Between Cultures: Europe and Its Others in Five Exemplary Lives 9780812291933

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Between Cultures

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INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN AGE Series Editors Angus Burgin Peter E. Gordon Joel Isaac Karuna Mantena Samuel Moyn Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen Camille Robcis Sophia Rosenfeld

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Between Cultures Europe and Its Others in Five Exemplary Lives

Jerrold Seigel

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL A DELPHI A

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Copyright 䉷 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Seigel, Jerrold E., author. Between cultures : Europe and its others in five exemplary lives / Jerrold Seigel. pages cm. — (Intellectual history of the modern age) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4761-9 (alk. paper) 1. East and West. 2. East and West in literature. 3. Transnationalism. 4. Identity (Psychology). 5. Culture—Psychological aspects. 6. Burton, Richard Francis, Sir, 1821–1890. 7. Lawrence, T. E. (Thomas Edward), 1888–1935. 8. Massignon, Louis, 1883–1962. 9. Achebe, Chinua. 10. Pamuk, Orhan, 1952– I. Title. II. Series: Intellectual history of the modern age. CB251.S426 2016 909⬘.09821—dc23 2015006914

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Contents

Introduction 1 1. Masquerade, Engagement, and Skepticism: Richard Burton

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2. Commitment and Loss: T. E. Lawrence 65 3. The Islamic Catholicism of Louis Massignon 115 4. Independence and Ambivalence: Chinua Achebe and Two African Contemporaries 152 5. Reflection, Mystery, and Violence: Orhan Pamuk 196 Conclusion. Distance and Belonging

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Notes 247 Index 265 Acknowledgments 277

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Introduction

Early in September 1853, Richard Burton arrived in Mecca. Part of a caravan of Muslim pilgrims, Burton was clothed much like his companions and, like them, recited the appropriate prayers, in good Arabic, as he approached each of the storied and sacred sites. But Burton was an Englishman in disguise, a captain in the British army who had begun his study of Arabic at Oxford and tried out his ability to present himself as an ‘‘Oriental’’ while serving in India during the 1840s; he would spend most of his career as a British civil servant and diplomat, while writing many books. In 1855 he told the world about his trip in a Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah, the work that made his reputation as the colorful, adventurous, challenging, and to some people suspicious and problematic figure he would remain until his death in 1890. By then he would be known at once for his far-ranging travels, his deep involvement in Eastern culture, and for his assertive skepticism toward both religion and established morality. Interest in Burton’s life and writings has been inspired by many things: the rare mix of adventurousness and intellect that made him at once one of the preeminent explorers of his day and a writer of astounding range and erudition; his ability both to represent the Victorian age to which he belonged and to challenge its pieties; his mix of loyalty to the British Empire and the values it claimed to foster with a radicalism that undermined them. But what best joins these strands of his persona together is a thread his pilgrimage to Mecca strongly highlights, especially since, as we will see, he was moved by a genuine fascination and respect for Arab life and religion: he sometimes sought to inhabit more than one culture at the same time. In these moments he dedicated himself to opening up a real or imagined space between cultures, where he could infuse the persona formed in one with qualities and energies drawn from another.

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Burton was far from alone in undertaking such a project. In some ways it has been shared by people of many times and places, and global migrations since the late twentieth century have made it ever more evident today. But there are manifold ways to cultivate such a mode of being, and in this book we take Burton as the first among a group of people who pursued it along a special path, making themselves into vehicles for examining the nature and consequences of what I will call an intercultural identity. Such self-conscious experimentation sets these individuals apart from those with similar experiences, among them immigrants, many Jews throughout history, Islamicized Christians in medieval Spain, and various hyphenated peoples throughout the globe today.1 Individuals in all these situations may feel a need to navigate between cultures, to cross cultural boundaries while somehow acknowledging or preserving them. But immigrants are principally engaged in passing from one cultural environment to another (although the transition may stretch out over generations), a situation to which certain advocates of ‘‘multiculturalism’’ today respond with defensive strategies for preserving group identities against forces that threaten to dilute them. Neither substituting one group identity for another nor circling the wagons around an identity considered to be endangered generates what the figures represented in this book attempted: to explore the lineaments and horizons of an intercultural space while residing within it. At times some sought to protect one way of life against another, but even in doing so they were preoccupied with the challenge of taking on a second cultural identity as part of their way of inhabiting their first. Each created a kind of dialogue between two personae within a single self.2 Alongside Burton, the people whose lives and careers we take up below are T. E. Lawrence (celebrated as Lawrence of Arabia), Louis Massignon (a renowned, deeply introspective, and profoundly troubled French scholar of Islam), Chinua Achebe (a major pioneer in modern African literature), and Orhan Pamuk (the Nobel Prize–winning Turkish novelist). A few others appear more briefly, in particular two African writers with ties to Achebe, Sheikh Hamidou Kane and Tayeb Salih. I will say more about why I have chosen them in a moment, but two things they all have in common need to be noted at the start. One is the high degree of self-awareness already mentioned: all of them gave special and sustained attention to assessing the benefits and dangers of intercultural existence. The second is that each sought to bridge some explicitly European identity with a persona rooted

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in another part of the world. This means that they straddled the boundary that has done the most to focus attention on cultural difference and its significance in modern history, the frontier between the originally European West and the other regions of the world it came to dominate.3 That some of our subjects did this from a European starting point and others from one rooted elsewhere created sharp contrasts between them, especially because all of them understood the deep harms visited on other peoples by European colonialism. Such differences are of great import, to be sure, but we will see that they did not blot out the common elements and issues all of them confronted in attempting to live between cultures. Let it be clearly noted at the start that such a way of being is by no means always a happy one. There can be something disorienting, even threatening, about inhabiting two different and sometimes hostile worlds at the same time, and it may well be impossible to carry out in a satisfying way; to some degree all the figures we consider failed in the attempt or chronicled the failures of others. But even when the failure brought pain and regret, and perhaps especially then (most deeply in the case of Lawrence), there was and remains something exemplary about the lives and histories they fashioned as a result. I hope the chapters that follow will show that this project of simultaneously cultivating identities rooted in different cultures, notably in ‘‘Western’’ and ‘‘Eastern’’ (or at least ‘‘non-Western’’) cultures, raises large and important questions, involving not just the specific relations between Europe and other regions of the world, but also what it means for human beings to be cultural beings, both creatures and creators of cultures.

* * *

I think it will be helpful to give some sense of what these questions involve at the start, by thinking for a moment about the capacities human beings must possess in order to live as cultural beings. For this there can be no better point of entry than language, probably the greatest gift human cultures bestow on their members. The benefits of language are legion: other creatures communicate in various ways, but human speech and writing provide vehicles for exchanging information that are at once far more stable and precise, and more general and flexible, than what other living beings

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possess. Language is, in Steven Pinker’s phrase, ‘‘the stuff of thought,’’ but it is also a tool for conveying and refining feelings, allowing people to exercise and cultivate both intellectual and affective capacities that would remain undeveloped without it. It also provides human groups with a chief medium of collective memory, making real or fictional accounts of past experience available to successive generations and offering rich resources for individual and communal nurture, albeit ones that are not always employed in beneficial ways. Because humans begin to acquire language at a very early stage of life, when much of the capacity for analytical thinking they will exhibit later has not yet emerged, we may be tempted to conclude that language learning is a chiefly passive process, in which infants merely imitate the gestures and actions of adults. But recent studies suggest that such a conclusion misses much of what takes place when children acquire languages. Humans are born with linguistically relevant capacities that distinguish them from other animals. One of these is an ability to recognize the difference between random sounds and sonic elements that are susceptible to being organized into systems of meaning; a second is the power to reason about such signs in ways that can resolve inevitable linguistic ambiguities. Infants display the first of these aptitudes within a few months of birth, before they begin to imitate the sounds made by people around them, by responding with heightened attention to the language or languages regularly spoken in their hearing, while remaining relatively indifferent to sounds introduced casually or haphazardly: ‘‘Infants are sensitive to the difference between relative pitch, which is linguistically relevant, and absolute pitch (e.g., male versus female voices), which is socially relevant; to rhythmic aspects of linguistic input; to vowel duration; to linguistic stress; to the contour of rising and falling intonation; and to subtle phonemic distinctions.’’ The preference infants exhibit for the way a particular language organizes these elements even before it is ‘‘theirs’’ constitutes the first stage in the process by which they select and begin to develop ‘‘particular pathways for representing and processing language.’’4 Since infants respond in this way in whatever cultural situation they inhabit, they have the potential to attach themselves to an indefinite number of such pathways: in principle all human infants have the ability to learn any human language (and to acquire more than one if their situation encourages it). By puberty this possibility is lost (or at least much diminished), but in the meantime children have exhibited other innate capacities

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essential to becoming language users. Around age two children give evidence of being able to view verbal signs through logical categories, grasping, for instance, that words must apply to objects at some particular level of generality. They recognize that ‘‘cat’’ refers neither to the paw nor fur of the creature designated, nor to the more abstract idea of ‘‘animal’’ of which it is only one exemplar; adults who help them to distinguish these separate modes of reference must rely on some potential that is already present in their pupils. More significant still, sometime between the ages of four and six children begin to act as ‘‘little grammarians,’’ focusing on linguistic anomalies in an attempt to make usage more predictable and regular than they find it to be. A young American girl, told that an object her mother was using was a typewriter, replied, ‘‘No, you’re the typewriter. That’s a typewrite’’—rejecting the application of the active term ‘‘writer’’ to a passive object. Certain French children, confronted with the uncertainty created by using ‘‘une voiture’’ to mean both ‘‘a car’’ and ‘‘one car,’’ have invented the construction ‘‘une de voiture’’ for the latter, thereby signaling their desire for a separate formula to refer to a singular member of a class of things. Later, recognizing that people around them are able to distinguish the two meanings without having distinct signs for each, they go over (or back) to the standard usage; but their path to this point makes clear, as Annette Karmiloff-Smith concludes, that ‘‘infants and young children are active constructors of their own cognition.’’5 Sometimes this activity goes as far as bringing forth a new language; in one recently documented case, children in a remote Australian village evolved a spoken idiom of their own, taking over words from both English and tongues native to their area, but inventing grammatical forms (such as verb tenses) distinct from those employed in the languages spoken around them, requiring those who want to employ the new idiom to learn new rules.6 A kindred perspective on language, applied to adults as well as infants, was offered by a much earlier writer, Michel Bre´al, the late nineteenthcentury French professor of linguistics who was responsible for inviting his Swiss contemporary Ferdinand de Saussure to teach in Paris. Bre´al pointed out that certain features of language make it serviceable only to beings who can bring intelligence and reflection to bear on it; one feature was that words often carry a variety of possible meanings and uses, so that people must be able to assign some particular one depending on context and the perceived intention of speakers. Bre´al illustrated the point by observing that a common French dictionary devoted no fewer than twelve columns to

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illustrating the diverse and potentially confusing uses of the little word a`, in its various guises as complement, conjunction, or preposition, and ‘‘yet the people find its way with no difficulty in this seeming chaos.’’ This situation illustrated what it is that makes language deserve its appellation ‘‘the educator of the human race’’—not because its vocabulary and syntax provide ready-made frames for thought and expression, but just the opposite: because of the incomplete guidance it gives to users, the gaps and inconsistencies speakers must fill in and resolve for themselves, and which stimulate the mind to develop its powers.7 To quote Annette Karmiloff-Smith again: ‘‘What is special about humans is the fact that they spontaneously go beyond successful behavior.’’ The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty drew the implications of such an understanding at greater length: The human dialectic . . . manifests itself first of all by the social and cultural structures that it brings into existence and within which it confines itself. But the objects it employs for practical purposes and as bearers of cultural meaning [ses objets d’usage et ses objects culturels] would not be what they are if the activity that brings them forth did not also point in the direction of being able to negate or go beyond them. Every generation of human beings comes into a material and cultural world partly shaped by the imagination and inventiveness of those who preceded it, finding in this inheritance both resources and restrictions for their activities. But the same powers of reflection that allow any group to make use of this heritage impel its members to transcend it, to seek new tools and new uses for old ones, new forms of speech and thought, new painting styles or new ways to interpret the past.8 That humans possess this creative impetus is often celebrated, but it is sometimes overlooked or forgotten that the reflective capacities that can put us at a distance from shared values and practices play a role in the process whereby we first become cultural beings. These same abilities are surely at work when we take on other, related forms of culturally patterned expressive action: bodily movement, facial display, and setting the acceptable boundaries and gestures that define personal space. I know of no studies that tell whether these modes of behavior and action present a similar

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pattern of early openness to learning multiple forms that is lost as children grow up, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the process through which individuals adopt and absorb them has much in common with that of language. Here, too, reflection and objectification need to be brought to bear on the task of navigating the anomalies and potential confusions that such signals, like linguistic ones, present. As the social theorist Martin Hollis has emphasized, social and cultural experience has a character much like the one Kant observed in regard to nature: cultures do not make sense of themselves, but only come to have sense in the minds that engage with them. To gain social knowledge a person must act—to use Kant’s language—not just as a pupil but also as a judge, applying forms of conceptual understanding that make sense out of what must sometimes appear as a fluid and unstable ground of interaction and experience. The difficulty of understanding just what objects and practices signify, the need to determine just how and to whom certain prescriptions or prohibitions apply (gender roles, age and class distinctions), require that individuals be able to employ ‘‘intelligent agency,’’ acting in ways that presume and develop the capacity to clarify the often murky meanings of their social surroundings, in order to make their way within them.9 Because the flexibility exhibited by infants, their ability to imbibe and absorb cultural elements and patterns, recedes along this whole front as they grow up, we may be tempted to regard any attempt by adults to insert themselves into a second culture as somehow artificial and unnatural. Tongues learned later on are seldom mastered at the level of those we acquire as children, and the same seems largely true of the other forms of expressive behavior just noted. Taking on features from a second culture requires a self-conscious and purposeful form of imitation that contrasts with the more spontaneous and seemingly ‘‘natural’’ entry into a primary one. These are some of the reasons why attempts to establish an intercultural existence may never fully succeed. But the presuppositions of cultural membership just considered suggest that these two ways of entry into culture are not wholly distinct, but exist on a spectrum or continuum where boundaries are permeable. However much attempts to blend or fuse cultures may seem foreign to our ordinary manner of belonging to a single one, they also constitute a further development of abilities that are essential in order for us to live as cultural beings in the first place; thus they put certain essential prerequisites of cultural membership into higher relief. The

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cases below all exemplify these general features, illustrating how our individual ways of belonging to our cultures draw on the capacity to set ourselves at a distance from them. Another way to say this is that cultures are always particular and concrete, but that making our way within them requires that we call on abstract capacities of reflection and interpretation. Each culture, like each language, is what it is through the characteristic forms and elements that distinguish it from others; but in order to become part of any culture or acquire any language, we need to draw on intellectual powers that are independent of any specific cultural situation. We live at once within culture and outside it. And yet this conclusion, although apt and enlightening on one level, may mislead us on another, because we can only exist as concrete beings, as individuals bearing the impress of the conditions where our lives take shape. The promises and tensions that arise from this two-sidedness have been examined in a somewhat different connection by a notable philosopher of our time, Thomas Nagel. Human beings, he argues, have the potential to develop a ‘‘view from nowhere,’’ a perspective that would arise by virtue of looking on every concrete determinant of our being from some external point, and subjecting it to an appropriate mode of analysis. Taking each such condition in turn—among them age, sexuality or gender, class, ethnicity, and historical situation—we can contemplate it from outside, focusing on the physical, social, or temporal conditions to which it is subject and the limitations it and the others impose. To do this in regard to each and every situation that imprints itself on our being would be to achieve a generalized perspective independent of every feature of our concrete life, a ‘‘view from nowhere.’’ But while we may learn a great deal about ourselves in this way, and even achieve some degree of autonomy from certain of the forces that impinge on us, we can never cease to be the concrete individuals we are, and whose existence is largely shaped by all these conditions. The promise that seems to reside in such reflective independence is therefore never fulfilled; what such a condition brings instead is a split, sometimes perplexing and painful, between our actual being, with its persisting limitations, and our expanded consciousness.10 Such a conclusion helps to understand both the already-mentioned difficulties often entailed by attempts to pursue an intercultural existence, and why such projects can be significant and exemplary all the same.

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In the course of illustrating these general issues in particular cases, the personal histories recounted below will make evident that the faculty of reflection is not the only component of human nature that can move people to put themselves at a distance from what cultures would have them be. A different kind of gap, but one that has more in common with the first than we may immediately suppose, is opened up by sexuality. Few prohibitions are harder to enforce than sexual ones; wherever cultures impose them, people find myriad ways to escape. This widespread evasion should remind us that cultures are not wholly contained in or represented by the standards and expectations explicitly announced within them; if large numbers of people in any given situation ignore or transgress certain prohibitions, should we not regard their doing so as part of the pattern of behavior that these ways of life comprise? What we encounter here may reasonably be seen less as breaking out of cultural limits than as evidence that many cultures contain deep divisions between conflicting attempts to decide where limits should be set, conflicts that pit formal, often religiously colored constraints against some alternative set of norms (in European history one example would be the contrast between Christian self-denial and aristocratic libertinism). But even if it is not always possible to say just what boundaries a given culture imposes on sexuality, tensions often arise between such limits and the desires they seek to contain. Whether given individuals or groups transgress sexual rules or not, the tensions they feel in regard to them can generate a sense of distance from the values and attitudes that impose them. As tandem generators of distance between people and the cultures they inhabit, reflection and sexuality can reinforce or even become intertwined with each other. All of our figures recognized this connection implicitly or explicitly, beginning with Burton, whose reflection on cultural difference was partly set in motion by the contrast he felt between English puritanism and the freer atmosphere of the continental Western European countries he came to know as a boy, an experience that contributed to the sense of not wholly belonging anywhere he felt from an early age. That sense may have been fed by the fascination he sometimes exhibited for homosexual experience, but on which he may never have acted (it seems impossible to know for sure). The pull of homoerotic desire operated more strongly on both Lawrence and Massignon, even at moments when each—in their thoroughly distinct fashions—kept at a distance from it. The understanding all three

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had for the highly different ways non-standard sexuality is treated in different cultures was one element in the complex relationship each felt toward particular ones. In neither Achebe nor Pamuk do we find a similar concern about homosexual desire or practice, but both understood the meanings attached to masculinity and femininity in particular ways of life as a prime marker of the differences between them, with important consequences for their own relations to the cultural mix each sought to navigate. This means that for all five not just sexuality in the immediate sense but gender identity, the specific manner in which given forms of life conceive, signify, and regulate sexual difference, constituted a major thread in the intercultural identities each sought to knit together. The possibility of refashioning the gender identities prescribed in one milieu by weaving in attitudes and understandings drawn from somewhere else provided one spur for their attempts to inhabit a space between cultures.

* * *

Before turning to our subjects, I need to say a word about why they have been chosen. It would be easy to criticize the selection as incomplete or even arbitrary, as in some ways it is, but three things speak in its favor. The first is the intrinsic interest of the people chosen, a valuation that readers may have to take on faith at this point, but which I hope most who follow the accounts below will share. The second is that the group as a whole provides a sufficient variety of examples to reveal at least something of the range of possible attractions and difficulties that the attempt to live between cultures involves. That they come from diverse times and places highlights the broad range of contexts and environments in which attempts to live simultaneously in more than one culture have been undertaken. The third, and not the least important, is the ample body of material each provides for examining these lures and risks. The range of documentation in every case includes personal material, biographical or autobiographical (memoirs, letters, interviews), together with writings of a more general cast: literary, philosophical, historical, and anthropological. This seems to me a critically important reason for choosing to include them rather than others, since being able to draw on such a rich archive makes it possible to examine their careers and experiences in terms they developed themselves, native to

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them as individuals, rather than imposing some vocabulary or conceptual idiom from outside. For this reason I am tempted to say that they offered themselves as subjects for this book even as I went in search of them. It is the absence of this range of writing and reflection, with its specific attention to what the experience of simultaneously inhabiting more than one culture entails and how it might be understood, that has led me to exclude some figures who might well have been candidates had they approached their experience differently and provided a more extensive account of it. Among these are (I list them for those who will recognize the names) Lafcadio Hearn, Trebitsch Lincoln, Ernest Fenollosa, Muhammad Asad (born Leopold Weiss), and, alas, all of the women whom I hoped at one point I might be able to include: Lady Stanhope, Mary Wortley Montagu, Isabelle Eberhardt, Gertrude Bell, Alexandra David-Neel, Sister Nivedita, Pearl Buck, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. It would create too bulky a digression to try to justify all these exclusions here, but none seems to me to offer the rich texture of materials provided by the figures included. (The differing nature and quantity of the material each of them provides is reflected in some chapters being longer than others.)11 One unintended and in some degree regrettable result of not taking on some among the people just listed is that one particular alternative to Europe generates most of the intercultural spaces at issue here: Arab and Muslim life and belief. Such a configuration has genuine advantages at a juncture—our present—when the relations between Islam and the West are of great moment for a wide range of reasons, and it might be justified historically as well, on the grounds that the geographical proximity of European and Islamic societies, and the conflicts and interchanges that resulted from it, have given a special weight to their relations over a large sweep of history. But I did not intend it at the start, and the absence of any figures who stand between European and South or East Asian forms of life may threaten to make the general questions I have tried to raise in this introduction recede behind more particular ones involving relations between Christian and Muslim lifeways. This danger may be lessened in some degree by the relatively small place that strictly religious concerns occupied for either Lawrence or Pamuk (in contrast to both Burton and Massignon, for whom Islamic belief and practice were cardinal points of focus), by Burton’s (albeit less intense) involvement with Hindu and pre-Muslim Persian as well as Islamic culture, and by the circumstance that the alternative to European Christianity in Achebe’s world was African village life and the

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polytheism that reigned within it. If the range of ‘‘others’’ to Europe in the lives and careers examined below still remains narrower than one might wish, I hope this limit may be at least partly overcome by what we are able to learn from the group as a whole, based on the mix of personal and general insights each of them drew from exploring the particular intercultural space he inhabited.

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Chapter 1

Masquerade, Engagement, and Skepticism: Richard Burton

Richard Burton provides an exemplary starting point for considering a series of lives between cultures for several reasons. First, his efforts to insert himself into a second way of life were manifold and lifelong, involving travel not just in Arabia but in India and Africa; they grew from his linguistic and scholarly passions that led both to his pilgrimage to Mecca and his translation and commentary on the Thousand and One Nights; and they included sophisticated experiments with disguise and self-transformation whose limited efficacy he well understood. He never thought to relinquish his original British identity, but he became a precocious and insightful ethnologist, devoting himself to grasping and absorbing other modes of thinking and behavior. Yet one consequence of his understanding how deeply people are stamped by the cultures they inhabit was that he ended by articulating a radical skepticism about culture itself, lashing out against the moral and intellectual restraints that cultures seek to impose on their members. In his later writings, living between cultures meant both inserting himself as deeply as he could into some way of life not his own, and asserting the human need for independence from every existing one. Without ever ceasing to see Arab life and culture as a vehicle for achieving distance from the narrowness of European values and prejudices, he came to see Islam as harboring restrictions very much like those imposed by his own native culture, and similarly in need of rescue from them. Although this pattern only appears fully in his translation and commentary on the Thousand and One Nights, its basic lines are already visible in his account of the pilgrimage to Medinah and Mecca he accomplished in

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1853. Both the pilgrimage book and the journey it reported evoked much criticism in his own time, denounced as self-promoting (the book made his reputation, as he clearly hoped it would), hypocritical (professing belief in a religion he did not embrace), and morally suspect (inspired by a partly hidden and dangerous animus against both Christian belief and European civilization). An additional charge has been leveled by more recent critics, namely that in the context of expanding European colonialism, the kind of knowledge of foreign peoples and cultures he sought was bound to be used to dominate others, so that his whole project was tainted by its connection to imperial power and the injuries it inflicted.1 Although some of these charges were in tension with others, none of them was wholly baseless, and we will come to the grounds for them as we go along; deeply interesting as he remains, Burton was not always an admirable person. But there can be no doubt that a central motive for the Mecca trip was a genuine admiration and attraction for Islamic faith and Eastern life, affirmed in word and deed over many years. In a later edition of the Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah he responded to the accusations of hypocrisy and apostasy lodged against the first in terms he developed at more length in other writings, arguing that his taking part in Muslim belief and practice was justified by the kinship between Islam and Christianity, both Abrahamic religions (a connection recognized and appreciated, he noted, by earlier writers, and that would later be highlighted by Louis Massignon), as well as by other features of Mohammed’s creed. ‘‘Al-Islam, in its capital tenets, approaches much nearer to the faith of Jesus than do the Pauline and Athanasian modifications which, in this our day, have divided the Indo-European mind into Catholic and Roman, Greek and Russian, Lutheran and Anglican.’’ Comparing the spirit of Moslem lands with some Christian ones, he concluded that ‘‘the Moslem may be more tolerant, more enlightened, more charitable, than many societies of self-styled Christians.’’2 In the pilgrimage book Burton explained why he had not adopted an easier way of making the trip, namely declaring himself a convert and going as a European follower of Allah and the Prophet, a course that would have saved him both the trouble of pretending to be an ‘‘Oriental’’ and the danger of discovery: My spirit could not bend to own myself a Burma´, a renegade—to be pointed at and shunned and catechised, an object of suspicion

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to the many and of contempt to all. Moreover, it would have obstructed the aim of my wanderings. The convert is always watched with Argus eyes, and men do not willingly give information to a ‘‘new Moslem,’’ especially a Frank: they suspect his conversion to be feigned or forced, look upon him as a spy, and let him see as little of life as possible. Firmly as was my heart set upon traveling in Arabia, by Heaven! I would have given up the dear project rather than purchase a doubtful and partial success at such a price. That Burton did not merely make this explanation up to justify his desire to go in disguise is shown by his having included a similar observation in a book published two years before he set out on the journey to Mecca; here he wrote that ‘‘Islam, like many other faiths, professing to respect the convert, despises and distrusts him,’’ adding that in the Indian province he was writing about any new Muslim ‘‘was compelled to enter a certain caste— one of no high degree—to marry in it and to identify himself with the mongrel mass it contained.’’3 Only by seeming to have practiced the faith from childhood could Burton fulfill the desire he avowed at the book’s start: to ‘‘see with my eyes what others are content to ‘hear with ears,’ namely Moslem inner life in a really Mohammedan country.’’4 Burton’s most extensive account of what it was about Muslim religion that fueled his desire to get closer to it came in an essay he never published (although some of the ideas in it appeared in other writings): ‘‘El Islam, or The Rank of Muhammadanism among the Religions of the World.’’ Although printed only after his death, the text seems to have been written soon after the pilgrimage trip.5 Here the status Burton assigned to Islam in cultural and religious history derived from its being an exemplary instance of a phenomenon visible in other major faiths too, namely a powerful impulse to distill the pure essence of monotheism out of the muddier mix established religions made of it. He recognized the role Mosaic Judaism played in this evolution, to be sure, but he saw it as less central than some other accounts supposed, because the idea of a special divinity, superior to any others, was present within the polytheistic systems found in many places, including India, Arabia, Egypt, and Central America. (We will see that it also appears in the West African Ibo beliefs of Chinua Achebe’s forebears.) This sense that a particular god merited exceptional devotion ‘‘was the thought-germ of an eternal, unnamed, incorruptible and creative Deity. Enveloped in the mists and shades of priestly fraud and popular

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ignorance, still the dogma did exist; and so comforting has been its light to the soul of man, that no earthly power has ever availed to extinguish it.’’ Moses gave the first clear expression to this idea, inspired by a vision that a ‘‘handful of degraded slaves’’ could be empowered to become a great people if they were infused with the belief that they served as the chosen vehicle of the one supreme God. But the lawgiver’s message never realized its universal potential, partly because of being restricted to the Hebrews, but equally because his work met a fate that would return to haunt other spiritual innovators and reformers, namely that the purity of his message was diluted by the need to make it accessible to an unrefined multitude. His original aim was to make the Hebrews into ‘‘a race of pure Theists, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, reverencing nothing but the One Supreme, worshiping him without medium or mediator,’’ but his followers were not up to it; faced with their resistance he toned the message down, absorbing into it the priestly system and the round of feasts, sacrifices, and ceremonies already common among the Egyptians, drawing Hebrew faith and ritual away from pure monotheism and back toward more adulterated forms of belief and practice. A kindred story unfolded in Christianity but on a more universal scale. Jesus directed his message to all who would listen, but the selfless and supernatural morality he exemplified was turned in a more worldly and practical direction by Paul and his successors, allowing for its absorption by a secular-minded church. This situation provided the setting in which the Prophet did his work. Mohammed’s efforts at religious reform and purification were directed against the absurd fanaticism of the Jews, and the superstitions of the Syrian and Arabian Christians, and the horrid idolatries of his unbelieving countrymen. . . . Abolishing all belief in a local or personal God, he announced to his Arabs the One Supreme, now in terms as terrible as man could bear, then in words so lofty and majestic that they sank for ever into the heart-core of his followers. . . . He revived the earliest scheme of Mosaicism and the pristine simplicity of Christianity by making every man priest and patriarch of his own household. No more than in the other cases, however, could this turn to the deepest spring of religious devotion survive the need to become a faith for multitudes. The prophet’s followers turned it into ‘‘a mass of stringent

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ordinances so disposed as to provide for every contingency.’’ Yet the original inspiration remained alive at the heart of this vulgarized practice, and part of this core was a powerful move away from the Christian denigration of human nature through sin and toward an affirmation of the dignity of man, ideas the Prophet employed both to correct laxity and immorality and to ‘‘check that tendency of self-mortification which he could not wholly expel from the affections of his countrymen.’’ On this basis Mohammed ‘‘bequeathed to the world a Law and a Faith than which none has been more firmly or more fervently believed in by mankind,’’ and which ‘‘suffices to prove its extrinsic value to the human family.’’6 Such an account suggests why Burton may have had serious reasons for wanting to put himself into contact with ‘‘Moslem inner life,’’ but the significance he attached to Islam lies only partly in its distinctive content or spirit, since he portrayed Mohammed’s fundamental impulse as a resurgence of the drive to capture monotheism’s essence that had surfaced earlier in other religions. This sense that different faiths all shared a common core was an important part of Burton’s stance toward religion, and he gave expression to it in various ways. But some of them were less serious and respectful than the essay on Islam. One instance, no less significant for being lighthearted and skeptical, occurs in a work published two years before the trip to Mecca. Referring to an unnamed British lieutenant serving in southern India, he wrote: He could talk to each man of a multitude in his own language and all of them would appear equally surprised by, and delighted with him. Besides, his faith was every man’s faith. . . . He chanted the Koran, and the circumcised dogs [the character speaking in Burton’s writing was a Christian—not circumcised] considered him a kind of saint. The Hindoos also respected him, because he always ate his beef in secret, and had a devil [some heathen image] in an inner room. At Cochin he went to the Jewish place of worship, and read a large book, just like a priest.7 A number of writers have recognized an idealized image of Burton himself behind this portrait, and for good reason, as we will see soon enough. But what he elsewhere presented as a common intellectual and moral impulse that gave value to creeds he did not embrace here turns into an indifferent or cynical willingness to pretend an attachment to whichever one might

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happen to be of use at a given moment; among the exploits he attributed to the lieutenant was a highly elaborate but failed plot to kidnap a willing young nun from a Catholic convent in Goa. Just how these sides of Burton’s persona, one probing and serious, one shifting and frivolous, stood in relation to each other is a question to which answers will emerge as we go along. There is no better place to begin than with a talent and penchant he shared with the lieutenant, and that was crucial to his ability to complete the pilgrimage, namely his remarkable ability to take on the features of people culturally unlike himself, partly through carefully acquired knowledge—at once of languages, behavior, and customs—and partly through disguise.

* * *

Burton began to combine these elements in the 1840s, while serving as a junior officer in the army of the East India Company (then still the ruling authority on the subcontinent). There he was assigned the task of gathering information about the region of Sind, a largely Muslim province on the border of Afghanistan (today it belongs to Pakistan). The region had escaped British control until 1843, when it was conquered and then autocratically ruled by General Charles James Napier. Burton had arrived in India in the previous year; although by no means foreign to the side of military life that involved combat and physical prowess (he was disappointed that he arrived too late to take part in Napier’s campaigns, and he subsequently fought in the Crimean War and wrote a training manual about swordplay), his Indian work chiefly involved reporting on local life, an activity for which he was especially well suited because of his remarkable gift for languages. Required (like other Europeans in his time) to study Greek and Latin as a quite young child, he also became fluent in French and Italian in his schooldays, during which his family lived on the continent for many years. At Oxford, where his father hoped he would prepare for an academic career, he set himself to learn Arabic, working on his own because no undergraduate instruction was offered in that language in the 1830s (he started off by writing the characters from left to right as in English, a reversal that provoked a laugh from the Oxford Arabist with whom he eventually made contact). This was the moment when he worked out a system of

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language study he would employ for other tongues later: carrying a grammar book constantly with him but working with it in multiple brief stretches never exceeding fifteen minutes each, reading some text of interest to him with the aid of a dictionary as soon as he had acquired a basic vocabulary (usually the work of a week), putting himself in contact with native speakers whose pronunciation he silently imitated, and then reading out loud to himself. His devotion to linguistic study was if anything only deepened by his decision to abandon university life and seek a military commission, and he eventually came to speak and write well in some twenty-nine languages, plus nearly a dozen associated dialects. Posted to India, he began to study Hindi before leaving England, and devoted much of the voyage to advancing his knowledge of it; arrived in Bombay, he sought out the best available native tutors, and with their aid soon added Gujurati and Sanskrit to his stock. To all this he was driven by reasons both practical and personal. As he later wrote, there were two paths to advancement in India: distinguishing oneself through combat or developing special competency in local languages. Premiums were given to officers who could show their proficiency in Indian tongues, and Burton won several; there can be little doubt he was the best linguist in the colonial administration, indeed one of the best among Europeans of his time. One reason for his success in India was that he mixed a genuine passion for formal study with a more direct kind of exposure he shared with many of his fellow officers, namely short- and longer-term relationships with local women. Such connections were a very old story by the time Burton arrived; in the eighteenth century they sometimes involved real marriages, seriously undertaken on both sides, with acknowledged offspring, and based on a relative absence of prejudice difficult to imagine in the face of the racist views that were gaining power in Burton’s day.8 Burton had a number of liaisons with Indian women (one of whom remained a kind of romantic ideal to him long afterward), making him part of a system that, as he later put it, ‘‘connected the white stranger with the country and its people, gave him an interest in their manners and customs, and taught him thoroughly well their language’’—although often with oddities or limits, one officer being known for always referring to himself with feminine pronouns and adjectives.9 Burton’s passion for formal study protected him from such blunders. These linguistic achievements brought him to the attention of Napier, who assigned him to delve into conditions and customs in the newly conquered Sind, making him part of

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a general survey of the region directed by Walter Scott, nephew and namesake of the great novelist. In preparation Burton learned enough Persian and Punjabi to converse in those languages, both of which were spoken in the area.10 Competence in local idioms was necessary but not sufficient for gaining the kind of knowledge Burton sought, since a British officer speaking a tongue acquired in adulthood (never, to be sure, without an evident accent) was still an outsider and an object of suspicion. The inspiration to counter this situation through disguise did not surface all at once; at first Burton’s efforts to dress in local garb were not ‘‘intended to deceive,’’ but undertaken because ‘‘there is nothing so intrinsically comfortable or comely in the European costume, that we should wear it in the face of every disadvantage,’’ and because he quickly discovered that ‘‘peasants will not run away from us as we ride through the fields, nor will the village girls shrink into their huts as we near them.’’11 Burton was by no means the first European to put on Eastern dress for such reasons; travelers had done it for over a century, including at least one woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.12 But mere convenience became secondary to the felt need to get beyond ‘‘the dense veil which the fearfulness, the duplicity, the prejudice and the superstitions of the natives hang before’’ the eyes of European officials. Such a barrier mattered little in regard to one part of Burton’s work in Sind, which consisted of surveying land and examining an existing system of canals on behalf of Napier’s project of improving both transport and irrigation in the province, thus raising the level of both prosperity and tax collections; but it was highly relevant to some of Napier’s other concerns, which involved improving the morals of the inhabitants and replacing what he considered barbaric and unnecessarily cruel practices with more humane and ‘‘civilized’’ ones. More generally, both Burton and his superiors were savvy enough to recognize that knowledge about everyday life was necessary in order to deal effectively with their subjects. ‘‘In a position where a foreigner is thrown into close intercourse with natives of the East, it is absolutely necessary to study the customs of their society a little, unless he desires every day to offend by apparent neglect and incivility, and to make himself ridiculous by misplaced attention and politeness.’’13 Burton had no illusions that he could pass as an Indian of a sort familiar to locals. Instead his strategy was to take advantage of the presence of Eastern people with mixed identities (ones some anthropologists in our day call ‘‘hybrid’’) in the places he wanted to explore; modeling himself on them

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allowed him to present himself in a guise that fit with and explained his impressive but imperfect language skills. After trying several characters, the easiest to be assumed was, I found, that of a half Arab, half Iranian, such as may be met with in thousands along the northern shore of the Persian Gulf. The Sindians would have detected in a moment the difference between my articulation and their own, had I attempted to speak their vernacular dialect, but they attributed the accent to my strange country, as naturally as a home-bred Englishman would account for the bad pronunciation of a foreigner calling himself partly Spanish, partly Portuguese. Besides, I knew the countries along the Gulf by heart from books, I had a fair knowledge of the Shieh [Shia] form of worship prevalent in Persia, and my poor Moonshee [his language instructor] was generally at hand to support me in times of difficulty, so that the danger of being detected—even by a ‘real Simon Pure’—was a very inconsiderable one. The persona he adopted was that of ‘‘a Bazzaz, a vendor of fine linen, calicoes and muslins,’’ calling himself Mirza (an honorific title) Abdullah of Bushire. The disguise, which included oil to darken his skin and elaborate, expensive clothing, made him seem ‘‘Oriental’’ enough to escape being treated as a European, yet exotic enough to become an object of curious interest to the people he encountered. He was able to enter village squares, private dwellings, mosques, and places ‘‘where he heard music and dancing.’’ The information he could collect in this way freed him from the need to rely, as most Europeans in similar positions did, on native informants (a system that long remained in use and that Rudyard Kipling later described in his novel Kim).14 On this basis he was able both to fulfill the tasks assigned to him by his superiors and gather material for the four books about India he wrote between 1847 and 1851 (when he was back in Europe, seeking treatment for eye troubles possibly related to the cholera to which he was exposed in Sind). Both in his reports and in his books, he speaks in a voice somewhere between that of an intelligence officer and a modern anthropologist. We know from the diary Napier kept at this time (now in the British Museum, where Fawn Brodie drew on it for her excellent biography of Burton) that the general was struck and surprised by a number of the things

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his young lieutenant communicated to him. The surprise had less to do with attitudes of the recently conquered Sindians toward the British (which ranged, perhaps predictably, from a kind of resigned and seemingly amicable subservience to venomous hostility) than with practices that limited the changes British actions could bring to local life. One such matter involved Napier’s frustration at being unable to end the system through which welloff murderers escaped the death sentences he imposed on them by hiring poverty-stricken substitutes; one of these clarified what was going on when he explained to Burton that giving himself a sumptuous last meal and leaving the rest of the payment to his surviving family was far better than continuing with the wretched life he was leading. The data Burton provided about infanticide, especially of female babies, and of how common it was for husbands to kill or maim wives suspected of being unfaithful, convinced Napier that the harsh punishments he ordered would not succeed in putting a stop to violence inside families.15 Napier was interested in such things because he had an unquestionable faith in the superiority of British ways and a determination to impose them wherever he could. In drawing his young aide into his projects the general exposed Burton—who shared neither his boss’s premise nor his aims—to dangers that had damaging consequences for his career. Worried by rumors that British troops were frequenting homosexual brothels in Karachi, Napier assigned Burton to bring him information about such places (as the only officer who could speak any local language, he was the obvious choice). ‘‘Carefully disguised,’’ Burton visited several of them, reporting on what he found with the same kind of close observation and moral detachment he displayed in many other connections; but some of his contemporaries were bound to take his detailed account as evidence that he had a more direct involvement in the behavior he described. Napier closed down the brothels but he did not accuse Burton of enjoying them, and he kept his promise not to send the document to the East India Company offices where others might see it. For two years it remained hidden in the general’s files; but after Napier returned to England (like Burton in search of medical treatment) someone found the paper and maliciously sent it to higher-ups in Bombay, with the recommendation that its author be dismissed from the service. Burton was not in fact forced out, but his career in India was gravely compromised, leaving little or no chance for him to advance to higher office there.16 The brothels were absent from the books Burton published about India (he later mentioned them in his notes to the Thousand and One Nights),

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but the texts included incidents he knew would be shocking to many British readers. Among these was his report that respectable women in a certain ethnic group in Goa commonly exposed their breasts in public, while ‘‘females of loose character are compelled by custom to cover the body.’’ Another was that pregnant Hindu women betook themselves to shrines displaying phallic carvings in the hope that the respect shone to them would make their babies come out male. Burton recounted such things in the same neutral tone and with the same freedom from moral judgment he displayed in his various reports to Napier. Sometimes his subject was cultural incomprehension itself, as in the incident that began when a British officer whipped idle natives on a river bank for not going to the aid of a man struggling not to drown in the water; they remained unmoved by this treatment (Burton observed that offering a rupee would have made them jump to help the stranger), forcing the officer to dive into the river and pull the man out himself. Instead of offering gratitude, however, the rescued swimmer responded to the officer with an unexpected question: ‘‘Sahib, you have preserved me, what are you going to give me?’’ and, when no charity was forthcoming, cursed his benefactor, who then whipped him as he had the bystanders who earlier refused their help.17 A similar attention to cultural difference inspired Burton’s suggestion that Sindian childrearing practices were more loving than European ones because Western ‘‘parents are engrossed by other cares—the search for riches, or the pursuit of pleasure—during the infancy of their offspring,’’ and his explanation for why Muslim women were less devoted to motherhood than Hindus—that the greater prospect of remarriage for the former, should their husbands divorce them, made them worry more about losing the charms of youth through childbirth.18 One subject of particular interest to Burton in India was religion, including both ritual practices such as Muslim conversion ceremonies and rites of circumcision, and the intellectual content of different faiths. He noted that the stark contrast between Hindu polytheism and Muslim devotion to a single god did not prevent the two religions from each taking on features of the other. Thus ‘‘the Hindoo’’ has learned from neighboring Sikhs (whose monotheism stemmed from exposure to Islam) ‘‘to simplify his faith: to believe in one God,’’ albeit while still finding divine powers in such potent natural phenomena as rivers. In a parallel way, Islam in India as elsewhere absorbed some of the magical practices and the belief in djinns (genies) and other spirits both benign and hostile that Mohammed had

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sought to curb, but which remained common in regions where his teaching spread. Both cases were examples of a phenomenon evident closer to home, the way Northern European Protestantism and Mediterranean Catholicism both absorbed elements from the religions—Druid or Pantheistic—that flourished before Christianity arrived.19 Burton defended Islamic practice in terms that would recur in his later writing, for instance admonishing a fictional ‘‘John Bull’’ on a visit to Sind: ‘‘You might take a lesson, if not too proud to be taught, from their regularity in performing their religious duties; high and low almost all pray twice a day, some as many as five times, in public too, so that there may be no shirking,’’ and adding that, in contrast to the situation faced by French or Irish Catholics, ‘‘their priests will allow them to peruse their scriptures translated into the vernacular.’’20 Burton recognized that much of the religious life he observed was rooted in folk practices, and like others in his time he found some of these attractive because they displayed the qualities of color, directness, and innocence often cherished by romantic writers. But he also found evidence that the proximity of contrasting forms of religion generated religious attitudes of quite a different sort, closer in spirit to the urbane and worldly posture of the lieutenant in Goa who made every religion his own without holding to any. Referring to the Amils (a group of Hindus now thought to have emigrated to Sind in the Mughal period, but whose descendants would flee to India when the province became part of Pakistan in 1947), he noted: ‘‘From mixing much with the members of another faith, and possessing a little more knowledge than their neighbors, many of these men become Dahri, or materialists, owning the existence of a Deity, but dissociating the idea from all revelation, and associating it with the eternity past and future of matter in its different modifications. A few are Atheists in the literal sense of the word, but it is rare that they will trust their secret to a stranger.’’ Such rejections of revealed religion were ‘‘less common in the unenlightened East than it is in the civilized West,’’ but those Easterners who advanced them were ‘‘formidable’’: ‘‘the European [unbeliever] seldom thinks proper, or takes the trouble, to make converts to his disbelief; the Oriental does, and aided by his superiority in learning over the herd, he frequently does it with great success.’’ Burton saw a link between the appearance of such heterodox ideas and two other phenomena that interested him, one the spread (particularly in Persia) of Sufism, an inward, esoteric, and mystically inclined offshoot of Islam often seen as suspect by orthodox Muslims, the other the work of Indian Vedantic thinkers who

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interpreted Hindu myths and scriptures as philosophical allegories rather than sources of doctrine and practice; together these two developments led him to predict (much too optimistically) that ‘‘a mixture of pantheism with pure deism, will presently be the faith of the learned and polite in both these countries.’’21 This whole complex of attitudes, like the picture he gave of the lieutenant in Goa, stood very close to Burton himself. He was drawn to Sufi practice, so much so that before ending his first Indian stay in 1847 he went through a course of study and exercises that led to his being ordained as a Sufi master, and he retained ties to Sufism throughout his life; on the Mecca pilgrimage being a Sufi would be part of his disguise, and the desire he expressed in the book to experience the ‘‘inner life’’ of Muslims may have had a Sufi ring, too.22 At the same time, however, his later writings would turn this multiplicity of cultural and religious involvements into a rejection of the singular truth claims that particular faiths make on their own behalf, issuing in a frank skepticism toward all forms of established morality and religion and making him appear (using the distinction he noted in regard to the Amils) more as an ‘‘Oriental’’ atheist than a European eclectic. It is in those later texts that the most extreme and challenging consequences Burton drew from his attempt to inject himself into cultures not his own would come to the surface.

* * *

Before we can approach these writings, however, we need to look more closely at Burton’s manner of inserting himself into Eastern life, and the ways it both altered and confirmed his identity. A number of writers have recognized that taking on the character of an ‘‘Oriental’’ over weeks or months and establishing relations with others on this basis had the power to destabilize his own sense of who he was. His wife may have been the first to suggest this, reporting that in Cairo he ‘‘lived as a native, til (as he told me) he actually believed himself to be what he represented himself to be.’’23 Even some writers who see Burton largely in terms of complicity in imperial domination think the line between imitation and identification is especially difficult to draw in his case.24 Certainly some of Burton’s contemporaries believed he had crossed a border they thought it important to maintain;

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the pilgrimage book raised fears that he had actually become a Muslim, or at least abandoned Christianity, and in India he was several times labeled as a ‘‘white Nigger’’ because of his evident attraction to elements of native life. The narrator of one of his books, clearly a stand-in for the author, refers to himself as a ‘‘semi-oriental,’’ based on his direct grasp of social and political relations that others could only view in a Western mirror.25 But the ‘‘semi’’ in this label needs to be stressed, because Burton’s attempts to represent himself as an ‘‘Oriental,’’ and even in some way to become one, had the effect of at once blurring his identity as a European and bringing it into sharper focus. He well understood a basic and perhaps universal dilemma in the relation between identity and disguise, that however much a person may feel his or her sense of self altered by taking on some sympathetic and attractive new character, the need to keep up the appearance and the recognition that the stratagem may fail is bound to heighten awareness that beneath it all one remains the same person as before. His awareness on this score is evident in a comment he made about Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, whom opponents accused of being a fraud. In his account of the trip to Salt Lake City he undertook in 1860, Burton defended Smith, arguing that no movement as substantial as the one he started could owe its strength to ‘‘mere imposture’’; but he added that all the same ‘‘it is impossible to ignore the dear delights of fraud and deception, the hourly pleasure taken by some minds in finessing through life, and in playing a part till by habit it becomes a nature.’’ Only the self that knows it is playing a part can experience such delights and pleasures, however attached it becomes to the mask it dons.26 He described his relationship to Mirza Abdullah, the personage he became in Sind, in just these terms, and it surfaced again in some more casual and playful moments, such as the time he truculently walked by some fellow officers in Egypt while gotten up as an Arab. Failing to recognize him, they were on the point of maltreating the uppity stranger when he shocked them by suddenly revealing who he was. On the pilgrimage, too, Burton’s disguise at once drew him into the Eastern character he assumed, and highlighted the distance he necessarily maintained from it. The persona under which he made the bulk of the journey was not quite the one he thought to take on when he boarded a ship to Alexandria from England; at that point his plan was ‘‘to resume my old character of a Persian wanderer,’’ the Mirza Abdullah of Sind, but with somewhat altered features. He was no longer to be a merchant, but a prince

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and a Dervish, an identity especially ‘‘proper for disguise’’ because it ‘‘is assumed by all ranks, ages, and creeds,’’ and because having renounced all ordinary social roles, the Dervish ‘‘is allowed to ignore ceremony and politeness’’ and wander where he likes. If threatened with discovery he has only to give freer rein to the oddness expected of him and ‘‘become a maniac, and he is safe,’’ treated with the same indulgence as is ‘‘a notably eccentric character in the West.’’ One danger loomed, that among those who sought shelter behind the veil of the Dervish were criminals and cutthroats, whose company had to be avoided. Burton hoped to find protection from them by carrying enough money (carefully concealed to be sure) to remain independent, and by his ability to present himself also as what he actually was, a devotee of study and of books, and in particular a bearer of medical knowledge, in which he had long taken an interest and had a certain competence.27 Drawing on this knowledge, he revised his character before leaving Egypt, exchanging his claimed Persian origin for a more mixed one, as a physician ‘‘born in India of Afghan parents . . . educated at Rangoon, and sent out to wander, as men of that race frequently are, from early youth.’’ He had enough Persian, Hindustani and Arabic to sustain such a mix, and ‘‘any trifling inaccuracy was charged upon my long residence at Rangoon.’’ He continued to represent himself as a Dervish, but in demeanor he now ‘‘assumed the polite, pliant manners of an Indian physician, and the dress of a small Effendi (or gentleman).’’ This transformation (first suggested to him by a clever and sharp-eyed merchant of Russian origin who befriended him in Cairo) fit with the understanding Burton earlier exhibited in India, that a hybrid identity was safer because it provided an explanation for his inevitable deviations from any pure one. However composite the guise he assumed, however, it required a special ability and willingness to study the ways culture imprints itself on personality and to open oneself to being altered by them. He knew that the superficially mixed identities generated by European expansion could be awkward and unconvincing: his first sight of a Sepoy (the name given Indians employed in the lower ranks of the British army) soon after landing in Bombay nearly sent him back to the ship: although picturesque, the man was ‘‘an imitation European article. . . . The coat of faded scarlet seemed to contain a mummy with arms like drumsticks.’’28 Whether or not he had such examples in mind, Burton was explicitly determined to avoid a similar fate. He tells of spending much time on the voyage to Egypt ‘‘getting into

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the train of Oriental manners,’’ schooling himself in such things as drinking a glass of water (giving an elaborate account of five differences between the way a European and an ‘‘Indian Moslem’’ perform the act), the exclusive use of the right hand to touch things regarded as clean, ‘‘the manipulation of the rosary,’’ the way of sitting in a chair (‘‘your genuine Oriental gathers up his legs, looking almost as comfortable in it as a sailor upon the back of a high-trotting horse’’), the manner of walking ‘‘with the toes straight to the front, the grave look and the habit of pious ejaculations.’’ He was similarly attentive to differences in attitude that affected behavior, for instance explaining what lay behind the general point illustrated by the story of the rescued swimmer recounted above: that ‘‘if you save a man’s life, he naturally asks you for the means of preserving it’’ (a notion he saw confirmed by his ventures into medical practice). The unlikelihood of being thanked was tied up with the observation that ‘‘in none of the Eastern languages with which I am acquainted is there a single term conveying the meaning of our ‘gratitude.’ ’’ This lack was no mere ‘‘absence of a virtue’’ but an expression of a worldview in which every person had the right to every other’s surplus, all necessities having been provided by the Creator, who also imposes on everyone the duty of helping others: by rendering someone a service ‘‘you have but done your duty, and he would not pay you so poor a compliment as to praise you for the act.’’ To a benefactor one responds only with a prayer that ‘‘Allah increase thy weal’’ and ‘‘that your shadow (with which you protect him and his fellows) may not be less.’’29 Burton valued this level of ethnographic understanding both for itself (later he would make use of it in regard to cultures that attracted him far less) and as a tool for successfully carrying out his project. But he never lost the anxiety that someone along the way would see through him; just for this reason he reported himself relieved and gratified on the Mecca trip whenever his action and speech overcame some person’s suspicion or doubt.30

* * *

But Burton’s taking on an Eastern identity was more than a mere masquerade; the genuine quality of his desire to experience ‘‘Moslem inner life’’ appears with special clarity once he arrives in Medinah and then in Mecca. Until then, and along the road between the two places, other topics

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captured most of his attention: the landscape and climate, the feel of being in the desert and the physical features of those who live there, local food and dress both male and female, the dangers of being caught sketching or taking notes (he reproduced some of his drawings in the book), measures taken to defend against thieves, Arab hostility to the region’s Ottoman overlords, and the likely future end of Turkish rule it portended. The features of Arab life that attracted him on this part of his journey were those that contrasted with ‘‘civilization,’’ among them the fierce independence and the noble, even chivalric quality of social relations, especially among the Bedouins, the high emotional tone of both desert existence and the poetry written about it, the persistence there of near-animal qualities in human nature that are suppressed in more urbane settings, and an appreciative attitude toward brigands and outlaws: ‘‘Who so revolts against society requires an iron mind and an iron body, and these mankind instinctively admires, however misdirected be their energies.’’31 Where these elements were absent he found little to value—for instance, inside Medinah, its style of life softened and corrupted by the presence of the many visitors and tourists. Once arrived at the sacred sites, however, it was Muslim faith and practice that became the focus of his attention. Toward some elements of popular belief he felt deep skepticism, to be sure. ‘‘Although at least fifty female voices’’ at a famous cemetery ‘‘loudly promised that morning, for the sum of ten parahs each, to supplicate Allah in behalf of my lame foot, no perceptible good came of their efforts.’’ And even though ‘‘every Moslem, learned and simple, firmly believes that Mohammed’s remains are interred in the Hujrah at Al-Madinah, I cannot help suspecting that the place is doubtful as that of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem.’’32 The physical features of the towns and buildings often left him cold, too: the central mosque in Medina appeared as ‘‘mean and tawdry’’ and ‘‘decorated with pauper splendor’’ (by contrast, however, its counterpart in Mecca ‘‘is grand and simple, the expression of a single sublime idea’’).33 In a way, his accounts of Muslim belief and ritual partake of a similar neutrality, providing description without judgment much in the manner of his earlier writing about India; for each object or prospect along the way he gives theological or historical information to explain what pilgrims do there and why, at some points noting disputes about the importance or meaning of some site and the conflicts they occasion (including those between Sunni and Shiite), and providing many references to earlier writers’ accounts, agreeing with some and dissenting from others.

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But what gives a different overall tone to these pages is the repeated insertion into them of the prayer texts recited at each juncture. Some of these he reports as spoken by others, but some of them Burton declaimed himself. He gives more than a dozen of the prayers pronounced at Medina, many of them half a page or more in length; somewhat fewer are listed in regard to Mecca. I think it is impossible to read these prayers without being struck by the utter absence of irony with which they are set down. The translations contain explanations of both unfamiliar references and an occasional word left in Arabic, but without interrupting the flow of supplication. The language is devotional and deeply felt, straightforward and poetic, at once submissive (deep bows or prostrations accompany some of the appeals) and highly dignified. Here is one representative example, offered at the spot where the Archangel Gabriel is supposed to have descended to Mohammed to convey the divine word: Peace be upon You, O Angels of Allah, the Mukarrabin (cherubs), and the Musharrifin (seraphs), the pure, the holy, honored by the Dwellers in Heaven, and by those who abide upon the Earth. O beneficent Lord! O Long-suffering! O Almighty! O Pitier! O thou Compassionate one! Perfect our Light, and pardon our Sins, and accept Penitence for our offences, and cause us to die among the Holy! Peace be upon Ye, Angels of the Merciful, one and all! And the Mercy of God and His Blessings be upon You!34 The Medina prayers ‘‘ended, as we began, with the worship of the Creator.’’ In Mecca, after kissing the holy black stone, there ‘‘came the Istighfar, or begging of pardon . . . after which we blessed the Prophet, and then asked for ourselves all that our souls most desired.’’ At one point Burton recites a prayer on behalf of someone else, fulfilling a promise made in Egypt.35 Had he wanted to signal some sense of distance from the tone or content of these pleas he could easily have done so, but he did not. The outpouring of deep feeling in others moves him even when it puzzles him: at the tomb of Fatima, ‘‘a strange sight it was to see rugged fellows, mountaineers perhaps, or the fierce Iliyat of the plains, sometimes weeping silently like children, sometimes shrieking like hysteric girls, and utterly careless to conceal a grief so coarse and grisly, at the same time so true and real, that I knew not how to behold it.’’36 These are the places in the narrative that seem best to realize the goal he set out at the start, to experience ‘‘Moslem inner life

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in a Mohammedan country’’; they present it as possessed of a purity and directness that recalls the quest for the essential spirit of monotheistic devotion Burton attributed to Mohammed in the essay from which we quoted earlier. Burton describes his emotions at crucial moments in the pilgrimage as both sharing the feelings of his companions and leaving him at a distance from them. At the first sight of Medina from the hills around it, ‘‘nothing was more striking, after the desolation through which we had passed, than the gardens and orchards about the town. It was impossible not to enter into the spirit of my companions, and truly I believe that for some minutes my enthusiasm rose as high as theirs. But presently when we remounted, the traveler returned strong upon me: I made a rough sketch of the town, put questions about the principal buildings, and in fact collected materials for the next chapter.’’ Arrived at the sanctuary in Mecca, ‘‘I may truly say that, of all the worshipers who clung weeping to the curtain, or who pressed their beating hearts to the stone, none felt for the moment a deeper emotion than did the Haji from the far-north. It was as if the poetical legends of the Arab spoke truth, and that the waving wings of angels, not the sweet breeze of morning, were agitating and swelling the black covering of the shrine. But, to confess humbling truth, theirs was the high feeling of religious enthusiasm, mine was the ecstasy of gratified pride.’’37 It is far from easy to know how to take these passages: are the declarations of how closely his feelings matched those of his Muslim companions instances of the hypocrisy that some of Burton’s contemporaries saw in his journey, pretending to enter into the life of a faith he did not share? Or is it just the opposite, that he recounts the second moments of pulling back in order to shield himself from accusations of having drawn too close to an alien creed? It is difficult to believe that pride was the sole source of the feeling that overcame him at the high point of his visit to Mecca, for that would have accorded badly with his desire to experience Muslim inner life—unless we recognize that accomplishing some difficult task imposed on believers may be a source of pride even for those moved chiefly by faith (a danger often recognized by religious purists and reformers, and to which we return later). The pride Burton felt in becoming a Sufi master, given voice in the passage we quoted above, did not mark his attraction to Sufism as a mere pretense. Just the opposite: it reflected the satisfaction of accomplishing a difficult and valued task. The pride in completing the pilgrimage radiates a similar quality. This was the view of Burton’s wife, not always a

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wholly reliable witness to his feelings, but whose testimony in this case fits well with what we know from his own writings: ‘‘He did not go in mockery, but reverentially. He had brought his brain to believe himself one of them. . . . Richard was thus the only European who had beheld the inner and religious life of the Moslems as one of themselves.’’38 My conclusion is that neither the pride he spoke of feeling at the end of the pilgrimage, nor the turn to sketching and reflection on his experience after the upsurge of high enthusiasm he felt at the first sight of Medina, meant that he repudiated or denied the spontaneous emotion that first arose in him; instead, both moments show that identification and distance were not mutually exclusive in his relation to Arab and Muslim culture. One state of mind called the other forth; like two poles in a magnetic field, they defined the push and pull of Burton’s relations to Arab life. A similar dialectic can be discerned in his relations to other cultural milieus that occupied an important place in his career, and to which we now turn: first the ones he encountered in his early life, where his mix of identification with and distance from every given way of life had some of its roots, and in his dealings with two groups toward whom he sometimes expressed feelings and judgments most people today would regard as deplorable: Jews and black Africans.

* * *

Burton’s family was British (with roots in Ireland and possibly France), but his childhood was almost entirely spent in France and Italy, his soldier father having taken the family to live on the continent after he lost his military commission and a large part of his income, as a consequence of his refusal to testify against George IV’s consort Queen Caroline when the king was seeking to divorce her in 1820. (Although probably guilty of the adultery with which she was charged, Caroline had enormous popular support in England, and the controversy that swirled around her became a cause ce´le`bre; the elder Burton’s loyalty to her stemmed from the kindness she earlier bestowed on British officers in Genoa while he was stationed there.) The family settled in Tours in 1821, the year of Richard’s birth; they returned to England briefly following the revolutionary upheaval of July

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1830, in Paris, but soon departed for another Loire Valley town, Blois. Burton’s parents found themselves ill there, however, leading them to seek the milder climate of Italy; over the next years parents and children spent periods in various Italian cities, including Pisa, Florence, Rome, and Naples. Burton attributed many things about his later personality and career to his youthful experiences on the continent. The family was by no means wholly isolated from English life, since British colonies existed in the places where they settled (as in numerous European towns), providing a setting for the social life of their members. Dane Kennedy sees a certain similarity between these outposts and those in colonial locales outside Europe, but whereas Burton described British societies in India as spaces where John Bullish narrow-mindedness found more developed expression, it was the opposite with the continental communities. The ‘‘Anglo-Saxondom’’ they established was devoid of ‘‘snobs,’’ as well as of the ‘‘bitter discord’’ often found in me´nages bourgeoises. The prudery then spreading in English life was absent, too: ‘‘The difference of the foreign colonies was that the weight of English respectability appeared to be taken off them, though their lives were respectable and respected.’’ The expatriates were not exactly cosmopolitans, since living abroad made them ‘‘intensely patriotic’’ (although not much concerned about English politics); they ‘‘stuck to their own Church because it was their Church, and they knew as much about the Catholics at their very door, as the average Englishman does of the Hindu.’’ Many looked on their French neighbors with suspicion and especially condemned romantic relationships between young people of the two countries.39 But continental life all the same gave Burton and his siblings a taste for a broader and more open kind of social existence than England afforded, a preference that he discovered both when the family returned briefly to England in 1830 and still more later on, when he became a student at Oxford. On the first trip the children were put off by the small and commonplace nature of English buildings, by the inferior food, and by ‘‘the national temper, fierce and surly . . . a curious contrast to the light-hearted French of middle France.’’ Later, in Oxford, the old dislike to our surroundings returned with redoubled violence. Everything appeared to us so small, so mean, so ugly. The faces of the women were the only exception. . . . The houses were so unlike houses, and more like the Nuremberg toys magnified. . . . The little bits of garden were mere slices. . . . The interiors were cut

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up into such wretched rooms. . . . And there was a desperate neatness and cleanness about everything that made us remember the old story of the Stoic who spat in the face of the master of the house because it was the most untidy place in the dwelling. To contrast England and France in such terms was not unique to Burton in these years: the young John Stuart Mill reported a similar impression from a visit across the Channel, later recalling that being ‘‘able to breathe for a whole year the free and genial atmosphere of continental life’’ made him aware of ‘‘the low moral tone’’ of British social intercourse.40 But no one ever saw Mill as un-English, whereas people in Oxford viewed Burton in just this way, disapproving of his manners, his accent in Latin (the continental pronunciation was closer to Italian), and his dislike of the teaching and food in his college. The disapproval was mutual; when one student laughed at his mustache Burton tried to challenge him to a duel: ‘‘I felt as if I had fallen among ´epiciers.’’ None of the learning or experience he had absorbed was appreciated: ‘‘It was found out that I, who spoke French and Italian and their dialects like a native, who had a considerable smattering of Bearnais, Spanish, and Provenc¸ale, barely knew the Lord’s Prayer, broke down in the Apostles’ Creed, and had never heard of the Thirty-nine Articles—a terrible revelation.’’ That Burton’s animus was directed at least as much against British smugness as against religious education as such seems clear in the positive impression he retained of John Henry Newman, the don who later became a Catholic and a cardinal; although his person and speech struck Burton as somewhat colorless, he showed qualities of ‘‘complete candour and honesty; he said only what he believed, and he induced others to believe with him.’’41 Neither the preference for continental life nor the strong sense for the power of cultural difference these experiences bred in Burton kept him from seeing many things about France and Italy in negative terms, too, the pettiness of life in small French towns, the squalor and dirtiness of preRisorgimento Rome. But toward his own country Burton’s childhood cast him as an outsider in another way: it deprived him of the formative experiences and personal connections that making a career in nineteenth-century England required. ‘‘The conditions of society in England are so complicated, and so artificial, that those who would make their way in the world, especially in public careers, must be broken to it from their earliest day. The future soldiers and statesmen must be prepared by Eton and Cambridge.

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The more English they are, even to the cut of their hair, the better. In consequence of being brought up abroad, we never thoroughly understood English society, nor did society understand us.’’ In particular, Burton lacked a kind of tie that formed an important part of every national identity in the nineteenth century (and in many ways still does), namely to a particular locality (he used the word ‘‘parish’’). ‘‘It is a great thing, when you have won a battle, or explored Central Africa, to be welcomed home by some little corner of the Great World, which takes a pride in your exploits, because they reflect honour upon itself. In the contrary condition you are a waif, a stray; you are a blaze of light, without a focus. Nobody outside your own fireside cares.’’ Burton already felt much of this distance during his time at Oxford (it contributed to his leaving without taking a degree), but through all these comments there beams a clear sense that his impaired and conflicted British identity was one he could never cast off, however much it came to be mixed with other ones.42 As other writers have noted, his description of himself as ‘‘a waif, a stray . . . a blaze of light without a focus’’ fits with some persisting features of his personality already visible in his childhood. His mother seems to have had a complex fascination with both self-command and indiscipline (she was passionately attached to a half-brother she described as ‘‘wild’’), two contradictory qualities that Burton would display and value in later life. Their roots seem readily visible in such incidents as the one in which she called her two sons’ attention to tempting apple tarts in a French pastry-shop window, only to call the boys away, praising the virtues of self-denial. Burton and his younger brother Edward broke the glass with their fists and ran off with the tarts in their bloody fingers.43 A persisting desire to challenge and outrage their parents seems evident in a later moment that involved disguise as part of their strategy. An epidemic of cholera broke out while the family was living in Naples; mortality was especially high among the poor, many of whose bodies were cast into mass graves outside the city in the dead of night. Fascinated by the macabre events, Burton and his brother put on clothes in which they could pass as mute undertaker’s assistants and helped with the internments. Later he remembered the decaying bodies as giving off ‘‘a kind of lambent blue flame . . . which lit up a mass of human corruption, worthy to be described by Dante.’’44 The disguise was much simpler than the ones Burton would later employ, but here as later it served to gain entry to actions in which mystery was mixed with religious significance; now as later he was moved by a fascination for foreign and forbidden

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things and a disposition to manipulate his own identity in order to draw closer to them. Burton recounted these things about his childhood at least partly because he thought they pointed toward the conflicted relationship to English life he would always retain. The suspicion in which he was held by many influential people cast a pall over the diplomatic career he began in 1861; although he received a number of consular appointments, most of them sent him to difficult, even dangerous places in which he had little interest. Only Damascus, where he arrived in 1869, allowed him to draw on his knowledge of Eastern cultures (there he went back to his old practice of masquerading as a local, wandering about incognito in order to gain information, a stratagem in which he was now joined by his wife); but his inability to deal effectively with conflicts between various ethnic groups there—and especially his hostility toward the city’s Jews, part of a complex attitude to which we will come in a moment—overcame him and he was forced out. Trieste, his next and final posting, was easier to deal with but it was also a comedown from Damascus and paid less (he did a great deal of writing there, working in a room he furnished in a Moroccan style). During these years he spent periods in England, but often unhappily, and his closest associates in London were figures who resembled him in arousing suspicion and hostility in more conventional people. Among them were Richard Monckton Milnes and Algernon Swinburne, members with Burton of a band that called itself the ‘‘Cannibal Club,’’ known for their sometimes poetic eccentricity, their interest in erotic and pornographic literature, and their association with nonstandard sexual practices. Burton displayed these involvements most publicly in his translations of the Thousand and One Nights (including the commentaries that accompanied it) and his publication of the Kama Sutra (in a translation by someone else that he revised). All the same, the knighthood he eventually received in 1886, four years before his death, owed more to his writing than to his government service. That he received it should remind us that Victorian England was morally and culturally far more diverse and open than its guardians of virtue wished. The Arabian Nights translation had many defenders as well as enemies, a response that testified to the more affirmative attitudes toward sexuality that began to appear from the 1860s, and that remained alive even among many highly respectable people and despite the objections of bigots; indeed, the still common image of Victorian life as one-sidedly repressive

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owes much to the reaction against these liberalizing currents.45 Such coexistence of staid and restrictive attitudes with more open and adventurous ones was exemplified by Burton’s own marriage: his wife, descendant of a family whose storied history went back to the Middle Ages (the Arundells) and a fervent Catholic, was also a determinedly independent woman who married without her parents’ consent and used her many social connections to defend her husband against his moralistic critics; she had much to do with obtaining his knighthood. At certain moments her fearful puritanism took destructive turns, leading her to suppress publications she saw as harmful to his reputation while he was alive, and to burn some of his notebooks and manuscripts after his death; but she clearly understood that these facets of his person and career were part of what made Burton the special figure he was, and to whom she was devoted.46 These complex, sometimes confusing aspects of Burton’s relations to circumstances and people in his time were deeply connected to the sense of himself as at once bound up in a particular cultural identity—British—and unable to enter fully into it, bred into him from childhood.

* * *

The rich but also often troubling, equivocal, and inconsistent nature of Burton’s relations to other peoples and cultures is especially evident in his dealings with Jews and black Africans. Some of his pronouncements about both groups are bound to strike most people today as somewhere between embarrassing and despicable, especially since he regularly viewed them through the prism of race, and his unembarrassed use of racial categories in regard to those who bore the brunt of Nazi and colonialist violence makes it tempting to class him as an outright racist. We need to remember, however, that ‘‘race’’ could be an extremely vague notion in the nineteenth century, applied to groups both large and small and by no means (as some of the language quoted below shows) always indicating biological determination of traits. Pinning the label ‘‘racist’’ on him does not prepare us for the highly critical, even demeaning, things he said about supposedly higher or more advanced groups, notably Christians in general and his own countrymen in particular, especially as they appeared in colonial settings. Rather than suppose that it was some set of racist impulses that determined his

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attitude toward Jews and Africans, we need to consider the particular mix of hostility and appreciation he displayed toward each group, and to take the racial language he used not as driving his thinking but as the thencommonplace instrument through which he expressed it. Burton’s offensive anti-Jewish pronouncements belong to the last two decades of his life, and had at least part of their origin in the tense and hostile relations with Jewish inhabitants of Damascus he developed after he became the British consul there in 1869. Conflicts between ethnic groups were rife in the city and its region, and Burton’s troubles began when he sided with Muslims who accused Jewish apprentices of defacing an Islamic school, and Jewish moneylenders of cheating peasants. After some Jews with connections in England lodged complaints about this with British officials in London, followed by Burton himself adding fuel to the fire by some hot-headed actions on other matters, he was dismissed from the longcoveted post. His anti-Jewish feelings deepened after he moved to Trieste, a city where Jews were prominent in business and cultural life, and where early stirrings of the political antisemitism that soon became powerful in the Habsburg empire (of which Trieste was then a part) were already present. It was there that he assembled materials for an essay entitled ‘‘The Jew’’ that remained unpublished in his lifetime but of which parts were issued by W. H. Wilkins in 1898, in the same volume that contained the text on the historical significance of Islam we considered earlier, as well as a piece about ‘‘The Gypsy.’’ The essay on Jews was a motley collection of his own observations and statements by others, not all negative or critical, but clearly intended to contribute to the burgeoning stream of anti-Jewish polemic that became a flood by the end of the century. It included most of the stock tropes of antisemitic rhetoric: Jews were covetous moneygrubbers, shifty, selfish, and aggressive in their search for wealth; keeping apart from the peoples in whose lands they lived, they still managed to acquire great power and influence, feeding the sense of superiority that underlay their aggression toward others; thus they were rightfully feared and despised by those who knew them. Displaying as he often did the fruits of his wide reading, Burton acknowledged the defenses of Jews put forward by liberals and other defenders, inserting into his text a long passage from a speech by the Whig historian and politician T. B. Macaulay that attributed the negative qualities often identified with Jews to the exclusion and oppression visited upon them. Burton took this explanation seriously, but he blunted its effect by asserting that Jews had long responded to such

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treatment in a way that people of a more noble and generous nature would not have, namely by developing a theory and practice of revenge. He supported this view by citations from the Talmud and by a list of incidents in which Jews had been accused of violence toward outsiders, evidence that modern Jews did not shrink from putting the Talmudic precepts into practice. The credence Burton clearly gave to these accusations extended even to the often-repeated charge of murdering Christian children in order to use their blood in rituals. This part of the dossier against the Jews was highly truncated in the published version of ‘‘The Jew,’’ however, since the editor Wilkins (a friend of Burton’s and especially of his wife’s) thought it too offensive to publish in toto.47 What prefaced this polemic, however, was an account of something about Jews that Burton clearly admired, namely their strength and vigor, both as a group and as individuals. Of all human types the Jews ‘‘possess the most abundant vitality,’’ an ‘‘indestructible and irrepressible lifepower’’ that found expression not just in the influence they had gained in so many countries, but also in mental and physical well-being that let them live longer than other groups and enjoy greater immunity from disease (Burton cited statistical studies that he believed supported these differences). We might expect such a catalogue to be attributed to innate physical constitution, in line with the language of race he often employed. But the explanation he gave was not biological; it was cultural: Jewish strength was the consequence of a certain way of life, given shape by the laws laid down by Moses himself: All the laws attributed to the theistic secularism of Moses were issued with one object—namely that of hardening and tempering the race to an extent which even Sparta ignored. The ancient Jew was more than half a Bedawin and not being an equestrian race his annual journeys to and from Jerusalem were mostly made on foot. His diet was carefully regulated, and his year was a succession of fasts and feasts, as indeed it is now, but not to such an extent as formerly. The results were simply the destruction of all the weaklings and the survival of the fittest.48 The famous phrase with which this statement ends was first used by Herbert Spencer in his 1864 treatise Principles of Biology, as an equivalent for what Darwin called ‘‘natural selection’’; it seems reasonable to assume that

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Burton had read Spencer by the time he wrote this passage (although I know of no other evidence that he had). What needs to be noted, however, is that the racial character Burton describes was not some genetic inheritance but the result of a set of cultural practices (even if they were in some degree imaginary); it was because the severe demands that Mosaic law imposed on Jews as a people could not be met by their own weaker members that the aggregate grew strong. This was a view quite in line with the social Darwinism Spencer developed out of evolutionary theory, but it departed from the more purely biological perspective usually associated with post-Darwinian racial thinking. Although Burton seems not to have expressed this view of Jews before he compiled his essay about them, he very likely had something close to it in mind some years earlier in a favorable, albeit cryptic, declaration about them. Responding to some antisemitic statements he encountered in Brazil (where he served as consul before going to Damascus and Trieste), Burton wrote: ‘‘Had I a choice of race, there is none to which I would belong more willingly than the Jewish—of course the white family.’’49 The implication that some Jews were not ‘‘white’’ and that these were inferior to the others suggests that Burton already harbored a certain ambivalence toward Jews. Although he does not say so, it seems likely that ‘‘strength and energy’’ were the qualities that drew him to the ones he admired, since he valued these traits wherever he found them and liked to attribute them to himself; recall the comment about desert bandits quoted above from the Personal Narrative: ‘‘Who so revolts against society requires an iron mind and an iron body, and these mankind instinctively admires, however misdirected be their energies.’’ Clearly, Burton had moved far from this identification by the time he wrote ‘‘The Jew’’; all the same, even that essay offered a ground for admiring its subjects, namely that the same culture that hardened Jews as a people also fostered in them a moral attitude Burton found worthy of deep respect, the determination to serve God out of pure devotion and not for any personal advantage. Although the ancient Hebrews already interpreted their special relationship to Jehovah as justifying hostility and violence toward other peoples, the same sense of special communal solidarity inculcated a rare humanity amongst its own members unknown to all other peoples of antiquity: for instance, it allowed the coward to retire from the field before battle, and, strange to say, it inculcated

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the very highest of moral dogmas. In 250 B.C. Sochaeus, and after him the Pharisees, according to Josephus, taught that God should be served, not for gain, but for love and gratitude: hence his follower Sadik forbade the looking forward to futurity, even as Moses had neglected the doctrine with studious care. Even in the present age of the world such denegation of egotism would be a higher law.50 It may be impossible to decide whether the approval Burton here expressed for allowing cowards to escape battle was genuine or ironic, and similarly whether his association of high moral purity with Jews was at work also in his earlier profession of kinship with them. But finding these ideas in the later essay adds more substance to the evident ambivalence at the core of his dealings with Jews, visible and active even in the moment of his most hostile stance toward them. Although more difficult to see, a similar complexity can be discerned in his attitude toward black Africans. Burton seems never to have felt any sense of special kinship toward them, but here too the antipathy he often voiced in racial categories needs to be considered alongside some very different judgments. It is worth recalling that Burton appears never to have been bothered by being called a ‘‘white Nigger’’ on account of the relations he sought out with darker-skinned people in India, and it may be that the best path toward understanding his overall relationship to Africa and Africans lies in reversing the usual approach to the question and considering his positive pronouncements before taking up the negative ones. The latter must not be either ignored or underplayed, but the former help to provide a framework within which to see how they fit into his larger mindset. Burton’s most extensive discussion of black African culture came in the preface he wrote for a collection of West African proverbs and sayings he published in 1865. That he troubled to do the book at all is evidence that he took African culture seriously, and his comments about it are remarkable enough to deserve quotation at length. Invoking the question often (and regrettably) posed in his time, whether ‘‘the Negroes are a genuine portion of mankind or not,’’ Burton went on: If it is mind that distinguishes men from animals, the question cannot be decided without consulting the languages of the Negroes, for language gives the expression and the manifestation of the mind. Now, as the grammar proves that Negro languages are capable of

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expressing human thoughts—some of them, through their rich formal development, even with astonishing precision—so specimens of their ‘‘Native Literature’’ [the proverbs] show that the Negroes actually have thoughts to express; that they reflect and reason about things, just as other men. Considered in such a point of view, such specimens may go a long way towards refuting the old-fashioned doctrine of an essential inequality of the Negroes with the rest of mankind, which now and then shows itself, not only in America, but also in Europe. Such negative judgments had been developed by people who had never heard, or been unable to understand, the speech of black people in their own languages: But when I was amongst them in their native land, on the soil which the feet of their fathers have trod, and heard them deliver in their own native tongue stirring extempore speeches, adorned with beautiful imagery, and of half an hour’s duration; or when I was writing from their dictation, sometimes two hours in succession, without having to correct a word or alter a construction in twenty or thirty pages; or when in Sierra Leone, I attended examinations of the sons of liberated slaves in Algebra, Geometry, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, etc.—then, I confess, any other idea never entered my mind but that I had to do with real men. Burton followed this with similar testimonies from others who had been in like situations, and concluded: ‘‘The fact is, civilization takes too much upon herself. There is more of equality between the savage and the civilized—the difference being one of quantity, not of quality—than the latter will admit. For man is everywhere commensurate with man. Hence, whilst the average Englishman despises the Yoruba, the Yoruba ‘reciprocates’ with hate and fear.’’ Burton made a similar observation in a letter to his friend Monckton Milnes: ‘‘Those who talk of the benighted African should have seen the envoy who conveyed to the Governor the ultimatum of the Ashanti King. There was not a European on the coast to compare with him in dignity, self-possession and perfect savoir-faire touching the object of his mission.’’51

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Faced with such declarations as these, it is hard not to be astonished, as well as appalled, by the very different things Burton wrote on other occasions. Here he gave vent to all the standard tropes of anti-black prejudice and polemic: Africans were dirty, smelly, lazy, drunken, violent, bestial, stupid, oversexed, and undisciplined. About East Africans in particular, he wrote that their ‘‘stagnation of mind, indolence of body, moral deficiency, superstition, and childish passion’’ betray an ‘‘apparent incapacity for improvement,’’ and that their inability to take a distance from the concerns of each passing moment kept them from developing either memory or any productive kind of imagination. Burton was particularly critical of Africans who attempted to take on European ideas, clothing, or behavior (especially under the influence of Christian missionaries), and his outpourings in this line received enough public notice for them to be attacked by African writers, including the then well-known black physician, scientist, and banker James Africanus Horton, who castigated Burton for advancing false and insulting racial theories.52 A number of things help to account for the sharp differences between what almost seem to be two different Richard Burtons speaking in these voices. One is that in some degree his views changed over time. The negative comments mostly reflect his experiences at the end of the 1850s, when he had his first encounters with Africa and Africans in the continent’s eastern regions, starting with the journey he undertook to the third major Muslim pilgrimage site, Harar in Somaliland, and followed by his attempt to find the source of the Nile in the central African lake regions in the company of another British army officer, John Hauning Speke. Although each trip achieved its aim in some ways, both were painful failures in others, especially for Burton. He undertook the Harar trip as a continuation of his earlier visit to Medina and Mecca, and expected to do it, too, in disguise, as a Muslim merchant. The plan seemed to go well at first but had to he abandoned when Burton was convinced along the way that his light complexion (he neglected to bring along the nut oil he had used to darken his skin in Arabia) would put his life in danger in Harar itself—not because he would be suspected of being a Western European, but because people were likely to take him as a Turk, an identity no less hated in East Africa than that of ‘‘Frank.’’ Thus he made his entrance into Harar in uniform as a British officer and not as a Muslim pilgrim. Even so, he was effectively imprisoned for ten days by the Amir, who ruled the place with a strong and often violent hand. Burton’s life seems to have been in real danger, the

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Amir fearing that his presence would fulfill an old prophecy about the kingdom losing its independence should any European succeed in entering it. In the end, however, Burton was allowed to go free, chiefly because the ruler feared that the British might retaliate if he harmed one of their officers, curtailing his profitable participation in the slave trade. While in Harar, Burton pursued his longstanding interest in local cultures and histories (he believed that his ties to local people from whom he sought information on this score may have aided in preserving his life), but one lesson of the visit was that he would not be able to pursue his cultivation of an ‘‘Oriental’’ identity on African soil, and his next African projects chiefly involved geographical exploration in the style of other famous nineteenth-century travelers such as David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley. These, however, turned out to bring greater dangers and worse suffering than the Harar trip, partly because of the difficulties of organizing enough local people to support the undertaking, the perils presented by the climate and terrain, the hostile reception given the visitors by local tribes (which ended with Burton being severely wounded and having to be carried in a litter for some weeks), and partly because of the conflict that developed between Burton and his partner Speke. The two were badly matched, Speke being an enthusiast for big-game hunting with no interest in native cultures or religions and no familiarity with local languages. But he was an intrepid if sometimes careless explorer, and it was he who succeeded in locating the source of the Nile in Lake Victoria, at a time when Burton was laid up with illness. The grounds on which he believed in his discovery were shaky and uncertain, involving what he thought he had been told by local people with whom he had no common language, but he succeeded where Burton failed. The latter, partly out of jealousy, refused to credit Speke’s claims, and the venomous and public controversy between them dragged on for years, ending only with Speke’s death in 1864, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound that may have been an accident but some believed to be suicide. Like the Harar episode, the Nile project presented Burton with a very different experience from those he met with in either India or Arabia, and some of what he wrote about it simply reflects the contrast. That many of his comments are bound to strike people with more modern sensibilities as vile and contemptible is testimony to an evolution in attitudes that we should cherish as an advance in both understanding and human empathy. But affirming our commitment to this gain should not close our eyes to the truth of some of Burton’s observations (a number of which, as we shall

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see, still applied to the life Chinua Achebe described a century later). As Fawn Brodie insists: There was filth, mutilation, ignorance, indolence, drunkenness and violence. The natives did live in huts populated with ‘‘a menagerie of hens, pigeons, and rats of peculiar impudence,’’ like the poor in Ireland, as he was careful to point out. Certain tribes did burn their witches, again, as he noted, like Europeans of a not-too-distant date. . . . In several tribes, if an infant cut his upper incisor teeth before the lower, he was killed or sold into slavery. If twins were born, they were often both killed. . . . Burton saw the disregard for life among his own bearers. One bought a slave child, who as he discovered shortly, could not keep up with the caravan because of sore feet. The owner decided to abandon her, but cut off her head lest she benefit someone else.53 The splendor of nature in Africa could not compensate Burton for the sense of alienation he felt there: ‘‘The absence of all association, the sense of loneliness and estrangement, the absurd distance from friend and family seem to diffuse an ugliness over every African river, however fair.’’ The continent was a ‘‘stranger-land,’’ at the other pole from the Arabia where he so easily felt at home, and which he described in the foreword to the Thousand and One Nights translation as ‘‘the land of my predilection . . . a region so familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a reminiscence of some by-gone metempsychic life in the distant Past.’’54 The antipathy Burton felt toward African life was not so complete as to blind him to features he could admire; even in the eastern regions whose conditions made him speak about ‘‘degeneration’’ and ‘‘bestiality,’’ he noted elements close to those he would later cite as evidence for intelligence and cultivation, reporting that ‘‘many negro and negroid races’’ possessed ‘‘an unstudied eloquence which the civilized speaker might envy, and which, like poetry, seems to flourish most in the dawn of civilization.’’ But such observations were mostly drowned out by the tide of revulsion.55 One reason why later writings such as the proverbs book could shift the balance toward the positive judgments noted above may simply have been that the impact of Burton’s first experiences in Africa was no longer so immediate and potent, receding at the same time that he acquired more experience of native languages and thinking. Curiously, however, not only

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did his recourse to racial categories not diminish in the face of his recognition that African tongues and speech testified to genuine intellect and creativity, the moment when Burton presented African cultural forms as evidence for black people’s unquestionable intellectual capacity was also the one when strictly biological and physical thinking became more prominent in his writing. Burton was not alone in taking this direction: he pursued it in concert with the friends and associates with whom he banded together to found the Anthropological Society of London in 1863. The group broke away from an older organization, the Ethnological Society, precisely to give greater emphasis to the physical and biological basis of racial and cultural difference (a viewpoint encouraged by the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859); the shift was signaled by the substitution of ‘‘anthropological’’ for ‘‘ethnological’’ in the new organization’s name. Other considerations motivated the break as well, in particular a desire to speak freely in meetings and discussions about sexual behavior in ‘‘primitive’’ societies and about physical sexual features both male and female; such things were forbidden at the Ethnological Society because their sessions were open to women, a problem the new group dealt with by excluding them. Burton stood close to James Hunt, the Anthropological Society’s president and a leader in compiling and using data on measurable physical differences in such things as skull and brain size, and facial and bodily proportions. Burton contributed to all this by collecting skulls in Africa (beginning on the trip in search of the Nile’s source); he often spoke about the racial elements he thought he could discern in various parts of people’s faces or torsos, and like Hunt gave much attention to phrenology, that fashionable nineteenth-century ‘‘science’’ that traced attributes of personality to cranial shapes and bumps.56 How can we understand Burton’s turning in this direction just at the moment when he was praising the precision and expressive power of African languages and the high cultural level of their proverbs, declaring at the same time that the distance between ‘‘savage’’ and ‘‘civilized’’ was much less than commonly supposed? And how can a person so aware, as he was in the case of the Jews, that significant ‘‘racial’’ characteristics can be generated by culture and history no less than by biology, have insisted on the determining power of measurable physical features? These tangled questions stand near the center of any attempt to grasp how Burton’s preconceptions and experiences shaped his understanding of cultural relations and whether there was any consistency to his thinking. They are important in grasping broadly shared nineteenth-century attitudes as well.

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A key to unraveling them has been supplied by Dane Kennedy: behind Burton’s emphasis on the biological determination of differences between human groups was his opposition to one particular and prominent way of affirming human universality in his time, the one advanced by Christian evangelicals. For them what mattered most about human beings was the state of their souls; cultural difference was a marginal concern compared with the spiritual core common to humans everywhere and the need to bring all individuals into the fold of faith. By contrast, looking for a physical basis of differences in thinking and behavior was a way to shine a more intense light on cultural diversity too. Evangelical Christians played a large role in nineteenth-century culture. Much of the puritanical moralism signaled by the term Victorian, and against which Burton spoke out all through his life, arose from the evangelical campaign to shape everyday life around rigorous adherence to Christian precepts. Thus it is not surprising that Burton was anything but friendly to the missionary project of conversion pursued by evangelicals in the 1860s. Among their converts were the most prominent of the Africans who rose up against Burton’s negative pronouncements about African life and culture. Like the Sepoy whom he decried on his first trip to India, such people appeared in his eyes as ungainly hybrids, neither genuinely African nor truly European. He saw the Africans who had embraced the missionary message as coming from the same mold, dressing themselves up in ‘‘the cast-off finery of Europe’’ and behaving accordingly. Like some of Burton’s other reactions to Africans, this one seems to have been fed by a visceral dislike that issued in judgments both superficial and mean-spirited; later he came to recognize that people such as his chief critic, James Africanus Horton, were capable of genuine cultivation and accomplishment. All the same, I think it is wrong to see these notions as in tension with Burton’s own engagement with disguise and cultural synthesis, as some writers have. On one level, his dislike of Christianized Africans constituted his own version of the Muslim suspicion and distrust of converts he noted in both India and Arabia; in addition, it gave expression to his understanding that merely changing one’s religious faith could not bridge the distance between cultures, because it did not address the pervasive contrasts in everyday behavior and the presuppositions about the world underlying them that bulked so large in cultural identity. Burton’s objections to the missionary project rested on an additional ground, his conviction that core elements of Christianity fit badly with

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African life as it existed, especially in contrast with the other non-native religion that was expanding its presence on the continent during the nineteenth century, Islam. Muslim doctrine and ethics set itself against practices that constituted immediate and powerful barriers to moral and social advancement in Africa: ‘‘cannibalism and fetishism, the witch tortures, the poison ordeals and legal incest, the ‘customs’ [to be described below] and the murders of albinos, of twins.’’ That it left in place other objectionable things, ‘‘polygamy, domestic slavery, and the degradation of women,’’ was true, but abolishing them (as Christian missionaries desired) would have required a fundamental social restructuring. ‘‘Unlike Christianity,’’ as Dane Kennedy summarizes Burton’s view, ‘‘which left its converts socially deracinated and morally unmoored, [Islam] supplied them with a syncretist faith that accommodated itself to ancestral traditions while contributing a new social and ethical framework for meeting the wider world.’’57 It was this cultural fit, not any theological consideration, that led Burton to see Islam’s influence there as positive, while Christianity’s was not. Here as elsewhere, however, Burton’s ability to grasp such contrasts in cultural terms did not lead him to retreat from his emphasis on racial difference conceived biologically. The ‘‘first step in moral progress’’ Islam provided prepared ‘‘the African . . . for a steady onward career, as far as his faculties can take him.’’ Such a formula makes modern readers cringe, a reaction that is bound to be deepened in the face of two positions Burton took that were in accord with it. The first of these was his attitude toward slavery. In several writings he argued that slavery was an appropriate and justifiable condition in situations where people’s degree of social and intellectual development had not reached a sufficiently ‘‘civilized’’ level, and that Africans were still in the process of reaching such a point. Although no longer so justified as it had once been, slavery had until recently served as a vehicle of improvement, taking people out of situations whose isolated and undeveloped conditions offered few resources for bringing them to a higher plane of existence.58 The second notion Burton and his friends such as Hunt defended against Christian-inspired views (and those of the Ethnological Society) had to do with whether differing human groups were all branches of a single tree, or whether instead they descended from separate origins and lineages. Christianity, rooted in the Biblical idea of a single creation, entailed a monogenist view of humanity, a single point of human origin; but the Anthropological Society promoted polygenism, which traced differing groups to different evolutionary pathways, along which some had

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advanced farther than others. Few notions are more offensive to advocates of human equality today, and it is not easy for us to recognize the very different implications that the choice between the two notions carried. All the same, as Kennedy has recognized: Burton’s embrace of a polygenist understanding of race was motivated not just by his belief in the separate genesis of Africans, but by his desire to defend their distinctive social practices and sense of cultural identity against extinction. He was most fervently outspoken in his advocacy of the polygenist position during his years in West Africa because it was there that the missionaries had made their most significant inroads against indigenous systems of behavior and belief. . . . What appears to us a paradox—the convergence of curiosity about other cultures as autonomous systems operating outside any absolute standards with the view of race as a biological fact whose various groupings are distinct, fixed, and hierarchically ordered—was entirely consistent and logical to Burton.59 The idea that cultural contrasts were rooted in racial difference firmed up the ground on which different ways of life could be granted independence against the homogenizing thrust of European and especially Christian claims to cultural universality. It was this perspective that allowed Burton to arrive at some remarkable and even sympathetic understandings of practices often regarded as merely cruel and barbaric. Of these, few were looked on with greater horror by Westerners than the ‘‘customs’’ of the West African kingdom of Dahomey, the ritual acts by which groups of people were put to death to provide companions for a defunct king. Burton had listed the ‘‘customs’’ along with cannibalism and infanticide as among the most barbarous of African practices in his 1863 book Wanderings in West Africa. But the next year he was sent to Dahomey to try to put a stop to the practice, and once there he became convinced that it was too deeply rooted in native beliefs and loyalties to be abolished (a judgment that recalls his reports to Napier about intra-familial violence in Sind). These beliefs and loyalties, moreover, were akin to some that underlay ‘‘civilized’’ practices: rather than ‘‘love of bloodshed,’’ what the executions expressed was ‘‘filial piety.’’ ‘‘The Dahoman, like the ancient Egyptian, holds this world to be his temporary lodging. His true home is Ku-to-men,

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Deadman’s Land. It is not a place of rewards and punishments, but a Hades for ghosts, a region of shades, where the King will rule for ever and where the slave will for ever serve. The idea is perpetually present to the popular mind.’’ When a king dies, he must be sent to Ku-to-men with a retinue of wives, ministers, friends, and servants; royal dignity required that the numbers be large, so that as many as two thousand people might be decapitated in the ‘‘grand customs’’ that followed a royal death. Smaller numbers were dispatched in the yearly echoes of the larger ritual. Sometimes these were carried out in order for the living to communicate with the dead. ‘‘The king, wishing to send a message to his father, summons a captive, carefully primes him with the subject of his errand . . . and strikes off his head. If an important word be casually omitted he repeats the operation.’’ The deaths were therefore vehicles of social connection, not a breaking of interpersonal bonds. ‘‘A Dahoman king neglecting these rites would be looked upon as the most impious of men.’’ For an outsider to argue that the practice should stop was bootless: ‘‘It may be compared without disrespect to memorialising the Vatican against masses for the dead.’’60 Burton’s account of these practices—as well as of some others, involving female warriors and their complex sexuality—foreshadows that of more modern anthropologists, making clear that his positing of a biological basis for cultural difference did not impede—if anything it encouraged and enhanced—his ability to understand it in strictly cultural terms. His attention to the ways that apparently senseless forms of behavior give expression to coherent and pervasive systems of belief calls up a well-known comment of the highly (and rightly) esteemed anthropologist Clifford Geertz: ‘‘Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs.’’61 Burton did not rise to the level of Geertz’s metaphor, but he would easily have grasped its sense. We need to recognize, however, that he offered such analyses in a somewhat different spirit from the cultural anthropology that has descended from Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas. Anthropologists in this tradition have been not just inquirers into cultures that are more compact and integrated (and to us more exotic) than the ones modern Westerners inhabit, but defenders of those other ways of life, against outside efforts to ‘‘improve’’ the lives of their members.62 Burton was also a defender of the cultures he sought to understand, the African ones toward which he felt some kind of instinctive unease no less than the Arab ones he spontaneously admired, but his attitude differed in one significant respect from that

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of modern anthropologists. The best way to describe this difference might be to say that he was more mindful than his successors that what Geertz describes as webs of meaning are also tissues of nonsense, or—perhaps it would be better to say—that it mattered more to him to make clear how fully permeable the boundary between cultural meaning and nonsense really is. That he regarded ‘‘primitive’’ cultures as shot through with nonsense no less than with the meaning he identified in the Dahomey ‘‘customs’’ is already clear in his earlier writings on Africa. Burton was surely aware that such practices as killing or enslaving infants who cut their incisor teeth in the wrong order had some basis in shared beliefs and assumptions too, but the practice was no less to be condemned for that, and on some level this was his attitude toward sending messages to the land of the dead by chopping off the heads of living messengers. In the same place where he defended the Dahomey customs he told of a tribe that had nearly been annihilated because its members believed that putting a sacred snake on the path to their village would defend them from their enemies (the reptile was dangerous, Burton maintained, only to rats). This does not mean that he regarded all such ‘‘civilized’’ judgments as superior to those of less advanced people: contesting the common European view that Africans in general led ‘‘a wretched existence,’’ he maintained that ‘‘the so-called reflecting part of Creation will measure every other individual’s happiness or misery by his own; consequently it is hoodwinked in its judgment. Considering the wisdom displayed in the distribution and adaptation of mankind, I venture to opine that all are equally blessed and cursed.’’ Generalizing this judgment in another place, he wrote that ‘‘nations are poor judges of one another; each looks upon itself as an exemplar to the world and vents its philanthropy by forcing its infallible system upon its neighbor. How long is it since popular literature has begun to confess that the British Constitution is not quite fit for the whole human race, and that the Anglo-Saxon has much to do at home, before he sets out a-colonelling to regenerate mankind?’’ (To which Americans in the first decades of the twenty-first century may sadly respond that for some of their elected leaders such a time has, alas, not yet arrived, even now.)

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This skepticism, dashing cold water on both the claims cultures make to regulate the lives of their members and on their belief in the high worth of their values, became a central element in Burton’s meditation on cultural difference sometime in the 1860s. That this attitude should be understood as a fruit of his longstanding sense of never belonging wholly to any single culture, and of his attempts to carve out for himself some kind of space between different ones, can best be seen by looking at the two works in which he gave it most explicit expression, Stone Talk (1865) and The Kasidah of Haji Abdu el-Yezdi (1880). The two writings strike different tones, the first excited and aggressive, the second calmer and more reflective, and only the former speaks specifically about life in the nineteenth century, but the two works are very close in spirit. Both are written in verse, there is much overlap in their content, and both put ideas and sentiments that are clearly Burton’s own in the mouths of imagined ‘‘Orientals,’’ a Hindu in the first and a Muslim in the second. Burton never publicly admitted being the author of either, a tactic that served to shield him from the opprobrium that giving voice to radical critiques of morality, religion, and contemporary British and European life would have been bound to call down on his head; but not putting his name to the works also allowed him to speak at once as a person with a particular cultural identity—not his own—and as an anonymous voice coming from no definite place. The first book, a dialogue between an English scholar, ‘‘Dr. Polyglott,’’ returning very tipsy from a dinner at which the talk was ‘‘’Bout India, Indians and all that,’’ and a London paving stone that his inebriation helps him to see as the metamorphosis of a long-ago Brahman, was published under the name ‘‘Frank Baker’’ (‘‘Frank,’’ as Fawn Brodie notes, was a version of Burton’s own second name, Francis, and Baker the family name of his mother); the second claimed to be a translation by ‘‘F.B.’’ of a poem by the Persian friend (and Mecca pilgrim, since he bore the honorific ‘‘Haji’’) whose name appeared on the title page. Burton printed 200 copies of the first but few survive because his wife, Isabel, quickly recognizing him behind the pseudonym and fearing that enemies would use the book to damage his chances for getting desirable appointments from the Foreign Office, bought up as many copies as she could find and burned them. With its more polished and sweet-sounding style, the Kasidah seems to have been partly inspired by the success of Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (published in 1859), which Burton hoped to emulate, but in contrast to its model it found little success with

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the public (although it has recently been reprinted a number of times). Like Fitzgerald’s book, Burton’s affirms the pleasures of life in the present over the promises of any future or beyond, but the Kasidah is peppered with anti-religious ideas that most readers at the time would have found shocking.63 One thing that made Isabel so anxious about the possible impact of Stone Talk on Burton’s career was the book’s wide-ranging and acid-voiced criticisms of contemporary European life. A major focus was on moral and religious hypocrisy, especially in regard to English sexual and moral prudery and its effects on women; putting this critique in the mouth of a Hindu allowed its anti-Christian dimensions to receive especially free rein. No less harsh, however, was the blast against imperialism, an evil in Europe since the time of the Romans: ‘‘But SHE forgot / to plunder subjects; You do not.’’ The ‘‘death and doom’’ brought by ‘‘the ravening Saxon,’’ and that left ‘‘India once so happy, now / In scale of nations sunk so low,’’ was so palpable that the very mention of her name in the House of Commons ‘‘clears every bench to England’s shame.’’ (This did indeed happen on some occasions in Parliament.) Similar effects of imperial domination were evident among ‘‘the Red Man in the [American] West,’’ as well as in Turkey, Tasmania, and Japan. Nor were things better inside Britain itself, where many poor people had been turned into virtual slaves, condemned to inhabit such places as ‘‘the dread dens of Manchester.’’ All the same, no horror of the time was worse than the actual slave trade, ‘‘blacks bepacked like cotton bales, / Sold like cattle, lashed till raw / By nankeen’d whites in hats of straw.’’64 The strong accents in which these things are condemned (and the fatuous replies put in the mouth of ‘‘Dr. Polyglott’’) make it evident that Burton shared the views of his Brahman ‘‘stone.’’ These features of Stone Talk cast strong doubt on the claims put forward by some writers that his negative pronouncements about Africans, even when couched in terms of race, were those of an apologist for empire. In fact, Burton had been a critic of it all along, condemning British domination of India for the hatred and animosity it bred even before he left in 1849, and in one unwelcome memo effectively predicting the bloody uprising that shook the foundations of British rule in 1857, leading the crown to take over the East India Company’s status as the Raj’s sovereign authority. He repeated this diagnosis in the autobiographical memoir published by his wife, describing how the rigidity of the Company’s administrators and their failure to understand

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local life led them to turn once flourishing villages into places of poverty and suffering; in contrast, the native rulers whom the Company displaced had taxed heavily when harvests were good and lightly when they were not. ‘‘Anglo-Indian rule had no elasticity, and everything was iron-bound; it was all rule without exception. A crack young Collector would have considered himself dishonored had he failed to send in the same amount of revenues during a bad season, as during the best year.’’65 The religious and moral radicalism and the extreme cultural relativism of both Stone Talk and the Kasidah sprang in large part from the generalization of these views. Railing against the readiness of British Protestants to condemn Catholics for their errors and to attribute immorality to countries still loyal to the papacy, thus hypocritically casting a veil over their own lapses, the Brahman insists that religious beliefs are never founded on anything objective, and that people simply absorb whatever views happen to hold sway where they grow up: Chance birth, chance teaching—these decide The faiths wherewith men feed their pride; And, once on childhood’s plastic mind The trace deep cut, you seldom find Effaceable, unless the brain Be either wanting or insane. The Kasidah applies the same perspective to morals: There is no Good, there is no Bad; these be the whims of mortal will: What works me weal that call I ‘‘good,’’ what hams and hurts I hold as ‘‘ill’’: They change with place, they shift with race; and, in the veriest space of time Each Vice has worn a Virtue’s crown; all Good was banned as sin or crime. In the notes appended to his ‘‘translation’’ of Haji Abdu’s verses, ‘‘F.B.’’ refers back to these lines when he says that his friend was ‘‘weary of . . .

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finding every petty race wedded to its own opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to be in error.’’ It is from these observations, more than from any philosophical argument, that the poem’s author derives his conviction that no religious system can contain universal truth; at best each one grasps some fragment of the meaning that every human group seeks to wrest from the world in order to give value to its own form of life. All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own. But this is no mere banal affirmation of diversity. Quoting Pope’s line ‘‘whatever is, is right,’’ ‘‘F.B.’’ at once accepts and upends it: ‘‘Unfortunately the converse is just as true:—whatever is, is wrong.’’66 Applied to the interweaving of claims to universal truth with the particular forms of life they seek to validate, Burton’s variation on Pope’s maxim stands as a generalized declaration that the ‘‘self-spun webs of significance’’ that are human cultures are interwoven with threads of nonsense. Achieving a liberating distance from them is the precondition for acquiring genuine knowledge and understanding: ‘‘he knows not how to know / who knows not also how to unknow.’’ One particular point on which Haji Abdu offered such skeptically grounded knowledge was that there exists no spiritual realm independent of material reality, and that therefore the soul was not an entity separate from the body. The soul was one of those ‘‘words that gender things. . . . Sufficeth not the breath of life / to work the matterborn machine?’’ Burton elaborated this mix of materialism and skepticism in part by drawing on Enlightenment thinking; the Kasidah quoted both Voltaire and Diderot, and its author surely knew that Montesquieu had preceded him in warning against the limited and parochial perspective from which peoples stake their claims to cosmic significance. Haji Abdu followed the author of the Persian Letters in finding both irony and grounds for modesty in the way that creatures who live on a mere ‘‘dot in the universe’’ propose themselves ‘‘as an exact model for providence.‘‘67 But the particular inflection the Kasidah gave these notions put Burton closer to an intellectual figure of his own time, Friedrich Nietzsche. Burton’s skepticism about culturally rooted notions of morality and truth led

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him to speak in radically individualist terms very close to those Nietzsche ¨ bermensch, the would use in connection with the figure he called the U heroic personality who creates life-sustaining values wholly from within, summoning up the deep power that lesser individuals both lack and fear. ‘‘He noblest lives and noblest dies / who makes and keeps his self-made laws,’’ the Kasidah proclaims in one place, and in another, ‘‘Be thine own Deus: make self free, / liberal as the circling air.’’ Nietzsche’s path to similar formulations was more complex and more philosophically sophisticated than Burton’s, but he too drew part of the inspiration for them from the recognition that every human culture, in setting up what Zarathustra called a ‘‘tablet of good’’ for itself, at once releases the force of human creativity and imprisons it within limits, erecting barriers against the very powers that humanity might employ to raise itself to a higher and freer mode of existence.68 Burton shared with Nietzsche the sense that the path to such liberation lay through people recognizing themselves as the sole source of their beliefs and values, and of the supposedly divine beings that proclaim and enforce them, thereby regaining access to the creative powers cultures obstruct in the very moment of releasing them. In proclaiming this radical message, Stone Talk and the Kasidah also shine a light on the link Burton himself recognized between it and his condition of living between cultures. Already in writings of the 1840s, as we saw above, he associated the skepticism and materialism he would advocate in his later works with Indians whose intellectual independence was made possible by their simultaneous connection to two competing belief systems. This was the case with certain Amils who ‘‘become Dahri, or materialists’’ through reflecting on the similarities and differences between their traditional Hinduism and the Muslim beliefs of their neighbors; they acknowledged a deity, but one uncoupled ‘‘from all revelation,’’ and embodying ‘‘the eternity past and future of matter in its different modifications.’’ Only a few of these materialists became outright atheists, but those who did were more likely than European unbelievers to urge their conclusions on others. Burton’s involvement in Eastern religions and forms of life played a parallel role in the evolution that drew him to a similar advocacy, a connection he acknowledged by choosing Hindu and Muslim spokesmen for himself in his two verse books. These connections would be reaffirmed in the project that capped his career in the 1880s, his translation of the Thousand and One Nights; but we will see that in it he declared Islam to be

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no less in need of rescue from the limits all cultures impose on their members than was the complex of British values and attitudes whose narrow puritanism he had long bemoaned.

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The stories that make up the Thousand and One Nights had been popular in the West since their first translation into a European language by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1717; a number of English versions were made from Galland’s French text both in his century and the next, and the exotic and magical qualities of the tales made them staples of popular literature, especially for children. But Galland’s version was far from complete, and his choice of what stories to include was shaped partly by a passion for fairy tales that made him see the Nights chiefly as a source for them, and partly by his desire to produce a book that would not offend moral sensibilities. Very similar motives assured that the English version made from his text and even some early attempts to go back to the Arabic original in the early 1800s would suffer from many of the same limits. Burton was not the first person to seek a more authentic rendering; in his time two English Arabists preceded him in bringing out new versions of the tales. The first was Edward W. Lane, whose earlier book, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), provided a major source of knowledge about Arab and Muslim life for many in the nineteenth century, including Burton. Lane had dressed and lived in the manner of a local during the two years he spent in Cairo in the 1820s, gathering material for his book and learning Arabic. He later produced an Arabic-English dictionary still regularly used by scholars today. His translation of the Nights has both admirers and detractors (Burton among the latter), but whatever its virtues it was far from complete, leaving out whatever he considered ‘‘objectionable’’ or ‘‘licentious.’’ Much closer to what Burton had in mind was the work of a younger Arabist, John Payne, the first to produce a complete version (around four times the length of Galland’s, and three times that of Lane), of which the first volume appeared in 1882. Burton greeted it with praise, judging its success in rendering difficult passages so complete that ‘‘all future translators must perforce use the same

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expression under pain of falling far short.’’ In a letter to Payne he acknowledged the younger man’s priority and promised not to put out his own version until the other’s was complete; the friendly relations between the two led each to dedicate a volume to the other. Despite this, much controversy has grown up around their relations, some accusing Burton of simply stealing from Payne. This judgment is almost certainly too harsh (Fawn Brodie has given a balanced and sensible defense of Burton in her biography), but there seems no doubt that Burton made considerable use of Payne’s text in producing his own, and it may well be that his own version would not have been ready for publication in 1885 (or ever) if Payne’s work had not been available to him.69 For us, however, these questions matter far less than the role the translation played in Burton’s larger involvement with Arab and Muslim culture. He saw his work on the Nights as ‘‘a natural outcome of my Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah,’’ noting that while on his way he stayed for some weeks with a physician friend, John Steinhaeuser, who lived in Aden and shared his fascination for the tales, and that the two agreed to collaborate on the ‘‘full, complete, unvarnished, uncastrated translation’’ they both wished to see. The plan was for Steinhaeuser to work on prose passages and Burton on verse ones, but these hopes collapsed when Steinhaeuser died suddenly while still in his fifties. Whatever work he had done was lost, leaving Burton with the need to start pretty much from scratch. In his foreword he described the book, arduous as it appeared (especially because of the extensive apparatus of notes, many of them learned and extensive essays on matters grammatical, religious, or social), as ‘‘a labor of love, an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction,’’ especially during the years when he suffered ‘‘banishment’’ to West Africa and South America; it was in contrast to these other places that he described Arabia in the terms we noted earlier, as ‘‘the land of my predilection . . . a region so familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a reminiscence of some by-gone metempsychic life in the distant Past.’’ Burton invoked this sense of having an especially intimate connection to the Nights and its world in explaining why he thought his version of the tales was still needed despite the existence of all the earlier ones. His object was ‘‘to show what ‘The Thousand Nights and a Night’ really is,’’ not by translating the text literally, word for word, but ‘‘by writing as the Arab would have written in English.’’ Burton would probably have acknowledged that both Edward Lane and John Payne had the linguistic capacity to pursue

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such a goal, but neither in his view identified enough with the spirit and tenor of the tales to undertake it—Lane because he remained an Evangelical Christian, and Payne out of reticence. ‘‘My work claims to be a faithful copy of the great Eastern Saga-book, by preserving intact, not only the spirit, but even the me´canique, the manner and the matter.’’ The last sentence brings to mind his attempt in the pilgrimage book to convey both the workings and the spirit of what went on at Medina and Mecca through careful attention to the details of the rituals, participation in the feelings aroused in other pilgrims, and a literal and sympathetic enunciation of the prayer texts. But the project of the Nights had a second side, namely achieving what was the ‘‘glory’’ of the translator: ‘‘to add something to his native tongue,’’ providing new and expressive metaphors and turns of speech. He hoped these novel words or phrases would enter English as equivalents for ‘‘the tropes and figures which the Arabic language often packs into a single term.’’ To offer them required that the translator gamble on the willingness of readers to accept the new coinages as an enrichment of English rather than a defection from it: ‘‘I have never hesitated to coin a word when wanted, such as ‘she snorted and snarked,’ fully to represent the original. These, like many in Rabelais, are mere barbarisms unless generally adopted; in which case they become civilised and common currency.’’ Seeking to enrich his own language in this way gave his intercultural existence a new dimension. Hitherto his Arab involvements had chiefly focused on himself, expanding or deepening his personal existence; here he turned the interchange in the opposite direction, reinvesting the fruits of his efforts in the native cultural ground that was still his own. Intertwined with this aim was the one Burton pursued in the Kasidah and Stone Talk, using an expanded consciousness to show the arbitrary nature of the moral and intellectual limits cultures impose on their members, so as to encourage a certain degree of escape from them. It was especially in the realm of erotic experience that he saw the Nights as contributing to this liberation. Exposure to Eastern ways showed the provincial nature of Western sexual mores both in regard to certain particular topics and in attitudes toward sex more generally. The two particular matters were same-sex relationships and the amatory lives of women. Burton was less than consistent in regard to the first: he employed a general argument to defend homosexuality against the notion common in his time that it was ‘‘unnatural,’’ countering that whatever human beings do is natural

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to them. But when he set out to show that same-sex relations were more common and widespread outside Europe than within it, it was only male homosexuality he considered; sex between women did not enter the picture. We may never know whether Burton himself ever engaged in sex with other men, but he clearly had a fascination with it (going back at least to his days in Sind), and in the Terminal Essay that concluded his translation of the Nights he used the diverse attitudes taken toward it in different places to underscore the arbitrary nature of cultural restrictions (he also offered some possible explanations for the differences, but we must leave them aside here). He did not recommend that Europeans follow these examples in regard to same-sex relations, but clearly thought that Westerners could profit from an understanding of Eastern attitudes toward female sexuality; these were premised on a widespread sense that women no less than men had a right to sexual satisfaction, and that men had a responsibility to provide it. Such a stance made for more harmonious and more mutually respectful relationships, raising the general level of happiness.70 All these aspects of actual sexual practice were deeply tied up in his mind with a less physical side of erotic life, namely the power of desire to nurture imagination and fantasy. In this regard linguistic norms were no less significant than behavioral ones, and Burton gave much attention to the contrast between the Western and especially British penchant for casting a veil of prudish reticence over sexual matters, and the taken-for-granted Eastern expectation that people could and should speak directly and unreservedly about them. Burton’s advocacy of freer sexual talk was never absolute (he resisted putting his translation of the Nights in the hands of girls and young women), but it was clearly part of a sense that involvement in Eastern practices could liberate Westerners from the restrictions they senselessly imposed on themselves. He defended the ‘‘dirty talk’’ (turpiloquium) both in his foreword to the first volume and in the Terminal Essay that concludes the last, agreeing with many in his own time and since that what counts as gross or indecent language changes with time and place, insisting in particular that (as the eighteenth-century English orientalist William Jones said about Indians) many peoples to the east of Europe have never considered ‘‘that anything natural can be offensively obscene,’’ and enjoying the irony with which an early French traveler described the Japanese as ‘‘so crude that they only know to call things by their names.’’ Burton made it clear, however, that this ease of dealing with things only gingerly touched by his contemporaries did not lower the level of the Nights as a

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whole; on the contrary (and I think any fair and attentive reader will agree), ‘‘The general tone of The Nights is exceptionally high and pure. . . . The pathos is sweet, deep and genuine; tender, simple and true. . . . Its life, strong, splendid and multitudinous, is everywhere flavored with that unaffected pessimism and constitutionals melancholy which strike deepest root under the brightest skies and which sigh in the face of heaven’’ that (translating the words that Burton quoted, as he often did, in Latin) ‘‘human life is but a brief escape from death.’’ What the tales lacked was not civility but what some in the nineteenth century took to be refinement: ‘‘innocence of the word not of the thought; morality of the tongue not of the heart, and the sincere homage paid to virtue in guise of perfect hypocrisy.’’71 The overall implications of this defense of liberated speech only emerge when we note that Burton did not view the power of the Nights to undermine cultural limits as limited to Europeans: it operated in the East, too, by virtue of the tales’ ability to give free rein to a human capacity for cultural inventiveness against which Islam set up barriers no less rigid than those imposed by Christianity. Burton’s attention to this aspect of the collection has at least two features that have not been sufficiently appreciated, first his insistence on regarding the stories as a hybrid product of two cultures and religions, one Persian-Zoroastrian, the other Arab-Muslim, and second the way that his emphasis on this mixing led him to view Mohammed and his achievement in a more negative light than he had before. Several earlier scholars and writers (including Galland, the first European translator) had maintained that the main body of the tales originated not in the Arab lands but in Persia before the advent of Islam, but others contested the point, including Lane. His authority gave the claim new currency, so that Burton’s emphasis on it formed part of what made his approach distinctive. The arguments need not detain us much; they involve the Persian origins of the chief figures’ names, including Scheherazade and her sister Dunyazad, and references in early Arabic sources to the Persian originals of the collection. Burton maintained that over time Arabic names and historical figures were inserted by ‘‘a host of editors, scribes and copyists,’’ who also converted ‘‘the florid and rhetorical Persian’’ into ‘‘the straight-forward, business-like, matter of fact Arabic,’’ at the same time giving Arabic names to the originally Zoroastrian gods, spirits, and kings. These changes affected all three of the basic types of stories in the Nights, animal fables, historical anecdotes, and fairy tales, but it was especially the last category that was ‘‘wholly and purely Persian,’’ and it was from it that

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the collection derived its remarkable power over readers. Even in Galland’s corrupt and limited version, compelled by ‘‘deference to public taste [a century before Victoria, and in France] to expunge the often repulsive simplicity, the childish indecencies and the wild orgies of the original,’’ and which clothed ‘‘the bare body in the best of Parisian suits,’’ the tales ‘‘arouse strange longings and indescribable desires; their marvelous imaginativeness produces an insensible brightening of mind and an increase of fancy-power, making one dream that behind them lies the new and unseen, the strange and unexpected—in fact all the glamour of the unknown.’’ In a comparison whose personal reference we will easily recognize, Burton explained that ‘‘the grand source of pleasure in Fairy Tales is the natural desire to learn more of the Wonderland which is known to many as a word and nothing more, like Central Africa before the last half century: thus the interest is that of the ‘Personal Narrative’ of a grand exploration to one who delights in travels.’’72 Although Galland and other translators, by leaving many tales out and cleaning up the language of others, sought to separate the Nights as a gateway to a world of fantasy from the frank and direct talk about sex contained in the original, the continuity between them was central to what made the collection so attractive and significant to Burton. In his eyes the power of the sex talk to inspire fantasy was twinned with the ability of the fairy-tale atmosphere to license talk about sex. We see this especially in a comment he made about a story in which a eunuch makes clear that his physical maiming did not leave him void of desire. Burton noted that eunuchs could be created by removing or damaging their sexual organs in various ways, ‘‘but in all cases the animal passion remains, for in man, unlike other animals, the fons veneris [the spring of amatory desire] is the brain. The story of Abelard proves this.’’73 The continuity between sexuality and fantasy was hardly a new idea, to be sure, but it was the essential ground on which Burton located the Nights. It is just this positive valuation of fantasy that Burton now portrayed as foreign to the spirit and letter of original Islam. The change from what he had said earlier was chiefly one of emphasis but it is striking nonetheless. In his earlier essay on ‘‘El Islam, or The Rank of Muhammadanism among the Religions of the World,’’ Burton described the terms of the Prophet’s revelation as ‘‘so lofty and majestic that they sank for ever into the heartcore of his followers,’’ but blamed some among the latter for turning the message into ‘‘a mass of stringent ordinances so disposed as to provide for every contingency . . . a well-organized system of practical precepts.’’ Now,

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however, the attempt to make Islam a legalistic and prosaic system of permitted and forbidden things, and from which ‘‘Persian supernaturalism’’ was specifically excluded, began with the Prophet himself, albeit under the influence of his milieu: Mohammed, a great and commanding genius, blighted and narrowed by surroundings and circumstance to something little higher than a Covenanter or a Puritan, declared to his followers, ‘‘I am sent to ’stablish the manners and customs’’; and his deficiency of imagination made him dislike everything but ‘‘women, perfumes, and prayers,’’ and with an especial aversion to music and poetry, plastic art and fiction. The Prophet took over some miraculous and magical notions from Judaism (which had borrowed them, against Moses’s original intention, from the Babylonians) but violently repressed a movement to allow ‘‘certain Persian fabliaux’’ to achieve recognition alongside the stories of the Qu’ran. Thus it was he who inspired the ‘‘furious fanaticism and one-idea’d intolerance which made Caliph Omar destroy all he could find of the Alexandrian Library and prescribe burning for the Holy Books of the Persian Guebres [the Zoroastrians]. And the taint still lingers in Al-Islam: it will be said of a pious man, ‘He always studies the Koran, the Traditions and other books of Law and Religion; and he never reads poems nor listens to music or to stories.’ ’’ In other words, the founder of Muslim faith saw his task as setting limits not just to belief and behavior but to imagination and the materials that could nourish it; resources for overcoming these constraints had to come from somewhere else, and in the Nights this meant access to the materials of a different culture, to the poetic sense of wonder infused by the Persian progenitors of the tales. Without this alien fertilization, the form of life the Prophet instituted remained no less confining and restrictive than was the European culture whose limits Burton sought to transcend through his involvement with Islam. The Islamic world did not wait idly for what Persian storytellers would contribute to its culture, however; the receptivity to some such infusion of foreign content was prepared by something in human nature that spontaneously rebelled against such restrictions. Before this need found its voice in the Persian accents of the Nights, ‘‘human nature’’ itself, ‘‘stronger than

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the Prophet’’ and ‘‘outraged’’ by the ‘‘arid, jejeune, and material’’ dispensation Mohammed provided, ‘‘took speedy and absolute revenge’’: Before the first century had elapsed, orthodox Al-Islam was startled by the rise of Tasawwuf or Sufyism, a revival of classic Platonism and Christian Gnosticism, with a mingling of modern Hylozoism; which, quickened by the glowing imagination of the East, speedily formed itself into a creed the most poetical and impractical, the most spiritual and the most transcendental ever invented; satisfying all man’s hunger for ‘belief’ which, if placed upon a solid basis of fact and proof, would forthright cease to be belief.74 It was to the same Sufism (Tasawwuf is another name for the spiritual teaching it promotes) that Burton himself had long been attracted, receiving instruction and training in it during the 1840s, and it gave life to the character of the wandering Dervish that he chose for his disguise on the pilgrimage. The ‘‘Hylozoism’’ Burton refers to here—the notion that all matter is in some sense alive—appeared in the fusion of Hindu metempsychosis with Darwinist materialism he effected in Stone Talk, and it was the mystical implications of this mix of physicalism and vitalism that informed the behest the Kasidah addressed to lovers of truth not to make the object of their quest too definite and concrete: ‘‘leave it vague as airy space, / Dark in its darkness mystical.’’ The dream world of boundless wonder provided by the Nights, where imagination was free to break through the confines set by both European culture and by original Islam, provided a continuation and supplement to the Sufi’s poetical approach to all things, unrestrained by practical considerations. Thus the Nights stood as testimony to the need that arises for people in Islam no less than in the West—Burton did not explicitly extend the point to include every culture, but these were the two he knew best—to find escape from the particular world of their formation in order to liberate the human powers of creativity reined in or suppressed by established ways of life. Here Burton’s commentary on his translation generalized his longpursued quest to inhabit a space between cultures, making it exemplify a necessary response to the situation all people face once they become enmeshed in the webs of meaning and nonsense they create in order to give bounded coherence to their collective lives.

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Chapter 2

Commitment and Loss: T. E. Lawrence

No modern figure better embodies the image of an individual absorbed into another culture without leaving his own than T. E. Lawrence, ‘‘Lawrence of Arabia.’’ The familiar label clung to him from the moment it was devised by the American journalist Lowell Thomas, in the highly popular series of illustrated talks he gave in New York and London in 1919. Succinct and resonant, the phrase designated Lawrence as an Englishman who had immersed himself in a distant and alien land, providing an anchor for the instant fame he acquired in America and Britain and that soon spread to other places. That Lawrence was ‘‘of Arabia’’ meant first that he had achieved something rare and memorable there, leading to victory the coalition of tribes that rose up against the Ottoman domination of the peninsula, and contributing to the Allied success in the Great War by weakening Germany’s ally Turkey. But from the start many people were aware that his involvement with Arabia was no less personal than military and strategic. To the end of his life Lawrence knew that his bond with the Arab world was one he could not break, and on one level he remained deeply proud of it. But on another plane it was a link he came to bewail and reject, dedicating himself to an existence in which it was to have no part. The whole history of his Arabian adventure and identity stands in the shadow—or the glare—of this rejection. Some of the people we will meet later also came to lament and seek to escape their intercultural existence, but no one turned so bitterly and determinedly against it as Lawrence, or described the grounds for doing so with more clear-eyed passion. And yet, we will see that even this rejection was part of what was deepest and most entangling in the attraction that drew him to be ‘‘of Arabia’’ in the first place, and that never ceased to possess him.

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Lawrence gave voice to both the reasons and the feelings that underpinned this negative judgment near the beginning of the famous book that recounted his role in the desert war, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. His words make clear both how disillusioned the experience left him, and how engulfing it had been. In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith. I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed’s coffin in our legend [said to be suspended between heaven and earth, an image invented by the prophet’s enemies to imply that neither realm would take him in], with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do. Such detachment came at times to a man exhausted by prolonged physical effort and isolation. His body plodded on mechanically, while his reasonable mind left him, and from without looked down critically on him, wondering what that futile lumber did and why. Sometimes these selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.1 Our attempt to come to terms with Lawrence’s powerful and tortured way of being himself will bring us back to this remarkable self-portrait at various points, but several of its features need to be highlighted right away. The first is that the entry into a foreign culture led him into a space that was ‘‘nowhere,’’ making his identity, even his whole personal existence, problematic. He remarked to one of his first biographers, Robert Graves, that his two selves, one Bedouin and one European, were ‘‘mutually destructive,’’ so that ‘‘I fall between them into the nihilism which cannot find, in being, even a false God in which to believe.’’2 That living between cultures induced so radical a skepticism suggests that his experience had something in common with Richard Burton’s. But Burton never associated

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his case with any danger of breakdown or ‘‘madness,’’ a term both Lawrence and others applied to him at certain moments, nor did the translator of the Arabian Nights ever take his intercultural involvements as an occasion for the deeply introspective self-analysis Lawrence carried out on himself. Paradoxically or not, Lawrence was a person at once deeply reclusive and self-protecting, and highly open and self-disclosing, a compound to which he regularly gave both intentional and inadvertent expression. His self-observation often draws us into the depths of his inner life, and we cannot examine his mode of simultaneously inhabiting two cultures without following the signposts he provides. Various modes of psychological theory may offer help along this way, and it is sometimes hardly possible to ignore what they suggest, but we will see that Lawrence’s own selfdescriptions—like those of some of the patients treated by his contemporary Freud—are no less and perhaps more revealing than theory.

* * *

Lawrence‘s connection to Arab life did not begin with the Great War, but in the years before it. In 1909, when he was just over twenty years old, Lawrence traveled to Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria (all still more geographical expressions than countries in the modern sense) to do research and take photos for his Oxford thesis on the architecture of Crusader castles. In it he argued, against the orthodoxy of the time, that their structures derived from European models, not Eastern ones. Such determined independence of mind was only one feature of the later dauntless soldier evident in the undergraduate: he undertook the nearly thousand-mile journey alone and on foot, ignoring the warnings of older advisors, lived and ate with locals who were astounded at his temerity but treated him well; he suffered from illness and attacks by bandits, risked arrest or maltreatment by entering closed places (in one instance burning a large pile of brushwood stored in an interior castle courtyard in order to get an unobstructed view of the walls), began to learn Arabic, and acquired knowledge about the region’s geography, customs, and social life that he would draw on later. His thesis accepted with first-class honors, he made use of the connection it gave him to a prominent archaeologist, D. G. Hogarth, to acquire a fellowship as part of a team conducting excavations at Carchemish in Syria. The dig was his

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chief occupation between 1910 and 1914; in the seasons when work halted there he used much of his time to visit various Near Eastern regions and cities. Lawrence appears to have been extremely happy in these years of historical research and archaeological work, and his activities provided him with manifold connections to Arab life. At Carchemish his tasks included supervising the local people hired to labor on the site, and he showed a remarkable talent—again anticipating his wartime activity—in managing them, using cajolery and praise rather than strict discipline (tactics remarked to be in contrast with a nearby German team engaged in similar explorations) and finding ways to prevent social and kin-based rivalries and hostilities from disrupting the search for artifacts—for instance by putting members of feuding families in separate trenches. It was in these circumstances that he first began to sense some possibility of drawing close to Arab culture. Already during his first trip, in 1909, he wrote to his mother that ‘‘I will have such difficulty in becoming English again, here I am Arab in habits and slip in talking from English to French & Arabic all unnoticing.’’ (The comfort this expressed with things French would later recede as he became highly critical of French policies in the region; before the war his feelings were still colored by some earlier and happy travels in the French South.) His Arabic was still limited (and would never approach the level of a native speaker, as we will see later on) but he took it up with enthusiasm; in addition, he sometimes adopted Arab dress in these years, at least once keeping to it over a period of several weeks. Later he told a second early biographer, the military historian and theorist B. H. Liddell-Hart, that although he was too fair to be taken for an Arab in most parts of the region, he could come close in northern Syria, ‘‘where the racial admixture has produced many fair natives and many with only a broken knowledge of Arabic. I could never pass as an Arab—but easily as some other native speaking Arabic.’’3 This may suggest that he found some satisfaction in disguise, but such can hardly have been his only motive, as some comments he made in 1911 and 1912 tell us: in one he objected to foreigners who ‘‘come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn, for in everything but wits and knowledge the Arab is generally the better man of the two,’’ and in a second he wrote to a friend that ‘‘I have got to like this place very much: and the people here—five or six of them—and the whole manner of living pleases me.’’ These pronouncements seem to locate him on the path toward the report the archaeologist Hogarth would send to a

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mutual friend in 1917 (by which time Lawrence’s involvement with the uprising had already begun): ‘‘T. E. L. . . . writes . . . that he wishes to stay away from Europe & all things European for ever & ever, & get thoroughly Arabized.’’4 Noteworthy as these declarations may be, especially the last with its closeness to what he would later write about his ‘‘effort . . . to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation,’’ several things indicate that Lawrence remained very much the young Englishman abroad in these years. He sometimes expressed skepticism about cultural mixing, as when he deplored what he called (voicing a judgment shared by many European observers, including Burton) ‘‘the perfectly hopeless vulgarity of the half-Europeanized Arab,’’ and from the other side in a 1912 warning to a family friend against running ‘‘the risk of denationalizing’’ her son: ‘‘It is a very good thing to have a country to grumble over or praise as one wishes; it doesn’t matter much which country.’’ Lawrence’s way of life at Carchemish was quite far from that of local people. The £100 per year his fellowship provided was enough to live quite well in the Syria of the day. Donning Arab dress whenever he liked did not prevent his putting on his Magdalen College blazer many evenings for dinner in the large house he shared with compatriots and which contained a good stock of English books, and he had cash enough to buy objects of various kinds for friends and relatives back home. He appreciated the protection his status as a foreigner gave him, noting that a treaty between Britain and Turkey assured his immunity from arrest and prosecution, and writing at one point that ‘‘this country, for the foreigner, is too glorious for words: one is the baron of the feudal system.’’5 In other ways, too, he made his approach to Arab culture in the years before the war very much as a European, drawing on longstanding attitudes and practices. That he was not moved to reverse European claims to cultural primacy is suggested by the already-noted argument of his thesis that the Crusaders brought their architectural ideas with them, having no need to adopt Eastern ones. Although often critical of missionaries, he retained some kind of loyalty to Christianity; early in his first stay he reported on the existence among Arabs of a ‘‘secret sort of Christian’’ sect, commenting: ‘‘I think it is the best sign I have heard of in the country so far. A native Christian church is so much more likely to win than a foreign grafting and with the new toleration the members can become bolder.’’ Even after he became more indifferent toward such hopes for Christianity’s advance, his

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way of linking himself to the East retained threads from the time-honored attraction the region held for Europeans as the original cradle of Christianity and the land of the Bible.6 One testimony to this was the title he chose for his account of the desert war, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Curiously, the title finds no resonance in the text, in which neither the number seven nor the other elements play any recognizable part. In a later letter Lawrence explained that he chose the title not as a signpost to the book’s content but ‘‘out of sentiment, for I wrote a youthful indiscretion-book, so-called, in 1913 and burned it (as immature) in ’14 when I enlisted. It recounted adventures in seven type-cities of the East (Cairo, Bagdad, Damascus, etc.) and arranged their characters into a descending cadence: a moral symphony. It was a queer book, upon whose difficulties I look back with a not ungrateful wryness: and in memory of it I so named the new book.’’ Lawrence told Liddell-Hart that the title was connected to a Midrashic commentary on the Book of Proverbs; he gave neither the text nor the source, but Proverbs 9:1 reads: ‘‘Wisdom hath builded her house; she hath hewed out her seven pillars.’’ There is no way to know whether there was anything identifiably Arab about the wisdom Lawrence invoked in his youthful book, but clearly the formula through which he approached it was Biblical, so that even if the wisdom was somehow extra-European, the path to it was the traditional one that led through Western religion to its Eastern sources. Thus the title provides another reason to regard Lawrence’s various ways of drawing close to Arab culture in the period before the war as operating in concert with his original English identity; the same would be true, albeit in different ways, in the desert campaign.7 Lawrence made a point of crediting one particular Arab connection he made before the war with a special role in what he did during it. This was his tie to a young boy who worked on the dig, known as Dahoum. Although the suggestion was contested when first advanced, it seems generally agreed now that Dahoum was the ‘‘S. A.’’ (for Salem Ahmed, his formal name; Dahoum, his nickname, referred to his dark complexion) to whom Seven Pillars of Wisdom was dedicated. Lawrence several times declared that affection for this one Arab inspired his efforts to free them all. The dedication could hardly be more frank or poetic, and it links the ‘‘seven pillars’’ to freedom rather than wisdom: ‘‘I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands / and wrote my will across the sky in stars / To earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house, / that your eyes might be shining

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for me / When we came.’’ On the last page of his book Lawrence declared that his ‘‘strongest motive throughout had been a personal one, not mentioned here, but present to me, I think, every hour of these two years,’’ and in a memo set down when he was attending the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 Lawrence wrote that the strongest of his reasons for taking up the Arab cause was that ‘‘I liked a particular Arab very much, and I thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present.’’ That Dahoum died before the war ended, probably of typhus, left the question of what he might have thought about the gift unanswerable.8 Although people at the time were often reluctant to say so, it seems clear that Lawrence’s attraction to Dahoum was in some way erotic. The boy strongly piqued his interest from the start, causing Lawrence to remark on his beauty and willingness to learn from the foreigners. Dahoum appears in many of Lawrence’s letters of the time, either in connection with things they did together or with Lawrence’s efforts to further his education and provide some sort of future for him (which was explicitly not to involve trying to make him a Christian). In 1913 Lawrence brought him (with another young Arab) on a visit to Oxford. None of this means that the relationship was physical; on the contrary, many things we know about Lawrence argue strongly that it was not. This is an issue we must put off for now, however, since it involves the large and complex question of Lawrence’s singular and strange sexuality, a topic that demands to be approached in connection with general features of his personality that we can better appreciate by considering them in the contexts where they become visible. For now we need to note some of the other considerations that were involved in Lawrence’s taking up the Arab cause. It would be bootless to deny that love for the dead boy was in some way the strongest motive, since Lawrence affirmed it, but the history of his involvement makes it difficult to conclude that these feelings inspired his conduct from the start. When the war broke out Lawrence was among the many young men who rushed to join up, and it seems that had he not been quite short (less than five-foot-six) he might have been sent for active duty in France—as were two of his three brothers, both of whom died there. Instead he was assigned to a cartographic team, working first on maps of both France and the Sinai Peninsula (of the latter he had as yet no direct experience), and then of Syria, which he knew well. This work led to his being sent to Cairo, where he became involved more broadly in intelligence work for the campaign against Turkey, a project that allowed him to draw

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on his earlier study of Near Eastern geography and social conditions. He quickly became one of a small group of British officers who understood that the war effort could be furthered by drawing on the anti-Turkish sentiment that festered among various groups under Ottoman rule, Arabs chief among them but including Kurds, Druze, and other peoples too. The officers group (of which the twenty-six-year-old Lawrence was a very junior member) encouraged prominent Arabs to take up arms, and after Hussein, the Sherif of Mecca, did so in June of 1916, Lawrence was made part of a mission (led by a higher-ranking officer) sent to assess the situation. There he met two of the chief figures with whom he would work over the next years, Hussein’s sons Abdulla and Feisal; in the first he had little confidence, but he quickly seized on the second as the leader who could bring the revolt to triumph. Given the familiarity of the Bedouin tribes with desert conditions and how little Europeans knew about them, Lawrence advised sending the Arabs aid—money, advice, guns, and supplies—but no troops.9 By his own account this was to have been the end of his personal involvement in the desert campaign. He expected to return to his desk job, drafting maps and writing articles for a military journal he founded, The Arab Bulletin, and he had no expectation that his superior officer, General Gilbert Clayton, would send him back to Arabia to implement his own advice. When Clayton proposed to do just this, Lawrence resisted the assignment, urging ‘‘my complete unfitness for the job,’’ his preference for dealing with objects and ideas rather than persons, and that ‘‘I hated soldiering.’’ At least one of Lawrence’s biographers suspects that this protest may have been half-hearted and ‘‘a prudent protection against failure,’’ but the forcefulness with which he reports it in Seven Pillars of Wisdom casts much doubt on the notion that he already envisioned himself in something like his later role, whether out of affection for Dahoum or any other motive. Despite his many positive feelings toward Arab life and culture, Lawrence saw the potential of the Arab revolt largely through the lens of British strategy in the war; one reason he gave for thinking it good to encourage the Arab struggle was that the deep and powerful disunity between tribes, sects, and other groups in the peninsula meant that the movement’s aim would not be to create a unified national state. ‘‘The Semites’ idea of nationality was the independence of clans and villages, and their ideal of national union was episodic combined resistance to an intruder. Constructive policies, an organized state, an extended empire, were not so much beyond their sight as hateful in it. . . . Were it otherwise, we should have had to

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pause before evoking in the strategic centre of the Middle East new national movements of such abounding vigour.’’ To be sure, Arab freedom might be seen no less as a gift for Dahoum simply because it took this form, but Lawrence here casts doubt on whether he would have desired to offer it if Arab aspirations had been of another kind. Whatever role the connection to Dahoum played, it must have operated in connection with other motives.10 Lawrence sometimes gave other reasons for taking up the Arab cause, but one thing that sustained his involvement was his experience of the revolt itself, the impact of engagement in a visionary cause that brought dangers and hardships but also satisfactions and triumphs, drawing him close to people very different from himself. In the introductory chapter of Seven Pillars he noted that one reason for including certain details in the story was ‘‘the pleasure it gave me to recall the fellowship of the revolt. We were fond together, because of the sweep of the open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for.’’11 This sense of dedication and excitement was at its brightest in moments of success and triumph, such as the capture of the seaport city of Akaba in the summer of 1917, and the entry of Arab fighters into Damascus a year later. But just because the enthusiasm of such moments was so powerful, they could hide some dark underlying dilemmas, ones that troubled Lawrence all along and that would come to bulk much larger in his consciousness once the war was over. Chief among these was the guilt he felt at having been part of the machinations through which Britain and France after the war would deny to Arab leaders the autonomy in Syria and Palestine they thought they had been promised. This sense that Arab hopes would be betrayed gave a bitter taste to Lawrence’s participation in the struggle almost from the start. The passage from the introductory chapter quoted at the beginning of this one goes on: We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they

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thanked us kindly and made their peace. . . . I meant to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundation on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts . . . but when we won, it was charged against me that the British petrol royalties in Mesopotamia were become dubious, and French Colonial policy ruined in the Levant. The arrangements the Allies made (and which ended with the French dominating Syria, and expelling Feisal from Damascus in 1919, a month after he had been proclaimed king there) had their roots in the so-called SykesPicot Agreement, concluded in May 1916, before Lawrence’s involvement began. He knew about it all along; thus there was never a moment when he was free of worry and guilt that he was misleading those he had been sent to help. His response, he explained in the book, was that ‘‘I salved myself with the hope that, by leading these Arabs madly in the final victory I would establish them, with arms in their hands, in a position so assured (if not dominant) that expediency would counsel to the Great Powers a fair settlement of their claims. In other words, I presumed (seeing no other leader with the will and power) that I would survive the campaigns, and be able to defeat not merely the Turks on the battlefield, but my own country and its allies in the council-chamber.’’ The balm Lawrence here described did not protect him from feeling the pain of the wounding contradictions in his position. Even the moments when he devoted himself with great courage to achieving the Arab power he referred to here were laced with self-loathing. In early June 1917, he carried out one of his most remarkable feats: accompanied by only two companions, he completed a long and dangerous camel ride north to Damascus, to convince Arab leaders there to coordinate their actions with the strategy he was pursuing with Feisal, and which would lead to the capture of the strategic port of Akaba a few weeks later. The trip was successful and prepared the later actions that would give Feisal temporary control of Damascus the next year. But before undertaking it Lawrence wrote to Clayton that ‘‘I’ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way: for all sakes try and clear this show up before it goes further. We are calling them to fight for us on a lie and I can’t stand it.’’12 The moral dilemmas in which Lawrence felt himself caught up were part of what generated his conviction that the project of inserting himself into Arab life was one bound to undo him. The passage we quoted to begin

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this chapter, about the closeness to madness of a person whose two selves converse ‘‘in the void,’’ is preceded by this one: Pray God that men reading the story will not, for love of the glamour of strangeness, go out to prostitute themselves and their talents in serving another race. A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been. Then he is exploiting his old environment to press them out of theirs. Or, after my model, he may imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back again. Then he is giving away his own environment: pretending to theirs; and pretences are hollow, worthless things. In neither case does he do a thing of himself, nor a thing so clean as to be his own (without thought of conversion), letting them take what action or reaction they please from the silent example.13 The Yahoos were characters in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, creatures of human shape but brutish behavior, in contrast to the Houyhnhnms, equine in appearance but noble and rational in their actions, so that Lawrence here pictured serving foreigners as tipping the spectrum of human potential that runs between reason and animality toward the bestial side. (We will come back to the question of the role ‘‘race’’ plays in this passage; in general Lawrence comes across as far less racist than Burton, but there were moments when he exhibited conventional British attitudes toward ‘‘lower’’ groups, including Arabs.) Putting his situation in these terms designates the space between realms to which Mohammed’s coffin was condemned, and the ‘‘void’’ where two incompatible selves converse, as arising wherever one attempts to inhabit a culture not one’s own, since it is simply the otherness of others, the impossibility for an outsider to be genuinely ‘‘of them,’’ that stains the relationship with servitude and false pretense. Hence the moments of enthusiasm and involvement that give Lawrence’s Arabian persona a positive cast cannot avoid morphing into negative shapes; the very same ties to his Arab companions he pictured glowingly as ‘‘the fellowship of the revolt’’ and ‘‘the morning freshness of the world to-be’’ are the ones that subject him to ‘‘a Yahoo life.’’ In a 1922 letter to George Bernard Shaw,

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Lawrence pointed to a kind of dark underside to the upbeat mood his book sometimes pictured: ‘‘The war was, for us who were in it, an overwrought time, in which we lost our normal footing. I wrote this thing in the war atmosphere, and believe that it is stinking with it.’’14 He understood how easily the one side could merge into the other, but he seems never quite to have articulated a further contradiction, namely that his attempt to strengthen the Arab position must somehow have intensified what he came to feel as his subjection to them. Several particular incidents illustrate how deep and painful this subjection could be. One of these, fairly early in the story, was the moment when Lawrence took it upon himself to execute a Moroccan who had killed an Arab after the two men quarreled. The murder threatened to set off an escalating blood feud between their relatives, and Lawrence, wanting to stave off the damage it would do to the Arab forces, concluded that the only way to close the book on the incident was for him, as a person with no kin on the ground, to fire the fatal shot. ‘‘Then rose up the horror which would make civilized man shun justice like a plague if he had not the needy to serve him as hangmen for wages.’’ A second instance, which Lawrence appears to have regarded as especially indicative of how he could be taken over by irrational passion, came toward the end of the campaign when the Arab fighters carried out a wholesale massacre of Turkish soldiers near the village of Tafas. Lawrence was partly responsible: infuriated by the cruel and vicious behavior of the Turks toward the villagers, leaving dying women and children maimed and bleeding on the ground, and by the loss of some of his cherished companions, he ordered the slaughter of some 200 already defeated and subdued Turkish troops. ‘‘In a madness born of the horror of Tafas we killed and killed, even blowing in the heads of the fallen and of the animals; as though their death and running blood could slake our agony.’’ The Tafas incident was given a prominent place in the David Lean film about Lawrence of 1962, leading his younger brother Arnold to write in a letter to the London Times that it had been the massacre of Turks there that lay behind the declaration in Seven Pillars that ‘‘no Englishman could so serve an alien race without prostituting his own self.’’ Lawrence associated this judgment with other moments, too, however, among them the horrible scenes of dead and dying Turkish soldiers he witnessed after the entry into Damascus. The situation there was complicated by the intraBritish rivalries and hurt feelings generated by Lawrence’s successful strategy to get Feisal into the city before any British forces arrived, and which

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led some British officers to regard him as complicit in the vengeful behavior they saw in his Arab companions. Remembering that one major called him a ‘‘bloody brute’’ and smacked him in the face, Lawrence reported that he was left ‘‘feeling more ashamed than angry, for in my heart I felt he was right, and that anyone who pushed through to success a rebellion of the weak against their masters must come out of it so stained in estimation that afterward nothing in the world would make him feel clean.’’15 The adjective ‘‘clean’’ brings us to the most-cited of the wartime incidents that made Lawrence picture his participation in terms of ‘‘brutishness’’ and ‘‘prostitution,’’ namely the night he passed in the Syrian city of Deraa in November of 1917, where he was captured, badly beaten, and most likely (his own accounts differ, and we may never know for sure) raped. Lawrence had slipped into the city—then occupied by Turkish troops—with two companions in order to search for an unguarded entry point through which his larger force could later surprise the enemy. Dressed in Arab clothes (we will come in a moment to his complicated commentary on what it meant to wear them), he expected to be able to move about unrecognized, but he was quickly spotted by a Turkish patrol and apprehended. After being kept for some time in a guard room, he was brought to the house of the Bey (the Turkish governor of the town), who clearly wanted to have sex with him. Lawrence’s resistance included wrestling the official and managing to knock him down by jerking his knee into the other man’s groin, despite his being held by a sentry. Gripped by four guards, he was then toyed with, beaten with a slipper, cut with a bayonet point to produce blood that was spread on his body, spit on, bitten—and kissed. But the Bey eventually gave up, and it was the soldiers to whom he was then given over who most severely whipped and pounded him, and whom he reports as taking turns in playing ‘‘unspeakably with me.’’ When they were finished the Bey refused him, as ‘‘too torn and bloody for his bed.’’ His captors then took him to another building where someone washed and dressed his wounds, and from which, the next day, he was allowed to walk away. Whether the Turks knew who he was remains uncertain; in Seven Pillars he quotes the Bey as saying at one point, ‘‘You must understand that I know,’’ but then discounts the words as ‘‘a chance shot.’’ Recent writers think Lawrence may have been dissembling, citing a 1919 letter in which he credited a traitorous Arab with letting the Turks know his plans.16 But if he wanted to deny he had been recognized, why quote the Bey’s comment

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at all? And had his identity been known, would his enemies have let him go? Whatever the answers to these questions may be, the Deraa incident was the most bitter of the pills Lawrence had to swallow in the desert campaign. He reports having rewritten the chapter about it many times, without ever satisfying himself that he ended up with an honest account. In 1924 he wrote to Charlotte Shaw, the wife of George Bernard Shaw (the couple supported Lawrence by soothing his doubts about the book and helping to get it published): About that night. I shouldn’t tell you, because decent men don’t talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book and wrestled for days with my self-respect . . . which wouldn’t, hasn’t let me. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with—our bodily integrity. . . . You may call this morbid: but think of the offence, and the intensity of my brooding over it for these years. It will hang about me while I live, and afterwards if our personality survives. Consider wandering among the decent ghosts hereafter, crying ‘‘Unclean, Unclean!’’17 It is not easy to know just what it was that Lawrence failed to ‘‘put plain’’ in the book, but to me the account he gives there seems detailed and even direct. It includes the Bey’s fawning flattery over ‘‘how white and fresh I was, how fine my hands and feet’’ and what rewards he would enjoy ‘‘if I would love him,’’ and it tells of the later moment when ‘‘I remembered smiling idly’’ at the corporal in charge of the assault on him, ‘‘for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me.’’ He added that the experience was not wholly novel to him, since it revived a five-year-old memory of himself as ‘‘a timid recruit at Khalfati, where something, less staining, of the sort had happened.’’ And he concluded, as in the letter to Charlotte Shaw, that ‘‘in Deraa that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost.’’18 We will come later to how these events bear on Lawrence’s complex and mysterious sexuality (his reference to losing his ‘‘bodily integrity’’ is one clue to it); for now it is their place in the no less dense question of his tormented relationship to the desert campaign that matters. In his book he declared that after Deraa his ‘‘maimed will’’ no longer ‘‘cared a hoot about

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the Arab Revolt (or about anything but mending itself); yet, since the war had been a hobby of mine, for custom’s sake I would force myself to push it through.’’19 Although it would be foolish to deny that this declaration must contain some kind of truth, since Lawrence made it and on some level believed it, many things demand that it be questioned. Calling the war a ‘‘hobby’’ is hard to tally with his overall account of it. People who worked with him at the time thought him somehow changed after Deraa, but he does not seem to have devoted less energy to the war than he had before; perhaps the things that had energized him until then—the excitement of battle and the ‘‘fellowship of the revolt’’—provided some of the ‘‘mending’’ he needed. Both the deeply involved and passionate account of the campaign and his role in it provided in Seven Pillars, and the efforts he made at the Peace Conference and afterward to bring Allied policy more in line with what the Arabs thought they had been promised, testify to his persisting commitment. In addition, neither the depression he sometimes suffered nor the tortured relationship to the war and to Arab life of which it was a part had their origins in that November night. His declaration that he hoped the camel ride to Damascus might end in his being killed came five months before, and the ‘‘Yahoo’’ subjection he bewailed was to his allies and companions, the Arabs, not to their common Turkish enemies. We will see later that the chapters of Seven Pillars dealing with the months following the Deraa incident contain Lawrence’s most probing and impassioned efforts at self-analysis, but they make no direct reference to what happened there. These matters bring us to the aspects of Lawrence’s career that are most relevant to Between Cultures, namely just what it meant to him to insert himself not just into the Arab struggle for independence, but more generally into Arab life.

* * *

The best point of entry into these questions lies in his discussions of putting on Arab dress, a matter that concerned him enough to return to it multiple times. He wore Arab garb through most of the war, continued to appear in it on some occasions afterward, in particular at the Peace Conference (where he served as an advisor to both the British and to Feisal), and was several times portrayed in it. We saw earlier that in the years before the war

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he associated adopting an Arab costume with becoming ‘‘Arab in habits,’’ and that the introduction to Seven Pillars of Wisdom mentioned in one breath ‘‘to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation.’’ This connection does not seem to have been in his mind at the beginning of the campaign, however. Referring to the disapproval some of his fellow British officers expressed about his donning an Arab head cloth on his first visit to Feisal, and retaining it on his trip back to Egypt, he implied that he attached little significance to it; it had been easy for him because ‘‘I had been educated in Syria before the war to wear the entire Arab outfit when necessary without strangeness, or sense of being socially compromised.’’ He added the other garments soon after returning to the Arab forces, when Feisal ‘‘suddenly’’ asked him to, giving as his reason that ‘‘the tribesmen would then understand how to take me,’’ and in particular not confuse him with the only other wearers of khaki they knew, who were Turks. ‘‘I agreed at once, very gladly; for army uniform was abominable when camel-riding, or when sitting about on the ground; and the Arab things, which I had learned to manage before the war, were cleaner and more decent in the desert.’’ He does not seem to have expected that taking on Arab dress could make his foreign origin invisible, since he did not attempt to hide certain telltale Anglo-Saxon features. As he told LiddellHart, ‘‘My burnt red face, clean shaven & startling with my blue eyes against white headcloth & robes, became notorious in the desert. Tribesmen or peasants who had never set eyes on me before would instantly know me, by the report. So my Arab disguise was actually an advertisement. It gave me away instantly, as myself, to all the desert.’’20 Lawrence did not always have this awareness in mind, however, as his failed expectation that disguise would protect him in Deraa made painfully clear. But that he could speak in these terms helps to understand why matters other than disguise became central in the several places where he discussed the advisability and meaning of dressing as an Arab. The first of these was in a set of ‘‘Twenty-Seven Articles’’ he published in August 1917, in the review he had started up earlier, The Arab Bulletin. The ‘‘Articles’’ were a curious compendium, a series of numbered instructions for ‘‘handling Arabs,’’ described as intended for ‘‘beginners in the Arab armies,’’ but acknowledged to be ‘‘only my personal conclusions’’ and ‘‘not suitable to any other person’s need or applicable unchanged in any particular situation.’’ It is far from clear just who the other ‘‘beginners in Arab armies’’ might be, since Lawrence can hardly have intended to set up a second

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center of operations that might rival the nucleus constituted by himself and Feisal; what offering advice to others chiefly provided was a frame for explaining and justifying his own course. The question of dress takes up only four of the twenty-seven paragraphs (five if we count its implicit reappearance in the final one), but it is the most tangled and contradictory. All the others give straightforward advice about becoming sensitive to local customs: work yourself in slowly, learn as much as you can about the people you are with and especially the leaders, act through them without letting it be thought that you want to command them, take account of the importance Arabs give to precedence and pedigree, and be careful what you say about matters where local standards and expectations diverge from ours, such as women. None of these topics led Lawrence to say first one thing and then its opposite, nor do any of them open up questions about how far a foreigner should seek to absorb Arab ways of being. But the question of dress did, drawing him into the swampy terrain of identity and selftransformation. The discussion takes off from the one item of Arab garb Lawrence recommended unambivalently, namely the head cloth. Soldiers and officers should wear it ‘‘when with a tribe,’’ first because it provided good protection against desert sun and second because Arabs ‘‘have a malignant prejudice against the hat,’’ regarding it with suspicion on both religious and moral grounds (Arab dislike of European hats had been noted by travelers at least since the eighteenth century). Neither the head cloth nor other items were to be seen as camouflage: ‘‘Disguise is not advisable. Except in special areas let it be clearly known that you are a British officer and a Christian.’’ Worn with no attempt to deceive, Arab garments brought distinct advantages, but these were mixed with challenges. ‘‘If you can wear Arab kit when with the tribes you will acquire their trust and intimacy to a degree impossible in uniform. It is however dangerous and difficult. They make no special allowances for you when you dress like them. Breaches of etiquette not charged against a foreigner are not condoned to you in Arab clothes.’’ Dressing in local garb thus offered a chance to get much closer to Arabs than was possible in Western apparel, but it simultaneously put greater demands on the wearer, who was expected to understand local ways better and hew closer to them. Wearing Arab clothing meant coming on stage in a potentially rewarding but difficult role. ‘‘You will be like an actor in a foreign theatre, playing a part day and night for months, without rest, and for an anxious stake. Complete success, which is when the Arabs forget

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your strangeness and speak naturally before you, counting you one of themselves, is perhaps only attainable in character: while half success (all that most of us will strive for—the other costs too much) is easier to win in British things, and you yourself will last longer, physically and mentally, in the comfort that they mean.’’ Thus Lawrence advised most people in his situation against choosing the more ambitious and potentially more fruitful route of trying to look like an Arab and being in some degree accepted as one, because its personal costs were too high and few could succeed at it in any case. But it was just this path he had taken himself, and proceeding along it was both rewarding and intensely demanding. If you wear Arab things at all, go the whole way. Leave your English friends and customs on the coast, and fall back on Arab habits entirely. It is possible, starting thus level with them, for the Europeans to beat the Arabs at their own game, for we have stronger motives for our action, and put more heart into it than they. If you can surpass them, you have taken an immense stride toward complete success, but the strain of living and thinking in a foreign and half-understood language, the savage food, strange clothes, and still stranger ways, with the complete loss of privacy and quiet, and the impossibility of ever relaxing your watchful imitation of the others for months on end, provide an added stress to the ordinary difficulties of dealing with the Bedu, the climate, and the Turks, that this road should not be chosen without serious thought. Bringing off the project of appearing as an Arab required ‘‘unremitting study,’’ an ability to ‘‘watch yourself and your companions all the time: hear all that passes, search out what is going on beneath the surface. . . . Bury yourself in Arab circles, have no interests and no ideas except the work in hand, so that your brain shall be saturated with one thing only, and you realise your part deeply enough to avoid the little slips that would undo the work of weeks.’’ The foreigner who fully rose to this challenge might become a more exemplary bearer of the local culture’s traits than those native to it, because the required effort generated a kind of impetus that could carry him (there was no her in this picture) beyond the point to which those born into it felt required to go. But dangers remained, since

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even achieving this high level of success could not eliminate the tensions and hardships it involved.21 Almost certainly written at a point close in time to the taking of Akaba (6 July 1917; the ‘‘Twenty-Seven Articles’’ were published in August), these sentences make clear that even in the midst of the campaign Lawrence saw attempting to dress and act like an Arab in terms that adumbrated the strongly negative ones he would employ in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (mostly written in a succession of versions between 1919 and 1922, and published in 1926). At both moments there was a highly instrumental side to living in such a way: the references to ‘‘surpassing’’ the natives and beating them ‘‘at their own game’’ remind us that he presented the ‘‘Twenty-Seven Articles’’ as advice for ‘‘handling’’ Arabs. In Seven Pillars he would note (in a passage we quoted earlier) that a person who serves the cause of some other ‘‘race’’ can do it either from the outside, seeking to ‘‘batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been,’’ or, ‘‘after my model, he may imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back again.’’ The first alternative meant ‘‘exploiting his old environment to press them out of theirs,’’ while the second required ‘‘giving away his own environment: pretending to theirs.’’ Both modes were ways of getting others to act as he wished, and Seven Pillars shows him in both guises. In the first he acted primarily as an English officer, using European knowledge to organize attacks on rail lines, and plotting the best strategy to employ given the strengths and limitations of the men and material at hand. But in the second it was his ability to think himself into local culture that made his course of action possible. He relied on it to put through his overall program of getting a multitude of often mutually hostile tribal groups to accept Feisal’s leadership, either by projecting the idea of Arab independence as a unifying vision, by promising the booty for which those who remained unmoved by ideals chiefly fought, or by exploiting existing hostilities so as to gain support for a particular tactic or strategy. One example of the third course was his plotting against a prominent Syrian, Nesib el Bekri, who preferred making Damascus the campaign’s prime target rather than the port of Akaba which Lawrence saw as the best initial goal. Here his game involved setting the powerful chieftain Auda Abu Tayi (about whom more in a moment) against the Syrian, using ‘‘the too-easily-lit jealousy between a Sherif and a Damascene; between an authentic Shia descendant of Ali and the martyred Hussein [two of

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Mohammed’s early followers], and a very doubtfully reputed descendant of the ‘successor’ Abu Bekr.’’22 But Lawrence was seldom moved by a pure calculus of manipulation, since we know that a range of deeper attractions for Arab life had long drawn him toward it. To be sure, even such a goal as making Dahoum a present of Arab freedom did not exclude looking on some or all of his companions as tools for the work he had in hand, given that their own impulses or preferences did not always make them useful partners; but in this case the instrumental considerations were infused and colored by more substantive and affective ones. Evidence that he saw the question of wearing local dress in other terms than simply ‘‘handling’’ Arabs comes from several places in his writings where the particular question of clothing was subsumed under a broader perspective, one that distinguished contrasting overall manners of belonging to two ways of life at once. He spoke about this difference in Seven Pillars, but also in an essay published earlier as an introduction to the new edition of a book by an older traveler and writer, Charles M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta. Published in 1888, Doughty’s work had gone out of print, but its author was still alive in 1921 when Lawrence, who admired and learned much from him, got the publisher Jonathan Cape to reprint the book. We will come back later to one of Lawrence’s reasons for making a kind of hero of Doughty, namely that of all the English who took up the difficult challenge of traveling and living in the desert, ‘‘none of us triumphed over our bodies as Doughty did.’’ But Lawrence also used Doughty as a touchstone for distinguishing between ‘‘two chief kinds of Englishmen’’ abroad, who ‘‘in foreign parts divide themselves into two opposed classes. Some feel deeply the influence of the native people, and try to adjust themselves to its atmosphere and spirit. To fit themselves modestly into the picture, they suppress all in them that would be discordant with local habits and colours. They imitate the native as far as possible, and so avoid friction in their daily life.‘‘ Although Lawrence did not specifically name himself as a member of this group, he would do so in Seven Pillars, and here as there he portrayed it in largely negative terms. Such people ’’cannot avoid the consequences of imitation, a hollow, worthless thing. They are like the people but not of the people, and their half-perceptible differences give them a sham influence often greater than their merit. They urge the people among whom they live into strange, unnatural courses by imitating them so well that they are imitated back again.‘‘ Of the two types, however, it was the second who

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were more numerous: ’’In the same circumstance of exile they reinforce their character by memories of the life they have left. In reaction against their foreign surroundings they take refuge in the England that was theirs. They assert their aloofness, their immunity, the more vividly for their loneliness and weakness. They impress the peoples among whom they live by reaction, by giving them an ensample [sic] of the complete Englishman, the foreigner intact.‘‘ Lawrence described Doughty as ‘‘a great member of the second, the cleaner class’’ (we already know that ‘‘clean’’ was a loaded adjective for Lawrence). But certain things about him set him apart from it. ‘‘He says that he was never oriental, though the sun made him an Arab; and much of his value lies in the distinction. His seeing is altogether English; yet at the same time his externals, his manners, his dress, and his speech were Arabic, and nomad Arab, of the desert. . . . By being always Arab in manner and European in mind he maintained a perfect judgment, while bearing towards them a full sympathy which persuaded them to show him their inmost ideas.’’23 We will come later to some of the things omitted where the ellipses appear in this passage (they have to do with Doughty’s, and Lawrence’s, descriptions of basic Arab traits); two points need stressing now. First, these opposing models of how to live among foreigners are not modes of ‘‘handling’’ them. Rather, they are two contrasting personal styles, two characteristic and differently felt ways of relating to life in an alien environment. But second, despite what Lawrence says initially, Doughty does not quite belong to the second class: he did not ‘‘take refuge’’ in his Englishness or assert aloofness and immunity, since his dress, speech, and manner were all modeled on the Arabs among whom he lived. We have to conclude, therefore, that the choices Lawrence described were not limited to the two he numbered but were at least three: dress and think like a European, dress and at least try to think like an Arab, or dress like an Arab but think like a European (a fourth, dress like a European but think like an Arab, is abstractly possible, but doesn’t really arise). Doughty belonged to the third model, but Lawrence seems not to have assigned anyone else to it. It does not appear at the place in Seven Pillars where he distinguishes the other two; here there is no suggestion of a way to bridge them. As in the ‘‘Twenty-Seven Articles,’’ the choice lies between two ways of gaining influence over Arabs. ‘‘Class one, subtle and insinuating, caught the characteristics of the people about him, their speech, their conventions of thought, almost their manner. He directed men secretly,

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guiding them as he would. In such frictionless habit of influence his own nature lay hid, unnoticed.’’ By contrast the second, the John Bull of the books, became the more rampantly English the longer he was away from England. He invented an Old Country for himself, a home of all remembered virtues, so splendid in the distance that, on return, he often found reality a sad falling off and withdrew his muddle-headed self into fractious advocacy of the good old times. Abroad, through his armoured certainty, he was a rounded sample of our traits. He showed the complete Englishman. There was friction in his track, and his direction was less smooth than that of the intellectual type: yet his stout example cut wider swathe. Seven Pillars offers no example of the second sort, and Lawrence clearly felt personally distant from such ‘‘John Bull’’ types; but given that he also attributes real effectiveness to them, one person he may well have had in mind was Viscount Edmund Allenby, the British commanding general in the Middle East during the war and very much the English aristocrat and soldier. Despite the contrast in their personal styles and characters, Lawrence greatly admired Allenby (who understood Lawrence’s value and supported him), and was grateful to be able to work with him. In this passage, each of the two sorts has its own kind of success, and Lawrence here does not bring up the negative consequences of trying to live as an Arab among Arabs that he bewails elsewhere. But he did not let himself off the hook, since he went on to note a different disadvantage of his own more subtle manner: those who ‘‘admired native custom; studied the language; wrote books about its architecture, folklore, and dying industries . . . one day . . . awoke to find this chthonic spirit turned political, and shook our heads with sorrow over its ungrateful nationalism—truly the fine flower of our innocent efforts.’’ The Lawrences of the world were caught in contradictions that the Allenbys were spared.24 I have reported these deeply felt but tortuous meditations at some length because they make clear how present in Lawrence’s mind were the problems and challenges of inhabiting two cultures at once. Seven Pillars of Wisdom provides much material for looking at these issues in more detail. One revealing moment in the story has to do with what he calls, in the nearly identical formulas we have noted, ‘‘imitating them so well that they

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are imitated back again,’’ and to ‘‘imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back again.’’ The two are close if not identical to what the ‘‘Twenty-Seven Articles’’ referred to as to ‘‘surpass’’ the Arabs or to beat them ‘‘at their own game.’’ The most explicit description of such behavior on Lawrence’s part has to do with his relations with the remarkable Arab fighter and tribal leader Auda Abu Tayi. Auda joined Feisal’s campaign soon after Lawrence was sent back to advise and guide it, and his arrival marked an important turning point, since without him the forces would have lacked much of the strength that allowed them to achieve what they did. A striking and colorful figure, he made himself powerful and wealthy by despoiling his enemies, but ‘‘his generosity kept him always poor, despite the profits of a hundred raids.’’ A great storyteller, ‘‘he saw life as a saga.’’ Lawrence’s relationship with Auda eventually became close enough that he could imitate the Bedouin fighter well enough to have an impact on both him and his followers. This achievement required much preparation, however, not least because the Arab’s speech long remained difficult for him to grasp. At the beginning my Arabic had been a halting command of the tribal dialects of the Middle Euphrates (a not impure form), but now it became a fluent mingling of Hejaz slang and north-tribal poetry with household words and phrases from the limpid Nejdi, and book forms from Syria. The fluency had a lack of grammar, which made my talk a perpetual adventure for my hearers. Newcomers imagined I must be the native of some unknown illiterate district; a shot-rubbish ground of disjected Arabic parts of speech. However, as yet I understood not three words of Auda’s, and after half an hour his chant tired me.25 We are not told at what point Lawrence began to overcome this limitation, but it was in the summer of 1917, after his return from his heroic ride to Damascus to plead the case for making Akaba the first target, that he had absorbed enough of Auda’s speech to stage what seems to have been a strikingly successful impersonation of him. This was the moment when Lawrence reports himself as particularly disturbed by his implicit connivance in deceiving the Arabs about the degree of independence the Allies were prepared to allow them once the war ended, the anxiety to which he responded by vowing ‘‘to make the

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Arab Revolt the engine of its own success’’ and ‘‘to lead it so madly in the final victory that expediency should counsel to the Powers a fair settlement of the Arabs’ moral claims.’’ Auda’s resources and ability to inspire his followers constituted an important part of this strategy, and Lawrence was careful to behave in a way that expressed his genuine respect and liking for him, and to show ‘‘that really we were his friends.’’ One might not expect that taking him as a model not just for imitation, but for parody, would demonstrate such fellowship, but somehow (at least in Lawrence’s telling, and he often had a dour view of his achievements) it did. The chance came when Lawrence missed the presence of Auda’s cousin Mohammed, with whom he was friendly (and who gave Lawrence help with improving his Arabic), on his return from Damascus. When Lawrence asked Auda why Mohammed seemed to have disappeared, the warrior-chief responded by making up a story about his cousin: Mohammed was hiding out because he had bought a necklace in a bazaar but had not given it to any of his wives, which made them all angry at him. Lawrence guessed right away that the yarn was a prank and an example of Auda’s love of stories for their own sake, and he responded by spinning a pointless tale of his own but in Auda’s voice, adopting his verbal ticks and bodily gestures. This recitation was punctuated with ritual phrases, starting with ‘‘In the name of God the merciful, the loving-kind,’’ and went on to ‘‘a close parody of Auda’s epic style,’’ with hand waving ‘‘and the rising and dropping tone which emphasized the points, or what he thought were points, of his pointless stories.’’ The listeners were fascinated, ‘‘for they all recognized the original, and parody was a new art to them.’’ Repeated phrases (‘‘we marched and we marched,’’ ‘‘the land was barren,’’ ‘‘by God a donkey,’’ ‘‘by very God a donkey’’) peppered ‘‘a raiding story in which nothing happened,’’ and which ended where Auda’s accounts of nighttime adventures often did, ‘‘by very God the sun rose upon us.’’ At the end, ‘‘the tribe was in waves of laughter on the ground,’’ and it was Auda himself who ‘‘laughed the loudest and longest, for he loved a jest upon himself. . . . He embraced Mohammed, and confessed the invention of the necklace.’’26 This remarkable incident seems to be the only example Lawrence gave in Seven Pillars of success in taking on Arab speech and gesture sufficient to ‘‘surpass’’ natives or beat them ‘‘at their own game’’ that he described as necessary in order to garner the full benefits that wearing local dress promised. In this regard, his successful parody of Auda was a kind of triumph of

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insertion into another culture, making natives recognize him as able to play their game as well as or better than they. But at the same time the incident fit very well his negative characterization of such imitation as a vain or hollow pretense. This was especially the case because the moment when he put on Auda’s persona was fraught with the tension between Lawrence’s commitment to the Arabs and his complicity in deceiving them; becoming a mirror for reflecting Auda back onto himself may have served as a way of giving visible form to Lawrence’s felt closeness to Arab life, but it could not overcome his simultaneous identity as a British officer. To this we need to add what we noted earlier in regard to Richard Burton’s less tortured relations with disguise and imitation. Masquerade may be highly effective, but it can never fully escape being play-acting; the person who takes on one way of being while remaining within another simultaneously softens and hardens the boundaries between them, because the features the mask covers remain beneath it: knowing that others may see through the fac¸ade becomes part of the consciousness that directs the imitation. In this case there was never any question of Lawrence expecting that his show might make people forget who he was; he makes clear that his Arabic was never good enough for that, and the mutual understanding of his limitations in this regard may have been one thing that allowed his audience to appreciate the performance, allowing them to forgive whatever defects they saw in it. A genuine attempt to deceive his audience would not have been received in the friendly way this one was. This is not to say that Lawrence at this moment was not also dramatizing his attempt to inhabit a space between cultures: it was from within this space that he took on Auda’s vocal and physical gestures and nudged him to acknowledge the fable about Mohammed for what it was. The incident should serve to remind us that on one level cultural membership always rests on imitation of those who represent the culture to us, but that on another level imitation is never enough in itself since, to recall the observation of Martin Hollis we invoked in the introduction to this book, individuals must employ ‘‘intelligent agency’’ to navigate the complexities and inconsistencies cultures present to their members. A similar consciousness of cultural difference is evident in an episode Lawrence reports as taking place almost immediately following his imitation of Auda, a kind of intercultural dialogue. At an after-dinner campfire some days before the assault on Akaba, several Arabs did some stargazing through telescopes Lawrence had brought with him. The situation led Auda

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to ‘‘set us to talk on telescopes,’’ with Lawrence remarking how much more powerful the ones available in 1917 were than Galileo’s, and about a possible future in which further improvements might make all the stars in the universe visible. ‘‘ ‘Why are the Westerners always wanting all,’ provokingly said Auda. ‘Behind our few stars we can see God, who is not behind your millions.’ ’’ When one of his men then asked whether these distant worlds contained men and if they knew about the Prophet and heaven and hell, ‘‘Auda broke in on him. ‘Lads, we know our districts, our camels, our women. The excess and the glory are to God. If the end of wisdom is to add star to star our foolishness is pleasing.’ ’’27 Here the meanings of ‘‘wisdom’’ and ‘‘foolishness’’ depend on the cultural context that frames them. Auda’s exposure to European culture through Lawrence allows him to recognize the search for an ever-larger compass and an extension of horizons as a peculiarly Western trait; he warns his companions against it not on any general grounds, but because it threatened to remove them unnecessarily from the world they know. Seven Pillars of Wisdom contains a number of more or less irenic instances of cultural comparison, evidence that Lawrence saw many cultural gaps as easily bridgeable. But these places in the text do not diminish the much more tense and conflicted feelings he exhibited when he bewailed having two selves that ‘‘converse in the void’’ and leading ‘‘a Yahoo life.’’ In the next section of this chapter we turn our attention to what lay behind these dark sentiments, and the ways that having a second identity provided a point from which to recognize and confront the troubling content of his own character and psyche.

* * *

The underlying patterns both Lawrence and others have found at the center of his personal existence were painful for him to contemplate, and they are painful to discuss, too. But both his own self-understanding and much of the work devoted to Lawrence’s life and career tell us that driving many of his actions was a powerful and neurotic urge for self-punishment. He expressed this impulse in numerous ways, of which three demand to be listed at the start. One of these we need only mention, but the others

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require closer attention. The first involved the many harshly negative judgments he gave about Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which he repeatedly described as a failed book and unworthy of being published, an opinion of which early readers such as George Bernard and Charlotte Shaw and E. M. Forster sought to disabuse him. The second was his attempt to efface his identity as ‘‘Lawrence of Arabia’’ between 1922 and the end of his life by enlisting in the Royal Air Force (and for a time the regular British Army) under assumed names and as a simple private, bound to be given the lowest and most distasteful kind of work; the third consisted of the painful, degrading, and violent series of beatings to which he subjected himself over several years in the 1920s and 1930s. Although the second of these assaults on himself may be the most revealing about the shape of Lawrence’s life history, it is of course the third that is the most striking and that has caught the attention of everyone who has written about Lawrence since it was brought to light in 1968. He organized it by inventing a fictitious uncle who insisted that he be physically punished for having disgraced his family in various ways, and then employing a gullible and brawny young Scot to land the blows (others took his place after the Scot returned to Edinburgh). The first instrument was a birch cane, later replaced by a metal whip, applied on bare buttocks (after the effect through clothing proved insufficient); there is no doubt they caused intense pain. Testimony also exists that Lawrence received powerful sexual stimulation from them, resulting in both erection and ejaculation. Not surprisingly, the beatings (together with other afflictions connected to them) have been examined under a psychological lens, and connections have been posited between the floggings and the Deraa incident, where sexual pleasure and physical pain were also linked (some of the sessions were planned on its anniversary), as well as with what we know to have been repeated beatings given Lawrence as a boy by his mother (we return to their relationship later).28 We can be grateful that Lawrence’s biographers have mostly treated these dimensions of his story with good sense and restraint, recognizing that categories such as masochism and ‘‘flagellation disorder’’ can hardly be avoided, but without seeking to reduce Lawrence to a mental case. Both John E. Mack, an American psychiatrist whose biography deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize, and Harold Orlans, author of a more recent and more conventional but also succinct and probing study, merit respect and praise for their accounts. We leave them mostly aside here, however, in order to

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focus, as neither of them does, on Lawrence’s own remarkable efforts at self-examination and self-analysis. These are of especial interest for us because the pathways they open up into his psychic interior also illuminate some of what was at stake for him in attempting to ‘‘live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation’’ during the war, as well as in the later features of his life just mentioned. Although Lawrence’s efforts at self-scrutiny occur in several places, including letters and books he published after Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his most focused and direct attempt comes in a chapter near the end of that book, entitled ‘‘Myself.’’ It was based, as he tells us, on a set of reflections he undertook on his thirtieth birthday (16 August 1918), a day on which ‘‘I spent hours apart by myself, taking stock of where I stood, mentally.’’ Although often frank and revealing, Lawrence’s observations about himself are not always easy to parse, partly because of the tensions and contradictions that run through them, partly because the account is patchy and disjointed, and partly because the quasi-poetic tone that characterizes much of his writing is particularly in evidence here. All the same, the chapter is worth more sustained attention than it has received. As at many places in the book, Lawrence was here preoccupied with the falsity of his position in the desert campaign, serving both the Arab cause and the Western powers he knew were ready to betray it. Despite being fully true to neither side, he still retained his ‘‘craving for good repute among men,’’ and the difficulty of openly admitting his equivocal position ‘‘made me profoundly suspect my truthfulness to myself.’’ Seeking to allay that suspicion, he began by uncovering the tension and confusion that lay behind what others took to be his modesty, based on his repeated refusal to receive compliments. ‘‘I was not modest, but ashamed of my awkwardness, of my physical envelope, and of my solitary unlikeness which made me no companion, but an acquaintance, complete, angular, uncomfortable, as a crystal.’’ Because the roles he was expected to fill did not really fit him, he had a sense of standing apart from both others and his own self: ‘‘As my war was overwrought because I was not a soldier, so my activity was overwrought, because I was not a man of action. They were intensely conscious efforts, with my detached self always eyeing the performance from the wings in criticism.’’ The notebooks he kept during the campaign were filled not with facts and figures but with ‘‘states of mind, the reveries and self-questioning induced or educed by our situations.’’ Writing them was a way of ‘‘groping about in my own pitchy darkness,’’ and they made him

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‘‘very conscious of the bundled powers and entities within me.’’ This ‘‘eagerness to overhear and oversee myself’’ was no effort to soothe his discomfort, however; it ‘‘was my assault upon my own inviolate citadel.’’ Lawrence knew well that his obsession with self-observation was itself a signal feature of the self he subjected to scrutiny. At its center was a split between what he described as ‘‘higher’’ and ‘‘lower’’ parts of his being, the first intellectual and the second physical. The frankly faced contradictions this involved are so striking that mere paraphrase is not enough to convey them; what one part of him rejected another desired all the more. The lower creation I avoided, as a reflection upon our failure to attain real intellectuality. If they forced themselves on me I hated them. To put my hand on a living thing was defilement; and it made me tremble if they touched me or took too quick an interest in me. This was an atomic repulsion, like the intact course of a snowflake. The opposite would have been my choice if my head had not been tyrannous. I had a longing for the absolutism of women and animals, and lamented myself most when I saw a soldier with a girl, or a man fondling a dog, because my wish was to be as superficial, as perfected; and my jailer held me back. In a letter of 1925 Lawrence glossed a friend’s observation that the author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom appeared in the book almost as two separate persons by saying, ‘‘Normally the very strong one, saying ‘No,’ the Puritan, is in firm charge, and the other poor little vicious fellow can’t get a word in, for fear of him.’’ But the effect of this ‘‘assault’’ by one part of himself against the other (or, as he sometimes saw it, against the whole) was never complete. The side he referred to as both ‘‘reason’’ and ‘‘illusion’’ was ‘‘strong enough to win, but not strong enough to annihilate the vanquished,’’ so that desire for what he suppressed constantly popped back up, imposing new efforts on the other. He ‘‘could see happiness in the supremacy of the material, and could not surrender to it: could try to put my mind to sleep that suggestion might blow through me freely; and remained bitterly awake.’’29 The result of his being constantly preoccupied with the side of himself he abhorred was that he invested ‘‘the lower creation’’ with a surprising potential, namely the possibility of giving his being the consistency that the higher part could not impose. ‘‘There seemed a certainty in degradation, a

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final safety. Man could rise to any height, but there was an animal level beneath which he could not fall.’’ In other words, the extreme degradation threatened by ‘‘lower’’ pleasures endowed them with a uniform, homogeneous character that promised just the predictability and stability that the mind sought but failed to achieve. Yet this did not allow him to give himself to lower things, it only infused the repulsion he felt toward them with a perverse attractiveness. To yield to this allure, as he put it in the 1925 letter cited a moment ago, would have required that he ‘‘take the filthy steps which would publicly shame me,’’ a course he remained ‘‘too shy’’ to follow. ‘‘I want to dirty myself outwardly, so that my person may properly reflect the dirtiness which it conceals,’’ but his need for approval from others didn’t allow it. In a way it was just such ‘‘filthy steps’’ that Lawrence took after the war, subjecting himself to life in the lower ranks of the Royal Air Force and Army; we will see later just how clearly this subjection echoed the worst features of his wartime experience. In the desert years, however, he could find no way to achieve the stability that ‘‘total degradation’’ seemed to offer. He could at once subject his body to hardship and take pleasure in it—in riding, fighting, slaking thirst and hunger—but his position as leader of the revolt meant that his relations with things outside himself, and especially with other people, always involved calculation and mental effort, making them a heterogeneous mix of mental and physical elements; thus they left him in a state that was always precarious and unsettled. It was not just that the tension between his Arab and British loyalties made him waver; behind it lay a deeper inability to establish a firm bond to any of the goals he set for himself and others. What made him ‘‘rudderless’’ and ‘‘a danger to ordinary men’’ was that his ever-recurring need to focus on himself drew him away from all the external things with which he established ties. He was animated by ‘‘a special attraction in beginnings, which drove me into everlasting endeavour to free my personality from accretions and project it on a fresh medium, that my curiosity to see its naked shadow might be fed.’’ The same powerful impulse to self-scrutiny that divided him internally and made his attachments to others ephemeral also heightened his awareness of the contrast between himself and them. ‘‘They talked of food and illness, games and pleasures, with me, who felt that to recognize our possession of bodies was degradation enough, without enlarging upon their failings and attributes. I would feel shame for myself at seeing them wallow in the physical which could be only a glorification of man’s cross. Indeed, the truth was I did not like the

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‘myself’ I could see and hear.’’ In sum, the overall pattern of his personal existence was woven out of three threads that ran through it at every level: his hyperconscious self-scrutiny, the sense of foreignness to the physical, palpable aspect of his being that it generated, and the permanent fluidity and instability that characterized his relations to all things—material, animal, and human—in the world.30 Seen through the tangled weave of this self-portrait, many of Lawrence’s relations to Arab life, as well as some features of his later existence, appear in a different light, beginning with the three most significant consequences of his quasi-Arab existence specified in the early pages of Seven Pillars of Wisdom: his division into two irreconcilable selves whose ‘‘converse in the void’’ was ‘‘very close’’ to madness; his sense of forever floating between realms, in the way legend pictured Mohammed’s coffin; and his leading a ‘‘Yahoo life,’’ degrading his humanity by subordinating it to animality. The account of ‘‘Myself’’ does not provide any reason to doubt that these three dilemmas were deeply tied to his attempts to dress and think like Arabs without being one, but it reveals that these defining features of his experience had another and more purely personal root, as facets of a pattern formed by relations between the warring dimensions of his own being. The division into irreconcilable selves stemmed from the restless selfconsciousness that subjected both itself and his more material side to constant scrutiny; the sense of having no solid resting place or connections to things outside himself grew out of his inability to form permanent attachments; the ‘‘Yahoo’’ subjection to animality was a reflection of the heightened importance his body assumed as a consequence of his mind’s inability to vanquish it. The existence of these connections does not necessarily mean that the significance of the desert campaign itself in generating the experiences Lawrence bewailed at the start of his book ought to be diminished, but it seems highly unlikely that the general lines of the self-portrait given in ‘‘Myself’’ had not occurred to him before, and still less that they were not already part of his person. In this light we cannot avoid asking whether the potential of a quasi-Arab life to take on the painful forms he described was not one source of the attraction—conscious or unconscious—it held for him. The portrait that emerged from his thirtieth-birthday probings was one in which latent violence against himself was a powerful and continuing presence, and the source of this ‘‘assault,’’ as he called it, was simply the consciousness of his physicality, the felt presence of the material envelope he

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detested. One recent and insightful psychological inquiry into schizophrenia suggests that what often brings the self to split itself apart is precisely hyperconsciousness, an excess of the very power of self-reflection through which the ‘‘I’’ seeks unity with itself.31 Lawrence’s self-analysis fits this model very well. Whether the term ‘‘schizoid’’ ought to be applied to him or not, there was something cruel and potentially self-destructive in the aggression his mind directed against his body and his whole way of being. Both life among desert Arabs and the demands of battle offered opportunities to act out this aggressiveness and, as other writers about Lawrence have noted, the terms in which he describes Arab ways often endow them with a disposition to self-punishment much like his own. The ‘‘true Arab,’’ he declared at one point, was ‘‘not the noisy, luxury-loving, sensual, passionate, greedy person’’ found in towns, ‘‘but a man whose ruling characteristic is hardness, of body, mind, heart, and head.’’ Such toughness involved an estrangement from worldly satisfactions that was powerful enough to include self-punishment: ‘‘Accordingly he hurt himself, not merely to be free, but to please himself. There followed a delight in pain, a cruelty which was more to him than goods. The desert Arab found no joy like the joy of voluntarily holding back. He found luxury in abnegation, renunciation, self-restraint.’’32 We learn in Seven Pillars of Wisdom that ‘‘the common base of all Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty.’’33 And yet this rejection of the material world was no more realizable for them than for him; quite the contrary, it left the one no less full of longing for the satisfactions of the flesh than the other. The conditions of Arabs’ lives might make them appear puritanical, but even among desert Bedouins a different nature was evident underneath. They were absolute slaves of their appetite, with no stamina of mind, drunkards for coffee, milk or water, gluttons for stewed meat, shameless beggars of tobacco. They dreamed for weeks before and after their rare sexual exercises, and spent the intervening days titillating themselves and their hearers with bawdy tales. Had the circumstances of their lives given them opportunity they would have been sheer sensualists. Their strength was the strength of men geographically beyond temptation: the poverty of Arabia made them simple, continent, enduring. If forced into civilized life they would have

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succumbed like any savage race to its diseases, meanness, luxury, cruelty, crooked dealing, artifice; and, like savages, they would have suffered them exaggeratedly for lack of inoculation. Some elements in this list are ones Lawrence would not have applied to himself, but it was the power he recognized in the temptations of ‘‘the lower creation’’ that gave such force to his will to repress all desire for them. And the result was the same in both cases: the persisting inner conflicts generated a constant replay of their opposition, returning always to where they began. Arabs . . . were incorrigibly children of the idea, feckless and colourblind, to whom body and spirit were for ever and inevitably opposed. . . . They were a people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive. . . . Since the dawn of life, in successive waves they had been dashing themselves against the coasts of flesh. Each wave was broken, but, like the sea . . . some day . . . might roll unchecked over the place where the material world had been. . . . One such wave (and not the least) I raised and rolled before the breath of an idea, till it reached its crest, and toppled over and fell at Damascus. As we know, Lawrence often associated this ‘‘fall’’ of the idea of Arab independence with the Allied plans and policies in which he saw himself as guiltily complicit. But there were moments when the campaign’s disappointing outcome seemed instead to be rooted in a revenge of individual weakness on the ideal that sought to overcome it, a fate to which the Arabs were no less subject than he. To our strained eyes, the ideal, held in common, seemed to transcend the personal, which before had been our normal measure of the world. . . . Yet this transcending of individual frailty made the idea transient. Its principle became Activity, the primal quality, external to our atomic structure, which we could simulate only by unrest of mind and soul and body, beyond holding point. So always the ideality of the ideal vanished, leaving its worshipers exhausted: holding for false what they had once pursued.

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Which is to say that the aspiration he shared with them, to surmount individual limitations through commitment to a higher cause, lost its supposed power to draw people out of themselves because the energy it generated was dependent on the same ‘‘unrest of mind and soul and body’’ that gave rise to the desire ‘‘to transcend the personal’’ in the first place. The supraindividual ideal was too much yoked to the contradictions of private existence for which it appeared as a remedy to break free of them. This did not make public policy innocent of the revolt’s disappointing outcome, but it identified another and more existential source operating alongside it.34 The sentences just quoted appear in a context that points to a further dimension of the complex homology between Lawrence’s character and his experience of Arab life. Discussing the people recruited to be part of the bodyguard set up to protect him after he returned from the debacle of Deraa, he attributed their willingness to be subjected to harsh discipline to a cultural contrast between East and West. Servitude, like other conduct, was profoundly modified to Eastern minds by their obsession with the antithesis between flesh and spirit. These lads took pleasure in subordination; in degrading the body: so as to throw into greater relief their freedom in equality of mind: almost they preferred servitude as richer in experience than authority, and less binding in daily care. Consequently the relation of master and man in Arabia was at once more free and more subject than I had experienced elsewhere. Servants . . . had a gladness of abasement, a freedom of consent to yield to their master the last service and degree of their flesh and blood, because their spirits were equal with his and the contract voluntary. Such boundless engagement precluded humiliation, repining and regret.35 Lawrence’s own case was unlike that of Arabs in that for him ‘‘boundless engagement’’ did not preclude ‘‘humiliation, repining and regret’’; on the contrary, it provided a broad foundation for them. But the elements this description shares with his own ‘‘Yahoo’’ subjection to a ‘‘race’’ to which he similarly did not feel inferior (although he attributed many virtues to it) are hard to miss, and the greater self-awareness he attributed to his own form of subjection was precisely what allowed him to see its connection to

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the parallel inner one formed by relations between the two sides of his being. The desert campaign offered many opportunities to act out this subjection by imposing punishment on his body. The earliest of these moments was his going off alone to find a member of his band whose camel appeared without him after he had become separated from Lawrence and Auda on a march. Lawrence could easily have avoided taking on the task of searching for him but feared that doing so would lessen his influence over people so familiar to the desert. ‘‘So, without saying anything, I turned my unwilling camel round and forced her, grunting and moaning for her camel friends, back past the long line of men . . . into the emptiness behind.’’ In this case Lawrence did not make much of the physical pain that bringing the lost fighter back caused him (it is dramatized in David Lean’s film), but something close to agony was a large part of the picture in other instances. One of these referred to his entry into Deraa on the night he was beaten and probably raped there. Lawrence had injured his foot shortly before. ‘‘The slippery track made walking difficult, unless we spread out our toes widely and took hold of the ground with them: and doing this for mile after mile was exquisitely painful to me. Because pain hurt me so, I would not lay weight always on any pains in our revolt: yet hardly one day in Arabia passed without a physical ache to increase the corroding sense of my accessory deceitfulness towards the Arabs, and the legitimate fatigue of responsible command.’’ Punishing himself for such deceit was not always a stated motive, however. In the camp the Arab forces established after they took the town of Wejh from the Turks, keeping harmony among them and preparing the next actions required that Lawrence spend his days going back and forth between the widely separated tents of the army’s various components— Feisal’s followers, some Egyptians, some British—and between them and the town with its radio set-up. To the surprise of his companions, he insisted on making these trips barefoot or in light sandals, hardening my feet, getting by slow degrees the power to walk with little pain over sharp and burning ground, tempering my already trained body for greater endeavour. Poor Arabs wondered why I had no mare; and I forbore to puzzle them by incomprehensible talk of hardening myself, or confess I would rather walk than ride for sparing of animals; yet the first was

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true and the second true. Something hurtful to my pride, disagreeable, rose at the sight of these lower forms of life. Their existence struck a servile reflection upon our human kind: the style in which a God would look on us; and to make use of them, to lie under an avoidable obligation to them, seemed to me shameful.36 We recognize the estrangement from ‘‘the lower creation’’ to which he gave voice in his birthday reflections. The Lawrence who began Seven Pillars by warning others against the ‘‘Yahoo life’’ into which ‘‘the man who gives himself to the possession of aliens’’ falls was the product of a kind of double negative: the self he renounced was already one regularly engaged in repudiation of itself. What setting these two negatives against each other generated was not a stable positive integer, however, but an endless spiral of self-rejection.

* * *

We have already noted that the regime of beatings to which he subjected himself after the war has to be located somewhere along this twisted line, but perhaps it is not so immediately apparent that his entry into military service as a lowly private belongs there too. Part of the self-repudiation it effected was his attempt to hide his identity behind pseudonyms, John Hume Ross and Thomas Edward Shaw; the stratagem was quickly enough foiled by journalists who discovered the truth, but it enacted once again his need to keep himself free of ‘‘accretions’’ and to find ever-new ‘‘beginnings.’’ In addition, this chapter in Lawrence’s life was, like his involvement in the desert war, a way of entering into, and subjecting himself to, an alien way of life, although in this case a British one, divided from his own chiefly by social class. He recognized the common soldiers whose ranks he joined as formed in a very different mold from the one that put its stamp upon people of his background and education, writing in one letter that they showed nothing of the overlay that leisure and culture had ‘‘plastered’’ onto people of his own sort: it was as if the development of civilization had made no impression on them, leaving them ‘‘as animal, as carnal, as were their ancestors before Plato and Christ and Shelley and Dostoevski.’’ Even as he lived among them Lawrence also inhabited another world, corresponding

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with officers, scholars, and literary figures (including Shaw, E. M. Forster, and Thomas Hardy). Life in the ranks even had a quality he called ‘‘nomadity. No one dares say, ‘Here I will sleep tonight, and this I will do on the morrow,’ for we exist at call.’’ As with the desert campaign too, joining the RAF required a striking change of clothing. Ordinary kit was drab and impersonal, whereas dress uniforms were bright and attractive, but other qualities of military clothing struck him more forcefully: ‘‘These clothes are too tight. At every pace they catch us in a dozen joints of the body, and remind us of it. The harsh friction of the cloth excitingly polishes our skins and signals to our carnality the flexure of each developing muscle or sinew. They provoke lasciviousness, by telling so much of ourselves.’’ The book he wrote about his military life, The Mint, graphically described the dirty work he was assigned, handling rotting and insect-infested sacks of food and soiling his clothes with garbage and manure. It also pictured being in the service in terms that recalled his serving other aliens: ‘‘Service life . . . teaches a man to live largely on little. We belong to a big thing, which will exist for ever and ever in unnumbered generations of standard airmen, like ourselves. Our outward samenesses of dress and type remind us of that. Also our segregation and concentration. . . . As we gain attachment, so we strip ourselves of personality.‘‘ The privacy he valued in the way common to Englishmen of his class was sacrificed to a common life, much as in the desert.37 But perhaps the feature of joining the ranks that tied it most closely to the life from which he now declared his separation was the mode of entry into it. It required a physical exam in which recruits’ naked bodies were scrutinized, pummeled, and interrogated; in his case the inspection showed scars from the desert war including the whip marks on his back from Deraa (‘‘ ‘Punishment?’ ‘No, Sir, more like persuasion, Sir, I think.’ ’’), as well as the signs of insufficient nutrition left by six months during which devoting himself to writing his book and fearing its failure left him both too short of cash and too depressed to eat regularly. Questioned about this, Lawrence pretended that his period of malnutrition had been only half as long, but the officer saw the truth in the lines of his body. ‘‘The worst of telling lies naked is that the red shows all the way down. A long pause, me shivering in disgrace.’’ It is hard not to see in this painful moment a replay of what he said about the night in Deraa: ‘‘The citadel of my integrity’’ had been rudely violated. In this case, however, Lawrence brought the incident on himself.38

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* * *

By now our portrait of Lawrence’s inner and outer life is filled in enough to confront the issue we have so far put off, the knotty matter of his sexuality. By saving it until now I think we can avoid reducing the question to the form in which it has usually been cast: was he a homosexual? The answers given have swung from positive to negative and back again: the longstanding belief or suspicion that he was gay has been undermined by the absence of evidence for any actual sexual partners (not counting his captors at Deraa), a lack that contributes to the strong likelihood he never had any. But there is no doubt that Lawrence was generally repulsed by the idea or prospect of sex between men and women, while he sometimes described erotic relations between men much more approvingly. His most recent biographer concludes persuasively that he was in general a stranger to sex, but that what desires and impulses he had were indeed for other men, however much he may have failed to act on them.39 One element in the picture was his relationship with Dahoum. All indications are that actual sex was never a part of it, but some kind of quasierotic attraction, however repressed, seems clearly to have been. The dedication of Seven Pillars is a love poem, and declares itself to be one, as we saw; to attribute a willingness to devote oneself to so dangerous and arduous a cause as the Arab struggle for independence on the ground of mere liking, even ‘‘very much,’’ as the 1919 memo had it, is hard to credit. Some light can be cast on Lawrence’s connection to Dahoum by setting it next to another intense friendship, this one with a fellow student at Oxford called Vyvyan Richards. A frank homosexual, Richards later said of his initial meeting with Lawrence that ‘‘for me it was love at first sight.’’ But the affection was never returned in the way he hoped. He had neither flesh nor carnality of any kind; he just did not understand. He received my affection, my sacrifice, in fact, eventually my total subservience, as though it was his due. He never gave the slightest sign that he understood my motives or fathomed my desire. In return for all I offered him—with admittedly ulterior motives—he gave me the purest affection, love and respect that I have ever received from anyone . . . a love and respect that was

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spiritual in quality. I realise now that he was sexless—at least that he was unaware of sex.40 This remarkable portrait fits well with many of Lawrence’s own accounts of himself. He wrote to Charlotte Shaw in 1924: The motive which brings the sexes together is 99% sensual pleasure, and only 1% the desire for children, in men, so far as I can learn. As I told you, I haven’t ever been carried away in that sense, so that I’m a bad subject to treat of it. Perhaps the possibility of a child relieves sometimes what otherwise must seem an unbearable humiliation to the woman:—for I presume it’s unbearable. However here I’m trenching on dangerous ground, with my own ache coming to life again.41 And in another, somewhat later letter: ‘‘I can’t understand all the fuss about sex. It’s as obvious as red hair: and as little fundamental, I fancy.’’ LiddellHart reported that in their conversations Lawrence emphasized his ‘‘sexlessness,’’ but he gave it a peculiar coloration, insisting that he was (in his biographer’s paraphrase) ‘‘not ascetic, but a hedonist. The more elemental you can keep sensations the better you feel them. He replaces all normal pleasures by something internal.’’42 I take this to mean that he took a kind of sensual pleasure in feelings kept inside a somehow fenced-in personal space, where no connections to external objects, including other individuals, could be formed. Did this leave room for masturbation? The complex relations to ‘‘the lower creation’’ he recounts in ‘‘Myself’’ might be read either way, but Vyvyan Richards’s picture would seem to exclude it. Approval of gay sex for others, but in a way that seems not to involve himself, is evident in some remarkable passages of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, of which the longest is this: The Arab was by nature continent; and the use of universal marriage had nearly abolished irregular courses in his tribes. The public women of the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been palatable to a man of healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another’s few needs in their own clean bodies—a cold convenience

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that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth. Awkward and convoluted as it is, this passage clearly prefers the sex it describes between men to the kind available with women, and for Lawrence to call it ‘‘sexless,’’ ‘‘clean,’’ and ‘‘pure’’ certainly went far toward looking with favor on it, and perhaps also on the claim that the ‘‘intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace’’ constituted a kind of physical counterpart of the ‘‘mental passion’’ that unites ‘‘souls and spirits.’’ But there is no doubt that this mode of coming together was carnal, leading those who engaged in it along the same path to self-punishing bodily degradation he trod in a different way. Whatever sympathy or even kinship Lawrence felt with these youths, the reasons already given make it doubtful that he took part in their actions.43 An additional and telling reason for thinking he kept at a distance from them emerges from a later and still more curious passage in the book, where he names and speaks about two young boys who were known to be lovers: ‘‘They were an instance of the eastern boy and boy affection which the segregation of women made inevitable. Such friendships often led to manly loves of a depth and force beyond our flesh-steeped conceit. When innocent they were hot and unashamed. If sexuality entered, they passed into a give and take, unspiritual relation, like marriage.’’44 What Lawrence writes here is highly singular and surprising, so much so that most readers of his book seem not to have absorbed it. Apart from the fact that the view of Arab sexual culture in the first sentence contrasts with what he said in the earlier and longer passage about universal marriage strengthening a penchant for continence, what makes these words so remarkable is not the notion that Western thinking is too much shaped by its preoccupation with ‘‘flesh’’ to understand the special depth and power that love between men can assume if it remains non-physical, but that if such relationships become sexual their temperature drops, making them worldly and matter-of-fact,

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‘‘like marriage.’’ Lawrence was not here giving voice to the common notion that the wedded state can bring an end to love’s intensity. Quite the contrary: it is sex itself that reduces relations to the ‘‘give and take’’ of everyday practical life. Sex draws otherwise ‘‘hot’’ interactions down into the banal world of accommodation and compromise that is ordinary existence. Marriage enters in only as a symbol for the ordinary.45 This passage may cast some light on the way Lawrence understood his relationship to Dahoum, namely as belonging to the sphere of special intensity reserved for ties that are not physical. This would make the warmth of feeling expressed in the dedication to Seven Pillars of Wisdom a consequence of the ‘‘innocent’’ quality of their relationship, just the opposite of what most readers today are likely to suppose. Such a perspective accords with the comment he made to Liddell-Hart, that one can feel pleasure better by keeping it inside oneself; once the physical world outside enters in, the feeling becomes less ‘‘elemental’’ and the affect loses its intensity. But as both this passage and the longer one quoted above make clear, Lawrence understood full well that few passionate friendships between men remain on this level; where an undercurrent of erotic attraction flows it will find its outlet. On some level Vyvyan Richards was wrong to think that Lawrence was unaware of sex or that he did not feel its power. Rather, the position he takes here is the same as the stance he described in ‘‘Myself,’’ where what separates him from the people around him is not an absence of attraction to ‘‘the lower creation,’’ but the determination on the part of his ‘‘intellectual’’ side to prevent any realization of his desire to experience physical pleasure. To grasp the way Lawrence saw the role of sexuality in his life we need to remember that he viewed his separation from those others—the rest of humanity—able to enjoy the delights of the body as a corollary of his own inner division. That he was occasionally capable of lasting relationships does not diminish the very large place that these parallel forms of distance occupied in his life. We can never know what Dahoum thought of their relations, but clearly Vyvyan Richards was strongly aware of the abyss this opened up between them. A similar pattern marked Lawrence’s friendships with people who did not imagine him as a sexual partner; looking at a series of these ties, Harold Orlans concludes that where others wanted to draw closer, Lawrence held back. ‘‘They could not penetrate and he could not abandon his reserve.’’46 It may be that this cast of feeling toward sexuality underwent some change toward the end of his life, a possibility suggested by a letter he wrote

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to his friend Henry Williamson in 1930, about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the famous novel by his namesake D. H. Lawrence, published two years earlier. His comment was at once continuous with his earlier ideas about sex and a striking departure from them: What D. H. Lawrence means by Lady Chatterley’s Lover is that the idea of sex, and the whole strong vital instinct, being considered indecent causes men to lose what might be their vital strength and pride of life—their integrity. . . . [D. H.] Lawrence wilted and was made writhen by the ‘‘miners-chapel-dirty little boy, you’’ environment: he was ruined by it: and in most of his work he is striving to straighten himself, and to become beautiful. Ironically, or paradoxically, in a humanity where ‘‘genitals are beauty’’ there would be a minimum of ‘‘sex’’ and a maximum of beauty or Art.47 In these sentences Lawrence identifies himself with a much more positive attitude toward sex than the one he exhibited in many other places, seeming to wish for himself the same rescue from looking on it as indecent and dirty as his namesake did. In another way, however, the passage might be read as in accord with his earlier way of understanding himself, since one way of putting it would be precisely that it was seeing sex as base and loathsome that sapped his ‘‘vital strength . . . pride of life . . . integrity.’’ Integrity was a very important value for Lawrence, and named what he lost in Deraa in November of 1917; perhaps by 1930 he had come to see his driven way of conceiving it as preventing his recognition that the body has its own beauty.

* * *

Whether or how far such thinking may have altered Lawrence’s stance toward either sex or relations with other people more generally it is not possible to say, since he took the discussion no further. In any case these questions, interesting as they may be for Lawrence’s biography, have no direct bearing on his involvement with Arab life, from which he had cut himself off well before 1930. But precisely because he had broken those ties with such insistence, seeking to hide his identity behind the false names under which he enlisted in the RAF and then the British Army, the whole

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trajectory of his life appears in a new light when we see it against the pattern in his relations to others—both sexual and not—that he described as his ‘‘everlasting endeavour to free my personality from accretions and project it on a fresh medium.’’ His writings both public and private testify repeatedly to his attempts to preserve himself from ‘‘accretions.’’ In a letter of 1917 he thanked a friend in England for reminding him about little details of life there because he feared how ‘‘terribly bound up in Eastern politics’’ he was becoming, and felt a need to ‘‘keep free. I’ve never been labeled yet, and yet I fear they are going to call me an Arabian now [a prediction soon to be fulfilled]. As soon as the war ends I’m going to build a railway in S. America, or dig up a S. African gold-field, to emancipate myself.’’ At around the same time, he pleaded with his mother not to attach any military titles to his name when addressing letters to him; such things were ‘‘only nuisances,’’ and ‘‘I’m sending back all private letters so addressed. . . . It is a wonderful thing to have kept so free of everything. Here am I at thirty with no label and no profession,’’ and grateful for their absence. Later, in London, he proclaimed his lack of permanent connections to external objects from a different perspective, when his mother reported having lost a ring she cared about. He wrote in response: ‘‘Don’t worry. Nothing mankind has yet made is worth any regret. . . . When you lose a thing there is no rhyme or reason in losing its associations also. You can transfer them to your finger itself, or to something else, for your imagination made them, & is all powerful over them & you.’’ Here the feelings evoked by associations were viewed in the same way Lawrence elsewhere regarded sensory pleasures: their innate strength became more evident and palpable when they were freed from the external objects supposed to be essential to them.48 This same aspiration to live a life devoid of lasting connections lay behind the sympathy he displayed for what he called the ‘‘cleanness’’ of desert life, the freedom from permanent ties to worldly objects assured by the doctrine of ‘‘world-worthlessness’’ that provided the foundation for ‘‘all Semitic creeds,’’ the anti-material stance that ‘‘led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty.’’ Lawrence gave a striking illustration of what such a doctrine meant and felt like by telling of a visit he made to a Roman ruin in Syria. He recounted the incident twice, first in an article he published in an issue of an Oxford magazine dated 1912–13, and again in an early chapter of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Given what it tells us, the fact that he first reported the visit several years before the desert war began is one notable

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thing about it; a second is that Dahoum was one of his guides on the visit, and the passage is the only place in Lawrence’s book where the boy’s familiar name appears. Legend had it that the building had been constructed by a local prince as a palace for his queen, and that the clay he used for the walls had been kneaded with oil from flowers, so that certain rooms bore the scent of blossoms. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, ‘‘This is jessamine, this violet, this rose.’’ But at last Dahoum drew me: ‘‘Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all,’’ and we went into the main lodging . . . and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. . . .’’ ‘‘This,’’ they told me, ‘‘is the best: it has no taste.’’ My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part. Such an attitude did not make the Arab an ascetic; ‘‘he enjoyed the little vices and luxuries—coffee, fresh water, women—which he could still preserve.’’ But in the bare emptiness of the desert ‘‘he found himself indubitably free. He lost material ties, comforts, all superfluities and other complications to achieve a personal liberty which haunted starvation and death.’’49 Dahoum’s appearance as a bearer of this message is one significant aspect of this passage; it confirms the inference we drew earlier, that Lawrence saw their relationship as belonging to those personal ties where intensity of feeling was preserved by the absence of physical relations. But still more important is the story’s demonstration that Lawrence already saw Arab culture as strongly marked by features that made it kin to his own ‘‘endeavour to free my personality from accretions and project it on a fresh medium,’’ more than four years in advance of his involvement in the revolt. At this point it seems highly unlikely that he could have seen his engagement with Arab life itself as an example of this effort, but both the negative consequences of it he detailed in his book and his concerted attempt after the war to disappear as the person he had been in the previous years surely made it one. In light of these episodes it becomes clear that no chapter in Lawrence’s personal history constitutes so striking and substantial an instance of the need to keep himself free of accretions as does the overall

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arc of his being ‘‘of Arabia.’’ In some way we can probably never fully grasp, this pattern of attachment and disengagement may well have been part of what prompted him to inject himself so deeply into Arab life in the first place. It is just this dialectic that leads me to say, as I did at the beginning of this chapter, that Lawrence’s ultimate rejection of the identity by which we still know him was itself an expression of the very impulses that originally drew him toward it.

* * *

Many of the roots of this pattern must remain invisible to us, but some of them seem to lie in Lawrence’s childhood. His was no ordinary upbringing. His father and mother never married, although they lived together as a family for decades. The father, whose legal name was Thomas Chapman, was an Anglo-Irish landlord with aristocratic connections who married a cousin in 1873; they had four daughters. Lawrence’s mother Sarah, a Scots woman whose parents also never married, entered the family in 1878 as governess for the girls, but she and Chapman soon became lovers. The discovery of their liaison was a dramatic story we need not retell, but it led to Lawrence’s father leaving his wife to live with Sarah. Because the wife refused to give him a divorce the new couple could not wed; they moved about in England and France for a number of years, produced five sons, adopted the name Lawrence (but without attempting to register it legally), and settled in Oxford. The two women in Thomas Chapman’s life shared a strict Evangelical religiosity but were otherwise strikingly different, the wife being a sour but evidently weak person who left her husband to his penchants for drink, cards, and easy living, while Sarah was a kind of martinet who quickly imposed discipline on her man and her children. According to Lawrence she ‘‘carried away’’ his father and ‘‘kept [him] as her trophy of power’’; alcohol and gambling no longer had any part in his life. Gaining control over young Thomas Edward seems to have been more difficult, and appears to have been the reason for the regular beatings she gave him (his brothers escaped this fate by being more compliant). Even after the beatings yielded to more subtle and inward forms of control, Lawrence saw her determination to set standards for those around her as undiminished, and he never

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ceased to admire her strength and focus, qualities he saw in himself too. In letters to Charlotte Shaw in 1927 he described her as ‘‘monumental,’’ ‘‘rather wonderful; but very exciting.’’ ‘‘She is so set, so assured in mind, I think she ‘set’ many years ago; perhaps before I was born. I have a terror of her knowing anything about my feelings, or convictions, or way of life. If she knew they would be damaged: violated: no longer mine. You see, she would not hesitate to understand them: and I do not understand them, and do not want to.’’ ‘‘No trust’’ ever existed between them, so that each ‘‘jealously guarded his or her own individuality, whenever we came together. I always felt that she was laying siege to me, and would conquer, if I left a chink unguarded.’’ Long after his childhood ended she still made him ‘‘afraid of letting her get, ever so little, into the circle of my integrity: and she is always hammering and sapping to come in.’’50 Some of Lawrence’s relations with his mother both before and after the war sound a more tranquil and less jarring tone than these comments suggest; his letters to her were friendly and affectionate, telling about his life at Carchemish in some detail, and later she shared in the pleasure he took in the Shaws’ positive response to Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But alongside these indications that the tensions between mother and son did not wholly vitiate the love between them, there stands Lawrence’s clear recognition that she constituted one powerful source of his determination to protect his ‘‘integrity’’ against the various threats he perceived to it. The species of wholeness he lost in Deraa and again at his entry into the RAF was only one of these, another being his expressed preference for keeping his feelings inside a guarded space where no external connections could gain power over them. The picture becomes still more complicated, but perhaps also clearer, when the highly self-revealing passages we have highlighted in Seven Pillars of Wisdom are read through the prism of this image of his mother: the desire to reveal himself (including the self-understanding he here claimed not to seek) appears as a kind of tortuous reconciliation with her, just as the whippings intimate a complex need to keep the memory of their relations alive in his life. Most of these connections have been recognized by other writers, and especially by John Mack, whose psychobiographical account retains some Freudian elements, refined by a caution not to impose them for theory’s sake. But Mack does not develop the themes and connections we have sought to highlight here, because he does not give the question of what it meant to live between cultures the central importance Lawrence himself

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often did.51 In addition, there is another dimension of Lawrence’s family heritage that has not received the attention it deserves, and that takes on special significance from our perspective, namely the remarkable contradiction between the Evangelical Christianity around which his mother organized her domestic regime and the judgment it entailed that the family’s life was deeply stained with sin. Both in Lawrence’s own time and since, the family’s situation has been mostly considered in relation to his (and his brothers’) status as illegitimate. Although the children were only told the truth on this score after their father’s death, Lawrence insisted that he understood his parents were not legally married before he was ten (hints may have come from both inside the household and outside it), and he ‘‘didn’t care a straw.’’ Perhaps, but the letter in which he makes this declaration goes on to suggest that the reason for such indifference was that other features of the family’s life were more troubling and painful. He thought Sarah might have suspected that her making home life into a kind of ‘‘inquisition’’ was responsible for his wanting no part of parenthood for himself, ‘‘but she does not know that the inner conflict, which makes me a standing civil war, is the inevitable issue of the discordant natures of herself and my father, and the inflammation of strength and weakness which followed the uprooting of their lives and principles.’’52 We do not know whether he also discovered early on that ‘‘Lawrence’’ was not in fact the family’s name; if so the ease with which he abandoned it after the war (with very limited success, just as his father never wholly expunged his Chapman connections) may have had a complex childhood root too, woven into its more immediate motives. But the family’s role in preparing Lawrence’s later relations to the Arab cause derived at least as much from the blaring discord at its core: the clash between declared, and on his mother’s part no doubt deeply felt, religious and moral conviction, and the life of transgression into which the household was forced by the couple’s passion and the barriers to Chapman’s divorce and remarriage. It seems reasonable to speculate that the intensity of this conflict was heightened by his mother’s need to exhibit her faith with still greater determination where she could, in order to compensate for the anxiety she doubtless felt, especially in light of reports that some people who knew the family in Oxford guessed the truth about them; this would seem to be what Lawrence meant by ‘‘the inflammation of strength and weakness which followed the uprooting of their lives and principles.’’ The moral and personal confusions that made the household atmosphere

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so highly charged echoed in the terms by which Lawrence recounted his shifting and unstable connections to the Arab revolt. To show this we need only look again at part of a description we considered a bit earlier: To our strained eyes, the ideal, held in common, seemed to transcend the personal, which before had been our normal measure of the world. . . . Yet this transcending of individual frailty made the idea transient. Its principle became Activity, . . . which we could simulate only by unrest of mind and soul and body. . . . So always the ideality of the ideal vanished, leaving its worshipers exhausted: holding for false what they had once pursued. So did Sarah’s devotion to Evangelical faith find its everyday expression chiefly in the ceaseless activity of making her husband and children into exemplars of godly behavior, just the transformation of religious tension into ‘‘worldly asceticism’’ that Max Weber saw as the link between Puritanism and the early capitalist devotion to work for its own sake. So far as we know Sarah was never exhausted by the struggle to the point of doubting her faith, but the discord between moral devotion in principle and what she knew others took as sinful living in practice may well have contributed to her son’s acknowledged indifference not just to religious dogma (despite some early nods to Christianity), but to every faith, even every transindividual attachment, distancing him from the nationalist cause to which he appealed even before he enrolled in it. The depth of the guilt Lawrence felt about the ‘‘falsity’’ of his position in the Arab revolt points back toward these features of his family life. Some of his contemporaries who shared his strong sympathy for Arab aspirations, such as Gertrude Bell, followed by some of his biographers, have seen his emphasis on what he called the British ‘‘betrayal’’ of their allies as onesided and exaggerated, since in fact influential British politicians, including Winston Churchill, supported the positions he took.53 However this may be, Lawrence’s guilt on this score was deeply tied up at once to a hope that devotion to an ideal would save him from his personal weaknesses, and to a foreknowledge that in the end his deeper skepticism would overtake him: ‘‘Even I, the stranger, the godless fraud inspiring an alien nationality, felt a delivery from the hatred and eternal questioning of self in my imitation of their bondage to the idea,’’ but the feeling could not last. Not only did his

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inner division dissolve the faith he sought to affirm, it cast both his own motives and his companions in an ugly light. To man-instinctive, anything believed by two or three had a miraculous sanction to which individual ease and life might honestly be sacrificed. To man-rational, wars of nationality were as much a cheat as religious wars, and nothing was worth fighting for. . . . Among the Arabs I was the disillusioned sceptic, who envied their cheap belief. . . . The ignorant, the superficial, the deceived were the happy among us. By our swindle they were glorified. We paid for them our self-respect, and they gained the deepest feeling of their lives. The more we condemned and despised ourselves, the more we could cynically take pride in them, our creatures.54 This is the Lawrence who cast the whole history of his heroic and in many ways highly successful involvement in the desert war in terms of ‘‘Yahoo’’ subjection, lacerating himself with his words much as he later would have himself beaten with a cane and a rod. But just as Lawrence’s role as a soldier and leader merited the fame he garnered from it, so do his efforts to explore the dimensions of intercultural existence deserve a higher valuation than Seven Pillars of Wisdom awarded them. The first would not have been possible without the second, since military success depended on his ability to create unity among the diverse components of the Arab army, an achievement that rested largely on his ability to penetrate and absorb the mentality of the people with whom he lived and worked. The hyperconsciousness that kept the opposing parts of his being in a kind of perpetual war with each other made the whole experience deeply painful to him, but the constant reflection on himself and others that made him inwardly anxious and unstable sharpened his observation of the people and things around him and expanded the universe of his possible relations with them. Although all the people considered in this book in some way took their own selves as vehicles for exploring the nature and consequences of intercultural existence, it was Lawrence who most fully subjected himself to the task; there is even reason to describe his life both in Arabia and afterward as an ongoing sacrifice to it, remembering, however, that in his case just this sacrifice was required in order to give expression to the deeply conflicted person he understood himself to be.

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Lawrence’s history reminds us that however much individual attempts to carve out a space between cultures may share with each other, it is only by coming as close as we can to what is distinctive about each case that we can do justice to it, and thereby begin to appreciate the full range of particular experiences that attempts to live between cultures may involve.

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Chapter 3

The Islamic Catholicism of Louis Massignon

Louis Massignon may be known to few people today, even in his native France, but he was far from obscure in his own time. A celebrated scholar and teacher, the author of influential books and essays and a longtime professor at the prestigious Colle`ge de France, he was also a public figure of some renown, especially during the 1950s when his opposition to the Algerian War (in which France sought to crush its colony’s determination to achieve independence) brought him together with such luminaries as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. A fervent and exacting Catholic, Massignon all the same considered the Muslim and Arab world to be his ‘‘spiritual home,’’ and he dedicated his life to clarifying and deepening his ties to both. I hope to show that his attempt to map out and inhabit a space between the two deserves wider attention than it has received. There are several reasons for bringing him out of the shadows. The first is the remarkable personal trajectory by which he came to his Janus-like identity, painful and even neurotic perhaps, but also in its way heroic. A second lies in the challenging series of reflections about Islam in relation to both Christianity and Western life he formulated, some of them woven into the tissue of his own experience, others opening onto more general issues about religion and culture. A third claim on our attention is the highly unusual and thought-provoking perspective on human history he constructed in the later part of his life. Visionary and far-reaching, Massignon’s historical theory drew its basic pattern from a surprising (and hitherto unrecognized) source, namely Friedrich Nietzsche, the anti-religious philosopher who proclaimed the death of God, a connection that gave an unexpectedly radical edge to the thinking of a person for whom religious devotion and obedience were core values.

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Massignon’s project of cultivating more than one religious identity at the same time was hardly unique, since people in many times and places have appealed to multiple gods. But his efforts had nothing in common with the pragmatic openness to diverse divinities and rituals common in the ancient world and later (for instance, in the thirteenth-century Mongol Empire described by Marco Polo), and even though he sometimes took part in activities associated with projects for interreligious and intercultural dialogue that nurtured modern ecumenism in the years after World War II, his aims never really coincided with theirs. His Christianity was too intense and demanding to grant any other faith even a potentially equal status; once his religious direction was established, he never doubted that there was but one truth and that the Roman Church was its custodian. But he believed that under modern conditions something threatened to turn Christians away from the essential core of their creed’s message, and that drawing close to Muslim life and faith offered them a path toward recovering it. Moreover, he was convinced that he himself had been granted a special experience of what this recovery involved, and that he had a particular responsibility to cultivate and deepen it, in order to share its meaning and implications with others. We will see that Massignon pursued this vocation in a number of different ways, many of them highly intellectual. But at the center of his singular relationship to the two creeds was the vivid and ever-after present experience of his conversion, the moment when he exchanged the skeptical and in his later view deeply sinful existence he led for some years in his youth for repentance, conviction, and devotion. The conversion took place while he was traveling in the Middle East (in present-day Syria and Iraq), where he had gone to conduct archaeological research. There he developed close links with Arab friends, often living and dressing as they did, and keeping apart from other Europeans; he made progress in learning Arabic and began his study of the Muslim figure who would become the central focus of his work, the poet and mystic Husayn Ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, who was condemned for heresy and crucified in 922. So intense and passionate was Massignon’s intellectual and personal involvement in Arab life at this juncture that the authors of the only comprehensive biographical study of his life remark that ‘‘a priori it might have been much more natural for him to convert to Islam’’ rather than, as he did, to Christianity.1 Although Massignon himself never quite put it that way, he several times noted how important Islam and Arab culture were to what he

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regarded as his crucial moment of self-understanding. As he wrote three years later to his friend, the writer Paul Claudel: It is on Arab soil that I have lived most strongly, that I have found the most magnificent occasions to learn that in order to love fully it is necessary to sacrifice oneself fully. God took this under consideration, in a very fatherly way, and it was in Arabic that I acknowledged Him for the first time, under His name of al Haqq, the Truth. It was in Arabic that I made my first prayer (I had been living for three months in the desert, alone among Arabs): ‘‘Allah, Allah, as’ad dhou’fi’’ (God, God, help my weakness!). . . . And doubtless it will be in Arabic that it will please Him to have me serve Him one day. Massignon acknowledged that the Arabic in which he made his plea was less than perfect (his French could be choppy and awkward, even obscure, sometimes too), but the connection he voiced here between his identity as a Christian and the place Arab and Muslim culture occupied in his life was strong and deep. Writing to another friend two decades later, he recalled that ‘‘it was in Arabic that I thought and lived my conversion,’’ and that the ‘‘profound gratitude’’ he retained toward Islam as a result placed him at the ‘‘crossroads’’ between the two religions.2 From this arose a powerful sense that his Christian faith did not separate him from the religion of the Prophet, but confirmed and justified his attachment to it, locating what was deepest in his being in a space replete with both.

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That Massignon’s spiritual trajectory went from childhood faith to adolescent skepticism to end in a deep and lasting commitment had something to do with the contrasting religious attitudes of his parents. His mother was a pious Catholic, and her influence seems clearly to have been at work in the fervor the young Louis displayed around the time of his first communion in 1894, when he was eleven; she would greet his later conversion with gratitude and relief, and on some level it marked his return to the path toward which she tried to point him. But her way of giving direction to her young son was insistent and demanding, and seeking to elude her tight

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grasp may have been one motive for the different course he took up in the next years. He was also drawn to that path by his father, a secular rationalist and materialist whose skeptical and anti-clerical views may have been all the more attractive because he voiced them in a spirit of moderation and open-mindedness that intruded much less on his son. A fairly well known artist and sculptor who did his work under the name of Pierre Roche, Fernand Massignon was, like others in his time, an enthusiast for things Japanese, an attitude that may have prepared his son’s interest in foreign cultures. That involvement was also fostered by connections Louis made in school. One close friend as a lyce´e student was Henri Maspero, a Jew fated to die in Buchenwald, the son of a distinguished Egyptologist and the father of Franc¸ois Maspero, who would later found a well-known publishing house and bookstore with close ties to the French Communist Party. The two friends shared a precocious devotion to learning, and both would become professors at the Colle`ge de France (Maspero as a scholar of China); securing admission to Paris libraries as teenagers, they pursued interests in Near Eastern and Asian subjects. One thing that drew them in this direction was a sense that European and classical topics were somewhat old hat, resting on already accumulated material, dealing with long-debated questions, and dominated by a positivistic spirit that valued erudition for itself. By contrast, attention to less traditional areas of study opened up as yet unexplored vistas and required a vigorous and even heroic search for new materials. This did not mean that pursuing such interests expressed a sense of distance from French culture and its values; on the contrary, the young Massignon believed that his country’s expansion outside Europe brought benefits to the peoples who came under its influence, and he saw those who studied these areas in a light that made them akin to colonial travelers and adventurers, even to the soldiers who laid the ground for the European presence there. Massignon read the memoirs of the English explorer Henry Morton Stanley and attended a public event honoring the French General Jean-Baptiste Marchand; similar attitudes marked his friends, even some who would later become prominent figures on the anticolonial French left. Like others at the time, they were attracted to an ideal of heroic individualism, colored by the spreading enthusiasm for the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings many of them read. Even after he developed the sense of deep identification with Arab culture that played its part in his conversion, Massignon continued to regard European—or at least French—expansion in a positive light.

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It was within this frame that he went on to deepen his involvement with Eastern culture, weaving threads that were at once scholarly and personal. He studied languages, including both Sanskrit and Hebrew, visited North Africa, and began to think about research topics. An important influence on him was the well-known Romanian-French scholar Ignaz Goldziher, a great admirer of Islam while also a pious Jew. His interests included Muslim myths, the sayings and judgments called Hadith and attributed to Mohammed, and mystical Sufism. He described his methods as historical and ‘‘interiorist,’’ in contrast to the positivistic approach of Ernst Renan, who regarded any people’s cultural style as determined by its racial character. In order to understand some unfamiliar culture or its components, Goldziher believed, the researcher had to ‘‘decenter himself, go to the very heart of the thing to be studied.’’ Among Goldziher’s services to Massignon was the support he gave for choosing Hallaj as a thesis subject, standing against a widespread view that mysticism was too peripheral a phenomenon in Islam to provide the foundation for a career.3 Before coming to that point, however, Massignon completed and published a study on Leo Africanus, the sixteenth-century author of a widely read Description of Africa, a book that provided information about matters as disparate as markets, table manners, agriculture, and religious practices, spread over many regions of the continent. Leo was himself a traveler between cultures, although not wholly a voluntary one: born and educated in North Africa (in Arabic he was known as al-Hasan al-Wazzan or Yuhanna al-Asad), he was captured by Spanish privateers, perhaps while returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca, and brought to Rome. Converting to Christianity (largely, no doubt, for pragmatic reasons), he lived for years in Italy and was employed by the papacy; he wrote his book on Africa in Italian. Massignon described the text as containing a mix of European and Arab elements. Its ‘‘very ‘Europeanized’ framework’’ consisted of precise statistics and pointed observations, alongside a prudent concern to distinguish ‘‘what he himself had seen from what others told him’’; by contrast, what Massignon then saw as characteristically Arab features were the book’s long sections devoted to casual anecdotes and its stock of personal stories told with a kind of naive pride. A somewhat different ‘‘fusion’’ of methods and traditions would soon be Massignon’s own.4 The first of his many stays in the Middle East began in 1906, when he traveled to Baghdad via Egypt to take part in an archaeological expedition, and ended in 1908, with his conversion and its aftermath. Once arrived, he

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devoted himself to learning Arabic, to studying geography and religion, and to seeking out people who could initiate him into Arab culture. Two of these, the Alusi brothers ‘Ali and Mahmoud Shukri, became his lasting friends; from them he rented a house in a quarter of Baghdad little frequented by Europeans, and where, as he wrote at the time, he was able to put down ‘‘Arab roots.’’ Determined to learn as much as he could from his Arab friends, he sought to keep himself ‘‘far from the European colony— may Allah scatter it like the Abyssinian army at the war of the Elephant, amen.’’ Comments by others show that, despite such sentiments, he had not broken all ties to local Europeans; but his wearing Arab clothes and seeking to live as locals did made him suspect to some of them, even ones who approved of his seriousness and diligence.5 These connections were part of what later made him declare that he came to Christianity out of a deep involvement with Muslim and Arab life. But had they been the only elements in that trajectory, the conversion he experienced in 1908 could hardly have taken on the intensely dramatic quality it did. What mainly gave it this character was an event that befell Massignon on his voyage across the Mediterranean from Marseille, namely his encounter with an elegant and charismatic young Spanish aristocrat named Luis de Cuadra. Cuadra was wholeheartedly and in some ways openly gay, and he drew Massignon into a series of homosexual adventures that provided the nucleus of what the Frenchman would later see as a deeply sinful and self-destructive life, the abyss from which his conversion would rescue him. Cuadra was not only an enticing and magnetic gay man, however, he was also a convert to Islam, and drawn to some of the same mystical currents that would later preoccupy Massignon; he seems to have been the first person to call the latter’s attention to Hallaj. Cuadra was attracted to Islam by certain contrasts he saw between it and Christianity, especially an ability to transcend asceticism and a freedom from obsession with sin; a chief reason he gave for becoming a Muslim was so that he could worship God without contrition, and combine religion with sensual pleasures, such as those evoked by Omar Khayyam; the Alusi brothers, who were known to Cuadra, seem to have made a similar point to Massignon. Although this sense of what the faith of the Prophet meant was far from the one the Frenchman would later put forward, its relevance to his life at the time, and the passion with which Cuadra argued for it, had a deep impact on him. When Massignon told Cuadra that his chief motive for going to the East was a desire to understand Arabs and Muslims, the

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Spaniard replied: ‘‘In order to understand one needs to give oneself,’’ and ‘‘you do not know how to give yourself.’’ The judgment fits with a certain stiffness in Massignon’s mien which would often be evident later, but perhaps just for this reason it jibed with and nurtured his already evident determination to transcend dull erudition and achieve the kind of ‘‘interiorist’’ understanding advocated by Goldziher. To ‘‘give himself’’ to Muslim life was precisely what he would ardently do, all the more after the conversion that pulled him away from the involvements into which Cuadra had drawn him. But the latter saw Massignon’s new turn as a self-denying betrayal of the path he had tried to open up for him. He wrote to Massignon after the latter’s conversion (the comment seems to be the only scrap of their correspondence that survives) that ‘‘you will cry tears of blood for having renounced giving pleasure when you were 25.’’6 Cuadra never relinquished his life as a gay man, and there is some evidence it may have contributed to his suicide in 1921, either by exposing him to criminal prosecution (he ended his life by leaping from the window of a prison where he was being held, but just what charge landed him there has not been established), through remorse (although this seems not to have been a feeling that came easily to him), or by way of the unnamed illness that (according to a friend who witnessed it) ‘‘ravaged’’ him at the time. Massignon did renounce his homosexual past, but not without difficulty, apparently having at least one post-conversion gay encounter, with an unidentified man early in 1913. Even in the part of his life when such things survived only in memory, they left a clear residue in his mind. Toward Cuadra he retained an attitude of intense but now religiously channeled interest and concern, seeking news about him, worrying at reports of his being ill, praying for his conversion before his death and for his salvation afterward. Whether in remembrance of their connection or not, he also gave special attention to homosexuals as a group. In 1929 he wrote a ‘‘Prayer for Sodom,’’ some parts of which suggest an image of gay people as a kind of elite, raising themselves above common existence by refusing to be confined within ordinary natural limits; what animated their search for a satisfaction beyond what nature prescribes was ‘‘a desire for heaven without the desire for God.’’ He specifically defended this anti-naturalist attitude against his friend the Thomist theologian Jacques Maritain, in whose eyes the ‘‘unnatural’’ quality of homosexuality provided a sign of its exclusion from the divinely instituted order of the world. Massignon’s opposed view seems to echo some notions put forward by the great

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nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, who once wrote of lesbians as ‘‘great in your contempt for nature.’’ Over the years Massignon seems to have abandoned his notion of homosexuals as an elite, but from the end of the 1940s, by which time he had become ordained as a Melchite priest (a denomination loyal to Rome that did not require clerical celibacy, and whose liturgy was in Arabic), he dedicated himself to saying a monthly mass for them as a group, a practice he had to conduct quietly and in private, praying and suffering (as he said) ‘‘in silence and without their knowledge.’’7 It is more than likely, in addition, that in Massignon’s own mind some of his later commentary on the religious significance of sexual experience more generally had reference to his own gay past. This is particularly the case in regard to an exchange he had with the avant-garde intellectuals Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris (both, like him, fascinated by mystical states). In it Massignon described sexual ecstasy, with its seeming ability to carry individuals ‘‘outside themselves,’’ as ‘‘a negative thing’’ with a positive significance. It provided a sign of ‘‘the body’s deficiency’’ and a reminder of its eventual death (in French orgasm is sometimes referred to as ‘‘la petite mort,’’ the little death); but this material passing away was akin to the ‘‘spiritual death’’ that was a precondition for the rebirth that leads some individuals toward unity with God. And he added: ‘‘I believe that one must actually pass through it; it is the species of death in which the mystic delivers himself over entirely to God [s’est entie`rement livre´ a` Dieu], but where God withdraws from him.’’ Secular people such as Leiris and Bataille might have such an experience in a limited way (Massignon noted that their ‘‘predecessor’’ Nietzsche pointed toward it when he spoke of ‘‘the death of God’’), but for those on the way to faith it was distinguished by a far deeper sense of abandonment and emptiness, calling out for the union with God that was its only remedy.8 This description sounded clear echoes of Massignon’s own remarkable conversion experience, which he remembered (and the testimony of others at the time confirms) as shaking him to his very core: images of sexuality and death were prominent in it, each involving at once fear and desire. The chain of events was unleashed during a trip into the desert, when he was arrested by Ottoman authorities under suspicion of being a spy (in fact it was not rare for members of archaeological expeditions in the years just before World War I to send information to officials back home, helping to keep track of what rival powers’ citizens were up to). Massignon was not

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imprisoned, however, and was allowed to travel back to Baghdad, under surveillance, on a Turkish river steamer. He made the voyage in a state of high nervous agitation, apparently fearing for his life; after seeking to escape and being recaptured he plunged a knife into his chest—according to one account laughing as he did so. The wound was not serious, but it led to his being put under restraint and given drugs to calm him; some who observed and aided him in this moment thought he was suffering from mental derangement. It was in this state that he underwent the shattering experience he later described as ‘‘The Visitation of the Stranger.’’ Much of what this phrase denoted remains murky, but Massignon clearly believed himself to have been in the grip of a punishing and yet regenerating power, unnameable but somehow divine; his experience of it was much like the ecstatic rapture of mystics whose ‘‘negative’’ character he later elucidated. The ‘‘Stranger’’ was ‘‘the One whom no Name a priori dare invoke, neither ‘You’ nor ‘I’ nor ‘He’ nor ‘We.’ ’’ The unnamed power ‘‘took me as I was on the day of His wrath [Massignon could not avoid the third-person pronoun despite its inadequacy], inert in His hand like the gecko of the sands, little by little overturned all my acquired reflexes, my precautions, and my deference to public opinion.‘‘ Looking for ways to articulate what happened, he turned to biographical writings of mystics and quoted the following lines from the celebrated Sufi poet Rumi: ’’The One whose beauty made the Angels jealous has come in the morning twilight and he looked into my heart; / He was crying and I cried until the coming of dawn, then He asked: ’of the two of us, who is the lover? ’ ’’ The experience was at once physical and mental, ‘‘like a burning at the center of my heart’’ and issuing in ‘‘a discarding of all my ideas.’’ It led both to a ‘‘reversal of values’’ and to a ‘‘ ‘finalist’ reversal of effects on causes . . . as most men experience only when dying.’’ One result was to turn the critical attitude he had earlier directed against others toward himself, with two effects: repenting for his own defects gave him a way out of the spiritual desert he had inhabited before, but knowing that his faults were his own sealed his identification with those who remained where he had been. He was convinced that God, by first letting him fall into the wilderness and then coming forth to draw him out of it, had provided him with a palpable demonstration that even the worst sinners could be saved. Deeply painful as the experience was, it gave him a sense of restored identity, causing him to cry out several times ‘‘I am Louis Massignon.’’ And it left him with the immediate ‘‘certitude that I would return to Paris.’’9

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The life he would lead there would be one in which his ties to the ArabMuslim world would be if anything strengthened by the manner of the conversion that drew him away from it, a paradox signaled at the time by his spontaneous use of Arabic to address his first prayer to the Christian God. We will come in a moment to the ways he understood the mutual reinforcement that belonging at once to Christian Europe and to the Muslim East effected in his life, but first we need to take note of the powerful and enduring sense of unworthiness that remained with him. Although there was something contained and even staid about his manner, passions seethed beneath the surface, and he often seemed on the verge of some kind of irruption or explosion. A year or so after his conversion he apologized to his (still new) friend Paul Claudel for a gauche outburst about himself, explaining that his old life and the egoism he now saw at its center still weighed on him, making him give voice too unrestrainedly both to his sense of unworthiness and to the power of the divine presence he felt. Two years later he asked Claudel not to be put off by his ‘‘ill-considered confidences in regard to my inner shame about myself,’’ since feeling his own ‘‘fundamental nothingness’’ was both inescapable and essential for him.10 The state of mind persisted to the end, finding expression, for instance, in recurring worries that he was guilty of exploiting Islam for his own advancement. Many who knew him were struck by the way references to such agitations intruded into his teaching and scholarship. Here is the literary critic Bernard Guyon: ‘‘He spoke about what ordinary people never say: his most intimate life, signs that had enlightened him, weaknesses, mistakes, regrets, remorse, dangers he had known, defeats he had suffered, badly-contained outbursts of rage, humiliations; and then mysterious encounters, unexpected deliverances, the foot of the divine Visitor on the taut nape of his neck, ecstasy, mystical compassion.’’ A distinguished younger Islamist, Maxime Rodinson, reported that the content of Massignon’s lectures often ranged far from their announced subject, dealing with ‘‘everything’’: homosexuality, T. E. Lawrence (whom Massignon met during World War I; we will consider his description of their encounter below), and questions such as hospitality and compassion that bulked large in his personal views about religion. As corroboration, Rodinson quoted Mircea Eliade’s description of

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an evening at Massignon’s apartment, where the host’s talk was all about ‘‘circumcision, male prostitutes, etc.’’11 In the years just after his conversion, Massignon was drawn by the idea that he might stave off the moral and spiritual dangers he feared by putting himself in a situation that gave them scant entry, namely sharing the hermit-like and chaste existence of the monk and priest Charles de Foucauld, who lived among the Tuareg people in the Moroccan desert. Foucauld had been a colonial officer before his conversion turned him in a different direction, and it was as a heroic representative of French civilization that Massignon became aware of him earlier; but it was the Foucauld who would later be beatified by the Church who preoccupied him now, and with whom he corresponded. He also discussed the plan with Claudel, who encouraged him in it, fearing that Massignon’s continued trips to the Muslim Near East for study and research exposed him to grave spiritual dangers. With Foucauld, Massignon forged a deep and mystically tinged bond, persisting even after the hermit-priest’s death in 1916 at the hands of some members of the Berber group among whom he lived. But Massignon gave up the idea of sharing the other man’s life in 1913, in favor of a different way to calm the anxieties that beset him, namely marriage and entry into a more or less conventional family life. He was urged in this direction by his mother, whose concern about his spiritual state dovetailed with his own fear that he could not maintain a vow of chastity, but it seems that an additional consideration was that the desert could not provide the books to pursue his scholarly career. His wife was a cousin, with whom he had three children, one of whom died at an early age. The marriage was an important adjunct to the career as an established and highly respected academic that made him a prominent figure in France and the Near East until his death in 1962. One visible symbol of the proper and decorous existence into which he now entered was his often-remarked manner of dress, the sober and restrained black suit and dark tie he regularly wore to teach and to go about Paris. But this sign of commitment to a settled and ordered life, what the French call range´, connoted something further to Massignon, namely a link to Hallaj. Quoting from one of the mystic’s books, he wrote that Hallaj ‘‘dressed in black because ‘it is the dress fitting for those whose works are rejected’: a very curious mental attitude, a kind of coquettish humility (coquetterie d’humilite´) toward God.’’ I cannot say whether anyone else was aware of the connection, but in Massignon’s own mind the sober black suit

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that served as a marker of his membership in French bourgeois life also gave him a place in Hallaj’s different and distant world. Wearing black was a way of adopting Hallaj’s appeal for divine acceptance through displaying his sense of unworthiness, keeping alive his sense that there had been a romantic, even quasi-erotic element in his relation to the divine Stranger: ‘‘Of the two of us, who is the lover?’’12 It sounded the themes of humility and identification with those who suffer rejection that, as we will now see, were central to the simultaneously Muslim and Christian identity that flowed from his singular and remarkable experience of conversion in 1908.

* * *

Massignon classified Judaism, Christianity, and Islam together as the three Abrahamic religions, all descended from the Hebrew patriarch’s faith in a single God, and his willingness to sacrifice himself—in the person of his son Isaac—for the sake of divine obedience. But each faith bore its own defining characteristics, and central to Islam was its special closeness to the experience of exclusion and abandonment Hallaj exemplified, and that played a part in Massignon’s sense of affinity with him. This association took two forms, distant in time and yet intimately connected. The first was Biblical, rooted in the Muslim identification with Ishmael, the rejected son of Abraham left to wander in the desert with his mother, the servant woman Hagar, and regarded by Muslims as the forefather of Arab tribes and an ancestor of Mohammed. The second was modern, inhering in the contrast between the ‘‘advanced’’ civilization of Europe and the less evolved and weaker Eastern regions subjected to some form of colonial domination. Each perspective showed Islam’s exclusion from advantages enjoyed by others; what brought the two together across time and space was the Bible’s adumbration and foreshadowing of humanity’s whole subsequent history. Massignon explained this connection in a letter to Claudel, writing that ‘‘history, in the deep sense, needs to be seen from Golgotha as its center,’’ not just because the history of humanity was the story of its fall and redemption, but also because the presence of the two thieves flanking Christ on the cross foreshadowed the central issues of human social relations. More generally, as he wrote in a later essay: ‘‘I think that there exists a certain ‘curve’ in time and that the end of civilizations will bring them back

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to their beginnings (in the same way that there is a ’curve’ in Einsteinian space), and that this curve of temporality is finality itself. I think that the problems of humanity’s beginning are those that will be posed at its end, especially that of the sacred character of the right of asylum and of respect for the stranger.’’13 Later we will consider the use Massignon made of this image of civilizational ‘‘curves’’ in the theory of human history he set out in his book on Hallaj, but first we need to see how his view of Islam’s place under modern conditions replayed these core themes of its history. His most concise statement about Islam’s distinctiveness came in a late essay about Foucauld, specifying the martyred priest’s significance and lesson. Foucauld provided an ‘‘experiential initiation into understanding the human condition’’ by devoting and sacrificing his life to ‘‘the most abandoned of human beings.’’ For my personal experience made me feel that the most abandoned of people in the most symbolically metaphysical sense of the most sublime negative way are the Muslims: these mysterious people excluded from the divine preferences in history, through the sons of Abraham, and driven into the desert with Ishmael and Hagar. I felt that their temporary exile was the prefiguration of the penitential life of hermits, of solitaries who would sanctify all Muslim generations, fulfilling for them the sacrifice of the Kurban, obtaining by their brotherly compassion the coming of Mercy.14 ‘‘Kurban’’ is an Arabic term referring to animal sacrifice, but the Hebrew word is nearly identical, so that Massignon was here comparing the exile of Ishmael and the solitary life of hermits it prefigured to the substitute sacrifices at the center of the other two great monotheistic religions: Abraham’s offering of his son Isaac, and Jesus’s giving himself on the cross in place of sinful humanity. Foucauld’s profound and fatal closeness to ‘‘the most abandoned of human beings’’ provided a model for Massignon’s devotion to Islam: ‘‘My life has been given fraternally’’ for over fifty years to ‘‘the whole mass of Muslim faithful for whom he died,’’ and by one part of which ‘‘his life was taken violently.’’ Thus Massignon’s career became a kind of after-image of the hermit priest’s different life, each testifying in its way that Christian commitment required identification with those who seemed most excluded and abandoned, even those who bore some guilt for the death of martyrs.

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Massignon’s mode of affirming this identification, however, was shaped by his having remained in Paris instead of seeking to join Foucauld in the desert, and central to it was standing against the modern form of inflicting suffering on Muslims, in which the role of Abraham in banishing Ishmael was, so to speak, taken over by Western colonial powers. In his essay on Foucauld he referred to ‘‘Western culture’s perforating technique of colonial penetration’’ (la technique perforatrice de pe´ne´tration coloniale de la culture occidentale), whose effects he deplored in a number of other places. One instance that preoccupied him was the moral corruption (de´pravation) effected by the presence of colonial armies outside Europe, exemplified in the encouragement officials gave to the spread of prostitution in order to satisfy the sexual needs of soldiers, and which degraded the lives of women brought to work in the maisons closes. Massignon first complained about this as early as 1917, pointing a finger at the British general Viscount Edmund Allenby, whom Massignon observed at the same moment he met Lawrence. Later he castigated the French for following similar policies in North Africa, and spoke out publicly in support of Moroccan groups who were seeking to depose a native official whom they, and Massignon too, regarded as complicit with the French policies. Islam was guilty of mistreating women in its own fashion, to be sure, but ‘‘it is European colonization that is responsible for the methodical creation of brothels on Islamic soil.’’15 Massignon believed that Europeans—and particularly his fellow Catholics—who defended such policies did damage to their own moral condition as a result, demonizing their colonial subjects and weakening their own commitment to justice and truth. At the lecture in 1953 where he spoke the words just quoted, one of his listeners rose to express doubt that the French could effectively demonstrate the complicity of native officials in the French policies, because no Muslim court (it was they that had jurisdiction in these matters) would accept the world of a non-believer in such a case. Massignon rebutted this view (how persuasively we need not try to judge) by quoting the statements of Islamic authorities who, precisely on this question, favored accepting the testimony of anyone who displayed a love of truth and who cited (as Massignon did) the Qu’ranic condemnation of procurement. In such Muslim eyes the truth always ‘‘shines through’’ a statement that contains it, no matter who is speaking. The narrow notion that one’s own camp had a monopoly not just on divine truth but on every other kind, Massignon found instead in politicized French Catholics who saw all the pronouncements of their enemies (for instance,

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Marxists) as devoid of truth whatever their content. He quoted one of them who declared that even the word peace ‘‘in the mouth of a materialist can only mean a lie.’’16 The harms Western powers inflicted on the weaker societies they dominated were economic and social as well as moral. Massignon regularly combatted the view that what extra-European regions most needed was material improvement on the Western model, rather than respect and sympathy for their own way of life.17 Like other critics of ‘‘progress,’’ he gave support to programs for shoring up traditional artisan production and its organization into guilds or confraternities, on the grounds that pre-industrial forms of work and association could be vehicles for preserving communal and spiritual values. To be sure, some Western techniques were well worth adopting elsewhere, for instance those providing better hygiene, and even some modern consumer goods were capable of genuinely improving life, as the demand for them on the part of non-Westerners testified. But there were also instances when growing desire for such things amounted to ‘‘a violent supplanting of indigenous needs’’ by foreign ones. Preserving older forms of production and organization would serve to protect people whose way of life was threatened by the same elements of Western modernity that posed dangers to religion and morality in Europe itself.18 It may be that ‘‘oppression’’ and ‘‘injury’’ describe some of these relations between Europe and the Muslim societies subjected to it better than ‘‘exclusion’’ and ‘‘rejection,’’ but Massignon also employed the latter terms. He sometimes pointed to the Muslim poor (on whose behalf he undertook a number of aid projects) as the ‘‘doubly excluded,’’ first from the religious truth of Christianity and second from social well-being. Moreover, in a prayer to Joan of Arc he composed in 1956, during the Algerian War, he asked the martyred saint to intercede on behalf of Arabs, both in general and for several particular individuals he named, who were being made to suffer by French actions. By her life and death Joan had called France to a higher sense of itself, in which devotion and sacrifice overcame personal interest; if that were to happen again, the Algerian conflict might be mitigated or even resolved. The prayer cast Joan’s persecution by her enemies as a tropological equivalent of the Jewish rejection of Mary (who, seen through such non-Christian eyes, appeared as an adulterous wife), so that both sainted women belonged to the ranks of the proscribed and excluded, and might be expected to have a special sympathy for others similarly maltreated. In a moment when the desire to retain domination over colonial

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subjects threatened to undermine the original Christian commitment to the lowly and suffering, a greater involvement and sympathy for Muslims provided a way to revivify it.19

* * *

These existential features of Muslim life and history were central to Massignon’s personal identification with it, but he also called attention to ones that were cultural and theological. None of these involved religious truths absent from Christianity. Once his conversion had taken place he never wavered from commitment to Catholic teaching, or from his loyalty to papal authority. In a letter to Claudel soon after his conversion, expressing happiness that his friend shared his view that ‘‘there can forever be only one Religion, as there is, in the temporal world, only one holy, catholic and apostolic Church. We have to ‘excuse’ but not ‘accept’ the plurality of possible religions, which is the malady of India.’’20 All the same, Massignon did not hide his preference for certain features of Eastern culture that contrasted with Western values and attitudes. In an article of 1939 he elaborated on a difference between typical Muslim and Western ways of organizing space, visible in contrasting approaches to building gardens and places of worship. A Muslim garden ‘‘is essentially a place of reverie in retirement from the world.’’ Very different is ‘‘our classical garden, which began with the Roman Empire and continued with the Medicis and Louis XIV.’’ In it, ‘‘the intent is to control the world from a central point of view, with long perspective lines leading to the horizon and great water basins reflecting the distances, all framed by relentlessly pruned trees, leading the eye, little by little, to a sense of conquest of the whole surrounding land.’’ By contrast, ‘‘the Muslim garden’s first and foremost idea is to be enclosed and isolated from the outside world; instead of having its focus of attention on the periphery, it is placed in the center,’’ where thought can ‘‘unfold in an atmosphere of relaxation.’’ In a similar way mosques are more spare constructions than churches, devoid of the elaborate invocations of saints and martyrs depicted in windows, frescoes, or paintings; as a result the attention of worshipers is drawn to the quibla, the one point that ‘‘marks the direction of Mecca, the place of the propitiatory sacrifice to the God of Abraham.’’ The contrast extends to other buildings

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as well: ‘‘Muslim artistic decor does not attempt to imitate the Creator in His works by the relief and volume of forms, but evokes Him by His very absence in a delicate suggestive representation that is as perishable as a thin veil, thus underlining simply and with quiet resignation the fleeting passage of things that die—and everything is perishable ‘except His face.’ ’’ But that countenance is never made visible, giving a kind of reminder ‘‘that faces and forms do not exist in themselves but are unceasingly recreated by God,’’ an implication amplified by the flowing arabesques that never settle into stable geometrical forms, ‘‘forbidding us to contemplate, as does Greek philosophy, the inner beauty of a circle.’’21 Massignon seems never to have specifically invoked the parallel between the Western impulse to dominate the world exhibited in secular and religious architecture and the colonialist actions that perpetuated the exclusion and denigration of Muslims, but the similarity is hard to miss. Massignon approached these relations from a different angle when he specified a contrast between the Muslim way of experiencing the divine presence and those of both Christianity and Judaism. Each of the two older faiths rested on a belief in some concrete embodiment of God’s will within the world, for the first the chosen people of Israel and its history, for the second the incarnate man-God, Christ. Such material mediation was absent in Islam. Mohammed was a prophet, not a redeemer; he was venerated, to be sure, but he had no saving power, and just for that reason it was the Qu’ran as text that served as the focal point of religious practice, occupying the place that the history of Israel or the person of Christ held for the other two creeds. ‘‘If Christianity consists fundamentally of the acceptance and imitation of Christ before acceptance of the Bible, Islam, by contrast, consists of acceptance of the Qu’ran before imitation of the Prophet. . . . The Qu’ran is the only intermediary one can invoke with God in order to know His will.’’ The Muslim faithful were an umma, a community of believers to whom God had sent a messenger, but the God revealed to them did not act through historical events, remaining wholly transcendent, and leaving the faithful with a deep yearning to bridge the distance, as Ishmael yearned for recognition from his father Abraham. Massignon developed these differences in a number of ways. Whereas Christianity was a revelation of divine mysteries inaccessible without the testimony of Scripture, Islam was a kind of revealed natural religion, a particular fulfillment of the universal human need to acknowledge, worship, and obey God. Mohammed endowed his teaching with its own

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specific doctrines and rituals, to be sure, bearing the marks of the time and place where they emerged, but because they served first of all to carry out the highly general purpose of affirming and serving God, Islam was able to absorb elements from both of the earlier Abrahamic religions, and also to preserve a stronger and more positive sense of the common origin of all three than did either Judaism or Christianity.22 This made even Islam’s insistent claims to possess the truth somehow less exclusive than those of the other faiths, a notion that found expression in the claim advanced in the 1953 lecture we considered above, that ‘‘the Muslim, who believes in the original equality of the three Abrahamic religions . . . knows that they each refer to the same God of Truth,’’ an understanding lost on certain of his fellow Catholics. Similar contrasts between Christianity and Islam were evident in the two faiths’ characteristic approaches to a religious practice of great importance to Massignon, mysticism. The differences were never absolute, not just because Islam drew on Christian sources, but also because mystical engagement, by its very nature, renders the boundaries between religions more permeable, since it aims to put individuals into direct contact with some divine or spiritual force, thereby transcending particular institutions or doctrines. These features of mystical practice have sometimes rendered it suspect to defenders of organized and institutionalized religion, who rightly worry that individuals who think they have achieved some immediate union with God can only with difficulty be kept within doctrinal and sometimes even moral bounds. As Massignon put it at one point, the impulse toward mystical involvement was ‘‘a kind of revolt against the laws of nature, in the name of their hidden lawgiver,’’ and ‘‘The mystical life would be completely anarchistic and would rebel against the canonical law if it did not find among the legendary roles of scriptural personages a spiritual guidance and among their maxims of behavior a rule of life.’’23 Both sides of this duality, the potential anarchism and the subjection to rules, were part of Massignon’s own religiosity. To the first belong ‘‘the Visitation of the Stranger’’ and his account of the via negativa that led from the ‘‘little death’’ of sexual ecstasy toward union with the divine, as well as his impatient and sometimes harsh criticism of the clerical behavior he saw around him. As one religious scholar who knew him well noted, he often found it difficult to identify even with ‘‘political and religious institutions to which he manifested a deep loyalty.’’24 The other face is visible in his care to obtain Vatican approval before becoming ordained as a priest in the

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Arabic-speaking Melchite Christian sect, his membership in the tertiary order of Franciscans, his lifelong identification with the ascetic hermit Charles de Foucauld, and his life as a husband, father, and professor. Despite the common ground they occupied, Massignon made clear that Islamic and Christian forms of mysticism differed from each other in ways that reflected their distinct senses about God’s relationship to the created world. The mediation between divine and human realms effected in Christianity by the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus and by the lives of the saints that echoed it contrasted with the uncompromising Islamic insistence on the hidden and transcendent nature of God. ‘‘Islamic law requires that the Deity remain inaccessible,’’ and ‘‘more than any other, Muslim mysticism is the mysticism of transcendence and moves to ‘God alone, God, the first served.’ ’’ Muslim devotion required a spare and restrained style, in accord with which those who sought a mystical path had to maintain ‘‘the strictest simplicity,’’ concentrating their efforts on ‘‘a single rule, a single vow, a single guide, a single work of mercy.’’ For Christians, on the other hand, not only were ‘‘the main features of that union with God realized by the Messiah of Israel,’’ later sacred history also provided a rich panoply of saintly images and models, an ‘‘expansion of rules, of vows, of guides and intercessors and works of zeal,’’ any one of which could serve as a point of departure for meditation. In practice this difference was not so great as it seemed, since any Christian entering into mystical contemplation had to concentrate on some single object too, so that the same kind of sharp focus required of Muslims was ‘‘what it all comes down to in the end’’ for both.25 All the same, Massignon saw important advantages in Muslim mysticism as compared with its Christian counterpart, in line with the former’s lesser reliance on intermediaries. Telling about the experience he and other Westerners had at a conference on Islamic religion and philosophy in 1954, he described them as feeling ‘‘the force of the Muslim affirmation of the divine Transcendence, of the God of Abraham, which releases, without intending to, in the Christian listener a deep impression of mystical desire without images, emptying him of the distressing luxury of sensible imagery with which Christian mysticism is weighted down in our IndoEuropean languages.’’26 As an instrument for making cultural boundaries permeable and for carving out a space where elements of different ways of life can be compounded, mysticism may appear to have little or nothing in common with the more active and reflective means Burton and Lawrence sought to

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employ—taking on foreign dress, consciously imitating alien speech and gestures, assimilating ‘‘native’’ elements of thinking and feeling. Mysticism, by contrast, often appears as a passive state, in which an individual is carried away, ‘‘enraptured’’ or even ‘‘ravished’’ by divine power. But as a general account of mystical experience as Massignon understood it (and others too), it is at best one-sided, because mystical contemplation is often an active project, beginning in acts of concentrated reflection and selfreflection without which the later and more passive stages cannot be attained. The point has been well made by the translator of Massignon’s Essay on the Technical Language of Islamic Mysticism: ‘‘The experience of the mystic, as Massignon describes it, was passive only at its highest point, after many difficult, voluntary preparations.’’ These constituted a kind of ‘‘experimentation’’ in regard to which Massignon used a medical and scientific vocabulary, much of it drawn from the Arabic authors he studied, and which contributed to viewing mystical meditation as ‘‘an active trial upon the self.’’27 This experimentation had two principal modes, one highly personal and contemplative, the other bearing on broader questions of culture and language. We need to look for a moment at each of these aspects of mystical transcendence in turn. The first, more personal one, opens a window on some ways in which Massignon’s relationship to Arab culture both resembled and differed from Lawrence’s, and we will use it as a point from which to consider what may be learned from the relations between them. Then we will take up the second mode of mystical ‘‘trial upon the self,’’ with its larger cultural and linguistic involvements.

* * *

In its more directly personal guise, mysticism involved ‘‘a system of psychological introspection,’’ a mode of self-examination whose main features had been identified by Sufi wanderers and mystics. Their looking into the self was ‘‘a method of . . . making use ab intra of all of life’s events, fortunate or unfortunate. It was ritual experimentation with pain, and it transformed those loyal enough to persevere to the end into physicians, to whom others could then go for treatment.’’ The source of the pain that inspired such self-examination, Massignon explained in another place, lay in a particular

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experience of moral disorientation or confusion, ‘‘the identifying of anomalies in the spiritual life of the believer,’’ who experiences ‘‘errors of judgment . . . mental pretenses . . . hypocrisies’’ in the very act of praying—knowing that even at these moments something is being kept back from the devotion offered to God. Dealing with such experiences requires a ‘‘science of hearts,’’ where ‘‘ ‘heart’ designates the incessant oscillation of the human will . . . under the impulse of various passions.’’ The only way to bring stability to this fluctuation is to seek unity with ‘‘the Essential Desire, one single God,’’ and it is systematic introspection that ‘‘must guide us to tear through the concentric veils that ensheathe the heart.’’ In this mode, mystical ascent requires a ‘‘personal effort’’ that begins by submitting one’s ‘‘conscience to introspection’’ and continues from the ‘‘negative critique’’ of the subject’s own spiritual state toward ‘‘the stages of perfection’’ attainable by sustained meditation.28 This description might apply to many people, as Massignon doubtless believed it did, but it also referred to his own experience. One juncture when he found that his own prayers could not shield him from ‘‘errors of judgment . . . mental pretenses . . . [and] hypocrisies’’ was at the moment in 1913, more than four years after his conversion, when the desire for sexual experience with another man overcame his resistance. He confessed what had happened in a letter to Claudel, voicing a fear that his soul was still in great danger and recognizing what his biographers call ‘‘the inefficacity of his prayers, the permanence of temptation, the violence of his impulses.’’29 It is clear from the ways he exhibited his never-subdued sense of unworthiness that self-examination remained a cardinal preoccupation for him, and it gave added weight to his identification with Islam and its culture. It is in this light that Massignon’s project of simultaneously inhabiting two cultures reveals its similarity and contrast to Lawrence’s. Both had a deep sense of personal degradation and used their involvements in a form of life not their own as a vehicle for confronting it. Each used the encounter to construct an identity that permanently defined him to himself and to others, but neither fully succeeded in overcoming the inner dissatisfactions that were deeply involved in the search for it. The differences stand out no less clearly, to be sure—not just the much smaller place that religion occupied in the Englishman’s life (although we remember that religious conflicts were important in shaping his early milieu no less than in Massignon’s, and that echoes of them appear in Seven Pillars of Wisdom), but also the contrast

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between the profoundly individual and personal terms in which Lawrence pursued his self-scrutiny on his thirtieth birthday and the more ready-tohand religious language Massignon employed. It seems inescapable that these differences had something to do with the surprising and curious occurrence that when the two met in Palestine during World War I, and had a number of conversations, neither seems to have cottoned to the deep importance that identification with Arabs and Muslims held for the other. Lawrence never mentioned the encounter, or anything else about Massignon, so that we have only the Frenchman’s report to go on. The meeting came about because Massignon served during the war as an adjutant to the French diplomat Franc¸ois Georges-Picot, then the head of the French mission charged with looking after the country’s interests in accord with the agreement he had chiseled out with Sir Mark Sykes in 1916. Massignon met and got on well with Sykes (a conservative Catholic, and something of a Francophile); he also established good relations with Feisal. As a consequence Sykes supported Massignon’s appointment as a French counterpart to Lawrence—not as a desert fighter, to be sure, but as an official representative to Feisal and a distributor of funds to the Arab army. Lawrence resisted this arrangement, not because he particularly disliked Massignon, but largely out of his growing hostility and suspicion toward the French. Massignon believed that Lawrence, in addition, was jealous of his growing closeness to Feisal. Whether this was the case or not, Lawrence had no choice but to accept Massignon’s appointment, since Sykes was his superior and in charge of the diplomatic connections. The two met on several occasions and entered Jerusalem together after Allenby captured it late in 1917. Massignon described their conversations as civil and sometimes amicable but hardly warm—not surprising since the two were a study in contrasts, Massignon’s careful dress and very proper military bearing (one of the connections in which he showed himself to be respectful of codes and propriety) standing out against Lawrence’s often rebellious and undisciplined manner.30 On one point Massignon’s account seems only partly reliable, namely in regard to how far he shared Lawrence’s worry about the Europeans’ betrayal of their Arab allies. In the 1959 lecture in which he described his many connections to Charles de Foucauld, he compared his regret on this score to Lawrence’s, describing both himself and the desert hermit (who was also a scholar) as having ‘‘abused’’ the Muslim hospitality offered to them ‘‘in our layman’s passion to understand, to conquer, to possess.’’ Such

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sentiments fit well with now commonplace critiques of Orientalist scholarship, but they are far from the ones Massignon expressed at the time, when he still spoke easily about ‘‘our country’s true face’’ and its ‘‘true historical vocation’’ as providing benefits that ‘‘all the Arab nations will one day have to acknowledge.’’ Like some of his countrymen, Massignon found it easy to contrast the practical and narrow-minded mentality he saw as typical of the English with the French attachment to higher principles and deeper feelings, one of whose benefits was a greater closeness to peoples still relatively unspoiled by modern materialism. But it was Lawrence who found the weight of the compromises he had been forced to accept unbearable, and who partly out of disgust with them sought to detach himself from his direct connections to Arab life once the war was over and his account of it written. Massignon, by contrast, mixed his criticism of colonialism with persisting elements of belief that his country might be brought back to its better self and work for the well-being of its colonial subjects, a hope expressed in his prayer to Joan of Arc in 1953.31 Massignon’s descriptions of the Lawrence he knew in 1917 show that much of what made the Englishman both so charismatic and so troubled came through to him. He appeared as ‘‘free of every convention, almost an outlaw, but very direct, simultaneously sweet and bitter—with a shyness comparable to a young girl’s, followed by harsh intonations uttered in a whisper, almost like a prisoner.’’ And in one of their conversations Lawrence ‘‘talked, not of a future to be built with others, but of a kind of solitary space for two [was the other Dahoum?] in a strange detachment from the world. He brought to mind a kind of elemental freedom forged out of an asceticism so utterly withdrawn that my own naked faith was shocked by the presence of his no man’s land.’’ Had Massignon pursued these observations, they might have provided a point of entry into much of what tormented Lawrence about himself, but he went no further. Even had he done so he might not have come to any understanding of the ways in which Lawrence’s Arab involvements were crucial to his inner life, just as Massignon’s own were for him. Part of the barrier between them had to do with the distance each maintained toward the other in response to worries about which country might gain greater advantage from its ties to Arab leaders, to which was added Lawrence’s reticence and the painful nature of his wartime experience (the Deraa incident was only a few weeks in the past). But the distance they kept from each other also reflected the

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contrast we have already noted between their very different senses of what constituted the core of personal existence, which in turn shaped the sharply different significance that mixing West and East held for each.

* * *

Alongside the ‘‘psychological introspection’’ Massignon identified as one spur to mystical practice stands the second, more general and cultural one, the incitement provided by sacred texts. They stimulate reflection because the language in which sacred truths are conveyed is often difficult to grasp and digest. To quote the translator of the essay on the language of Islamic mysticism again, ‘‘Massignon kept in mind the istinbat of difficult words, the ‘chewing’ and ‘swallowing’ that the mystics practiced in order to assimilate Qu’ranic terms into their lives.’’32 This need actively to chew over sacred language and its meanings was one thing that imparted special importance to the linguistic challenges of religious texts. But Massignon also saw human languages themselves as demanding efforts that led to such deeper understanding, opening up a path into the kind of intercultural space where mystical contemplation operated. Here what set the journey in motion was not the resistance specific to sacred idioms, but a friction generated by the plurality of languages and the contrasts between them. Massignon’s sense that the difference between languages had great philosophical and religious significance lay behind his hostility toward attempts to create some single and easily understood language in the name of human universality (such as Esperanto, a popular focus in his time). He was equally suspicious of attempts to find the essence of language in some common set of structures underlying them all. ‘‘The raison d’eˆtre of a language, and its reason for surviving, resides in its novel or special (original) manner of expressing human social facts: to say it very directly, in its difficulty (ta’qid).’’33 To be sure, this diversity was not an eternal feature of humanity. At the end of time human differences would lose their significance in the face of God’s universal judgment, and among the distinctions that would fall away would be linguistic ones. But what would bring about this unity was not the appearance of some new language; it was interaction between existing ones. Massignon gave particularly clear expression to this vision in 1925, at

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a time when he accorded an important place in his thinking to those other Semites who were not Arabs, the Jews, and expressed support for the Zionist goal of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Later, as Jewish settlement picked up speed, threatening to displace Arabs from parts of the land and generating opposition to Zionism among them, he grew increasingly suspicious; at some moments his hostility toward the movement led him to voice sentiments he later acknowledged, with a certain chagrin, as antisemitic. In 1925, however, he spoke of the people of Israel as bearing a special mission, ‘‘mysterious and dissolvent,’’ through which ‘‘this people of exiles’’ would announce the coming end of ‘‘the time of nations’’ and call all those able to receive the message together in the bosom of Abraham. In order to make that call heard, however, Israel would have to ‘‘recover its national language,’’ Hebrew, making it the idiom of the purely ‘‘spiritual nation’’ it would become ‘‘in contact with the Holy Land.’’ The task of reviving Hebrew, however, was one that could only be accomplished ‘‘through close collaboration with a sister language, which can only be Arabic,’’ both culturally and religiously the contemporary idiom closest to Hebrew. One reason Massignon later gave for his subsequent turn against Zionism was that the political control some of its followers increasingly sought was incompatible with Israel becoming the ‘‘spiritual nation’’ this linguistic interaction presupposed (and which would not have needed to displace Arabs).34 Massignon’s interest in an eventual universal language was therefore not discrepant with the positive significance he attached to the particular ‘‘difficulty’’ each language presents, especially for speakers of some other one. The need for such effort was particularly evident in the case of Western languages and Arabic, whose differences he explained in part by the latter’s retention of features all languages possess at the moment when they arise out of specific local conditions, but that diminish as these are effaced by the increasing weight of ‘‘commercial’’ or ‘‘scribal’’ requirements. Only the first stage gives access to a given people’s original mental structures, and it was Arabic that first made him aware that a language might bring them into view. ‘‘As a foreign guest of the Arabs, I one day found in their language this contact, this communicable consciousness of the true, by participation in their structure of thinking, as it can be grasped by the particular shape of their speech. I could have found this contact elsewhere. But it is in Arabic, in the archaic hardness of its Semitic morphology, that one has the best chance to recover what the English call ‘parsing,’ a direct initiation into speech as the people hand it down.’’ It was not some bygone ‘‘classical’’

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idiom of the Arabs that made itself felt in this way, but a ‘‘spoken witness to the unvarying articulations of their personal history,’’ embodied in the unusual prominence of consonants in Arabic words, stamping them with references to bygone objects and experiences, some practical and concrete and some more mysterious and magical. Whereas Western languages were adapted to a Greek logic aimed at the elaboration of general concepts of understanding, popular Arabic exhibited a Semitic ‘‘care for the endless registration of observed anomalies and attested exceptions.’’ People who come to grasp this contrast (which Massignon dreamed of discussing more at length in a book he would never write) gain a new perspective on their own language, ‘‘ ‘expatriating’ their desire to understand things outside their own norms, decentering it, as Copernicus did in regard to the Ptolemaic universe.’’ Such a change in perspective could not be effected from the outside, however: ‘‘To understand the other, one must not annex him to oneself, but become his guest. One can experience the ‘exogamous’ character of language [a term taken over from Le´vi-Strauss] only by making use of the ‘right of exile.’ ’’35 What linked this kind of experience of language to the self-examination that was the other starting point for mystical contemplation was that both defamiliarized a mode of existence previously taken as natural or unquestioned, allowing the person who reflected on his or her ordinary way of being to achieve a certain independence from it, and thus to open a way toward developing a different one. Massignon seems to have had this potential inherent in language in mind when he used the same metaphor of ‘‘Copernican’’ decentering to describe such independence from external conditions more generally. The occasion was his recounting of a story told by the novelist Romain Gary, and which demonstrated the power of ‘‘the spiritual’’ to inspire liberating actions within the material world. Prisoners are suffering badly in a concentration camp, helplessly crushed, when they see at their feet, on the ground, some flying beetles turned over helplessly on their backs, unable to stand and fly again. At once some of the prisoners . . . recognize the emergency and stoop down to put the beetles back on their legs. Silly as it may sound, they are obeying the unwritten law that says we shall be free of every material jail.

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It doesn’t open immediately, but it shows the way of escape, like the ‘‘mental decentering’’ of Copernicus, escaping from the Ptolemaic universe.36 Massignon cited this story as a metaphor for the ‘‘transfer of suffering’’ from others to themselves that certain heroic individuals seek to effect, thereby entering into a mystical identification with Christ and the saints. What made restoring the use of their legs to helpless beetles a figural equivalent for both such religious transcendence of the world, and for ‘‘expatriating’’ one’s consciousness into a perspective opened up by an alien language, was that all these actions affirmed the human power to seek release from external constraints, thus entering on the path to a freer and more autonomous form of life. Massignon’s own lifelong project of seeking out a space between cultures was itself a mode of such ‘‘decentering,’’ as his comments on both language and mysticism suggest, pointing toward the potential to free ourselves from escapable, and often self-imposed, bonds. That humans had both a need and a capacity to open up a distance from the anomalous and confining world of everyday values and expectations would be a significant theme of the historical theory Massignon would work out to explain the importance he found in his major subject, Husayn Ibn Mansur al-Hallaj.

* * * Although only specialists are likely to know his name today, Hallaj was far from an obscure figure; both Richard Burton and Orhan Panuk mentioned him in their writings (neither had read Massignon’s account of him at the time they did so). But no one before Massignon sought to make his person and career into a revelation about the nature of Islam and its significance for non-Muslims. Among Arabs, Hallaj was widely regarded as a heretic, singular in his beliefs and too much open to outside influences, including Christian ones; moreover, mysticism in general was commonly regarded as a peripheral phenomenon in Islamic life, even though the group chiefly associated with it, the Sufi wanderers, were well known and nearly ubiquitous in Arabia and India (which had been one reason for Burton’s attempt to disguise himself as one of them).

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Massignon’s fascination for Hallaj extended through his whole mature life, beginning in 1907, when his attention was first called to the condemned and crucified mystic by Luis de Cuadra, and then by the Alusi brothers. It does not seem possible to say what Hallaj meant to him at this moment, but knowing that what drew Cuadra to Islam was partly his sense that it was relatively free of Christianity’s emphasis on the sinfulness of worldly enjoyments and the need for contrition, it is at least possible that something of mysticism’s quasi-anarchistic potential to leave rules and restrictions behind may have been involved. After Massignon’s conversion, however, the most prominent themes of his comments on Hallaj had to do with the scope the latter offered for establishing connections between Islam and Christianity. Hallaj’s life and death provided striking evidence for such ties. Not only did he die by crucifixion, ‘‘a thousand details’’ testified to the likeness his end bore to Christ’s: he predicted his own demise, spoke of himself as ‘‘the truth,’’ suffered flagellation, and his final words echoed those of Jesus: ‘‘ ‘Ilahynn’ ⳱ ‘Eli my God.’ ’’ Knowing in addition that Hallaj read and cited Christian texts, Massignon in the years just after his conversion believed that the black-garbed mystic had died ‘‘implicitly and perhaps explicitly as a Catholic Christian . . . uniting the experience of self-sacrifice with belief in the sacrifice of the Word made flesh, the man-God.’’ Massignon later concluded that the available evidence did not support this conclusion, but he continued to see his subject’s story as a kind of Muslim replay of Christ’s sacrifice, ‘‘a pure offering’’ of himself by an innocent creature ‘‘who takes our place.’’37 Massignon extended this notion of symbolic kinship between the two faiths to include a number of other Islamic figures who took over Christian elements of belief or practice. At one point he characterized Muslim religious history as ‘‘a series of substitutions,’’ a mutual exchange between Mohammed and believers in which their attempts to assimilate one or another of his features created the diverse and even anarchic history that divided his followers into separate and sometimes warring sects. Their history was prefigured in him, as was the history of humanity in the life of Jesus; thus the mystery of substitution that lay at the center of Christianity found expression in Islam too. Hallaj was the model for all these others and it is likely that he was in Massignon’s mind when he wrote about them.38 Some of the evidence Massignon offered for the importance of mysticism within Islam seems reasonable and persuasive, but it is not hard to see

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why some of his more challenging claims met a certain resistance. Whether Mohammed’s declaration that ‘‘no one will arbitrate for me with God’’ refers to a mystical kind of immediacy may be hard to say, but he seems to have experienced certain moments of mystic-like rapture, and Massignon was able to argue that other exemplary Muslims, such as the medieval philosopher Avicenna, were at least open to some forms of mystical experience too. But Massignon went considerably further at some moments, especially in the treatise on Islamic mystical language that served as a complement to his book on Hallaj. It is dangerous to minimize the role of the mystical lexicon in the development of Islamic dogma. The mysticism of Islam is what has made it an international and universal religion. [International because] . . . the proselytizing work of mystics visiting infidel countries . . . did much more than the tyrannical fanaticism of conquerors speaking foreign languages to convert so many Indians and Malays to Islam. Universal, because the mystics were the first to understand the existence and moral efficacy of al-hanifiyya, the rational monotheism natural to all men. Mystical writers were thus important in giving Islam the character of ‘‘natural religion’’ that made its orientation be at once more modest and in a way more universal than Christianity. ‘‘Through its mysticism Islam has found the means to rise to a height from which it can see farther than its own, severely limited horizon. . . . In it there is something interreligional.’’39 These and other claims of Massignon’s study of Hallaj met a rather critical reception when The Passion of Husayn Ibn Mansuˆr Hallaˆj: Mystical Martyr first appeared in 1922. Some reviewers, particularly German ones, objected that the author had been moved more by his personal ideas and sympathies than by texts and documents. At least one North African intellectual later accused Massignon of wanting to highlight a heterodox figure in order to draw attention away from more central features of Islam, and the same writer emphasized that the attempt to draw Islam closer to Christianity led the Frenchman to give far too much emphasis to the quest for individual salvation, a cardinal Christian preoccupation foreign to the more communal Muslim emphasis on obedience and submission.40 All the same,

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Massignon’s work is often praised today for injecting both a higher degree of seriousness and a much more open and positive attitude into Western (and especially French) studies of Islam. Whether he gave a balanced picture of Muslim religious practice as a whole matters less for us than understanding the role mysticism played in his way of seeking to carve out and inhabit a space between cultures. Massignon found the general features of mysticism that he identified in other instances, both positive and potentially negative, in Hallaj’s writings and career. The latter sometimes found the fruits of this quest deeply nourishing, as when he wrote, ‘‘My spirit is mixed in with His Spirit like musk with amber or wine with pure water,’’ and ‘‘You infuse my heart with self-awareness, as spirits infuse themselves into bodies.’’ But such moments were suspect to many around him and even Hallaj himself sometimes found the mystical states into which he entered puzzling and painful. At one point he cried out, ‘‘O Muslims save me from God. . . . He does not bring me back to myself, nor does He give me back my soul; what coquetterie, it is more than I can bear.’’41 Mysticism’s potentially anarchic implications were evident in Hallaj, too: he ‘‘understood that our desire for God must mentally destroy our image of the Temple, in order to find Him who established it, and destroy the temple of our body, so as to connect with the One who came to speak to men.’’ At least from the time of his conversion, however, Massignon was convinced that the destabilizing elements in Hallaj’s mysticism were only one side of his personality; what justified his own identification with his subject was overwhelming evidence that, as he wrote in a letter to Claudel, the martyred mystic was ‘‘not a rebel, but a passionately obedient person; in contrast to the majority of unrestrained mystical Muslim visionaries he deliberately combines the most passionately rigorous observance of the whole law with the most lively outpourings of contemplative love.’’42 All these features of Hallaj’s mystical religiosity were parts of what made Massignon see him as kind of Muslim counterpart to his own manner of faith and life, and thus a witness to the possibility that inhabiting one of the two cultures did not prelude living inside the other. Central to Massignon’s belief on this score was his conviction that, like Christ, Hallaj had become a point of focus and devotion for many believers after his death, thus finding reintegration with the descendants of those who rejected him. After his death the ‘‘excommunicated saint’’ survived in memory and came to be incorporated into ‘‘the Islamic community on

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earth’’ by ‘‘chains of witnesses’’ who testified, in word or deed, to his exemplary role in their common life. ‘‘The torrent of signs, dreams, and apparitions observed at the time of Hallaj’s death gives the impression that the working of the Muslims’ collective imagination has come to a halt on his person,’’ providing a recognition ‘‘of the interdependence of the destinies of other Muslims with his own.’’ Massignon underlined this testimony both because it confirmed his belief that Hallaj deserved a prominent place in Islam and because it supported his conviction that mysticism was a genuine and essential element in Muslim culture. By drawing the person and memory of Hallaj back into the community that began by sacrificing him, these chains ‘‘also prepare the way for the final integration of the masses of the Islamic Community in the ecumenicity of the Elect.’’43 It is at this point that Massignon’s account of Hallaj’s significance became the nucleus for the more general theory of history he developed in his book. The theory only appears in direct and explicit form in the preface he wrote, near the end of his life, for the planned second edition of the work (it did not appear in print until 1975, thirteen years after his death). Whether what he there called the ‘‘working hypotheses’’ of his study had in fact been in his mind all along or not—they were not set out in the very brief preface to the first edition, dedicated chiefly to describing the volume’s organization—they bring together many themes present throughout his career. That any theory of history Massignon proposed had to be religious in character hardly needs saying at this point, but just for this reason one feature of it may well appear surprising, namely that one of its major roots lay in militantly secular soil, specifically the writings of probably the greatest modern philosophical atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche. We have noted Massignon’s interest in Nietzsche at several points. The philosopher’s well-known focus on heroic individuals colored the young French scholar’s admiration for colonial explorers and adventurers, and Massignon cited him in connection with the relationship between sexuality, death, and desire for union with God that he described in his interchange with Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille. But these things do not really prepare us for the degree to which Massignon’s vision of history, and especially the importance within it of heroic individuals who transcend cultural limits—saintly to be sure and Hallaj among them—echoed Nietzsche. At the center of this vision was the metaphor of a ‘‘curve’’ we encountered above, the bending line traced by the evolution of every human group

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as its historical trajectory bears it back to the original ground where its character and destiny were prefigured. The curves described in The Passion of Hallaj constituted a modified form of this trajectory, namely the relationship between particular communities—nations, religions, and in the end humanity as a whole—and the exemplary figures whose life and work infused itself into their collective self-awareness. The pattern began in rejection before ending in acceptance and absorption. The ur-exemplar was the life and afterlife of Jesus, but in Massignon’s view the case of Hallaj fit the model just as well. One implication of this correspondence was that the particular ‘‘curve’’ of Islamic history would eventually join up with the universal one traced out by Christianity. The starting point was that human time has a direction, since it moves toward a future, and that therefore we can only conceive of human history if we posit that it has an end. This ‘‘historical finality,’’ moreover, ‘‘must become intelligible ‘interiorly,’ for it concerns the person who alone extracts from it the meaning of the common ordeal (and not the individual, the differentiated element dependent on the social group that remains its natural end).’’ I have italicized the terms ‘‘person’’ and ‘‘individual’’ here to highlight the importance Massignon attached to the contrast between them. An individual is merely one among many members of a group, an entity that, like objects in nature, can be studied from the outside, with abstract and quantitative methods. But ‘‘person’’ refers to a higher way of being, fully human and only graspable from within, from the independent core of selfhood that finds expression in a whole life (which thus takes on the features of what Massignon’s contemporary Sartre called a ‘‘project’’). It was not only the rounded wholeness of their being that raised such persons above the level of mere individuals; by extracting ‘‘the meaning of the common ordeal,’’ their lives gave symbolic expression to what lay at the core of their group’s history (a formula modeled, again, on the exemplary case of Jesus). Although in principle one might approach the history of any human group by starting off from the wide variety of individual patterns and experiences that can be found within it, ‘‘it is useless to make it out to be the aggregation of these without having noted in it certain unusual individual curves, blessed with unique points (and even ‘knots’) corresponding to the ‘interior experiences’ of certainties (and even of anguish) by which they have ‘found’ some ‘psychic resolvents’ in their adventures in this environment. Having first become intelligible ‘dramatic situations’ for those, they become unraveled for others afterwards.’’ The ‘‘persons,’’ then, bear

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within themselves the genuine meaning of the collective experience that binds a group together, a meaning that includes difficulties (‘‘knots’’) and suffering (‘‘anguish’’) but also packets of truth (‘‘certainties’’). By leading lives that make these separate elements visible and show how they can be combined into new and exemplary ways of being, such persons provide patterns for others, too. A few sentences later Massignon would refer to them more directly as ‘‘saints.’’ What makes the benefits that such figures impart both socially and historically significant is their combination of particular and general relevance. Within any given human setting there exist only a limited number of ‘‘dramatic situations,’’ basic scenarios of which individual lives are variations. That is, each society or community exists in a particular environment that offers its members a delimited number of life paths and choices. But most of these personal dramas remain unresolved, because the majority of human beings do not have the capacity to find solutions to the universal dilemmas that surface within them. The exemplary saints, however, possess the power to do this, knitting the particular features of their lives into a whole whose meaning transcends its local and temporal determinants. The individual solutions they are able to effect depend on their becoming the beneficiaries of ‘‘strictly personal godsends,’’ a divine aid that mysteriously flows to them alone. But by drawing on it they provide emblematic resolutions for the others. Because ‘‘these testimonial realizations of divine grace in us are superhuman reactions,’’ nothing in the social or cultural environment where they take place makes any significant contribution to them. In particular, no components of the secular culture through which ‘‘a society deceives itself by believing it can formulate for itself in such things a representation that explains its past and preforms its future’’ can rise to this level. This does not mean that the saints are mere passive recipients of divine aid (as a rigidly predestinationist sort of Protestant theology might suggest); on the contrary, Massignon insists that each such achievement of personal wholeness requires personal effort and a special kind of self-awareness, a prise de conscience, arrived at by ‘‘a heroic act (usually ‘once in a lifetime’).’’ To perform such an act on oneself requires great courage, in some cases including a willingness to sacrifice oneself on behalf of a higher cause or goal. Such an ‘‘isolated heroic act’’ is not wholly independent from things outside it. First, it ‘‘has a pivotal value that is ‘trans-social.’ One can represent it as a projection of the life trajectory of its author’’ outside the world,

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both toward other human contexts and toward divine transcendence. Second, it bears a close connection to elements in its setting, namely the specific array of defects and evils that human nature introduces into any given order of social relations. It constitutes ‘‘a sublimation not discontinuous with the masses of the by no means disinterested gamut of mercenary virtues, calculated actions, mediocre decisions, and crimes.’’ Two things link the heroic personalities to the people who remain attached to these dubious or evil qualities: one is the role that such defects play in determining the earthly fates of those who transcend them, often sacrificed to the jealousy, greed, or fear of people whose faults and shortcomings they lay bare; the other is the feeling, even if only an inkling, that it is toward redemption from precisely these evils that the example of those with a special connection to God points. From these ties there arises ‘‘a real and efficacious solidarity of the affections of the mass with the redemptive, saving, and holy suffering of a few heroic souls,’’ heightened by the need for divine aid in face of ‘‘the crises of collective suffering—famines, epidemics, wars, persecutions—suffered by the masses of unfortunate people.’’ Only from the point of view that reveals the often hidden connection between suffering and redemption does the true meaning of such misfortunes become intelligible: they are ‘‘crises of parturition’’ through which a truth inaccessible to ordinary human understanding comes into the world. The fabric of history is woven by ‘‘the irreversible shuttle of succeeding moments’’ that links ‘‘the creative life curves of fellow-suffering and restorative ‘royal’ souls, famous or hidden, who realize the divine plan,’’ to the ‘‘immense number of souls who have remained behind somewhere along the way.’’ Because these connections are the very fabric of any group’s collective history, the reintegration of saintly individuals into the community that began by scorning them must be recognized as an integral part of their stories. A study of any of them—Hallaj being the exemplary one for Massignon— therefore cannot stop with biography; it must rise to the level of history, documenting the saints’ operative connections to others, the ‘‘chains of suffering and sacrificed witnesses’’ through which takes place their reabsorption into the collective life that cannot generate such solutions for itself.44 The writing of Nietzsche that provided a template for this historical vision was his 1874 essay (one of three ‘‘Untimely Meditations’’) Schopenhauer as Educator. One reason Massignon was able to absorb elements from it was that Nietzsche’s writings (which Massignon first encountered at a

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time when he had lost his own religious faith, so that unbelief did not then constitute a barrier between them) retained much of the vocabulary and tone he imbibed from the deeply religious ambience of his family. In his essay on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche put forward a program of cultivation and self-development centered on the imitation of ‘‘great redemptive men,’’ heroic individuals who rejected any form of earthly happiness, sacrificing their own individual desires and aims to ‘‘the noblest ends, above all those of justice and compassion.’’ The ‘‘higher self’’ exemplified by such figures was one able to bear the pain of worldly frustrations, and enact a solution to the universal human dilemmas that others could only bewail. Nietzsche was drawn to Schopenhauer because he exemplified this heroic quality. His vision of life was an unblinkingly tragic one, rooted in the conviction that people were forever fated to be disappointed in pursuing whatever earthly projects or goals they conceived for themselves (as demonstrated by his own unhappy love life, and by the violence and disorder that plagued revolutionary attempts to remake the world). Schopenhauer believed that what lay behind such outcomes was the power of the ‘‘cosmic Will,’’ a universal force indifferent to individuals, but able to employ them as pawns for its own hidden purposes, chief of which was its own survival, not theirs, so that human fates, including death, did not matter to it. The sole shield people could set up against the Will’s trickeries was ‘‘heroic renunciation,’’ a paradoxical strengthening of the person achieved through the act of detaching oneself from all worldly concerns. By turning his back on desire and ambition, thus showing the way to a Nirvana-like independence, Schopenhauer provided the model for the class of ‘‘great redemptive men’’ Nietzsche invoked. It was a vision that drew on religious and even quasi-mystical elements, as Nietzsche acknowledged by calling those who fit his model ‘‘philosophical saints.’’ Such individuals had appeared at unpredictable moments in human history, and for this reason people in search of a higher life had to seek their exemplars not in figures who stood close to them in space or time, ‘‘but rather in those apparently scattered and chance existences which favorable conditions have here and there produced.’’45 To be sure, Massignon’s invocation of great redemptive men diverged from Nietzsche’s at many points, above all that divine power had nearly everything to do with Massignon’s Catholic vision and nothing to do with Nietzsche’s secular one. In addition, Massignon’s understanding of human finality was directed toward the unification of humanity within the already

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known parameters of revelation, whereas Nietzsche’s projected a future not yet visible but somehow to be fashioned on earth by a race of heroic ‘‘Overmen,’’ humans shorn of their ageless weaknesses (he did not yet use this term in 1874, but the ‘‘great redemptive men’’ already foreshadowed it). Yet the similarities were no less significant, beginning with the way that the members of each group silently spoke to each other and to humanity across time and space; in regard to those geographically or temporally close to themselves Nietzsche’s formula fit both: they had to act with ‘‘the courage to declare one’s independence from others, with their unexamined values and expectations.’’ Another way to say this is that both were marked by the distance that separated themselves from their cultures. Nietzsche attributed great importance to culture as a power in human life, describing human groups as directing and defining themselves by virtue of the particular ‘‘tablet of good’’ on which each one inscribed the system of moral judgments that distinguished it from neighbors and rivals, the valuations that allowed each one to ‘‘rule and triumph and shine.’’ He recognized also that language was a powerful force in shaping thought, giving form to the perceptions and experiences on which the mind works. In some degree all the members of a given culture were shaped by the behavior their tablets enjoined, and by the way of thinking prefigured in their languages, but there was a stark difference between ‘‘weak’’ individuals whose only way of feeling self-worth was to take on the features and values of those around them, and the ‘‘strong’’ whose special nature and destiny gave them a ‘‘pathos of distance’’ that freed them from being confined inside cultural limits. In The Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche described the latter as ‘‘explosives in which a tremendous force is stored up’’; when the tension finally erupts, ‘‘what does the environment matter then, or the age, or the ’spirit of the age,’ or ’public opinion’!’’ It was just this freedom from what determined ordinary existence that made both species of heroic and saintly individuals able to resolve issues that others in their time could not.46 I cannot say whether Massignon had these connections between his ‘‘redemptive . . . heroic souls’’ and Nietzsche’s ‘‘great redemptive men’’ in mind, but we have already noted that he read Nietzsche as a young man and sometimes referred to him later. Others who shared his faith in religion might be unhappy to know that he modeled his thinking on so noted an advocate of atheism, but one might remind them that his borrowings drew the German thinker’s program of imitating ‘‘philosophic saints’’ back

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toward its still perceptible religious roots. One thing that makes the connection worth bringing to light is that it highlights the kinship between Massignon’s attempt to live between cultures and a potential present in many comparable efforts, but one perhaps surprising to find in a person so dedicated to faith and obedience. Although he never gave his critique of cultural restraints the radical turn elaborated by Nietzsche (and independently of him by Richard Burton), one reason he valued the various modes of ‘‘decentering’’ was that they affirmed the human potential for liberation from multiple cultural—as well as personal—limitations. Divine or human, the powers on which we must call to resolve the dilemmas that cultures impose on their members are the same ones that give us the capacity to stand at a distance from them.

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Chapter 4

Independence and Ambivalence: Chinua Achebe and Two African Contemporaries

For the three figures considered so far, Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence, and Louis Massignon, living between cultures meant injecting themselves into a way of life alien to their native European one. The people to whom we turn now all pursued their intercultural identities in the opposite direction, as non-Europeans drawn onto some European terrain. That they did so owed much to a feature of world history all of them deplored, recognizing all the same that it brought benefits to themselves and others, namely the colonial domination Europe came to exercise over large parts of the world. For Africans such as Chinua Achebe this supremacy was direct and formal, as well as demeaning and often cruel: their continent came to be subjugated, divided, and in many ways remade—or unmade—by imperial rule. Orhan Pamuk also saw his native culture as degraded by European power, albeit in more subtle ways, since (as he several times remarked) his country never lost its political independence, and also because racist feelings and actions, although long part of European relations with Turkey (operating in the other direction too), usually took less virulent forms there than on the ‘‘dark continent.’’ Whatever the differences, the figures we consider in this and the next chapter found the powerful attraction Europe exercised over them a source of anxiety and tension, so that finding a way to understand and explore the space between cultures each inhabited required large quantities of intellectual energy and imagination.

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* * *

Several times in writings and interviews, Chinua Achebe portrayed himself as having begun life at a point where cultures intersected. Born in 1930, almost half a century after British involvement in the ‘‘scramble for Africa’’ created Nigeria out of previously separate regions and peoples, and thirty years before the country became independent, he was aware that ‘‘providence ushered me into a world at a cultural crossroads. By then, a longstanding clash of Western and African civilizations had generated deep conversations and struggles between their respective languages, religions, and cultures.’’ Starting out from such a pass generated tension and uncertainty, but it was also ‘‘one of the major advantages I had as a writer.’’1 What made the impress of this juncture on his life especially deep was that his family’s history drew him toward the European side from the start. His father and mother were among the first people in the Ibo region of eastern Nigeria to accept conversion to Christianity, and both worked as missionaries to bring others into the fold; his father in particular set himself against the ‘‘heathen’’ ways still followed by many of his neighbors, rejecting not just traditional ritual and magic, but stories, proverbs, and festivals, too (although he softened somewhat as time went on).2 Growing up in such a household gave the young Achebe a sense of distance from much in his surroundings: he long used his baptismal name, Albert, and an older brother became an Anglican priest. But many ties to traditional life persisted. Old ways of being and thinking still permeated everyday village existence, and other members of his family preserved their links to them, explicitly rejecting his father’s invitations to accept the ‘‘true faith.’’ Achebe later displayed a particular fondness for a story about his paternal greatuncle, a prominent and much-respected member of local society (the Anglican missionaries first sought to establish themselves in his compound, until he sent them away) and an important figure in the family, since he served as a substitute parent to Chinua’s orphaned father. Refusing to join his nephew in the new faith, he pointed to the insignia of distinction he had earned (called ‘‘titles,’’ we will discuss their significance below), saying: ‘‘What shall I do to these?’’—a question Achebe later read as meaning ‘‘What do I do to who I am? What do I do to history?’’ The writer came to believe ‘‘that my whole artistic career was probably sparked by this tension

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between the Christian religion of my parents . . . and the retreating, older religion of my ancestors. ’’ Those who still followed the latter ‘‘seemed so very content in their traditional way of life and worship. Why would they refuse to become Christians, like everyone else around them? I was intent to find out.’’3 By his own testimony, however, such questions only assumed importance in his mind as time went on. As a schoolboy he seems to have looked on the traditional African world through the eyes of an outsider, sharing his parents’ sense of distance in a more boyish way. The primary school he attended was modeled on British ones, pupils read the same books as did European children of their age, and Achebe reacted to the stories of African exploration and adventure (by Rider Haggard, for instance) much in the way his distant coevals did. ‘‘I did not see myself as an African in those books. I took sides with the white man against the savages. In other words, I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. The white man was good and reasonable and smart and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid, never anything higher than cunning. I hated their guts.’’ Given how sharply and even bitterly Achebe later criticized such colonialist accounts of European engagement with African life, his willingness to voice this memory is a testimony to his honesty, and also to his refusal to let his outrage about imperialist oppression and exploitation blot out his appreciation for the advantages he gained from British schooling. These began very early (‘‘I am a prime beneficiary of the education that the missionaries made a major component of their enterprise’’) and continued through his university studies. Giving evidence of intellectual gifts from the start, he was encouraged by his teachers, some of whom helped him gain entry to an excellent secondary school, the Government College at Umuahia, whose rigorous curriculum, high-quality faculty, and egalitarian principles he later praised. If his consciousness about the dark side of the British presence in Africa was developing in these early teen years, his writings give little evidence of it. He reports that he and his fellow students (some of whom were to become important figures in independent Nigeria) happily learned to play cricket and took easily to the ‘‘gentlemanly’’ dress and aura of the sport, and that he was proud to serve as godfather to a friend who chose this moment to undergo the Christian baptism he had not received as a child. It was here too that Achebe first took note of the power of English to unify young Africans divided by a

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Babel of native languages. He would never cease to regard English as the only workable vehicle for the cultural unification of his country.4 This positive view of British culture continued on a number of levels in Achebe’s years as a university student. He felt fortunate that the colonial administration established a University College at Ibadan (then the largest city in Nigeria) just in time for him to be part of its first entering class, in 1948. Having concentrated largely on science in secondary school, he entered Ibadan as a medical student, but he found his interests shifting toward literature and the arts; happily he was able to switch faculties (although he lost one year of scholarship support and had to rely on aid from his older brother), because the University of London, of which the Nigerian college was officially a branch, had just decided to allow arts students from countries in the Empire to substitute their native languages for the traditional Latin requirement. The Ibadan faculty was notably distinguished, not just in European subjects but in ones bearing on African life as well; as at his secondary school, a number of the students Achebe met and befriended were destined for distinguished careers. They developed relations with each other by organizing activities outside of classes, including a literary magazine where he published his first stories. The sense of being groomed as part of an elite on which his country would later rely grew stronger: ‘‘The system was so well organized that as we left university most of us were instantly absorbed into civil service, academia, business, or industry. We trusted—I did, anyway—the country and its rulers to provide this preparatory education and then a job to serve my nation.’’5 Many places in Achebe’s writings testify to the close and in many ways persisting identification with British culture that developed out of these experiences. In his last book he recalled that even in the midst of the Biafran War that bloodily divided Nigeria in the late 1960s, he and people like him could joke about the close copies of educated Brits they knew themselves to be. On a committee set up to write ‘‘a kind of constitution for Biafra,’’ a rivalry developed between two candidates to become the group’s secretary: one had been to Oxford, the other to Cambridge, and the first provoked general laughter by deriding the second on the grounds that ‘‘Oh, he is from the other place.’’ More serious was the very different appearance this closeness to British university education made in Achebe’s portrait of the demagogic and highly corrupt post-independence politician he satirized in his novel A Man of the People, the chief minister M. A. Nanga. In a newspaper editorial Nanga declared it was time to

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extract from our body politic as a dentist extracts a stinking tooth all those decadent stooges versed in text-book economics and aping the white man’s mannerisms and way of speaking. We are proud to be Africans. Our true leaders are not those intoxicated with their Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard degrees but those who speak the language of the people. Away with the damnable and expensive university education which only alienates an African from his rich and ancient culture and puts him above his people. What prompted this outpouring was Nanga’s refusal to heed the sound advice British-educated economists in his government gave about how to respond to a drop in coffee prices, because he knew that following it would cost him the next election. At the end of the book Nanga gets his comeuppance: death by assassination.6 There was a further reason why Achebe found it easy to connect the European world to his native one. The future novelist was not just a West African, he was an Ibo, a member of a group whose values and practices contrasted in many ways with what have often been taken to be features of ‘‘traditional culture,’’ and these contrasts made Ibos in Achebe’s generation especially well equipped to benefit from the opportunities generated by British efforts to modernize the country. The special relationship between Ibo proclivities and these openings became an object of much commentary at the time of the Nigerian Civil War that broke out in 1966, during which the Ibos, denounced and attacked by other Nigerians, sought to establish the independent state of Biafra in their home territories in the country’s South and East. But the Hausa-Fulani and Yoruba who were dominant in the North and West (including the region of the capital, Lagos) overcame the secessionists in fierce battles, inflicting massacres that evoked widespread international protests and left as many as 30,000 Ibos dead. Achebe, in accord with Western historians of modern Africa, traced one of the main roots of these conflicts to the competitive individualism that set Ibo culture apart from its neighbors, the high value it placed on achieving social status by personal work and effort. Achebe would later present these features of his people’s native way of life in his novels; in one of his last writings, the mix of personal recollection and history called There Was a Country, he made these characteristics bulk large in the background to the Civil War.

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The Ibo culture, being receptive to change, individualistic, and highly competitive, gave the Ibo man an unquestioned advantage over his compatriots in securing credentials for advancement in Nigerian colonial society. Unlike the Hausa/Fulani he was unhindered by a wary religion [many of these Northern Nigerians were and remain Muslims], and unlike the Yoruba he was unhampered by traditional hierarchies. This kind of creature, fearing no god or man, was custom-made to grasp the opportunities, such as they were, of the white man’s dispensations. Earlier it had been the Yoruba who established the closest relationship to the British administration, largely because the proximity of their lands to the coast led the missionaries to build their first churches and schools there. But the Ibos ‘‘wiped out their handicap in one fantastic burst of energy in the twenty years between 1930 and 1950,’’ achieving not just offices, but the country’s highest literacy rate and highest percentage of people with post-secondary education. Part of the reason they were able to do all this was a widespread enthusiasm for schooling and the paths to a better life it opened up, qualities that Achebe experienced first of all in his own family. In their case he portrayed the ambition and determination to succeed as given dignity by a high moral bearing, but other Nigerians did not see Ibos in the same light, and for reasons Achebe understood full well. Citing an American study of the Biafra conflict published at its height, he accepted its conclusion that some Ibo behavior invited justifiable criticism and envy by virtue of ‘‘its noisy exhibitionism and disregard for humility and quietness,’’ qualities often associated with parvenus; some likened Ibos to Jews, and the violence directed against them to Nazi genocide. For a minority to become ‘‘the major source of administrators, managers, technicians, and civil servants’’ made their differences stand out in high relief. This was not yet the case at the time of Achebe’s father’s conversion, which took place around 1904, long before the decades of rapid Ibo advancement, but the son’s childhood and youth corresponded exactly to the period when his ethnic cousins became notorious for their success. His later memory of the easy transition he and his friends made from being students to embarking on promising careers looked back on that moment.7 Paradoxically or not, the years when Achebe and his friends were preparing this transition were also the time when agitation for independence

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was contributing to a far more critical stance toward the British presence than his own early attitudes evinced. Anticolonial views had found public expression earlier, notably in the Lagos newspapers established in the 1930s by Nnamdi Azikiwe, a Nigerian recently returned from studying at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Largely put on hold during World War II, the anti-imperial struggle erupted with renewed vigor after 1945, just in the years when Achebe was at Ibadan. He retained many positive memories of his studies and teachers there, but one incident he several times recounted (he dated it in 1952) points up the deepening fissures then developing between native attitudes and British culture, and which called his own earlier identification with it into question. Most of the works read in literature classes were classics, ranging from Shakespeare and Milton to James Joyce and Hemingway, but the teachers also assigned a novel set in Nigeria by the Anglo-Irish writer Joyce Cary, Mister Johnson. First published in 1939 and reissued in 1947, it was widely lauded in the 1940s and 1950s. Most people taking up the book today would likely find the praise it received dated or obtuse at best; both its general picture of native African life as dirty, crude, selfish, and feckless, and of its title character, an inept young African puffed up, befuddled, and in the end undone by thinking too highly of his low-level job in the colonial civil service, exhibit the stereotypical thinking and unreflecting sense of racial superiority so common in the age of colonialism. Whatever the white teachers at Ibadan thought of the book, Achebe and his fellow students found it ignorant and insulting; in class one of them forthrightly declared that ‘‘the only moment he had enjoyed in the entire book was when the Nigerian hero, Johnson, was shot dead by his British master, Mr. Rudbeck.’’ Achebe seems to have thought the outburst tasteless, but the moment stood out in his mind as exemplary of the growing divide between young Nigerians and their colonial rulers. He remembered it as awakening him to the reality that those who obtain ‘‘power over narrative . . . can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.’’ Although (as he later noted) he might not have been able to put it this way then, it was in order to help his people to regain the power to tell their own story that he became a writer.8 It was at this point that Achebe’s picture of his own youth began to highlight the double-sidedness he voiced in the image of living at ‘‘a crossroads,’’ giving the Christianity of his parents the aspect of a threat to traditional Nigerian culture. As he noted, ‘‘The transformation of a colonial people into a people agitating for independence introduced something in

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the air that was not there before—a rebelliousness. Everyone was questioning everything. This is the feature of the 1950s when I was going to the university—that everything was up for questioning, including the Church, including Christianity, and it was at this stage that I dropped my Christian name.’’ In the end he would come to view the Christianity so cherished in his family as part of the West’s offensive claim to cultural superiority, embodying what he called ‘‘the One Way, One Truth, One Life menace’’ of which he would portray his native heritage as free. Later he saw a similar threat in ‘‘the great power and influence of US culture’’ to weaken attachment to other ways of life, especially among the young, and he became sharply critical of the Trinidadian writer V. S. Naipul for accepting the view that Western achievements provided the grounds for a universal culture; such thinking, he insisted, blocked the path to a genuine world civilization, able to give recognition to ways of life made subordinate by Europe’s expansionism. This developing consciousness was fed by discoveries he had not yet made in 1952, about the long history of European racist attitudes toward Africa that were intertwined with the horrors of the slave trade, and the widespread violence and cruelty perpetrated by imperial Britain. Things that once seemed beneficent now revealed their oppressive side; the label ‘‘British protected person’’ stamped in his first passport (issued in 1957, three years before Nigerian independence) emerged as colonialist flim-flam: ‘‘It is a gross crime for anyone to impose himself on another, to seize his land and his history, and then to compound this by making out that the victim is some kind of ward or minor requiring protection.’’9 These ideas and attitudes would infuse and inspire much of Achebe’s mature work as a writer, and they contributed to the high status he achieved as a pioneer of modern African literature. But his relationship to native life never became one-dimensional or simple, partly because of the debt he knew he owed to British education, partly because the anger he expressed toward colonialism emanated from a remarkably moderate and unaggressive temperament (‘‘I never held a gun in my life’’), and partly because of the ethnic conflicts and jealousies that made his country’s post-colonial history so tragically conflicted. His devotion to the doomed Biafran secession and to the Ibo culture it sought to protect made him experience the flaws and disappointments of independent Nigeria with special sorrow and bitterness. Speaking to a British audience in 1993 he said he would not take up ‘‘the pros and cons of colonialism,’’ because ‘‘you would get only cons from me.’’ But in a later writing he offered ‘‘a piece of heresy: The British

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governed their colony of Nigeria with considerable care,’’ through highly competent officials ‘‘imbued with a high level of knowledge,’’ and they provided a degree of stability and safety (for instance in travel) plainly superior to what Nigerians were later able to realize for themselves. Although he criticized the British for seeking to retain their influence in Nigeria after independence by working to put power in the hands of proxies, and he surely did not agree with the suggestion voiced by a character in A Man of the People, that it might have been better not to ask the white man to go, the response he put in the mind of the book’s chief figure was ‘‘Perhaps he is right.’’10 The qualities of good sense and responsibility he attributed to the colonial administration were also ones he found in his chief teachers at Ibadan, notwithstanding the conflicts over such things as Mister Johnson. More than once he recalled the declaration one of the professors of comparative religion, James Welch, made near the end of the novelist’s time there: ‘‘I’m an Englishman, you see. You are Africans; you are Nigerian, you know. Very soon you will be running your own business—independence. We can’t teach you how to run Nigeria. We are not experts in African religion or anything. We can only teach you what we know. After that you can do what you like with it.’’ Overall there is little reason to question Achebe’s agreement with the poet and journalist he portrayed in his novel Anthills of the Savannah, whose commitment to Nigerian independence never wavered but who felt at best a limited commonality with ‘‘those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the hated oppressor.’’ We need to keep this complex fabric of memories, ideas, and feelings in mind as we turn to the kind of intercultural space Achebe mapped out as the author of his novels.11

* * *

Achebe’s fiction revolves around two central questions: the impact of colonialism and Christianity on traditional village society and culture, and the mostly urban experience of educated Nigerians like himself in the period just before and after independence. In the trilogy that consists of Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), and Arrow of God (1964), the first and third titles deal chiefly with traditional life and its relations to the

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foreign ways that were undermining it, while the second focuses on modern Nigeria and the role of educated people within it. Two related works, A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), continue this latter focus. The title Things Fall Apart conveys very well what Achebe portrayed as the consequence of the British presence in Iboland, and in a way it names the main theme of all the other books. The novels set chiefly in villages provide a wealth of ethnographic information, introducing readers to traditional ceremonies, beliefs, and attitudes, along with the shared stories and proverbs that supported and interpreted them. Achebe believed that his writings provided accurate accounts of all these things, and that one might read him as a kind of anthropologist. We will take up his relationship to other ethnographic studies in a moment; for the most part, however, we are concerned with his books chiefly as windows into the Ibo world whose relationship to its British intruders so preoccupied him. At the heart of Things Fall Apart lies the story of Okonkwo, a figure whose physical strength and social success make him exemplary of the macho individualism that ruled Ibo village society. His downfall and suicide in face of the alien forms of power introduced by British and Christian domination signal the collapse of traditional life. His fame in his village of Umofia and its neighbors ‘‘rested on solid personal achievements,’’ as a wrestler, a warrior, and a yam farmer. Since he inherited nothing tangible from his gentle and rather lazy father, who preferred flute-playing to work and struggle, the status he achieved was testimony that ‘‘among these people a man was judged according to his worth,’’ not the position of his ancestors. But his father’s contrasting personality points to the existence of other, albeit subordinate, ways of being a man in this world, and we learn quite early that there was something troubling and dangerous about Okonkwo’s aggressive and even brutal masculinity. He treats his wives harshly and deflates less energetic and successful men by calling them womanly. Respect for his industry and determination made his fellow villagers recognize him as ‘‘one of the lords of the clan,’’ but the violence in his nature seems often on the verge of breaking out, and the aspects of Ibo life these features of his character embody would have something to do with the spread of Christianity among his people.12 Okonkwo’s high status was attested by his taking ‘‘titles,’’ social distinctions symbolized by objects that served as records or badges. There were four such titles among Ibos, and while few people ever got beyond three,

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Okonkwo acquired them all; this was what made him a ‘‘lord.’’ To receive a title a person had to give an elaborate ceremonial meal to the whole village (sometimes supplemented by presents), each higher one requiring a larger outlay. This meant that only the rich could take titles, but Achebe regarded the expenditure involved as diminishing the difference in wealth that made it possible, thus tempering the inequality on which it was based. In his essays he pictured this feature of the title system as in accord with the generally egalitarian spirit of Ibo life, which recognized the value of each individual’s animating spirit or chi, and gave everyone a place in the community. The evidence seems clear all the same that in the world of his novels those who took the higher titles had no intention of diminishing the superior status they gained by acquiring them. In Arrow of God we learn that when six neighboring villages came together to form an alliance against an enemy making raids on them, agreeing to devote themselves to the same chief gods, they were persuaded by ‘‘one of the three people in all the land who had taken the highest title in the land, Eru, which was called after the lord of wealth himself,’’ to offer the chief priesthood to a lesser person from one of the weaker villages, so that no already powerful individual would rise to a level that would challenge the position of the established ‘‘lords.’’ The limits of Ibo egalitarianism are also demonstrated by the existence of a class of untouchables or osu, people whose ancestors had served as slaves dedicated to the cult of some god, and who were generally ostracized. Like Okonkwo’s brutality, their presence would be one factor in the spread of Christianity in the world Achebe chronicled.13 To be sure, it was the intrusion of the missionaries that led to the retreat of the old religion, but divisions and conflicts in native society were central to making the first converts open to the alien message. Some osu were among those early recruits, as was a woman who had more than once given birth to twins, traditionally taken from their mothers and left to die in a special ‘‘evil’’ part of the forest, since they were regarded as the work of bad spirits whose possible entry in the village had to be fended off. But the conversion that bulked largest in the story was that of Nwoye, Okonkwo’s eldest son and a no less central figure in Achebe’s trilogy than his father. There was something in his nature that predisposed him to take in the message the followers of Jesus brought; in personality he resembled his soft and peaceable grandfather rather than Okonkwo. (Achebe several times commented on the close relations that develop between grandparents and grandchildren, sometimes putting them in a kind of Freudian light based

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on sympathy between those who share an enemy, and sometimes seeing them in terms of an Ibo belief that the spirits of dead people can return in an infant of the same family.) One sign of this was a quality Nwoye shared with Achebe, namely that he preferred the mild and reassuring stories told by women to the warlike ones that were mostly the province of men. But it was a particular set of events in which his father was deeply involved that played the largest role in what Okonkwo regarded as his son’s betrayal. It all began when a young woman from Okonkwo’s village was killed by someone from a neighboring one. Retribution had to be exacted, and it was Okonkwo who was sent to demand it, threatening war if amends were not made. The price of peace was that a young virgin was given to Umofia, to be married to the man who had lost his wife, together with a boy whose eventual fate, everyone understood, would be death. But for a reason the novel does not make clear, the boy, Ikemefuma, remained among the Umofians for three years. It seemed natural enough that he would reside in Okonkwo’s compound, and there he and Nwoye became close friends, playing, talking, and growing up together. When the execution could no longer be put off, one of Okonkwo’s friends urged that he not be part of the trek into the bush where it would take place: Ikemefuma had come to call Okonkwo ‘‘father,’’ and for the man to be involved in killing the boy ‘‘did not please the earth,’’ whose goddess might seek revenge. But true to the macho toughness for which he was famous (and which marked him off from his own father), he was not to be deterred; it was he who struck the fatal machete blow. Knowing that Okonkwo had done the deed, Nwoye did not eat for days afterward; years later he refused to attend his father’s funeral. At the moment of Ikemefuma’s death, Nwoye’s conversion was still in the future, but when it came doctrine mattered less than memory and the feelings it preserved. ‘‘It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul—the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuma who was killed. He felt a relief as the hymn poured into his parched soul.’’14 Although others in Achebe’s world would be drawn to the religion of the British by a desire to partake of the superior power the foreigners manifestly possessed, what attracted Nwoye was just the opposite, the ability of Christianity to give value and comfort to things considered weak and womanly in the society—and the family—he knew. What

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Achebe tells us about his own sense of distance from warlike and macho pursuits, his preference for ‘‘feminine’’ over ‘‘masculine’’ stories, and his sense that something on the edge of brutality contributed to what made Okonkwo so successful among the Ibos, all suggest that the novelist shared some of the sense about what was problematic in his own culture that drew Nwoye to the Gospel religion. This was so even though for him Christianity was a faith simply passed on by his own parents (whose reasons for converting he seems never to have likened to Nwoye’s), and to which he no longer adhered by the time he became a writer. Achebe never explicitly declared that traditional Ibo society was less than wholly welcoming to people such as Nwoye or himself, and to be sure it contained other features that accorded more with such people’s needs (such as the high value placed on ceremony, and on storytelling itself), but he clearly understood that certain cultures are more favorable toward people of particular temperaments than are others, and that the way individuals respond when they encounter some alien form of life will be colored by their sense of how sympathetic they think both it and their native one are to people like themselves. One sign that such questions were very much on Achebe’s mind in writing his novels is the awareness of cultural difference he attributes to the people in them. It may well be that Ibo villagers understood such things in the way he portrays them (many people have developed some degree of recognition on this score simply from being exposed to a different mode of life, both Herodotus and Marco Polo having testified to awareness about it centuries earlier), but even if the conversations he reports echo ones he actually heard, we will see in a moment that some of their content reflects the influence of European ethnography to which he was exposed at Ibadan. Moreover, awareness of cultural difference is not the same thing as acceptance of it, and the tolerance Achebe’s characters display toward other people’s customs is limited at best. When one person reports that in a neighboring village ‘‘titled men climb trees and pound foo-foo for their wives,’’ another responds, ‘‘All their customs are upside down’’; they decide bride price by haggling instead of ‘‘as we do, with sticks.’’ To this his companion replies, ‘‘That is very bad. . . . But what is good in one place is bad in another.’’ One thing that makes a custom ‘‘bad’’ is that it is likely to lead to quarrels, but the report that ‘‘I have even heard that in some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family’’ elicits incredulity: ‘‘That cannot be. . . . You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the children.’’

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Later, however, a different reason for variety of customs emerges, namely that some can be deliberately invented in order to con people into behaving in a certain way. Thus the Tortoise in a story convinces the birds who help him fly to attend a feast in the sky, that on such an occasion it is the custom among their exalted hosts for everyone to choose a new name. Because he ‘‘was a widely-traveled man who knew the customs of different peoples,’’ they believed him, but his game was to take the name ‘‘all of you’’ for himself, so that when the gods declare that the feast is for ‘‘all of you’’ he can claim it as his own. More seriously, the custom of leaving twins to die provokes skepticism: ‘‘What crime had they committed?’’ Responding to those who did not believe the stories about white men carrying Africans away into slavery (a practice that young people in Achebe’s time no longer witnessed for themselves, since it ended some generations before), an elder declares that ‘‘There is no story that is not true. . . . The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination among others.’’ And he concludes that the rare Albinos among his people must have strayed from their path while searching for ‘‘a land where everybody is like them.’’15 Perhaps the most sophisticated instance of self-conscious cultural comparison in Things Fall Apart concerns religion, and it is the one that most clearly reflects British ethnographic studies. It occurs at a point when the Christian missionary effort had begun to bear significant fruits, in part because the British ‘‘had also built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money flowed into Umofia.’’ The chief missionary at this point was a ‘‘Mr. Brown,’’ a moderate who restrained the more zealous converts in his flock from acting out their disdain for the old religion, for instance by killing and eating the sacred python. His successor’s less tractable nature was one thing that contributed to the crisis that would end with Okonkwo’s suicide; but while Brown remained he engaged in discussions with non-Christians. One of these was a great man of the village, Akunna, ‘‘who had given one of his sons to be taught the white man’s knowledge in Mr. Brown’s school.’’ In their dialogue the Anglican was concerned to show how different his faith was from the native one, but Akunna saw many points in common between them. Just as the Christians believed in ‘‘one supreme God who made heaven and earth,’’ so did Ibos have Chukwu ‘‘who made all the world and the other gods.’’ To the missionary’s objection that there were no other gods, and that the carved images of divinities the villagers worshiped were mere pieces of wood, Akunna replied that indeed they were pieces of wood:

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Chukwu provided the material for them so that people could have intermediaries through which to approach Him, much in the way Christians connected to God through the head of their church, who had his own residence, as Mr. Brown admitted after first avowing that God was the only head of the church, in England. Because Chukwu’s work in sustaining the world was ‘‘too great for any one person,’’ he needed ‘‘the smaller gods to help him.’’ (Akunna seems not to have known about the Christian cult of the saints, which he could surely have offered as evidence for his case.) Brown’s assertion that ‘‘you give all the worship to the false gods you have created’’ was not true, because ‘‘when they fail and there is no one else to turn to we go to Chukwu,’’ just as people approach a great man directly only after they have first requested aid from his servants, at first keeping their distance from the greatness that engenders fear. And to the objection that toward their God the Christians feel only love, the response was that ‘‘we must fear Him when we are not doing his will. . . . And who is to know his will?’’16 Whether a similar exchange ever actually took place in Iboland in the early period of missionary activity we may never know, but Achebe’s accounts of his childhood and youth never mention any; instead, he describes such a way of comparing religions as something he first learned about as a student at Ibadan. In later writings and interviews he referred to the impact that classes on comparative religion there had on him, recalling the two teachers of the subject, James Welch, whom we mentioned earlier, and Edward G. Parrinder, a former missionary in East Africa who wrote a book titled West African Religion. In one later interview Achebe recalled, ‘‘I don’t know if Parrinder turned me toward the study of religion, but he certainly enlightened me. I already had the interest, even if I didn’t know it. I certainly had an interest in our gods and religious systems.’’ On another occasion he recalled that he found his exposure to comparative religion ‘‘extraordinarily interesting because for the first time I was able to see the Ibo system of beliefs set beside other systems. For instance, I discovered that the Yoruba and even the Ashanti in Ghana had a pantheon of gods and various gradations of divinity that resembled those of the Ibo. To study this seriously was something quite new to me.’’17 Indeed, a closer look at some things Achebe learned at Ibadan indicates that more of the ethnographic content his novels provide may have had its origins there than he let on. One biographer reports that while at

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Ibadan he read books on West African religion and culture by G. T. Basden, a former missionary and amateur anthropologist who had officiated at the wedding of Achebe’s parents (and who may have been a model for Mr. Brown), and by a trained ethnographer and admirer of Bronislaw Malinowski, C. K. Meek. Meek was an anthropological officer in the Colonial Nigerian Administrative Service, and his book on Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe (originally published in 1937) is a remarkably broad, level-headed, and sympathetic account of Ibo life that merits respect even today. Achebe in several writings chastised the British for their ignorance of local customs; in perhaps his most hostile reference to British interest in Ibo culture he portrayed the District Commissioner who oversaw the aftermath of Okonkwo’s suicide at the end of Things Fall Apart as preparing to use what he learned about local beliefs at that moment for a later book to be called The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. No doubt the attitude satirized by this title was widespread among colonial officials, but as we saw above, Achebe acknowledged that some of them were both knowledgeable and responsible, a judgment confirmed by Meek’s book. To be sure, Meek was a servant of the British imperial system, and in general he had a high opinion of what it had accomplished in Nigeria. But part of this achievement was that it allowed and even nurtured the move toward independence: in the foreword to his book’s second edition in 1949 he praised the establishment of an Eastern Regional House of Assembly, viewing it as ‘‘a national parliament in embryo’’ and as part of the wider ‘‘political ferment’’ that developed after the Second World War. He was very much of his time in applying the word ‘‘primitive’’ to African religion (although his unease at doing so is displayed in the qualification that it applied ‘‘only in a relative sense’’), but the society he depicts is extremely well organized, self-conscious, and sophisticated. He made short shrift of old fables about such things as bride price: ‘‘It is hardly necessary to remind readers that this well-established term does not imply that a wife is purchased from her parents and becomes a mere chattel of her husband. The main purpose of bride-price is to regularize and give permanence to the union of a man and a woman, and so to distinguish marriage and the foundation of a family from a mere paramour relationship.’’ He went on to note that many features of Ibo marriage were unduly favorable to husbands and—a point often illustrated in Achebe’s novels—that ‘‘the situation of an Ibo wife is never easy, for even if she gets on well enough with her husband

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she may find it difficult to live amicably in the same compound with some of his relatives, or with her co-wives, or the wives of her husband’s relatives.’’ Marriage was one of the instances in which Christianity created burdens for local people, since ‘‘marriages contracted [by Christians] under the Government Marriage Ordinance can only be dissolved by legal proceedings in British Courts, an expensive method which may involve severe hardship or make divorce impossible,’’ in contrast to traditional marriages, which could be ended without any legal complications if either party had reason to demand it. Achebe sometimes chided the British for not knowing that monarchy was foreign to Ibo political traditions, a failure of understanding that licensed their attempt to impose local kings on Nigerian villages. Meek, however, understood this history—and that there were exceptions to it— very well. ‘‘Kingship is not and never was a feature of the Ibo constitution. Where it occurs it is clearly of exotic origin. But as it does in fact occur in one or two communities, it must be described.’’ He went on to give a detailed account of the factional disputes that royal power generated where it did exist, ending with the question (to which only the future could provide an answer) of whether people there would be able to overcome their conflicts sufficiently ‘‘to devise for themselves a constitution suited to their immediate needs’’; if not, the colonial government would have to intervene more than he wished. In other places he chastised his fellow colonial officers for their insufficient knowledge about African forms of land tenure, which made them ill equipped to deal with disputes; he defended some practices associated with witchcraft as local ways of sustaining communal solidarity and toward which better understanding ought to make administrators more tolerant; and he pointed out that Christianity was unlikely to put an end to belief in witches, given the place witch cults had long occupied in European religious history. His book included numerous informed and respectful references to Chukwu and his relations to other Ibo gods. Reading Meek suggests that Achebe’s determination to present the story of his own people in his novels and to counter the influence of works such as Mister Johnson did not distance him so far from the perspectives developed by colonial officials as he would later maintain.18 I do not offer this conclusion in order to cast doubt on Achebe’s good faith or honesty; much of the personal history recounted in the first part of this chapter testifies to how fully he understood and (despite exceptions) acknowledged the debt he owed to his very British education. But it seems

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that as his awareness about the oppressive and unjust features of colonialism grew stronger, his need to take a distance from all its works deepened too, leading him to downplay the contribution to his intellectual formation made by the kind of critical anthropological thinking that Meek’s book and the teachers who assigned it to him represented. Whether or not he could have come to the strategy of using ethnography and cultural comparison as vehicles for telling the story of his people on his own, the fact is that his road to doing so passed through the portal of Ibadan. One sign that the orientation toward cultures as objects of study he encountered there shaped his approach to the society portrayed in his novels is the clarity with which they represent features of Ibo culture that made it vulnerable to encroachment by a foreign one, of which the most striking is the internal tension that made the memory of Ikemefuma’s fate a spur to Nwoye’s conversion. That Achebe gave a central place to this story is a sign that he was able to place himself at once inside and outside the Ibo culture he was determined to rescue from Western misunderstanding. A similar duality made itself felt in his other novels.

* * *

In Arrow of God, whose story takes place some years after the initial penetration of Christianity recounted in his first book, the person for and around whom ‘‘things fall apart’’ is not a warrior like Okonkwo but the aging chief priest Ezeulu. We meet him in the first scene performing his essential ritual function, which was to announce the appearance of each new moon (created and sent by the god he served, Ulu) and the festival associated with it, and especially to regulate the community’s yam production by keeping track of the lunar year, which began and ended with the harvest (Meek gave an extensive account of yam growing and the customs with which it was interwoven in his book, but used different names for the associated deities). From each year’s new crop he would set aside twelve yams, cooking and eating one at each new moon’s appearance; when he had consumed the last one it was time to proclaim the new harvest festival, after which the now ripe crop could be taken in. Ezeulu was fascinated by the power this gave him, but he wondered: was it really his or only the god’s? Could he prevent the planting and reaping by

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refusing to announce the new moon and the festivals? An inner voice tells him he would not dare, but he hears it as the harsh whisper of an enemy, determined to refuse him the power he wants to believe to be his. At the end of the novel he does just what he imagined at its start, forestalling the harvest and provoking great hardship in his village. The result was to bring about a mass defection from the cult of Ulu, to the benefit of the Christian missionaries operating in the region. Two closely linked things prepare this outcome. The first is Ezeulu’s conflict with other villagers, his competition with the priestess of the snake goddess and his anger against those who do not give him the respect he is due as Ulu’s chief priest. The second is the looming presence of the white government, whose manifest power gives the natives a deepening sense of their own weakness and a desire to overcome it. The locals have not forgotten that the colonial authority annihilated a whole village because a missionary had been killed there, in addition taking away all the natives’ guns. The only way to protect themselves, some of them conclude, is to find ways to partake of the whites’ knowledge and thereby gain a share in their power, which some of them also hope to use against their local enemies. Ezeulu shares this view. He has friendly relations with a British administrator, Winterbottom, and sends one of his sons to the whites’ school. But the boy, Oduche, goes beyond what his father intended, at once coming to feel separate from the life around him and seeing his education as a way to become a great man in his village. At one point he imprisons a sacred python in a box; the creature emerges unharmed, but the incident stirs up resentment that heightens Ezeulu’s conflict with the votaries of the snake goddess, deepening the already-existing divisions in the village. He thinks it possible that Ulu has led him to establish relations with the whites in order to use their power to combat those who prefer other gods. Things are brought to a head when Winterbottom undertakes to carry out the British strategy of ruling indirectly through local notables, by making Ezeulu a kind of king. He had looked askance at this strategy when his superiors first began to promote it, both because he believes that Africans are bound to abuse such power if they have it, and because he knows that the Ibo were ‘‘a people who abominated kings.’’ But duty makes him obey the instructions of those higher up. When he summons Ezeulu to meet with him in the neighboring village where the British have their local headquarters, however, the priest does not understand why he is being told to make the journey, and takes it as some kind of insult. Once arrived he

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refuses the new office, regarding his priesthood as a higher one, and the British, bristling at the resistance to their authority, imprison him for a time. The lockup is mild enough (he is allowed many visitors), but it causes him to miss the twelfth new moon, at once confirming his power to delay the harvest and giving his enemies in the village an opportunity to combine against him. Faced with them on his return he expressly refuses to proclaim the festival, despite warnings that in the past people had abandoned gods that did not protect them. So do they now: when Ezeulu’s recalcitrance leads to the ruin of the harvest, the missionaries point out that their God makes no such demands on His people, inspiring a large-scale turn from the cult of Ulu to Christianity. As in Things Fall Apart, the gateway through which foreign ways intrude to undermine traditional life is widened by the internal conflicts the culture fosters, and by the characteristically Ibo propensity for individual self-assertion that Ezeulu and Okonkwo each displays in his way. Next to his portrayal of Ibo culture, Achebe here provides, more than in his first book, a parallel account of the British colonials. They share many features with the Africans: their conviction that they are governed by common aims and values does not prevent them from feeling competitive and jealous toward each other, and of course they exploit the natives, much more effectively than the latter are able to do in return. Like the native culture, theirs is not monolithic, making room in particular for disagreement about Africans. Winterbottom’s negative view of blacks includes a belief that they are barbarously cruel (he twice deplores the practice of burying a condemned man alive up to his neck in mud with a yam on his head, in order to attract vultures) and overly ambitious (they think too much about acquiring titles). But these notions are resisted by Winterbottom’s younger and self-consciously more progressive subordinate Clarke, who points out that every human group has its own way of practicing cruelty and that ‘‘the love of title was a universal human failing.’’ Doubtless Achebe’s sympathy for the foreigners was much less than for his own people, but Arrow of God follows Things Fall Apart in highlighting deplorable features of both (harsh treatment of women is a theme sounded here, too), and it shows that its author had penetrated quite far into the ways of thinking and feeling exhibited by the British. Clarke admires Winterbottom for sparing no effort to carry out the policy of establishing paramount chiefs despite his personal opposition to it, seeing such acquiescence as the mark of a truly civilized person. But he finds conversation with his superior

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frustrating and irritating: he restrains himself from voicing his disagreement about Ibo ambition, and when Winterbottom’s stream of dinnertable talk keeps Clarke from making clear his thinking on another subject (about the contrast between French and British practice in Africa), he feels ‘‘impotent anger with the man for not letting him finish, and personal inadequacy for not having made the point as beautifully as he had made it to himself.’’19 Later, at the moment when Ezeulu’s resistance to British policy leads to his imprisonment, the responsibility for keeping him confined and recording the official reason for it falls on Clarke because Winterbottom is ill, but the younger man finds it difficult to carry through. ‘‘Clarke was not the person to lock a man up without fully satisfying his conscience that justice had not only been done but appeared to have been done. . . . If he kept the fellow in jail what would he say was his offence? What would he put down in the log?’’ This apparently small point vexed Clarke like a fly at siesta. He realized that it was insignificant but that did not help matters; if anything it made them worse. He could not just clap an old man (yes, a very old man) into jail without reasonable explanation. All very silly really, he thought, now that Winterbottom had given him the answer. The moral of all this was that if older coasters like Winterbottom were no wiser than younger ones they at least had finesse, and this was not to be dismissed lightly.20 It may be that sheer talent and insight could suffice to produce so penetrating and subtle a portrayal of British values and the confusions they may engender, without benefit of the education and socialization Achebe received at his schools, but in fact he did pass through these remarkable outposts of ‘‘civilized’’ culture, identifying strongly with them in his early life (when he happily learned to play cricket and to put on the gentlemanly dress proper to it), and testifying to the persisting marks they left on him later. His ability to switch back and forth between native and British contexts in Arrow of God, taking on the tones and accents of people in the second no less easily than the first, surely reflects that experience, and it constitutes a significant part of what made him so distinguished and convincing a writer.

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Whether or not one takes the ease and subtlety exhibited by Achebe’s shifting back and forth between these idioms as signifying his simultaneous insertion into the two cultures he portrayed, it is exactly the problems generated by such a lived duality that dominate the third book in his trilogy (the second to be written), No Longer at Ease. Its main figure, Obi, is a person who shared much more with Achebe himself than do the chief characters in the other two novels: he has received an extensive British education, including a period of study in England, which he then seeks to use as a member of the educated elite in independent Nigeria, just the path Achebe described for himself and those like him. (He did not study at an English university but did attend a London school run by the BBC.) Obi’s story continues that of Things Fall Apart: he is the son of Isaac, the name given to Nwoye at his baptism, and bears the surname of his grandfather, Okonkwo. Like Achebe, he grows up in a Christian household, still maintained by his parents, but by the time he returns from England he has lost any religious faith. He still feels a strong attachment to his family (and to local customs and food), and looks forward with great anticipation to his reunion with them and his return to Umofia. But this attachment is part of what makes him end by suffering a dismal failure, like Okonkwo and Ezeulu unable to maintain the form of life he and others think should be his. Looked on as a person of exceptional promise who was expected to bring many benefits to his people, he ends up disgraced: arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison—for taking bribes. We learn this outcome at the novel’s start; the rest of the book is devoted to telling how it came about. The reasons have much to do with the context in which the story plays itself out, mid-twentieth-century urban Lagos, a world estranged from rural Umofia, yet still deeply tied to it. Achebe portrays this world in a highly critical light, basically sparing no one. The British, soon to hand over the direction of Nigeria to its natives, still harbor views about Africans that echo those voiced by Winterbottom: ‘‘The African is corrupt through and through,’’ one official declares; education is wasted on him. Those who say so may attribute the continent’s backwardness to its debilitating climate and the diseases it fosters, but these still provide whites with grounds to deny that blacks have the capacity to govern themselves. Achebe would later express doubts about Nigeria as a self-governing country himself, especially after the persecution of the Ibos began; although he attributed some of the problems that emerged then to

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the colonial disruption of its traditions and to the British attempt to maintain a degree of post-colonial control through proxies, evident anticipations of his later disillusionment already figure largely in this, the second of his novels to be published (in 1960, the year of independence). The city stinks, not just from sewage and garbage but because taxi drivers go out of their way to run over dogs, believing that killing them brings good luck, while avoiding ducks in the road because ‘‘duck be different. If you kill duck you go get accident or kill man.’’ Similar pidgin language recurs throughout the book and in Achebe’s later novels, too (his ear for it no less sharp than for British or village talk); colorful as it may be, the ideas expressed in it, here as elsewhere, are limited and easily satirized. The caustic tone deepens in regard to half-educated natives who try to affect formal British speech, such as the Umofians in Lagos who have helped to support Obi’s time in England and who welcome him back on his return: ‘‘The importance of having one of our sons in this vanguard of progress is nothing short of axiomatic. . . . We are happy that today we have such an invaluable possession in the person of our illustrious guest of honor.’’ The acquisitive and materialistic spirit that infuses these words is all too characteristic of such people, making itself felt in the way they adapt the old Ibo love of proverbial speech to the ambitions that drive them in the capital: ‘‘We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck. . . . We are strangers in this land. If good comes to it may we have our share. . . . But if bad comes let it go to the owners of the land who know what gods should be appeased. . . . Many towns have four or five or even ten of their sons in European posts in this city, Umofia has only one.’’ In a later meeting one speaker baldly declares that what draws the Umofians to Lagos is money, not work. Clearly Achebe already saw in them some of the parvenu qualities he would identify as provoking hostility to the Ibos as a group, an enmity that would not spare those who, like Obi before his downfall, resisted being caught up in such narrow concerns. No Longer at Ease may be described as the story of one idealistic young man’s failure to hold out against a corrupt system. Bribery is rife in the civil service, and the Africans who manage to get posts in it are quick to take on whatever trappings of the plush life enjoyed by their colonial masters they can: cars, apartments, European food, and servants, whom they treat with the same condescension and indifference as do the British. Achebe would color this world with still darker tones in the period after independence.21

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Obi’s failure to maintain his separation from this materialistic and corrupt world has multiple causes, but the deepest ones arise out of his relationship to the two cultures he inhabits—the traditional life into which he was born, and the foreign and modern way brought to Africa by the British. Both his initial sense of autonomy and its demise have their roots in this duality. At the start he seems able to lift himself into a higher sphere by virtue of the distance his in-between position gives him from both; in the end, however, the material and emotional substance each possesses endows them with a power that his intellectually constructed free space cannot withstand. The two orientations grip him like two sides of a vise, generating pressures he cannot find the resources to resist. Two elements of his life in particular bring this outcome down on his head: his love for a woman rejected by the standards of Ibo culture, and his confidence in the power of education to purge the world in which he works of its corruption. The woman, Clara, is an Ibo who, like Obi, had been studying in England, he literature and she nursing; he remembered seeing her at parties there, but it is only on their shared voyage back home that they become lovers. Their relationship gives Obi an extra tie to his own people, but it has a romantic quality absent from his earlier liaisons, and that he feels to be European. ‘‘Until Obi met Clara on board the cargo boat Sasa he regarded love as another grossly overrated European invention.’’ He had declared love to other women, but without really believing in it himself, remaining ‘‘outside it all, watching the passionate embrace with cynical disdain. . . . With Clara it was different,’’ there was no ‘‘superior half’’ at his elbow wearing ‘‘a patronizing smile.’’ But it had not been easy to approach her. Although clearly attracted to him, she remained skittish and wary, first keeping him at a distance and then seeking to discourage his love. Finally she reveals the reason: she is an osu, a member of the ‘‘untouchable’’ cast of people descended from slaves dedicated to religious cults. The two can never marry. Obi’s response is ‘‘Nonsense!’’ and he refuses to be deterred, even though he knows he will face stiff opposition from his family and others close to him. The first resistance comes from the school friend in Lagos to whom he confides his situation; when the latter gives voice to his certainty that the marriage will never come about, Obi is upset and incredulous. ‘‘It was scandalous that in the middle of the twentieth century a man could be barred from marrying a girl simply because her great-great-greatgrandfather had been dedicated to serve a god, thereby setting himself apart

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and turning his descendants into a forbidden caste to the end of Time. Quite unbelievable. And here was an educated man telling Obi he did not understand.’’ What makes Obi believe he can elude the barriers thrown up by such groundless prejudices is his sense that he lives in a sphere much wider than the one they govern: his insertion into the modern world where such superstitions have no purchase will free him from their grasp. Confident in the power this connection gives, he buys Clara an engagement ring, the Bible she desires, and things for their household.22 But the marriage is not to be. The reason is not that Obi collapses under the pressures put on him, although these are crushing. He holds out against his family’s censure when he makes a trip home to visit his gravely ill mother, at which point she and his father have been told of the affair by the Umofians in Lagos. To his argument that Christianity should liberate the family from ungodly superstition, his father replies that his becoming Christian had not cut him and his family off from their people (a point Achebe made, and judged positively, about his own family), and in their world to marry an osu is to brand person and relatives with a leprosy-like mark of shame: ‘‘Your children and your children’s children unto the third and fourth generations will curse your memory. . . . Who will marry your daughters? Whose daughters will your sons marry? . . . We are Christians, but we cannot marry our own daughters.’’23 Obi’s mother voices the hope that she may die before he can marry an osu, and declares that she will kill herself if she lives to hear of it. Later Isaac tells Obi that he has had to bear a burden of suffering for dedicating himself to the true faith and that he accepts the need for it: the past leaves its mark even on those who seek to purify themselves of it. He reminds Obi that he had been cursed by his father for converting to Christianity and that he had refused to attend Okonkwo’s funeral, unable to blot out the memory of Ikemefuma’s death. Just as he paid a price, he thinks Obi must pay one too. Although deeply troubled by all this, the young man does not yield and returns to Lagos. When he tells Clara about the visit, however, it strengthens her conviction that marrying would land the couple in a swamp of rejection and recrimination, ruining their own and others’ lives, and she gives back his ring. But in the meantime she has discovered that she is pregnant. The determination not to bear the baby is hers, not his, and the sordid details of the search for an abortion sour their relations still more. She nearly dies from an infection brought on by the badly performed procedure; when he

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goes to visit her in the hospital she turns her back, refusing even to look at him. Released some weeks later, she flees the capital. These events unfold at the same time that another chain of disasters envelops Obi, made up of the quandaries created by his work. Soon after returning from England he lands a job as an upper civil servant, becoming part of the scholarship board that administers access to higher education. Although long aware that bribery is rife in the world he enters, he is quickly reminded of it by superiors who expect him to look for bribes and by people who offer him money (and in one case sex) in exchange for favorable action on their applications. The same spirit reigns in everyday life too, where police officers and others want their palms greased. But Obi is determined not to fall into this slough, and he is convinced that he has the resources to avoid it. To the Umofians who see him as a kind of instrument they can all use to exploit the system, he tries to explain (in simple and straightforward English that contrasts with their flowery and stilted talk) that education’s purpose was ‘‘for service, not for white-collar jobs and comfortable salaries. With our great country on the threshold of independence, we need men who are prepared to serve her well and truly.’’ The moral idealism had roots in both his worlds, but its patriotic object derived from his British education, since (we learn at the very start) ‘‘it was in England that Nigeria first became more than a name for him. That was the first great thing that England did for him.’’ He believes that the reason the administration is so corrupt is that it is filled with ‘‘old Africans,’’ natives who had to claw and bribe their way up in order to obtain decent positions. Things would change once the ranks came to be filled up with people like himself, new men with university educations who would receive appointments based on their talent and training, not some kind of personal influence. Since they did not have to resort to bribery, engaging in it would not come to seem normal and acceptable to them; they might not be better than the others but ‘‘they can afford to be virtuous’’ and their virtue ‘‘can become a habit.’’24 But the reality of his life as a civil servant reveals the hollowness of these hopes. Along with a salary that at first seems almost princely to him come obligations that quickly eat it away. He and Clara are thrilled that he can buy a new car with the allowance given him, as he is expected to do; the warning note struck by the reminder that he will have to pay annual insurance and licensing fees is too soft to be heard in the din of enthusiasm, but

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it will grow louder and more discordant when other demands rise up to join it. On his first trip to his village he discovers that his family needs his material help and he commits himself both to sending his parents money and to supporting a younger brother’s education (Achebe’s older brother came to his aid in a similar way when the need arose). The obligation to pay back the funds for his trip to England advanced by the Umofians in Lagos takes a bigger bite than he expected; so do bills, especially for costly electricity. Whipsawed by all this, Obi begins to cut down on expenses, telling his servant to buy less and cheaper food and prepare simpler meals. But he can’t make ends meet. Clara, seeing the difficulties, slips him a £50 note from her savings; he is ashamed to take it but cannot afford to refuse, vowing he will quickly pay her back. Then he is robbed by some teenage boys who prey on visitors to a nightclub, using the pretense of looking after their cars in the parking lot. The trip to Umofia to visit his sick mother jacks up the pressures, drawing him into the conflict with his family over Clara, and reducing his income by the amounts required to pay back the civil service for the allowance advanced so he can make the journey. On his return the discovery of Clara’s pregnancy inflicts a need for yet more cash to pay for the illegal abortion, even as it spells the end of their relationship. At this point the news arrives that his mother has died. Overcome with grief and guilt, he finds himself affected in ways he cannot understand. His sleep patterns disturbed, he fails to leave for home at the intended moment, and in the end never goes to his mother’s funeral (telling himself it was better to send money than to waste it on petrol), a turn one of the Lagos Umofians compares to Isaac’s failure to attend Okonkwo’s. At this point something inside Obi snaps; nothing seems the same to him. Suddenly all his resistance to taking the bribes offered him (both material and sexual) dissolves. As he yields to them one after another, word gets out; he is spied on, discovered, and arrested. In one of his many interviews, Achebe summarized his sense of why Obi could not escape this fate. I think it is because he has come out of his society without joining a new one. If he belonged to the old society, the corrupt one, he would have known the rules and been well protected. He would not have gone to jail because he would have sent his steward to go and get the money. He had bits of his past and bits of the new morality

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he picked up in his studies, and he was completely at sea in the Lagos society. In other words it is isolation that brings his fall. I am not saying that one should never be isolated. Most of the great teachers and great revolutionaries have had to step out of their societies. But if you are going to do that you should know well in advance what you are in for and be prepared to suffer like Okonkwo or Ezeulu. This describes Obi’s location between cultures very well (albeit not quite in the terms we have used here), and points to the kind of weakness that attempts to inhabit such spaces often engender. But Achebe knew that they could be sources of strength too, despite the perils they harbor, and that his own career was an attempt to draw on the first without succumbing to the second. In one of the interviews where he spoke about living and working at a ‘‘crossroads,’’ he specified the two pathways that intersected in him as ‘‘community’’ and ‘‘network.’’ The community existed in traditional village life, providing a space for face-to-face interactions between people who were personally connected to each other in a variety of ways; the network, for which his British education was an essential point of access, stretched out into the far distance, linking him, and other African writers, to often anonymous people in faraway parts of the world. ‘‘There’s a certain strength in being able to have one foot in the network and another foot in the community. But if one forgets one’s foot in the community—and that is quite possible—one can get carried away into a network system. And this is a real problem for us,’’ posing a challenge that was ‘‘very exciting and also very perilous.’’ He did not quite say that he thought his own career rose to the challenge—in contrast to Obi’s—but clearly this was at least his hope.25 There is reason to ask, however, whether in the description of Obi quoted just above, Achebe’s determination not to let his own involvement in such a global network loosen his ties to traditional Ibo culture led him to treat his partially autobiographical protagonist with less sympathy than he deserves. Obi’s theory that educated people would not be susceptible to bribery was doubtless both naive and elitist, but it rested on a revulsion against real abuses and a worthy desire to combat them. His rejection of the prohibition toward osu may have been fueled by his highly personal feelings and desires for Clara, but it simultaneously defended principles of equality and respect for groups labeled ‘‘inferior’’ that advocates for

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oppressed peoples, surely including formerly colonized Africans, can hardly afford to ignore. Okonkwo and Ezeulu are heroic figures, no doubt (and in one place a rural Umofian compares Obi with his grandfather, on the grounds that both are strong defenders of principle, in contrast to both Okonkwo’s weak father and the flexible Isaac), but the books that tell their stories also recognize elements in their culture that justifiably breed alienation from it—the institutionalized vengeance that led to the execution of Ikemefuma, the often cruel treatment of women, the trashing of twins, the stigmatizing of the osu—and that opened the way for the intrusion of foreign alternatives. In order to show that the power Obi thought he could derive from appealing to values outside his native culture was insufficient to support his vow to marry Clara and maintain his resistance against taking bribes, Achebe had to endow the unrelenting accumulation of blows against him with Greek proportions, more crushing even than the circumstances that brought down his other tragic figures. That, paradoxically or not, Achebe himself achieved his remarkable position as a pioneer of African literature and a writer of worldwide significance precisely by chronicling the bitter failures visited on people who shared with him the condition of living at a cultural crossroads demonstrates that both outcomes were possible in his world; his success in realizing the positive one helped sustain his ties to the West, even in face of the antagonism he sometimes expressed toward it, and contributed to the remarkable aura of objectivity and balance his books often project. I think we can be helped to understand this achievement better by looking briefly now at two of his contemporaries, Africans whose fictional portrayals of attempts to live between cultures both resemble and differ from his.

* * *

The two writers come from widely distant parts of the continent and they represent markedly different modes of involvement with European culture, but they share certain things with each other, and with Achebe. The first, Sheikh Hamidou Kane, was born in Senegal, in French West Africa, in 1928, two years before Achebe, and published his best-known book, Ambiguous Adventure (1962), in French; the second, Tayeb Salih, a year younger than Kane, was a Sudanese who wrote Season of Migration to the North (1966)

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in Arabic, although he had studied in England and worked for years for the BBC. Neither was a full-time writer and their literary output was less than Achebe’s, but both have been widely (and I think justifiably) praised by critics and readers. Although the grounds for establishing links between their writings and their lives are narrower than for him, the inner conflicts of each one’s chief characters seem too deeply felt to be merely imagined. Achebe admired Kane’s novel as a native account of African life comparable to his own work, but many things distinguish them from each other, beginning with the African societies from which they came. Whereas Achebe’s world was fluid, individualistic, and little affected by inherited status, Kane’s was strongly hierarchical, dominated by an aristocracy whose position descended from generations of ancestors; the chief figure in his novel is one of them. And whereas Ibo religion was polytheistic and spiced with cults of sacred plants and animals, Kane’s was intensely Islamic and monotheistic. The important place of Qu’ranic study in such a world meant that formal schools and the literacy they imparted were central elements, in contrast to the orally transmitted stories and proverbs of the Ibos. That Senegal’s colonial masters were not British but French was significant too. The French, like the British, were expanding educational opportunities for their colonial subjects in the years after World War II, opening lyce´es that paralleled the government colleges of Nigeria, setting up post-secondary faculties that later combined to become the University of Dakar, and establishing an institute for the study of African cultures in Paris, where both supporters and opponents of colonialism worked and taught. Kane’s career benefitted from these foundations much as Achebe’s did (both were quickly recognized as talented students and encouraged to go further); after receiving a largely religious education as a young child, he attended a Frenchstyle secondary school in St. Louis, then the Senegalese capital, and a lyce´e in Dakar, following which he lived and studied for several years in Paris, obtaining degrees in both law and philosophy, and participating in the intellectual ferment of the capital. Ambiguous Adventure appears to have been largely written by the time he returned to his country to begin a distinguished career in government service in 1959. The book bears the marks of his French education, as well as of his earlier Islamic one: whereas Achebe’s books are descriptive and ethnographic, Kane’s novel is highly poetic and metaphysical (Descartes and Pascal are discussed in it). It presents the cultural clash between Europe and Africa less in terms of contrasting lifeways than as a collision of worldviews.

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Central to the story is the loss of faith that the main character, Samba Diallo, undergoes while a student in Paris (Obi turns away from religion too, but it is only a minor part of his story). His rupture with his past is also that of his people, since as a boy he was the favorite pupil of the Diallobe´ spiritual leader who taught him the Qu’ran, and who would have chosen him as his successor had relations with the whites not deflected the disciple from this path. When Samba returns home after the teacher dies, he is killed by a ‘‘fool’’ who had become the teacher’s closest companion; remembering the boy from his youth, the ‘‘fool’’ can see him only as the teacher reborn, and the spectacle of Samba’s estrangement from God drives him to violence. The novel begins at a point when French rule of the Diallobe´ region is well established, and, as in Nigeria, the question of how to respond to the whites’ overwhelming power divides the native people. Some have a clear sense of what European domination means for the world at large and deplore it. One of these is Samba’s father, a courtly figure who often strikes people as having the bearing of a medieval knight. What dismays him most about the whites’ acquisitiveness and materialism is that the non-Europeans who come into contact with them absorb these passions instead of resisting them: ‘‘We see them . . . in all latitudes, aquiver with covetousness, metamorphosing themselves in the space of one generation, under the action of this new egotism which the West is scattering abroad.’’ In a kind of nightmare hallucination he imagines the diverse features that once distinguished peoples of the world from one another melting away as they take on the monochrome appearance of ersatz Europeans: ‘‘floods of human creatures of all colors’’ converge on a kind of giant hearth in whose igneous light ‘‘they lost their original colors, which gave way to the wan tint that filled the surrounding air.’’26 There is much in this image that accords with Achebe’s dismal portrait of Nigeria as it became independent, but with a significant difference: Samba’s father cherishes the cultural contrasts that give each people a particular ‘‘color,’’ but he does not consider whether some groups resembled Europeans in important ways even before they encountered them, such as those Western individualists avant la lettre, the Ibos. One reason for this contrast is the particular quality of Islamic faith Kane portrays among the Diallobe´, imparted by the spiritual master who is Samba’s teacher. It is a fervently otherworldly religion, intently focused on God as a transcendent power and the Qu’ran as the sole repository of His

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revealed word, and giving little attention to everyday life except for the place prayer should occupy in it. Death, because it draws human beings outside the earthly world they know, is a stronger reference point than life, and the message of separation from embodied being is reinforced by the master’s harsh discipline, imposing real physical suffering (ears pinched till they bleed, burns from glowing faggots) as a punishment for errors. The pain Samba undergoes does not weaken his religious devotion, however, but deepens it, branding him with the understanding that Truth must be valued far above mere well-being or happiness. The absolute nature of such Truth gives Kane’s understanding of the relations between Eastern and Western ways of knowing a different cast from Achebe’s. One of the latter’s counts against Christianity and European thinking was ‘‘the One Way, One Truth, One Life menace’’ their sense of cultural superiority loosed on the world, in contrast to the tolerance and lack of dogmatism he attributed to his own culture. In Kane’s world there is a similar opposition, but with the signs reversed: native culture is the realm of singular Truth, while Europe is devoted to mere partial and pragmatic understandings about how things work in the world. Modern science and enlightenment combat error and superstition, but they are cold and lifeless compared with the old faith’s fervent sense of closeness to the world’s ‘‘beating heart.’’ Samba’s father recognizes that the Europeans have made a new kind of sense of the world and evolved tools for both understanding and changing it, but ‘‘they are so fascinated by the returns they get from the implement that they have lost sight of the infinite immensity of the workyard. They do not see that the truth which they discover each day is each day more contracted. A little truth each day—to be sure, that must be, that is necessary. But the Truth? To have this, must one renounce that?’’27 Despite such fears the leaders of the Diallobe´ decide to send their children to the white man’s schools. At the root of this choice was the understanding that ‘‘the newcomers did not know only how to fight. They were strange people. If they knew how to kill with effectiveness, they also knew how to cure, with the same art. Where they had brought disorder, they established a new order. They destroyed and they constructed. On the black continent it began to be understood that their true power lay not in the cannons of the first morning, but rather in what followed the cannons.’’ The decision in favor of the French schools was taken only after much debate. On the one side was the understanding that only by partaking of the whites’ strange power could the Diallobe´ survive and defend their heritage:

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‘‘When the hand is feeble, the spirit runs great risks, for it is by the hand that the spirit is defended.’’ But the perils ran in the other direction too: ‘‘The spirit runs great risks when the hand is too strong.’’ The questions were posed somewhat differently than in Achebe’s Iboland, partly because conversion to Christianity was less of an issue in Senegal, where the colonial schools were modeled on the secular and state-run educational system of the French Third Republic, and partly because the hierarchical nature of Diallobe´ society meant that individuals had to be guided by their leaders in such matters (there was no counterpart here to Nwoye’s being drawn to Christianity by personal feelings generated by Ikemefuma’s execution). The person whose views decided things was the remarkable figure of the ‘‘Most Royal Lady’’ (la grande royale), sister of the Diallobe´ chief and Samba’s aunt. Endowed with both physical strength (she was an expert horsewoman) and moral authority (she had pacified the northern region of the country), she was respected and feared everywhere. Her face, the only part of her left visible by her engulfing blue robe and yellow slippers, ‘‘was like a living page from the history of the Diallobe´ country.’’ It was through her influence that the young Samba was taken out of the spiritual master’s school and sent to a French one, setting him on the path that would take him to Paris.28 Her reasons had nothing to do with liking the white school; on the contrary, ‘‘I detest it.’’ She chose her course with a clear-eyed and tragic vision of its possible consequences. ‘‘The school in which I would place our children will kill in them what today we love and rightly conserve with care. Perhaps the very memory of us will die in them. When they return from the school, there may be those who will not recognize us. What I am proposing is that we should agree to die in our children’s hearts and that the foreigners who have defeated us should fill the place, wholly, which we shall have left free.’’ Samba’s father took a less bleak view, yielding to the need to acquire foreign knowledge, but holding out the hope that his son, together with all the non-Europeans drawn into the net of the West— ‘‘Hindus, Chinese, South Americans, Negroes, Arabs’’—would be able to contribute to building the new citadel while preserving for the world the awareness of the deep well of dark Truth whose depths Western-style knowledge could not plumb.29 But it is the Most Royal Lady’s more bitter vision that predicts Samba’s fate. In Paris he follows a path no less charted by willingness to confront the dangers European culture throws up than was her admonition to their

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people, studying philosophy out of what he recognizes as ‘‘the morbid attraction of danger. I have chosen the itinerary which is most likely to get me lost.’’ Prominent among the issues that imperils his faith is the tension between human liberation and divine obedience, between a perspective that welcomes every historical development that promises to realize human potential and to free people from suffering and oppression and one that values only those actions that affirm or accept God’s governance of the world. A debate around these questions breaks out at the home of Lucienne, a French fellow student (and member of the Communist Party) with whom Samba has an abortive liaison. Her idealistic missionary father tells of the dream he once had, quickly punctured by his superiors, to preach the gospel in Africa all by itself, unaccompanied by any support or supplies, military, economic, or even medical, thereby hoping ‘‘that the example of your faith would have revived our own.’’ When Samba regrets that this dream of putting devotion to God above every merely human purpose never had a chance of being realized, Lucienne responds with skepticism: Does he mean that ‘‘it was more urgent to send you pastors than physicians?‘‘ Yes, he replies, for the reason that ‘‘my country is dying because it dares not settle’’ once and for all the alternative ‘‘between faith and the health of the body.’’ In Lucienne’s view such an option should not arise: ‘‘The possession of God ought not to cost man any of his chances.’’ But for Samba the choice is pressing and it is the Europeans who have imposed it: ‘‘It exists—and it seems to me to be a product of your history. . . . For my part, if the direction of my country devolved upon me, I should admit your doctors and your engineers only with many reservations, and I do not know whether I should not have combated them at the first encounter.’’ The communist Lucienne believes she can sympathize with the pain behind this resistance, but she warns her friend about the company in which ‘‘you would find yourself in that combat’’: some might side with him for admirable reasons like his own, but most who did so would ‘‘ally themselves with this cause to cover up designs that would move backward.’’30 Although far from Lucienne’s politicized perspective, Samba is struck by this rejoinder, in part because it echoes debates among his own people. His teacher, the spiritual master, had been troubled by similar doubts in the days when Samba was his pupil. What if God’s giving victory to the white foreigners was an indication that ‘‘we, his zealots, have offended Him?’’ One troubling sign in this regard was the report he had ‘‘heard that in the country of the white man, the revolt against poverty and misery is

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not distinguished from the revolt against God. . . . What must have been the misbehavior of those who believe in God if, at the end of their reign over the world, the name of God should arouse the resentment of the starving?’’ Now, in the midst of Samba’s troubles in Paris, his father writes to him about a conversation with the spiritual master soon before the latter’s death, in which the old man confessed his despair: ‘‘I have thought this infamous thought: that God could be an obstacle to the happiness of men,’’ and he went on to condemn religious leaders who have used their claim to stand close to God as a weapon to defend their own power and keep people obedient: the ‘‘most holy of all the holy wars’’ would be against them. The conversation at Lucienne’s house and the letter from his father combine to drain away Samba’s remaining resistance against the assault of doubt, leaving him faithless and unattached. ‘‘What have these problems to do with me? I have the right to do as this old man has done: to withdraw from the arena of their confused desires . . . to retire into myself. After all, I am only myself. I have only me.’’31 Near the end of his stay in Paris he meets a daughter of Africans living in the French capital; having been born there she knows nothing firsthand of her family’s place of origin, and the lack gives her a sense of disorientation that she hopes Samba can repair. But he tells her that one who has lost the road that seemed to ‘‘to penetrate to the heart of the world’’ cannot find it again. In his conversation with her, Samba exclaims that he hates the whites, hates them for having taken away his ability to ‘‘burn at the heart of people and things.’’ But it is a complex hate, born of ‘‘love repressed. . . . The most poisoned hatreds are those born of old loves.’’ What was the source of this love? Where did it begin? ‘‘I don’t know any too well. Perhaps it was with their alphabet. With it, they struck the first hard blow at the country of the Diallobe´. I remained for a time under the spell of those signs and those sounds which constitute the structure and the music of their language. When I learned to fit them together to form words, to fit the words together to give birth to speech, my happiness knew no further limit.’’ It may matter that these words and sounds were French; one might not describe English quite in this way. Perhaps, too, what Samba remembers is simply the joy of finding oneself able to enter into another human tongue, to discover that one can express oneself in a second and different idiom. But it is not only the sound or expressive power of a European language that Samba calls up here; it is also the way of thought intertwined with it.

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‘‘I had interrupted my studies with the teacher of the Diallobe´ at the very moment when he was about to initiate me at last into the rational understanding of what up to then I had done no more than recite—with wonder to be sure. With these new skills I was suddenly entering, all on one floor, a universe which was, at the very first, one of marvelous comprehension and total communion.’’ In other words, what Samba loved in French education and culture was that it did not presuppose a hierarchically structured universe of understanding, ordered by reference to an authoritative source (the Qu’ran is the defining text of Arabic) and into which one can enter only after a rote initiation, but a world of communication and comprehension ‘‘all on one floor,’’ to which one gained access directly through the human powers embodied in language itself. In essence it was the same conflict he would confront in Paris between what Lucienne called ‘‘the possession of God’’ and ‘‘the chances of man.’’ Despite the powerful attraction he feels for a culture that does not subordinate his human faculties of reason and comprehension to some supra-human power, however, he is already too deeply formed by the alternative one for the love not to turn into its opposite. By drying up his passion for ultimate Truth, French education leaves him with no way to recover his self-defining connection to the universe’s central core. ‘‘Progressively they brought me out from the heart of things, and accustomed me to live at a distance from the world.’’32 Living at such a distance puts him at a remove from both cultures. Like Achebe’s Obi, he recognizes the value of the powers to which such independence gives access, but also that the separation from concrete attachments this autonomy requires leaves him isolated and unmoored. His attempt to inhabit a space between cultures was no less heroic than Obi’s, and no less tragic.

* * *

The mix of love and hate toward the West that Hamidou Kane so poignantly evokes stands even more strongly at the center of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. This was not his only book (an earlier novella, The Wedding of Zein, was made into a highly successful film, and he published a number of short stories as well), but it is the best known, and surely the most relevant here. As a Sudanese, Salih can be seen either

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as an Arab or an African, and he wrote in Arabic, but the difference was of little account in regard to the novel’s central character: both he and others described his face as Arab but his hair as African (a compound suggested by photos of Salih as well), people in England referred to him simply as a ‘‘black man,’’ and one woman friend called him an ‘‘African demon.’’ Season of Migration to the North has often and rightly been described—like Achebe’s and Kane’s books—as an anticolonial novel. Unlike Achebe, however, Salih pays only limited attention to ethnography, and, unlike Kane, the questions he raises are seldom philosophical. His novel is above all the story of one remarkable and mysterious individual, Mustafa Sa’eed, presented to us by an unnamed narrator. The anti-imperial sentiments of the book are clear and forthright. One figure berates British colonial schools for providing native students with just enough education to occupy ‘‘junior government posts,’’ and describes post-colonial independence as a vehicle for the old masters to continue their rule from afar, by leaving behind ‘‘people who think as they do.’’ At one point Mustafa Sa’eed gives a bitter summary: ‘‘The ships at first sailed down the Nile carrying guns not bread, and the railways were originally set up to transport troops; the schools were started so as to teach us how to say ‘Yes’ in their language. They imported to us the germs of the greatest European violence, as seen on the Somme and at Verdun, the like of which the world has never previously known, the germ of a deadly disease that struck them more than a thousand years ago.’’ We will see, however, that behind this outpouring lay a far deeper and more complex relationship to the English and their language, and on this score Sa’eed’s perspective shared much with his creator Salih’s. The record of the latter’s views is much thinner than for Achebe, but in one interview he declared that there was much to admire in the responsible and humane way the British ran their Empire, and he insisted that colonialism, although forever stained by the original sin of depriving people of their rightful independence, brought significant benefits to its subjects. Like Achebe, he blamed native Africans alongside the British for the corruption and selfish ambition that degraded his country after independence, and he saw an oppressive and disturbing side to traditional customs.33 One testimony to this is the climax of Season of Migration to the North. It comes about after a sexually obsessed and much older man insists on marrying Mustafa Sa’eed’s widow, gaining the consent of her family against her will and thus demonstrating, as one of the narrator’s friends reminds

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him, that in local village society ‘‘women belong to men and a man’s a man even if he’s decrepit.’’ In this and other ways, despite all the changes brought by the twentieth century, ‘‘everything’s as it was.’’ When the new husband seeks to consummate the marriage with violence, his unyielding wife stabs him to death and then fatally plunges the knife into her own body. The bloody murder-suicide pushes the narrator, who already knows much about Sa’eed, to uncover—as we will in a moment—the cave of his secrets.34 Their relationship had begun when the narrator returns to his Nile village after a seven-year absence, studying English poetry in a British university, an education that prepares him for a government job in the newly independent country. During this time the outsider Sa’eed had taken up residence in the village, married, had two sons, and become a solid and respected but also enigmatic participant in local life. When the two men first meet they speak about the narrator’s studies, and a bond of sympathy develops between them. The returned native recognizes something unusual in the former outsider, but has no notion what it might be until an evening when the two are drinking together in company with others. Suddenly Sa’eed bursts forth with a dozen lines of English poetry, about the suffering of World War I, delivered ‘‘in a clear voice and with an impeccable accent,’’ and he is visibly and deeply affected by his own words. Among those present only the narrator understands what has happened, and his shocked reaction leads to a meeting in which Sa’eed—perhaps he has been waiting for such an opportunity—tells the younger man the outlines of his story. Soon afterward he disappears; his body is never found but he has left a will, making the narrator his executor. Nothing is ever heard of him again.35 In outline this is his story. Born into a somewhat similar village, Sa’eed had been sent to schools in Khartoum and Cairo, then sailed to England where he remained for some thirty years. He studied at Oxford and became a well-known economist, teaching there and writing a number of books. He also had a series of torrid affairs with English women, several of whom committed suicide after the break-up. Finally he married one—and murdered her. He was saved from the gallows by an effective defense at his trial, mounted, in his own account, by people moved by a powerful British sense of fairness, and without his in any way asking for their aid. He might have preferred the death sentence; instead he spent seven years in prison, after which he left Europe and traveled throughout the world, before coming to the narrator’s village and settling down.

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Away in Khartoum at the time of the murder and suicide, the narrator returns to search out what lay behind it. Among the things he discovers is one that gives Sa’eed’s history its special twist. Mustafa’s compound in the village contained a locked room, rectangular with a peaked roof and green windows, sealed by an iron door. No one save him had ever entered it, but the narrator has the key, received from its owner with the will that appointed him guardian of Sa’eed’s two sons. Until now he has never used it, but the bloody events put an end to his reluctance. He enters the place in a tortuous mood fed by hostility toward the villagers (who tried to hide what had happened from him), guilt at not having had the courage to declare his own love to Mustafa’s widow, so that he could have married her himself (he knows she would have accepted him) and saved her from her fate, and anger toward Mustafa for having laid the ground for it all. The space is musty and dark and only after a while can he begin to make out its contents. Good God, the four walls from floor to ceiling were filled, shelf upon shelf, with books and more books and yet more books. . . . The whole of the room was covered with Persian rugs. . . . [On one wall] a fireplace—imagine it! A real English fireplace with all the bits and pieces . . . with the mantelpiece of blue marble. . . . On either side of the fireplace were two Victorian chairs covered in a blue silk material . . . [and over the mantelpiece] the face of a woman . . . a large portrait in a gilt frame. Nearby were leather upholstered chairs, a long wooden dining table, silver candelabra, and ‘‘a settee covered in blue velvet, with cushions of—I touched them: of swansdown.’’ The books ranged over a wide swath of British literature and scholarship: the Encyclopedia Britannica, Gibbon, Macaulay, Kipling, Moore, Shaw, Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, Namier, Laski, Hazlitt, Doughty, many others, including several works of Sa’eed himself. But it was all English or European: ‘‘Not a single Arabic book.’’ Elsewhere there were photos of some of the women about whom Mustafa had told the narrator earlier, along with long accounts of his relations with them. And a single issue of The Times of London, dated on a Monday in 1927, with its stories, letters, and advertisements, an outline summary of the life, public and private, of the country on a single day.

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The space was not wholly devoid of reference to the world just outside. In one notebook, colored drawings of English country scenes shared space with ‘‘pencil sketches of people from our village.’’ All the artwork was skillfully done and the locals portrayed were the ones of most moment in Mustafa’s life: his wife Hosna; the narrator’s grandfather, whom the older man admired; his best friend from childhood, Mahmoud, with whom Mustafa worked; and Wad Rayes, the old man whose forced marriage to Hosna had led to the bloody double death. ‘‘Their faces looked out at me with the penetrating expressions I had long been aware of but which I had been incapable of defining. Mustafa Sa’eed had drawn them with a clarity of vision and sympathy that approached love.’’ Wad Rayes’s image was especially prominent: there were eight sketches of him. ‘‘Why was he so interested in Wad Rayes?’’ Apart from the images the notebook contained only two things, a title and a dedication. The title was ‘‘My Life Story—by Mustafa Sa’eed.’’ The dedication was ‘‘To those who see with one eye, speak with one tongue and see things as either black or white, either Eastern or Western.’’36 We are given no hint in Salih’s novel of how Mustafa Sa’eed could have set up this shrine to his double life, and especially to the British part of it, the one to which he could no longer maintain direct ties. But the love that seemed to inspire the local portraits was no less evident in the astounding collection of objects, furniture, and books. And yet in both cases that love is neither ordinary nor easy to comprehend, since the story of his life Mustafa told the narrator, and for which letters and notebooks in the room provided details, was of a being incapable of love. All his life he had been a person of singular isolation, living from the start the condition to which Obi Okonkwo or Samba Diallo, or Salih’s narrator, came as their worlds collapsed; it was this condition that empowered him to enter into the British life he sought to preserve in his sealed room. We learn from his ‘‘Life Story’’ that he never knew his father, who died some months before Mustafa’s birth. Things were only slightly different with his mother, whose visage he remembered as ‘‘a thick mask, as though her face were the surface of the sea. . . . It was as if she were some stranger on the road with whom circumstances had chanced to bring me. . . . I used to have . . . a warm feeling of being free, that there was not a human being . . . to tie me down as a tent peg to a particular spot.’’ His career as a student began one day when he alone of the boys with whom he was playing did not run away from the government official who

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came to his village in search of pupils. In school he ‘‘discovered in my brain a wonderful ability to learn by heart, to grasp and comprehend. On reading a book it would lodge itself solidly in my brain’’; problems in arithmetic melted away before him. ‘‘My mind was like a sharp knife, cutting with cold effectiveness. . . . I was cold as a field of ice, nothing in the world could shake me.’’ This is the key in which the rest of his life was played out; to no one did he feel any warmth or real attachment. There was something fascinating about him, especially to white women, whom he charmed with an appearance they considered exotic, and rendered still more striking by the invented names and made-up stories he attached to it. His seductions were carried out coldly and deliberately; at one point (as he testified at his trial) he lived simultaneously with five women, all of whom he promised to marry. Unable to withstand the pain of separating from him, one after another committed suicide.37 Save one, the one he married. Her name was Jean Morris and the account he left makes her appear as a distorted mirror image of himself. When he began to notice her at parties she dedicated herself to humiliating him. ‘‘ ‘I wouldn’t dance with you if you were the only man in the world.’ When I slapped her cheek, she kicked me and bit into my arm with teeth like those of a lioness.’’ He never learned how she supported herself or who her family was. ‘‘She used to lie about the most ordinary things and would return home with amazing and incredible stories about incidents that had happened to her and people she’d met.’’ But she was ‘‘exceedingly intelligent,’’ could be very charming, and with her alone Mustafa fell in love, so fully that ‘‘I was no longer able to control the course of events.’’ She mercilessly tempted him sexually, made bargains about giving herself to him only to break them, stretched out the pursuit for three years, then said she was tired of it. ‘‘Marry me,’’ she said, and he did. But it was months before she allowed the union to be consummated. Their life together became ‘‘a murderous war in which no quarter was given,’’ punctuated by insults and infidelities on her part, and ending finally with a sexual consummation in the company of a dagger which she supplied and he placed between her breasts before pressing down on her body as he entered her, so that the blood gushed forth. Only at this point do their declarations of love ring true to each other.38 It may not be possible to provide any full and wholly satisfactory account of the ties between the passion for things British that drove Mustafa Sa’eed to construct and furnish his astounding private retreat and the

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extraordinary features of his personality that made his life-path possible. But some of the links are clear, as are their ties to other attempts to live simultaneously in more than one culture. What first distanced Mustafa from the people and things around him was the deeply rooted sense of isolation already visible in his relations to his family (whether we should think of it as innate, or as induced in him by the absence of his father and the peculiar distance his mother maintained from him, is a question neither resolvable nor of much moment). But what made that isolation into the defining feature of his being and at the same time allowed it to become a vehicle for his entry into a second culture was the powerful intellect that allowed him to penetrate with great ease into previously unencountered worlds of thought and expression. Even his body followed the lead this capacity provided: a person who had been at school with him remembered that ‘‘we used to articulate English words as though they were Arabic and were unable to pronounce two consonants together without putting a vowel in between, whereas Mustafa Sa’eed would contort his mouth and thrust out his lips and the words would issue forth as though from the mouth of one whose mother tongue it was.’’39 But even when it took a physical form this ability to enter into a second lifeworld was a product of self-conscious determination, part of what might be called the hypertrophied reflectivity that issued from Mustafa’s identification of his self with his knife-blade mind. It was the radically detached position this reflective power created that made his approach to his second culture be inseparable from the distance he maintained toward it, recreating the equivocal relationship he had with his first. By implication (since Salih never quite puts it this way) it was the original distance that separated him from British culture that fired up his attraction for it, that made him desire it as a demonstration of his powers, just as it was the distance at which Jean Morris kept him that drew him to her. From this perspective what made the room he set up so attractive to him was that it reflected back to him the intense compound of separation and involvement that defined his being, and that always remained part of his way of entering into British life, which is to say that it was the image of a self that in the very act of becoming embedded in a particular culture remained forever alien from any and every one. This reading is confirmed by the tangled web of Mustafa’s relations to the village where he married and had children before disappearing forever. We are told little about the process by which he decided to go there, but it is clear that on some level he hoped to find a form of existence opposite to

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the one he had known before, one in which a shared and acknowledged way of life gave shape and meaning to people’s existence, accompanied by only a minimum of the reflective distance that had characterized his manner of being before. The symbolic center of this way of life in Salih’s novel is the narrator’s grandfather, a man who has spent his whole life in one place and knows everything about it; his person exhibits at once the physical continuity between the village and the landscape that enfolds it, and the temporal continuity that links the present to its past and future. ‘‘By the standards of the European industrial revolution we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe.’’ Mustafa felt the power and attraction of the grandfather too, saying that he ‘‘knows the secret. ‘A tree grows simply and your grandfather has lived and will die simply.’ ’’ Something makes the narrator doubt that Mustafa really values such a simple life as much as he says (even though at this point he knows little about him). But the older man gives more evidence on this score in the will that gives the narrator guardianship over his two sons, one section of which asks him to preserve them from the infection that had poisoned his own life, ‘‘the wanderlust’’; let them instead ‘‘grow up imbued with the air of this village, its smells and colors and history, the faces of its inhabitants and the memories of its floods and harvestings and sowings.’’ But he knew that the mantle he hoped would protect the boys could not shield him from the cold he carried within. ‘‘Rationally I know what is right: my attempt at living in this village with these happy people. But mysterious things in my soul and in my blood impel me towards faraway parts that loom up before me and cannot be ignored.’’ Soon after, he was gone.40 Thus Mustafa’s life was a series of separations from the cultures he inhabited; to remain outside them in the very act of inhabiting them was his way of being who he was. Tayeb Salih never discusses this mode of being as an embodiment of the human power of reflection that is—as I argued at the beginning of this book—essential both to inhabiting cultures and to retaining distance from them, but he seems to have conceived his extraordinary character in terms close to these. This is one thing that makes his novel an exemplary instance of the project of living between cultures we are trying to explore here. But for Mustafa as for all our other subjects, this general and abstract question of cultural membership arose in a concrete form, namely as a relationship between the West and the East, which for our three African

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writers meant between dominators and subjects. Like Achebe and Kane, Salih presented this relationship sometimes in an idiom of outrage and repulsion, and sometimes in a key of magnetic attraction. Mustafa’s whole character was on one level an expression of the first; at a certain moment he views his own entry into Europe as a kind of imperial invasion in reverse, with the colonial subject as the aggressor. But his presentation of his life history as a response to those who make the world appear in the black and white terms of East and West because they can see only with a single eye and speak with only one tongue was part of the same effort to overcome this kind of opposition that found expression in his attempt to live at once the life of a simple villager and of the person who could inhabit his secret room. On one level he aspired to be more like the narrator, a person for whom acquiring a Western education was not so fraught with tension and conflict, saying of himself at one point: ‘‘I too had lived with them. But I had lived with them superficially, neither loving nor hating them.’’41 Were this a book that aimed to gain access to the experience of large numbers of people, we might try to discover how widespread these two contrasting ways of relating to the West were in twentieth-century Africa, one passionate and conflicted, the other cooler and more able to take the world as it is. Here it is enough to note that all three figures we have dealt with in this chapter understood that both were potential responses to the experience of living at a cultural crossroads. Remarkable in all three is that the characters at the center of their work were all people undone by the need to live at such a point, whereas each of the writers found an identity, a vocation, and a voice at that same intersection.

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Chapter 5

Reflection, Mystery, and Violence: Orhan Pamuk

Early in Istanbul, the essay about his native city that is also a memoir of his own life, Orhan Pamuk describes himself in a way one might take as a warning against including him in a book called Between Cultures. In contrast to some writers he admired—Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, V. S. Naipul—and who ‘‘managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations,’’ feeding their imaginations by exile and drawing nourishment ‘‘not through roots but through rootlessness,’’ Pamuk remained ‘‘in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me what I am.’’ When on a visit to Germany he encountered some fellow Turks who had recently gone to work and live there, and who knew that Pamuk’s writings involved questions about the relations between East and West, he had to disappoint their expectations that he might help them to navigate their confused sense of identity. Unlike them he saw himself as ‘‘just a Turk and not a German Turk.’’1 But Pamuk portrayed himself differently at other moments. Discussing his novel My Name Is Red, he described it and all his books as ‘‘made from a mixture of Eastern and Western methods, styles, habits and histories. . . . My comfort, my double happiness, comes from the same source. I can, without any guilt, wander between the two worlds and in both I am at home.’’ Sometimes he even described himself explicitly as inhabiting East and West at the same time. In Istanbul he reports that he became so familiar with Western travel writers who had given accounts of the Ottoman capital, and so steeped in their way of seeing it, that ‘‘whenever I sense the absence

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of western eyes, I become my own Westerner. . . . I will often feel as if I’ve become one with that western traveler . . . at once the object and subject of the western gaze.’’ In one interview he did not hesitate to declare that ‘‘I’m a westerner.’’2 Conflicting as they may be, these statements portray Pamuk’s relations to East and West in relatively calm terms. But sometimes his feelings appear as more stormy and troubled. Writing about Andre´ Gide’s Journals, where the French novelist haughtily declared Europe to be the only civilization worthy of the name, Pamuk likened his response to the ‘‘tension’’ and ‘‘guilt’’ Gide aroused in the older Turkish writer Ahmet Handi Tanpinar (otherwise a great admirer of French literature), and he pointed to the sometimes violent stories and images through which the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki conveyed his painful mix of admiration and hostility toward Europe (Tanizaki’s Naomi later provided one model for the story line of Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence). Gide brought Pamuk face-toface with feelings that were anything but poised and irenic: ‘‘My image of Europe or the West is not a sunny, enlightened, grandiose idea. My image of the West is a tension, a violence born of love and hate, longing and humiliation.’’3 Whatever the personal roots of this complex ambivalence, it also reflected patterns woven into the evolution of Pamuk’s native country and city. Geography had something to do with it, given that Istanbul stands on both banks of the Bosporus, European on one side and Asian on the other; but the stronger grounds are historical. The Turkish Republic where Pamuk was born in 1952 was the successor to the Ottoman Empire, whose position as a major world power (and an Islamic bastion and rival against the Christian West) definitively ended with its collapse in World War I (helped along by the Arab revolt in which T. E. Lawrence played his role). By then the Empire’s fortunes had long been on the wane, as enemies both internal and external sought and found ways to chop it up. Within Turkey one powerful reaction to this decline was a series of Westernizng reforms, notably the program of the ‘‘Young Turks’’ of the late nineteenth century, and—more powerful and effective—the establishment of a secular republic by a group of military officers led by Mustafa Kemal Atatu¨rk in 1922. Atatu¨rk hoped to bring his country into the modern world, and in some ways he did, but many of his compatriots had to be dragged kicking and screaming along this path, and both the resistance and the conflicts it bred have remained central to Turkish life ever since.

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At the center of this conflict was and remains the contrast between the secularism of the republicans and military leaders, who saw traditional religious ideas and practices as a chief source of the country’s weakness, and the persistent attachment of large segments of the population to Muslim faith (some of whose devotees, in Turkey as elsewhere, became more demanding and militant with the spread of radical Islam in the second half of the twentieth century). Among Atatu¨rk’s signature reforms were two that would echo in multiple ways in Pamuk’s work: the establishment of a secular system of law, and the introduction of a Latin alphabet to replace the Arabic script in which Turkish had been written. Since the official language itself remained largely the same (and was promoted against regional dialects as an instrument to unify the country), the split between traditional Turkish culture and the attempt to remodel it on Western lines was installed at the center of both literature and everyday life. Much of the opposition to these changes was rooted in rural areas and small towns, while a considerable amount of support for them came from better-off city dwellers, business and professional people and civil servants, many of whom—including Pamuk’s father—felt drawn to European life and sought to give their children Western educations. But all was not harmonious between the military regime and the bourgeois groups who shared its commitment to ‘‘progress’’; some of these, intellectuals above all, were liberal republicans who hoped to move the country toward a more participatory (although not necessarily a fully democratic) system of government. The regime, however, had many authoritarian tendencies, suppressing civic freedoms both in Atatu¨rk’s day and later. Pamuk several times portrayed the discomfort middle-class people felt, and the evasions they practiced while reaping benefits from a regime whose practices went against their announced principles. This historical ground provided the setting for Pamuk’s career, making his simultaneous insertion into Eastern and Western culture a central feature of his essays and novels. Immediately following his self-portrayal in Istanbul as at once ‘‘the object and the subject of the western gaze,’’ he adds that ‘‘not quite belonging to this place and not a stranger . . . is how the people of Istanbul have felt for the last 150 years.’’ Nor did he attribute this state of mind only to city dwellers or liberals like himself. In his most directly political novel, Snow, the Islamic radical called Blue, a chief contributor to the story’s violence, and whose death at the hands of militant secularists brings on its climax, described his feelings during a period when

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he lived in Germany in a way close to Pamuk’s: often some particular German would catch his attention, setting off an obsessive preoccupation with what the other thought of him: ‘‘I’d try to see myself through his eyes and imagine what he might be thinking.’’ In Blue’s case, becoming both subject and object of an alien gaze was not empowering, it was degrading, an intrusion that helped provoke his determination to combat the power of the West; but his sense of looking at himself through Western lenses echoes Pamuk’s, and we will see that the latter too could sometimes recognize it as demeaning.4 Pamuk was not so far from Blue in another important way, namely that in his view some of the most significant consequences of Westernization in Turkey were negative, at least in the realm of culture: by giving the final blow to the dying Ottoman Empire, Atatu¨rk and his band had done away with the old culture without bringing forth a new one to replace it. The effects of this destruction are often on view in Istanbul, first of all in the interior spaces occupied by his own family and others like it. Both his parents’ dwelling and those of his relatives (many of whom occupied units in the same multi-storied building, the ‘‘Pamuk Apartments’’) were stuffed with collections of oddments—bric-a-brac, souvenirs, remnants of former lives and habitations. The impulse to preserve such stuff was a consequence of the lesser power exercised by ‘‘the desire to westernize and modernize,’’ compared with ‘‘the more desperate wish . . . to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire, rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved’s clothes, possessions, and photographs. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums.’’ The mood such displays bred in him as a child was a mix of boredom and gloom. Later, however, he came to regard these feelings as part of a more pervasive and profound mood that infused the whole of the city’s life, a deep sadness whose Turkish name, hu¨zu¨n, he preserved in the English version of Istanbul in order to convey ‘‘a melancholy that is communal rather than private.’’ Contributing to this mood were the charred remnants of many old mansions built by imperial officials along the Bosporus; as the Empire declined their owners were no longer able to keep them up, and nearly all of them burned down in a series of fires, so that by the time of young Orhan’s childhood in the 1950s most were only gaping shells. The bleak

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impression they gave was compounded by the more modest wooden houses that lined many back streets, their listing and long-unpainted walls incongruously abutting bleak new concrete apartment buildings like the one his own extended family built and inhabited; as their fortunes waned some of the relatives had to decamp to poorer neighborhoods, adding to the sense of decline.5 Pamuk devotes a whole chapter of his memoir to hu¨zu¨n, explaining that a kind of light emanated from its darkness. The notion bore both aspects in the minds of two groups of writers who employed it, one orthodox Muslims, the other mystical Sufis (in The Black Book he would mention Massignon’s hero Hallaj as one of the latter). For the first it designated a kind of recoil from having invested too much of oneself in ‘‘worldly pleasures and material gain’’; for the second the term named ‘‘the spiritual anguish we feel because we cannot be close enough to Allah.’’ Thus both traditions saw hu¨zu¨n as turning people away from the superficial attractions of ordinary life and toward deeper needs of the spirit, each recognizing it as ‘‘a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.’’ The same was true of the specific hu¨zu¨n of the city. After giving pages to lists of features that provoke this urban melancholy—old Bosporus ferries, patient pimps on summer evenings looking for one last drunken tourist, ‘‘fifties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any Western city but here serve as shared taxis,’’ a postcard seller offering the same wares in the same spot for forty years—Pamuk concludes that hu¨zu¨n is ‘‘an ache that finally saves our souls and gives them depth.’’ It injects an air of both poetry and dignity into the resignation with which Istanbul residents approach their world; the mood that makes the city appear so dark to them is the force that draws them ever deeper into the life around them. In all these ways this melancholy becomes so inseparable from their being that its source must lie within themselves: ‘‘hu¨zu¨n is not the outcome of life’s worries and great losses but their principal cause.’’6 This cast of feeling was part of life for Istanbul’s residents as a whole, but it took on a special form for a quartet of exemplary writers Pamuk saw as his predecessors. One was a poet, another a popular historian and journalist who worked for years on a kind of encyclopedia of Istanbul life, the third a novelist and the last a writer of memoirs focused on the Bosporus. It was less their individuality that mattered to him than a feature all of them shared: they ‘‘drew their strength from the tensions between the past and the present, or between what Westerners like to call East and West;

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they are the ones who taught me how to reconcile my love for modern art and western literature with the culture of the city in which I live.’’ All at some point had been ‘‘dazzled by the brilliance of western (and particularly French) art and literature,’’ holding its grand figures in ‘‘great and sometimes childish esteem’’ and wishing to follow their path; but all discovered that to imitate these models directly would be to deprive themselves of the very originality and authenticity their exemplars inspired them to value. They found a solution by turning to a subject that was theirs alone, ‘‘the decline of the great empire into which they were born.’’ Learning from masters such as Paul Verlaine, Ste´phane Mallarme´, and Marcel Proust to cherish objects for the feelings they evoke rather than for any use or purpose they might serve (Pamuk does not say so, but this was the aesthetic program of the literary and artistic movement called Symbolism), the Turkish writers drew on their ability as natives to grasp the meaning of things around them in ways that few if any outsiders could, while infusing their subjects with poetic affect in the manner of their French literary heroes. Knowing that ‘‘the splendor of old Istanbul’’ they so deeply loved could never be revived, they sought neither a return to the past nor some imagined future, but nurtured their imagination on the solitude and melancholy that was their shared lot. Devotees of two worlds to which they both did and did not belong, they emerged as ‘‘ ‘eastern’ when asked to be ‘western’ and ‘western’ when they were expected to be ‘eastern.’ ’’7 The closeness Pamuk felt toward these writers was fed by his upbringing and the path toward becoming a writer it opened up for him. The young Orhan inherited both wealth and culture, the first devolving from the considerable fortune his paternal grandfather had amassed in business, large enough for the family’s next two generations to live off despite some serious losses and failures, the second represented by his father, a mediocre provider but a sympathetic parent and an enthusiast for European literature; he lived out part of his youth in Paris, translated French poetry, and compiled a large library. Before his death he presented his son (whose career was by then well launched) with a suitcase full of notebooks and manuscripts left over from his never-realized literary ambitions. Pamuk would take the suitcase as a point of departure for his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Given such an inheritance it is not surprising that Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, the chronicle of a business family whose trajectory leads successive generations away from practical life, on a path toward both culture and decline, became a model for Pamuk’s first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons.

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As Pamuk came to recognize and embrace his literary vocation, these elements of his upbringing drew him toward the kind of relationship to his country’s past and present he ascribed to his four ‘‘melancholic’’ predecessors. Before turning to writing he set his sights on becoming a painter, devoting much time and energy to producing scenes of the city. In these years (from his teens to age twenty-two or twenty-three) his models were French pictorial modernists loosely tied to Impressionism, particularly Raoul Dufy, Henri Matisse, and Maurice Utrillo; setting out to imitate them led him to an experience much like that of the quartet of writers, coming to self-discovery through the failed attempt to become like someone else. It was his first encounter with a problem that would later ‘‘nag at me . . . the self-contradiction—a westerner would call it the paradox—that we only acquire our own identity by imitating others.’’8 There were several reasons why these others had to be Westerners, both in visual art and in literature, most of them having to do with the absence of serviceable Eastern models in the world Pamuk knew. Although exposed to Eastern literature as a child, he could not recognize its great exemplars— notably the Thousand and One Nights (read in an old translation derived from Antoine Galland, not in Burton’s)—as belonging to the civilization he inhabited; the country where Scheherezade spun her tales seemed a foreign place. To be sure, the heroes bore names he had often heard on the streets of his city, but I saw nothing of my world in their stories; perhaps life was like this in the remote villages of Anatolia but not in modern Istanbul. So the first time I read the Thousand and One Nights, I read it as a Western child would, amazed at the marvels of the East. I was not to know that its stories had long ago filtered into our culture from India, Arabia, and Iran; or that Istanbul, the city of my birth, was in many ways a living testament to the traditions from which these magnificent stories arose. This gap between the tales and the Turkey of Pamuk’s youth was testimony to a larger problem in his native culture: ‘‘The ‘Thousand and One Nights’ is a marvel of Eastern literature. But because we live in a culture that has severed its links with its own cultural heritage and forgotten what it owes to India and Iran, surrendering instead to the jolts of Western literature, it came back to us via Europe.’’9 He would portray the same inability of

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Turkish culture to recognize and draw on its own roots in his novels, especially My Name Is Red, whose plot is framed by the weakening ties between the great Ottoman tradition of painted manuscript illustration and its Persian origins, effected partly by political conflicts between Turks and their neighbors to the East, but much more by the growing attraction exercised on officials and artists by Western painting and portraiture as it developed from the time of the Renaissance. As an adult, Pamuk believed there was a further reason for his childhood sense of alienation from the Nights, namely the degree to which the tales were dominated by the ‘‘war of deception’’ carried on between men and women in Islamic societies. Issues of gender identity and the forms of behavior prescribed for men and women in different cultures would be prominent in his novels. But at this early point it was something else that made him take Western culture as a model for his budding ambitions, both artistic and literary. This was the devaluation of representation and visual description that stemmed from Muslim restrictions on depicting the human figure, and the preference they fostered for calligraphic and decorative designs over portrayals of people and everyday life, especially in mosques and other public places. The barrier to such depiction was never absolute to be sure, finding a particular exception in manuscript illumination (a circumstance that may have been rooted in the ability of the princely and courtly circles who were the artists’ chief patrons to elude religious constraints when these interfered with their desires to embellish their lives or exalt their positions), but Pamuk regarded the limitation as a central reason why he had to draw on Western sources, even in order to write about Istanbul. He explained this need when noting that one aspect of the city’s melancholy mood was that its inhabitants commonly saw and imagined it in black and white rather than in color. The city had been enlivened by ‘‘glorious colors’’ in the past, but these ‘‘were never painted by local hands.’’ To be sure, native artists produced views of the city, but they did so in a particular way. ‘‘Ottoman miniaturists took their inspiration from Persians. Like the Divan poets who praised and loved the city not as a real place but as a word . . . they saw the city as a map or as a procession passing in front of them. Even in their Books of Ceremonies, their attention was on the sultan’s slaves, subjects, and magnificent possessions, the city was not a place where people lived but an official gallery, viewed through a lens of unvarying focus.’’ As a result, people in search of an image of actual life in old

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Istanbul to illustrate a schoolbook or a magazine article had little choice but to turn to the engravings produced by Western artists. Most of these were in black-and-white, but there were notable exceptions, in particular the gouaches painted by the traveling eighteenth-century French architect and illustrator Antoine-Ignace Melling, testimony to how brightly varied and beautiful the Ottoman capital had been in its heyday. The splendor of Melling’s images made the absence of native ones stand out more, contributing in their own way to the hu¨zu¨n generated by imperial and urban decline. Melling’s witness to the city’s former glories underlined the fact that Istanbul natives of the time ‘‘did not know how to paint themselves or their city—indeed had no interest in doing so.’’ And what was true of painting was even more so of novels: only in its Western form, which alone gave ordinary individuals a central place, could literature provide models for visualizing the city not as a stage for the dramatization of imperial power but as ‘‘a place where people lived.’’10 Western art and literature were thus central to what drew Pamuk to the West. Given the effacement of the old Ottoman culture, a native Turk who aspired to be a painter or writer had little choice but to draw on foreign models, and in addition Western forms favored an engagement with everyday reality and the individuals who lived it that traditional Turkish ones did not seek. But these recognitions did not dissolve his attachment to the hu¨zu¨n of his native city or to qualities linked to it in other parts of Turkish life. In his novel Snow he would specify what drew him to the remote Anatolian town of Kars where it took place as ‘‘the simplicity . . . the companionship, the intimacy, the fragility of life, its continuity, and the sense of being in a place where time moves so slowly,’’ all qualities disrupted by the intrusion of modern life and politics. His description of the abovementioned writer Tanpinar had reference to a part of himself too: ‘‘as preoccupied with the tranquil dignity of the pre-modern culture as he was with European modernism.’’11 Mixed in with the magnetism he found in Western life and culture was an ineluctable critique of it, and especially of those who sought to remake Turkey on its model: the charred shreds and remnants of a former splendor they left behind testified that something deeply desirable had been lost. All these things found their way into what he described as an image of the West ‘‘born of love and hate, longing and humiliation.’’ By the time Istanbul appeared in 2003, Pamuk had published several novels, and he used the memoir’s account of his childhood to highlight

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connections between recurring themes in his fiction and two closely connected early experiences. One was his belief that somewhere there existed a second version of himself, and the other his fascination with mirrors, both real and metaphorical. The memoir begins with the first: ‘‘From a very young age I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: Somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double.’’ The writer professed not to know where this notion came from, but he associated it with once having been told that the face of a generic and kitschy photo of a child hanging on the wall of a relative’s apartment was actually his own. He knew this was not so, but the resemblance made him wonder if the little boy in the picture was the ‘‘other Orhan,’’ a connection that calls up an idea he would develop in his 2010 Norton lectures at Harvard, namely that identifying with some fictional character, generic or not, expands our world by giving us a sense that we might be other than we are. In a different way he would later draw the same sense from having both an ‘‘Eastern’’ and a ‘‘Western’’ self.12 The literal mirror he designated as providing a similar experience of self-multiplication was a three-paneled glass attached to his mother’s dressing table. In moments of boredom he would push aside the other items on the surface and ‘‘cheer myself up with a game very similar to one I would later play in my novels.’’ Bringing my own head forward so that I could see it in the central panel of the mirror triptych, I would push the two wings of the mirror inward or outward until the two side mirrors were reflecting each other and I could see thousands of Orhans shimmering in the deep, cold, glass-colored infinity. . . . Caught between the three mirrors, the tens and hundreds of reflected Orhans changed every time I altered the panels’ positions. . . . I was proud to see how slavishly each link in the chain aped my every gesture.13 All these doubles were ones he knew he was causing to appear himself, and such self-multiplications, willed or imposed from outside, would recur over and over in his writings.

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One of the most striking appeared in his novel of 1985 (the third published), The White Castle. The story revolves around the idea of a second self, since its subject, as the text says, is ‘‘two men who had exchanged lives.’’ The first is an erudite Venetian scholar—never tied down by a name—captured by Ottoman sailors in a sea battle and brought to Istanbul early in the seventeenth century; after refusing to convert to Islam, he is given as a slave to a servant of the Sultan whom we only know as Hoja (the name means ‘‘master’’), the man whose persona he later assumes. When the Italian first sees the other he is knocked back by a resemblance that makes him think he has somehow come face-to-face with another version of himself: ‘‘It was as if someone wanted to play a trick on me and had brought me in again by a door directly opposite the one I had first come through, saying, look, you really should have been like this, you should have come in the door like this, should have gestured with your hands like this, the other man sitting in the room should have looked at you like this.’’ Hoja seems unmoved by the resemblance, but he takes the Venetian as his servant, hoping to further his own career by drawing on the store of Western knowledge the other brings. The two spend many years together, sometimes in friendship, sometimes in hostility and even hatred. Hoja uses what he learns from his slave to devise projects such as fireworks displays, calendars, and predictions, and later a mysterious weapon, so as to gain favor with the Sultan (eventually this puts the Italian into close relations with the ruler too). In addition, however, the Turk later turns to the other for help when he finds himself anxious to understand why ‘‘I am what I am.’’ What provokes the exchange of identities, however, is the failure of the ambitious weapon the pair construct for the Sultan. The military disaster that ensues allows jealous courtiers to defame the pair, and especially to attribute it to treachery on the part of the foreigner, putting his life in danger. But it is Hoja who flees to Venice, dressed in the other man’s clothes and taking the Italian’s identity away with him. This transformation was made possible by the language instruction the narrator had given him, together with a deep fund of information about the Venetian’s country, his family, and his life before capture. Hoja’s departure leaves the other who so resembles him to take over the office of Imperial Astrologer the Turk had attained. Although the Sultan seems to know that he is not the real Hoja, he allows him to continue as if he were; finally, however, the anxiety this game generates induces the narrator to leave the Ottoman capital for another town, Gebze, where he later sets down the story we are now reading

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(and which a preface to the novel tells us was later discovered and published by one of the characters in Pamuk’s previous novel, Silent House).14 He tells us about writing the text in the same first-person European voice that speaks throughout, but it is as ‘‘Hoja’’ that he now lives and works, and the masquerade penetrates his own consciousness at least to the degree that we often cannot be certain to which of the two persons the pronouns ‘‘he’’ and ‘‘I’’ refer. The story reaches its end when, years later, the other Hoja returns, presenting himself as an Italian traveler who is neither of the persons he has been before, but who knows uncannily much about both. Reading the other’s text, he is fascinated by the character who mirrors back to him the self he may once have been. If this summary makes it unclear whether the two figures retain their ‘‘real’’ identities beneath the tissue of ambiguities, fabrications, and masquerades the story weaves around them, that is as it should be. The ‘‘real’’ is both amplified and dissolved by the play of mirrors the novel sets up. Although in both Istanbul and The White Castle such reflective doubling has a place in both Eastern and Western experience, the novel like the memoir sees the practice of self-reflection as a characteristically Western preoccupation, and views Westerners as especially drawn to the possibility it opens up of being other than they are. This point is first made in The White Castle by the contrast between the Venetian’s immediate fascination with the resemblance between the two men and the Turk’s indifference to it, but it is more fully developed later, when the narrator spends an evening with a Turkish travel writer, a real and well-known figure named Evliya Chelebi (he lived from 1611 to 1682, and he was mentioned with admiration in Silent House). Passing through Gebze near the novel’s end, Chelebi is hosted by ‘‘Hoja,’’ regaling him with many curious tales from his travels. It is in response to these stories that the narrator, as he says, ‘‘first imagined this tale you are about to finish! The story I told seemed not to have been made up but actually lived.’’ Chelebi found the tale fascinating, but he saw it in a different light than ‘‘Hoja’’ did. The travel writer was at one with the other in cherishing accounts of ‘‘the strange and surprising,’’ but he thought these qualities should be sought ‘‘in the world, not within ourselves,’’ since when individuals focus on their own inner life, they at once separate themselves from others and become infected with the desire ‘‘to be someone else. . . . By searching for the strange within ourselves, we, too, would become someone else, and God forbid, our readers would too. He did not even want to think about how terrible the world would be if men

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spoke always of themselves, of their own peculiarities, if their books and their stories were always about this.’’ ‘‘But I wanted to!’’ And once Chelebi had departed, ‘‘I sat down at once and wrote out my story.’’15 The contrast between the two attitudes is just the one Pamuk would later put at the center of his own story in Istanbul (and pursue more fully in My Name Is Red): it was the Eastern and Muslim restriction on both individuality and its representation that made his selfinsertion into Western culture a necessity in order for him to become the person he sought to be. The White Castle develops this contrast in a number of ways. The proclivity for self-reflection that is one of the narrator’s characteristic features from the start long remains foreign to Hoja. Only after the question of just who is who arises between the two (first in regard to Hoja’s presenting the Italian’s ideas to the Sultan as his own) does he begin to express a need to address it. To the other’s advice that he ‘‘think about why he was what he was,’’ Hoja replies sarcastically: ‘‘ ‘So what should I do, look in the mirror?’ . . . But he didn’t seem any less upset. . . . I said ‘they’ [the Europeans] did look in the mirror, and in fact much more often than people here did. Not only the palaces of kings, princes, and noblemen, but the homes of ordinary people as well were full of mirrors carefully framed and hung upon the walls; it wasn’t only because of this but because ‘they’ constantly thought about themselves that ‘they’ had progressed in this respect.’’ Hoja responds by first insisting that the other give him an example of such self-scrutiny, making the Italian sit for long periods, writing down all he knows about himself, dredging up memories both pleasant and painful, and generating much of the information Hoja would later take away to Venice with him. But soon the example draws him into a similar activity, recalling and writing about his whole history, and imparting to his companion ‘‘more about his life than I’d been able to learn in eleven years.’’ Just where this stage in their relations might have gone had things been left to develop we never find out, because it ends suddenly when news arrives that plague has broken out in the city. In response the pair turns from self-examination to looking for measures to confront the public crisis and thereby prove their worth to the Sultan. This they are able to do based on the Italian’s familiarity with statistics: by counting the number of deaths in different neighborhoods and charting the pattern of the epidemic’s growth and decline, he was able to predict how much longer it would last. The two never return to the practice

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of mutual self-examination, but the period when they engaged in it provided the foundation on which the later exchange of identities could take place.16 Just how fully Hoja has been infused with, even overcome by the Western belief in the virtue of knowledge drawn from the interior of individuals is revealed once the plague has passed and the two men turn to devising the weapon that later fails in the Sultan’s military campaign. We never learn just how the weapon was constructed, only that it was enormously large and cumbersome, so much so that the difficulty of moving it over poor and muddy winter roads was one reason for its breakdown, and thus for the Sultan’s inability to capture the white castle that gave the book its title (the fortress’s name was ‘‘Doppio’’—did it invoke the doubling of identities? Of cultures?). But in Hoja’s eyes, at least, the mysterious machine was a tool for laying siege to people’s psychic interiors. ‘‘He’d repeat once again that everything was connected with the unknown inner landscape of our minds, he’d based his whole project on this. . . . He spoke of a great truth he’d perceived during the days of the plague when we had contemplated ourselves in the mirror together: now all of it had achieved clarity in his mind, you see, the weapon had its genesis in this moment.’’ Later, during the campaign where the weapon has its unhappy tryout, he spent his time trying to get people in the region to reveal the ‘‘dark recesses’’ of their minds, to give voice to their faults, their transgressions, their guilt, as he and the narrator had done in their solitude; the power the weapon would mobilize somehow lay there. (How much of this may have been some variant of Christian confession and how much a foreshadowing of Freudian diving into psychic depths we do not need to decide.) Uncertain how to gain access to these contents, he began to peer inside the heads of people who had been killed and decapitated during the battles: ‘‘When he saw the heads piled up to one side to be taken to the sovereign I knew at once what he was thinking. . . . I was never able to learn just how far he had gone.’’17 After Hoja’s departure in the guise of his former slave we hear no more of these obsessions. His flight leaves the narrator to assume the other’s place as Imperial Astrologer at the Sultan’s court; eventually he takes a wife and has children. But he often finds himself preoccupied with thoughts of ‘‘Him.’’ This ‘‘Him,’’ or ‘‘He,’’ always capitalized, was the other, to be sure: but which other was it? If the speaker was the narrator, then the reference was to Hoja; but if the Italian spoke as the Turk he had become, then it was

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himself, or rather the self he once was but had exchanged for another. Or was it simply that element in the self that is capable of becoming another, something universal in selfhood on which we all draw? For ‘‘Hoja’’ the uncertainty and confusion were at their height when some third person asked him to speak about his former companion, particularly if that questioner continued to recognize the Italian beneath the Turk. Such was the case with the Sultan, whose evident skepticism about the exchange of identities was especially troubling since it might portend harsh punishment. That prospect mostly seemed diminished by the affectionate tone in which the ruler sought news of the departed Italian, but it worries ‘‘Hoja’’ all the same. The tension becomes unbearable when the Sultan asks him to write up an account of the relations between the two men—not as the fiction we are now reading, but as a narrative of real people and events, within which there would be no place for the suspension of disbelief on which his continued existence depends. Like the character in a novel that he is, he can exist only inside a fiction. At his point the narrator escapes to Gebze, where he is left in peace.18 Just as the Sultan toyed with ‘‘Hoja’’ about his ‘‘real’’ identity, so does Pamuk toy with us, his readers, but not frivolously: he means to say something about one of his favorite topics (later developed at length in his Norton lectures at Harvard), the relationship between fiction and life, and the ways each nurtures and enriches the other, most of all at the points where we are not sure where one leaves off and the other begins. When the narrator finishes telling Chelebi the story he has invented (or remembered), ‘‘there was a prolonged silence. I sensed that we were both thinking of Him, but in Evliya’s mind there was a Him completely different from the one in mine. I have no doubt that he was actually thinking of his own life! And I, I was thinking of my own life, of Him, of how I loved the story I’d created; and I felt pride in everything I had lived and dreamed.’’ And when, setting aside the travel writer’s fears that making stories based on looking into individual interiors would rob the world of its coherence, he declares his own willing desire to do just this; it is precisely for the sake of possible readers ‘‘in that terrible world to come’’ that ‘‘I did all I could to make both myself and Him, whom I could not separate from myself, come alive in the story.’’19 That ‘‘terrible world to come’’ is, to be sure, the one we (including Pamuk) now inhabit, and The White Castle is, like several of the author’s other books, a story of how he became a writer within it, slowly discovering

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himself by experimenting with the range of identities, real and fictional, in which he found some features of himself reflected. At the same time it is a book about the relations between that world and the one to which Hoja and Chelebi were native, set apart from the other by its suspicion of individual singularity and the desire to represent it. One message the story seems to impart is that the powers emerging in the first of these two worlds put the second one in crisis, at once threatened by the former and in need of nurture from it. The two companions have intimations of this at the moment when they are at work on their weapon. Even as they hope it will bring the Sultan victory they share the premonition of a coming defeat, whereby the Ottoman Empire would lose ‘‘all of its territories one by one.’’ Such a decline might take other forms as well, such that everyone in Istanbul might rise from their warm beds one morning as changed people; they wouldn’t know how to wear their clothes, wouldn’t be able to remember what minarets were for. Or perhaps defeat meant to accept the superiority of others and try to emulate them: then he would recount some episode from my life in Venice, and we would imagine how acquaintances of ours here would act out my experiences dressed up with foreign hats on their heads and pants on their legs. Later, after the failure of the weapon and Hoja’s departure, the narrator tells of hearing various rumors about ‘‘Him,’’ among them that ‘‘he had been inside the walls of Vienna during the unsuccessful siege [the Ottoman defeat of 1683, often regarded as the first inkling of the Empire’s decline], advising the enemy on how to rout us completely!’’ But he cannot bring himself fully to believe them. When, at the end, the original Hoja returns, he gives voice to ideas that accord with these reports: ‘‘He confided, as if he were betraying a secret, that actually He was not a true friend of the Turks, that He’d written unflattering things about them: . . . that we were now in decline, described our minds as if they were dirty cupboards filled with old junk. He’d said we could not be reformed, that if we were to survive our only alternative was to submit immediately, and after this we would not be able to do anything for centuries but imitate those to whom we had surrendered.’’ We are not told whether the narrator took these pronouncements at face value or remained skeptical about them, as he had about the earlier rumors of

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Hoja’s activities, but we do know that he was not taken in by the traveler’s representation of himself as an Italian, recognizing how far his accent remained from that of a native speaker. Nor does he look on the declaration that ‘‘he’d learned my name and who I was from Him’’ in the way it was intended. Perhaps he sees all these things merely as supports for his visitor’s claim to be an alien and not Hoja, keeping silent as a way of toying with the other, much in the way the Sultan had once played with him, preserving the fiction that makes their relations possible.20 However this may be, many people in both East and West had come to share such disdain for Turkish culture by Pamuk’s time (a main figure in his earlier novel Silent House, Dr. Selhaˆttin, provides one example). Pamuk shared these views in part, but we already know from Istanbul and his tortuous comments on being both Turk and European in other writings that his feelings were much more complex (Dr. Selhaˆttin’s uncompromising enthusiasm for Western knowledge and values brings more harms than benefits to those around him). Issues of cultural superiority are alive in The White Castle, to be sure, but they recede in the face of the book’s preoccupation with figures native to one way of life immersing themselves in another. The explicitly fictional nature of this manner of carving out a space between cultures may make it less ‘‘real’’ than the ones we considered in the cases of Burton, Lawrence, and Massignon. But what if being creators of fictions is a condition we all somehow share with those who are authors by profession? And what if this ‘‘somehow’’ lies closer to the center of being human, and of what makes us cultural beings, than we ordinarily recognize? Just where such fictions leave us and what role they may play in people’s real lives are questions Pamuk would confront and reflect on in his subsequent books.

* * * The next of these, The Black Book (1990), is longer and more complex than its predecessors, and takes place almost entirely in contemporary Istanbul (but with much looking back into the recent and more distant Turkish past). On one level it is a detective story (in French a livre noir is just that), recounting a man’s search for the beautiful wife, also his cousin, who suddenly and without explanation leaves him and disappears. Here, too, an exchange of identities lies at the center, in this case between the abandoned

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husband Galip, a lawyer, and another cousin Celaˆl, a well-known newspaper columnist and the half-brother of his wife (twenty years her senior), who vanishes at the same moment as she. The suspicion aroused in the reader right away, that they have gone off together, is confirmed at the end when both are shot dead on the street, probably by nationalists incensed at the pro-Western ideas in Celaˆl’s writings and by his leftist past. We are told that the two have not been hiding to escape such a danger, however; rather, they had retreated into solitude to spin each other stories, hoping to fend off Celaˆl’s deepening and debilitating memory loss. By then we have learned that the half-siblings had long shared a deep intimacy, so far as we know never physical, and that her earlier membership in a far-left group (one of whose leaders she married, then left) reflected his influence. Once Galip concludes that the two must be together, his search leads him to occupy Celaˆl’s empty apartment, wear his clothes, sleep in his bed, absorb himself in boxes of his letters and manuscripts, write his columns (Celaˆl had been republishing old ones, too weakened by his loss of memory to take up new topics), impersonate him on the telephone, and pretend to be him (without much success) in a meeting with some visiting English journalists. On one level, Galip’s attempt to become Celaˆl is an effort to restore his lost closeness to his wife, Ru¨ya, whose name means ‘‘dream’’ in Turkish; not the worst way to describe the book would be as a meditation on why our dreams abandon us and whether or not we are well advised to try to recover them. In form the novel alternates between chapters that tell Galip’s story and ones that reproduce Celaˆl’s columns; some of these concern a family that occupies a multi-story apartment house much like Pamuk’s (and whose members object to one of their own telling his personal version of their history, as some of the novelist’s relatives also did), but these are interleaved with reflections on Istanbul’s present and past. Here as in The White Castle the identity exchange becomes the frame within which a whole series of connected questions are played out: about the self and its relationship to others, the permeable boundaries between fiction and reality, and the situation of a culture whose attempt to remodel itself threatens to make it forget its own past (the collective analog to Celaˆl’s personal memory loss). Politics, a major theme in Silent House but quiescent in the story of Hoja and the Venetian, here resumes a major role, as it would later in Snow, always in ways that put the aspiration to remake collective existence into close relation with the individual desire to fashion what another Pamuk novel calls

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A New Life, to become someone else. In The Black Book the parallel extends to the question of whether such a transformation would testify to a person’s or a culture’s creative power, or constitute an abandonment of its core. All these issues are woven into the detective-story texture of the book, the mesh that turns objects and people into clues to a deep mystery, endowing everything we encounter with the potential to reveal some hidden gist of things. By the end, this sense of life as a mystery generates a final question: must our cultures impose such a sense on the world, and should we want them to?

* * *

No less than in The White Castle and Istanbul, the question of reflection, both as an instrument of individual self-formation and a human capacity toward which different cultures adopt contrasting perspectives, lies at the core of The Black Book, and it provides the best point of entry into the story. The theme makes its first explicit appearance in an early chapter presented as one of Celaˆl’s columns, called ‘‘The Eye.’’ The title refers to a book illustration depicting a Cyclops-like ‘‘grotesque monster,’’ with one eye much higher on its face than the other. Walking out into a back street, the columnist suddenly has a powerful sense that such an ‘‘all-seeing eye’’ is gazing on him, constantly following him in his walks. From the start he feels it to be at once outside him and yet somehow his own: ‘‘The eye was my creation, just as I was the eye’s.’’ It gave him a different sense of who he was and might be: ‘‘Like the English girl who followed the rabbit through a gap in the hedge, I soon found myself falling into a new world.’’ The experience gave him at once a greater certainty of himself—‘‘It was because I was under the eye’s constant surveillance that I knew I existed’’—and a promise of a different life: ‘‘a new and more beautiful existence awaited me.’’ The path to this altered existence lay through imitation: ‘‘Imitation is a formative art. Unless we were always trying to be like others, and wishing to become people other than ourselves, life, I think, would quickly become impossible.’’ The others on whom the writer sought to model himself were many, ‘‘a rich and industrious neighbor . . . the ghost of a hero from a book I’d read five times from cover to cover, a teacher . . . various . . .

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heroes from the foreign films.’’ But somehow it was always himself he was imitating, or the part of himself that, like these others, gazed at him from a distance (or whom he imagined as doing so, as Blue pictured the German who observed him in Snow): ‘‘The eye was the man I wished to be.’’ Being under such a gaze felt oppressive and confining, but it was also liberating, opening up a new landscape of existence.21 Highly personal as was this experience, the chapter also sounds themes from both Western and Eastern cultural history. References to European accounts of the relations between subjective consciousness and objective existence stud the test: deriving a certainty of one’s being from selfreflection is the substance of Rene´ Descartes’ famous Cogito, ergo sum; the sense that to be the source of such a gaze is at once oppressive and liberating was the central paradox of Jean-Paul Sartre’s metaphysics and morality (itself rooted in late eighteenth-century German idealist philosophy), and there can be little doubt that Pamuk intended these Cartesian and Sartrean echoes. Eastern traditions have made reflection and mirroring crucial to self-awareness as well (a recognition muted in The White Castle), perhaps most intently in Sufi mysticism, echoes of which seem to contribute to the genesis of Celaˆl’s ‘‘all-seeing eye’’: self-contemplation was a dimension of Islamic mysticism that particularly fascinated Massignon, and we learn later in The Black Book that Celaˆl was deeply involved in certain strains of this literature, naming Hallaj as one contributor to it; moreover, the moment when the ‘‘eye’’ imposes its presence on him arrives while he is leaning against a mosque wall. One Sufi writer who employed such images and who makes an appearance in The Black Book is the Turkish poet Sheikh Galip (born in 1793 and well known to readers of Turkish literature; it seem no mere coincidence that the Galip of the novel shares his name): two lines from his best-known work, Love and Beauty, provide an epigraph for a later chapter: ‘‘The two together / The reflection and its reflection entered the mirror,’’ and Celaˆl copies from his work in one column. Whether it involved reflection, imitation, or some combination of them, however, Celaˆl did not always regard the prospect of becoming someone else as appealing or promising. Just the opposite is the message of a chapter entitled ‘‘I Must Be Myself.’’ It takes off from two questions posed to him by a barber who visited him one morning in his office: ‘‘Do you have trouble being yourself?’’ and ‘‘Is there a way a man can be only himself?’’ At first the writer found the queries at once too banal and too global to take seriously, but as the day went on they echoed in his head, generating a

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recurring series of injunctions: ‘‘I must be myself. . . . I must be myself. . . . You must be yourself. . . . You must be yourself.’’ Following his own behest required that he ‘‘forget these people buzzing inside my head . . . their voices, their smells, their demands, their love, their hate,’’ because attending to them would make him become ‘‘the person they want me to be,’’ an insufferable fate worse than being nothing at all; even an ideal image carried within himself had to be avoided because it was ‘‘nothing more than the sum total of all those people I was imitating.’’ As for finding oneself by looking in a mirror, the person reflected back to him when sitting in the chair of a second barber was not himself but ‘‘someone else,’’ the public Celaˆl the barber took him to be and whose opinions on various questions he solicited (later this barber would be accused of his murder). Only at night, sitting alone in an armchair in his apartment, shutting out all the influences that sought to remake him in their image, could he feel that he was genuinely himself; it was ‘‘like coming home.’’22 The Black Book sets up too many echoes of this struggle, between becoming oneself through imitating others and being oneself through rejecting all the models others offer, for us to attend to them all here, but the central point around which they cluster is Galip’s relationship with Ru¨ya. She, the dream to which he seeks to unite himself and who vanishes from his life, is driven by the desire to be other than she is, whereas he wishes to bring her back to the world in which both might find a way to join their lives together while remaining the people they are. After her death he describes what made their union defective by saying, ‘‘I could never convince you to be content with an ordinary life. And never could I convince you that I, too, could play a part in it.’’ To this he later adds his fantasy that, had they still been together at age seventy-three, she would finally have ‘‘run out of other, better lives to long for and would, at last, have come to love me.’’23 To be sure Galip’s enclosure within an ordinary existence is not complete, since his ability to take over Celaˆl’s identity is central to the story; in one way it brings to fruition his lifelong desire to have a second persona, closer to that of his more imaginative cousin. The period when he lives as Celaˆl provides further evidence that his personal boundaries are porous, in the form of his relations with a mysterious figure with whom he holds (or endures) long telephone conversations, and who may well be the murderer: the caller pleads to have Celaˆl’s address, professes love for him, calls him his brother, and demonstrates that he knows the columnist’s writings by

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heart, citing them in great detail (as Celaˆl, with his fading memory, no longer could) to prove that he is his quarry’s ‘‘perfect reader.’’ But he also declares his intention to murder him. Because Galip takes on Celaˆl’s features too, living in his apartment and developing just as full a knowledge of his thinking and writing as the caller, he coalesces with the latter as well, and the identity between them may well extend to a veiled desire on Galip’s part to do away with his cousin: after all, it is he who has gone off with his wife. Galip’s relations with Ru¨ya constitute a kind of identity exchange, too: she is his dream, so that marriage to her constitutes his attempt to combine one way of being himself with another. This tenor of their relations dates back to their childhood. Ru¨ya had been born at a moment when her parents—her father newly married to his second wife, not the woman who bore Celaˆl twenty years before—were in the West, but they returned to Istanbul, where the cousins grew up together in the large family apartment building; identical in age, they shared school and relatives, childish desires and pleasures, illnesses and convalescences. Galip’s sense for the nature of their relationship was linked to the memory of a particular childhood game they played, recounted in the chapter headed by the quote about mirrors and reflections from the Sufi poet Sheikh Galip. The game began in a department store to which their mothers had taken the deeply bored children; there, in the place’s ‘‘darkest corner . . . we found ourselves caught between two full-length mirrors. We stood there stunned, watching our reflections multiply, watching them grow smaller and smaller and vanish into infinity.’’ Later they found a similar fascination in a picture on the back cover of a magazine, showing ‘‘a redheaded girl’’ looking at the same picture of the same girl, so that girls and magazines multiplied as they receded into ever-smaller and more distant images of themselves, disappearing into a looking-glass world like Alice. On another occasion the two children grabbed a book from the hands of ‘‘an older cousin they both adored’’ (Celaˆl, to be sure) and, holding the pages between them, read a tale of a boy and girl who fell in love while reading together from a still more ancient version of the very same story; fate separated them, but they found each other again when the voice of poetry said to the boy, ’’You are your beloved and your beloved is you.’’ It was in these moments that Galip came to see his dream in Ru¨ya.24 But the ideal union he fantasized was never to be realized: each cousin’s way of seeking to be other than her- or himself was too distant from the

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other’s. Ru¨ya’s sought a complete and encompassing transformation, the sort of different life in a different world she hoped to bring about in her student days by way of revolutionary politics. In the time before Galip concludes that Ru¨ya must be with Celaˆl, he wonders if she might have returned to the ex-husband who had been her companion in leftist activism, and goes to his house, on the pretense of seeking information to help a client—also a former leftist student—accused of murder. Ru¨ya is not there, but the ex-husband is happy to talk, with some bitterness, about the old days, having renounced his radicalism for a brand of anti-Western nationalism and married a ‘‘plain, simple, and modest’’ woman—also his cousin—with whom he has children; they live in a house furnished in what Galip calls a ‘‘petit-bourgeois’’ style that made it identical with thousands of others. He reveals that what made his and Ru¨ya’s former life as activists and conspirators so passionate and exciting was the constant assumption of ‘‘pseudonyms and false identities,’’ signs to him now that ‘‘of course all they’d wanted all along was to be someone other than the people they were. . . . When they heard of a new acquaintance who took his alias seriously, how happy they were!’’ At moments when he himself looked down at a new identity card in his hand, ‘‘he’d cry with joyous, youthful innocence, ‘I’m a completely new person!’ He couldn’t say it often enough, and those around him never tired of hearing it.’’ Having the new identity helped him to find fresh meanings in the world around him, clues to the future he and his friends would bring about. Soon, however, disillusionment set in. ‘‘After becoming a new person, and then another and another and another, there was less and less hope of returning to the happiness they had known as the people they’d been at the beginning.’’ A moment arrived when the signs they formerly thought they could read about the future no longer made sense to them, so that they were ‘‘forced to admit they had lost their way. . . . One evening, Ru¨ya had packed a few belongings into her little bag and returned to her old family, to her old house, where she felt safe.’’25 Galip knows all the same that she never lost her old longing to be someone else and live in a different world, fulfilling it in the more passive form of night-long absorption in detective stories; it was precisely against this that he harbored hopes for a moment when she would at last ‘‘run out of other, better lives to long for and . . . come to love me.’’ To be sure, he aspired to a life he did not lead no less than she; but in a different way. He described his in the same chapter where he recounts his

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memories of their childhood. The chapter is one of several columns he wrote in the missing Celaˆl’s name, and it begins: I dreamed that I had at last become the person I’ve always longed to become. In the midst of life, wandering through the muddy concrete forest that is our city, in a dark street swarming with darker faces: my dream, my Ru¨ya. Drained by sorrow I fell asleep and found you. In my dream, in the story my dream brought me, I knew you’d still love me, even if I failed to become someone else; I knew I must resign myself, look at the person staring back at me in my picture, and accept myself just as I was; there was, I knew, no point in fighting it any longer and nothing to be gained by stepping into someone else’s shoes.26 The labyrinth these words construct may not be an easy one to navigate, but I think its meaning is evident enough: the person Galip dreams of becoming is his unchanged self, but transformed by becoming the love object of his dream, who recognizes in him the fulfillment of her desire for an expanded and enriched life. Only this manner of becoming someone else allows for finding real satisfaction in the everyday waking world, because in this world no person, and we will see that the point extends to ‘‘no country’’ and ‘‘no culture,’’ can ever become wholly other than what it is. Books— like the ones the cousins read as children or like the ones Pamuk writes— make an essential contribution to such transmutations, at once inspiring the dreams of becoming someone else and testifying that such dreams are fictions, remaining forever within the domain of the imagination; to think that actual life can be modeled on them is to lose one’s way in just the manner Ru¨ya and her first husband did. Like these metamorphoses, exchanges of identity are excellent subjects for fiction, but in the real world they can be only feigned and temporary, a point underscored by Galip’s return to being his old self, but without Ru¨ya, after the double murder. In one way, however, Galip does undergo a transformation: at several points in the novel’s last chapters it transpires that he has become the teller of his own story, slipping in and out of identity with the author who has all along been hiding within him. This gives him a different relationship to Ru¨ya, one that survives her departures. Only ‘‘after I had given my life over to stories, and tried at last to tell my own’’ did he realize ‘‘that the gardens of our memories were linked in the same way. Each story led to another

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story in an infinite chain, with each door leading to another door that led to another.’’27 In the penultimate chapter Galip becomes a storyteller for the English journalists to whom he represents himself as Celaˆl. The tale he recounts is of an Ottoman prince who wished to become fully himself, and who went off to live in an isolated castle to pursue this aim, hoping to become worthy of the Sultanate he was in line to inherit. His first plan was to read as widely as he could, absorbing ideas and images from every part of the world, so as to provide himself with a stock of wisdom on which to draw as ruler; but he comes suddenly to realize that this way of seeking to become himself precisely kept him from ever doing so, since it led him only to think and speak in others’ voices. Furiously he turns against all the books he has collected, burning many, and cuts himself off from other people (with success save in regard to women, but the story of that is too long to tell here), to end by envying ‘‘the stones of empty deserts’’ and ‘‘the rocks of mountains’’ because they were and remained nothing but themselves. The chapter is a kind of replay of Celaˆl’s reaction to the barber’s two questions, but here it has become a cautionary tale: the prince’s wanting to be like a rock or stone presages his actual death, bringing us back to Celaˆl’s earlier affirmation that there can be no life without imitation, without trying somehow to be other than one is. By the book’s end, however, this other self is envisioned in the manner of Galip’s dream of Ru¨ya, as part of an imaginative engagement that does not involve actually trying to fill ‘‘someone else’s shoes.’’ Instead, he becomes the teller of his own and other people’s stories: ‘‘Like the prince, I tell stories to become myself.’’28 In The Black Book these questions about self and other on the individual level have a clear parallel on the collective ground of culture. The questions posed often rise to a high plane of generality, but what generates them, as in other of Pamuk’s books, is the crisis of Turkish culture, brought on by the decline of the Empire and the Westernizing responses to it. To Ru¨ya’s first husband, having exchanged his revolutionary radicalism for nationalism, the crisis is the product of a great centuries-long conspiracy, calculated ‘‘to rip away our memories, our past, and our history,’’ leaving his country’s people, like the Jews, ‘‘with nothing to share but our misfortunes.’’ Once the vehicle of this denuding had been a missionary alien religion, but a much more powerful tool had replaced it: the movies, hypnotizing viewers in dark halls with seductive and eroticized images of a foreign and debilitating way of life, the breeding ground of the revolutionary illusions that misled him and Ru¨ya. He is not the only witness to the disorienting power of

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Western images transmitted by films; at one point Galip lets himself be led to a prostitute who draws her customers by masquerading as a famous actress, and who implores him afterward to save her from life, ‘‘I mean from the film world.’’ In one of his columns Celaˆl too wrote about the way watching Westerners in films changed people’s manners of acting and interacting, the ways they gestured, moved, ‘‘opened windows, kicked doors, held tea glasses, put on their coats.’’ Attempting in this way to imitate others so unlike themselves made them lose the ‘‘innocence’’ they once possessed, the quality of feeling a spontaneous harmony between themselves and the world around them. People such as Cevdet Bey and Selhaˆttin Bey (Celaˆl named the protagonists of Pamuk’s first two novels) were ‘‘ascetics in torment. . . . They, like me, like all of us, had once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, caught by chance a glimpse of an inner essence, only to forget what it was.’’29 But Celaˆl did not offer this account in the denunciatory key of Ru¨ya’s ex-husband; his tone was more ruminative, even tragic, complicated by the sympathy he felt for other elements of Western culture. The column where he spoke about movies began with a visit to a museum that sheltered what was left of a set of mannequins commissioned early in the twentieth century by Sultan Abdulhamid II, representing Turkish naval heroes (so far as I can discover, these models were one of Pamuk’s fictions). Although supported by the sovereign and inspired by patriotism, the ‘‘magnificent’’ figures were denounced by Islamic purists on the grounds that ‘‘to replicate God’s creatures so perfectly was to compete with the Almighty’’ (a complaint also voiced against Western art in My Name Is Red). To Celaˆl the resistance was ‘‘just one of thousands of examples of the prohibition fever that raged throughout our nation’s long journey westward.’’ The figures were removed from display, but their maker did not lose his ‘‘fever for creation,’’ putting together more models on other subjects and keeping them hidden in his basement. When the Westernizing Republic arrived in the 1920s he thought his day had come: department stores were now displaying clothing on realistic mannequins, and surely the shops would buy his. But no one took them because people insisted on figures that looked like Europeans and not ‘‘like us’’; they wanted ‘‘to be something else altogether.’’ In the end he did find a use for his sculpted figures, but a sad one: cut into pieces the arms, hands, legs, and feet were used to display sleeves, gloves, socks, and shoes. The dismantling of the models matched the dismemberment of the former way of life they had been intended to celebrate.30

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Many people in Turkey, and some in The Black Book, thought they knew what lesson should be drawn from such stories. One was the prince whose story Galip told the visiting journalists; in his years of solitarily seeking to become himself he had declared ‘‘thousands of times,’’ all recorded by his scribe, that ‘‘all peoples who are unable to be themselves, all civilizations that imitate other civilizations, all those nations who find happiness in other people’s stories were doomed to be crushed, destroyed, and forgotten.’’ The returned Hoja of The White Castle described the declining Ottoman Empire in similar terms, and the deep melancholy Pamuk attributed to his city and its inhabitants in Istanbul shows that he knew the feelings behind such an outburst, even if he did not share its conclusion. As a novelist steeped in Western stories he stood not with the prince but with Galip’s comment in The Black Book’s last paragraph: that the story of himself and his cousins would always ‘‘remind me of another story in which the hero discovers that he can only become himself by first becoming someone else or by losing himself in someone else’s stories.’’31 This was, to be sure, the story of Pamuk’s coming to be a novelist. Several chapters of The Black Book provide examples of the ‘‘other people’s stories’’ to which Galip referred, and the nurture to be found in them, but perhaps the most revealing is the one that replays Dostoevski’s famous account in The Brothers Karamazov of Christ’s return to earth, where he is rejected and put to death by the Grand Inquisitor. The chapter follows immediately on the one in which the prostitute who works in the guise of a famous actress implores Galip to save her ‘‘from this life,’’ the movieinspired life of being someone she is not; she ends with a declaration that prepares the transition to Dostoevski’s parable: like everyone else, she is waiting to be delivered by ‘‘Him.’’ In the retelling that follows, the Russian novelist is mentioned (Pamuk also wrote about him in other places), but the author of the story is said to be Ferit Pasha, a Turk who went to Paris in the 1860s (just at the time Dostoevski did), whose work was unknown in his own country because written in French. Celaˆl (the chapter presents itself as one of his columns) makes it part of Turkish culture by citing various Islamic texts that refer to an awaited and expected Redeemer, perhaps a kind of return of the Prophet; but he admits that few Muslims know these passages, and nothing really hides the basic Christian tenor of the story, even though the never-named ‘‘He’’ makes his entry through a dark back street of Istanbul (Dostoevski set the parable in Seville) and is captured and executed by a Grand Pasha. The official’s reasons for condemning the interloper are not identical with the ones the Inquisitor offers in

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Dostoevski’s telling, but the two share ground, and the Pasha’s resonate with some questions we have seen arise in the history of Galip and his cousins, and in The White Castle too. The Pasha is convinced that whatever hope for a world beyond the present the long-awaited ‘‘He’’ may inspire, his arrival will not alter the conditions and limits of the existence humans are fated to endure in the here and now; hence letting people think He has returned is bound to end by infecting life with a new pessimism. Once you have rekindled hope in the hearts of the downtrodden, how to keep the flickering flames alive? With time they will see that things are no better than they were before. . . . They will lose faith in the Book, lose faith both in the real world and that other world shimmering in the heavens above, and surrender once again to darkness, dissolution, and the spiritual void. . . . So by the Day of Judgment, as You will see, they will no longer believe in You or in the stories You’ve told them. That faith gone, nothing will any longer infuse people with the sense that they share a common destiny; that sense gone, each individual ‘‘will begin to believe in his own story; indeed, they will all become their own story, and each and every one of them will also want to tell it.’’32 The Pasha’s last point recalls the conversation between the narrator of The White Castle and the travel writer Chelebi; the latter feared just the outcome the Pasha described, whereas the former welcomed it and, like Pamuk, addressed himself to people in search of such tales. Expectations of some post-religious kind of salvation and the disillusionment they foster recur regularly in Pamuk’s work: the revolutionary faith that inspired Ru¨ya and her first husband; the Enlightenment utopianism of Dr. Selhaˆttin and its dismal outcomes in Silent House; the whole substance of Pamuk’s next novel, A New Life, where the main character’s sense of having been suddenly plunged into a wholly different existence by reading a mysterious book (that may or may not be the story of his own life) splinters into a chaotic mass of banal fragments. In Pamuk’s world the skepticism the Grand Pasha sees as the necessary end product of ‘‘His’’ return to earth looms up as the denouement of all such utopian aspirations. Galip’s sense of distance from them finds expression in his hope that Ru¨ya would ‘‘run out of other, better lives to long for and . . . come to love me’’—that she would accept the untransformed world as the only solid frame for her life.

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Running out of ‘‘better lives to long for’’ is not an unalloyed good in itself; some may regard it as a deplorable narrowing of human possibilities. What does The Black Book offer in exchange? Asking this question brings us to the last of the large issues broached by the novel: the relations between culture and mystery. What is it that makes cultures, or certain cultures, turn the world into a repository of clues to the solution of some deep enigma, and what is gained and lost when they do so? These question become most explicit at the moment when Galip, living in Celaˆl’s apartment, finds and reads there a treatise about a system for deciphering the secret messages written into the lines and features of people’s faces, developed by a mystical Sufi sect, the Harufi, in the seventeenth century. The Harufi actually existed, but Pamuk seems to have invented the ¨ c¸u¨ncu¨, and Galip suspects that Celaˆl name of the book’s author, F. M. U invented it too, to cover up his having written the treatise himself. Whoever he was, the author values the Harufi because he regards their ability to decode signs others cannot read as offering a weapon that Eastern culture can wield in its struggle to overcome Western domination. In his view East and West were polar opposites, counterposed to each other like black and white or evil and good, and fated to make war against each other. At any given moment ‘‘the winning side was the one that succeeded in seeing the world as a mysterious place awash with secrets and double meanings. Whereas the side that saw the world as a simple place, devoid of mystery and ambiguity, was doomed to defeat and its inevitable consequence, slavery.’’ East and West each had their ways of naming some ‘‘center hidden from the world,’’ among them the Christian God, Hindu Nirvana, the Harufi secret codes, Kant’s noumenon—and ‘‘the detective novel’s culprit.’’ The last showed itself to be in the line of the earlier examples by proposing two ways of giving back to mystery the central place it once occupied in human affairs: one was ‘‘to commit the perfect murder, and the other was to vanish without a trace.’’33 Drawn into just such a search for occult clues by the hope of finding his vanished wife, Galip feels the attraction of the mystical one devised by the Harufi. According to the book about them, theirs was a specifically Eastern solution, because the signs the techniques detected in faces took the form of Arabic letters, the beginnings of words whose presence in sacred

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texts invoked the divine meanings at the world’s dark center. But the Harufi had vanished, leaving people in the East devoid of the power these tools had once given them. Faced with the debilitating superiority Westerners had achieved in so many spheres, the inhabitants of great Eastern cities (Cairo and Damascus as well as Istanbul) displayed their absence of hope in their uniformly downcast faces. In this situation the East could only revive itself by recasting its old wisdom in a Western idiom: the way ‘‘to vanquish this emptiness, give new meaning to our faces,’’ was to devise ‘‘a new system that linked the lines in faces to the letters of the Latin alphabet.’’ It was this new way of penetrating the world’s dark mysteries that the book promised to reveal. Although Galip does not say so, there is a clear (and sly) echo here of Atatu¨rk’s reform of the Turkish alphabet, but the Westernizing implication is quickly turned aside, and what the new system brings to life is something very like the original mysticism on which it draws. The meanings to be found in faces would not resemble the stable and practicable ones to which Western science aspired; they would have the character of the endless expanse of interpretations with which textual scholars are often familiar: any first interpretation opened the way to a second, after which there followed ‘‘a third meaning from the second, and a fourth from the third, ad infinitum.’’ The person ‘‘who sets out to solve the mystery’’ would be like a traveler trying to find his way in ‘‘an unending maze of city streets.’’ The more he discovers, the more the mystery spreads; the more the mystery spreads, the more is revealed and the more clearly he sees the mystery in the streets he himself has chosen . . . for the mystery resides in his own journey, his own life. It would be at that very moment when the woeful reader, weakened by the pull of the story, sank so deep into it as to lose his bearings, that our long-awaited savior, the Messiah some dared only name as He, would finally manifest Himself. At this point the traveler, ‘‘like all those who have embarked on the Sufi path before him,’’ would begin to find his way.34 Thus the search for a riposte to Western power through a Harufism reborn in the characters of the Latin alphabet led to something indistinguishable from the old messianic longing. For those who see culture in this way, changing the alphabet in which the secret meanings are conveyed

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does not really alter much: Westernizers of Atatu¨rk’s sort (the alreadymentioned Dr. Selhaˆttin being one) are no less given to utopian imaginings than are religious messianists or the Marxism that inspired students like Ru¨ya and her husband. Galip’s initial fascination with the treatise on Harufism arises in part out of the hope that it may help him in his search for clues to Ru¨ya’s whereabouts; in addition he is drawn to the notion that his own face bears such a secret, and that discerning it will help him to become someone else. But here, too, disillusionment quickly sets in. Looking at himself in Celaˆl’s bathroom mirror, he does see letters emerging from the lines of his face (those of us engaged in interpreting texts or objects know well how easy it is to see in them the meanings we expect or wish to find there), but the experience quickly fills him with terror. About its cause he was unsure, ‘‘unable to decide’’ whether it ‘‘had come from seeing his face transformed into a mask swarming with signs or from reading the dreadful message that the letters conveyed.’’ He never says quite what this fearsome message was, but what he tells about the book suggests it was connected to the infinite succession of meanings to which the Harufi techniques exposed those in search of such secrets: the message that terrorized him was that he could not escape losing himself in the endless chain of possible meanings he might find in himself. Such a fate echoes the experience Ru¨ya and her husband underwent as revolutionary activists: ‘‘After becoming a new person, and then another and another and another, there was less and less hope of returning to the happiness they had known as the people they’d been at the beginning.’’ It was just such a return that Galip now sought by way of recognizing that there was no secret universe behind the glass (as the young Orhan at his mother’s dressing table, or Galip and Ru¨ya as children in the department story still imagined), and that life could only be lived within the limits of actual existence. Shaking off the terror, he puts Celaˆl’s desk in order and sits down to write, with the ease of someone who suddenly knows just what he wants to say, producing two columns later published in his cousin’s name. Both are addressed (although readers of the paper would not be aware of it) to Ru¨ya, and we have noted elements of them before. The first ends with a series of things of which he could never convince her, and in which her lack of belief was the seed of her disappearance: he could not persuade her ‘‘that I believed in a world without heroes,’’ ‘‘that the poor

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writers who invented heroes were no heroes themselves,’’ or, at once simplest and most difficult, ‘‘to be content with an ordinary life.’’ The second of the two columns recounts the dream in which Galip finds a Ru¨ya who ‘‘would still love me, even if I failed to become someone else.’’ The dream taught him to abandon the effort to step into ‘‘someone else’s shoes,’’ and to ‘‘accept myself, just as I was.’’ Coming to write the two columns marked Galip’s liberation not just from the pressure to exchange his identity for some other, but also from the search for clues to both his own mystery and to the deep secrets to which seekers of messianic and utopian truths devoted themselves. Shorn of these illusory lures, the world in his eyes lost the detective-story quality that made everything in it be a clue to something else.35 Galip had already voiced his need for such a way of being before experiencing the terror of Celaˆl’s bathroom mirror, expressing the alternative thus: He decided then and there that there was no room in this world for signs, clues, second and third meanings, secrets, or mysteries. . . . A desire rose up in him to live in a world where things meant themselves and nothing else: a world in which letters, texts, faces, and streetlamps stood only for themselves . . . where green ballpoint pens were nothing but green ballpoint pens. . . . [He] looked down at the map spread out on the desk and tried to convince himself that he was already there. The chapter-column that begins with the dream in which Ru¨ya loves him just as he is, and which then recounts his childhood memories of the department-store mirrors and the other image-games that resembled them, ends with a long list of moments in which his love for her just-as-sheis became manifest to him, each one some wholly ordinary, even banal occurrence—her not being able to decide what belt to wear, facial expressions she made while reading, her staring at cigarette ends in an ashtray, the way she shivered in the cold, that her hands holding on to a tram railing did not look like his. Each is simply an instant in itself, connected neither to some outside source of significance nor even to other entries on the list. Each has value simply for being what it is. The title of this chapter is ‘‘In Which the Story Goes Through the Looking Glass,’’ but this is the second

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such passage, not a fall into a mysterious world where objects take on aspects they do not ordinarily bear but an exit from it, a return to things as they are in the everyday. It is an everyday replete with and enriched by visions that come from the other side of the glass, but in which these are taken as nurture for expanding and deepening the self that remains anchored on this side.36

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The quality things exhibit when they appear as ‘‘themselves and nothing else’’ is what Pamuk means by ‘‘the innocence of objects.’’ The phrase provides the title for one of his most recent books, the catalogue of the ‘‘Museum of Innocence’’ he set up and opened in Istanbul in 2011. Objects are innocent when they are free of what might make them clues to some mystery, whether it be a disappearance, the meaning of history, or a cosmic secret. The items in the collection are at once ones that play a role in the novel whose title is also The Museum of Innocence, and a kind of inventory of articles typical of the everyday life of Istanbul at the end of the twentieth century. The novel is the story of a young and well-off Istanbul native, Kemal, who, having lost his beloved Fu¨sun (her name echoing the hu¨zu¨n that ties Istanbul’s residents to their melancholy city) through his own weakness and indecisiveness, dedicates himself over years first to remembering her, then to a kind of gentle but unstinting siege of her family that finally leads to their engagement, after her first marriage breaks up. Throughout, but more and more in the later sections of the story, Kemal collects an assortment of often banal and meaningless objects, taken up solely because they were hers, had been part of her family’s decor, or because she had used or touched or lost them. Their real-world counterparts, assembled by Pamuk over years of visiting antique shops, flea markets, and other sources of no-longer-used things, form the museum’s collection, carefully displayed in cases and provided with labels that link them to the story. Taken together, the novel and the catalogue of the museum that shares its name draw together many of the themes that structure Pamuk’s simultaneous habitation of West and East. In its overall plot line the novel has the apparent shape of a return from a life oriented westward toward Europe to

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one that reaffirms a purely Eastern and Turkish existence. Kemal is first drawn to Fu¨sun (they were distant cousins and had met off and on as children) when she is working as a salesgirl in a clothing shop with the Turkish spelling of Champs-Elyse´es as its name (he goes there to buy something for the fiance´e he never marries). They become lovers after he convinces her to visit him in an unused apartment owned by his family (largely modeled on the one that served Pamuk as a studio in the years he aspired to become a painter, and where, as we learn in Istanbul, his first love came to model for him). This phase in their relations has an explicitly European quality: a whole chapter in the novel is devoted to explaining how deeply un-Turkish was Fu¨sun’s willingness to give up her virginity and display the intensity of her physical pleasure in their afternoons of lovemaking. In the Istanbul of the time many young men believed there were women in some smart districts of the city who ‘‘did not cover their heads, wore miniskirts, and made love with men for pleasure,’’ although few of the hungry males who searched for them found any; real or imagined, however, they were ‘‘just like women in Europe.’’ One of the things people who grew up in his milieu thought about Europe, Pamuk tells us in an essay, was that it was ‘‘a sexual paradise,’’ an idea that was ‘‘a pretty accurate guess’’ compared to Istanbul; his earliest view of a nude woman was an illustration in a French magazine, and ‘‘this is surely my first and most striking memory of Europe.’’ To be sure, Westerners often conceive similar notions about the East, as elements of our earlier chapters remind us, but what matters here is that the phrase ‘‘sexual paradise’’ describes Kemal’s relations with Fu¨sun during the two months they were lovers very well. The Museum of Innocence begins with ‘‘the happiest moment of my life,’’ an instant during one of their afternoons of lovemaking when the intensity of their mutual pleasure deflects both from noticing that one of her earrings has fallen off; the earring becomes a prime object for the museum, a souvenir of the paradisiacal moment Kemal will dedicate himself to recovering later on.37 If the novel begins in such a ‘‘European’’ sexual paradise, it ends in a world whose deep coloration by traditional Turkish life renders it radically inhospitable to the kind of pleasure the two lovers once enjoyed. When Kemal begins to believe he may be able to get Fu¨sun back, a prospect opened up by the deepening estrangement between her and the man she has married, he pursues his goal by becoming a constant visitor at the apartment where the couple lives with her parents. Their house and furnishings have much in common with the locale where Ru¨ya’s ex-husband

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and his family live when Galip visits them, and that defined him as ‘‘petitbourgeois.’’ There it was ‘‘the old easy chairs with their floral cotton slipcovers . . . the enameled plates with butterflies around the rims, the ugly buffet with the candy dish they only used on holidays . . . the never-touched assortment of liqueurs,’’ and the television ‘‘kept on all night long, glowing in the corner like a streetlamp’’ with ‘‘a hand-crocheted doily on the top.’’ In Fu¨sun’s family, too, the television played constantly, and the dinnertable chair from which Kemal watched it stood inches from a sideboard that sheltered ‘‘crystal glasses . . . silver sugar bowls . . . liqueur sets . . . never-used coffee cups, the old clock, the silver lighter, the little glass vase with the spiraling floral pattern whose likeness one could see displayed on the buffet of any middle-class family in the city.’’ All these objects and many like them would enter into the museum when Pamuk set it up. In a way they recall the objects Istanbul described in the apartments of Pamuk’s family, save that no one in Fu¨sun’s house acknowledged them as sources of melancholy in the way he did.38 So complete was the return to a traditional and, in the terms the novel employs, non-European form of social life that Fu¨sun, at the juncture when she agrees to their engagement, tells Kemal ‘‘you absolutely must believe’’ that ‘‘at no point during my marriage with Feridun did we have marital relations. . . . In this sense I am a virgin. I shall be with only one man in my life, and that man is you.’’ As for their earlier liaison, ‘‘we can draw a veil over those two months that preceded the past nine years. . . . So it will be just as in those films—I married someone, but I remained a virgin.’’ To which Kemal ‘‘frowned soberly and said ‘I understand.’ ’’ His willingness to accede to the fable is part of what can only be described as the complete humiliation to which he subjects himself in order to get Fu¨sun back. At one point he tallies up the evening visits he made to her family’s apartment (surely a locale of exquisite boredom to the author of Istanbul) as 1,593 (!), some of them over five hours long.39 Kemal’s humiliation is part of what gives The Museum of Innocence a connection to Naomi, a novel by the Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki, whom Pamuk mentions in some of his essays. It, too, is a story of sexual obsession and abandonment, in which a man drawn to a woman in part because of her ‘‘European’’ qualities accepts various forms of humiliation in order to reclaim her (its Japanese title translates as ‘‘A Fool’s Love’’). The two plots are not wholly parallel (in Naomi the couple is actually married), but similar enough that Tanizaki’s story looms behind Pamuk’s.

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Naomi serves as a kind of declaration of its author’s pulling back from the Western attachments he had once cultivated; having adopted a selfconsciously European ‘‘bohemian’’ lifestyle as a young man, he began to reaffirm his identification with his native country sometime after the devastating Tokyo earthquake of 1923. His book, begun in 1924, may be a kind of allegory of the cultural subjection he came to regard as a consequence of his earlier yearning to be more European.40 Looked at in a certain light, The Museum of Innocence might seem to follow a similar pattern. We know that Pamuk sometimes acknowledged ‘‘hate’’ as an element in his complex relationship to the West. In the years when he was collecting objects for his museum, a number of his compatriots were feeling disillusioned and oppressed by their earlier ties to Europe, in part because of the European Union’s rejection of Turkey’s application for membership, and the criticism of the country as insufficiently Western that was voiced to justify the decision. Pamuk in one essay mentioned certain of his relatives as among those who then lost some of their earlier enthusiasm for the West. But there are many reasons to regard his as a different case. One is the uproar provoked in 2005 by his strong criticism of the widespread Turkish refusal to admit responsibility for the massacres of Armenians at the time of World War I, or even discuss them publicly; the episode made him an object of widespread enmity and for a time of official prosecution, forcing him into temporary exile (he taught at Columbia University in New York, to which he has remained attached ever since). The controversy also intensified his identification with Western-style demands for freedom of expression, and may have contributed to the admiration that led to his receiving the Nobel Prize in 2006. His sense of distance toward the Istanbul from which he later declared himself inseparable did not begin with the Armenian controversy, however, since his memoir of growing up in the city referred to a period in his mid- to late teens when he looked on ‘‘this world of ‘ours’—in which everyone . . . shared in a common identity, respecting humility, tradition, our elders, our forefathers, our history, our legends,’’ with hatred. The deeply ironic, even burlesque portrayal of Kemal’s subjection to Fu¨sun and her family betrays similarly negative sentiments, reminding us that his ambivalence toward his own culture was no less persisting and deep than his contradictory feelings toward the West.41 All these things need to be kept in mind when we consider the actual museum whose name the novel shares. The conception behind it mixes

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elements of cultural nationalism with an affirmation of attitudes Pamuk often depicts as principally Western. The novel points to European collections, especially smaller quasi-private ones, as the models for Pamuk’s own, but a tone of criticism or jealousy toward them is audible too, when he describes European museums as ‘‘the repositories of those things from which Western Civilization derives its wealth of knowledge, allowing it to rule the world.’’ One aim of the Museum of Innocence appears to have been to provide an instrument that might help redress this imbalance of cultural power, recalling the project of reviving Harufi techniques Galip encountered in The Black Book. In Istanbul, too, Pamuk bewailed the absence of any replacement for the old Ottoman culture left in shambles by the Westernizers, a motif picked up by the regret expressed in the museum catalogue for the carelessness and disinterest that allowed things that had been part of everyday life in the time he was growing up to be neglected, thrown away, or destroyed, an offense he now dubbed ‘‘the massacre of objects.’’ The museum was on one level an attempt to revive them, to make them participate in telling the story of the people who used them, an aim pursued in narrative form in the novel.42 Pamuk was aware, to be sure, that when displayed together in the special space of the museum, the objects would also take on a kind of life of their own. Looking at some ‘‘rusty keys, candy boxes, pliers, and lighters’’ assembled on his desk well before the museum existed, but which he already imagined as part of it, ‘‘I felt as if they were communicating with each other. Their ending up in this place after being uprooted from the places they used to belong to and separated from the people whose lives they were once part of—their loneliness, in a word—aroused in me the shamanic belief that objects too have spirits.’’43 Such a sense for the power of things removed from their contexts of use to generate a kind of spectral power, intimating (like the mirror play that so often animates Pamuk’s writing) the existence of a universe beyond the one we know, has often inspired modernist literary and artistic movements: the surrealists cultivated ‘‘found’’ objects as entry points for the kind of dreamlike energies they hoped might transform the world, and Marcel Duchamp offered his ‘‘Readymades’’ (a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, most famously a urinal) as instruments for effacing the boundaries between art and life. Visitors to the Museum of Innocence or readers of its catalogue may feel such energies emanating from the things assembled there. But unlike surrealist objects or Duchamp’s, these stand before us because they have a place inside a particular literary text, which we are invited to bring to mind when we look at

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them. Gazing at them may induce an experience akin to reading stories, pushing out the boundaries of our existence to include possible lives it does not ordinarily contain, but the connection to a particular novel reminds us that the world into which they take us is fictional, drawing us back from the kind of confusion of dream and reality the surrealists advocated, to which Ru¨ya was subject, and that Galip learned to avoid. One feature of his museum on which Pamuk strongly insists is its individual focus, a quality developed at length in a section of the catalogue titled ‘‘A Modest Manifesto for Museums,’’ which provides an answer to ‘‘the question of how new museums should be made.’’ Here, too, the notion surfaces that the museum might help to redress a longstanding cultural imbalance: in contrast to such great traditional institutions as the Louvre, the Prado, the Vatican, or even Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace, the aim of new museums should be ‘‘to explore and uncover the universe and humanity of the new modern man emerging from increasingly wealthy non-Western nations.’’ The great collections of the past were set up to tell the stories of nations, presupposing that these are ‘‘far more important than the stories of individuals. This is unfortunate because the stories of individuals are much better suited to displaying the depths of our humanity.’’ Past museums have sought to be like epics; future ones should be modeled on novels. Pamuk drives this idea home by repeating it a number of times. The ‘‘ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are richer, more humane, and much more joyful’’ than the histories of societies, states, or nations; museums should ‘‘tell, with the same brilliance, depth, and power, the stories of the individual human beings living in countries such as China, India, Mexico, Iran, or Turkey’’; the ‘‘measure of a museum’s success . . . should be its capacity to reveal the humanity of individuals’’; museums ought to become ‘‘smaller, more individualistic, and cheaper’’; future museums should aim ‘‘to re-create the world of single individual human beings’’; resources should be invested in ‘‘smaller museums that tell the stories of individuals.’’44 Readers of this chapter hardly need be told that such a program called for representing Eastern life in a manner Pamuk had often described as characteristically Western, and to which he portrayed Eastern culture as resistant. He highlighted the contrast in the conversation between the Venetian narrator of The White Castle and the Ottoman writer Evliya Chelebi, where the latter fears and the former looks forward to a culture focused on individuals and their stories; and it reappeared in Celaˆl’s reference to the long refusal of Turkish shops to display clothes on realistic mannequins

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as just one of thousands of examples of ‘‘the prohibition fever that raged throughout our nation’s long journey westward.’’ A similar perspective made Pamuk understand Western travel writers as providing an entry into dimensions of his city’s life that no Easterners were able or willing to consider, just as the novel as a vehicle for exploring individual experience (and its social contexts) was a Western form. If on one side the program set out in the ‘‘Modest Manifesto for Museums’’ was part of an attempt to redress the cultural imbalance that had previously allowed museums to serve as instruments of Western hegemony, on the other it constituted a subtle and unacknowledged recipe for infusing Eastern culture with Western attitudes and values. We need to mention just one more example of this contrast in order to see its particular relevance to The Museum of Innocence and the collection that shares its name. It comes from Pamuk’s novel of 1998, My Name Is Red, the book that most extensively develops the opposition between Western interest in individuality and Eastern resistance to it. The story (like The Black Book, it has a disappearance and a murder at its center, interwoven with a tale of lost and partly found love) is framed by the conflict between miniature painters who seek to inject Western-style realism into Ottoman and Islamic manuscript illumination and traditionalists who resist doing so, and at one point the case for the Western manner of painting is supported by a tale from the past. In it a prince, suddenly freed by his father’s death from the isolated apartment in which his nervous parent kept him confined, comes upon a real horse for the first time in his life, having previously seen only idealized images of horses in books; so shocked is he by the steed’s animal nature and the disconcerting shape of its body parts that he has all the horses in the realm over which he now ruled put to death. I cannot say for certain whether Pamuk had this story in mind when he gave The Museum of Innocence the singular ending he did, but the two bear a close relationship. Kemal and Fu¨sun officially celebrate their engagement at the first stop of a car trip he organizes to take her and her family to visit Europe, where none of them had been before. Later in the evening she finds herself accidentally locked out of her mother’s room in the inn where they are all staying; she seeks shelter in Kemal’s room, and the two make love for the first time in nine years, sounding echoes of the sexual paradise where their relations began. She leaves before morning, however, and the next day, quietly but intensely furious, she accuses Kemal of tricking her

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into having sex—thus ending the prospect of their marriage, because ‘‘people like you never marry what they’ve already had.’’ Although her conclusion is clearly mistaken in the case of her lover, she goes off in a frenzy, disappearing down the highway; he pursues and overtakes her in his father’s 1956 Chevrolet (the car model that Pamuk often placed among the chief signs of Istanbul’s pervasive hu¨zu¨n). She agrees to get in, but only on condition that she will drive (the story of her license, obtained after much difficulty, occupies one chapter in the novel, and the permit itself appears as one of the museum’s exhibits); angrily speeding off, she makes a jerky U-turn and then quickly crashes the car into a tree, killing herself. The same moralistic idealization that made her demand of Kemal that he believe she had never had sex with her husband, so that she could enter their marriage as a virgin, now drove her to a death that can hardly be seen other than as suicide, just as the contrast between real living animals and the idealized depictions that were the only acceptable representations in traditional Islamic culture drove the prince to massacre the horses.45 Kemal was injured in the crash, badly enough to require a two-month hospital stay, but once recovered he can only refer to her death as an accident, despite his awareness at the time that she was ‘‘racing toward the plane tree . . . locked onto it, as onto a target.’’ So besotted and myopic a refusal to see things as they are is very much of a piece with his bland tally of the 1593 visits to Fu¨sun’s family in their banal and cliche´d house, and his agreement to accept the fable of her virginity. In the museum catalogue Pamuk distances himself only slightly from Kemal’s self-induced blindness. The museum displays its objects in cases, mostly numbered to correspond to the chapters of the novel; the catalogue lists no case for Chapter 79, where the car crash takes place. The only reference to her death is a laconic note in connection with an earlier chapter, that she had ‘‘her left elbow out of the window in imitation of Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief . . . worth remembering when speculating whether Fu¨sun’s death was an accident or suicide.’’46 Grace Kelly’s character remains alive at the end of Hitchcock’s 1955 movie, so it is difficult to know on which side of the scale Fu¨sun’s imitation of her would weigh. But we remember that Fu¨sun invoked movies as a model for her claim to have remained a virgin during her marriage, a reminder that she was susceptible to having her life—like the prince’s and like Ru¨ya’s—be invaded by fictions. At least two motives need to be recognized behind the ambiguity Pamuk here promotes. The first is that it highlights the permeable boundary

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between author and characters that had been a feature of his writing all along. ‘‘Conversations’’ between Kemal and the teller of his tale appear in the novel’s last chapters, and the catalogue ends with the slyly innocent claim that the character told his story to the author over drinks in an Istanbul bar. In his Norton lectures at Harvard in 2010, Pamuk explained that the pleasures and benefits we derive from the alternative ways of being that novels present to us derive not just from identifying with one or more fictional characters, but equally from puzzling out the intention that leads their creator to plot their story in a particular way. Novels have a ‘‘secret center’’ to which readers strive to gain access, and it is the novelist’s aims and intentions that constitute this focal point, developing ‘‘his heroes in accordance with the topics he wants to explore, research and relate, and with the life experiences he wishes to make the focus of his imagination and creativity.’’ Writers engage in a kind of silent dialogue with both their characters and their imagined readers, trying at once ‘‘in a masterful and subtle way, to both conceal and suggest the novel’s center—its deeper meaning, a single comprehensive view of the forest from a distance. The central paradox of the art of the novel is the way the novelist strives to express his own personal worldview while also seeing the world through the eyes of others.’’ In regard to The Museum of Innocence, the collection is an equal partner with the novel in expressing this mix of revelation and concealment. By treating the manner of Fu¨sun’s death as he does, Pamuk engages in just this kind of literary play, at once hiding and revealing his own view of the story behind Kemal’s.47 The refusal to confront Fu¨sun’s death directly in the museum and catalogue has much to do with Pamuk’s complex and sometimes tortuous relationship to the two cultural spaces whose connections and contrasts provide his constant subject. The mutual attraction and repulsion of West and East was a central theme of The Museum of Innocence no less than of his other books, a point to which Pamuk calls attention by identifying himself with an object that, like the ‘‘accident,’’ he did not put on view, but described as having a central place in the collection all the same. It is an ‘‘East-West watch,’’ a clever and beautiful pocket timepiece that faces in both directions at once, showing Muslim prayer times on one side (they provided a common way of dividing the day in Turkey before 1925) and a standard Western dial, with its more abstract and secular circle of hours on the other. The watch figures in the story as one marker of the contrast between cultures that frames the narrative, and a picture of it appears in

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the catalogue, on the page just preceding the tale of his ‘‘conversations’’ with Kemal that concludes it. Pamuk explains that he could portray the watch in the catalogue because there its two faces could be depicted side by side on a single page, imparting equal status to each. But there was no way to display it in the museum without giving preference to one or the other way of marking time: even setting the watch in a case that showed one face directly and the other in a mirror would put one closer to viewers, and ‘‘I was firmly convinced that our museum must stand equidistant from East and West.’’ Thus the watch could only be shown in the book. But ‘‘to those who mocked my excessive concerns I smiled back and said [invoking a famous line from Gustave Flaubert]: ‘The East-West watch, c’est moi.’ ’’ Like it, his presence in the show could not be directly depicted—instead he was the mind within which it existed.48 Flaubert, however, employed this formula to declare his identity with a single character (Emma Bovary). Pamuk, by contrast, identified himself with a situation, a Janus-faced manner of being that provides him with both much nurture and much pain. His whole career as a novelist has depended on his being able to face in both directions at once, just as his native city does, and we know that he was capable of identifying both with a Western affirmation of individuality and innovation, and with an Eastern loyalty to solidarity, continuity, and tradition. But he also felt many potentially violent tensions in regard to both, deploring the resistance to realistic representation and the determination to cloak the world in mystery he saw in traditional Eastern culture, as well as the sometimes destructive overconfidence and egotism the West clothed in progressive righteousness. The notion that we can preserve the best of each by somehow combining them is an attractive one, but surely the meaning of Fu¨sun’s death in The Museum of Innocence is that the attempt to import the individual autonomy and enlightened anti-puritanism of the West into an East still infused with traditional moralism and the self-delusions it can foster was a perilous endeavor. Pamuk has been animated by a love-hate relationship to both cultures, a condition that has allowed him to present each with a mix of sympathy and critical distance. In admiring the broader humanity he has sought to encourage by living simultaneously in both, we should not lose sight of the violence his accounts often recognize as inseparable from their relations, understanding full well that it is no accident.

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Conclusion

Distance and Belonging

The individuals whose histories we have recounted here are surely not typical, if only because their complex and often critical relationship to their cultures of origin sets them apart from the mass of people for whom being oneself begins with affirming some elemental group identity. All the same, I think there are things to be learned from reflecting on certain features of these lives between cultures. The lessons bear in part on culture as a universal phenomenon of human existence—on human beings as cultural beings—and in part on the specific relations between European (or Western) and extra-European ways of life, a question that has been a main spur to thinking about cultural difference at least since the eighteenth century, and that was central to each of the attempts to explore a space between cultures examined in this book. I approach these questions first by recalling the point advanced in the introduction, that some sense of distance is an implicit, albeit often unacknowledged, element of cultural identity itself. The reason is that two separate but parallel dialectics operate in making us members of cultures. First, humans must draw on the same reflective faculty that gives them distance from all the conditions of their lives in order to find their way within the bumpy and sometimes perplexing terrain that cultures (like languages) present to their members. As Martin Hollis put it, cultures do not make sense of themselves, but require that their members exercise ‘‘intelligent agency’’ in order to give some degree of coherence to them; to inhabit our social worlds we must interact with them not just as pupils but as judges, too. Second, and more elementally, people’s needs for affective and physical satisfactions—notably sexual ones—at once collide with the limits set up by established rules and norms, and yet bind us to the same cultural

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elements, as they are modeled for us in infancy and childhood by parents and caregivers. This dialectic constitutes a less rigid formulation of what Freud identified as the Oedipus complex, pitting the desires for which parents (or their surrogates) provide the first sources of gratification against the socially imposed limits of which they are simultaneously the agents, and which we internalize when we identify with them. Together, the two dialectics of reflection and affectivity underpin the intimate connection between the loyalty people develop toward their cultures and the sense of distance they often feel toward them. Small as the number of our subjects may be, and particular as all their circumstances were or are, the illustration of this dialectical relationship they all provide calls attention to a central and sometimes overlooked aspect of what it means for human beings to be cultural beings. Each of our subjects gave expression to this dialectic in some personal way, of which the most radical was Richard Burton’s proto-Nietzschean critique of culture itself. I glossed it earlier as prompting us to recognize that what Clifford Geertz called the self-spun webs of meaning that human cultures constitute are interwoven with threads of nonsense. Burton was far from the first to insist that cultures contain elements difficult or impossible to justify in rational terms; people in many times and places have observed that cultural differences often rest on arbitrary and parochial ideas and beliefs. But Burton’s all-out assault, in Stone Talk and The Kasidah of Haji Abdu el-Yezdi, on every particular culture’s claims for the special validity of its intellectual and moral constructions put the point with striking directness, and in terms that still resound today. None of the other figures we have considered spoke in such radical accents (although Nietzsche’s critique of culture as we know it found its way into Louis Massignon’s theory of history), but two of them, Orhan Pamuk and Chinua Achebe, explicitly recognized that the systems of meaning to which they themselves belonged were run through with strings of foolishness. Pamuk highlighted the hollowness in the uncritical and inhumane rationalism that some of his fellow Turks took to be Western culture, in the figure of Dr. Selhaˆttin in Silent House, but his deeper and more general questioning of both modern and traditional forms of collective meaning-making found expression in The Black Book’s skepticism about the claims that cultures advance to provide solutions to deep cosmic or historical mysteries. In Achebe’s work, not only did the Ibo villagers portrayed in Things Fall Apart regard the customs of their neighbors as

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senseless (a very common attitude toward others, to be sure), but they also acknowledged that pretense and hypocrisy undermined the general validity claimed for some of their own beliefs and stories, since cunning individuals could appropriate them for selfish ends. Even more striking, given that Achebe regarded himself as a defender of traditional Ibo culture against Western disrespect, is his recognition that the inroads Christianity made in the villages of his homeland were facilitated by elements of Ibo belief and practice that imposed cruel and unnecessary suffering on individuals and groups—the parents of twins, people such as Nwoye squeezed by harsh and vindictive customs of revenge, the group ostracized as osu. Despite his commitment to rescuing his native culture from its detractors, Achebe clearly felt no duty to defend such components as these, and in essays and interviews he insisted that cultures change over time, indeed they must do so if they are to survive, and that individuals such as he had a right and even a duty to distinguish between inherited ideas and practices that deserved to be preserved and others that called out to be abandoned.1 Although Achebe may never have explicitly said so, one implication of No Longer at Ease is that when cultures fail to change in response to changing conditions, they become oppressive and even destructive. This is not quite what he intimated when he attributed Obi’s fate in that novel to the isolation into which the latter fell by separating himself from his culture of origin without being able to attach himself firmly to another one, but one side of the vise in which he was so painfully squeezed consisted of traditional Ibo culture’s failure to recognize, as Achebe himself did, that even some customs to which people felt most passionately attached deserved to be cast off. Such an attitude constitutes a less extreme expression of the sense of distance from one’s own culture (or cultures) that Burton voiced in his more radical way, and Achebe was clearly aware that what nurtured this sense in himself was the close contact with another culture given him by his position at a ‘‘crossroads.’’ In the face of the negative or oppressive features of cultural belonging that Burton, Pamuk, and Achebe all experienced (and that appear at least implicitly in the other figures we have examined here, too), it may not be amiss to ask a question seldom posed because its answers seem so obvious: Why do people put up with the demands cultures place on them? Why do we not rebel more often against the restraints within which cultures seek to confine our thinking and behavior? The responses usually given provide much of the answer: that we have a deep need for the solidarity with others

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that cultures provide; that cultures offer ways to develop and realize potentials likely to remain dormant without them, such as for language; that our ties to cultures are extensions of the early and elemental dependency on parents and caregivers we all experience as infants. But the considerations we have been developing here suggest a further and different sort of reason, namely that in some part of our being we accede to cultural limits because we recognize that the control they exercise over us as individuals is looser and less complete than is often maintained, especially by those who set themselves up as the voices and guardians of collective values or standards; in other words, that it is precisely our partial but essential capacity to slip free of cultural restraints that makes being members of a culture bearable. To be sure, individuals develop this capacity to widely different degrees, depending on their temperament and the opportunities and experiences open to them: some may remain only dimly aware of it, while others (like those we have focused on here) may build a large part of their lives around it. Similarly, particular cultures—as well as the sub-groups within them— recognize and judge the ability of individuals to deviate from shared norms and values in sharply differing ways, ranging from insistent rejection through toleration to affirmation and even pride. In general, the cultures least hospitable to individual deviations from collective norms are those that either exist in isolation from others or that feel somehow threatened by the contacts they develop with them, while those most open to such departures are those able to respond to their interactions with other ways of life by absorbing elements from them. The increasing relevance of this difference in a world connected by ever more extended and thicker networks of interaction and communication is one thing that gives the kinds of questions raised by the lives we have considered here their claim on our attention. This brings us to the second feature shared by our five subjects (and by the two additional African figures more briefly considered in connection with Achebe), namely that all the spaces between cultures they sought to explore spanned European and non-European forms of life. Much recent commentary by historians, critics, and theorists has set itself against the opposition between ‘‘the West and the rest,’’ seeking a more open and less ‘‘Eurocentric’’ way of understanding the relations between different regions of the world. Such a goal deserves praise to the degree that it promotes an equality of respect among human groups. But the significance long attached to the polarity of East and West by people on both sides of it, and the

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political and cultural weight it bore between at least the eighteenth century and the end of the twentieth (in some ways the burden has grown even heavier since), argue for recognizing its importance as a phenomenon of modern world history, however much one may object to it as a reference point for judgments of value. In a way, each of the figures we have treated here was seeking to overcome or transcend the opposition between Europe (or the West) and some world felt to be other to it, but all their projects took it as a reality and an inescapable starting point. Perhaps more significant still, all the Europeans in our group were in some degree advocates of the extra-European cultures into which they sought to enter (even if, in the case of Burton, the connection involved some strongly negative attitudes as well), and all the non-Europeans found important resources for individual and collective development in European models and materials. We should not let the significance of this commonality be obscured by the fact that all our subjects—the Europeans no less than the others—knew full well how oppressive and destructive the European presence elsewhere often was. Much writing on the relations between European and nonEuropean cultures in the recent past has been animated by strong anticolonialist sentiments, and on moral grounds their reminders about the damage done by imperial power merit universal assent. But passion can sometimes cloud judgment, and this seems to me to be the case with what may still be the most influential (although by now much-debated) piece of writing on these questions, Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said portrayed nineteenth-century European attention to Eastern cultures—as instanced in fiction, travel books, and scholarly work—as a discursive project whose aim and effect were to construct an image of an exotic and flaccid ‘‘Orient,’’ at once susceptible to and deserving of domination by a more advanced and energetic Europe. Depictions of the East—especially the Islamic East— provided cultural preparation and justification for imperial conquest; intentionally or not, those who gave attention to Eastern life and culture cleared the ground for colonialism’s destructive impact on ‘‘lesser’’ peoples. Said’s argument is especially relevant here because Burton provides him with a kind of touchstone for his thesis (Massignon appears in his book too, but in a less central place): although Burton possessed both a deeper and more direct knowledge of Eastern life and a higher level of sympathy with it than practically any other figure of his time, the very depth of his involvement was part of his implicit sense that his status as a European

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entitled him to command and master the foreign world he entered. His prose radiates ‘‘a sense of assertion and domination over all the complexities of Oriental life,’’ his knowledge ‘‘elevates his consciousness to a position of supremacy’’ that ‘‘merges with the voice of empire’’; confident of his ability to enter into Eastern life and know it at a deep level, he was acting out the presupposition that to have knowledge about the East ‘‘one must see and know the Orient as a domain ruled over by Europe.’’2 That Burton’s search for knowledge about the East was partly inspired by the needs of imperial administration and that he, like his superiors, understood very well that knowledge could be a vehicle for acquiring and exercising power: these are simple truths, recognized at the time (as long before) and incontestable in hindsight. But to reduce Burton’s involvements to his inherence in a discourse of cultural domination is to forget that he—along with many others who had some connection to colonial administration—was drawn to Eastern life for reasons that led him vehemently to reject the negative notions some of his fellow Europeans held about it. (It should not be forgotten, although we have no space to discuss it here, that even some students of Eastern languages and literature who stood closer to the centers of imperial power than Burton made significant contributions to the development of Indian and Arab culture, preparing the ground for later independence movements.)3 The notion that ‘‘objectification’’ of another culture should be regarded as a tool of domination forgets that viewing things from a perspective that endows them with coherent and graspable features is inseparable from most kinds of knowledge, no matter how innocent or beneficial. In Burton’s case the argument also fails to give sufficient recognition to the similarly objectifying and critical perspective he took toward Europeans, and in particular toward his own countrymen and their activities in the East, not only highlighting their empty pride and pretense but arguing that their presence generated resentment and hostility that would soon find justifiable expression in violent anti-imperial revolt. Neither Lawrence’s nor Massignon’s manner of involving himself in Eastern culture deserves to be seen as a vehicle of domination. Lawrence experienced his participation in the desert war as exposing him to a painful subordination at least as much as it gave him a chance to impose himself on others, and an important goal of his strategy was to give the Arabs the best chance to enjoy the independence he was helping them to win. Massignon, as we have seen, believed that drawing

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closer to Islam could provide Christians with a shield against the temptation to forget Jesus’s original commitment to the excluded and the weak. Said’s perspective makes no place for ‘‘Orientalisms’’ with such features. Nor did the damage inflicted by European colonialism block the nonEuropeans we have considered here (and in this they are representative of many others) from finding essential resources for individual and collective development in European cultures. This was true not just of Pamuk (who in a sense was half-European from the start) but more significantly of Achebe and his African contemporaries. Achebe felt a deep ambivalence toward the British educational system to which he owed so much, the negative side intensified by what appears to have been guilt and chagrin that the Christian environment into which he was born concealed at least some of the truth about colonialism from him during his early life. But the hostile feelings he often expressed toward the colonial masters never blinded him to defects both in traditional Ibo life and in what his own people made of independence once they achieved it. The benefits he recognized as accruing to him from his connection to Britain consisted not only of the perspectives opened up by European anthropology and literature, but no less in the entry it afforded into the extended networks of writers and readers without which he could not have made his career. The cases of Sheik Hamidou Kane and Tayeb Salih, although less well known, are perhaps more remarkable. That the central character of Ambiguous Adventure ended up feeling hatred toward French culture is hardly surprising, but that he also felt love must be remembered as well; it seems especially significant that what attracted him in French education was the discovery of a mental realm not controlled or regulated by religious authority, giving freer rein to the intellectual faculties that it both drew on and nurtured. The figure of Mustafa Sa’eed in Season of Migration to the North displays the love of British culture that survived all his hostility toward it even more strikingly, in the secret room he preserved in the little Nile village where he settled, finding in it some antidote at once to the limitations of traditional life and to the deep sense of personal isolation that originally drove him away from it. I do not mean to suggest that the nurture all these figures found in European culture in any way makes up for the damage Western colonialism inflicted on their societies. But I do take their cases as evidence that in colonial situations no less than in others, the specific ties to cultures individuals develop are ones they knit together for themselves; the fact that most people are content to model their cultural participation unreservedly

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on those around them, never developing or even discovering their potential for some more independent manner of entering into a collective identity, should not be taken as evidence that they lack the capacity to do so. Nor should we credit the claims advanced by certain cultures, or the people who put themselves forward as their guardians, that the form of solidarity they enshrine precludes such a degree of individuality. Individuality and cultural membership are not alternative modes of social existence but two sides of a single one. Even though it would be wrong to generalize too much from the cases brought together in this book, I think we should be grateful for the range of possible manners of living both within and between cultures they bring to light, as well as for the testimony they provide to the broad human capacity for maintaining a liberating distance from the ways of life that form us.

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Notes

Introduction 1. For a particularly revelatory example of what this might mean for Jews, see Mercedes Garcia-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe, trans. Martin Beagles, with a foreword by David Nirenberg and Richard Kagan (Baltimore and London, 2003). Of the large literature on the cultural interplay between Christians and Muslims in medieval Spain, see especially Cyrillle Aillet, Les mozarabes: Christianisme, islamisation et arabisation en peninsule ibe´rique (IXe–XIIe Sie`cle) (Madrid, 2010). The general topic has been pursued in recent years by Sanjay Subrahmanyam; see Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (Waltham, MA, 2011), and Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2012). I very much share Subrahmanyam’s skeptical attitude toward ‘‘cultural incommensurability,’’ voiced in the introduction to the second book, although my aims and concerns are largely distinct from his. 2. For a pertinent critique of such defensive ‘‘multiculturalism,’’ see Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York and London, 2006). Those who seek to preserve cultures intact against possible contagion by others ‘‘are busy trying to ensure that the Hulli of Papua New Guinea or, for that matter, Sikhs in Toronto or Hmong in New Orleans [or Jews or Italians in New York or Muslims in Paris] keep their ‘authentic’ ways. What makes a cultural expression authentic, though,’’ given the many debates cultures exhibit about it? (106). Appiah’s views about cultural identity and the potential all human beings have to transcend it are in accord with much that I argue below. He might have been a candidate for inclusion in this book, but see my comment about him below, in note 11. 3. See George W. Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York and London, 1987). 4. Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1992), 37. 5. Ibid., 31–32, 11. See also the comments on Karmiloff-Smith’s work by Howard Gardner, ‘‘Green Ideas Sleeping Furiously,’’ New York Review of Books, March 23, 1995; quotes are from p. 36; and, for a related set of comments on subjectivity and

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248 Notes to Pages 5–15 language, see Manfred Frank, What Is Neo-Structuralism?, trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard Gray (Minneapolis, 1989), 282ff. It should be noted, however, that some of the linguistic constructions children devise are ones most of us would regard as merely childish, such as using ‘‘goed’’ as the past tense of ‘‘go.’’ I owe this reminder to Gerald Izenberg. 6. See ‘‘A Village Invents a Language All Its Own,’’ New York Times, July 14, 2013. 7. Michel Bre´al, Semantics: Studies in the Science of Meaning, trans. Mrs. Henry Cust (New York, 1900, 1964), esp. 239–42. For a critical discussion of the contrary views sometimes attributed to Saussure, who in reality stood much closer to Bre´al than is often understood, and of the ‘‘post-structuralist’’ claims about language in part derived from them, see my account in The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge and New York, 2005), chap. 18. 8. Karmiloff-Smith, 32. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La structure du comportement, 190; quoted by Theodore F. Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale. La Gene`se de la philosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty jusqu’a` la Phe´nomenologie de la perception, with a preface by Emmanuel Levinas (The Hague, 1971), 46. Emphasis in the original. 9. Martin Hollis, ‘‘Of Masks and Men,’’ in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (Cambridge and New York, 1985), esp. 229. 10. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York, 1986), 3–12, 214–23. 11. I have not included Anthony Appiah in this list, although he both exemplifies living between cultures and provides much rich reflection on it. Born in Ghana to an English mother and African father and educated in England, he now lives and works in the United States. But he seldom takes up issues involving simultaneous membership in two cultures, perhaps because his early experience did not render them problematic as it did for all the figures we consider here. As he notes, ‘‘We were in Ghana, a country where Christians, Muslims, and the followers of traditional religion live side by side, accepting each other’s different ways without experiencing much curiosity about them’’ (Cosmopolitanism, 149). Such ease contrasts sharply with the deep tensions Chinua Achebe experienced in a comparable situation. Both came from elite sections of societies colonized by the British, but these upper reaches had a different character in Appiah’s Asante world from Achebe’s Ibo one. Chapter 1 1. The locus classicus is, of course, Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). I will have something to say about this issue in the Conclusion. 2. Preface to the third edition of Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah by Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, ed. Isabel Burton (London, 1893; repr. New York, 1964), xxii–xxiii. 3. Richard Burton, Scinde; or, the Unhappy Valley (London, 1851), I: 228.

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Notes to Pages 15–19 249 4. Personal Narrative, 23, 2. 5. The piece was published together with two others as The Jew, the Gypsy, and El Islam by the late Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, ed. W .H. Wilkins (Chicago and New York, 1898). See Wilkins’s preface, xiv, for the probable date. So far as I know his estimate has never been challenged. 6. The Jew, the Gypsy, and El Islam, 335–36, 332, 337. In an 1864 essay critical of the German anthropologist Theodor Waitz, Burton wrote that Islam was ‘‘the first and greatest reformation of the corrupted faith called Christianity’’ and described its adherents as superior to Christians in both ‘‘morality and manly dignity’’ and in ‘‘industry and honesty.’’ See ‘‘Notes on Waitz’s Anthropology,’’ Anthropology Review 2, no. 7 (November 1864), and Dane Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2005), 80. Burton repeated the main lines of this history, the relations between Judaism and Islam and the movement of both away from an original purity of religious morality toward an acceptance of the idea of rewards and punishments in the ‘‘Terminal Essay’’ of his Arabian Nights translation: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Now Entituled [sic]: The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, with Introduction, Explanatory Notes on the Manners and Customs of Moslem Men and a Terminal Essay upon the History of The Nights, by Richard F. Burton (facsimile of the original 1885 London [‘‘Benares’’] edition, Denver, 1900), X: 127–28 and 178–88 (hereafter Nights). The notion that Islam was an attempt to establish a pure monotheism was advanced by European writers before, notably by the eighteenth-century translator of the Qu’ran, George Sale. On him and his translation, see Alexander Bevilacqua, ‘‘Islamic Letters in the European Enlightenment’’ (Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 2014), chap. 4. Burton refers to Sale and to the Preliminary Discourse in which he advanced these views in the Terminal Essay in Nights (100n) but does not remark on the similarity of their views. There seems to be no reference to Sale in El Islam. Among Burton’s other sources were surely eighteenth-century defenders of Mohammed such as Henri de Boulainvilliers; for a recent account of his views see David Allen Harvey, The French Enlightenment and Its Others: The Mandarin, the Savage, and the Invention of the Human Sciences (New York, 2012), 19–20. 7. Sir Richard Francis Burton, Goa and the Blue Mountains: Or, Six Months of Sick Leave (London, 1851; repr. Santa Barbara, CA, 2001), 52. The passage has been often quoted, for instance by John Hayman in his very useful edition of Sir Richard Burton’s Travels in Arabia and Africa: Four Lectures from a Huntington Library Manuscript (San Marino, CA, 1990), 74. 8. The most perceptive and moving account of this earlier situation is William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London, 2002, 2004). See also Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings (London, 1954), 235. 9. From the autobiographical sketch printed by Isabel Burton in her biography, The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (London, 1893), I: 109.

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250 Notes to Pages 20–23 10. There are good accounts of Burton’s linguistic achievements in Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man, and Fawn M. Brodie, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (New York, 1967). For Burton’s own account of his language learning, see the autobiographical postscript to his book Falconry in the Valley of the Indus (London, 1852), 95–99. Kennedy’s and Brodie’s books provide excellent overall accounts of Burton’s life, and I have learned much from both, but I respectfully differ with each in some respects. Kennedy places more emphasis than I think justified on Burton’s relationship to the general category of ‘‘difference,’’ a currently fashionable but I think overly abstract critical preoccupation. His illuminating discussion of Burton’s racist language in regard to black Africans, on which I draw below, is more subtle than this perspective suggests. I think the account I give here will show that Brodie is off base in viewing Burton’s penchant for disguise as evidence of ‘‘a savage dissatisfaction with himself,’’ as well as in such judgments as that his main reason for undertaking the Mecca pilgrimage was a ‘‘primary obsession’’ about ‘‘the mysteries of Arab family life’’ (see, e.g., Brodie, 89 and 91). Mary Lovell, A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton (New York, 1998), is the most complete account, but it is far less concerned with Burton’s intellectual and inner life, or with interpretive issues generally, than are the works by Brodie and Kennedy. 11. Kennedy, 43. 12. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters from the Levant During the Embassy to Constantinople, 1716–18 (New York, 1971; reprint of the 1838 London ed. and with preliminary discourse by J. A. St. John, Esq.), 165. For other examples see Leila Ahmed, Edward W. Lane, A Study of His Life and Works and of British Ideas of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1978), 67–68. 13. Quoted by Kennedy, 37, from a manuscript in the Huntington Library. The point had long been understood by the British in India. See Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996). 14. Richard F. Burton, Sindh and the Races That Inhabit the Valley of the Indus, with an introduction by H. T. Lambrick (London, 1851; repr. 1973), xv–xvii. It appears that Burton had undergone circumcision by this time (he certainly did so before the Mecca trip; see John Hayman’s introduction to his volume Sir Richard Burton’s Travels in Arabia and Africa. For a general account of British information gathering and intelligence practices, see C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge and New York, 1996). 15. Brodie, 63–64. 16. Ibid., 66, 69–70. 17. For the earlier part of this paragraph, see ibid., 73 and 75. For the drowning story, see Burton, Falconry in the Valley of the Indus, 53–54. Every writer on Burton seems to include it; cf. Brodie, 74–75. 18. Scinde; or, the Unhappy Valley, I: 248–49 and 258.

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Notes to Pages 24–29 251 19. Sindh and the Races, 328, on Hindus, and 172–73, on Islam and the other examples of earlier survivals. 20. Scinde: or, the Unhappy Valley, I: 32. 21. Ibid., I: 244–45. 22. Brodie, 68. See also Isabel Burton’s Life, I: xiv–xv. 23. Isabel Burton, Life, I: 169. 24. Kennedy, 69, citing Kaja Silverman, ‘‘White Skin, Brown Masks: The Double Mimesis, or with Lawrence in Arabia,’’ Differences 1, no. 3 (1989), and Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Post-Colonial India (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988). 25. Scinde; or, the Unhappy Valley, I: 195. 26. Brodie, 187; Burton, The City of the Saints and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (New York, 1963), 452. 27. Personal Narrative, 1–2 and 14–15. 28. From the autobiographical sketch printed by Isabel Burton in her Life, I: 100. In the pilgrimage book Burton also gave a negative account of Europeans in India who imitated local ‘‘customs, manners, and dress,’’ saying that Indians would ‘‘never respect’’ them, but this was a judgment based on his low regard for Indian courage and nobility of character. In contrast to other peoples, such as Afghans, Arabs, Persians, North American tribes, and even some Indians (the Rajputs), he thought, most people on the subcontinent felt demeaned by being dominated by people who showed their own characteristics back to them. The others just listed saw Europeans who took on ‘‘native’’ dress or behavior as adding some foreign admixture to the bravery and gallantry they saw in themselves. Personal Narrative, 39–40 and n. It is common in the literature on colonialism and on Burton to take such observations as evidence of a pervasive European belief in racial superiority, and there is no doubt that Burton, like almost everyone else in his time, believed in a hierarchy of ‘‘races.’’ But race, as others have noted, was a vague and fluid term, applicable to small groups as well as large; however harshly we may judge Burton’s view about the lack of courage and manliness among most Indians, it is clear that he did not extend the assessment to all nonEuropean peoples, nor did he fail to recognize exceptions in India itself. He wrote at a later point in the pilgrimage narrative: ‘‘It would be well for those who sweepingly accuse Easterners of want of gallantry, to contrast this trait of character with the savage scenes of civilisation that take place among the ‘Overlands’ at Cairo and Suez. No foreigner could be present for the first time without bearing away the lasting impression that the sons of Great Britain are model barbarians.’’ Personal Narrative, I: 210. 29. Ibid., I: 6, 51. 30. For instance, ibid., 216–17. 31. Ibid., 103. 32. Ibid., II: 39 and I: 339. Burton justified his doubts about the tomb by noting that contemporary accounts described the situation at the time of Mohammed’s death as chaotic and confused.

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252 Notes to Pages 29–45 33. Ibid., 307; cf. 310. 34. Ibid., 326. Other prayers appear on 309, 311, 313–14, 317–18, 319, 327–28, 328–29, and 330. 35. Ibid., II: 169 ; I: 319. At this same point Burton notes that Burckhardt reported that one request made at the Prophet’s tomb was ‘‘Destroy our enemies, and may the torments of hell-fire be their lot!’’ But ‘‘I never heard it’’ there. 36. Ibid., I: 435. 37. Ibid., I: 280; II: 161. 38. Isabel Burton, Life, I: 169–70. 39. Ibid., 17–18. 40. Mill’s Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston, 1969), 37–38. 41. Isabel Burton, Life, I: 27, 67–70, 77. 42. Ibid., 32. 43. See Brodie, 23–24, for this incident and similar strands in Burton’s relations with his mother. 44. Isabel Burton, Life, I: 51–52; Brodie, 39. See also the editor’s introduction to Sir Richard Burton’s Travels in Arabia and Africa, 4. 45. See Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford and New York, 1994), and his companion volume The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford and New York, 1994). I discuss Mason’s work in my book Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics and Culture in England, France, and Germany Since 1750 (Cambridge and New York, 2012). 46. Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man, gives a more positive view of her than most other writers who have dealt with Burton. Brodie is more critical, but even she recognizes that Isabel was a person of ‘‘lively intelligence, zest for adventure, capacity for adaptation, and even talent for writing.’’ Brodie, 201. 47. The Jew, the Gypsy, and El Islam, 3–129, and Wilkins’s preface, viii–x. Wilkins is right in all likelihood that Burton intended to publish the essay, but the text as printed is full of contradictions and whole sections are mere quotes from others or lists of dates. 48. The Jew, the Gypsy, and El Islam, 9. 49. Quoted by Kennedy, 185, and in part by Brodie, 265. 50. The Jew, the Gypsy, and El Islam, 11. 51. Richard Burton, Wit and Wisdom from West Africa: A Book of Proverbial Philosophy, Idioms, Enigmas, and Laconisms (London, 1865; repr. New York, 1969), xvi– xvii and xxxiv–xxv n. The letter to Milnes is in Donald A. Young, ‘‘The Letters of Captain Sir Richard Burton; New Sources on the Nile Controversy,’’ in In Search of Sir Richard Burton: Papers from a Huntington Library Symposium, ed. Alan H. Jutzi (San Marino, CA, 1993), 9. 52. See in general Kennedy, chap. 5, esp. pp. 132–35, from which these quotations come. 53. Brodie, 150.

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Notes to Pages 45–58 253 54. Hayman, ‘‘Burton as Autobiographer,’’ in In Search of Sir Richard Burton, 43–44. 55. Brodie, 150. 56. For Burton and the Anthropological Society, see Kennedy, chap. 5. 57. Richard Burton, Wanderings in West Africa, I: From Liverpool to Fernando Po (London, 1863; repr. Santa Barbara, CA, 2001), I: 158; Kennedy, 158. 58. See Kennedy’s discussion of this topic and, for one of Burton’s more moderate pronouncements, ‘‘A Mission to Dahomey,’’ one of four lectures he gave in Brazil in 1866, in Sir Richard Burton’s Travel’s in Arabia and Africa, 108–9. Here he declares his opposition to restoring ‘‘the Export Slave-trade. . . . Civilization cannot step backwards,’’ and to compulsory labor. ‘‘But the negro cannot improve in his own country and it is a mercy to remove him from it. . . . The hour is fast approaching, I believe, when a free emigration from the benighted shores of Africa shall take the place of forced exportation. And to this measure I look forward as one conducing to the interests of both black and white.’’ 59. Kennedy, 158–59. 60. ‘‘A Mission to Dahomey,’’ 105–6; Brodie, 215. 61. Clifford Geertz, ‘‘Thick Description: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,’’ in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973). 62. On the attitudes that inspired this classic anthropology, see George W. Stocking, ‘‘The Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s,’’ in The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison, WI, 1992), esp. the reference to Boas’s collaborator Edward Sapir, 306–7. 63. It seems impossible to say when the Kasidah was written. Isabel later claimed it was begun in 1852, but she may have been trying to deny Burton’s dependence on Fitzgerald’s Rubiyat. See Brodie, 357n.35. 64. I cite Stone Talk (by the lines of the text) from the typescript reprint issued as Occasional Paper No. 24 (supported by the Works Progress Administration) by the California State Library (San Francisco, 1940). This edition is available in some places where the original London edition of 1865 is not, but some who have written about Burton seem unaware of its existence. For the quotes in this paragraph, see 953–60, 982–92, and 1335–38. 65. Personal Narrative, I: 37–38n.; Isabel Burton, Life, 103–6. 66. Stone Talk, 1261–66. For the Kasidah, I cite the edition printed in 2009 in Champaign, Illinois. For these pages, V: 1–8, 27n.1, 54, and VI: 1–4, 32. 67. Kasidah, VII: 1–16, 35, and n.2; Letter 59 of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721; many editions). 68. Thus Spake Zarathustra (published 1883–91; many editions), Part I, chap. 15, and Part III, chap. 12. 69. For Lane and for a defense of his translation see Leila Ahmed, Edward W. Lane: A Study of His Life and Works and of British Ideas of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1978). For Payne and his relations with Burton, see

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254 Notes to Pages 60–71 Brodie, 302–4 and 341–43. For Burton’s comments on both, see ‘‘Translator’s Foreword’’ to Nights, I: x–xiii. Burton says that his work was far enough along by the spring of 1879 that he could begin copying his manuscripts and assembling the whole for publication, but he does not explain what slowed this process down between that time and when he learned about Payne’s work; nor does he give any real explanation of why three more years passed between Payne’s publication in 1882 and his in 1885. 70. It should be noted, however, that similar attitudes about female sexuality were making themselves felt in Europe from the 1860s; see my discussion of this in Modernity and Bourgeois Life, 355–69. 71. Nights, foreword, I: xv–xviii, and Terminal Essay, X: 203. 72. Ibid., X: 66–79, 123–26. 73. Ibid., V: 46n. (Brodie quotes this sentence, 304, but she does not give its source.) 74. Nights, X: 129. Chapter 2 1. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (London, 1926; new ed., 1940; repr. Mansfield, CT, 2011), 30. 2. Robert Graves, T. E. Lawrence to His Biographer, Robert Graves (London, 1938; repr. Garden City, NY, 1963), 63, cited by John E. Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence (Boston and Toronto, 1976), 69. 3. B. H. Liddell-Hart, T. E. Lawrence to His Biographer, Liddell-Hart: Information About Himself, in the Form of Letters, Notes, Answers to Questions and Conversations (London, 1938), 85. 4. Lawrence to his mother, 24 June 1911, in T. E. Lawrence, The Selected Letters, ed. Malcolm Brown (New York, 1989), 39–40 (hereafter Selected Letters). To Vyvyan Richards, 13 December 1912, in The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, ed. David Garnett (New York, 1939), 161 (hereafter Letters). Letter of 23 January 1917, quoted in Harold Orlans, T. E. Lawrence: Biography of a Broken Hero (Jefferson, NC, and London, 2002), 31. 5. Letter of 28 July 1912 to Mrs. Rieder in Letters, 148; Orlans, 18. 6. For the dissertation see Orlans; for the letter about the Christian sect see Selected Letters, 18. For earlier interest in Christian origins in the Middle East see for instance Leila Ahmed, Edward W. Lane: A Study of His Life and Works and of British Ideas of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1978), and Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Washington, DC, and Cambridge, 2009). 7. For the letter cited in this paragraph see Thomas J. O’Donnell, The Confessions of T. E. Lawrence: The Romantic Hero’s Presentation of Self (Athens, OH, 1979), 23. For the comment to Liddell-Hart see Lawrence to His Biographer, Liddell-Hart, 131. 8. Most recent writers on Lawrence mention his relationship with Dahoum. See especially Mack, 96–98; Orlans, 20–22, Philip Knightley and Colin Simpson, The Secret

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Notes to Pages 72–88 255 Lives of Lawrence of Arabia (London, 1969), esp. 163–64; Seven Pillars, 7, 684. The name Dahoum appears only once in Lawrence’s book; see below. 9. Orlans, 25–31. 10. Seven Pillars, 103, 127; Orlans, 30. Knightley and Simpson argue strongly that it was the strategic considerations of the war rather than any personal identification of attraction to the Arabs that motived Lawrence to join the campaign. 11. Seven Pillars, 22–23. For the other reasons see the Paris memo referred to above, in Knightley and Simpson, 155–57. 12. Seven Pillars, 22–24; Orlans, 31. 13. Seven Pillars, 29–30. 14. Letter of 27 August 1922, Letters, 202. 15. Seven Pillars, 186–87, 653–54, 682. For Arnold Lawrence’s view of the Tafas incident see Mack, 238. See also the letter to E. T. Leeds of 24 September 1917, Letters, 238. Lawrence’s most recent biographer recounts a similar moment to which Lawrence does not refer directly: a British general in his memoirs reported seeing in the Damascus railroad station after the town was taken from the Turks a ‘‘long ambulance train full of sick and wounded Turks. . . . The Arab soldiers were going through the train, tearing off the clothing of the groaning and stricken Turks, regardless of gaping wounds and broken limbs, and cutting their victims throats. . . . I asked Lawrence to remove the Arabs. He said he couldn’t ‘as it was their idea of war.’ I replied ‘It is not our idea of war, and if you can’t remove them, I will . . .’ [and] at once gave orders for our men to clear the station.’’ Orlans, 38. The incident may well have happened, but Lawrence reports that he had run-ins with Barrow, the general in question, in the preceding days. See Seven Pillars, 656–60. 16. Orlans, 33. 17. T. E. Lawrence, Correspondence with George Bernard and Charlotte Shaw, 1922–26 (Cambridge, 2000), 70–71. 18. Seven Pillars, 454–56. In one memoir Lawrence mentions being at Khalfati, but he reports no such incident. T. E. Lawrence, Oriental Assembly, ed. A. W. Lawrence, with photographs by the author (London, 1939) 37, 40. For the most recent attempt to puzzle out the evidence for what happened, see Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York, 2013), 398–402. 19. Seven Pillars, 456. 20. Ibid., 111, 129; Lawrence to Liddell-Hart, 154. 21. I cite the text above as printed in an appendix to his book by Mack, 463–67. 22. Seven Pillars, 280–81. 23. Lawrence’s introduction to Charles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, with a new preface by the author, one-volume ed. (London, 1921), xviii–xxii. 24. Seven Pillars, 354–55. 25. Ibid., 230, 240. 26. Ibid., 283, 285–87.

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256 Notes to Pages 90–111 27. Ibid., 289. 28. Good summary accounts may be found in Orlans, 220–24, and in Mack, 427–41. 29. Seven Pillars, 580–81. Letter quoted in O’Donnell, 27. 30. Seven Pillars, 583–84. 31. Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (New York, 1992). 32. Preface to Eric Kennington’s Arab Portraits, in Oriental Assembly, 152; Seven Pillars, 140–41. 33. Seven Pillars, 38. 34. Ibid., 226–27, 41, 476. 35. Ibid., 475. 36. Ibid., 260–61, 450, 175–76. 37. Letters, 413, 415; T. E. Lawrence, The Mint (London, 1935; repr. 1973), 205. 38. Lawrence, The Mint, 20. 39. See Malcolm Brown’s introduction to Selected Letters, xxviii, and the discussions in Mack and Orlans. 40. Quoted in Knightley and Simpson, 29. 41. Letter in Correspondence with George Bernard and Charlotte Shaw, 78. 42. Lawrence to His Biographer, Liddell-Hart, 163. 43. Seven Pillars, 29; Mack, 425. 44. Seven Pillars, 244. 45. It should be noted here that Lawrence actually proposed marriage to a woman once—and only once—while a student; the object was a longtime family friend who seems hardly to have taken the proposal seriously. In any case she rejected it. Just how this incident should be connected to his later statements that his family experience—on which more in a moment—left him with no desire to establish a household of his own remains obscure. On the proposal see Mack, 64–66; and Mack, 426, on the question of Lawrence and marriage more generally. 46. Orlans, 160. 47. Letters, 687 (dated 25 March 1930). See also Mack, 425–26. 48. Letters, 135, 123, 193. 49. Seven Pillars, 38. Mack, 106, cites the slightly different text in the Jesus College Magazine of 1912–13; he does not notice that the story is also told in Seven Pillars. 50. Mack cites these letters from unpublished manuscripts, 31–32. 51. Mack’s attention to Lawrence as a person who hopes ‘‘to fulfill ideal expectations for himself through enabling others to achieve the fulfillment of their selves’’ is one of the things that raises his book above the level of much psychobiography, but it is hard to reconcile such an interpretation with the self-analysis Lawrence pursued in ‘‘Myself.’’ 52. The letter is reprinted in Mack, 27–28.

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Notes to Pages 112–127 257 53. See Orlans, 47–48, who notes Gertrude Bell’s criticism of Lawrence and documents Lawrence’s appreciation for Churchill’s efforts to see that promises were kept to the Arabs, concluding that some personal feeling led Lawrence to prefer ‘‘the mood of bitterness and betrayal to that of accomplishment and triumph.’’ 54. Seven Pillars, 564–66. Chapter 3 1. Christian Destremau and Jean Moncelon, Louis Massignon (Paris, 1994; reissued in 2005 as Louis Massignon: Le ‘cheikh admirable’), 62. Destremau and Moncelon’s work is the best general source on Massignon’s life. Jacques Keryell, Jardin donne´e: Louis Massignon a` la recherche de l’abolsu (Paris, 1993), provides some useful documents from French archives, but its perspective is too deeply caught up in piety to achieve much distance on its subject. 2. Destremau and Moncelon, Louis Massignon, 58–62; Massignon to Claudel, 28 February 1911, in Paul Claudel and Louis Massignon, Correspondance (1908–1914), ed. and annotated by Michel Malicet (Paris, 1973), 111–12; Massignon to Mary Kahil, 28 February 1938, in L’hospitalite´ sacre´e, ed. Jacques Keryell (Paris, 1987), 204. 3. See the section on Goldziher in Robert Irwin, The Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London, 2006). 4. Louis Massignon, Le Maroc dans les premier anne´es du XVIe sie`cle, tableau ge´ographique d’apre`s Le´on L’Africain (Algiers, 1906), 44–45. On Leo Africanus see Natalie Z. Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (New York, 2006). 5. Destremau and Moncelon, 47. 6. ‘‘Vous pleurerez des larmes de sang d’avoir renonce´ a` plaire a` vingt-cinq ans.’’ Quoted in Destremau and Moncelon, 81. 7. Ibid., 201, 270. 8. Ibid., 271. 9. Louis Massignon, ‘‘Visitation of the Stranger: Response to an Inquiry About God,’’ in Testimonies and Reflections: Essays of Louis Massignon, ed. and trans. Herbert Mason (Notre Dame, IN, 1989), 41–42; in French in Louis Massignon, Parole donne´e, ed. with an introduction by Vincent Monteil (Paris, 1962), 282–83; Destremau and Moncelon, 62. 10. Letters of 19 January 1909 and 21 December 1911, in Claudel and Massignon, Correspondance, 57–58 and 143. 11. Guyon quoted in Destremau and Moncelon, 358; Maxime Rodinson, Entre Islam et occident: Entretiens avec Ge´rard D. Khoury (Paris, 1998), 54–55. 12. Louis Massignon, ‘‘Perspective transhistorique de la vie de Hallaj,’’ Parole donne´e, 75. 13. Claudel and Massignon, Correspondance, 48; ‘‘L’Occident devant l’orient: primaute´ d’une solution culurelle,’’ in Louis Massignon, Opera minora, ed. Y. Moubarac (Beirut, 1963), 1: 218.

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258 Notes to Pages 127–138 14. I have slightly altered Herbert Mason’s translation, ‘‘An Entire Life with a Brother Who Set Out on the Desert: Charles de Foucauld,’’ in Testimonies and Reflections, 22; original text in Parole donne´´e, 63–64. 15. Louis Massignon, ‘‘L’Islam et le te´moignage du croyant,’’ in Parole donne´e, 232–44. 16. Louis Massignon, ‘‘Islam and the Testimony of the Faithful,’’ in Testimonies and Reflections, 52–53. 17. On this see especially the article ‘‘L’Occident devant l’orient: primaute´ d’une solution culturelle,’’ in Massignon, Opera Minora, 1: 208–23. 18. Destremau and Moncelon, 224–25. 19. ‘‘Jeanne d’Arc et L’Alge´rie,’’ Parole donne´e, 143–46. On the Muslim poor see Destremau and Moncelon, 206. 20. Letters of 22 September 1908 and 10 August 1912, in Claudel and Massignon, Correspondance, 47, 189. 21. ‘‘Aspects and Perspectives of Islam,’’ in Testimonies and Reflections, 68–70. 22. For these notions in general, see Pierre Rocalve, Louis Massignon et l’Islam: Place et roˆle de l’islam et de l’islamologie dans la vie et l’oeuvre de Louis Massignon (Damascus, 1993), esp. 26–28. 23. ‘‘Muslim and Christian Mystics,’’ in Testimonies and Reflections, 124–25. 24. The quote is from Jacques Waardenberg, ‘‘L’Approche dialogique de Louis Massignon,’’ in Louis Massignon et le dialogue des cultures, ed. Daniel Massignon (Paris, 1996), 199. 25. Ibid., 116, 125–26. 26. ‘‘Was Avicenna, the Philosopher, also a Mystic?’’ in Testimonies and Reflections, 115. 27. Essay on the Origins of the Technical Language of Islamic Mysticism, trans. with an introduction by Benjamin Clark (Notre Dame, IN, 1997), xxv. 28. Preface to ibid., 10; Testimonies and Reflections, 126–33. 29. Destremau and Moncelon, 108. 30. Louis Massignon, ‘‘My Entry into Jerusalem with Lawrence in 1917,’’ in Testimonies and Reflections, 32–38. On the whole episode see Destremau and Moncelon, 132–59, and Albert Hourani, ‘‘T. E. Lawrence and Louis Massignon,’’ in his book Islam in European Thought (Cambridge, 1991), 116–28. Hourani suggests that Massignon may have made up the part about Lawrence’s resistance to the Frenchman’s appointment, but Destremau and Moncelon have found documents in the French archives that confirm it. 31. Louis Massignon, ‘‘An Entire Life with a Brother Who Set Out on the Desert,’’ in Testimonies and Reflections, esp. 30–31; Destremau and Moncelon, 160–78, esp. 169 and 176. 32. Testimonies and Reflections, 126–27; Essay on the Origins of the Technical Language of Islamic Mysticism, xxiii.

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Notes to Pages 138–156 259 33. Louis Massignon, ‘‘Reflexions sur la structure primitive de l’analyse grammaticale en arabe,’’ in Parole donne´e, 327–41. 34. Destremau and Moncelon, 253. 35. ‘‘Reflexions sur la structure primitive de l’analyse grammaticale en Arabe,’’ in Parole donne´e, 327–41; the quotes in the text appear on 341 and 327–30. 36. ‘‘The Transfer of Suffering Through Compassion,’’ in Testimonies and Reflections, 157. Although Massignon wrote this text in English, I have slightly altered the punctuation for the sake of clarity. 37. The first two quotes in this paragraph are from letters to Claudel in Claudel and Massignon,Correspondance, 196, 46. The last is from Destremau and Moncelon, 192. 38. To Claudel, Correspondance, 51. 39. ‘‘Muslim and Christian Mystics in the Middle Ages,’’ 126; Essay on the Origins of the Technical Language of Islamic Mysticism, 9; ‘‘Was Avicenna, the Philosopher, Also a Mystic?’’ 111–15. 40. Destremau and Moncelon, 192–95. 41. ‘‘Perspective transhistorique sur la vie de Hallaj,’’ in Parole donne´e, 75, 78–79. 42. Claudel and Massignon Correspondance, 195. 43. Louis Massignon, The Passion of al-Hallaj, Mystic and Martyr of Islam, trans. with an introduction by Herbert Mason, 4 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1982). The quote about the ‘‘torrent of signs’’ is on 631; the second quote is from the preface, lv. 44. All the quotes in the above paragraphs come from Massignon’s preface, ibid., lv–lxv. 45. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘‘Schopenhauer as Educator,’’ in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, with an introduction by J. P. Stern (Cambridge and New York, 1983). 46. I discuss these aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking and provide references to the texts in The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge and New York, 2005), chap. 16. Chapter 4 1. Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country (New York, 2012), 8 (hereafter TWC); Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Jackson, MI, 1997), 184 (hereafter Conversations). 2. I use the form ‘‘Ibo’’ here rather than ‘‘Igbo,’’ which Achebe often (although not always) employed because it seems less exotic and is more common in American English. 3. Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child (New York, 2009), 36 (hereafter EBPC); TWC, 11–12. 4. EBPC, 118; TWC, 22–25. 5. TWC, 29. 6. Ibid., 145; Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (London, 1966), 4.

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260 Notes to Pages 157–189 7. TWC, 74–75. 8. Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments (New York, 1989), 24; Conversations, 111. 9. Conversations, 191; EBPC, 5; Conversations, 163–64; EBPC, 7. 10. TWC, 43; A Man of the People, 92. The more rigid side of Achebe’s anticolonialism appears in his one-sidedly negative reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. 11. TWC, 109; Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (London, 1987), 100–101. 12. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1959; repr. New York, 1983), 7, 11, 28 (hereafter TFA). 13. TFA, 115; Conversations, 47–48; Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (1964; 2nd ed., New York, 1974), 15 (hereafter AG). 14. TFA, 137. 15. Ibid., 71–72, 92, 130. 16. Ibid., 164–65. 17. Conversations, 191; TWC, 34. 18. C. K. Meek, Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe: A Study in Indirect Rule (Oxford, 1937; repr. 1949), 185, 267, 279–80, 344–46. For Chukwu see Meek’s index. 19. AG, 108–9. 20. Ibid., 176–77. 21. Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (London, 1960; repr. New York, 1994), 18, 36, 7. 22. Ibid., 80–82. 23. Ibid., 152. 24. Ibid., 14, 23, 44. 25. Conversations, 79–80. For an attempt to conceive modernity as characterized by the increasing weight of such distant connections, effected by the progressive extension and thickening of the networks through which they are established, see my book Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics and Culture in England, France, and Germany Since 1750 (Cambridge and New York, 2012). 26. Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure, trans. Katherine Woods (London, 1963; orig. French ed., 1962), 69–70. I have slightly altered the translation. 27. Ibid., 76. 28. Ibid., 49, 10–11, 20. 29. Ibid., 46, 80–81. 30. Ibid., 113–17. 31. Ibid., 126. 32. Ibid., 159–60. 33. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson Davies (London, 1969; repr. New York, 2009), 33, 48, 88; Elizabeth Wachtel, Writers & Company Archives: Tayeb Salih, CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) Books, interview conducted on 14 April 2002 and rebroadcast in 2011, retrieved 14 May 2013. 34. Season of Migration, 44–45, 79, 99, 83.

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Notes to Pages 189–217 261 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 111–25. Ibid., 18, 20, 24. Ibid., 117–36. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 61, 55–56. Ibid., 79, 41.

Chapter 5 1. Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely (New York, 2004), 6; Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors: Essays and a Story, trans. Maureen Freely (New York, 2007), 201 (hereafter OC). 2. Istanbul, 264, 288–89; ‘‘The Paris Review Interview’’ (2004–5), OC, 369. 3. OC, 209. 4. Istanbul, 289; Orhan Pamuk, Snow, trans. Maureen Freely (New York, 2004), 79–80. 5. Istanbul, 29, 89. 6. Ibid., 90–107. 7. Ibid., 108–13. 8. Ibid., 271. 9. OC, 119. 10. Istanbul, 74–75. So far as I can determine the whole range of Melling’s beautiful images is still available only in an 1819 edition of his Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et des rives du Bosphore, but some are reproduced very well in the catalogue of an exhibition about Melling held at the Muse´e Carnavalet in Paris in 1991. 11. OC, 278, 205. 12. Istanbul, 5–6; Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, trans. Nazim Dikbas (New York, 2010). 13. Istanbul, 77–78. 14. Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle, trans. Victoria Holbrook (New York, 1991); for the quotes in this paragraph see 22, 58. 15. Ibid., 154–55. 16. Ibid., 59, 63, 98, 107. 17. Ibid., 119–21, 142. 18. Ibid., 147, 149. 19. Ibid., 154, 55–56. 20. Ibid., 109, 159. 21. Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book, trans. Maureen Freely (New York, 2006), 112–21. 22. Ibid., 178–84. 23. Ibid., 335–37, 459. 24. Ibid., 367–73.

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262 Notes to Pages 218–243 25. Ibid., 122–32. 26. Ibid., 367. 27. Ibid., 370. 28. Ibid., 417. 29. Ibid., 149, 63–64. 30. Ibid., 59–61. 31. Ibid., 429, 460. 32. Ibid., 158–59. 33. Ibid., 305. 34. Ibid., 304–6, 318–21. 35. Ibid., 323, 337, 367. 36. Ibid., 370–74. 37. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely (New York, 2010), 61 (hereafter MI); OC, 191. 38. The Black Book, 130; MI, 294–96. 39. MI, 457, 294. 40. OC, 214–17; Junichiro Tanizaki, Naomi, trans. Anthony H. Chambers (New York, 1985). Pamuk mentions Tanizaki in OC, 205, and in the Norton Lectures. 41. Istanbul, 321–23. 42. MI, 73; Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects, trans. Ekin Oklap (New York, 2011), 43 (hereafter IO). 43. IO, 52. 44. IO, 53–56. 45. Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red, trans. Erdag M. Go¨knar (New York, 2001), 219; MI, 484. 46. IO, 236. 47. The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, 76–77, 143–44. 48. IO, 248. In fact the problem could have been solved by turning the watch sideways in the middle of a case with mirrors on both sides, which suggests that Pamuk’s reasons for not displaying it were not the practical ones he gave. Conclusion 1. See for instance Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Jackson, MS, 1997), 125. 2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), 196–97. Dane Kennedy gives a partial and too sympathetic account of Said’s view of Burton in The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2005), 69. For Said’s less consequential (and I think less incisive and pointed) discussion of Massignon, see Orientalism, 264–74. 3. On this point see David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengali Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835 (Berkeley, 1969). For general critiques of Said’s thesis see for instance C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence

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263

Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge and New York, 1996); David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (London, 2005); John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester and New York, 1995); E. P. Thompson, ‘‘Alien Homage’’: Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore (Delhi and Oxford, 1993), chap. 5; Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford and New York, 2004).

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Index

Abdulhamid II, Sultan, 221 An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (Lane), 57 Achebe, Chinua, 152–80, 239–40, 244; and Appiah, 248n11; Arrow of God, 160–61, 162, 169–73; and British culture, 153–60, 172–73; British education, 154–56, 158–60, 168–69, 173, 179, 244; and British ethnography, 161, 164, 165–69; on Christian missionaries and village life, 153–54, 162–67, 170–71; and colonialism/imperial rule in Africa, 152, 154, 158–60, 168–69, 171–73, 188, 244, 260n10; comparative religion studies, 166–67; cultural comparisons and awareness of cultural difference, 164–69; distance from traditional African culture, 153–55; early life in British Nigeria, 153–60; and European racism toward Africa, 159, 171; family, 153–54; father’s conversion, 153, 157, 164; on Ibo culture, 156–57, 162, 181, 240; intercultural identity, 2–3, 152, 158–59, 169, 172–73, 175–80; and Kane, 181, 183, 184; living at ‘‘a crossroads,’’ 158–59, 179, 180, 240; and Meek’s book on Ibo culture, 167–69; and Nigeria’s anti-colonial agitation, 157–60; No Longer at Ease, 160–61, 173–80, 240; and Salih, 188; temperament, 159, 164; Things Fall Apart, 160–69, 184, 239–40; university education at Ibadan, 155–56, 158–59, 160, 166–67, 169

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Africa: Achebe and European colonialism in, 152, 154, 158–60, 168–69, 171–73, 188, 244, 260n10; Burton on African languages and proverbs, 41–42, 45–46; Burton on Christianity/Islam in, 47–48; Burton on Dahomey, 49–51; Burton’s attitudes toward black Africans, 37–38, 41–51; Burton’s Harar trip, 43–44; Burton’s Nile project, 44–45; BurtonSpeke explorations, 43–46; French colonialism, 115, 118, 128, 137, 181, 182–84; Kane and Islam in, 181, 182–83; Kane’s intercultural identity, 2, 180–87; Leo Africanus on, 119; missionaries in, 153–54, 162–67, 169, 170–71, 184; Salih’s intercultural identity, 180–81, 187–95; Senegal, 180–87; Sudan, 180–81, 187–95 Akaba, 73, 74, 83, 87, 89–90 Algerian War, 115, 129 Allenby, Viscount Edmund, 86, 128, 136 Alusi brothers ([uf74]Ali and Mahmoud Shukri), 120, 142 Ambiguous Adventure (Kane), 180–87, 244 Amils, 24, 56 Anthills of the Savannah (Achebe), 160, 161 Anthropological Society of London, 46, 48–49 anthropology, cultural, 50–51; Achebe and British ethnographic tradition, 161, 164, 165–69; Burton in contrast to modern tradition of, 50–51; Burton’s ethnographic reports, 21–23, 28; Meek’s book on Ibo culture, 167–69

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266 Index Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 247n2, 248n11 The Arab Bulletin, 72, 80 Arab revolt and desert campaign of World War I: Damascus campaign, 73, 76–77, 83–84, 255n15; Feisal and, 72, 74, 80, 81, 83, 87, 99, 136; Lawrence and, 71–84, 87–90, 92–93, 97–100, 136–37, 243, 255n10; Lawrence on the ‘‘fellowship’’ of, 73, 75–76, 79; Lawrence’s camel ride to Damascus, 73, 76–77, 79, 87, 255n15; Massignon and, 135–38; Tafas incident, 76 Arab world/Arab culture: Burton and the Arabic language, 1, 18–19, 59; Burton’s admiration for, 1, 14–17, 29–32, 47–48, 58, 242–43; Burton’s desire to experience ‘‘Moslem inner life,’’ 15, 17, 25, 28–32; Burton’s pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, 1, 13–15, 25, 26, 28–32, 45, 59, 251n28; Lawrence and, 65–90, 108–9; Lawrence and the Arabic language, 67, 68, 87, 89; Lawrence and wearing Arab dress, 68, 69, 77, 79–90; Lawrence’s motivations for taking up the Arab cause, 71–73, 255n10; Massignon and, 116–17, 119–23, 124; Massignon and the Arab desert campaign, 135–38. See also Islam; Thousand and One Nights Arabic language: Atatu¨rk’s reforms of Turkish alphabet, 198, 225–26; Burton and, 1, 18–19, 59; Burton’s Thousand and One Nights translation, 59; and Harufi signs, 224–26; Lawrence, 67, 68, 87, 89; Massignon and, 117, 120, 124, 139–40; Salih and, 188, 193 Arrow of God (Achebe), 160–61, 162, 169–73 Asad, Muhammed (Leopold Weiss), 11 Atatu¨rk, Mustafa Kemal, 197–98, 199, 225–26 atheism, 24–25, 53–57, 145. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich Auda Abu Tayi, 83, 87–90 Avicenna, 143 Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 158

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Basden, G. T., 167 Bataille, Georges, 122, 145 Baudelaire, Charles, 122 Bekri, Nesib el, 83 Bell, Gertrude, 11, 112, 257n53 Biafra and the Nigerian civil war, 156 Biafran War, 155, 157 The Black Book (Pamuk), 200, 212–28, 232, 239 Boas, Franz, 50 Bre´al, Michael, 5–6 British colonialism: Achebe and Nigeria, 153–60, 171–73, 188, 244; Burton’s criticisms of, 53–54; Massignon’s criticisms of, 137; and Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, 188, 189, 244 Brodie, Fawn M., 21, 45, 52, 58, 250n10, 252n46 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevski), 222–23 Buck, Pearl, 11 Buddenbrooks (Mann), 201–2 Burckhardt, Johann Ludwig, 252n35 Burton, Isabel, 31–32, 37, 52–53, 251n28, 252n46 Burton, Richard, 1, 13–64, 239, 241–42; admiration for Arab life and Islam, 1, 14–17, 29–32, 47–48, 58, 242–43; ambivalence toward Jews, 36, 37–41; anthropological/ethnographic reports, 21–23, 28; and the Arabic language, 1, 18–19, 59; attitudes toward black Africans/African culture, 37–38, 41–51; and Christian evangelical project in Africa, 47–48; on Christianity, 14, 16–17, 47–48, 249n6; conflicted relationship with Britain/English life, 32–36; depiction of a British lieutenant in Goa, 17–18, 25; desire to experience ‘‘Moslem inner life,’’ 15, 17, 25, 28–32; diplomatic career, 36, 38; disguise and self-identity, 25–28, 32; disguises as an ‘‘Oriental,’’ 1, 14–15, 20–21, 25–28, 44, 250n10; essay on Islam, 15–17, 62–63; and European colonialism, 14, 53–54, 243; explorations

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Index 267 in Africa with Speke, 43–46; family and early experiences in Europe, 32–36; Harar trip, 43–44; and homosexuality, 9, 22–23, 36–37, 59–60; India career and reports on province of Sind, 18–25; intercultural identity, 1, 13, 33–35, 56–57, 59, 66–67; and Islam’s restrictions, 13, 25, 56–57, 61–64; The Kasidah of Haji Abdu el-Yesdi, 52–57, 59, 239, 253n63; knighthood, 36; language studies, 1, 18–20, 250n10; marriage, 37; Medina and Mecca pilgrimages (and pilgrimage book), 1, 13–15, 25, 26, 28–32, 45, 59, 251n28, 252n35; on Mosaic Judaism, 15–16, 39–40, 249n6; and Nietzsche, 55–56, 239; at Oxford, 18–19, 33–35; persona of Mirza Abdullah, 21, 26; pseudonymous writings, 52; on race and racial traits, 37–51, 251n28; reflections on cultural difference, 9, 23, 28, 46–57, 59–61; and religion in India, 23–25; and sexuality, 9, 22–23, 36–37, 59–60; skepticism about cultural values and universal truths, 13, 25, 51–57, 59–64, 66–67; on slavery, 48, 253n58; Stone Talk, 52–57, 59, 64, 239; and Sufism, 24–25, 31, 64; the Thousand and One Nights, 13, 36, 56–64 Camus, Albert, 115 Caroline, Queen, 32 Cary, Joyce, 158 Chapman, Thomas, 109–11 Chelebi, Evliya, 207–8, 210, 223–34, 233 Christianity: Achebe on effects on traditional village life, 153–54, 160–71; Achebe’s evolving view of, 158–59; Achebe’s fictional characters’ conversions, 162–67, 169, 176, 184; the Arabicspeaking Melchite sect, 122, 133; Burton on, 14, 16–17, 47–48, 53–56, 249n6; Lawrence and, 69–70, 109–12; Massignon on Islam and, 115, 116, 126–34, 142–43, 146; Massignon on mysticism, 132–34, 142–43; Massignon’s Catholicism, 115, 116, 122, 130, 132–33;

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and monotheism, 15–17; syncretism, 24. See also conversion; missionaries, Christian Churchill, Winston, 112, 257n53 Claudel, Paul, 117, 124, 125, 126, 130, 135, 144 Clayton, Gilbert, 72, 74 Colle`ge de France, 115, 118 colonialism and European imperialism, 242–45; Achebe and Africa, 152, 154, 158–60, 168–69, 171–73, 188, 244, 260n10; British, 53–54, 137, 153, 158–60, 171–73, 188, 244; Burton and, 14, 53–54, 243; colonial schools/education, 154–56, 158–60, 168–69, 173, 179, 183–84, 188, 189, 191–92, 244; French, 115, 118, 128, 137, 181, 182–84; Kane and, 181, 182–84; Massignon and, 118, 126, 128–30, 137; Nigeria, 153, 157–60, 188; Salih on, 188; Senegal, 181, 182–84; and vehicles of cultural domination, 243 Conrad, Joseph, 196 conversion: Achebe’s father’s, 153–54, 157, 164; Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, 176; Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, 162–67, 169, 184; Burton on Islamic suspicion of, 14–15; of Cuadra, 120; of Leo Africanus, 119; Massignon’s experience, 116, 117, 119–20, 121, 122–23, 126; nineteenthcentury missionary projects, 47–48 Cuadra, Luis de, 120–21, 142 Dahomey, 49–51 Dahoum (Salem Ahmed), 70–73, 84, 102, 105, 108, 137, 254–55n8 Darwin, Charles, 39–40, 46 David-Neel, Alexandra, 11 Deraa, 77–79, 80, 91, 99, 101, 106. See also Lawrence, T. E. Descartes, Rene´, 215 Description of Africa (Leo Africanus), 119 disguise: Brodie on Burton’s, 250n10; Burton and self-identity, 25–28, 32; Burton on Europeans who took on ‘‘native’’ dress, 27–28, 251n28; Burton’s childhood, 35–36; Burton’s Dervish, 27,

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268 Index disguise (continued ) 64; Burton’s Harar trip, 43–44; Burton’s hybrid identity models, 20–21, 27; Burton’s Indian physician, 27; Burton’s ‘‘Oriental,’’ 1, 14–15, 20–21, 25–28, 44, 250n10; Burton’s persona of Mirza Abdullah, 21, 26; and Burton’s pilgrimage, 14, 26–27, 64; Lawrence on identity and imitation, 68, 80–81, 88–90; Lawrence on wearing Arab dress, 68, 69, 77, 79–90; Lawrence’s advice on, 81–83. See also imitation Dostoevski, Fyodor, 222–23 Doughty, Charles M., 84–85, 190 Duchamp, Marcel, 232 Dufy, Raoul, 202 East India Company, 18–25, 53–54 Eberhardt, Isabelle, 11 Eliade, Mircea, 124–25 Enlightenment thinkers, 55 Essay on the Technical Language of Islamic Mysticism (Massignon), 134 ethnography, cultural: Achebe and British tradition of, 161, 164, 165–69; Burton’s reports, 21–23, 28. See also anthropology, cultural Ethnological Society (London), 46 Evangelical Christianity, 47–48, 109–12 Feisal, son of Hussein: and Lawrence, 72, 74, 80, 81, 83, 87, 99, 136; and Massignon, 136 Fenollosa, Ernest, 11 Fitzgerald, Edward, 52–53 Flaubert, Gustave, 237 Forster, E. M., 91, 101 Foucauld, Charles de, 125, 127, 128, 133, 136 France: colonialism, 115, 118, 128, 137, 181, 182–84; Kane’s education in Dakar and Paris, 181, 184–87, 244; Kane’s intercultural identity, 2, 180–87; Massignon in Paris, 117–18, 124–26 Freud, Sigmund, 67, 239

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Galip, Sheikh, 215, 217 Galland, Antoine, 57, 61, 62, 202 Gary, Romain, 140–41 Geertz, Clifford, 50–51, 239 gender identity and cultures: Achebe and, 10, 163, 164; Pamuk and, 10, 203 Georges-Picot, Franc¸ois, 136 Gide, Andre´, 197 Goldziher, Ignaz, 119, 121 Graves, Robert, 66 Great Britain and English life: Achebe and British ethnography, 161, 164, 165–69; Achebe’s early identification with, 153–60, 172–73; Achebe’s education, 154–56, 158–60, 168–69, 173, 179, 244; Burton’s conflicted relationship with, 32–36; Lawrence’s childhood, 91, 107, 109–12, 256n45; Lawrence’s enlistment in the RAF and British Army, 91, 94, 100–101, 106–7; Massignon on English narrow-mindedness, 137; Oxford, 18–19, 33–35, 67–68, 69, 71; Salih’s education, 188, 189, 191–92; Salih’s fictional locked room filled with British literature, 190–93. See also British colonialism Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 75 Guyon, Bernard, 124 Haggard, H. Rider, 154 Hallaj, Husayn Ibn Mansur al-: all-black clothing, 125–26; death of, 142, 144–45; Massignon’s study of, 116, 119, 120, 141–45, 146; in Pamuk’s The Black Book, 200, 215 Hardy, Thomas, 101 Harufi mysticism, 224–26 Hearn, Lafcadio, 11 Hinduism, 23–25, 56 history, Massignon’s theory of, 115, 145–51; exemplary saints and heroic personalities, 145, 147–48; metaphor of civilizational ‘‘curves,’’ 126–27, 145–46; Nietzsche and, 115, 145, 148–51; and Nietzsche’s essay on Schopenhauer, 148–49 Hogarth, D. G., 67–69 Hollis, Martin, 7, 89, 238

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Index 269 homosexuality: Burton and, 9, 22–23, 36–37, 59–60; Lawrence and the Deraa incident, 77–79, 91, 106; Lawrence on Arab sexual culture, 103–5; Lawrence’s attraction to Dahoum, 71, 102, 105; Massignon and, 9–10, 120–22, 135; Massignon’s ‘‘Prayer for Sodom’’ and attention to, 121–22; Massignon’s relationship with Cuadra, 120–21; Sind brothels, 22–23; the Thousand and One Nights, 59–60 Horton, James Africanus, 43, 47 Hunt, James, 46, 48 hu¨zu¨n, 199–200, 203–4, 222, 228 Ibo culture of Nigeria: Achebe’s Arrow of God, 160–61, 169–73; Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, 160–69; bride price, 167; Christian missionaries and, 153–54, 162–67, 169, 184; class of osu, 162, 175–77, 179–80; competitive individualism, 156–57; and kingship, 168, 170–71; Meek’s book on, 167–69; and the Nigerian Civil War, 156; other Nigerians’ views of, 157; title system, 161–62; traditional village life and British/Christian culture, 156–57, 160–73; witchcraft, 168 identity. See disguise; imitation; intercultural identities imitation: Burton and identification and, 25–28, 32; Burton’s negative accounts of Europeans, 27–28, 251n28; Lawrence on identity and, 68, 80–81, 88–90; Lawrence on wearing Arab dress, 68, 69, 77, 79–90; Pamuk and becoming oneself by, 214–16, 220. See also disguise Impressionism, 202 India: Burton’s reports on province of Sind, 18–25; folk practices, 24; Hinduism and Islam of, 23–24, 56 intercultural identities, 1–3, 10–12, 238–45; Achebe, 2–3, 152, 158–59, 169, 172–73, 175–80, 244; bridging a European and non-European persona, 2–3, 241–45; Burton, 1, 13, 33–35, 56–57, 59, 66–67; dialectics of reflection and affectivity,

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6–10, 238–41; group identities and defensive multiculturalism, 2, 247n2; and human abilities to live as cultural beings, 3–10, 238–39; of immigrants, 2; Kane, 2, 180–87, 244; Lawrence, 2, 65–67, 84–90, 95–96, 113–14; Lawrence’s eventual rejection of, 65–67, 74–76, 79, 91, 94–101, 106–9, 113, 137; Massignon, 2–3, 115–17, 135–38, 144–45, 151; natural failures/difficulties of, 3, 7; Pamuk, 2–3, 152, 196–205, 231, 237; Salih, 2, 180–81, 187–95, 244; selfawareness, self-analysis, and selfconscious experimentation, 2–3; sense of distance from one’s culture, 6–10, 32, 35, 150, 153–55, 191, 193–94, 231, 238–41 Islam, 119, 123, 141–42, 200, 224–26; African life and, 47–48; Burton and, 1, 14–17, 24–25, 28–32, 47–48, 58; Burton on restrictions of, 13, 25, 56–57, 61–64; Burton on the Prophet’s religious reforms, 16–17, 23–24, 62–64, 249n6; Cuadra and, 120–21, 142; ‘‘exclusion’’ and abandonment by the Abrahamic faiths, 126–30; gardens, architecture, and organization of space, 130–31; Hinduism and, 23–24, 56; Kane and, 182–87; Massignon and culture of, 116–17, 119–23, 124, 130–31, 133; Massignon and mysticism, 116, 119, 120, 132–34, 141–45, 146; Massignon on Christianity and, 115, 116, 126–34, 142–43, 146, 243–44; monotheism and, 15–17, 249n6; the Qu[uf75]ran, 131, 182–83, 187; restrictions on depiction the human figure, 203, 221, 234; in Turkey, 199, 222. See also Sufism Istanbul (Pamuk), 196–99, 204–5, 229, 230, 232 ‘‘The Jew’’ (Burton), 38–40, 252n47 Jews: Burton and, 36, 37–41; Massignon on, 126–27, 139; Zionism, 139 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 11 Joan of Arc, 129, 137 Jones, William, 60

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270 Index Judaism, Mosaic: Burton on, 15–16, 39–40, 249n6; Massignon on Islam and, 132; and monotheism, 15–16, 249n6. See also Jews Kane, Sheikh Hamidou, 180–87, 244; and Achebe, 181, 183, 184; Ambiguous Adventure, 180–87, 244; fictional character’s loss of faith, 182, 185–87; and French colonialism, 181, 182–84; French education in Dakar and Paris, 181, 184–87; and French language and thought, 186–87; and hierarchical Diallobe´ society, 181, 184, 187; intercultural identity, 2, 180–87; and Islam, 181, 182–83; and Senegal, 180–87 Kant, Immanuel, 7 Karmiloff-Smith, Annette, 5, 6 The Kasidah of Haji Abdu el-Yesdi (Burton), 52–57, 59, 239, 253n63 Kennedy, Dane, 33, 250n10; on Burton’s views of Christianity and Islam in Africa, 48; on Burton’s views of racial difference, 47, 49, 250n10, 253n58; on Isabel Burton, 252n46 Khayyam, Omar, 120 Kim (Kipling), 21 Kipling, Rudyard, 21 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 106 Lane, Edward W., 57–59, 61 language: Achebe and English, 155; Atatu¨rk’s reform of the Turkish alphabet, 198, 225–26; Bre´al on, 5–6; Burton and Arabic, 1, 18–19, 59; Burton on African, 41–42, 46; Burton’s studies, 1, 18–20, 250n10; children’s innate capacities for, 4–5, 247–48n5; grammar, meaning, and human cognition, 5–6; and the human process of becoming cultural beings, 3–6; Kane and French, 186–87; Lawrence and Arabic, 67, 68, 87, 89; Massignon and Arabic, 117, 120, 124, 139–40; Massignon on consciousness, culture, and, 138–41, 143; Massignon on Hebrew, 139–40; Massignon on mystical contemplation and, 138–41; Nietzsche on thought and,

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150; Salih and English, 188, 193; and the Thousand and One Nights, 59 Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe (Meek), 167–69 Lawrence, D. H., 106 Lawrence, T. E., 65–114; Arab cause/revolt and desert campaign, 71–84, 87–90, 92–93, 97–100, 136–37, 243, 255n10; on Arab homosexuality and sexual culture, 103–5; Arabic language skills, 67, 68, 87, 89; beatings, 91, 100, 109–10; bodily integrity, 78, 101, 106, 110; bond with the Arab culture, 65–90, 108–9; camel ride to Damascus, 73, 76–77, 79, 87, 255n15; childhood and family experiences, 91, 107, 109–12, 256n45; and cleanness/the adjective ‘‘clean,’’ 77–78, 85, 103–4, 107; Damascus campaign, 73, 76–77, 83–84, 255n15; Deraa incident, 77–79, 80, 91, 99, 101, 106; enlistment in the RAF and military service as private, 91, 94, 100–101, 106–7; essay introducing Doughty’s Travels, 84–85; eventual rejection of Arab life, 65–67, 74–76, 79, 91, 94–101, 106–9, 113, 137; excavations at Carchemish in Syria, 67–69; on ‘‘fellowship’’ of the revolt, 73, 75–76, 79; guilt over deceiving the Arabs about postwar independence, 73–79, 87–88, 92–93, 97, 112–13, 136–37, 257n53; on imitating Arabs, 68, 80–81, 86–90; inner division between the higher/lower parts of his being, 93–96, 103, 105; intercultural identity, 2, 65–67, 84–90, 95–96, 113–14; keeping himself free of ‘‘accretions,’’ 94, 100, 107, 108–9; the ‘‘Lawrence of Arabia’’ name, 65, 91, 111; on living the ‘‘Yahoo life,’’ 75, 79, 95, 98–99, 100, 113; and Massignon, 124, 128, 135–38, 258n30; models of how to live among foreigners, 84–87; Oxford thesis, 67–68, 69; and passionate friendships between men, 71, 102–5; relationship with Auda, 87–90; relationship with Dahoum, 70–71, 73, 102,

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Index 271 105, 108; relationship with his mother, Sarah, 91, 107, 109–12; and religion/ Christianity, 69–70, 112, 135–36; selfanalysis and self-observation, 67, 79, 92–96, 113–14, 136; self-loathing, selfpunishment, and impulse for degradation, 74, 77, 79, 90–101, 135–36; selfrepudiation and pseudonymous identities, 100, 106–7; Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 66, 70–73, 76–80, 83–96, 103–5, 110; sexuality, 9–10, 71, 78–79, 91, 102–6; Tafas incident, 76; ‘‘Twenty-Seven Articles,’’ 80–83, 87; on wearing Arab dress, 68, 69, 77, 79–90 Lean, David, 76, 99 Leiris, Michel, 122, 145 Leo Africanus, 119 Liddell-Hart, B. H., 68, 70, 80, 103, 105 Lincoln, Trebitsch, 11 Livingstone, David, 44 Love and Beauty (Galip), 215 Lovell, Mary, 250n10 Macaulay, T. B., 38 Mack, John E., 91–92, 110–11, 256n51 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 50, 167 Mallarme´, Ste´phane, 201 A Man of the People (Achebe), 155–56, 160, 161 Mann, Thomas, 201–2 Marchand, Jean-Baptiste, 118 Maritain, Jacques, 121 marriage: Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, 175–78, 180; Burton’s, 37; in Ibo culture, 167–68; Lawrence’s proposal, 256n45; Massignon’s decision to marry, 125–26; Pamuk’s The Black Book (as union/ identity exchange), 217–18; Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, 234–35; Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, 188–89, 190, 192 Maspero, Franc¸ois, 118 Maspero, Henri, 118 Massignon, Fernand, 118 Massignon, Louis, 115–51; academic career, 124–25; and the Arab desert campaign,

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135–38; and the Arabic language, 117, 120, 124, 139–40; and Arab/Muslim life and culture, 116–17, 119–23, 124, 130–31, 133; Catholicism of, 115, 116, 122, 130, 132–33; and Charles Foucauld, 125, 127, 128, 133, 136; conversion experience, 116, 117, 119–20, 121, 122–23, 126; decentering experiences, 140–41, 151; decision to marry, 125–26; early life and spiritual trajectory in Paris, 117–18; early studies of Eastern culture and Islam, 119–21; enduring sense of unworthiness, 124–26, 135; and European colonialism, 118, 126, 128–30, 137; on exemplary saints and heroic personalities, 145, 147–48; and homosexuality, 9–10, 120–22, 135; intercultural religious identities, 2–3, 115–17, 135–38, 144–45, 151; on Islam’s exclusion and abandonment, 126–30; on Islam’s relation to Christianity, 115, 116, 126–34, 142–43, 146, 243–44; on Jews, 126–27, 139; and languages, 117, 119, 120, 124, 138–41, 143; and Lawrence, 124, 128, 135–38, 258n30; manner of dress, 120, 125–26; metaphor of civilizational ‘‘curves,’’ 126–27, 145–46; on mysticism and mystical contemplation, 132–45, 215; and Nietzsche, 115, 145, 148–51; ordination as Melchite priest, 122, 133; parents’ contrasting religious attitudes, 117–18; post-conversion return to Paris, 124–26; prayer to Joan of Arc, 129, 137; relationship with Cuadra, 120–21, 142; on sexual ecstasy, 122, 132; study of Hallaj, 116, 119, 120, 141–45, 146; study of Leo Africanus, 119; theory of history, 115, 145–51; ‘‘Visitation of the Stranger,’’ 123, 132; and Zionism, 139 Matisse, Henri, 202 Mecca, 1, 13–15, 25, 26, 28–32, 45, 59, 251n28. See also Lawrence, T. E. Meek, C. K., 167–69 Melchite Christian sect, Arabic-speaking, 122, 133

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272 Index Melling, Antoine-Ignace, 204, 261n10 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 6 Mill, John Stuart, 34 Milnes, Richard Monckton, 36, 42 The Mint (Lawrence), 101 mirrors: Pamuk and, 205, 206–12, 214–20, 226–28; and the second self, 206–12; selfreflection as instrument of self-transformation, 205, 206–12, 214–20, 226–28 missionaries, Christian: Achebe and British Nigeria, 153–54, 162–67, 170–71; Burton’s opposition to project of, 47–48. See also conversion Mister Johnson (Cary), 158, 168 Mohammed, Prophet: Burton on religious reforms of, 16–17, 23–24, 62–64, 249n6; Burton’s Mecca and Medinah prayers (and tomb of), 29–30, 252n35; Lawrence and legend of the coffin of, 66, 75, 95; Massignon and, 119, 131–32, 142–43, 236. See also Islam monotheism, 15–17, 249n6 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 11, 20 Moses, 16, 39, 63 The Museum of Innocence (Pamuk), 197, 228–37 My Name Is Red (Pamuk), 196, 203, 234 mysticism: anarchistic potential of, 132, 142, 144; Harufi, 224–26; Islamic/ Christian approaches to, 132–34, 142–43; Massignon on, 132–45, 215; Massignon’s conversion and the via negativa of, 123, 132; Massignon’s study of Hallaj, 116, 119, 120, 141–45, 146; Pamuk and, 200, 215, 224–26; psychological introspection/ personal contemplation, 134–38, 215; reflection stimulated by language and sacred texts, 138–41; Sufi, 119, 123, 141–42, 200, 215, 224–26 Nabokov, Vladimir, 196 Nagel, Thomas, 8 Naipaul, V. S., 159, 196 Naomi (Tanizaki), 197, 230–31 Napier, Charles James, 18, 19–23 A New Life (Pamuk), 214, 223

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Newman, John Henry, 34 Nietzsche, Friedrich: Burton and, 55–56, 239; ‘‘death of God,’’ 122; essay on Schopenhauer, 148–49; and heroic individualism, 55–56, 118, 145, 149–51; on language and thought, 150; and Massignon’s theory of history, 115, 145, 148–51 Nigeria: Achebe’s early life in, 153–60; Achebe’s university education at Ibadan, 155–56, 158–59, 160, 166–67, 169; anticolonial agitation for independence, 157–60; and the Biafran War, 155, 157; British colonial, 153–60, 171–73, 188; Civil War, 156; Hausa/Fulani culture, 156, 157; newly independent Lagos, 160–61, 173–80; Yoruba culture, 42, 156, 157. See also Achebe, Chinua; Ibo culture of Nigeria Nivedita, Sister, 11 No Longer at Ease (Achebe), 160–61, 173–80, 240 Orientalism (Said), 242–43 Orlans, Harold, 91–92, 105, 255n15 Ottoman Empire, 197, 199, 211; Lawrence and the Arab revolt, 65, 72; and Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, 203, 234; the Sultan’s court in Pamuk’s The White Castle, 206–12, 222 Oxford University: Burton at, 18–19, 33–35; Lawrence and, 67–68, 69, 71; and Salih’s character’s British education, 189 Pamuk, Orhan, 196–237, 239; the actual museum of innocence and its catalogue, 228–34, 235, 237; and the Armenian controversy, 231; The Black Book, 200, 212–28, 232, 239; Cevdet Bey and His Sons, 201–2; on the city of Istanbul, 196–97, 198, 199–200, 203; drawing on Western art/literature to write about Turkey, 198–205, 208; early life and family, 201, 205; European writerpredecessors, 200–202; family’s Istanbul apartment house, 199, 213, 230; on

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Index 273 gender and cultural difference, 10, 203; idea of the second self and identity exchange, 205, 206–14, 216–20; on imitation and becoming oneself, 214–16, 220; intercultural identity, 2–3, 152, 196–205, 231, 237; Istanbul, 196–99, 204–5, 229, 230, 232; mirrored selfreflection and self-transformation, 205, 206–12, 214–20, 226–28; The Museum of Innocence, 197, 228–37; My Name Is Red, 196, 203, 234; A New Life, 214, 223; Nobel Prize, 201, 231; Norton lectures at Harvard (2010), 205, 236; on relationship between culture and mystery, 224–28; on relationship between fiction and life, 210, 212, 219–20, 236; Silent House, 207, 212, 223, 239; Snow, 198–99, 204, 215; and Sufi mystics, 200, 215, 224–26; and the Thousand and One Nights, 202–3; and Turkey’s split between traditional and Western culture, 152, 197–99, 220–22, 232; on urban melancholy (hu¨zu¨n), 199–201, 203–4, 222, 228; as visual artist/ painter, 202, 203–4; The White Castle, 206–12, 222, 223, 233–34 Paris Peace Conference (1919), 71, 79 Parrinder, Edward G., 166 Pasha, Ferit, 222 The Passion of Husayn Ibn Mansuˆr Hallaˆj: Mystical Martyr (Massignon), 143–44, 146 Payne, John, 57–59, 253–54n69 Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to AlMedinah and Meccah (Burton), 1, 13–15, 25, 26, 28–32, 59, 251n28 phrenology, 46 Pinker, Steven, 4 Polo, Marco, 116, 164 Pope, Alexander, 55 ‘‘Prayer for Sodom’’ (Massignon), 121–22 Principles of Biology (Spencer), 39–40 Proust, Marcel, 201 race/racial differences: Achebe on European racism toward Africa, 159, 171; Burton

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and, 37–51, 251n28; Burton on physical and biological basis of, 46–51; Burton’s polygenist understanding of, 48–49; and Burton’s views of black Africans, 37–38, 41–43, 46–49; Lawrence’s views on, 75 reflection: and cultural membership, 5–11, 13, 86–90, 194, 214–15, 238–39; dialectics of affectivity and, 6–10, 238–41. See also intercultural identities; mirrors Renan, Ernst, 119 Richards, Vyvyan, 102–3, 105 Rodinson, Maxime, 124–25 The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Fitzgerald), 52–53 Rumi, 123 Said, Edward, 242–43 Sale, George, 249n6 Salih, Tayeb, 2, 180–81, 187–95, 244; and Achebe, 188; and Arab/African culture, 187–88; and the Arabic language, 188, 193; on British colonialism, 188; British education, 188, 189, 191–92, 193; and the English language, 188, 193; fictional characters and isolation/reflective distance, 191, 193–94; fictional character’s shrine to his double life, 190–93, 244; intercultural identity, 2, 180–81, 187–95; Season of Migration to the North, 180–81, 187–95, 244; and Sudanese culture, 180–81, 187–95 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 115, 146, 215 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 5 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 148–49 Schopenhauer as Educator (Nietzsche), 148–49 Scott, Walter, 20 Season of Migration to the North (Salih), 180–81, 187–95, 244 Senegal, 180–87; Diallobe´ society, 181, 182–84, 187; French colonialism, 181, 182–84; French education and postsecondary facilities, 181, 183–84; Islam of, 181; Kane and, 180–87

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274 Index Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Lawrence), 66, 70–73, 76–80, 83–96, 103–5, 110; on the Arab cause and desert campaign, 72, 73, 76, 79; on Arab homosexuality and sexual culture, 103–5; chapter ‘‘Myself’’ and self-examination, 92–96, 103, 105, 256n51; dedication to Dahoum, 70–71, 102, 105; Deraa incident in, 77–78; introductory chapter, 73, 80; Lawrence’s negative judgments of, 91; on living in the dress of Arabs, 80, 83; title, 70 sexuality, 9–10; Arab, 103–5; Burton and, 9, 22–23, 36–37, 59–60; Burton’s defense of ‘‘dirty talk,’’ 60–61, 62; death and, 122, 132; female, 59–60; Lawrence and, 9–10, 71, 78–79, 91, 102–6; Massignon and, 9–10, 120–22, 135; Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, 229; religious significance of, 122; Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, 192; and the Thousand and One Nights, 59–61, 62. See also homosexuality Shaw, Charlotte, 78, 91, 103, 110 Shaw, George Bernard, 75–76, 78, 91, 101 Sikhs, 23 Silent House (Pamuk), 207, 212, 223, 239 Sind (province), 18, 21–23. See also India; Lawrence, T. E. skepticism: Achebe’s about African customs, 165; Burton’s about cultural values and universal truths, 13, 25, 51–57, 61–64, 66–67; Enlightenment thinkers’ materialism and, 55; Lawrence’s, 66–67 slavery, African: ancestors of the Ibos’ osu class, 162, 175; Burton’s views on, 48, 253n58 Smith, Joseph, 26 Snow (Pamuk), 198–99, 204, 215 social Darwinism, 39–40 Speke, John Hauning, 43–44 Spencer, Herbert, 39–40 Stanhope, Lady, 11 Stanley, Henry Morton, 44, 118 Steinhaeuser, John, 58 Stone Talk (Burton), 52–57, 59, 64, 239

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Sudan: Arab/African culture, 187–88; Salih and, 180–81, 187–95 Sufism: Burton and, 24–25, 31, 64; Harufi sect, 224–26; mysticism, 119, 123, 141–42, 200, 224–26; Pamuk and, 200, 215, 224–26 Swinburne, Algernon, 36 Sykes, Mark, 136 Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), 74, 136 Symbolism, 201 Syria: Burton’s diplomatic career, 36, 38; Lawrence and excavations at Carchemish, 67–69; Lawrence and the Damascus campaign, 73, 76–77, 83–84, 255n15; Lawrence’s camel ride to Damascus, 73, 76–77, 79, 87, 255n15; Lawrence’s visit to a Roman ruin, 107–8 Tanizaki, Junichiro, 197, 230–31 Tanpinar, Ahmet Handi, 197, 204 There Was a Country (Achebe), 156–57 Things Fall Apart (Achebe), 160–69, 184, 239–40 Thomas, Lowell, 65 Thousand and One Nights: and the Arabic language, 59; Burton on the process of writing, 58–59, 253–54n69; Burton’s translation and commentary, 13, 36, 56–64; foreword, 58, 60; Galland’s first translation, 57, 61, 62, 202; as hybrid product of Persian-Zoroastrian and Arab-Muslim cultures, 61–62, 63–64; Lane’s translation, 57–59, 61; Pamuk’s sense of alienation from, 202–3; Payne’s translation/Burton’s use of, 57–59, 253– 54n69; sexuality/desire and fantasy, 59–61, 62; Terminal Essay, 60, 249n6 To Catch a Thief (1955 film), 235 Travels in Arabia Deserta (Doughty), 84 Trieste, Italy, 36, 38 Turkey, 196–237; Arabic/Latin alphabet, 198, 225–26; Armenian controversy, 231; Atatu¨rk’s secular reforms, 197–98, 199, 225–26; city of Istanbul, 196–97, 198, 199–200, 203–4; dismantling of Sultan Abdulhamid II’s mannequins, 221; EU

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Index 275 membership application, 231; influence of Western films, 221; and Islam, 199, 222; Melling’s images of Istanbul, 204, 261n10; split between traditional and Western culture, 152, 197–99, 220–22, 232; and World War I Arab campaign, 71–72, 76–79, 99; Young Turks, 197. See also Ottoman Empire; Pamuk, Orhan ‘‘Twenty-Seven Articles’’ (Lawrence), 80–83, 87 Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche), 150

Waitz, Theodor, 249n6 Wanderings in West Africa (Burton), 49 Weber, Max, 50, 112 The Wedding of Zein (Salih), 187 Welch, James, 160, 166 The White Castle (Pamuk), 206–12, 222, 223, 233–34 Wilkins, W. H., 38, 39, 252n47 Williamson, Henry, 106 World War I. See Arab revolt and desert campaign of World War I

Utrillo, Maurice, 202

Yoruba culture, 42, 156, 157

Verlaine, Paul, 201

Zionism, 139

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Acknowledgments

Among the many friends and colleagues with whom I have discussed this book at various moments, I need to express particular gratitude to Mitchell Cohen for calling my attention to Tayeb Salih, to Ira Lapidus and Alexander Bevilacqua for reading and commenting on the chapter about Louis Massignon, and to Zvi Ben-Dor, Lisa Lyons, Suzanne Marchand, and Richard Sennett for conversations that were sometimes more useful to me than they knew. I also warmly thank Damon Linker for the enthusiasm and help he provided in bringing the manuscript to the University of Pennsylvania Press; Erica Ginsburg, Erich Schramm, and Hannah Blake for their fine administrative and editorial work; and Holly Knowles for making the index. As always, my wife, Jayn Rosenfeld, provided support without which I could not have made it to the end.

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