Avant-garde Orientalism: #alexgarland, #michelhouellebecq, #milankundera, #susansontag, and #paultheroux, #avantgardeorientalism

Cuts from the book’s original conclusion:  Alex Garland, Michel Houellebecq, Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag, Paul Theroux

In celebration of a future that could well be one of limited options—accompanied, perhaps, by a multitude of interpretive variations—I will conclude this study with examples that illustrate my point about the potentialities of formal play while also recognizing its limitations:  the boundary at which art for its own sake becomes less a venue of alternative readings than an excuse for self-censorship, an avoidance of stark truths that require hard solutions.  Art offers only hypotheses in the end.  It offers pliable, if therefore also potentially workable, strategies for a new planetary humanism.  Releasing the latter from the constraints of various institutional “bodies-without-organs,” operating with renewed vigor across the globe, remains an unfulfilled requirement. 

Avant-garde play:  Garland, Houellebecq, Sontag, Theroux

I have written elsewhere on particular late modern works that achieve the kind of distancing and reversal, estrangement and appeal, that characterize the avant-garde canon of travel writing on the Orient.  Two examples are Alex Gardner’s The Beach (1996) and Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme (2001), novels that depict how traveling to exotic terrains at first seem endowed with liberating opportunities but are quickly transformed into readymade experiences that undermine the effects of escape itself while perfectly satisfying the consumerist impulses that characterize many people’s daily lives, impulses that readily thwart or modify desire even as they indulge it.  In both of these works, the quest for authenticity is answered with the obvious postmodern solution of the prefabricated tour:  researched, streamlined, packaged and marketed for just the right audience of supposedly unique and adventurous—if also pre-screened—individuals.  Gardner’s book reveals the bad faith behind imposing the age-old Western fantasy of Paradise Recuperated onto the late, imperialist one of the postwar War Game, the Club Med/boot-camp version of cleansing the earth of difference and danger (an especially bad vacation combo fostered by rapid globalization, resurgent and diversifying racisms, and the ubiquity of video-style death simulations as popular entertainment).  Houellebecq’s book takes Garland’s thesis further by narrating the industrialization of another kind of package tour, one that exploits the availability of commercialized sex in Southeast Asia as a marketing tool for travel, if also as a marketing tool for Houellebecq’s novel.  The reversal of expectations that avant-garde formal procedures involve manifests itself in Garland’s book as the literary excitement of turning a make-believe Vietnam War (“play”) into a “real” disaster for the protagonist as part of the post-Reagan War on Drugs (a war that—like the War on Terror it anticipates—continues without abatement).  Ironically, it is the very suppliers of the required intoxicants who become the reluctant enforcers of the New World Order in the novel, just as real police and government operatives within that Order have used their authority to protect the drug trade,[1]the profitability of which ensures its de facto legality in capitalist society.  The downside in Plateforme, of course, is that sexual tourism—something the book’s reactionary author clearly considers a cynical product of Sixties liberationist ideology—becomes the target of an Islamist terrorist organization operating in Southeast Asia, using sexual liberation as a justification for supposedly religiously-sanctioned mass murder.  Dumb ideas always “hook up,” he seems to say, in the so-called clash of civilizations to produce a bad, even explosive, combo.  

While the latter denouement is anticipated in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) in which a party of anti-war activists foolhardily bring their international peace demonstration, complete with press teams, to the border of Cambodia only to be fatally sniped at by the Khmer Rouge, Garland’s novel owes an even greater literary debt to Michel Herr’s masterpiece of new journalism and postmodern language play, Dispatches (1977).  Less evident as formal predecessors, but vital as the ideological fulcrums from which both books seem historically suspended or even reproved, are Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Nightand Susan Sontag’s Trip to Hanoi (both 1968). While Sontag’s book is less known than Mailer’s bombastic, sprawling eructation of a protest novel, her travel book must have seemed, at the time of publication, even more provocative than Mailer’s as a work of cultural fact-finding based on a North Vietnamese-sponsored junket to the capital of a country then considered by many Americans an enemy nation.  Sontag’s revolution of consciousness toward the North Vietnamese is a subtle, intellectually painstaking process, fastidiously pre-achieved and then re-achieved after conceding, in the opening pages of the book, her basic commitment to the anti-imperialist stance of her hosts.  What bothers her about them is the “aesthetic sensibility” (18), the almost childish Marxist-Leninist phraseology (in English, hence a translation issue as well) that lacks sufficient intellectual nuance or cosmopolitan breadth for Sontag, qualities she obviously prides herself on having and which render her discourse, as she states it, more objective, more precise, more “adult” if simultaneously more playful—“play”:  the thing that allows nuance and invention to take over.  At the same time, she acknowledges that the basic arguments of her hosts are “true” and that the “flattened-out,” ideological language they employ seems increasingly justified in the course of her stay.  It is at this stage that the reader realizes Sontag’s mission is to ennoble that flattened-out language with a sufficiently nuanced sensibility.  Yet in some ways, her own subtlety gets flattened-out in the process, even if that process implies that language itself is beggared in the face of imperialist atrocities and mass destruction.  At first she considers her Vietnamese hosts as mere children (the old orientalist trope), but soon comes to see them as heroes while her own sophisticated language becomes almost immaturely inappropriate.  Toward the end of the book, it is the “experience” (72) of visiting Hanoi that allows her to accept this compromise of sensibility based on her developing insight that the specific conditions of war in Vietnam have necessitated a disciplined culture of survival, reinforcing a long history of social regimentation and stoic self-sacrifice for the modern cause of national self-determination.[2]  As Sontag concludes, Vietnamese society “deserves to be idealized” (72).  In this way, her book demonstrates the continuing relevance experience and morality have with regard to the manipulation of forms and the interpretation of signs that the avant-garde excels at for the sake of alternative futures.  At the same time, and in aesthetic defiance of the more empirically-bound approaches to writing “travel essays,” many other avant-gardists do not presume that a visionary purpose need affirm itself empirically in any comprehensive way. The future must always surprise. “If not,” they seem to ask, “why go?” 

Finally, while Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar (1975) may seem a purely conventional travel book in almost every respect—less formally innovative or intellectually challenging than the kinds of experiments a committed avant-gardist might pursue with explicitly literary motivations—it does provide evidence of receptivity to avant-garde tactics on the part of established travel writers in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries.  Two passages in particular illustrate the kind of reversal of expectations I have been arguing for as an indicator of both a hermeneutics of reciprocity and the reversal of gaze as fundamental to the avant-garde intensification of an aesthetics of diversity by recognizing and heightening difference.  While the first example is almost infantile in its anecdotal provocation, the second is perfectly elementary in its illustration of avant-garde technique, one I have already characterized for its qualities of “simultaneous contrast.”  What I am getting at is that avant-garde observational tactics try to anticipate the international, multicultural aspect of any discussion of East and West in a way the provokes recognition of a new cultural ecology of interactive if sometimes combative multiplicities.  

My first example from Theroux is a veritable anamorph of narrative form:  A fellow passenger on the night express train from Nong Khai in Thailand tells Theroux the story of his experience at the White Rose bar and brothel in Vientiane, Laos.  The tall, perfectly gorgeous woman he encounters there tells him that she will do anything he wants for four dollars.   He eyes her “fantastic knockers and […] beautiful brown back” (211) and sodomizes her “for all it [is] worth,” i.e., in a way that might be called aggressive, hermeneutically-speaking.  When he feels down her thigh, however, he discovers she has a large male sex (“process,” he calls it), not to mention a snarky grin on her face.  But the speaker quickly qualifies his narrative by saying that “it ain’t the same story” (212) that Theroux (or the reader) might have already guessed at.  The traveler ends up talking with “Oy” (as his mysterious sex partner is called) and decides that, despite her sex, she’s not a man at all but (only) “a girl with a prick!” (212).  Though he acknowledges experiencing a moment of “panic” (what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has famously identified as “heterosexual panic” (912-921)), he realizes, on reflection, that he is strongly, almost sentimentally, attracted to her.  Thus, as an explicit consequence of a cultural framing of the reversal of gaze, he discovers, in an echo of Segalen’s thesis, that he has seen himself “not as he was.” A kind of incorporation and reciprocity has been enacted, allowing him not to respond with the usual intercultural outrage or violence,[3]but to think fondly of Oy—even hoping to see her again.  

            [The following paragraph, with block quotation, was retained in the Palgrave MS.]  The second example, though perfectly mundane, provides an even more explicit instance of how the aesthetics of diversity, accelerated and exacerbated by the Avant-garde, might be utilized by a classic travel writer. The passage, in fact, goes to the heart of Theroux’s personal strategy of writing about trains:  

The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture:  Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar.  The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represents the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character.  At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical. (209)

Though asserting, in effect, the essence of each culture encountered in the great railway bazaar, Theroux’s observation also suggests how a cacophony of cultures might aesthetically interact through the conjoined apparatuses of travel and modernity.  Such is the great railway bazaar, whether integrated or discontinuous.  While often superimposed in the most ruthless historical conditions of oppression, rail systems prove both useful and burdensome to the future of the various communities that require them, albeit with local features specific to those communities.  These features symbolically crystalize the simultaneous contrasts of anthropologically distinct groups in the throes of globalization.  Compared to the hard fact of rapid transportation, the “essential paraphernalia” that Theroux talks about seem perfectly inessential to any outsider, yet each item acts as a kind of signature quality, distinction, or contrast that exemplifies the cultural integrity of its origins.  It is an impure marker, however, and thus points the way to a kind of cultural hybridization that will nonetheless affirm a new standard of integrity in a global multiplex of evolving and interacting communities and individuals (if also, perhaps, extremely disappointing culinary fusions).  

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[1]  Consider CIA operations in Latin America in the 1980s or the Mexican police’s alleged role, more recently, in the kidnapping and murder of hundreds of Mexican college students.

[2]  Needless to say this tradition of self-sacrifice has also been ridiculed and parodied by various dissident writers in Vietnam, most conspicuously in the novels of Duong Thu Huong, the best of which is Novel Without a Name (1995). 

[3]  Such responses are not untypical, as recently evidenced in Okinawa, Japan, in an incident between a transgendered woman and a male U. S. marine that ended in her death. 

Avant-garde Orientalism: Daniel Vukovich, Andy Warhol, and Don Delillo

Excised Discussion of Daniel Vukovich’s China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C. #andywarhold, #dondelillo, #danielvukovich

Daniel Vukovich’s China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C.offers an alternative assessment of the West’s ways of speaking about and understanding the Orient as it applies to the case of China, a country that was never actually colonized by the West but which certainly experienced many of the same depredations due to the West’s imperialist interference and adventurism. Vukovich’s stated aim, then, is to apply postcolonial and decolonization theory to another, more recent version of orientalism being applied to China.  He calls it a new Sinology of “sameness” between China and the West, a sameness of capital growth and political liberalization that China is in the process of realizing (with the West’s “help,” of course), but which is still being diverted or spoiled as a result of the political residua, not of oriental backwardness, but of Maoism, the alternative path of development that interrupted the process of modernization up to 1949 and for which Vukovich advocates.  Thus, while traditional orientalism is premised on an absolute cultural difference between China and the West, the new Sinology/ orientalism involves a telos(or alternatively, “civilizing mission”) of capitalist development, one that must inevitably (so its advocates believe) triumph over Maoism, the real stumbling block to China’s future despite claims that Maoism itself might somehow contribute to that future. 

In Vukovich’s zeal for a more correct appraisal of Maoism, questions of art, form, style, or cultural idiosyncrasy do not seem to matter very much.  It is all window-dressing for use by the new Sinologists and pseudo-pluralists to distract us from a worthier aim:  to show how Maoism, for whatever its flaws,[1]is still key to arriving at a truer, albeit alternative, Chinese future—that of a just, egalitarian society.  Such is the ambitious alternative Vukovich has in mind.  Art and bogus scholarship (like the new orientalism) simply conceal and divert us from these aims while true politics, and Vukovich’s more committed brand of scholarship, reveal and justify their functionality against the aesthetic ploys of the privileged to maintain the injustices of unfettered capitalist development.  Art, artifice, style, form, the new Sinology of “sameness”[2]—unless such notions specifically advocate for a Maoist solution in China, they remain distractions from the political essence of things; to suggest otherwise would be gravely disingenuous or pathetically naïve in Vukovich’s view. 

Avant-garde art, however, engages in a kind of exposure of or engagement in politics, but it does so through the pretense of still being art(though there are obviously many instances, as in the work of the Berlin Dadaists or the Paris Situationists later, when participants explicitly announced their work as politics).  To this extent, one would think Vukovich would agree that such a strategy is in line with a politics of unmasking injustice and reforming society—if perhaps not also at the cost of Tibetan sovereignty or millions of peasants’ lives. On these latter points, however, he still seems to disagree, going to great lengths to explain such things (or explain them away) in a long excursus on The Great Leap Forward.  As a result, one comes away from his study with the sense that his commitments are too rigid to see avant-garde technique as anything but another liberal democratic pretense at social criticism and thus another hindrance rather than aid to exposing the mechanisms of false ideology or to helping shake off oppression.[3]

This predisposition comes out very clearly in Vukovich’s discussion of Don Delillo and Andy Warhol.  While Warhol’s avant-gardism is at first begrudgingly acknowledged to be all about “commodity fetishism”—as Fredric Jameson calls it (Vukovich 91; Postmodernism158)—Vukovich undermines its potential significance by later calling the artist’s mass-produced silkscreens “anti-political” and thus mere simulacra without a meaningful origin.  At the same time (and contradictorily), he gives Warhol’s portrait of Mao a very precise symbolic reading as the “original” of an entire “chain of equivalences” that operate in Don Delillo’s novel Mao II, equivalences that range from Maoism itself to the cult of the “Moonies,” the Iranian Revolution, and various Middle Eastern terror groups (89).  Altogether, these equivalences connote—through their ambiguation in the bourgeois individual’s mind[4]—the persistent, Western horror of crowds and of the politics of the crowd(87-88).  It is a phenomenon that originates, Vukovich explains, in the Western anxiety about oriental masses potentially organizing in a totalitarian way, a way that is perceived as repressing individualism and thus as a threat to the West, at least insofar as Cold War politics characterized the situation.  Vukovich thus unhesitatingly appropriates the avant-garde simulacrum to invoke a modernist origin and to attribute a modernist symbolism to Warhol’s work as it applies to the Orient.  By doing so, he neutralizes the critical distance that avant-garde and postmodern artists place between themselves and modernist sensibility.  Instead, their works are reduced to a negative political strategy that ends up reinforcing conservative, reactionary, or imperialist messages even though they have also been dismissed at other points in his book as merely “anti-political” (putatively non-political and thus merely fatuous).  Unless it’s Maoism, all strategies somehow contribute to Imperialism here.  In this way postmodernism and the Avant-garde are negatively assimilated to Vukovich’s intention of justifying Maoism as China’s only acceptable future in the modern context because it is the only viablepolitical program representing an indigenous, popular aspiration for a genuinely egalitarian society (as against the cultural necessity of forcing capitalist modernity onto the East to enhance the globalist, hegemonic powers that be).  Vukovich performs this critical operation in a few deft strokes (about two pages) as a result of which the visual Avant-garde, represented solely by Warhol’s blue silkscreens of Chairman Mao, is invoked and quickly dispensed with. 

The literary avant-garde, on the other hand, is given more space in an extended discussion of Delillo’s Mao IIwhere the critical strategy of dwarfing a work’s possible significance to irrelevance is done with greater subtlety and care, though it amounts to the same thing in the end:  the pluralism and critical potentiality of the Avant-garde and the postmodern are again reduced to condemnable modernist pieties and practices. As a postmodern author, Delillo can be seen as a literary descendent of the Avant-garde, but instead he is equated almost exclusively with high modernism and thus the new orientalism in ways that often miss the point of Delillo’s representational techniques.[5]  Though Vukovich is correct to show that Mao IIdemonstrates a general commitment to free individual expression and the integrity of such expression, Delillo is still primarily postmodern and pluralist in outlook, not exclusively modernist in rhetoric and thus paranoid in outlook as Vukovich insinuates (87, 90).  The novelist’s prognostications about extremist ideologies in the book are not paranoid, 1950s screeds[6]against collectivity per se but against the kind of politics that exploit collectivities for maximum propagandistic advantage in an exercise of will to power (though one might justifiably blame Delillo for inadequately covering establishment parties and administrations in that indictment). 

That said, Vukovich does at least intuit, vaguely, the possibility that the main characters he castigates do not actually constitute the novel’s most important postmodern elements, elements captured instead in Delillo’s characterizations of other, more decentered, more marginalized figures, about whom Vukovich expresses more ambivalence.  The chief protagonist of the novel is Bill Gray, a fictional author (and thus a sort of “unacknowledged legislator of the world”) who bemoans the loss of his positional superiority to other “leaders” who represent for him the unconscionable manipulation of the modern crowd—the terrorist, the cult leader, the extremist politician, or other media-savvy prestidigitators.  These despotic (and thus “oriental”) types are fictionally substantiated through the characters of Abu Rashid and George Haddad, leader and representative, respectively, of a Maoist Lebanese terror group whom Gray makes contact with in Beirut in an attempt to free a kidnapped Swiss poet.  Though Vukovich focuses his critical sniping at Gray (the modern, literary aesthete) and Haddad (caricaturally depicted by Delillo as a heartless rationalizer of mass death for the cause (94)), he wisely turns his attention away from these conspicuous male figures to the more vestigial one of Karen Janney.  The “arc” of Janney’s character development in the novel is that of a brainwashed member of the Unification Church (the “Moonies”), to her “post-cult” phase as Gray’s mistress, and finally back to a more collective identification with mass politics through what is described as an “affirmation of her desire for oneness if not of her implied ‘mass politics’” (96). One is immediately surprised by the affirmative way in which Vukovich describes Karen’s desire, one that “speaks to a different type of need, the human as a social and community-centered animal on a large, deeply meaningful … scale” (96).  But this quality of poetic seriousness is quickly undermined when Vukovich resorts, disparagingly, to a quote of Jeoffrey Bull, a Delillo scholar who links Karen’s desire for oneness with such ominous-sounding things as “totalism” and “symbolic immortality” (96).  Thus, while a kind of collective humanfeeling is temporarily invoked by Vukovich, the dreamy evocations of “immortality” and the sinister ones of “totalitarianism” quickly reduce the fictional device of a sympathetic, socially-responsive character to a level of a romantic idealism or pathological extremism and thus, again, to irrelevance in Vukovich’s view:  another gesture, another distraction that he can dismiss as a pretense at plurality unlike the more effective initiatives he identifies with Maoism and “mass”-oriented ideologies, initiatives he believes have a more genuinely pluralistic potential. Because Bull has framed Karen’s sentiments as a form of “spirituality,” Vukovich imputes a similar impulse to Delillo and can therefore dismiss Karen’s “desire and compassion” as something “depoliticized” or as “false consciousness” (96).  Such false consciousness derives, he insists, from a Cold War, cultural-studies tradition of reading Russian critic Bakhtin in terms of a liberalized “heteroglossia” of speech rather than in a way that conforms to what Timothy Brennan calls Bakhtin’s unequivocal support for the lowest kinds of speech:  “an affirmation of ordinary, crude, unruly speech, populist rebellion, and mass, socialist politics” (Brennan qtd. in Vukovich, 96).  It’s a remarkably dexterous critical performance but still seems stretched, a deliberate recourse to alternative texts to avoid reading Delillo more explicitly and thus to avoid attributing any genuinely pluralist impulse to him but rather to discredit any evidence suggesting such an impulse.  He thus reaffirms what seems an unshakable incapacity on the part of certain materialist critics to recognize experiments of form or genre as genuinely contributing to the critique of modernity, a critique the materialists have presumably “cornered” in theoretical terms, thus invalidating anything else. 

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[1]One could number them in the tens of millions.

[2]Sadly, this “sameness” seems to be happening in reverse these days with an American President (Trump) vying with totalitarian heads of state like Xu to be more autocratic and less democratic than ever before (even if Mao himself gave an excellent example of just how well one might fulfill such an impulse). 

[3]I guess hundreds of thousands, even millions, of deaths constitute a more accurate criterion for what counts as a genuine politics for Vukovich. 

[4]As Vukovich notes, Spivak calls this “an assimilation of the Other through non-recognition” (89).

[5]Though Vukovich also says, apropos of Delillo’s “new orientalist” agenda, that “To be fair, Mao II sees this as a universal, not explicitly “Oriental” Geistand problem…” (90).  One has to love this apparent concession to critical decency.   

[6]Vukovich seems never to have seen Ihab Hassan’s famous columnar lists of competing modern and postmodern concepts. As a result he associates paranoia with the postmodern, while Hassan clearly and persuasively associates it with the modern, in contradistinction to postmodern schizophrenia.  See Hassan’s “The Concept of Postmodernism.” 

Avant-garde Orientalism: Excised portion of India chapter

Below are two paragraphs from the original conclusion of Chapter 6 on European and North American writers on India, paragraphs that had to be cut before the book went to print.  They briefly discuss the writers and poets who are the focus of this chapter: Frederic Prokosch, Henri Michaux, Octavio Paz, and Allen Ginsberg.  #allenginsberg #octaviopaz #henrimichaux #fredericprokosch #avantgardeorientalism 

In each of the works examined, certain features and superficies of India are made to seem analogous to avant-garde strategies of deregulating the human impulse toward ποιειν (i.e., “making” or creative fabrication) which constitutes the process of knowing and thus of self-definition. Though an avant-gardist’s self-justificatory reflexes typically interpret his deliberately defective creations as newer, more pertinent forms of art for a new world in which the self still strives to understand what it is, he also recognizes the subtle modes of dehumanization that are risked in the process of aestheticization.  The avant-gardist therefore strives to short-circuit or disorganize such modes through subversion and invention. In this way a certain space or gap is opened by which Otherness can affirm its difference or even opposition, can undertake an alternative deciphering of signs to reveal the simultaneous contrasts inherent to creative production.  In the aporia of avant-garde contradiction and self-dismantling a plausible reciprocity is staked out at the borders of mutual human frailties and sensitivities.  But aggression, too, is required to provoke a new kind of honesty and to appeal to diverse or even divergent sensibilities, to younger bodies, to open minds.  As such, the avant-garde interpreter’s representational dysfunction both captivates and mobilizes the participant Other to assume a different kind of agency in the production and consumption of poetic signs.  

            As Prokosch’s novel of imaginary travel suggests, the travel genre itself is a kind of adumbration of this process, since automatic displacement is the foundational principle of the work, undermining expectations insofar as classic novels, no matter how encompassing, must initiate and finally conclude a unified action.  Though regularly interrupted by encounters that imply simple digression and complication of a continuous journey, the journey itself never fully materializes in Prokosch’s novel.  It is always truncated, discontinued by the requirement to move sideways, placing the traveler in a perpetual nowhere between self and Other, beginning and end.  The end itself is in medias res.  Michaux, on the other hand, seems to engage in a very deliberate, precise act of dismemberment—the “Other” sliced into semiotic pieces—only to find that he has cannibalized himself in an act of barbaric self-exhibitionism.  Both Paz and Ginsberg obsessively, voyeuristically interrogate Indian poverty, chaos, and filth in a poetic act of reclamation, sublimation and hoped-for transcendence.  Yet both seem caught up in an erotics of bodily and communal expulsion, of rotting flesh and sediments of decay being recuperated with a kind of love.  Lepers and the ashes of the dead become indices of a kind of verbal self-immolation, the spiritual efficacy of which seems suspect if also effective as an exercise in total creative immersion.  

Avant-garde Orientalism: Lawrence Durrell, Marguerite Duras

Two minor cuts from the final edition of Avant-garde Orientalism, the first from the section on Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet in the "Egypt and Palestine" chapter; the second from the Duras/Genet section in "The Literary Genealogy of Avant-garde Orientalism" chapter.  #avantgardeorientalism, #lawrencedurrell, #margueriteduras

On Durrell:  'In Balthazar this formula is vividly illustrated in the case of Scobie, a sort of farcical policeman-spy in the novel with many colonial adventures to recount and exotic collectibles to display.  With years of experience to draw on, Scobie has cultivated an indulgent attitude toward his Egyptian charges in a way that echoes some of [Jean] Cocteau’s borrowed sentiments:  “You see the Egyptians are marvelous, old man.  Kindly.  They know me well.  From some points of view, they might look like felons, old man, but felons in a state of grace, that’s what I always say.  They make allowances for each other” (35).  Of course, when Scobie deviates from predictable behaviors to walk Alexandria’s streets wearing a dress and his “Dolly Varden,” he is chased away by the locals with obvious malice, only to be beaten to death later by some French sailors.  In short, the moment any shift from the official pattern is attempted and standard orientalist warnings are ignored, the cultural tolerance that supposedly comes with imperial enforcement is quickly shattered.  The primitive instincts of the native Others erupt in a way that suggests an automatic, perhaps genetic predisposition supposedly missing in the exemplary Westerner, if not in the West’s more marginal cases (i.e., the sailors, workers, derelicts, and others of lower station who don’t matter).  At the same time, Durrell never hints that the local populace might be using their knowledge of Scobie’s proclivities to harass him for actions performed in his official capacity as director of municipal police.  But in a sense, Scobie is no less a defective Westerner than the French sailors who kill him.  They are not the sort of Europeans whose cultural integrity entitles them to rule here [in Egypt].' 

On Duras:  'Finally, in echoing the lepers, the Vice-Consul’s screams outside the French delegation reveal his liminal relation to both communities—communities with an iconic, [...] dominant female at the center, but one who is no less heterogeneous to those communities than the Vice-Consul is. [25]  Whilst serving as allegorical fulcrum between beggar woman and ambassador’s wife, the Vice-Consul represents the gulf of desire and regret between them, from whence to face one or the other shore can lead only to bullets or to screams.  All three, then, negatively frame the void at the center of colonialism.'

25.  Indeed, one reviewer of Duras’s books finds mitigating factors to explain the Vice-Consul’s conduct:  “Pour retrouver l’inspiration du Vice-consul, c’est au scenario de Hiroshima, Mon Amour, qu’il faut retourner. Dans le Vice-consul, l’holocauste atomique est remplacée par la présence obsédante de la faim et de la misère, catastrophe qui, cette fois, s’abat sur tout un continent.  Hiroshima deviant l’Indochine et l’Inde, Calcutta et Lahore où le vice-consul de France tirait sur les mendiant lépreux parce qu’il ne pouvait plus supporter la souffrance du monde; au ‘Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima.  Rien’ correspond ‘On ne peut pas comprendre Lahore de quelque façon qu’on s’y prenne.’” Jean V. Alter’s review of Duras’s Le Vice-consul in The French Review 40.4 (February 1967): 585-587.  

Avant-garde Orientalism: Jean Genet

Here is a paragraph--in fact, a single sentence--from the original manuscript of the "Egypt and Palestine" chapter of Avant-garde Orientalism, a paragraph that had to be cut before publication for lack of space. It focuses on some of the friends and associates of Jean Genet during his time with the fedayeen of Yasir Arafat's Fatah Movement.  The section on Genet is entitled "Saint Genet Among the Lions," invoking Jean-Paul Sartre's moniker for the writer.  #avantgardeorientalism, #jeangenet, #palestine, #thepersonalreview  

'Much of Genet's book attempts to memorialize the various personages he encountered or who aided him in his efforts to understand the Palestinians, from the "young lions" to various leaders who either survived or died; from the rich Palestinian familes who supported liberation to the ones who preempted it by selling their lands to the Jews; from anomalous volunteers to heroic doctors, such as the Cuban doctor Alfredo, who thought that perhaps by dying in Jordan he might be able to change his nationality to Palestinian; from Abu Omar, [1] who had been a student of Henry Kissinger's in America but who later thwarted the first wave of Syrian tanks moving into Lebanon against the PLO only to be caught, tortured and executed by the Syrians later, to the poet Khaled Abu Khaled, who first clued Genet in to the murderous animosity between Palestinians and Jordanians in the early 1970s, to Dr. Mahjoub, founder of the Egyptian Communist Party (White 609); from Ali whom Genet loved, to Mubarak, the Sudanese volunteer soldier to whom Genet was attracted because of their shared difference from the other fedayeen and their mutual recognition as component parts of a sexual algebra they couldn't solve; and finally, again, from Hamza, whom Genet eventually learned was living in Germany after escaping the Syrians who had captured and tortured him, to Hamza's mother with whom Genet was briefly reunited in 1984 and who continued to live in Jordan in the house where they had first met.'

1. As Edward Said reports, Abu Omar was the Palestinian movement name for Hanna Mikhail, a contemporary and friend of Said's who attended graduate school at Harvard at the exact same time as he, only in Middle Eastern Studies instead of comparative literature.  He also says that Hanna was committed to Arab nationalism and more at home than Said in the Arab world, actually giving up a good teaching post at the University of Washington to join the Palestinian revolution.

Avant-garde Orientalism: An Introduction, #avantgardeorientalism

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

Today I’m going to talk about my new book Avant-garde Orientalism: The Eastern ‘Other’ in Twentieth-Century Travel Narrative and Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan).  In doing so I’ll be discussing my aims and methods for bringing together two very different topics of study--Orientalism and the Avant-garde--topics that seem unrelated if not antagonistic to each other.

What is the Avant-garde and What is Orientalism?

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 19^th Century (Poggioli).  It is embraced by the more youthful and innovative artists and poets in the 20^th 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). 

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 19^th-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 19^th-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.)  

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 19^th and early 20^th 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-

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). 

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 20^th 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 

Hunt, "The Awakening Conscience

 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 19^th-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. 

Lyubov Popova, Constructivist design

What’s the Relationship between the Avant-garde, the Modern, and the Postmodern?

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, 20^th-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

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).

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

  

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[i] From Daniele Conversi, “Art, Nationalism and War: Political Futurism in Italy (1909 - 1944)."  Sociology Compass 3.1 (2009): 92 - 117.