Orientalist writing was limited to either false generality or private fantasy

Evidence

Even if all travelers to the Orient after Chateaubriand and Lane have taken their work into account (in some cases, even to the extent of copying from them verbatim), their legacy embodies the fate of Orientalism and the options to which it was limited. Either one wrote science like Lane or personal utterance like Chateaubriand. The problems with the former were its impersona Western confidence that descriptions of general, collective phenomena were possible, and its tendency to make realities not so much out of the Orient as out of its own observations. The problem with personal utterance was that it inevitably retreated into a position equating the Orient with private fantasy, even if that fantasy was of a very high order indeed, aesthetically speaking. In both cases, of course, Orientalism enjoyed a powerful influence on how the Orient was described and characterized. But what that influence always prevented, even until today, was some sense of the Orient that was neither impossibly general nor imperturbably private. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 447

Categorization

• XREF: This either/or — science (Lane) vs. personal utterance (Chateaubriand) — maps directly onto the binary opposition/logocentrism that later postcolonial critique (e.g. Spivak, later Bhabha) works against; also echoes the contrast between administrative/archive knowledge and travel testimony that runs through colonial discourse theory.
• DEFINE: Defines the two available Orientalist modes — impersonal scientific description versus private fantasy — and the structural exclusion of the Oriental’s actual human reality.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 447