Orientalism - autonomous learning

194 ORIENTALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
195
in the Englishman's case his government was closer to settling in
the rest of the Orient than France was-for the time being. Flaubert
saw this with perfect accuracy:
It seems to me almost impossible that within a short time England
won't become mistress of Egypt. She already keeps Aden full of
her troops, the crossing of Suez will make it very easy for the
redcoats to arrive in Cairo one fine morning-the news will reach
France two weeks later and everyone will be very surprised! Remember
my prediction: at the first sign of trouble in Europe,
England will take Egypt, Russia will take Constantinople, and we,
in retaliation, will get ourselves massacred in the mountains of
Syria. 119
For all their vaunted individuality Kinglake's views express a public
and national will over the Orient; his ego is the instrument of this
will's expression, not by any means its master. There is no evidence
in his writing that he struggled to create a novel opinion of the
Orient; neither his knowledge nor his personality was adequate for
that, and this is the great difference between him and Richard
Burton. As a traveler, Burton was a real adventurer; as a scholar,
he could hold his own with any academic Orientalist in Europe; as a
character, he was fully aware of the necessity of combat between
himself and the uniformed teachers who ran Europe and European
knowledge with such precise anonymity and scientific firmness.
Everything Burton wrote testifies to this combativeness, rarely with
more candid contempt for his opponents than in the preface to his
translation of the Arabian Nights. He seems to have taken a special
sort of infantile pleasure in demonstrating that he knew more than
any professional scholar, that he had acquired many more details
than they had, that he could handle the material with more wit
and tact and freshness than they.
As I said earlier, Burton's work based on his personal experience
occupies a median position· between Orientalist genres represented
on the one hand by Lane and on the other by the French writers I
have discussed. His Oriental narratives are structured as pilgrimages
and, in the case of The Land of Midian Revisited, pilgrimages for a
second time to sites of sometimes religious, sometimes political and
economic significance. He is present as the principal character of
these works, as much the center of fantastic adventure and even
fantasy (like the French writers) as the authoritative commentator
and detached Westerner on Oriental society and customs (like
Lane). He has been rightly considered the first in a series of fiercely
individualistic Victorian travelers in the East (the others being Blunt
and Doughty) by Thomas Assad, who bases his work on the distance
in tone and intelligence between his writers' work and such works as
Austen Layard's Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon
(1851), Eliot Warburton's celebrated The Crescent and the Cross
(1844), Robert Curzon's Visit to the Monasteries of the Levant
( 1849), and (a work he does not mention) Thackeray's moderately
amusing Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1845).120
Yet Burton's legacy is more complex than individualism precisely
because in his writing we can find exemplified the struggle between
individualism and a strong feeling of national identification with
Europe (specifically England) as an imperial power in the East.
Assad sensitively points out that Burton was an imperialist, for all
his sympathetic self-association with the Arabs; but what is more
r~levant is that Burton thought of himself both as a rebel against
authority (hence his identification with the East as a place of freedom
from Victorian moral authority) and as a potential agent of
authority in the East. It is the manner of that coexistence, between
two antagonistic roles for himself, that is of interest.
The problem finally reduces itself to the problem of knowledge
of the Orient, which is why a consideration of Burton's Orientalism
ought to conclude our account' of Orientalist structures and restructures
in most of the nineteenth century. As a traveling adventurer
Burton conceived of himself as sharing the life of the
people in whose lands he lived. Far more successfully than T. E.
Lawrence, he was able to become an Oriental; he not only spoke
the language flawlessly, he was able to penetrate to the heart of
Islam and, disguised as an Indian Muslim doctor, accomplish the
pilgrimage to Mecca. Yet Burton's most extraordinary characteristic
is, I believe, that he was preternaturally knowledgeable about the
degree to which human life in society was governed by rules and
codes. All of his vast information about the Orient, which dots every
page he wrote, reveals that he knew that the Orient in general and
Islam in particular were systems of information, behavior, and
belief, that to be an Oriental or a Muslim was to know certain things
in a certain way, and that these were of course subject to history,
geography, and the development of society in circumstances specific
to it. Thus his accounts of travel in the East reveal to us a
consciousness aware of these things and able to steer a narrative
course through them: no man who did not know Arabic and Islam
as well as Burton could have gone as far as he did in actually becom­