Orientalist writers constructed the Orient from books rather than from direct experience

Evidence

Gérard de Nerval, collecting the material in Egypt he later published as Voyage en Orient, his life’s major prose work, saw more of the library than of the rest of the country. After two months in Cairo, more than half way through his stay, he wrote to his father that he had not even visited the pyramids. ‘Moreover I have no desire to see any place until after I have adequately informed myself from the books and memoires’, he explained. ‘At the Société Egyptienne I have found a collection of almost all the works, ancient and modern, that have been published on the country, and as yet I have read only a very small part of them.’ Six weeks later he wrote again, saying that he was leaving the country even though he had not yet ventured outside Cairo and its environs. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 122

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the ‘citationary’ nature argument the next paragraph makes explicit.
• QUESTION: Nerval represents an extreme case — worth chasing how many other Orientalist writers exhibited this library-bound method.