to be intimate and recognize the otherness, but always from a distance. This attempt to gain sympathy and the idea of the power to enter into the emotional life of another was important for the Orientalist discourse. Still, it was a failure. They couldn't speak about 'the other' without admitting to their own subjectivity. Some observe this behaviour as Romanticism's rejection of the 'universalism' movement from before. 

I believe the oriental writings of Romantics endured the same fate as his counterpart in the arts. The East was an exotic place that produces a lot of curious tales, spread over the whole of Europe. It was a blank page with a mystic aura above it. That means it was the perfect spot to liberate themselves and admit to that 'Escapism' sense every Romantic was haunted with, as well as his 'Sehnsucht'. When things weren't that glamorous as The Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, they made it that way. As if it was their duty to ease the Europeans fantasies and their own. Sadly, it looks like a form of cultural colonialism. The Orient's reality and culture were reduced, reformed, and exploited in favour of their 'conquerors'.