Orientalism (33 page)

In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a
topos
, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these. Direct observation or circumstantial description of the Orient are the fictions presented by writing on the Orient, yet invariably these are totally secondary to systematic tasks of another sort. In Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert, the Orient is a re-presentation of canonical material guided by an aesthetic and executive will capable of producing interest in the reader. Yet in all three writers, Orientalism or some aspect of it is asserted, even though, as I said earlier, the narrative consciousness is given a very large role to play. What we shall see is that for all its eccentric individuality, this narrative consciousness will end up by being aware, like Bouvard and Pécuchet, that pilgrimage is after all a form of copying.

When he began his trip to the Orient in 1833, Lamartine did so, he said, as something he had always dreamed about: “un voyage en Orient [était] comme un grand acte de ma vie intérieure.” He is a bundle of predispositions, sympathies, biases: he hates the Romans and Carthage, and loves Jews, Egyptians, and Hindus, whose Dante he claims he will become. Armed with a formal verse “Adieu” to France, in which he lists everything that he plans to do in the Orient, he embarks for the East. At first everything he encounters either confirms his poetic predictions or realizes his propensity for analogy. Lady Hester Stanhope is the Circe of the desert; the Orient is the “patrie de mon imagination”; the Arabs are a primitive people; Biblical poetry is engraved on the land of Lebanon; the Orient testifies to the attractive largeness of Asia and to Greece’s comparative smallness. Soon after he reaches Palestine, however, he becomes the incorrigible maker of an imaginary Orient. He
alleges that the plains of Canaan appear to best advantage in the works of Poussin and Lorrain. From being a “translation,” as he called it earlier, his voyage is now turned into a prayer, which exercises his memory, soul, and heart more than it does his eyes, mind, or spirit.
⁸⁹

This candid announcement completely unlooses Lamartine’s analogic and reconstructive (and undisciplined) zeal. Christianity is a religion of imagination and recollection, and since Lamartine considers that he typifies the pious believer, he indulges himself accordingly. A catalogue of his tendentious “observations” would be interminable: a woman he sees reminds him of Haidée in
Don Juan
; the relationship between Jesus and Palestine is like that between Rousseau and Geneva; the actual river Jordan is less important than the “mysteries” it gives rise to in one’s soul; Orientals, and Muslims in particular, are lazy, their politics are capricious, passionate, and futureless; another woman reminds him of a passage in
Atala
; neither Tasso nor Chateaubriand (whose antecedent travels seem often to harass Lamartine’s otherwise heedless egoism) got the Holy Land right—and on and on. His pages on Arabic poetry, about which he discourses with supreme confidence, betray no discomfort at his total ignorance of the language. All that matters to him is that his travels in the Orient reveal to him how the Orient is “la terre des cultes, des prodiges,” and that he is its appointed poet in the West. With no trace of self-irony he announces:

He has become a prophet merely by the fact of residence in the Orient.

By the end of his narrative Lamartine has achieved the purpose of his pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, that beginning and end point of all time and space. He has internalized reality enough to want to retreat from it back into pure contemplation, solitude, philosophy, and poetry.
⁹¹

Rising above the merely geographical Orient, he is transformed into a latter-day Chateaubriand, surveying the East as if it were a personal (or at the very least a French) province ready to be disposed of by European powers. From being a traveler and pilgrim in real time and space, Lamartine has become a transpersonal ego
identifying itself in power and consciousness with the whole of Europe. What he sees before him is the Orient in the process of its inevitable future dismemberment, being taken over and consecrated by European suzerainty. Thus in Lamartine’s climactic vision the Orient is reborn as European right-to-power over it:

Nor does Lamartine stop at this. He climbs still higher to the point where the Orient, what he has just seen and where he has just been, is reduced to “nations without territory,
patrie
, rights, laws or security … waiting anxiously for the shelter” of European occupation.
⁹²

In all the visions of the Orient fabricated by Orientalism there is no recapitulation, literally, as entire as this one. For Lamartine a pilgrimage to the Orient has involved not only the penetration of the Orient by an imperious consciousness but also the virtual elimination of that consciousness as a result of its accession to a kind of impersonal and continental control over the Orient. The Orient’s actual identity is withered away into a set of consecutive fragments, Lamartine’s recollective observations, which are later to be gathered up and brought forth as a restated Napoleonic dream of world hegemony. Whereas Lane’s human identity disappeared into the scientific grid of his Egyptian classifications, Lamartine’s consciousness transgresses its normal bounds completely. In so doing, it repeats Chateaubriand’s journey and his visions only to move on beyond them, into the sphere of the Shelleyan and Napoleonic abstract, by which worlds and populations are moved about like so many cards on a table. What remains of the Orient in Lamartine’s prose is not very substantial at all. Its geopolitical reality has been overlaid with his plans for it; the sites he has visited, the people he has met, the experiences he has had, are reduced to a few echoes in his pompous generalizations. The last traces of particularity have been rubbed out in the “résumé politique” with which the
Voyage en Orient
concludes.

Against the transcendent quasi-national egoism of Lamartine we must place Nerval and Flaubert in contrast. Their Oriental works play a substantial role in their total
oeuvre
, a much greater one than Lamartine’s imperialist
Voyage
in his
oeuvre
. Yet both of them,
like Lamartine, came to the Orient prepared for it by voluminous reading in the classics, modern literature, and academic Orientalism; about this preparation Flaubert was much more candid than Nerval, who in
Les Filles du feu
says disingenuously that all he knew about the Orient was a half-forgotten memory from his school education.
⁹³
The evidence of his
Voyage en Orient
flatly contradicts this, although it shows a much less systematic and disciplined knowledge of Orientalia than Flaubert’s. More important, however, is the fact that both writers (Nerval in 1842–1843 and Flaubert in 1849–1850) had greater personal and aesthetic uses for their visits to the Orient than any other nineteenth-century travelers. It is not inconsequential that both were geniuses to begin with, and that both were thoroughly steeped in aspects of European culture that encouraged a sympathetic, if perverse, vision of the Orient. Nerval and Flaubert belonged to that community of thought and feeling described by Mario Praz in
The Romantic Agony
, a community for which the imagery of exotic places, the cultivation of sadomasochistic tastes (what Praz calls
algolagnia
), a fascination with the macabre, with the notion of a Fatal Woman, with secrecy and occultism, all combined to enable literary work of the sort produced by Gautier (himself fascinated by the Orient), Swinburne, Baudelaire, and Huysmans.
⁹⁴
For Nerval and Flaubert, such female figures as Cleopatra, Salomé, and Isis have a special significance; and it was by no means accidental that in their work on the Orient, as well as in their visits to it, they pre-eminently valorized and enhanced female types of this legendary, richly suggestive, and associative sort.

In addition to their general cultural attitudes, Nerval and Flaubert brought to the Orient a personal mythology whose concerns and even structure required the Orient. Both men were touched by the Oriental renaissance as Quinet and others had defined it: they sought the invigoration provided by the fabulously antique and the exotic. For each, however, the Oriental pilgrimage was a quest for something relatively personal: Flaubert seeking a “homeland,” as Jean Bruneau has called it,
⁹⁵
in the locales of the origin of religions, visions, and classical antiquity; Nerval seeking—or rather following—the traces of his personal sentiments and dreams, like Sterne’s Yorick before him. For both writers the Orient was a place therefore of
déjà vu
, and for both, with the artistic economy typical of all major aesthetic imaginations, it was a place often returned to after the actual voyage had been completed. For
neither of them was the Orient exhausted by their uses of it, even if there is often a quality of disappointment, disenchantment, or demystification to be found in their Oriental writings.

The paramount importance of Nerval and Flaubert to a study such as this of the Orientalist mind in the nineteenth century is that they produced work that is connected to and depends upon the kind of Orientalism we have so far discussed, yet remains independent from it. First there is the matter of their work’s scope. Nerval produced his
Voyage en Orient
as a collection of travel notes, sketches, stories, and fragments; his preoccupation with the Orient is to be found as well in
Les Chimères
, in his letters, in some of his fiction and other prose writings. Flaubert’s writing both before and after his visit is soaked in the Orient. The Orient appears in the
Carnets de Voyage
and in the first version of
La Tentation de Saint Antoine
(and in the two later versions), as well as in
Hérodias, Salammbô
, and the numerous reading notes, scenarios, and unfinished stories still available to us, which have been very intelligently studied by Bruneau.
⁹⁶
There are echoes of Orientalism in Flaubert’s other major novels, too. In all, both Nerval and Flaubert continually elaborated their Oriental material and absorbed it variously into the special structures of their personal aesthetic projects. This is not to say, however, that the Orient is incidental to their work. Rather—by contrast with such writers as Lane (from whom both men borrowed shamelessly), Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Renan, Sacy—their Orient was not so much grasped, appropriated, reduced, or codified as lived in, exploited aesthetically and imaginatively as a roomy place full of possibility. What mattered to them was the structure of their work as an independent, aesthetic, and personal fact, and not the ways by which, if one wanted to, one could effectively dominate or set down the Orient graphically. Their egos never absorbed the Orient, nor totally identified the Orient with documentary and textual knowledge of it (with official Orientalism, in short).

On the one hand, therefore, the scope of their Oriental work exceeds the limitations imposed by orthodox Orientalism. On the other hand, the subject of their work is more than Oriental or Orientalistic (even though they do their own Orientalizing of the Orient); it quite consciously plays with the limitations and the challenges presented to them by the Orient and by knowledge about it. Nerval, for example, believes that he has to infuse what he sees with vitality since, he says,

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 armed—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 “le pays des rêves 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:

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 para-pilgrimage, is a swerving away from discursive finality of the sort envisioned by previous writers on the Orient.