Two Styles, One Time

(Literary Form, the Denial of Coevalness, and the Plural East in Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta and Twain's The Innocents Abroad)

الملخص

This essay argues that the Orientalism of nineteenth-century travel writing is carried by literary form, and it demonstrates the claim comparatively. The denial of coevalness — the placing of the observed in a time other than the observer's, in Johannes Fabian's term — is by now a recognized feature of the genre; this essay asks at what level of the text it is produced. Reading two stylistically antithetical narratives — Charles Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), written in a deliberately archaic, biblically inflected prose, and Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad (1869), written in a brisk American vernacular — it shows that both, by opposite formal means, deny the East a present coeval with the observer's. Doughty's scriptural register transposes Arabia into biblical time through diction, syntax, and tense; Twain's modern, ironic voice fixes the East as belated and unprogressive. That two such different styles converge on the same temporal distancing indicates that the effect is a property of the genre's forms — the eyewitness posture, the ethnographic present, the spectacle frame — rather than of individual prejudice. Reading with Said, Fabian, Bhabha, Pratt, and Spivak, the essay further argues that the same close attention to style exposes what those forms suppress: an East differentiated by region, tribe, and sect, in which Eastern voices themselves perform acts of distancing. Beneath the single binary the forms inscribe, the texts preserve the outline of a multiply centered Orient — a finding that connects nineteenth-century travel writing to current world-literary debate about centers and peripheries.