SOURCE: “Scudéry's Theatre of Disguise: The Orient in Ibrahim,” in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. 32, No. 3, 1992, pp. 51-61.

[In the following essay, Stone maintains that the Orient depicted in Ibrahim “is the medium through which the European (hero and reader alike) comes to understand himself and to know his place in the world. … The Orient thus serves as a theater for the European's play, a device used to display him to himself.”]

It is hardly surprising that Scudéry's Ibrahim (1641), despite a verisimilar and largely favorable description of Turkish history and culture, depicts an Orient more European—serving the Western world view—than Oriental. Thematics alone suffice to suggest how the Oriental setting is but an elaborately veiled feint for European domination. Color is doubly local, that is, located not only in the exotic difference of the Orient but in the very prejudicial mind of the hegemonic European reader who gazes through the text at this Other culture. Justinian travels to the Orient, where circumstances cause him to assume an Oriental identity. The hero's partaking of the exotic, however, constitutes no permanent obstacle/exile, for he never relinquishes his Christian loyalties and eventually returns to assume fully his European identity. The history of Justinian's voyage to the Orient is thus a metaphor for the hero's self-discovery; the narrative brings him outside of himself, into another land and another culture, in order to enhance his self-knowledge.

The Italian hero enslaved and sentenced to death by his Islamic captors comes to enjoy both privilege and power under Soliman II. Sparing his life, the sultan makes Justinian his favorite pasha, the Grand Vizir Ibrahim. Soliman later awards Ibrahim six months of freedom to return to Monaco to see his beloved Princess Isabelle Grimaldi. Finally, despite the sultan's own overwhelming desire for the same Isabelle, whom he has brought to Constantinople, the sultan frees the couple and secures their safe passage back to Europe. Justinian, alias Ibrahim, becomes Justinian again thanks only to Soliman's intervention.

Significant for the question of knowledge, for the epistemology of the novel as it fixes the identities of the European self and the Other, is the fact that the Oriental identity created here is disposable, a role assumed intermittently, then definitively rejected. The Euro-centeredness of the tale which culminates in the hero's return home suggests that the Orient figured by Scudéry is essential only as Other to the Western subject. The Orient is the medium through which the European (hero and reader alike) comes to understand himself and to know his place in the world. Outside of the European representation that conceives it, outside of this fiction, the Orient has no meaning; it is inessential, unrepresentable as a separate, autonomous culture.¹ The Orient thus serves as a theater for the European's play, a device used to display him to himself. I shall argue that in this theater not only the Orient but the European subject slips from knowledge.

If the novel conspires to bring the European into contact with the Orient so as to afford him knowledge of a foreign culture and, by the same gesture, to help him to know himself by knowing this Other, it does not, however, seal this voyage hermetically. Despite the elaborate symmetry of a plot structure whose patterning assures the coincidence of stories over some 1700 pages,² the novel does much to subvert the plenitude of the resolution that unites the European couple in marriage on European soil. Predicated on the presence of the Other, the hero's journey to the Orient details an escape into the self that is actually an escape from the self, a story of alienation.

On the one hand, Soliman is the malevolent opponent who threatens the autonomy of the European subject and that of the European state that he menaces militarily. On the other, the sultan imitates in all of his many beneficent acts the generous paternalism on which the symbolism of the French monarchy is based. By mirroring these two cultures, Scudéry denies both their difference and, implicitly, the hero's autonomy. Soliman is at once enemy and savior; consequently, any knowledge based on his mediation connotes a false idea of separation, a false notion of difference and identity. To the extent that the Otherness which Scudéry would situate outside Europe is finally located back within it, back in Europe and not ailleurs in the Orient, the knowledge gained through representation is really that of a knowledge lost. The hero discovers himself in his Turkish identity, and in this mirror image he remains forever disguised, caught within the fiction of his perceptions.

Justinian and Soliman share, moreover, the same conflict between love and duty, the same desire for the same woman, as well as the same origin, since Justinian comes from a land that the sultan now governs. With all the complexity of a painting, therefore, the text's mirror reflects somewhere within it not only Justinian as Ibrahim but the sultan's image as it looks back at Justinian gazing at his own reflection. The hero who confronts himself in Oriental dress looks up from the mirror only to discover his master's hands on the frame of the glass; he sees himself being seen. Justinian cannot know himself except as performer in this triply voyeuristic scene of the splitting of his identity.

The more he looks into this image, the more he studies his reflection, the more it appears to fracture, to shatter the truth about himself. Indeed, what most dramatically calls into question the completeness of the novel's resolution and the idea of closure implicit in the final restoration of the hero's European identity is the notion that mirroring itself, the very act of mimesis, is grounded in no set history, in no real outside representation. As a consequence, the Orient as a theater of disguise for the European subject is more than a device for advancing plot. It is the medium through which the text plays out the scene of its own representation. One discovers in Scudéry's text not the real Orient but an “effet oriental” which, like the “effet de réel” described by Barthes through which the text calls attention to its own capacity to signify, places value not on any preexistent, extra-representational reality but rather on the real structured in representation.³ In Scudéry's novel the Orient thus serves, beyond any capacity as a mediating agent for bringing the novel's disparate episodes to their rightful conclusion, as a heuristic device that (re)opens the story into an elaborate feint, or trompe-l'œil, through which the text celebrates itself. An appreciation of this Oriental effect therefore provides the key to understanding the truth of the fiction which orders the subject's knowledge.

In the novel's opening scene we see how the text moves from the appropriation of the Other to the fragmentation of the subject through the transparent display of the text's own power to signify. Describing the triumphant return of Soliman to Constantinople following his victory over Persia, the narrative captures the opulence of the Orient with pageantry whose remarkable proportions are described in minute detail. The victorious sultan is hailed by visiting dignitaries from Europe and Africa as well as his own countrymen. Flags, animals, music, gifts all contribute to the plenitude of this moment. Extending approximately a dozen pages, the episode catalogs all those who attended, what they wore, and what sights they viewed. To the extent that the description offers an inventory of the Orient, representation equates knowledge with the identification of things in the world. The European reader comes to know, and therefore to control or master, the Orient through the detailing of things in this Other culture.

The inventory, however, is doubly encoded within the text. Scudéry offers information about the seating arrangements, made according to standard diplomatic practice. The Sultane-reine takes her place in the loge on the right, followed by the Christian princes. The Islamic princes, according to their custom, sit on the honored left side. Assuming their places at the staged events, the distinguished guests rehearse, by their very assumption of rank, the ordering of the events which follow into left and right, East and West codes. If the text describes the scene in meticulous fashion, thereby objectifying Islam for Scudéry's Christian reader, this epistemology is undercut by the biased exploitation of the European perspective. The narrative is punctuated with specifications about Oriental customs, precisions which indicate that the European, while marginalized (receiving secondary rather than primary dignitary status) on the right side within the Oriental story, is the privileged reader/viewer of the event described.

One presumes, for example, that it is for the reader's benefit that special mention is made of the French exemption from the public gift-giving ceremonies: “Ils [les Ambassadeurs] y furent tous, excepté celui de France, qui par un privilège qui n'est accordé qu'à lui seul, fit les siens en particulier: De peur que cette action publique n'eût quelque image de servitude.”⁴ Such references have the effect of transforming an historical or political opposition—a thematics of cultural exchange—into a structural praxis. For the novel here offers a strategy for reading that involves not a simple but a double mediation: of the West by the East; of the East by the West. The novel sets in place two competing ordering systems: that of the Orient represented in the text and that of the European grid that butts up against it. Scudéry thus juxtaposes two mirror, or reciprocal, ordering systems for knowing the world, neither of which can be understood except in relation to the other. That is, neither the Oriental nor the European functions as an exclusive discursive system that contains, or determines, the other; rather truth is located in the plenitude of the moment that performs them together as mirror (inverted) images of the same history.

Exploiting this difference, the episode culminates with a reenactment of the great battle that secured Soliman's victory, a performance that, in deepening the text's layers of mise-en-abyme, shows truth to originate not in any real model outside representation but in representation itself. Indeed the historical model literally becomes here a pre-text, or first text, for a performance that redirects the events of the novel:

Comme le bruit de tant de voix se fut dissipé, l'on vit paraître une troupe vêtue à la Chrétienne, & remarquable pour telle, par les Croix qui paraissaient à ses drapeaux: Elle représentait certains Chrétiens qui, vivant sous l'Empire du Sophi, avaient cru être obligés de défendre ce Prince, quoiqu'il ne fût pas de leur Religion: & en effet, avaient combattu si généreusement pour lui, qu'ils avaient été les premiers à la guerre et toutefois les derniers vaincus. Cette feinte troupe avait ordre du Bassa de la Mer de résister quelque temps à celle des Turcs, qui sortit à l'heure même de la ville, & de se laisser vaincre ensuite: Et ceux qui étaient habillés à la Turque, avaient commandement de les enchaîner, & de trainer leurs drapeaux par terre. Mais comme le combat fut commencé, ce généreux Esclave qui avait attiré les yeux de l'assemblée sur lui, à la prise de la feinte ville de Tauris, tomba tout à coup d'un jeu, dans une pensée plus sérieuse, & étant emporté du zèle de sa Religion, il passa de la troupe Turque dans la Chrétienne, & en changeant de parti fit changer la face des choses. Les Turcs qu'il avait abandonnés tâchèrent bien de le vaincre avec les autres, mais il les mena battant jusque dans les portes de la ville; & quoiqu'ils fissent encore trois sorties sur lui, il les repoussa toutes les trois fois jusque dans les mêmes portes (I, 13-14).

On the surface, this account of the performance, particularly the surprise event that concludes it, represents the renouncement of role-playing, appearances, for the truth. The Christian forgets his text and scripts another that is more authentic, more suitable to his identity as a Christian. In doing so, however, he transforms the performance into history, for the feint that he inserts into the official reenactment now figures as a real part of Justinian's story: the slave/actor is Justinian's friend Doria, for whom the hero will obtain the sultan's pardon. Doria's enactment of the Christian resistance is a fiction. The only Christians involved in the actual battle, we are told, felt obliged to defend their Persian master. Even in bondage they exemplified what is characterized as typical Christian distinction in battle. Dramatized here, then, is an act of mimesis that inverts upon itself, a display of religious fervor that by subverting the performance—the reenactment intended to celebrate Soliman—succeeds in capturing the power of the performance to transform rather than represent. If the scripted mise-en-abyme of the victory battle imitates an actual history of Soliman's troops, the rescripted text enacted within the mise-en-abyme models a new history, a history that roots the subsequent action in the power of performative acts that are indissociably linked in this scene with the notion of theatrical performance and with the doubling implicit in role-playing.

This shifting of perspective occurs with no apparent contradiction. The ultimate test of any ordering system is its ability to predict a course of action that will be consistent with the knowledge that it produces. And here the scripted mise-en-abyme depicting the Christians' subservience to their Oriental master is no more an indicator of the events to come than the rescripted performance that occurs within it. The vindication of the Christian position through multiple feints is in fact the basic pretext/pre-text that motivates or explains subsequent developments in the novel. Significantly, each level of the triumphal dramatization reflects not only past or determined events but predicts future ones as well. Subservience is apparent not only in the Christian soldiers' performance during the actual battle preceding the performance here; it occurs subsequently in Justinian's integration into Islamic life and the eventual coming to knowledge or re-identification process that this experience mediates for him. Conversely, mastery is apparent not only in Doria's expression of his Christian beliefs and his eventual freedom; it is realized in Justinian's ultimate freedom from bondage to the sultan, the result of an elaborate scheme which I discuss below. The narrative is therefore dependent less on a specific history, on a preexistent reality or model, than on its own internal timeclock as determined by its many levels of performance.

The same principle of representation as solely responsible for the ordering of events is evident in the scene where Justinian shows Doria his Turkish palace. Justinian takes his friend Doria on a tour of this elaborate dwelling. The specificity of the description that includes all the materials used in construction of the palace speaks to the notion of representation as a cataloging akin to a taxonomy. Yet value ultimately rests less with resemblance, with art as a copy of the real, than with the capacity of representation to signify in the absence of any real model.

Doria, and with him the reader, moves from the exterior of the building to its interior, from the public sphere to the privacy of the bedroom, via a gallery containing fourteen portraits of the Turkish emperors that span Ottoman history. The gallery mediates the space of the palace as well as the history of Justinian's relation to the sultan, who awaits them once the tour of the palace is complete. Each Turkish emperor has his own lifesize portrait in the gallery, and merits an independent section in the text. Accolades are given by the characters in function of the specificity of the painting as much as on the achievements of the figure represented in the paintings:

Mais comme il ne s'était pas contenté de faire represénter leurs visages, & qu'il avait voulu encore faire une peinture de l'Histoire Ottomane, il y avait en cette Gallerie quatorze grands Tableaux, où l'on voyait en chacun un Empereur de grandeur naturelle, & dans ce même cadre, toutes les actions principales de sa vie: mais cela si bien fait, si distinct, & si bien ordonné, que Doria en fut ravi … (I, 219-20).

Representational accuracy is further underscored by reference to the inclusion of even the defeat of the Christians at the hand of the Ottomans in the name of completeness. Justinian observes apologetically that “il n'avait osé ne les y pas mettre” (I, 220). The gallery tour culminates with an invitation to compare the portrait of his sultan “à l'original, pour juger si je lui dérobe ou si je le flatte” (I, 247). All, then, would appear to turn on the model; the value of the painting lies in its ability to imitate the original.

However, the pictures do not in fact speak for themselves; if they are worth a thousand words, it is in the narrative that Justinian supplies, filling in as it were, where the image leaves off. The dependency on narration as a supplement to the image suggests that more is at stake here than the simple imitation of history. The retelling of the story provides continuity with the past and establishes the absolute power of previous rulers.⁵ Yet there is a certain undercutting of representation even at this level, for Justinian is careful to observe that only the first prince and one other, his own sultan, exemplify virtue. Whatever the historical accuracy of this remark, however necessary to flesh out the representation, it serves to suggest a value or judgment that exists universally but which does not appear uniformly in the Oriental history figured in the gallery portraits. By referring to criteria for judging and authenticating representation that exceed the space of paintings themselves, Justinian points to a critical gap, to an absence in understanding, that he fills as he narrates, or supplements, the painted images. In this way the very text that mediates Justinian's subordinate relation to the Turks is in turn remediated by the narrative that makes him, and with him the Christians, the center of a more encompassing representation that includes in its space the perspective of the viewer/narrator.⁶

The deeper one penetrates into the palace, the more it comes to signify the power of representation to exceed itself, to signify beyond mimesis, the imitation of a model. Entering the pasha's bedroom, Doria discovers a portrait that he immediately recognizes as being that of Isabelle, although the resemblance is poor:

En la peinture du milieu, qui était plus grande que les autres, paraissait une femme, que Doria reconnut bientôt, pour avoir quelque chose d'Isabelle, quoique ce fut une ressemblance très imparfaite: car comme Ibrahim avait perdu le portrait qu'il en avait, il n'avait pu faire autre chose, qu'instruire le Peintre de la couleur de ses cheveux, du tour de son visage, de tous les traits en particulier, de la vivacité de son teint, de sa taille, & de la gorge, car pour cet air & cet agrément, que l'on ne peut exprimer, qu'en l'appellant l'âme de la beauté, c'est une chose qui ne peut passer de notre imagination, dans celle d'un autre, & qui par conséquent ne permit pas au Peintre d'Ibrahim, de faire un merveilleux portrait d'Isabelle (I, 249-50).

Unlike the historic painting, which imitates specific models, the image here signifies in the model's absence. This communication occurs because the painting of Isabelle is so symbolically overdetermined that it reads like a narrative:

une femme magnifiquement vêtue, qui foulait aux pieds l'Honneur, la Vertu, & l'Amour, que l'on voyait représentés, avec des marques qui les font connaître: & qui de la main droite qu'elle élevait en haut, prenait une petite Couronne que la Fortune qu'on voyait en l'air lui présentait, & qu'elle sembait recevoir agréablement, avec ce mot, TOUT POUR ELLE (I, 250).

Since the resemblance is faulty, it is the allegorical images and the inscription which give this painting, the center one in a series of five hung on the same wall, its authenticity and veracity. They transform the image into a monument that elevates the history of Justinian's love for Isabelle to a level of perfection which compensates for the inadequacies of the painter's reproduction. More precisely, what matters is not the referential quality of the portrait—Isabelle is immediately recognized as its subject despite the inadequate likeness—but the truth that originates in the inscription which transforms the Oriental palace, a monument to Ibrahim's success, into a monument, or shrine, for Justinian's love. In this monumentality we see how the Orient fixes the subject's absolute alienation, for it seems to concretize the division that separates him from himself.

The sultan mediates the hero's experience in much the same way. Soliman offers the novel's most dramatic performance of the text's refracted mirrorings because he determines the actions of the characters and because he does so by repeatedly shifting his position from opponent to defender. His story is one of a strategic and systematic reorientation of representation away from mimesis, as suggested by the events concerning his intervention that function to overdetermine the plot. For example, Soliman proposes to Ibrahim, who is about to leave for another battle against the Persians, that Isabelle be kept in the old seraglio for protection. If this sheltering protects her from would-be political assailants, it nevertheless makes her the more available to Soliman, for he is the only man permitted to enter the seraglio. At first glance, therefore, it seems that the true evil intentions are cloaked in a feigned concern for Justinian and his beloved. But one uncovers no real truth beneath this appearance, since the feint is equally determinant of the course of events. The sultan's love for Ibrahim and his sense of responsibility enable him in the end to dominate his passion.

The story in effect bifurcates at this point into two scripts: that of the evil sultan, the rival whose desire for Isabelle is so strong that he sacrifices Ibrahim, and that of the good sultan, the trusted protector, who ultimately honors his obligations to his friend, abandoning all claim to Isabelle. Soliman in fact mediates as a “beneficent devil” who multiplies reasons for believing. The sultan assures the couple's safe passage back to Europe and his own bond to his people by creating the fiction that he had killed Ibrahim “après avoir découvert qu'il avait intelligence avec l'Empereur Charles; & qu'il favorisait les Chrétiens en toutes choses” (IV, 445). While the novel does not ask the reader to confound this fiction with the truth—one cannot believe that Ibrahim is both dead and alive—the false account does conflate the truth to the extent that it denies the completeness of the real history of Justinian's safe passage back to Monaco. The sultan's feint is operative as a performance of the difference that does not separate but that instead binds Ibrahim and Justinian, the Orient and Europe, the image and the subject enclosed within representation.

Shifting our attention away from facts and vraisemblance, the feint locates meaning in the text's own multivalent structures. Justinian has, of course, “favored the Christians in all things,” although his only real betrayal of the sultan has been as a rival in love, not war. The sultan's countrymen cannot be expected to appreciate this difference; conversely, Scudéry's reader cannot fail to ascertain it. Truth is shaped by a text that refracts as it reflects, that in death, sign of absolute closure, is able to celebrate its own occulting practice, its resistance to closure. Ibrahim is dead because Justinian is alive again as himself, albeit as a subject dependent on the identity which he would cast off upon returning to Monaco but which survives in effigy in the Orient. In this doubling and in this difference we discover the real truth value of the text.

Celebrating the feint, specifically the ability of feint to inform representation by subverting identities, Soliman's final story militates against representation as infinite repetition of the same. Rescripting the text in this way, the sultan here again multiplies dissimilar images within the same glass. If he does violence to history as perceived by his subjects, who will never know the truth of his actions, he implicitly underscores the real history of Justinian, of the subject who comes to power wearing the now invisible, but no less determining, mask of his alienation. Justinian's self-image is rent, for he returns to center, to love and country, only through the mediation of the Orient, mediation that he consciously suppresses:

ils arrivèrent en peu de jours à Monaco: où la Princesse fut reçue de ses sujets, avec autant d'étonnement que de joie. Le bruit de leur retour, étant aussitot allé à Gennes, les principaux du Senat y furent les visiter. Ces Illustres personnes cachèrent de leurs aventures, ce qu'elles crurent à propos de n'en dire pas … (IV, 453).

Reflection of the Other, the European subject figured in representation is in the end a model of a certain unknowing, or fragmentation. Capable of piecing the fragments of the text together in a representation based not on resemblances alone but on a complex ordering and measuring that explores the tension between even similar objects, the subject outside representation, the reader, models in the place of a finite and absolute knowledge a certain knowing of the limits of knowledge. In the practice of classifying things, therefore, feint does not mean “imaginary” or “untrue” but designates a position or a role structurally indispensable to the production of meaning.⁷ As the image frees itself from the model, it establishes itself as arbiter of the truth. So the Orient, freed from history and placed in the service of the European epistemology, its grid for knowledge, provides the hero with a medium for confronting and then performing his Otherness.

What gives pause to the modern reader who confronts Scudéry's Oriental history is precisely the fact that the devices traditionally perceived as signs of the novel's relative immaturity as a genre or, less tolerantly, as weaknesses of a narrative technique still dependent on surprise and feint—these baroque excesses—perform the novel's most profound truth about subjectivity and representation. Paradoxically, truth as we know it, truth of the radical division of the subject, lies less with the rationalism of the cogito than with the very excesses that the Cartesian model, in its self-contained efficiency, would eliminate and, seemingly, render obsolete.⁸

Notes

1. In a compelling analysis Edward W. Said, in Orientalism (New York: Vantage Books, 1979), theorizes that the Orient is unavailable to the West except as a sign figured and contained within its own representational system. As depicted by European writers, the Orient exists only as a fictional construct, as an imaginary elsewhere produced through the (slanted, biased) grid of Western epistemology. According to Said, therefore, non-Oriental representations preclude knowledge of the “natural” or “real” Orient.

2. René Godenne, Les Romans de Mademoiselle de Scudéry (Geneva: Droz, 1983), pp. 29-45, details the novel's structure.

3. Roland Barthes, “L'effet de réel,” Communications 11 (1968): 84-89.

4. Madeleine de Scudéry, Ibrahim ou l'illustre bassa, 4 vols. (Paris: Compagnie des Librairies du Palais, 1665), I, 8-9. I have retained the original punctuation, syntax, and capitalization but have modernized the spelling of all quotations from the novel.

5. Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris: Minuit, 1981), pp. 152-53, offering an analysis of how the historic medal renders the king's power absolute by joining image and inscription, provides insight into Scudéry's representation here.

6. Similarly, in this scene Justinian observes that Soliman would exemplify a perfect virtue if only he were Christian.

7. I borrow this concept from Jean-Luc Nancy's analysis of the masque in Descartes, Ego sum (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1979), p. 88.

8. These are questions that I am now exploring in a book-length study to be entitled The Classical Model.