Travelers’ prior imaginings shape what they see more than observation does.
Evidence
When he began his trip to the Orient in 1833, Lamartine did so, he said, as something he had always dreamed about: “un voyage en Orient [était] comme un grand acte de ma vie intérieure.” He is a bundle of predispositions, sympathies, biases: he hates the Romans and Carthage, and loves Jews, Egyptians, and Hindus, whose Dante he claims he will become. Armed with a formal verse “Adieu” to France, in which he lists everything that he plans to do in the Orient, he embarks for the East. At first everything he encounters either confirms his poetic predictions or realizes his propensity for analogy. … Soon after he reaches Palestine, however, he becomes the incorrigible maker of an imaginary Orient. He alleges that the plains of Canaan appear to best advantage in the works of Poussin and Lorrain. From being a “translation,” as he called it earlier, his voyage is now turned into a prayer, which exercises his memory, soul, and heart more than it does his eyes, mind, or spirit. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 450
Categorization
- XREF: Mechanism of prevision/pre-figuration connects to the reader’s scaffold on representation: the pilgrim sees what imagination primed rather than what exists. — connects to: Travel yields little the traveler did not already possess perceptively — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 661
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 450