Reading Arabia: British Orientalism in the Age of Mass Publication, 1880-1930

By Andrew C. Long

Reading Arabia traces the evolving tradition of British Orientalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining the role of mass print culture in constructing the British public’s perception of "Arabia." Long brings together close readings and ideological analyses of primary texts by Richard Burton, Charles Doughty, Robert Cunninghame Graham, Marmaduke Pickthall, and T. E. Lawrence, along with pamphlets, journalism and commentary, silent films, stage spectacles, and travel literature. Through these texts, Long examines the fantasy of the Orient and its constitutive function. Building on the pioneering work of Edward Said, Reading Arabia looks beyond foreign policy debates and issues of human rights to show how British Orientalism is rooted in words and phrases of a popular culture that shaped the way the public read and imagined the Arab world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9780815652328

Book preview

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3323-5 (cloth)978-0-8156-5232-8 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Long, Andrew C.

Reading Arabia : British Orientalism in the age of mass publication, 1880–1930 / Andrew C. Long.

pages cm. — (Contemporary issues in the Middle East)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8156-3323-5 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-8156-5232-8 (ebook) 1. Great Britain—Relations—Arab countries. 2. Arab countries—Relations—Great Britain. 3. Arab countries—Foreign public opinion, British. 4. Orientalism—Great Britain—History. 5. Arabs in popular culture—Great Britain—History. 6. Arabs in mass media. 7. British literature—History and criticism. 8. Arabs in literature. 9. Fantasy in literature. 10. Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature. I. Title.

DS63.2.G7L66 2014

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Lounes and Tassadit

Andrew C. Long currently teaches in the Department of Cultural Studies at the Claremont Graduate University. He taught at the City University of New York and the American University of Beirut before moving to southern California. He has published essays on topics including modern writers and texts, conspiracy and informing, the pamphleteer, and politics and culture in the modern Middle East.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Britain at the Fin de Siècle and the Orientalist Unconscious

1. The Two Tangents of British Orientalism

Burton and Doughty, Dandy and Prophet in the 1880s

2. Khartoum Nightmare

Popular Literature of the British Campaign in the Sudan

3. A Refusal and a Traversal

Robert Cunninghame Graham’s Engagement with Orientalism in Mogreb-el-Acksa

4. Orientalism from Within and Without

Marmaduke Pickthall

5. The Arabist as Abject Modern

T. E. Lawrence

Conclusion

How to Read the Orientalist Archive

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Richard Francis Burton

2. Robert Cunninghame Graham

3. Marmaduke Pickthall

4. T. E. Lawrence [identity of subject disputed]

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN over the course of a rough period in my life, in both a personal and professional sense, though it was always a resource of hope. I especially enjoyed the research process, which admittedly was a kind of escape as I was lost in thought in various libraries and archives, working with compelling documents and manuscripts. Still, writing this book also involved that special pleasure of sharing something new and offering what I believe are original insights about an important feature of modern and contemporary world culture: the place of the fantasy of the Orient in everyday life and mass culture, especially in mass-produced print culture.

I would never have completed the manuscript without support from many people who read the initial book proposal or helped me publish early versions of two of the book chapters. This group includes Eric Hooglund, Tony Crowley, Saree Makdisi, Robert Myers, and my copy editor and friend Steve Holtje. From the beginning to the end of this process Granville Ganter read drafts and offered his insights, a special effort that was crucial for completion of the book, and for which I am forever grateful. Others who always offered support and patiently listened to my complaints include my friend and colleague, Henry Krips, and my family, Sarah Ann Long, James Long, and Allen Long. My colleagues and friends from Lebanon provided support and critical insight, a group that includes Nisrine Chahine, Asma en Nasser, Romy Lynn Attieh, Huda Fakhreddine, Tamer Amin, Lina Choueiri, Nisrine Sfeir, Gillian Piggott, and John Wall. In the early stages I was assisted by two most intelligent and engaged graduate assistants at the American University of Beirut, Rania el Turk and Katia Aranji, and I am very grateful for their assistance and friendship. Of course the support of Syracuse University Press and especially Mary Selden Evans and Deanna McCay was critical, while Kay Steinmetz gave me the all-necessary final editorial push. I am also grateful to the Huntington Library for a 2007 summer fellowship and to the Ahmanson Reading Room staff, as well as to Alan Jutzi, who helped me with rare source material about and by Hall Caine, Leonard Smithers, Richard Burton, and T. E. Lawrence. Of course, no part of this project would have been possible without the Aïtels: Fazia, Tassadit, and Lounes.

Introduction

Britain at the Fin de Siècle and the Orientalist Unconscious

Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with our world.

—Edward Said, Orientalism

THIS BOOK IS A STUDY of the Middle East—specifically, the portrayal of the Arab world in the British cultural imaginary during the period 1880–1930. I focus on the depictions of this time and place through close readings of work by Captain Richard Francis Burton, Charles Montagu Doughty, Robert Cunninghame Graham, Marmaduke Pickthall, and T. E. Lawrence. All of these writers were writer-adventurers who built their popular reputations in good part through writing about the Near East and North Africa. Even today many of these texts are still widely read and revered as objective reportage, despite Edward Said’s influential critique of Orientalism and the subsequent work of countless postcolonial critics. Reading Arabia addresses the resilience of Orientalism and asks a key question: Why must we still read about the Near East and North Africa—the Arab Muslim world—in certain ways? To answer this query, I examine these ways of reading and finally point to what I identify and refer to as the constitutive fantasy of the Orient.

Most important is the constitutive function of the Oriental fantasy for the formation and function of British society in modern times, that is, the late nineteenth century through the present. As I will elaborate shortly, the Oriental fantasy is intertwined with the commodity culture—the consumer economy—of the late Empire. This commodity culture includes packaged goods, mass entertainment, new forms of everyday life, and packaged words—texts ready for mass consumption by both young people and adults. The Orient, then, is a subject of discourse and also a driving force for fantasies of the fin de siècle period. These fantasies (representations of Sultans and harems, for example) are to an extent a key component in the desire structure that provides the impetus and basis upon which commodities/consumables are both exchanged and consumed. The function of this desire structure served to make these fantasies integral to daily life in modern Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and indeed, even continuing into the present.

While some of the preceding discussion may seem contentious, I maintain these are points worth pursuing. However, in this book I have chosen to concentrate for the most part on literary texts and print culture. I have focused on a select group of writers and texts to exemplify the form and function of the fantasy in a literary context, and then I will show how the fantasy warped and mediated the life struggle of each writer. Yet there is more, as these writers were working within a context of great political and cultural change, specifically within a literary tradition that had hitherto been the purview of an informed elite. Though some of these writers were part of the same elite and some were not, all nonetheless found themselves in the midst of a cultural sea change that affected their literary idiom, Orientalism, and their métier, that of the professional writer. This shift also swept each of them into a new life and set of life experiences as cultural icons.

Their respective struggles with the fantasy of the Orient became all the more poignant and important as their work, which involved the word as commodity and fundamental form of the fantasy of the Orient in mass culture, gained a new priority with regard to the marketing of the British Empire and its colonies. Simply put, while these texts are commodities—popular fiction and textuality as a commodity form—they are also linked to a new market of more traditional commodity forms. These commodities, which we now know as the material forms of mass culture, include packaged food and sweets, household goods, tobacco products, entertainment (such as songs and films), and travel. I will revisit the Oriental archive to locate the place and formative function of these texts in the consumerist milieu of the 1880–1930 period.

The importance of this effort can be viewed in the context of how the fantasy of the Orient is still with us, albeit in various guises, and is now part of everyday life in the West. And so, with recourse to the work of Jacques Lacan and his contemporary interpreter (and theorist in his own right) Slavoj Žižek, I will trace and then analyze the fantasy of the Orient as part of the Western political unconscious and also as a feature of everyday life. This effort mediates each of the following chapters in different ways, but it is the primary objective that theoretically binds the book as a whole.

Postcolonialism and the Critique of Everyday Life

Clearly this project sits squarely within postcolonial studies, at least as a critical genealogy of the colonial imaginary, though there is an important difference. I will return to the relationship between Reading Arabia and postcolonial studies in the conclusion. But for now we should simply consider that while Orientalism certainly overlaps with this area of study, and Edward Said’s work is a part of the canon of postcolonial studies, the new wrinkle is that the truth of the people and cultures of North Africa and the Near East is not the stake, contrary to some iterations of this area of critical scholarship. Moreover, perhaps this truth might be so shrouded or blocked out by fantasy as to make it unknowable, even necessarily unknowable, to the extent that this truth has a constitutive function in tandem with a kind of political unconscious that decisively mediates the way we have formed our respective societies in Britain and the United States. So, with regard to Said’s statement in the epigraph that opens this chapter, the study of British Orientalism has as much to do with British cultural studies and literary modernism, our world, as with Middle Eastern and postcolonial studies.

The everydayness of interest here is just that, the culture of everyday life in modern times. This includes the routines of mass-produced culture (e.g., commuting, eating, and working) that make the known trajectory of middle- and working-class life itself seem to be a set of natural expectations—indeed, the trajectory of life as such.¹ This culture, a commodity culture, made its full appearance in the 1880s and in new forms that have persisted to this day. These forms are a key component of globalization as an economic and political system and a homogenous (and homogenizing) form of culture.

Still, and staying with Said and his emphasis on literature, everyday life entails a crucial textual hinge: literally, the printed word that makes the attendant material culture possible and knowable. This last point cannot be emphasized too much, and it is just what this book is about—popular texts that demonstrate and articulate the form and function of the Oriental fantasy and its relationship to the modern world in Britain and the West.

A Perambulation Full of Eastern Promise

The period I focus on here, the 1880s through the 1930s, was the moment in Britain when commodity culture blossomed, bringing a new world of mass-produced consumables of every size, shape, and form, as well as new functions such as the typewriter. Moreover, the role of literature as a mass-produced commodity is critical to the discussion here, while the place of the fantasy of the Orient, as a fantasy within the printed word, is paramount.

In many ways, however, this moment or epoch was felt, or intuited, and not ostensibly connected to intellectual processes such as those of the conscious mind, not to mention language and the printed word. If language is an unreliable mediator, then it seems that commodity culture has made an end run around it with a direct appeal to the consuming subject. It is as though this culture entered the bloodstream of the unconscious through the body, coupled with forbidden ideas and fantasies of sensual indulgence and wrapped in packaging that allows these fantasies to slip past the gates of repression or, rather, the dominant conceptions of Victorian and Edwardian propriety and culture. A good deal of this new commodity culture was related to the Near East and North Africa. Examples of these types of commodities include Egyptian cotton; perhaps, in later decades, petroleum; political association, such as the Arabi uprising of 1879–1882, led by Colonel Ahmed Arabi in opposition to European influence; or the place of the fantasy of the Orient in British (and American) consumer culture.

It is then odd to shift from the text to the street—from the material word to the imaginary and ineffable. But we might best grasp the fantasy of the Orient with a fictitious walking tour of London, the capital of the Empire, the metropole of metropoles, as well as other English cities of the period.² I have examined photographs, largely street scenes, in major collections accessible online, such as those of the London Transport Museum and the W H Smith newsagent kiosk chain. This tour will be an apt way to start looking for the truth of British Orientalism precisely because its legacy in scholarship and discourse about the Arab world today is not rooted in the streets of Cairo and Damascus. Indeed, whatever truth we might discover in a similar exercise, looking at photographs from the Bonfils studios, for example, is irrelevant. The fantasy that underpins British Orientalism, which is still operative today, was born in the cities of Great Britain as a mass-cultural phenomenon. The truth of the Middle East does not matter; it is the fantasy of the Orient that rules the day, even now.

If we crossed Trafalgar Square in 1900, we could not help but notice a statue of General Charles Gordon (or Chinese Gordon as he was popularly known after his success as a commander in China in the 1860s), a recently fallen and much-revered hero of the Empire.³ Gordon was a British consul to the Sudan during the Mahdist uprising of the 1880s. He was martyred when the fortifications of Khartoum were breached and the Mahdi Army entered the city and slaughtered its citizenry. According to legend, Gordon was killed on the stairs of the Consul’s Palace and promptly beheaded. His death caused great consternation across the Empire, and Queen Victoria herself expressed outrage and upset at his death. Boys clubs, such as the newly formed Boy Scouts, advertised in boys’ magazines in order to raise funds for memorials in Gordon’s honor. When Khartoum was eventually retaken, nearly twenty years later, a boys’ college was founded in his honor, the Gordon College of Khartoum.

Near this somber, sentimental monument to a martyr of the Empire in Trafalgar Square, we might notice billboards and signs painted on the sides of buildings. Or perhaps we might also see advertisements attached to the sides of buses (then powered by steam) or similar placards affixed to newsstands in the railway and underground stations. These advertisement boards would champion a range of commodities, such as soap, especially Pears soap; Eno’s Fruit Salts (with a slogan proclaiming How Kandahar was won); and, most of all, packaged food, edibles, and prepared drinks.⁴ We might see an ad for Bovril, a most British beverage, or perhaps for Horlicks, and a whole range of milk-based offerings from Nestlé. The latter would hawk their goods with plain block signs featuring mainly text and few images. Others would use images, though usually graphics rather than photographs. In Imperial Leather Anne McClintock makes much of these ads and their connection to the Empire, and she points to Pears soap ads in particular. Janice Boddy takes the case further with a trenchant analysis of these Pears soap ads and their connection to the Anglo-Egyptian War in the Sudan, also known as General Gordon’s War.⁵ Both scholars are right insofar as they show the relationship between an emergent commodity culture—a new world of packaged goods and mass consumption—and Empire. But they do not pursue the point further to explore the relationship between the commodity—packaged goods produced, distributed, and consumed under the aegis of imperial and global finance capitalism-and the attendant fantasy of Africa and the Near East.

In his book London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis, Jonathan Schneer writes about a truly imperial city where all the politics of the Empire were active, whether as a matter of administration or even resistance. Regarding the latter, he devotes chapters to resistance movements in India and Africa. He also comments on the commercial aspect of the Empire and speculates:

Workers in Eno’s Fruit Salts perhaps took pride in manufacturing The antiseptics of Empire, as a typical advertisement put it. The employees of Bovril, a company which produced beef extract thought to contain health promoting qualities and which was given therefore to soldiers wounded in South Africa, might preen themselves on upholding the British flag and contributing to the success of British valour.⁶

He continues with a similar comment about Monkey Soap and its advertising slogan’s reference to scouring Boers from Africa. But he does not note that a good deal of these advertisements made reference to the Near East in some manner or to the Arab world in general. What is remarkable but unremarked on is just how central the Arab world is to this new commodity culture, which marks a new shift in global capitalism and its imperial guise.

Fry’s Cocoa was a company located in the city of Bristol to the south and west of London, based near the docks that were the former eighteenth-century port of departure for British slave ships headed to the Americas—a legacy that survives in street names such as Blackboy Hill and White Ladies Road. The ships also brought back rum and tobacco (the Wills family and their cigarette brand were Bristol-based) as part of what Paul Gilroy identifies as a triangle of exchange, that is the Black Atlantic slave trade. Indeed, even in the late nineteenth century Fry’s was advertising its cocoa products across the country with ads that featured a young African boy holding a cup of hot chocolate out to an unseen colonial master, announcing, Cocoa Sah!

The use of the Empire in Fry’s ad campaign is obvious. But even more striking (though less horrifying) are the advertisements used to market of one of its other sweet consumables, first marketed in 1914: Fry’s Turkish Delight. This confection entails a chocolate coating around rose-colored Lokum, which came packaged in a purple foil wrapper bearing the sales slogan Full of Eastern Promise. What we should note here is that the exotic references in many of these advertisements, whether on ad boards or packaging, are connected to goods relating to the body. The ads refer to smelling nice, health and cleanliness, or an intense sugar burst. Here, then, is something radical and new, and most combustible in all senses. A simple combination of text and a catchy slogan invoke an idea suggesting something exotic and sensual in a far-off land, yet available here and now in a shiny purple wrapper.

If we stay in Bristol and travel to the working-class industrial outskirts of Eastville, we might see the stadium where the newly formed football team plays (though they moved nearby to a new stadium later in the twentieth century): the (Bristol) Black Arabs, founded in 1883. The team was formed in the year of the Anglo-Egyptian War and so is connected by inference to Gordon’s martyrdom. The team name was taken from a nearby rugby team, while black referred to the jersey color (another rugby team, the Saracens, still plays under this team name today). The Bristol Rovers, as they are now known, remain an active club, though they are now nicknamed the Pirates—also an oblique reference to the Bristol docks, and the setting for the opening of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in a pub that is still functioning, Llandoger Trow—and plays in the English Football Association’s League Two. Though the club is not particularly successful on the pitch, it has a loyal fan base, of which one influential group is known as the Black Arabs. On the 125th anniversary of the club in 2008, and for one game, the Bristol Rovers wore the Black Arabs’ kit, which is still available for purchase. It is not particularly lavish, despite the exotic promise of the name, and amounts to a black jersey with a yellow diagonal stripe or sash.

If we move to the south and the east, to the city of Portsmouth, we might see emblazoned on storefronts and in public places the insignia of the football club of that city, a multipointed gold star above a horizontal crescent moon reminiscent of a slightly turned Turkish or Algerian flag. The imagery is clearly Islamic in reference, and it is associated with the charter for the city. The football club can be traced to Richard I (the crusader king known as the Coeur de Leon), though it is not surprising that, like the Bristol Rovers, the club was founded in 1898, the year Kitchener annihilated the Mahdi Army of the Sudanese Caliphate at Omdurman, a battle that was over in a matter of hours and featured heavy use of Gatling and Maxim guns against men armed with spears.

Araby, or the Fantasy in Print

The unity of the large ensemble of texts I analyze is due in part to the fact that they frequently refer to each other: Orientalism is after all a system for citing works and authors.

—Edward Said, Orientalism

The typewriter has a place in the Oriental fantasy. It might seem odd to tie this mechanical, nineteenth-century object, a proper (analog) writing machine, to something so ineffable and antimodern as a fantasy of the desert and Eastern antiquity, but thinking through the paradoxes reveals a good deal about how the Oriental fantasy functions. To this end Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is loaded with details and insights. We can start by noting that Alan Turing referred to one of his six-foot-tall Enigma machines (the famous code-cracking machines of World War II, part typewriter and part computer) as a large copper-coloured cupboard . . . which on first glance looked like an oriental goddess.⁷

Perhaps, however, the relationship between the typewriter and the fantasy of the Orient is not so odd. The Anglo-Sudanese War was documented by daily reports from professional reporters who used typewriters and related machines, such as the telegraph system and its keyboard, to bring details of the campaign to the British public. But in so many ways, as Kittler notes, the typewriter was most analogous with that other late-nineteenth-century machine, the machine gun, in its Gatling and Maxim variants. As the latter spat out bullets, so the typewriter, a machine pioneered by the gunmaker Remington, spat out words at a rapid rate in even sequences. The sequences or time intervals of bullets fired are analogous to the evenly spaced words on the page, as the typewriter was a kind of personal and portable printing press. Indeed, and here Kittler summons Heidegger, Derrida, and eventually Foucault, the typewriter replaces the hand, supplanting authorial authority and the type of author and even the kind of work that marked an earlier epoch.⁸ The pen was replaced by the machine as though, again, there was a short circuit, a direct route to the brain and the production of text. Kittler documents the use of the typewriter by Nietzsche, who in turn noted that the machine changed the way he thought and wrote. Using a typewriter he could move from elaborated ideas to shorter elliptical texts, the aphorisms that made his style, or use the fragment, a feature of modernist, and postmodernist, theory.⁹

Nietzsche eventually gave up typing for himself and hired women to type for him. One of them was Lou Andreas-Salomé, with whom Nietzsche was romantically entangled.¹⁰ This last point is not mere scholarly gossip but is notable in that the process of writing for Nietzsche, and for writing as such in the age of the typist, was marked as a feminine activity, if only because it was women in the nineteenth century and into the present who were most associated (in the West) with the typewriter and its digital legacy and remain so due to sexism in the job market. Kittler also associates the typewriter with the symbolic in Lacan’s schema or, simply put, with the Law insofar as the typewriter renders the chaos of expression, the spoken word, into evenly spaced printed text in regular blocks and formations. There is not much to argue with here, and it is obvious that the typewriter has had a tremendous influence on poetry, in particular, but there is more. Because women are so strongly associated with the typed page its regular spaces, which differentiates and produces meaning, there is something here that exceeds the authority of the symbolic.

Consider then the new kind of romance that accompanied the rise of middle-class life in the period, with regular commutes and regulated social space, the suburbs and bedroom communities of London. This form of illicit romance offered something sleazy and exciting, something forbidden that was carried out in the spaces of everyday life—train platforms, alleyways, cheap hotels—just as in the desert, truly a page across which a romance novelist might write.

Kittler references T. S. Eliot and his typewritten poem The Wasteland, and also notes the connection between Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and his thoughts at Paddy Dignam’s funeral in Ulysses, but does not make much more of the latter writer and his most famous novel.¹¹ Indeed, Ulysses is the best and most trenchant commentary and working-through of every point Kittler has made about the typewriter and the consequences for the unconscious. Consider that en route to the funeral every step taken by the jingle-besotten adman Bloom is mediated by the printed word, which he in turn sees around him on biscuit tins and packaged meat, while his fantasies are intertwined with fragmentary and illicit missives, such as postcards and brief letters sent to other women. Even his toilet paper is cheap literature, Matcham’s Masterstroke.

I will return to Joyce momentarily, but for now also consider the connection between the typewriter and the printed word of modernity to the fantasy of the Orient. There is a vintage photograph in W H Smith’s photographic archive of the Euston Station newsstand. This image struck me from the first because it is, in some ways, so familiar, yet was taken in the 1920s. It is familiar because the stand looks like contemporary newsstands in the underground and railway system in Britain, as well as in