El Aurens the Orientalist

T.E. Lawrence is the “British agent-Orientalist’ as Said explains it; he assumed “the role of expert-adventurer-eccentric […] and the role of colonial authority, whose position is in a central place next to the indigenous ruler” (Said 246). Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the Hollywood adaptation of it (Lawrence of Arabia), presents a man (the Orientalist) on a quest to excite and galvanize the Orient into modernity—something innately Western in form and purpose—which will give that imperialist adventurer the chance to create and understand a personal vision of the new terrains. Said speaks of this desire of the Orientalist to ‘contain a personal vision:’
Since the White Man, like the Orientalist, lived very close to the line of tension keeping the coloreds at bay, he felt it incumbent on him readily to define and redefine the domain he surveyed. Passages of narrative description regularly alternate with passages of rearticulaed definition and judgment that disrupt the narrative; this is a characteristic style of the writing produced by Oriental experts who operated using Kipling’s White Man as a mask (Said 228).
Lawrence was the ideal modern Orientalist; felling it was his responsibility to use his abilities of definition and redefinition as a means of ‘rescuing’ the Orient from its modernist deficiencies. Lawrence of Arabia is a guide, through the tenets of popular culture and Orientalism, to assist in the consumer’s definition of the Orient. Orientalim is the “distillation of essential ideas about the Orient”; it is the informative tool that gives the West the ideas it needs to understand something that is foreign and the realities ultimately unknown. Lawrence is the savior of the Arab people, providing them with his vast Western knowledge and ideals. Through this process he is able to understand the Orient from a western perspective, effectively breaking down the walls of ignorance and opening the East to the West (but not vice versa). Today, because of the European adventurer/Orientalist like Lawrence, the consumer of Orientalism is also the perpetuator of the ‘Orient as deficient ideal.’ It is also a result of these pioneering Orientalists, that the Orient is a satellite to the West in many issues, to which any resistance is labeled terrorism or threats of freedom.

Here’s a scene from the 1962 David Lean film in which Lawrence the imperialist gains the information to become Lawrence the Orientalist…



“[…] or is it that you think we are something you can play with, because we are a little people?”