A conspiracy is afoot. Though you may not have noticed it until now, after reading Enlightenment Orientalism, it will be difficult for you to pick up another piece of literary criticism on the novel without the suspicion that a high degree of preselection has taken place to cover a heterogeneous and wild mass of texts that call to you with magic lamps and delirious trips to the moon and other planets. I overstate, of course, but this is the distinct sense that one is left with after working through the spirited polemic that unmasks what is shown to be a nationalist chauvinist bias in favor of the sober realist novel.

Aravamudan undertakes to prove this thesis with rhetorical flair (“The 1720s see the decline of the open-network transcultural novel in English, when the gates of domestic realism begin to clang shut and when a generic price will have to be paid to exit the moated castle of the domestic realism preferred by the bourgeois Briton” [65]), exploring well-known authors such as Aphra Behn, Defoe, and Montesquieu alongside many works from a broader and far richer archive (Marana’s The Turkish Spy). Critics taken to task include Ian Watt, John Richetti, and Michael McKeon as Aravamudan persuasively pursues his thesis regarding the “gate-keeping function” of nation-centered histories of the novel that have excluded widely circulating texts (Galland’s translation of The Arabian Nights) or neglected “exotic” aspects of canonical works.

“Fictions,” he asserts in contrast to these critics noted earlier, “seem largely indifferent to the question of national origin until the middle of the 18th century” (36). His critical genealogy substantiates these claims by anchoring itself in earlier, more capacious conceptions of the novel (he discusses Huet) in which the term roman is said to refer to “faraway places or antiquity”; this in turn lays the groundwork for the emergence of the subgenre of Enlightenment Orientalism in the novel, in part through the larger claim that romance in the Early Modern period was always a “conversation with the east” (50) in which translation played a key role. The introduction necessarily has some space-clearing gestures regarding “Saidian Orientalism” with which I would differ, but this is because Aravamudan wants to retain a broader notion of Orientalism as transculturation. His emphasis is a reading of Orientalism (the 1978 text) that answers the question as to why it is so productive, or, as he puts it, “Why is Orientalism so fecund?” in the sense of generating images, narratives, and even modes of dress. Recall here Foucault’s disagreement (or dialogue) with Stephen Marcus on the former’s refutation in The History of Sexuality (volume 1) of “the repressive hypothesis” regarding Victorian culture’s relation to sexuality. Aravamudan’s point, like Foucault’s on sexuality, is that there is by contrast an “incitement to speak” associated with the productive aspects of power.

As a way to highlight the book’s contributions to critical interpretations and scholarship, let me pick up particular elements of the argument, beginning with what he calls “xenotropisms.” Aravamudan cites Huet’s notion that the novel should involve “narrative interchange among a variety of people, sources, languages, and epochs” (39), arguing that becoming aware of this can prevent one from making “errors of selection, omission and validation” to confirm an already received idea of the novel based on the model of bourgeois realism. Instead, he wants to restore the “multiplicity of the generic protocols” in which the literary trope of the foreign (to simplify the manifold meanings of xenotropism by its Greek root words, xenos and tropos) plays a significant role. Alongside this, he introduces the notion of surveillance chronicle (or “spy novels”) as one of the crucial subgenres in the period, which seems apt given that both Behn and Defoe play some murky role as spies or conveyors of information.

Given Behn’s Oroonoko is now so widely taught, his analysis is illuminating because it accounts for what are otherwise strange and neglected elements of her work by using the categories he has generated of surveillance chronicle and Enlightenment Orientalism. The meaning of that text, he argues, does not lie fully within any of the three cultures incorporated into the work: English, Peeie Indian, or Igbo. For Aravamudan, this is what a “transculturated” text means—one whose significance emerges as a result of and across the acts of translations (61). This claim may seem moderate, yet it buttresses his larger argument against critics who wall off the empirical and factual from romance. As he puts it, with a nod to Roland Barthes, “empirical realities create romance effects”: it is thus that he describes how the claims to the empirical in this text are used to generate fictional “effects.” Arguing against McKeon, Behn is trying (as someone who was also a translator of Fontenelle’s text on America) to translate the strange and bring it home—it is not “naive empiricism” (McKeon’s phrase). This is only one example of many that might be adduced to illustrate how the “gatekeeping function” of nation-centered histories of the novel have excluded certain texts or neglected key aspects of oft-discussed works. Many of the writers central to the scholarly story of the rise of realism themselves maintained an admiration of other strains. Aravamudan gives the example of Defoe as the likely author of a continuation of Marana’s Letters of a Turkish Spy (examined earlier in his critical study), which used “the fictional vehicle to discuss the political history of Europe from 1687 to 1693” (63). He notes that “Defoe is using a textual model [Marana’s] that by that point had been tried and tested and proven spectacularly successful” (63) in order to clarify the nature of his critique: there is indeed a realist strain that comes to preeminence by midcentury; all along, however, there are other variants that critics must intentionally ignore in order to fit with this thesis. These realist strains “were deified at the expense of countercurrents that continued to pull away from the dominant ‘posited essence’ of realism as Bakhtin has it—whether these be later Oriental satires, adventure tales, or gothic romances” (62). What, we might ask, is the large theoretical counterclaim of Aravamudan’s revised genealogy of the novel—one that displaces realism as its stable center? It appears to be this: by erasing the strange variants and divergences, existing critics of the novel become complicit in the national consolidation of the genre. As he puts it, “By underwriting all these confusing morphings with continuous narratives and stable identities, the English novel ideologically recuperates fiction for the nation, thereby becoming the monolingual opposite of what Bakhtin means by novelistic heteroglossia. Enlightenment Orientalism could be seen as ironically demonstrating the heteroglossia that Bakhtin credited not just to national realism but to the novel writ large” (68).

For Aravamudan the erasure of novelistic plurality occurs at two levels: one is the ideological work done by the English novel itself; the second (perhaps a testament to the efficacy of the first) is the reiteration—rather than contestation—of this work by contemporary critics of the novel (who are its secret sharers). Aravamudan doesn’t make the analogy, but we might venture (as others surely have) to illustrate his argument regarding realism with a visual parallel: as a narrative form it is something like the invention of perspective as described more than eighty years ago by Erwin Panofsky (e.g., “Hence homogenous space is never given space, but space produced by construction . . .”).Footnote ¹ Who doesn’t aesthetically or perceptually admire visual works that make use of perspective? Or as Aravamudan disarmingly puts it after a scathing critique of the vaunting of realism of the period over all other forms, “I too love the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century high realist novel—what is not to like?” (25). But because from a present critical perspective on visual culture one wouldn’t blithely dismiss other forms of representation as naïve, primitive, or flawed, why would we dismiss their literary counterparts? Such visual and spatial metaphors are already present in Aravamudan’s analysis, such as when he asserts that his project includes the reading of works by authors who resisted the “vertical” novel and held on to the “horizontal” structure of a form that integrated many places; in order words, the reading of novels as cultural translations, as “cultural transportation devices that carry something over from afar . . . [meta-phorein]” (74–75).

Other chapters of this rich study touch on widely read works such as Montesquieu’s Persian Letters but elaborate on the implications of his argument. In a claim I would agree with (bearing Diderot’s writings for Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes in mind), Aravamudan argues against those who would read Montesquieu as exclusively and secretly parodying a “real” target, which is Regency-era France, when he makes use of the Harem—in other words, the use of the Orient as “mere” allegory for a true reference in Europe is far too reductive. Instead, he persuasively asserts that “a stereoscopic vision . . . might very well be the overarching metaphor of Enlightenment Orientalism” (79). At another moment Aravamudan turns to Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, which bears a complex and entangled relation to Edmund Burke’s attempt to impeach Warren Hastings of the East India Company, and argues that Hamilton’s “preliminary dissertation” on India “corresponds to the wide optics of Enlightenment Orientalism as a form of global classical scholarship” (105). This latter notion—global classical scholarship—is quite illuminating, and it performs important ideological work: “Global classicism compares Hindu culture to that of classical Romans and the Greeks, and also to feudal European culture, while excoriating Islamic culture as overthrowing peaceful Hindu vegetarianism.” In other words, Mughal despotism is interrupted by British intervention (remember our alibis of empire here), delivering the stoical Hindus to a new stage. Though a passing remark, I think Aravamudan is on to something quite fascinating through this notion of global classicism, which effectively renders kindred a pre-Islamic Indic tradition with its peer antiquities through this selective exclusion of Islam in the subcontinent. Aravamudan highlights his notion of pseudoethnography in a thorough overview of the scholarship on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, bringing Book 4 under his lens for the many ways in which the Houyhnhnms (the elegant and noble horses) have been read: as Republican Spartans, as a pejorative portrayal of the Chinese (“affectless Orientals”). The infamously hirsute and feces-hurling Yahoos, in turn, have been identified with the Ainu (indigenous peoples of Japan), or a variety of tribal groups of the New World. Through Gulliver’s identification with the Houyhnhnms, understood as theriophily (from the Greek therion, or beast), he suggests Swift is reacting to “seventeenth-century Cartesianism . . . The concept of the machine is entirely rejected, including any notion of the animal as machine” (146). He reads this, and Gulliver’s speaking with horses, as Swift “signaling . . . a non-anthropocentric alternative as yet unexplored by the scientific Enlightenment” (147). Gulliver, in this case, demonstrates the ultimate xenophilia, or love of the other: an interspecies romance, in which Swift explores what the world would look like through an equine body rather than a hominid one. It is a reading that gestures knowingly at a range of recent animal studies, as well as Jacques Derrida’s speculations on the beast and sovereign, while developing Lévi-Strauss’s quip that “animals are good to think with.” The chapter’s end reaches for a more general claim, ambitious but justified by many textual illustrations, which allows the reader to see what these odd fictive works accomplish for Aravamudan: “Fiction comes of age through transgeneric experimentation. From human to beast and from the interplanetary to the microscopic [a reference to Voltaire’s Micromegas], Enlightenment Orientalism generates a space for conjectural reflection and open-ended thought-experiment beyond verifiable realist sociology” (159). Here it is Enlightenment Orientalism, as he has redefined it, that enables speculative and conjectural thought, while realism is mired in the verifiable and sociological. The book’s closing section elaborates this distinction by way of Walter Benjamin’s rich remarks on Nikolai Leskov in his essay on “The Storyteller,” which posits two primal or archaic types who produce narratives: the “settled tiller of the soil” who reconsolidates local traditions, chronicling daily life, and the “trading seaman” bearing news of other places and faraway marvels (245). Benjamin’s account seems to privilege the poetic over the prosaic elements of narrative. Associating Benjamin’s seaman with the figure of Sindbad (whose pervasive literary influence the book recurrently explores), Aravamudan suggests a parallel between Benjamin’s distinction and his own regarding the difference between the realist novelist and the fantastic Orientalist. The former is an “eschatological chronicler,” the latter a “profane storyteller.” Rather than tell us who we are obsessively, “Oriental tales tell us about others elsewhere” (247). In moments like these, we can see the (polemical?) contribution a study like this makes to studies of race, representation, and colonialism: it goes far beyond the somewhat predictable view of Oriental tales as simply and hopelessly caught within ideological stereotypes. Yes, they are indeed stereotypes, but what “work” do they accomplish, and how? Through what formal and generic literary techniques? These, instead, are the questions that Aravamudan’s study answers.

Put otherwise, Enlightenment Orientalism (as a genre) was a path not taken, or rather more correctly it was taken and yet marginalized by historians of the novel, and equally reduced to mere imperial ideology (Aravamudan asserts) by those who study colonialism. Both camps make little of this genre—indeed on first view it seems difficult to make much of it—and yet Aravamudan accomplishes this through his readings, and through the critical claim that Enlightenment Orientalism be understood as an “investigative tool that offers an alternative to . . . the nation-centered novel after the middle of the eighteenth century” (111). A brilliant elucidation of otherwise puzzling works, ones that this study itself describes as “interplanetary, intercultural, and interspecies,” Enlightenment Orientalism takes apart the “progressive ideology of naive empiricism” that underwrites many (if not all) histories of the novel.