Orientalism - autonomous learning

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196 ORIENTALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
197
ing a pilgrim to Mecca and Medina. So what we read in his prose
is the history of a consciousness negotiating its way through an alien
culture by virtue of having successfully absorbed its systems of
information and behavior. Burton's freedom was in having shaken
himself loose of his European origins enough to be able to live as
an Oriental. Every scene in the Pilgrimage reveals him as winning
out over the obstacles confronting him, a foreigner, in a strange
place. He was able to do this because he had sufficient knowledge
of an alien society for this purpose.
In no writer on the Orient so much as in Burton do we feel that
generalizations about the Oriental-for example, the pages on the
notion of Kay! for the Arab or on how education is suited to the
Oriental mind (pages that are clearly meant as a rebuttal to
Macaulay's simple-minded assertions)121-are the result of knowledge
acquired about the Orient by . living there, actually seeing it
firsthand, truly trying to see Oriental life from the viewpoint of a
person immersed in it. Yet what is never far from the surface of
Burton's prose is another sense it radiates, a sense of assertion and
domination over all the complexities of Oriental life. Every one of
Burton's footnotes, whether in the Pilgrimage or in his translation
of the Arabian Nights (the same is true of his "Terminal Essay"
for W22) wf\s meant to be testimony to his victory over the sometimes
scandalous system of Oriental knowledge, a system he had.
mastered by himself. For even in Burton's prose we are never
directly given the Orient; everything about it is presented to us by
way of Burton's knowledgeable (and often prurient) interventions,
which remind us repeatedly how he had taken over the management
of Oriental life for the purposes of his narrative. And it is this fact
-for in the Pilgrimage it is a fact-that elevates Burton's consciousness
to a position of supremacy over the Orient. In that position
his individuality perforce encounters, and indeed merges with,
the voice of Empire, which is itself a system of rules, codes, and
concrete epistemological habits. Thus when Burton tells us in the
Pilgrimage that "Egypt i~ a treasure to be won," that it "is the
most tempting prize which the East holds out to the ambition of
Europe, not excepted even the Golden Horn,"123 we must recognize
how the voice of the highly idiosyncratic master of Oriental knowledge
informs, feeds into the voice of European ambition for rule
over the Orient.
Burton's two voices blending into one presage the work of
Orientalists-cum-imperial agents like T. E. Lawrence, Edward
Henry Palmer, D. G. Hogarth, Gertrude BeIl, Ronald Storrs, St.
John Philby, and William Gifford Palgrave, to name only some
English writers. The double-pronged intention of Burton's work is
at the same time to use his Oriental residence for scientific observation
and not easily to sacrifice his individuality to that end. The
second of these two intentions leads him inevitably to submit to the
first because, as will appear increasingly obvious, he is a European
for whom such knowledge of Oriental society as he has is possible
only for a European, with a European's self-awareness of society
as a collection of rules and practices. In other words, to be a
European in the Orient, and to be one knowledgeably, one must see
and know the Orient as a domain ruled over by Europe. Orientalism,
which is the system of European or Western knowledge about
the Orient, thus becomes synonymous with European domination
of the Orient, and this domination effectively overrules even the
eccentricities of Burton's personal style.
Burton took the assertion of personal, authentic, sympathetic,
and humanistic knowledge of the Orient as far as it would go in its
struggle with the archive of official European knowledge about the
Orient. In the history of nineteenth-century attempts to restore,
restructure, and redeem all the various provinces of knowledge and
life, Orientalism-like all the other Romantically inspired learned
disciplines-contributed an important share. For not only did the
field evolve from a system of inspired observation into what Flaubert
called a regulated college of learning, it also reduced the
personalities of even its most redoubtable individualists like Burton
to the role of imperial scribe. From being a place, the Orient became
a domain of actual scholarly rule and potential imperial sway.
The role of the early Orientalists like Renan, Sacy, and Lane was to
provide their work and the Orient together with a mise en scene;
later Orientalists, scholarly or imaginative, took firm hold of the
scene. Still later, as the scene required management, it became clear
that institutions and governments were better at the game of management
than individuals. This is the legacy of nineteenth-century
Orientalism to which the twentieth century has become inheritor.
We must now investigate as exactly as possible the way twentiethcentury
OrientaIism-inaugurated by the long process of the West's
occupation of the Orient from the 1880s on-successfully controlled
freedom and knowledge; in short, the way Orientalism was
fully formalized into a repeatedly produced copy of itself.