Since the appearance of Edward Said's landmark work Orientalism, no one can read European writing about the East unsuspiciously. Said has demonstrated how such writings are connected to a wider web of structures and hegemonic movements: namely imperialism and colonialism. Yet despite the illumination Orientalism provides, the work also generates blindnesses: Said's totalizing scheme often leads to a crude reductionism that renders all western writing about the East--no matter how complex, sensitive, or self-aware--implicated in and furthering projects of domination.
My aim in this paper is to show that the East was not just a place to be classified, articulated, and explained as part of a larger enterprise of exploitation and domination; nor was it just a place on to which personal and collective fantasies could be projected. The East was also a place from which Europeans could gain a new perspective on themselves by contact with the other. Indeed, it is through contact with the other--as mediated by travel accounts--that readers encountered the possibility of seeing themselves as an other.
To illustrate this idea--that the East's otherness holds the possibility of a radical new self-understanding for the West--I shall focus on Robert Curzon's Visits to Monasteries in the Levant. Curzon's Monasteries revises an old subgenre of travel writing: the Holy Land pilgrimage. Like earlier accounts, Curzon's narrates his journey toward the sacred destination of Jerusalem; but unlike many of those accounts, Curzon's gives up the fantasy of bringing the Holy Land back under Western (Christian) control. He does so largely because he discovers that the Holy Land is already too much under the dominance of Christian institutions and western commercial culture--to the point that it has become a degraded place, devoid of spirituality. Paradoxically, the very institutional presence of the West has made the Holy Land unavailable to the West as a spiritual source. To regain that source requires giving it up. Monasteries thus outlines not a project of possession, but one of renunciation.
Central to Curzon's narrative--and one that forms the basis of a counter Orientalist discourse--is the notion that the West turns the East into its own image, and in so doing destroys the very thing it desires: a spiritual lifeline to God and the past. For it is in the monasteries of the Levant (these are not in Jerusalem) that the spiritual practices and feelings that once animated Europe continue to exist. And it is there that Europe (especially England) can see what it has lost. Curzon's experiences thus provide a way for Europe both to reconnect with its past and to understand its own lack as a civilization. But again, as the example of Jerusalem shows, this awakening can only happen if the West leaves the East alone.
This notion of discovering a lack within one's own culture also occurs in Curzon's contact with the Arabs and Turks of the Levant and it can be found in other travel writings on the East. Here I shall draw connections between Curzon's narrative and other travel writings--with a special mention made of Charles Doughty's Arabia Deserta, a work that is deeply concerned with the failings of the West--with the goal of identifying a discourse of cultural critique that challenges, rather than reinforces, the West's dominant paradigms of thought.
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