Orientalism - autonomous learning

172 ORIENTALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
173
parrot speak for the first time. True, there were places like
Bethlehem (whose etymological meaning Chateaubriand got completely
wrong) in which one found again some semblance of real
-that is, European--civilization, but those were few and far between.
Everywhere, one encountered Orientals, Arabs whose
civilization, religion, and manners were so low, barbaric, and
antithetical as to merit reconquest. The Crusades, he argued, were
not aggression; they were a just Christian counterpart to Omar's
arrival in Europe. Besides, he added, even if the Crusades in their
modem or original form were aggression, the issue they raised
transcended such questions of ordinary mortality:
The Crusades were not only about the deliverance of the Holy
Sepulchre, but more about knowing which would win on the
earth, a cult that was civilization's enemy, systematically favorable
to ignorance [this was Islam, of course], to despotism, to
slavery, or a cult that had caused to reawaken in modern people
the genius of a sage antiquity, and had abolished base servitude?S2
This is the first significant mention of an idea that will acquire
an almost unbearable, next to mindless authority in European writing:
the theme of Europe teaching the Orient the meaning of
liberty, which is an idea that Chateaubriand and everyone after him
believed that Orientals, and especially Muslims, knew nothing
about.
Of liberty, they know nothing; of propriety, they have none: force
is their God. When they go for long periods without seeing conquerors
who do heavenly justice, they have the air of soldiers
without a leader, citizens without legislators, and a family without
a father.S3
Already in 1810 we have a European talking like Cromer in 1910,
arguing that Orientals require conquest, and finding it no paradox
that a Western conquest of the Orient was not conquest after all,
but liberty. Chateaubriand puts the whole idea in the Romantic
redemptive terms of a Christian mission to revive a dead world, to
quicken in it a sense of its own potential, one which only a European
can discern underneath a lifeless and degenerate surface. For
the traveler this means that he must use the Old Testament and the
Gospels as his guide in Palestine;84 only in this way can the apparent
degeneration of the modern Orient be gotten beyond. Yet Chateaubriand
senses no irony in the fact that his tour and his vision will
reveal nothing to him about the modern Oriental and his destiny.
What matters about the Orient is what it lets happen to Chateaubriand,
what it allows his spirit to do, what it permits him to reveal
about himself, his ideas, his expectations. The liberty that so concerns
him is no more than his own release from the Orient's hostile
wastes.
Where his release allows him to go is directly back into the realm
of imagination and imaginative interpretation. Description of the
Orient is obliterated by the designs and patterns foisted upon it by
the imperial ego, which makes no secret of its powers. If in Lane's
prose we watch the ego disappear so that the Orient may appear in
all its realistic detail, in Chateaubriand the ego dissolves itself in
the contemplation of wonders it creates, and then is reborn, stronger
than ever, more able to savor its powers and enjoy its interpretations.
When one travels in Judea, at first a great ennui grips the heart;
but when, passing from one solitary place to another, space
stretches out without limits before you, slowly the ennui dissipates,
and one feels a secret terror, which, far from depressing the soul,
gives it courage and elevates one's native genius. Extraordinary
things are disclosed from all parts of an earth worked over by
miracles: the burning sun, the impetuous eagle, the sterile fig tree;
all of poetry, all the scenes from Scripture are present there.
Every name encloses a mystery; every grotto declares the future;
every summit retains within it the accents of a prophet. God Himself
has spoken from these shores: the arid torrents, the riven
rocks, the open tombs attest to the prodigy; the desert still seems
struck dumb with terror, and one would say that it has still not
been able to break the silence since it heard the voice of the
eterna1. 85
The process of thought in this passage is revealing. An experience
of Pascalian terror does not merely reduce one's self-confidence, it
miraculously stimulates it. The barren landscape stands forth like
an illuminated text presenting itself to the scrutiny of a very strong,
refortified ego. Chateaubriand has transcended the abject, if
frightening, reality of the contemporary Orient so that he may stand
in an original and creative relationship to it. By the end of the
passage he is no longer a modem man but a visionary seer more
or less contemporary with God; if the Judean desert has been silent
, since God spoke there, it is Chateaubriand who can hear the silence,
understand its meaning, and-to his reader-make the desert
speak again.