Orientalist travelers consistently subordinated observed reality to literary templates.

Evidence

This candid announcement completely unlooses Lamartine’s analogic and reconstructive (and undisciplined) zeal. Christianity is a religion of imagination and recollection, and since Lamartine considers that he typifies the pious believer, he indulges himself accordingly. A catalogue of his tendentious “observations” would be interminable: a woman he sees reminds him of Haidée in Don Juan; the relationship between Jesus and Palestine is like that between Rousseau and Geneva; the actual river Jordan is less important than the “mysteries” it gives rise to in one’s soul; Orientals, and Muslims in particular, are lazy, their politics are capricious, passionate, and futureless; another woman reminds him of a passage in Atala; … All that matters to him is that his travels in the Orient reveal to him how the Orient is “la terre des cultes, des prodiges,” and that he is its appointed poet in the West. With no trace of self-irony he announces: This Arab land is the land of prodigies; everything sprouts there, and every credulous or fanatical man can become a prophet there in his turn. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 451

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism of template-driven perception connects to the reader’s toolkit on how representation precedes and shapes perception of the Other.
• SEED: Could scaffold an essay contrasting template-driven travel writing with contemporary ‘bucket-list’ tourism where experience must match curated imagery.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 451