Extended version of a lecture presented at the American University of Beirut on Wednesday, March 27th, 2019, and at Pace University in New York for the Dyson Seminar Series on April 17th, 2017. #avantgardeorientalism, #thepersonalreview
What is the Avant-garde and What is Orientalism?
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| Duchamp's "Large Glass" |
The Avant-garde represents the cutting edge—the “advance guard”—of Modernism in the arts, literature, architecture, and other media. It is a military term that starts being used in the arts in France in the 19th Century (Poggioli). It is embraced by the more youthful and innovative artists and poets in the 20th Century and continues to be used in our own time, though to a lesser and perhaps less meaningful extent. In its heyday, of course, the Avant-garde was at the forefront of Modernist developments—especially as they emerged in the modern metropolis (Williams)—but it was also often at odds with modernization in its broader social or economic manifestations; that is, the Avant-garde was both ahead of its time AND highly critical of the “modern” as such, so much so that it sometimes defied modern expectations. Here are some examples from Marcel Duchamp and Russian Suprematist El Lissitsky (one of his later Constructivist designs).
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| El Lissitsky, Construc- tivist Design |
Orientalism, on the other hand, is the study and representation of what many in the West once considered a fairly homogeneous space called the Orient. In classic 19th-century scholarly terms, Orientalism focused on the Near East (that is, North Africa and the Middle East). But the Orient could also include India and the Far East (that is, China, Japan, etc.) when broadly applied. Orientalism is conspicuous in 19th-century realist painting, but also in literature—as in the novels of Pierre Loti or Rudyard Kipling. Here's an example, a real masterpiece by Delacroix. (Works by Gérome are more typical of the orientalist paintings we love to hate.)
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| Delacroix's "Death of Sardanapalus" |
Orientalism in lit- ature and painting is not so much practiced today as denigrated. It’s a kind of representation that originated with Romanticism (painters like Ingres and Delacroix and poets like Victor Hugo or even Coleridge and Shelley) and which relies largely on stereotypes and cultural prejudices in the West as a way of understanding its oriental or “Eastern” subject matter. But it is also seen today as a kind of academic handmaid of colonialism in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, using its knowledge of oriental peoples and customs for the advantage of Western nations administering their colonial territories, whether in the Orient or elsewhere. This view might sound harsh to some, but many scholars agree it’s a fair appraisal of orientalist practice. It’s also a view that became pervasive with the success of Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, published in 1978, which articulates what we call the postcolonial view of this kind of work. So, in effect, orientalism has long been a target of postcolonial criticism, the schol-
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| Cover of Said's book with Gerome's "Snake Charmer" |
arly field that interprets culture in light of modern colonialism and imperialism. Prominent scholars in the field are Said, Gayatry Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Ali Behdad, Gyan Prakash, Timothy Brennan, Anwar Acheraiou, historian Anwar Abdel Malek, Derek Gregory, and others.
What’s the Difference between Classic Orientalism and Avant-garde Orientalism?
Orientalism then, has a pretty bad reputation among postcolonial scholars. So when a new book entitled Avant-garde Orientalism comes along, it might at first seem to be promoting Orientalism, or to be an attack on the postcolonial critique, one that many thought had killed any impulse to BE an orientalist: That is, the orientalist impulse to represent oriental places, peoples, and cultures as exciting, exotic destinations or topics of study where one can go to enjoy relative freedom from the repressive atmosphere of life back home in Europe or America. The classic orientalist does this by exploring or indulging in presumed Eastern extravagances, often related to sex but also to a kind of pre-modern existence that is considered backward, effeminate, decadent, feudal and cruel (if not without its own impressive cultural legacies). As such, these exotic cultures were considered the opposite of modern Western states and the West’s so-called “grand narratives” (Lyotard) of enlightenment, emancipation, individuality, democracy, nationhood, and a general moderation of values that supposedly made the West the West. The West could feel good about itself knowing (or believing) it was greater, more advanced, more tempered, more reasonable, and thus even exceptional (at least the U.S.A. part, according to its more triumphalist apologists).
Although an avant-garde writer who travels to Asia, Africa, or the South Pacific might exhibit similar exoticist impulses, “Avant-garde Orientalism” is not the same as what I’ve been describing. That said, by suggesting there is an “avant-garde” kind of Orientalism, I’m not claiming that there’s a new kind of Orientalism that dissolves the postcolonial arguments against it. I am acknowledging, however, the importance and difference of certain writings on a range of North African and Asian cultures, produced in the mid- to late 20th Century (and since) by select European and North American writers. By this I mean an international collection of experimental Western writers whose ideas about the Orient don’t conform to the postcolonial picture of Orientalism as the servant of
colonialism or as the cultural judge of the East we’ve come to see it as. These writers were not associated with the academy's more 19th-century Victorian or Realist values (see Holman Hunt's "The Awakening Conscience"—a classic work of Victorian moralizing), but with 20th-century avant-garde ones (see Lyubov Popova's constructionist design below). As such, they were committed to experimental techniques in the literary and plastic arts yielding works that undermined the institution of art itself and certain ideological assumptions behind it. These assumptions have mostly to do with the transcendence of the arts, their ability to reflect society as in a mirror while not being tainted by it or not being judged in the same way one might judge the rest of society. Thus the ideology of art is often consistent with notions of class hierarchy or even of racial and cultural supremacy (based on theories of Peter Bürger, Renato Poggioli, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno). The avant-garde critique of art as an institution thus results in an increasing politicization of art, not as a corrupting influence, as some might say, but as a valid artistic function. It’s not surprising then that the Avant-garde, which could be highly critical of many Western institutions, would overlap with post-colonialism in taking a critical attitude toward colonialism and conventional Western representations of Eastern cultures.
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| Tomb of Humayun, Delhi |
Although an avant-garde writer who travels to Asia, Africa, or the South Pacific might exhibit similar exoticist impulses, “Avant-garde Orientalism” is not the same as what I’ve been describing. That said, by suggesting there is an “avant-garde” kind of Orientalism, I’m not claiming that there’s a new kind of Orientalism that dissolves the postcolonial arguments against it. I am acknowledging, however, the importance and difference of certain writings on a range of North African and Asian cultures, produced in the mid- to late 20th Century (and since) by select European and North American writers. By this I mean an international collection of experimental Western writers whose ideas about the Orient don’t conform to the postcolonial picture of Orientalism as the servant of
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| Hunt, "The Awakening Conscience |
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| Lyubov Popova, Constructivist design |
As a phenomenon mostly associated with the modern metropolis, the Avant-garde tended to stay there. So its interest in the East was atypical, making such travels or such works fairly unique. Yet when they happened, they were still part of an agenda of artistic rebellion and antagonism to many Western values, including colonization and hegemony. That said, this avant-garde version of anti-colonialism might not seem consistent with the Avant-garde’s supposed modernity, since most Westerners at the time, including many very advanced Modernists, considered colonialism a necessary prelude to the modernization of the non-Western world. What, then, did writers associated with experimental techniques see in the opportunity to travel East or to represent it in novels, poems, and travel memoirs? What novelty did they find in the opportunity to bear witness to what many still considered a backward world of lazy natives, decadent cultural practices, and ruthless, unenlightened despots? In the section of my book introduction entitled “Avant-garde Offensive,” I explain the complex relationship between the Avant-garde and Western modernity. What needs to be made clear is the fact that, as the “shock troops” of modernity in the arts and literature, 20th-century avant-gardists often deviated from Modernism’s ideals and pieties. In a way, then, the Avant-garde is Modernism’s anticipation of Postmodernism (emerging in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s), or a sort of bridge between the two eras, pre- and post-War. Their eyes fixed always on the future, avant-gardists looked less to the prescribed vision of modern predictability, of industrialized capitalist economies, or of artistic perfection in finished works of art, than to a more dystopic future of diverse and hybrid forms, forms that seemed resistant to the global monoculture that Modernism seemed to foreshadow. A strong statement, but one that reflects, I think, the avant-garde discontents with modernity. So what I am saying is that the Avant-garde, in some measure, shares with postmodernist critiques of modernity—and thus with post-colonial theory as well—a strong hostility to the hegemony of the West as manifested in colonialist policies and as reflected in classic orientalist scholarship: its idea that the scholar's knowledge of the Other should be used to exercise power over it. Avant-garde writers are also mostly marginal to the literary canon, and thus do not readily serve the more hegemonic functions of canonical works.
Spectrum of Avant-garde Politics
What are the anti-colonialist strains in the international Avant-garde? One finds them in works by the French Surrealists, the American Beats, and others. Note, for instance, André Breton’s denunciations of France's colonial war in Morocco in the early 1920s; or, the verbal
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| André Breton |
salvos against the War in Vietnam and against capital punishment, coming from Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs; or, back in France, Jean Genet’s staunch support for unpopular causes such as those of the Palestinians and the Black Panthers; or Thomas Pynchon’s horrific parodies of colonial intervention in Africa in his novel V.; or, again—back in Europe and back in time—Berlin Dada in the years before Hitler’s ascendancy in which the art movement became an actual political party with an explicitly socialist agenda (participants such as Richard Huelsenbeck, John Heartfield); and later, the Situationist International in France railing against bourgeois complacency and the “society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard).
That said, it should be pointed out that the International Avant-garde is by no means a monolith consistently voicing left-leaning or progressive ideological positions about the Orient and the colonies. Historically, avant-gardists have positioned themselves across the ideological spectrum, sometimes presenting themselves as a gifted artistic elite prepared to advocate for colonialist agendas if necessary. For example, consider the proto-fascist declarations of the Futurist F. T. Marinetti who called war “the world’s only hygiene,”[i] or Ezra Pound’s propagandizing for Mussolini during World War II, or T. S. Eliot’s stuffy royalism and Anglicanism. I don’t cover Pound or Eliot in my book, but I do discuss Marinetti and the more benign Jean Cocteau and Lawrence Durrell, all three of whom wrote about Egypt and used avant-garde strategies in various ways.
Methodological Concepts: Simultaneous Contrasts, the Hermeneutic motion, and “Pure Language”
So, as a way of covering the ideological spectrum of avant-garde attitudes in travel writings about the East, I have used the idea of “simultaneous cultural contrasts” as a way to describe the multiplicity of ideological positions on the Orient and on resistance movements in Asia and Africa in the Twentieth Century. That said, while most of these writers are trying to be provocative and novel, they are also, in my view, attempting to discover alternatives to the West’s globalist preconceptions. The term “simultaneous contrasts” is taken from French painter Robert Delaunay’s ideas about color theory, ideas glossed by the French avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire as “[e]very shade [calling] forth and [being] illumined by all the other colors of the prism” (see Delaunay's "Circular Forms" below).
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| Robert Delaunay, "Circular Forms: Sun and Moons" |
I’ve also made use of translation theory to characterize avant-garde interpretive strategies. Simply put, I’ve applied George Steiner’s idea of the “hermeneutic motion” as a strategy for describing the uniqueness of avant-garde representations of North African, Middle Eastern, South or East Asian peoples and regions. Steiner’s idea of translation or interpretation involves four things: (1) initiative trust, (2) aggression, (3) incorporation, and (4) reciprocity. Though one can find all four in works by the travelers to North Africa and Asia that I discuss in my book, what stands out for me is the pairing of interpretive aggression and reciprocity—in short, a desire to provoke, but also to affirm, an alternative potentiality, something hybrid or multicultural, if also weighted by the writers’ own subjective idiosyncrasies and obsessions. In this respect, I’ve also made use of Walter Benjamin’s idea of “Pure Language,” a sort of mystic future of linguistic potentiality, of Language’s totality in its combined semantic functions, but not to be confused with cultural purism. As I write in my discussion of hermeneutics in may chapter on the Maghreb: "Avant-gardists are less concerned ... with respecting [different] environments and peoples than they are with respecting [the] potentialto [be or] become [themselves] more fully through [...] an uncoerced cultural concourse with global alternatives" (116).
Moving West to East, from Tangier to Tokyo
So what I have done is bring together a number of texts
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| Marguerite Duras |
about travel or expatriation in cities like Tangier, Cairo, Beirut or Calcutta, texts written by an international collection of Western writers but not excluding transnational or postcolonial “Third World” writers committed to literary experimentation (for instance, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz or the Bengali American Amitav Ghosh). Though I focus primarily on actual travel writing—texts written during or after actual journeys—I have made liberal use of texts in other genres—poems, plays, novels—that deal with problems of dislocation stemming from travel, usually the kind of voluntary displacements one should distinguish from involuntary ones such as exile or immigration.
In other words, I mostly discuss the kind of travel associated with leisure, pleasure, and acculturation, just as art and literature are associated with these things. Some of these travels are purely imaginary, such as those in Frederic Prokosch’s book The Asiatics; or Marguerite Duras’s depiction of a madwoman’s journey by foot from Cambodia to Calcutta in The Vice-Consul (certainly a case of involuntary displacement), a journey the author juxtaposes with the story of Anne-Marie Stretter, whose journey to the heart of the French delegation in British India as the wife of the French ambassador allows her to become a force of instability in the phallocentric order of empire.
The texts I discuss are organized from West to East, from North Africa to the Middle East and on to South and East Asia. My own text, while devoting long chapters to the Maghreb, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, and finally to India, concludes with a somewhat cursory glimpse at China and Japan by examining certain prose works of Victor Segalen (whose “aesthetic of diversity” provides a prototype to my “simultaneous cultural contrasts” concept). Next, I look at the surrealist poet and artist Henri Michaux’s A Barbarian in Asia, which describes his travels in China and Japan (if also in India and Sri Lanka) in the 1930s (incidentally—though he has many flippant things to say about Indians and other Asians, it is clear by the end of that text that he considers himself the barbarian). And finally, I discuss Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, a work of semiotics that signals the academic appropriation of certain avant-garde tactics related to the study of the East, marking it with a kind of detachment and ahistoricism. Though this detachment suggests a return to aestheticism, it is tempered with some of Michaux’s poetic inventiveness, something Barthes manages to transform into a unique decoding of the cultural signs of Japan.
The texts I discuss are organized from West to East, from North Africa to the Middle East and on to South and East Asia. My own text, while devoting long chapters to the Maghreb, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, and finally to India, concludes with a somewhat cursory glimpse at China and Japan by examining certain prose works of Victor Segalen (whose “aesthetic of diversity” provides a prototype to my “simultaneous cultural contrasts” concept). Next, I look at the surrealist poet and artist Henri Michaux’s A Barbarian in Asia, which describes his travels in China and Japan (if also in India and Sri Lanka) in the 1930s (incidentally—though he has many flippant things to say about Indians and other Asians, it is clear by the end of that text that he considers himself the barbarian). And finally, I discuss Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, a work of semiotics that signals the academic appropriation of certain avant-garde tactics related to the study of the East, marking it with a kind of detachment and ahistoricism. Though this detachment suggests a return to aestheticism, it is tempered with some of Michaux’s poetic inventiveness, something Barthes manages to transform into a unique decoding of the cultural signs of Japan.
A Genealogy of Avant-garde Orientalism
So—after grappling with all these theoretical issues in Chapters One and Two (the latter a sustained discursus of theoretical works on postcolonial method, travel writing, and avant-garde practice), I finally get to the more literary concerns that prompted the writing of the book in the first place. Chapter Three is a literary genealogy of Avant-garde Orientalism, which traces its roots to various Romanticist and Symbolist poets, and then moves on to certain High Modernist authors like Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka before manifesting itself fully as a kind of literary phenotype in works by such authors as Genet and Duras. This genealogy helps to illustrate the very important modulation between modernist and avant-gardist treatments of Eastern settings. The settings in the earlier works seem richly allegorized as a space both liberating and threatening to the Western visitor, spaces that seem to fuse all things Eastern to heighten the psychological "dissociation of sensibility" the Westerner experiences or seeks. But as the century progresses, the settings become more specific in ways that seem more explicitly historical, that is, more about colonial interference or injustice than the psychological tohu-bohu of the displaced traveler. This shift is most strikingly achieved in Genet's The Screens, a play about the Algerian War of Independence, but also about what Genet seems to have considered the war’s lost opportunity as a moment of creative potentiality, one
that ended up ossifying—or so he saw it—into a militarized Third World state. I conclude this chapter with my only post-millennial text: Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2010). Dyer’s two-part travel novel uses Mann’s Death in Venice as an occasion to make mock of the German author’s heavy-handed Modernism, but also to lay bare the subtle Orientalism of that work, where Venice—a high point of Western Civ—succumbs to an Eastern disease imported from India. But this cultural infection turns out to have originated from the West after all—like the Aryanism I think it allegorizes. Unlike Mann, Dyer goes on to set the second half of his schizoid novel in India itself—Varanasi—where the protagonist, in his response to a more genuine city of death (corpses, burning ghats) transforms himself into a postmodern multicultural deity, a sort of ascetic, Hinduized Virgin Mary pregnant with a kangaroo god named Ganoona. The book both mocks and celebrates, I think, the hybrid potentiality of East and West.
Bowles, Burroughs, and Gide in the Maghreb
The chapter “Tangier and the Maghreb” covers ground that’s been more thoroughly explored by scholars, thanks to the notoriety of the novel William Burroughs wrote in Tangier (Naked Lunch) and to the late popularity of Paul Bowles, whose first novel, The Shelter-
ing Sky, was filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci in the late 1980s.
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| Paul Bowles |
Studies like Greg Mullins’ Colonial Affairs and Brian Edwards’ Morocco Bound provide very thorough historico-biographical accounts of the ways in which the contemporary political situations in Morocco and Algeria in the 1950s contributed to both authors’ literary output as well as their critical outlook on independence movements in North Africa. What I do that is different, I think (but which I do consistently throughout the book), is to provide close readings of the texts at issue apropos of their Orientalism, in this case Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Bowles’s Sheltering Sky, but also with a focus on the latter author’s travel writings and personal anthropological studies, the most important of which are compiled in Their Heads Are Green and their Hands Are Blue. I also link both of these American writers with the French author André Gide, whose travel narrative Amyntas provides biographical clues to his better-known novel The Immoralist, set in Tunisia and Algeria at the turn of the 19th Century. In The Immoralist modernist notions about the liberating potential of life in the Maghreb are illustrated, but always, again, with the sense of death’s proximity, signaled, in part, by the ever-encroaching Sahara Desert but also by the death of the protagonist’s wife. Gide’s sexually-liberated protagonist, Michel, seems to thrive in the Maghreb, while his wife, Marceline, is sacrificed with almost complete indifference on his part. (He’s basically discovered he’s gay.) Bowles takes a similar path in The Sheltering Sky in which his American protagonist, Port Moresby, runs adrift in his strange, inexplicable search for minimalist existential conditions, only to die of an undiagnosed disease in an obscure village. But this time he’s survived, barely, by his own American wife, Kit, who is “incorporated,” one might say, into the family of a Touareg trader—that is, a “harem,” a word that can obviously be read in almost diametrically opposed ways. Kit escapes, if only to become a wandering, perhaps mad figure. On the other hand, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch is an all-out avant-garde romp in which Tangier is nightmarishly, if
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| William Burroughs |
sometimes zanily depicted as a lurid colonialist dumping ground in which, as Burroughs famously wrote, “all Agents defect and all Resistors sell out” (142). The then International Zone of the City of Tangier—where virtually all foreigners had more legal rights than the locals—was the inspiration for Burroughs’ so-called “Interzone” in Naked Lunch where an international criminal regime seems to hold sway. Perhaps most diabolically, Islam itself is appropriated and transformed into a business corporation (Islam Inc.), a mask for colonialist interests in North Africa to be used when needed to help snuff out any genuine political reforms or revolutionary appeals on behalf of indigenous peoples. One can’t help thinking of how today’s neo-imperial regimes in the West have exploited Islamist terror to justify perma-war in the Middle East and the ongoing expansion of the military industrial complex.
Chapters on Egypt/Palestine, India
I don’t have time to discuss in any detail the other chapters included in the book: first, on Egypt and Palestine (actually Jordan and Lebanon where Palestinians were displaced), and second, India. More Modernist writers seem to have traveled to Egypt than anywhere else in the Orient during the 20th Century. So I had my work cut out for me in trying to write up interesting analyses about such divers writers as Jean Cocteau, F. T. Marinetti, Lawrence Durrell (author of The Alexandria Quartet), Thomas Pynchon (who sets a chapter of his novel V. in Alexandria and Cairo), and finally the Bengali American novelist Amitav Ghosh, whose memoir, In an Antique Land, wraps up my discussion of
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| Jean Genet |
Egypt before I move on to look at the one text on the Middle East that I include. (Incidentally, Ghosh’s work is the subtlest of all in its avant-gardist strategies while surreptitiously borrowing and exploiting certain orientalist habits of mind). The text on the Middle East is Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love, which depicts, in a completely subjective, personalized way, the lives and living conditions of the so-called Fedayeen in their struggles with Israel and other local powers (such as the Jordanian and Syrian Armies or Phalangist militias in Lebanon) all in the 1970s and early 80s (it was Genet’s last book). This long but discontinuous narrative shows again Genet’s strong empathy for groups and individuals “othered” by various nation states, perhaps even by the entire world community of that time; however, as in The Screens, one senses the writer’s empathy partly depends on the Palestinians’ ongoing inability to achieve statehood, Genet’s instinctive mistrust of all states providing a check on his capacity to embrace any group or revolution that might succeed as one. In the India chapter I discuss Prokosch’s The Asiatics before going on to discuss the poetry and travel narratives of three poets: the French Belgian, Henri Michaux, the Mexican Octavio Paz—who was his country’s ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968 when he resigned in protest over the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City—and the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, each of whom wrote extensively about India, including a substantial number of poems on various experiences and topics associated with South Asian cultures.
Though all of these works are fascinating in their own ways and strain after new insights into the Other with the help of formal techniques that attempt to break up Western discourses of power (what Burroughs calls the “Word Hoard”), it is these discourses of power that continue to impede alternative outlooks. We might consider such alternatives as a prelude to what some critics now call “relationality” (Edward J. Hughes), a concept that echoes Said’s original appeal for new ways to “study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective” (Orientalism 24). Though not an academic study, Ginsberg's Indian Journals
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| Allen Ginsberg |
seems to respond in advance to this sort of appeal. It is iconic, I think, as an instance of “Avant-garde Orientalism” because of the poet’s sustained experimentalism apropos of trying to understand Indians in an empathetic way while also probing his own preconceptions and vulnerabilities. It is as if he were seeking the Other both within and without, by teaching himself to query its differences and similarities simultaneously. So although there is really no one book that exemplifies what I mean by Avant-garde Orientalism, I think Ginsberg’s provides an instructive and useful starting point.
Why does Avant-garde Orientalism matter? Because it constitutes for the West an alternative way or “other tradition” of trying to imagine the Other’s returned gaze and to remind the West of what seems to have become its all but extinguished capacities for empathy with unknown peoples, groups, practices, and faiths that are too quickly reduced to threatening forces—all lurking in the shadows—that it convinces itself must be vanquished.
[i] From Daniele Conversi, “Art, Nationalism and War: Political Futurism in Italy (1909 - 1944)." Sociology Compass 3.1 (2009): 92 - 117.
