Orientalism - autonomous learning

88 ORIENTALISM
The Scope of Orientalism
89
series of textual children, from Chateaubriand's ltineraire to Lamartine's
Voyage en Orient to Flaubert's SalammbO, and in the same
tradition, Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians and
Richard Burton's Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madinah
and Meccah. What binds them together is not only their common
background in Oriental legend and experience but also their learned
reliance on the Orient as a kind of womb out of which they were
brought forth. If paradoxically these creations turned out to be
highly stylized simulacra, elaborately wrought imitations of what
a live Orient might be thought to look like, that by no means
detracts either from the strength of their imaginative conception or
from the strength of European mastery of the Orient, whose
prototypes respectively were Cagliostro, the great European impersonator
of the Orient, and Napoleon, its first modem conqueror.
Artistic or textual work was not the only product of the
Napoleonic expedition. There were, in addition and certainly more
influential, the scientific project, whose chief instance is Ernest
Renan's Systeme compare et histoire gbwrale des langues semitiques,
completed in 1848 for-neatly enough-the Prix Volney,
and the geopolitical project, of which Ferdinand de Lesseps's Suez
(::anal and England's occupation of Egypt in 1882 are prime instances.
The difference between the two is not only in manifest
scale but also in quality of Orientalist conviction. Renan truly
believed that he had re-created the Orient, as it really was, in his
work. De Lesseps, on the other hand, always was somewhat awed
by the newness his project had released out of the old Orient, and
this sense communicated itself to everyone for whom the opening
of the canal in 1869 was no ordinary event. In his Excursionist
and Tourist Advertiser for July 1, 1869, Thomas Cook's enthusiasm
carries on de Lesseps's:
On November the 17th, the greatest engineering feat of the present
century is to have its success celebrated by a magnificent inauguration
fete, at which nearly every European royal family will have
its special representative. Truly the occasion will be an exceptional
one. The formation of a line of water communication between
Europe and the East, has been the thought of centuries, occupying
in turn the minds of Greeks, Roman, Saxon and Gaul, but it was
not until within the last few years that modern civilization began
seriously to set about emulating the labours of the ancient
Pharaohs, who, many centuries since, constructed a canal between
the two seas, traces of which remain to this day.... Everything
connected with [the modem) works are on the most gigantic scale,
and a perusal of a little pamphlet, descriptive of the undertaking,
from the pen of the Chevalier de S1. Stoess, impresses us most
forcibly with the genius of the great Master-mind-M. Ferdinand
de Lesseps-to whose perseverance, calm daring and foresight,
the dream of ages has at last become a real and tangible fact ...
the project for bringing more closely together the countries of the
West and the East, and thus uniting the civilizations of different
epochs.81
The combination of old ideas with new methods, the bringing together
of cultures whose relations to the nineteenth century were
different, the genuine imposition of the power of modern technology
and intellectual will upon formerly stable and divided geographical
entities like East and West: this is what Cook perceives and what,
in his journals, speeches, prospectuses, and letters, de Lesseps
advertises.
Genealogically, Ferdinand's start was auspicious. Mathieu de
Lesseps, his father, had come to Egypt with Napoleon and remained
there (as "unofficial French representative," Marlowe says82) for
four years after the French evacuated it in 1801. Many of Ferdi­
;-1
nand's later writings refer ~ack to Napoleon's own interest in
,If digging a canal, which, because he had been misinformed by
"',j experts, he never thought was a realizable goal. Infected by the
erratic history of canal projects that included French schemes
entertained by Richelieu and the Saint-Simonians, de Lesseps returned
to Egypt in 1854, there to embark on the undertaking that
was eventually completed fifteen years later. He had no real engineering
background. Only a tremendous faith in his near-divine skills as
builder; mover, and creator kept him going; as his diplomatic
'."
l! )
I.,:.
and financial talents gained him Egyptian and European support,
he seems to have acquired the necessary knowledge to carry matters
to completion. More useful, perhaps, he learned how to plant his
potential contributors in the world-historical theater and make them
see what his "pensee morale," as he called his ptoject,really meant.
"Vous envisagez," he told them in 1860, "les immenses services
que Ie rapprochement de l'occident et de l'orient doh rendre it la
civilization et au developpement de la richesse generale. Le monde
attend de vous un grand progres et vous voulez repondre al'attente
du monde."83 In accordance with such notions the name of the
investment company formed by de Lesseps in 1858 was a charged
one and reflected the grandiose plans he cherished: the Compagnie
I