Lawrence of Arabia: The Problem of Modern Heroism and Edward Said’s Counter-critical Assessment of Orientalism
“In his work [T.E. Lawrence’s] we can see most clearly the conflict between narrative history and vision… The great drama of Lawrence’s work is that it symbolizes the struggle, first, to stimulate the Orient (lifeless, timeless, forceless) into movement; second, to impose upon that movement an essentially Western shape; third, to contain the new and aroused Orient in a personal vision whose retrospective mode includes a powerful sense of failure.”
-Edward Said in Orientalism (1978)
The 1962 Cinematic Masterpiece of David Lean’s Sandy Epic
Between the film’s 60th anniversary and the recent read on the controversy over the historical British imperial agent T.E Lawrence, I decided that it was the perfect opportunity to finally give David Lean 227 minutes of my time. Netflix Indonesia has recently released the 2022 restoration of 4K UHD quality. The spatial audio just added to the already-immersive experience.
What surprised me most about Lawrence of Arabia is how straightforward and enthralling it is. The 4 hours-length actually allows the director to spend more time detailing T.E. Lawrence’s (Peter O’Toole) emotional arc. He’s a conflicted hero who must contend with his divided loyalty. The film turns out to be sensual adventure of political nuance, war and psychological journey in a 70mm print. The bold adaptation of Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a movie with all the sweep and antique confidence of a cavalry charge. It is a semi-biographical war chronicle that narrates an integral part of World War I and an epitome of filmmaking just before New Hollywood Era. It also indulges us with post-traumatic disorder journey and long shots of gorgeous cinematography (and men).
Lean demonstrated a mastery of storytelling structure, scale, perspective-shifting, the intense closeup moment, the colossal widescreen panorama — epitomized by the film’s most famous coup de cinéma: having accepted his commission to go out to the Middle East with the Arab bureau in the first world war, Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence blows out a match and the scene changes to the burning desert at sunrise. The screen is ablaze. The dunes undulate in the heat, and Maurice Jarre’s score howls along with it.
Lawrence is his own writer of destiny; as he emphasizes many times and became source of ideological difference with Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) and his Arab nomads that “nothing is written.” He was to unite warring desert tribes to fight the Turks and the Ottoman Empire in the British interest. But Lawrence’s own loyalties become divided, and he falls in love with the Arab nations and all their fondly (or condescendingly) imagined ascetic martial heroism, perhaps the way Byron did with Greeks during the war of independence a century before. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars became a key text of orientalism, and the movie intuits its romantic grandeur, while amplifying its absurdity and conceit. Eventually, as the first part chronicles the story of the rise of a hero, from intermezzo onwards it tells the downfall mimicking Icarus who flew too close to the sun.
The key difference of real-life Lawrence in Seven Pillars and David Lean’s Lawrence is the absurdity of hero status, hypocritical nationalism, and as Edward Said delineates, a story of powerful failure. It is, in essence, a heroic failure, like the mythical Achilles died in an absurd way defending Troy in Homer’s Iliad: an arrow struck his tendon during the siege. Lean cleverly shows admiration for the heroes, but not glamorizing war itself; Lawrence is empathic that their actions are necessary in order to prevent the rise of fascism that could overtake the globe.
Among Lawrence’s burning dune of Neffud-crossing, guerilla siege of Aqaba and blowing up the Ottoman railway between Damascus and Medina, the so-called glorification was concluded by the very institution that employed him: British and French government’s betrayal to the Arabs with the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement and the 1935 motorcycle accident on his home country in England. This secret treaty is what molded Middle East as we know today with its modern conflicts and unbeknownst to the person who helped uniting Arab tribes in an effort to independence. I have to underline that for the countercriticism of Seven Pillars I am referring to David Lean’s version of rebellious, conveniently ambiguous Lawrence with his alluding homosexual nature, and not the equally complex real-life figure as discussed by Edward Said.
When I began to look more closely at the Lawrence myth and all that it entailed, I began to realize what a protean figure he was, one capable of being represented variously as a modern romantic, an inveterate dreamer, a great writer, an anti-imperialist, a queer officer and even a human-God. Amongst these representations, Edward Said’s representation of Lawrence in Orientalism (1978), as a typical (white, European) orientalist, although not the most thoroughly worked out, is undoubtedly, although a reductionist presentation as pinned by Amartya Sen, one of the most interesting.
Lawrence of Arabia and Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978)
Said’s critique of Lawrence in Orientalism has provoked a number of recent responses. Mohammad Nour Naimi, in “T.E. Lawrence and the Orientalist Tradition” (1992) — a doctoral thesis at the University of Essex that fully confirms Said’s own view of Lawrence — finds that Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an archetypal product of the orientalist tradition. In the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Lawrence represents the Middle East as an intellectual void, a geographical space to be possessed and circumscribed by himself, a recognized “expert” due to his earlier travels in Syria, his studies of the crusades, Charles Doughty and other travelers, and his indoctrination by David Hogarth, his Oxford mentor. In particular, Naimi seeks to investigate the sources of these orientalist influences on Lawrence and of the self-images and multiple modes of hero which Lawrence constructed, and which were later adopted by his contemporaries in the early biographies of him. Susan Williams, on the other hand, in “On Orientalism: Re-viewing Said’s View of T.E. Lawrence” (2002), citing extracts from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s letters, and some of his other writings, challenges Said’s view that, with regard to the Arabs, Lawrence was a racist, an imperialist and, in a dogmatic sense, an orientalist. For Said, writing in Orientalism, Lawrence was a typical orientalist who saw the Oriental (the Arab, the Semite) not as an empirical reality (a being who might be met with, spoken to or observed) but as an ontological and epistemological type, a specific category or essence, transtemporal, transindividual, and, in a predictive sense at least, inevitable. This inclination to classify was a product of a process of pseudo-scientific 19th-century thinking that, on the basis of supposedly empirical data (anthropological, biological, cultural) succeeded in dividing the world up into a series of more or less autonomous groups — racial, ethnic and linguistic (Said 229–33).
From the exigencies of this conceptual classification no Western orientalist — a category that for Said includes anyone who teaches, writes about or researches the Orient — could escape. Orientalists such as Doughty, Hogarth, Lawrence and Vanessa Bell may have believed that their vision of things Oriental was “individual, self-created” out of some sort of “intensely personal encounter” with the East, but they were in fact all compelled to view the Orient through orientalist spectacles — and so saw the oriental “other” as hostile, irrational, inferior, unchanging and effeminate. As for orientalism, that was in effect an integral part of European material civilization and culture; a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient; a Western style for having authority over it; and a systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage — and even produce — the Orient, politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively.
The evidence that Said assembles to prove the typicality of Lawrence’s orientalism is taken almost entirely from the Seven Pillars of Wisdom (not the 1962 film). It was, no doubt, on the basis of such evidence that Said felt able to identify Lawrence as yet another of those European orientalists who, in the tradition of Edward William Lane, Doughty and Lady Hester Stanhope, felt able to characterize the Oriental (the Arab, the Semite) as an archetypal “other”, radically different from the European “self” (Lawrence chaps 1–3). Said’s analysis of Lawrence’s orientalism appears, I think, give rise to two problems, both of which Said almost certainly recognized. First, the events of the Arab Revolt which Lawrence describes in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom are almost entirely concerned with change and not with stagnation as the orientalist paradigm would require. Second, the various orientalism which Said identifies in Lawrence’s work are nearly all confined to the introductory chapters. The remainder of the work, based mainly on Lawrence’s own personal memory of events, his own diary record and similar official and unofficial sources (one can ignore here Lawrence’s sometimes elaborate literary constructions: the supposed “discovery” of Faisal as a leader of the Arab Revolt, the Allied “deception” of the Arabs, the drama of betrayal, etc.), is almost entirely free of them. In effect, therefore, the orientalist part of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom can be seen merely as a sort of prologue to the work, one that introduces or frames it much more important reconstructionist element. The prologue, as we know, was not written entirely by Lawrence or his will, but by the several different publishers, British scholars and sponsors.
Said’s solution to the problems raised for his thesis regarding orientalism — that the Seven Pillars of Wisdom is almost entirely concerned with change, and that the orientalist sections are mostly confined to the introductory chapters — is, I think, similarly twofold. First, he discovers in the Arab Revolt the emergence of what he refers to as a “new dialectic”, one which requires the contemporary orientalist not only to understand the Orient as heretofore but also to participate in its process of change:
Now the Orient must be made to perform, its power must be enlisted on the side of “our” values, civilization, interests, goals. Knowledge of the Orient is directly translated into activity [ … ] The Orientalist has now become a figure of Oriental history, indistinguishable from it, its shaper, its characteristic sign for the West.
(Said, 238)
Second, he discovers, not only in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom but also in literature in general, a radical distinction between vision — essentially static and unchanging — and narrative, i.e. a method of dealing with and describing change. Vision, a product of orientalism amongst other things, is a static system of “synchronic essentialism”. Narrative (diachronic) reveals the instability that lies hidden behind it:
What seemed stable — and the Orient is synonymous with stability and unchanging eternality — now appears unstable. Instability suggests that history, with its disruptive detail, its currents of change, its tendency towards growth, decline or dramatic movement, is possible in the Orient and for the Orient. History and the narrative by which history is represented argue that vision is insufficient, that the “Orient” as an unconditional ontological category does an injustice to the potential of reality for change.
(239–40)
Vision and Narrative in Said’s Orientalism and Lawrence’s Seven Pillars
Narrative, in other words, invariably challenges vision, while vision, driven by a Nietzschean “will-to-power”, attempts to dominate reality, to impose (Apollonian) being on (Dionysian) becoming (Said mentions the word Apollonian in Orientalism, but strangely not Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian). As for the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, that work can, in Said’s view, be seen as a classic example of the struggle between vision and narrative, one in which (contrary to my view) vision comprehensively defeats narrative (239–40).
Said’s discovery, or rediscovery, of the distinction between vision and narrative has, it seems to me, profound implications, not only for the business of literature in general, but also for Said’s orientalist thesis in particular. For in allowing the possibility of a narrative account of developments in the Middle East in the period of the Arab Revolt is Said not tacitly admitting the possibility of a non-orientalist account of events in the Orient? And if this is the case, can one not also conclude that orientalism does not have to be — has not always been — a systematic (autonomous) discipline, by which European culture was able to manage, and even produce, the Orient, and a corporate institution for dealing with it, from whose exigencies the orientalist is unable to escape? Might not many orientalists, in other words, have written narrative histories of the Orient, Islam, the Arabs and so on, which were never intended to imply some kind of synchronic essentialism? Or did Said perhaps assume, that it is impossible for anyone, oriental or occidental, to write about the Orient, the East, the Arab, the Semite and so on, without assuming an element of essentialism, an assumption that implies that we are all, whether we like it or not, because of the structure of the language we use, orientalists. And if that is the case, how is it possible to make such a clear distinction between vision and narrative?
Said’s concept of the relationship between knowledge and power is essentially poststructuralist, although leavened with a significant amount of Marxism. In Orientalism he explains that orientalism should not be looked on as some kind of airy European fantasy or myth but as a created body of theory and practice, one in which there has for many generations been a considerable material investment. European culture, that is to say, driven by a battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections, exercises a sort of Gramscian hegemony that enables a “sovereign” Western consciousness effectively to create the Orient. At the same time, continued European investment makes orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering the Orient into Western consciousness. In Lawrence’s case at least, there is little doubt that he was shaped by a “sovereign” Western, mainly English, consciousness; and that he in his turn contributed significantly to the filtering through of the Orient into Western consciousness.
The only problem is that in the period of the First World War, at least, the sovereign European consciousness and the orientalism that that consciousness supposedly created, appear to have split into two separate parts (I make no mention here of the Russian, Austrian and Italian contribution to the process): an Anglo-French part that sought to impose an intellectual hegemony on a new Arab East, and a German part that sought to impose an intellectual hegemony on an old Ottoman (Turkish) East. Indeed, so great were these and other similar divisions (religious, ethnic, cultural) that one wonders whether there ever any such thing as a European “sovereign” consciousness was.
Said then writes that the great drama of Lawrence’s work is the struggle it symbolizes, first, to stimulate the Orient (lifeless, timeless, forceless) into movement; second, to impose upon that movement an essentially Western shape; third, to contain the new and aroused Orient in a personal vision whose retrospective mode includes a powerful sense of failure and betrayal (241). That may be true. There is certainly some evidence for it. But if it is true, one should also be aware of the immense strain that such a theatrical pretense entailed for Lawrence. As he wrote in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by February 1918, at a low point in the Arab Revolt, he felt that his contribution to the struggle for Arab independence was finished. He had made a mess of it and was determined to beg General Allenby, the Commander of the British Forces in the Middle East, to find him a smaller post elsewhere. He now had “no tricks left worth a meal in the Arab marketplace”. What he wanted now was the “security of custom”, to “pillow myself on duty and obedience: irresponsibly”:
I complained that since landing in Arabia I had had options and requests, never an order: that I was tired to death of free-will, and of many things beside free-will. For a year and a half, I had been in motion, riding a thousand miles each month upon camels: with added nervous hours in crazy aeroplanes, or rushing across country in powerful cars [ … ] Generally I had been hungry: lately always cold: and frost and dirt had poisoned my hurts into a festering mass of sores.
However, these worries would have taken their due petty place, in my despite of the body, and of my soiled body in particular, but for the rankling fraudulence which had to be my mind’s habit: that pretence to lead the national uprising of another race, the daily posturing in alien dress, preaching in alien speech: with behind it a sense that the “promises” on which the Arabs worked were worth what their armed strength would be when the moment of fulfilment came [ … ] My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.
(502)
David Lean’s Version of The Tragedy of The Conqueror and Sykes-Picot Agreement
In contrast to the orientalist account in Seven Pillars, David Lean’s film is considered to be one of the most essential “epic films” of all time, where Lawrence himself is not a strait-laced, patriotic hero whose actions are purely for his nation and its security. Rather, he is a bit of a rebel: he is irritated by the disillusionment and the conformity of British society (particularly the ruling class and the politician) and seeks both adventure and theatricality within the desert. Despite O’Toole’s charisma, he’s a bit of a wild card, which makes for an interesting deconstruction and the eventual destruction of the hero’s arc; Lawrence is even confronted about his “greatness” at many points. The story of a hero becomes problematic because Lawrence was deliberately heroized but later with his sense of Nietzschean will-to-power and Godhead attribute, he transformed into a natural barbarian not because what Arabia and British government did to his character, but due to the treatment of exaggerated heroism from both sides and his own savior complex. David Lean’s film ended with endmost mental derangement of “lunacy” of the main character, the failure of the conquest, the strive for freedom with British and French hypocritical treatment on their agent and Arab nations as a whole, with Prince Faisal of Mecca acting as a conduit between the three nations.
The character Prince Faisal was depicted as not only a blatant example of Hollywood whitewashing, but Faisal’s outspokenness is not nearly as interesting as the considered attitude that Sherif Ali holds. It is a disappointing element of a film that focuses on the rights of indigenous people, and for the most part, avoids presenting Lawrence as a “white savior” with flaws. This is also the main contrast of Seven Pillars where the real-life Lawrence seems to present himself, if not implicitly, as the liberator of the Arab nations. Even though in the spring of 1916 Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz, descendant of the Prophet and protector of the faith, launched a revolt against the Turks, Lawrence was the main perpetrator of the revolt during the peak moment of Anglo-French campaign against Ottoman Empire in Arabia. For some time, the British had been tempting Sherif Hussein with promises of post-war independence. The emergence of eccentric and sympathetic Lawrence was a massive chess piece on the board of Anglo-French imperial power. With this piece, they entreated him to unite Arab tribes and liberate them from Turkish authority, heightened UK’s Promises to Arabs (McMahon-Hussein Correspondence) and the violation that followed after the success of the revolt then the defeat of the Ottoman Empire.
These critical delineations of new Lawrence, Arab Revolts during the first world war, the Bedouins, European imperialism and Prince Faisal’s whitewashing behavior countercriticize and belittle Edward Said’s representation in his Orientalism. Instead of enthusiastic, knowledgeable orientalist agent, Lawrence was mentally and physically victimized not because of the battle scars and his gang-rape torture in Deera, but because of the romantic heroization by both the Arabs and the European and American war bureau. With him being victimized, so had the Arab revolts ended and the gained independence evolved into the vast territorial power being handed out by the imperialists merely like pieces of bread. The agreement effectively divided the Ottoman provinces outside the Arabian Peninsula into areas of British and French control and influence.
By the summer of 1917 Lawrence knew about the Sykes-Picot treaty; a secret arrangement among Britain, France and Russia for perpetuating imperialism in the mid-East. This agreement made a farce of the promises of independence that had been given by Lawrence though not by him alone-to the Arabs. Lawrence smarted under the knowledge that no matter what he would now say or do, he had no choice but to further this deceit. He had hoped, as he flamboyantly wrote in the suppressed preface to The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, “to restore a lost influence, to give 20 millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream palace of their national thoughts.” The reality, which made him all the sicker as he became a legendary figure among the Arabs, was “a homesickness [which] came over me stressing vividly my outcast life among the Arabs, while I exploited their highest ideals, and made their love of freedom one more tool to make England win.”
As brilliantly depicted in the scene in Faisal’s tent, Lawrence was confronted by the prince with the ululating question “you’re an Englishman. Are you not loyal to England?”, of which he replies, “to England, and to other things.” Then Faisal confronted him with poignant look, almost whispering, “I think you’re another of these desert-loving English,” hinting indignantly at British imperialism and treatment to Arabia for the past 100 years. Towards the end of the film, the already unsound-minded Lawrence, after his barbarous, bloodthirsty uproar of massacring Turkish soldiers in Tafaas (“No prisoners!”), was distressed further by the only person who loves him deeply, Sherif Ali, of which he irritably claimed to the American journalist who framed the heroic story and made the English an international sensation, “does it surprise you, Mr. Bentley? Surely, you know the Arabs are a barbarous people. Barbarous and cruel. Who but they! Who but they!” while the camera zooming to the lifeless and distant Lawrence in white bloody robe, representing the bestial Oriental according to his meritocratic Oxford education.
“Oh, you rotten man!” Mr. Bentley exclaimed with infinite sadness, knowing that the man he publicized as savior is dead. In the end, the British inside him was eroded and transfigured him into the inferior “Other” of which he had reported, and thought, becoming their god, leader and savior of the oppressed nations in the past two years.
It is not just a tragedy of powerful failure of an orientally manufactured hero, the hypocrisy of European imperialism and gigantically tantalizing, war-plagued fiery furnace of endless dune, but also the tragedy of how powerful Arabia’s campaign of independence has ultimately failed. It has become the conflict-agonized consequence we still feel and observe on this day.
