Orientalism - autonomous learning

116 ORIENTALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
117
a science which anatomized and melted human entities as if they were
so much inert matter. But it was not just any science he mocked: it
was enthusiastic, even messianic European science, whose victories
included failed revolutions, wars, oppression, and an unteachable
appetite for putting grand, bookish ideas quixotically to work
immediately. What such science or knowledge never reckoned with
was its own deeply ingrained and unself-conscious bad innocence
and the resistance to it of reality. When Bouvard plays the scientist
he naively assumes that science merely is, that reality is as the
scientist says it is, that it does not matter whether the scientist is a
fool or a visionary; he (or anyone who thinks like him) cannot see
that the Orient may not wish to regenerate Europe, or that Europe
was not about to fuse itself democratically with yellow or brown
Asians. In short, such a scientist does not recognize in his science
the egoistic will to power that feeds his endeavors and corrupts his
ambitions.
Flaubert, of course, sees to it that his poor fools are made to
rub their noses in these difficulties. Bouvard and Pecuchet have
learned that it is better not to traffic in ideas and in reality together.
The novel's conclusion is a picture of the two of them now perfectly
content to copy their favorite ideas faithfully from book onto paper.
Knowledge no longer requires application to reality; knowledge is
what gets passed on silently, without comment, from one text to
another. Ideas are propagated and disseminated anonymously, they
are repeated without attribution; they have literally become idees
rer;ues: what matters is that they are there, to be repeated, echoed,
and re-echoed uncritically.
In a highly compressed form this brief episode, taken out of
Flaubert's notes for Bouvard et Pecuchet, frames the specifically
modem structures of Orientalism, which after all is one discipline
among the secular (and quasi-religious) faiths of nineteenth-century
European thought. We have already characterized the general scope
of thought about the Orient that was handed on through the
medieval and Renaissance periods, for which Islam was the
essential Orient. During the eighteenth century, however, there
were a number of new, interlocking elements that hinted at the coming
evangelical phase, whose outlines Flaubert was later to re-create.
For one, the Orient was being opened out considerably beyond
the Islamic lands. This quantitative change was to a large degree
the result of continuing, and expanding, European exploration of
the rest of the world. The increasing influence of travel literature,
imaginary utopias, moral voyages, and scientific reporting brought
the Orient into sharper and more extended focus. If Orientalism is
indebted principally to the fruitful Eastern discoveries of Anquetil
and Jones during the latter third of the century, these must be seen
in the wider context created by Cook and Bougainville, the voyages
of Tournefort and Adanson, by the President de Brosses's Histoire
des navigations aux terres australes, by French traders in the Pacific,
by Jesuit missionaries in China and the Americas, by William
Dampier's explorations and reports, by innumerable speculations
on giants, Patagonians, savages, natives, and monsters supposedly
residing to the far east, west, south, and north of Europe. But all
such widening horizons had Europe firmly in the privileged center,
as main observer (or mainly observed, as in Goldsmith's Citizen of
the World). For even as Europe moved itself outwards, its sense
of cultural strength was fortified. From travelers' tales, and not only
from great institutions like the various India companies, colonies
were created and ethnocentric perspectives secured. 4
For another, a more knowledgeable attitude towards the alien
and exotic was abetted not only by travelers and explorers but also
by historians for whom European experience could profitably be
compared with other, as well as older, civilizations. That powerful
current in eighteenth-century historical anthropology, described
by scholars as the confrontation of the gods, meant that Gibbon
could read the lessons of Rome's decline in the rise of Islam, just as
Vico could understand modern civilization in terms of the barbaric,
poetic splendor of their earliest beginnings. Whereas Renaissance
historians judged the Orient inflexibly as an enemy, those of the
eighteenth century confronted the Orient's peculiarities with some
detachment and with some attempt at dealing directly with Oriental
source material, perhaps because such a technique helped a European
to know himself better. George Sale's translation of the Koran
and his accompanying preliminary discourse illustrate the change.
Unlike his predecessors, Sale tried to deal with Arab history in terms
of Arab sources; moreover, he let Muslim commentators on the
sacred text speak for themselves. 5 In Sale, as throughout the
eighteenth century, simple comparatism was the early phase of the
comparative disciplines (philology, anatomy, jurisprudence, religion)
which were to become the boast of nineteenth-century
method.