Double and Other: C.F. Meyer's Der Heilige

Abstract

In his seminal book Orientalism, Edward Said traces the evolution of that phenomenon as an academic discourse that places the Orient under the sign of an exotic but fundamentally negative alterity. This psychic distancing from the Orient is performed in order to pave the way for its colonialization by the West. Said affirms that the Orient has almost always been for Europe one of its deepest and most recurring images of the (Said 1). Just two pages later, he states his book tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self' (Said 3). Though both these asse rtions are consistent in indicating Europe's projection of itself as radically different from the Orient, the image of the Orient as surrogate self to Europe seems to contradict the hypothesis that the Orient served as a primary source for European visions of the Other. Said's statements are not so much self-contradicting as they are illustrative of the deep-seated entanglement binding the motifs of the Double and the Other in colonialist discourse on the Orient, particularly in the French and English literary he discusses in his book. Of course, this entanglement is not restricted to literature dealing at some level with the Near, Middle, or Far East, those regions that (along with Africa) were most intensely subjected to English and French colonization in the nineteenth century. Paul Coates has asserted that works of fiction exist in a space between the Double and the Other. To enter into a work of fiction is in a sense to transform the Other into a Double: to discover in the apparent foreignness of another person the lineaments of one's own aspirations and hopes (Coates 1), and this judgement seems reasonably sound. Nevertheless, Said's book shows us how the insertion of the Orient into this space encompassing the existence of literary fiction can be elucidated to characterize not just the consciousness of certain individual writers, but to reveal how an entire continent created, in some measure, its own self-image by creating protagonists who evolve highly ambiguous identities. European ambitions and ideals are transposed onto colonial subjects in such literature, while Western