Orientalism - autonomous learning

138 ORIENTALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
139
erner surveying as if from a peculiarly suited vantage point the
passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine East, then going
on to articulate the East, making the Orient deliver up its secrets
under the learned authority of a philologist whose power derives
from the ability to unlock secret, esoteric languages-this would
persist in Renan. What did not persist in Renan during the 1840s,
when he served his apprenticeship as a philologist, was the dramatic
attitude: that was replaced by the scientific attitude.
For Quinet and Michelet, history was a drama. Quinet suggestively
describes the whole world as a temple and human history
as a sort of religious rite. Both Michelet and Quinet saw the world
they discussed. The origin of human history was something they
could describe in the same splendid and impassioned and dramatic
terms used by Vico and Rousseau to portray life on earth in primitive
times. For Michelet and Quinet there is no doubt that they
belong to the communal European Romantic undertaking "either
in epic or some other major genre-in drama, in prose romance,
or in the visionary 'greater Ode'-radically to recast into terms
appropriate to the historical and intellectual circumstances of their
own age, the Christian pattern of the fall, the redemption, and the
emergence of a new earth which will constitute a restored
paradise."3s I think that for Quinet the idea of a new god being born
was tantamount to the filling of the place left by the old god; for
Renan, however, being a philologist meant the severance of any and
all connections with the old Christian god, so that instead a new
doctrine--probably science-:-would stand free and in a new place,
as it were. Renan's whole career was devoted to the fleshing out of
this progress.
He put it very plainly at the end of his undistinguished essay on
the origins of language: man is no longer an inventor, and the age
of creation is definitely over. S6 There was a period, at which we can
only guess, when man was literally transported from silence into
words. After that there was language, and for the true scientist the
task is to examine how language is, not how it came about. Yet if
Renan dispels the passionate creation of primitive times (which
had excited Herder, Vico, Rousseau, even Quinet and Michelet) he
instates a new, and deliberate, type of artificial creation, one that
is performed as a result of scientific analysis. In his le(;on inaugurale
at the College de France (February 21, 1862) Renan proclaimed
his lectures open to the public so that it mi!rht see at first hand "Ie
laboratoire meme de la science philologique" (the very laboratory
of philological science).l!7 Any reader of Renan would have understood
that such a statement was meant also to carry a typical if
rather limp irony, one less intended to shock than passively to
delight. For Renan was succeeding to the chair of Hebrew, and
his lecture was on the contribution of the Semitic peoples to the
history of civilization. What more subtle affront could there be to
"sacred" history than the substitution of a philological laboratory
for divine intervention in history; and what more telling way was
there of declaring the Orient's contemporary relevance to be simply
as material for European investigation?3S Sacy's comparatively lifeless
fragments arranged in tableaux were now being replaced with
something new.
The stirring peroration with which Renan concluded his le(;on
had another function than simply to connect Oriental-Semitic
philology with the future and with science. Etienne Quatremere,
who immediately preceded Renan in the chair of Hebrew, was a
scholar who seemed to exemplify the popular caricature of what a
scholar was like. A man of prodigiously industrious and pedantic
habits, he went about his work, Renan said in a relatively unfeeling
memorial minute for the Journal des debats in October 1857, like a
laborious worker who even in rendering immense services nevertheless
could not see the whole edifice being constructed. The edifice
was nothing less than "la science historique de l'esprit humain,"
now in the process of being built stone by stone. so Just as
Quatremere was not of this age, so Renan in his work was determined
to be of it. Moreover, if the Orient had been hitherto identified
exclusively and indiscriminately with India and China, Renan's
ambition was to carve out a new Oriental province for himself, in
this case the Semitic Orient. He had no doubt remarked the casual,
and surely current, confusion of Arabic with Sanskrit (as in Balzac's
La Peau de chagrin, where the fateful talisman's Arabic script is
oescribed as Sanskrit), and he made it his job accordingly to do for
the Semitic languages what Bopp had done for the Indo-European:
so he said in the 1855 preface to the comparative Semitic treatise.4jJ
Therefore Renan's plans were to bring the Semitic languages into
and glamorous focus afa Bopp, and in addition to elevate the
of these neglected inferior languages to the level of a passionate
new science of mind a la Louis Lambert.
On more than one occasion Renan was
in his asser­