Orientalism (24 page)

These two characteristics—the didactic presentation to students and the avowed intention of repeating by revision and extract—are crucial. Sacy’s writing always conveys the tone of a voice speaking; his prose is dotted with first-person pronouns, with personal qualifications, with rhetorical presence. Even at his most recondite—as in a scholarly note on third-century Sassanid numismatics—one senses not so much a pen writing as a voice pronouncing. The keynote of his work is contained in the opening lines of the dedication to his son of the
Principes de grammaire générale
: “C’est à toi, mon cher Fils, que ce petit ouvrage a été entrepris”—which is to say, I am writing (or speaking) to you because you need to know these things, and since they don’t exist in any serviceable form, I have done the work myself for you. Direct address: utility: effort: immediate and beneficent rationality. For Sacy believed that everything could be made clear and reasonable, no matter how difficult the task and how obscure the subject. Here are Bossuet’s sternness and Leibniz’s abstract humanism, as well as the
tone
of Rousseau, all together in the same style.

The effect of Sacy’s tone is to form a circle sealing off him and his audience from the world at large, the way a teacher and his pupils together in a closed classroom also form a sealed space. Unlike the matter of physics, philosophy, or classical literature, the matter of Oriental studies is arcane; it is of import to people who already have an interest in the Orient but want to know the Orient better, in a more orderly way, and here the pedagogical discipline is more effective than it is attractive. The didactic speaker, therefore,
displays
his material to the disciples, whose role it is to receive what is given to them in the form of carefully selected and arranged topics. Since the Orient is old and distant, the teacher’s display is a restoration, a re-vision of what has disappeared from the wider ken. And since also the vastly rich (in space, time, and cultures) Orient cannot be totally exposed, only its most representative parts need be. Thus Sacy’s focus is the anthology, the chrestomathy, the tableau, the survey of general principles, in which a relatively small set of powerful examples delivers the Orient to the student. Such examples are powerful for two reasons: one, because they reflect Sacy’s powers as a Western authority deliberately taking
from the Orient what its distance and eccentricity have hitherto kept hidden, and two, because these examples have the semiotical power in them (or imparted to them by the Orientalist) to signify the Orient.

All of Sacy’s work is essentially compilatory; it is thus ceremoniously didactic and painstakingly revisionist. Aside from the
Principes de grammaire générale
, he produced a
Chrestomathie arabe
in three volumes (1806 and 1827), an anthology of Arab grammatical writing (1825), an Arabic grammar of 1810 (
à l’usage des élèves de l’École spéciale
), treatises on Arabic prosody and the Druze religion, and numerous short works on Oriental numismatics, onomastics, epigraphy, geography, history, and weights and measures. He did a fair number of translations and two extended commentaries on
Calila and Dumna
and the
Maqamat
of al-Hariri. As editor, memorialist, and historian of modern learning Sacy was similarly energetic. There was very little of note in other related disciplines with which he was not
au courant
, although his own writing was single-minded and, in its non-Orientalist respects, of a narrow positivist range.

Yet when in 1802 the Institut de France was commissioned by Napoleon to form a
tableau générale
on the state and progress of the arts and sciences since 1789, Sacy was chosen to be one of the team of writers: he was the most rigorous of specialists and the most historical-minded of generalists. Dacier’s report, as it was known informally, embodied many of Sacy’s predilections as well as containing his contributions on the state of Oriental learning. Its title
—Tableau historique de l’érudition française
—announces the new historical (as opposed to sacred) consciousness. Such consciousness is dramatic: learning can be arranged on a stage set, as it were, where its totality can be readily surveyed. Addressed to the king, Dacier’s preface stated the theme perfectly. Such a survey as this made it possible to do something no other sovereign had attempted, namely to take in, with one
coup d’oeil
, the whole of human knowledge. Had such a
tableau historique
been undertaken in former times, Dacier continued, we might today have possessed many masterpieces now either lost or destroyed; the interest and utility of the tableau were that it preserved knowledge and made it immediately accessible. Dacier intimated that such a task was simplified by Napoleon’s Oriental expedition, one of whose results was to heighten the degree of modern geographical knowledge.
¹⁴
(At no point more than in Dacier’s entire
discours
do we see how the dramatic form of a
tableau historique
has its use-equivalent in the arcades and counters of a modern department store.)

The importance of the
Tableau historique
for an understanding of Orientalism’s inaugural phase is that it exteriorizes the form of Orientalist knowledge and its features, as it also describes the Orientalist’s relationship to his subject matter. In Sacy’s pages on Orientalism—as elsewhere in his writing—he speaks of his own work as having
uncovered
,
brought to light
,
rescued
a vast amount of obscure matter. Why? In order
to place it before
the student. For like all his learned contemporaries Sacy considered a learned work a positive addition to an edifice that all scholars erected together. Knowledge was essentially the
making visible
of material, and the aim of a tableau was the construction of a sort of Benthamite Panopticon. Scholarly discipline was therefore a specific technology of power: it gained for its user (and his students) tools and knowledge which (if he was a historian) had hitherto been lost.
¹⁵
And indeed the vocabulary of specialized power and acquisition is particularly associated with Sacy’s reputation as a pioneer Orientalist. His heroism as a scholar was to have dealt successfully with insurmountable difficulties; he acquired the means to present a field to his students where there was none. He
made
the books, the precepts, the examples, said the Duc de Broglie of Sacy. The result was the production of material about the Orient, methods for studying it, and exempla that even Orientals did not have.
¹⁶

Compared with the labors of a Hellenist or a Latinist working on the Institut team, Sacy’s labors were awesome. They had the texts, the conventions, the schools; he did not, and consequently had to go about making them. The dynamic of primary loss and subsequent gain in Sacy’s writing is obsessional; his investment in it was truly heavy. Like his colleagues in other fields he believed that knowledge is seeing—pan-optically, so to speak—but unlike them he not only had to identify the knowledge, he had to decipher it, interpret it, and most difficult, make it available. Sacy’s achievement was to have produced a whole field. As a European he ransacked the Oriental archives, and he could do so without leaving France. What texts he isolated, he then brought back; he doctored them; then he annotated, codified, arranged, and commented on them. In time, the Orient as such became less important than what the Orientalist made of it; thus, drawn by Sacy into the sealed
discursive place of a pedagogical tableau, the Orientalist’s Orient was thereafter reluctant to emerge into reality.

Sacy was much too intelligent to let his views and his practice stand without supporting argument. First of all, he always made it plain why the “Orient” on its own could not survive a European’s taste, intelligence, or patience. Sacy defended the utility and interest of such things as Arabic poetry, but what he was really saying was that Arabic poetry had to be properly transformed by the Orientalist before it could begin to be appreciated. The reasons were broadly epistemological, but they also contained an Orientalistic self-justification. Arabic poetry was produced by a completely strange (to Europeans) people, under hugely different climatic, social, and historical conditions from those a European knows; in addition, such poetry as this was nourished by “opinions, prejudices, beliefs, superstitions which we can acquire only after long and painful study.” Even if one does go through the rigors of specialized training, much of the description in the poetry will not be accessible to Europeans “who have attained to a higher degree of civilization.” Yet what we can master is of great value to us as Europeans accustomed to disguise our exterior attributes, our bodily activity, and our relationship to nature. Therefore, the Orientalist’s use is to make available to his compatriots a considerable range of unusual experience, and still more valuable, a kind of literature capable of helping us understand the “truly divine” poetry of the Hebrews.
¹⁷

So if the Orientalist is necessary because he fishes some useful gems out of the distant Oriental deep, and since the Orient cannot be known without his mediation, it is also true that Oriental writing itself ought not to be taken in whole. This is Sacy’s introduction to his theory of fragments, a common Romantic concern. Not only are Oriental literary productions essentially alien to the European; they also do not contain a sustained enough interest, nor are they written with enough “taste and critical spirit,” to merit publication except as extracts (
pour mériter d’être publiés autrement que par extrait
).
¹⁸
Therefore the Orientalist is required to
present
the Orient by a series of representative fragments, fragments republished, explicated, annotated, and surrounded with still more fragments. For such a presentation a special genre is required: the chrestomathy, which is where in Sacy’s case the usefulness and interest of Orientalism are most directly and profitably displayed. Sacy’s most famous production was the three-volume
Chrestomathie arabe
, which was
sealed at the outset, so to speak, with an internally rhyming Arabic couplet: “Kitab al-anis al-mufid lil-Taleb al-mustafid;/wa gam’i al shathur min manthoum wa manthur” (A book pleasant and profitable for the studious pupil;/it collects fragments of both poetry and prose).

Sacy’s anthologies were used very widely in Europe for several generations. Although what they contain was claimed as typical, they submerge and cover the censorship of the Orient exercised by the Orientalist. Moreover, the internal order of their contents, the arrangement of their parts, the choice of fragments, never reveal their secret; one has the impression that if fragments were not chosen for their importance, or for their chronological development, or for their aesthetic beauty (as Sacy’s were not), they must nevertheless embody a certain Oriental naturalness, or typical inevitability. But this too is never said. Sacy claims simply to have exerted himself on behalf of his students, to make it unnecessary for them to purchase (or read) a grotesquely large library of Oriental stuff. In time, the reader forgets the Orientalist’s effort and takes the restructuring of the Orient signified by a chrestomathy as the Orient
tout court
. Objective structure (designation of Orient) and subjective restructure (representation of Orient by Orientalist) become interchangeable. The Orient is overlaid with the Orientalist’s rationality; its principles become his. From being distant, it becomes available; from being unsustainable on its own, it becomes pedagogically useful; from being lost, it is found, even if its missing parts have been made to drop away from it in the process. Sacy’s anthologies not only supplement the Orient; they supply it as Oriental presence to the West.
¹⁹
Sacy’s work canonizes the Orient; it begets a canon of textual objects passed on from one generation of students to the next.

And the living legacy of Sacy’s disciples was astounding. Every major Arabist in Europe during the nineteenth century traced his intellectual authority back to him. Universities and academies in France, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and especially Germany were dotted with the students who formed themselves at his feet and through the anthological tableaux provided by his work.
²⁰
As with all intellectual patrimonies, however, enrichments and restrictions were passed on simultaneously. Sacy’s genealogical originality was to have treated the Orient as something to be restored not only because of but also despite the modern Orient’s disorderly and
elusive presence. Sacy
placed
the Arabs
in
the Orient, which was itself placed in the general tableau of modern learning. Orientalism belonged therefore to European scholarship, but its material had to be re-created by the Orientalist before it could enter the arcades alongside Latinism and Hellenism. Each Orientalist re-created his own Orient according to the fundamental epistemological rules of loss and gain first supplied and enacted by Sacy. Just as he was the father of Orientalism, he was also the discipline’s first sacrifice, for in translating new texts, fragments, and extracts subsequent Orientalists entirely displaced Sacy’s work by supplying their own restored Orient. Nevertheless the process he started would continue, as philology in particular developed systematic and institutional powers Sacy had never exploited. This was Renan’s accomplishment: to have associated the Orient with the most recent comparative disciplines, of which philology was one of the most eminent.

The difference between Sacy and Renan is the difference between inauguration and continuity. Sacy is the originator, whose work represents the field’s emergence and its status as a nineteenth-century discipline with roots in revolutionary Romanticism. Renan derives from Orientalism’s second generation: it was his task to solidify the official discourse of Orientalism, to systematize its insights, and to establish its intellectual and worldly institutions. For Sacy, it was his personal efforts that launched and vitalized the field and its structures; for Renan, it was his adaptation of Orientalism to philology and both of them to the intellectual culture of his time that perpetuated the Orientalist structures intellectually and gave them greater visibility.