Individual travelers’ voices can merely channel a collective national will over the Orient

Evidence

For all their vaunted individuality Kinglake’s views express a public and national will over the Orient; his ego is the instrument of this will’s expression, not by any means its master. There is no evidence in his writing that he struggled to create a novel opinion of the Orient; neither his knowledge nor his personality was adequate for that, and this is the great difference between him and Richard Burton. As a traveler, Burton was a real adventurer; as a scholar, he could hold his own with any academic Orientalist in Europe; as a character, he was fully aware of the necessity of combat between himself and the uniformed teachers who ran Europe and European knowledge with such precise anonymity and scientific firmness. Everything Burton wrote testifies to this combativeness, rarely with more candid contempt for his opponents than in the preface to his translation of the Arabian Nights. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 496

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the distinction between the individual ego as instrument of a public/national Orientalist will versus genuine individual authorship of novel views.
• XREF: Connects to Said’s core claim that Orientalism is a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient, and that even ‘individualist’ voices express collective will — relevant to later Islamophobia readings on how scholarship channels state/imperial power.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 496