Orientalism - autonomous learning

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170 ORIENT ALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
171
French, perhaps even a European, concert in the Orient, which of
course they supposed would be orchestrated by them. Theirs was
the Orient of memories, suggestive ruins, forgotten secrets, hidden
correspondences, and an almost virtuosic style of being, an Orient
whose highest literary forms would be found in Nerval and Flaubert,
both of whose work was solidly fixed in an imaginative, unrealizable
(except aesthetically) dimension.
This was also true to a certain extent of scholarly French travelers
in the Orient. Most of them were interested in the Biblical past or
in the Crusades, as Henri Bordeaux has argued in his Voyageurs
d'Orient.79 To these names we must add (at Hassan al-Nouty's
suggestion) the names of Oriental Semiticists, including Quatremere;
Sau1cy, the explorer of the Dead Sea; Renan as Phoenician
archaeologist; Judas, the student of Phoenician languages; Catafago
and Defremery, who studied the Ansarians, Ismailis, and Seljuks;
Clermont-Ganneau, who explored Judea; and the Marquis de
VogUe, whose work centered on Palmyrian epigraphy. In addition
there was the whole school of Egyptologists descended from Champollion
and Mariette, a school that would later include Maspero
and Legrain. As an index of the difference between British realities
and French fantasies, it is worthwhile recalling the words in Cairo
of the painter Ludovic Lepic, who commented sadly in 1884 (two
years after the British occupation had begun): "L'Orient est mort
au Caire." Only Renan, ever the realistic racist, condoned the
British suppression of Arabi's nationalist rebellion, which, out of his
greater wisdom, he said was a "disgrace to civilization. "80
Unlike Volney and Napoleon, the nineteenth-century French
pilgrims did not seek a scientific so much as an exotic yet especially
attractive reality. This is obviously true of the literary pilgrims,
beginning with Chateaubriand, who found in the Orient a locale
sympathetic to their private myths, obsessions, and requirements.
Here we notice how all the pilgrims, but especially the French
ones, exploit the Orient in their work so as in some urgent way to
justify their existential vocation. Only when there is some additional
cognitive purpose in writing about the Orient does the outpouring
of self seem more under control. Lamartine, for instance, writes
about himself, and also about France as a power in the Orient;
that second enterprise mutes and finally controls imperatives heaped
upon his style by his soul, his memory, and his imagination. No
pilgrim, French or English, could so ruthlessly dominate his self
or his subject as Lane did. Even Burton and T. E. Lawrence, of
whom the former fashioned a deliberately Muslim pilgrimage and
the latter what he called a reverse pilgrimage away from Mecca,
delivered masses of historical, political, and social Orientalism
that were never as free of their egos as Lane's were of his. This is
why Burton, Lawrence, and Charles Doughty occupy a middle position
between Lane and Chateaubriand.
Chateaubriand's Itineraire de Paris aUrusalem, et de Urusalem
aParis (1810-1811) records the details of a journey undertaken
in 1805-1806, after he had traveled in North America. Its many
hundreds of pages bear witness to its author's admission that "je
parle eternellement de moi," so much so that Stendhal, no selfabnegating
writer himself, could find Chateaubriand's failure as a
knowledgeable traveler to be the result of his "stinking egotism."
He brought a very heavy load of personal objectives and suppositions
to the Orient, unloaded them there, and proceeded thereafter
to push people, places, and ideas around in the Orient as if nothing
could resist his imperious imagination. Chateaubriand came to the
Orient as a constructed figure, not as a true self. For him Bonaparte
was the last Crusader; he in tum was "the last Frenchman
who left his country to travel in the Holy Land with the ideas, the
goals, and the sentiments of a pilgrim of former times." But there
were other reasons. Symmetry': having been to the New World and
seen its monuments of nature, he needed to complete his circle of
studies by visiting the Orient and its monuments of knowledge: as
he had studied Roman and Celtic antiquity, all that was left for him
was the ruins of Athens, Memphis, and Carthage. Self-completion:
he needed to replenish his stock of images. Confirmation of the
importance of the religious spirit: "religion is a kind of universal
language understood by all men," and where better to observe it
than there in the Orient, even in lands where a comparatively low
religion like Islam held sway. Above all, the need to see things,
not as they were, but as Chateaubriand supposed they were: the
Koran was "Ie livre de Mahomet"; it contained "ni principe de
civilisation, ni precepte qui puisse elever Ie caractere." "This book,"
he continued, more or less freely inventing as he went along,
"preaches neither hatred of tyranny nor love of liberty."81
. To so preciously constituted a figure as Chateaubriand, the Orient
was a decrepit canvas awaiting his restorative efforts. The Oriental
Arab was "civilized man fallen again into a savage state": no
wonder, then, that as he watched Arabs trying to speak French,
Chateaubriand felt like Robinson Crusoe thrilled by hearing his