Orientalism - autonomous learning

184 ORIENTALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
185
on the first: "Les reves et la folie ... Le desir de rOrient. L'Europe
s'eleve. Le reve se realise ... EUe. Je l'avais fuie, je l'avais perdue
... Vaisseau d'Orient.»101 The Orient symbolizes Nerval's dreamquest
and the fugitive woman central to it, both as desire and as
loss. "Vaisseau d'Orient"-vessel of the Orient-refers enigmatically
either to the woman as the vessel carrying the Orient, or
possibly, to Nerval's own vessel for the Orient, his prose voyage.
In either case, the Orient is identified with commemorative absence.
How else can we explain in the Voyage, a work of so original
and individual a mind, the lazy use of large swatches of Lane,
incorporated without a murmur by Nerval as his descriptions of
the Orient? It is as if having failed both in his search for a stable
Oriental reality and in his intent to systematic order to his
re-presentation of the Orient, Nerval was employing the borrowed
authority of a canonized Orientalist text. After his voyage the earth
remained dead, and aside from its brilliantly crafted but fragmented
embodiments in the Voyage, his self was no less drugged
and worn out than before. Therefore the Orient seemed retrospectively
to belong to a negative realm, in which failed narratives,
disordered chronicles, mere transcription of scholarly texts, were its
only possible vessel. At least Nerval did not try to save his project
by wholeheartedly giving himself up to French designs on the
Orient, although he did resort to Orientalism to make some of
his points.
In contrast to Nerval's negative vision of an emptied Orient,
Flaubert's is eminently corporea1. His travel notes and letters reveal
a man scrupulously reporting events, persons, and settings, delighting
in their bizarreries, never attempting to reduce the incongruities
before him. In what he writes (or perhaps because he writes),
the premium is on the eye-catching, translated into self-consciously
worked-out phrases: for example, "Inscriptions and birddroppings
are the only two things in Egypt that give any indication of life."lo2
His tastes run to the perverse, whose form is often a combination
of extreme animality, even of grotesque nastiness, with extreme and
sometimes intellectual refinement. Yet this particular kind of perversity
was not something merely observed, it was also studied,
and came to represent an essential element in Flaubert's fiction. The
familiar oppositions, or ambivalences, as Harry Levin has called
them, that roam through Flaubert's writing-flesh versus mind,
Salome versus Saint John, Salammbo versus Saint AnthonyI03-are
powerfully validated by what he saw in the Orient, what, given
his eclectic learning, he could see there of the partnership between
knowledge and carnal grossness. In Upper Egypt he was taken with
ancient Egyptian art, its preciosity and deliberate lubricity: "so
dirty pictures existed even so far back in antiquity?" How much
more the Orient really answered questions than it raised them is
evident in the following:
You [Flaubert's mother] ask me whether the Orient is up to what
I imagined it to be. Yes, it is; and more than that, it extends far
beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated,
everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken
the place of suppositions--so excellently so that it is often as
though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams.1° 4
Flaubert's work is so complex and so vast as to make any simple
account of his Oriental writing very sketchy and hopelessly incomplete.
Nevertheless, in the context created by other writers on the
Orient, a certain number of main features in Flaubert's Orientalism
can fairly be described. Making allowances for the difference between
candidly personal writing (letters, travel notes, diary jottings)
and formally aesthetic writing (novels and tales), we can still remark
that Flaubert's Oriental perspective is rooted in an eastward
and southward search for a "Visionary alternative," which "meant
gorgeous color, in contrast to the greyish tonality of the French
provincial landscape. It meant exciting spectacle instead of humdrum
routine, the perennially mysterious in place of the all too
familiar."lo5 When he actually visited it, however, this Orient impressed
him with its decrepitude and senescence. Like every other
Orientalism, then, Flaubert's is revivalist: he must bring the Orient
to life, he must deliver it to himself and to his readers, and it is his
experience of it in books and on the spot, and his language for it,
that will do the trick. His novels of the Orient accordingly were
labored historical and learned reconstructions. Carthage in
SalammbO and the products of Saint Anthony's fevered imagination
were authentic fruits of Flaubert's wide reading in the (mainly
Western) sources of Oriental religion, warfare, ritual, and societies.
What the formal aesthetic work retains, over and above the
marks of Flaubert's voracious readings and recensions, are memories
of Oriental travel. The Bibliotheque des idees rer;ues has it that an
. Orientalist is "un homme qui a beaucoup voyage,"106 only unlike
most other such travelers Flaubert put his voyages to ingenious. use.
Most of his experiences are conveyed in theatrical form. He is