Orientalism - autonomous learning

182 ORIENT ALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
183
Le ciel et la mer sont toujours Iii.; Ie ciel d'Orient, la mer d'lonie se
donnent chaquematin Ie saint baiser d'amour; mais la terre est
morte, morte sous la main de l'homme, et les dieux se sont envoles!
(The sky and the sea are still there; the Oriental sky and the Ionian
sky give each other the sacred kiss of love each morning; but the
earth is dead, dead because man has killed it, and the gods have
fled.)
If the Orient is to live at all, now that its gods have fled, it must be
through his fertile efforts. In the Voyage en Orient the narrative
consciousness is a constantly energetic voice, moving through the
labyrinths of Oriental existence anned-Nerval tells us-with two
Arabic words, tayeb, the word for assent, and mafisch, the word
for rejection. These two words enable him selectively to confront
the antithetical Oriental world, to confront it and draw out from it
its secret principles. He is predisposed to recognize that the Orient
is "Ie pays des reves et de l'illusion," which, like the veils he sees
everywhere in Cairo, conceal a deep, rich fund of female sexuality.
Nerval repeats Lane's experience of discovering the necessity for
marriage in an Islamic society, but unlike Lane he does attach himself
to a woman. His liaison with Zaynab is more than socially
obligatory:
I must unite with a guileless young girl who is of this sacred soil,
which is our first homeland; I must bathe myself in the vivifying
springs of humanity, from which poetry and the faith of our fathers
flowed forth! ... I would like to lead my life like a novel, and I
willingly place myself in the situation of one of those active and
resolute heroes who wish at all costs to create a drama around
them, a knot of complexity, in a word, action. 97
Nerval invests himself in the Orient, producing not so much a
novelistic narrative as an everlasting intention-never fully realized
-to fuse mind with physical action. This antinarrative, this parapilgrimage,
is a swerving away from discursive finality of the sort
envisioned by previous writers on the Orient.
Connected physically and sympathetically to the Orient, Nerval
wanders informally through its riches and its cultural (and
principally feminine) ambience, locating in Egypt especially that
maternal "center, at once mysterious and accessible" from which
all wisdomderives. 98 His impressions, dreams, and memories alternate
with sections of ornate, mannered narrative done in the
Oriental style; the hard realities of travel-in Egypt, Lebanon,
Turkey-mingle with the design of a deliberate digression, as if
Nerval were repeating Chateaubriand's Itineraire using an underground,
though far less imperial and obvious, route. Michel Butor
puts it beautifully:
To Nerval's eyes, Chateaubriand's journey remains a voyage along
the surface, while his own is calculated, utilizing annex centers,
lobbies of ellipses englobing the principal centers; this allows him
to place in evidence, by parallax, all the dimensions of the snare
harbored by the normal centers. Wandering the streets or environs
of Cairo, Beirut, or Constantinople, Nerval is always lying in wait
for anything that will allow him to sense a cavern extending beneath
Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem [the principal cities of
Chateaubriand's ltineraire]. . . . .
Just as the three cities of Chateaubriand are in communication
-Rome, with its emperors and popes, reassembling the heritage,
the testament, of Athens and Jerusalem-the caverns of Nerval
. . . become engaged in intercourse. 99
Even the two large plotted episodes, "The Tale of the Caliph
Hakim" and "The Tale of the Queen of the Morning," that will
supposedly convey a durable, solid narrative discourse seem to
push Nerval away from "overground" finality, edging him further
and further into a haunting internal world of paradox and dream.
Both tales deal with multiple identity, one of whose motifs-explicitly
stated-is incest, and both return us to Nerval's quintessential
Oriental world of uncertain, fluid dreams infinitely multiplying
themselves past resolution, definiteness, materiality. When the
journey is completed and Nerval arrives in Malta on his way back
to the European mainland, he realizes that he is now in "Ie pays du
froid et des orages, et deja rOrient n'est plus pour moi qu'un deses
reves du matin auxquels viennent bient6t succeder les. ennuis du
jour."lOO His Voyage incorporates numerous pages copied out of
Lane's Modern Egyptians, but even their lucid confidence seems to
dissolve in the endlessly decomposing, cavernous element which is
Nerval's Orient.
His camet for the Voyage supplies us, I think, with two perfect
texts for understanding how his Orient untied itself from anything
resembling an Orientalist conception of the Orient, even though
his work depends on Orientalism to a certain extent. First, his
appetites strive to gather in experience and memory indiscriminately:
"Je sens Ie besoin de m'assimiler toute la nature (femmes
etrangeres). Souvenirs d'y avoir vecu." The second elaborates a bit