Orientalist writing can serve as ego-prolongation rather than impersonal scholarship

Evidence

These closing lines send us back to Chateaubriand’s interest in getting his name inscribed on the Pyramids. We will have understood that his egoistic Oriental memoirs supply us with a constantly demonstrated, an indefatigably performed experience of self. Writing was an act of life for Chateaubriand, for whom nothing, not even a distant piece of stone, must remain scriptively untouched by him if he was to stay alive. If the order of Lane’s narrative was to be violated by scientific authority and enormous detail, then Chateaubriand’s was to be transformed into the asserted will of an egoistic, highly volatile individual. Whereas Lane would sacrifice his ego to the Orientalist canon, Chateaubriand would make everything he said about the Orient wholly dependent on his ego. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 446

Categorization

• DEFINE: Contrasts the two poles of Orientalist self-conception: the ego-sacrificing technocrat (Lane) versus the ego-asserting romantic (Chateaubriand), a distinction useful for reading other pilgrim-narrators.
• XREF: Resonates with the construct of the category, this passage pairs with Said’s larger distinction between scientific and personal Orientalist voices that later Islamophobia readings will inherit.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 446