Book Review: "Orient Re-oriented"
Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia
Timothy Weiss
Toronto [Canada], University of Toronto Press, 2004.
270 pages, ISBN: 0802089585, US $60.00,
http://www.thattechnicalbookstore.com/b0802089585.htm
In the introduction to what has by now become the cornerstone of postcolonial
studies, i.e., Orientalism, Edward Said states that "the Orient is an idea that
has a history and tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given
it reality and presence in and for the West" (5). In the book, Said retraces the
long-lasting historical complicity between Orientalism and European imperialism
- a complicity which he scrutinizes with no less wit and erudition in his later
book, Culture and Imperialism (1993). Said's Orientalism and counter-Orientalism
have engaged both admirers and detractors whose critical positions are as varied
as their institutional affiliations, disciplinary practices, and political
orientations. Most of this post-Orientalism debate, however, has revolved around
three basic flaws in Said's thesis: its methodological infelicities, its
essentializing pronouncements, and its failure to produce an alternative to that
which it critiques.
Weiss's Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia is a recent addition to
the ever-increasing post-Saidian scholarship in postcolonial studies. Combining
post-Heideggerian hermeneutics (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Wolfgang
Iser) and Husserlian phenomenology, Weiss offers an invigorating "translational
approach" to culture and identity as a substitute for the
"archeological-genealogical" approach of Foucault and Said. While Saidian
discourse analysis follows a diachronic line of inquiry, probing the genealogies
of power relations and knowledge production and transmission (Orientalism 5),
Weiss's approach is essentially heuristic, aimed at uncovering synchronic,
interdependent and shifting subject-object relations. To translate the Orient is
thus to interpret it within complex textual networks and in terms of changing
subject (and object) positions. According to Weiss's phenemonological-hermeneutic
method, the interpretation of texts, Oriental or otherwise, implies first and
foremost a transformative/"orienting" process wherein both subject and object
depend on each other for the production and interpretation of meaning. Texts,
and by extension cultures, are transformed, re-oriented, created anew, every
time they are approached. This process, Weiss goes on to argue, takes place in
and produces what he calls an "emergent reality" or a "liminal space," a space
that is as diverse and unstable as its moments of enunciation. Within this
space, not only can a wider variety of texts be accommodated, but also different
and changing epistemological possibilities opened up (8).
In light of the elaborate theoretical scheme he has outlined in the
Introduction, Weiss provides in the ensuing chapters insightful (con)textual
analyses of selected works by Jorge Louis Borges, Paul Bowles, David T.K. Wong,
Kazuo Ishiguro, Ricardo Piglia, and Salman Rushdie. The first chapter, "Borges's
Search or the Bibliophilic Orient," introduces the reader mainly to the Orient
of Borges's Historia universal de la infamia, an Orient that figures less as a
geographical location than as an imaginative treasure house of fascinating
philosophies and religions. The Borgesian Orient, Weiss contends, is conceived
as "an impressionistic, poetic, imaginative landscape, rather than as something
principally geographic" (21). Borges's translations of Oriental texts,
particularly The Arabian Nights, are informed by his awareness of the universe
as a seamless web of interrelated subjectivities (30). Truth is sought in
inter-subjective relations, in the relatedness of people and experiences to one
another across time and space, and Weiss's hermeneutic approach highlights the
way this truth plays itself out in Borges's translated Orients.
While for Borges the Orient is essentially a rich collection of texts, an
archive of mystifying scripts (20), for Paul Bowles, it is a lived experience.
Borges re-writes, re-orients the Orient; Bowles experiences it (43). In "‘Without Stopping': The Orient as Liminal Space in Paul Bowles," Weiss examines
the American writer's travel narratives in terms of their politics of
anti-modernity and poetics of escape. For Bowles, the Orient, and the Maghreb in
particular, represents both an escape from and a critique of post-WWII American
modernity. "Africa Minor," for instance, resists the Orientalist formulae to
which the Arab/Moroccan/Muslim character is frequently subjected in Western
writing by offering ways of seeing the world from an un-American perspective.
The essay's counter-Orientalist thrust thus lies in the creation of constantly
recursive loops of interpretation and translation, of narrative spaces where
multi-voicedness and dialogism are at play (71). What is more, Bowles's Their
Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1957), a collection of essays he wrote
during his sojourn in North Africa, articulates an interminable tension between
representation and translation (59). As a piece of travel writing, Weiss
remarks, the collection shows how the writer-traveller is frequently adrift
between the desire to re-present and the fear to dis-orient. Ever anxious to
steer clear of the Scylla of re-presentation and the Charybdis of
dis-orientation, the writer-traveller is doomed to inhabit a liminal space, an
emergent reality, in which translation is necessarily transformative, and
re-presentation aporetic at best.
Weiss's Heideggerian-Husserlian readings of the re-oriented Orients in the texts
of Wong, Ishiguro, and Piglia are based on the methodology of geo-phenomenology
according to which space and subjectivity are "consubstantial" and floating
entities. Weiss reads place in these authors' works not as a geographical,
material space, but rather as a deep sense of lived and shared experiences
within a community (110), as a form of "consciousness" and "belief" (118). For
space is a function of one's consciousness of that space. Weiss's next chapter,
"The Living Labyrinth: Hong Kong and David T.K. Wong's Hong Kong Stories"
explores the narrativization of Hong Kong as en emergent post-colonial space
whose contemporary multi-cultural outlook is defined by the co-existence of both
Eastern and Western values. Wong's collection of short stories, Weiss argues,
translates Hong Kong in terms of an evolving "cultural imaginary" that reflects
the city's Sino-Western history (97). In "Where is Place? Locale and Identity in
Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans and Ricardo Piglia's La ciudad ausente," Weiss sheds more light on the triangulation of subjectivity, space, and
narration and the translational process that enmeshes these coordinates both
locally and globally.
The next chapter, "At the End of East/West: Myth in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's
Last Sigh," focuses on the narrativization (translation/re-orientation) of myth
and history in postmodern and postcolonial fiction. Rushdie's mytho-poetics,
Weiss emphasizes, not only expands the semantic scope of language and narrative
(149), but it also opens up history and historiography to unlimited narrative,
hermeneutic and epistemological possibilities. For instance, in The Moor's Last
Sigh, Rushdie re-historicizes the story of Boabdil, The Lusidas, and The
Reconquista in such a way as to inscribe "emancipatory visions of the world" in
general and to re-imagine Indian political history in particular (171).
Rushdie's translational recuperation of these stories moves away from an
"ideological" re-presentation of them and toward a "utopian" re-imagining of
their liberating re-historicization.
In the last two chapters, Weiss re-directs his study toward a
re-conceptualization of identity and citizenship in terms of a theoretical model
that combines Buddhist philosophy with the work of a host of multi-ethnic
writers/thinkers, such as Édward Glissant, Amin Maalouf, Paul Ricoeur, Tzvetan
Todorov, Neil Bissoondath, V.S. Naipaul, Emmanuel Lévinas - to name but a few.
The penultimate chapter, "Identity and Citizenship in a World of Shame," argues
that (post)modern identity, as well as citizenship, should be perceived as a
composite, heterogeneous entity, "a rhizomic tissue of cultural qualities and
values that interact" (178). Notions such as Glissant's "creolization,"
Maalouf's "dialogics" of identity, Todorov's "transculturation", and Ricoeur's
and Levinas' intersubjective consciousness - all provide possible paradigms for
understanding the constant confluence and infusion of what Gayatri Spivak in
another context describes as planetary, rather than global, collectivities (73).
Weiss's Conclusion, "Neither Subjects nor Objects: In the Middle Way," draws
further on Buddhist thinking and insists that "the dual challenges of
fundamentalism and groundlessness" (208) that beleaguer contemporary societies
can be overcome by conceiving a new conceptual framework wherein both
subjectivity and cultural identity are allowed their global and constant state
of "emergence" and "impermanence" (199). "[N]either subject- nor
object-oriented," (208) the translational approach provides precisely such a
framework.
Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia is definitely worth reading,
for Weiss's theorization of the Orient in terms of translational, re-orienting
hermeneutics not only critically and profitably revises Saidian discourse
analysis but also offers a cogent and promising alternative to the identity
politics that still bedevils today's neo-colonial cosmopolitics.
Works Cited
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
