The Orientalist’s detachment from the Orient gets converted into totalizing textual representation

Evidence

The Orient threw him back on his own human and technical resources. It did not respond, just as Kuchuk did not, to his presence. Standing before its ongoing life Flaubert, like Lane before him, felt his detached powerlessness, perhaps also his self-induced unwillingness, to enter and become part of what he saw. This of course was Flaubert’s perennial problem; it had existed before he went East, and it remained after the visit. Flaubert admitted the difficulty, the antidote to which was in his work (especially in an Oriental work like La Tentation de Saint Antoine) to stress the form of encyclopedic presentation of material at the expense of human engagement in life. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 486

Categorization

• XREF: Mechanism pairs with Said’s core thesis that knowledge of the Orient is produced through representational distance rather than engagement.
• DEFINE: Establishes the encyclopedic-distance move as a defining Orientalist textual strategy.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 486