Orientalism and 'textual attitude': Bernier's appropriation by Southey and Owenson

Reviewing Robert Southey's epic poem set in India, The Curse of Kehama, Sir Walter Scott commented in 1811 on the lengthy notes which ac-companied the poetic text: 'The notes contain a profusion of eastern learning, and the massive blocks which Mr Southey has selected as specimens of Brahminical poetry and mythology, give us [. ] an idea of the immense quarries, in which the author must have laboured'.1 Like many antiquarian and orientalist writers of the period, Southey attached a vast amount of source material to his primary text, keying images of peoples, places and things, as well as geographical and historical details, taken from an impressive range of Indological works, to individual lines, incidents and characters in his poem, evidently buttressing his poetic narrative with orientalist scholarship. Turning to the modern critical edition of Southey's work which identifies his numerous sources,2 it is striking how heterogeneous these materials are, drawn from several European and classical oriental languages, as well as rePrésenting a huge span of geographical and historical information. This feature of orientalist (and similarly antiquarian) literature appears to support what Edward Said described as a 'textual attitude' to the East among Europeans, the reliance and interdependence of European authors on a vast body of writing which supported their imaginative portrayals of the East, even as they themselves contributed to that growing corpus by producing their own works of literature. This textual accumulation, as Said asserts, exerts over time a powerful discursive force which cannot be countered, at least until the subject nations of the East are able to 'write back' to the Empire. The evidence of a shared European compendium of Eastern knowledge suggested by the extensive footnotes to many a major work of orientalist literature would at first glance appear to support Said's thesis admirably. Despite the considerable enmities and rivalries between European powers at this time, not least in relation to their commercial and territorial ambitions in the East, it would appear that European writers were by and large.