Psychology and the modern novel

I have spent the weekend completing some leisure reading. I finished The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and am a quarter of the way through an English translation of Les Bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell. The English title for the novel is The Kindly Ones. The narrator Max Au takes the reader on a harrowing tour of the mind of a cold-hearted Nazi officer who cuts his teeth in the killing fields of the Eastern front where gruesome field executions become methodical genocide over time. Au shares his initial disgust in carrying out orders that he considers ineffective, unnecessary, and demoralizing. His initial objections give way to his innate sadism. Littell paints a convincing portrait of the conflicted literature student who studies law to please his mother, enlists under pressure and cedes his humanity willingly. Several narrative elements contribute to this esquisse of the consciousness of knowing malice. Au's descriptions of atrocities convey his quintessential amorality. The narrator is trapped in his egoism and perseveres past his disgust in order to satisfy his fascination with death. The novel proposes multiple motivations for the banal evil that ordinary people perpetrated during WWII. While Au masks his moral corruption behind much pedantry, Littell offers his protagonist little cover. He strives to make Au's sinister logic beguiling because all affectations are transparent. Self-interest spurs Au to action and concomitantly the readet to inaction: the reader is indicted for his/her complicity in reading the confessions of a murderer. This is a defining trait of the modern novel, that is the existential engagement of the audpience in the dramatic concupiscence of life's morality play.

Orientalism and Its Discontents

Irwin offers an exhaustive list of criticisms leveled at Said and his theory. The ad hominem attacks of Said's critics seem unduly venomous. The attacks on his methodology merit closer scrutiny. On p.286, Irwin writes "Said's presentation of the history of Orientalism as a canon of great but wicked books, almost all by dead white males, was that of a literary critic who wildly overvalued the importance pf high literature in intellectual history. I think it is valid to ask just who among the Orientalists in queston was reading Lane, Scott, Eliot and Flaubert. I think it is alsop valid to reconstruct the zeitgeist of an intellectual season by investigating the scope and breadth of literary achievemnt during this epoch. The fsctual and historical errors that Irwin catalogues are probably inexcusable to the historian, but forgivable among humanists. Said's project does not live or die on the basis of historical fact. His argument is rooted in the distinctive narrative devices that are repeated or echoed in all of the authors whom he considers Orientalists. Another methodological failing according to Irwin is the conflation and misapplication of Gramsci and Foucault's theories. Irwin accuses Said of using imprecise and at times contradictory articulations of "discourse" and attributing all his slippery arguments to postmodernist intellectual giants. Irwin notes that Foucault and Gramsci have "rather different ideas about the relationship between power and knowledge. Irwin suspects Said of intellectual dishonesty because of intentional omission of critical details. On p. 291, Irwin writes " Said presented Orientalism as a unified, self-confirmatory discourse, but in so doing he ignored Reiske's outsider status, Goldzhiher's quarrels with Vambery and Renan, Kedourie's hostility towards Gibb, Rodinson's suspicions of Massignon and Hodgson's criticisms of most of his predecessors." Irwin accuses Said of racial profiling. He considers Said's analysis shabby because, for instance, Renan and Gobineau are mentioned throughout the book, but their ideas analyzed in the most superficial of ways. Irwin believes that the "consensus or paradigm" that Said assails is nothing more than a paper tiger, a manufactured foil. He concedes that the book has a cult following and that it "fostered a plethora of narratives of oppression, and its arguments fed into subaltern studies" but concludes that Said's jeremiads fell on deaf ears. On p.301, he writes "...late capitalism's blithe insouciance towards its unmaskers, its apparently successful domestication of anti-imperialist scholarship and its commodification of oppositional theory are hard to ignore..."

Salammbo and Orientalism

I could not resist spending part of the day reading Salammbo to confirm Said's claims about Flaubert. Said begins “Orientalist Structures and Restructures” by revisiting the unfinished novel Bouvard et Pecuche. He considers at length Bouvard's idee recue of “Europe-regenerated-by-Asia” Said is critical of the positivist arrogance that assumes that “our” Europe and “our” Asia can be soldered together. Said explores the Oriental representations within 18th century European music, art and literature. He considers this one of the interconnected and secularizing elements that foreshadowed the Orientalist structures of the 19th and 20th centuries (expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy, classification). Said argues that Flaubert echoed the Orientalist modus operandi and fashioned himself “ a hero rescuing the Orient from its “obscurity, alienation, and strangeness through lexicography, grammar, translation and cultural decoding” (p.121) Said places a spotlight on the uses of the classical Orient and the traces of power. Said init8imates on p. 144 that Faubert's interest in the Orient was heightened by the Napoleonic expeditions to Egypt and the scientific speculations of Etienne and Isidore Saint-Hilaire . Said descibes Flaubert as a n example of European writers who embodied a distinctive consciousness : “ To be a European in the Orient always involves being a consciousness set apart from, and unequal with, its surroundings.” (p.157) I searched for this consciousness in Salammbo, but hesitate to declare that I found what Said expected to find. The daughter of Hamilcar Barca is a composite of exotic but recognizable traits that populate French literature. She resembles Corneille's Phedre in my mind. Said opines that Flaubert portrait of Salammbo is based on his reading of William Lane's Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians. I think that this is a stretch. I believe there is an element of imitation (“The Orientalist can imitate the Orient”) but the historical fantasy of the Carthage face to face with Rome is a classical trope that every student of Latin would have been expected to know. Flaubert takes liberties with a tradition that glorifies Rome more than it villifies the Orient. I would name such a consciousness archaeological rather than Orientalist as there was a desperate need in the 19th century to get at the root of civilization, to behold in first person glory, the trajectory of history, the suspected parabola of time. I disagree with Said on this point: the nostalgia that he soft-pedals is born of disappointment with the trappings of modernity. The disenchanted novelist indulges in historical fantasy in the hopes of stumbling a more satisfyig Shangri La. With Flaubert however there is less of the conceit of Chateaubriand (p.173 " What matters about the Orient is what it lets happen to Chateaubriand, what it allows his spirit to do, what it permits him to reveal about himself, his ideas, his expectations.") or the triumphalism of Nerval. His adventure is literary license. The Carthaginian ruins beckon because Flaubert fancies himself a modern Ezekiel who can make dry bones speak. Carthage is more than topos, canvas or stage in Salammbo. It is the refuge of the epic and Barca's palace a sanctuary. I am not sure that the mythology which Said ascribes to Flaubert as "personal" (p.180)is accurate. I agree that the Orient functioned asa place of deja vu (p.180), but once again I think the vantage point is classical rather than modern. The richly suggestive "legendary" woman of his narrative is a reinvented Cleopatra. Flaubert inherited this discourse,even as he helped to transmit it. Said's contrast between latent and manifest Orientalism (p.206) may be helpful here. His distinctions presume a psychology of domination far less subtle than Flaubert's Salammbo

Orientalism

In re-reading Orientalism, I am struck by a few strategic points in the argument which I missed the first time. In the original introduction (p.15 in my copy), Said asks "how can we treat the cultural, historical phenomenon of Orientalism as a kind of willed human work-- not of mere unconditioned ratiocination-- in all its historical complexity, detail and worth without at the same time losing sight of the alliance between cultural work, political tendencies, the state, and the specific realities of domination?" I had not realized that he intended to navigate so fine a line. I considered the work quite polemical in my first few readings of it. I remembered the pointed jabs at the academy for its collusion with the imperialist project. I overlooked the "methodological question" at the heart of the work. Said questions authority and unmasks cultural values and prejudices that shape the canon. On p.41, he describes Orientalism as " a library or archive of information commonly and in some aspects, unanimously held...a family of ideas and a unifying set of values." When Said dissects Lord Balfour's addresses to the House of Commons, he brings into relief "the reservoir of accredited knowledge, the codes of Orientalist orthodoxy" (p.39) which birthed the modern Middle East. I am particularly intrigued by the argument that Said makes with regard to the literary front for this intellectual assault. I know well the constraints of La Chanson de Roland, which vilifies Saracens in order to "upstage" Frankish betrayal and I am familiar with the condescension at the heart of of Salambo. I am less familiar with(but now curious to read)Hugo's Les Orientales. Said, by the end of chapter one, weaves a convincing narrative that culminates in the Napoleonic "coup de theatre" in Egypt. De Lesseps, in particular, manipulated the Orient (literally, in the case of the Suez Canal) to fit European ambition.

Assignment List

Dec 20 Complete Orientalism by Edward Said and chapters nine (“ An Enquiry into the Nature of a Certain Twentieth-Century Polemic”) and ten (“Enemies of Orientalism”) from Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents by Robert Irwin
Dec 21 Begin Tablet and Pen by Reza Aslan ( review in www.wordswithoutborders.com; book available through www.indiebound.org )
Dec 22 Begin Beirut 39 by Samuel Shimon, Amin Maalouf, and Tahar Ben Jelloun
Dec 23 Consult Persian Letters by Charles de Montesquieu (EPUB)
Dec 24 Begin Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology (PDF)
Dec 27 Consult chapters two (“Quining Consciousness”) and three (“ Consciousness and the Brain”) of Netlibrary book Consciousness Reconsidered by Owen Flanagan
Dec 28 Read Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James on e-reader (EPUB)
Dec 29 Consult chapter five (“Unconscious Information in Language and Psychodynamics”) in Netlibrary book Languages of the Mind: Essays on Mental Representation by Ray Jackendoff
Dec 30 Consult Book II (“The Definition of Mind”) in Netlibrary book The Mind and the Brain by Alfred Binet (EPUB)
Dec 31 Begin blog post answer to the question “ Is there such a thing as Middle Eastern consciousness? If yes, is it organic or is it a product of Western cultural, economic, or political forces? If no, what Middle Eastern archetypes are part of the global collective unconscious?”