Orientalism - autonomous learning

192 ORIENTALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
193
I mention such matters simply as a way of keeping vivid the
sense of layer upon layer of interests, official learning, institutional
pressure, that covered the Orient as a subject matter and as a
territory during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Even the
most innocuous travel book-and there were literally hundreds
written after mid-century1l6-contributed to the density of public
awareness of the Orient; a heavily marked dividing line separated
the delights, miscellaneous exploits, and testimonial portentousness
of individual pilgrims in the East (which included some American
voyagers, among them Mark Twain and Herman Melville 1t7 ) from
the authoritative reports of scholarly travelers, missionaries, governmental
functionaries, and other expert witnesses. This dividing
line existed clearly in Flaubert's mind, as it must have for any
individual consciousness that did not have an innocent perspective
on the Orient as a terrain for literary exploitation.
English writers on the whole had a more pronounced and harder
sense of what Oriental pilgrimages might entail than the French.
India was a valuably real constant in this sense, and therefore all
the territory between the Mediterranean and India acquired a correspondingly
weighty importance. Romantic writers like Byron and
Scott consequently had a political vision of the Near Orient and a
very combative awareness of how relations between the Orient and
Europe would have to be conducted. Scott's historical sense in The
Talisman and Count Robert of Paris allowed him to set these novels
in Crusader Palestine and eleventh-century Byzantium, respectively,
without at the same time detracting from his canny political appreciation
of the way powers act abroad. The failure of Disraeli's
Tancred can easily be ascribed to its author's perhaps ove1'­
developed knowledge of Oriental politics and the British Establishment's
network of interests; Tancred's ingenuous desire to· go to
Jerusalem very soon mires Disraeli in ludicrously complex descriptions
of how a Lebanese tribal chieftain tries to manage Druzes,
Muslims, Jews, and Europeans to his political advantage. By the
end of the novel Tancred's Eastern quest has more or less disappeared
because there is nothing in Disraeli's material vision of
Oriental realities to nourish the pilgrim's somewhat capricious impulses.
Even George Eliot, who never visited the Orient herself,
could not sustain the Jewish equivalent of an Oriental pilgrimage
in Daniel Deronda (1876) without straying into the complexities
of British realities as they decisive~y affected the Eastern project.
Thus whenever the Oriental motif for the English writer was not
principally a stylistic matter (as in FitzGerald's Rubtiiyat or in
Morier's Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan), it forced him to
confront a set of imposing resistances to his individual fantasy.
There are no English equivalents to the Oriental works by Chateaubriand,
Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert, just as Lane's early
Orientalist counterparts-Sacy and Renan-were considerably
more aware than he was of how much they were creating what they
wrote about. The form of such works as Kinglake's Eothen (1844)
and Burton's Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and
Meccah (1855-1856) is rigidly chronological and dutifully linear,
as if what the authors were describing was a shopping trip to an
Oriental bazaar rather than an adventure. Kinglake's undeservedly
famous and popular work is a pathetic catalogue of pompous ethnoct;ntrisms
and tiringly nondescript accounts of the Englishman's
East. His ostensible purpose in the book is to prove that travel in
the Orient is important to "moulding of your character-that is,
your very identity," but in fact this turns out to be little more than
solidifying "your" anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and general allpurpose
race prejudice. We are told, for instance, that the Arabian
Nights is too lively and inventive a work to have been created by a
"mere Oriental, who, for creative purposes, is a thing dead and
dry-a mental mummy." Although Kinglake blithely confesses to
no knowledge of any Oriental language, he is not constrained by
ignorance from making sweeping generalizations about the Orient,
its culture, mentality, and society. Many of the attitudes he repeats
are canonical, of course, but it is interesting how little the experience
of actually seeing the Orient affected his opinions. Like many
other travelers he is more interested in remaking himself and the
Orient (dead and dry-a mental mummy) than he is in seeing
what there is to be seen. Every being he encounters merely corroborates
his belief that Easterners are best dealt with when intimidated,
and what better instrument of intimidation than a sovereign
Western ego? En route to Suez across the desert, alone, he glories
in his self-sufficiency and power: "I was here in this African desert,
and I myself, and no other, had charge of my li/e."11S It is for the
comparatively useless purpose of letting Kinglake take hold of himself
that the Orient serves him.
Like Lamartine before him, Kinglake comfortably identified his
superior consciousness with his nation's, the difference being that