Kinglake

Kinglake is the English traveler whose Eothen exemplifies, in Edward Said’s analysis, how an Oriental pilgrimage can serve less to discover the Orient than to consolidate the traveler’s identity and imperial confidence. His claim that travel shapes character is undercut by a book that, in Said’s reading, hardens anti-Semitism and xenophobia rather than opening its author to what he encounters. Kinglake’s self-sufficient figure crossing the desert becomes an instrument of a public English will: the traveler imagines himself sovereign, while the Orient is reduced to a stage for his authority.

Identity and Travel Writing

Kinglake is discussed among the nineteenth-century writers who made pilgrimages to the Orient. Said places these journeys within a broader Romantic pattern: travelers sought to escape the mustiness of the existing Orientalist archive and make their own writing a fresh repository of experience. Yet the pilgrimage was already shaped by inherited stories and expectations, and its route commonly passed through Biblical lands. The traveler’s desire for personal renewal therefore met a region already densely interpreted by scholarship, religion, and imperial history.

For English writers, Said argues, this imaginative freedom was especially constrained by political reality. India was an actual British possession, and the lands between the Mediterranean and India acquired weight as territory within an expanding imperial domain. To write about Egypt, Syria, or Turkey was consequently not only to imagine a distant setting but to engage, however obliquely, with political management and British interests. Kinglake belongs to this English tradition, in which the pilgrimage could not be detached from the material fact of empire.

Said distinguishes Kinglake’s travel book from the more self-directed French literary pilgrimages associated with Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert. French travelers could more readily make the Orient a locale for private myths and personal imperatives. English writers, by contrast, faced the resistance of a territorial and political reality that pressed upon their fantasies. Kinglake’s account thus belongs to a tradition in which individual travel is closely entangled with national power, even when the traveler presents himself as acting alone.

Eothen and the Traveler’s Self

Published in 1844, Eothen is described by Said as rigidly chronological and dutifully linear. Its form makes the journey read less like an adventure than like a carefully ordered tour through an Oriental bazaar. Said calls the book a catalogue of pompous ethnocentrisms and nondescript accounts of the Englishman’s East: a sequence in which the traveler’s judgments carry more force than the particulars of the people and places he passes.

Kinglake gives the book an explicit rationale: travel in the Orient is supposed to contribute to the “moulding of your character--that is, your very identity.” Said’s criticism turns on the result. Rather than broadening the traveler’s understanding, this process appears to solidify “your” anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and generalized racial prejudice. The promised formation of character becomes a tightening of the assumptions the journey might have tested.

The book’s representation of creativity makes that contradiction stark. Kinglake treats the Arabian Nights as too lively and inventive to have been produced by a “mere Oriental,” whom he calls “a thing dead and dry--a mental mummy.” Said sets this sweeping judgment beside Kinglake’s admitted lack of knowledge of any Oriental language. Ignorance does not make the traveler cautious; it coexists with confident generalizations about the Orient’s culture, mentality, and society. The image of the “mental mummy” thus exposes the method of the book: living difference is fixed in a stereotype even as the traveler claims that experience is remaking him.

Desert Scene and Imperial Confidence

The journey across the desert toward Suez gives Kinglake’s self-fashioning its most concentrated expression. Traveling alone, he celebrates his self-sufficiency and writes, “I was here in this African desert, and I myself, and no other, had charge of my life.” The sentence places the traveler at the center of the scene: the desert becomes the setting in which he can represent himself as answerable to no one. Said’s point is not simply that Kinglake enjoys solitude, but that the Orient serves the comparatively private purpose of allowing him to take hold of himself.

That apparently individual triumph is also political. Said argues that Kinglake’s consciousness comfortably identifies itself with his nation’s, whose government was closer than France’s to extending its reach across the Orient. The traveler’s sovereign Western ego is therefore not independent of public power. It acts as a vehicle through which a national claim to authority can appear personal, self-generated, and earned by the journey.

Flaubert’s prediction about England’s intentions in Egypt clarifies the imperial context that Said sees around Kinglake’s writing. He imagines British troops moving from Aden through Suez to Cairo, and anticipates that England will take Egypt at the first sign of trouble in Europe. The passage is not evidence that Kinglake himself made this prediction; it marks the larger political field within which Said places English travel writing. Against that field, the desert declaration of individual command looks less like freedom from history than an intimate expression of the power surrounding the traveler.

Knowledge, Prejudice, and Significance

Said contrasts Kinglake with Richard Burton. Burton was an adventurer and a scholar capable of matching European Orientalists, and he understood his writing as a contest with the uniformed teachers who governed European knowledge. Kinglake, by comparison, shows no comparable struggle to produce a novel opinion of the Orient; Said judges neither his knowledge nor his personality adequate to that task. The contrast helps locate Kinglake’s distinctive role: he does not chiefly challenge scholarly authority but reproduces familiar attitudes through the authority of his own travel experience.

The journey itself barely changes those attitudes. Said emphasizes how little actually seeing the Orient affects Kinglake’s opinions. The people he encounters merely confirm his prior belief that Easterners are best dealt with by intimidation; the traveler’s own dominating ego becomes the instrument of that intimidation. Travel here supplies apparent first-hand warrant for judgments that remain essentially untouched by experience.

Kinglake therefore illustrates a larger argument about Orientalist representation. The traveler’s personal voice does not escape the structures of knowledge and power that define the Orient from a position of superiority. His claimed individuality and his national alignment work together: the former lends lived immediacy to the latter, while the people encountered become evidence for a preconceived picture rather than agents who might unsettle it. In Said’s account, Eothen’s significance lies in this unresolved contradiction between the promise of self-formation and the journey’s actual work of reinforcing the traveler’s authority and prejudice.