Medieval Christian vision cast Oriental figures as eternally fixed representatives of their fate

Evidence

How early this schematization began is clear from the examples I have given of Western representations of the Orient in classical Greece. How strongly articulated were later representations building on the earlier ones, how inordinately careful their schematization, how dramatically effective their placing in Western imaginative geography, can be illustrated if we turn now to Dante’s Inferno. Dante’s achievement in The Divine Comedy was to have seamlessly combined the realistic portrayal of mundane reality with a universal and eternal system of Christian values. What Dante the pilgrim sees as he walks through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso is a unique vision of judgment. Paolo and Francesca, for instance, are seen as eternally confined to hell for their sins, yet they are seen as enacting, indeed living, the very characters and actions that put them where they will be for eternity. Thus each of the figures in Dante’s vision not only represents himself but is also a typical representation of his character and the fate meted out to him. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 182

Categorization

• XREF: This prefigures Said’s later argument about Orientalism denying the Orient dynamic history — figures frozen as ‘typical’ of an inherent nature; connects to the constructed-Other vocabulary.
• DEFINE: Introduces the mechanism by which a representing figure becomes a ‘typical’ (typological) representation — the scaffold for thinking about how Orientalist representation fixes its object.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 182