I
recently finished reading ¨Orientalism¨ by the Palestinian scholar
Edward Said. This book is an examination of European attitudes toward
the East, from Arabia to China, but mostly centring on the Arab
world. To summarize the work in a phrase is difficult but ¨Michel
Foucault goes East¨ might be close enough to give an idea.
Regardless of what you might think of Foucault´s ideas or Said´s
wisdom in using them, Said knows his business. He seems to have read
just about every book on the subject in existence. He treats many in
detail and I´d like to focus here on one in particular, a travelogue
that he mentions in passing along with more famous authors such as
Mark Twain whose ¨Innocents Abroad¨ is often cited these days for a
passage that mentions (pre-zionist) Palestine as an empty wasteland,
and Richard Burton, the ¨1001 Nights¨ translator and adventurer
who, disguised as a Pashtun, smuggled himself into Mecca. What struck
my interest in Said´s list of titles however, was a travelogue by
William Makepeace Thackeray. Said said it was ¨moderately amusing,¨
which is moderately high praise, coming from him.
The
book in question is called ¨Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to
Grand Cairo¨ and was published in 1845 after Thackeray´s two month
journey which touched off in several ports on the Iberian peninsula,
some islands in the Mediterranean, Greece, Turkey, Palestine,
finally ending at the summit of the great pyramid of Giza. It appeared
not long after Thackeray´s novel about the rascally Barry Lyndon,
and just a few years before his most famous work, ¨Vanity Fair,¨
about the even rascalier Becky Sharp.
I
only got an idea about the contents of the book after I went to my
computer and searched around a bit. There was no information on the
book beyond a mention of its title, author and year of publication. I
was a little surprised as Said´s book is well known, and with his
reference to the book in a positive light, slight as it was, I would
have thought it would have attracted more attention to itself. There
was nothing in Wikipedia, an oversight I might try to correct, but
fairly quickly my search led me to a remarkable page which allowed me with the click of a mouse to download the book in its entirety. In
several different formats. The internet has such a marvelous
potential to make so much available with such ease at so little cost.
I was only the 80th person to avail myself of this work. The
quality of the scan is not perfect. Little mistakes abound and there
are one or two places where the thread of meaning is lost. Here´s an
example of what must be the worst:
The terrace Wiore tlie palace was similarly en-dtvacheil U{H»n by these wi^tched habitations. A fii^w luilUons. Judiciously e:!cpended
I
should stress this was the exception. Still, I wonder whether these
errors spring from a rushed job at scanning, old and crusty source
material, or perhaps modern rendering algorithms aren´t suited to
archaic fonts and type faces. In any case, the book is there for the
taking, and with a few exceptions, easy to read.
Is
it worth the read? Yes and no. Thackeray is no expert on the areas he
visits; he is a tourist, has more interest in the journey itself and
praising the steam ship, the captain and crew, and above all the
company which, and hats off to Thackeray´s frankness here, provided
him with a free passage. The actual destinations are of secondary
importance to him. He frames all that comes before him with the
expectations of one who never leaves home, nor has any desire to.
This is not to fault Thackeray. He plays the part of the tourist with
honesty and wit. He gives us as good an illustration of the tourist´s
mind as any. For example, he tells the story of his early morning
visit to St. Roch cathedral in Lisbon to see the famous mosaics.
(They still draw tourists today.) He arrives only to find the curator
still in bed. Instead of waiting, he leaves, doubly pleased with
himself. Pleased with his making the effort, and pleased that he is
spared trouble of actually seeing and taking in the mosaics.
Thackeray
reflects much of the prejudices of his times: the cheapness of the
Jews, the horrid sensuality of the Arabs, the obsessing over the
different shades of skin in each port, the happy black people, the
immanent decline of Islam, and the low value placed on life in
general. If Thackeray didn´t see anything directly to back these
sorts of assertions, he has plenty of lurid second-hand stories to
tell us. All this conforms to Said´s thesis in ¨Orientalism,¨ that
the West thinks of the East as the embodiment of the ¨other,¨
derived from some kind of platonic counterpart to the West. It´s not
at all difficult to see this same conception of the East in popular
culture today. Thackeray still manages to surprise us. The difference
between how he views Greece and Turkey couldn´t be more stark. Of
Greece, he says ¨the shabbiness of this place actually beats
Ireland, and that is a strong word.¨ With Turkey, despite his
reservations over the despotic Pasha, he raves over the architecture,
the food, the women, the navy, and what may bear the most
significance, a detailed account of his visit to a Turkish bath.
Bathing
and the importance of hygiene in the 1840s were not what they are
today. In the previous century baths were taken maybe once a year,
and the hygienic practices that were followed were dubious. Settlers
from Europe amused native Americans by their habit of pulling a clean
handkerchief from their pocket, blowing their nose into it and
carefully refolding the hankie and replacing it as though it
contained something precious. Bathing in Thackeray´s time was
something relatively new, good not just for hygiene, but cure for
illnesses, mental and physical, and even as a punishment for the
wrong doer. It was Thackeray, by the way, who coined the term ´the great unwashed´ to refer to the common people. Wikipedia tell us that it was David Urquhart who
introduced the Turkish bath to England in 1850, but Thackeray beat
him by 5 years, at least on paper. The mystery and indulgence of the
Turkish bath is clearly the highlight of his travels.
Perhaps
another contribution Thackeray makes, this time to the world of
literature, is a proto-type for the stock figure of the exert expat
Englishman gone native. In this case, he appears late in the book, in
Cairo. His name is ¨J,¨ an old school friend of Thackeray´s, and
expert on all things Cairene. Though English to the core, he has
adopted local dress, customs and mannerisms. He even enjoys the
attentions of his own concubine whom Thackeray is delicate enough to
refer to as an attractive and seemingly available ¨cook.¨ Such
characters are with us today and can be found in exotically-localed
works like the James Bond films. They tend to be dispensable and can
be forgotten once they´ve made themselves useful by giving the hero
some bit of information. The character Henderson in the Bond film,
¨You Only Live Twice¨ is a prefect example. He provides us with a
little comic relief, a show case for comfortable exoticism, and to
Bond he provides a name, enabling the plot to keep rolling along,
and, this accomplished, he is promptly murdered by a gang of ninjas. Thackeray´s ¨J¨ is spared the fate of a murder at the hands of marauding ninjas but is nevertheless forgotten once he leaves Cairo.
Thackeray
deserves praise for the laudable religious tolerance he shows. In his
time, religious tolerance was not an Englishman´s strong suit. For
example, the conversion novel was a popular genre of English fiction.
A young spiritually starved Jewish girl escapes from the clutches of
the grasping materialistic men who surround her. She meets a fine
young Christian man, she converts, they marry and live happily ever
after. Thackeray himself contributed to the genre, and as might be
expected, he has not much good to say of non-Christian faiths or
those who follow them. To be fair though, not much bad is said of
them either, and Thackeray bears them no special animosity. He also
has the ability to admire female beauty wherever and however it
presents itself. His harshest words are reserved for the Christians
who congregate in the holy land around Bethlehem. There´s the
meddling religious crackpot of an American consul, the Armenians, the
Catholics and the Greek Orthodox, all up to their necks in sectarian
squabbles. Thackeray leaves the holy land in a disappointed and
bitter mood. The trip between the port town of Jaffa (that´s Tel
Aviv today) and Bethlehem is noteworthy. It´s the wildest part of
the journey and because of the risk of attack from brigands, the
party is obliged to travel on horseback in a convoy, escorted by an
Arab bodyguard, armed to the teeth and dressed to the nines in
flowing robes, whom Thackeray romanticizes shamelessly.
The
book ends in Cairo with a remarkable scene on a Nile river boat
where, he tells of his first sighting of the pyramids:
¨The distances, which had been grey, were now clothed in purple; and the broad stream was illuminated. As the sun rose higher, the morning blush faded away; the sky was cloudless and pale, and the river and the surrounding landscape were dazzlingly clear. Looking ahead in an hour or two, we saw the Pyramids. Fancy my sensations, dear M – two big ones and a little one!!! There they lay, rosy and solemn in the distance, - those old, majestical, mystical, familiar edifices. Several of us tried to be impressed; but breakfast supervening, a rush was made at the coffee and cold pies, and the sentiment of awe was lost in the scramble for victuals.¨
Thackeray
notices his companions are similarly unimpressed and goes on to
wonder how ´our organs of veneration have become so withered.´ It´s
an odd note to end on, because surely, if the tourist ponders the
health of these organs, then he should realize that it´s the
traveller on a religious pilgrimage whose veneration is strongest. The only
pilgrims he comes across in the journey, however, are some Jews bound
for Jerusalem and nobody else in the book is treated to such a verbal
drubbing as these fellow passengers. Perhaps there´s a happy medium
between the coffee scrambler approaching the pyramids and the single minded pilgrim but
Thackeray doesn´t pursue these questions.
Notes
on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo has its points of interest,
especially for the Thackeray compleatist, the Orientalist, the
historian, the traveller or the tourist. Thackeray makes an amusing
and observant travel companion but thankfully, he leaves us at Cairo,
not insisting we accompany him all the way back to Cornhill.
