Orientalist divagations: four French authors in Egypt

Abstract

A primary assumption of this essay is that certain French modernists, by positing an internal fragmentation of the self, were sensitised in some measure to the limitations of orientalist representations of Egypt and Egyptians and attempted a more open or responsive style of literary engagement with the country and its people. Evidence of this shift can be detected in the travel writings of Gérard de Nerval and Gustave Flaubert whose responses to life in Egypt simultaneously exemplify, countermand, and transcend standard orientalist procedures, as acknowledged by notable critics of orientalism. In this way the two authors establish an intellectual genealogy extending into the twentieth century with the work of André Gide and Jean Cocteau who, like their predecessors, attempt to capture the charged encounter between the Western observer and the various human objects of his or her libidinal attentions in the exoticised East. In each case a personal aesthetic seems to inflect the writer's representation of the Egyptian Other in a way that draws attention less to the question of cultural difference than to a sense of perceptual and representational inadequacy on the part of the writer-observer who struggles to enlarge his cultural purview in a way that lends an ironic dignity to the otherwise disparaged or stereotyped bodies of his literary gaze.