Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel

Abstract

Eighteenth-century English and French fiction, Srinivas Aravamudan shows, staged a contest of fabulist forms and translations against nationalist and domestic mimesis. The former opened up new horizons of transcultural utopia, where the latter (and the victor) sought to ground and discipline readers' imaginations. That domestic realism won should not blind us to the attractions of its competitor nor lead us to view that competitor as less ‘enlightened’, less a product of the modern moment. In its flight to the fantastic and its celebration of the plural and playful potentialities of experiments with the Orient, Aravamudan's book is in agreement with another significant work just published in the area, Marina Warner's Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the ‘Arabian Nights’ (London: Chatto & Windus, 2011), but its argument comes to rest on altogether different territory. Where Warner sees the oriental tale as a form of fancy dress that domesticates, commercializes, and neutralizes magical thinking in a modernizing (Western) society, Aravamudan claims more agency and philosophical coherence among the ‘constellation’ of texts he selects for discussion, revealing a ‘compelling pattern’ (p. 30), an opportunity lost (indeed consciously suppressed) for an ‘experimental, prospective, and antifoundationalist’ thought experiment (p. 4) in Europe. Aravamudan terms this ‘Enlightenment Orientalism’, a plural, fertile pursuit of knowledge through fictional play that builds on the philological and theological investigations of Renaissance orientalism and is more open to experiment than its successor, a Romantic orientalism anxious to contain and control foreign forces. He charts this thought experiment convincingly through five ‘modes’ — not quite genres, not quite themes, more groupings of different examples of oriental tale-telling with a shared angle of vision. The first part addresses two different modes of pseudoethnography: first, spy stories/surveillance chronicles, secret histories, and second, the fictional correspondence of oriental informants travelling in the Occident. The second part describes three different modes of transcultural allegory: first, stories of discoveries of new and other worlds (lunar, planetary, animal, or geographically remote); second, libertine orientalism; and third, scandalous accounts of European courts relocated in oriental locales. Aravamudan's erudition, the depth and breadth of his knowledge, to pursue a challenging thesis is everywhere evident. The committed difficulty of his style does not make for easy reading but can deliver striking insight. Particularly fine and original is the third chapter, in which Aravamudan finds a resistance to single or simple moral truths and correspondences in a variety of accounts of discoveries of new worlds, travels to remote nations, and animal fables: here, for example, surprising and convincing connections are found between the oriental animal fable and Book IV of Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Especially gratifying throughout the book is the interwoven analysis of French and English sources uncovering a stimulating philosophical and creative traffic resistant to nationalist agendas. Aravamudan's commitment to opening up the plurality of oriental modes has the slightly perverse effect of rendering the ‘novel’ an apparently relentless and totalizing machine designed to suppress difference and indulge a parochial interest in personality. However, the fine and fine-grained original readings of texts familiar (Behn's Oroonoko, Defoe's Roxana, Montesquieu's Lettres persanes) and strange (Haywood's Eovaai, Smollett's History and Adventures of an Atom) prove a source of compensatory wonder.