A. CLARE BRANDABUR AND NASSAR AL-HASSAN ATHAMNEH

                    PROBLEMS OF GENRE IN THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM:  A TRIUMPH 

THE POSSIBILITY OF a fresh evaluation of T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph opens as a result of Edward Said’s masterful discussion of this work in Orientalism and in Culture and Imperialism. In placing Seven Pillars at the head of a list of “the great imperial narratives” (followed by Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and La Voie Royale) and in assigning it pre-eminence in postcolonial discourse, Said implicitly suggests that we renegotiate this work’s peculiar genre. The common misidentification of the book as an historical account has resulted in it being wrongly criticized for its supposed historical inaccuracy, while its merits as imaginative literature have been overlooked. In The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, for example, the authors indulge in a great deal of speculation about the reliability of the narrative voice on the basis of the testimony of other participants in the Arab Revolt—who question whether time would have allowed Lawrence to travel to Damascus and back in a certain instance and who discredit the account of events at Deraa in Chapter 117—as though the book were primarily to be judged, in spite of Lawrence’s statements to the contrary, as a work of history. Similarly, the blurb on the back cover of the 1991 Doubleday Anchor edition, while less denigrating, typifies the customary approach to Lawrence’s book, calling it “a thrilling military history.” Such simplistic approaches tend to distract the reader from an appreciation of this masterwork for its value as imaginative literature. 

In his discussion of the Orientalist bent that gives rise to the “imperial narrative,” Said makes a distinction between a static “vision”—i.e., a set of reductive categories or stereotypes, such as the Muslim mind, the Semite, the Oriental, by which the Orientalist scholar gains scientific mastery of the Orient—and a dynamic stream of “narration,” i.e., the encounter with actualities of the Orient in the form of its people, its cities, and its culture. In these imperial narratives the static preconception or “vision” is constantly threatened by the dynamic force of the living actualities of the Oriental world contained in the narrative.  Popular culture, guided by mass media, has nurtured an image of Lawrence as culture hero, demonstrating the superiority of the white Englishman over the dark Arab hordes, an image reinforced both by the WW II newsreels of Lowell Thomas, which were designed to satisfy the Allied need for an icon of victory during the dark early days of the war, and David Lean’s more recent widescreen extravaganza Lawrence of Arabia.  While this 1962 film, which was re-released in 1992, represents an impressive effort at translating Lawrence’s book to the screen, it lacks any voice-over to suggest the complex interior monologue of the text and so relies for an articulation of the protagonist’s painful inner conflict solely on the superb acting of Peter O’Toole in the title role.  As a result, an “exciting historical adventure” dominates completely the book’s anguished autobiographical aspects.  

In order to gain a more adequate understanding of Lawrence's achievement we need to recongnize that the vision/narration paradigm Edward Said identifies in the imperial narrative essentially corresponds to the more general subjective/objective or self/other relationship explored in discourse concerning the nature of autobiography and its relationship to history.  The imperial narrative is a special case of this discourse in which autobiography, history, and confessional fiction tend to merge.