REPRESENTATIONS OF LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

Abstract

Edward Said’s short piece on T.E. Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia”—in Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient—has provoked some debate, though less than one might expect. This article takes a further look at Said’s argument. It suggests that in calling for a “new dialectic” in his discussion of Lawrence and the Arab Revolt—so recognizing the need of the contemporary orientalist not only to understand the Orient but also to participate in the process of change—and in introducing the concept of narrative as an alternative to the concept of vision, Said partly undermines his own position regarding orientalism. The article also looks further at Lowell Thomas’s contribution to the creation of the Lawrence myth, and at contrasting interpretations of the principal film version, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

Keywords:

• representation
• orientalism
• discourse
• narrative
• vision
• film

Notes

1 The contents of Namier’s lecture, I later discovered, were drawn almost entirely from an article he wrote, entitled “Lawrence as I Knew Him”, published in In the Margin of History (1939).

2 Wilson only received official recognition for his contribution to the screenplay after a long dispute that involved adjudication by the Producer’s Association and the British Screen Writers’ Guild.

3 Korda actually got as far as shooting some scenes in the Jordanian desert, but the film was aborted, not according to some accounts by Emir Abdullah, Feisal’s brother, the founder of the Jordanian state, but by the British government, which feared that the film would alienate the Turks. Rank’s film was apparently cancelled for political and other reasons (probably related to the collapse of British prestige following the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the expulsion of Glub Pasha from Jordan).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexander Lyon Macfie

Alexander Lyon Macfie has written widely on the Straits Question, the Eastern Question, the modern history of the Middle East, and other related subjects. His publications include The Eastern Question (2nd ed., 1996), The Straits Question (1993), Ataturk (1994), The End of the Ottoman Empire (1998), Orientalism: A Reader (2000), Orientalism (2002), Eastern Influences on Western Philosophy: A Reader (2003) and The Philosophy of History (2006).